Part 18 (1/2)
Nawara glanced over at Wedge. ”Commander, I did not realize--”
”No reason you should have Nawar .... ”Wedge hitched a moment. The way the Twi'leks ran Nawara's name together, he couldn't be certain exactly what Nawara's clan name was. When in doubt, go with indigenous custom.
”... Nawar'aven. It was an adventure the squadron had well before you joined it. Suffice it to say it was resolved to the satisfaction of all interested parties.”
”It was indeed, Wedgan'tiiles.” Koh'shak stretched the last syllable of Wedge's name into a whole sibilant phrase of its own. ”And now you are come here seeking satisfaction of another kind.”
”Quite true, Koh'shak.” Wedge half-turned and pointed back at the two Alliance s.h.i.+ps. ”We have for you some won-drous things drawn from the various worlds of the New Republic.” As he turned back to face the starport's master, he noticed Nawara and Cazne'olan speaking to each other in low tones, with their braintails convulsing wildly.
Koh'shak closed his pinkish eyes and settled interlaced fingers over the bulge in his middle. ”I am certain what you have brought will be impressive. Shall we begin our negotia-tions?”
His offer seemed a bit abrupt to Wedge, and the sur-prised look on Nawara's face indicated he also thought something was amiss. What's going on here?
Before Wedge could venture a reply, Nawara gently grabbed Wedge's right forearm. ”While the Commander ap-plauds your alacrity in seeing to his needs, we have been traveling for days to get here. He chooses to invoke twi'janii.”
Koh'shak's eyes popped open with the speed Wedge would have expected if the starport master had felt a gun being jammed against a spine. ”!
welcome Wedgan'tilles and would have granted him twi'janii without reservation if I felt he did not find our climate oppressive.”
”Open your eyes yet wider, Koh'shak.” Cazne'olan ges-tured toward Wedge.
”He is a warrior in truth as well as dress. Even in the hot season he would not be discomfitted.”
”Your courtesy in reminding me of that is appreciated, Cazne'olan.”
Koh'shak's words came out light and even, but the violent twitching of his braintails seemed to belie the benign tone of the reply.
”Wedgan'rilles, you and your peo-ple are to consider yourselves our guests. We will see to your pleasure, then to our business.”
”You are most kind,” Wedge said, believing Koh'shak to be anything but. I don't know what he has in mind as our pleasure, but I'm certain his will be business, and I don't antic.i.p.ate that being much fun at all.
23.
Elbows planted on either side of the dataterminal's key-board, leila leaned forward and rubbed her hands over her face. The jolt of excitement she had expected had come, but it faded far too quickly. Fatigue and an unfocused fear flooded through her in its wake. She could feel herself begin-ning to slow down, but she refused to surrender.
No, no giving up now. I won this one. She pressed her fingers against her eyelids. I think.
She had begun her quest to locate the Duros captain, Lai Nootka, in a most organized and methodical way. She pulled as much as she could about him from Imperial and Alliance sources and compiled a profile of him based on that informa-tion. The most complete Imperial record came from a planet named Garqi where Nootka and his crew had been impris-oned for several months on charges of smuggling for the Alliance. Nootka's presence on the planet had been well doc-umented, and the Prefect Barris, Nootka's Imperial adver-sary, had paid dearly for his brush with the Alliance.
Garqi was where Corran met Nootka.
Alliance files were far more generous in the amount of information they provided. Nootka had indeed moved s.h.i.+p-ments for the Alliance, but he acted on their behalf only when it suited him. He didn't appear to have firm ties to the Alliance--not even as firm as those Mirax Terrik had.
Nootka's distance from the Alliance, yet willingness to work with it, certainly put him in a grey area that might have been why Tycho chose to trade with him.
Iella's inquiries then went off in several directions at the same time.
She started a search for any records pertaining to any of the aliases and various s.h.i.+p identification codes she could find for the Star's Delight.
She was less interested in the Alliance material than she was the Imperial records, but she did note that Nootka had not been off on missions for the Alliance at the time Tycho said he met with him on Coruscant.
She also dug deeper into the person who was Lai Nootka himself. The Duros were a race of tall, slender, blue-skinned beings whose facial expressions seemed, to most hu-mans, to be entirely dour. They remained aloof, and it was often said that they lacked noses because they were disin-clined to stick their noses into business that did not concern them. Most Duros remained neutral concerning the Rebel-lion, but a few brave individuals like Lai Nootka dared trade with the Rebels. Only in this did Lai Nootka appear to be different from the majority of his people, which made re-searching him much easier.
Iella's greatest triumph was in locating the series of young-adult Duros novels from which Nootka drew inspira-tion for his various aliases and the new names of his s.h.i.+p. He had mixed and matched first and family names of characters to create aliases for himself, and then for each alias, gave his s.h.i.+p a name that was not a.s.sociated with the corresponding characters in the books; but everything had indeed come from that pool of names. When none of the aliases she al-ready had for him turned up an Imperial record, she tried inventing additional aliases, using the process she imagined Nootka himself had used to create his new ident.i.ties. She started pumping these possible aliases through the Imperial computer and hoping for the best.
The computer had reported back a lot of misses, but finally she got a hit. Just four days before Tycho's meeting with Lai Nootka, a modified Corellis.p.a.ce Gymsnor-3 freighter named Novachild entered the Coruscant system. A Duros named Hes Glillto had been listed as the captain of record. No departure for that s.h.i.+p or captain had been re-corded, but this didn't surprise leila. The one record provid-ing the information about his arrival was in a duty log filed by Lieutenant Virar Needa of Orbital Solar Energy Transfer Satellite 1127 after Coruscant had fallen to the Alliance and after Tycho Celchu had been taken into custody.
Though officially part of their duty, OSF;FS officers sel-dom maintained or filed such logs, but from what she could see Needa had been obsessive about it. The log had data concerning incoming and outgoing s.h.i.+ps that traveled in-system during Needa's watches on the station. The lack of a departure record for Novachild could have meant nothing more sinister than that the s.h.i.+p had left while Needa was sleeping, but Iella felt in her gut that was unlikely.
She sat back in her chair and looked at the data on the screen again. The fact that no other Imperial records men-tioned the Novachild or Hes Glillto told leila the records had been deliberately purged. And anyone with the access needed to purge those records could easily manufacture and enter the data that shows Tycho was in Imperial lntelligence's pay.
Or, Tycho himself could have doctored things to make it look as if he had been framed.
Iella slowly shook her head. The information she had was intriguing but essentially useless. She could not prove Lai Nootka and Hes Glillto were the same person. The Novachild's arrival put it on Coruscant a couple of days before the meeting Corran had witnessed, but she couldn't exclude the possibility that the s.h.i.+p had departed before the date of the meeting. Unless she could definitively place Nootka on Coruscant at that time, she couldn't prove Tycho was telling the truth.
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 inno-cence, and his opinion did carry a lot of weight in her mind. Even so, if Tycho had caused Corran's death, lella didn't want him to be able to get away with it. I owe Corran that 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, tortling along, came Rogue Squadron's black, clam-sh.e.l.l-headed M-3PO unit. ”Good morning, Mistress.”
”Morning?” leila glanced at the chronographic 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 leila. That would be a crime and--”
”I was speaking metaphorically, Emtrey, not literally.” leila frowned at the droid. ”I meant that he would be upset with me.”
”Ah, I see.”
Ieila 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 leila a good view of the gold eyes burning in the hollow of his face. ”You do want the truth to triumph, don't you?”
Ieila 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 leila 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 a.s.sumption everyone seems to have made concerning the conquest of Coruscant.”
”And that is?”