THREE

I stumbled out of bed on the far side and barked my shin on a low table set there. I kicked out angrily at it. Who would have put that there? I knew I wouldn’t have put it there because even a gentle bump would have toppled it and scattered the datacards stacked there as easily as my kick had.

I looked around the room and in the half-light I saw all manner of things that were wrong about the place. The holographs on the walls were pleasant enough, and were even of scenes from Corellia, but were of locations I’d not known on my homeworld. Who built this parody of my home?

My feet caught in the sheets I’d tossed off and I crashed to my hands and knees. The pain in my shin found an ally in my knees and hands, and just for a moment shocked me into a clarity of mind. The holographs and the table and the datacards, all these little pieces of the apartment that were not mine, they were things Mirax had placed here. Mirax, my wife.

I looked up at everything she’d brought in to make our apartment feel like a home. Somehow she had found replacements for many of the things we had lost when our previous home had been destroyed. Intellectually, as I looked around the room, I could catalog her contributions to the decor, and could even remember the when and where of her finding the items. I looked at the closet and could see her clothes hanging there. I found it easy to recall when she had purchased this gown, or where she had gotten that jacket.

But I could not recall anything about her connections to those items. In looking at the clothes I couldn’t remember which gown was her favorite. I couldn’t remember which jacket she considered slimming, or which blouse and slacks she considered appropriate for business, and which outfit she wore when we were out to have fun.

I studied a holograph of Vreni Island on Corellia. It showed a small island covered with trees, floating in a stormy sea as a thunderstorm approached. Shifting my view slightly I injected lightning into the picture, a massive triple fork that sent countless tendrils crawling across the waves. The image was fantastic and the holograph was a work of art, but I could not recall why Mirax had wanted it. I didn’t know if she had known the holographer or if she had spent time on the island, or if she had purchased it as an investment.

Mirax is gone, and I am losing details of her life.

I got up and ran to the living room. The red light still blinked on the holopad. I punched it with the urgency of a pilot ejecting from a stricken fighter. Her image appeared once again and I smiled, but as she spoke, my smile died. The countless nuances I’d read into how she looked at me, and what she said, how she inflected her voice and shifted her balance, were gone. I could have been looking at some commercial broadcast of a beautiful woman selling anything from lum to a trip to the Alakatha resorts.

I hit another button and switched the holopad over into communications mode. I keyed in a call to Squadron Headquarters. The head and shoulders of a black droid materialized, all but lost in the darkness except for the glow of golden eyes in his clamshell head. “You have reached Rogue Squadron Headquarters. This is Emtrey. It is good to see you, Captain Horn.”

“You, too, Emtrey.” I raked fingers back through my short brown hair. “I’m going to ask you a question and I want a straight answer—and the question is going to sound strange.”

“I understand the parameters of your request.”

“Good.” I hesitated for a moment. “It is approximately 1:30 in the morning, Coordinated Galactic Time, right?”

“1:31:27, to be exact, sir.”

I nodded. Normally I found Emtrey’s slavish adherence to reality annoying, but right now it was a lifeline to sanity. “And I’m Corran Horn, right?”

The droid’s head jerked back. “Yes, sir. A moment please.…Your voiceprint checks to within 99.4953 percent of accuracy, the variation being accounted for by travel stress and degree of rest.”

“Okay, good, Emtrey, very good.” I licked my lips. “Here’s the big one.”

The droid’s image leaned forward toward me. “I am ready, sir.”

“I’m married to Mirax Terrik, right?”

Emtrey’s eyes flared. “Oh, yes, sir. You will recall that I attended the ceremony Commander Antilles conducted on the Lusankya, and again attended the ceremony you had here on Coruscant. I believe Whistler made a holographic record of the first ceremony, and I know there were multiple holographs of the second one.”

My jaw dropped. I knew there were holographs of the ceremonies, but I had forgotten them. Our original copies had been destroyed when our home had been leveled, but Mirax had obtained new copies from her father. I wanted to turn to the cabinet where we stored them and play one immediately, but I hesitated. I couldn’t risk finding them as emotionally empty as I had the replay of Mirax’s message.

“Are you all right, Captain Horn?”

I frowned, then nodded slowly. “I don’t know, Emtrey. Is the colonel available?”

Emtrey’s eyes flickered for a moment. “The colonel is in his office. He has a meeting scheduled thirty standard minutes from now.”

“Ask him to cancel it or postpone it, please. I have to talk to him.” I stared intently at Emtrey as if I could reach into his robotic brain and communicate my urgency. “Mirax is gone, I mean really gone, and I have to find her. I’ll be there in a half hour. Horn out.”

I arrived at headquarters a little later than expected because of gross indecision on my part concerning clothes. I went to toss almost anything on, but I saw too many shirts and pants and jackets that Mirax had bought for me and, rather often, transported from all over the galaxy. Try as I might, I couldn’t remember what she had said about any of them. I couldn’t remember her smiles or laughter as she dressed me up, or what she’d said as she later worked me back out of the clothes. Each shirt hung there like a ghost of a memory, all two dimensional and lifeless.

I’d finally shrugged something on—a hideous matching of patterns and colors, as it turned out, but I had dressed in the dark. I had a haunted look on my face so people on the hoverbus shied away from me. I would have taken our airspeeder and doubtlessly salvaged some of the time I’d lost dressing, but even as messed up as I was, I knew I had no place piloting anything through Imperial City even if the traffic was light.

Emtrey made no attempt to stop me in the antechamber to Tycho’s office. I shot in past him, then snapped to attention and gave Tycho as crisp a salute as I could manage. “Thank you for seeing me, sir.”

Standing at his desk, with a big transparisteel viewport framing a view of the Imperial Palace behind him, Tycho looked every bit the recruiting hologram image of a pilot. Steel-spined straight, wasp-waisted, with his light brown hair cut short and just beginning to show some white at the temples, he returned my salute sharply. Sympathy softened his blue eyes. “Emtrey told me about your problem, though he didn’t give me much detail.”

“I didn’t have much to give him. I’m sorry.”

Tycho shook his head and pointed me to a chair in front of his desk. “Not your fault, I think.” He glanced back at the doorway. “That’s why I asked General Cracken to join us.”

I turned back and saw Airen Cracken enter the office. Though an older man, he had not thickened around the middle with age. White predominated in his hair, but tinges of the red hair he’d passed on to his son Pash still lingered around the sides and back. His eyes were green, like mine, but more of a sea-green, which did not make them lack for intensity. He waited for both of us to salute, which we did, and he returned it sharply.

Tycho waited for General Cracken to take the other chair and sit before he sat himself. “General Cracken was my appointment anyway, and one I could not postpone.”

“No, sir,” I said, as I sat. I had first met General Cracken on Coruscant, when I showed up at Tycho’s treason and murder trial. My arrival seemed to surprise the general, but that was the first and last time I’d seen him taken unawares by anything. He’d asked me to help him negotiate with Booster Terrik for possession of an Imperial Star Destroyer, and I had failed in that mission rather dismally. The infrequent times we had met since then had been more satisfactory, but his presence here did nothing to put me at ease.

Cracken smiled carefully. “I wanted to discuss with Colonel Celchu the intelligence we obtained from Phan Riizolo, the Booty Full’s captain. From him, really, we learned very little that will help us deal with the Invidious and solving the mystery of its location.”

I frowned. “I’d really rather talk about my wife.…”

“I know, but this is germane, believe me, Captain Horn.”

He leaned forward and plugged a cable from the datapad he carried into the holoprojector pad on the corner of Tycho’s desk. An image of an Imperial Star Destroyer hovered there as if in orbit around the crystalline model of Alderaan centered on the near edge of the desk. “This is the Invidious, represented in old Imperial holo-images because we have no current ones of any reliable quality. At the time of the Emperor’s death, it was part of a task force commanded by High Admiral Teradoc and served as part of the fleet with which he secured his holdings as the Empire crumbled. That was a good seven years ago. Then, approximately six years ago, Leonia Tavira appears to have obtained it.”

Cracken hit a key on his datapad and the image shifted to that of a very young woman in an Imperial Naval uniform, with the rank insignia of an admiral. I’d seen enough of those rank badges on self-styled warlords to make me imagine the Empire had given them away as party favors at the Emperor’s funeral, but I’d never seen them on someone so young. Her black hair had been cut to the line of her jaw, emphasizing her youth, but an ancient hunger played through her violet eyes.

I looked at Cracken. “She’s a child.”

“Was.” Cracken sat back in his chair. “We think she was sixteen standard years old when she began an affair with the Moff on Eiattu 4, the homeworld of a former pilot in Rogue Squadron.”

Tycho smiled. “Plourr. We didn’t know she was part of the world’s ruling family until they came looking for her to come back and guide them.”

I concentrated for a moment. “She was before my time, before the squadron was re-formed and Coruscant was taken. Didn’t realize who she was when I met her on Corellia, back when I was still with CorSec.”

“Her reports on that incident spoke highly of you nonetheless, Captain Horn.” Cracken pressed his hands together. “Leonia proved to be ambitious, and after the apparently accidental death of the Moff’s wife, he married Leonia. Then he suffered a stroke that left him speechless and paralyzed. Because of an allergy to bacta, the road back to health was not easy for him, but he worked hard in physical rehab. He regained use of his hands, a goal he had, it seems, because he then turned a blaster on himself and committed suicide. Leonia assumed his title and duties and ruled Eiattu 4 until Plourr and the Rogues forced her to flee. This she did, with a considerable portion of the planet’s wealth.”

I felt a chill run down my spine. Over the years I had heard countless stories of people willing to sacrifice others for their own greed. With CorSec I had even investigated a couple of these mourning-murderers, but they were nothing in comparison to Leonia Tavira. “Is there any question that she did away with her husband and his first wife?”

Cracken shook his head. “Not in my mind, but there is no evidence to prove she did. From Eiattu there is no trace of her—she escaped in a shuttle—until she had another run-in with Rogue Squadron. This time she was in command of a small band of pirates that proved somewhat less tractable than the Invids. She fled from that confrontation and hooked up with Teradoc. She obtained the Invidious from him by means unknown and vanished except for the occasional supply raid. She became more bold during Thrawn’s campaign, and first appeared with the Invids during the Emperor’s return. She was a minor concern then, but she learned very well how to manage her pirates.”

An image of the Booty Full replaced her holograph. “What she has done is forged a loose coalition of freebooters and marauders into a fleet that looks to her for planning and coordination. She provides them times and places for rendezvous, then plots courses, downloads battleplans and uses the Invidious’ firepower to suppress planetary defenses. Her allies then loot and pillage to their hearts’ content, transferring half of what they take to her. She then vanishes and they return to their bolt-holes, waiting for her next call.”

I frowned. “Why haven’t we gone after her fleet? Tracking them can’t be that difficult.”

“It isn’t. We know, for a fact, that many of them spend their time at Nal Hutta, or lairing up in various and sundry smugglers’ hide-outs throughout the galaxy.” Cracken’s eyes narrowed. “Without Tavira and the Invidious, her fleet would fall apart and mopping them up would be simple. With her ship intact, we can’t begin to prey on the fleet unless we devote sufficient forces to be able to repel an ambush. You were at K’vath. We had a Mon Cal Cruiser and two Star Destroyers there to take down a bulk cruiser and eighteen Tri-fighters.”

Tycho leaned forward and rested his elbows on his desk. “The fact is, though, sir, that we were not ambushed at K’vath.”

“I know, and that is one of the more troubling aspects of this whole affair.” Cracken sighed and I felt a wave of fatigue wash out with his breath. “The source that tipped us to the Booty Full’s raid appears to be one tied to Tavira. Riizolo says he wanted to go out on his own, so he severed ties with Tavira. He says he had been holding out on her anyway, which is why he was able to buy his own clutches. He even sliced the plans for the taking of the Glitterstar from her computer. Because we escorted the liner back to Coruscant, he believes he just got unlucky in the timing of the raid, since we were obviously there to escort the ship, not go after him.”

I shook my head. “He’d not be the first criminal to refuse to believe he was set up.”

“He still is stupid enough to think what little information he was able to give us will save him from prison.” Cracken hit another key on the datapad. “About the most useful thing he did give us is this updated image of Leonia Tavira.”

Gone was the prim vixen from the previous image. Though still very young, Leonia had become sharper and far more beautiful. Her violet eyes had a piercing quality that belied the gentle smile on her face. Her hair had grown out somewhat and was raggedly cut, but held back with a red bandanna of the same hue as the scarlet panels on her black jacket. She wore blaster pistols on either hip, and the gunbelts that encircled her waist emphasized her slender, petite physique. Her black leggings clung to her like synthetic flesh, while armored boots encased her legs from the knees down.

I shook my head. “Looks like life gave her some Iceheart lessons.”

Cracken snorted a laugh. “I hate to think what Tavira would have become if Ysanne Isard had taken her on as an apprentice. Or even Grand Admiral Thrawn, for that matter. She appears to learn from her experiences very quickly and very well, which is part of the reason we have trouble locating her. As we suspected before, and as Riizolo confirmed, she initiates contact, not the other way around. None of the Invid pirates know where she hides her ship or when she will show up. Only those individuals recruited to crew on the Invidious learn those secrets, but that avenue of access is one-way only. Once you are invited to the Invidious, you do not leave it.”

Tycho studied Tavira’s image, then glanced at Cracken. “I seem to recall a number of other operations launched against her that proved fruitless. Do you suspect she has sources of information that tip her to our plans?”

“I certainly would like to think so, Colonel, because that means we could trap her if we could locate her source and feed him bad data.” Cracken opened his hands. “So far all efforts in that area have come up empty. In fact, I have had Iella Wessiri coordinating our efforts to locate any spies working for Tavira, and the both of you know how thorough she can be.”

I smiled. Iella had been my partner in CorSec and had been the chief prosecution investigator in Tycho’s treason trial. “If she can’t find a spy, there isn’t a spy.”

“A conclusion I am forced, reluctantly, to accept.” Cracken shook his head. “Somehow Tavira seems to know when we have prepared for one of her raids and calls it off. We’ve been able to figure out no pattern of behavior that would tip her off, so we have had to rely on more and more unorthodox methods for trying to locate her.”

He turned to face me and ice crystallized in my guts. “Part of those efforts involve Mirax.”

I slumped back in my chair, suddenly feeling as old as the galaxy itself. “I know, somehow, that she is not dead, but I cannot feel her otherwise. What do you know, General?”

“I know very little, and some of that I cannot tell you.”

Tycho frowned. “This is his wife, General, and she’s missing.”

“I know that, Colonel, and I know where she might be.” Cracken held his hands up to forestall comment by either one of us. He needn’t have done it for me because I felt as if all my bones were turning to liquid and the very act of breathing was almost more than I could manage.

“Mirax came to me to ask what she could do to help bring an end to the Invid raids. It turns out that a client of hers, a collector of antiquities, had lost some valuable items when an Invid raid hit a vacation home he maintained. He wanted the items back and was interested in having Mirax make some inquiries. She came to me offering her services, noting that such a cover story might allow her to go where my people could not. I explained to her that the Invids could prove very dangerous, but she was willing to accept that danger—though she did travel alone, not wanting to subject co-pilots to such risk. She said that the sooner the Invids were broken up, the less she would worry about their possibly killing Rogues, and that she and you could get back to your lives.”

Somehow I balled my hands into fists and fought to stop the tears threatening to leak from my eyes. If I had not set the destruction of the Invids as a condition for our decision about having a child, she never would have taken this risk. I should have seen that, I should have known what she would do. She never was one to stand around idle when a goal eluded her grasp.

Was she? With that question, with my realization that I couldn’t remember enough about her to answer it, the tears came. I wanted to apologize, but the lump in my throat choked off my words. My mouth gaped open in a silent scream, then I hammered my right fist down against the arm of my chair and snapped my mouth shut. I sniffed, swiped at tears, then sat back upright.

“Please, forgive me,” I croaked.

“Nothing to forgive, Corran.” Tycho gave me a brave smile. “You’re taking this a lot better than I would if I had the equivalent news about Winter.”

Cracken reached out and patted me on the knee. “But for your sense of Mirax’s being gone, I would not be overly alarmed, Captain Horn. She is overdue for reporting in, but not by so much time that I see a need to assume the worst.”

“I’m not assuming, sir.” I opened my fists and stared down at my empty hands. “She’s gone. Not dead, just gone! I was sleeping and heard her scream my name, and then she was gone.”

Cracken’s head came up. “You think this is more than a nightmare?”

“It was no nightmare.”

“Then part of your Jedi heritage?”

I stopped and thought hard. Did I maintain some sort of unconscious, untrained connection with Mirax through the Force? I didn’t know if that was possible.

“I don’t know, General, I just know she is gone. I can’t feel her anymore.” I looked toward Tycho. “Tell me you can feel Winter’s presence, please.”

Tycho smiled quickly. “I think I know what you mean, Corran, and I do feel her presence when we’re together, but it is not a constant thing. She’s off nursemaiding Anakin Solo and I have no idea where she is or how she is doing. Knowing her, I assume all is well. I can’t tell you, however, that I have the same bond with her that you share with Mirax.”

“Thanks for your honesty.” I turned back to Cracken. “Tell me where she last was.”

The general shook his head. “I cannot.”

“You must.”

“I can’t and won’t, Captain Horn.” Cracken’s face closed. “Think about it for a minute. I have agents in place who are very vulnerable.…”

“It’s Mirax’s vulnerability I’m worrying about here.”

“I know that, man, don’t think I don’t.” An edge crept into Cracken’s voice and sliced through my anger. “She’s in the same position you were when we inserted you and the Rogues here, into Coruscant. If I give you that information and you head out after her, you might just cause those who are dealing with her to think they have been set up. You have to trust her and trust that she will do the right thing.”

“And if that isn’t enough?” I found my hands had become fists again, so I forced them open once more. “You may not want to give me the information, General, but you can be ordered to do so.”

“Only by the New Republic’s ruling council.”

I gave him as hard a stare as I could muster. “I’m willing to petition them to get me that information. What I’ve done for the New Republic may have aged a bit, and nothing is as tiresome as yesterday’s hero, but I’ll burn whatever political capital I have to save Mirax.”

Cracken frowned at me. “But we don’t even know she needs saving yet.”

“You don’t know, General, I do.” I stood and offered both men a salute. “I respect you both very much, and I do not mean to be insubordinate, but my wife is in trouble and I will help her. I’d like your help, but absent that, don’t try to stop me.”