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“Bait.” Kell scowled and leaned against the strike foil of the nearest X-wing. “Phanan, I don’t know about you, but I haven’t had enough time to make enough friends and acquaintances that I can just snap my fingers and find someone with the qualities you’re talking about.”

“Ah, but you don’t have my superior intellect, do you?”

“One more mention of your superior intellect and I’ll make it necessary for you to install a brain that’s all mechanical.”

Phanan leaned close, unfazed by or oblivious to the threat. “When I was in the hospital on Borleias, the patient in the next room was a woman. A beautiful woman. A survivor off the Implacable.”

“So she’s a military prisoner now? Ton, we can’t break her out of jail for your plan—”

“Not a prisoner now. She was a prisoner aboard the Implacable. Admiral Trigit’s mistress—unwilling mistress. She was snatched off a planet colony Trigit bombarded into sand, she was kept drugged … you can guess the rest.”

Kell grimaced.

“She had a whole lot to tell New Republic Intelligence about Trigit and his methods. A very observant, intelligent young woman. Not to mention a beauty.”

“You’ve already mentioned that she was a beauty.”

“Yes, but I’m still not over her. I heard she was being transferred to Coruscant for further debriefing. If we can find her and convince her to help …”

“We could sponsor her to pilot training and catch Colonel Repness in his same pathetic tactic.” Kell glanced again at Tyria. “I’m in.”

“Good. I’ll see if I can track her down—Lara Notsil is her name—and then see if Face will keep us off the duty roster long enough to talk to her.”

“And if he won’t?”

“I’ll bring him in on the plan.” Anticipating Kell’s objections, Phanan hastily continued, “I won’t mention Tyria by name. I can keep her out of the story.”

“Well … all right. Let’s keep her out of this end of it, too.”

“Done.”

A day later, they reassembled in the same hangar, all the Wraiths and more personnel besides.

Face looked over the newcomers with interest. Tallest among them was a human male, on his head an untidy mess of straw-colored hair. Next was a dark-skinned woman with large, alert eyes, a red bead tied to one lock of hair on her forehead, and a broad smile that suggested that every minute of every day she was thrilled to be alive. The last, and shortest, was a Twi’lek woman, her features startlingly beautiful by human standards but her red-eyed stare forbidding, her brain tails hanging loose behind her instead of being draped over her shoulders in the fashion of a Twi’lek among friends and allies. All three wore the standard orange-and-white New Republic pilot’s suit.

“Lots of news today,” Wes Janson said, looking over his datapad. He was, Face saw, back to his usual self, his eternally youthful features merry, no sign on them of discomfort from the injury to his side. “Most of it good, some bad.

“Bad news: I’m back. Bad for me, because I was enjoying my rest, and bad for you, because if some of you had been a little quicker, I wouldn’t have been shot. Keep it in mind as I make up assignments over the next few weeks.”

He smiled at the chorus of groans that resulted. “Runt, also, is fit for duty, which is probably both good and bad, because some of his personalities enjoy working and some don’t.” The greatest mental peculiarity of Runt’s Thakwaash species, now well known to the Wraiths, was that most had multiple personalities—not caused, as they were among humans, by great emotional trauma, but occurring as a natural part of their mental development. Each of Runt’s personalities was adept at a different task, and new personalities tended to emerge as he learned.

“We have new pilots to fill our roster.” One of the Wraiths had died at the battle on the moon of System M2398; two more had perished in the fight that destroyed the Implacable. “I present to you Flight Officer Castin Donn, our new computer specialist.” The blond-haired man nodded cheerfully. Janson continued, “Castin is