Star Wars - X-Wing 02 - Wedge's Gamble

by Michael A. Stackpole

  A slender, brown-haired man entered the suite first and smiled as an image of Alderaan appeared on the wall. "It has been a long while since I saw Wuitho Trifalls." He pointed at the promontory from which a river fell in three spectacular waterfalls. "I visited there with my family the week before I went off to the Imperial Academy. NovaCom maintained a repulsorlift cabin in the area, so that's where we stayed. It was as beautiful as that picture, but without the roar of the water, it seems ..."

  Dead. Corran didn't need to see the sorrow and pain on Tycho Celchu's face to know what word had gone un­spoken. Save for the coldest-hearted Imperialist among the survivors of Alderaan, the Alderaanians had suffered a deep, emotional wound when their homeworld had been destroyed. It crushed some but others, like Tycho and Princess Leia Organa, seemed to be driven by that loss to forever put to rest the Empire and its evil.

  "I apologize for that, sir. The projector chooses im­ages at random."

  Tycho's face brightened. "Don't apologize. I may miss my home, but that does not mean I like seeing holograms of it any less. The planet may be dead, but its beauty lives on in images like that."

  The second visitor shuffled through the doorway, then took a hop forward as it shut behind him. The black droid had the body of a 3PO unit, but the crested clam­shell head of a spaceport control droid. "Good evening, Lieutenant Horn. May I say I was pleased to receive your invitation to visit this evening because I am finding Cap­tain Nunb a bit brusque for my tastes ..."

  Corran flicked a green-eyed glance at Tycho. "Do you want to do it or should I?"

  "Do what? May I help?"

  Tycho smiled. "We couldn't do it without you, Emtrey. Shut up."

  "Sir, I must protest ..."

  "Shut up."

  "But I ..."

  "Shut up."

  With Tycho's third repetition of the command, the droid's arms snapped to its sides and its head canted for­ward sharply until its chin almost touched its chestplate. At the base of its skull, back at the top of its neck post, a glowing red button became visible. Emtrey shook once as if hit by a blaster bolt, then stood still and, most re­markably, silent.

  "Every time I see that little routine I'm amazed." Corran shook his head and waved Tycho to the couch. "I think I've gotten to the bottom of what's going on with him, though."

  "Great." Tycho sat down and turned to face away from the picture wall. "Tell me what you've got—or at least as much as you can."

  "Sure." A shiver worked its way down Corran's spine. A month previously Tycho had reported that Emtrey, Rogue Squadron's M-3PO unit, had exhibited odd behavior when told to shut up repeatedly. The droid had been acting strangely for a time before that, but no one had complained because he was talking less and had managed to cobble together some excellent exchanges on the black market and within the Alliance's quartermaster corps to get the Squadron needed supplies. That behavior Corran had been able to trace to his suggestion that the droid "scrounge" some parts to fix his X-wing.

  "I managed to track records back to right before the evacuation of Hoth. Emtrey was there working for a Lieutenant in the Quartermaster Corps. Her name was Losca or something like that. Anyway, she was having to work hard to try to build up stores after the losses at Derra IV and she wasn't having much luck. At that point in time the defeat made things look bad for the Rebellion, so resources began to dry up."

  Tycho nodded. "I remember. We had a difficult time

  getting our equipment to function in the cold because we didn't have the proper conversion kits."

  "It appears this Lieutenant Losca was getting killed on negotiations and wasn't getting the job done to her or Alliance Command's satisfaction. She wanted to create a database that would allow her to function like a com­modities trader, but computer resources were limited and tied up coordinating things like defenses. Apparently the Alliance leadership wasn't too high on the idea of becom­ing a commodities exchange, so they forbade her from doing anything that ambitious and urged her to keep doing what she was doing."

  "The Hoth base was supposed to be top secret." Tycho frowned. "Setting it up as some sort of market­place would have led to its discovery even earlier than Vader's tactic of using probe droids surveying worlds."

  "That may be true, but this Lieutenant Losca ap­peared to think that without some sort of trade, the Re­bellion would run out of supplies. The base would remain hidden, but be out of everything that made it possible to rebel. In desperation she had some techs cobble Emtrey together out of spare parts. She sliced some commodities-brokering code together and burned it into some chips which were implanted into Emtrey. The brokering chips give him a second personality that operates without the normal 3PO personality being aware it exists. The scrounger can be brought to the fore by asking it to scrounge something, or telling it to shut up, as you dis­covered. When you use that latter technique, the droid becomes a simple terminal that gives you access to all its data."

  The man from Alderaan leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. "What were the security precau­tions Losca took with the droid?"

  "I don't know, and I can't ask because she died on Hoth during the assault. Emtrey got off the planet and has been kicking around from unit to unit until we got him. No one else learned about his secret until we ran across it. I had Whistler do a basic diagnostic scan of

  Emtrey and the scrounging circuitry is the only unusual stuff in there. I don't think he's a security risk."

  "That's good." Tycho smiled. "And it was good work getting the data from Hoth. Most of those files are still classified, aren't they?"

  "All of them are, but Whistler's got slicing code that can get him through low-level security stuff." Corran shrugged. "Those files are easy to break—unlike the rou­tines used to seal portions of your record."

  Tycho barely missed a beat. "Good. I doubt there is much damage that could be done by people learning de­tails about Hoth. My adventures, on the other hand, could cause problems."

  Corran made no effort to hide the surprise at Tycho's words. "Aren't you angry with me for trying to crack your file?"

  Tycho smoothed his light brown hair at the back of his neck. "Anger isn't going to do me any good, is it? I might be a little disappointed, but not angry."

  "Why disappointed?"

  "If there was something you wanted to know, you could have asked."

  "Would I get a straight answer?"

  Tycho blinked. "Why would you think I'd lie to you?"

  Corran jerked a thumb toward the closed door. "There are two Alliance Security officers at my door, cor­rect? They're waiting to escort you back to your quarters, right?"

  "Yes. So . . . ?"

  "So General Salm thinks you're some sort of threat to the Alliance. Shouldn't that make me wonder about you?"

  "It could." Tycho shrugged his shoulders. "Then again, you could think about what you know about me and decide for yourself if I can be trusted or not."

  Corran sat back and folded his arms across his chest. In his career with the Corellian Security Force, Corran had questioned all manner of people—humans, aliens,

  and even the occasional droid. He'd always had a sense about who was telling the truth and who was lying to him. He'd gotten used to following that feeling, playing his hunches to find the chinks in the stories suspects used to build.

  From Tycho he was getting no sign of deception, but what he didn't know about the man seemed to out­weigh what he did know. There was no question that Tycho Celchu had been a valued and valiant member of Rogue Squadron from before Hoth until after Endor, Bakura, and dozens of other little battles. He flew an A-wing in the assault on the second Death Star and man­aged to draw pursuit away from Wedge and the Millen­nium Falcon. Well after that he had volunteered for a classified mission and all trace of his records up to six months before he rejoined Rogue Squadron had been en­crypted. The gap only amounted to three quarters of a year, but it marked the end of trust in him by a host of Alliance figures. It seems Wedge An
tilles was the only person who still had faith in him.

  Corran had only known Tycho for six months, but in that time Tycho had repeatedly flown an unarmed shuttle into dangerous situations to recover pilots who had been shot out of their ships. On one of those occasions he had saved Corran's life by providing him a datafeed that let him target incoming TIE Interceptors. It had been a brave thing to do, and one that could have gotten Tycho killed, but he took the chance to keep Corran alive.

  Despite owing Tycho his life not once but twice, Corran still had reservations about him. Tycho had been secretive about the gap in his record. Corran could have easily ignored that, but the ease with which Tycho had overpowered his security detail and slipped away from supervision on the second occasion when he saved Corran's life made Corran wary. He knew his suspicion was the residue of having been a CorSec officer whose fa­ther and grandfather had also served CorSec, and he'd hoped learning the truth about Tycho would ease his mind.

  The problem was that the only place he could learn the story would be from Tycho who, for better or worse, had to be considered somewhat unreliable as a narrator. Still, it's better than unfocused suspicion.

  "Sir, I have trusted you in the past, and I'll go on trusting you in the future because I've not seen you do anything wrong. And I apologize for trying to slice out your file. I guess having worked with CorSec has just honed my sense of paranoia. Not knowing why Salm has you under guard has that sense working overtime."

  "But you'd still like to know what happened to me two years ago?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Fine." Tycho shrugged with resignation, but his voice carried with it some relief. "It'll be good to share this with someone else, but it goes no further, right?"

  Corran held his hand up. "On my honor."

  Tycho fixed him with a crystal-blue stare for a sec­ond, then nodded. "I volunteered to fly a TIE starfighter into Coruscant. The Alliance impounded it at Bakura and modified it heavily to fill it with sensor packages. In com­ing in I made several orbits of the planet and picked up all sorts of interesting data on the Golan space fortresses, the defense shields, the orbital solar collection mirrors, the skyhooks, the dry docks and ship factories, and every­thing else orbiting the planet. I then took the ship in, landed on Coruscant, and the data was downloaded. It was shipped out by various routes and within two weeks I was asked to fly the eyeball back out, taking readings as I went, then hook up with a freighter and return to the Alliance. I knew getting out would be tough, but we had all the proper codes to get out, so I chanced it."

  "And the Imps got you."

  "They did. Two ion-cannon blasts shorted every sys­tem I had in the ship, including the self-destruct. A Star Destroyer pulled me on board and I was captured. They hit me with a Stokhli stun spray and I was out. When I finally awakened again I was on a transport coming out

  of hyperspace. We grounded and I found out I'd been taken to Lusankya."

  "Lusankya?!"

  "You know it?"

  "Only by the most vague and nasty of rumors. It's supposed to be Iceheart's own private prison. Weird things happen to people there."

  Tycho nodded. "The guards, when they deign to speak to a prisoner, take great delight in noting that no one leaves unless Ysanne Isard is through with them."

  Corran shook his head. It was easier for him to be­lieve that the Katana-fleet existed than it was to accept the existence of Lusankya. Corran had first heard the word mentioned after a rival of Corellia's Diktat had been murdered by a trusted aide. The aide had been taken away by Imperial authorities about a year before the mur­der, but had been returned three months later. After he killed his boss he was reported to have repeated the word "Lusankya" over and over again. After that incident Corran had heard of a dozen other, similar situations where a seemingly normal person had turned on friends and family, betraying them or performing some hideous act of terrorism against them. Each of these incidents had a link to Lusankya in some way or other, but that link only became apparent after the crime had been commit­ted.

  Corran frowned at Tycho. "People who come out of there are human remote bombs. They do horrible things when the Empire activates them."

  Tycho's hands convulsed into fists. "I know, I know. What's worse, no one has ever mentioned Lusankya be­fore they have acted. The clues are always found later. But with me, after three months of interrogation and de­tention, I guess they decided I was useless. I was in bad shape—catatonic for most of my time at Lusankya so I remember almost nothing, then I was let go. They shipped me to Akrit'tar. After three months I managed to escape from the penal colony there and made my way

  back to the Alliance. I was debriefed for two months but they couldn't find anything wrong with me."

  "And they hadn't found anything wrong with the other people who had been to Lusankya either, right?"

  "No. The only difference between me and them was that I remembered having been there. It is the opinion of General Salm and some others that I was allowed to re­tain my memory, and that my escape was engineered, just so I could return to the Alliance and betray it."

  Without any evidence to prove he was a sleeper agent, the Alliance couldn't imprison Tycho without seeming as much of a heartless entity as the Empire itself. Even so, Corran reminded himself, lack of evidence was not evi­dence of lack. Salm's suspicions about Tycho could be one hundred percent correct, and the utter lack of evidence pointed to the skill of Ysanne Isard and her people.

  Corran's eyes narrowed. "So, you don't even know, really, if you are an Imperial agent waiting to happen or not?"

  "I know I'm not." The Alderaanian's shoulders slumped. "Being able to prove it is something else again."

  "But being constantly under suspicion, that's got to wear on you. Why put up with it? How can you put up with it?"

  Tycho's expression drained of emotion. "I put up with it because I must. Enduring it is the only way I can be al­lowed to fight back against the Empire. If I were to walk away from the Rebellion, if I were to sit the war out, I would have surrendered to the fear of what Ysanne Isard might, might, have done to me. Without firing a shot she would have made me as dead as Alderaan, and I won't al­low that. There's nothing in what I have to live with on a daily basis that isn't a thousand times easier than what I survived at the hands of the Empire. Until the Empire is dead, I can never truly be free because I'll always be under suspicion. Living with minor restrictions now means someday no one has to fear me."

  Tycho slowly opened his hands and scrubbed them

  over his face. "I don't know if any of that sets your mind at ease, but that's all there is."

  Corran shook his head. "It helps, a great deal. Whether you are or are not an Imperial agent in a Rebel uniform, the fact is that you've saved my life twice. That definitely counts for something—a great big something, in fact."

  "Good." Tycho pointed at the droid. "What do we do about him?"

  "I don't think he's much of a security risk, provided he doesn't trade in futures for commodities that are pres­ent on whatever targets we're heading out to hit. Whis­tler's already modified his purchase parameter program­ming to cover that situation." Corran smiled. "I don't think General Salm will think Emtrey any less of a threat than he considers you, if we report on his scrounging per­sonality. As long as we don't activate it, except in very specific cases, we should be safe."

  "So you think we can reactivate him?"

  "Yeah, I suppose so." Corran stood and walked over to the droid. "Brace yourself."

  He hit the button on the back of the droid's neck.

  Emtrey's head snapped back and locked in its proper position. The droid looked around for a moment or two during which his elbows crept out away from his body. "I don't know what got into me. Please, forgive my rude­ness." The droid's head tilted to the right and his eyes brightened. "Did I miss anything?"

  Corran slapped him on the shoulder. "Nothing you'd find useful, Emtrey. We were just swapping gossip and re­peating rumors t
hat had no substance to them at all."

  4

  At first the giddiness bubbling up inside him surprised Wedge, then gratified him as he slipped into his chair be­hind Admiral Ackbar. They're actually here, the Provi­sional Council. I never thought I'd see the day. He felt the same excitement inside him that he'd known as a child when some alien or famous Corellian had come to his parents' refueling station. Had he been asked he would have assumed that being in the same room with the lead­ers of the New Republic would not seem that special, but it was and made him think that the war hadn't burned all of his innocence out of him yet.

  Mon Mothma, still looking strong and serene despite the traces of grey creeping into her hair, stood at her place at the circular table. "I call this meeting of the Provisional Council to order. Councilor B'thog of Elom sends regrets at being unable to attend, but we have a quorum, so we will be able to proceed. Councilor Organa, if you would be so kind as to update us on your attempts to open a di­alog with Warlord Zsinj."

  The woman at Mon Mothma's right hand stood. Though she wore a pale green gown gathered loosely at the waist with a silver belt, Wedge couldn't help but see

  Princess Leia ready for battle, the way he had seen her so many times before. It struck him as odd that a martial im­age could so easily replace the elegant vision before him, but he was reading the fight in her eyes and the fire in her spirit. Those qualities had made her one of the Rebellion's most respected leaders, and clearly sustained her in her governmental activities.

  "I have attempted through numerous channels to make contact with Warlord Zsinj, but have been rebuffed every time. It appears he believes his possession of the Super Star Destroyer Iron Fist has made him into a force to be reckoned with in the galaxy. What little of his Im­perial career we know about indicates he is a man who embraces the idea that the ends do justify the means. He is a survivor, and shows cunning at playing his enemies off against each other. The leadership vacuum in the Im­perial Navy post-Endor allowed him to rise further than was previously reasonable, then declare himself a Warlord and begin his drive to take control of the Empire."