The fact was, he realized, that he was unhappy. Something was gnawing away at him inside. Something was wrong, and there was no way he could ignore it. It created an anxiety in him that was out of all proportion with what he was doing. It felt as if he weren’t involved in a patrol at all, but in some other mission with a hidden agenda he knew nothing about.
“Nemesis One, report.”
“One is clear, Control.”
The voice coming through the comm unit betrayed no hint of deception or urgency, but Corran couldn’t shake the sickening feeling that he was being manipulated. He had a natural aversion to being used, and he could feel unseen hands all over himself, pointing him in a certain direction, for reasons he could not fathom. He was surprised to find himself less resentful of their agenda—whatever it was—than of being manipulated.
I’m reasonable. I don’t shy away from difficult tasks. I do what I am asked to do, within reason. Didn’t I do that…? His thoughts dead-ended as he realized he couldn’t summon up specific memories to back up his argument. He knew he had performed many dangerous missions, but he couldn’t pinpoint them. His inability to do so wouldn’t have concerned him, and in fact almost did not, except that he kept feeling like a hologram being processed by someone else’s computer.
“Nemesis One, we have two contacts on the heading of 270 degrees. They are ten kilometers distant. They are hostile. You are free to engage and terminate them.”
“As ordered.” Corran punched up the data on the incoming ships and displayed it over his monitor. Two TIEs. The starfighters inspired no fear in him, and he would have viewed them with utter detachment except that a random thought shot off through his brain.
Two TIEs aren’t nearly as deadly as a single Tycho. The connection seemed entirely logical to Corran: the similar sounds created a link. The fact that Tycho Celchu had been an Imperial pilot who flew TIEs reinforced it. Corran knew Tycho had betrayed Rogue Squadron, and Corran had been determined to see him pay. If I weren’t here, I’d be there, taking care of Tycho.
Before he could begin to wonder where there was, Control’s voice came through the comlink again. “We have additional information on the incoming ships. Transmitting now.”
The image on the monitor shifted from a TIE starfighter to an X-wing. An additional line of data beneath the fighter’s image informed Corran the ship was flown by Captain T. Celchu. A jolt of adrenaline pulsed through his body, then slammed into his brain. He couldn’t believe his luck—the coincidence of being able to fly against Tycho and avenge Rogue Squadron was incredible. And I will make the most of it.
Corran inverted the TIE Interceptor he flew and dove. The X-wings started to come after him, vectoring in on his belly, so he inverted again, then pulled through a climbing loop to starboard. He soared as the X-wings dove, neither side wasting laser energy when the chances of hitting were so small. Corran kept tightening the loop into a spiral that emphasized the squint’s greater maneuverability, then streaked away to underscore its superior speed as well.
A light flicked on within the head’s-up display, indicating one of the X-wings was trying for a proton torpedo target lock, but a quick climb, roll, and twisting dive broke the lock and brought Corran out on a vector toward Tycho’s X-wing. Corran sideslipped the Interceptor to starboard, then rolled up on the left wing and climbed in toward Tycho. He flipped his lasers from quad- to dual-fire, assuming he’d have to use multiple shots in multiple passes to bring Tycho down. He led the X-wing, anticipating Tycho’s break, then hastily snapped off a shot that splashed energy over Tycho’s shields as the Interceptor overshot its target.
No reaction. That isn’t like Tycho at all. Corran rolled up on the right stabilizer, climbed into a loop, then rolled over and out to port. Another inversion took him into a dive, but his scanners showed the X-wings hadn’t stayed with him past the first maneuver, much less through the second.
Corran shivered. They’re handling like TIE starfighters, not like X-wings, and the pilot flying that first one isn’t Tycho. He switched his targeting computer over to the second ship and saw that X-wing was listed as being flown by Kirtan Loor. An immediate desire to vape that ship filled him, but it did not deflect him from thinking. In fact, the vehemence of his feelings about Loor swept him past the fact that Loor and Tycho had been in collusion on Coruscant.
It carried him far enough that he recalled Loor didn’t know how to fly any space ships at all, much less starfighters.
Loor can’t be there. The chance that Tycho and Loor would show up where I could attack and kill them is unbelievable. Whereas before he had taken great delight in the coincidence, now it became evidence that he was being manipulated. The link between a TIE and Tycho had been made in his mind before Tycho showed up as a pilot. While he knew inferring causality from that relationship was not strictly logical, his being manipulated meant it was more than possible.
Tycho is an enemy, so he was placed in one fighter. Another enemy was plucked from a list of my enemies and placed in the second fighter. More anger flared through Corran and battered aside the blockages in his brain that had kept him thinking of nothing outside the cockpit. The apparent insertion of personal enemies into his situation told Corran two things. First off, I’m in a simulator, and second, someone knows enough about me to know who my enemies are. Pitting me against my enemies gives me some wish fulfillment, which is a good thing. It rewards behavior, but I have to ask myself, is flying an interceptor against X-wings behavior for which I want to be rewarded?
His stomach shrank and hardened into a rock that threatened to explode volcanically. I’m flying an Imp ship against Rebels. I don’t want to do that. Corran immediately realized that only his enemies—the remnants of the Empire—would want him to feel good about attacking Rebels, yet few Imps would take the time or make the effort to manipulate him that way. Some would imprison him and the rest would just kill him.
Except one.
Ysanne Isard.
Injecting her into the jumble of thoughts bouncing around his brain immediately started to impose order on his mind. She was known and feared for her ability to warp Rebels and turn them against friends and family. She had been successful with Tycho Celchu, and he was not the only success story to come out of her Lusankya prison. Her altered agents had wrought havoc among the Emperor’s enemies, and his death had done nothing to cause Iceheart to curtail her operations.
The fog in Corran’s brain began to evaporate. He remembered having met Isard after his capture. She’d vowed to transform him into a tool of the Emperor’s vengeance. This simulator run—and the one before it—clearly was designed to get him to attack Rebel symbols. Subsequent sessions would further crush his resistance, training him to greater and greater levels of efficiency while turning him against everyone he knew, loved, and respected.
She would make me over into the human equivalent of the plague she unleashed on Coruscant.
Corran shook his head, then raised his hands from the simulator’s steering yoke and yanked his helmet off. Electrodes taped to his head pulled away rather abruptly, taking some hair with them, but he ignored the pain. The electrodes fed my brain wave patterns to a computer. The patterns were compared to data gathered from interrogations, so the computer could recognize what I was thinking about and project the proper clues into the simufotion. Very good.
He pulled the respiration mask from his face and let it dangle against his chest. “This is Nemesis One. The game is over. I won’t betray my people.”
The star field on the screen in front of Corran vanished. In its place he saw Ysanne Isard’s head and shoulders. Her mismatched eyes, the left one a fiery red and the right one an ice blue, added venom to the woman’s steely expression. Her sharp, slender features might have made her seem beautiful to some, but the fear her anger stabbed into his heart made her more than ugly to Corran. Her long black hair had been pulled back into a ponytail, yet she had let her white temple-locks remain unbound as if that girlish affectation
would somehow soften her image.
“You are under the impression, Corran Horn, that this little victory is significant and hampers my efforts in some way. It does not.” An eyebrow arched over her arctic eye. “You worked with the Corellian Security Force, so you can understand how powerful certain interrogation techniques can be. What you have endured so far is little more than testing.”
“And I passed.”
“From your perspective that might seem true.” Her eyes sharpened. “From mine it merely means you have reclassified yourself. You will require more time than others I have worked with in the past, but here at Lusankya, time is abundant.”
Corran shrugged. “Good, then I’ll have abundant time to plan my escape.”
“I doubt it.” She sighed as if what she was about to say hurt her in some way. “Were you easy to train, you would find your stay here pleasant. As you are difficult, the next step is for me to determine if you know anything I consider valuable. Unfortunately this means sifting through a lot of things I don’t want to know. I hope your life has been interesting, because my technicians have been known to resort to cruelty when they are bored.”
“They’ll learn nothing from me.”
Isard frowned. “Please, Horn, skip the bluster. We will start with a level four narco-interrogation and work our way down to level one if we must. You know you’ll tell us whatever we want to know.”
Sheer terror froze the lump in Corran’s stomach solid. With a level four interrogation session he’d be remembering things his mother had forgotten while she was carrying him in her womb. I will have no secrets. Hundreds of images flitted through his mind as he sorted valuable memories from the casual ones.
This process, while agonizing, also brought a smile to his face. Gil Bastra, the man who had created a series of identities for Corran to use after he fled from Corellia, had made sure the identities took Corran out into the outlier worlds. From Loor they know everything about my days with CorSec. Thanks to Gil there’s very little valuable information I can give her. I was out of circulation until I joined Rogue Squadron, and I don’t know enough about the Rebellion to hurt it.
“I see your smile, Horn. You may feel bold enough to smile now, but things will change.” Isard herself smiled, and Corran found it a most forbidding thing. “When we are finished with you, smiles will be but a memory, and a painful one at that.”
Chapter Nine
Wedge laughed aloud, telling himself he was laughing at the irony of feeling nervous, not because of being nervous. Here he was, a celebrated hero and the sole survivor of both Death Star runs, conqueror of Coruscant and leader of the most feared fighter squadron in the galaxy, and at Iella Wessiri’s door he felt nervous. Enough ice water ran in his veins, so the rumors went, to replenish Coruscant’s polar caps, yet he found himself clearing his voice and hesitating before he pushed the buzzer button at her door.
On the way over from squadron headquarters he had convinced himself he wasn’t going to be asking her out on a date, really. He’d spent the previous hour being harangued by Erisi Dlarit concerning the Vratix terrorist and his whereabouts after the raid on Warlord Zsinj’s bacta store. He’d done his best, over and over again, to explain to her that he had no reports about the Thyferran native, but promised to pass notice of her interest up to General Cracken. That really was all he could do, but Erisi took a lot of convincing on that point.
The experience had been draining. There had been moments when he considered just cutting her off and ordering her out of his office, but he could tell her concern about the Vratix was based on her conviction that the insectoid creature was a terrorist and a potential hazard to anyone who came in contact with it. He thought Erisi’s reaction might have been born from her frustration at not having been able to do anything to prevent Corran’s death. By making the terrorist her responsibility, she might prevent another tragedy, thereby atoning for her lack of action in Corran’s case. Wedge found her motive noble, but her insistence exhausting. Corran’s death and the misery of millions on Coruscant had everyone in the squadron worn thin, and being dismissive of Erisi’s concerns would not help the situation.
Corran’s death had likewise affected Iella deeply. She had been Corran’s partner in the Corellian Security Force and had fled Corellia at the same time he had. Her flight had brought her to Coruscant, where she joined up with the Rebel underground. Her reunion with Corran had been a joyous occasion. It had been easy for Wedge to see how they complemented each other and must have worked well as a team.
Those qualities that made her well-suited to working with Corran were qualities Wedge found attractive. She was thoughtful and stable, yet possessed of a good sense of humor and a fierce loyalty to her friends and to justice. Unfortunately, her loyalty made her most zealous in helping the prosecution find evidence against Tycho Celchu, but she approached the search so openly that Wedge couldn’t find fault with her in doing her duty as she saw it.
He pressed the door buzzer, then tugged at the cuffs of his jacket sleeves. I’m not asking her out. I’m just here as a friend visiting a friend. Wedge shook his head. For the past ten years, since the death of his parents and through his association with the Rebellion, he’d really given little thought to romance and relationships. He’d certainly found companionship with a number of Rebel women, but he’d not found a single companion, a partner, the way Han Solo or Tycho Celchu had. He couldn’t explain why not, nor did he let it bother him—the nature of the Rebellion and his assignments meant planning for anything long-term was silly, and avoiding relationships meant the chances of getting hurt when the unspeakable happened were much less.
He’d seen Leia over the time Han Solo had been encased in carbonite. She had been driven almost to the point of recklessness in her attempts to free her beloved. He laughed. Entering Jabba’s palace meant she was driven beyond recklessness. While he envied Han Solo the passion with which he was loved, he dreaded the idea of being plagued by the pain Leia had known.
The door to the apartment slid open and Wedge’s nervousness slackened when Iella smiled. “Wedge. This is a surprise.”
“A pleasant one, I hope.” He glanced down at his hands for a moment, then back up into her brown eyes. “I should have called before heading over, but I was going to get something to eat and I thought, well, I hate eating alone and…”
The brown-haired woman’s smile widened for a moment and carried on up into her eyes, then shrank as if the corners of her mouth had slammed into walls and were rebounding. “I think you’d better come in.” She turned away from the door, and he followed the lithe woman down a short corridor to a modest-sized parlor. The door closed automatically behind him, cutting off the brightest source of light and sinking the room into a grey gloom.
The man sitting in the corner chair looked every bit as if he were constructed from shadow-threads and slivers of grey. The sharpness of his features accentuated the gauntness of his frame. His shoulders and knees poked like knobs against the grey fabric of the jumpsuit he wore. A few strands of black hair wove through the white and grey combed over his largely bald head but did nothing to disguise the shape of the skull beneath it. In fact, were it not for the spark of life burning in the man’s brown eyes, Wedge would have believed him to be a mummified worker resurrected from some tomb in the bowels of Coruscant.
Iella folded her arms across her chest. “Commander Wedge Antilles, this is Diric Wessiri. He is my husband.”
Husband! Wedge covered his surprise by taking a step forward and extended his right hand toward Diric. “My pleasure, sir.”
Diric inclined his head forward and shook Wedge’s hand with a long-fingered grip that was firm and even strong, though the strength faded quickly. “The honor is mine, Commander. Your exploits bring glory to your world and fellow Corellians.”
“Glory wasn’t our goal, sir.”
“Nonetheless…” The man smiled, then let his hand drop back toward his lap. “Forgive me, Commander. At another point I woul
d engage you in a lively discussion, but now I am somewhat fatigued.”
“I understand.”
Iella walked to her husband’s side and gently rested a hand on his shoulder. “The Imps caught Diric up in a sweep about a year ago. They interrogated him, broke his identity, then imprisoned him. Six months ago or so they set up a bio-research project and made Diric part of the slave-labor force. They only used humans because the lab produced what we know to be the Krytos virus.” She gave his shoulder a squeeze. “General Cracken’s people had Diric in quarantine, then debriefed him. I only learned he was alive when they brought him here four hours ago.”
“I should be going, then, and leave you two alone.”
“No.” The old man raised his right hand and gently patted Iella’s hand. “I have long been among Imperials and other slaves. It is good to have normal people here to ease me back.”
Wedge coughed lightly into his hand. “I don’t think you’ll find my life normal at all.”
Iella laughed politely. “Nor mine.”
“How fortunate. Normal can be quite boring.” Diric’s head came up and he fixed Wedge with a steady stare. “And I want you to know, Commander, if anything has happened between you and my wife, I bear neither of you malice. I have been dead for a year. While I dreamed of being alive again, I do not bear a grudge against those who lived while I was dead.”
Wedge held a hand up. “First, no titles.”
“Where they kept me, we joked that titles were for when we were once again people. I use it to remind me I am again a man. And I use it out of profound respect for what you have done.”
“Don’t. I’m just Wedge. Nothing I’ve done is the equal of your enduring Imperial captivity, so titles don’t apply here. Second, Iella is intelligent, a wonder to work with, a joy to be around, and above all else, loyal to her friends. In fact, save one thing, she’s just the sort of woman I could see myself growing old with. That one thing is this: she’s married to you. Her loyalty to you, her fidelity, has never been in question. You are undoubtedly one of the luckiest men on this planet.”