Starfighters of Adumar (26 page)

Wedge couldn’t help but laugh. “I was always under the impression that a documentarian shouldn’t get so close to her subjects.”

“Well … well … I was
angry
.”

“What did you get?”

“Your civilian clothes, pilot’s suits, Janson’s fancy cloak, helmets, datapads, some datacards, four comlink headsets, your blastswords—one of them belonged to Cheriss so I gave it back to her—a whole pile of love notes Janson had been collecting …”

Janson looked up, his expression outraged. “Hey! You didn’t look at any of them.”

“No, certainly not.”

He relaxed, a little mollified.

“Except for the ones that had been opened, that is. The one from Lady Marri was very poetic, I think.”

Janson stood, his face flushing red. “I can’t believe you—” Then his expression changed. “I don’t recall any note from a Lady Marri.”

Hallis grinned at him.

Janson sat again. “I’ve been had. General, I request permission to jump from an upper-story balcony, to ease my shame.”

“Granted,” Wedge said. “Now, Iella. You’re the one in the most tricky situation here. I hate to be a demanding
houseguest—but what
can
you give us without ruining your life?”

She gave him a wan smile. “Good question. I’m still bound by my orders and my duties, so the answer is ‘not much.’ But since my superior doesn’t know of any direct connection between us, I have some latitude … for the time being. I can put you up, unless my superior asks a direct question whether I’ve seen you. And until the searches going on for you turn into door-to-door searches. You’re going to have to get out of Cartann. I can get you Adumari money, some comm and computer equipment. Unfortunately, I don’t have many contacts; the team that followed me here was responsible for setting up that sort of thing.”

“How about a holocomm transmission back to the New Republic?”

She shook her head. “The holocomm unit was eventually moved to a site set up by my superior. I don’t know where it is.”

Wedge considered. “Still, the rest is very helpful. Is there any way you can find out what the status is of
Allegiance
? We need to know that before the next time we try to get up there.”

Iella glanced over at one of her cabinets. “My comm gear picked up and recorded your open transmissions to
Allegiance
.” Her expression grew bleak. “And their lack of a reply. But I know they’re still up there. My comm unit has picked up coded transmissions from them continuously since before you went on your gauntlet run. There’s been no irregularity to their comm traffic. No sort of activity to suggest they were captured, for instance.”

Hallis said, “Iella, I need to talk to you. Privately.”

Iella gave her a quizzical look.

“I’m going to persuade you to abandon your mission, to go with Wedge and the others. And to shoot your superior right in the guts if you ever happen to see him again.”

“That’ll take a lot of persuading.” Iella gestured
toward one of the side doors. “But I’ll give you the chance. After you.”

They were gone only a couple of minutes, long enough for Wedge and Tycho to wearily drag their boots off and accept cups of water from Cheriss. Then Iella came slamming back through that side door, her face pale, her expression set and angry.

“Change of plans,” Iella said. “I’m abandoning my post and my mission. I’ll figure some way to get you out of Cartann. And if I see Tomer Darpen, I’m going to burn him down where he stands.”

Wedge stared at her in shocked silence for a moment. Then he turned to Hallis. “How did you do that?”

Hallis shrugged.

“No, really, please. I have to know. It normally takes a vote of the Senate or a planetary collision to get Iella to change her mind. I need to learn how to do whatever you did.”

Iella colored nicely. “Wedge.”

“I’ll show you.” From beneath her sleeve, Hallis pulled out a standard datapad. With her other hand, she reached behind her and dragged a wire with a standard datapad coupler at the end of it. She jacked it into the pad and powered the unit up, then held the screen so Wedge could see. “You’re not going to like this.”

Tycho leaned in to see. Janson, Hobbie, and Cheriss also crowded in behind him to get a look. Iella turned away, perhaps unwilling to see this a second time.

The datapad view wavered across a sea of faces and the backs of heads. Wedge recognized the surroundings as the Outer Court chamber of the
perator
’s palace.

Finally the view stabilized. Wedge recognized the
perator
standing at the heart of his knot of advisors. The clothes worn by his advisors defined the scene—this was the last gathering Wedge had attended, the one where he and his pilots had been exiled and effectively sentenced to death.

The recording’s sound kicked in, a meaningless babble of voices. Then the voices dropped out one by one; Wedge presumed that the recorder had to have been using a directional sound recorder to home in on a very few voices.

On the
perator
’s voice. He was saying, in hushed tones, “… 
pity they couldn’t have been persuaded to lend us their arts. That would have been spectacular, and Antilles’s name alone would have been enough to cow some of the enemy forces …”

Then Tomer Darpen was at his elbow.
“A moment of your time, my lord
.”

“Only a moment. Time is pressing
.”

“I wish to extend my personal apologies, and General Antilles’s apologies, for what he has just been obliged to do
.”

Even in the somewhat blurry recording, the
perator
looked surprised.
“Obliged
?”

Tomer nodded.
“The general is pinned down between opposing forces. His natural desire is to aid you, of course; he knows it is the only honorable option. But ambiguous orders handed down by his diplomatic corps superiors, orders intended to keep him alive so that he remain valuable to them, prevent him from fighting. The situation has crushed him, has robbed him of all will to live
.”

The
perator
shook his head, his expression shocked.
“I cannot believe it
.”

Tomer lowered his eyes, his expression sad.
“It’s true. He longs for death to burn away his shame. And so General Antilles begs a favor of you
.”

“Speak
.”

“He begs you to set your forces on him, assaults that he cannot decline … and cannot survive. So that he can die honorably and never again be used as a tool by the diplomatic corps. Do this, and not only will his
memory be cherished, but you can be sure that the next pilot-representatives sent here will be unfettered by ridiculous orders restraining them from behaving as true pilots should
.”

The
perator
nodded, his expression sympathetic.
“At last I understand. The poor man
.”

“It must look like an act of justice on your part. But he will thank you with his dying breath
.”

“I understand
.”

“Thank you
, perator.”

Hallis’s recording view followed Tomer as he left the ruler’s side and moved toward Wedge and his pilots. Her audio lock remained with him, and though his next few words were muffled—doubtless by him holding a comlink up to his face and speaking quietly—Wedge could make out his words.
“En-Are-Eye-One to
Allegiance,
acknowledge. New orders
, Allegiance.
Do not accept, record, or acknowledge any transmissions from Adumar’s surface or from vehicles not belonging to the New Republic until I rescind this order. Repeat it back to me to indicate you’ve understood … Correct
, Allegiance.
En-Are-Eye-One out
.”

Hallis switched the datapad screen off.

They were all silent for a long moment. Finally Wedge looked at the documentarian. “Thanks, Hallis. But I have to ask—why didn’t you tell me some of this before we left the
perator
’s palace?”

“The first part, knowing that Tomer had set you up, couldn’t help you. The second part, knowing that the
Allegiance
was off the comm waves—I was just getting up to you to tell you that when I heard you figuring it out for yourselves.”

“Makes sense,” Wedge said. He turned to Iella. “You know that you’re next.”

She nodded.

“I don’t understand,” Janson said.

“Tomer set things up to kill us,” Wedge said. “Accomplishing a lot of things. It scored points with the
perator
by making him think that we pilots had been with him all along, just thwarted by bureaucratic orders, so the
perator
doesn’t think we opposed him. And it scrapes us out of the way so I can’t file my report, my conclusions on the way he set up this whole diplomatic mission—conclusions I now have to assume were largely correct. He wants everyone who can offer up a comprehensive report to the Chief of State to be dead. That means that Tomer’s subordinates here, including Iella, will eventually end up facedown in an alley.”

“It’ll take me just minutes to pack,” Iella said. “Which begs the question: Where do we go? I wasn’t in charge of setting up safe houses.”

“I know where,” Cheriss said. “General Antilles—”

“It’s about time you called me Wedge.”

She didn’t smile, but she did offer him a little nod of acknowledgment. “Wedge, there are some men and women who want to meet you. When I returned earlier tonight and made myself known at the
perator
’s palace, they tracked me down and told me so.”

Wedge frowned. “What sort of men and women?”

“Political leaders. From nations not controlled by Cartann. From nations soon to be smashed by Cartann.”

“Do you think they’d be willing to offer us use of a spaceworthy craft to get us to
Allegiance
?”

She nodded. “I think they would. But I don’t think that is what is foremost on their minds. I think they want to ask a favor of you.”

“I’d be happy to listen. All right, everybody. Tycho and I need to get cleaned up, and everybody is to get dressed up—nicely as we can. They’re scouring the streets looking for four downed pilots hiding from their eyes, not seven upstanding citizens out for a late night of carousing.”

“You’re issuing orders to Intelligence,” Iella said, her voice mild.

“Just to my pilots—and making some assumptions. Care to come along?”

“Anywhere,” she said.

11

By dawn, Wedge and the other six refugees were in the passenger/cargo compartment of a
Farumme
-class hauler, an aircraft Wedge suspected was constructed about the time he was being born. Air whistled through holes in the hull. Rings were imbedded in the compartment’s framework, the better to allow for cargo to be lashed down securely, but the only thing being transported now was Wedge’s party, seated on padded benches that ran the length of the compartment. The Yedagon Confederacy agent who had met them, a lean, very fair man of few words, rode with the pilots in their control compartment.

Wedge glanced around the compartment. Janson, Tycho, and Hobbie were all asleep. He was as tired as they were, in as great a need of sleep, but he had things to think about.

Cheriss sat alone on a bench on the other side of the craft. She had seldom looked at Wedge since their departure from Iella’s quarters, and seemed lost in her thoughts.

Hallis was on the same side of the craft, alone, all the New Republic personnel’s datapads piled up beside her.
She had, at Wedge’s request, copied the recording of Tomer Darpen’s treachery to each datapad. Now she was struggling with the most sophisticated of the datapads available to her, Iella’s, to edit that and some other recordings into a portion of her documentary. Her occasional bouts of muttering and swearing suggested that it wasn’t going well.

And Iella—Iella was tucked under Wedge’s arm, her eyes closed, her expression serene.

Wedge smiled, knowing his was probably an idiot’s grin but not caring. He was on the run, a death sentence on his head, on a world where his enemies and admirers alike would be happy to kill him, unable to get in touch with his superiors. But for this moment he was carefree, happy in a way he hadn’t been in years.

Iella’s eyes opened. She looked at him a little fuzzily, then smiled and burrowed her face into his neck. “Haven’t you had any sleep?”

“I’ve been thinking. Putting things in order.”

“Marshaling your troops, General?”

“Only when I could force myself to stop thinking about you.”

Her shoulders shook a little and he realized she was laughing silently. “You know what’s so wonderful about compliments from you?” she asked.

“What?”

“I know you always mean them. You have no skill at flattery.”

Cheriss unstrapped herself and rose. She walked over to Wedge and Iella, her steps unsteady because of the craft’s rocking motions and occasional battles with turbulence. Her expression was as serious as it had been back in Iella’s quarters. “General … Wedge … may I speak to you for a moment? Privately?” She turned a look of apology toward Iella.

“Sure.” Wedge looked down into Iella’s eyes, tried to gauge her reaction. But her expression offered little but
sleepy contentment. There was no concern, no jealousy to be seen in them.

Wedge joined Cheriss toward the front of the compartment. They held on to the rings in the framework to steady themselves against the craft’s motion.

When Cheriss spoke, her voice was barely loud enough for him to hear over the engine’s roar and the whistling of wind through rivet holes. “I just wanted to say … you were right and I was wrong.”

“That’s a hard admission,” Wedge said. “It tries to stick in my throat whenever I’m obliged to offer it.”

She managed a faint smile. “I didn’t really understand it after I woke up on your big ship. My injury was almost healed and I knew I had nothing left to me—my title lost, the
perator
’s regard for me lost, your regard for me probably lost—”