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“By the time you listen to this recording, the frigate Fireborn will be destroyed and all aboard her, myself included, dead. I have done what I had to do in order to free my people. I have done this thing to make others understand they cannot own us.

“I allowed myself to be captured and taken aboard Fireborn so that I could accomplish the seemingly impossible, and you will never know how I have accomplished it. Understand, though, that every vessel of your navy is in danger. So long as you stand by while we are enslaved and oppressed, you can count on losing your defenders and loved ones by the hundreds and thousands.

“Let this serve as a challenge to all who think they can own sapient beings. You, too, will die at the hands of someone like me, and history will spit on your graves.

“My death also serves as a punishment for Chief Daala, who has always styled herself as an honorable warrior … yet has always behaved as a lackey, first of the Emperor and Grand Moff Tarkin, now of corporations that harvest profits from slaves outside the Alliance and then spend fortunes to buy Alliance laws that allow them to continue their crimes. Lick up their spittle, Chief Daala. I laugh at you from beyond your reach.”

A HoloNews bureau chief, a gray-furred Bothan male in his division’s main newsroom thousands of kilometers below the explosion site, viewed the first broadcast of the recording on the ridiculously oversized wall monitor overlooking his staff. He shook his head. “Daala’s not going to take well to that.”

His assistant, a male Chadra-Fan half his height but just as furry, seemed mesmerized by the image of Grunel Ovin as the message began to repeat itself behind a superimposed commentator. “No, she’s not. Good news day, though.”

“Oh, definitely.”

Six hours later, Wynn Dorvan’s heart sank as Chief Daala swiveled her conference room chair toward him, her face as stony as he had ever seen it, and announced her decision. “Mandos to Klatooine. Go.”

He opened his mouth to offer yet another reasoned argument against her chosen course of action, then closed it. Reason wasn’t working. Revenge, absolute suppression of defiance, was the order of the day. He rose and trotted to his office.

He knew this was not going to be good. The full strength of Daala’s mercenary force would unleash its considerable expertise and advanced technology on the desert-dwelling Klatooinian group variously known as Ovin’s Sand Panthers and the Sapience Defense Front. Daala’s logic was that the sudden cessation of this group—substitution of a series of red-drenched craters for the wasteland encampments where warriors, civilians, and children had lived—would cause all such groups everywhere to reconsider whether destroying a capital ship of the Galactic Alliance was a good idea.

Wynn held the pragmatic opinion that the merciless extermination of a society was no better an idea than the treacherous bombing of a ship, but empirical data supporting such a theory was hard to come by and even harder to make meaningful to someone as angry as Natasi Daala.

This was not going to be his battle to win, so he did as he was told, and contemplated his retirement.

In her office kilometers away, after receiving Wynn Dorvan’s encoded communication, Admiral Parova buzzed for Captain Hunor to join her. The Falleen male swept into her office at such speed that his ponytail took an extra half a second to sway into place against his back after he skidded to a stop. “Admiral.”

She smiled up at him. He was such a good, obedient right hand. Once the Galactic Alliance and the Galactic Empire were reunited under traditional Imperial guidelines and nonhumans such as Hunor found their careers entombed beneath a transparisteel ceiling, he’d probably feel betrayed. But for now, he earnestly believed that the acts of sabotage, suborning, and murder he was accomplishing on the side were all solely for the removal of a Chief of State who seemed increasingly erratic.

She handed him a set of data cards. “Mandos to destroy Ovin’s encampments.