The Essential Novels

by James Luceno

  “I figured that the moment your TIEs started shooting at me.”

  Kirtan slowly crossed his arms. “No, you don’t understand how desperate is your situation here. You thought you outsmarted me and the Empire. You were cautious, but not insurmountably so. You are dying even now.”

  Bastra’s bushy grey eyebrows met in a frown. “What are you talking about?”

  “When we took the Starwind I ordered a medical evaluation for you. You may have forgotten that I always remember what I have seen and heard, and in doing so you have forgotten how you ridiculed me for using skirtopanol to interrogate a smuggler working for the Rebellion. You told me then that he died during interrogation because his boss, Billey, had his people dose themselves with lotiramine. It metabolizes the interrogation drug and can induce chemical amnesia or, in some cases, death.”

  Kirtan gave Bastra a cold smile. “Your medical scan shows elevated levels of lotiramine in your blood.”

  “I guess you’ll just have to kill me the old-fashioned way, then.” Bastra smiled openly, flashing white teeth in a thick, stubble-coated face. “Since Vader was the last Jedi, I guess you’ll even have to get your hands dirty doing it.”

  “Hardly.”

  “You never were one to break a sweat doing any work on Corellia, were you, Loor?” Bastra slumped back against the bulkhead. “I don’t think you would have fit in even if you’d made an effort. You were always your own worst enemy.”

  “I wasn’t meant to fit in. You were Corellian Security, I was Imperial Intelligence attached to your office.” Kirtan forced himself to calm down a bit and unknotted his fists. Lowering his hands to his sides, he tugged on the hem of his black tunic. “And now you are your own worst enemy. You have accelerated blastonecrosis.”

  “What? You’re lying.”

  “No, no I’m not.” Kirtan let pity slip into his voice. “The lotiramine is very effective in masking the tracer enzymes for the disease. Here, on this ship, our medical facilities are far superior to those you would find among Rebels. We were able to pick out the enzymes.”

  Gil Bastra’s shoulders slumped and his grey head bowed. His hands came together around his bulging stomach. “The fatigue, loss of appetite. I thought I was just getting old.”

  “You are. And you are dying.” The Intelligence officer idly stroked his sharp chin with a long-fingered hand. “I can do nothing about the former problem, but there are ways to cure blastonecrosis.”

  “And all I have to do to be cured is turn in my friends?”

  Looking down upon the grey lump of a man across from him, Kirtan felt momentarily embarrassed by memories of having feared Gil Bastra’s judgment of him and his work. Bastra had not been his direct supervisor, but he had been the one to assign officers to work with Intelligence, and Bastra’s lack of respect had been reflected through the personnel sent to work with Kirtan. Every time that Kirtan had felt in control and superior, Bastra had managed to undercut him and shame him.

  Is this another of those times? Kirtan caught himself and nodded slowly. “There is more fight in you than you would want me to believe there is. I know you fashioned the new identities for your confederates and did a very good job of it, too. In fact, you only made mistakes in your own cover. Still I knew that you’d find yourself a freighter and hop around the galaxy, as your heart pleased. You were too old to change your lifestyle to something totally alien to avoid detection. You decided to gamble and now you have lost.”

  The old man’s head came up slowly. Kirtan saw fire still smoldering in the blue eyes. “I’ll give you nothing.”

  “Yes, yes, of course you won’t.” The Intelligence man laughed lightly. “You forget, I learned interrogation from a number of very good people, including yourself. I will get information from you. When I do—and you know I will—Corran Horn, Iella Wessiri, and her husband will be mine. It is inevitable.”

  “You’re overestimating your abilities, and underestimating mine.”

  “Am I? I think not. I know you well enough to know you’ll only break under extreme pressure. I can and will take you to the edge of your endurance, then float you in bacta until you are ready to continue interrogation.” Kirtan folded his hands together. “However, you are just one relay in the network that will bring the others to me. Corran Horn is too volatile to stay confined in any role you create for him. And I know that role had to be very constricting for him.”

  Bastra’s chest heaved mightily with a sigh. “And how do you know that?”

  Kirtan tapped his temple with a finger. “You think I have forgotten the falling out the two of you had? You decided to protect him because his father had been your partner when you started out, but you are a vengeful man, Gil Bastra. Whatever role you created for Corran would squeeze him every day, just to remind him he owed his life to a man he hated.”

  Fat rippled beneath the prisoner’s grey jumpsuit as he laughed. “You do know me.”

  “I do indeed.”

  “But not well enough.” Bastra gave him a grin that was all teeth and defiance. “I am vengeful—vengeful enough to engineer things so a disgraced Intelligence officer would spend the rest of his career dashing around the galaxy trying to capture three people he once worked with. Three people who escaped out from under his hooked beak, and were able to do so because his nose was so up in the air all the time that he couldn’t notice the most obvious of mistakes they made.”

  Kirtan used scorn to smother his surprise. “I caught you, didn’t I?”

  “And it took you the better part of two years to do so. Ever wonder why? Ever wonder why, when you were about to give up, a new clue would surface?” Bastra surged forward and stood. Though the prisoner was nearly thirty centimeters shorter, than Kirtan, the Intelligence officer felt somehow dwarfed by him. “I wanted you following me. Every second you were on my trail, every moment I looked easier to catch than the others, I knew you’d come after me. And while you were coming after me, you wouldn’t be going after the others.”

  Kirtan pointed a trembling finger at the old man’s face. “That doesn’t matter because you can and will be broken. I will have from you the things I need to find the others.”

  “You’re wrong, Kirtan. I’m a black hole that’s sucking your career down into its heart.” Bastra sagged back down onto the cot. “Remember that when I’m dead, because I’ll be laughing about it for all eternity.”

  This cannot continue. I will not be humiliated any longer! “I’ll remember your words, Gil Bastra, but your laughter will be a long time coming. The only eternity you’ll know is your interrogation, and I guarantee—personally guarantee—you’ll go to your grave having betrayed those who trusted you the most.”

  4

  Corran made a vain grab at the hydrospanner with his right hand as the tool slipped from the X-wing’s starboard engine cowling. His fingertips brushed the spanner’s end, sending it into a spin toward the ferrocrete deck of the hangar. A half second later, when his right knee slipped and unbalanced him, he realized having failed to catch the tool was the least of his problems. He tried to hook his left hand on the edge of the open engine compartment, but he missed with that grab, too, leaving him set to plummet headfirst in the hydrospanner’s wake.

  Still trying to prepare himself for the agony coming from a fractured skull, he was surprised to find pain blossoming at the other end of his body. Before he could figure out what had happened, his flailing left hand caught hold of the cowling it had missed before, aborting his long fall to the ground. He hauled himself back onto the S-foil and lay there on his belly for a moment, considering himself very lucky.

  As the pain in Corran’s rump lessened, Whistler’s scolding gained volume. Corran rubbed a hand back over his left cheek and felt a small tear in the fabric of his flight suit, prompting him to laugh. “Yes, Whistler, I am very lucky you were quick enough to catch me. Next time, though, can your pincer catch a little less of me and a bit more of my flight suit?”

  Whistler blatted a rep
ly Corran chose to ignore.

  The pilot twisted around onto his seat with only mild discomfort. “So, do I still need the tool, or did the last adjustment do it?”

  The droid’s tone ran from high to low in a fair imitation of a sigh.

  “No, of course I still need it.” Corran frowned. “You should have caught it, Whistler, not me. I can climb back up here by myself. It can’t.” Even as he said that and slid toward the S-foil’s forward edge, it occurred to him that he’d not heard the hydrospanner hit the ground. That’s odd.

  Peering over the edge of the wing, he saw a smiling, brown-haired woman holding the hydrospanner up in his direction. “This belongs to you, I take it?”

  Corran nodded. “Yeah. Thanks.”

  She handed it to him, then climbed up on the cart he’d used to get up on top of the S-foil. “Need some help?”

  “No, I’ve pretty much got it handled, despite what the droid says.”

  “Oh.” She extended her hand toward him. “I’m Lujayne Forge.”

  “I know, I’ve seen you around.”

  “You’ve done a bit more than that. You flew a dupe against me in the Redemption scenario.” She leaned her slender body against the side of his fighter, bisecting the green and white wording that indicated the X-wing was the property of the Corellian Security Force. “You put the Korolev down.”

  Corran tightened the hydrospanner over the primary trim bolt on the centrifugal debris extractor and nudged it to the left. “That was luck. Nawara Ven had already taken the shields down with his missiles. It was more his kill than mine. You still did well.”

  Her brown eyes narrowed ever so slightly. “I guess. I have a question for you, though.”

  Corran straightened up. “Go ahead.”

  “The way you took that bomber after me, did you do that just as part of the exercise, or was there something more to it?”

  “Something more?”

  Lujayne hesitated, then nodded. “I was wondering if you singled me out because I was from Kessel?”

  Corran blinked in surprise. “Why would that make any difference to me?”

  She laughed and tapped the CorSec insignia on the side of the fighter with a knuckle. “You were with CorSec. You sent people to Kessel. As far as you’re concerned, everyone on Kessel is either a prisoner or a smuggler who ought to have been a prisoner. And when the prisoners and smugglers liberated the planet from the Imps, well, that didn’t change anything in your eyes, did it?”

  Setting the hydrospanner on a safe spot, Corran raised his hands. “Wait a minute, you’re jumping to a lot of conclusions.”

  “Maybe, but tell me, you didn’t know I was from Kessel?”

  “Well, I did.”

  “And tell me that didn’t make a difference to you.”

  “It didn’t, honest.”

  “I bet.”

  The firm set of her jaw and the way she folded her arms across her chest told Corran she didn’t believe him. There was a fair amount of anger in her words, but also some hurt. Anger he could deal with—there wasn’t a smuggler or criminal who hadn’t been angry when he was around. The hurt, though, that was unusual and made Corran feel uncomfortable.

  “What makes you think I hold your coming from Kessel against you?”

  “The way you act.” Lujayne’s expression softened a bit, and some of the anger drained away, but that just let more anxiety and pain bleed into her words. “You tend to keep to yourself. You’re not associating with the rest of us—beyond a narrow circle of pilots you think are as sharp as you are. You’re always watching and listening, evaluating and judging. Others have noticed it, too.”

  “Ms. Forge, Lujayne, you’re making meters out of microns here.”

  “I don’t think so, and I don’t want to be judged for things over which I had no control.” Her chin came up and fire sparked in her eyes. “My father volunteered to go to Kessel under an Old Republic program where he taught inmates how to move back into society upon their release. My mother was one of his students. They fell in love and remained on Kessel—they’re still there, along with most of my brothers and sisters. They’re all good people and their work with inmates was designed to make your job easier by giving criminals other skills so they’d not return to crime when they were released.”

  Corran sighed and his shoulders slumped. “I think that’s great, I really do. I wish there were thousands of people like your parents and kin doing that sort of work. The fact is, though, that even if I’d known that, I’d still have gone after you in the exercise.”

  “Oh, my being from Kessel had nothing to do with it?”

  He almost dismissed her question with a glib denial, but he caught himself and she clearly noticed his hesitation. “Maybe, just maybe, it did have something to do with my flying. I guess I decided that if you were from Kessel and could fly, you had to be a smuggler, and it was important for me to fly better than you could.”

  She nodded once, but her expression did not shift from one of concern to smug triumph as he had expected it would. “I believe that, and I can understand it. Still, there’s something more there, right?”

  “Look, I’m sorry if what I did made you look bad in the exercise, but I really don’t have the time to talk about this now.”

  “No time or no inclination?”

  Whistler hooted something in an utterly carefree manner.

  “You stay out of this.” Frustration curled his hands into fists. “You’re not going to let this go, are you, Ms. Forge?”

  With a smile blossoming on her face, she shook her head. “If you’d gotten this far in an interrogation, would you give up?”

  Corran snorted a laugh. “No.”

  “So, explain yourself.”

  He definitely heard a request for more than an explanation of his conduct in the Redemption scenario in her voice. For a split second he flashed on the times at CorSec when his human partner, Iella Wessiri, had made similar demands of him. Iella had been a conciliator—always the one to be patching up the disagreements between folks in the unit. That’s what Lujayne is trying to do, which means I’ve managed to alienate a number of the other pilots trying to get into the unit.

  “Concerning the exercise, I really just wanted to see how good you were. I’d been able to figure out where some of the other pilots stood in relationship to me, but I’d not flown against you. You know, you’re not bad.”

  “But I’m not in a class with you and Bror Jace.”

  Corran smiled quickly, then covered it with a frown. “True, but you’re still very sharp. I’d like to think the rest of the pilots are going to be at least that sharp. I’d even be set up to fly against that Gimbel kid in his Redemption scenario tomorrow but Jace volunteered before I could.”

  “His name is Gavin, Gavin Darklighter.”

  “Gavin, then.”

  “And you didn’t want to be following Jace’s lead?”

  “Would you?”

  Lujayne smiled. “Given a choice, no, I guess not. Next to you, he’s the most standoffish person in the group.”

  Corran felt uneasy inside. “I’m not as bad as he is.”

  “No? At least he has the good graces to deign to join us in DownTime for some recreation. He’s a sliced and blown datafile compared to you.”

  Corran turned to the left and pointed his finger at the astromech droid. “Don’t even start.”

  Lujayne raised an eyebrow. “So your droid thinks you should get out more, too?”

  Something halfway between a snarl and a growl came from Corran’s throat, but it lacked the power to make it menacing. “Whistler has the ability, from time to time, to be a nag. His problem is that in the time since I left CorSec I’ve been in situations where I’ve had to be very careful. I moved through a number of identities that didn’t allow me to be very open with people. For example, most recently, I spent over a year as the confidential aide to a succession of incompetent Imp officials governing a Rim world. One slip, one crack in my identity, and
I’d have been caught. And when you get out of the habit of trusting folks and relaxing around them, well …”

  “I understand.”

  “Thanks.” Corran gave her a grateful smile. “On top of that, I’m learning a lot of new things here and I’ve been trying to concentrate on my flying. That’s not easy—there’s a whole new set of slang to get used to and people from species I barely knew existed that I now have to work with and even share living quarters with.”

  “That is difficult—my roommate is a Rodian.”

  “That’s rough, but I’ll bet she’s less idiosyncratic than my roommate.” Corran whistled at the Gand pilot entering the hangar. “Ooryl, come over here, please.”

  The pilot’s grey-green flesh clashed with the bright orange of his flight suit, and the knobby bits of his exoskeleton poked bumps in odd places from beneath the fabric as he walked. “May Ooryl assist?”

  “I’ve been curious about something since we were assigned the same quarters, but didn’t think to ask you about it until right now.” Corran frowned. “I hope you don’t mind—you might take it personally and I don’t mean to embarrass you.”

  The Gand just watched him with multifaceted eyes. “Qyrgg would hope to avoid embarrassment as well, but you may ask.”

  Corran nodded in what he hoped was a friendly manner. “Why do you speak of yourself in the third person?”

  “Qrygg is embarrassed by not understanding your question.”

  Lujayne smiled. “You do not seem to refer to yourself with the pronoun ‘I.’ ”

  “And you alternate the names you use.”

  The Gand’s mouth parts clicked open in what Corran had decided was a Gand’s best approximation of a human smile. “Ooryl understands.”

  “And?”

  Ooryl crossed his arms, then tapped his trio of fingers against his body’s deltoid armor plates. “On Gand it is held that names are important. Any Gand who has achieved nothing is called Gand. Before Ooryl was given Ooryl’s name, Ooryl was known as Gand. Once Ooryl had made a mark in the world, Ooryl was given the Qrygg surname. Later, by mastering the difficulties of astronavigation and flight, Ooryl earned the right to be called Ooryl.”