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Rebel Force #6

Uprising

by Alex Wheeler

CHAPTER ONE

The moon was dead.

A film of red dust lay over the cratered land. Nothing disturbed the still, acrid air.

There was no sound; there was no movement. There was only scorched, flat ground stretching to the bare horizon. If life had flourished here once, that time was long over.

Erased, all traces of creature or creation wiped out.

Gone.

And so there was no one to see the bright star that skimmed across the horizon, nearly invisible in the light of the rising sun.

There was no one to understand that the star was a ship, circling the moon. Its first visitor in millennia.

Certainly there was no one to recognize the ion trail as that of a rusty old CloakShape fighter.

Unseen, the CloakShape orbited the moon, spiraling closer and closer to the thin atmosphere.

And inside, Commander Rezi Soresh—former Imperial Commander, current fugitive—stared blindly into space, and waited to die.

Twenty-seven days, sixteen hours, and four minutes.

That was how long he'd been waiting. Ever since Darth Vader had convinced the Emperor he was a traitor, Rezi Soresh had been on the run.

He snorted. On the run. What a joke. On the crawl was more like it. Hobbling from one star system to the next. Creeping through the shadows. Desperately scrounging for food, for shelter, for ships. One month before, he had been one of the most powerful men in the galaxy. Then he'd been blamed for the disaster on Belazura—even though it hadn't been his mistake that got the Imperial garrison destroyed. The ambush of the Rebels should have worked. Would have worked, if it hadn't been for the Jedi scum. And even so, it wasn't his fault. Darth Vader had twisted the facts, convinced the Emperor that Soresh was incompetent, maybe even a traitor. All because Vader was jealous of Soresh's power.

If Soresh hadn't had a backup escape plan, he would be dead.

But life wasn't worth much anymore. Thanks to the Rebel vermin and the vengeful Dark Lord, Soresh was nothing. Less than nothing.

He was prey.

There were those who believed that the galaxy was teeming with life. Fools. The galaxy was a vast and empty wasteland, small outposts of civilization sprinkled through trillions of kilometers of void. Rezi Soresh was no fool—he knew how to use the emptiness. He knew how to hide.

But Vader was no fool, either, and Soresh had never expected to survive this long.

Gradually, as he drifted aimlessly through the wilds of the Outer Rim, something had changed in him. Something had awoken, something he'd never expected to have again: Hope.

Perhaps he was as smart as he'd thought. Perhaps Vader wasn't as powerful as he'd feared. Perhaps he had a chance to save himself, and reclaim his rightful position at the Emperor's side. To get revenge on his enemies.

He had stumbled upon this moon by chance—but perhaps it was destiny.

Soresh dropped altitude and skimmed over the arid land, surveying his new home. It would take time to build a new base of power. It would take resources. But he had ample amounts of both. There were still sources he could risk trusting, secrets he could use to manipulate, to blackmail, to obtain what he needed. As one of the Emperor's most valued advisors, he'd been trusted with a large discretionary fund. Over the years, Soresh had siphoned the money into more than a hundred accounts. He had cultivated a cadre of underlings who would be loyal only to him. He had collected black market information, and knew more about his enemies than they knew about themselves. For one standard month, he had lived as a dead man, afraid to risk any contact with his old life. But living in fear, drifting through nowhere, endlessly waitin g—it was no better than death. And it was no longer tolerable.

As always, he would be patient, and he would be careful. Soresh knew how his enemies saw him. They thought he was a narrow man, cowardly, paranoid, more comfortable with a datapad than a blaster.

They were right. But they failed to understand that these were not weaknesses; they were his greatest