Star Wars_ MedStar 01_ Battle Surgeons - Michael Reaves [21]
Although the exact nature of the machinations by which Count Dooku had accomplished this grand scheme were still unclear, ultimately they did not mat-ter. In fact, it was better to be ignorant so that, if caught, not even drugs or hypnoscans could extract the truth.
Not that exposure was very likely. This new identity had been impressively documented, and the position in the chain of command was high enough that almost every piece of important data coming through could be evaluated. The confederacy had laid the groundwork well. The spy glanced at a wall chrono, then sat down behind the large, impressive desk. Built into the desktop was a flatscreen that displayed various views of the Rimsoo buildings, the transport ship hangar, and the bota-processing docks. There really wasn’t too much more to the place. Everything combined wouldn’t be worth the waste of a single proton torpedo, except for one thing: the bota.
The different flatscreen scenes showed everything looking normal. That would change soon enough-in just a few minutes, in fact.
A push of a button stopped the screen on the "space-dock"-much too grandiose a term for a slab of ferro-crete ten meters square-where the shuttle, bearing a load of processed bota, was about to lift off. The spy watched as the transport rose silently on invisible repul-sor waves. It climbed quickly, building up speed for a quick dash through the main spore strata to minimize damage. It reached the height of a thousand meters in mere moments, dwindling to an all-but-impossible-to-see dot. Then the dot abruptly bloomed, blindingly white, becoming for a second brighter than Drongar Prime.
A few seconds later, the rumble of the explosion rolled over the base, like tumbling, crashing breakers of sound.
The spy couldn’t feel any joy over this act. People had died in the doing of it, but it was necessary. One had to cling to that. It was part of a distant, but important, goal.
One had to keep that in mind.
Den Dhur was thinking hard. It would soon be time for him to go back to his cubicle and dig out the small but powerful comm unit he had bought on the black market for his war assignments. It had cost him a pile of credits, but it was worth it. Disguised as a portable en-tertainment module, it was actually capable of sending a holocoded message packet through hyperspace on a bandwidth that was all but undetectable by both Re-public and Confed monitor stations.
The problem was, there didn’t seem to be a whole lot to report. While it wasn’t general knowledge that the Drongar engagement was primarily about claiming the bota fields, it wasn’t a big surprise, either. Den’s prob-lem right now was that he didn’t have a good story to follow.
That problem didn’t last long.
Den was crossing the compound when he saw his shadow turn pitch black for a fraction of a second. He turned and looked up carefully, squinting so as to max-imize the polarization factor in his droptacs. Even with ambient light damped down, the bright spot overhead was intensely white, outshining the planet’s sun. For a horrified second he thought some other, nearby star had gone nova. That would be a milking hot story, except that he wouldn’t be around to report it.
He heard shouting, cries of shock and alarm, from be-hind him. Someone was standing beside him, looking up-Tolk, the Lorrdian nurse. "What happened?" she asked.
"Looks like the bota transport blew up."
As if to confirm this, the sound of the explosion crashed down, vibrating the bones of those who had skeletons. Den felt his teeth chatter in response to the low-frequency waves.
A nearby clone trooper-a lieutenant, according to his blue chevrons-whistled in awe. "Yow.
Their field must’ve gone critical. Probably slipped a superconduc-tor coupling."
"No way," an Ishi Tib tech engineer-Den recog-nized him as the one dancing in the cantina during the rain on his first day planetside-said. "My crew went