you'll dispose of this correctly, I would hope."
Wedge nodded. "And if you survive, what will you do
with the leport then?"
"I'm a member of Rogue Squadron, Commander, which
means I only take orders from my superior officers." Asyr
smiled. "What I do with that report, sir, is whatever you tell
me to do with that report."
"You're taking a big step, cutting yourself off from your
people."
"I know that, and I know it won't be easy, but the
squadron is my home now. You've only ever asked me to
fight and fly and possibly die. That I'll do for people I can
trust. Those who ask me to betray friends, well, they've
shown they don't want me to be trustworthy, so they clearly
aren't. Those facts don't make the choice any easier, just
more imperative."
Wedge tucked the datacard away in a pocket, then
clapped Asyr on the shoulders. "Glad you're with us and on
my wing. I always like flying with someone I can trust."
38
Though lella's eyes burned from fatigue, the adrenaline
pumping through her system had her hyper-alert. She effort-
lessly wove the armored airspeeder through the canyons and
chasms of Coruscant, slowly closing in on the Justice Court
building. Nawara Ven and Kirtan Loor sat in the back, the
lawyer continuing to ask questions and Loor replying with
haughty disdain.
Seeing Loor again had been a shock for her. She recog-
nized him instantly, but not without difficult),. He had al-
ways been lean and cadaverous, though now his flesh had
greyed a bit and tightened over his cheekbones and around
his eyes. He played himself up to be supremely confident, but
his clipped answers and terse comments clued her to his fear.
leila had no doubt that if Corran had been with them at
the safehouse where they deposed Loor, Loor would have
crumbled like stale ryshcate. Corran had always had a way
of zeroing in on a suspect's weaknesses. He would figure out
the thing about which they were lying, then push and push
on those points, pounce on inconsistencies, then increase the
pressure until the suspect confessed.
Loot had resisted giving them a full confession. He pro-
duced a datacard on which, he said, he had encoded and
encrypted complete dossiers on the Empire's operatives
within the bureaucracy. He had also guaranteed them that
on the stand he would reveal the identity of the traitor within
Rogue Squadron. After that, provided the other details of his
surrender deal were carried out, he would provide the key to
the datacard's encryption routine.
"Fine," she'd said, "but can you give us Corran's mur-
derer?"
Loor had smiled coldly. "The traitor set him up, and the
traitor I will give you. Corran's murderer, on the other hand,
was Ysanne Isard. Her you'll have to get yourself."
And get her I will, somehow. Iella checked the advanced
scanning system on the airspeeder's console. The scanner
compared the profiles of all the traffic it had encountered so
far against everything it was detecting as the journey contin-
ued. Matches would indicate they were being followed, but
nothing had passed the computer's standards for a threat.
Good. We're clear, so far.
"Coming up on the parking facility. We're going into the
secure level, then down into the Justice Court." She wanted
to add that the next few seconds, as she slowed to enter the
building, were the most vulnerable in the whole flight. A
single proton torpedo or concussion missile could destroy the
airspeeder in the blink of an eye. A timed or proximity war-
head could be launched from anywhere and catch them.
The airspeeder slid into the darkened tunnel and slowed.
Ahead a green holographic projection cycled through various
alphabets. The words "Facility is Full" appeared in Basic
above and below whatever language was being displayed in
the middle. The green backlight illuminated a gate that
barred further passage.
Iella hit a button on the console keypad, then punched in
her security code. Instead of giving her a new security code to
use in bringing Loor to court--the addition of which might
have alerted Imperial agents to strange goings-on--Halla Et-
tyk had just locked everyone else out with code that made
the lockout look like a computer glitch.
The gate retracted into the floor. "We're in."
Loor shifted in his seat in the back. "Does it bother you,
lella, to be shielding me this way?"
"No more now than it did the first time you asked the
question, Loor." She moved the vehicle forward into the
darkened parking area, and midway between the gate and
the lift doors, she slung it around, swapping it end for end, so
the nose pointed back out toward the exit. She let the speeder
drift to a stop approximately twenty meters from the lift.
"Does it bother you having to depend upon me?"
Loor shook his head. "Not at all, my dear. You have a
facility for 1oyalty--I don't imagine you are wasting it on
me--and to your mission you will be true. Your job is to
deliver me to court, then watch me walk away, shedding my
crimes like a lYandoshan shedding skin."
"Reminding me that you let the Trandoshan who mur-
dered Corran's father go isn't the way to get me to feel good
about helping you."
"No, I suppose it isn't." Loor sighed nonchalantly. "I'11
have to trust you'll want Corran's betrayer more than you
want me dead, won't I?"
"That you will." Iella cracked her door open and
emerged from the speeder. She took a quick look around,
saw nothing, then rapped on the top of the car. "Come on
out. It's clear."
As the other two left the vehicle, leila pulled out her
blaster and checked the power cell. Full charge, good. "Let's
go. We get to the lift, I input the code, we head down and
through the prosecutor's office. Simple, swift, and no one
will get hurt."
Loor pulled up the hood on his cloak. "After you."
lella growled at him and moved toward the elevator,
taking up a position on the right side of the group. She held
her blaster in two hands, up by her face, with the barrel
pointing toward the ferrocrete ceiling. As she walked toward
the lift she kept looking about, backward, forward, and side
to side, trying to pick up on any movement, anything out of
the ordinary. Across from her, unarmed though he was,
Nawara looked about vigilantly as well.
Between them, his cloak billowing out to inflate his sil-
houette to the size of his code name, Loor strode confidently.
Though she could not see his face, his stance and stride indi-
cated he was blithely amused by her caution. The grant of
immunity has made him feel invincible.
Iella felt the slick caress of a strand of webbing brush
against her right cheek. She swept it away with her left hand
and heard it snap near her ear.
That struck her as odd, then
sinister, as she saw Nawara bat at a similar thread with one
of his brain tails.
The lift doors, barely ten meters away, opened with little
more than a whisper.
As the lift doors parted, Loor felt his pulse quicken. Time
slowed until nanoseconds took hours to pass. His emotions
spiked, fear braiding itself together with triumph. The fear
came from the realization that he might die, for surely an
assassin or assassins lurked in the lift. I could well be dead
before those doors close again.
The triumph that wove in with the fear came from the
realization that Ysanne Isard saw him as enough of a threat
to kill him. She had always dismissed him before, patronized
him, used him, and threatened to discard him. Now she saw
how truly powerful he was. The desperation that marked this
attempt on his life gave full measure to her concern over
what he could do to destroy her.
Loor began to smile. In this you show me I have won!
leila began to turn toward the unlit box, her blaster coming
down as she squared her stance. Something black moved
within the lift, a shadow that resolved itself into the form of
a man dashing forth, a blazing blaster held in each hand.
"Die, Derricote, die!" he screamed.
Scarlet bolts of blaster energy burned toward the trio.
One caught Nawara Ven on the right hip. It spun him
around and flung him through the air.
Before the Twi'lek could hit the ground, a pair of
blaster-bolts lanced through Kirtan Loor's chest. The first,
which drilled him high on the left side of his body, lifted him
from his feet. The second struck him high in the abdomen
and centered on his midline, driving him back and down. He
landed beside Nawara Ven's tumbling body and slid halfway
over to the airspeeder.
Years of training overrode conscious thought in Iella. As
bolts began to track in her direction, she coolly triggered a
double-burst that stopped the assassin's charge only a stride
or two from the lift. The bolts stabbed deep into the man's
gut, snapping him forward. Blaster-bolts from his guns
traced parallel lines down the ferrocrete as he hunched over,
dropped to his knees, then fell forward on his face. His
blaster pistols clattered down beside him, abandoned a s his
hands clutched at his ruined belly.
Keeping her blaster on his form, she ran forward and
kicked the pistols away. The assassin made a sound, a little
moan, and it cut her legs out from under her. She sank to her
knees beside him and rolled him onto his back. Even before
she saw his face, the sounds he made and the feeling of his
bony shoulders told her who he was. Intellect momentarily
overrode emotion, providing her the clues she needed to con-
firm his identity, then it retreated as pain and despair ex-
ploded in her.
She pulled his head into her lap and brushed strands of
hair from his face. "Why, Diric, why?" "Lusankya."
Iella's breath caught in her throat. "No, no, that can't
he."
"She broke me. She made me into one of her own. She
had me placed in Derricote's lab to watch him." Diric
winced fiercely, and his body went rigid for a moment. "She
sent me to kill him before he could betray her. I had no
choice. That wasn't him, though."
leila shook her head. "No. It was Kirtan Loor."
Diric managed a weak smile. "Good. I never liked him."
He reached a hand up toward her face, but it never got there.
'Tm dying."
"No." She fished for a comlink in her pocket. "I'11 get
emergency medical droids here."
"No, Iella, no. Isard made me what others accuse Tycho
of being. He isn't. She had me reporting on him, too. From
what she did, I cannot be saved." His tongue wet thin lips. "I
can't live in suspicion, as a puppet. It would make life
too . .. boring."
"Diric, no, we can help you."
"It's over. I love you. She wanted me to kill you. I
couldn't resist." He smiled weakly. "I could defy--the trig-
ger that opened the lift was supposed to be linked to a bomb.
I did what I could. So you could stop me from betraying
myself by killing you." Pain contorted his face. "Thank you
for freeing me."
With her hand, Iella smoothed the pain on his face into
peace, then realized he'd slipped away. Her throat thick, her
eyes welling with tears, she gently lowered his head to the
ferrocrete floor and kissed him one last time.
Kirtan Loor lay on the ferrocrete and could feel nothing. He
knew this was not good. That he was dying was an ines-
capable conclusion and it outraged him. He tried to feed that
outrage as much fuel as he could, but he simply ran out. The
anger and fury in him collapsed in on itself, imploding into a
black void that sucked the last bits of life from Kirtan Loor.
At the heart of that void existed one fact, the one true
thing that had marked his entire life. Gil Bastra had seen it.
Corran Horn and Iella Wessiri had seen it. Ysanne Isard had
seen it. Loor had done all he could to combat it, but it was a
defect that was inborn and immutable. ! make assumptions.
I refuse to look beyond them for reality. I am defeated by
He stared up at the ferrocrete ceiling, seeking in its hap-
hazard patterns some cosmic truth, but the only truth he
found ground away at him. She did not send an assassin to
kill me, she sent him to kill Derricote. I am dying in his
place, for his crimes. Is there anything worse?
For some reason the image of Corran Horn came to him.
Horn said there was nothing worse than dying alone. He
fought to dismiss that idea, but as darkness nibbled away at
the corners of his sight, he allowed as how that, just once,
Corran Horn had been right.
39
Despite his fatigue, Wedge couldn't remember having felt
better. Strapped into the cockpit of his X-wing, with Mynock
behind him, Asyr on his starboard wing, and atmosphere
below his fighter, Wedge felt as if the galaxy's reset button
had been hit. His mission was clear safeguard the forces
making a run on an Imperial terrorist cell. He didn't know if
this was all that was left of the Palpatine Counter-insurgency
Front, or if this was just one tentacle of that foul kraken, but
he had no doubts they'd destroy it.
Gone were the ambiguities that had been forced on him.
Tycho's trial was political. The run to Ryloth and the convoy
escort mission from Alderaan had both been political. Even
the raid on Zsinj's space station had been political. While he
realized the whole Rebellion had, in essence, been political,
his role in it had been military. The targets we were given
were military, picked because of their military value, and the
mission parameters were ones that could be fulfilled through
a military effort.
Wedge keyed his comm unit. "Hunter One, this is Rogue
Lead. We are on-station."
"l copy, Rogue Lead. Stand by for tactical team direc-
tives."
"As ordered." Wedge glanced down at his scanner. The
squadron had broken itself down into five pairs of fighters.
Four of the pairs orbited the target district with 90 degrees of
separation between their positions. The last pair, Erisi Dlarit
and Rhysati Ynr, flew high cover up around the level of the
skyhooks. The lower fighters were meant to assist the raid
and pick up stragglers, while the high-orbit pair would cut
off any PCF terrorists that made it out of the district and in
toward their target.
"Rogue Lead, this is Hunter One. We are taking heavy
fire from the western approach. Help is needed."
"I copy. On the way." Wedge hit a button on his con-
sole, shifting the corem unit to the squadron's tactical chan-
nel. "Rogue Two, did you get that?"
"I copied, Lead." Asyr's voice betrayed no nervousness.
"After you."
"Five, you and Ten with the next call, then Seven's ele-
ment, then Twelve's element." "As ordered."
Wedge kicked his X-wing up on the port S-foil, then hit
the left rudder and pointed the fighter's nose at the ground.
He let the fighter succumb to gravity, then rolled it and pre-
pared to glide out onto the target. The Justice Court building
flashed past, then Wedge hauled back on the stick and leveled
out. Target is five kilometers out and coming up fast.
Even in the distance he could see blaster fire spraying out
to cover the approaches on the west side of the building. As
he swooped in, he saw one smoking speeder-ferry slowly
drifting down toward the unseen ground. Wedge flicked his
lasers over to single fire and dropped the crosshairs on the
focal point for the blaster fire. As range dropped to a kilome-
ter, he tightened down on the trigger and feathered the left
rudder pedal to keep his fire tracking on target.
The X-wing's four lasers fired in sequence, peppering the
middle level of the building with a staccato hail of energy
darts. They swept across the wide doorway, some of them
scattering half-hidden individuals inside the warehouse.
Other laser-bolts shredded one of the two E-Web Heavy Re-