From the droid's own eye comes a shimmering red beam.

She blinks and winces as it passes over her face.

"GRAND ADMIRAL RAE SLOANE," the droid says. "IT IS GOOD TO SEE YOU. WELCOME TO THE HALL OF IMPERIAL REGISTER. PLEASE WATCH YOUR STEP. THE FALL IS QUITE STEEP."

The droid is right. The Pit is fifty floors. Not straight up, but rather, straight down. Plunged into the exomantle of Coruscant like a pneumatic bolt. The shape of it is circular, and it spirals ineluctably downward, giving Sloane the sense that she is swirling down the drain. At the bottom, she half expects that the Hall of Imperial Register gobbles you right up like a mouth: a sarlacc nesting at the nadir, digesting wayward data-miners.

She will not be digested, not today.

She will, however, go mad if she doesn't get moving. Inertia is a curse and Sloane's whole life and career have been about combating it. So she sets up shop in a little alcove. Hours pass. The droid attendants-more administrative droids, these fixed to the railings so that they can zip past the shelves of records both hard copy and digital-bring her old data cartridges. She told them that she needed a proper accounting of all the ships of the Imperial Navy in play as of the destruction of the second Death Star. She's on her eighth and final cartridge.

She starts with the Dreadnoughts-the Super Star Destroyers.

Thirteen were in service before the revivified Death Star was destroyed above Endor. One of those is the Ravager, the SSD from which Sloane rules the Empire (and which, strictly speaking, is now Gaelan's command). One of those is the Executor, Vader's command ship. The Executor was lost that day, plunging into the surface of the Death Star. Taking hundreds of thousands of the best Imperials with it.

Sloane shudders as she thinks of it.

That leaves eleven others.

Three are now in the hands of the New Republic. Two of those were from admirals willingly surrendering the ship and its people. One was taken forcibly by New Republic forces while it underwent repairs over Kuat.

Five were destroyed outright in battles across the galaxy with the New Republic-the ships were understaffed, underprotected, and on the run. (The Dreadnoughts are home to massive batteries of fleet-killing weapons, yes, but are also slow, unwieldy beasts-they hang there in the sky like bricks, and without adequate protection it is an inevitability that enemy forces could erode the ships until obliteration ensues.) One was taken by pirates: the Annihilator. Tagge's old ship. But who controls the Annihilator now? The reports don't say.

Another, the Arbitrator, made a bad hyperspace calculation to escape pursuing NR ships. It evaporated when it was sucked into a gravity well.

That leaves Palpatine's own command ship: The Eclipse.

Records show that it, too, was destroyed by a fleet of New Republic vessels-Ackbar's own frigate, Home One, firing the ship-killing shot.

Ah, but there's the catch, and it's why Sloane is here: The ships dumped data across the stars, transmitting pulses of information to this location. That provides a black-box recording of information so one could discern what exactly happened before a ship was destroyed, captured, or surrendered. All the other tracking data adds up to the known fates of each SSD. Their stories match the data for all of them-except one.

For the Eclipse, the data ends a full day-cycle before the ship was reportedly destroyed. It shows no siege by New Republic forces. It simply...drops off the star map. Gone. Vanished.

Sloane concedes that it's possible the ship stopped reporting due to a malfunction in its data recorder. Though redundant systems were supposed to alert command if that had happened-again, bureaucracy and reiterative mechanisms should have saved the day here.

And yet they didn't.

Is it possible that the Eclipse is still out there? Could the Ravager not be the last Super Star Destroyer in the naval arsenal?

The inventory of the Star Destroyers is similar, but on a far grander scale. Seventy-five percent of the Star Destroyers in service before Endor can capably be tracked to similar fates: destroyed, captured, lost in confirmable if curious ways. But a full quarter of those ships cannot be accounted for. Records show fateful ends that contradict their black-box recordings.

Does the Empire have more ships than she knows? Ghost fleets out there somewhere? Are they operating independently? Have they been captured or abandoned? Something else may be going on.

Does Rax know? Or is he in the dark, too?

Speaking of Gallius Rax...

Picking through the data to find anything on the erstwhile fleet admiral will be an act of finding a precious gem in a box of broken glass-it will be a slow and miserable retrieval. But it's why she's really here, so she summons a droid and sets it to work.

"I WILL SEE WHAT DATA I CAN EXCAVATE," the droid says, then gives a small nod before its servomotors whir and carry it away.

Excavate, she thinks. A perfect word. And from a droid, no less.

- Flip, flip, flip. Page after page on the cartridge reader-she palms the control orb and swipes it left again and again, scrolling through endless administrative pages. Here, as with the naval archives, the presence of Rax is naught but a vapor trail. She's chasing shadows.

And so she's down to searching the records of those who associated with him: Yularen, Rancit, Screed, and Palpatine himself. She cross-references personnel reports, genealogical records, inventory lists, anything, everything. Hours pass. Her eyes are bleary. She feels alone and overwhelmed, and the only sound that accompanies her frustration and her anxiety is the sound of droids clicking and clacking and rattling about.

She stands up. The search is over.

Rax barely exists.

Trying to figure out who he is or who he was is an act of grabbing at fog-it dissipates in your hand while still obscuring everything beyond it.

It's time to go, so she packs up her notes and tucks them in a side satchel before slinging it over her shoulder.

Suddenly movement behind her- She wheels on it. Reaching for her blaster.

It's the droid. Of course it is. It wouldn't be anyone else, and yet-well, she has to excuse her own shock. I'm tired and angry.

The droid buzzes: "AN IMAGE CRYSTAL." It extends a telescoping arm. In it, a small smoke-gray crystal. The Empire doesn't use these anymore, as they're somewhat antiquated, but decades before, single-serving image crystals were still in use. Now the Empire has the ability to archive visual and textual information across cartridges or datacards.

She's about to hand it back. What could one image matter?

Still. The reader is right here. She unslings the bag and, without sitting, places the crystal in the smooth portal on the alcove desk, then hits the button beneath it so it lights up.

A three-dimensional image emerges in the space before her.

It looks like somewhere in an Imperial docking bay. In the background, a Lambda-class shuttle sits. At the margins of the holo, white-armored stormtroopers and a pair of red-armored Imperial Royal Guardsmen.

There, in the middle of the photo: Wullf Yularen, Dodd Rancit, Terrinald Screed, plus three others: Grand Vizier Mas Amedda, Emperor Palpatine, and...

A boy.

Or, rather, a boy on the cusp of being a young man.

The boy looks like a dirt-cheeked rube shoved into an ill-fitting academy uniform. His hair is dark, his skin is pale. Those eyes, though. A familiar arrogance shines there. Each a black hole swallowing the light.

One thing stands out: One of the boy's hands is facing outward, and Sloane sees something across his palm. A marking of some kind. A tattoo?

Or a brand?

This holographic image by itself does nothing to illuminate who Rax is. And yet it stirs in her a strange kind of hope: In this act of "excavation" she has found a rather curious fossil, hasn't she? If this is him, if this is Gallius Rax, then the mystery of his presence becomes one she can solve. He becomes a beast she can kill.

(Not literally, of course. Or so she hopes.) What next, then, for this mystery? She has a bit of thread in her hands-how shall she pull it? Four of the men in the image glowing before her are dead. Palpatine is gone. Yularen died on the Death Star, Rancit perished in a Rebel attack (though she's heard rumors that Vader executed him for treason), and Screed was killed by pirates off the Iktari Circle.

Which leaves one left alive.

It is time, she thinks, to pay Mas Amedda a visit.

Erno watches the kid do it. The little dum-dum doesn't even know he's being watched. Kid creeps up to the wall like a scuttling spider under the cover of night, then takes the stencil to the pale brick and pulls out the light painter-he shakes it a few times and gives it a hit, and then it pulses an image onto the side of the P&S (Peace & Security) station.

An iconic image of a bad, bad man.

Maybe not even a man. Maybe a machine.

VADER LIVES, it says. That, stenciled underneath the all-too-familiar artist rendering of the helmeted thug.

The kid turns, grinning like he got away with it. He didn't.

Erno steps into the halo of light from the street-orb overhead, and he clears his throat so the kid in the dark hood and cloak looks up. Another one of these Acolyte idiots. Erno whistles. "Nice art. A real original."

The kid doesn't say anything. He stands there, quaking in his bare feet. He's young, dumb, scared. Erno sighs and levels his blaster. "C'mon, you little roach-rat, turn around, turn around. Let's get these binders on."

Pouting, the boy turns and Erno slaps on a pair of binders, then hauls him around front and in through the doors of the station.

The new hire at the front desk, a pretty Pantoran named Kiza, says, "Hey, Detective," and he gives her a wink and a nod even though she'd probably never have anything to do with a scruffy thick-neck like him. Erno drags the kid through the station and past the desks and the holoscreens and the peace officers and into one of the back rooms. He gives the kid a light shove and the boy lands hard in a chair.

The boy hisses something at him. It isn't in a language he understands, and he doesn't care to ask about it.

"Uh-huh, sure, sure. Whatever, kid." Erno sits down across from the boy, and pops a cut square of rubber-root in his mouth, giving it a good chew. It tastes like the underside of a boot but gives his mouth something to do, and better this than the stimsticks he used to smoke.

He gets the boy's measure fast. Human punk, maybe fourteen, maybe fifteen. Pale like the others (they pretend they're nocturnal). Black hood, black cloak. This one doesn't have a mask, though. A lot of these Acolyte freaks, they put together these masks-hammering together plastoid, metal, wood, goggles, ventilators, whatever-and wear them as they harangue the locals. It's all pathetic, paltry stuff. Vandalism, mostly.

"Vader lives," Erno says, chawing on the rubber-root. "Vader lives, you say. Last I heard, he went up with the Death Star. Whoom. He's dead. If he was ever even alive. Empire's falling apart, and it wouldn't be if he were still around, don't you think?"

"Death isn't the end."

"Last I checked, it's pretty much the final stop, kid."

The boy grins. His teeth are white, too white. His tongue snakes along them, and for a moment Erno feels his guts clench. His instincts are telling him something's wrong here, but he doesn't know what.

No, this kid's just getting to you. It's late. You been on duty for too long now. Get this moron booked, then head home.

"What's your name?"

"Oblivion."

He snorts with derisive laughter. "Oh. That's a nice name. That a family name?" The loser doesn't say anything, he just sits there, chest rising and falling like a cornered, feral animal. "Look, kid. I got you for vandalism. You can spend a couple nights down in the hole. But I'm feeling friendly. I'm feeling generous. You roll over on a couple of your Acolyte buddies-you are an Acolyte of the Beyond, right?-and I'll get you out of here with a stern finger-wagging and not much else. Hm?"

Still the boy says nothing.

Erno sighs.

"What's the deal with you pouty little thugs, anyway? You're, what, a buncha suck-ups for the Empire?"

"Not the Empire. Something greater than the Empire."

"Vader."

The boy grins.

"Not Palpatine?"

Again the boy says nothing. That grin only widens.

Makes sense, Erno figures. Who would think that old withered twig was worth a measure of twisted hero worship? Vader at least looked like a tough guy. Imposing, dangerous, a real bad bag of tricks.

"You don't have a mask?" Erno asks.

"I don't."

"Why not? The mask is more of the Vader thing, huh? Trying to look like him? You know he was a bad guy, right?"

"Are you a decent man?" the boy asks. "A 'good guy'?"

Hardly, Erno thinks. His wife has left him for a pair of artists in the Teeno Village district. His neighbors think he's a slob. Even the fish in his fishtank give him a dubious look every morning when he leaves for work.

"I asked about your mask."

The boy shifts in his seat. "You have to earn your mask."

"Oh. Ho ho. You haven't earned it yet?"

The kid looks up at the ceiling, then around the room at the bare walls. "This building is very old."

"Yeah. So?"

"I know what's downstairs."

What's downstairs...? The museum next door uses the shared basement with the P&S building. The detectives keep evidence locked up down there, and the museum uses the same lockup to keep a bunch of old musty, dusty artifacts and the like.

Erno's about to pick this apart because really, why does this snot-dribbling punk care? Maybe it's a clue. Maybe the kid's parents work for the museum. Could be a- But then someone comes in the room.

It's a security officer, Spob Rydel, hat in hand. "Erno, you oughta see this."

Ennnhhh, I'm busy, Rydel, he thinks, but fine, fine, if one of the security ops guys wants him to see something, so be it. He takes the kid's wrists and brings them to the tabletop before slapping a button underneath the surface-the table goes magnetic, and the kid's binder cuffs thud hard to the tabletop as the magnetic field pulls them down.

Then he's up and back through the station, and the holoscreens are turning to CCI-the Coronet City Info channel-one by one.

It takes Erno a second to gauge what he's even seeing. Holofeeds from various areas around the city all show similar scenes: Downtown, in Diadem Square, a horde of hooded and cloaked figures are mobbing storefronts and leaping on top of the air-tuks to pull the speeders down to the ground; on the 1-line of the mag-lev subway, they swarm aboard as soon as the train stops at the Juni Street Station; down by the casinos, they rush those coming out and going in, dark cloaks fluttering in the night.

They carry sticks.

Sticks painted red.

They have masks.

Some kind of concerted attack. A riot. Or worse.