Star Wars_ X-Wing 08_ Isard's Revenge - Michael A. Stackpole [38]
“Corran thought he’d been on a long space journey taking him from Coruscant to Lusankya, but Isard just faked it all along.”
Iella nodded emphatically. “Exactly. Using drugs on the prisoners, she could have warped their sense of time, or even had them totally unconscious as she moved them from one place to another. As long as their cells looked the same, the staff was the same, and the food was the same, the prisoners would have no clue where they had been.”
“You’re basing a lot of this on the idea that someone as smart as Isard was doing all this.”
“Probably, but what if it’s an individual just following Isard’s instructions? Isard would have had to trust this person implicitly to turn the prisoners over to them.”
“Okay, if not Isard, someone she trusted to do what she told them to do. Someone who’s now making his own play at power.” Mirax nodded solemnly. “Someone who has Isard’s resources and contacts in the New Republic, giving him the information he needed to plant Urlor Sette here at the party.”
“Exactly.”
“Okay, you’re suspicious of the situation at Commenor, but what’s the purpose of faking that facility? I mean, the clues from Urlor led there, so we went. The Interceptors might have been an ambush, but a pretty poor one. What did Isard’s agent want to have happen there?”
“I think it was bait.” Iella smiled grimly. “We backtracked the trail to Commenor and there’s more trail to follow. The bodies pulled from the graves could only have been there a couple of years, but they show more decay on the bones than we’d expect from the soil in that area on Commenor. I think they were buried somewhere else, disinterred, and moved to Commenor. Once we figure out where they came from, we’ll go to that new world and find more bait.”
“Or a trap.”
“Right.” She shrugged and sipped her caf. “We get so happy at having broken through the puzzle this person is laying out for us that we allow ourselves to think it was never meant to be broken. We figure we have the upper hand, but we’re just following the trail they’ve laid.”
“Interesting hypothesis. How do you test it?”
Iella winced. “There’s the problem. The obvious way to test it is to have teams go back to Commenor and look around for clues that indicate the site was faked. If it is a fake, then there ought to be redundant clues that will point this out. The bodies that I mentioned would have been missed except I saw them described as being in an ‘advanced’ state of decay. I checked with the forensic tech to find out what that meant and he walked me through it. I checked with the guys who took soil samples, and I was able to pull together a picture that looks like the bodies weren’t always there. That was a tough way to get at the fake data and I’m willing to bet there are easier ones.”
Mirax sat back and crossed her legs at her booted ankles. “Of course, if you send teams back, you’ll tip the enemy to the fact that you’ve found the deception and will be following it up.”
“You never want the Hutt you’re after to know you’re following his slime trail. Plus, we don’t know how much of our planning and intelligence is getting to the other side.”
Corran’s wife smiled slyly. “Why not just go there ‘off duty?’ Corran said you used to do that back when you were with CorSec. We can go without telling anyone. They’ll never know. If we find something, we know you’re right, and if we don’t, that’s a step forward, too.”
Iella sipped at the caf and nodded. “It could work. We’d have to go in very covertly, since the political situation is a bit touchy in the aftermath of the raid.”
Mirax winked at her. “I think I know a thing or two about getting into and out of spaceports without attracting too much official attention. You can leave those details to me. You just get together the gear you’ll need and we’ll be good to go.”
Iella thought for a moment, then nodded.