Iella couldn’t argue with Mirax there. The office entry-way had halfwalls topped with turned wooden pillars that upheld a reflective silver ceiling. A massive desk crossed the foyer. Off to the right a number of very comfortable-looking chairs surrounded a table in a small waiting area. Off to the left an open doorway led back into what, on the blueprints for the office, had been the research center, file room, utility closets, and small food prep station. Back behind the desk stood three doors to the partners’ offices.
Iella inclined her head toward the open doorway. “File room first, then Wooter’s office. If there is evidence here, we’ll find it.”
In reviewing the evidence collected from the raid on the Xenovet facility, Iella had realized there was very little at the actual site that hadn’t been gone over. She stepped back from the physical evidence and began to examine the environment in which the facility had been located. The presence of the Xenovet site was indeed a physical fact, but the circumstances surrounding its use were not. The prisoners had said that they thought they had been in that facility for years, but that conflicted with the history of the site according to area residents.
Or, if the prisoners had been there during that time, the Imps also ran the breeding business as a cover.
In widening her search for details concerning the Xenovet facility, Iella ran across a local attorney named Mem Wooter. Wooter had made a living during the Imperial era by acting as counsel for thieves, glitbiters, and other lowlifes being prosecuted by Imperial officials. The cases were unremarkable and Wooter got them assigned to him under the Imperial pretense of having a defense representative for all prisoners. He seemed good at making deals for clients and not pushing things where the Empire’s evidence in the case was especially weak.
While Wooter’s experience had been in minor criminal cases, when Xenovet went into receivership, Wooter had been appointed a trustee for the firm. He paid the site’s expenses out of his own pocket, looking to recoup his losses when the site was sold. The bankruptcy records Iella had pulled from Commenor computers appeared to be very tidy and perfectly in order, which was a marked contrast to Wooter’s filings in criminal cases. Still the bankruptcy court had no problem with him since he made no unreasonable demands on them and documented all his expenses. The case judge had even made a note in a file to the effect that if Wooter spent as much as the site cost, the court might just award him the property and close the file.
Mirax flipped on the glow panels in the file room and looked around at an endless array of shelves filled with datacard boxes. “Well, this won’t be an easy search.”
“No, but we’ll have plenty of time to do it.” The building’s blueprints had been cross-checked against utility records, showing that Wooter’s security precautions began and ended with the Kambis 9400. “No alarms, no surveillance equipment. We’re in the clear.”
Mirax frowned as she pulled one box of datacards from a shelf and set it on the long table running down the center of the rectangular room. “Wooter’s certainly a contradiction. Smart enough to have a good lock, too dumb to have a security system. Smart enough to handle the Xenovet facility for the Imps, dumb enough to display his wealth by taking this sort of office.”
“Makes things seem kind of obvious, doesn’t it?” Iella set her duraplast helmet down on the table. “But that’s what brought us here anyway, right?”
“True.” Mirax plucked a datacard from the box. “Look at this one. It’s the Xenovet accounts.”
Iella took Mirax’s datapad from her and slipped the card into it. “Encrypted, but I’ll make a copy of the data and we can slice it elsewhere.”
A shiver shook Mirax. “It’s too easy. There’s something about this I don’t like.”
Iella handed back the datacard and slipped the datapad into her coverall’s left thigh pocket. “You’re beginning to sound like Corran. Don’t tell me you have Jedi blood in you, too.”
“Worse, my father raised me to be suspicious.”
“Then he didn’t do a good enough job.” A man standing in the file room doorway slipped a blaster carbine from beneath his long nerf-hide coat and leveled it at them. “You’ll be coming with us.” He stepped into the room and to the right, allowing them to see another man similarly armed standing in the office foyer.
Iella slowly raised her hands and Mirax followed suit. Long years of training, first with CorSec and later with the Rebellion, told Iella that to make any sort of move would be suicidal. While she knew that going with the two of them meant the chances of her living through the encounter were slender, in the file room they had no place to run. Shooting us here would be easier than blasting a bantha in a turbolift box.
Mirax exited the room first with her hands held high. Iella followed close on her heels and was impressed that the man coming after her didn’t poke her in the back with the muzzle of his blaster carbine. Doing that would let me know where the weapon is, which might give me a chance to knock it out of the way and attack him. His caution showed he wasn’t some streetlurker out to prove how tough he was. He’s a professional, which means he’s not going to panic. That’s good.
In the hallway outside the office two more men joined the first two. They came out of the next office over—the legend on the door proclaimed them to be accountants. Iella smiled. “You ran surveillance gear in through air ducts so the power hookups would be billed through the other office, not Wooter’s. Nice.”
The first man directed them down the hallway to a doorway allowing access to the maintenance lifts.
Mirax nodded. “Very nice. I bet Wooter didn’t even know he was being watched. Just like Isard to think of that sort of thing.”
The lead man let the comment pass, but one of the others hitched for a second. The leader caught the hesitation as quickly as Iella did and stopped. “You two can keep quiet, or we stun you and carry you out of here in trash bins. Your choice.”
Another of the men summoned the freight lift as they assembled in the little tiled room that looked all the more dingy and cheap because of the contrast with the rest of the building. All four of the men were tall and strongly built—Iella guessed they trained on a high gravity world—but they were different enough that she didn’t figure them to be clones. They could have passed for stormtroopers had they been wearing armor, which made Iella think they were probably Special Intelligence operatives, which were just the sort of people Isard had employed on Coruscant and elsewhere to do her dirty work.
All six of them piled into the freight lift and it descended. The blaster carbines all retreated inside jackets for appearance’s sake, but Iella knew that making any sort of a move in the crowded lift would be insane. Crossfire might get some of them, but we’d be in the middle of it, which would hurt a lot.
The freight lift opened onto a freight dock area at the rear of the building. The scent of rotting garbage assaulted Iella’s nostrils, and a hand in the middle of her back propelled her forward. As she stepped from the turbolift she saw one of the Verpine maintenance workers from the lobby. One of their kidnappers flashed his carbine at the Verpine and the creature chittered and bowed his way into a retreat while the others led Iella and Mirax out into the alley behind the building.
A trio of wheeled trash bins along the right side of the alley narrowed it appreciably, and a pair of twitching legs sticking up out of the nearest open one brought a smile to several faces. Beyond the trash bins Iella saw a pair of black hovercars and assumed they were their destination. The doors on the hovercars opened and two more individuals exited each vehicle. She looked around and saw another alley leading off to the left about halfway down to the vehicles. The main street lay behind them, with two of the kidnappers between her and it. Another street capped the alley back beyond the hovercars.
If they get us into the hovercars, they can take us wherever they want to, interrogate us, and kill us. As desperate as she knew the situation to be, there wasn’t anything she could do about it. One kidnapper led the group, follo
wed by Mirax and a second guard. Iella came next with the last two kidnappers following her. And in this narrow alley, shooting us down would be easy. Still, if I had a diversion…
They’d moved past the first trash bin when the diversion came. The grubby figure of a man who had been digging in the bin skipped and capered his way past them, then asked each of them for money. “I’m not a glitbiter, just something to see me by.” He tugged on the sleeve of the first man in line, then swept on down, grabbing at Iella’s right hand. A snarled command from the man behind her brought a shocked look to the derelict’s face, then he backed off, pressing his spine against the middle trash bin.
“Wish I could help,” Iella said slowly.
“You will, kind lady.” The man lunged for the last kidnapper in line, slamming him across the alley and into the ferrocrete wall on the other side.
The kidnappers all turned as their comrade yelped and the men by the vehicles pointed down the alley toward them. Iella brought her right hand up and slid her index finger onto the trigger of the holdout blaster the derelict had slipped her. She shot the third kidnapper in the middle of his back, pitching him forward into the derelict and last kidnapper. She spun to shoot the second kidnapper, but Mirax had already scythed a booted foot through the man’s knee, dropping him to the ground. Iella shot the first kidnapper in the face, then grabbed Mirax’s hand and sprinted with her toward the hovercars.
The men at the vehicles didn’t fire at the running women—whether from surprise or out of fear of hitting their confederates Iella didn’t know and didn’t care. She cut into the alley with Mirax and started running full out. The alley broke to the right and they raced around the corner, then stopped.
“Sithspawn! Dead end.” Mirax slapped her hand against a ferrocrete wall. “Don’t have anything to blow a hole through it on that toolbelt, do you?”
“Sorry.”
“Never a husband around with a lightsaber when you need one, you know?”
“Yeah, having him or Wedge or all of Rogue Squadron here right now would be rather handy.” Iella slid back behind a fiberplast crate and hunkered down. She aimed her blaster twenty meters back at the alley mouth. “They’re going to be coming and they’re going to be angry.”
“I gathered that might be happening.” Mirax shifted another fiberplast crate around and started piling broken chunks of ferrocrete on the top. Smaller pieces she kept closer at hand.
Iella raised an eyebrow. “You’re going to throw ferrocrete at them?”
“Might not work well, but it will make me feel much better.” Mirax shrugged. “Besides, to hear Wedge tell it, rocks worked for the Ewoks.”
“Well, I’d be happy to see a battalion of those furry little critters right now.”
Down at the far end of the alley the white crescent of a face poked its way around the corner, then drew back quickly. The muzzle of a blaster carbine followed and sprayed lethal red energy darts through the narrow, ferrocrete alley. The bolts left guttering flames burning on the walls.
“I’d rather take you alive,” someone called around the corner.
Iella sighted in on the corner, dropped her aim point thirty centimeters, and moved it a meter out. “Don’t expect us to make this easy for you.”
“I didn’t think that was in the plan.”
Iella watched, waiting for them to make a move. A muffled thump rolled down the alley, but she couldn’t place the sound. The stuttered whine of blaster carbines going off followed, with a hail of red darts tattooing the end of the alley. Two men came rolling and stumbling past the alley mouth, driven forward and picked apart by concentrated blasterfire. They rolled to a stop in the middle of the alley, their clothes smoldering and their bodies limp.
Iella glanced at Mirax. “What’s going on?”
Mirax shook her head. “I have no idea, but I think I like it.”
The two of them remained down behind cover until a chittering filled the alley and two blaster-toting Verpines crouched over the dead men. They poked at one of the bodies, then waved someone else along. They remained over the bodies, looking at Mirax and Iella, but they made no move toward them, nor did they point their weapons in their direction.
An older man with a fringe of white hair on his head and a flowing white mustache ducked his head into the alley and pulled it back again. “Don’t shoot, I’m a friend.”
Iella set her blaster down. “We believe you.”
“Good.” The man stepped into the alley, letting his blaster dangle by a shoulder strap from his right shoulder. “You’re both unhurt?”
“We are.” Iella stood and folded her arms across her chest. “Who are you?”
The man smiled. “Baz Korral. Mirax’s father saved my life in the mines on Kessel, and he asked me to keep an eye on you. When one of my Verpines reported you’d been taken, we moved. Meant to be here sooner, but we came as fast as we could.”
Iella nodded. Verpines were able to communicate via energy waves produced and received by their antennae. They were the perfect species for creating a net of watchers. “Don’t worry, the guy you had in the alley had us covered.” She pointed at the holdout blaster. “He gave me this and got things moving.”
“Someone gave you a holdout blaster?” Korral’s white brows arrowed in at each other. “I had no one in the alley, no one with a blaster.”
Mirax frowned. “The derelict, he wasn’t yours?”
“Derelict?” Korral looked at his Verpines. Their antennae twitched, then one shook his head. Korral looked back at the two women. “The Verps in the main alley say there’s no one there but the guys who took you and their friends.”
Mirax looked at Iella. “Remember when I said this was too easy?”
Iella nodded. “I do.”
“Well, I was wrong.” Mirax shivered. “And I don’t think I like it at all.”
Chapter Nineteen
Wedge Antilles waited until the last of Rogue Squadron’s pilots sat down, then nodded to Nawara Ven to lower the lights in the briefing room. Wedge hit some keys on his datapad and the holoprojector it had been linked to served up the image of a solar system. At its heart lay a yellow star; seven planets orbited it, three outside an asteroid ring that marked the halfway point between the system’s outer edges and the star at its hub.
“This is the Corvis Minor system. The third and fourth planets are inhabited. The third is a semi-arid world with temperate zones at the poles, and the fourth is a water-rich tropical world. Both produce some exotic xenobiological products that sell as luxury commodities within the Hegemony and outside, though all trade outside the Hegemony flows through Liinade Three or Ciutric. The populations on these worlds are small and benign. A Victory-class Star Destroyer is on station around the fourth planet. It’s called Aspiration, came into the Imperial Fleet right after Endor, and joined Krennel when he installed himself as the Hegemony’s leader.”
Wedge hit another button and the image shifted. The focus moved past the asteroid belt to the fifth planet. Then it zoomed in, revealing a gas giant with a half-dozen moons in orbit. “This is the planet we’re concerned with, or, rather, one of its moons. Astronomical data on this section of the system is sketchy at best, but computer simulations indicate that this moon, Distna, named after the discoverer’s wife, may be hollow. It has half-standard gravity, a bit of an atmosphere, and could be the equivalent of a spacedock. It is possible that Krennel is building his Pulsar Station inside it, or even building the station into it.”
Tycho ran a hand over his jaw. “If the station is actually being built into that moon, the crust will act as far more effective armor than the Death Star ever had.”
Hobbie groaned. “How come we never have these superweapons that could eliminate a problem like that?”
Wedge smiled. “Because, Hobbie, we rely on pluck, courage, and skill instead of capital expenditure.”
“I guess, then, that the rumors of a raise are not true?”
Wedge joined the others in laughter,
then cleared his throat to settle them down. “Our mission is going to be a simple one. We’re guiding a T-Six-Five-R into the system. We’ll do fly-bys on Distna to collect what data we can, then we get back out. Because of the gas giant, the various moons, and the asteroid belt, jumping into that area is going to be difficult. We have a limited number of entrance and exit vectors, and they will change, so we need to work up a variety of exit solutions.”
Corran raised a hand. “Two questions.”
“Go ahead.”
“First, who gets stuck driving the snoopscoot?”
Wedge pointed to the Quarren pilot sitting next to Tycho. “For those of you who don’t know him, this is Nrin Vakil. He flew with the Rogues back before most of you joined the squadron. The New Republic has had him on other duties for a while, but he’s good with the recon ship. He’ll be Rogue Alpha for this run.”
Nrin raised a hand and Hobbie reached over to slap him on the shoulder. The other pilots nodded and murmured hellos. Wedge assumed Nrin would be interrogated by the others once the briefing was ended. Given Nrin’s penchant for being a bit dour, they’ll learn that whatever hardships they’ve faced, they were nothing compared to the earlier days of the squadron.
“Your second question, Corran?”
“The Vic around the fourth planet, it’s not going to be a problem?”
“Aspiration isn’t likely to come off-station because of the difficulty of navigating in and out of hyperspace for that sort of micro-jump. Thrawn may have used that sort of jumping to tactical advantage, but landing in here would mean the Vic couldn’t jump back out to defend the inhabited worlds without some very difficult maneuvering. Using sub-light drives to get out there would eliminate the problem, but it would also take far longer for transit than we’ll be in the system. If it does jump in, we use Distna to shield us from its guns, run to the asteroid belt, and hit an exit vector.”
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