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“Well,” said Squeaky, “what shall we do now? I know many mnemonic games. Compare Storerooms is a good one.”

Chewbacca rumbled something.

“No, I don’t know Droid-Crushers.”

Rumble.

“What do you mean, you’d be happy to demonstrate? Oh, ha, ha.”

Wedge sighed. For such a short flight in, this was going to be a long mission.

It was long after the Rogues and Wraiths settled into their parking orbit around Kidriff’s moon that Face remembered his unread mail.

“Vape, put that new storage through to my comm screen. In order of reception, please.”

First was a letter, text only, from his sister, now at school on Pantolomin. It was chatty, full of details of everyday life, much as Face remembered it. A bright bit of home to distract him from the bleak lunar scape that was his sole viewing pleasure right now.

The second, and last, item was from New Republic Intelligence. He had to wade through screen after screen of standard admonishment that he was not to distribute this material, upon pain of trial and incarceration, before he got to the meat of the message and remembered what it was all about: his recent query concerning Lara Notsil and Edallia Monotheer, the name she’d been called by the old man on Coruscant.

The enclosed material was all classified secret; nothing had a higher secrecy rating. He hoped the answers he was looking for weren’t hiding behind a more stringent level of classification, a level he couldn’t access.

The file on Lara Notsil contained little information he didn’t already know. Much of it she’d told him and the other Wraiths at one time or another. Born on a farm in Aldivy. Decent grades in school. No indication of special aptitudes other than agriculture. Then, the data derived from her own accounts and a little independent verification: how her community refused to offer aid to the enemy by turning over stockpiles of grain and meats to a former Imperial admiral by the name of Trigit, how Trigit’s ship Implacable had bombarded the town out of existence. How follow-up troops had found a survivor, Lara Notsil, and taken her up to the ship. How Trigit, taken with the girl, had kept her half-comatose on a steady diet of drugs and made her his unwilling mistress. Until Wraith Squadron and allied troops had destroyed Implacable. Until Lara had escaped in Trigit’s personal evacuation pod.

A rather sparse account. But colonists like the Aldivians, given to raising their crops and children, didn’t devote a lot of time to more extensive personal records. On some colonies, they didn’t even carry identification.

Then the file on Edallia Monotheer. For all that she was born on Coruscant, a planet notable for the extent and quality of its citizen records, her account was scarcely longer than Notsil’s. It had been reconstructed from interviews; all primary sources about her appeared to have been destroyed.

Born about fifty years ago. Trained to be an actress. She’d caught the eye of Armand Isard, father of Ysanne Isard; he was the head of Intelligence throughout most of the reign of Emperor Palpatine. Monotheer had trained as an Intelligence agent and had executed many successful missions for her superiors.

Then, according to this account, she had been arrested and convicted of treason, along with her husband. Both were executed for funneling information about Imperial Intelligence to anti-Imperial factions on Chandrila. An opinion annotated by some anonymous New Republic Intelligence analyst suggested that this was a standard technique to cause the death of a subordinate who had committed some less significant offense, and that Monotheer had had nothing to do with the Rebel Alliance.

Husband. Face found the link to data on Monotheer’s immediate family and brought it up.

There was not much of interest there on her husband. He had a history similar to hers. There were rumors that the two of them had had a child, but there was no data on file about this.

But far more interesting than the husband