The Krytos Trap (27 page)

And I’m not so sure I want to do that
. She sighed. Diric had told her about some of the conversations he’d had with Tycho. He was more convinced than ever of Tycho’s innocence, and his opinion
did
carry a lot of weight in her mind. Even so, if Tycho
had
caused Corran’s death, Iella didn’t
want him to be able to get away with it.
I owe Corran that much
.

A familiar hoot brought her back to the present and sparked a smile on her face. “Whistler!”

The small green and white R2 beeped happily. Behind him, tottling along, came Rogue Squadron’s black, clamshell-headed M-3PO unit. “Good morning, Mistress.”

“Morning?” Iella glanced at the Chronographie readout at the top of her datapad’s screen. “I don’t believe it. I’ve been here eight hours. Diric will kill me.”

Emtrey’s head canted to the left. “I would hope not, Mistress Iella. That would be a crime and—”

“I was speaking metaphorically, Emtrey, not literally.” Iella frowned at the droid. “I meant that he would be upset with me.”

“Ah, I see.”

Iella patted Whistler gently on his domed head. “So what are you two doing here in the computer center?”

Whistler warbled nonchalantly.

“We can so tell her, Whistler.” Emtrey’s head righted itself and thrust forward, giving Iella a good view of the gold eyes burning in the hollow of his face. “You do want the
truth
to triumph, don’t you?”

Iella nodded slowly. “Every day it seems I’m hearing less and less of it. What have you got?”

Emtrey pointed toward her dataterminal’s I/O port. “Whistler, hook in there and show her what we found.”

Whistler squawked rudely—a sound Iella recognized as one she’d often heard the droid use to chasten Corran. Her throat thickened as melancholy tried to suck the life out of her, but she shook her head. She looked up at Emtrey and forced words out past the lump in her throat. “What have you been doing?”

“We have finished the tasks Master Ven set for us before he left with the others, so we started going over transcripts and noticed an underlying assumption everyone seems to have made concerning the conquest of Coruscant.”

“And that is?”

“It is assumed that Ysanne Isard
let
us have the world
because she
wanted
us to have it, infected as it was with the Krytos virus. The stresses possessing it has put on the Alliance certainly are great, and the assumption is probably valid, but there is no straight-line correlation between her desire to let us have the planet and actions taken in the final days.”

“I’m not certain, at this hour, I follow what you’re saying.” Iella rubbed at her burning eyes with her left hand. “Can you break it down and be more specific?”

“Certainly.” Emtrey glanced down at the R2 unit. “Show her the current disease case grid.”

Whistler chirped happily. The data on the terminal’s screen vanished beneath a graph that plotted incidences of sickness over time in red. A thick blood-red line quickly blossomed into a triangle with a steep hypotenuse, then leveled out into a rectangle that began to flare upward again over the last ten days. The disease had spread quickly at first, but had plateaued—until recently.

Iella nodded. “The plateau indicates the period when the disease stopped spreading because bacta therapy managed to keep it under control.”

“Exactly. The graph of fatalities has a similar profile.”

“I can imagine. This is pretty horrible.”

“True, Mistress. Whistler, now run the plus-six graph.”

“Plus-six?”

“The projected disease report graph we would have seen if the planet had fallen to the Alliance just six days later than it did.” The new graph exploded from the starting point and spiked quickly off the top of the screen. “Projected fatalities in this model are 85 percent of afflicted populations.”

Iella’s jaw dropped open. “Whole alien populations would have been wiped off Coruscant.”

“Exactly. This model, when broken down by species, shows a complete depopulation of Gamorreans, Quarren, Twi’leks, Suilustans, and Trandoshans. The chances of the disease traveling off-world are incalculable, but the potential for galaxy-wide extermination of some species cannot be discounted.”

She blinked and rubbed at her eyes again. “Why are the models so different?”

Silvery highlights flashed from the edges of Emtrey’s black carapace as he raised his hands. “One reason is highly speculative. First, it seems that in boiling off a reservoir to create the storm that brought down the planet’s shields, our efforts destroyed a large amount of the virus present in the planetary water system. Second, and far more germane to our discussion, is the abbreviated incubation period our arrival gave the disease. Had the Alliance arrived just a week later, we would already have had a wave of deaths and a whole new round of infections because of contact with bodily fluids from the victims and the virus in the water system.”

Iella nodded slowly. “If we had been just a week later in liberating the planet, there would have been no way to save it. Non-human members of the Alliance would have fled, dooming their own populations. Without non-human support, the Alliance would have foundered.”

“That seems probable, Mistress.”

“Yeah.” Iella’s brown eyes tightened. “So the reason the Imps stopped our initial effort to shut down the shields was to keep us from taking over the world
too
soon. For Iceheart it wasn’t a matter of
if
but
when
we’d take the world. And since Tycho’s contribution to our efforts were what enabled us to bring the shields down
before
the time that would have been optimal for Iceheart, we can suppose he wasn’t working for her.”

Emtrey nodded and Whistler trumpeted triumphantly.

“Unless, of course, that’s exactly what Iceheart wants us to think.” Iella shook her head. “Not bad work, you two, but it’s about as helpful as what I found on Lai Nootka. I can put someone who ought to be him flying something that ought to be his ship here about the time Tycho said he met with Nootka, but I can’t prove it. I’d dearly like to believe Tycho is being framed, but I don’t see a good reason why Isard would be devoting so many resources to getting someone who is really not that important.”

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.”

24

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.