Star Wars_ X-Wing 03_ The Krytos Trap - Michael A. Stackpole [29]
His stomach shrank and hardened into a rock that threatened to explode volcanically. I’m flying an Imp ship against Rebels. I don’t want to do that. Corran immediately realized that only his enemies—the remnants of the Empire—would want him to feel good about attacking Rebels, yet few Imps would take the time or make the effort to manipulate him that way. Some would imprison him and the rest would just kill him.
Except one.
Ysanne Isard.
Injecting her into the jumble of thoughts bouncing around his brain immediately started to impose order on his mind. She was known and feared for her ability to warp Rebels and turn them against friends and family. She had been successful with Tycho Celchu, and he was not the only success story to come out of her Lusankya prison. Her altered agents had wrought havoc among the Emperor’s enemies, and his death had done nothing to cause Iceheart to curtail her operations.
The fog in Corran’s brain began to evaporate. He remembered having met Isard after his capture. She’d vowed to transform him into a tool of the Emperor’s vengeance. This simulator run—and the one before it—clearly was designed to get him to attack Rebel symbols. Subsequent sessions would further crush his resistance, training him to greater and greater levels of efficiency while turning him against everyone he knew, loved, and respected.
She would make me over into the human equivalent of the plague she unleashed on Coruscant.
Corran shook his head, then raised his hands from the simulator’s steering yoke and yanked his helmet off. Electrodes taped to his head pulled away rather abruptly, taking some hair with them, but he ignored the pain. The electrodes fed my brain wave patterns to a computer. The patterns were compared to data gathered from interrogations, so the computer could recognize what I was thinking about and project the proper clues into the simufotion. Very good.
He pulled the respiration mask from his face and let it dangle against his chest. “This is Nemesis One. The game is over. I won’t betray my people.”
The star field on the screen in front of Corran vanished. In its place he saw Ysanne Isard’s head and shoulders. Her mismatched eyes, the left one a fiery red and the right one an ice blue, added venom to the woman’s steely expression. Her sharp, slender features might have made her seem beautiful to some, but the fear her anger stabbed into his heart made her more than ugly to Corran. Her long black hair had been pulled back into a ponytail, yet she had let her white temple-locks remain unbound as if that girlish affectation would somehow soften her image.
“You are under the impression, Corran Horn, that this little victory is significant and hampers my efforts in some way. It does not.” An eyebrow arched over her arctic eye. “You worked with the Corellian Security Force, so you can understand how powerful certain interrogation techniques can be. What you have endured so far is little more than testing.”
“And I passed.”
“From your perspective that might seem true.” Her eyes sharpened. “From mine it merely means you have reclassified yourself. You will require more time than others I have worked with in the past, but here at Lusankya, time is abundant.”
Corran shrugged. “Good, then I’ll have abundant time to plan my escape.”
“I doubt it.” She sighed as if what she was about to say hurt her in some way. “Were you easy to train, you would find your stay here pleasant. As you are difficult, the next step is for me to determine if you know anything I consider valuable. Unfortunately this means sifting through a lot