X-wing_ The Krytos Trap Part 26

He hauled himself off the very comfortable bantha-hide divan. He'd not intended to fall asleep, but the tunnel-shuttle's appointments were plush and seductive, especially in comparison with what he had endured in Lusankya. This is more impressive than the Hotel Imperial. The shuttle had a small refresher station which had allowed Corran to take his first shower since his capture. The Lusankya diet had not been very high in protein content, so his hair, beard, and fingernails had not grown much during his captivity; still, he could have used a shave. Then again, in this tunic, I'm hardly presentable. He laughed. If it were really that luxurious, there would have been a closet with a full wardrobe on board.

Holdout blaster in hand, Corran walked over to the egress hatch and opened it. Waiting for him was what looked like a private lift. The box, paneled with dark greel wood, was otherwise featureless. This made Corran a little appre-hensive; without controls, he had to a.s.sume it was programmed to go to a specific place. ! don't know if I want to be there, but I suspect it will be better for me than here. He entered the lift and the doors closed behind him.

The car ascended quickly and quietly. Corran shook the lees of sleep from his head. He squeezed himself into the corner of the car just left of the doors, out of direct line with the opening. Blaster in his right hand, he was ready to pivot on his left foot, duck low, and come out shooting if he had tO.

The lift slowed, then stopped.

The doors opened whisper-quiet.

The musty scent of stale air rolled into the lift. Corran brought the neck of his tunic up over his nose, then dropped it again, realizing it smelled slightly worse than the chamber beyond the doorway. He peeked out quickly and beyond a gauzy wall of spider webs saw a grey room and shadowy figures scattered about it. He ducked back, then looked out again.

No one is moving. Aside from the spiders and whatever they snack on, there's nothing living in here.

He sliced the web-wall in half with his left hand, then stepped into the long, rectangular room. Dust billowed up around his feet and coated his soles. Slender, dust-laden web-strands hung down from the ceiling like vines in a forest. Some of them attached themselves to the figures in the room, as if etheric umbilical cords maintaining the figures in their twilight existence.

Corran had no idea where he was, but the taint of evil in the room threatened to overwhelm him. That surprised him because he saw no active threat and didn't feel directly men-aced. The sensation reminded him of his days back in Cor-Sec, when he entered the scene of a particularly violent ma.s.sacre of spice runners who had angered Durga the Hutt. It was all destruction, but not wanton--it was completely calculated and deliberate.

The figures he saw were all statues and mannequins. As he approached the first one, a little light flashed on in the s.p.a.ce before it and resolved into a hologram of the head and shoulders of a man. A voice from the base of the statue said, "Avan Post, Jedi Master from Chandrila, served with distinc-tion in the Clone Wars."

Corran looked up at the head of the white marble statue to see if it matched the hologram, but the face on the statue had been destroyed. The stone had melted back to the level of the ears and streamed down over the figure's torso. Noth-ing else about the statue's shape enabled Corran to figure out if it was Post or not. Then again, why would the bologram of Post be connected to this statue if it isn't him?

Corran frowned. And why remove his face?

Corran moved deeper into the room. The muted illumi-nation came from glowtiles set near floor level and enabled Corran to pick out two darkened doorways set into one of the longer walls, but he didn't feel compelled to head out and explore the area beyond them. He couldn't explain it, but he had a hunch there was something important in the room, something he had to find. While intellectually he knew run-ning far and fast was the best thing for him, his father had always encouraged him to follow his hunches. Doing that has kept me alive. No reason to change now, especially now.

As he moved through the chamber it became obvious that the statues and display cases were all exhibits in some sort of museum. A Jedi museum.

Everything pertained in one way or another to Jedi Knights and Masters, with the vast majority of them having served in the Clone Wars. Just over forty years ago, all of these people were alive.

Without fail, whether the representation was a static ho-logram with little mementos, or a life-size statue, or a man-nequin dressed as the person it represented, the Jedi's image had been ruined. Some statues lay in pieces on the ground. Some of the mannequins had limbs missing or holes pounded through the torsos. All of them had been defaced--most literally, though some had only had their eyes carved out. He could not discern a pattern to the damage--beyond the fact that all the faces were maimed in one way or another--but Corran knew there was one, keyed to the mind of the person who had done it.

Discarding his prison tunic, Corran pulled some clothes from one of the broken dummies and got into them. The rough-spun brown trousers and pale pull-over tunic itched against his bare flesh and threatened to drive him crazy. From what I remember of Jedi stories, a Jedi would have chosen such clothes just to force himself to learn to ignore the physical sensations distracting him--his clothes become an exercise in concentration. He couldn't remember where he'd heard that--it had to have been from his grandfather or father, because the Jedi were extinct by the time Corran had learned they had existed, and people who wanted to avoid Imperial scrutiny didn't display much interest in the Jedi Knights of old.

Corran's hand went to his throat to touch the medallion he'd worn since he'd inherited it from his father--a medal-lion he'd left with Whistler for safekeeping before his mission to Coruscant. Mirax Terrik had identified it as Jedi Credit, a medallion issued in limited numbers to mark a Corellian Jedi's elevation from Knight to Master. I guess carrying it around was my father's way of covertly defying the Empire.

Corran pulled on a Jedi's brown cloak and fastened it at his throat. He swirled it around himself, sending lint-nerfs scurrying across the floor and leaping from the top of a dis-play case. A glint of gold in that case caught Corran's eye. He stepped closer and swept dust from the gla.s.s with his hands.

His mouth went dry. That medallion, it's just like the one I wore, save for the way the eyes have been gouged out of it. Who is that? Irritated that the holographic legend didn't play, Corran jiggled the case. A hologram began to glow, creating an image of a slender man hovering above the gla.s.s, about twenty centimeters high. A voice, starting low and slow, then speeding up into a soprano, accompanied the display. "Nejaa Halcyon, a Jedi Master from CoreIlia, died in the Clone Wars."

The light from the holographic projection bled below into a static hologram. It showed Halcyon standing with a boy. The Basic legend running down the edge of the image read, "Nejaa Halcyon and an apprentice." The projection snapped off and the hologram went dark, but it took Corran several seconds to become cognizant of that fact.

That boy. That was my father .... He'd seen ho-lograms of his father as a child, and the boy in the image looked very much like Hal Horn had at that age. He even looked a bit like me. But that can't he, can it?

Corran frowned mightily. Mirax had told him that the commemorative medallions were given to family, friends, students, and Masters by the Knight who appeared on them. If my father had been his apprentice, that would explain how he got the coin, but he never said anything about knowing a Jedi or training with him. My grandfather did, but he never mentioned this Halcyon. That hologram has to be wrong, ! have to have seen it wrong.

He jiggled the case again, but the projection did not return. He stepped back and up to it again without results. He jogged and then shook the case, but that only moved the medallion around and tipped over the hologram. I need light to see who's really in that hologram.

Swaddling his left fist in his Lusankya tunic, Corran hammered it against the display case. The gla.s.s shattered into hundreds of sparkling shards.

Looking around ner-vously, waiting for some alarm system to start blaring, Cor-ran shook the canvas wrap off his hand and cast it aside. He carefully plucked out the medallion and put it in his pocket. To it he added the hologram and would have walked over to one of the footlights to examine it, but the third memento of Nejaa Halcyon attracted his attention.

s.h.i.+fting his blaster to his left hand, Corran reached into the case and pulled out a thirty-centimeter-long silvery cylin-der. A concave dish capped it, a thickened k.n.o.b served as the pommel, and a black b.u.t.ton rode in a recessed niche pre-cisely where his right thumb naturally rested.

Pointing the cup away from himself, Corran hit the b.u.t.ton.

A silvery-white shaft of light just over a meter in length hissed to life. It hummed low and mournfully as its cold illumination turned all the Jedi images into ghosts. Corran twisted his wrist around, bringing the energy blade through a set of interlocked loops. The sound quickened slightly as the blade transformed a strand of webbing into a drifting tendril of smoke.

Corran turned, thinking to sweep the lightsaber blade through one of the mannequins, but stopped before he struck. These images have endured enough abuse. I won't add to it. He knew he was correct not to contribute to the further despoiling of the monuments. Moreover, there had seemed to be a subtle pressure, a hidden malevolence in the room, that encouraged and condoned the destruction.

Corran felt good defying it.

He hit the b.u.t.ton under his thumb once to shut the blade off. It remained lit. Corran frowned for a moment, then hit the b.u.t.ton twice in quick succession, and the blade vanished. The double hit to turn it off guarantees it won't go down in combat if the b.u.t.ton is. .h.i.t accidentally.

As shadows reconquered the room, Corran s.h.i.+vered. Trying to integrate this storehouse of Jedi memorabilia with Lusankya was enough to make his brain hurt. I'd probably have a better chance of figuring out what all of this stuff is doing here if I had a clue as to where I was. It's good to have clothes and equipment, but somehow I doubt disguising my-self as a Jedi Knight is a way to become less conspicuous in making my escape. And that's still my first priority--getting out of here.

Corran smiled and let the lightsaber roll back and forth across the palm of his hand. "I bet you'll make a wonderful door opener."

Suddenly a short, sharp pop echoed through the com-plex of rooms. A shockwave started dust swirling through the room, centered on a doorway back along the wall to the right. Sounds like someone else is finding novel ways to open doors. This room is too open, nowhere to bide.

Three figures dressed in black moved into and through the doorway. They paused there and swept the room with the harsh white beams of the glowrods fixed to the barrels of their blaster carbines.

Having no other option, Corran froze in place. The lights flashed over him, lingering only as long as they had on the other unmoving figures in the room.

"Nothing here."

The tallest of them nodded. "Then we wait." His voice trailed off for a second. "Hey, there was something funny about one of the dummies over here."

He played his light over Corran again and his friends likewise brought their lights to bear on him. "This one's got a face."

"Yeah, I have a face and I'd like to keep it." Corran thumbed the lightsaber to life. "l hope that's not going to be a problem for anyone."

37.

Wedge walked over to the circular holopad sitting atop a pedestal in the center of the briefing room. "We've only got time to go through this once, so listen up." He hit a series of keys on the holopad, causing a holographic map of the Pal-ace district and environs to spring to life.

The whole scene rotated up 90 degrees to give the pilots a chance to look down through the network of towers, tunnels, and cause-ways which clogged that section of the city. Deep in the lower reaches of the display a red square pulsed with life.

"We have a report that the Palpatine Counter-insurgency Front is staging from this location for a strike on a bacta storage facility in Invisec.

We're flying cover for a commando force that is going to go in. The fact is that these PCF folks are very dedicated to their jobs and are likely to scatter when our forces. .h.i.t. We expect speeder bikes, swoops, and speeders to be heading out of there. Since they used an airspeeder bomb to hit an earlier site, we have to a.s.sume that any and all such vehicles are moving bombs. We're going to take them down."

Wedge pointed to the empty seat beside Pash Cracken. "Nawara isn't here because our strike is going to hit the PCF about the same time Nawara normally runs the gantlet of holojournalists. If he's not there on the day ]~cho's defense is supposed to open, they might think something is going down and move too soon. Ooryl, you'll fly on Pash's wing. Normal a.s.signments for everyone else."

Pash glanced up at Wedge. "If we're going to be hawk-ing targets through the city, isn't there a good chance we'll lose some of them? There are places an X-wing might not fit, but a speeder bike will."

"Your father's getting us a tracking feed from the secu-rity office onboard the Emperor's skyhook, but there is a chance some might get away."

Erisi's hand went up. "There will be a lot of civilian traffic up. How badly are these guys wanted? How much collateral damage do we risk?"

Wedge winced. "If any of them get through to their tar-get, a lot of people will die. Thousands, perhaps even hun-dreds of thousands. When we go in the munic.i.p.al authorities will issue a sector-wide emergency grounding call. Anyone who ignores that call, especially after we start lighting the area up, is making a very big mistake. We don't want to shoot civilians, but if you have a positive ID on a target, take it.

Shooting in the city isn't going to be real pretty, but letting a PCF terrorist get through is going to be worse."

Erisi nodded. "What if the PCF people go to ground with the civilians?"

"Then they won't be blowing up a bacta storage facil-ity." Wedge grinned grimly. "We'll spot them and call in someone who can help neutralize them."

"Ooryl believes this is a must-win, no-win scenario." You have that right. We're busting open a rat's nest and hoping to kill all of them before they call do damage when they escape. The chances of collateral damage are high, and while a Corellian usually doesn't have any use for odds, in this case 1 wish they were much lower against us. "There is no denying that the probable outcome of our exercise is the loss of some innocent folks on the ground or in a building. We have to be careful but thorough. I can't tell you to shoot with children on a causeway backstopping your shots. I'm just going to trust that you'll be smart enough to avoid find-ing yourself in that situation."

He sighed. "Your astrogation droids have the map of the Palace sector and Invisec. The bacta facility is protected and you'll get a warning tone if you enter the exclusion zone around it. If you find yourself there, get out. They'll take your target. Anything else?"

He looked around the room, but no one had any com-ments or questions.

"Great. Hit the hangar and mount up. Fly your best out there. We might not be up against a Death Star, but this mission is still vital. And may the Force be with you. Dismissed."

The pilots started to file out. Wedge noticed Asyr give Gavin a quick kiss, then stroke his cheek with her left hand. She said something to Gavin that Wedge couldn't hear, then she turned toward him and held a hand up. "Commander, if you have a moment."

"Just a moment, Asyr."

Asyr nodded to Gavin and he departed. She approached Wedge and the fur on the back of her neck rippled up and down. "Do you recall a conversation we had six weeks ago? About my having to make a decision?"

Wedge nodded. "I told you there would come a point where you had to choose between the squadron and your allegiance to the Bothan Martial Intelligence."

"You said at the time that you trusted me, and wanted to continue to trust me."

"Right. And I told you that if you chose to leave the squadron, I'd respect your decision." Wedge shook his head. "Of course, if you're doing that right now, I might not re-spect your choice of timing."

Her violet eyes flashed coldly for a second as she looked up at him. "I want you to continue to respect my decisions and my timing. And I want you to continue to trust me." She dug into the pocket of her flightsuit and pulled out a data-card. "I was ordered to prepare a report about the bacta ma.s.sacre at Alderaan. It was felt a doc.u.ment that suggested our delay in getting there might, in some way, have been deliberate and the result of human action. That datacard has the only copy of said report.

If anything happens to me, you'll dispose of this correctly, I would hope."

Wedge nodded. "And if you survive, what will you do with the leport then?"

"I'm a member of Rogue Squadron, Commander, which means I only take orders from my superior officers." Asyr smiled. "What I do with that report, sir, is whatever you tell me to do with that report."

"You're taking a big step, cutting yourself off from your people."

"I know that, and I know it won't be easy, but the squadron is my home now. You've only ever asked me to fight and fly and possibly die. That I'll do for people I can trust. Those who ask me to betray friends, well, they've shown they don't want me to be trustworthy, so they clearly aren't. Those facts don't make the choice any easier, just more imperative."

Wedge tucked the datacard away in a pocket, then clapped Asyr on the shoulders. "Glad you're with us and on my wing. I always like flying with someone I can trust."

38.

Though lella's eyes burned from fatigue, the adrenaline pumping through her system had her hyper-alert. She effort-lessly wove the armored airspeeder through the canyons and chasms of Coruscant, slowly closing in on the Justice Court building. Nawara Ven and Kirtan Loor sat in the back, the lawyer continuing to ask questions and Loor replying with haughty disdain.

Seeing Loor again had been a shock for her. She recog-nized him instantly, but not without difficult),. He had al-ways been lean and cadaverous, though now his flesh had greyed a bit and tightened over his cheekbones and around his eyes. He played himself up to be supremely confident, but his clipped answers and terse comments clued her to his fear.

Iella had no doubt that if Corran had been with them at the safehouse where they deposed Loor, Loor would have crumbled like stale ryshcate.

Corran had always had a way of zeroing in on a suspect's weaknesses. He would figure out the thing about which they were lying, then push and push on those points, pounce on inconsistencies, then increase the pressure until the suspect confessed.

Loot had resisted giving them a full confession. He pro-duced a datacard on which, he said, he had encoded and encrypted complete dossiers on the Empire's operatives within the bureaucracy. He had also guaranteed them that on the stand he would reveal the ident.i.ty of the traitor within Rogue Squadron. After that, provided the other details of his surrender deal were carried out, he would provide the key to the datacard's encryption routine.

"Fine," she'd said, "but can you give us Corran's mur-derer?"

Loor had smiled coldly. "The traitor set him up, and the traitor I will give you. Corran's murderer, on the other hand, was Ysanne Isard. Her you'll have to get yourself."

And get her I will, somehow. Iella checked the advanced scanning system on the airspeeder's console. The scanner compared the profiles of all the traffic it had encountered so far against everything it was detecting as the journey contin-ued. Matches would indicate they were being followed, but nothing had pa.s.sed the computer's standards for a threat. Good. We're clear, so far.

"Coming up on the parking facility. We're going into the secure level, then down into the Justice Court." She wanted to add that the next few seconds, as she slowed to enter the building, were the most vulnerable in the whole flight. A single proton torpedo or concussion missile could destroy the airspeeder in the blink of an eye. A timed or proximity warhead could be launched from anywhere and catch them.

The airspeeder slid into the darkened tunnel and slowed. Ahead a green holographic projection cycled through various alphabets. The words "Facility is Full" appeared in Basic above and below whatever language was being displayed in the middle. The green backlight illuminated a gate that barred further pa.s.sage.

Iella hit a b.u.t.ton on the console keypad, then punched in her security code. Instead of giving her a new security code to use in bringing Loor to court--the addition of which might have alerted Imperial agents to strange goings-on--Halla Et-tyk had just locked everyone else out with code that made the lockout look like a computer glitch.

The gate retracted into the floor. "We're in."

Loor s.h.i.+fted in his seat in the back. "Does it bother you, lella, to be s.h.i.+elding me this way?"

"No more now than it did the first time you asked the question, Loor."

She moved the vehicle forward into the darkened parking area, and midway between the gate and the lift doors, she slung it around, swapping it end for end, so the nose pointed back out toward the exit. She let the speeder drift to a stop approximately twenty meters from the lift. "Does it bother you having to depend upon me?"

Loor shook his head. "Not at all, my dear. You have a facility for 1oyalty--I don't imagine you are wasting it on me--and to your mission you will be true. Your job is to deliver me to court, then watch me walk away, shedding my crimes like a lYandoshan shedding skin."

"Reminding me that you let the Trandoshan who mur-dered Corran's father go isn't the way to get me to feel good about helping you."

"No, I suppose it isn't." Loor sighed nonchalantly. "I'11 have to trust you'll want Corran's betrayer more than you want me dead, won't I?"

"That you will." Iella cracked her door open and emerged from the speeder. She took a quick look around, saw nothing, then rapped on the top of the car. "Come on out. It's clear."

As the other two left the vehicle, leila pulled out her blaster and checked the power cell. Full charge, good. "Let's go. We get to the lift, I input the code, we head down and through the prosecutor's office.

Simple, swift, and no one will get hurt." Loor pulled up the hood on his cloak. "After you." lella growled at him and moved toward the elevator, taking up a position on the right side of the group. She held her blaster in two hands, up by her face, with the barrel pointing toward the ferrocrete ceiling. As she walked toward the lift she kept looking about, backward, forward, and side to side, trying to pick up on any movement, anything out of the ordinary. Across from her, unarmed though he was, Nawara looked about vigilantly as well.

Between them, his cloak billowing out to inflate his sil-houette to the size of his code name, Loor strode confidently. Though she could not see his face, his stance and stride indi-cated he was blithely amused by her caution. The grant of immunity has made him feel invincible.