[Black Fleet Crisis] - 02(120)

“You should arrive not long after the task groups from the Fourth Fleet reach Farlax. Oh, and you will take the temporary rank of commodore for the duration of this assignment.”

“Commodore, eh?” He tried a cheerful smile on Leia, but she was no more persuaded by it than he was.

“Does that come with a hat?”

Even though he was caught in legal limbo—not quite a full member of the Senate, nor quite a former one—Tig Peramis of Watalla retained some of the usual courtesies of office. Behn-kihl-nahm would not allow him to speak or vote in the Assembly and had removed him entirely from the Defense Council. But Peramis’s ‘access keys still allowed him entrance to all but the Council chambers and restricted records. And that meant access to the other senators, whose gossip he thought worth nearly as much as a senatorial record search.

Months ago he had denounced the Fifth Fleet as a weapon of conquest and tyranny and warned the Defense Council about the ambitions of Vader’s daughter.

He had been reprimanded by Behn-kihl-nahm and ridiculed by Tolik Yar, but events had proved him prophetic, confirming his worst fears. And the lightning annexation—on the flimsiest of pretexts—of eighteen formerly independent worlds in Farlax seemed to Peramis to foreordain a dramatic escalation.

The middle-of-the-night gatherings in the Defense chambers, Leia’s secret meeting with the Ruling Council, the “bungled” blockade attempt, the nakedly emotional appeals on behalf of tiny alien populations, and the open and deliberate provocation of the Yevetha at every turn all appeared to Peramis as pieces of an elaborate plan to justify annexation of Koornacht itself. Even the periodic outbreaks of criticism in the Senate seemed calculated, the critics themselves buffoons doing more discredit to their cause than damage to the Princess.

But something a drunken Senator Cundertol carelessly said to him alarmed Peramis to the point that he could no longer be satisfied with rumor and gossip.

“A Corellian pirate with two battle groups to command,” Cundertol had giggled. “He’ll show you goon-faces something about fighting. Old Eating-a- Boat didn’t want to kill other goon-faces, so he’s goon-goon-gone—” Peramis fed him more doan wine in the hopes of coaxing Cundertol to tell him more, but the Bakuran only grew more childishly self-amused at being in the superior position.

“Should have been a good boy,” Cundertol said, swaying on his feet as he shook a finger. “You can’t come to the party.”

Half an hour later Cundertol was glassy-eyed with doan shock, and Peramis was entering the Senate office complex with both his and Cundertol’s voting keys in his hand.

Cundertol’s key alone would not be enough to give Peramis access to the Defense Council records, but Peramis knew from experience that security on senators’ personal logs was much more lax. Convenience demanded it. A personal log kept behind too many barriers would never be used. Of course, nothing classified Secure was supposed to be kept in something as unsecured as a personal log. But Peramis thought Cundertol someone who was likely to place more value on convenience than confidentiality.

The Bakuran’s voting key opened every necessary door and every damning file. It was all there, in a xeno phobic rant that demonstrated the surprising fact that the senator actually did temper his words in public.

A battle group-strength force was headed to Farlax to reinforce the Fifth—but piecemeal, a clever stratagem that would help conceal what was happening by allowing all the other battle groups to remain visible on their patrol stations. And the Corellian who was to take charge of the war fleet was, as Peramis had suspected, Princess Leia’s husband, Han Solo.

Peramis stayed in Cundertol’s office only long enough to watch the log once and copy it to a data card.

Then he returned to the private dining room where he had left Cundertol, replaced the voting key in the senator’s valise, and left him to ride out his pleasure trance alone.

In the privacy of his own quarters in the Walallan mission, he retrieved the small black box Nil Spaar had given him from its hiding place in a chest of his eldest son’s toys. There was no one to see him—he had sent his family home months ago, and the modest staff that served him knew better than to intrude in the middle of the night.

Seated at a table in his office, Peramis connected both the black box and his datapad to the hypercomm.

At that point he paused. The furtiveness, the physical act of readying the devices, made him uncomfortable. He had not used the black box before. He had told himself that he never would. Peramis did not think of himself as a spy, much less a traitor.

But he had kept the box nonetheless.