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“The other Rogues have the Headquarters as a touchstone. I gave them no way to reach me and I have no way to reach them save through using Inyri as a cutout. I imagine the Alien Combine also has a way to reach the other Rogues. Has there been any word on Aril?”

Rima shook her head.

Corran frowned. “Does that mean there’s no information or there is, but I don’t need to know it?”

“There is no news.” Rima’s shoulders sagged just a bit. “There was a lot of confusion in the aftermath of the raid. Some reports have suggested a group of Sullustans were led off early on, but we’ve no confirmation of that, nor any indication they are in any of the prisons here. They vanished and so has Aril.”

“People tend to do that.” Corran’s hands knotted into fists. “One thing that’s important, I need to talk to Commander Antilles.”

“Who?”

Corran smiled wearily at Rima. “I’m here, the other Rogues are here.” Including Tycho. “Commander Antilles has to be here and I need to speak with him. I saw something the other night that he needs to know about.”

“If it is that important, perhaps I need to know about it?”

Not with you being as close to Tycho as you seem to be. Corran shook his head. “You don’t need to know, Rima, sorry. Squadron business.”

“Very well.” The white-haired woman shrugged. “Stay here until I return for you.”

“As ordered.” Corran drew the blaster from the makeshift holster he’d fashioned in the lining of his jacket. “Can you get me some spare power packs for this thing?”

“I’ll see.”

“That doesn’t sound very hopeful. What if stormtroopers raid this place?”

“Ask if you can borrow some from them.” Rima gave him a grim smile. “All they can say is no.”

He waited two more days, spending his time working up a line that would convince stormtroopers to surrender their weapons to him. He found it a singularly frustrating occupation because, since they tended to be much larger than he was, he knew he could not intimidate them. Appealing to their humanity seemed a dubious prospect, as did appealing to their sense of fair play.

He spent the vast majority of time in the apartment going over the earlier events and trying to draw conclusions from all of it. First and foremost he was certain he’d seen Tycho Celchu talking with Kirtan Loor. That meant the operation on Coruscant was busted wide open. With Tycho on Coruscant the Imps clearly had full descriptions and datafiles on everyone in the squadron. He had to assume they were under surveillance or would soon be watched.

The fact that he’d stumbled across Tycho and Loor meeting in public did bother him a bit. If Tycho was an Imperial agent—as had been everyone else who’d ever been at Lusankya—why wouldn’t the meeting have been held in an Imperial facility? The obvious answer to that question was that Tycho hadn’t appreciated his Lusankya experience and was being wary of trapping himself in an Imperial stronghold. He was smart enough to know the Imps couldn’t be trusted, so he was probably gouging them for sufficient credits to buy some far-away world and live like a Moff for the rest of his life.

The fact that their mission had so clearly been blown really left the Rogues only one choice: leave immediately. He felt he had collected enough information about the general level of security on the planet to be useful, but he also expected all that to change in the near future, if it had not changed already. He had to assume that whatever any of the Rogues had learned was of dubious value, and therefore, their mission was a bust.

The only way to salvage any of this is to go home and start fighting against the Empire again.

Before he could come up with another plan that would be effective, but also before he’d admitted defeat to himself, Rima came for him. She resisted answering his questions about their destination and seemed abnormally taciturn and withdrawn, but she did give him power packs for his blaster, so he chose not to press her for information. He did wonder what had gotten into her, but he chose not to ask questions on the street.