Star Wars: X-Wing I: Rogue Squadron (15 page)

“And this treatment killed him.” Her eyes became mismatched slits. “Do you know why?”

“He had a reaction to the bacta used to treat him.”

“Do you know why?”

Kirtan was about to offer her the explanation the Emdee-five droid had given him when Bastra died in the bacta tank, but he knew that she would not accept it. “I do not.”

Isard hesitated for a second and Kirtan knew he had escaped punishment by being truthful. “What does ZXI449F mean to you, if anything?”

He instantly recognized the number, but held back his answer until he could sort out the details and put them in a coherent form. “That is the lot number of a batch of bacta that was contaminated by the Ashern rebels on Thyferra. It made its way to Imperial Center and infected nearly two million soldiers and citizens. It rendered them allergic to bacta.” Kirtan frowned. “But Gil Bastra never was on Imperial Center.”

“You do not know that for a fact. Perhaps he
was
here.” She shook her head slowly. “It does not matter, because he could have run into that batch of bacta almost anywhere. It was ordered disposed of, and I saw to it that much of it was funneled to the black market.
That
, however, is not important. What is important is this:
Blastonecrosis
is a condition that affected roughly two percent of the people who were dosed with that particular lot of bacta. An Emdee droid would have inquired of a patient if he had been dosed with bacta in the last two years.”

“But because I ordered treatment and didn’t recognize the significance of the disease, Gil Bastra died.”

“No!” Isard’s eyes hardened. “Gil Bastra committed suicide.”

“What?”

“His reports about you are in your file. Your slicer was able to excise them from the Corellian records, but not
my
records. A man is best evaluated by his enemies.”

Kirtan’s stomach slowly collapsed in on itself. “Those evaluations were prejudiced against me.”

“Perhaps, but Bastra was amazingly perceptive. He wrote that you rely on your memory too much—trusting that retention of information can somehow compensate for an insufficient amount of analysis. Because you know so much—like the obscure fact
about the fatal interaction of
lotiramine
and
skirtopanol
, you didn’t look beyond Bastra’s obvious line of defense to see how much deeper things had gone. If you had, you would have known about his possible bacta allergy and he might still be with us.”

She slowly exhaled and tugged at the hem of her scarlet jacket. “Bastra knew you well enough to know he’d be dead soon. That gave him enough hope to feed you useless information. He held out as long as he could because he was playing for more time for his confederates to further sever ties with their past.”

The Intelligence agent realized right then that the display of bravado Bastra had provided during their first meeting on the
Expeditious
had not been a false and hollow thing. Kirtan’s face burned as he heard again everything Bastra had said, this time with the man’s mocking tones intact and brutal.
What I had seen as my brilliance in ferreting out his errors had been him playing to my sense of superiority, leading me on after him like a nerf eager for slaughter. For two years I’ve been a fool
.

A revelation hit him strongly enough to make him tremble. “I’ve been fooled for even longer than the two years I’ve chased them down, haven’t I?”

“Very good, Agent Loor.” Isard’s expression lightened slightly, as if she were on the verge of smiling, but she did not. “The responsibility for your deception is not wholly your own. Our training and indoctrination tends to make agents and soldiers believe in their own infallibility. This has proved to be a detriment to the Empire. You were not alone in falling prey to it—even the late Emperor had his blind spots.”

Kirtan decided to avoid the invitation to question the Emperor’s wisdom, or lack thereof, and instead followed up on his previous question. “The
‘falling out’ Bastra and Horn had was faked. I thought the reason for it was stupid, and assumed they were stupid for being at odds over it.”

“This is even better, Agent Loor.”

“I feel as if in realizing how badly I was used, I can see more depth to things.”

“A blind spot is eliminated, letting you see more of what goes on around you.” She ran an index finger along her jaw. “If you had read Bastra’s evaluations of you instead of having them destroyed, you would have been able to come to this epiphany sooner.”

He nodded confidently. “And I would have had them by now.”

“And you were doing so well.” Isard’s face contorted into a snarl. “Don’t backslide.”

Kirtan blushed. “I’m sorry.”

“More’s the pity that you are not. You assume superiority where there is none.” She folded her arms across her chest. “The Emperor likewise assumed that if he destroyed all the Jedi Knights that
his
Jedi Knight—and a handful of Force-trained special agents—would be sufficient to control the galaxy. He did not see—though I tried to warn him—the impossibility of proving that all the Jedi had been destroyed and that no other Jedi could rise against him. His obsession with the Jedi blinded him to the real threat posed by opposition leaders who are no more intelligent or remarkable than you are.

“As a result the Empire is falling apart and the Rebels are threatening to supplant the Empire with their own New Republic.”

Kirtan nodded. “And you wish to restore the Empire.”

“No.” Her denial came cold enough to freeze carbonite. “My goal is to destroy the Rebellion. Imperial
restoration can only be accomplished if the Rebels are eliminated and that can only be accomplished if we blunt their military, sorely stress their administration, and crush their spirits. These goals are interwoven and I have operatives, like you, working on all levels to bring my plans to fruition. Can you withstand the pressure of so vital a mission?”

Kirtan slowly nodded. “I can. How may I serve you?”

This time she did smile and Kirtan wished she had not. “Your target is to cut the heart out of the Rebellion. You will be the death of Rogue Squadron.”

“Excuse me?” Kirtan frowned, wondering if he had heard her incorrectly. “I am no fighter pilot. I know nothing about Rogue Squadron.”

“Ah, but you have the expertise I want and desire. You served on Corellia and the unit’s commander is Corellian.”

“Wedge Antilles, I know.” Kirtan raised his hands. “But that is not to say I know
him
. I don’t. I don’t even know anything about the squadron.”

“But you can learn.”

“Yes, I can learn.”

“And you shall learn.” She nodded slowly toward him, then brought her head up abruptly. “You will also find you have a personal stake in this.”

Kirtan aborted a wince. “Yes?”

“Our source within the squadron tells us that a friend of yours is a flight leader of remarkable skill.”

One of Isard’s earlier statements ran through his mind again.
A man is best evaluated by his enemies
. “Corran Horn.”

“You see, you already know more about them than you thought you did.” Ysanne Isard gave him
an even stare. “Do you accept being the instrument of Rogue Squadron’s destruction?”

“With pleasure, Madam Director.” Kirtan smiled to himself. “With the utmost of pleasure indeed.”

Corran forced himself to relax. Though Commander Antilles had cast the trip as an exercise in astronavigation and hyperspace jumping, deep down in his gut Corran thought a lot was being left unsaid. He was certain that if they had been going out on a formal patrol or escort mission Wedge would have told them so. The fact that he hadn’t said anything conflicted with the mission requirement of packing up and stowing their personal gear in their X-wings. This left Corran thinking something more than an exercise was taking place.

Because of his training exercise scores, Corran had been promoted to Lieutenant and given the command of Three Flight. As an officer he had expected Wedge would trust him enough to let him know what was really going on. Even so, with his background he had great respect for security, and that put a brake on his uneasiness.

Those concerns don’t matter. Getting through the drill does
. Heading outbound from Folor’s scarred grey surface, Corran flew lead for Rogue Squadron’s Three Flight. Ooryl was back to starboard
while Lujayne and Andoorni were off to port, similarly staggered front and back. Within the unit they had comm unit call signs of Rogue Nine through Twelve respectively, though for this exercise they would be operating as a semiindependent flight.

“Let’s keep it close, Three Flight. Whistler will send you all our jump coordinates and speed parameters. Have your R2s double-check it, then lock the route.” He checked his datascreen for the positions of the first two X-wing flights and Tycho Celchu bringing up the rear in a captured
Lambda
-class shuttle,
Forbidden
. “We follow One Flight on this leg, then Two Flight on the next one. After that we’re leading, so let’s be prepared.”

The members of his flight signaled their readiness to jump, so Corran keyed his comlink over to the command frequency. “Three Flight ready to jump on your mark, Rogue One.”

“Good. All flights, five seconds to mark.”

With Wedge’s reply Whistler began counting down for the five seconds. Corran watched the seconds click off the digital display. When it read 00:00 he engaged the X-wing’s hyperdrive and sat back as the stars filled the viewscreen. Just as the color threatened to overwhelm him with its intensity, his snubfighter leaped into hyperspace and moved beyond the ability of the light to abuse him.

The first leg was to take them about an hour and had them flying along the plane of the galactic dish, moving against the swirl of the galaxy itself. The course brought them in ever so slightly toward the Core, which was good because the databases containing information about navigation hazards got progressively better as they headed toward the Core.

And Coruscant
.

Corran knew the Imperial capital was not their
intended target—at least not for this flight—but he felt certain they would get there eventually. His more immediate concern, however, was plotting the course for the third leg of the jump. While he had not been told their final destination, Commander Antilles had given him a list of twenty starting and ending points, and he had calculated the best courses he could see for making those jumps. The direction, speed, and duration of the first leg allowed him to eliminate all but two of the courses given to Rhysati for solution for the second leg and that narrowing down of ending points meant he only had two plans of his own to refine.

The first course of his, which would take the flight further along the disk and outside the most populated and advanced section of the galaxy, had been plotted pretty tightly. Several black hole clusters narrowed leeway as far as that course was concerned. He glanced at it again and decided it couldn’t be refined any more.

“Whistler, bring up the course for the Morobe system.”

The astromech droid hooted at him as numbers and graphics scrolled up on the screen.

“Yes, I know you did the best you could on this plotting. Freeze output there.” He tapped the glass on the monitor. “At the Chorax system you have us skirting it by .25 parsecs. There’s only one planetary mass in that system and the sun isn’t that big. Since the Chorax system comes up so early in our leg, if you pull us another tenth of a parsec closer we should come out of hyperspace close enough to Morobe’s habitable planets that we won’t need to make an in-system jump to find gravity if we need it.”

The astromech wailed at him.

Corran laughed. “You’re correct, the data you
used to compute the course indicated giving the system a wider berth, but that’s because you’re using
merchant
data and they’re afraid of pirates and smugglers working the system. We’re a squadron of X-wings. We have nothing to worry about.”

With astronavigation and hyperspace jumping being so tricky a business, courses were plotted as often as not to brush by inhabited systems, even if they were inhabited by social misfits and undesirables. If a hyperdrive went out in midflight, or refused to engage after a course correction between jumps, being within hailing distance of worlds from which help could easily be summoned was a blessing. Trying to find a ship that had misjumped to some random location in the galaxy was next to impossible—as all those who hunted after the fabled
Katana
fleet had learned since its disappearance.

The first leg of the journey ended uneventfully. Two Flight, with Rhysati flying lead, took over from One Flight and brought the squadron around on its new heading. Just before they made the jump to light speed, Commander Antilles shot Corran the coordinates for the third jump.

“So, it’s Morobe after all.” Corran called the flight plan up for one last time, ignoring Whistler’s disgusted wail, and went over it. The course appeared as nearly perfect as possible, given the ships they were using. A ship capable of greater speed could have trimmed even more distance off the run by getting closer to the Chorax system. The greater speed would allow it to resist the influence of the star’s hyperspace mass shadow. Without the resistance the ship would be dragged back into realspace in the system and, more likely than not, would be unable to escape the sun’s gravitational grasp.

“Fortunately X-wings have enough power to get us through.” Corran glanced at his reactor fuel level
readings. The hyperdrives barely sipped fuel, while the sublight engines gulped it. Running up to a lightspeed jump burned a lot of fuel, though not as much as maneuvering through a dogfight, but nothing they had done on their journey so far had been that taxing on the engines or fuel supply.

By the time we make my jump we’ll still be at eighty-seven percent of a full load. More than enough to make it to the Morobe system and back home again
.

The squadron came out of hyperspace and Corran eased his stick to port. “Squadron, come about to a heading of 230 degrees and depress 12 degrees. Flight plan on its way to you.” He pushed his stick forward until the X-wing’s nose dipped slightly. “Jump to light speed in five.”