The convoys became easier and easier pickings, and Eriadu Mining began to accept that it was more cost-effective to surrender the containers than to risk having their overpriced lead or follow ships destroyed in defensive engagements. The company attempted to trick the pirates by placing empty container ships among the fully loaded ones, but the dummy ships only prompted an increase in the number of raids. The company also tried concealing explosive devices and even, on a few occasions, parties of armed spacers in some of the containers. Not once, however, did Q’anah’s raiders take the bait, and over time the strategy of including dummy containers and armed troopers was also deemed too expensive. Attempts were made to predict which containers the pirates would target, but in the end Eriadu Mining’s battle analysts decided that Q’anah was choosing containers at random.
Just coming into his own as a lieutenant in Outland’s anti-piracy task force, Wilhuff refused to accept the disheartening analysis and devoted himself to a detailed study of the raids in which Q’anah had participated — failures and successes both — in the hope of deciphering her method for choosing containers. Her attacks weren’t at all like the hunts he had witnessed on the Carrion Plateau, where solitary predators or prides would select the stragglers, the young, or the weakest of the herd animals, and for some time it indeed appeared that her choices had neither rhyme nor reason. But Wilhuff remained convinced that a pattern existed — even if Q’anah herself wasn’t consciously aware of having created one.
The scheme that ultimately emerged was so deceptively simple, he was surprised no one had unraveled it. Q’anah turned out not to be the pirate’s original name, but rather one she had adopted after her father had relocated the family to Asmeru. In the ancient language of that mountainous world, the word referred to an ages-old festival that always fell on the same day of the planet’s complex calendar: the 234th day of the local-year, in the 16th month. Q’anah had assigned each of the five numbers to a letter of her name, and had used that sequence as her basis for choosing targets. Thus on her initial attack on an Eriadu Mining convoy, she had targeted the second container ship counting back from the lead ship; then the third from that one, then the fourth from that one, and so on, until she had grabbed five containers. On subsequent attacks the sequence might commence substituting the last targeted container for the lead vessel. Sometimes she would reverse the sequence, or move forward in the line rather than toward the rear. Occasionally a pattern would begin in one convoy but wouldn’t conclude until the next convoy or even the one after that. The numeric sequence itself, however, never changed. Q’anah was essentially spelling out her sobriquet over and over, as if leaving her mark on every convoy she attacked.
Once Wilhuff had grasped the pattern and persuaded Outland’s commanders that his months of obsession hadn’t driven him completely mad, Eriadu Mining agreed to sacrifice several container ships to the pirates as a means of confirming the theory. Emboldened by the results, the company urged Outland to stock the predicted convoy targets with soldiers, but Wilhuff’s paternal cousin, Ranulph Tarkin, proposed an alternative method for exacting revenge by secreting a computer virus in the containers’ hyperdrive motivators. One of Outland’s most respected commanders, Ranulph — who so resembled Wilhuff’s father they could have passed for twins — had designed the ploy years earlier, but Eriadu Mining had balked, based on the cost of having to outfit countless containers with the virused computers. With a lead on which containers Q’anah would target, however, the company agreed to finance the measure, even though the strategy entailed dispatching only one convoy at a time and often operating at a loss.
To make matters worse, the attacks suddenly ceased. It was almost as if the pirates had learned of the ploy, and with increasing pressure from Core buyers for added shipments and wasting funds on attempts to ferret out spies in their midst, Eriadu Mining was on the brink of financial ruin when the Marauders finally struck, targeting precisely those containers Wilhuff had predicted. No sooner did the pirates slave the containers to their frigate than the virus wormed its way into the ship’s navicomputer, overriding the requested jump coordinates and delivering it to a realspace destination where Outland warships were lying in wait. Once the frigate had been crippled and boarded, and Q’anah and her crew rounded up and shackled, Ranulph — always the gentleman — insisted on introducing the pirate queen to her eighteen-year-old “captor.”
Her sneering expression ridiculed the very idea of it. “Barely a whisker on his chin, but luck enough for a professional sabacc player.”
“It was your vanity that turned out to be a laudable substitute for luck,” Wilhuff told her. “Your need to leave your signature all over Eriadu’s convoys.”
Her real eye opened wide and she quirked a grin that told him she understood what he had accomplished, but she followed up the begrudging grin with a snort of contempt. “There isn’t a prison that can contain me, boy — even on Eriadu.”
Wilhuff offered the sly smile that would later become a kind of signature. “You’re confusing Eriadu with worlds that have noble houses and trials by jury, Q’anah.”
She searched his youthful face. “Execution on the spot, is it?”
“Nothing so straightforward.”
She continued to appraise him openly and defiantly. “There’s hardly a part of me that hasn’t been replaced, boy. But take my word: I’m not the last of my kind, and your convoys will continue to suffer.”
He allowed a nod. “Only if we fail to discourage your followers.”
Outland had Q’anah and her crew transferred to one of the stolen containers, whose sublight engines were programmed to send the ship slowly but inexorably toward the system’s sun. The plight of the captives was broadcast over the pirates’ own communications network, and several of Q’anah’s cohorts succeeded in determining the point of origin of the transmission and hastening to her rescue. Their ships were destroyed on sight by Outland forces. The rest were wise enough to go into hiding.
Wilhuff demanded that the container ship’s audio and video feeds be kept enabled to the very end, so that Outland’s forces and any others who might have been listening could either savor or lament the agonized wails of the pirates as they were slowly roasted to death. In the end, even the notorious Q’anah succumbed to the torture and wailed openly.
“Your task is to teach them the meaning of law and order,” Jova would hector his nephew. “Then to punish them so that they remember the lesson. In the end, you’ll have driven the fear of you so deeply into them that fear alone will have them cowering at your feet.”
Imperial center
BRIGHT-SIDE CORUSCANT air-traffic control directed the Carrion Spike to the Imperial Palace, and there into a courtyard landing field that was large enough to accommodate Victory- and Venator-class Star Destroyers. As repulsors eased the ship down through the busy skyways and into the court, Tarkin realized that the Emperor’s current residence had once been the headquarters for the Jedi — though practically all that remained of the Order’s elegant Temple complex was its copse of five skyscraping spires, now the pinnacle of a sprawling amalgam of blockish edifaces with sloping façades.
At the edge of the landing courtyard, centered among a detail of red-robed Imperial Guards armed with gleaming force pikes, stood Mas Amedda, dressed in voluminous shoulder-padded robes and carrying a staff that was taller than him, its head ornamented by a lustrous humaniform figure.