X-wing_ The Krytos Trap Part 18

Nawara glanced over at Wedge. "Commander, I did not realize--"

"No reason you should have Nawar .... "Wedge hitched a moment. The way the Twi'leks ran Nawara's name together, he couldn't be certain exactly what Nawara's clan name was. When in doubt, go with indigenous custom.

"... Nawar'aven. It was an adventure the squadron had well before you joined it. Suffice it to say it was resolved to the satisfaction of all interested parties."

"It was indeed, Wedgan'tiiles." Koh'shak stretched the last syllable of Wedge's name into a whole sibilant phrase of its own. "And now you are come here seeking satisfaction of another kind."

"Quite true, Koh'shak." Wedge half-turned and pointed back at the two Alliance s.h.i.+ps. "We have for you some won-drous things drawn from the various worlds of the New Republic." As he turned back to face the starport's master, he noticed Nawara and Cazne'olan speaking to each other in low tones, with their braintails convulsing wildly.

Koh'shak closed his pinkish eyes and settled interlaced fingers over the bulge in his middle. "I am certain what you have brought will be impressive. Shall we begin our negotia-tions?"

His offer seemed a bit abrupt to Wedge, and the sur-prised look on Nawara's face indicated he also thought something was amiss. What's going on here?

Before Wedge could venture a reply, Nawara gently grabbed Wedge's right forearm. "While the Commander ap-plauds your alacrity in seeing to his needs, we have been traveling for days to get here. He chooses to invoke twi'janii."

Koh'shak's eyes popped open with the speed Wedge would have expected if the starport master had felt a gun being jammed against a spine. "!

welcome Wedgan'tilles and would have granted him twi'janii without reservation if I felt he did not find our climate oppressive."

"Open your eyes yet wider, Koh'shak." Cazne'olan ges-tured toward Wedge.

"He is a warrior in truth as well as dress. Even in the hot season he would not be discomfitted."

"Your courtesy in reminding me of that is appreciated, Cazne'olan."

Koh'shak's words came out light and even, but the violent twitching of his braintails seemed to belie the benign tone of the reply.

"Wedgan'rilles, you and your peo-ple are to consider yourselves our guests. We will see to your pleasure, then to our business."

"You are most kind," Wedge said, believing Koh'shak to be anything but. I don't know what he has in mind as our pleasure, but I'm certain his will be business, and I don't antic.i.p.ate that being much fun at all.

23.

Elbows planted on either side of the dataterminal's key-board, leila leaned forward and rubbed her hands over her face. The jolt of excitement she had expected had come, but it faded far too quickly. Fatigue and an unfocused fear flooded through her in its wake. She could feel herself begin-ning to slow down, but she refused to surrender.

No, no giving up now. I won this one. She pressed her fingers against her eyelids. I think.

She had begun her quest to locate the Duros captain, Lai Nootka, in a most organized and methodical way. She pulled as much as she could about him from Imperial and Alliance sources and compiled a profile of him based on that informa-tion. The most complete Imperial record came from a planet named Garqi where Nootka and his crew had been impris-oned for several months on charges of smuggling for the Alliance. Nootka's presence on the planet had been well doc-umented, and the Prefect Barris, Nootka's Imperial adver-sary, had paid dearly for his brush with the Alliance.

Garqi was where Corran met Nootka.

Alliance files were far more generous in the amount of information they provided. Nootka had indeed moved s.h.i.+p-ments for the Alliance, but he acted on their behalf only when it suited him. He didn't appear to have firm ties to the Alliance--not even as firm as those Mirax Terrik had.

Nootka's distance from the Alliance, yet willingness to work with it, certainly put him in a grey area that might have been why Tycho chose to trade with him.

Iella's inquiries then went off in several directions at the same time.

She started a search for any records pertaining to any of the aliases and various s.h.i.+p identification codes she could find for the Star's Delight.

She was less interested in the Alliance material than she was the Imperial records, but she did note that Nootka had not been off on missions for the Alliance at the time Tycho said he met with him on Coruscant.

She also dug deeper into the person who was Lai Nootka himself. The Duros were a race of tall, slender, blue-skinned beings whose facial expressions seemed, to most hu-mans, to be entirely dour. They remained aloof, and it was often said that they lacked noses because they were disin-clined to stick their noses into business that did not concern them. Most Duros remained neutral concerning the Rebel-lion, but a few brave individuals like Lai Nootka dared trade with the Rebels. Only in this did Lai Nootka appear to be different from the majority of his people, which made re-searching him much easier.

Iella's greatest triumph was in locating the series of young-adult Duros novels from which Nootka drew inspira-tion for his various aliases and the new names of his s.h.i.+p. He had mixed and matched first and family names of characters to create aliases for himself, and then for each alias, gave his s.h.i.+p a name that was not a.s.sociated with the corresponding characters in the books; but everything had indeed come from that pool of names. When none of the aliases she al-ready had for him turned up an Imperial record, she tried inventing additional aliases, using the process she imagined Nootka himself had used to create his new ident.i.ties. She started pumping these possible aliases through the Imperial computer and hoping for the best.

The computer had reported back a lot of misses, but finally she got a hit. Just four days before Tycho's meeting with Lai Nootka, a modified Corellis.p.a.ce Gymsnor-3 freighter named Novachild entered the Coruscant system. A Duros named Hes Glillto had been listed as the captain of record. No departure for that s.h.i.+p or captain had been re-corded, but this didn't surprise leila. The one record provid-ing the information about his arrival was in a duty log filed by Lieutenant Virar Needa of Orbital Solar Energy Transfer Satellite 1127 after Coruscant had fallen to the Alliance and after Tycho Celchu had been taken into custody.

Though officially part of their duty, OSF;FS officers sel-dom maintained or filed such logs, but from what she could see Needa had been obsessive about it. The log had data concerning incoming and outgoing s.h.i.+ps that traveled in-system during Needa's watches on the station. The lack of a departure record for Novachild could have meant nothing more sinister than that the s.h.i.+p had left while Needa was sleeping, but Iella felt in her gut that was unlikely.

She sat back in her chair and looked at the data on the screen again. The fact that no other Imperial records men-tioned the Novachild or Hes Glillto told leila the records had been deliberately purged. And anyone with the access needed to purge those records could easily manufacture and enter the data that shows Tycho was in Imperial lntelligence's pay.

Or, Tycho himself could have doctored things to make it look as if he had been framed.

Iella slowly shook her head. The information she had was intriguing but essentially useless. She could not prove Lai Nootka and Hes Glillto were the same person. The Novachild's arrival put it on Coruscant a couple of days before the meeting Corran had witnessed, but she couldn't exclude the possibility that the s.h.i.+p had departed before the date of the meeting. Unless she could definitively place Nootka on Coruscant at that time, she couldn't prove Tycho was telling the truth.

And I'm not so sure I want to do that. She sighed. Diric had told her about some of the conversations he'd had with Tycho. He was more convinced than ever of Tycho's inno-cence, and his opinion did carry a lot of weight in her mind. Even so, if Tycho had caused Corran's death, lella didn't want him to be able to get away with it. I owe Corran that A familiar hoot brought her back to the present and sparked a smile on her face. "Whistler!"

The small green and white R2 beeped happily. Behind him, tortling along, came Rogue Squadron's black, clam-sh.e.l.l-headed M-3PO unit. "Good morning, Mistress."

"Morning?" leila glanced at the chronographic readout at the top of her datapad's screen. "I don't believe it. I've been here eight hours. Diric will kill me."

Emtrey's head canted to the left. "I would hope not, Mistress leila. That would be a crime and--"

"I was speaking metaphorically, Emtrey, not literally." leila frowned at the droid. "I meant that he would be upset with me."

"Ah, I see."

Ieila patted Whistler gently on his domed head. "So what are you two doing here in the computer center?"

Whistler warbled nonchalantly.

"We can so tell her, Whistler." Emtrey's head righted itself and thrust forward, giving leila a good view of the gold eyes burning in the hollow of his face. "You do want the truth to triumph, don't you?"

Ieila nodded slowly. "Every day it seems I'm hearing less and less of it.

What have you got?"

Emtrey pointed toward her dataterminal's I/O port. "Whistler, hook in there and show her what we found."

Whistler squawked rudely--a sound leila recognized as one she'd often heard the droid use to chasten Corran. Her throat thickened as melancholy tried to suck the life out of her, but she shook her head. She looked up at Emtrey and forced words out past the lump in her throat. "What have you been doing?"

"We have finished the tasks Master Ven set for us before he left with the others, so we started going over transcripts and noticed an underlying a.s.sumption everyone seems to have made concerning the conquest of Coruscant."

"And that is?"

"It is a.s.sumed that Ysanne Isard let us have the world because she wanted us to have it, infected as it was with the Krytos virus. The stresses possessing it has put on the Alli-ance certainly are great, and the a.s.sumption is probably valid, but there is no straight-line correlation between her desire to let us have the planet and actions taken in the final days."

"I'm not certain, at this hour, I follow what you're say-ing." Iella rubbed at her burning eyes with her left hand. "Can you break it down and be more specific?"

"Certainly." Emtrey glanced down at the R2 unit. "Show her the current disease case grid."

Whistler chirped happily. The data on the terminal's screen vanished beneath a graph that plotted incidences of sickness over time in red. A thick blood-red line quickly blos-somed into a triangle with a steep hypotenuse, then leveled out into a rectangle that began to flare upward again over the last ten days. The disease had spread quickly at first, but had plateauedmuntil recently.

Iella nodded. "The plateau indicates the period when the disease stopped spreading because bacta therapy managed to keep it under control."

"Exactly. The graph of fatalities has a similar profile."

"I can imagine. This is pretty horrible."

"True, Mistress. Whistler, now run the plus-six graph."

"Plus-six?"

"The projected disease report graph we would have seen if the planet had fallen to the Alliance just six days later than it did." The new graph exploded from the starting point and spiked quickly off the top of the screen. "Projected fatalities in this model are 85 percent of afflicted populations."

Iella's jaw dropped open. "Whole alien populations would have been wiped off Coruscant."

"Exactly. This model, when broken down by species, shows a complete depopulation of Gamorreans, Quarren, Twi'leks, SuUustans, and Trandoshans. The chances of the disease traveling off-world are incalculable, but the potential for galaxy-wide extermination of some species cannot be dis-counted."

She blinked and rubbed at her eyes again. "Why are the models so different?"

Silvery highlights flashed from the edges of Emtrey's black carapace as he raised his hands. "One reason is highly speculative. First, it seems that in boiling off a reservoir to create the storm that brought down the planet's s.h.i.+elds, our efforts destroyed a large amount of the virus present in the planetary water system. Second, and far more germane to our discussion, is the abbreviated incubation period our ar-rival gave the disease. Had the Alliance arrived just a week later, we would already have had a wave of deaths and a whole new round of infections because of contact with bodily fluids from the victims and the virus in the water system."

Iella nodded slowly. "If we had been just a week later in liberating the planet, there would have been no way to save it. Non-human members of the Alliance would have fled, dooming their own populations. Without non-human sup-port, the Alliance would have foundered."

"That seems probable, Mistress."

"Yeah." lella's brown eyes tightened. "So the reason the Imps stopped our initial effort to shut down the s.h.i.+elds was to keep us from taking over the world too soon. For Iceheart it wasn't a matter of if but when we'd take the world. And since Tycho's contribution to our efforts were what enabled us to bring the s.h.i.+elds down before the time that would have been optimal for Iceheart, we can suppose he wasn't working for her." Emtrey nodded and Whistler trumpeted triumphantly. "Unless, of course, that's exactly what Iceheart wants us to think." lella shook her head. "Not bad work, you two, but it's about as helpful as what I found on Lai Nootka. I can put someone who ought to be him flying something that ought to be his s.h.i.+p here about the time Tycho said he met with Nootka, but I can't prove it. I'd dearly like to believe Tycho is being framed, but I don't see a good reason why Isard would be devoting so many resources to getting some-one who is really not that important."

Whistler reeled off a series of sharp bleats.

"Yes, I will tell her." Emtrey looked down at Iella. "Whistler says discrediting Tycho will discredit Rogue Squadron. If Tycho is convicted, Commander Antilles will be distracted. Tycho's conviction could also cause an inquiry into the events of the first a.s.sault on Borleias. He could be blamed for the disaster, absolving the Bothan General of his mistake, and that might make the Bothans feel they can grab for more power."

"I can follow that, but it's too risky a return for Iceheart to take an interest in it. There has to be something else."

"There is, Mistress Wessiri." Emtrey lowered his hands to near his hips.

"Whistler says Ysanne Isard would do it because she's cruel."

That idea landed in Iella's gut and sat there like one of Hoth's frozen continents. "You know, Whistler, you may have something there. Toying with an innocent man like that is exactly what she would do, especially when it meant that the Alliance was dancing to a tune she called. Of course, that doesn't prove Tycho is innocent, but thwarting her is enough to make sure I keep digging until I learn what's really going on, one way or another."

24.

Corran scratched at his right ear, flaking off some crusted flesh. "Yeah, I know it sounds as if I got hit harder than I did, but I'm convinced I'm right." He looked at Jan. "l think it's a good shot at getting out of here, or at least one that has to be explored."

"I agree."

Urlor shook his head. "Too far-fetched."

"Which is why I want to test my theory when we're down in the mine."

Urlor's ma.s.sive left hand stroked his beard. "Will you give this foolishness up if your experiment fails?"

Jan raised an eyebrow and glanced at Corran. "Will you?"

Corran hesitated before answering. Though he had not blacked out, the Emdee droid had kept him in the infirmary overnight for observation--at least Corran a.s.sumed it was overnight, having had no way of judging the pa.s.sage of time. Corran had gone over in his mind what had happened and came to two conclusions. The first, which no one doubted, was that the guard had singled him out because someone had mentioned his desire to escape. Though Corran hadn't men-tioned it to anyone other than Jan and Urlor, the questions he had asked of the inmates would have been enough to alert even the most dense of individuals to his plans.

The second thing he had concluded, and had spent the last week attempting to convince Jan and Urlor was true, was that they were all upside down.

The technology for cre-ating and negating artificial and real gravity was ancient. s.h.i.+ps of all sizes and stripes could generate their own gravity.

Reversing the gravity in the complex would lead any escap-ees to a.s.sume that by going up they'd be getting closer to the surface and freedom when, in fact, they'd be getting farther from it and killing their chances of escape. If Corran had heard troopers marching past, any escapee would run full on into at least one level occupied by soldiers.

Even if he didn't get captured, by the time he realized what had happened, he'd have a long way to go just to get back to the prison level, much less go beyond it to freedom.

He shook his head. "No, I'll still go even if my experi-ment is unsuccessful. I have no doubt that I'm right--the experiment is just to convince you I'm right."

Urlor folded his arms across his chest. "Why do you care if we believe you?"

"If I'm right, you can come with me."

The big man held up his ruined right hand. "You'd find a cripple of little use to you. I've learned to become patient. I'll wait for you to come back."

"You're wrong there." Corran looked at Jan. "How about you?"

The older man sat silently on his billet for a moment, then shook his head rather firmly. "Forgive me. There is no way I can go, but I allowed myself to indulge in the fantasy."

"You're strong. You could make it."

"I appreciate your a.s.sessment of me, Corran, but it is overgenerous." Jan shrugged. "Besides, just as a desire to keep me safe prevents our people from harming our Imperial compatriots, so a desire to keep our people safe prevents me from joining you. If I escape, Iceheart will kill the lot of us. I'll remain here and keep them safe until you can bring help back."

Corran frowned. "So neither of you will go?"

"No." Urlor shook his head. "You'll be on your own." Unspoken in that sentence was the conviction there was no way to guarantee that the Imps didn't have spies among the Alliance prisoners.

And my traveling alone means that if I'm a spy, I won't be taking anyone else with me. "Don't worry, I'm no Tycho Celchu, nor will I let myself be betrayed by one another time."