"I don't know." Inyri brought the airspeeder out of the garage and immediately started it climbing. "We were below waiting the way we were supposed to, then we heard a couple of small explosions and one big one from the office at the head of the stairs. There wasn't any percentage in staying around, so we took off."
Her voice took on an edge. "I wasn't really coming back for you. The speeder bikes had an angle on exit and I figured that being last in line I'd be the first to die. I broke off and thought to run back to the way they came in, then I noticed you were shooting at the bike on my tail. When you got him, the least I could do was pick you up."
Mirax patted Inyri on the shoulder. "Intentions don't count, what you do does."
Corran sat up in the back seat. The only way Imperials could have gotten to the memory core factory and raided it when they did was if they had inside information about what was happening there and when it was going to take place. Without thinking too hard on the matter he could identify twenty people who knew about the operation and that number could have expanded exponentially if someone stupid started bragging.
From those who might have sold the operation out he immediately discarded any of the Rogues, Mirax, Winter, and Iella. All of them, save Winter, had actually been in the factory. Wedge said Winter was incorruptible. While it was not in Corran's nature to believe that about anyone, the fact that Pash Cracken and Iella also vouched for her let him clear her.
Mirax looked out through the windscreen. "Where are we going?"
"Zekka picked out a location for us to meet if things didn't go as planned. We'll link up there and then see who else has survived this debacle."
As Inyri whisked them along a twisty, mind-boggling course through the city, ascending and descending through levels and around buildings, Corran continued considering suspects. In the back of his mind he knew the exercise was futile because there was no way he could prove his suspicions. He also knew that the first person on his suspect list, Zekka Thyne, would also be the last person on it. Corran knew Thyne had betrayed them, he knew it in his heart, and he didn't really need proof for that conviction.
His being placed in the position of lookout was perfect from the Imp point of view. He protested that he wanted something more important but Vorru forced him to keep that job. Even though I thought letting him organize lookouts was a bad idea, I was relieved since I wouldn't have him with a gun in a place where my back might be turned. Heck, I was even glad be was disappointed with his assignment. Unfortunately, without proof I'll have a hard time convincing others he's the Sithspawn who gave us up to the Imps.
Inyri swooped the airspeeder down and brought it in through a small round portal on the shadowed midlevel of a building. A round plug of a door rolled in place after they entered. Lights came on in a hangar, revealing it to be empty except for a racked speeder bike off to the right. Inyri brought the airspeeder to a stop, letting it settle on the hangar floor.
"I guess we got here before the others." With her hands on the top of the windscreen, Inyri pulled herself up out of the airspeeder. "I hope they make it."
"I can vote for that." Corran clambered out of the back of the airspeeder and walked over to the speeder bike. He pressed a hand against the cold metal of its engine housing, then turned as the doorway into the interior of the building opened.
"You'll want to get away from the speeder bike." Zekka Thyne emerged from the building with a blaster
carbine leveled in Corran's direction. "Get your hands up. Hmmm. I can see why you security types like saying that, such a feeling of power. You, too, Terrik. Inyri, take their blasters."
Mirax frowned. "What's going on here?"
Corran raised his hands to shoulder height as Inyri collected his gun. "Patches sold us out."
Inyri shook her head. "Impossible. He hates the Imps as much as you do—as much as any of us do."
Corran jerked a thumb toward the speeder bike. "The engine's cold. We got no warning because he wasn't there. Didn't want to take a chance the Imps would shoot him up."
"I knew you'd figure it out, just the same way I knew they wouldn't get you." Thyne sneered at him. "You and your father always were lucky. That's the only way you got me, your old man was luckier than I was."
"It wasn't luck. My father was smarter than you were. He still is."
"He's dead."
"My point stands." Corran shrugged. "What did you figure you'd tell Vorru after everyone else got wiped out in the raid? Or did you figure it wouldn't matter?"
Mirax slowly nodded. "He's got a plan to get away, Corran. He's going to sell you to his Imperial contact for safe passage and a new identity on a new world."
Thyne's smile broadened to hideous proportions. "Close, very close, except in one detail." The carbine rose to shoulder height. "Kirtan Loor just wants a corpse."
The whine of a single blaster shot filled the hangar and the bolt tinted everything with the color of blood. Thyne staggered, then slumped back against the wall. His legs collapsed and his carbine clattered to the ground. With both hands he tried to stem the steaming blood dribbling from his belly.
Corran looked over at Inyri, his gaze drawn to her because of the blaster pistol falling from her hands, then ran over to Thyne. Squatting down he could tell from the way blood soaked the man's clothes that there wasn't
anything he could do for him. "Unless you have a bacta tank in there, you're dead."
"Then I'm dead. Just like your father." A wet cough wracked Thyne. "You want to know if I had him killed, yes?"
Corran shook his head. "No. I wouldn't believe whatever you told me and it wouldn't bring him back." And since you really want to torture me with it, I won't give you the satisfaction of thinking I do want to know.
Thyne grimaced against the pain that contracted his muscles. "Let me tell you this. Loor knows about you. He knew about you before he forced me to betray you. I sold you out this time, but someone else sold you out before me."
Corran's jaw dropped open. Tycho! But Wedge said he'd died on Noquivzor so I couldn't have seen him here. Someone else? Who?
Thyne forced a laugh. "There, I will haunt you."
"No, you'll just be dead and you'll die knowing you've warned me about an enemy I didn't know I had." Corran patted the man on the shoulder, pulling his hand back before Thyne could bite weakly at it. "You've just saved my life, Zekka Thyne, and that's something we'll both remember until death takes us."
Thyne's head lolled to the left and his body slackened. Corran stood and saw Mirax comforting Inyri. He started to open his mouth to say something, but Mirax caught his eye and shook her head to forestall his comment. He closed his mouth again realizing that the question he would have asked, though simple, probably would not have a simple answer. Nor an answer I really have a chance of understanding.
He didn't even know if he should thank Inyri for saving his life by shooting her lover. Corran admitted to himself that he'd not have thought she'd do that for all the stars in the galaxy. Her reaction toward him had been hostile from the moment they'd met on Kessel. Corran clearly remembered Inyri dispassionately handing Thyne a blaster so Thyne could kill him at the Headquarters.
Later she had seemed to resent his helping her escape from the Imperials after her speeder bike had been shot down.
Every clue she'd given him suggested that if Thyne had been slow in shooting him, she'd have gladly done the job rather speedily.
Inyri eased herself free of Mirax's embrace and sat back against the airspeeder's hull. The front end of the vehicle hid Thyne's body from her view though a thin rivulet of blood was meandering toward a drain in the center of the hangar floor. She hid her face in her hands, sobbed silently a bit, then wiped away her tears.
When she looked over at him, despite the red rimming her eyes, she looked eerily like her sister, Lujayne. "You want to know why."
Corran nodded. He'd heard enough preambles to confessions to know that she needed to talk more than
he wanted to have her actions explained. "If you want to tell me."
"Coming from Kessel, it marks you. No one respects you because they assume you're a criminal. When you tell them you aren't they just assume you're a liar. Even the prisoners don't respect you—they all come from worlds that have more going for them than spice mines and a prison. If you're born there you can never escape Kessel."
Corran felt a tight knot forming in his stomach. When he'd first met Lujayne Forge he'd prejudged her because of where she had come from. Everything Inyri said was true, but her sister hadn't let that stop her. Lujayne had confronted Corran with his bias and made him see what he was doing. That experience with Lujayne had changed him. It had made him ready to look beyond where Inyri came from, but she'd prejudged and rejected him.
"Thyne helped me escape Kessel. He respected me. He made others respect me. He made me respect me. Yet in all the time I was with him I knew that he was not the sort of person I had been raised to respect. He was the
antithesis of everything my parents had taught me was good and right in the galaxy."
Mirax nodded. "But he respected you and valued you in a way you never thought you'd find."
"Exactly." Inyri looked up at Corran. "Every time you would show up I'd be reminded of what I'd been raised to believe. I tried to keep you away, but in the middle of a lightfight you and Gavin run out and pull me out of the street. Thyne didn't do that. He didn't turn around and come back for me, but I missed the signs even then.
"Today he didn't warn me about what would happen at the factory. If you two hadn't been there in the garage, I would have died. And when we got here, his central concern was killing you, not the fact that I'd survived. I realized that Thyne did respect me, but only for my usefulness to him. He thought he could trust me implicitly, which is rare among the members of the Black Sun."
She shrugged. "So, he saved me from Kessel, but you saved me from the Imps and, through that, saved me from thinking I was worthless. That was worth more than Thyne's respect ... or his life. I guess that favor you said you owed my sister has been redeemed."
"That favor I owe your sister, that's one that will take a lifetime to pay off. What you did here, as far as I'm concerned, nulls the datacard between us. We're even." Corran smiled, then shook his head. "Of course, we're still on Coruscant, we're being hunted by Imperial stormtroopers, and Thyne told me we have yet another traitor in our midst. Seems to me this is the perfect time to be settling up accounts and making sure all our affairs are truly in order."
Mirax nodded. "Never put off to tomorrow what you can do today."
Inyri raised an eyebrow. "Except, perhaps, dying."
"Good point." Corran headed toward the door into the building. "Let's get cleaned up and then we can go see if anyone else procrastinated their way past death."
36
If the Force is with us, Gavin thought as he ducked around a corner, it's definitely the dark side. Blaster bolts gnawed away at the wall, leaving the corner serrated and flaming. Looking to his right, he saw Ooryl and Nawara positioned inside a doorway, so he dove between them and rolled on past as they opened fire on the stormtroopers chasing them down the corridor.
Pursuit began almost immediately after they left the factory. They entered and moved through a number of buildings and thought they were in the clear when Portha shot a stormtrooper who challenged them. The storm-trooper went down but apparently lived long enough to report their location to his headquarters. Stormtroopers began to converge on the area, giving the Rogues few choices of where to run and even less time to consider them.
Wedge had insisted on going up, but the building they'd picked to give them access to the bridges on higher levels was probably the worst choice they could have made. A transparisteel and ferrocrete monolith, at the lower levels it stood absolutely alone, with no attachments, walkways, or links to other buildings. Up on the
fiftieth level it branched out and gave them the access to other avenues of escape they desired, but getting to the fiftieth level proved to be the problem.
Coming up into a crouch, Gavin looked around and his heart sank. As with several previous floors, this one was an open square space centered on a lift and stairwell core. The floor-to-ceiling windows provided a lovely view of the shadowed levels of Coruscant—a view he found decidedly claustrophobic.
Especially with an Imperial Troop Transport gravtruck floating up to their level. An armored side panel snapped down on the truck's boxy cargo pod. A stormtrooper framed himself in the opening and tossed something at the window. It stuck for a second, appearing to be a black amoebic blob, then it exploded, spraying transparisteel fragments into the room.
Gavin had already dived to the floor, but he still felt the sting of the shards on his left flank and face. We've
had it.
"Stay down," Wedge shouted above the din, "everyone stay down!"
Though he had no intention of making himself a target when trapped between two stormtrooper squads, he wondered if the Commander had snapped. Staying down was tantamount to surrendering, which would make sense except that the stormtroopers had never given any sign of being interested in taking prisoners. Looking to his left at the stormtroopers picking their way along the panel and entering through the broken window, Gavin didn't get the impression they were more inclined to shows of compassion than the other stormtroopers they'd fought so far.
Then something odd happened. The gravtruck tipped up at the front, spilling two stormtroopers from the walkway and tossing those in the back from their feet. A half second later the thing that had made the driver shy hit the front end of the gravtruck and exploded. The concussion of the blast shattered more windows and obliterated the gravtruck's cab. Beyond the floppy-limbed
tumbling of broken stormtroopers, Gavin saw the gravtruck begin to break apart and slip from sight.
A sleek snubfighter shot up past their level, then came back around and flew directly toward the building. Though not as elegant as the next generation of starfighters, the black with gold trim Z-95 Headhunter came as a welcome sight to Gavin. Its blasters started blazing from each wingtip and sliced fire through the building's central core. Sparks shot from ruptured electrical conduits and water gushed from shattered mains. Walls evaporated beneath the assault, and of the storm-troopers who had been following them, Gavin could see no trace.
The Headhunter pulled back as a long black repulsorlift vehicle rose into place. Wedge got up and ran toward the window even before the gull-wing door to the vehicle's passenger compartment had fully opened. He waved the others forward and Gavin followed, but kept an eye on the downed stormtroopers and the central core to protect against further trouble.
"Gavin, go."
"After you, sir."
Wedge laughed, then winced. "Go, it's an order."
Gavin tossed his blaster carbine to Pash, then leapt into the vehicle and jammed himself between Erisi and the Trandoshan. Wedge followed and the vehicle dropped away from the building. Wind whistled in through the closing doors, and it wasn't until silence again reigned that Gavin heard the driver's voice. Once he did, Gavin recognized it and found the shocked look on the other Rogues' faces mirrored his own surprise.
Wedge nodded toward the driver's compartment. "Yes, Emtrey, I am hurt, but it's not serious."
Gavin shook his head and poked a finger in his right ear to try to clear it. "How can Emtrey be here?"
Rhysati nodded. "And who's flying the Headhunter, Commander?"
"Tycho."
Gavin's face froze as his emotions went from elation
to suspicion and the despair of betrayal. "How? He was killed at Noquivzor."
Wedge shook his head slowly. "No, he wasn't. The raid was real, but neither he nor Emtrey was there. Whistler was logging reports for both of them to make it appear like they were there. Both of them were actually
here."
Iella raised an eyebrow. "You brought them here,
w
hy?"
"There are two things I've learned in the Rebellion. The first is that what any of us thinks is secret is really information that can be used to purchase other, more valuable information. If it were deemed expedient and useful for our presence on Coruscant to become common knowledge, say, to show a potential ally that we are taking steps to take the world, that ally would learn we were here. It would only be a matter of time before that information got into Imperial hands and we got into trouble." Nawara nodded. "The fact that we were sold out today lends credence to this idea."
"And that brings me to my second point—the opposition can only plan to handle those things they know about. Tycho has been here as long as the rest of us have and has been working for me. I wanted one sabacc card that wouldn't change value on me and he was it. He'd been to Coruscant inside two years ago, knew how to get around, and, as we saw just now, has turned out to be very useful."
Emtrey's clamshell head swiveled around to the back. "Captain Celchu indicates we have no pursuit and are clear to our hideaway. He also has a message for you."
"Link him through."
"Wedge, I'd save this, but it's time-critical."
"Go ahead, we're all friends here."
"An urgent message came through for you while I was waiting." Tycho's voice grew somber. "We've got forty-eight hours to bring Coruscant's shields down."
37
Kirtan Loor bowed before Ysanne Isard. "Rogue Squadron is a threat no more."
Isard nodded as if she had only half heard him. "They are not dead, however."
"Not for lack of trying." Loor smothered the frown that struggled to make itself manifest. Her order to him had been to prevent Rogue Squadron from doing whatever it was they had planned to do. Killing them was an option, and he certainly could have had a squadron of TIE bombers fly in and level the Palar factory. Had he done so he had no doubt he would have been criticized for the overkill. "Their escape is regrettable, but our forces have seized their weapon and equipment caches. They are helpless."
Star Wars - X-Wing 02 - Wedge's Gamble Page 26