Isard's Revenge Read online

  Iella took a sip, then set the mug down on the desk. She opened the bag and peeked inside. “And the pastries, they were your idea, Whistler?”

  The droid trumpeted triumphantly.

  Mirax sighed. “I tried to convince him that something a bit more substantial would be better for you, but he seems to think all CorSec officers function on strong caf and foods full of fat and sugar and gluten.”

  “Well, it couldn’t hurt at the moment.” Iella narrowed her eyes. “Um, how did you get in here, anyway?”

  Mirax fished a security datacard from the pocket of her nerf-hide jacket. “General Cracken and I have an understanding. He uses me to keep tabs on my father’s Errant Venture. I pass on rumors that I hear while trading, offer opinions.”

  “Cracken doesn’t worry too much when your cargo manifests don’t actually square with what arrives?”

  “He knows he can trust me not to do anything harmful, and I did have a little to do with rylca production on Borleias, so it’s an easy détente.” Mirax smiled. “Neither Corran nor my father know of my arrangement with Cracken, and I’d just as soon keep it that way.” She reached out with a foot and tapped Whistler’s barrel body with a toe. “You got that, Whistler?”

  The droid warbled emphatically.

  Iella raised an eyebrow. “Whistler keeping secrets from Corran? How did that happen?”

  Mirax winked. “When he retires, Whistler wants to be the navigator on the Pulsar Skate. We have an understanding, which is good, because he’s been on the Skate enough that he could run it all by himself. He probably knows more about it and my business than I do.”

  “Whistler used to be that way with our caseloads in CorSec, too.” Iella laughed out loud. For years Whistler had helped Corran fight smugglers in and around Corellia. And now he wants to work with Mirax and her “exotics” trade. Interesting. She pondered this change of heart on Whistler’s part, but then decided it wasn’t that radical a shift. If Corran could fall in love with Mirax, there’s no reason why Whistler couldn’t do the same.

  “Well, I think Whistler will be great at his new career. He was wired to be an overachiever.” Iella drank a bit more of the caf. “This is really good. I’m sorry to have canceled dinner with you, but analyzing the data from the prisoners’ debriefings is taking forever.”

  Mirax tucked a dark strand of hair behind her right ear. “Don’t worry about dinner, we’ll do it another time. Corran got called back to squadron headquarters for briefings anyway. Looks like something big is going down.”

  Iella looked up at her friend. “So then I cancel and you’re all alone.”

  Whistler cheeped.

  Mirax patted the droid on the head. “No slight against you, Whistler, but I can’t force you to order a dessert, then eat half of it.”

  Iella offered up half a pastry. “I’ll split one with you.”

  “It’s a deal.” Mirax cleared some datacards off the small office’s other chair and sat down. “Anything to clarify the report that Isard is alive?”

  Iella chewed a mouthful of pastry, then washed the sticky sweetness from her mouth with caf before answering. “Corran shouldn’t have told you that.”

  “True. But since he figures she’s the one who sent Urlor and murdered him, Corran also figures I’m a target, so he wants me to be careful. Give it up, Iella. You know I’m not going to tell anyone.”

  The intelligence officer sighed. “Several prisoners said they saw her and heard her, but they’re in pretty bad shape. I can’t give their identifications too much weight since some of them are in the grips of dementia. It seems pretty clear that whoever put those people there wanted them to starve to death, and they were pretty close. If we’d waited another week, we’d just have corpses.”

  “And dead men tell no tales.”

  “Not true. Urlor’s body led us to these guys.”

  “Do these guys lead you to Isard?”

  Iella sighed. “Not directly.” She waved a hand at the datapad monitor on her desk. “I’ve been going over the reports we all made at the time of Thyferra’s liberation and a couple of details don’t seem to mesh well.”

  Mirax licked sugar residue from her fingers. “Like what?”

  “Well, first off, I’ve not been able to find any indication in any record or anecdote or anything that Isard was capable of piloting a Lambda-class shuttle. She wasn’t a pilot before she went to Thyferra, and no one there knows anything about her being able to fly.”

  Mirax nodded. “That makes it less likely that she was in the shuttle that Tycho blew up. Still, didn’t Corran have sensor readings indicating someone was on board?”

  Whistler tootled positively.

  “I’ve pulled the sensor-trace data records and that’s right. I also noted something else: There were two comm frequencies being used by the shuttle. Isard conversed with Corran over one, but I don’t have any record of what sort of data was flowing over the other.”

  “So you think Isard was having the shuttle flown remotely from Thyferra to make the Rogues think she was escaping.” Mirax’s brown eyes narrowed. “If it got destroyed, or if it jumped out, either way no one would be looking for her on Thyferra itself. She smuggles herself out with the Xucphra refugees and she’s clear.”

  “Isard certainly would have had the resources to fake documentation that would get her clear.” Iella held the caf mug in her hands and let the warmth bleed into them. “I very much want to believe that Tycho’s proton torpedo converted her into free-floating hydrogen, but this little kink in the facts that we overlooked before is a problem.”

  “Still, it doesn’t mean she’s back in action.” Mirax frowned. “Why would she lay low during the whole Thrawn thing?”

  “Isard help an alien Grand Admiral? I don’t think so.” Iella tapped a stack of datacards on the desk. “Imperial records concerning Thrawn might as well not exist, but I can’t believe Isard didn’t know about him and his existence out in the Unknown Regions. She didn’t ask him back to help her when she was running the Empire, and I can’t imagine she wanted to help him reestablish it with him as the new Emperor. She probably just crawled into some tiny hole and licked her wounds, hoping Thrawn and the New Republic would kill each other.”

  “Yeah, and she did have some wounds to lick. She lost Coruscant, she lost Thyferra, she lost her own private Super Star Destroyer, Lusankya. Getting away with her life and the location of the prisoners was the only up side for her.” Mirax leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “How many more facilities like the one on Commenor does she have for stashing prisoners?”

  Iella shook her head. “No way to tell. In fact, I’m not sure the Xenovet facility was much more than a blind.”

  “I don’t understand. You found the prisoners there. Your forensics team must have found clues and everything.”

  “They did, plenty of evidence of records being destroyed, shallow graves for some of the dead, everything we need to piece together a circumstantial case that points to the prisoners having been there a while.”

  Mirax’s black hair brushed down past her shoulders as she lifted her head. “The problem is?”

  “The problem is that the evidence would have been perfect had the prisoners all been dead. From them, however, we have details that make me wonder. For example, they remember huge, long hyperspace flights, but they were locked in little cells at the time. According to them, they were bounced from planet to planet, and they’ve been in the current facility for years.”

  “Corran thought he’d been on a long space journey taking him from Coruscant to Lusankya, but Isard just faked it all along.”

  Iella nodded emphatically. “Exactly. Using drugs on the prisoners, she could have warped their sense of time, or even had them totally unconscious as she moved them from one place to another. As long as their cells looked the same, the staff was the same, and the food was the same, the prisoners would have no clue where they had been.”

  “You’re basing a lot of this
on the idea that someone as smart as Isard was doing all this.”

  “Probably, but what if it’s an individual just following Isard’s instructions? Isard would have had to trust this person implicitly to turn the prisoners over to them.”

  “Okay, if not Isard, someone she trusted to do what she told them to do. Someone who’s now making his own play at power.” Mirax nodded solemnly. “Someone who has Isard’s resources and contacts in the New Republic, giving him the information he needed to plant Urlor Sette here at the party.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Okay, you’re suspicious of the situation at Commenor, but what’s the purpose of faking that facility? I mean, the clues from Urlor led there, so we went. The Interceptors might have been an ambush, but a pretty poor one. What did Isard’s agent want to have happen there?”

  “I think it was bait.” Iella smiled grimly. “We backtracked the trail to Commenor and there’s more trail to follow. The bodies pulled from the graves could only have been there a couple of years, but they show more decay on the bones than we’d expect from the soil in that area on Commenor. I think they were buried somewhere else, disinterred, and moved to Commenor. Once we figure out where they came from, we’ll go to that new world and find more bait.”

  “Or a trap.”

  “Right.” She shrugged and sipped her caf. “We get so happy at having broken through the puzzle this person is laying out for us that we allow ourselves to think it was never meant to be broken. We figure we have the upper hand, but we’re just following the trail they’ve laid.”

  “Interesting hypothesis. How do you test it?”

  Iella winced. “There’s the problem. The obvious way to test it is to have teams go back to Commenor and look around for clues that indicate the site was faked. If it is a fake, then there ought to be redundant clues that will point this out. The bodies that I mentioned would have been missed except I saw them described as being in an ‘advanced’ state of decay. I checked with the forensic tech to find out what that meant and he walked me through it. I checked with the guys who took soil samples, and I was able to pull together a picture that looks like the bodies weren’t always there. That was a tough way to get at the fake data and I’m willing to bet there are easier ones.”

  Mirax sat back and crossed her legs at her booted ankles. “Of course, if you send teams back, you’ll tip the enemy to the fact that you’ve found the deception and will be following it up.”

  “You never want the Hutt you’re after to know you’re following his slime trail. Plus, we don’t know how much of our planning and intelligence is getting to the other side.”

  Corran’s wife smiled slyly. “Why not just go there ‘off duty?’ Corran said you used to do that back when you were with CorSec. We can go without telling anyone. They’ll never know. If we find something, we know you’re right, and if we don’t, that’s a step forward, too.”

  Iella sipped at the caf and nodded. “It could work. We’d have to go in very covertly, since the political situation is a bit touchy in the aftermath of the raid.”

  Mirax winked at her. “I think I know a thing or two about getting into and out of spaceports without attracting too much official attention. You can leave those details to me. You just get together the gear you’ll need and we’ll be good to go.”

  Iella thought for a moment, then nodded. “It’ll take me about three weeks to clear up things here.”

  “Perfect. I can get some vaguely legit business set up on Commenor in that time.” Mirax smiled happily. “It’ll just be you and me on a girls’ night out.”

  “So you’re not going to tell Corran?”

  “Wedge and squadron business are what he’s focusing on at the moment. I see no reason to distract him.”

  “He’s your husband.”

  Mirax laughed. “He was your partner. Would you handle him differently?”

  “Hmmmm, good point.” Iella fed a datacard into her datapad. “I’ll prep a report and entrust it to Whistler here. If anything goes amiss with us, he can turn it over to Corran.”

  “It’s a plan.”

  “And a workable one, I think.” Iella raised her mug of caf in a salute. “If we can confirm that we’re being played, we stand a chance of turning the tables on our enemy, and that’s definitely a position I want us to be in.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Corran Horn looked over from his conversation with the Issori pilot, Khe-Jeen Slee, and smiled at Gavin Darklighter, who stood next to the table’s open seat. “Sure, Gavin, sit down. We’re just telling stories.”

  The Issori’s dark green scaled flesh lightened slightly in hue as Gavin off-loaded his tray. “We are pleased to have you join me and Corran.”

  “I don’t want to interrupt, but I did have a question for Corran.”

  Khe-Jeen waved a hand toward Corran. “Please, ask it.”

  Corran looked at Gavin and rolled his eyes. “Sure, what is it?”

  Gavin glanced down at his food and his voice barely rose above the din in the crowded base commissary. “Have you ever wanted to be a father?”

  The question rocked Corran back in his chair and he noted that Khe-Jeen watched his reaction with the pure intent of a predator tracking prey. “I haven’t thought that much about it. Mirax has said we should talk about it, but we’ve been kind of busy with Thrawn and all. Is this something you’re thinking about?”

  The younger pilot smiled and nodded. “You met my family back on Tatooine.”

  “Right, lots of brothers, sisters, cousins, and all.” Corran fingered a round brown biscuit, spinning it as he ran his finger along the edge. “Are you getting the itch to have a family?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  Corran frowned. “Ah, not meaning to pry here, but are you and Asyr, um, capable of doing that? I mean, I thought Bothan-human matings didn’t work.”

  Gavin gave him a goofy grin. “Well, the parts line up fine as far as I’m concerned, but things don’t connect that well on a cellular level, I guess. We want to get married, then we’re going to adopt. We’ve filled out the preliminary datafiles and we need to gather all the other stuff they’ll want—the officials, I mean.”

  “That’s great, Gavin.” Corran slapped him on the arm. “You’ll make a great father. You’re compassionate and intelligent. You have a great sense of humor, and you’re pretty good at feeling out the moods folks are in.”

  “Thanks, Corran, that means a lot.”

  Khe-Jeen Slee sucked the meat off a small bone, then began to crunch cartilage. “We are pleased for you, Gavin, and your willingness to accept responsibility for younglings not your own. We have noted a nobility about you which is impressive.” The Issori swallowed hard and a big bulge started to work its way down his throat. “On Issor, you would never face the choices you do here.”

  Gavin looked up, a brown, gooey bean mixture dripping from the spoon he’d raised halfway to his mouth. “You don’t allow adoptions on Issor?”

  “There is no need for them.” Khe-Jeen nibbled the end off the bone and crushed it between his teeth. “We Issori are oviparous. The females of the species produce eggs which are tended and hatch, provided they have been fertilized. The males produce a packet of the fertilizing agent…” The Issori unzipped his sleeveless flight suit and began to slip a clawed hand down toward his abdomen.

  Corran reached out and grabbed his arm. “We’ll take your word for it, you don’t have to show us.”

  A clear membrane flashed up over Khe-Jeen’s amber eyes. He slowly withdrew his hand, bringing with it a sheaf of holographs. He wordlessly selected one, then handed it to Corran. “Perhaps this will enlighten you.”

  Corran held the static holograph so Gavin could see it. The image showed two Issori, one male and a smaller, lighter-colored female. He was pouring a liquid from a pitcher onto an egg and she was brushing the liquid over the egg. To Corran, it looked similar to what he’d seen chefs do in basting a roast, but he decided to keep that observation to
himself.

  Gavin’s brown-eyed gaze flicked up. “You’re the egg?”

  “I was, yes. The Issori have a caste-based society. The caste of the egglayer determines the caste into which the child will be born. The caste of the fertilizer determines rank within that caste and political alliances between the families involved. Breedings are negotiated, sometimes with eggs or packets traveling great distances to be used in a fertilization ceremony such as this. This image is of a Whooncha. It is an intra-caste breeding of the nobility, meant to strengthen the standing of two families within the ruling caste. A Whoon-li would be an inter-caste breeding within one realm involving a noble and a more common caste. A Vuin-cha would be a breeding between nobles from different realms.”

  Corran nodded. “And a Vuin-li would be a noble breeding with a common caste from outside the realm.”

  The Issori stiffened. “Such a thing would never happen.”

  Corran frowned. “Wait, you’re telling me that no two Issori from different castes and different nations would ever breed together? What if they are in love?”

  Khe-Jeen allowed himself a little laugh. “These displays of emotion that so often rule other sapients are taken in perspective by the Issori. We consider love much like a rainstorm. It can be light or hard, long or short, mild or tempestuous. It can also end. To tie the life of a child to the mercurial emotional attachments of its parents is cruel. Families agree on breedings, families raise the children. My name, for example, has three elements. Khe indicates I am of a single breeding which my father’s family negotiated. It is not his family name, but instead comes from the character of our alphabet that my father’s family uses to mark such a union. My mother was of the Jeen family. I am known as Slee. Both the Khe and Slee parts of my name were chosen based on a formula that allowed the numerical values of the letters of my name to add up to an auspicious number.”