Star Wars_ X-Wing 08_ Isard's Revenge - Michael A. Stackpole [19]
Wedge sighed, then nodded to her. “Good analysis. I hadn’t thought that hard.”
“You’re not trained to do analysis, Wedge. You provide intel, or act on plans formulated because of it. You don’t have to do interp and analysis.” Iella gave him a warm smile. “At least you didn’t have to before you won your decade of dots, General.”
“Save the General stuff, Iella. I’m still Wedge to you.” He glanced down. “At least, I assume such familiarity is okay.”
“Sure.” She winked at him. “I didn’t think you’d let your rank go to your head.”
“No, but it looks as if I’ll be having to apply my brains more than before.”
“Just in different ways, Wedge.” Iella turned and rested her right hand on Corran’s left shoulder. “Corran, you should get out of here. Wedge can take you back home. There’s nothing more you can do here. It will be hours before the droids come back with their final analysis of the toxin and the device components.”
Wedge nodded. “Be glad to do it, Corran. You look more exhausted than a Hutt-wrestler.”
“Yeah, and I feel like one who’s lost a bunch of matches, too.” Corran heaved himself up from the edge of the table. “I don’t need transport, though. I want to walk for a bit.”
Wedge inclined his head toward the door. “I could stretch my legs, too.”
“No, if it’s the same to you, I’d like to be alone.” Corran smiled sheepishly. “Look, you’re both very good friends and I appreciate your concern, but right now I need to think some things through.”
Wedge started to say something, but a slight shake of Iella’s head stopped him. He folded his arms across his chest. “Look, you know how to reach me by comlink if you need to talk, find you’re lost, want to tear up a swoop-jockey haunt, you name it.”
“And I don’t want to be left out, either, if you’re going to be picking on swoopies.” Iella drew Corran into a hug. “Go home, get some rest. We’ll have what you need to know to find out who did this by noon tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Iella.” Corran gave her a kiss on the cheek, then turned and threw a hasty salute at Wedge. “I’ll report in tomorrow, General.”
“Just let Emtrey know where you are and that will be fine.” Wedge returned the salute and gave him a smile. “I don’t imagine Mirax would be all that pleased with me requiring you to actually come to the base. Good night.”
Wedge watched in silence as Corran left the examining room, then he turned and looked at Iella. “You really think you’ll have enough data to let us start tracking the person behind this by tomorrow?”
“We’ll have some leads.” She tapped the box with a finger. “The common components here are fairly low tech, which means they were probably manufactured on the world where the device was put together. Given what it costs to haul manufactured items between planets, low-ticket trinkets like this aren’t worth shipping. The custom components—the chips and the graft wire—might have come from elsewhere, but they were modified during manufacture. The mods aren’t that difficult to do, but they require technical expertise and suitable facilities. Once we have a world, we can begin a survey of people and places that could work.”
Wedge ran a hand along the edge of his jaw. “What about the toxin?”
“Could have been shipped in from elsewhere, milked from creatures that were shipped in, or manufactured. We’ll rule out synthetics first—they’re never quite the same as the naturally produced stuff. The easiest thing for us to track would be if it was milked from exotics on a planet where the creatures are not native. Most worlds require the registering of exotic xenobiologicals, so we can vector in that way.”
“Sounds like a lot of work.” Wedge shook his head. “Where do we begin?”
“We?”
“Hey, you said these ten little pips I