Star Wars_ X-Wing 02_ Wedge's Gamble - Michael A. Stackpole [153]
Over at the grave site an honor guard raised the squadron flag, then backed away and saluted. That signaled an end to the ceremony, and the visitors began to drift away. A cream-furred Bothan with violet eyes crossed to where Wedge stood and nodded almost graciously. “You were quite eloquent, Commander Antilles.” Borsk Fey’lya waved a hand toward the departing masses. “I have no doubt quite a few hearts were stirred by your words.”
Wedge raised an eyebrow. “But not yours, Councilor Fey’lya?”
The Bothan snoted a clipped laugh. “If I were so easily swayed, I could be convinced to back all sorts of nonsense.”
“Like the trial of Tycho Celchu?”
Fey’lya’s fur rippled and rose at the back of his neck. “No, I might be convinced that such a trial was not necessary.” He smoothed the fur back down with his right hand. “Admiral Ackbar has not convinced you to abandon your petition to the Provisional Council about this matter?”
“No.” Wedge folded his arms across his chest. “I would have thought by now you would have engineered a vote to deny me the chance to address the council.”
“Summarily dismiss a petition by the man who liberated Coruscant?” The Bothan’s violet eyes narrowed. “You’re moving into a realm of warfare at which I am a master, Commander. I would have thought you wise enough to see that. Your petition will fail. It must fail, so it shall. Captain Celchu will be tried for murder and treason.”
“Even though he is innocent?”
“Is he?”
“He is.”
“A fact to be determined by a military court, surely.” Fey’lya gave Wedge a cold smile. “A suggestion, Commander.”
“Yes?”
“Don’t waste your eloquence on the Provisional Council. Save it. Hoard it.” The Bothan’s teeth flashed in a feral grin. “Use it on the tribunal that tries Captain Celchu. You’ll not gain his freedom, of course—no one is that eloquent; but perhaps you will win him some modicum of mercy when it comes time for sentence to be passed.”
2
High up in a tower suite, up above the surface of Imperial Center, Kirtan Loor allowed himself a smile. At the tower’s pinnacle, the only companions were hawk-bats safe in their shadowed roosts and Special Intelligence operatives who were menacing despite their lack of stormtrooper armor or bulk. He felt alone and aloof, but those sensations came naturally with his sense of superiority. At the top of the world, he had been given all he could see to command and dominate.
And destroy.
Ysanne Isard had given him the job of creating and leading a Palpatine Counter-insurgency Front. He knew she did not expect grand success from him. He had been given ample resources to make himself a nuisance. He could disrupt the functioning of the New Republic. He could slow their takeover of Coruscant and hamper their ability to master the mechanisms of galactic administration. A bother, minor but vexatious, is what Ysanne Isard had intended he become.
Kirtan Loor knew he had to become more. Years before, when he started working as an Imperial liaison officer with the Corellian Security Force on Corellia, he never would have dreamed of finding himself rising so far and playing so deadly a game. Even so, he had always been ambitious, and supremely confident in himself and his abilities. His chief asset was his memory, which allowed him to recall a plethora of facts, no matter how obscure. Once he had seen or read or heard something he could draw it from his memory, and this ability gave him a gross advantage over the criminals and bureaucrats with whom he dealt.
His reliance on his memory had also hobbled him. His prodigious feats of recall so overawed his enemies that they would naturally assume he had processed the information he possessed and had drawn the logical conclusions from it. Since they assumed he already knew what only they knew, they would tell him what he had