“Thank you, Cheriss.” Once he, Tycho, and Hobbie had their new blades buckled on, Wedge led the way past the helpful building guards and down to the street.
It had grown dark and cool outside in the hours of their dinner appointment, and now the streets were filled with shadowy figures and the occasionally wheeled transport. Even more rarely, a repulsorlift-equipped transport would cruise by a few meters overhead, its complement of five or ten passengers idly watching the pedestrian traffic below. Wedge kept his face down, the better to keep passersby from giving him a closer look and recognizing him.
“Cheriss, you heard his coins clinking over all the noise of the fight?”
She nodded.
“And you took out two of the enemy. That’s very good work.”
“Thank you, General.”
“With all your talents, and your obvious respect for pilots, why aren’t you a pilot yourself?” Wedge asked. He saw a little hesitation in her expression and added, “If it’s personal, just tell me it’s none of my business. I won’t be offended.”
“No,” she said. “It’s just—it’s not something I feel shame over.” Her miserable expression suggested she was lying. “But I can’t learn to fly. Ever. When I go up in aircraft, even when I’m on a high balcony, I become dizzy. I panic. I can’t think.”
“Vertigo,” Wedge said. “So you concentrated on the blastsword instead?”
She nodded. “It is a dying art. Oh, most nobles carry blastswords in public, and many commoners like myself. But the art as they practice it in their schools is stylized. They train with blaster power set to shock instead of burn, and they have rules that make some sorts of blows illegal. I, on the other hand, researched the blastsword art of centuries ago, when it was still very prestigious. I learned about alternative secondary weapons and using the environment against my enemies.” She brightened again. “I can tell that you haven’t trained with the blastsword … but it’s obvious you know how to fight. The maneuver with the banister, Major Janson’s use of the cloak, Colonel Celchu’s skill with his fists—I would love to learn what you know.”
“We’ll trade, then. Teach us what you can, in the time we’re here, of the use of the blastsword, and I’ll let my merry band of reprobates teach you about the back-alley maneuvers they’ve learned.”
He turned to catch the eyes of the other pilots, to make sure none of them had an objection, and saw that Janson was glum. “What’s wrong, Wes?”
Janson sighed. “My cloak is all burned up,” he said. “I liked that cloak.”
“We’ll find you one even more garish,” Wedge promised.
“Now, Cheriss, I hope you’ll understand, but I have to be very rude to you for a minute.”
“You want me to walk on ahead again,” she said.
He nodded. She offered him what he took to be an understanding smile, then increased her pace.
“I’m going to leave you now,” Wedge told his pilots. He checked the chrono from his pocket. As with most people who did a lot of travel from planet to planet, his chrono showed both ship’s time and local time, and the local time indicated it was less than a half hour of midnight.
“You can’t see her now,” Hobbie said, his face grave.
“Why not?”
“You’re all sweaty from the fight.”
“He’s right,” Janson said. “You stink of sweat, and smoke, and the wine the minister spilled on you—”
“He missed me.”
“I don’t think so. Anyway, you’re not fit for a liaison tonight.” Janson put on a long-suffering face. “I’ll go in your place. I’m ready for this assignment, sir.” He saluted.
“This isn’t a liai—” Wedge shut up and turned to Tycho. “If he keeps this up, Hobbie gets to choose his clothes for the next three days.”
“Oh, good,” Hobbie said.
Tycho nodded. “Keep your eyes open tonight, Wedge. We can be pretty sure the Imps put those assassins on us … but we can’t be sure there aren’t duelists out there who want to kill you honorably.”
Wedge waited until Cheriss turned a corner ahead. He whipped off his cloak and reversed it so its dark interior color was now on the outside, and turned to join the pedestrian traffic heading the other way.
At this time of night, with no events taking place, the plaza where he’d made first landfall on Adumar was
nearly empty. Though not illuminated by artificial lights, it was still bright enough under the shine of two moons, one of them full and quite large in the sky.
The temporary stand where Wedge had made his speech was gone, though the four poles with their speakers were still there. The spot where the X-wings had landed was empty, Wedge and his pilots having transferred their snubfighters to their balcony early that day.
But despite its echoing emptiness compared to the previous day, the plaza was not lifeless. Near where the X-wings had landed, a circle of men and women watched a blastsword duel; even at this distance Wedge could see the lines of green and violet color twirling through the air, hear the snap as a blastsword tip hit a surface. The fight continued for several more seconds, so it must not have found flesh, but moments later he heard a second blast followed by a quick shriek. Then a third blast, and applause.
Another life lost to no good purpose. Wedge shook his head.
Ahead, there was a slender silhouette waiting beneath the shortest of the dark display panels. When he was a dozen meters away, he slowed, sure that he should not call Iella’s true name, but not certain as to what sort of greeting was appropriate. Finally he said, “May I approach?”
“You may.” It was Iella’s voice. She lowered the hood of her cloak as he reached her, and moonlight fell full on her face. She extended her hands.
He took them, then stood at a loss for words.
She laughed. “You were more eloquent yesterday.”
“I do that sort of thing more often.” He caught sight of another silhouette, big, probably male, deep within the shadow cast by the nearest building. “Friend of yours?”
“My bodyguard,” she said. “Here, anyone with a
marginally profitable job can afford bodyguards for situations like these. Do you have one?”
“Not with me, no. She’s already killed a man for me tonight.” Wedge shook his head, willing away the distraction of the night’s events.
“Killed—were you attacked?”
“All of us. Tycho, Wes, and Hobbie, too. We came out of it unhurt.” He gestured as if thrusting with a blastsword. “Four visiting blades, cutting down assassins. Something more for the court to talk about.” Iella seemed to have caught her breath and grown paler. Wedge leaned in closer. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I’m not the one in danger, Wedge.
You
need to be careful. These peoples’ affection for duels, for picking up honor coupons by killing each other, could get you murdered.”
Wedge waved her objections away. “How have you been?”
Her expression remained cheerless. “Well enough. I’ve been working hard. Mixing fieldwork with analysis. It never gets boring.”
“That doesn’t sound as though you’ve found any one thing that you want to devote yourself to.”
She shrugged, and he could sense even more distance between them. “I guess I’m not like you, that way. Listen, Wedge, I can be here, but not forever. What do you need?”
He sighed. “Duty first. I need to know what’s really going on here on Adumar. I’m effectively ambassador here for the time being, and I’m in completely over my head. How long has the New Republic really been aware of Adumar?”
“You don’t know?”
“No. I thought it had been a matter of days or weeks. Your presence, your cover, suggests it’s been longer than that.”
“Five or six months,” she said. “Intelligence discovered that someone was recruiting computer slicers for hire to do interfaces between a new set of computer protocols and New Republic and Imperial standards. Intelligence got interested, put together an identity for me as a Corellian slicer, and dropped me on one of the worlds where they were hiring. It’s the sort of mission we call a blind jump. When I got here, I set things up for the arrival of a team.”
“What’s your name here, by the way?”
She managed a faint smile. “Fiana Novarr.”
“I’m sort of surprised that a hired code-slicer would be invited to an affair like last night’s dinner, with the
perator
and all.”
“I went in on the arm of a minister. That’s not important, Wedge.”
“I suppose not. So what’s all this about a mapping ship finding Adumar, and suddenly they want our pilots as diplomats?”
“That’s all true, but it’s only part of the story. I was here for a few weeks—a temporary prisoner in theory, since I couldn’t communicate offworld until actual relations were opened with outside worlds, though I did anyway—and figured out that Adumari scout ships had gotten far enough out to discover human-occupied worlds. They’d figured out that there were two big power hubs, the New Republic and the Empire. And they wanted to learn everything they could before getting in contact with either one. They wanted to have the leisure to decide which one, if any, to side with. But the mapping ship incident did happen, and it sort of accelerated their plans.”
“Thus the invitation to me and Turr Phennir.”
She nodded.
“How did they keep you from knowing about the Imperial pilots coming?”
“They’re pretty sneaky people,” she said. “Convoluted politics and secrecy are a way of life for them.”
“Well, here’s an important one. What sort of arrangements am I going to be able to make with them if they’re not a united world? I can’t do much more than open up diplomatic relations and persuade them that the Imps are bad.”
“That’s exactly what you’re supposed to do. Other forces are working on the
perator
of Cartann to persuade him to enter into a world government.”
“So all the hard mental work is taken care of. I just need to stand around, pose, look pretty for the holocams …”
She managed a brief smile. “That’s it.”
“Ie—Fiana, I’m not sure I like this place. They don’t put a very high value on human life. What do you think?”
“You’re right.” She shrugged, a clear sign that this was something out of her hands. “It’s different in other Adumari nations. Their mania for pilots is not quite as high. Dueling is not the fad it is here. Another reason for Cartann to join in a world government. It might acquire some more civilized characteristics.”
“Who’s your superior?”
“I can’t tell you that. That’s on a need-to-know basis.”
“Well, I’m talking about a need-to-punch basis. Your immediate superior and General Cracken didn’t give me a full briefing before I got here, and consequently I’ve been floundering around like an idiot. I need to know which of them to punch.”
She smiled, got it under control. “Wedge, is that it? I need to get back to my quarters. It would probably do Fiana’s reputation some good for her to be seen with Wedge Antilles … but it would also put me under scrutiny I don’t want.”
“I suppose so.” Then a wave of something like doubt
hit him. “No, that’s not it. Listen, I haven’t seen you in months. And now that we’ve talked, I still feel as though I haven’t seen you. What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” She presented him with a serene expression. For all he could read in it, she could have been all the way across the plaza.
“I don’t believe you.”
“I can’t help you with that, Wedge.”
“Iella, have we stopped being friends?”
She was silent a long moment. “I suppose we have.”
Wedge felt his breath catch. It took him a moment to recover it. “When did that happen?
How
did it happen?”
“It’s not you, Wedge. It’s me.” Her mask of serenity slipped, leaving her expression tired, even dismayed. “I just had another direction to go. You’re not there.”
“That’s not an answer. That’s Intelligence gibberish covering up an answer.” It surprised Wedge, how hurt his tone sounded.
“I have to go.”
“Every time we’ve ever spoken, I’ve been straight with you. I want an answer from you.”
She put her hood up. Suddenly he could no longer see her features. “I have to go,” she said, and turned away.
As she moved off into the darkness, her bodyguard detached himself from the building’s shadow and followed.
Wedge stood there and watched her fade into the darkness of the plaza’s shadowy edges. It occurred to him that this departure was just the image, the reflection of something that must have happened long ago. He just didn’t remember when, and the mystery of it was like a little, stony knot of pain next to his heart.
5
That pain hadn’t subsided by morning. He thought about the situation with Iella, could come to no hypothesis that covered all the facts, and set it aside for the time being. He set aside thinking about it, anyway; the ache stubbornly refused to be set aside.
By the time breakfast was done, his datapad had still received no word from Tomer about appointments with the
perator
for the purposes of diplomacy. Nor was there news on the men who had attacked them last night. Once again the day was his.
He asked Cheriss to call ahead to the air base and order Red Flight’s Blade-32 aircraft to be loaded with weakened lasers and pigment-cloud missiles … and to spread the word that Wedge Antilles might be accepting challenges this day, but only from fighters similarly equipped.
They were already on the wheeled transport and heading toward the air base when she concluded that call. Out of the corner of his eye, Wedge saw her pocket her comlink, look at him, look toward the transport’s controls, and look at him a second time.
“Is there a problem?” he asked.
“Not a problem, no. Well, maybe.”
He turned toward her, but she looked forward along their travel route, avoiding his eyes. “Last night, when you slipped away … that was dangerous, you know.”
“The Adumari have no respect for someone who can’t confront danger.”
“True. But if you were to die when I was supposed to be acting as guide for you, I would lose considerable honor.”
“If I elude your attention, you have nothing to be ashamed of even if I get myself killed.”
Her expression tightened. “Still. When you left … was it to see a woman?”