• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Iella nodded in agreement. “And, Corran, there was no way you could have let her live, let her run. That kind of evil had to be stopped, and you know everyone who was on the Lusankya would have agreed with you.”

Wedge felt a lump rise in his throat as she spoke. Iella’s husband, Diric, had once been a prisoner on the Lusankya, though no one had known it until after his death. Ysanne Isard had broken Diric and turned him into one of her agents. She sent him after an Imperial official who was defecting to the New Republic, a prisoner Iella was guarding. Iella had been forced to kill her own husband. Forced much in the same way as Corran was forced to trigger the death of his friend.

Corran took Iella’s left hand in his own and gave it a squeeze. “You’re right, of course. Both of you. I know that. Still, this knot in my gut isn’t going away until we find the other prisoners.” His voice sank slightly. “Or find out what happened to them.”

Iella got up and walked over to the table. She picked up the small box-and-wire device and turned it over in her hands. “Well, we have a good place to start with this. It’s a nasty little piece of work, and a fairly specialized one. Most of it is made up of off-the-shelf components, but there are some custom pieces in here, too. Whoever put it together knew what he was doing.”

Wedge frowned. “I know that’s what killed Sette, but how did it work?”

Iella flipped open the box—which was no bigger than a deck of sabacc cards. Inside, Wedge saw a couple of computer chips, two energy cells, some electronic components, a small motor, a metal cylinder with holes drilled into it every centimeter or so, and a rainbow of wires. Iella hit a small button, and the twenty-centimeter-long cylinder flipped upright.

“Preliminary analysis indicates this cylinder housed a thin-walled glass capsule that contained two powerful drugs—well, one was a drug, the other was a naturally occurring venom, but one seldom found in the quantities used here. The venom is hemotoxic—it acts like acid, eating away at capillary walls, which caused the hemorrhaging from the eyes, nose, and mouth you saw. The drug spiked Sette’s blood pressure, pumping the toxin through him in seconds. He died of a massive stroke as the toxin ruptured every blood vessel in his brain.”

Wedge shifted his shoulders uneasily. “The box was attached to his circulatory system somehow?”

Iella showed him the bottom of the box, right below the bottom of the cylinder. “They used a venous graft to connect it to his aorta. The second the mix hit his bloodstream, the poison was all through him.”

Corran rose from his chair and came over to lean heavily on the table. “The wires came from a nerve graft—the kind they use in cybernetic replacements. The machine hooked into Urlor’s aural nerves, picking up what he heard. When the chip matched the voiceprint of my saying Urlor’s name to the voiceprint it had stored, the motor turned a gear that spun another one that depressed a plunger down through the cylinder and pumped the kill-juice into him.”

Wedge nodded slowly. “You think the voiceprint came from your time in the Lusankya?”

“Maybe. Probably not.” Corran shrugged sluggishly. “We didn’t use names much there. If we used names we could have provided the Imps with clues to what might be happening. I suspect they got it from any of a variety of reports I gave about my time in the Lusankya.”

General Antilles felt ice trickle through his guts. “Those reports are still classified, aren’t they?”

“As nearly as I know.”

Iella nodded. “They are, which means whoever did this has access to some of our classified material. That’s not really a surprise, though, is it?”

Wedge raised an eyebrow. “It isn’t?”

“Think about it, General. Urlor Sette arrives at a party being thrown in the honor of Rogue Squadron—a party you didn’t know about until this afternoon. Word was not that widespread about it, but whoever it was managed to get him in.”

Iella set the poison injector down. “We have to figure