Star Wars_ The Black Fleet Crisis 03_ Tyrant's Test - Michael P. Kube-McDowell [63]
Drayson spent the next hour browsing through the personnel records of the casualties of the engagement at Doornik 319. He marked four of them for further consideration—husband-and-wife pilots from the battle cruiser Liberty, a female crew chief who died fighting the hangar fire aboard Venture, and the Hassarian captain of the ill-fated Trenchant.
Each story had a powerful emotional hook. But their effectiveness in deflecting the focus from Leia and Han would be undercut by the fact that, coming so late in the crisis, all four deaths could be as easily blamed on Leia’s actions as on Nil Spaar’s. The tragedy was obvious; that the Yevetha were to blame was less so.
So Drayson set the casualty records aside and retrieved his data folders concerning the eight destroyed colonies in Koornacht Cluster, including the stasis probes’ documentation of the devastation. Assessing the cold realities of emotional kinship, Drayson knew that the most ready identification would be with the humanoid Brigians, the hard-working Morath miners on Elcorth, and the largely human inhabitants of Polneye.
Which, in the end, brought Drayson to the same place his first instincts had said he must go, hours before—to the young Grannan survivor from Polneye, Plat Mallar. It would have been better if Mallar were human, and if Polneye’s historical associations were with the Alliance rather than the Empire, but those problems could be dealt with if addressed head on.
The only question remaining was which provider was to receive the benefit of Drayson’s gift-wrapped leadline scoop. Over the years, he had cultivated mutually helpful relationships with understanding producers in news organizations of all sizes, but rarely had the material been this hot or the stakes this high. He needed someone who not only would set the proper tone for the copycats hustling to catch up, but who also had the courage to risk a shutdown order, even the seizure of the studio facilities, to break a big story first.
In the end, it came down to an old friend or a young idealist, and Drayson settled on the latter.
“Open message to The Life Monitor, blind and secure,” he said. “Personal to Cindel Towani. This is your shopping service. I want to alert you to a special offer, limited availability, your signature required.…”
The initial release of the sixty-second issue of The Life Monitor reached fewer than a hundred thousand subscribers, and Belezaboth Ourn, extraordinary counsel of the Paqwepori, was not among them.
But the lead producer of Capitol Scavenger was, and within an hour a licensed crosslink to Towani’s feature had appeared in the rolling CS queue. That brought Plat Mallar’s story to the attention of nearly half a million more viewers, including the senior night producer for Sunrise and the Senate correspondent for Roll Call.
From there, it was picked up by Coruscant Global and New Republic Prime—both of which gave as small a nod to Cindel Towani as possible, but ran the audio-video portion of her story uncut. By dawn, Mallar’s achingly poignant plea on behalf of the inhabitants of Polneye had reached more than forty million ears on Coruscant and ridden the hypercomm trails to eighty thousand other New Republic worlds.
By midday, it had even reached a destitute and dispirited Ourn.
Both the flight crew of the wrecked Mother’s Valkyrie and his consular staff had long since abandoned him. One by one, they had faced up to the failure and futility of their mission and disappeared, buying cheap passage to Paqwepori on their families’ credit or with the proceeds from selling mission supplies and equipment in the no-name market halls. Cathacatin, the licensed breeder-keeper, had been the last to go, slaughtering the few remaining toko birds before he departed rather than see them suffer from neglect.
Ourn’s continued presence in the diplomatic hostel was strictly a courtesy, for he no longer had either the status or the resources to command a room,