The Krytos Trap

by Michael A. Stackpole

  Iella shrugged. “And if I don’t want to be reasonable?”

  Halla winced, then sat back in her white high-backed chair. “Idealists should not be in this business, you know.”

  “And your point is?”

  “The Duros thing has bothered me, too. I can grant that Tycho might have pulled that name from Corran’s file just to annoy him, but that would be very risky for him to do. The trail Tycho has left has shown him to be very careful, so I don’t see him throwing out that sort of taunt. Therefore I can imagine that he really did meet with Lai Nootka. And if that’s true, I have to wonder about our inability to find Nootka or any record of his presence here on Coruscant.”

  “So even though you believe Tycho was working for the Empire, you think Nootka’s disappearance may be evidence of someone making sure Tycho’s perfidy is obvious?” Iella frowned. “Who? Why?”

  “Good, obstruction-of-justice questions to answer.” Halla sighed. “You want to find Nootka, right?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  Halla sat forward and fingered a small black wafer of silicon. “Do it. And take this—it’s a code chip that will let you bring your airspeeder into the upper-level security garage. You can take the turbolift down to the court from there. It’ll save Diric from having to go in and out with the courtroom crowds from now on.”

  Iella accepted it from her and smiled. “Things are just going to continue getting crazier, aren’t they?”

  “I’m afraid so.” Halla visibly shivered. “I’m very much afraid so.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Aided by the Trandoshan’s healthy shove, Corran flew through the darkened doorway. Unable to see anything, he curled himself into a ball and hoped he didn’t land on his head. He smashed his shins into something hard, then bounced down onto his right shoulder before continuing his roll. He hit more things, most of which cried out, and all of which gave way, then came to an abrupt stop against something very solid.

  Corran opened his eyes and in the dim light made out the smiling, bearded face of a positively huge man. He’d come to rest against the man’s shin and thigh—clearly the man had dropped to one knee to stop Corran’s tumble through the room. Back along his flight path Corran heard the muttered curses of people he’d knocked down.

  The bearded man stood and dragged Corran to his feet. “Quite the entrance.”

  “I had help in making it.” Corran plucked at the shoulders of his tan canvas tunic and tried to settle it in place. The bulky garment extended all the way to his knees. The sleeves ran to mid-forearm, but that was because the shoulder seam started well below the curve of his deltoids. Naked beneath it, Corran felt a little uncomfortable. He knew that was part of the psychological war waged by Isard on him and the other prisoners—deny them human clothing and you deny them a little piece of their humanity.

  The big man nodded. “The Trandoshan doesn’t like anyone. I’m Urlor Sette.” He offered Corran his hand. Sette was missing the last two fingers of his right hand but didn’t seem bashful or embarrassed about it.

  Corran met the man’s firm grip with a solid one of his own. “Corran Horn.”

  “Glad to make your acquaintance.” Sette pointed off to the left. “Come on, I’ll take you to the Old Man.” The big man’s voice carried with it equal measures of respect and affection, reminding Corran of how he’d often called Gil Bastra “the Old Man.”

  Must be the nominal leader among the prisoners here. Corran realized that his being thrust into the general Lusankya population could have been another ploy by Isard to get him to reveal information he’d not given up during interrogation. Because he did not have a clear memory of what he had actually said while being chemically debriefed, he didn’t know what she might be looking to confirm or uncover. For all I know, this is an elaborate charade. I will have to be on my guard.

  Urlor led Corran out of the area near the doorway and deeper into the cell complex. It appeared to have been ground and drilled out of solid rock. Thick dust coated the floor and hung in Urlor’s wake like ground-covering fog. The irregular rock walls and ceiling had pockets of luminous lichen clinging to them. Their lime-green light gave the dust an eerie glow, and greyed out the flesh of those standing about.

  Corran followed Urlor into a side chamber with an entrance low enough that even he had to duck his head. Beyond the threshold the big man straightened up and moved aside. On the opposite side of the circular room, barely six meters from the entrance, an older, white-haired and bearded man sat up and hung his legs over the edge of a hammock braided together from darkened strips of tunic canvas. Corran immediately had a vague sense that he’d seen the man before, or a holograph of him, but if so, it was a long time ago, and he couldn’t place him.

  “Sir, this is Corran Horn. They just delivered him to us.”

  The older man stood and straightened his tunic, then peered closely at Corran. He felt as if under the scrutiny of his first drill instructor at the Corellian Security Force Academy. The effect was not wholly unpleasant in that it reinforced the leadership role into which the old man had been cast. “Come here, son, let me see you close up.”

  Corran closed the gap between them and felt Urlor drop in behind him, ready to prevent him from doing any harm to the old man. “I’m with Rogue Squadron, a lieutenant.”

  “You have the look of a pilot about you—size, anyway. You’ve got a good leader in Antilles—assuming Skywalker’s not back in charge there.”

  “No sir, he isn’t. Wedge Antilles is still in charge, and is a commander now.”

  The older man nodded, then squinted at Corran’s face. “You’re from Corellia?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did I know your grandfather?”

  Corran shrugged. “His name is Rostek Horn. He was with CorSec.”

  The old man shook his head and straightened up again. “No, I was thinking of someone else, from the Clone Wars. I don’t recall Rostek Horn, though I might have met him once or twice. It’s possible.”

  Though the man qualified his statement, Corran felt he was being polite instead of indecisive. Although his age had given him white hair and wrinkled skin, clearly the man’s mental faculties were not suffering from the ravages of age. The old man knew exactly who it was he thought Corran looked like, and he also knew that he’d never met Corran’s grandfather. That clarity of mind impressed Corran, as did the mannerly qualification of his firmly voiced denial.

  The old man extended his hand to Corran. “My name’s Jan.” His dark eyes flicked up toward Urlor. “Despite what he will tell you, there’s no rank here. That was for when we were people. Now we’re just here.”

  “Pleased to meet you, sir.” Corran shook the man’s hand and found his grip firm even though his hands were a bit bony.

  Jan sat back in the hammock. “You say Antilles has finally accepted a promotion?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “He always seemed level-headed. Good officer material. And who’s commanding the fleet?”

  Corran hesitated. “I’m not sure how much of that you want me to discuss, sir.”

  A smile spread across Jan’s face. “Very good, my boy. If you’re in here it’s because Isard has sucked you dry like the spider she is, but caution is good.” He glanced down. “It’s just that some of us have been in here since Yavin and, well, we wonder about how the war is going. We’ve had others through here who have told us a lot. We know, for example, that the Emperor is dead and with him another Death Star. And we know about the Ssi-ruuk. But news has been pretty spare in the last year and a half—you’re the first military man who’s not an Imp who has ended up here for about that long. The few civilians who’ve been here have been interesting, but their knowledge of how the Rebellion is going has been filtered through Imp news sources.”

  Urlor landed a hand heavily on Corran’s right shoulder. “Imps would have us believe Rogue Squadron is dead and gone. Died at a place called Borleias.”

  “Sure, in some Im
p’s lum dream.” Corran turned, slipping from beneath Urlor’s grip, so he could see both men at the same time. “Rogue Squadron did get hit hard at Borleias, but that was more the product of bad intel going in than it was anything the Imps actually did to us. The fact is, though, that inside a month after we got bloodied, we were back and took Borleias away from the Imps. And, from there, we staged for the invasion of Coruscant.”

  His smile grew broad as pride swelled inside him. “Rogue Squadron went into Coruscant and managed to bring the shields down. I don’t remember much, but I know our fleet arrived and I was evacuated by Isard as she fled the planet, so I have to figure the New Republic now rules Coruscant. It’s ours.”

  “It is yours because we gave it to you.”

  Corran looked to his right, toward the doorway, and saw an obese man squeezing his way through it. The tunic, which was black like the man’s thinning hair, could barely contain the man’s bulk. Anger filled the man’s brown eyes for a second, then melted away as he straightened up and tugged at the hem of his sleeves. “You inherited a sick world, a dying world.”

  Jan bowed his head in the heavy man’s direction. “This is General Evir Derricote, late of Imperial service. He is the ranking Imperial here among us.”

  Corran immediately realized that a secondary reason for the lack of titles among the Rebel prisoners was to allow them to further differentiate themselves from the Imps in Lusankya. “I’m Corran, and I was at Borleias.”

  “Then you saw me smash the little invasion fleet you sent against me.”

  “Yeah, I did, and I lost friends at that battle.” Corran balled a fist and arced it toward Derricote’s bullet head, but it never landed. Urlor lunged forward, grabbed the collar of Corran’s tunic, and hauled him backward. Corran’s feet left the floor and the canvas rasped against the flesh of his armpits as the big man held him up. “Hey! That hurts!”

  Urlor kept his voice even. “There’s a rule—if we beat up on Imps, the staff here beats up on the Old Man.”

  What I almost did. Corran’s mouth hung open as if to let the twisting sensation in his stomach a chance to escape. He nodded once and Urlor put him back down. Corran turned to Jan and bowed his head. “I won’t let it happen again.”

  “Spirit is good, Corran, very good.” Jan coughed lightly into his hand. “The general here was the one who told us of Rogue Squadron’s defeat at Borleias. He left out your apparent return and victory.”

  Derricote sniffed. “Had I still been on Borleias there would have been more Rebel blood shed.”

  “Not likely. We pinpointed the power generator at the Alderaan Biotics facility and severed the conduit that sent the auxiliary power to your shield generators and ion cannons. A handful of TIEs survived our second raid, and those pilots surrendered when they flew home and found their base in our hands.” Corran shrugged. “And as for Coruscant, the fact that you use the word ‘inherit’ to describe what we did, well, it means that the world is ours now. It might be sick, but it’s better off in our hands than it ever was in yours.”

  “I doubt the dying think that.”

  “I doubt the dying blame the Rebels for their problems.”

  Derricote shrugged, and a shiver ran through the layer of fat around his middle. “It does not matter to me who they blame. When the histories are written, this shall be but a momentary disturbance in the Empire’s epic.”

  Jan rocked to his feet. “That will be up to the historians to determine, won’t it, General?”

  “When I get out and put together my memoirs, you will fare well, Jan.” Derricote ducked his head and slid his body back out through the doorway. He paused halfway through, and Corran thought for a moment he might have been stuck, but the fat man turned to look at Jan again. “Before I forget what I came here for, a batch is ready.”

  “Thank you. I’ll have Urlor organize a party to help you decant it.” Jan nodded at Urlor and the large man stooped to force Derricote from the doorway, then followed him out. The older man smiled. “The general is a recent addition to our population, but he has proved himself useful in that he’s good with biotics. He’s managed to ferment a relatively mild ale here, providing us with a forbidden pleasure that many of us had forgotten.”

  “You trust him and drink it?”

  Jan shrugged. “He drinks enough of it that if it were lethal, he’d have long since been dead. Despite being proud of his Imperial service, he seems somewhat perplexed by his imprisonment here. He thought he had fulfilled the parameters of a project for Iceheart, but she disagreed and he’s here.”

  Corran nodded. “I can understand his confusion. I don’t know why I’m here either.”

  “It may be temporary. We get a lot of transients who are transferred out in bulk. Traffic into and out of Lusankya seems to be relatively rare.”

  “That’s not good news. If this place is truly a backwater planet, the chances of our being found by the Alliance are tiny.”

  Jan fingered the knots in the braided canvas cord that gathered his hair into a ponytail. “I’ve been here for, as nearly as I can determine, seven years, and no one has found me yet.” His laugh came warm and natural, not tinged with the sort of madness Corran had heard in Derricote’s laugh. “There’s always tomorrow.”

  “Right.” Corran sighed and looked around the small chamber. “Urlor’s acquainted me with one rule. Are there others?”

  “We do what we’re told when we’re told to do it. Rations are not great but are not starvation fare, either. Produce is seasonal but not so peculiar as to let us pinpoint where we are. I think there’s an agrocombine maintained to supply us, though none of us down here ever see it. We assume there are lower grade prisoners who are used to maintain it, but we’re in the deepest level, which has the highest security. At least that’s where we think we are. Could be there’s something more stringent, but I’ve not seen it.”

  “What do they have us do?”

  “Hard labor make-work.” The old man sighed. “Big rocks are made into little rocks, little rocks are made into gravel, and gravel is moved from one point to another. It is painfully and mind-numbingly boring, designed to crush hope and make the days meld one into another. It drives some of the men insane.”

  Corran lowered his voice. “Anyone ever escape?”

  “Not quite that insane, son.”

  “No one has tried?”

  “Few have tried, no one has made it.”

  “To your knowledge.”

  Jan’s mouth opened, then he shut it and nodded. “To my knowledge—you are correct. At any rate, no one has made it since I’ve been here.”

  Corran frowned. “Those who have tried, they get brought back here?”

  “Parts of them, anyway.” The old man pointed vaguely off deeper into the caverns. “The Imps have a chamber where they keep the skulls and other relics of their dead. We smuggle ours into the mines where we work and bury them.”

  “So escape is impossible?”

  Jan winked at him as he dropped his voice into a conspiratorial whisper. “I never said impossible, I just said it hadn’t been done successfully.”

  Corran laughed quietly. “I’m with Rogue Squadron. Impossible is our stock in trade, and success is what we deliver.”

  Jan slapped him on the shoulder. “Now I’m thinking it’s a pity I didn’t know your grandfather. With a grandson like you, I’m sure we would have gotten along famously.”

  “I have a feeling you’re right, sir.” Corran nodded solemnly. “And being his grandson, I’m going to do everything I can to get out of and off of this rock.”

  The old man smiled. “From the moment I saw you, Corran Horn, I somehow expected nothing less.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Wedge felt more trapped by wearing a dress uniform and being in the witness box than he ever had in action against the Empire. He didn’t see Halla Ettyk as a simulacrum of Ysanne Isard or an enemy warrior with whom he would be doing combat. The pleasant expression on her face belied eit
her of those descriptions. Moreover, Wedge knew he had entered her arena—for him to think about defeating her here was as foolish as for her to imagine she could best him in a dogfight.

  This is all about survival—mine and Tycho’s survival.

  The prosecutor looked up from her datapad. “Commander Antilles, how did you come to be on Coruscant before our forces had taken possession of it?”

  “My squadron and I were inserted into Coruscant in a pathfinder capacity. We were here to evaluate the world from a number of points of view to determine if, how, and when the Alliance might want to attempt to take it.”

  “I see. What was the security classification on this operation?”

  “The highest. If it had been known that we were coming or that we were here, we would have been dead.”

  Halla nodded sagely. “In preparation for sending your squadron out, what role did Captain Celchu play?”

  Wedge shook his head. “He played no part.”

  “Why not?”

  “Objection.” Nawara stood at the defense table. “Calls for a conclusion.”

  “It goes to the witness’s state of mind, Admiral.”

  Admiral Ackbar shook his head. “Counselor Ven, please do not object to questions calling for answers that Captain Celchu’s commanding officer should know. Overruled. You may answer the question, Commander.”

  Wedge nodded. “Captain Celchu was seen as a security risk by General Cracken, so he was not involved in the preparation for the mission.”

  “Then how did Captain Celchu end up oh Coruscant?”

  This is not going to sound good. Wedge sighed. “I do not like covert missions. The things you don’t know always seem to be the things that get you into trouble. If any of our people got picked up on the mission, it would be logical for the Imps to conclude there were more of us present, and hunt us down. I wanted someone on Coruscant whom I could trust to get me out of difficult situations.”