Tarkin recalled the Koorivar captain’s words to Vader: Not all of us were Separatists.

With the deaths of Dooku and the Separatist leadership, and the deactivation of the droid army, Antar 4—like many CIS worlds — had soon found itself in the Empire’s crosshairs. More to the point, in the crosshairs of Moff Tarkin, who had been given Imperial orders to make an example of the moon. No attempt was to be made at repatriation, nor was Tarkin to waste time sorting the Separatists from those resistance fighters and intelligence operatives waiting to be exfiltrated to safety.

COMPNOR did its best to cover up the fact that many Koorivar and Gotal loyalists had been swept up in the arrests, executions, and massacres, but the media eventually got hold of the story, and for a while the Antar Atrocity had become a celebrated cause in the Core — this despite the swift disappearances of many beings who had attached themselves to reporting on the story. Instead, the disappearances so fueled the public’s hunger for details that the Emperor decided to remove Tarkin from the controversy by assigning him to pacification operations in the Western Reaches and had ultimately installed him as commander of the bases servicing the deep-space mobile battle station project, replacing Vice Admiral Rancit, who was reassigned to Naval Intelligence.

In thinking back to that period, some four years earlier, Tarkin recalled the case of two Coruscanti journalists who had risen briefly to the forefront among a host of anti-Imperial irritants. A quick search of the HoloNet archives conjured their holograms, which Tarkin placed above the table alongside that of Knotts. In the Coruscant database, Tarkin located intelligence reports detailing their activities.

An attractive, dark-skinned human woman with blue-gray eyes, Anora Fair had been the most vocal and volatile of the Core media correspondents who had fixated on the events at Antar. An ambitious journalist, Fair had already attracted attention for her probing interviews with Imperial officials and her editorials critical of Imperial policy, as well as of the Emperor himself. Her unrelenting reports on the Antar Atrocity had been brought to life with holographic recreations of arrests and executions, produced and directed by a rubicund Zygerrian female named Hask Taff, whom many a pro-Imperial pundit had deemed “a master of HoloNet manipulation.”

It was clear to COMPNOR that the two of them knew more than they could possibly have known without the help of an intelligence community insider, and suspicions at the time had focused on a disaffected former Republic station chief named Berch Teller.

A HoloNet archive search for Teller came up empty, but an access-restricted database search returned a decade-old image of a rangy, dark-haired human with thick eyebrows and a cleft chin. Extracting the hologram, Tarkin placed it alongside those of Anora Fair and Hask Taff, then changed his mind and moved Teller’s hologram to the center, with Knotts — the broker — to one side, and the two media professionals on the other.

Tarkin contemplated the arrangement and was pleased. With each new set of prints, the trail was beginning to surrender its secrets.

Captain Teller’s intelligence network résumé indicated a long and distinguished career. Early in the Clone Wars, Teller had been involved in covert operations on a host of Separatist worlds. That, however, paled in comparison with the fact that Teller had been one of the intelligence officers who had debriefed Tarkin following his rescue and escape from the Citadel, with the plans to a secret hyperspace route into Separatist space.

He and Teller had history.

And there was more.

Assigned to Antar 4 in the war’s final year, Captain Teller had helped train and organize Gotal and Koorivar partisans into well-armed resistance groups, which had carried out raids, destroyed armories and spaceports, and generally made a nuisance of themselves for the governing Separatists. Sensing what was in store for Antar 4 after the war’s abrupt conclusion, Teller had appealed to his superiors in the intelligence agencies to arrange for the extraction of his principal assets before Tarkin could bring the hammer down on the moon. Republic Intelligence had tried to provide aid in the form of documentation and transport, but COMPNOR, by then on the rise in the Imperial hegemony, had refused to intervene, and so many of Teller’s operatives, despite their long-standing loyalty to the Republic, had been arrested and executed.

The Imperial directive to make an example of the moon had made perfect sense to Tarkin at the time. He wasn’t a retributionist; it was simply that separating friend from foe would undoubtedly have allowed many Separatists to flee into hiding. Eliminating them en masse on Antar 4 was preferable to having to hunt them down later, in whatever remote regions they found shelter. His actions had conveyed a message to other former CIS worlds that defeat didn’t grant them absolution for their crimes, or assure them that the Empire was ready to welcome them back into the fold with open arms. The message had to be made clear to Raxus, Kooriva, Murkhana, and the rest: Surrender all former Separatists, or suffer the same fate as the population of the Gotal moon.

Still, Tarkin could see how a Republic officer like Teller might feel betrayed to the point where he would attempt to wage a campaign of revenge against all odds. The military was filled with those who refused to accept that collateral damage was acceptable when it served to further the Imperial cause. In the absence of order, there was only chaos. Did Teller expect an apology from the Emperor? Compensation for the families of those who had been unjustly executed? It was witless thinking. Multiply Teller by one billion or ten billion beings, however, and the Empire could face a serious problem …

He continued to peruse Teller’s résumé, wading through the dense text that scrolled in midair in front of his eyes. By the time Teller had made his appeal to his intelligence chiefs, he had already been reassigned to head up security at—

Tarkin stared at the words: Desolation Station.

The clandestine outpost responsible for overseeing much of the research for the deep-space battle station.

But Teller wasn’t there for long; he had vanished shortly after the events at Antar 4 and hadn’t been seen since. Some in Military Intelligence believed that he had been assassinated by COMPNOR agents, but others were convinced that it was Teller who had not only fed information about Antar 4 to Anora Fair and Hask Taff, but also been instrumental in spiriting the media partners to safety hours before they were to have been disappeared by COMPNOR.

Tarkin eased off the castered stool and began to pace the length of the massive table, all the while regarding the four projected holoimages. Was it possible that some or all of them were involved in the pirating of the Carrion Spike? He stopped to mull it over, and shook his head. The odds were good that Teller and Knotts knew each other, in that they had answered to the same case officer at Republic Intelligence; also that Teller had approached the journalists with his story. But none of the four was a starship pilot, much less an engineer capable of managing the corvette’s sophisticated instruments and systems.

Returning to the stool, Tarkin re-summoned the lengthy file devoted to Antar 4.

The Republic databases were difficult to navigate, as much of the information had been deleted or redacted, or was in the process of being altered and “reinterpreted.” Once he had successfully wormed his way into the appropriate archives, however, he was able to narrow the parameters of his search for Republic assets associated with the resistance. Ultimately the distant computers provided the names of several of Teller’s partisan subordinates who had escaped execution on the moon and were at least worthy of consideration. There was, for example, a Gotal starship pilot, identified in the archives only as “Salikk,” and a Koorivar munitions and surveillance expert listed only as “Cala.”