Star Wars_ X-Wing 03_ The Krytos Trap - Michael A. Stackpole [88]
And I’m not so sure I want to do that. She sighed. Diric had told her about some of the conversations he’d had with Tycho. He was more convinced than ever of Tycho’s innocence, and his opinion did carry a lot of weight in her mind. Even so, if Tycho had caused Corran’s death, Iella didn’t want him to be able to get away with it. I owe Corran that much.
A familiar hoot brought her back to the present and sparked a smile on her face. “Whistler!”
The small green and white R2 beeped happily. Behind him, tottling along, came Rogue Squadron’s black, clamshell-headed M-3PO unit. “Good morning, Mistress.”
“Morning?” Iella glanced at the Chronographie readout at the top of her datapad’s screen. “I don’t believe it. I’ve been here eight hours. Diric will kill me.”
Emtrey’s head canted to the left. “I would hope not, Mistress Iella. That would be a crime and—”
“I was speaking metaphorically, Emtrey, not literally.” Iella frowned at the droid. “I meant that he would be upset with me.”
“Ah, I see.”
Iella patted Whistler gently on his domed head. “So what are you two doing here in the computer center?”
Whistler warbled nonchalantly.
“We can so tell her, Whistler.” Emtrey’s head righted itself and thrust forward, giving Iella a good view of the gold eyes burning in the hollow of his face. “You do want the truth to triumph, don’t you?”
Iella nodded slowly. “Every day it seems I’m hearing less and less of it. What have you got?”
Emtrey pointed toward her dataterminal’s I/O port. “Whistler, hook in there and show her what we found.”
Whistler squawked rudely—a sound Iella recognized as one she’d often heard the droid use to chasten Corran. Her throat thickened as melancholy tried to suck the life out of her, but she shook her head. She looked up at Emtrey and forced words out past the lump in her throat. “What have you been doing?”
“We have finished the tasks Master Ven set for us before he left with the others, so we started going over transcripts and noticed an underlying assumption everyone seems to have made concerning the conquest of Coruscant.”
“And that is?”
“It is assumed that Ysanne Isard let us have the world because she wanted us to have it, infected as it was with the Krytos virus. The stresses possessing it has put on the Alliance certainly are great, and the assumption is probably valid, but there is no straight-line correlation between her desire to let us have the planet and actions taken in the final days.”
“I’m not certain, at this hour, I follow what you’re saying.” Iella rubbed at her burning eyes with her left hand. “Can you break it down and be more specific?”
“Certainly.” Emtrey glanced down at the R2 unit. “Show her the current disease case grid.”
Whistler chirped happily. The data on the terminal’s screen vanished beneath a graph that plotted incidences of sickness over time in red. A thick blood-red line quickly blossomed into a triangle with a steep hypotenuse, then leveled out into a rectangle that began to flare upward again over the last ten days. The disease had spread quickly at first, but had plateaued—until recently.
Iella nodded. “The plateau indicates the period when the disease stopped spreading because bacta therapy managed to keep it under control.”
“Exactly. The graph of fatalities has a similar profile.”
“I can imagine. This is pretty horrible.”
“True, Mistress. Whistler, now run the plus-six graph.”
“Plus-six?”
“The projected disease report graph we would have seen if the planet had fallen to the Alliance just six days later than it did.” The new graph exploded from the starting point and spiked quickly off the top of the screen. “Projected fatalities in this model are 85 percent of afflicted populations.”
Iella’s jaw dropped open. “Whole alien populations would have been wiped off Coruscant.