Exile Page 7

  “Of course I’m not. The Alliance risks an undercover contact in Coronet to try to recruit my daughter as a double agent? I’m a proud father.” Gejjen’s suspicious look didn’t waver, so he added, “Oh, don’t worry. She didn’t take the offer.”

  “And she reported everything she knew about that recruiter to CorSec, I assume.”

  “Of course not. Her mother and the institute taught her too well for that. That recruiter now falls into the category of one of her personal set of contacts. Maybe she’ll choose to suborn him. Or use him for some other purpose.”

  Gejjen shook his head. “I really prefer to think that you’re just kidding me.”

  Wedge nodded, affable. “You do that.” He came to a stop beside a door leading into a refresher. “I need to make a quick stop. I’ll catch up with you later.”

  “Don’t forget the dinner three nights from now.”

  “I won’t.”

  Gejjen and his bodyguards continued on their way. Wedge ducked into the refresher.

  That dinner, a testimonial affair arranged to celebrate his retirement, was one piece of evidence pointing to the unlikelihood of an assassination attempt occurring today. Public appearances were the events where it would be easiest to eliminate him, and he had only two scheduled—today’s holonews conference and the dinner. Nothing had happened at the conference, so the dinner became the next most likely opportunity.

  But as Iella had pointed out, the story was just too good, too fulfilling to the public if he were to die today. Minutes after stepping down from his position as military Supreme Commander of Corellia, Wedge Antilles was cut down by an Alliance assassin … The viewing audiences would sympathize and say “Of course,” and Wedge’s life would fall into a neat little pile of perspective for them.

  Once in the refresher, Wedge took a quick look around, making sure that no one waited in any of the stalls or the sanisteam unit at the end. He peered out the door again, assuring himself that the only beings in sight were Gejjen and party, now meters away and continuing toward the building’s exterior doors.

  From under his tunic, Wedge pulled a government-printed sign that read FACILITIES UNDER REPAIR. He pressed it to the front of the door, to which it adhered; then he shut and locked the door.

  His package was waiting for him where it was supposed to be, affixed out of sight under the sink. He pulled the anonymous gray bag free and opened it on the sink counter.

  Inside were a change of clothing—lightweight black pants, shirt, shoes, cap, belt—and a jacket decorated on its back with a view of Centerpoint Station. The long, lumpy, unlovely space station was now a rallying symbol for Corellians, and there were hundreds of thousands of jackets just like this one being worn on the streets.

  Wrapped up in the clothes were a sun visor to conceal his eyes and a DH-17 blaster pistol, scoped, the precise pattern of venting on its barrel indicating that it was not of recent manufacture. But its gleaming black surface suggested that it had been meticulously maintained or recently restored. Wedge didn’t care for the DH-17 as much as some other models—the grip angle prevented it from being a natural pointer for him—but it was a good weapon, and Iella was sure to have found one that could not be traced back to the Antilles family.

  Hastily he shed his white admiral’s uniform, tossing it into the sanisteam stall, and dressed in the garments from the bag. He put the DH-17 into the right-hand jacket pocket and kept his hold-out blaster, a smaller, less powerful weapon, in its little holster at the base of his spine.

  Finally he looked at himself in the mirror.

  Staring back at him was Wedge Antilles in a Centerpoint jacket and a visor over his eyes.

  He sighed. Disguise never had been his strong suit. But at least someone fixated on looking for a man in an admiral’s uniform might miss him.

  Two minutes later he exited a side door of the government building, well away from the public front exit and the rear access that were the most likely points for his departure, and merged instantly with pedestrian traffic. At the same time he gave his comlink a click.

  There was an immediate reply of two clicks, Iella letting him know that she saw him.

  He had proceeded about a hundred meters down the walkway—as speeder traffic hurtled by to his left, he’d counted ninety-eight steps—when he heard three clicks on his comlink. Iella reporting that he was being tailed.

  Wedge swore. This wasn’t going to be a clean departure, then. He put his hands in his jacket pockets, gripping the blaster with his right.

  Ahead, one street up, was the speeder hangar building where Iella had left the airspeeder that was to be his departure vehicle. It was, in fact, a vehicle belonging to the Corellian government, to the fleet of speeders used by minor functionaries; the day before, Iella had stolen it and put it in place on the building’s fourth floor.

  As he approached the street corner, Wedge weighed his options. The obvious one was to continue ahead, down into the depressed, plascrete-lined pedestrian underpass. But that would put him in a straight tunnel about twenty meters long with nowhere to duck if enemies entered behind him and began shooting.

  Beside him, speeders occasionally slowed to allow passengers to board or depart. He could jump into one of those vehicles, commandeer it, make a run for it. But that wasn’t inconspicuous, and he was likely to be identified.

  He could break into a run, see if that flushed out his pursuers so that Iella could deal with them—

  His decision was forced on him. His comlink crackled with Iella’s voice, her cry of “Down!” He dived for the sidewalk, hit it hard, felt the air above his back heat up. Ahead, a speeder making a right turn onto the cross-street between Wedge and the parking hangar took a blaster bolt, a blaster rifle bolt, in the starboard side. That plasteel panel and the transparisteel viewport above it blackened and bowed in, and a moment later the speeder was lost to sight, hidden behind the building Wedge had departed mere moments ago.

  Wedge rolled over toward the street to his left, freeing the blaster pistol from his pocket before he was completely on his back. He took quick note of the orange airspeeder now heading his way from a proscribed altitude above the normal traffic flow—realized that, from the angle of the shot meant for him, the speeder couldn’t have been its source—and kept rolling, inverting as he did so, leaving him facing back the way he’d come as he rolled out into the traffic lane.

  That wasn’t as dangerous as it would have been had the traffic included ground vehicles. For the moment, it was all speeders, and the ones headed his way swerved or gained a little altitude as their pilots realized there was a man sprawled in the road.

  They didn’t swerve or climb particularly well. Three ran over him in the space of a second, but only their repulsor-lift pulses hit him, pushing him harder into the roadway duracrete. And in passing over him, they provided a little cover from the oncoming airspeeder, giving him time to look for—

  There they were on the sidewalk, two men in traveler’s robes—Jedi robes? One carried a blaster rifle; the other, a silvery tube Wedge thought had to be an unlit lightsaber. There were no pedestrians between their position and Wedge’s—no shock there, as they had obviously waited for the walkway to clear before firing.

  He returned fire, squeezing the trigger as fast as he could, using each bolt’s passage through the air to show him how to traverse. He knew the Jedi attacker would ignite his lightsaber and bat the bolts out of the air, but perhaps his wild spray of fire would cause the sniper to panic—

  It didn’t work out quite that way. Both men dived for the ground. Wedge’s shots still hit the Jedi in the groin and then the face; that man twitched and then lay still, scorched and smoking.

  The sniper resumed aiming … and Wedge resumed rolling, moving farther out into the traffic lanes, banging knees and elbows with every revolution, being hammered by the repulsors of each speeder that passed directly over him. His ears rang from the impacts.

  A man dressed in an eye-hurting green jumpsuit
fell out of the sky and landed beside the sniper. He was broad-shouldered, not tall, and had a bushy red beard that fell nearly to his waist. Even at this distance, something about him shouted disguise to Wedge.

  The sniper looked up at the man from the sky, losing his fix on Wedge.

  Wedge glanced up for a moment. The airspeeder that had been heading his way was now moving from a position directly over the sniper and back toward the traffic lane—back toward Wedge. The bearded man had to have come from it, and had to have dropped four stories to land beside the sniper.

  The red-bearded man kicked the sniper full in the face. The force of the blow snapped the man’s head back and sent him skidding for a meter across the sidewalk.

  Wedge’s comlink crackled again with Iella’s voice. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes—oof—bumpy.” Wedge scrambled farther to his right, ending up in the gap between two traffic lanes moving in opposite directions.

  “The awful orange speeder is your new ride. I’ll retrieve the one I dropped off.”

  “Understood. Love you.”

  “Love you.”

  The orange speeder did a complete barrel roll as it roared over two lanes of traffic, then dropped precipitously into the gap where Wedge stood. He forced himself not to flinch as it came to a stop, its bow only a meter from him.

  The pilot was a woman in her early twenties. Her eyes were hidden behind dark goggles, and her hair was a riot of colors, every lock seemingly a different hue. She pointed a gloved finger at him as if aiming a blaster pistol. “Hi, Dad!”

  Wedge scrambled across the speeder’s bow and over its windscreen, dropping into the front passenger’s seat. “Myri! I thought you were supposed to stay at home, keep it secure.”

  “Plans change. Are you mad? Spelled, ungrateful?”

  “No. Let’s go.”

  “Just a second, we’re waiting for—”

  The speeder rocked and sank almost to ground level from the impact of something landing in the backseat. Wedge spun, saw a flash of awful green jumpsuit and red beard, and kept himself from swinging his pistol fully into line.

  Then he caught sight of the eyes behind that preposterous red beard. “Corran!”

  Corellia’s resident Jedi Master grinned at him.

  Myri hit the thrusters, and Wedge was shoved by acceleration into his seat back, toward Corran. He continued, “So Iella’s message got to Mirax.”

  Corran nodded. “And my wife got the message to me, and I got to your quarters in time for Myri to get me here. Everybody got something. Hey, girl, keep it down to fifty meters or lower.”

  Myri waved at him, cheerfully ignoring his advice as she climbed to near rooftop level, but then her ballistic course reached its apex and she began a stomach-twisting dive toward a traffic lane a few blocks away.

  “Sorry it was such a mess,” Wedge said. “I really thought the disguise and side-door gambit would throw off pursuit.”

  “It did,” Myri said. “Mom says the main hit teams were assembled front and back. We missed about three-quarters of the assassins this way.”

  “Oh. Good. Please tell me that all that stuff will wash out of your hair.”

  “It will. But the tattoos are permanent.”

  “Tattoos?”

  Myri laughed at him.

  CORUSCANT JEDI TEMPLE VEHICLE HANGAR

  It wasn’t a large number of starfighters, less than a full squadron’s worth—nine X-wings, one E-wing—but they were all beautifully maintained, and Jag Fel felt an unexpected pang as he looked at them. It seemed so long ago that flying craft like these had been his whole life.

  He missed that. He missed belonging to a band of comrades, divided by individual needs and peculiarities and prejudices but united in their goals and their support for one another.

  He let none of what he was feeling reach his face.

  “The Jedi order would like to fund and support your mission,” Luke Skywalker was saying.

  That snapped Jag’s attention back to the present. “To find and destroy Alema Rar,” he said.

  “To find and neutralize Alema Rar,” Luke corrected. “Yes, obviously, it might entail killing her. But should an opportunity arise to capture her, transport her back here …”

  “So that she might be convinced to see the error of her ways?” Jag let just a hint of mockery enter his voice.

  “No. So that she might find her own path to redemption.”

  Jag considered. Dealing with the Jedi would always be like this, he decided. The military made plans based on objectives—such as Find and eliminate an enemy force. The Jedi didn’t so much make plans as choose directions—such as Make things better. Back in the days of the Yuuzhan Vong war, the two different approaches had been a bit closer to each other; in these less defined times, the basic incompatibilities were more obvious.

  So he would have to adjust his thinking a bit if he was to work with the Jedi. But he was a bit unsettled to realize that he wasn’t sure the Jedi approach was the wrong one. Even with Alema Rar … Once he, Jag, had known a Jedi girl who had stepped off the right path, gone the wrong way for a while. She had found her own way back soon enough. But what if she hadn’t? If she had continued, might she not be a bit like Alema Rar, and would Jag be just as sanguine about hunting her down and killing her?

  “I accept,” he said.

  “Good. I’m actually heading up a similar unit, pursuing leads involving the Sith lady Lumiya. She may be dead now—or maybe not—but what’s clear is that she was in alliance with Alema as of a few days ago, when they ambushed me and Mara. Now that it’s clear that Lumiya was, or is, employing agents, and who some of them are, we stand an improved chance of finding her trail.”

  “I don’t know much about her. I assume the term Sith lady doesn’t bode well.”

  “Not well at all. I’ll get you the basic information on her.” Luke reached into a pocket and handed items over to Jag. “Identicard. It identifies you as Jagged Fel, a civilian specialist employed by the Jedi order. The second one’s a credcard. It gives you access to a drawing account set up for your task force. The third is a security card with what you need to assume control of”—he pointed—“that X-wing. Sorry I can’t provide you with a Chiss clawcraft.”

  “That’s all right. I’m fond of X-wings, as well.”

  “I also want to assign a couple of Jedi to you. You’re hunting a Dark Jedi; you’ll benefit from having Jedi with you.”

  “I agree.”

  Luke glanced toward a door leading into the hangar. “Speaking of which …”

  He must have been alerted by an impulse in the Force, for when Jag followed his glance, the door was shut. But now it slid up and open, and a woman in brown Jedi robes walked into the hangar. “Uncle Luke, you wanted to see—oh.”

  Jag refrained from stiffening. It was Jaina Solo. His mind clicked through a number of possibilities and arrived at one inescapable conclusion: that she was going to be—

  “I’m putting together a small task force to find Alema Rar,” Luke said. “Colonel Fel here is in charge. I’m assigning you to it, and Zekk, when he’s fit to fly.”

  Jaina came to a stop a few meters away, looking between the two men as if still expecting the punch line to a joke that already wasn’t funny. “That is not a good idea. I don’t think I can operate as this man’s subordinate.”

  Luke gave her a quizzical look. “Back in the Yuuzhan Vong war, though he outranked you, he didn’t offer you any grief about being your subordinate.”

  “Things are different now.”

  Luke nodded. “Yes. You’re both older and wiser. And on top of that, the two of you have worked together before, know each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and have complementary skills. Consider it settled.” He glanced between them. “I’ll leave you two to get caught up. Jag, please get me a plan of operation at your earliest opportunity.” He turned and headed toward the door.

  Jag waited until Luke was out of hearing. “The problem with Je
di Masters,” he said, “is that they can’t be beaten with impunity.”

  Jaina looked at him, suspicious. “Jag, did you just make a joke?”

  “No.” He clamped down on the anger rising within him. “He knows why I wouldn’t want to work with you and has decided to disregard my wishes. I’ll have to assume that his reasoning is sound, whatever it is, until proven otherwise. All right, let’s do some strategic planning.”

  “Why wouldn’t you want to?” Jaina was clearly confused and, so far as Jag could tell, possibly hurt as well. “Because of what happened with the Dark Nest?”

  “It doesn’t matter. We have planning to do.” He gestured toward the door.

  She stood her ground, glaring. “It does matter. If I’m going to be working in a hostile environment, I need to know why. If we have a problem, you should have told me about it years ago.”

  “I couldn’t.” The words, heated, snapped out of him. “I was stranded on Tenupe for two years. And because of your actions, ignoring the consequences of freeing Low-bacca and what he did subsequently, I am now barred from my family forever. And that is the why.”

  She gaped. The anger didn’t leave her face, but something in it changed. Jag supposed that she was offended either by his blaming her or by the fact that he had been punished for the action of others. “Yes,” he added, “the Jedi way preaches forgiveness, but that isn’t the Chiss approach. To the Chiss and my family, I am an unperson, and that’s forever. Don’t bother thinking about ways to correct the situation—it would be roughly as useful as worrying about painting out the laser damage your uncle left on the hull of the Death Star. Instead, worry about Alema Rar.”

  Finally her mouth closed. It took her a few moments, but military discipline reasserted itself. “All right. Strategic planning.” At his gesture, she preceded him to the door back into the Temple hallways.

  CORELLIAN EXCLUSION ZONE LOVE COMMANDER

  “I feel,” Lando announced, “like an idiot.” He studied himself in the main display screen serving the captain’s chair on the Love Commander control cabin. Mounted on a swing-out arm so that it could be positioned directly before him or moved out of the way, it was now beside his chair and switched off. Reflective when not active, it showed him in his new guise, wearing a white beard and mustache, and a white wig with hair so long that the braid swinging from it would reach to his thighs when he stood.