23

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.”

Whistler reeled off a series of sharp bleats.

“Yes, I will tell her.” Emtrey looked down at Iella. “Whistler says discrediting Tycho will discredit Rogue Squadron. If Tycho is convicted, Commander Antilles will be distracted. Tycho’s conviction could also cause an inquiry into the events of the first assault on Borleias. He could be blamed for the disaster, absolving the Bothan General of his mistake, and that might make the Bothans feel they can grab for more power.”

“I can follow that, but it’s too risky a return for Iceheart to take an interest in it. There has to be something else.”

“There is, Mistress Wessiri.” Emtrey lowered his hands to near his hips. “Whistler says Ysanne Isard would do it because she’s cruel.”

That idea landed in Iella’s gut and sat there like one of Hoth’s frozen continents. “You know, Whistler, you may have something there. Toying with an innocent man like that is exactly what she would do, especially when it meant that the Alliance was dancing to a tune she called. Of course, that doesn’t prove Tycho is innocent, but thwarting her is enough to make sure I keep digging until I learn what’s really going on, one way or another.”