A New Dawn Read online

  Skelly turned to face the Moonglow chief. “Look, Lal, all you have to do is suspend blasting past Zone Forty-Two. You and the other firms, just for a while. Long enough for me to test my—”

  Lal looked at him in disbelief. “I thought you said you were giving up!”

  Skelly’s small eyes narrowed. “You’d like that, right? I forgot. All you guild outfits are the same. Out for yourselves …”

  Kanan tried to tune it out as he pushed his pallet past. “Coming through.”

  Lal, clearly pleased to have someone other than Skelly to talk to, looked down at the load Kanan was hauling and checked it against her manifest. “Glad you made it, Kanan. I heard there was some trouble out there.”

  “No concern of mine,” Kanan said, parking the hovercart. “Here’s your bombs.”

  “This batch goes to Zone Forty-Two,” Lal said, waving some workers over. She nodded to Skelly, who smoldered as he stared at the hovercart. “Someone’s favorite place,” she whispered.

  Skelly leaned on the hovercart handle. “I’ve told you, we can’t keep blasting down there. Not with these—”

  “Take them home, then,” Kanan said, walking around Skelly. “Blow yourself up.” He began to unload crates of explosives one at a time for the workers to carry away.

  “Wait,” Skelly said, finally noticing the freighter pilot. He stepped beside Kanan and looked back at Lal. “You’ll listen to Kanan, right? He’s one of your top explosives haulers—and one of my best friends.”

  “Right on one. Wrong on the other,” Kanan said, continuing his job.

  “Kanan flies with this stuff,” Skelly said. “He knows what it can do. He’ll tell you: Using microblasts to cut crystal is one thing, but you shouldn’t use it to crack open walls! He knows—”

  “I’ll tell you what I know,” Kanan said, turning and poking a finger in Skelly’s sternum, knocking him back a step. “I have a deadline. I’ve got more to unload. So long.” He returned to the empty cart and turned it around.

  Lal stepped aside to take a call. “Imperial channel,” she said, waving Skelly off. “This is important.”

  “This is important, too,” Skelly muttered to no one. Seeing Kanan pushing the hovercart away, he started marching after him. Catching up, he tried to match the pilot’s pace. “Kanan—pal, why didn’t you back me up over there?”

  “Get lost, will you?”

  “Lost is what we’ll all be if this keeps up,” Skelly said, huffing and puffing. “I know what the baradium family of explosives can do. Better than anyone. I’ve done the yield estimates. I’ve even studied the seismology of this moon—”

  “You must be fun on holidays,” Kanan said, pushing the cart back into the elevator.

  “—right down to what they never consider: the core!” Skelly kept talking as he pushed his way into the car with Kanan. “It’s sturdy up here, but way down deep? This moon could snap like a protein cracker!”

  “Ah.”

  “Ah is right. I knew it! You agree with me!”

  “No, food reminded me,” Kanan said, drawing a pouch from his jacket. “I skipped breakfast.”

  “I’m serious,” Skelly said, reaching into his own vest. He wore a single glove over a right hand that Kanan had never once seen him use, except as a pincer: There was something gripped in it now, not much larger than a coin. “It’s all on this holodisk. I’ve got my work right here. You know those groundquakes we get on Gorse when the moon passes close by? The only reason it isn’t worse on Cynda is because the crystal formations keep the tension in check. But we keep blowing them apart! If I can get just one person to read this—”

  “Why does it have to be me? I’m nobody.”

  “Everybody comes to Okadiah’s!” Skelly said. “You’re there all the time. You can talk to people.”

  “Why can’t you?” Kanan knew why. “Oh, yeah. He banned you, for aggravating people.”

  “Just have a look.” Skelly waved the disk before Kanan.

  “Get it out of my face, Skelly. I’m serious.” Kanan threw his food pouch to the deck of the pallet. Pushing back against workers for other firms always caused a hassle; Okadiah had warned him against it. But Skelly was friendless, and for good reason. Kanan was near his limit.

  Skelly’s face twisted into a disdainful snarl. “Yeah, that’s right. I forgot. You’re paid by the shipload, right? And now you’re all going to be running like eskrats, because the Empire’s dropped by.” He got in the taller man’s face. “Well, the Empire had better watch out, or it’s going to have a real disaster on its hands!”

  “Last warning!”

  Skelly opened his mouth again—but before a syllable emerged, Kanan’s fist slammed into Skelly’s teeth. Five seconds of violence later, the elevator doors opened to the landing bay—where waiting loader droids saw Kanan pushing the pallet with Skelly’s crumpled body atop it.

  “Good, you’re here,” Kanan said. He shoved the cart at them. “Put this somewhere.”

  As Kanan headed back to Expedient for another load, a dazed and flustered Skelly looked up at the puzzled droids. “Nobody listens.”

  “I have a ping on Cynda cam five-six-oh,” the operator in the second row said. “Threat to the Empire in spoken Basic. Elevator cam. Thirty-eight decibels, clearly intoned.”

  Across the crowded data center, Zaluna Myder didn’t look up from tending to her plants. “Who was listening?”

  “A transport driver.”

  And us, Zaluna thought to herself as she turned back to business. Her gray hand swept at the air in front of her—and a new half-meter-tall hologram appeared on one of the display platforms surrounding her work dais.

  Hundreds of thousands of kilometers above Gorse, a couple of people were having a conversation in one of the lunar mining station’s elevators. Or they had been having a conversation, until one person had decked the other. And it was all unfolding again, seconds later, in three static-laced dimensions in front of Zaluna’s enormous black eyes.

  Focusing on the moving image, the Sullustan woman reached for this hour’s mug of caf. Now in her fifties, Zaluna spent an hour each day in the corporate gym, but she still knew it was past time to do without the artificial stimulant. On the other hand, her work had only gotten busier—and the caf was the only vice she’d ever had. She knew for certain that fact put her in the distinct minority of Gorse’s residents—because in the last thirty-plus years, Zaluna Myder had seen and heard everything.

  She had to. It was her job. And in the earpieces plugged into her giant shell-like ears, she heard the words that had caught the system’s attention: “… the Empire had better watch out …”

  She glanced down at the terminal operator in the second row. “The listener was a transport driver, you say. Anybody we—”

  “Migrant, no record,” he replied. “Nobody we care about.”

  Zaluna didn’t need to ask whether the speaker was someone they cared about. His words alone were enough. The surveillance supercomputers had comprehended the statement, measured it against mysterious metrics, and kicked the incident up to the Mynocks, who’d taken it to her.

  Myder’s Mynocks. That was what the shift on her floor was named after she rose to supervise it. She had no children or grandchildren; she hadn’t needed any other family, ever. Standing here on her platform she was queen, lending her guidance to the surveillance operators and taking the occasional spare moments to tend her potted plants. She’d had the misfortune to be born onto a world where the sun never rose, but at least her office had full-spectrum lighting.

  Zaluna had been a fixture since her late teens here in World Window Plaza, the upside-down and truncated cone that was still the newest building on Gorse. Transcept Media Solutions had built the structure—which had no windows at all—as a local repository for marketing data about the planet’s residents. There wasn’t much commerce on Gorse unattached to the mining industry, but that didn’t matter: When people did leave, they took their purchasing preferences with t
hem. And thanks to the monitoring stations it maintained, Transcept would have their profiles when they arrived elsewhere. That information was surely worth something, although who’d want it or why was a subject Zaluna rarely considered.

  Few people apart from poor transient laborers left Gorse anymore, but that wasn’t a concern. First the Republic and later the Empire had become Transcept clients—and Zaluna had kept her dream job. Watching and listening: That was what she’d been born to do. Not because of her giant Sullustan eyes and ears—though they missed nothing—but because as long as she could remember, she had loved to observe and absorb information.

  And neither did Zaluna forget anything.

  “Ah, our old friend,” she said aloud as her finger movement brought the holographic image to a halt. “Skelly, no surname. Human, born Corellia, forty standard years ago. Demolitions expert, Dalborg Mining, Cyndan operation. Last known address, Crispus Commons on Gorse. Clone Wars veteran. Injured, hand replaced. Two teeth missing—”

  The operator in the second row looked back at her, amused. “That’s him,” Hetto said. “But I haven’t even pulled up the file yet.”

  “You did eight days ago,” Zaluna said, sipping from her mug. “No need to tell me twice.”

  “You’re scaring me, boss.” Laughter came from along the lines of desks.

  “You could use a good scare, Hetto. Back to work, all of you.”

  The operators hushed immediately—and Hetto smiled and turned back to his terminal. Over two decades she’d watched his youthful brashness turn into jaded irascibility, but he still relished getting a rise out of her.

  Zaluna had never expected to command a room of any kind. The diminutive Sullustans—at just over a meter and a half, Zaluna was taller than most—were one of the least threatening peoples on Gorse, a world where folks did a lot of threatening. Long before she had been promoted to her superior position, Hetto had taken to walking her to and from her tough neighborhood. She appreciated the gesture, but in fact she faced danger gamely. Theft on Gorse was a constant, like the groundquakes that rocked the world. You might get knocked down now and again, but you simply had to get back up.

  It had started before the Empire, under the Republic: The Mynocks had been tasked with screening electronic communications and certain monitored public places for “conversations suspected to pose a threat to the lives of Republic citizens.” As the Clone Wars had dragged on, “the lives of Republic citizens” had evolved into “Republic security”—and under the Empire, that phrase had morphed into “public order.”

  No matter, Zaluna had thought. They’re just words. She’d never had a problem with listening to those of others for a good cause. The mining business attracted a lot of rowdies, yes, but worse things grew in darkness. It was smart for law enforcement authorities to use the latest tools to keep tabs on miscreants.

  And there was no shortage of things to listen for. During the Clone Wars, the Separatists had hatched many plots against the Republic; watching out for them was just common sense. Even the Republic’s supposed defenders, the Jedi, had turned traitors—if you believed the Emperor’s account. She wasn’t sure she did, but she was fairly certain that if there was a plot, then someone like Zaluna had probably first flagged it.

  Privacy? In her younger days, Zaluna had found it a silly concept. Either thoughts were in your head, or you let them out. The only distinction between a whisper and an intergalactic broadcast was technical. A listener with the means to hear had the absolute right to do so. Really, the obligation to do so—else the act of communicating was a futile one. Zaluna didn’t speak her mind nearly as often as Hetto, but when she had something to say, she definitely wanted people to listen.

  But times had changed. Under the Empire, words had become causes with greater effects. People she’d monitored had disappeared, although she’d never found out why. And the job had ceased to be as much fun.

  Skelly’s frozen image lingered there before her, his mouth stuck open mid-rant. It seemed a perfect pose—and she knew she’d see it again. Because Skelly, she knew, was red-stamped. Records digitally stamped with a red star indicated visits from Gorse’s mental health authority.

  “He gets any more stars, he can open up his own galaxy,” she said. She took a deep breath, relieved. Red-stamped people tended to stay in the medical system, rarely escalating to anything else. They were freer with words than most, rarely intending action. And Skelly had been fun to listen to in the past, at least. She unpaused the feed. “That’s that, then. I’ll close out the—”

  “Incoming message,” Hetto said, speaking abruptly. “The official channel.”

  That doesn’t happen every day, she thought. “Put it through!”

  A macabre form appeared holographically in the space before the brown-clad supervisor. His mechanical voice spoke precisely and clearly. “This is Count Vidian of the Galactic Empire, speaking to all surveillance stations under my authority. I am launching inspections of mining operations both on Cynda and at the processors on Gorse. All such locations are now under Security Condition One. No exceptions.”

  Zaluna gawked at the life-sized figure. “Excuse me. All the mining operations? Are you aware how many—”

  Count Vidian did not wait to hear her finish. The transmission ended.

  Hetto spoke first, as always. “What the hell?”

  “Yeah,” Zaluna said, under her breath. Then she let out a whistle. The mining trade employed tens of thousands of people.

  “Is he serious? Does he even know what he’s asking for?” Hetto threw up his hands. “Maybe we need to get a red stamp for that guy’s file. I swear, some of these Impies must be out of their minds! That, or—”

  “Hetto!” Zaluna snapped.

  Except for the low murmur of audio feeds coming from the monitors, the room fell silent. More quietly this time, she said, “We do what we’re told.”

  Zaluna traced her jowls with her fingertips as she tried to remember the last time Sec-Con One had been invoked. It hadn’t happened since the Emperor first drafted Transcept into Imperial service to deal with the Jedi crisis. It meant escalating every case under watch to the highest level—and Zaluna had a sense of what that meant.

  It was nothing good.

  Her eyes had returned to the live feed of Skelly on Cynda, the connection she had been about to close without action. “Bump him up, Hetto.”

  “But he’s a red-stamp.”

  “Which counts for nothing today.” The supervisor straightened. “Whatever his condition, Master Skelly’s mouth is going to earn him some time with our friends in white.”

  And good luck to him then, she thought.

  “Count Vidian, this is an honor,” gushed the tall cape-clad Neimoidian waiting at the bottom of the Imperial shuttle’s landing ramp. Despite the short notice, every firm working the moon had sent someone to the party meeting Cudgel, and the director’s big red eyes practically beamed with pride. “The Cyndan Mining Guild welcomes you,” he said, a wide, thick-lipped smile on his noseless green face. “I’m Director Palfa. We’ve all heard so much about—”

  “Spare me,” Vidian snapped, and half the listeners on the cavern floor took a step back, unnerved. “I have a schedule—and so do you. When you bother to keep it!”

  The director’s throat went dry. “O-of course.” The others averted their eyes, afraid to stare at the cyborg.

  Good, Vidian thought.

  In the waning days of the Republic, Vidian’s management texts had become pop-culture hits despite—no, because of—his reluctance to appear on the business HoloNets. He wasn’t shy or ashamed of his appearance; he just didn’t like wasting his time. But while the mystique added to his public reputation, in person his physical presence was a large part of his managerial success.

  The turnaround expert, he had written, is a germ invading the body corporate. It will be opposed. Whenever someone sought to make over an organization, entrenched bureaucrats always tried to intimidate him. But two cou
ld play that game, and Vidian had been winning for fifteen years.

  The legend of Denetrius Vidian had started five years before that, on what doctors expected would be his deathbed. But he’d survived, spending his bedridden time turning his meager bank balance into a fortune through electronic trading. In time, he purchased expensive, high-tech prosthetics, crafted to his own specifications. He did not look like other humans, but then humanity had abandoned him first, leaving him to rot in that hospice.

  So Vidian had optimized his physical features in keeping with his now-famous trinity of management philosophies: “Keep moving! Destroy barriers! See everything!” Simple rules, which he diligently applied at every opportunity.

  Including now, as the coterie made for the elevators. “The tour you ordered will cover some distance,” the director said. “Would your lordship like to rest first?”

  “No,” Vidian said, marching so quickly the others had trouble keeping up. He moved faster now than he ever had in his youth; physical age no longer mattered. Some joked that Vidian was half droid, but he knew the comparison was inapt. Droids shut down. Vidian had spent too many years lying around already. So he had compounded his successes by working 90 percent of every day. “Keep moving: With an able body, the mind can achieve anything!”

  Leading Vidian from the elevator onto a lower floor, the director paused in his blather about Cynda’s wonders. “I’m sorry,” he said, presenting his comlink. “Would you like to call your vessel to report your arrival?”

  “I just did, while you were prattling in the elevator,” Vidian said.

  Palfa seemed puzzled. He hadn’t seen or heard Vidian do anything. The count had installed a variety of comlink receivers into his earpieces; by routing his artificial voice through them, he regularly placed calls without ever appearing to open his mouth. Vidian hated getting information from intermediaries, who often distorted things for their own reasons; his communication capabilities were just one more way of cutting out the middle. “Destroy barriers: Get information directly, whenever possible!”