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

by Michael A. Stackpole

  "I will find out if any of the computer core techni­cians have any interesting vices we can exploit or an inter­est in exploiting the vices we have to offer."

  "I think that will be fine." Wedge smiled. "In two days we will meet again and see how close we are to mak­ing the plan work."

  31

  Kirtan Loor's hands convulsed into fists. Who is more stupid, a fool or someone who relies upon a fool? Zekka Thyne's initial report about a planning meeting for what the Rogues would be doing to bring Imperial Center down had seemed promising. Thyne had told him who had attended and it had pleased Loor to learn Iella Wessiri and Corran Horn had been reunited. The fact that he'd not known Iella was living right under his nose did not thrill him, but her location had been outside his area of immediate interest until she became part of Rogue Squadron's operation.

  The datafiles that the Imperial Intelligence organized crime division had sent over to him had provided interest­ing information on Fliry Vorru as well as the Devaronian, Dmaynel Kiph, but of Asyr Sei'lar they had no record. Though he had been chastened before by Ysanne Isard about drawing unwarranted conclusions, Loor decided Sei'lar was probably a member of some Bothan spy net­work. The possible existence of an independent Bothan Intelligence operation on Imperial Center suggested the Alliance was not a wholly unified front, which meant

  Iceheart's strategy for dividing and destroying them piece­meal had even greater merit.

  What angered Loor was Thyne's deception—a decep­tion that became quite apparent from subsequent reports. Thyne had said the first meeting had merely been organi­zational and had not produced any sort of a working plan. In the five days since that meeting, though, Thyne had been given certain tasks to perform that ran outside the usual duties he had within Black Sun. Initially he had overseen the collection of all sorts of data from the Black Sun's gambling and spice operations on Imperial Center, but he only collected the datacards. He had no idea what information they contained.

  After two days of that he had been shifted over to equipment procurement. While his activities provided Loor with an interesting window on the black market availability of almost anything, it did not give him the sort of information that would be useful for countering the Rogues' operation. Thyne was overbuying weapons and having them delivered to any number of sites. In this Loor recognized an effort to provide far too many sites for Imperial Intelligence to adequately cover.

  It seemed clear to Loor that Thyne had been isolated by the command group and given jobs that, while valu­able, were not crippling if bungled. Thyne was not the only person buying weapons on the black market so Loor had to conclude that perhaps none of the arms Thyne had collected would be used. Loor would have decided Thyne's cover had been blown, but Vorru's file left little doubt about how the man would have been dealt with if Black Sun knew Patches was working with the Empire.

  Several things seemed obvious to Loor. The first was that Thyne had managed to show himself to be unreli­able. He assumed this was because Thyne clearly would have loved to supplant Vorru as the head of Black Sun and Vorru, just as clearly, would want to prevent that from happening. Thyne's animosity for Corran and Iella could have also made him a liability in any planning councils. Loor had decided that Thyne had been ejected

  from the initial meeting before plans had been discussed and only later learned that Thyne had been concussed and amnesia blanked the substantive part of the meeting. The spy within Rogue Squadron had not been present at the meeting. The spy's subsequent reports had been sin­gularly useless. The planning council had compartmental­ized the jobs needed to complete the operation, so the spy's activities proved less enlightening than Thyne's. Having Rogue Squadron personnel maintain a low profile did make sense, since they were not as familiar with Im­perial Center as other members of the conspiracy, but it made their activities useless as indicators of what was go­ing to happen.

  The only saving grace in all of it was that things ap­peared to be building slowly. Isard had told Loor that nothing could happen before two weeks—the incubation period of the new strain of the Krytos virus. The Sullustans taken in the warehouse had been injected with the virus ten days earlier so he was very close to his dead­line already. Isard said she'd already introduced the virus into the water supply, so countless creatures were already ingesting it. Loor himself had taken to boiling water and only drinking wines imported from other worlds—even though the virus was not supposed to infect humans, he wanted to take no chances.

  Loor sat back in the shadowed depths of his office and rubbed a hand against his forehead. The key to tak­ing any planet was to lower its shields and drop troops. While a planetary bombardment might cause a lot of damage, only troops on the ground could take and hold real estate. Without the shields going down, that couldn't happen, so the shields had to be the logical target for the Rogues.

  The obvious target for taking the shields down was to attack the shield generators themselves. Loading a landspeeder full of Nergon 14 and having a suicide bomber run it into a generation station seemed the most expedient way of dealing with the shields. Two facts ar­gued against that as a strategy—the sheer number of sta-

  tions would require a metric ton or two for the Rebels to obliterate them all and the Rebels had not, to his knowl­edge, purchased any Nergon 14 so far. More importantly, destroying the shield generators would work against their future efforts to hold the planet.

  A strike against the power generation stations had similar problems. There were even more of them than there were shield generation stations. The planet's electri­cal grid was coordinated such that an area that lost its lo­cal power plant would immediately have energy supplied by others in nearby sectors. Flickering lights would be the only sign of disruption. In his months on Imperial Center Loor had only seen lights flicker when one of the power­ful local thunderstorms broke over a building where he was.

  The obvious target was the computer that controlled everything on Imperial Center, but Loor had seen prisons that had less security than the central computer. The cen­ter had its own platoon of stormtroopers and the bar­racks within a fifty-kilometer radius had orders to respond to alarms there with all speed and firepower at their command. The facility itself had been built with more demanding specifications than those of any other building on the planet, including the Imperial Palace. Ru­mor had it that if the Death Star had been used against Imperial Center, the computer center would have been a recognizable and salvageable piece of debris.

  An armed strike on the computer center would seem doomed to failure, but the presence of Rogue Squadron did make it a bit more viable. If they had fighters—and fighters of various types were available on the black market—they might be able to intercept and down some of the incoming troops. That would give the attackers more time, though the outcome would still be dismal for the Rebels. The ground-based TIE fighter squadrons in the area would be able to counter the fighter threat, so placing them on alert was a precaution he would suggest to Isard.

  Perhaps the most difficult part of guarding against

  the Rebel action was balancing on the razored edge of Isard's plan. She wanted to give Imperial Center to the Rebels, saddling them with responsibility for a population that would drain them of bacta and fluid capital, effec­tively hobbling them and pinning them in one place. If his precautions against Rebel action were too obvious, the Rebels might do something unusual, giving them the planet before she wanted them to have it or, worse yet, convincing them to scrub their invasion. The idea of fac­ing her anger if things went wrong filled Loor with dread. Still, there are only four more days until her mini­mum deadline, two and a half weeks until the maximum. I'm close to success. Loor nodded slowly in the darkness. "If Derricote delivers what he promises with this Sullustan group, the Rebels will take a dying world and their movement will die right along with it."

  32

  Corran wetted a small cloth swab with ethyl alcohol and rubbed it over the focal end of the BlasTech DL-4
4 Heavy blaster pistol. He peered at it closely, then gave it one more light pass with the cloth. As the alcohol evaporated, he saw Gavin reflected in miniature. "Ah, Gavin, this is the third time you've asked me if you could ask me a question."

  The kid blushed as he snapped the trigger assembly for his SoroSuub S1BR into the receiver housing. "I know, sorry." Gavin kept his voice low enough that no one in the warehouse space aside from Corran could hear him. "I wanted to ask you about, um, you know."

  Corran winced. He didn't know, but that sort of thing was only said as preface to a question about killing or sex. Since Gavin had long ago become an ace and had acquitted himself well in the firefight in the warehouse across Invisec, Corran assumed the question had to be about sex. His parents should have told him about this before they let him go off to war, shouldn't they? Corran looked around to see if Wedge was nearby, figuring he would do a much better job helping Gavin.

  He couldn't see Wedge anywhere. Corran shrugged his shoulders and eased the concentration element into the barrel of the blaster pistol. "What's your question?" Gavin set his face in what he clearly thought was a serious expression, but the general youthfulness of his features undermined the effort. "On Tatooine, well, in Anchorhead, well, in the area around the farm, it was small and so ... We didn't have a school the way you did on Corellia, see, we all took classes via a local HoloNet and sent lessons in on datacards, you know ..."

  Corran fit the barrel assembly together and snapped it into the gun's frame. "Gavin, are you trying to tell me you don't know how to kiss a girl?"

  The young man pulled his head up and blinked, then frowned. "Anchorhead may have been small but not that small."

  "Kin don't count."

  Gavin blushed. "I wasn't related to everyone around there, you know."

  Corran raised his hands and smiled. "I know, I know, I was just giving you a hard time. What is it that you want to know?"

  "Well, you've been around a lot. And you come from Corellia." Gavin's voice dropped precipitously. "You've seen, you know, two people get together, but they're dif­ferent, right?"

  "Do you mean like Erisi and me? We come from dif­ferent worlds, but we're both human—though we haven't gotten together."

  "No, I mean like Nawara and Rhysati." "Oh." Corran nodded slowly. Throughout the galaxy the permutations of relationships between two or more individuals were legion, as were the rules, formal and oth­erwise, that governed their conduct. Prohibitions on rela­tionships between races and classes and castes varied from planet to planet, but the rules governing interspecies relationships tended to be largely similar. The majority of them were set by official Imperial policy—a policy CorSec officials had called "look but don't touch."

  "Exotic and different can be very attractive, Gavin.

  There are some folks who absolutely draw the line on dating outside their species while there are others who seem to be interested in experiencing anything and every­thing they can." Corran shrugged. "I guess I don't think it's wrong, but it just may not be right."

  "I don't think I follow you."

  "I wasn't very clear. Look, would you like to have children someday, have a family?"

  "Yes, I think so."

  "Okay, what if the person you fall for isn't capable of having children with a human?"

  "I would, well, um, I don't know."

  "There are other problems, too, and we're not talking the possible difficulties and dangers of making love, ei­ther."

  "Dangers?"

  "Sure. Suppose the person you're with is used to giving and getting gentle little love nips—with ten-centimeter-long teeth?" Corran hooked two fingers over like fangs. "Your hide isn't as thick as a Gamorrean's, so you'd be leaking."

  "I hadn't thought about that." Gavin frowned and his shoulders slumped. "I mean, I don't think that will be a problem."

  "Some species don't live as long as we do—though amid present company, life expectancy isn't that big an is­sue." Corran picked up a new heavy blaster and began to disassemble it for cleaning. "There are a lot of things you can take into consideration, Gavin, but it pretty much boils down to the same thing relationships between hu­mans do: if you and the other person get along, problems can be worked out."

  Gavin nodded. "So have you ever, you know . .. ?" The young man's voice trailed off as color rose in his cheeks.

  Corran felt two hands on his shoulders and looked back to see Iella's smiling face above his. "Has Corran ever what}"

  Corran shrugged his shoulders. "Nothing."

  Mirax appeared on his left and leaned on the table between Corran and Gavin. Her dark hair had been pulled back into a thick braid. "The look on Gavin's face doesn't suggest it was nothing, CorSec."

  Iella's hands tightened playfully on the back of his neck. "Come on, Corran, there's not much you haven't

  done."

  A smile blossomed on Gavin's face and Corran sud­denly felt outnumbered. And reluctant to answer Gavin's question. He knew it wasn't because of Iella's presence— she already knew the answer and could even tell the story better than he could. And he figured Gavin would find it amusing and make him less nervous. Clearly Gavin wanted to hear that Corran had dated an alien because the boy obviously had an interest in someone, and from the glances Corran had seen and the stories he'd heard, Gavin was thinking a lot about the Bothan, Asyr Sei'lar. While Corran thought she was a bit worldlier than Gavin could handle, he was willing to bet the farm boy from Tatooine could learn fast.

  He found his reluctance to say anything came from Mirax's presence and his feelings toward her. Erisi and Rhysati had been paired together for their part of plan­ning the operation, giving Corran time apart from her. It allowed him to put Erisi into perspective. Even though they were of the same species and even were attracted to each other, something deep down inside told Corran that their getting together would be wrong. Not wrong, a di­saster!

  Everything that made Erisi wrong seemed to make Mirax right. She understood him because of their com­mon background. Granted their fathers had been enemies—Corran characterized them as chronic enemies instead of mortal enemies—but that gave them a bond he would never have with Erisi. Ultimately with Erisi he knew he'd have felt like a pet, whereas with Mirax he felt like a friend and equal.

  During the planning operations Corran, Mirax, Gavin, and Iella had gone out and secured a lot of sup-

  plies for the operation. Things were scarce and, if availa­ble at all, were high priced. More than once Corran wished Emtrey had been on Coruscant to help with pro­curement, but Mirax proved every bit his equal in obtain­ing things. Whereas the droid might have used an instant analysis of a trader's wares to figure out his markup and squeeze him until his prices became reasonable, Mirax charmed, cajoled, wheedled, and even threatened. She'd learned every trick in the book from her father and Corran thought old Booster would be proud when he learned about her exploits.

  But there is so much about her I don't know, like her reaction to learning I dated outside my species. Fear that she might see such an action as making him unclean or unworthy killed any quip he might have tossed at Iella. He looked up at Mirax but saw no suspicion or disap­pointment in her face.

  Gavin fit two pieces of the blaster rifle together and tightened down a restraining bolt. "I wanted to know if he'd ever dated someone who wasn't human."

  Iella laughed. "Well, there were plenty of women he dated who weren't human, in spirit, that is."

  Mirax sniffed lightly. "But why bring the bacta queen into this."

  "I never dated Erisi."

  "No, you just pretended to be her Kuati impregnator, then kissed her in full view of the Grand Hall of the Gal­axy in the Imperial Palace." Mirax shook her head. "Clearly no relationship there at all."

  Corran laughed. "The way you tell it, I might have actually had fun."

  Iella lightly cuffed the back of his head. "You always did complain about the easiest duty, Horn."

  "Believe me, I'd take Chertyl Ruluwoor over
Erisi gladly."

  "Oh." Iella raised an eyebrow. "That's interesting."

  Gavin frowned. "What's Chertyl Ruluwoor?"

  Mirax straightened up and tapped a finger against her chin. "Sounds Selonian."

  "It is." Iella smiled broadly. "Tell them, Corran."

  "No, you tell them. You tell it better."

  "You don't mind?"

  "If I have to be mortified, I'd prefer not to do it to

  myself."

  Mirax swung around and seated herself on the edge of the table. "This sounds wonderful." She winked at Corran, then looked up at Iella. "Go ahead, he'll survive

  it."

  "True, it's not like it's the first time he's heard this." Iella smiled and Corran knew she'd put a good face on the incident. "Chertyl Ruluwoor was a female Selonian who had been sent to our unit to get some training. It was a cultural exchange program. She was tall—at least two meters—and slender. Selonians are all very lithe and she was covered with relatively short black fur that glis­tened a silver-blue when the light hit it right. Definitely gorgeous, definitely humanoid, but definitely not human. "The Annual CorSec Awards Ball was coming up and she didn't know anyone. Selonians tend to be a very pri­vate sort of people and the only ones you see in public are sterile females. They run things in their society and main­tain a family unit with fertile males and females, but she was all alone. The unattached male officers in our branch put together a pool to see who would take Chertyl to the celebration. Each man was required to buy a ticket for five credits and the winner—whom everyone considered a loser—would get the pot to compensate for the evening." Mirax frowned. "It strikes me that the whole process was the wrong way around."