Star Wars - X-Wing 8 - Isard's Revenge

by Isard's Revenge (by Michael A Stackpole)

  Which is why we have to stop him.

  Gavin ran his hand down over the fur on Asyr's spine. "I don't know about the rest of you, but it seems to me that Mon Mothma's announcement and Krennel's answer means that having evidence of this station's existence is going to be very important. I figure we've got a bunch of snoop-and-scoot missions in our future."

  He stood and stretched. "It's about time for me to run some brush-ups on piloting a T-Six-Five-R, so I'm heading down to the simcenter. Anyone else wants to join me, I'd love the company."

  18

  Iella Wessiri shifted the toolbelt on her waist so the hydrospanner banged along her right thigh instead of against the back of her leg. The toolbelt, duraplast helmet, and gray-and-blue striped coveralls completed a disguise that started with her dyeing her hair jet black and putting in bright blue contact lenses. Everything worked together perfectly to make it appear as if she were a worker for Commenor Holocom, which was a common enough sight to let her pass unnoticed.

  Mirax, on the other hand, had colored her hair a bright red and had donned a red business suit with black blouse beneath it, which attracted a lot of stares. She carried a datapad in her left hand and used a stylus in her right to point Iella this way and that, giving anyone watching the impression that she was Iella's supervisor making a quality-assurance run with her. The situation clearly pleased neither of them, as was evidenced by muttering on the part of both parties. Various and sundry sapient characters on the street gave both of them a wide berth.

  Iella had wanted to head out to Commenor within three weeks of her conversation with Mirax, but Corran's discovery on Liinade III had given New Republic Intelligence a brand-new focus. She spent the better part of a month pouring over data on Krennel's Hegemony worlds, looking for a possible shipyard for the Pulsar Station. She hadn't been able to pinpoint one, and sincerely doubted one existed, but the lack of data on some of Krennel's worlds disturbed her.

  The world's pacification gave her a bit of a break, so she and Mirax headed out for their mission to Commenor. Their first stop had been the Errant Venture, the Imperial Star Destroyer Mirax's father had won from the New Republic for his role in the liberation of Thyferra. There Mirax had talked Booster Terrik into using the ship's facilities to manufacture fraudulent documents to get them into Commenor, and Booster had even managed to find them passage to the world with another ship. Iella had reluctantly agreed with Booster that the Pulsar Skate was too well known a ship to get them onto Commenor unnoticed.

  They entered the lobby of a large office building and paused at the holodirectory. With the air of a bored executive, Mirax punched up the data for the offices of Wooter, Rimki, and Vass, Attorneys at Law. The directory noted the offices were on the eighteenth floor and closed for the weekend, but Mirax punched a button to summon a turbolift to carry them upward.

  "The offices are closed, Supervisor. They're not working on the weekend, as we shouldn't be."

  Mirax spitted Iella with a hard stare and poked her in the shoulder with the stylus. "If you had not cross-melded two lines, we wouldn't be working on the weekend and they could be."

  One member of the janitorial staff, a Trandoshan, winced, while two insectoid Verpines just waggled antennae at each other. Iella trailed after Mirax rather dejectedly, keeping her eyes cast down at the ground. Wordlessly she entered the turbolift and the doors closed behind her.

  Mirax ran her hand over the wooden wall paneling. "Genuine, not some fiberplast substitute. Very stylish and very expensive."

  "Easy to do when you're on an Imperial expense account." Iella slowly shook her head. "If Mem Wooter hadn't decided to get greedy, he could have been in the clear."

  Mirax smiled and curled a scarlet lock of hair behind her left ear. "I thought you were the one telling my father that snatching Wooter and sweating facts out of him couldn't be done because we weren't sure he was involved. I thought you were reserving judgment."

  "Well, I was." Iella shrugged uneasily. "Fact is I'm as bad as Corran in resisting suggestions your father makes."

  "No, you're not."

  "Okay, maybe I'm not that bad." She laughed lightly. "After spending years hearing horror stories about him, though, I'm not comfortable doing what he suggests. This is especially true when it comes to the realm of crimes against a person."

  "And what we're going to be doing is different?"

  "Crimes against property, big difference." Iella hooked her thumbs through her toolbelt as the lift stopped and the doors parted. "I tell you, Supervisor, they made unauthorized repairs to their own line that caused the problem."

  "The problem was unauthorized lum consumption, Splicist." Mirax led Iella down the hallway to the double doors with the firm's name emblazoned on them in gold Aurebesh lettering. She knocked firmly on the door, and then waited. Under her breath she commented, "Looks like a Kambis Ninety-Four-Hundred lock. Not bad."

  "You're kidding, right?" Iella fished a square packet from a toolbelt pouch. The device fit neatly in the palm of her hand. With a flick of her thumb she turned it on and a slender tab the thickness of a keycard snapped out on one of the long sides. She flashed it down through the keycard slot once quickly, and then twice more. On the third try the door clicked open.

  Mirax blinked. "How did you?"

  Iella shrugged. "Whistler could have opened this door."

  "So could I, but folks would have heard the blaster whine."

  Iella ushered Mirax into the office foyer and closed the door behind them. "Intel has some interesting toys. Set it for the lock type, flash through once to blank the current code, a second time to set a new one, and a third to open the door."

  Mirax smiled. "Know where Cracken gets those things?"

  "I doubt he'd want you having one."

  "Hmmm, and then I guess a brisk trade in them would be out, too." Mirax looked into the office. "Then again, if this office is any indication, working for the Imps might be far more lucrative."

  Iella couldn't argue with Mirax there. The office entryway 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, and 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 or 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 enounter 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 mail 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, followed 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, and 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, and then swept on down, grabbing at Iella's right and. A snarled command from the man behind her brought a shocked look to the derelict's face, and 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, and 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, and 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, and 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.