Star Wars_ X-Wing 07_ Solo Command - Aaron Allston [117]
Shalla cleared her throat. “Tough call. At a certain level, I think Corran Horn was right. Mentally and emotionally, Lara’s not all together. But she seems to be sticking to her plan, to her perception that Zsinj is the enemy. And if I read her words right, she’s resigned herself to death in this effort. That makes it more likely that her words can be trusted.
“Add to that the very interesting way she transmitted data. It was complicated, it was unreliable. It was a desperation measure. If she really was an agent of Zsinj’s, she could have just shot us a tight-beam transmission from her interceptor’s comm system. We would have known that there was very little chance of such a message being detected. The approach she actually used suggests to me that she’s afraid that her interceptor’s comm system is tapped, recording, something, and she wanted to get around whatever measures had been taken that way.”
“All right. Face?”
“She’s a pretty good actress,” Face said. “In her line of work, she’d have to be. But there was a lot of what seemed like very genuine strain in her voice. I’d lean toward the side of her telling the truth.”
“Donos?”
Decorum demanded that he look at them when he answered. To do that, he’d have to put his hand down. If he did that, they’d see his tears. They’d know he wasn’t in control of himself. They’d know—
Well, to hell with what they knew, with what they thought. He slammed his hand down on the tabletop. Shalla and Solo jumped. He looked around the table, defying all to say anything about the tears on his cheeks. “She was telling the truth,” he said.
“I need a little more than that,” Wedge said. “Your reasons?”
“That final bit … if she’s luring us into a trap for Zsinj, what was that last bit for? To make me feel bad? What good would that do?” He took a deep, shuddery breath. “If she had wanted to manipulate me, to make me come in on her side, she’d have said, ‘If I get out of this alive, I’ll come back to stand trial.’ That gives me everything, puts everything on me. If I just want justice, I win—she stands trial. If I want her, I win—I stand beside her at her trial, and I can dream that she’ll get off light. That’s the way to swing me over, but she didn’t do that. She just said good-bye.”
Wedge nodded. “All right. There you go, General. Three opinions, all in the same direction, for different reasons.”
Solo asked, “Why did she think Vahaba would be on our list?”
“I looked at the data file she’d appended to the audio,” Wedge said. “She had done a good job of calculating the criteria we were using, except that she thought that the planets our false Han Solo would be visiting would all be former trading partners with, or recipients of regular trade goods from, Alderaan.”
Solo leaned back. “That makes sense. It does. One of the factors we used was choosing worlds that produced certain types of matériel that are valuable in times of war and times of peace. That would correspond to a certain degree to the types of goods Alderaan was importing after it banned all its weapons. Can you run the numbers on our projections again, substituting trade with Alderaan for what we had?”
Wedge gave him a smile. “Already did. And guess which system, discounting the ones we’ve already visited, jumps to the top of the list? Vahaba.”
“Vahaba.” Solo smiled. “If we can get the Falsehood repaired fast enough, we can dangle it like bait for Zsinj again. All right, Nelprin, Donos, thanks for coming. Loran, I need you for a moment more.”
Donos rose, offered a salute, and was the first one out the door.
When the three pilots were gone, Solo turned to Wedge. “If Zsinj wouldn’t come in at Kidriff to get me, he won’t come in anywhere. He’s just too conservative. Protecting Iron Fist all the way. So if we can’t get Iron Fist close enough to a gravity well to trap it for a while, we need to bring a gravity well to Iron Fist.”
Wedge frowned. “Meaning what? An Interdictor cruiser?” Those vessels, uncommon even in the Imperial fleet where they were most prevalent, possessed gravity-well generators that, when activated, could