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“It could.” Tycho shrugged his shoulders. “Then again, you could think about what you know about me and decide for yourself if I can be trusted or not.”

Corran sat back and folded his arms across his chest. In his career with the Corellian Security Force, Corran had questioned all manner of people—humans, aliens, and even the occasional droid. He’d always had a sense about who was telling the truth and who was lying to him. He’d gotten used to following that feeling, playing his hunches to find the chinks in the stories suspects used to build.

From Tycho he was getting no sign of deception, but what he didn’t know about the man seemed to outweigh what he did know. There was no question that Tycho Celchu had been a valued and valiant member of Rogue Squadron from before Hoth until after Endor, Bakura, and dozens of other little battles. He flew an A-wing in the assault on the second Death Star and managed to draw pursuit away from Wedge and the Millennium Falcon. Well after that he had volunteered for a classified mission and all trace of his records up to six months before he rejoined Rogue Squadron had been encrypted. The gap only amounted to three quarters of a year, but it marked the end of trust in him by a host of Alliance figures. It seems Wedge Antilles was the only person who still had faith in him.

Corran had only known Tycho for six months, but in that time Tycho had repeatedly flown an unarmed shuttle into dangerous situations to recover pilots who had been shot out of their ships. On one of those occasions he had saved Corran’s life by providing him a datafeed that let him target incoming TIE Interceptors. It had been a brave thing to do, and one that could have gotten Tycho killed, but he took the chance to keep Corran alive.

Despite owing Tycho his life not once but twice, Corran still had reservations about him. Tycho had been secretive about the gap in his record. Corran could have easily ignored that, but the ease with which Tycho had overpowered his security detail and slipped away from supervision on the second occasion when he saved Corran’s life made Corran wary. He knew his suspicion was the residue of having been a CorSec officer whose father and grandfather had also served CorSec, and he’d hoped learning the truth about Tycho would ease his mind.

The problem was that the only place he could learn the story would be from Tycho who, for better or worse, had to be considered somewhat unreliable as a narrator. Still, it’s better than unfocused suspicion.

“Sir, I have trusted you in the past, and I’ll go on trusting you in the future because I’ve not seen you do anything wrong. And I apologize for trying to slice out your file. I guess having worked with CorSec has just honed my sense of paranoia. Not knowing why Salm has you under guard has that sense working overtime.”

“But you’d still like to know what happened to me two years ago?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Fine.” Tycho shrugged with resignation, but his voice carried with it some relief. “It’ll be good to share this with someone else, but it goes no further, right?”

Corran held his hand up. “On my honor.”

Tycho fixed him with a crystal-blue stare for a second, then nodded. “I volunteered to fly a TIE starfighter into Coruscant. The Alliance impounded it at Bakura and modified it heavily to fill it with sensor packages. In coming in I made several orbits of the planet and picked up all sorts of interesting data on the Golan space fortresses, the defense shields, the orbital solar collection mirrors, the skyhooks, the dry docks and ship factories, and everything else orbiting the planet. I then took the ship in, landed on Coruscant, and the data was downloaded. It was shipped out by various routes and within two weeks I was asked to fly the eyeball back out, taking readings as I went, then hook up with a freighter and return to the Alliance. I knew getting out would be tough, but we had all the proper codes to get out, so I chanced it.”

“And the Imps got you.”

“They did. Two ion-cannon blasts shorted every system I had in the ship, including the self-destruct.