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No one was talking; instead, everyone watched Iella Wessiri as she moved the length of one wall, slowly and rhythmically waving an electronic device beside it. The lights on the device blinked a steady pattern in white.

Wedge waited until Iella finished. She nodded at him to indicate that the chamber was free of listening devices.

“Two hours ago,” Wedge began, “a refugee ship arrived from the direction of the Hapes Cluster. It had been part of a fleet heading toward Hapes. The fleet had been assembled in considerable secrecy, but the Yuuzhan Vong intercepted it, and this ship was the only one to escape. This coincides with word we’ve received from Talon Karrde today that the Vong are becoming much more adept at tracking refugee traffic.

“I suspect that the New Republic fleet groups, under direct control of the Advisory Council, are going to be unable to devote their resources to this problem. So I’m going to devote some of ours. I’m looking for ideas.”

“The first step,” Luke said, “has to be to figure out what the Yuuzhan Vong are doing. How they’re getting their accurate information about refugee ship movements. It could be that they’ve infiltrated one of the Yuuzhan Vong into the refugee ship network … in which case you’ll want a Jedi to travel on some of those voyages to try to find a crew member who can’t be detected in the Force.”

“Good point,” Wedge said. “Anyone else?”

Danni Quee waved from the back of the room. “They could be using some sort of tracking creature.”

“Also a good point,” Wedge acknowledged. “What do we do about that?”

Danni considered. “Tracking creatures will probably be using gravitic fluctuations to signal their presence. I can build a detection device similar to what I’m using to track yammosk activities. If we mount it on a refugee vessel, it can record gravitic flux and determine whether a creature like that is aboard. But if the vessel doesn’t survive the trip and we can’t retrieve the recording, that does us no good.”

Corran Horn spoke up. “So we make sure that the vessel survives. We put together a surprise for the Vong and then run the vessel on missions until they decide to take it. This has an additional benefit; the Yuuzhan Vong are preying pretty much at will on refugee ships. If Yuuzhan Vong vessels assigned to this duty start disappearing, they may have to rethink their operations.”

“Good,” Wedge said.

Corran continued, “But if the Yuuzhan Vong aren’t using gravitic tracker creatures, we still have to figure out where the holes are in the security of the refugee network. We’ll have to root out the problem the old-fashioned way.”

“Well, it looks like we have some tactics to employ,” Wedge said. “I think we’ll need a volunteer to coordinate this effort, and that volunteer can work with me and Tycho to assemble a mission. Anyone?”

Lando’s hand was, to the surprise of the others, first in the air. “I think it’s about time I made a lot of Vong look bad,” he said. “In my own inimitable way, of course.”

“Of course.” Wedge grinned at him.

“I’ll need communications access to Talon Karrde, Danni’s device, a starfighter squadron, maybe a Jedi or two, and a lot of brandy. I can’t stress the brandy part enough.”

Wedge gave him a dubious look. “I think we’ve accomplished what we needed to here. Does anyone have anything else?”

“I do.” Luke gave Mara an apologetic look. “I’m going to Coruscant. Something’s happening there, something outside the activities of the Yuuzhan Vong, and I have to look into it. I suspect that once I’m there, I can find a way to get offworld, but what I don’t know is how I’d get to the planet’s surface.”

“Intelligence can get you there,” Iella said. “We’ve been thinking about putting a team on the ground there—we need to set up Resistance cells on Coruscant. We can combine the two missions.” She gave him a wicked smile. “I’ll give you that extremely annoying mechanic.”

“Thank you so much,” Luke said, deadpan.

Domain Lah Worldship, Myrkr Orbit

He was