Star Wars_ X-Wing 02_ Wedge's Gamble - Michael A. Stackpole [101]
The spy within Rogue Squadron had not been present at the meeting. The spy’s subsequent reports had been singularly useless. The planning council had compartmentalized the jobs needed to complete the operation, so the spy’s activities proved less enlightening than Thyne’s. Having Rogue Squadron personnel maintain a low profile did make sense, since they were not as familiar with Imperial Center as other members of the conspiracy, but it made their activities useless as indicators of what was going to happen.
The only saving grace in all of it was that things appeared to be building slowly. Isard had told Loor that nothing could happen before two weeks—the incubation period of the new strain of the Krytos virus. The Sullustans taken in the warehouse had been injected with the virus ten days earlier so he was very close to his deadline already. Isard said she’d already introduced the virus into the water supply, so countless creatures were already ingesting it. Loor himself had taken to boiling water and only drinking wines imported from other worlds—even though the virus was not supposed to infect humans, he wanted to take no chances.
Loor sat back in the shadowed depths of his office and rubbed a hand against his forehead. The key to taking any planet was to lower its shields and drop troops. While a planetary bombardment might cause a lot of damage, only troops on the ground could take and hold real estate. Without the shields going down, that couldn’t happen, so the shields had to be the logical target for the Rogues.
The obvious target for taking the shields down was to attack the shield generators themselves. Loading a landspeeder full of Nergon 14 and having a suicide bomber run it into a generation station seemed the most expedient way of dealing with the shields. Two facts argued against that as a strategy—the sheer number of stations would require a metric ton or two for the Rebels to obliterate them all and the Rebels had not, to his knowledge, purchased any Nergon 14 so far. More importantly, destroying the shield generators would work against their future efforts to hold the planet.
A strike against the power generation stations had similar problems. There were even more of them than there were shield generation stations. The planet’s electrical grid was coordinated such that an area that lost its local power plant would immediately have energy supplied by others in nearby sectors. Flickering lights would be the only sign of disruption. In his months on Imperial Center Loor had only seen lights flicker when one of the powerful local thunderstorms broke over a building where he was.
The obvious target was the computer that controlled everything on Imperial Center, but Loor had seen prisons that had less security than the central computer. The center had its own platoon of stormtroopers and the barracks within a fifty-kilometer radius had orders to respond to alarms there with all speed and firepower at their command. The facility itself had been built with more demanding specifications than those of any other building on the planet, including the Imperial Palace. Rumor had it that if the Death Star had been used against Imperial Center, the computer center would have been a recognizable and salvageable piece of debris.
An armed strike on the computer center would seem doomed to failure, but the presence of Rogue Squadron did make it a bit more viable. If they had fighters—and fighters of various types were available on the black market—they might be able to intercept and down some of the incoming troops. That would give the attackers more time, though the outcome would still be dismal for the Rebels. The ground-based TIE fighter squadrons in the area would be able to counter the fighter threat, so placing them on alert was a precaution he would suggest to Isard.
Perhaps the most difficult part of guarding against the Rebel action was balancing on the razored edge of Isard’s plan. She wanted to give Imperial Center to the Rebels, saddling them with responsibility for