The Old Republic 04: Annihilation by Drew Karpyshyn

Author:Drew Karpyshyn
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Action & Adventure, Space Opera, Crime, Fiction, Science Fiction, Adventure, General
ISBN: 9780345529411
Publisher: LucasBooks
Published: 2012-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

MINISTER DAVIDGE FOUND IT DIFFICULT to focus on his work. In part it was relocating to a temporary office on the west side of the Orbital Defense Command Center—an unavoidable circumstance considering that his old office and a dozen others on the eastern wing of the building had been reduced to rubble the night before last.

The extra guards posted outside his door—and inside his door, and following him even when he went home at night—didn’t help, though he understood the reason behind the extra security.

Most troubling of all, however, was the fact that he had personally been targeted for assassination. He’d always considered himself a mere cog in the Imperial machine—a key cog, to be sure, but not one who would ever garner that kind of attention. The Sith Lords and Grand Moffs were the face of the Empire; he was just the man who kept the shuttles running on time. He always believed he was protected by his anonymity; he wasn’t really part of the war—he was just an analyst crunching numbers.

That comforting illusion had been blown to pieces just as surely everything in his office. While he might not bear any particular ill will to the enemies of the Empire, the attempt on his life made him understand that they hated and despised him. It was unsettling. Disturbing. And it made dealing with entire unpleasant business extremely stressful.

He’d reviewed the latest report from the Imperial investigators multiple times; looking over the facts that had been gathered over the last thirty-six hours again and again as he tried to make sense of the whole affair … and prepared to give his own report to Darth Marr.

The communications room they had set up for him in his temporary office lacked the durasteel door of his original office; it was separated from the rest of the room by a simple sliding door. But it still gave him the privacy he needed. More important, it also had a black cipher to make sure nobody could listen in on his most sensitive communications.

He activated the cipher and waited for the holo of Darth Marr to materialize as he received and decoded the incoming call with his own cipher.

“I didn’t expect to have to wait a day and a half to get a status report from you, Minister Davidge,” Marr said to open their conversation.

“I didn’t want to contact you until I was certain the conversation would be secure,” he explained.

The cipher in his old office had been destroyed, and there was only one other one on Ziost—an inactive spare that had been stored in the maximum-security underground vault beneath the ODCC. With everything else that was going on, it had taken some time before the engineers had hooked it up to the communications equipment in his new office.

“Cautious as ever,” Marr noted, though Davidge couldn’t tell if it was meant as a compliment, an insult, or simply an offhand remark.

“I have the details of the report, my Lord,” he said.

“I assumed as much when you called me.

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