Star Wars_ X-Wing 03_ The Krytos Trap - Michael A. Stackpole [87]
Garqi was where Corran met Nootka.
Alliance files were far more generous in the amount of information they provided. Nootka had indeed moved shipments for the Alliance, but he acted on their behalf only when it suited him. He didn’t appear to have firm ties to the Alliance—not even as firm as those Mirax Terrik had. Nootka’s distance from the Alliance, yet willingness to work with it, certainly put him in a grey area that might have been why Tycho chose to trade with him.
Iella’s inquiries then went off in several directions at the same time. She started a search for any records pertaining to any of the aliases and various ship identification codes she could find for the Star’s Delight. She was less interested in the Alliance material than she was the Imperial records, but she did note that Nootka had not been off on missions for the Alliance at the time Tycho said he met with him on Coruscant.
She also dug deeper into the person who was Lai Nootka himself. The Duros were a race of tall, slender, blue-skinned beings whose facial expressions seemed, to most humans, to be entirely dour. They remained aloof, and it was often said that they lacked noses because they were disinclined to stick their noses into business that did not concern them. Most Duros remained neutral concerning the Rebellion, but a few brave individuals like Lai Nootka dared trade with the Rebels. Only in this did Lai Nootka appear to be different from the majority of his people, which made researching him much easier.
Iella’s greatest triumph was in locating the series of young-adult Duros novels from which Nootka drew inspiration for his various aliases and the new names of his ship. He had mixed and matched first and family names of characters to create aliases for himself, and then for each alias, gave his ship a name that was not associated with the corresponding characters in the books; but everything had indeed come from that pool of names. When none of the aliases she already had for him turned up an Imperial record, she tried inventing additional aliases, using the process she imagined Nootka himself had used to create his new identities. She started pumping these possible aliases through the Imperial computer and hoping for the best.
The computer had reported back a lot of misses, but finally she got a hit. Just four days before Tycho’s meeting with Lai Nootka, a modified CorelliSpace Gymsnor-3 freighter named Novachild entered the Coruscant system. A Duros named Hes Glillto had been listed as the captain of record. No departure for that ship or captain had been recorded, but this didn’t surprise Iella. The one record providing the information about his arrival was in a duty log filed by Lieutenant Virar Needa of Orbital Solar Energy Transfer Satellite 1127 after Coruscant had fallen to the Alliance and after Tycho Celchu had been taken into custody.
Though officially part of their duty, OSETS officers seldom maintained or filed such logs, but from what she could see Needa had been obsessive about it. The log had data concerning incoming and outgoing ships that traveled in-system during Needa’s watches on the station. The lack of a departure record for Novachild could have meant nothing more sinister than that the ship had left while Needa was sleeping, but Iella felt in her gut that was unlikely.
She sat back in her chair and looked at the data on the screen again. The fact that no other Imperial records mentioned the Novachild or Hes Glillto told Iella the records had been deliberately purged. And anyone with the access needed to purge those records could easily manufacture and enter the data that shows Tycho was in Imperial Intelligence’s pay. Or, Tycho himself could have doctored things to make it look as if he had been framed.
Iella slowly shook her head. The information she had was intriguing but essentially useless. She could not prove Lai Nootka and Hes Glillto were the same person. The Novachild’s arrival put