Those were noble messages, to be certain, but Wedge felt they were not the right messages for Corran. He tugged on the sleeves of his uniform jacket as a Bothan protocol subaltern waved him forward. Wedge stepped up to the podium and wanted to lean heavily upon it. Years of fighting and saying good-bye to friends and comrades weighed him down—but he refused to give in to fatigue. He let his pride in the squadron and his friendship with Corran keep him upright.
He looked around at the crowd, then focused on the mound of pseudogranite rubble before him. “Corran Horn does not rest easy in that grave.” Wedge paused for a moment, and then another, letting the silence remind everyone of the true purpose of the ceremony. “Corran Horn was never at ease except when he was fighting. He does not rest easy now because there is much fighting yet to be done. We have taken Coruscant, but anyone who assumes that means the Empire is dead is as mistaken as Grand Moff Tarkin was in his belief that Alderaan’s destruction would somehow cripple the Rebellion.”
Wedge brought his head up. “Corran Horn was not a man who gave up, no matter what the odds. More than once he took upon himself the responsibility of dealing with a threat to the squadron and to the Rebellion. Heedless of his own safety, he engaged overwhelming forces and by sheer dint of will and spirit and courage he won through. Even here, on Coruscant, he flew alone into the heart of a storm that was ravaging a planet and risked his life so this world would be free. He did not fail, because he would not let himself fail.
“Each of us who knew him has, in our hearts, dozens and dozens of examples of his bravery or his concern for others, or his ability to see where he was wrong and correct himself. He was not a perfect man, but he was a man who sought to be the best he could be. And while he took pride in being very good, he didn’t waste energy in displays of rampant egotism. He just picked out new goals and drove himself forward toward them.”
Wedge slowly nodded toward the rubble pile. “Corran is now gone. The burdens he bore have been laid down. The responsibilities he shouldered have been abandoned. The example he set is no more. His loss is tragic, but the greater tragedy would be letting him be remembered as a faceless hero mouldering in this cairn. He was a fighter, as all of us should be. The things he took upon himself might be enough to crush down any one person, but we all can accept a portion of that responsibility and bear it together. Others have talked about building a future that would honor Corran and the others who have died fighting the Empire, but the fact is that there’s fighting yet to be done before the building can begin.
“We have to fight the impatience with the pace of change that makes us look nostalgically on the days of the Empire. Yes, there might have been a bit more food available. Yes, power outages might have been fewer. Yes, you might have been insulated from the misery of others—but at what cost? The security you thought you had froze into an icy lump of fear in your gut whenever you saw stormtroopers walking in your direction. With the liberation of Coruscant that fear can melt, but if you forget it once existed and decide things were not so bad under the Emperor, you’ll be well on your way to inviting it back.”
He opened his hands to take in all those assembled at the monument. “You must do what Corran did: fight anything and everything that would give the Empire comfort or security or a chance to reassert itself. If you trade vigilance for complacency, freedom for security, a future without fear for comfort; you will be responsible for shaping the galaxy once again into a place that demands people like Corran fight, always fight and, eventually, fall victim to evil.
“The choice, ultimately, devolves to you. Corran Horn will not rest easy in his grave until there is no more fighting to be done. He has done everything he could to fight the Empire; now it is up to you to continue his fight. If he is ever to know peace, it will only be when we all know peace. And that is a goal every one of us knows is well worth fighting for.”
Wedge stepped back from the podium and steeled himself against the polite applause. Deep down he would have hoped his words had been inspiring, but those gathered around the memorial were dignitaries and officials from worlds throughout the New Republic. They were politicians whose goal was to help shape the future others of their number spoke about. They wanted stability and order as a foundation for their constructions. His words, reminding everyone that fights were yet to be waged, undercut their efforts. They had to applaud because of the situation and who he was, but Wedge had no doubt most of them thought him a politically naive warrior best suited to being a hero who was feted and used in holograph opportunities to support this program or that.
He could only hope that others listening to what he had to say would take his message to heart. The politicians required stability, and the way they acquired stability was to ignore instability or patch it over with some quick fix. The citizens of the New Republic would find their politicians as distant as the Imperial politicians before them. With their new-won freedom, the people would be able to let their leaders know what they thought, and might be tempted to protest if things did not move swiftly enough in the direction the people wanted.
A rebellion against the Rebellion would result in anarchy or a return of the Empire. Either would be disaster. Fighting for progress and against reactionary forces was the only way to guarantee the New Republic would get a chance to flourish. Wedge dearly wanted that to happen and hoped the politicians would look past their efforts to gather power to themselves long enough to take steps to provide real stability and a real future.
Over at the grave site an honor guard raised the squadron flag, then backed away and saluted. That signaled an end to the ceremony, and the visitors began to drift away. A cream-furred Bothan with violet eyes crossed to where Wedge stood and nodded almost graciously. “You were quite eloquent, Commander Antilles.” Borsk Fey’lya waved a hand toward the departing masses. “I have no doubt quite a few hearts were stirred by your words.”
Wedge raised an eyebrow. “But not yours, Councilor Fey’lya?”
The Bothan snoted a clipped laugh. “If I were so easily swayed, I could be convinced to back all sorts of nonsense.”
“Like the trial of Tycho Celchu?”
Fey’lya’s fur rippled and rose at the back of his neck. “No, I might be convinced that such a trial was not necessary.” He smoothed the fur back down with his right hand. “Admiral Ackbar has not convinced you to abandon your petition to the Provisional Council about this matter?”
“No.” Wedge folded his arms across his chest. “I would have thought by now you would have engineered a vote to deny me the chance to address the council.”
“Summarily dismiss a petition by the man who liberated Coruscant?” The Bothan’s violet eyes narrowed. “You’re moving into a realm of warfare at which I am a master, Commander. I would have thought you wise enough to see that. Your petition will fail. It must fail, so it shall. Captain Celchu will be tried for murder and treason.”
“Even though he is innocent?”
“Is he?”
“He is.”
“A fact to be determined by a military court, surely.” Fey’lya gave Wedge a cold smile. “A suggestion, Commander.”
“Yes?”
“Don’t waste your eloquence on the Provisional Council. Save it. Hoard it.” The Bothan’s teeth flashed in a feral grin. “Use it on the tribunal that tries Captain Celchu. You’ll not gain his freedom, of course—no one is that eloquent; but perhaps you will win him some modicum of mercy when it comes time for sentence to be passed.”
2
High up in a tower suite, up above the surface of Imperial Center, Kirtan Loor allowed himself a smile. At the tower’s pinnacle, the only companions were hawk-bats safe in their shadowed roosts and Special Intelligence operatives who were menacing despite their lack of stormtrooper armor or bulk. He felt alone and aloof, but those sensations came naturally with his sense of superiority. At the top of the world, he had been given all he could see to command and dominate.
And destroy.
; Ysanne Isard had given him the job of creating and leading a Palpatine Counter-insurgency Front. He knew she did not expect grand success from him. He had been given ample resources to make himself a nuisance. He could disrupt the functioning of the New Republic. He could slow their takeover of Coruscant and hamper their ability to master the mechanisms of galactic administration. A bother, minor but vexatious, is what Ysanne Isard had intended he become.
Kirtan Loor knew he had to become more. Years before, when he started working as an Imperial liaison officer with the Corellian Security Force on Corellia, he never would have dreamed of finding himself rising so far and playing so deadly a game. Even so, he had always been ambitious, and supremely confident in himself and his abilities. His chief asset was his memory, which allowed him to recall a plethora of facts, no matter how obscure. Once he had seen or read or heard something he could draw it from his memory, and this ability gave him a gross advantage over the criminals and bureaucrats with whom he dealt.
His reliance on his memory had also hobbled him. His prodigious feats of recall so overawed his enemies that they would naturally assume he had processed the information he possessed and had drawn the logical conclusions from it. Since they assumed he already knew what only they knew, they would tell him what he had not bothered to figure out for himself. They made it unnecessary for him to truly think, and that skill had begun to atrophy in him.
Ysanne Isard, when she summoned him to Imperial Center, had made it abundantly clear that learning to think and not to assume was the key to his continued existence. Her supervision made up in severity what it lacked in duration, putting him through a grueling regimen that rehabilitated his cognitive abilities. By the time she fled Imperial Center, Isard had clearly been confident in his ability to annoy and confound the Rebels.
More importantly, Kirtan Loor had become certain that he could do all she wanted and yet more.
From his vantage point he looked down on the distant blob of dignitaries and mourners gathered at the memorial for Corran Horn. While he despised them all for their politics, he joined them in mourning Horn’s loss. Corran Horn had been Loor’s nemesis. They had hated each other on Corellia, and Loor had spent a year and a half trying to hunt Corran down after he fled from Corellia. The hunt had ended when Ysanne Isard brought Loor to Imperial Center, but he had anticipated a renewal of his private little war with Horn when given the assignment to remain on Coruscant.
Of course, Corran’s demise hardly made a dent in the legion of enemies Loor had on Imperial Center. Foremost among them was General Airen Cracken, the director of Alliance Intelligence. Cracken’s network of spies and operatives had ultimately made the conquest of the Imperial capital possible, and his security precautions had given Imperial counterintelligence agents fits for years. Cracken—or Kraken, as some of Loor’s people had taken to calling the Rebel—would be a difficult foe with whom to grapple.
Loor knew he had some other enemies who would pursue him as part of a personal vendetta. The whole of Rogue Squadron, from Antilles to the new recruits, would gladly hunt him down and kill him—including the spy in their midst since Loor presented a security risk for the spy. Even if they could not connect him with Corran’s death directly, the mere fact that Corran hated him would be a burden they’d gladly accept and a debt they would attempt to discharge.
Iella Wessiri was the last of the CorSec personnel Loor had hunted, and her presence on Imperial Center gave him pause. She had never been as relentless as Corran Horn in her pursuit of criminals, but that had always seemed to Loor to be because she was more thorough than Horn. Whereas Corran might muscle his way through an investigation, Iella picked up on small clues and accomplished with élan what Corran did with brute strength. In the shadow game in which Loor was engaged, this meant she was a foe he might not see coming, and that made her the most dangerous of all.
Loor backed away from the window and looked at the holographic representation of the figures below as they strode across his holotable. The ceremony had been broadcast planetwide, and would be rebroadcast at various worlds throughout the galaxy. He watched Borsk Fey’lya and Wedge Antilles as they met in close conversation, then split apart and wandered away. Everyone appeared more like toys to him than they did real people. He found it easy to imagine himself a titanic—no, Imperial—presence who had deigned to be distracted by the actions of bugs.
He picked up the remote device from the table and flicked it on. A couple of small lights flashed on the black rectangle in his left palm, then a red button in the center of it glowed almost benignly. His thumb hovered over it for a second. He smiled, but killed the impulse to stab his thumb down and gently returned the device to the table.
A year before he would have punched that button, detonating the explosives his people had secreted around the memorial. With one casual caress he could have unleashed fire and pain, wiping out a cadre of traitorous planetary officials and eliminating Rogue Squadron. He knew, given a chance, any of the SI operatives under his command would have triggered the nergon 14 charges—as would the majority of the military command staff still serving the Empire.
Loor did not. Isard had pointed out on numerous occasions that before the Empire could be reestablished, the Rebellion had to die. She had pointed out that the Emperor’s obsession with destroying the Jedi Knights had caused him to regard the rest of the Rebellion as a lesser threat, yet it had outlived the Jedi and the Emperor. Only by destroying the Rebellion would it be possible to reassert the Empire’s authority over the galaxy. Destroying the Rebellion required methods more subtle than exploding grandstands and planets, accomplishing with a vibroblade what could not be done with a Death Star.
Rogue Squadron could not be allowed to die, because they were required for the public spectacle of Tycho Celchu’s trial. General Cracken had uncovered ample evidence that pointed toward Celchu’s guilt, and Loor had delighted in clearing the way for Cracken’s investigators to find yet more of it. The evidence would be condemning, yet so obviously questionable that the members of Rogue Squadron—all of whom had indicated a belief in Tycho’s innocence at one level or another—would decry it as false. That would increase the tension between the conquerors of Imperial Center and the politicians who slunk in after the pilots had risked their lives to secure the world. If the heroes of the Rebellion could doubt and resent the government of the New Republic, how would the citizenry build confidence in their leaders?
The Krytos virus further complicated things. Created by an Imperial scientist under Loor’s supervision, it killed non-humans in a most hideous manner. Roughly three weeks after infection, the victims entered the final, lethal stage of the disease. Over the course of a week the virus multiplied very rapidly, exploding cell after cell in their bodies. Their flesh weakened, sagged, and split open while the victims bled from every pore and orifice. The resulting liquid was highly infectious, and though bacta could hold the disease at bay or, in sufficient quantities, cure it, the Rebellion did not have access to enough bacta to treat all the cases on Coruscant.
The price of bacta had shot up and supplies dwindled. People hoarded bacta and rumors about the disease having spread to the human population caused waves of panic. Already a number of worlds had ordered ships from Imperial Center quarantined so the disease would not spread, further disrupting the New Republic’s weak economy and eroding its authority. It did no good for human bureaucrats to try to explain the precautions they had taken for dealing with the disease since they were immune, and that immunity built up resentment between the human and non-human populations within the New Republic.
Loor allowed himself a small laugh. He had taken the precaution of putting away a supply of bacta, which he was selling off in small lots. As a result of this action, anxious Rebels were supplying the financing for an organization bent on the destruction of the New Republic. The irony of it all was sufficient to dull the omnipresent fear of discovery and capture.
There was no question in his mind that to
be captured was to be killed, yet he did not let that prospect daunt him. Being able to turn the Rebels’ tactics back on them struck him as justice. He would be returning to them the fear and frustration Imperials everywhere had known during the Rebellion. He would strike from hiding, hitting at targets chosen randomly. His vengeance would be loosely focused because that meant no one could feel safe from his touch.
He knew his efforts would be denounced as crude terrorism, but he intended there to be nothing crude about his efforts. Today he would destroy the grandstands around the memorial. They would be nearly empty, and all those who had left the stands would breath a sigh of relief that they had not been blown up minutes or hours earlier; but everyone would have to consider congregating in a public place to be dangerous in the future. And if he hit a bacta treatment and distribution center tomorrow, people would also have to weigh obtaining protection from the virus against the possibility of being blown to bits.
By choosing targets of minimal military value he could stir up the populace to demand the military do something. If the public’s ire focused on one official or another, he could target that person, giving the public some power. He would let their displeasure choose his victims, just as his choices would give direction to their fear. Theirs would be a virulent and symbiotic relationship. He would be nightmare and benefactor, they would be victims and supporters. He would become a faceless evil they sought to direct while fearing any attention they drew to themselves.
Having once been on the side attempting to stop an anti-government force, he could well appreciate the difficulties the New Republic would have in dealing with him. The fact that the Rebellion had never resorted to outright terrorism did not concern him. Their goal had been to build a new government; his was merely to destroy what they had created. He wanted things to degenerate into an anarchy that would prompt an outcry for leadership and authority. When that call went out, his mission would be accomplished and the Empire would return.
Star Wars: X-Wing II: Wedge's Gamble Page 35