Wedge’s attire varied only slightly from that Twi’lek warriors wore. His brown boots came up to his knees and beige trousers had been tucked into them. To that he added an emerald green loincloth and a bandoleer of the same color. All of his battle ribbons and awards had been embroidered on the bandoleer, starting with two Death Star representations at his right shoulder and ending with a symbol representing Coruscant near his left hip. The crests of the Alliance and Rogue Squadron stood side by side over his heart. His cloak was a darker green than his bandoleer and had been lined with a shiny red fabric that formed two red wings when he folded the cloak back behind his shoulders.
He descended the gangway and looked up. Kala’uun Starport occupied a colossal cavern which had been hollowed out of the heart of the mountain that sheltered it. Above his head lay level upon level of Twi’lek clan warrens, comprising the living quarters and work areas of over 100,000 Twi’leks. He could only guess at what the warrens looked like—according to Nawara, few were the non-Twi’leks who ever saw them, and those individuals were people a clan had acknowledged as a friend.
The Courage of Sullust had landed off the Skate’s starboard wing. Nawara Ven disembarked and came walking over toward Wedge. They wore similar clothes, though Nawara’s loincloth, bandoleer, and cloak were all a deep shade of purple. His cloak had been lined with a grey that was slightly darker than his skin tone. “Are you ready, Commander?”
Wedge nodded. “Lead the way.”
Nawara did, and Wedge followed a step behind him and one to his left. “It looks like our welcoming party. Is the Shak clan still the Head-clan here?”
One of Nawara’s braintails ran back along his spine. The tip of it jerked up and down in what Wedge had been told was the Twi’lek equivalent of a nod. “Koh’shak is still the master of the starport. It would appear, from the colors of the individual next to him, that someone from the Olan clan has chosen to greet us as well.”
“Cazne’olan, perhaps?”
Nawara shrugged. “Possibly. I don’t know him. The Olan clan and mine do not mix much—no animosity, just little association with each other. His presence here could be good or could be very bad.”
Wedge smiled, stepping up beside Nawara as they both stopped before their hosts. Nawara Ven bowed deeply, bringing both his braintails down to dangle limp by his knees. Wedge aped his bow, then opened his hands and pressed their backs against his thighs. The gesture was slightly awkward but was meant to symbolize exactly what the limp braintails did: a lack of negative feelings and thoughts about the people in front of him. Without braintails he had to rely on the universally peaceful symbolism of an empty, open hand to make his intent clear.
Wedge and Nawara straightened up at the same time, then their hosts bowed to them. Scarlet cloth swathed the corpulent Koh’shak. The gold badges of his office and clan held his outer cloak closed at his throat, though his round middle poked through the central opening. Wedge got an eyeful of Koh’shak’s red robe and a wide cloth of gold sash pressed into the double duty of containing his girth and supporting a pair of Sevari flashpistols.
Cazne’olan would have seemed thickset except by comparison with Koh’shak. His black cloak covered a bright yellow robe and blue sash. The gold office and clan badges he wore were smaller than Koh’shak’s, but the craftsmanship on them seemed more delicate and less overpowering. Cazne’olan held his bow for a second longer than Koh’shak, but straightened up with less effort.
The heavier Twi’lek opened black-taloned hands. “In the name of Kala’uun’s Clans, I bid you welcome, Nawar’aven.”
“In the name of my clan, I am pleased to be accepted at Kala’uun.” Nawara turned to his left. “I am pleased to present to the Clans of Kala’uun my commanding officer…”
Cazne’olan stepped forward between Nawara and Koh’shak, extending his hand to Wedge. “Nawar’aven, you have no need to introduce Wedgan’tilles to us. We remember him from his last adventure on our world.”
Wedge smiled and shook Cazne’olan’s hand. “Good to see you again.”
“And you.” Cazne’olan took a step back and paused for a second before his headtails began to twitch up and down. “You have done much and learned much in the time since we have seen each other. Not the least of which is learning how to dress.”
Nawara glanced over at Wedge. “Commander, I did not realize—”
“No reason you should have Nawar…,” Wedge hitched a moment. The way the Twi’leks ran Nawara’s name together, he couldn’t be certain exactly what Nawara’s clan name was. When in doubt, go with indigenous custom. “…Nawar’aven. It was an adventure the squadron had well before you joined it. Suffice it to say it was resolved to the satisfaction of all interested parties.”
“It was indeed, Wedgan’tilles.” Koh’shak stretched the last syllable of Wedge’s name into a whole sibilant phrase of its own. “And now you are come here seeking satisfaction of another kind.”
“Quite true, Koh’shak.” Wedge half-turned and pointed back at the two Alliance ships. “We have for you some wondrous things drawn from the various worlds of the New Republic.” As he turned back to face the starport’s master, he noticed Nawara and Cazne’olan speaking to each other in low tones, with their braintaiis convulsing wildly.
Koh’shak closed his pinkish eyes and settled interlaced fingers over the bulge in his middle. “I am certain what you have brought will be impressive. Shall we begin our negotiations?”
His offer seemed a bit abrupt to Wedge, and the surprised look on Nawara’s face indicated he also thought something was amiss. What’s going on here?
Before Wedge could venture a reply, Nawara gently grabbed Wedge’s right forearm. “While the Commander applauds your alacrity in seeing to his needs, we have been traveling for days to get here. He chooses to invoke twi’janii.”
Koh’shak’s eyes popped open with the speed Wedge would have expected if the starport master had felt a gun being jammed against a spine. “I welcome Wedgan’tilles and would have granted him twi’janii without reservation if I felt he did not find our climate oppressive.”
“Open your eyes yet wider, Koh’shak.” Cazne’olan gestured toward Wedge. “He is a warrior in truth as well as dress. Even in the hot season he would not be discomfitted.”
“Your courtesy in reminding me of that is appreciated, Cazne’olan.” Koh’shak’s words came out light and even, but the violent twitching of his braintails seemed to belie the benign tone of the reply. “Wedgan’tilles, you and your people are to consider yourselves our guests. We will see to your pleasure, then to our business.”
“You are most kind,” Wedge said, believing Koh’shak to be anything but. I don’t know what he has in mind as our pleasure, but I’m certain his will be business, and I don’t anticipate that being much fun at all.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Elbows planted on either side of the dataterminal’s keyboard, Iella leaned forward and rubbed her hands over her face. The jolt of excitement she had expected had come, but it faded far too quickly. Fatigue and an unfocused fear flooded through her in its wake. She could feel herself beginning to slow down, but she refused to surrender.
No, no giving up now. I won this one. She pressed her fingers against her eyelids. I think.
She had begun her quest to locate the Duros captain, Lai Nootka, in a most organized and methodical way. She pulled as much as she could about him from Imperial and Alliance sources and compiled a profile of him based on that information. The most complete Imperial record came from a planet named Garqi where Nootka and his crew had been imprisoned for several months on charges of smuggling for the Alliance. Nootka’s presence on the planet had been well documented, and the Prefect Barris, Nootka’s Imperial adversary, had paid dearly for his brush with the Alliance.
Garqi was where Corran met Nootka.
Alliance files were far more generous in the amount of information they provided. Nootka had indeed moved shipments for the Alliance, but he acted on
their behalf only when it suited him. He didn’t appear to have firm ties to the Alliance—not even as firm as those Mirax Terrik had. Nootka’s distance from the Alliance, yet willingness to work with it, certainly put him in a grey area that might have been why Tycho chose to trade with him.
Iella’s inquiries then went off in several directions at the same time. She started a search for any records pertaining to any of the aliases and various ship identification codes she could find for the Star’s Delight. She was less interested in the Alliance material than she was the Imperial records, but she did note that Nootka had not been off on missions for the Alliance at the time Tycho said he met with him on Coruscant.
She also dug deeper into the person who was Lai Nootka himself. The Duros were a race of tall, slender, blue-skinned beings whose facial expressions seemed, to most humans, to be entirely dour. They remained aloof, and it was often said that they lacked noses because they were disinclined to stick their noses into business that did not concern them. Most Duros remained neutral concerning the Rebellion, but a few brave individuals like Lai Nootka dared trade with the Rebels. Only in this did Lai Nootka appear to be different from the majority of his people, which made researching him much easier.
Iella’s greatest triumph was in locating the series of young-adult Duros novels from which Nootka drew inspiration for his various aliases and the new names of his ship. He had mixed and matched first and family names of characters to create aliases for himself, and then for each alias, gave his ship a name that was not associated with the corresponding characters in the books; but everything had indeed come from that pool of names. When none of the aliases she already had for him turned up an Imperial record, she tried inventing additional aliases, using the process she imagined Nootka himself had used to create his new identities. She started pumping these possible aliases through the Imperial computer and hoping for the best.
The computer had reported back a lot of misses, but finally she got a hit. Just four days before Tycho’s meeting with Lai Nootka, a modified CorelliSpace Gymsnor-3 freighter named Novachild entered the Coruscant system. A Duros named Hes Glillto had been listed as the captain of record. No departure for that ship or captain had been recorded, but this didn’t surprise Iella. The one record providing the information about his arrival was in a duty log filed by Lieutenant Virar Needa of Orbital Solar Energy Transfer Satellite 1127 after Coruscant had fallen to the Alliance and after Tycho Celchu had been taken into custody.
Though officially part of their duty, OSETS officers seldom maintained or filed such logs, but from what she could see Needa had been obsessive about it. The log had data concerning incoming and outgoing ships that traveled in-system during Needa’s watches on the station. The lack of a departure record for Novachild could have meant nothing more sinister than that the ship had left while Needa was sleeping, but Iella felt in her gut that was unlikely.
She sat back in her chair and looked at the data on the screen again. The fact that no other Imperial records mentioned the Novachild or Hes Glillto told Iella the records had been deliberately purged. And anyone with the access needed to purge those records could easily manufacture and enter the data that shows Tycho was in Imperial Intelligence’s pay. Or, Tycho himself could have doctored things to make it look as if he had been framed.
Iella slowly shook her head. The information she had was intriguing but essentially useless. She could not prove Lai Nootka and Hes Glillto were the same person. The Novachild’s arrival put it on Coruscant a couple of days before the meeting Corran had witnessed, but she couldn’t exclude the possibility that the ship had departed before the date of the meeting. Unless she could definitively place Nootka on Coruscant at that time, she couldn’t prove Tycho was telling the truth.
And I’m not so sure I want to do that. She sighed. Diric had told her about some of the conversations he’d had with Tycho. He was more convinced than ever of Tycho’s innocence, and his opinion did carry a lot of weight in her mind. Even so, if Tycho had caused Corran’s death, Iella didn’t want him to be able to get away with it. I owe Corran that much.
A familiar hoot brought her back to the present and sparked a smile on her face. “Whistler!”
The small green and white R2 beeped happily. Behind him, tottling along, came Rogue Squadron’s black, clamshell-headed M-3PO unit. “Good morning, Mistress.”
“Morning?” Iella glanced at the Chronographie readout at the top of her datapad’s screen. “I don’t believe it. I’ve been here eight hours. Diric will kill me.”
Emtrey’s head canted to the left. “I would hope not, Mistress Iella. That would be a crime and—”
“I was speaking metaphorically, Emtrey, not literally.” Iella frowned at the droid. “I meant that he would be upset with me.”
“Ah, I see.”
Iella patted Whistler gently on his domed head. “So what are you two doing here in the computer center?”
Whistler warbled nonchalantly.
“We can so tell her, Whistler.” Emtrey’s head righted itself and thrust forward, giving Iella a good view of the gold eyes burning in the hollow of his face. “You do want the truth to triumph, don’t you?”
Iella nodded slowly. “Every day it seems I’m hearing less and less of it. What have you got?”
Emtrey pointed toward her dataterminal’s I/O port. “Whistler, hook in there and show her what we found.”
Whistler squawked rudely—a sound Iella recognized as one she’d often heard the droid use to chasten Corran. Her throat thickened as melancholy tried to suck the life out of her, but she shook her head. She looked up at Emtrey and forced words out past the lump in her throat. “What have you been doing?”
“We have finished the tasks Master Ven set for us before he left with the others, so we started going over transcripts and noticed an underlying assumption everyone seems to have made concerning the conquest of Coruscant.”
“And that is?”
“It is assumed that Ysanne Isard let us have the world because she wanted us to have it, infected as it was with the Krytos virus. The stresses possessing it has put on the Alliance certainly are great, and the assumption is probably valid, but there is no straight-line correlation between her desire to let us have the planet and actions taken in the final days.”
“I’m not certain, at this hour, I follow what you’re saying.” Iella rubbed at her burning eyes with her left hand. “Can you break it down and be more specific?”
“Certainly.” Emtrey glanced down at the R2 unit. “Show her the current disease case grid.”
Whistler chirped happily. The data on the terminal’s screen vanished beneath a graph that plotted incidences of sickness over time in red. A thick blood-red line quickly blossomed into a triangle with a steep hypotenuse, then leveled out into a rectangle that began to flare upward again over the last ten days. The disease had spread quickly at first, but had plateaued—until recently.
Iella nodded. “The plateau indicates the period when the disease stopped spreading because bacta therapy managed to keep it under control.”
“Exactly. The graph of fatalities has a similar profile.”
“I can imagine. This is pretty horrible.”
“True, Mistress. Whistler, now run the plus-six graph.”
“Plus-six?”
“The projected disease report graph we would have seen if the planet had fallen to the Alliance just six days later than it did.” The new graph exploded from the starting point and spiked quickly off the top of the screen. “Projected fatalities in this model are 85 percent of afflicted populations.”
Iella’s jaw dropped open. “Whole alien populations would have been wiped off Coruscant.”
“Exactly. This model, when broken down by species, shows a complete depopulation of Gamorreans, Quarren, Twi’leks, Suilustans, and Trandoshans. The chances of the disease traveling off-world are incalculable, but the potential for galaxy-wide extermination of some species cannot be discounted.”
She blinked and rubbed at her eyes again. “Why are the models so different?”
Silvery highlights flashed from the edges of Emtrey’s black carapace as he raised his hands. “One reason is highly speculative. First, it seems that in boiling off a reservoir to create the storm that brought down the planet’s shields, our efforts destroyed a large amount of the virus present in the planetary water system. Second, and far more germane to our discussion, is the abbreviated incubation period our arrival gave the disease. Had the Alliance arrived just a week later, we would already have had a wave of deaths and a whole new round of infections because of contact with bodily fluids from the victims and the virus in the water system.”
Iella nodded slowly. “If we had been just a week later in liberating the planet, there would have been no way to save it. Non-human members of the Alliance would have fled, dooming their own populations. Without non-human support, the Alliance would have foundered.”
“That seems probable, Mistress.”
“Yeah.” Iella’s brown eyes tightened. “So the reason the Imps stopped our initial effort to shut down the shields was to keep us from taking over the world too soon. For Iceheart it wasn’t a matter of if but when we’d take the world. And since Tycho’s contribution to our efforts were what enabled us to bring the shields down before the time that would have been optimal for Iceheart, we can suppose he wasn’t working for her.”
Emtrey nodded and Whistler trumpeted triumphantly.
“Unless, of course, that’s exactly what Iceheart wants us to think.” Iella shook her head. “Not bad work, you two, but it’s about as helpful as what I found on Lai Nootka. I can put someone who ought to be him flying something that ought to be his ship here about the time Tycho said he met with Nootka, but I can’t prove it. I’d dearly like to believe Tycho is being framed, but I don’t see a good reason why Isard would be devoting so many resources to getting someone who is really not that important.”