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“Ground support. They got me at Hoth. I am Lag Mettier.”

Wedge frowned. The name sounded familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it. It was possible he knew the man from Hoth, but the picture that was coming up in his mind was of a much younger man, blond, with a booming laugh. “You knew Dack Ralter, right?”

“Dack, I knew Dack.” Lag let Kapp ease him into a sitting position and accepted the flask of water the commando offered.

Kapp looked past him and addressed Wedge. “You know him?”

“Possibly. If so, he didn’t look like this at the time.”

The Devaronian nodded as he looked around at the people moaning and staggering in the barn. “They’ve all been sorely used here. I’m guessing they’ve not been cared for at all in the past couple of days. Maybe a week. We had minimal resistance.”

Page dropped to his haunches and nodded in agreement. “The main house looks pretty well cleaned out. We have a forensics team coming in to get whatever there is to be gotten.”

Lag lowered the flask, water dripping silver from his beard. “It won’t do any good. She’ll have seen to that.”

Wedge frowned. “What are you talking about?”

Lag let the flask slowly settle to his lap, as if he was too weak to hold it up to his mouth. “She said you’d eventually find this place, and she wanted to make sure it would be a dead end.” A gray tongue played over cracked lips. “They took the others out of here and left us. She wanted you to find us dead. She told us that.”

Wedge helped Lag raise the flask to his lips again. “This woman you speak of, who is she?”

Lag swallowed, then shivered. “Iceheart.”

Wedge’s blood ran cold. “Ysanne Isard was here?”

“A week ago, maybe two.”

“Are you sure?” Wedge dropped a hand to the man’s shoulder. “We killed her on Thyferra almost two years ago.”

“If you did, you didn’t do a very good job.” Lag cracked a smile. “She looked more alive than I do, and a whole bunch more deadly.”

Prince-Admiral Krennel stalked into the darkened cavern of a room where Isard laired. Krennel knew that word was not really exact enough, but he couldn’t think of Isard as living within the warrens described by the various computers and arcane equipment. Glow panels hanging down from the roof barely lit the canyons of fiberplast crates, making negotiation of the labyrinth all but impossible.

He rounded a corner and found Isard seated in a huge chair at the heart of a small arena. Around her, monitors and holoprojectors danced with countless images. Her fingers flashed over keypads built into the chair’s arms. With each keystroke another image changed, or the volume on one vignette rose to drown out all the others. She spun in the chair and the images were altered by the wave of her gaze sweeping past.

She came around to Krennel and stopped. His appearance seemed to surprise her, but then a casual grin curled her lips and she drew her legs up, shifting into a more comfortable position in her chair. Her gaze flicked to the datacard Krennel clutched in his artificial right hand. “I see you got my report.”

Anger surged in Krennel, but he kept it in check. He casually tossed the datacard into the space between them, then clasped his hands behind his back. “I got the report. I have read it. I do not approve of it. You cannot put your plan into effect.”

Isard snorted a little laugh, then punched a button on one of the keypads. The holoprojector to Krennel’s right showed the image of a compound with several buildings, an X-wing parked amid them, and a number of individuals walking back and forth between the main buildings. The figures and the X-wing were rendered in reds and yellows, and Krennel assumed he was looking at an infrared cam feed.

“You’ve allowed them to hit your facility on Commenor.”

Isard nodded. “This feed is six hours old. I had expected them to arrive in a week or so, not quite this soon. Chances are some of the prisoners I left there are still alive. Pity, but they were useless to me anyway. They know nothing of value—nothing beyond what I want them to know.”

Krennel nodded his head once, curtly. “What they know could lead