James Luceno - Tarkin

At the point she became a nuisance to Eriadu, she had already become the subject of breathtaking HoloNet tales and scandalous rumors, having survived starship collisions and starfighter crashes, blaster-bolt and vibroblade wounds, and countless fistfights and personal duels. Said to be as fast on the draw as a circus sharpshooter and as talented on the dance floor as a double-jointed Twi’lek, Q’anah had chewed off her own infected hand while awaiting rescue on an isolated moon, and was known to wear artificial arms and at least one leg — from the knee down — in addition to an ocular implant and who knew what else. Twice she had been captured and sentenced to lengthy terms in maximum-security prisons, and had escaped from each thanks to daring rescues mounted by her soldiers, who all but worshipped her. Only her link to House Elegin had saved her from execution. But following an encounter with Judicial Forces, during which she destroyed six ships, the Republic also put a high price on her head, and it was that bounty that had landed her in the Greater Seswenna, a sector rarely if ever patrolled by Judicials, notwithstanding repeated entreaties by Eriadu and other harassed worlds.

Lommite convoys typically comprised up to a score of unpiloted container ships slave-rigged to a crewed shepherd vessel, now and then with an armed gunboat trailing. Each container was capable of jumping to hyperspace, but during those years before the era of affordable and reliable navicomputers, the convoys had to navigate by hyperspace buoys located along the route, and experience had proved that jumping in single file was safer than going to hyperspace in clusters, even though the maneuver left the containers vulnerable to attack on their reversions to realspace.

Outland capital ships would ride herd on valuable shipments, but ordinary convoys frequently found themselves targeted by Q’anah’s flotilla of deadly frigates and corvettes. With the swiftest ships engaging the shepherd vessel, the rest would deliver boarding parties to some of the containers and separate them from the pack. Once the slave-rigs of the ore carriers were disabled, the boxy vessels would be slaved to a dedicated pirate frigate and jumped in line to hyperspace. By the time Outland could respond to the distress calls, Q’anah’s crews were already selling the stolen ore on the black market or turning it over to the companies that had hired them to carry out the raids.

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.”