The Essential Novels

by James Luceno

  “So we have to get there first.”

  “Or at least appear to be bent upon that goal, discouraging others from usurping our place in the galaxy.” Salm tried to keep his voice even, but his desire to see the Rebels in power hurried his words. “These pretenders will learn that we have not labored so long just to give them an opportunity to rape and pillage whole systems.”

  Wedge agreed with the General’s sentiment, but he knew breaking Coruscant open and taking the world would be far from simple. “It almost seems to me that an expedient alternative is to let some Moffs push themselves forward and have Iceheart deal with them.”

  “Your opinion was also heard in our councils. It was decided that leaving anyone to her tender mercies was a crime of grand proportion.”

  Ysanne Isard had risen to fill the power vacuum left by the Emperor’s death. The daughter of Palpatine’s last Internal Security Director, she came of age in the Emperor’s court. Wedge had heard rumors that she had been the Emperor’s lover for a time, but he had no way of verifying that story. What he did know was that she had betrayed her father to the Emperor, claiming he was going to defect to the Alliance. Her father was put to death immediately and it was said she triggered the blaster shot that killed him. The Emperor elevated her to replace her father and in his absence she did a remarkable job in holding the core of the Empire together.

  The Mon Calamari warrior pointed to the galactic display. “From Talasea, Rogue Squadron will provide escort to ships pushing even deeper, setting up safe worlds and supply depots. You will be but one unit of many probing the central Imperial defenses.”

  “You want to see how hard Iceheart will hit back. Gauge strength based on speed and the nature of response?”

  “Yes, as well as determining supply routes for possible disruption.”

  That made perfect sense to Wedge. Though space provided a limitless number of ways to get from one point to another, some simple basic rules governed how and where ships traveled. A ship attained speed and direction before jumping to light speed, and then maintained velocity in hyperspace. A ship moving fast enough could skirt phenomena like black holes, cutting parsecs off a more conservative and safer route.

  Because objects with mass—stars, black holes, planets, and Imperial Interdictor-class cruisers—exerted influence over hyperspace, they had to be navigated around. Their presence could abort a hyperspace flight and, in the case of a black hole or a star, could spell disaster for any ship that traveled too close to them. Making a trip through hyperspace required precise calculations that took advantage of a ship’s speed and mass to get it safely to its destination.

  Because hazards to navigation diminish the number of calculable routes between places, trade tended to move through predictable corridors. Since traveling between stars was not inexpensive, merchants chose routes that allowed them to visit the most profitable systems along the way. These routes, including systems where ships leave hyperspace to change their travel vectors, were well known and piracy was not uncommon.

  Disrupting Imperial supply routes would have a double effect for the Rebellion. Not only would it deprive Imperial garrisons of needed matériel for making war, but it would provide those same matériels to the Rebellion. While the New Republic and the Empire used different starfighters and capital ships, supplies like blasters, rations, and bacta could easily be employed by either side.

  Wedge ran a hand along the edge of his unshaven jaw. “I understand the mission, and I appreciate the urgency for it. I do have a question, though.”

  Ackbar nodded. “Please, Commander.”

  “Rogue Squadron will do the job, but I was wondering if we were advanced for it because we’re the unit that can do the job, or if we’re being used as a symbol.”

  “Frankly asked.” The Mon Cal’s coloration brightened to a salmon-pink on the dome of his head. “I argued against employing you this soon, but others aptly pointed out that if you were not put in place now, our operations might not have time to succeed. Rogue Squadron is a symbol in the Alliance and by positioning you to drive against the Empire we show we have made a commitment to liberating everyone in the Empire.”

  Wedge’s mouth became dry. “But the only way our use can function as a symbol is if our use is well publicized. And that publicity must get out to the warlords you expect to be frightened off by our presence.”

  Ackbar’s shoulders slumped every so slightly. “Your words are ripples of my discussions with the Council. Borsk Fey’lya is quite persuasive and he has Mon Mothma’s ear in many things.”

  Wedge looked at Salm. “And you’re worried about Tycho being a security risk!”

  “Tycho Celchu did not risk his life to get the Alliance the location of the second Death Star.”

  “No, he only risked his life to destroy that Death Star.”

  Ackbar stepped between his subordinates. “Please, gentlemen, if I want petty bickering I can go to more Council meetings. It is important for you to air your grievances, but I will not have you fight and refight the same battles over and over again.”

  “Sorry, sir. My apologies, General.”

  “Accepted, Commander. I beg your pardon, Admiral.”

  Ackbar nodded slowly. “Commander Antilles, in an effort to minimize damage done by the public profile being given your mission, we will keep your destination secret. This means your pilots will not know where they will be stationed and they will only be told that they are going on an extended training exercise. Logistics and Supply Corps staffers have prepared lists of equipment that cover anything your unit might not carry with it on the trip. We have an Imperial shuttle that Captain Celchu will use to bring supplies on your journey.”

  “Nav data will be fed out to my pilots prior to each jump?”

  “Exactly. You should give your flight leaders numerous routes for which they will compute navigation solutions, then you choose the appropriate one and have it communicated to your squadron at each change of course.” The Mon Cal pointed at the representation of Talasea on the display and it zoomed in. “The Morobe system is a red-yellow binary and Talasea is the fourth planet in orbit around the yellow primary. The world is cool and moist with indigenous insect and reptilian life. There are mammals there as well—feral descendants of the animals brought in for an early farming colony. Your base is on the largest of the island continents. The atmosphere is thick, fog is common, but the world is safe.”

  “What happened to the farming colony?”

  “Over the centuries most of the children emigrated to worlds where they could see the stars and didn’t have to work so hard. The last group of them made the mistake of harboring a Jedi after the Clone Wars. Lord Vader destroyed them as an example. Settlement ruins are on your island but our people have reported there was nothing of interest left behind there.”

  “Home Sweet Home.” Wedge smiled. “When are we to be on station?”

  “A week from now.”

  “That’s not much time.”

  “I know.” Ackbar shrugged his shoulders. “It was all I could buy you. May the Force be with you, Commander Antilles. I hope you won’t need it.”

  12

  Kirtan Loor clutched his hands at the small of his back so they would stop trembling. “I am in your debt, Madam Director, and at your service.”

  “How kind of you to say so, Agent Loor.” Ysanne Isard thumbed a small device. The lights in the room slowly brightened while shields descended over the windows. The rising illumination revealed the room to have a tall ceiling, with dark wooden beams curving up from the four corners to meet in an apex above the center of the floor. The walls and carpet shared the same deep blue, though a strip of carpet the same bright red as worn by Imperial Guards bordered the floor at the edge of the wall. In the far corner he saw a desk and chairs that were elegant yet far from ornate—in keeping with the general spartan nature of the room.

  It struck him as odd that a large room that was all but empty could seem so decadently opulent. The
only thing the room seemed rich in was wasted space. Then it struck him. On a world that is so crowded with so many people, wasting this amount of space is the height of luxury.

  Isard’s predatory pacing in the center of the room snatched his attention away from the subtle messages of the architecture and appointments. She wore an Admiral’s uniform, complete with boots, jodhpurs, and a dress jacket, though the garments were red. A black armband circled the upper part of her left arm and the jacket bore no rank insignia or cylinders at all. Yet even without the external signs of rank, her intensity and the deliberation with which she moved radiated power.

  Though he would have put her age at a dozen years older than his own, he found her attractive. Tall and slender, she wore her black hair long, and the white streaks descending from her temples made her seem more exotic than middle-aged. Her face appeared classically beautiful to him. A strong jaw, sharp cheekbones, a high forehead, a gracefully small nose, and large eyes were all the elements that most women would have killed to possess, or would have paid to have given to them.

  Even as he catalogued all the bits and pieces of her that should have triggered some sort of lust in him—and the aura of power surrounding her was terribly exciting—fear overrode any glimmerings of carnal desire. When she looked at him, with dark brows accenting her eyes, he knew where the menace dwelt in her. One eye was ice-blue—as cold as Hoth and as cruel as a Hutt in a sporting mood. The other eye, the left one, was a molten red, with golden highlights that flashed with fiery determination. The left eye told him that any effort by him that was not fully devoted to her service would be met with the bloodless retribution promised by her cold right eye.

  Kirtan shivered and she smiled.

  “Agent Loor, your personal file has a number of interesting inputs. You are rated as having a visual memory retention rate of nearly one hundred percent.”

  He nodded. “If I read it or see it, I remember it.”

  “This can be a useful tool, if applied correctly.” Isard’s expression lost some of its hardness, though this in no way made Kirtan feel as if he were any safer. “In the report about Bastra you mentioned not using skirtopanol during his interrogation because he had been dosing himself with lotiramine. This was a precaution you learned to take because of a case on Corellia where doing just that had negative effects, yes?”

  “The suspect died.”

  “Your report says you used the fact that the lotiramine masks the presence of blastonecrosis to confront Bastra with his own mortality. When that did not prove effective, you began conventional interrogation.”

  Kirtan nodded. “Sleep deprivation, protein starvation, coercive holographic and auditory illusions taken from what I knew of him. It all proved quite promising until the blastonecrosis began to make his whole body septic. I then initiated treatment for the condition.”

  “And this treatment killed him.” Her eyes became mismatched slits. “Do you know why?”

  “He had a reaction to the bacta used to treat him.”

  “Do you know why?”

  Kirtan was about to offer her the explanation the Emdee-five droid had given him when Bastra died in the bacta tank, but he knew that she would not accept it. “I do not.”

  Isard hesitated for a second and Kirtan knew he had escaped punishment by being truthful. “What does ZXI449F mean to you, if anything?”

  He instantly recognized the number, but held back his answer until he could sort out the details and put them in a coherent form. “That is the lot number of a batch of bacta that was contaminated by the Ashern rebels on Thyferra. It made its way to Imperial Center and infected nearly two million soldiers and citizens. It rendered them allergic to bacta.” Kirtan frowned. “But Gil Bastra never was on Imperial Center.”

  “You do not know that for a fact. Perhaps he was here.” She shook her head slowly. “It does not matter, because he could have run into that batch of bacta almost anywhere. It was ordered disposed of, and I saw to it that much of it was funneled to the black market. That, however, is not important. What is important is this: Blastonecrosis is a condition that affected roughly two percent of the people who were dosed with that particular lot of bacta. An Emdee droid would have inquired of a patient if he had been dosed with bacta in the last two years.”

  “But because I ordered treatment and didn’t recognize the significance of the disease, Gil Bastra died.”

  “No!” Isard’s eyes hardened. “Gil Bastra committed suicide.”

  “What?”

  “His reports about you are in your file. Your slicer was able to excise them from the Corellian records, but not my records. A man is best evaluated by his enemies.”

  Kirtan’s stomach slowly collapsed in on itself. “Those evaluations were prejudiced against me.”

  “Perhaps, but Bastra was amazingly perceptive. He wrote that you rely on your memory too much—trusting that retention of information can somehow compensate for an insufficient amount of analysis. Because you know so much—like the obscure fact about the fatal interaction of lotiramine and skirtopanol, you didn’t look beyond Bastra’s obvious line of defense to see how much deeper things had gone. If you had, you would have known about his possible bacta allergy and he might still be with us.”

  She slowly exhaled and tugged at the hem of her scarlet jacket. “Bastra knew you well enough to know he’d be dead soon. That gave him enough hope to feed you useless information. He held out as long as he could because he was playing for more time for his confederates to further sever ties with their past.”

  The Intelligence agent realized right then that the display of bravado Bastra had provided during their first meeting on the Expeditious had not been a false and hollow thing. Kirtan’s face burned as he heard again everything Bastra had said, this time with the man’s mocking tones intact and brutal. What I had seen as my brilliance in ferreting out his errors had been him playing to my sense of superiority, leading me on after him like a nerf eager for slaughter. For two years I’ve been a fool.

  A revelation hit him strongly enough to make him tremble. “I’ve been fooled for even longer than the two years I’ve chased them down, haven’t I?”

  “Very good, Agent Loor.” Isard’s expression lightened slightly, as if she were on the verge of smiling, but she did not. “The responsibility for your deception is not wholly your own. Our training and indoctrination tends to make agents and soldiers believe in their own infallibility. This has proved to be a detriment to the Empire. You were not alone in falling prey to it—even the late Emperor had his blind spots.”

  Kirtan decided to avoid the invitation to question the Emperor’s wisdom, or lack thereof, and instead followed up on his previous question. “The ‘falling out’ Bastra and Horn had was faked. I thought the reason for it was stupid, and assumed they were stupid for being at odds over it.”

  “This is even better, Agent Loor.”

  “I feel as if in realizing how badly I was used, I can see more depth to things.”

  “A blind spot is eliminated, letting you see more of what goes on around you.” She ran an index finger along her jaw. “If you had read Bastra’s evaluations of you instead of having them destroyed, you would have been able to come to this epiphany sooner.”

  He nodded confidently. “And I would have had them by now.”

  “And you were doing so well.” Isard’s face contorted into a snarl. “Don’t backslide.”

  Kirtan blushed. “I’m sorry.”

  “More’s the pity that you are not. You assume superiority where there is none.” She folded her arms across her chest. “The Emperor likewise assumed that if he destroyed all the Jedi Knights that his Jedi Knight—and a handful of Force-trained special agents—would be sufficient to control the galaxy. He did not see—though I tried to warn him—the impossibility of proving that all the Jedi had been destroyed and that no other Jedi could rise against him. His obsession with the Jedi blinded him to the real threat posed by opposition leaders who are no more
intelligent or remarkable than you are.

  “As a result the Empire is falling apart and the Rebels are threatening to supplant the Empire with their own New Republic.”

  Kirtan nodded. “And you wish to restore the Empire.”

  “No.” Her denial came cold enough to freeze carbonite. “My goal is to destroy the Rebellion. Imperial restoration can only be accomplished if the Rebels are eliminated and that can only be accomplished if we blunt their military, sorely stress their administration, and crush their spirits. These goals are interwoven and I have operatives, like you, working on all levels to bring my plans to fruition. Can you withstand the pressure of so vital a mission?”

  Kirtan slowly nodded. “I can. How may I serve you?”

  This time she did smile and Kirtan wished she had not. “Your target is to cut the heart out of the Rebellion. You will be the death of Rogue Squadron.”

  “Excuse me?” Kirtan frowned, wondering if he had heard her incorrectly. “I am no fighter pilot. I know nothing about Rogue Squadron.”

  “Ah, but you have the expertise I want and desire. You served on Corellia and the unit’s commander is Corellian.”

  “Wedge Antilles, I know.” Kirtan raised his hands. “But that is not to say I know him. I don’t. I don’t even know anything about the squadron.”

  “But you can learn.”

  “Yes, I can learn.”

  “And you shall learn.” She nodded slowly toward him, then brought her head up abruptly. “You will also find you have a personal stake in this.”

  Kirtan aborted a wince. “Yes?”

  “Our source within the squadron tells us that a friend of yours is a flight leader of remarkable skill.”

  One of Isard’s earlier statements ran through his mind again. A man is best evaluated by his enemies. “Corran Horn.”

  “You see, you already know more about them than you thought you did.” Ysanne Isard gave him an even stare. “Do you accept being the instrument of Rogue Squadron’s destruction?”