"Hardly."
"You never were one to break a sweat doing any work on Corellia, were you,
Loor?" Bastra slumped back against the bulkhead. "I don't think you would have
fit in even if you'd made an effort. You were always your own worst enemy."
"I wasn't meant to fit in. You were Corel lian Security, I was Imperial
Intelligence attached to your office." Kirtan forced himself to calm down a bit
and unknotted his fists. Lowering his hands to his sides, he tugged on the hem
of his black tunic. "And now you are your own worst enemy. You have accelerated
blastonecrosis."
"What? You're lying."
"No, no I'm not." Kirtan let pity slip into his voice. "The lotiramine is very
effective in masking the tracer enzymes for the disease. Here, on this ship, our
medical facilities are far superior to those you would find among Rebels. We
were able to pick out the enzymes."
Gil Bastra's shoulders slumped and his grey head bowed. His hands came together
around his bulging stomach. "The fatigue, loss of appetite. I thought I was just
getting old."
"You are. And you are dying." The Intelligence officer idly stroked his sharp
chin with a long-fingered hand. "I can do nothing about the former problem, but
there are ways to cure blastonecrosis."
"And all I have to do to be cured is turn in my friends?"
Looking down upon the grey lump of a man across from him, Kirtan felt
momentarily embarrassed by memories of having feared Gil Bastra's judgment of
him and his work. Bastra had not been his direct supervisor, but he had been the
one to assign officers to work with Intelligence, and Bastra's lack of respect
had been reflected through the personnel sent to work with Kirtan. Every time
that Kirtan had felt in control and superior, Bastra had managed to undercut him
and shame him.
Is this another of those times? Kirtan caught himself and nodded slowly. "There
is more fight in you than you would want me to believe there is. I know you
fashioned the new identities for your confederates and did a very good job of
it, too. In fact,
you only made mistakes in your own cover. Still I knew that you'd find yourself
a freighter and hop around the galaxy, as your heart pleased. You were too old
to change your lifestyle to something totally alien to avoid detection. You
decided to gamble and now you have lost."
The old man's head came up slowly. Kirtan saw fire still smoldering in the blue
eyes. "I'll give you nothing."
"Yes, yes, of course you won't." The Intelligence man laughed lightly. "You
forget, I learned interrogation from a number of very good people, including
yourself. I will get information from you. When I doand you know I willCorran
Horn, Iella Wessiri, and her husband will be mine. It is inevitable."
"You're overestimating your abilities, and underestimating mine."
"Am I? I think not. I know you well enough to know you'll only break under
extreme pressure. I can and will take you to the edge of your endurance, then
float you in bacta until you are ready to continue interrogation." Kirtan
folded his hands together. "However, you are just one relay in the network that
will bring the others to me. Corran Horn is too volatile to stay confined in any
role you create for him. And I know that role had to be very constricting for
him."
Bastra's chest heaved mightily with a sigh. "And how do you know that?"
Kirtan tapped his temple with a finger. "You think I have forgotten the falling
out the two of you had? You decided to protect him because his father had been
your partner when you started out, but you are a vengeful man, Gil Bastra.
Whatever role you created for Corran would squeeze him every
day, just to remind him he owed his life to a man he hated."
Fat rippled beneath the prisoner's grey jumpsuit as he laughed. "You do know
me."
"I do indeed."
"But not well enough." Bastra gave him a grin that was all teeth and defiance.
"I am vengeful vengeful enough to engineer things so a disgraced Intelligence
officer would spend the rest of his career dashing around the galaxy trying to
capture three people he once worked with. Three people who escaped out from
under his hooked beak, and were able to do so because his nose was so up in the
air all the time that he couldn't notice the most obvious of mistakes they
made."
Kirtan used scorn to smother his surprise. "I caught you, didn't I?"
"And it took you the better part of two years to do so. Ever wonder why? Ever
wonder why, when you were about to give up, a new clue would surface?" Bastra
surged forward and stood. Though the prisoner was nearly thirty centimeters
shorter, than Kirtan, the Intelligence officer felt somehow dwarfed by him. "I
wanted you following me. Every second you were on my trail, every moment /
looked easier to catch than the others, I knew you'd come after me. And while
you were coming after me, you wouldn't be going after the others."
Kirtan pointed a trembling finger at the old man's face. "That doesn't matter
because you can and will be broken. I will have from you the things I need to
find the others."
"You're wrong, Kirtan. I'm a black hole that's sucking your career down into its
heart." Bastra sagged back down onto the cot. "Remember that when I'm dead,
because I'll be laughing about it for all eternity."
This cannot continue. I will not be humiliated any longer! "I'll remember your
words, Gil Bastra, but your laughter will be a long time coming. The only
eternity you'll know is your interrogation, and I guaranteepersonally
guaranteeyou'll go to your grave having betrayed those who trusted you the
most."
4
Corran made a vain grab at the hydrospanner with his right hand as the tool
slipped from the X-wing's starboard engine cowling. His fingertips brushed the
spanner's end, sending it into a spin toward the ferrocrete deck of the hangar.
A half second later, when his right knee slipped and unbalanced him, he realized
having failed to catch the tool was the least of his problems. He tried to hook
his left hand on the edge of the open engine compartment, but he missed with
that grab, too, leaving him set to plummet headfirst in the hydrospanner's
wake.
Still trying to prepare himself for the agony coming from a fractured skull, he
was surprised to find pain blossoming at the other end of his body. Before he
could figure out what had happened, his flailing left hand caught hold of the
cowling it had
missed before, aborting his long fall to the ground. He hauled himself back onto
the S-foil and lay there
on his belly for a moment, considering himself very lucky.
As the pain in Corran's rump lessened, Whis-tler's scolding gained volume.
Corran rubbed a hand
back over his left cheek and felt a small tear in the fabric of his flight suit,
prompting him to laugh. "Yes, Whistler, I am very lucky you were quick enough to
catch me. Next time, though, can your pincer catch a little less of me and a bit
more of my flight suit?"
Whistler blatted a reply Corran chose to ignore.
The pilot twisted around onto his seat with only mild discomfort. "So, do I
still need the tool, or did the last adjustment do it?"
The droid's tone ran from high to low in a fair imitation of a sigh.
"No, of course I still need it." Corran frowned. "You should have caught it,
Whistler, not me. I can climb back up here by myself. It can't." Even as he said
that and slid toward the S-foil's forward edge, it occurred to him that he'd not
heard the hydro-spanner hit the ground. That's odd.
Peering over the edge of the wing, he saw a smiling, brown-haired woman holding
the hydrospanner up in his direction. "This belongs to you, I take it?"
Corran nodded. "Yeah. Thanks."
She handed it to him, then climbed up on the cart he'd used to get up on top of
the S-foil. "Need some help?"
"No, I've pretty much got it handled, despite what the droid says."
"Oh." She extended her hand toward him. "I'm Lujayne Forge."
"I know, I've seen you around."
"You've done a bit more than that. You flew a dupe against me in the Redemption
scenario." She leaned her slender body against the side of his fighter,
bisecting die green and white wording that indicated the X-wing was the property
of the Corellian Security Force. "You put the Korolev down."
Corran tightened the hydrospanner over the pri-
mary trim bolt on the centrifugal debris extractor and nudged it to the left.
"That was luck. Nawara Ven had already taken the shields down with his missiles.
It was more his kill than mine. You still did well."
Her brown eyes narrowed ever so slightly. "I guess. I have a question for you,
though."
Corran straightened up. "Go ahead."
"The way you took that bomber after me, did you do that just as part of the
exercise, or was there something more to it?"
"Something more?"
Lujayne hesitated, then nodded. "I was wondering if you singled me out because
I was from Kessel?"
Corran blinked in surprise. "Why would that make any difference to me?"
She laughed and tapped the CorSec insignia on the side of the fighter with a
knuckle. "You were with CorSec. You sent people to Kessel. As far as you're
concerned, everyone on Kessel is either a prisoner or a smuggler who ought to
have been a prisoner. And when the prisoners and smugglers lib-crated the planet
from the Imps, well, that didn't change anything in your eyes, did it?"
Setting the hydrospanner on a safe spot, Corran raised his hands. "Wait a
minute, you're jumping to a lot of conclusions."
"Maybe, but tell me, you didn't know I was from Kessel?"
'Well, I did."
"And tell me that didn't make a difference
to you."
"It didn't, honest."
"I bet."
The firm set of her jaw and the way she folded
her arms across her chest told Corran she didn't be-
lieve him. There was a fair amount of anger in her words, but also some hurt.
Anger he could deal withthere wasn't a smuggler or criminal who hadn't been
angry when he was around. The hurt, though, that was unusual and made Corran
feel uncomfortable.
"What makes you think I hold your coming from Kessel against you?"
"The way you act." Lujayne's expression softened a bit, and some of the anger
drained away, but that just let more anxiety and pain bleed into her words. "You
tend to keep to yourself. You're not associating with the rest of usbeyond a
narrow circle of pilots you think are as sharp as you are. You're always
watching and listening, evaluating and judging. Others have noticed it, too."
"Ms. Forge, Lujayne, you're making meters out of microns here."
"I don't think so, and I don't want to be judged for things over which I had no
control." Her chin came up and fire sparked in her eyes. "My father volunteered
to go to Kessel under an Old Republic program where he taught inmates how to
move back into society upon their release. My mother was one of his students.
They fell in love and remained on Kesselthey're still there, along with most of
my brothers and sisters. They're all good people and their work with inmates was
designed to make your job easier by giving criminals other skills so they'd not
return to crime when they were released."
Corran sighed and his shoulders slumped. "I think that's great, I really do. I
wish there were thousands of people like your parents and kin doing that son of
work. The fact is, though, that even if I'd known that, I'd still have gone
after you in the exercise."
"Oh, my being from Kessel had nothing to do with it?"
He almost dismissed her question with a glib denial, but he caught himself and
she clearly noticed his hesitation. "Maybe, just maybe, it did have something to
do with my flying. I guess I decided that if you were from Kessel and could fly,
you had to be a smuggler, and it was important for me to fly better than you
could."
She nodded once, but her expression did not shift from one of concern to smug
triumph as he had expected it would. "I believe that, and I can understand it.
Still, there's something more there, right?"
"Look, I'm sorry if what I did made you look bad in the exercise, but I really
don't have the time to talk about this now."
"No time or no inclination?"
Whistler hooted something in an utterly carefree manner.
"You stay out of this." Frustration curled his hands into fists. "You're not
going to let this go, are you, Ms. Forge?"
far in an interrogation, would you give up?"
Corran snorted a laugh. "No."
"So, explain yourself."
He definitely heard a request for more than an explanation of his conduct in the
Redemption sce-nario in her voice. For a split second he flashed on the times at
CorSec when his human partner, Iella Wessiri, had made similar demands of him.
Iella had been a conciliatoralways the one to be patching up the disagreements
between folks in the unit.
that's what Lujayne is trying to do, which means I've managed to alienate a
number of the other pi-lots trying to get into the unit.
"Concerning the exercise, I really just wanted to see how good you were. I'd
been able to figure out where some of the other pilots stood in relationship to
me, but I'd not flown against you. You know, you're not bad."
"But I'm not in a class with you and Bror Jace."
Corran smiled quickly, then covered it with a frown. "True, but you're still
very sharp. I'd like to think the rest of the pilots are going to be at least
that sharp. I'd even be set up to fly against that Gimbel kid in his Redemption
scenario tomorrow but Jace volunteered before I could."
"His name is Gavin, Gavin Darklighter."
"Gavin, then."
"And you didn't want to be following Jace's lead?"
"Would you?"
Lujayne smiled. "Given a choice, no, I guess not. Next to you, he's the most
standoffish person in the group."
Corran felt uneasy inside. "I'm not as bad as he, is."
"No? At least he has the good graces to deign to join us in DownTime for some
recreation. He's a sliced and blown datafile compared
to you."
Corran turned to the left and pointed his finger at the astromech droid. "Don't
even start."
Lujayne raised an eyebrow. "So your droid thinks you should get out more, too?"
Something halfway between a snarl and a growl came from Corran's throat, but it
lacked the power to make it menacing. "Whistler has the ability, from time to
time, to be a nag. His problem is that in the time since I left CorSec I've been
in situations where I've had to be very careful. I moved through a number of
identities that didn't allow me to be
very open with people. For example, most recently, I spent over a year as the
confidential aide to a suc-cession of incompetent Imp officials governing a Rim
world. One slip, one crack in my identity, and I'd have been caught. And when
you get out of the habit of trusting folks and relaxing around them, well ..."
"I understand."
"Thanks." Corran gave her a grateful smile. "On top of that, I'm learning a lot
of new things here and I've been trying to concentrate on my flying. That's not
easythere's a whole new set of slang to get used to and people from species I
barely knew existed that I now have to work with and even share living quarters
with."
"That is difficultmy roommate is a Rodian."
"That's rough, but I'll bet she's less idiosyncratic than my roommate." Corran
whistled at the Gand pilot entering the hangar. "Ooryl, come over here, please."
The pilot's grey-green flesh clashed with the bright orange of his flight suit,
and the knobby bits of his exoskeleton poked bumps in odd places from beneath
the fabric as he walked. "May Ooryl assist?"
"I've been curious about something since we were assigned the same quarters, but
didn't think to ask you about it until right now." Corran frowned. "I hope you
don't mindyou might take it personally and I don't mean to embarrass you."
The Gand just watched him with multifaceted eyes. "Qyrgg would hope to avoid
embarrassment as well, but you may ask."
Corran nodded in what he hoped was a friendly manner. "Why do you speak of
yourself in the third person?"
"Qrygg is embarrassed by not understanding your question."
Lujayne smiled. "You do not seem to refer to yourself with the pronoun 'I.' "
"And you alternate the names you use."
The Gand's mouth parts clicked open in what Corran had decided was a Gand's best