28

Kirtan Loor stared at the glowing holographic text hanging in the air in front of him and found himself poised between unbridled terror and unbound elation. The message offered him a way out from beneath Fliry Vorru’s thumb, but only if he took steps that could easily anger Ysanne Isard. Doing that could destroy him. But doing nothing clearly will destroy me.

The text, after it had been decrypted and decoded, carried a simple yet explosive message. Twenty ships—New Republic and privately owned freighters—would be traveling from Thyferra with a shipment of bacta bound for Imperial Center. Rogue Squadron was to meet them in the Alderaan system—as if all the bacta in the galaxy could heal that wound—and guide them in on the return trip to Imperial Center. The message contained the times and coordinates, easily allowing for the interception of the convoy.

If he destroyed the convoy, he would advance the Imperial cause beyond even Ysanne Isard’s wildest dreams. He had the means to do just that at his disposal. His earlier plans to substitute a look-alike group of fighters for Rogue Squadron and have them strafe the squadron’s base required him to put together a full dozen X-wing fighters. They would be hawk-bats among granite slugs if he set them on the freighters. He was more than willing to do that, blasting every single freighter from the Pulsar Skate to the Rebels’ Pride into free-floating atoms.

He had only one problem: he wasn’t supposed to know what the message said.

Imperial spies in service to the Rebellion had been given a variety of ways to make contact with their superiors. Certain public terminals, for example, had special coding that routed messages along secure lines to specific destinations. A datadisk could be recorded and left in any number of blind-drops for pickup by agents. Face-to-face meetings could be and had been arranged, even with the highest profile agents around. Whatever was necessary to move information would be done.

The Rebels were not without countermeasures, and they were effective when they wanted to stop information from getting out. Fortunately Coruscant was still more of an Imperial world than it was a Rebel one. While Rebel computer code experts had gone through the planetary computer system and shut down many of the most obvious stealthways into it, they had not found them all. The Rebels would clearly have preferred to avoid using the Imperial computers at all, but running Coruscant without them was impossible, so compromises were made.

The Imperial agent in Rogue Squadron had resorted to one of the most simple stealthways in the system to get the message out. A coded message was created and saved as usual, then deleted. The command used to delete the message was a batch command, one commonly used to purge a month’s worth of old messages at a time. When the computer asked for a date from which to begin the purge, the agent gave it the date and time, down to the second, the message had been created. The ending date for the purge was the same date and time.

The deletion routine in the system took that information and began special processing. A copy of the message was whisked away to a randomly chosen memory sector and there encrypted. At the original memory location where the message had been stored, zeroes were written to erase all traces of the message, then corrupted copies of other documents were written into its place. A scan of files would show documents and programs in the normal process of being overwritten.

No trace of the coded message was left in its original location. The agent was safe.

The encrypted message was transferred through a series of accounts and finally ended up on a datadisk that was dumped into a blind-drop. One of Loor’s Special Intelligence operatives retrieved it and brought it to him. Loor himself decrypted and decoded it. He told himself he did so because messages from that agent had normally traveled directly to Ysanne Isard. The fact that he had ended up with a copy meant the normal channels of communication were closed and he wanted to make certain delays did not prevent action from being taken to capitalize on the information.

Had I forwarded it to Iceheart blindly I would not be caught in this trap. Because the rendezvous would take place in less than three days, there was an open question as to whether the message would reach Isard in time for her to do anything about it. Loor felt fairly confident she would act to destroy the convoy, and his own squadron had enough firepower to chew up the twenty-ship convoy with little problem. A pair of proton torpedoes would destroy most of the freighters, which meant a full dozen could die in the first pass. Another volley of torpedoes would cripple or kill the others, and the X-wings could follow up with lasers to finish off the survivors.

Probably not flashy enough for her, but if my X-wings were marked up to be Rogue Squadron ships—and the news-nets have been full of examples that making last-minute changes to match the paint jobs will be easy enough—I can sow more discord and distrust between the people and the Rebel government. Iceheart would like that.

The problem with doing just that, however, was that the operation did not help him eliminate Vorru as a threat. If, instead of destroying the convoy, he hijacked it to another system, he would have control of a very large shipment of a vital commodity. While Vorru had a solid lock on the bacta black market on Imperial Center, there were other worlds clamoring for the medicine. If he used his supply correctly he could enrich himself. He would betray Vorru to the Rebels—not to the government on Imperial Center, but to the constituent governments on the various Rebel homeworlds, thereby increasing distrust between them and the rulers on Imperial Center.

Or I can enrich myself, buy a world all my own, and put Boba Fett on retainer to slay my enemies. That thought brought a smile to Loor’s face. The list would not be long, but it would not be an easy one to complete. A fitting challenge for a man with his skills.

Loor closed his eyes and gently massaged them beneath his eyelids. As satisfying as enriching himself would be, he realized he had to be very careful. Killing Vorru and Isard would provide him short-term pleasure, but he had to be looking at his long-term position. His first step was to guarantee his survival, his second to maximize his potential for power. Hijacking the bacta worked just as well to hurt the Rebellion as did destroying it, but it left him vulnerable to accusations by Isard that he wasn’t devoting himself to his duty of destroying the Rebellion. She could easily see the hijacking as a move to make him independent of her, and she would not like that.

I can always argue that I wanted to get out from under Vorru’s influence and nothing more. He doubted that such an argument would insulate him from her anger and retribution when she found out what he had done. And he knew she would find out—it was a question how much time he had until she did. If he could keep her in the dark for a month, either he would have gained enough power that he did not need to fear her, or she will have had me killed.

He realized once again that only by escaping her could he possibly survive. This gives me no choice.

He carefully began to compose a message. He told her of his intent to use the duplicate Rogue Squadron to “eliminate” the convoy. He would later argue that he would have said “destroy” if that’s what he had meant to do. Time being of the essence, I can’t give her the whole plan, I can merely let her know I am dealing with the problem.

He scanned his message, then prepared it for sending. He almost sent it immediately, then hesitated. No, if I send it now, she could possibly countermand my orders. I’ll give her a day’s warning. By the time she considers what will happen, it will all be done.

And Kirtan Loor would be one giant step closer to being free.