Star Wars - X-Wing 02 - Wedge's Gamble

by Michael A. Stackpole

  The process, which divorced reproduction from emo­tional commitments, struck many, including Corran, as inhuman, but the Kuati aristocracy found it practical in a number of ways. It left their people free to enter into al-

  liances and mergers without placing a child in jeopardy of being drawn into an enemy camp when whatever enter­prise that brought two people together collapsed. It also prevented inbreeding between noble families and pro­vided the children with a guardian/tutor with a very seri­ous and tight bond to his charges. The children knew their telbuns provided one half of their biological makeup, but they only acknowledged their aristocratic parent as having a blood relationship with them.

  The process was not easy on a telbun, but what did their feelings matter? They were property, nothing more.

  The official hit a few buttons on her datapad. "You and the telbun are cleared. Beyond the airlock is your shuttle. Enjoy your stay ... or whatever."

  The woman moved off down along the ship's spine toward the next docking foyer. Erisi and Corran retreated to circle in the center of the docking foyer. The circle slowly rose toward the outer hull and the circular plat­form on which they rose locked into the floor of the airlock with a click. Corran felt bits and pieces of things shift below his feet, then the cylindrical airlock slowly ro­tated ninety degrees until the side opened onto a shuttle's hatch. Beyond the opening stood a female pilot who waved them aboard the modified Lambda-dass ship.

  The hatch closed behind them. "If you will be seated," said the pilot, "and strap yourselves in, I can take you to the Hotel Imperial."

  Erisi nodded. "We are cleared for an entry vector?"

  "Yes, Mistress Darsk."

  Corran walked into the passenger compartment and took a seat in the last of four rows. Erisi cast a glance down a small corridor toward the cockpit, then came back and joined him. She said nothing as she strapped herself in, but she did rest her arm on his. The lights glis­tening on her blouse shifted color sequentially, as if a golden beach was being eroded by a silver wave.

  The ship shuddered and popped as it disengaged itself from Jewel's airlock, then it lifted off and its wings snapped down into place. As they did so, holographic dis-

  plays lining the walls of the passenger compartment pro­vided images that made it appear as if the whole ship had been made of transparisteel. The shuttle pulled up and away from Jewel, heading outbound from Coruscant for a moment. The screens filled with pinpoint images of dis­tant stars.

  Erisi kept her voice low. "Please forgive me for how rudely I have treated you."

  "Whatever you desire, mistress."

  She looked at him with a horrified expression at the dullness of his response, then that deepened as she real­ized that being alone in the ship's cabin did not mean they could not be overheard. Erisi leaned toward him, filling his nostrils with the sweet scent of nlorna flower perfume. She kissed him on the lips, lingering close enough to whis­per, "You are telbun. You understand."

  Corran nodded. "I am telbun. I understand." Her comment and his reply, fairly innocent and common given the relationship of their two cover identities, had been im­bued with a different meaning for the two of them. It was a touchstone, a link back into their real identities. When­ever they needed to assure themselves that the other per­son was just playacting they were able to use the phrases and responses to do so. In this way Corran knew her cru­elties were forced upon him by their situation, and she knew his indifferent responses did not reflect his true feel­ings for her.

  Of course, I don't know what those feelings are, re­ally. He liked Erisi enough as a friend and yet still found her very attractive. The degree of proximity forced by their roles had stopped short of physical intimacy, but had included living together throughout Jewel's journey and the training before that. Erisi had made no secret, in the past, of her attraction to him. No one would have faulted them for sleeping together, given their circum­stances, but Corran had held himself back from succumb­ing to her charms and the security of shared intimacy.

  At first he told himself it was because he didn't want to let his guard down. If they were to make love their

  guard would be down. One slip, one fatal admission, an inappropriate name whispered in an unguarded moment of passion, could have spelled their undoing. Only by being apart could they guarantee mission security.

  Those concerns eroded as they spent more time to­gether. For a very short time he allowed himself to imag­ine that he would be betraying Mirax in some way if he slept with Erisi. He did have feelings for Mirax, but there were no commitments or obligations between them. For all he knew she had a lover stashed away in every starport across the galaxy—he doubted it, and was sur­prised at the spark of jealousy ignited at the thought— and if she did, it was no business of his. They were both adults and if they did eventually enter into a relationship, what had gone before would have to be dealt with as something that happened before.

  His ultimate resistance stemmed from two things that fed back and forth into each other. The first surprised him when he discovered it, but he couldn't deny it—he thought of Erisi as being well and truly outside his social class—inescapably so. She came from a world where she was nobility. Money, opportunity, material advantages, and the best of everything were what she had been born to. While her joining the Rebellion spoke to true nobility in her heart, the fact was that she really enjoyed luxury and treated it as her due. He had seen that throughout the trip—she took to it like a Sarlacc to sand.

  Despite being a telbun, the same luxury was available to Corran. He was surprised by his inability to get used to it. Whereas Erisi might think nothing of peeling a fruit and leaving the rind on the arm of a nerf-hide divan, Corran found himself worrying about spilling something or sweating on the divan, thereby ruining it. Erisi didn't care if it was ruined, whereas he did because he did not have access to the sort of money that would allow him to laugh off a demand to replace the couch.

  Erisi's blithe disregard for money had all but given Corran fits. Erisi had ordered him to tip servants extrav­agantly, but he had a hard time rewarding indifferent or

  poor service as well as he did good service. And the ser­vants on the ultra-deck were obsequious and sycophantic in the extreme. There were times he wanted to just lash out and bash them, but he knew they'd accept a beating, then thank him for administering it in such a skillful manner—doing whatever they thought would inflate the gratuities.

  He knew he could never fit into her world, and he suspected she knew it, too. While the abuse she heaped upon him was exaggerated enough that he knew she didn't mean it, there were times the tone of her voice or the venom in her eyes seemed a bit too convincing. A small part of her realized his unsuitability as a mate, and that bit went to war with the part of her that liked him, producing enough anxiety that she dealt with him more sharply than she might otherwise have done.

  Her resentment about his lack of ability to cope with the common elements of her existence made him want to show her he could adapt. Deep in his heart he knew he would fail ultimately because just as he and Erisi needed a touchstone phrase to remind them who they truly were, Corran himself needed a connection back to what he saw as real life. His family circumstances had never been af­fluent, but neither had they been impoverished. Like his father and grandfather, he had worked for the Corellian Security Force and he was proud of his background. If he and Erisi couldn't be together, then it was her loss, not his.

  Erisi's hand tightened on Corran's arm. "Oh, my, look."

  The shuttle had come about and gave them an unob­structed view of the planet. They sailed in beyond the sphere of Golan Space Defense platforms and the orbital solar reflection stations. The latter reflected sunlight down to the planet to warm zones near the glacial caps at either pole. While quite habitable, Coruscant's orbit took it far enough from the sun that capturing and redirecting solar energy was needed to keep the world temperate year round.

  The shuttle was heading down and in
toward the daylight side of the planet, but a crescent of night gobbled up a big portion of it. The lighted side had a spiky, angu­lar quality to it, with towers rising up and grand canyons sinking down through a khaki and grey landscape. Sky­hooks, massive stone islands flecked with green and pur­ple gardens, floated lazily over the ferrocrete terrain. Corran could see nothing natural on that side of the world, just the rough scars of humanity's manufacture and constant reconstruction of the planet.

  The nightside, by way of contrast, sparkled and shim­mered with a full spectrum of colors that flowed through invisible channels. Millions of lights marked towers he could not see, and each light on them corresponded to one or two or four or a dozen people living in its prox­imity. Deep down at the base of the towers, winking in and out of life as buildings eclipsed his view, muted lights played out like those in ocean depths, hinting at life un­seen and likely unknowable.

  Approaching the line that marked the end of day and the beginning of the night, Corran saw a building that could only be the Imperial Palace. An arrogant edifice, it rivaled and mocked the Manarai Mountains to the south. Towers rose from it like coral spires from a reef and their sharp, angular construction made them seem as danger­ous to Corran as the coral they reminded him of. Those towers, that artificial mountain, housed the bureaucracy and officials that could destroy planets with a rounding error in the budget. It is a hive of evil. He shivered. No one will ever be safe until it has been purged.

  "Impressive, isn't it?"

  Corran looked up and found the shuttle's pilot stand­ing in the hatchway. "Shouldn't you be flying this thing?"

  "We're on instrument approach to the Hotel Impe­rial. My droid copilot can handle it." She gestured at the vision of the planet. "You're lucky. It's a clear night. If there were storms, I'd be at the helm dodging lightning and skyhooks and you'd not see much."

  Erisi lifted her chin. "My telbun and I ..."

  "You want the Emperor's suite. Someone else has a previous reservation."

  Corran spoke slowly and carefully. "We thought it was arranged."

  "It can be."

  Erisi's eyes narrowed. "Will a thousand credits suf­fice?"

  "As a down payment, yes."

  Corran smiled. "You're our contact?"

  The pilot nodded and Corran took a good look at her for the first time. He found her pretty, and her dark eyes were full of fire, but there was another quality about her that he couldn't place at first. He thought it had to do with her mood, and how quickly she had shifted from be­ing just an anonymous pilot to their contact, but he rec­ognized that mutability of personality as a mark of an excellent undercover operative. Iella could change like that—affect a mood and suddenly she was someone else.

  As the woman drew closer he nailed it. Though her hair was white and gathered at the back of her head, he realized she reminded him very strongly of Princess Leia Organa. He'd not made the connection when she was the pilot—he knew he'd not really paid that much attention to her. It was obvious to him that she was not Leia Or­gana, but because of the resemblance he would have been willing to bet she came from Alderaan.

  The pilot sat down in the chair in front of Corran and swiveled it around to face them both. "We've not much time here, but the cabin is clean, so we can talk briefly. I already know who you are. Here I'm known by the code name Targeter though as the pilot I go by Rima Borealis. That will do as a call name for now. We'll get you into the hotel and book you into a suite, but you'll live out of other rooms we have secured for you. New identities and identification cards will be supplied there."

  Erisi nodded slowly. "We're not it, are we?" She pointed toward the Palace as their ship descended. "Just the two of us gathering the information needed to bring that down—that's a lot of pressure."

  Rima shrugged. "I don't know, and I couldn't tell you if I did. Sorry." She patted Erisi on the knee. "I wouldn't worry, though. From what I understand, you Rogues are a thorn in the Empire's flesh. Now's the chance we have to shove it deeper and twist it a bit."

  "Nice analogy." Corran smiled. "I like it." "I thought you would." Rima returned his smile. "Nothing on this mission two Rogues can't handle, even if," she added with a shrug, "getting in to Coruscant is likely the easiest part of the whole thing."

  16

  Gavin Darklighter said nothing as the Pulsar Skate re­verted to normal space. His silence did not result from previously warbled warnings by Liat Tsayv, nor was it born of the need for operational security that General Cracken's people had drilled into him. And it was not the result of his having his eyes closed so he couldn't see any­thing.

  He could see.

  What he saw was Coruscant, and that vision took his breath away.

  Mirax turned in her seat. "Impressive, eh, kid?"

  Gavin knew he'd not seen as much of the galaxy as some folks—all of Rogue Squadron included, and the crew of the Skate as well—but he didn't think of himself as a total nullwit or nerf-herder. He wasn't one of the Sand People, for example, and he knew plenty about so­phisticated things, like flying an X-wing or slicing code in a computer. He might have grown up on a farm outside Anchorhead, but he'd been to town at least once a month, and his family was always invited over to the big house by his uncle for family celebrations.

  He'd even been to Mos Eisley. Once.

  But he'd never seen anything like Coruscant.

  "It's just a city, the whole thing, one big, huge, really big city." Gavin spread his arms wide for emphasis, but hit hull before he thought he'd gotten the gesture right. "It's all city."

  "Pole to pole, horizon to horizon, more or less." Mirax smiled. "There are spots on the glacier where things haven't been built over, but the only reason that's true is because the poles are frozen reservoirs. If you drink water down there, it was pole-frozen or shipped in from outside."

  A light came to life on the console. The Sullustan pi­lot chittered at Mirax, causing her to turn around and hit three buttons. "Merisee Hope here."

  "Coruscant Space Traffic Coordination on link here. Our files show you're transporting exotics? Our scan shows you have eight individuals on board."

  "Affirmative. Three humans, five exotics."

  "I copy. You are cleared on vector 34293AFX."

  Liat gave Mirax a nod, so she spoke into the comm unit again. "We copy. Thank you, Coordinator."

  Gavin saw her shut the comm unit off, then raised an eyebrow. "That seemed too easy."

  "Suspicion is a good thing, just so long as you don't go overboard with it."

  "Sounds like something Corran might say."

  Mirax glanced back at Gavin, but he couldn't read the expression on her face. "He might say such a thing, indeed. And he'd be thinking our entry was too easy, too. The trick of it is that certain members of Coruscant's Space Traffic Coordination office have been bought and paid for. When the entry-monitor satellites beamed an in­quiry to the Skate they got a transponder message that told them we were the Merisee Hope. That ship is a known slave-runner for one of the brothels on the edge of Invisec."

  "Invisec?"

  Mirax frowned. "I thought they briefed you before this run."

  "Well, yes, they did, but I don't remember Invisec be­ing mentioned before." Gavin shrugged helplessly. "What is it?"

  "A chunk of the Imperial City that is popularly known as the Invisible Sector, primarily because most people don't want to admit it exists. It's large enough to swallow up three or four of the largest metropolitan areas from elsewhere in the galaxy, but here it's just one pre­cinct out of many. Invisec is a contraction of the name and is used by folks who frequent it to refer to the area."

  "You mean the Alien Protection Zone."

  "Right, sure, if you want the Impspeak designation, but only the military uses that. Citizens don't talk about it, or call it 'there,' or refer to it as invisible or unseen, or the witty ones confess slumming down there by saying they disappeared for a while. Invisec is largely made up of the APZ, but it extends around it a
nd has little satellite sectors elsewhere in the city. Think of it like Mos Eisley, but uglier, nastier, and less hospitable."

  Worse than Mos Eisley? Gavin blinked. "Is that pos­sible?"

  "That's the thing about evil, Gavin, it doesn't dimin­ish when you spread it over a larger area. It's rumored Vader built a palace near Invisec because, for him, it was as attractive as a seashore sunset is to most folks. The black market thrives down there. Aliens who have work permits can leave Invisec and work in other locations. Those who don't are forced into working at the factories that have been built on the edges of Invisec."

  Looking past Mirax and out through the cockpit viewscreen Gavin saw the dark city below rise up toward the ship. It seemed as if towers lunged to impale the Skate but the Sullustan pilot deftly steered the ship around them. Down and down the ship glided, flitting between towers and around through canyons, pushing lower and lower through layers of light and shadow until they reached a point where Liat had to turn on the ship's run­ning lights or be left without a means for orienting the ship.

  The Sullustan slowed the ship and brought it down below the overhanging edge of a building. Dark fungi and white lime stained the walls. Gavin couldn't identify the stone used to construct the building, but it seemed to be ancient and covered with odd, twisty runes like nothing he'd ever seen before. "What does the writing say?"

  Mirax laughed. "That's not writing, Gavin, those are the trails of granite slugs. Hawk-bats tend not to get down this deep."