10

Iella Wessiri sat back in her chair and closed her eyes in spite of the sandpaper feeling of lids sliding down over eyeballs. She rolled her shoulders and let her head droop back a bit. She slowly worked her head to the right and left, loosening the muscles of her neck, then took in a deep breath, held it, and slowly exhaled.

With the next deep breath she caught the scent of hot and strong caf. Her eyes snapped open and she spun her chair toward the doorway. “Wedge?”

Mirax smiled sheepishly and extended a steaming mug toward her. “Sorry to disappoint you, Iella, but I figured you could use this when you called and canceled dinner this evening.”

“Thanks, I can use it.” She accepted the mug from Mirax and inhaled the steam. “Where’d you get this caf? I haven’t smelled anything this strong since … since I left Corellia.”

Mirax stepped in from the doorway and Whistler warbled triumphantly as he rolled into Iella’s office. His head turned in a circle, and he stopped and extended toward her a small bag clutched in his pincer. A tone ran from low to high, and Iella accepted the bag with a gracious bow of her head.

Mirax smiled. “Whistler seems to recall the settings you CorSec folks used on your caf distiller back on Corellia. I don’t allow him to make it that strong at home, but I gather he still brews it that way at the squadron. I found a caf shop that let him play with the controls in return for some exotic blends I managed to get my hands on. The result is in your mug.”

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.”