Isard's Revenge (6 page)

“No, I tell you this so you can recognize the opportunity you have to rebuild the Empire and become Emperor.” She pointed an unwavering finger at him. “You will recall I offered you this opportunity before, but you decided to take Pestage’s realm instead of bringing him to me. I would have made you Emperor, and now I shall again.”

The Prince-Admiral plucked a comlink from the desk. “Shall we call Mon Mothma now and tell her to hand over the reins of power?”

“Not directly, no. She’ll hand them to us all on her own.”

“What do you mean?”

A brief smile flashed over Isard’s face. “It will not surprise you to learn that sources on Coruscant have reported
to me that you have been the subject of discussions in the Provisional Council. The Rebels feel they need to make an example of an Imperial warlord, but they want to pick one and deal with him in such a way that they do not so frighten the others that there is no chance of peaceful settlements later. You are going to be their target.”

“Me? That makes no sense.” Krennel frowned. “I’ve spent the last five years building up defenses, making sure no one can prey upon my worlds. I’m hardly the easiest target they could pick on.”

“True, but you are the one who murdered the Imperial Grand Vizier and so blatantly profited by your act. They think if they wage war on you beneath the pretext of bringing you to trial, the other warlords won’t be threatened by what they do to you.”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “Transparent political motivations won’t turn lasers or shield ships.”

Isard nodded slowly. “True, but politics can play a leading role in how power shifts in the universe. Think, for a moment. As the New Republic strives to redress some of the ills of the Empire, who will be discomfitted?”

“Humans. They benefited the most under the Empire, so any moves to create equality will result in greater stress on their resources. Humans will have to make do with less so aliens can have more.”

“Very good. And who,
now
, possesses and controls these resources that will have to be shared.”

Krennel smiled. “Humans do. And even the most liberal of them, the most alien-loving among them, the ones who want to do the most, will feel their nerf is being gored when they are forced to give up more than they want to in order to help others.”

“Exactly. Those who want to preserve their own wealth and power will slow the pace of change, while those who seek power and wealth will want to accelerate it.” Isard opened her hands. “This provides you with an opportunity, Prince-Admiral. You declare your Ciutric Hegemony to be human-friendly. You will provide a haven for anyone who feels he or she is being abused by the New Republic.
And you will stress that the Hegemony is open to enterprising individuals of any species—that success here is based on individual effort and the merit of one’s contribution, not based on genetic makeup. The only ‘entitlement’ you recognize is the one of all creatures to be free to make the best life possible for themselves and their families.”

Krennel slowly nodded. “When the New Republic moves against me, it will look as though the aliens have enough influence in the Council to use armed force against someone merely protecting the rights of his own species. That should spike fear among humans and even make some of the other warlords willing to band together so they won’t be made targets.”

“Splendid. And as for the murder charge, you will point out that you merely did to Pestage what the New Republic intended to do all along. In fact, as I recall, Pestage fled from the Rebel forces here on Ciutric and sought sanctuary with you. Could it be he feared they meant to spirit him away and try him for Imperial crimes?”

The Prince-Admiral tapped a metal finger against his chin. “It could be I recall him saying something to that effect before he died.”

“Good, more dissent to be sown.”

Krennel watched Isard closely. “So, you come here, you tell me what the New Republic has in store for me, and you provide me with a political program that will thwart them. Why?”

“To preserve what little is left of the Empire.”

“You said that before. I believe it, but there must be more. There must be something you want, that you want for yourself.”

“There is, and you will give it to me.” Isard reached up with her right hand and touched the scars on the side of her face. “Rogue Squadron managed to defy me in the past and I cannot let that transgression go unpunished. In the course of what will happen, I will lay a trap for Rogue Squadron and you will give me the resources I need to destroy them.”

Krennel snorted lightly. “I have no love for Rogue Squadron, either. You do not ask for much, but your goal
may be unattainable. Rogue Squadron has led a charmed life when it comes to traps.”

“That’s all in the past, Prince-Admiral.” Isard’s arctic eye sparkled. “I’ve sent them a message, one that will confuse and distract them. It is bait and, as they follow it, they will move into my trap. You’ll see, you’ll see I’m right. And, when the time comes, your score with them will be settled as well.”

5

Wedge Antilles shivered, and he knew it wasn’t just because the morgue was kept cool. Beyond the big transparisteel viewport that separated him from the stainless steel and tile room where droids performed autopsies, Wedge saw row upon row of little doors behind which the dead waited for someone to have the sad duty of claiming them. Two droids, a Two-Onebee and an Emdee-One, slid Urlor Sette’s shrouded form into one of the refrigerated drawers and shut the door with a faintly audible
click.

Wedge turned away from the viewport and looked at the other two of the room’s occupants. Corran Horn sat hunched over on a chair with his hands covering his face. Blood droplets stained his jacket front and a small crescent of blood decorated each cuff, as well as the knee on which he had knelt next to the body. Corran’s reaction to Sette’s death didn’t strike Wedge as at all wrong—the death had been shocking and the loss of a friend was never pleasant.

He also knew Corran well enough to know there was more to it than just shock.
Sette’s death is a defeat for him. Before Thrawn, before we freed Thyferra, Corran gave his word that he would free the people who had been imprisoned on the
Lusankya
with him. Sette’s death is a failure, and opens up for him the possibility that he might continue to fail in this quest.

The woman sitting next to Corran rubbed her right hand along his curved back. She wore her light brown hair up and had on a cerulean dress with a short black jacket over it. She’d been at the party, too, and had immediately taken charge of the situation. Wedge marveled at her calm strength in the midst of such an incident, but that sort of strength was something he had come to expect and admire in Iella Wessiri.

“Corran,” she said softly, “there is no way you can accept responsibility for this man’s death. You didn’t kill him.”

Corran looked up with red-rimmed eyes. “That’s not what the droids said.” He pointed at the small box-and-wire device that the Emdee-One that had performed the autopsy had deposited on the room’s stainless steel table. “The second I said his name, I doomed him. I might as well have put a blaster to his head and pulled the trigger.”

“Listen to me, Corran Horn, you know that’s nonsense.” Iella’s voice developed an edge and anger sparked in her brown eyes. “The person who put that device together, the person who implanted it into your friend,
that
person killed him.”

Corran’s green eyes narrowed. “I know that in my head, Iella, but my heart …” He tapped his chest with a fist. “My heart still feels the guilt. If we’d moved faster to find them and free them, maybe—”

Wedge shook his head. “Listen to yourself, Corran. You know as well as I do that we’ve devoted a lot of time and energy to locating the
Lusankya
prisoners. While I was off with Wraith Squadron, you Rogues worked hard on that problem. You had Iella and a lot of New Republic Intelligence resources working with you. You did all you could, the best you could.”

“But we didn’t find them.”

“No, you didn’t find what, two hundred, maybe three hundred individuals in a galaxy with thousands and thousands
of planets to each one of them? The New Republic barely communicates with three-quarters of the Empire’s old worlds, and you know as well as I do that much of those communications are hollow formalities. When Isard scattered the prisoners, she did so because she knew we wanted them, and she was sharp enough to take steps to make sure we never found them.”

Wedge frowned. “The secret of where she placed them died when you and Tycho blew up her shuttle at Thyferra. You didn’t know that she’d hidden the prisoners, so you couldn’t have anticipated the result.”

Iella nodded in agreement. “And, Corran, there was no way you could have let her live, let her run. That kind of evil had to be stopped, and you know everyone who was on the
Lusankya
would have agreed with you.”

Wedge felt a lump rise in his throat as she spoke. Iella’s husband, Diric, had once been a prisoner on the
Lusankya
, though no one had known it until after his death. Ysanne Isard had broken Diric and turned him into one of her agents. She sent him after an Imperial official who was defecting to the New Republic, a prisoner Iella was guarding. Iella had been forced to kill her own husband.
Forced much in the same way as Corran was forced to trigger the death of his friend.

Corran took Iella’s left hand in his own and gave it a squeeze. “You’re right, of course. Both of you. I know that. Still, this knot in my gut isn’t going away until we find the other prisoners.” His voice sank slightly. “Or find out what happened to them.”

Iella got up and walked over to the table. She picked up the small box-and-wire device and turned it over in her hands. “Well, we have a good place to start with this. It’s a nasty little piece of work, and a fairly specialized one. Most of it is made up of off-the-shelf components, but there are some custom pieces in here, too. Whoever put it together knew what he was doing.”

Wedge frowned. “I know that’s what killed Sette, but how did it work?”

Iella flipped open the box—which was no bigger than a deck of sabacc cards. Inside, Wedge saw a couple of computer chips, two energy cells, some electronic components, a small motor, a metal cylinder with holes drilled into it every centimeter or so, and a rainbow of wires. Iella hit a small button, and the twenty-centimeter-long cylinder flipped upright.

“Preliminary analysis indicates this cylinder housed a thin-walled glass capsule that contained two powerful drugs—well, one was a drug, the other was a naturally occurring venom, but one seldom found in the quantities used here. The venom is hemotoxic—it acts like acid, eating away at capillary walls, which caused the hemorrhaging from the eyes, nose, and mouth you saw. The drug spiked Sette’s blood pressure, pumping the toxin through him in seconds. He died of a massive stroke as the toxin ruptured every blood vessel in his brain.”

Wedge shifted his shoulders uneasily. “The box was attached to his circulatory system somehow?”

Iella showed him the bottom of the box, right below the bottom of the cylinder. “They used a venous graft to connect it to his aorta. The second the mix hit his bloodstream, the poison was all through him.”

Corran rose from his chair and came over to lean heavily on the table. “The wires came from a nerve graft—the kind they use in cybernetic replacements. The machine hooked into Urlor’s aural nerves, picking up what he heard. When the chip matched the voiceprint of my saying Urlor’s name to the voiceprint it had stored, the motor turned a gear that spun another one that depressed a plunger down through the cylinder and pumped the kill-juice into him.”

Wedge nodded slowly. “You think the voiceprint came from your time in the
Lusankya
?”

“Maybe. Probably not.” Corran shrugged sluggishly. “We didn’t use names much there. If we used names we could have provided the Imps with clues to what might be happening. I suspect they got it from any of a variety of reports I gave about my time in the
Lusankya
.”

General Antilles felt ice trickle through his guts. “Those reports are still classified, aren’t they?”

“As nearly as I know.”

Iella nodded. “They are, which means whoever did this has access to some of our classified material. That’s not really a surprise, though, is it?”

Wedge raised an eyebrow. “It isn’t?”

“Think about it, General. Urlor Sette arrives at a party being thrown in the honor of Rogue Squadron—a party you didn’t know about until this afternoon. Word was not that widespread about it, but whoever it was managed to get him in.”

Iella set the poison injector down. “We have to figure that whoever Isard entrusted with hiding the prisoners was fairly high up in her intelligence operation. While Kirtan Loor’s information did turn over to us a good portion of the intel ops Isard had running on Coruscant, recent events during the Thrawn crisis showed we didn’t get
everything
, so it’s safe to assume we still have secrets leaking to the enemy.”

Wedge sighed, then nodded to her. “Good analysis. I hadn’t thought that hard.”

“You’re not trained to do analysis, Wedge. You
provide
intel, or act on plans formulated because of it. You don’t have to do interp and analysis.” Iella gave him a warm smile. “At least you didn’t have to before you won your decade of dots,
General
.”

“Save the General stuff, Iella. I’m still Wedge to you.” He glanced down. “At least, I assume such familiarity is okay.”

“Sure.” She winked at him. “I didn’t think you’d let your rank go to your head.”

“No, but it looks as if I’ll be having to apply my brains more than before.”

“Just in different ways, Wedge.” Iella turned and rested her right hand on Corran’s left shoulder. “Corran, you should get out of here. Wedge can take you back home. There’s nothing more you can do here. It will be hours before the
droids come back with their final analysis of the toxin and the device components.”