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.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Corran scratched at his right ear, flaking off some crusted flesh. “Yeah, I know it sounds as if I got hit harder than I did, but I’m convinced I’m right.” He looked at Jan. “I think it’s a good shot at getting out of here, or at least one that has to be explored.”
“I agree.”
Urlor shook his head. “Too far-fetched.”
“Which is why I want to test my theory when we’re down in the mine.”
Urlor’s massive left hand stroked his beard. “Will you give this foolishness up if your experiment fails?”
Jan raised an eyebrow and glanced at Corran. “Will you?”
Corran hesitated before answering. Though he had not blacked out, the Emdee droid had kept him in the infirmary overnight for observation—at least Corran assumed it was overnight, having had no way of judging the passage of time. Corran had gone over in his mind what had happened and came to two conclusions. The first, which no one doubted, was that the guard had singled him out because someone had mentioned his desire to escape. Though Corran hadn’t mentioned it to anyone other than Jan and Urlor, the questions he had asked of the inmates would have been enough to alert even the most dense of individuals to his plans.
The second thing he had concluded, and had spent the last week attempting to convince Jan and Urlor was true, was that they were all upside down. The technology for creating and negating artificial and real gravity was ancient. Ships of all sizes and stripes could generate their own gravity. Reversing the gravity in the complex would lead any escapees to assume that by going up they’d be getting closer to the surface and freedom when, in fact, they’d be getting farther from it and killing their chances of escape. If Corran had heard troopers marching past, any escapee would run full on into at least one level occupied by soldiers. Even if he didn’t get captured, by the time he realized what had happened, he’d have a long way to go just to get back to the prison level, much less go beyond it to freedom.
He shook his head. “No, I’ll still go even if my experiment is unsuccessful. I have no doubt that I’m right—the experiment is just to convince you I’m right.”
Urlor folded his arms across his chest. “Why do you care if we believe you?”
“If I’m right, you can come with me.”
The big man held up his ruined right hand. “You’d find a cripple of little use to you. I’ve learned to become patient. I’ll wait for you to come back.”
“You’re wrong there.” Corran looked at Jan. “How about you?”
The older man sat silently on his billet for a moment, then shook his head rather firmly. “Forgive me. There is no way I can go, but I allowed myself to indulge in the fantasy.”
“You’re strong. You could make it.”
“I appreciate your assessment of me, Corran, but it is overgenerous.” Jan shrugged. “Besides, just as a desire to keep me safe prevents our people from harming our Imperial compatriots, so a desire to keep our people safe prevents me from joining you. If I escape, Iceheart will kill the lot of us. I’ll remain here and keep them safe until you can bring help back.”
Corran frowned. “So neither of you will go?”
“No.” Urlor shook his head. “You’ll be on your own.” Unspoken in that sentence was the conviction there was no way to guarantee that the Imps didn’t have spies among the Alliance prisoners.
And my traveling alone means that if I’m a spy, I won’t be taking anyone else with me. “Don’t worry, I’m no Tycho Celchu, nor will I let myself be betrayed by one another time.”
Jan’s eyes narrowed. “Tycho Celchu? He was here once for several months. They called him out one day and he vanished. Was he a traitor?”
“He’s the reason I’m here. He gave the Imps override code data on a Headhunter I was flying. They took control and I’m here.” Corran forced his balled fists open. “Isard told me Tycho is on trial for my murder, so justice does prevail.”
Urlor scratched at his jaw. “Celchu was a sleeper, wasn’t he?”
As much as Corran hated Tycho, that description sent a shiver down his spine. Within the prisoner population were individuals who were suffering severe shock from their interrogations. Most were ambulatory, but not much beyond that. In the brief time he’d been in the general population he’d seen one or two of them recover to a certain extent, but their attention spans and short-term memory were short and shot respectively. They did seem to get better, but only gradually.
“I believed he was, but that must have been an act. If you think about it, being a sleeper meant many people would speak in front of him. When he recovered he’d have folks trying to help him with his memory.” Jan shook his head. “When he got to the point where he should have been better, they pulled him out and debriefed him. He had me fooled.”
“He had a lot of people fooled, Wedge Antilles included.” Corran nodded firmly. “He’s not fooling folks any longer, though. Just goes to show the Empire doesn’t win them all, not by a long shot. And if my experiment works, we’ll give them one more loss to account for.”
In some ways Wedge was surprised by his reaction to the display of hospitality Koh’shak put on for his benefit. He found it both barbaric and somehow naive. An area had been cleared near the Alliance ships. Opalescent glow-stones—technological lamps designed to look like natural stones—had been brought out from homes and arranged in a circular pattern. While red and gold highlights played through them, the illumination they produced was coldly blue and white. It made the humans into pale ghosts and rendered the Twi’leks as cyanotic ice creatures.
Rogue Squadron and the ships’ crews had been invited to the celebration. The visitors arrayed themselves in a circle that put them five meters from the outer edge of the glow-stone circle. Twi’leks from various clans interspersed themselves among the visitors, with one who spoke passable Basic acting as interpreter for two or three others. Wedge harbored no illusions about what was going on—his people were being interrogated, albeit politely. Their stories would be compared at Twi’lek councils, and decisions would be made about the future of Ryloth based on what the Twi’leks learned.
Servants passed around the outside of the circle, offering the visitors food, drink, and gifts. The musicians who had been assembled opposite him played a variety of string and wind instruments producing notes that ran up and down on a thirteen-note scale. Wedge found the music only marginally painful, while Liat Tsayv and Aril Nunb seemed to be moving in sync with notes he couldn’t hear. Out behind the cold spectral light cast by the glowstones, life continued as usual in Kala’uun. People walking by gawked for a moment or two, and many braintails—or lekku, as Wedge had learned they were called in Rylothean—twitched with silent messages about the assembly.
Wedge didn’t really have eyes for much of what was happening outside
the visitors’ circle, primarily because of what was going on at its heart. A lithe, petite Twi’lek female dancer spun and leaped through the air. Her tattooed lekku lashed out like whips, then whirled down and enfolded her like ivy. The tails of the loincloth she wore similarly clung to her body, sliding away as she whirled, to reveal silken flesh over taut and powerful muscles. She gave Wedge a pixie-wink, prompting a smile from him, then she twirled off to charm another of the visitors.
Cazne’olan draped a braintail over Wedge’s shoulder. “Sienn’rha is the only positive thing Bib Fortuna ever accomplished. He stole her from her darkside family and meant to present her to Jabba the Hutt. In preparation for that he had her taught to dance as well as she does. She was saved from Jabba by your Lukesky’walker. She always dances wonderfully, but this night she approaches perfection because of the gratitude she feels to the Alliance.”
“She is spectacular.” Wedge could not deny that he found her dance exciting and even stimulating, but that bothered him just a bit. By seeing her as being so seductive and beautiful, and reacting to her on a physiological level, it was very easy for him to forget she was a living, thinking creature. That made it deceptively simple for him to see how the Imperials found objectifying and dehumanizing other races justifiable—if they seem like animals or appeal to you on an animal level, clearly they are animals.
Cazne’olan tapped him on the shoulder. “It would be possible for a private dance to be arranged for you, my friend.”
“I appreciate the offer, but…”
Cazne’olan’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Sienn’rha asked me to convey that suggestion to you, on her behalf. She is well aware of your history and considers you quite a hero.”
“I see.” Wedge considered for a moment all the offer implied and felt sorely tempted. Sienn’rha’s sensuous beauty, from her full lips and dark eyes to her fluid and athletic grace, hinted at pleasures he’d not had time to enjoy for… If I can’t remember off the top of my head, it’s been well and nigh too long. But is here and now, with Sienn’rha, the time to change that?
Wedge smiled at Cazne’olan. “Convey to her my profound appreciation of her offer, and my sincere regret at having to refuse. Ultimately I am here as a representative of the Alliance. Perhaps some time when I am merely here as myself…”
“She will understand, I think.”
“I hope so.” Wedge frowned for a moment. “I have a question to ask you about something you said a moment ago.”
A lek twitched. “Ask.”
“You pronounce my name as Wedgan’tilles and Nawara Ven’s name as Nawar’aven, running them together. When you mentioned Bib Fortuna, you distinctly broke his name up. Why?”
Cazne’olan nodded slowly and let his lekku slip from Wedge’s shoulder. “Bib Fortuna was a member of the Una clan. Because of his predations on his own people, he was cast out. The joining of personal and clan names is, among us, a sign of belonging. Breaking the names apart is a statement of the distance between that person and his people.”
Wedge nodded. “How do you decide what a name will become? Nawara is a member of the Ven clan, but you make his surname into ‘aven’ when you pronounce it.”
“And I know your surname is Antilles, but I break it in two.”
“Exactly.”
The Twi’lek laughed lightly. “Naming conventions are determined by a venerable set of rules—superstitions almost—that transform names into auspicious omens. Ven, for example, translates into Basic as ‘silver.’ Nawara would translate roughly as ‘speaker’ or ‘tongue,’ either of which suggests a gifted negotiator. However, if his name were pronounced as Nawara’ven, because of peculiarities in Rylothean, his name would mean ‘tarnished silver.’ By changing the pronunciation slightly we retain the correct meaning.”
“I’m impressed.” Wedge smiled openly. “So, what does my name mean, the way you pronounce it?”
The Twi’lek shrugged. “There is no good, direct translation of foreign names, but Wedgan’tilles comes close to ‘slayer of stars.’”
“I like it.”
“It is much to be preferred to the alternative suggested by the Basic pronunciation.”
“Which is?”
“Difficult to translate.”
“Give me a rough go at it.”
Cazne’olan’s braintails twitched sharply. “Being generous, it is ‘One so foul he could induce vomiting in a rancor.’”
Wedge shuddered. “I prefer your pronunciation, I think.”
A gentle vibration running through the ground forestalled further lessons about Twi’lek culture. He assumed the vibration was produced by the raising of the portcullis, so he looked off toward where the tunnel entered the Kala’uun cavern. Boiling up out of it, in three pairs, came a half-dozen Uglies. The X-wing fighter’s distinctive S-foils jutted out from the sides of a TIE fighter’s ball cockpit. The stabilizers had been fastened to a collar that surrounded the cockpit, and as the fighters maneuvered and cavorted in the air above the assembly, he saw the S-foils rotating around the cockpit, making the design similar in principle to that of the B-wing fighter in service with the Alliance.
Never seen those before. Must be a homegrown Twi’lek design. The S-foils collapsed into a single wing on either side of the cockpit, then landing skids extended from the bottom of the collar and the peculiar ships descended. They landed in a rough semicircle facing the Alliance ships, easily menacing all the visitors.
One of the cockpit hatches opened and a huge Twi’lek pilot emerged from the top of the sphere. He wore a black Imperial flight suit, but a scarlet loincloth and cloak had been added to make it seem closer to native warrior attire. His lekku had been tattooed with a variety of sinuous and serpentine shapes which Wedge supposed were Rylothean glyphs, but he could not even guess at their significance.
As the warrior strode over to the circle, the music died and the servants shrank back. Sienn’rha stopped her dance and retreated into Wedge’s shadow. Wedge stood, with Cazne’olan on one side and the great, lumpish Koh’shak on the other. As the warrior came closer, Wedge saw he was positively huge, easily forty centimeters taller than Wedge and massing at least another thirty kilos. How he actually managed to jam himself into the TIE cockpit Wedge couldn’t imagine.
The warrior stepped through a quickly widening gap in the circle, then stopped five meters from Wedge. “I am Tal’dira, first among Twi’lek warriors. You, the lekku-less who wears the clothes of a warrior, you are Wedge Antilles?”
Wedge did his best to ignore the faint retching sound Tal’dira made in the back of his throat as he pronounced Wedge’s name. “I am Wedgan’tilles.”
The Twi’lek warrior raised an eyebrow at Wedge’s reply. “And you have come here for ryll?”
“I have come for ryll kor.” Wedge’s reply won a gasp from Koh’shak and a lekku-twitching from Tal’dira. “Is there a problem?”
“None, Wedge Antilles, if—” Tal’dira drew a pair of slender vibroblades from sheaths hidden in his bandoleer, “—you are willing to fight to prove you are a warrior. A warrior should deal with warriors. Win the fight and the kor shall be yours.”
Wedge’s stomach tightened and his heart began to pound. As a pilot, in his X-wing, he had no doubt at all that he’d be able to vape Tal’dira and his X-ball. In a vibrobkde fight, though… As much as he would have preferred to avoid fighting, he knew he really didn’t have any choice in the matter. The kor was vital to stopping the Krytos virus. If I have to carve this Twi’lek behemoth up to get it, I will.
He held out his right hand. “I will fight.”
Tal’dira tossed him one of the vibroblades. “A warrior should deal with a warrior.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
The warrior’s lekku writhed up and down once affirmatively. “Good.”
Wedge flicked the blade on with his thumb. “Come on. Pm ready.”
“You are, but your opponent isn’t.” Tal’dira looked around, studying each of the Rogues. They
all wore Twi’lek warrior garb, and the disdainful expression on Tal’dira’s face suggested he found something wrong with that. He openly appraised them, looking each of them up and down before passing from one to the next.
Will he pick one of them as my foe? Wedge felt his stomach begin to implode. I know Twi’leks can be cruel. Is he going to force me to slay one of my oum people because of some affront we’ve given him?
Tal’dira looked back at Wedge. “I have made my choice. Prepare yourself.”
Wedge nodded. “I’m still ready.”
“Good.” The warrior casually tossed the vibroblade to Koh’shak. “I choose you.”
The starport master’s eyes ballooned as he bounced the inert vibroblade from hand to hand. It slipped from his grasp and ricocheted off his stomach before tumbling toward the ground. The obese Twi’lek began to bend over, thick fingers wriggling slothfully in a vain attempt to catch the blade before it could hit the ground.
In one flowing motion that nearly shamed Sienn’rha’s performance, Tal’dira swooped forward and plucked the blade out of the air. It hummed to life and with one deft cut, split the brooch holding Koh’shak’s cloak closed. The garment puddled around Koh’shak’s feet and a stiff-arm blow to the chest dropped the starport master on top of it.
Tal’dira grabbed one of Koh’shak’s braintails and yanked none too gently on it, then pressed the vibroblade to the Twi’lek’s throat. “Warriors should deal with warriors, Kohsh’ak! Wedgan’tilles came to us as a warrior, leading a band of warriors, including our own Nawar’aven. You knew of this mission to Ryloth but hid that knowledge from me so you could profit from the gifts our visitors would bring. That is fitting conduct for a merchant, but not a warrior, Kohsh’ak!”
The Krytos Trap Page 21
