Niil shook his head. "It wasn't right away. Hell, when you spun that tale for that guard captain, you had me fooled. But even while they were escorting me to that cell, my brain was jumping between wanting to cut you in half for being a mole, and outright disbelief that you were a mole. So I decided to shove all the emotion aside, and looked at it from a logical standpoint."
Niil started to tick points off on his fingers. "If you were a mole, you had several dozen opportunities to betray the Karvis resistance. Ch'lana and Demaia? Even if you orchestrated that whole raid on the prison ship as a way to take us out, you had a lot of chances to kark us over. The fighting was desperate enough that all you'd have needed to do was shoot one of us in the back. And none of us even knew Demaia was there except you; why even tell us about her if you didn't want to risk seeing her freed? And even if any of that can be ignored, why help us and Ch'lana to take down that dark Jedi and his stooges? Again, all you had to do was shoot one of us in the back when we were coming to his aid."
Niil snorted. "Setting up a trap on that battle station made even less sense. If you were coordinating with the Empire to capture Ch'lana, Nightshade and myself, then you'd have obviously conned us into going to the Horuz system. If it was pre-planned, why not just arrange to have a few Interdictors set up near the fringes of the Horuz system to rip us out of hyperspace? We would've been sitting ducks, and could've been neutralized easily. What if the plan was to let us get inside the station first? All right, why were we allowed to get as far as we did? As good as we are in commando-style raids, we wouldn't have gotten past a corridor or two if they knew we were coming."
Niil eyed Collan. "Most importantly, I think Ch'lana - most certainly Demaia - would have seen right through you if you were serving the Empire. Galen, definitely. And if you were trained by your father, you probably would have been powerful enough to wipe us out in a few heartbeats . . . especially if no one suspected you. You had absolutely nothing to gain by helping us free the senators. You know the threat they represent to the Empire; it would have been far better to kill them than run the risk of having them rescued. And . . . well, you probably wouldn't expect to find such a valuable and successful Imperial operative strapped to a table and having the living frak tortured out of him."
