Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 06_ Vortex - Denning Troy [85]
Floating down the narrow lane directly in front of the repair shop she saw a QuickStryke urban assault car. Protruding from the commander’s hatch were the head and shoulders of a helmetless Mandalorian male with blond, short-cropped hair and cold blue eyes. He had a long scar down one cheek and a flat, crooked nose that had obviously been broken several times—both signs, to Madhi’s way of thinking, that he probably wasn’t one of Mandalore’s better hand-to-hand fighters. He held his chin a little too high, peering down on the Octusi as though he were a butcher selecting stock for his slaughterhouse.
“That commander looks familiar,” Madhi said. As she spoke, an image came to her, a HoloNet report she had seen of the siege of the Jedi Temple. She pulled her datapad from her pocket and activated the search function. “Isn’t he the one who blasted that apprentice on the steps of the Jedi Temple?”
“Sure looks like him,” Tyl replied. “Rhal, I think. Something Rhal.”
Madhi entered the name and moments later was rewarded with a news capsule of the incident. The apprentice, Kani Asari, had been Kenth Hamner’s personal assistant, and the killer had been a Mandalorian commander placed in charge of the siege by Chief Daala herself. Madhi compared the killer’s image with the commander outside, and her heart began to pound in excitement.
“Tyl, this is it,” she said. “Belok Rhal was the Mandalorian commander at the siege of the Jedi Temple.”
“So?” Tyl asked.
“So, Daala gave him complete authority at the Temple siege, and he killed an unarmed apprentice in full view of the media,” Madhi said. “And now here he is, putting down a slave revolt on Blaudu Sextus.”
“That’s a coincidence, not proof,” Tyl said. “It doesn’t establish a connection to Daala.”
“No,” Madhi said. “But it is a fact—and we do report facts, don’t we?”
Tyl thought for a moment, then reluctantly nodded. “Just be careful with your phrasing, okay?”
“No worries, I won’t imply anything,” Madhi said. Outside her window, the QuickStryke had come to a stop directly in front of the wounded Octusi, and Rhal gazed out over the Octusi, probably looking for a leader. “Shohta, how are we coming with the link?”
“We’re connected to the relay satellite,” he reported. “But I’m trying to buy more bandwidth. Their equipment is old out here, so we’re only getting grade-three signal.”
Madhi glanced over at Tyl. At grade three and standard bandwidth, her voice would be distorted and the vidimages grainy and jerky. But both would be recognizable—and the primitive quality of the broadcast might give the report an added note of urgency.
“Let’s do it,” she said.
Tyl nodded. “Keep the offer open,” he said to Shohta. “And bring the parabolic mike to Madhi. We’ll want an enhanced voice signal on Rhal.”
As Tyl spoke, he raised one hand and began a silent five-finger countdown. Madhi made a quick mental list of the points she needed to cover in her introduction, keeping in mind that her feed was arriving at the Perre Needmo studio at the beginning of their workday, about six hours before they were scheduled to go on-air. By now, a vidimage of the situation in Big Circle was already streaming onto the control room, where a startled production assistant would be rushing to bring it up on a monitor and confirm that the automatic recording equipment was capturing the transmission. Next, he would feed the transmission into the studio’s internal network and bring it to the attention of Perre Needmo and the senior production staff, who would decide whether to relay the report to the network immediately or save it for their own broadcast. Given the likelihood