Wedge nodded. "That may have been what gave her the idea. Here's the message. It's voice only." He reached over to the termi nal keyboard beside the conference table and pressed a button.
First, a hiss suggesting a low-quality recording, then Lara's voice emerged from the air around them. "This is Lara Notsil, transmitting to Wraith Squadron and Mon Remonda."
Donos tensed. Knowing that the message was from her hadn't prepared him for actually hearing her voice; he felt almost as though he'd been physically struck. Then he became aware of Shalla's gaze on him. Face's, too. They were evaluating him, his reaction.
Once, he would have washed all expression away from his face, giving them nothing to read. But he didn't care about that anymore. It hurt to hear Lara. It didn't matter if they could see the bleakness of his expression. He closed his eyes to listen more carefully.
"I was the one who suggested to the warlord that he'd encounter you at Comkin Five. If you did show up there, I hope it's because it's part of your mission plan—that you were hoping to engage him. I told him you might also appear at Vahaba. You might want to keep that on your schedule. You should be able to engage him there as well."
Donos opened his eyes to glance at Solo and Wedge. They were exchanging a look, and Solo shook his head, a trace of confusion to his expression.
"I'm working on a plan now whereby I might be able to transmit you Iron Fist's location, just as we did with the Parasite plan." That mission, in which Wraith Squadron had planted a program in the computer of a new Super Star Destroyer, Razor's Kiss, had led to the new ship automatically sending its location to Solo's fleet. Ultimately, it had resulted in the ship's destruction. "If I die, the plan might be able to continue in my absence, so don't just give up on it if someone manages to shoot me down. Attached to this message is a data package showing what I've done, what conclusions I've reached. I hope you can use them.
"Please tell the Wraiths that I'm holding faith with them." There was a long pause, the distinct sound of Lara swallowing with difficulty. "The rest of this message is for Myn Donos."
Wedge tapped a key on the terminal and her voice cut off.
He looked apologetically at Donos. "I'm sorry. I've heard it al ready, and it does pertain to her state of mind. We're all going to have to hear it."
Donos nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
Wedge tapped the key again.
A little background hiss returned to the air, but Lara didn't speak for several seconds. Then, "Myn, it's not likely that we'll ever see one another again. So I wanted to take this opportu nity to say good-bye. Well, more than that. I wanted to ex plain. About what I did.
"I was fighting a war, the way I'd been trained, and that involved infiltrating the enemy and getting their secrets back to my superiors, or sabotaging the data the enemy possessed. There was never a time I saw a file labeled 'How to Destroy Talon Squadron' and thought to myself, 'Oh, that's what I want to do.' To me, it was just data about occupied territories and interplanetary borders.
"Then I infiltrated Wraith Squadron, just a ploy to make myself more valuable to prospective employers, and things started happening. All the furniture that made up the way I'd thought and felt about things all my life started coming loose in my head. Nowadays it slides around and breaks into pieces and I have no idea what parts of it are real and what aren't." There was a waver to her voice now, a suggestion she was having trouble keeping it under control. "It hurts, and a lot of the time I don't know who I am anymore.
"But I know what I have to do. Whoever I am, I'm staying here, like a vibroblade right next to Zsinj's vitals, and when the right time comes I'm going to stab him deep. That'll probably be the last thing I do.
"I don't have any friends here, except one droid, and I don't have any where you are, or anywhere else in the galaxy, so when I'm gone there isn't going to be anyone to remember me kindly. So I was just sort of hoping you wouldn't hate me anymore. I really can't stand thinking that's the only way I'll be remembered."
There was a long silence, the sound of a sniffle. Her voice finally returned, quieter than it had been. "I wish I'd been someone else. To give you that chance you wanted.
"Lara Notsil out."
Donos felt his eyes burning. He put his hand over them. He felt tears under his fingers.
They were silent a long moment. Then Wedge, regret in his voice, said, "All right. Opinions. Shalla?"
Shalla cleared her throat. "Tough call. At a certain level, I think Corran Horn was right. Mentally and emotionally, Lara's not all together. But she seems to be sticking to her plan, to her perception that Zsinj is the enemy. And if I read her words right, she's resigned herself to death in this effort. That makes it more likely that her words can be trusted.
"Add to that the very interesting way she transmitted data. It was complicated, it was unreliable. It was a despera tion measure. If she really was an agent of Zsinj's, she could have just shot us a tight-beam transmission from her interceptor's comm system. We would have known that there was very little chance of such a message being detected. The approach she actually used suggests to me that she's afraid that her interceptor's comm system is tapped, recording, something, and she wanted to get around whatever measures had been taken that way."
"All right. Face?" .
"She's a pretty good actress," Face said. "In her line of work, she'd have to be. But there was a lot of what seemed like very genuine strain in her voice. I'd lean toward the side of her telling the truth."
"Donos?"
Decorum demanded that he look at them when he an swered. To do that, he'd have to put his hand down. If he did that, they'd see his tears. They'd know he wasn't in control of himself. They'd know—
Well, to hell with what they knew, with what they thought. He slammed his hand down on the tabletop. Shalla and Solo jumped. He looked around the table, defying all to say any thing about the tears on his cheeks. "She was telling the truth," he said.
"I need a little more than that," Wedge said. "Your reasons?"
"That final bit ... if she's luring us into a trap for Zsinj, what was that last bit for? To make me feel bad? What good would that do?" He took a deep, shuddery breath. "If she had wanted to manipulate me, to make me come in on her side, she'd have said, 'If I get out of this alive, I'll come back to stand trial.' That gives me everything, puts everything on me. If I just want justice, I win—she stands trial. If I want her, I win—I stand beside her at her trial, and I can dream that she'll get off light. That's the way to swing me over, but she didn't do that. She just said good-bye."
Wedge nodded. "All right. There you go, General. Three opinions, all in the same direction, for different reasons."
Solo asked, "Why did she think Vahaba would be on our list?"
"I looked at the data file she'd appended to the audio," Wedge said. "She had done a good job of calculating the crite ria we were using, except that she thought that the planets our false Han Solo would be visiting would all be former trading partners with, or recipients of regular trade goods from, Alderaan."
Solo leaned back. "That makes sense. It does. One of the factors we used was choosing worlds that produced certain types of materiel that are valuable in times of war and times of peace. That would correspond to a certain degree to the types of goods Alderaan was importing after it banned all its weapons. Can you run the numbers on our projections again, substituting trade with Alderaan for what we had?"
Wedge gave him a smile. "Already did. And guess which system, discounting the ones we've already visited, jumps to the top of the list? Vahaba."
"Vahaba." Solo smiled. "If we can get the Falsehood re paired fast enough, we can dangle it like bait for Zsinj again. All right, Nelprin, Donos, thanks for coming. Loran, I need you for a moment more."
Donos rose, offered a salute, and was the first one out the door.
When the three pilots were gone, Solo turned to Wedge. "If Zsinj wouldn't come in at Kidriff to get m
e, he won't come in anywhere. He's just too conservative. Protecting Iron Fist all the way. So if we can't get Iron Fist close enough to a gravity well to trap it for a while, we need to bring a gravity well to Iron Fist."
Wedge frowned. "Meaning what? An Interdictor cruiser?" Those vessels, uncommon even in the Imperial fleet where they were most prevalent, possessed gravity-well generators that, when activated, could keep all vessels within range from entering hyperspace.
"That's right."
"Does Fleet Command have one available for you?"
"No," Solo said. He turned to Face. "That's where you come in." . "Uh-oh," Face said.
"I'm going to set up an appointment between you and your Imperial admiral buddy. I want you to go ask him for an Interdictor."
Face said, "Begging your pardon, sir, but you're crazy enough to be a Wraith."
Solo grinned. "Until you've crewed with me for a few years, kid, you have no idea what 'crazy' means."
14
Tonin decided that it might be a good thing to be the King of the Droids.
He was now a mighty leader, in command of hundreds of utility droids aboard Iron Fist.
He had modified many of them, with magnetic treads replacing their wheels, so that they might maneuver on the outer hull of the vessel. They clustered at the engines and the hypercomm antennae, using their internal tools to chew and splice their way into external system ports and accesses.
More moved within Iron Fist at Tonin's commands. Some were in the engine compartments. Others had spliced into the computer data cables. One was now in the security system that monitored Lara's quarters; it fed modified recordings of her to the observers, so she could do whatever she pleased in her quarters while they saw only footage of her sleeping. Others dragged cables and dataports through the walls, giving Lara access to more and more secure portions of the ship and the computer archives.
Even so, half of the utility droids Tonin commanded con fined themselves to ordinary ship's functions ... for Tonin had to make sure the ship's central computer didn't notice a sudden drop in the utility droid population. If droid MSE-6-P303K
spent its day doing Tonin's bidding, droid MSE-6-E629L would spend half its day doing the duties assigned by the ship's com puter, then would visit one of the special interfaces Tonin had had installed at points in the ship, assume the identity of MSE-6-P303K, and spend the other half of its day doing that droid's duties.
So far, the ship's main computer hadn't noticed. This was, Tonin reflected, because Tonin was so much better at this task than the ship's computer was. Perhaps the ship's computer considered maintenance of a fleet of MSE-6 droids beneath its dignity.
The droid-guard in the corridor transmitted a warning to Tonin; it indicated someone was approaching Lara's door. Tonin decoupled himself from Lara's terminal and rolled hastily into her closet. But when the door opened, it was Lara herself who entered, looking tired and even dazed—but not hurt or unhappy, so far as Tonin could read human emotions. "Good morning, Tonin."
He beeped a greeting at her, then returned to his post at the terminal and extended his scomp-link once more into its data port. To the terminal's screen, he transmitted, you were gone FOR A LONG TIME.
"I'm sorry. I had to go on a mission. I think I got a commu nication through to Mon Remonda, though." She sat on her bed, pulled her boots off, and lay down. "I also gave myself a mild concussion and got personally congratulated by General Melvar for 'tenacity and courage in pursuit of the enemy.'"
THE CONCUSSION WAS PROBABLY A BAD IDEA.
"Don't be so sure." She gave him a little smile. "What have you been up to?"
WE HAVE HOLOCOMM ACCESS WHENEVER YOU NEED IT, BUT IF YOU USE IT, THEY WILL DETECT IT VERY QUICKLY. AND MY DROIDS FOUND AN UNMAPPED SECTION OF THE SHIP.
"Show me."
Tonin accessed this morning's most interesting recording and transmitted it to the terminal's screen.
It was a very low view, as was to be expected due to the MSE-6's tiny size, of a bank of rectangular viewports seen from an adjoining corridor. Beyond the viewports were cham-
bers that were obviously medical wards. One was an operating theater. Another held cages filled with sapient and near-sapient life-forms: Ewoks, rodentlike Ranats, Bilars with their stuffed- doll features but lacking the carefree expressions of most of their kind, a pink Ortolan with its trunklike nose pressed against the front bars of its cage, meter-long Chadra-Fan with their furry faces and gigantic ears, and more.
- She sat up, her tiredness apparently forgotten for the mo ment. "Is this everything you have on this chamber?"
YES, FOR NOW.
"We need more. Get a holocam droid into that chamber, assign it there permanently. And get a droid with a computer link in behind the walls, see what sort of data we can intercept. This is really important."
IT WILL BE DONE.
"Now, I've got to sleep." She flopped back onto the bed. "Concussions are no fun." don't do that anymore.
Admiral Rogriss froze with his wineglass halfway to his lips. "You want what?"
Face smiled. "Surely you have one available."
Rogriss set his glass down with a thump. "Available to me, yes. I can't make it available to you."
"Even to destroy Zsinj?"
"Even then. Factor in the likelihood that Iron Fist will destroy her. Factor in the likelihood that you Rebels will destroy her—accidents do happen. Then append the certainty that you'll take the credit for Zsinj's destruction regardless. I become a failure who, at worst, collaborated with the enemy and, at best, lost an Interdictor cruiser. No, no, no."
"Well, we can do a lot of things to keep this from happen ing," Face said. "First, we'll assign two of our own Imperial Star Destroyers to protect your Interdictor. Second, if you inform only the most trusted members of the Interdictor's bridge crew that they're temporarily working with the New Republic, the majority of the crewmen will never figure it out—they'll see our Star Destroyers out of their ports and presume that they're Imperial. Later, you can say that the Interdictor blundered into a fight between the New Republic and Zsinj and was able to get in the killing blow while everyone else was figuring out whom to shoot."
"What will you give me?"
Face frowned. "How's that again?"
"If I do this, I'll be giving you an Interdictor, even temporarily. Will you give me, say, a Mon Calamari cruiser for one of my missions?"
"I'll give you a framed and autographed holo of Face Loran , Boy Actor."
Rogriss brightened. "Excellent! I can trade it for a framed and autographed holo of Tetran Cowall. I always preferred his holodramas anyway."
Face seized his chest over his heart. "A good shot, Admiral. I concede the duel." Then he gave the admiral his most frank and evaluative stare. "Realistically, you're not giving us anything. You're joining us on a mission, of mutual interest. If we succeed, we both win. If you lose your Interdictor, you can be assured we'll have lost both Imperial Star Destroyers assigned to protect it ... and many more ships besides. I guess it boils down to the question of what's more important—accomplishing your Zsinj mission because it's good for the Empire or because it's good for Admiral Rogriss."
The admiral touched his own chest, an echo of Face's gesture. "You shoot well yourself." He looked away, at the white bulkhead wall, and was silent for several long seconds. "I'll do it," he said.
"I'm glad."
"We must have a rendezvous point." The admiral held up his wineglass.
Face touched it with his own. "Good to be collaborating with you, Admiral."
Lara could almost feel the stare of Tonin's holocam eye on her. The R2 had been very solicitous since her return from the Comkin mission. Worse, it seemed to sense the way her spirits lowered as she reviewed the data they continued to receive from the secret chamber on Iron Fist.
It was awful stuff. She didn't get into the worst of it in the summary she recorded for Mon Remonda. The attached data file would give the
New Republic the most gruesome details.
"Project Chubar is what they call the techniques used to raise the intelligence of sapient and near-sapient beings. The name derives from a character in a series of children's holos about a bilar, a cute mammalian creature, who is a clever pet of a young girl. The holos used animated graphics instead of actors. It's a twisted sort of touch that Face Loran supplied the voice for Chubar. Maybe you ought not tell him that one of his roles was the inspiration for the name of the project. Anyway, Chubar involves chemical treatments and a teaching regimen to bring a humanoid's mental functions up to those of human average—sometimes higher. In the case of creatures that are already intelligent—for instance, Ewoks—the process enhances mental traits that bring its type of intelligence more in line with a human's. Less reliance on sensory data and more on analysis, for instance.
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