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“No, no, not that.” Isard finished the last rep and smiled up at him. “Actually I’m pleased the ship is gone. Until you escaped from it, the ship had been pristine, even virginal. Your escape … violated it and soiled it. While I used it to escape Imperial Center, I had little to do with it after that. I couldn’t think of it in the same way. In many ways I was glad it died.”

“So were we.” He shook his head. “I’ve heard from Wedge how you scattered the other prisoners, which answers one of the two questions I had concerning the ship.”

“And the other was?”

“How you got it buried beneath the surface of Coruscant?”

Her nose wrinkled with his use of the pre- and post-Imperial name for the world, but it took a moment or two beyond that for her to provide her response. “I wish I knew. I know where and when Lusankya was created, and I know when it was given to me, so I have narrowed down the possible dates for its insertion into the world, but even as director of Imperial Intelligence I could find no clue as to how the insertion happened.”

“But it had to have taken hundreds of construction droids and weeks of time. A project that size could not have gone unnoticed.”

“I would agree, unless … the Force is something I do not understand and cannot touch, but the Emperor could. Is it possible he drew the ship down and buried it using the Force? I suppose. Is it possible that he merely stretched his mind out and prevented anyone from noticing the ship’s descent? Also possible.” She shook her head. “All I know is that the Emperor confided its location to me at roughly the same time its sister ship, the Executor, became operational.”

A chill ran down Corran’s spine. Even unschooled as he was in the Force, he’d managed to blank the mind of a stormtrooper looking for him. If the Emperor could manage to do that for billions of people, the miracle of the Rebellion is that it succeeded at all.

“So, the Emperor never really reckoned with the threat the Rebellion represented to him, did he?”

She began pumping her legs again. “I always thought you were more trouble than he did. He exerted great energies suppressing the internecine warfare between species in the Empire. He underestimated his enemy. This makes him much like you, Corran Horn.”

“Me? How does that follow?”

“The apology you owe me. It’s for underestimating me.” Isard gave him a smile that puckered his flesh. “You thought you’d killed me, but you hadn’t. You didn’t push, you didn’t pursue. I had thought you would have been more diligent than that. Your father certainly would have been.”

Corran stiffened, then spitted her with a harsh glare. “What you know of my father you stripped from my brain when you had me on Lusankya. I’m not going to let you use my own memories against me.”

“Oh, it’s not your memories I’m using, but my own.” Her smile tightened slightly as she began a third set of repetitions. “I met your father once. Spent some time with him. He was most annoying and prevented me from accomplishing my mission.”

“Like father, like son.”

“Indeed.” Isard crawled out of the weight machine and stood slightly taller than Corran. “The annoyance factor with you is getting to be too much. I want you to stop trying to send messages out of here. You’ll jeopardize the mission.”

Corran shook his head, then walked over to a triceps extension machine and sat down. He glanced over at her. “You don’t fool me, Isard. You don’t fall in love with someone like the Emperor because you like the way he laughs or the cute dimples he has. You fall in love with him because you feel a kinship to him. You wanted what he wanted, which was power; and that lust for power won’t go away. Just the way you brought us here and keep us here reflects your need for control. You have a goal and everything else will be subordinate to it.”

She dabbed with her towel at a droplet of sweat running down from her left temple. “General Antilles knows what I want. He knows what the price for my cooperation is. What I want from you is your cooperation so that I