"I can see that." Neelah gave a slow nod. "Maybe if the Empire wins the battle, Palpatine will find that you're just the kind of servant he prefers. Greedy and self-serving, but smart enough to recognize just who's got the upper hand."
"Don't bother trying to insult me." Kodir's laugh was quick and harsh. "As long as I've gotten what I want, I really don't care about your moral opinions."
"I'm sure you don't. But that makes me wonder about just one thing." Neelah peered closer at the figure stand-ing before her, the woman whose bloodline she shared. "If getting what you want is all that matters . . . why were you so tenderhearted about my fate? If all that wor-ried you was my interfering with your plans, wouldn't it have been more effective—and final—to have simply had me killed, rather than abducted and memory-wiped?"
"As I said: we need to learn from our mistakes. And that's one I'm not going to repeat again." Kodir reached to the section of her belt that had been concealed by the flowing cape, and pulled out a small but efficient-looking blaster pistol. She raised and pointed it straight at Nee-lah. "I'm sorry that I don't still have the same sisterly feelings toward you that I once did. There was a time when my foolish sentimentality made me think that I could spare your life. I've gotten over it, though. The Rebel Alliance, on the other hand, has shown a depress-ing tendency to let mere ethics guide its decisions; that very likely means that after this coming battle at Endor, I will be dealing with the Empire rather than the Rebels. Palpatine, though, has a vindictive streak that's just as worrisome. And he doesn't like plotting and scheming that's not his own: if anyone was going to get rid of Kuat of Kuat, the Emperor would have wanted to be the one to do it. So you see"— Kodir raised the blaster a fraction of an inch higher—"there's no way I can afford to let you remain alive, and risk having you tell what you've re-membered."
"You're right," said Neelah. She didn't flinch from the weapon poised in her direction. "And you really do seem to have learned from your mistakes. There's just one problem with that."
A thin smile showed on Kodir's face. "And what would that be?"
Neelah didn't bother to reply. Instead, she stepped forward toward the blaster; at the same time, she brought one forearm up and smashed it against Kodir's wrist, faster than the other woman could react. The blaster pis-tol went flying, its high arc broken by the nearest bulk-head. With her other hand, Neelah grabbed the collar of Kodir's flowing cape; with a quick, sharp tug, she pulled her off balance. As Kodir fell forward, Neelah brought her raised knee into the other woman's solar plexus, knocking the air from Kodir's lungs in a pain-filled gasp. Neelah stood back and let Kodir fall, forearms clutched instinctively to her gut; another blow to the back of the head laid her out flat on the room's floor.
A few seconds later, Kodir managed to twist herself onto her back. She blinked at finding the muzzle of the blaster pistol set right between her eyes.
"The problem with learning from our mistakes"— Neelah leaned down to keep the weapon aimed point-blank at her sister—"is that sometimes we learn a little too late."
Face pale with shock and pain, Kodir gazed up at her in disbelief. "You ... didn't used to be able... to do stuff like that..."
"I've been hanging out with a tough crowd." Keeping the blaster muzzle fixed on Kodir's skull, Neelah reached down and grabbed the front of the cape, using it to draw Kodir to her feet. "If you can stay alive long enough, there's a lot you can pick up from somebody like Boba Fett. Especially when you've got nothing to lose."
Before Kodir could manage a reply, another sound pulsed through the room, so deep and low that Neelah could feel it through the soles of her boots. Both she and Kodir looked up, as though storm clouds could have been seen through the durasteel bulkheads surround-ing them.
The noise sounded like distant thunder. But she knew it was something else.
News from a distant world arrived almost simultane-ously with the shock wave from the explosions.
Commander Rozhdenst had been personally moni-toring the link to the Rebel Alliance communications ship near Sullust. When word came at last that the at-tack on the uncompleted Death Star had turned into a full-scale battle between Rebel and Imperial forces, he closed his eyes for a moment, letting his chin sink down upon his chest. The desire to be there, to be in any fight-ing craft no matter how antiquated or unwieldy, as long as it was in the thick of the action, rose with tidal force through his heart.
He heard the door to the officers' quarters open. Opening his eyes, Rozhdenst looked up from where he sat at the comm unit controls and saw Ott Klemp. "It's started," said Rozhdenst simply. He didn't have to ex-plain what he was referring to. "And we're stuck here, in the middle of—"
His words were cut off by the first explosion shiver-ing through the frame of the mobile base. A dull, low-frequency rumble made the air in the room suddenly tangible upon both the commander's and Klemp's skin. The younger man, muscles visibly tensing, looked up toward the ceiling. "What was that?"
Before an answer could be ventured, indicator lights burst red across the comm unit panel. The voice of one of the Scavenger Squadron's forward scouts crackled over the speaker. "Commander! Something's going on down at the KDY construction docks—something big!"
Rozhdenst had already switched on the scanners for the base's viewport array. Across a row of display screens, from multiple angles, flame and churning smoke billowed up from the angular masses of equipment be-low. As both he and Klemp leaned toward the screens, another explosion was suddenly visible, uprooting one of the gigantic cranes at its base and sending it toppling down across the docks' central access corridor. The crossed durasteel struts of the crane's framework crum-pled and bent upon one another with the force of their crashing impact; cables several meters thick snapped like string, their broken ends whipping through ranks of load shifters and rail trucks, scattering them as though they were toys.
The noise from the explosions couldn't pass through the surrounding vacuum to the Scavenger Squadron's mobile base above, but the shock wave and expelled metal debris were enough to conduct the rumbling and clattering sounds from the hull to the interior a few seconds after the bursts of glaring light on the display screens. As Klemp put out an all-craft command to pull back from the inferno erupting beneath them, the com-mander punched in the highest levels of surveillance magnification from the scanners.
"It's not the ships—" Rozhdenst laid a broad fingertip on the closest display screen. "The fleet isn't what's going up." The elongated ships of the cruisers and Destroyers could be seen through the smoke, harshly lit by flames and the hard-shadowed light of another series of explo-sions. "It's the docks and all of the major shipbuilding equipment." As both he and Klemp watched, a durasteel-jawed magna-hoist lurched forward like a dying saurian, its blind head bursting through a wall of fire and plowing into a rack of structural girders. "The whole facility's been stuffed with high-thermal explosives, from the looks of it."
"Yeah, but ..." Klemp shook his head. "That whole fleet is going to be scrap as well by the time it's all over." Another impact shook the mobile base. "You think Kuat of Kuat did this? What's he after—sabotage or suicide?"
"Who cares—"Rozhdenst reached for the comm unit mike. "We've got to get those ships out of there."
"Sir, that's impossible. There's nobody aboard any of those ships. Who's going to bring them out of the docks?"
Rozhdenst glanced over his shoulder. "Who do you think? Our guys can do it."
"That's crazy. I mean... it just is, sir." Klemp pointed to the image of the flames billowing up on the display screen. "You want our squadron to fly into that} The condition that most of our Y-wings are in, they can just barely avoid getting hit—and you want them to go into that kind of a mess? They'll get torn to pieces!"