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The man’s voice quaked. “Y-yes?”

“You were right. I’m Wedge Antilles. I’m back.”

The couple of seconds it took for Wedge’s statement to blossom with all its import in Lorrir’s brain proved to be about a second longer than it took for Wedge to draw his blaster and shoot the Hegemony officer. The blue stunbolt hit Lorrir dead center in the chest, pitching him backward over the desk. His helmet clattered against the floor and a metal chair skidded back beneath him and bounced off the room’s rear wall.

Wedge holstered the blaster and pulled the desk back. He stooped down, found a strong pulse in Lorrir’s neck, then yanked Lorrir’s right glove free of his hand. Wedge slid the glove on and picked up Lorrir’s helmet. “I need a mask for a moment, so I’ll keep this. You won’t be able to go up without it, but then I won’t have to shoot you down again. Sleep well.”

Donning the helmet, Wedge slipped from the office, locked the door, and closed it behind him. He walked sedately over to the rest of the Rogues, then waggled his fingers at them.

Tycho looked surprised. “Things didn’t go well?”

“Lorrir developed a new sense of irony. He found my revelations stunning.” Wedge pointed to the Defenders. “Get in, get these things going. Fly in formation to the southern shield projector facility. We’ve got ten minutes for incoming and I want us ready to go.”

Everyone split to their machines and Wedge climbed into his. He brought the power up, then locked the restraining straps in place. As the Defender cycled power to systems, his communications console lit up with positive check-ins from the rest of the squadron. The fleet frequency button flashed, so he punched it.

“Colonel Roat here.”

“This is Reckoning Flight Control. When are your people going to report for loading?”

“I understood we were to head up after Colonel Lorrir. His Interceptor is still here. Do you want me to find him?”

“Negative, Colonel, just get your people airborne and headed this way. Someone else will deal with Lorrir.”

“As ordered, Control. On our way.”

The clone of Ysanne Isard did not realize she was a clone. She was possessed of all the original’s memories, her entire life history up to a point just prior to the Lusankya’s escape from Imperial Center. Along with these memories came the original’s attitudes, which included a healthy dose of skeptical contempt for things mystical, including the Force.

Yet, despite those prejudices, something struck her as very wrong about the message she’d gotten from Krennel. He asked her to dispatch someone to find Colonel Lorrir. She would have sent a subordinate, but she actually wanted to locate Lorrir for herself and pass on the message of Krennel’s displeasure. In Lorrir she had seen a grasping man who was abrasive with his inferiors, and fawningly obsequious with his betters. Because she stood outside the military establishment, he had treated her with cautious courtesy, which she knew would be stripped away and replaced with subservience once he knew how much power she commanded.

She reached the hangar in no time and saw Lorrir’s Interceptor still sitting on the ferrocrete deck. She knew it was his because he’d painted red stripes on each wing, just as the 181st used to do. She thought it a pity that a man’s life should be so paltry that he had to cling to a hideous defeat as the high point of his existence.

The clone called a tech over and asked if he’d seen Lorrir. The man pointed toward the closed operations room door. She walked over to it, tried the handle, and found it was locked. Glancing at her chronometer, she mentally calculated the security override code for that quarter hour, punched it into the keypad, and entered the office.

She took immediate notice of the ozone stink in the air which, combined with Lorrir’s body lying on the floor, told her the man had been stunned with a blaster. She squatted down and batted one of Lorrir’s feet aside, then pulled a black glove from beneath it. The glove only had two fingers and had been fitted with metal parts to make it appear to be a prosthetic