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There was not a sound in the War Hall other than a muffled cough or a furniture creak as the five-minute timer expired. Only four scouts survived to jump out of their target systems—all drones. None had found anything during their passes, save for newly dead worlds. Eyes began to turn from the frozen images on the wall to the woman standing alone in the center of the room.

“Now we know,” Leia said simply. “Controller, put the pilots’ visual IDs up while you queue the data from Number One for replay. I’d like us to remember who we owe for this.”

The blast that disabled Rone Taggar’s recon-X came from behind and below, without warning. Even before the cockpit went dark, he could tell from the blue lightning dancing over the cockpit that it was a powerful ion cannon bolt that had overwhelmed the fighter’s shields. Twisting in his harness, he tried to look back and find his attacker. There’d been no fire from the ground during the close approach, and he was now out of range for any ordinary ground-based antiship battery.

“Come on, where are you?” he muttered. “Where’d you come from?”

There were dozens of stars bright enough that Taggar could not look directly at them without squinting—more than enough dazzle to hide an interceptor or a defense buoy from his eyes. But he didn’t understand why his targeting system had missed it. The recon-X had the smallest blind spot to the rear of any Republic fighter, and on a normal threat acquisition—at fifty thousand meters or more—he would have bet a month’s pay that he could have held off any equal opponent long enough to finish the run.

Taggar silently counted off the restart interval, fully expecting the killing shot to come before he reached 100. The absorbers worked passively, soaking up the excess surface charge and using it to feed the restart cell. Its momentum unchanged by the blast, his fighter was still speeding away from N’zoth. With a successful restart, he could grab the last thirty seconds of data on the unscanned far side and jump away to safety.

The count had reached eighty-seven when he felt the lurch of the tractor beam grabbing hold of his ship. With the spoiler shaking and the fuselage chattering around him, Taggar fished in his chest pocket for the purge stick. Another ship, corvette-size, was visible ahead of him as he rammed the stick home into the socket on the control panel.

The purge charge that jumped from the stick raced through the computer memories of the fighter, erasing every coherent bit. Its final stop was the R2 interface, where it passed to a shape charge under the droid’s sensor dome. The small explosion that followed was surprisingly loud and briefly lit the inside of the cockpit. Glancing back, Taggar confirmed that the charge had completely and thoroughly decapitated the droid.

That left only one duty—the suicide needle now available at the other end of the purge stick, and the dead-man grip of the ship’s self-destruct trigger. Taggar looked out at the Yevethan warship, measuring the closing distance. He knew that he was taking a chance by waiting, especially after they’d seen R2-R blow its top. But he also knew that the corvette would have to lower its shields to bring him alongside.

When the ship had drawn close enough to loom over the fighter, Taggar closed his left hand around the trigger and let his head roll to one side as though he were unconscious. Watching through slit eyes, he saw light spilling from the underside of the corvette, between the opening doors of the docking berth. There was no pinnace inside—the berth was meant for his fighter.

Gambling, he waited longer still, until the coupling lines grabbed the spoilers and drew the recon-X upward, until the doors began to close under him. Then he lifted his head, rubbed his thumb across the pilot’s wings taped to the console, and jammed the palm of his right hand against the end of the purge stick.

A few moments later his head lolled forward against his chest and the hand closed tightly around the trigger began to relax, his tired fingers yielding