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By Root 503 0

“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