by Timothy Zahn
“They’re all working on it,” Tierce said. “They seem to be doing their best.”
“Is there a problem?” Pellaeon spoke up. His question was addressed to Disra, but his eyes—and his attention—were clearly on Tierce. “Perhaps you’d like to see to it personally.”
Disra ground his teeth again. Yes, he very much wanted to see what was going on up there. But Pellaeon wouldn’t have offered to let him squirm off the hook, even temporarily, unless he had some devious plan of his own in mind.
He suppressed a smile as it struck him. Of course—Pellaeon wanted the chance to pull a quick private interrogation on Tierce, and was trying to get the Moff out of the way.
And it was now equally clear that the hope of dangling that precise bait in front of him was precisely Tierce’s reason for delivering the message personally. “Thank you, Admiral,” Disra said, getting to his feet. “I believe I will. Major Tierce, perhaps you’ll keep the Admiral and his party company until I return.”
“Me, sir?” Tierce asked, giving the visitors a simple-minded, wide-eyed expression. “Why, certainly, sir. If the Admiral doesn’t mind.”
“Not at all,” Pellaeon said softly. “I’d be delighted.”
“I’ll be back soon,” Disra promised. “Enjoy yourselves. Both of you.”
Thirty seconds later he was back in the situation room. “What in the name of Vader’s teeth happened?” he demanded.
“Calm yourself, Your Excellency,” Thrawn said, his eyes flashing warningly at Disra. “We’ve only lost them temporarily.”
Disra glared at the other, biting back a blistering retort. If this mess was the con man’s fault, he was going to nail him to the wall. “May I inquire how something like this could happen?”
“Solo and Calrissian are combat veterans, highly experienced at survival,” Thrawn said calmly. “The security men they came up against were neither.” He shrugged, a subtle movement of shoulders beneath the white uniform. “Actually, it was rather instructive, pointing up as it did some obvious deficiencies in Capital Security’s training procedures. We’ll have to remedy that.”
“I’m sure they’ll be delighted to have your input,” Disra said, looking over at the status board. An overview of the city was currently displayed, along with the locations of all the Capital Security forces scattered around it. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to concentrate our surveillance on the spaceport? They’re probably trying to get back to their ship.”
“I’m sure they are,” Thrawn agreed. “However, if they arrive to find a ring of stormtroopers blocking their path, they’ll simply find an alternative way off Bastion.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Disra said reluctantly. Tierce’s argument, undoubtedly. Most likely his exact words, too; Disra could practically hear the Guardsman’s characteristic inflections in the con man’s voice. “May I ask what you suggest we do, then?”
Thrawn turned his glowing red eyes toward the status board. “The first step in catching a sentient prey is to think as he does,” he said. Again, words that sounded straight out of Tierce’s mouth. “What was their mission here, and how did they intend to accomplish it?”
“How about sabotage?” Disra gritted. “That sound like a likely mission?”
“No,” Thrawn said firmly. “They wouldn’t send men like Solo and Calrissian in as saboteurs. Spies, perhaps, but not saboteurs.”
“Admiral Thrawn?” one of the troopers spoke up from his station. “I’ve got a partial backcheck on the targets now. We’ve got a droid download that shows they’ve spent the past three days in the Imperial Library.”
“Very good,” Thrawn said, looking back at Disra. His head tilted fractionally toward an unoccupied corner of the room—
“I’d like to speak with you a moment, Admiral,” Disra said, picking up on the cue. “Privately, if I may.”
“Certainly, Your Excellency,” Thrawn said, gesturing toward the corner. “Let’s step over here.”
They crossed to the corner. “Don’t tell me—let me guess,” Disra muttered, keeping his voice low. “They’re here after the Caamas Document.”
“What an amazing revelation, Your Excellency,” Flim said, not quite sarcastically, his tone changing subtly out of his Thrawn character. “The interesting part is that I’ve never heard of either Solo or Calrissian having anywhere near the slicing training for a job like that.”
Disra frowned. Getting past the con man’s impertinence, he had a good point. A very good point. Disra himself had worked his way into the Emperor’s Special Files, but he’d had years to do it and any number of experts to call on for advice along the way. “Then the slicer must be the head-implant who’s with them,” he suggested.
Flim’s mouth puckered slightly. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “They didn’t get a good enough look at him for a positive ID, but my guess is that that’s Lobot, Calrissian’s old administrator from his pre-Endor days on Bespin. As far as I know Lobot hasn’t got any slicing expertise, either …”
He trailed off, his eyes suddenly narrowing. “What is it?” Disra demanded.
“There’s a trick I heard about once,” Flim said slowly. “A slicing trick someone in the fringe came up with a few years ago. Now, how did that work? No, be quiet a minute—let me think.”
For a dozen heartbeats the only sound in the room was the murmur of background conversation as the men working their boards reported to each other new information as it came in. All of it negative. Disra took deep breaths, concentrating on keeping a firm leash on his impatience. There were enemy spies loose in his city …
And abruptly, Flim’s eyes focused on him again. “Verpines,” he said with a note of triumph in his tone. “That was it. Verpines.”
He took a half step past Disra. “Lieutenant, start a wide-spectrum comm frequency scan,” he ordered, his voice suddenly that of Thrawn again. “Concentrate on Verpine biocomm frequencies.”
The lieutenant’s eyebrows didn’t even lift. “Yes, sir,” he said briskly, setting to work.
“Wait a second,” Disra said, almost grabbing at Flim’s sleeve and remembering just in time that that would be out of character. “Verpine biocomm frequencies?”
“It’s really an impressively cute trick,” Flim said, dropping his voice again to a level where only Disra could hear. “You have a Verpine slicer sitting off in a hole somewhere while a runner with an implant tuned to his personal biocomm frequency goes to the system you want to slice. With the data flow the implant can handle, the whole thing acts almost like a telepathic link. The Verpine sees through the implant’s eyes and works the slicing on his own computer board, and the runner’s fingers mimic his on the real system.”
“He turns him into a puppet, in other words,” Disra bit out, his stomach twisting with distaste. For an alien to play a human being that way, even an implant who was no longer really human, was a vileness that bordered on the obscene.
“Basically,” Flim agreed casually. “Like I said, a real cute trick.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Disra growled. Naturally, to a con man mired in the fringe himself, such obscenities were probably just a commonplace way of life. “So what if they’ve shut the link down?”
Flim shrugged, the same Thrawn-like gesture he’d used earlier. Out of earshot of the other troopers, he was still cagey enough to stay visually within his role. “Then we crump out, and we’ll have to try something else.”
Disra looked over at the status board. “What if we try broadcasting on those biocomm frequencies?” he asked. “Maybe tell the Verpine to start up their repulsorlifts or something? That would at least smoke out their ship for us.”
“We’d have to know how to encode a message into Verpine,” Flim said doubtfully. “I doubt we could find someone who can do it fast enough.”
“Couldn’t a protocol droid handle the translation?”
“Not without a special module,” Flim told him. “Off-the-floor models don’t usually come equipped to tra
nslate Verpine. Not enough call for it.”
He stroked his lower lip thoughtfully. “On the other hand, if Lobot’s still got the link open from his end, we might be able to pick up a resonance echo if we hit the right frequency. That was something we used to have to worry about with our comlinks when we were running against some of the more sophisticated planetary patrol groups. If we can get a receiver close enough, and if we’re lucky, we might be able to locate them.”
Disra felt his lip twist. “An awful lot of ifs in there.”
“I know,” Flim conceded. “But we’ve got to try something, and that’s the best I can do right now.” He nodded toward the door. “Maybe you’d better get Tierce back up here. This is tactics, and he is our tactics expert.”
And Pellaeon had had enough time alone with the man, anyway. “I’ll send him up,” he said, heading toward the door. “Keep me informed, Admiral.”
With one final lurch, the turbolift car came to a halt. “This it?” Zothip’s voice growled.
“I expect so,” Control said as the doors slid open. “Yes—this should be it.”
“So which way?” one of the other pirates demanded.
Easing her head to the side, Karoly lined up one eye with the crack still showing between the back doors. The pirates were half in and half out of the car now, Zothip standing in a narrow passageway outside with his fists set on his hips, all of them looking back and forth both directions down a narrow corridor.
“I don’t know,” Control said, looking around once himself and then pointing to the left. “Let’s try that way first.”
“Okay,” Zothip said. “Grinner, lock down the car—we don’t want anyone coming up behind us.”
“Right,” Grinner said, doing something Karoly couldn’t see with the control board. “Done.”
The pirates disappeared out of sight to the left. Karoly gave them a five-count; then, finding a toehold on the doorframe lip, she set her climbing claws into the crack between the doors and pried them open.
She stepped into the car; and she was just starting to close the doors again when she heard the sound of footsteps in the corridor outside.
The pirates were coming back.
There was no time for anything but instinctive reaction. Putting her full strength into the effort, she pulled the doors to within a couple of centimeters of being closed. They hung up there, but there was no time for her to try to free them. Crossing the car in two quick strides, she squeezed herself as invisibly as she could into the front left-hand corner.
Just in time. Even as she pressed her climbing claws firmly against the car walls to avoid the telltale clink of metal on metal should they accidentally brush together, the footsteps reached her.
“I don’t see what the big deal is that he’s got company,” Zothip was muttering as the first puff of air from their passage wafted in through the car opening. “Anyway, I only heard two voices in there.”
“That doesn’t mean there aren’t more,” Control said patiently as the group passed the open door and continued down the passageway. “Besides, if we’re seen by the wrong people this arrangement of ours goes straight down.”
“So what?” Zothip growled, his voice fading as they all continued down the corridor. “Canceling the arrangement—and Disra—is the whole idea, isn’t it?”
“We ought to at least talk first,” Control said. “We might be able to recast the deal.”
“Hey, Grinner, you sure know your way around a control panel,” another voice put in from the rear of the pack as the group continued on its way. “Did you know that when you locked the car down you popped the back doors?”
Karoly held her breath; but Grinner’s response was a brief obscenity and an uninterrupted tread down the corridor. She gave them another five-count; then, pulling off the climbing claws and putting them away, she drew her blaster and headed out after them.
She wasn’t more than a few steps into the corridor when a subtle wave of air in her face warned her that somewhere ahead a door had opened. She picked up her pace a bit, and came around a slight curve in the passageway just in time to see a rectangle of muted light close down to a sliver as the pirates closed a door down to a crack. Hurrying silently forward, she stopped at the door and eased her ear against the crack.
“Fancy place,” she heard one of the pirates say, his tone a mixture of contempt and envy. “Look at this—Ramordian silk sheets and everything.”
“Maybe he’ll give you a set for your bunk,” Zothip growled. “Where’s the—oh, there it is.”
There was the soft sound of a chair being pulled back across a thick carpet. Karoly moved her eye around the crack, trying to see what was going on. But from her angle all she could see was a small section of an elaborate wall hanging. “What are you going to do?” Control asked.
“Put in a call to his office,” Zothip grunted. “Whoever he’s got in there, I figure he can tell them to wait.”
“I’m sorry, Admiral,” Major Tierce said, his fingertips rubbing nervously at the sides of his pant legs. “But with all due respect, I really don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t think I’ve ever been to Yaga Minor. If I have, it would have been as part of a training cruise when I was a cadet. Certainly not—what did you say; six weeks ago?”
“About that,” Pellaeon said, watching Tierce’s face closely and wishing mightily that he had enough evidence on him to order a full verity analysis. The man was lying through his teeth—that much Pellaeon was sure of. But until he could positively identify Tierce as the man who’d sliced into the Yaga Minor computer system, there was nothing else he could do.
Or until that New Republic slicer Ghent found evidence of Tierce’s tampering. That was a wild card neither Tierce nor Disra knew about.
Behind Pellaeon, the double doors swung open. “I apologize for the delay, Admiral,” Disra said, striding past Commander Dreyf and around the side of the ivrooy desk. “That will be all, Major,” he added curtly to Tierce.
“Yes, Your Excellency,” Tierce said. For the briefest instant their eyes met, and Pellaeon thought he saw Disra give his aide a microscopic nod. Then, moving with the air of a man trying to run from a group of besiioths while still keeping some shreds of dignity, the major crossed the office and escaped.
“I trust Major Tierce was congenial company for you,” Disra commented.
“Quite congenial,” Pellaeon assured him, studying that twisted face closely. Not so much a face as a mask, he thought, built to conceal the mind behind it.
And he knew what was in that mind. The trouble was, he couldn’t prove it. Not yet. But let him have one slip on Disra’s part—just one—
“Now, where were we?” Disra asked briskly, leaning back in his chair. The short break had definitely done his confidence a mountain of good. “Oh, yes—those unfounded and slanderous things other people have been saying about me. It’s occurred to me, Admiral—”
He broke off as the call signal sounded from his desktop comm. Scowling, he leaned forward again and jabbed the switch. “Yes?” he barked. “What is it—?”
He stiffened, his eyes widening momentarily, his jaw dropping a fraction of a centimeter. His eyes darted to Pellaeon, back to the comm display. “Yes, I’m busy,” he growled. “And I don’t appreciate being interrupted this way for—”
Abruptly he stopped. Pellaeon strained his ears, but the speaker was focused toward Disra and he could hear nothing from his position on the opposite side of the desk.
And then Disra’s eyes widened again … and Pellaeon saw something he had never seen before. Something he had never expected to see.
Moff Disra, liar, conniver, and probable traitor, went white.
Dreyf saw it, too. “Your Excellency?” he asked, standing up and starting around the side of the desk.
The moment of shock passed, and Disra’s expression of stunned disbelief suddenly changed to that of a crazed rancor. “Back!” he snarled at Dreyf, his hand slashing at him as if trying to w
ard away a dangerous animal. “I’m all right. Just stay back.”
Dreyf stopped, throwing a confused look at Pellaeon. “Is anything the matter, Your Excellency?” Pellaeon asked.
“Everything’s fine, Admiral,” Disra said, the words coming out like they’d been sent through a grain-grinder. His eyes, Pellaeon noted, were still fixed on the comm display. “If you’ll excuse me again, there’s another matter I need to attend to right away.”
He stood up, keying off the comm with a vicious stab of his finger. “I’ll be right back,” he growled, heading at a not-quite run toward the double doors.
“Of course,” Pellaeon called after him. “Take whatever time you need.”
The last word was cut off by the boom as the doors closed behind him. “Well, that was interesting,” Dreyf commented, looking at the doors and then back at Pellaeon. “Another trick to buy himself some breathing space?”
“I don’t think either of these interruptions has been an act,” Pellaeon said, frowning thoughtfully at the Moff’s desk. Historically, the majority of people who were able to afford culture-grown ivrooy furniture were wealthy politicians, industrialists, and fringe crimelords. All of whom always had things to hide … “No, something’s going on out there. Something important.”
“Mm,” Dreyf murmured. “Shall I wander down the hall and see if I can find out what it is?”
“Maybe later,” Pellaeon said. “In the meantime, it seems we’ve been left alone. In Disra’s office.”
Dreyf lifted his eyebrows in understanding. “Yes, we have, haven’t we,” he agreed, looking around the office. His gaze fell on the desk … “Of course, it’s a little dubious legally,” he reminded his superior, throwing a sideways glance at the two troopers guarding the door. “We haven’t got a search order, and Disra hasn’t been officially charged with anything.”
“I’ll take the responsibility,” Pellaeon said. “Go ahead and see what you can find.”
“Yes, sir,” Dreyf said, giving him a tight smile as he circled around to the other side of the desk. “It’ll be a pleasure.”
