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“True. But since he figures she’s the one who sent Urlor and murdered him, Corran also figures I’m a target, so he wants me to be careful. Give it up, Iella. You know I’m not going to tell anyone.”

The intelligence officer sighed. “Several prisoners said they saw her and heard her, but they’re in pretty bad shape. I can’t give their identifications too much weight since some of them are in the grips of dementia. It seems pretty clear that whoever put those people there wanted them to starve to death, and they were pretty close. If we’d waited another week, we’d just have corpses.”

“And dead men tell no tales.”

“Not true. Urlor’s body led us to these guys.”

“Do these guys lead you to Isard?”

Iella sighed. “Not directly.” She waved a hand at the datapad monitor on her desk. “I’ve been going over the reports we all made at the time of Thyferra’s liberation and a couple of details don’t seem to mesh well.”

Mirax licked sugar residue from her fingers. “Like what?”

“Well, first off, I’ve not been able to find any indication in any record or anecdote or anything that Isard was capable of piloting a Lambda-class shuttle. She wasn’t a pilot before she went to Thyferra, and no one there knows anything about her being able to fly.”

Mirax nodded. “That makes it less likely that she was in the shuttle that Tycho blew up. Still, didn’t Corran have sensor readings indicating someone was on board?”

Whistler tootled positively.

“I’ve pulled the sensor-trace data records and that’s right. I also noted something else: There were two comm frequencies being used by the shuttle. Isard conversed with Corran over one, but I don’t have any record of what sort of data was flowing over the other.”

“So you think Isard was having the shuttle flown remotely from Thyferra to make the Rogues think she was escaping.” Mirax’s brown eyes narrowed. “If it got destroyed, or if it jumped out, either way no one would be looking for her on Thyferra itself. She smuggles herself out with the Xucphra refugees and she’s clear.”

“Isard certainly would have had the resources to fake documentation that would get her clear.” Iella held the caf mug in her hands and let the warmth bleed into them. “I very much want to believe that Tycho’s proton torpedo converted her into free-floating hydrogen, but this little kink in the facts that we overlooked before is a problem.”

“Still, it doesn’t mean she’s back in action.” Mirax frowned. “Why would she lay low during the whole Thrawn thing?”

“Isard help an alien Grand Admiral? I don’t think so.” Iella tapped a stack of datacards on the desk. “Imperial records concerning Thrawn might as well not exist, but I can’t believe Isard didn’t know about him and his existence out in the Unknown Regions. She didn’t ask him back to help her when she was running the Empire, and I can’t imagine she wanted to help him reestablish it with him as the new Emperor. She probably just crawled into some tiny hole and licked her wounds, hoping Thrawn and the New Republic would kill each other.”

“Yeah, and she did have some wounds to lick. She lost Coruscant, she lost Thyferra, she lost her own private Super Star Destroyer, Lusankya. Getting away with her life and the location of the prisoners was the only up side for her.” Mirax leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “How many more facilities like the one on Commenor does she have for stashing prisoners?”

Iella shook her head. “No way to tell. In fact, I’m not sure the Xenovet facility was much more than a blind.”

“I don’t understand. You found the prisoners there. Your forensics team must have found clues and everything.”

“They did, plenty of evidence of records being destroyed, shallow graves for some of the dead, everything we need to piece together a circumstantial case that points to the prisoners having been there a while.”

Mirax’s black hair brushed down past her shoulders as she lifted her head. “The problem is?”

“The problem is that the evidence would have been perfect had the prisoners all been dead. From them, however, we have details that make me wonder. For