Wedge frowned. “I know that’s what killed Sette, but how did it work?”
Iella flipped open the box—which was no bigger than a deck of sabacc cards. Inside, Wedge saw a couple of computer chips, two energy cells, some electronic components, a small motor, a metal cylinder with holes drilled into it every centimeter or so, and a rainbow of wires. Iella hit a small button, and the twenty-centimeter-long cylinder flipped upright.
“Preliminary analysis indicates this cylinder housed a thin-walled glass capsule that contained two powerful drugs—well, one was a drug, the other was a naturally occurring venom, but one seldom found in the quantities used here. The venom is hemotoxic—it acts like acid, eating away at capillary walls, which caused the hemorrhaging from the eyes, nose, and mouth you saw. The drug spiked Sette’s blood pressure, pumping the toxin through him in seconds. He died of a massive stroke as the toxin ruptured every blood vessel in his brain.”
Wedge shifted his shoulders uneasily. “The box was attached to his circulatory system somehow?”
Iella showed him the bottom of the box, right below the bottom of the cylinder. “They used a venous graft to connect it to his aorta. The second the mix hit his bloodstream, the poison was all through him.”
Corran rose from his chair and came over to lean heavily on the table. “The wires came from a nerve graft—the kind they use in cybernetic replacements. The machine hooked into Urlor’s aural nerves, picking up what he heard. When the chip matched the voiceprint of my saying Urlor’s name to the voiceprint it had stored, the motor turned a gear that spun another one that depressed a plunger down through the cylinder and pumped the kill-juice into him.”
Wedge nodded slowly. “You think the voiceprint came from your time in the Lusankya?”
“Maybe. Probably not.” Corran shrugged sluggishly. “We didn’t use names much there. If we used names we could have provided the Imps with clues to what might be happening. I suspect they got it from any of a variety of reports I gave about my time in the Lusankya.”
General Antilles felt ice trickle through his guts. “Those reports are still classified, aren’t they?”
“As nearly as I know.”
Iella nodded. “They are, which means whoever did this has access to some of our classified material. That’s not really a surprise, though, is it?”
Wedge raised an eyebrow. “It isn’t?”
“Think about it, General. Urlor Sette arrives at a party being thrown in the honor of Rogue Squadron—a party you didn’t know about until this afternoon. Word was not that widespread about it, but whoever it was managed to get him in.”
Iella set the poison injector down. “We have to figure that whoever Isard entrusted with hiding the prisoners was fairly high up in her intelligence operation. While Kirtan Loor’s information did turn over to us a good portion of the intel ops Isard had running on Coruscant, recent events during the Thrawn crisis showed we didn’t get everything, so it’s safe to assume we still have secrets leaking to the enemy.”
Wedge sighed, then nodded to her. “Good analysis. I hadn’t thought that hard.”
“You’re not trained to do analysis, Wedge. You provide intel, or act on plans formulated because of it. You don’t have to do interp and analysis.” Iella gave him a warm smile. “At least you didn’t have to before you won your decade of dots, General.”
“Save the General stuff, Iella. I’m still Wedge to you.” He glanced down. “At least, I assume such familiarity is okay.”
“Sure.” She winked at him. “I didn’t think you’d let your rank go to your head.”
“No, but it looks as if I’ll be having to apply my brains more than before.”
“Just in different ways, Wedge.” Iella turned and rested her right hand on Corran’s left shoulder. “Corran, you should get out of here. Wedge can take you back home. There’s nothing more you can do here. It will be hours before the droids come back with their final analysis of the toxin and the device components.”
Wedge nodded. “Be glad to do it, Corran. You look more exhausted than a Hutt-wrestler.”
“Yeah, and I feel like one who’s lost a bunch of matches, too.” Corran heaved himself up from the edge of the table. “I don’t need transport, though. I want to walk for a bit.”
Wedge inclined his head toward the door. “I could stretch my legs, too.”
“No, if it’s the same to you, I’d like to be alone.” Corran smiled sheepishly. “Look, you’re both very good friends and I appreciate your concern, but right now I need to think some things through.”
Wedge started to say something, but a slight shake of Iella’s head stopped him. He folded his arms across his chest. “Look, you know how to reach me by comlink if you need to talk, find you’re lost, want to tear up a swoop-jockey haunt, you name it.”
“And I don’t want to be left out, either, if you’re going to be picking on swoopies.” Iella drew Corran into a hug. “Go home, get some rest. We’ll have what you need to know to find out who did this by noon tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Iella.” Corran gave her a kiss on the cheek, then turned and threw a hasty salute at Wedge. “I’ll report in tomorrow, General.”
“Just let Emtrey know where you are and that will be fine.” Wedge returned the salute and gave him a smile. “I don’t imagine Mirax would be all that pleased with me requiring you to actually come to the base. Good night.”
Wedge watched in silence as Corran left the examining room, then he turned and looked at Iella. “You really think you’ll have enough data to let us start tracking the person behind this by tomorrow?”
“We’ll have some leads.” She tapped the box with a finger. “The common components here are fairly low tech, which means they were probably manufactured on the world where the device was put together. Given what it costs to haul manufactured items between planets, low-ticket trinkets like this aren’t worth shipping. The custom components—the chips and the graft wire—might have come from elsewhere, but they were modified during manufacture. The mods aren’t that difficult to do, but they require technical expertise and suitable facilities. Once we have a world, we can begin a survey of people and places that could work.”
Wedge ran a hand along the edge of his jaw. “What about the toxin?”
“Could have been shipped in from elsewhere, milked from creatures that were shipped in, or manufactured. We’ll rule out synthetics first—they’re never quite the same as the naturally produced stuff. The easiest thing for us to track would be if it was milked from exotics on a planet where the creatures are not native. Most worlds require the registering of exotic xenobiologicals, so we can vector in that way.”
“Sounds like a lot of work.” Wedge shook his head. “Where do we begin?”
“We?”
“Hey, you said these ten little pips I sport now mean I’ve got to start using my head in different ways. Might as well start now.”
Iella watched him through half-closed eyes, then slowly smiled. “Well, the droids are going to take time for the analysis, and the computers will start chunking out lists, cross-indexing them, and probably come up with a couple thousand likely candidates. When they get that list pared down, then we go through it. We refine the parameters of our search, pull up auxiliary data, and narrow the field further.”
“So, nothing to do until the list is finished?”
“Oh my, you clearly haven’t done anything in the way of detective work, have you?”
Wedge reddened slightly. “Ah, you and Corran were the ones trained by CorSec, not me.”
“And Corran has clearly neglected your training.” Iella came around the table and slipped her arm through Wedge’s. “The start of any good investigation involves hunting up a reliable source of caf—the kind that can keep you awake through an Ithorian production of a Gamorrean opera.”
“Isn’t that kind of caf considered a controlled substance within the New Republic?”
She laughed. “I think someone tried to p
ass a regulation like that, but the Senate staffers live on that kind of caf, so the proposal vanished.”
“Data-card probably just fell into a pot of the stuff.” Wedge smiled. “Probably improved the taste, too.”
“Well, we’ll have to see if we can find a place that makes its caf hot, strong, and to your liking, then. And, once we do that, we buy several liters, come back here, and go to work.”
Wedge nodded and took one last look at the device that killed Urlor Sette. “You want to know what scares me the most about that device and this whole murder?”
“What?”
“The way it was done, so boldly and obviously, it means whoever did it wants us to come after them.”
Iella’s eyes narrowed. “Calling Rogue Squadron down upon yourself would be ruled ‘suicide’ by most coroners.”
“Right, which means whoever did this thinks they can handle us, is crazy enough to think they can handle us, or just has one colossal hate on for us.”
“Not a pretty holograph.” Iella tugged Wedge toward the door. “Let’s get that caf. We’ll save a little and when we learn who it is we’re after, we’ll use it to melt them clean away.”
Chapter Six
Corran slipped into his darkened apartment and let the door close quietly behind him. A couple of lights blinked, then a softly rising tone greeted him.
“It’s me, Whistler. Keep it down.” Corran peeled off his jacket and dropped it beside the door. “Is Mirax asleep?”
The R2 unit tootled affirmatively, but a glow panel clicked on in the bedroom. “Corran, is that you?”
He kept back from the slender bar of light streaming through the narrow crack between doorjamb and door. “Yes, it’s me. Don’t get up, I’ll be with you in a moment.”
“Are you okay? Corran?”
And I’m supposed to be the one with latent Jedi skills. “I’ll be fine.” He pushed open the door to the bedroom with his right foot, then leaned against the jamb with his left shoulder. Looking at his wife as she lay there on her side, her black hair up, wearing a light blue nightgown, he smiled.
Smiled as much as his split lip would let him.
Mirax sat bolt upright in bed. “What happened to you?”
“It was nothing.”
“Nothing? Your lip is split, your right eye is almost swollen shut.” She threw back the covers and padded over to the refresher station. Corran heard water running, then Mirax returned bearing a wet washcloth. She raised it to dab at the blood on his chin, but he caught her hand.
“Mirax, I’ll be fine.” He took the washcloth from her and scrubbed away at the blood. “I decided I needed to get my head clear, so I walked from the morgue. I ran into a little trouble.”
Mirax planted balled fists on her hips. “A little trouble? You came out of the Lusankya looking better.”
He snorted a laugh and followed it with a smile that tugged at the split in his lip. “Well, these are more Lusankya-based injuries. I can’t get the image of Urlor dying like that out of my head. Wedge and Iella have already told me it’s not my fault that he died, but the fact that he wasn’t free yet is the reason he died. I promised to free him, and I’ve failed.”
She canted her head slightly. “So you went looking for trouble and let someone beat you up?”
Corran brought his chin up. “Trouble found me all by itself, I didn’t have to go looking. It was a little gang of kids. A Rodian was leading them. I wasn’t paying attention, so they decided to take me.”
Mirax took his right hand in hers and led him over to the edge of the bed. She made him sit there, then she knelt at his feet and started to unbutton his tunic. “I think I can get the blood out of the shirt. Where’s the jacket?”
“By the door. Most of it, anyway. One of the little glit-biters made off with a sleeve.” Corran pressed the wet cloth to his swollen right eye. “The Rodian swung a pretty good left. He came up on my right side from behind and clouted me. Spun me around, then he split my lip. Another of them grabbed my sleeve and for a second, I thought it was all over.”
He shook his head. “I started to feel sorry for myself, then I saw Urlor lying there in the morgue and I realized that as bad as I felt, at least I could feel. I thought of you, and of Jan Dodonna, and the other Lusankya prisoners, and whoever it was that sent Urlor here to Coruscant. I realized I had more important things to be doing than worrying about myself and that’s when things began to get a bit weird.”
Mirax tugged Corran’s shirt off his left arm, then unbuttoned the right cuff and quickly slipped it past the wet cloth in his right hand. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I’d felt it before, a couple of times, flying with the squadron or when I was with CorSec. Everything slowed down, I knew what the Rodian was going to do, what the others were going to do. I could just feel them there. I knew which way to move to avoid their punches. It felt as if they were puppets going through a series of highly choreographed moves, and I just slipped in and out between them. I didn’t have to hit anyone or anything. I just got away.”
Mirax tossed his shirt to the floor and pulled off his right boot. “Sounds very Jedi to me.”
“Yeah, maybe it was a Force thing. I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, though. What does is this: I need to focus on finding Jan Dodonna. Somehow, with Thrawn running loose and everything, it was easy to get distracted. No longer.”
Corran’s left hand curled down into a fist and Mirax quickly took it in her hands. “Corran, I know you’re disappointed in yourself for not having kept your word to General Dodonna about coming back to the Lusankya to free him, but you have to remember that you did do that. Your resignation from Rogue Squadron is what led everyone to go after Ysanne Isard and bring her down. You did get to the Lusankya, just as you said you would.”
“Sure, but they weren’t there.”
“No, they weren’t, but I think you need to stop seeing them as complete victims.” She reached up and tapped a finger against his temple. “I remember what you told me about Jan Dodonna, how he followed you and stopped Derricote from killing you. He was a smart man, and you have to know that he was fully capable of interpreting the move from the Lusankya. Isard’s moving him and everyone else out of there told them that you were succeeding. If you weren’t, if you weren’t going to make good on your promise, Iceheart never would have moved them. They know that.”
She let her hand come down to stroke the left side of his face. “If I were ever to go missing, I’d have no fear. I know you’d turn this galaxy inside out to find me. You’d do whatever you had to do to find me.”
Corran’s left eye narrowed. “No question, whatever it took.”
“Jan Dodonna knows you’re a man of your word. He also knows the move will have complicated things, but he’s not going to doubt that you’ll keep your promise.”
He lay back on the bed and closed his eyes. The conviction in Mirax’s voice pierced the veil of self-doubt that had sprung from his feeling that he’d failed Urlor. He knew Wedge and Iella had been right in pointing out that the death was not his fault, even though his voiceprint had been used as the trigger. Even so, he knew he couldn’t duck full responsibility for it, because Urlor had been chosen as a weapon to get at him. Had he never escaped from the Lusankya, Urlor never would have been sent to him. By doing what he had done, Corran had made an enemy, and that enemy clearly felt no compunction about using whatever tools were at hand to make a point.
But making a point and attaining a goal are two different things. Using Urlor’s death to taunt him and point out that he’d failed to keep his promise was one thing. That couldn’t be the only desired result of that move, however, because it was far too modest an outcome for the expenditure. Clearly the person wanted to hurt me. To distract me, keep me from focusing, but focusing on what?
“Mirax, see if this scans for you. Killing Urlor at that party, in that way, pretty much guarantees Rogue Squadron has its honor bounded up in freeing the prisoners, right?” br />
He felt her lie down on the bed beside him. “The first jump of your course seems well plotted.”
“Okay, so then it would seem that our enemy expects us to be thinking a bit more with our emotions than our brains. The enemy has made a move, now we will react to it.” He opened his left eye and turned his head to look at her. “Urlor is bait for a trap meant to destroy Rogue Squadron.”
“That also seems to follow.” She pursed her lips for a moment. “You’ll have to assume a trap is waiting for you no matter what you decide to do. You’ll have to plan in some safeguards.”
“So, tell me, am I just being egotistical by assuming this enemy wants a piece of me and Rogue Squadron?”
“Corran, you’re a pilot who used to be a member of CorSec. Ego gets issued with the uniforms.” Mirax gave him a quick smile. “In this case, though, I don’t think you’re wrong. Whoever is behind this is cruel and evil—and there’s a list of ex-Imperial leaders we could run down and find plenty of candidates who fit that description.”
“This person isn’t going to be on that list.” Corran frowned. “We’re dealing with someone who was close to Isard, who sees Rogue Squadron as the folks who destroyed Isard. They’re focused on retribution. I don’t think they’ll win, in the long run, but I am afraid lots more people will die, as did Urlor, before they’re stopped.”
Gavin Darklighter swirled the golden Corellian brandy in the small tumbler, then tossed it off. He felt a small bead of brandy leak from the corner of his mouth and work its way down through his goatee. The rest of the fiery liquid burned its way down his throat, but none of its warmth radiated out to dispel the chill that had settled over him.
He idly swiped at the droplet with his left hand, then sighed and shook his head. “The way that man died tonight, it took me back to when we were helping the victims of the Krytos virus here on Coruscant. They bled, too, bled and died.”