Then they came together, another furious exchange of thrusts and parries, and one of Thanaer’s blows, almost too fast to trace, flicked past her defense to strike her in the chest. There was a crack of released energy. Cheriss was thrown back and down to the floor by the blow.
She lay unmoving, her eyes closed, her breath coming fast and shallow. Moving with exaggerated slowness and care, Thanaer sheathed his dagger, reached down to switch off the power to Cheriss’s blastsword, and nudged that weapon away with the toe of his boot. Then he looked out into the crowd.
A lady at the edge of the crowd—blond, appealing, dressed in alternating shades of blue and violet, her features innocent and carefree—smiled at him and held out her hand. Palm down.
“So it is,” Thanaer said, and raised the point of his blastsword.
Wedge took a step forward, opened his mouth to speak—but he was a half second behind Janson, who shouted, a bellow that filled the chamber, “Challenge!”
Thanaer and the crowd turned to look. Janson stood, one hand in the air and feet apart in a mockery of a heroic pose, his expression merry. “That’s right, Ribbon-Beard. I challenge you.”
Thanaer blinked at him. “Title or non-title?”
“Oh, non-title, I think. I don’t want your title. Just some of that thin stuff you use for blood.”
The Cartann pilot smiled at him. “Very well. As soon as I dispose of this ground-bound rubbish, we can begin.”
Janson’s tone became mocking. “No, no, no. You kill her and I withdraw the challenge.”
A murmur rose in the crowd, a sound of surprise. Thanaer’s face darkened. “You insult me, Major.”
Tomer, behind Wedge and Janson, whispered, “You can’t do that. If you put conditions on the offering of challenge, it suggests that you have no interest in dueling him. Only in the conditions.”
Janson whispered back, “Thank you, Tomer. Now I understand.” He raised his voice. “Yes, Thanaer, I insult you.” The murmurs in the crowd grew louder. “You see, you’re just not good enough to face me in the air or on the ground. I have no interest in dueling you. I’ll do it for the girl’s sake. Spare her, I’ll give you this once-in-a-lifetime chance. Kill her and I’ll treat you like the nobody you are, and you’ll never get to face me. Is that simple enough for you to understand?” With his last few words, he took on the tone of a school lecturer who had neither affection nor respect for his students.
There were gasps from the crowd at his words. Thanaer straightened, stiffening, and looked down at Cheriss. His thinking was very clear to Wedge: Kill the girl, not just for the honor, but to offend Janson, or accept the challenge and gobble up all the honor he could.
He sheathed his sword. “I accept,” he said. “I will put your words on the tip of my blastsword and reinsert them in you.” He moved away from Cheriss to stand at the edge of the crowd.
Wedge and his pilots moved to kneel beside Cheriss. Her face was covered in a sheen of sweat, and there was a grayness, a pallor to it. Steam rose from her wound.
“Upper left pectoral,” Tycho said. “Not too deep. Survivable. But she’s in shock. That can kill her.”
Wedge swore to himself. The dress uniforms they wore didn’t allow them to carry their headsets; the comlinks they carried were very small, short-range only. He said, “Tycho, get her to the plaza. Don’t waste time. Don’t let anybody stop you. Hobbie, relay a message via the X-wings to Allegiance. Have them scramble a medical team down to our arrival plaza in the shuttle. Then catch up to Tycho. Act as his wingman to the plaza.”
Tycho nodded and gathered Cheriss up in his arms. In seconds both pilots were gone.
Wedge and Janson straightened and turned to look at Thanaer. The Cartann pilot was executing the same lunge over and over again for the enjoyment of the crowd.
“You jumped out ahead of me,” Wedge said. “This was my fight.”
Janson smiled. “Notice that, did you?”
“You don’t think I can take him?”
“I know you can.” Janson’s smile changed from simple merriment to the cold, reptilian satisfaction he sometimes demonstrated when he finally got a target lock on a difficult opponent who richly deserved to become one with deep-space vacuum. “But there are three important reasons why I should take this fight and you shouldn’t.”
“Such as.”
“First, the professional reason. You’re the diplomat, the focus of what’s going on. Should something go wrong, you’re not expendable. I am. Second, a personal reason. You’d do this out of duty. Me, I’m going to enjoy it.” He took off his belt and shrugged his way out of the jacket, exposing bare arms and the vibroblade sheath strapped to his left forearm. He handed both garments to Wedge and picked up Cheriss’s blastsword.
“Third reason?”
“Also personal.” He glanced past Wedge into the crowd. “I’m not sure what all went on last night… but you can consider this an engagement present. Or whatever.” He turned from Wedge and stepped out into the circle, raising the blastsword high.
The audience roared.
“Before you die,” Thanaer said, “I’m going to teach you the consequences of insulting your betters.”
Janson smiled back at him. He gestured toward the woman who had pronounced the palm-down death sentence on Cheriss. “Thanaer, I have to admit, your widow sure is pretty.”
The announcer interrupted their exchange. “We have a non-title ground challenge. Our new ground champion, Lord Pilot Thanaer ke Sekae, accepts the challenge of Major Wes Janson of the New Republic diplomatic envoy.”
There was little applause from the crowd this time. Wedge sensed a breathlessness to their expectation. He shared it.
He didn’t realize Tomer had joined him until the diplomat spoke. “Something of a no-win situation,” Tomer said.
“Explain that.”
“If Janson loses, obviously, your diplomatic party is reduced. Fewer pilots, fewer objects of admiration for the Adumari. The Imperials aren’t obliged to reduce the size of their party. If Janson wins, well, Thanaer is very well respected here. Very much beloved of the court of Cartann and the perator.”
Wedge shook his head. “Recalculate that, Tomer. If Janson loses, a man who does good things dies. If Thanaer loses, a man willing to gain some points at the cost of the life of a young woman dies. Are you capable of seeing the difference?”
Tomer sighed. “I think you and I speak very different dialects of Basic.”
“For once we agree.”
“To the perator,” the announcer said. Thanaer turned toward the exit by which the perator departed and saluted in the ritual circle-and-cross pattern. Janson followed suit, his salute a sloppy one.
“Honor or death,” the announcer said, and retreated into the crowd.
Thanaer assumed an on-guard pose.
Janson switched Cheriss’s blastsword to his left hand. “Wait! Look at this.” He waved it furiously in the air before him. “Look! A bantha!”
The glowing trail left in the air by the tip of his blastsword did, in fact, resemble a child’s scrawled impression of a bantha.
Wedge frowned. Janson wasn’t left-handed. It wasn’t a good idea to leave himself exposed this way—his sole ready weapon in his off hand.
Thanaer just stared, his expression confused.
“Not familiar with banthas?” Janson shrugged. “Try this.” He waved again, creating an unrecognizable snarl of glowing blue lines in another volume of air. “An Adumari farumme! Here’s another one.” He waved again, and the result, had it been processed through a computer and extensively repaired, could have resembled one of the local fighter-craft. “A Blade-Thirty-two!”
Thanaer just waited. “Are you ready to die yet?”
“One more.” Where the bantha scribble had faded, Janson traced another design. It was a stick figure of a man with a ridiculously tiny circle for a head. “It’s Thanaer ke Sekae!”
Thanaer’s jaw tightened, the only change to his expression Wedge
could see through the beard and ridiculous ribbons. Thanaer, all business, lunged.
Janson twisted toward the attack and brought Thanaer’s blade out of line with his own. Thanaer’s forward momentum brought them together, their hilt guards crashing into one another.
Janson brought his right forearm up in a blow that snapped Thanaer’s head back and smashed the man’s nose flat. With his right hand, Janson seized Thanaer’s sword hand and slammed it down across his upraised knee. Thanaer’s sword point hit the floor with a loud blaster pop and the hilt followed, dropping from Thanaer’s nerveless fingers.
Janson gave Thanaer a shove and the Cartann pilot staggered backward, suddenly disarmed and disoriented. Janson brought his boot heel down on the other man’s sword blade, just above the guard. The blade parted with a metallic sound and its point ceased hissing, ceased drawing glowing lines in the air.
Janson smiled at the man. “Your orders are simple.” He switched off the power to Cheriss’s blastsword and tossed the weapon, with feigned negligence, back in the direction he had come from. Wedge caught it out of the air. “I punch. You suffer. Got it?”
Thanaer responded by reaching for his dagger. Janson let him get it into his hand, then spun into a kick that further punished Thanaer’s sword hand and sent the dagger flying. It clattered to the ground near the edge of the crowd and skidded past the feet of the foremost observers.
“Forgot to mention,” Janson said, “on some worlds people fight with their feet, too. Feet, hands, rocks, pure cussed willpower—they’re warriors. You, you’re just a dilettante.” He brought his hands up in a standard unarmed combat pose, left arm and left side leading.
Confused and uncertain, blood streaming from his nose, Thanaer brought up his own hands in an imitation of Janson’s posture.
Janson smiled and waded in.
Wedge struggled to keep a wince from his face. It was a massacre. Janson fired off blows into Thanaer’s midsection. When the Adumari pilot tried to block those shots, Janson concentrated on his ribs, and Wedge could hear occasional cracks as bones gave way under his blows. When Thanaer tried to strike, Janson took the blows on his forearms or shoulders, or, in the case of especially clumsy shots, withdrew a handspan or two and let Thanaer unload his blows into empty air.
And always Janson returned to pounding, to beating, his blows sounding like someone using a hardwood club on a side of hanging bantha meat.
He didn’t hit Thanaer in the face again. Wedge knew this wasn’t mercy, but common sense—jawbones being more likely to break fingers than the other way around.
Thanaer’s final few blows made it clear that he could barely see and wasn’t thinking at all; he lashed out against empty air half a meter to the left of Janson’s position, then stared around, looking randomly for a foe in clear view a meter before him.
“At least you could say you were knocked out by a well-struck blow of the fist,” Janson said. “If I were going to be nice to you, that is.” He held up his open hand, palm toward his opponent, until Thanaer’s bleary gaze fixed on it. Then he stretched his hand full out to his side—and slapped Thanaer, a blow that sounded like the crack of an energy whip.
He drew his hand back again.
But Thanaer’s eyes rolled up in his head as a red mark the approximate shape of Janson’s hand appeared on his cheek, and his knees collapsed under him. He hit the floor with a grunt and his eyes fluttered shut.
Janson waved jauntily at the crowd and returned to Wedge’s side, whistling something Wedge recognized as a Taanabian dancing melody.
Applause broke out in the crowd, but it was not universal—exclamations and murmurs competed with it in volume.
Wedge helped him put his jacket back on. “That was it?” he asked. “You staked the entire fight on the assumption that you could block his first shot at you?”
Janson nodded. “Pretty much. I just couldn’t see him throwing his best attack on the very first attack of the match. That gave me one crack at him, maybe two.” He tied his belt back around him.
“You shouldn’t have humiliated him,” Tomer said.
Janson peered at him. “This whole world is full of ‘shouldn’t haves,’ Tomer. Without that humiliation, there was no chance he’d learn anything. With it, I figure he has about a five percent chance of realizing that he’s a big bag of Hutt droppings. Which is five percent more than he had a few minutes ago.” He shrugged. “Who’s hungry?”
Wedge grinned. “Let’s get out of here. I’m buying.”
Chapter Nine
The rest of the day offered hopeful news, and more than once.
By the time Wedge and Janson, joined by Hobbie, found a dining establishment where a small private room would afford them a certain amount of peace, the verdict was in on Cheriss. “She’ll make it,” Tycho explained via comlink. “She’s responding well to the bacta and should be released in a day, maybe less.”
“Good,” Wedge said. “Make sure the medical staff knows to notify me when they’re to release her. I want to be there as a friendly face when they cut her loose.”
“Will do.”
“And get down here. We have plenty to do today.”
“Have you ever thought about sleeping, boss?”
Wedge grinned. “Which is, exactly, what?”
“Sort of like being shot until you’re unconscious, except there’s no bacta, and you often end up feeling better than when you started.”
“Sounds good. I’ll give it a try someday. Call in when you reach groundside. Out.” Wedge folded up his headset and returned his attention to the menu, a flexible flatscreen that showed the evening’s available dishes as a series of animations running around the screen engaged in blastsword duels with one another. “I don’t think I want to eat anything that looks like it wants to cut its way back out of me.”
Hobbie gave him a dubious look. “Did you say we had plenty to do still?”
Wedge nodded.
“What, exactly?”
“We’re going to try to subvert an Imperial admiral.”
“Oh,” Hobbie said. “Something easy. While you’re doing that, why don’t Wes and I smuggle ourselves aboard Agonizer and destroy her with thrown rocks?”
Wedge gave him a grin. “With the right tools—say, a hundred thousand Ewoks and a month to prepare—you could probably do that. In the meantime, we have the right tools to subvert our Imperial admiral.”
“What tools?”
“Oh, Wes’s maturity, your optimism, and my diplomatic skills.”
Hobbie buried his face in his hands. “We’re doomed.”
Though he picked up a more powerful comlink from his quarters, Wedge kept its power output turned low, so that his signal could not possibly carry as far as Agonizer or even the nearest Cartann city. And every half hour, he or one of his pilots put in a call for Admiral Rogriss.
Shortly after Adumar’s sun sank and the first of her two moons rose, he got an answer and arranged an appointment.
An hour later, he stood alone at the periphery of a Cartann plaza—not the one where he and his pilots had landed, days ago, but another of the same size some distance away. Its central feature was a large fountain; at its center was a round island of something like duracrete supporting a sculpture made of some brassy metal. The sculpture showed the perator in his younger days, wearing a Blade fighter-craft pilot’s suit, waving to a crowd that was not present at this hour; behind him was a semicircle of seven fungus-shaped explosion clouds, representing, Wedge assumed, seven military campaigns or bombing runs.
Admiral Rogriss was not too long in coming. Wedge saw two silhouettes approaching from the opposite side of the plaza; one, larger, stayed back in the vicinity of the fountains, while the other moved unsteadily forward toward Wedge. Soon enough, moonlight illuminated his features, revealing him to be the admiral.
Wedge bit back a comment. Rogriss had deteriorated in the short time since Wedge had seen him last. Though the man’s expression was cheerful and carefree,
his posture and movements made it clear that he was as drunk as a new soldier on his first leave. In addition, something had changed in the man’s face. Wedge had seen the expression before, the change that takes place when a cocky young pilot loses a battle but survives to realize that he isn’t immortal, that he can be beaten.
Wedge nodded toward the figure who had hung back. “Your bodyguard? A local or an Imperial?”
“A faithful son of the Empire,” Rogriss said, his tone jovial. “Come to protect me and to witness from afar your bribe attempt.”
Wedge smiled and shook his head. “Bribe attempt? I’m afraid I’m here empty-handed.”
“Ah. As skillful a spy as you are a diplomat, I see. You’re not here to offer me a command, a salary, the gratitude of the Rebel Alliance if I’d only just betray those I’ve served faithfully for longer than you’ve been alive? I must say, my boy, I’m disappointed.”
“No, that sort of thing is for the real spies. I’m just a pilot.” Wedge lost his smile. “But I do have something to offer you. A way out.”
Rogriss laughed. “A way out of what? My pension?”
“Out of your dilemma. Just listen for a minute, Admiral. I don’t expect you to admit to anything I’m saying; you won’t offer up any information, and that’s fine. But I want you to hear what I have to say.”
Rogriss considered, then nodded.
“It’s obviously in your best interest if the Adumari choose to side with the Empire,” Wedge said.
Rogriss laughed again. “Thank you for pointing that out. You really are adapting to life as a diplomat.”
“Not because it’s your mission, but because the alternative will mean your ruin. Probably your death. A suicide, I expect.”
Rogriss didn’t answer. He just cocked an eyebrow, his expression dubious, and waited.
“Because if Adumar sides with the New Republic, you’re obliged to contact your superiors, in spite of the oath you swore on their behalf, and they send in an invasion force. The invasion force hammers Adumar so badly that it’s shattered, probably not worth sweeping up the pieces. A metaphor, I suppose, for your word of honor, which will be just as ruined. Just as irreparable.”
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