That threat damped some of the defiance in Thyne’s eyes. “Do not be disheartened, though, Patches, I would not surrender you unless forced to. These stormtroopers will conduct you to a place to which you will say you escaped after your speeder bike was brought down. We’ve been combing the area constantly for the last three days. You will tell your compatriots that you were in hiding and finally managed to escape. They will believe you.”
“No one will believe I hid.”
Loor looked over at one of the stormtroopers. “He’s right. Before you leave him inflict a nonfatal abdominal wound—one he could survive and one that won’t hamper him too much.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
Loor smiled. “Oh, but I think we do. Verisimilitude. If you can’t believe you would have been hiding, no one else will. People are suspicious, especially people like Corran Horn.”
“Then this will be another thing I owe him for. If it weren’t for him, I’d not be in your custody.”
“Indeed,” Loor nodded confidently. “And just to show you that I’m not a monster, I’ll give you a gift. If you find a convenient time to kill Corran Horn, do so. I consider him a threat to you and your operation. His elimination, therefore, will please me no end.”
29
Corran hated waiting. It seemed that since he’d left the rest of the Rogues with the Ithorian he’d done little but wait. After departing from the Ithorian’s jungle—which was just one apartment within a whole complex filled with such apartments so the Ithorians could live together, as was their wont—he had used a public comm station and had called a number Rima had given him. The recording at the other end asked him to punch in a personal code, which he did, then he was given instructions on where to go.
Being careful to see he was not followed, he went to the location indicated. He found himself at a biopod hotel run by a Selonian. The tall, slender creature showed Corran to a small pod midway up on a wall of pods. As Corran climbed in he estimated the cockpit of his X-wing was larger. He dialed the external opaquing for his door up to full, then lay down in a pod that measured two meters in length, a meter in height, and a meter in width.
He immediately adjusted the temperature up—it was set low enough that he figured a Sullustan had been the last occupant—and opened a channel on the comlink to let music fill the pod. The datapad display unit above his face flashed through a series of instructions concerning fire exits, the location of refresher facilities, and the locations of nearby culinary establishments. He watched that until one advertisement showed a Gamorrean digging a paw into a bowl of something pink that pulsed, at which point the need for locating food became moot.
He remained at that location for two days before Rima came for him and took him to another place that was better suited to his needs, though it was in need of a great deal of repair. Plasteel sheets covered one of the apartment’s walls. The furnishings, while hardly worn at all, were tattered and torn. The carpet had some blood in it and transparisteel occasionally crunched underfoot. The interior wall opposite the plasteel wall had been heavily dented by an oblong, vaguely cylindrical object.
Corran looked at her. “Is this the place where a speeder bike came crashing through the wall?”
Rima stared at him, somewhat stunned. “How do you know about that?”
“I was driving the bike that sent it into the window.” Corran ran his hand over the impression in the wall. “The others wouldn’t have told you about that. The Rogues didn’t know and the Black Sun people aren’t much for talking about their defeats. I’d imagine they have turned the story into something about rescuing the aliens from the Imps, right?”
“I do not know.” Rima shrugged easily. “My primary concern has been seeing to it that you and Erisi are taken care of. I apologize for quarantining you two, but I don’t know how much has been relayed to Imperial Intelligence.”
“I don’t know either, but I made some basic arrangements before I headed out and called the emergency number you gave me. Inyri Forge was going back to the Headquarters. That is one place Fliry Vorru can be found. It was my bad luck that Zekka Thyne was there the night I visited. That’s what initiated the chase that ended with my running into the Imperial raid on the Alien Combine.
“The other Rogues have the Headquarters as a touchstone. I gave them no way to reach me and I have no way to reach them save through using Inyri as a cutout. I imagine the Alien Combine also has a way to reach the other Rogues. Has there been any word on Aril?”
Rima shook her head.
Corran frowned. “Does that mean there’s no information or there is, but I don’t need to know it?”
“There is no news.” Rima’s shoulders sagged just a bit. “There was a lot of confusion in the aftermath of the raid. Some reports have suggested a group of Sullustans were led off early on, but we’ve no confirmation of that, nor any indication they are in any of the prisons here. They vanished and so has Aril.”
“People tend to do that.” Corran’s hands knotted into fists. “One thing that’s important, I need to talk to Commander Antilles.”
“Who?”
Corran smiled wearily at Rima. “I’m here, the other Rogues are here.” Including Tycho. “Commander Antilles has to be here and I need to speak with him. I saw something the other night that he needs to know about.”
“If it is that important, perhaps I need to know about it?”
Not with you being as close to Tycho as you seem to be. Corran shook his head. “You don’t need to know, Rima, sorry. Squadron business.”
“Very well.” The white-haired woman shrugged. “Stay here until I return for you.”
“As ordered.” Corran drew the blaster from the makeshift holster he’d fashioned in the lining of his jacket. “Can you get me some spare power packs for this thing?”
“I’ll see.”
“That doesn’t sound very hopeful. What if stormtroopers raid this place?”
“Ask if you can borrow some from them.” Rima gave him a grim smile. “All they can say is no.”
He waited two more days, spending his time working up a line that would convince stormtroopers to surrender their weapons to him. He found it a singularly frustrating occupation because, since they tended to be much larger than he was, he knew he could not intimidate them. Appealing to their humanity seemed a dubious prospect, as did appealing to their sense of fair play.
He spent the vast majority of time in the apartment going over the earlier events and trying to draw conclusions from all of it. First and foremost he was certain he’d seen Tycho Celchu talking with Kirtan Loor. That meant the operation on Coruscant was busted wide open. With Tycho on Coruscant the Imps clearly had full descriptions and datafiles on everyone in the squadron. He had to assume they were under surveillance or would soon be watched.
The fact that he’d stumbled across Tycho and Loor meeting in public did bother him a bit. If Tycho was an Imperial agent—as had been everyone else who’d ever been at Lusankya—why wouldn’t the meeting have been held in an Imperial facility? The obvious answer to that question was that Tycho hadn’t appreciated his Lusankya experience and was being wary of trapping himself in an Imperial stronghold. He was smart enough to know the Imps couldn’t be trusted, so he was probably gouging them for sufficient credits to buy some far-away world and live like a Moff for the rest of his life.
The fact that their mission had so clearly been blown really left the Rogues only one choice: leave immediately. He felt he had collected enough information about the general level of security on the planet to be useful, but he also expected all that to change in the near future, if it had not changed already. He had to assume that whatever any of the Rogues had learned was of dubious value, and therefore, their mission was a bust.
The only way to salvage any of this is to go home and start fighting against the Empire again.
Before he could come up with another plan that would be effective, but also before he’d admitted defeat to hi
mself, Rima came for him. She resisted answering his questions about their destination and seemed abnormally taciturn and withdrawn, but she did give him power packs for his blaster, so he chose not to press her for information. He did wonder what had gotten into her, but he chose not to ask questions on the street. When they slipped into the Headquarters he found other things to occupy his attention, especially his being ushered down the back corridor to a side room where Wedge sat waiting for him.
Corran snapped to attention and saluted as Rima left the room. “Horn reporting, sir.”
Wedge returned the salute, then smiled and gave Corran a back-slapping hug. “It’s good to see you’re alive and well, even though the last time I saw you, you were doing your best to kill me and a number of other people.”
What? “Excuse me, sir?”
“I was in the apartment where you sent a speeder bike through the window.” Wedge held a hand up and Corran saw some half-healed cuts on it. “Nothing major, but there’s not much bacta down here, so I have to heal the traditional way. Did find some ryll tincture that killed infection, though.”
“If I had known, I’d …”
“No one save the driver was badly hurt, so don’t worry.” Wedge inclined his head toward the door. “Winter tells me you wanted to talk with me? Something you could only tell me?”
“Winter?” Corran frowned for a second. “Ah, you mean Rima …”
“Right. We’d met before. She and Tycho are friends.”
“So I’ve gathered, which is why I wanted to talk to you.” Corran clasped his hands at the small of his back. “Five days ago, right here in the Headquarters, I saw Tycho Celchu talking with Kirtan Loor, an Imperial Intelligence agent.”
Wedge looked surprised, then frowned and slowly shook his head. “Five days ago?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s impossible.”
“I know what I saw, sir.” Corran jerked a thumb back toward the bar. “I saw him as sure as the Emperor is dead.” He tried to make his statement sound certain, but he was getting feelings of confusion and sorrow from Wedge’s expression. “Really, I did see him.”
“That’s impossible, Corran. Five days ago Warlord Zsinj attacked our base at Noquivzor. The barracks complex got hit hard. They’re digging through the rubble now but they don’t expect to find survivors.” Wedge hesitated for a moment, then swallowed. “Our support staff was devastated. Zraii survived, but that was the only confirmation they’d give me.”
“What about Whistler?” Corran blurted out the question before he realized how callous it made him sound. “He’s only a droid, but …”
Wedge patted him on the shoulder. “I understand. I don’t have word of him directly, but Zraii was working on our fighters in the hangar, so I have to suppose most of our astromechs were there with him. The hangar escaped serious damage. If any news comes through, I will let you know.”
“Thanks.” Corran took a deep breath and tried to sort everything out in his mind. “So what you’re telling me is that if I saw Tycho, I saw a ghost?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“And you told Rima, er, Winter? That’s why she was so quiet.”
“I just got word myself and broke it to her as gently as I could. We’re still hoping—bacta can do miracles if there’s even the remotest spark of life—but things do not look good.” Wedge sighed. “Of course, that’s the least of our worries right now.”
“Oh?”
Wedge nodded. “Zsinj’s attack is driving the invasion schedule forward. We have a new mission and you’re here to help plan it out.”
“I’ll do my best, sir.”
“Let’s hope we can all do our best, and then some.” Wedge slowly exhaled. “We’ve got to come up with a plan that will let us, with a minimal amount of lead time, take over or destroy whatever we need to bring down Coruscant’s shields and leave the world open to invasion.
30
Corran followed Wedge from the small room into the hallway and farther along to an even larger room. The first people he saw there were the Bothan Asyr and the Devaronian he’d helped to escape from the warehouse. They were already seated at the large round table in the middle of the room. As he came around Wedge he saw Fliry Vorru looking very Imperial and Zekka Thyne looked pale and in a bit of discomfort.
Looks like not everyone escaped unharmed.
“Corran!”
“Iella!” Arching his back, he picked her up in a hug and hung on tight. “I can’t believe you’re here.”
“Gil did this to me. The identities he set up were on Coruscant.” Iella pulled back away from him, but kept his hands in hers. “I can’t believe it’s you.”
If seeing Thyne hurt had made Corran feel good, seeing Iella made him feel … almost whole. I’ve spent too long with nothing and no one from my past aside from Whistler. It was as if that world didn’t exist. He smiled. “Where’s Diric?”
Iella’s smile froze for a second, then she glanced down. “I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry. What happened?”
“A year ago or so he was picked up in an Imp sweep and never came home. I bolted, made some Alliance contacts, and joined the Rebellion. There’s been no word and after this amount of time …”
Corran nodded and hugged her again. Diric Wessiri had been an interesting man. Old family wealth allowed him to lead a life of leisure. He viewed life as a collection of phenomena to be studied and experienced, but he was not one to let those experiences change him. He was easily twenty years Iella’s senior, but they fit together like oxygen and hydrogen. Diric didn’t always agree with things CorSec did, but he made an attempt to understand what had been done, and that quest for enlightenment had impressed Corran.
This is not the time to tell Iella that Gil is dead and that Loor killed him. There will be opportunities later, I’m sure. “Diric was special, but so are you. It’s great to see you again despite everything else.”
“I agree.” Iella squeezed his hands gently. “And Mirax asked to be remembered to you.”
A smile blossomed on Corran’s face. “She’s here? How?”
“The Skate brought the rest of the squadron here and couldn’t get away.” Iella frowned. “I would have thought the others had told you how they got here.”
“We were a bit busy when we ran into each other.”
“No kidding. Mirax has threatened to give you speeder bike lessons. First rule, she says, is stay away from buildings.”
Corran laughed aloud. “Yeah. We’ll have to discuss that more.”
Thyne snarled. “How long is this chummy crap going to go on?”
“Patches, someday when you have a friend you’ll learn this is what you do when you haven’t seen each other for a while.” Corran released Iella and she moved off to take a seat next to Winter.
“Well said, Lieutenant Horn.” Vorru folded his hands together on the table. “However, time is of the essence, I gather. Shall we get things under way? Commander?”
Corran took a seat beside Wedge, placing Winter on his right hand. Iella sat next to her, then the two aliens and finally Vorru and Thyne. Corran noticed that Thyne held his right hand and forearm protectively over his stomach. Gut-shot. Painful. Good.
Wedge stood. “I want to keep this as simple as possible. Since the warehouse incident we have all come to agree that working together to oppose the Empire is preferential to each going our own ways. Each of our groups has strengths and weaknesses, most of which overlap to minimize our exposure to the enemy. We can all agree that we will fare better on Coruscant once the Empire is overthrown and accomplishing that end is a goal of the Rebellion.
“Originally Rogue Squadron was sent here to recon Coruscant and gauge the vulnerable points for later exploitation. The problem is that Warlord Zsinj is testing both the Empire and the Rebellion. The Imperials know that to attack him is to weaken themselves to the point where they cannot prevail. The Alliance knows that to pursue Zsinj would dilute our strengt
h so that a strike at Coruscant won’t be possible for years, perhaps even decades. This means the Alliance will have to strike in the very near future and they want us to open the gates to Coruscant.”
Fliry Vorru tapped a fingertip against the tabletop. “Bringing down a planet’s shields is not an easy proposition.”
“Agreed.” Wedge leaned forward on his hands. “The central computer complex here is the key. Is it fair to assume Black Sun’s slicers have not been able to insert code into the master programs that control the planet?”
The white-haired man sat back in his chair. “I believe the discussion of that point is premature.”
“Oh?”
“Quite so, Commander.” Vorru nodded toward the representatives of the Alien Combine. “Their stake in this is quite clear. The Imperial regime is decidedly cruel and inhumane in dealing with them. The liberation of this planet would benefit them enormously. And you Rebels, well, you would be achieving a goal you’ve been focused upon for at least seven years. I mean, Winter dear, it is every Alderaanian’s dream to replace your lost world with Coruscant, is it not?”
Winter’s eyes glittered coldly. “The Alliance’s goal is to see the death of the evil that destroyed our world. Alderaan cannot be replaced and certainly not with this transparisteel and duracrete mausoleum for an Empire.”
Wedge folded his arms. “Your point, Vorru?”
“My point, Commander, is that the Alliance is not likely to be any more favorable to Black Sun than the Empire was. Less, in fact, I suspect. I want to know what is in this plan to reward me and my people for their cooperation.”
Corran snarled. “Why don’t you start with your liberation from Kessel?”
Vorru smiled delicately. “You would gladly see me back there, would you not, Lieutenant? If your plan succeeds you might find yourself appointed Minister of Security. If the cursing about you and your family done by Thyne here is any measure of Horn efficacy, I think I prefer having Ysanne Isard opposing me. What I would like, Commander Antilles, is some guarantee of clemency for those of my people who work to help you overthrow Isard.”
Star Wars: X-Wing II: Wedge's Gamble Page 22