The Krytos Trap (18 page)

He smiled. He had been given a great responsibility, and his success would create a power vacuum at the heart of the Empire. Isard maintained her goal was
not
the resurrection of the Empire, but the destruction of the Rebellion; still, it seemed obvious to him that the recreation of the Empire was a natural consequence of eliminating the Rebellion. When the Rebellion collapsed,
if
he did things well, he would be in position to help restore the Empire. While he knew better than to make himself a direct rival to Iceheart, he also knew she wouldn’t live forever.

Nor will I, but if I live
longer
than she does, the Emperor’s throne might well be open to me
. Loor smiled and sniffed proudly, but the scent of the city’s lower reaches tarnished his fantasy. He glanced down at his feet and saw a glistening fungoid residue that seemed to shift colors as he watched it. Immediately desirous of returning to his eyrie and washing away the stink of Imperial Center’s darker reaches, he fished a comlink out of his pocket and called for one of his guards to meet him with his airspeeder.

Loor did his best to scrape the goo off his shoes against the side of a building, but it clung tenaciously. He chuckled to himself, thinking of it as true
Rebel scum
. He made no headway in his battle with it and wondered if a lightsaber would be able to damage it. He’d concluded it would not by the time his airspeeder slid up to the curb and the rear gull’s-wing door swung up.

Loor started into the passenger compartment, then caught himself. Inside, nestled in the corner, a smallish, white-haired man pointed a blaster pistol at him. “Sorry, wrong speeder. My mistake.”

“No mistake. Get in.” The man sighed. “Get in or my other people will shove you in.”

Given no choice, Loor entered the vehicle and folded himself into one of the jumpseats. The door closed behind him, leaving the two of them alone in the speeder’s darkened interior. Loor raised his hands and clutched the safety straps. “Is there any purpose in my putting these on, Moff Vorru?”

Fliry Vorru nodded his head graciously. “Very good, Agent Loor. Yes, by all means, strap yourself in. I do not anticipate this being a rough ride, but things can get turbulent here on Imperial Center.”

“So I have noticed.”

“I’m certain you have.” Vorru set the blaster pistol on the seat beside him, then tugged at the grey cuffs on his midnight-blue jacket. “And I’m no longer a moff, merely a colonel in the Imperial Center People’s Militia.”

“Natty uniform. I’m sure it will show you off at your best when you hold a news conference and announce my
capture.” Loor tried to force a smile on his face, but it hardly seemed worth the effort. “Quite the coup for you.”

“Indeed, it could be.” Vorru yawned in an exaggerated fashion. “The question remains as to whether or not that is necessary.”

“Excuse me?”

“You present me with a problem, Agent Loor. Your Palpatine Counter-insurgency Front is one of the reasons my militia was created. As long as you are a threat, the Provisional Council needs me. Without you, all we can do is go after petty black marketeers and other criminals.”

“All of whom you currently control anyway.”

“You overestimate my abilities.”

Loor raised an eyebrow. “Do I? You found me quickly enough.”

Vorru shrugged. “More by happenstance than anything else. I was in the process of consolidating my hold on the black market in bacta and had Nartlo under observation, since he had a source I could not isolate. My people had your people under observation when they visited him last night. We continued watching and were led to this vehicle. Your people are good at disguising themselves—by the way, the blond hair and goatee really do distance your appearance from that of Tarkin. Changing the appearance of a vehicle is not as simple.”

The little man smiled. “I had no idea who we had found until we checked the records on this vehicle. The registration is utterly benign and ordinary, with no sign of slicing on the datafile at all. That indicated to me that the registration had made it into the computers through legitimate means, and
that
meant Imperial Intelligence. Since you had turned Zekka Thyne against me, I had made it my business to learn about you then, surprise, surprise, here you are.”

“I hope I don’t disappoint you.”

“It’s possible, but we’ll see.” Vorru frowned. “Normally I’d not have picked you up so early, but Nartlo indicated that he’d given you the locations of the Republic’s bacta repositories. I immediately became suspicious—he maintained you were just a bacta dealer, but those containment centers just
ache to be hit by the PCF. I tried to determine if Nartlo was lying to me, but you had anticipated I’d do that.”

Loor smiled. “You used
skirtopanol
on him.”

“Yes, and the convulsions were rather hideous.”

“Convulsions? Hmmm. We gave him a supply of
lotiramine
and told him it would prevent him from getting the Krytos virus. I included strict dosing instructions. If he went into convulsions he must have taken four times the recommended amount.”

“Some people assume that if one pill is good, more is better.”

“He died?”

“Cerebral hemorrhage.”

“He was useful, which is why we didn’t just kill him outright. The
lotiramine
would have made interrogation difficult for the Rebels, and some of the information he had about my operation would have had them haring off in all sorts of wrong directions.”

Vorru nodded. “Though he claimed no knowledge of a planned assault on the bacta stores, that
is
what you are planning, yes?”

Loor looked around the passenger compartment. “I would have thought General Cracken would resort to more professional methods of interrogation.”

“He would,
and will
, if you do not choose to cooperate with me.” Vorru crossed his legs and plucked at the crease in his slacks. “If I don’t get answers from you, I will tell Cracken I have uncovered a plot to assault the current centers. He’ll put precautions into place that will prevent your success while moving the bacta to new locations. You will lose and I will win.”

“And you have a plan that will result in some other outcome?”

Vorru smiled. “You will now be working for me. You will hit targets I give you and you will hit them when I want them hit. I am not unsympathetic to your war against the Rebellion, I just wish to kill yet one more mynock with a single laser-blast.”

Of course, it should have been obvious
. Loor nodded. “You would do what Prince Xizor could not.”

“Xizor relied too much on his personal abilities and not enough on the ability to read others.”

“Having made Black Sun over into the People’s Militia, you’ll be in position to assume power if the Rebellion falters.”

“But I have no desire to see the Rebellion fail. I just want to see the Rebellion’s
leadership
fail. Manipulate the Bothans and appease them, frustrate the Alderaanians until they alienate the other humans with their constant reminders of how their world was martyred for the Rebellion, let the black market bankrupt the Republic so someone who has monetary reserves can come in and bail things out—”

“That being you.”

“Of course.” Vorru nodded. “Ysanne Isard may have injected the Krytos virus into Imperial Center, but the Rebels injected a more deadly virus into Imperial Center before that:
me
. They saw me as someone who could be a brake on the predations of the underworld here, but they forgot the Emperor himself had seen me as a rival for power once upon a time. What they forgot, I never have. Now the Emperor is dead and I am here on his world.

“The question for you, Agent Loor, is this: how do you want to destroy the Rebellion? Do you want to blast it apart, or distract it until it, too, sickens and dies? What you will find growing up in its place, I can assure you, will be to your liking.”

The Intelligence agent pressed his lips together in a thin line.
My refusal to go along will mean my death, so my choice is obvious. And, as with Ysanne Isard, Fliry Vorru will not live forever
.

Loor nodded slowly. “What do you want?”

“I want you to hit only one of the six repositories at this time—the one just south of the Senate district. My people have already managed to steal most of that supply anyway, so your attack will cover our tracks and leave us to profit from the spike in black market pricing. I will give you other targets as we go along to further my aims.”

“Consider it done. Tonight, during Mon Mothma’s speech?”

Vorru’s face blossomed in a broad smile. “Ah, you have a taste for irony. Splendid. I think our alliance will be most profitable for the both of us. I anticipate doing business with you, Agent Loor, will be an ongoing pleasure.”

16

Iella Wessiri smiled at Diric as she settled into the witness chair. Diric was in the court for the first time and actually looked excited by the crush of people. The bailiffs had let him sit right behind the prosecution table because that put him in close proximity to where she sat when she wasn’t on the stand.

The ashen hue of Diric’s flesh betrayed his fatigue, but the trial had piqued his interest. If not for the fire that put into his brown eyes, she would have remained adamantly against his attending the trial. She felt the trial had to be on the Palpatine Counter-insurgency Front’s list of targets, and she didn’t want Diric exposed to their violence. The sheer savagery of their strike at a bacta containment facility the previous night had left her shaken and, secretly, pleased to have Diric where she could see him.

Halla Ettyk stood. “Iella Wessiri, could you please tell the court about your personal employment history over the last eight years?”

“I joined the Corellian Security Force just about a standard year before the Emperor dissolved the Senate. I worked there for six years, moving up into the Smuggling Interdiction division, where I partnered for two years with Corran
Horn. Approximately two years ago Corran, Gil Bastra, my husband Diric, and I all fled Corellia before our division’s Imperial Liaison officer, Kirtan Loor, could trump up charges and arrest us. From Corellia Diric and I came to Coruscant and remained in hiding for a year. We had enough money that we didn’t need jobs, so I did nothing during that first year here. Subsequent to my husband’s disappearance, about a year ago, I joined the Alliance organization here on Coruscant and aided Rogue Squadron in bringing the shields down. Since then, for the past two weeks, I’ve been assigned to your office as chief investigator on this case.”

The prosecutor nodded. “So, you worked with Corran Horn for two years.”

“I
partnered
with him for two years.”

“Describe what you mean by partnering.”

Iella shrugged slightly. “It’s akin to being married to someone in that you have to trust them completely. Your life is in your partner’s hands in dangerous situations. The only way you can build up that level of trust is by getting to know one another. The job means you’re together a great deal—in any given week you could easily see more of your partner than you do your own family. Some partners get to know each other so well that they almost get this Gotal-sense of being able to read each other’s moods and react in situations without a word being spoken.”

“Describe for us, please, your relationship with Corran Horn.”

“We were close, very close. About six months after I started working with him, Corran’s father was murdered. That event crushed Corran and I helped him through it. He’d been an only child and his mother had died previously, so he felt alone. The fact that Kirtan Loor freed his father’s murderer had Corran burning for vengeance, but Loor’s Imperial ties meant Corran couldn’t do anything, and that frustrated him. Gil and I worked at calming him down, and he came around. The point is that when you help someone through such a difficult time, you get to see his heart and get to know him very well.”

Halla Ettyk glanced at her datapad. “How well did you know Kirtan Loor?”

“He became our Imperial Liaison about a year before I was partnered up with Corran. I found him to be aloof and distant. We didn’t socialize—he made no effort to get to know the rest of us after work and didn’t socialize during office celebrations. He seemed to delight in frustrating investigations. In the three years I worked in the same office with him, I got to know him well enough to avoid him as much as possible.”

“Did you become good at avoiding him?”

“Yes. He’s fairly easy to spot, especially because of his height, and if he became too obnoxious, I could always retreat to the female officers’ refresher station and he’d not follow me.”

“You mention his height. How would you characterize his appearance overall?”

“Rather distinctive.” Iella brushed her light brown hair away from the side of her neck. “He prided himself on looking like a younger, taller Grand Moff Tarkin, and he wasn’t far wrong in that. He definitely stood out in a crowd.”

“Would you say Corran Horn knew Kirtan Loor as well as you did?”

“Objection, counsel is leading the witness.”

“Sustained. Rephrase the question, Commander.”

“Yes, Admiral. How well could you say Corran Horn knew Kirtan Loor?”

“Objection. That calls for speculation.”

“I’ll allow it. Overruled.” Admiral Ackbar nodded toward Iella. “You may answer the question.”

“I’d say Corran knew Loor as well as I did. Corran seemed to know where Loor would be before Loor did, and he programmed Whistler to give him a sign if Loor was around and he’d not noticed yet.”

“Thank you.” Again Ettyk checked her datapad. “Please describe for us the kinds of materials you have reviewed during your investigation.”

Iella started ticking things off on her fingers. “I have interviewed witnesses, I have listened to comlink recordings
and read transcripts of same, I have looked at physical evidence and reviewed reports prepared by forensics concerning same, and I’ve reviewed the file evidence available.”