"Promise me you"ll dispose of me."
Face shuddered. "I promise. But you"re not going to die."
"Well, I"ll try to hold you to that promise, too." His organic eye closed. "There"s no traffic, yet we"re stopped. Why is that?"
Face grinned and splashed back to his towing rope. "Your fault for hiring an incompetent driver."
The sun went down and Halmad"s myriad moons were brightly illuminated.
Behind them was a rich carpet of stars - for all its industry, Halmad had clear skies.
At a bend in the river where the trees were thin, Phanan said, "What"s that?"
Face looked back to see where Phanan was staring, then looked straight up.
Just crossing before one of the moons was a brightly illu-minated triangle, tiny in the distance. "That"ll be Iron Fist, I expect."
"Ah. Nice to have been able to see her before she was all blown up."
Two hundred meters farther on, Face heard Phanan gasping for breath. He splashed back to him. He couldn"t go as fast as he wanted. It was getting hard to move; his legs were cold and felt like lead.
Phanan was not knotted in pain, as Face had expected. He was stretched out in the pose he"d found most comfortable, but there was distress in his face. "Sorry," Phanan said. "A bit of panic." His voice was fainter than before.
"Panic."
"I was just imagining what a sad galaxy this would be without my superior intellect and general state of wonderfulness." Phanan gave a minimal shrug.
"That"s not something you have to worry about."
"Either way, you"re right." Phanan held out a hand; there was something in it.
Face took the datapad from him.
"What"s this?"
"It"s called a da-ta-pad. New Republic and Imperial children learn about them from the time they"re very young."
"Funny."
"Take it back with you. It has some last thoughts on it."
The coldness in Face"s legs crept up to inhabit the rest of him and he shuddered again. "Not last thoughts, Ton. Don"t be so fatalistic. You"re just punishing yourself."
Phanan managed a hoa.r.s.e chuckle. "You would know. That"s your specialty, isn"t it?"
"What do you mean?"
"I do what I do because I very badly want to hurt the people who hurt me.
You do what you do so you can punish a little boy who once made some holodramas for the Empire."
"That"s ridiculous."
"Is it? Face, just how much do you think you owe the New Republic?"
"Well... some."
"For your acting. For the fact that it furthered Imperial causes."
"That"s right."
"It"s not right. You"re putting a tremendous burden on the little boy you used to be."
"Well, a debt. It"s as though I incurred this tremendous debt account.
Now I"m paying it off bit by bit."
"The account doesn"t need balancing." There was scorn in Ton"s voice.
"You can"t reduce sapient lives to numbers and exchange them like credits. You can"t measure what a boy did in innocence against what a man has to do for the rest of his life."
"Now you"re raving."
"Ah. That"s good to know. Hey, we"re stopped again."
A bit farther, and Phanan said, in a hoa.r.s.e whisper Face could barely hear over the whine of the repulsorlift, "It"s up there again."
"Iron Fist?" Face looked up. The Super Star Destroyer was making another orbit.
It was distant, pristine, like the giant spearhead of some supernatural being from the long-forgotten mythologies of a hundred worlds. It drifted by, not caring about the lives and deaths and victories and tragedies of the humans below. And when it descended, it would bring death. That, Face decided, was Iron Fist. And such a thing had no right to exist. If it took him forever, he would see it destroyed.
He made sure his sudden revulsion did not make it to his voice. "Not too intimidating from this far away, is it?" he asked.
Phanan didn"t answer.
"I said, not too intimidating from here, is it?"
Phanan still did not respond.
Face stood where he was, unwilling to turn and look, to walk back on his cold-numbed legs to confirm what he feared. But the speeder bike slowly drifted forward until it was beside him.
Phanan"s chest did not rise or fall. But his organic eye was still open, directed upward, and his expression-for once lacking pain, lacking the shields of sarcasm or manufactured self-appreciation - was that of a child wondering at the glittering beauty of the stars.
Face"s vision blurred as his own eyes filled with the first tears he"d shed since he was a boy.
13.
At dawn, Face rose from his makeshift camp. He took one last look at the bundle he was leaving behind-ruined speeder bike, ruined pilot, and the combination of his own datapad and a Raptor comlink he"d laboriously programmed by moonlight, all beneath the thin thermal blanket he"d retrieved from the bike"s cargo-and then headed into the trees.
In spite of the pulsing aches that seemed to have replaced his muscles and bones while he slept, he would be able to travel swiftly. He had good directional sense. He did not have an injured comrade to tow through difficult, slow terrain.
Within an hour, he pa.s.sed by the gutted hulk of Phanan"s TIE fighter.
There were no bodies here. Zsinj"s investigators had come and gone, and had posted no one to guard a valueless, burned-out hull. There were no distant sounds of speeder bikes or TIE fighters. The search had moved or been called off.
When morning was still young, he swam out to where his interceptor lay partially submerged, and took a long and lonely time going through the routine power-up checklist. But when that was done, he had to act fast.
His window of opportunity would be a narrow one.
The murky water behind his interceptor boiled as he cut in his engines; he could see bubbles and foam drift around to his front viewport as his interceptor strained. Then the repulsors overcame the muck that trapped his vehicle. He rose to the water"s surface and then shot into the air.
Up, southwest across a narrow band of forest, a mere few moments until he found the river. Downriver just a few more moments as terrain blurred beneath him.
When he recognized the approximate area of his camp, he sent a signal across his comlink. The distant Raptor comlink responded with the signal he"d programmed into its companion datapad and a moment later he hovered over the glade where he"d spent the night.
There it was, the black thermal blanket atop his friend. He could not wait. Revulsion for the deed he was about to perform had been his companion last night; he did not have time for it now. He rotated so that his interceptor was pointed straight down, as though it were about to fly into the ground.
Repulsor and thrust emissions kicked leaves and plants into motion, and a moment later whipped the blanket from atop the speeder bike and Ton Phanan.
Phanan"s organic eye was closed-Face had closed it last night. But his mechanical eye was still powered, still staring redly, and Face wondered what it saw. Then Face fired.
His lasers turned the center of the glade into a burning inferno, charring speeder bike, organic body, and prosthetic parts into a melted crater of ash and bubbling metal. He fired until there was nothing recognizable there, nothing for the investigators of Zsinj or Halmad to identify as Ton Phanan.
Then he turned his bow skyward and fled to s.p.a.ce.
At the end of Face"s debriefing, Wedge asked, "You"ve eaten?"
Face nodded. He rubbed his chin where the General Kargin scar makeup had been removed, and seemed surprised to find stubble there. "A little."
"Good. Listen, Face, I know this isn"t going to help very much, but as far as I can tell from your report and your interceptor"s recordings, you did everything right. You did everything possible to preserve the integrity of this mission and the lives of your fellow pilots. I think highly of what you accomplished down there."
"But I was unable to bring Phanan back alive."
Wedge nodded. "I"ve been unable to bring a lot of friends back alive. And I"m not going to pretend that it"s not going to eat at you. It will. It still eats at me. I just want you to understand that it"s not something you alone have gone through. If you need to talk, come to me, or to Wes or to Myn. I don"t think we can make you feel any better... but we can remind you that it"s possible to survive the experience."
"Yes, sir." Face looked reflective. "I"d like to try to return that favor, if you"d like me to."
"How"s that?"
"I knew Ton better than anyone in the unit. I think I should at least help write the letter of notification to his family."
"Ah. Well, that"s not going to be necessary, Face. We"re both off that particular hook. While you were cleaning up, I went through his records and the datapad you brought back to me. The person we"re supposed to notify in the case of his death is you."
Face"s eyes went wide. "Me. Why not his family?"
"No living family. He was the only child of a couple who had him comparatively late in life. They both died before he completed his education. No siblings. No family member closer than distant cousins who"ve never met him. You"re also the beneficiary of his will."
Face didn"t even manage a reply to that statement. He just gaped.
"I have to process some of these doc.u.ments. Then I"ll get them into your hands. It won"t be for a while. In the meantime, I want you to get some sleep. At least, get some rest."
"Yes, sir."
Wedge returned the pilot"s salute and watched him go. He waited a few moments before calling, "Wes."
Janson stuck his head in the doorway. His normally merry features were now schooled into somber lines. "Yes, Commander."
"a.s.sign Lara Notsil to Face as his wingman. Also, she"s had the military first-aid course more recently than any of the rest of us, so a.s.sign her as squadron medic. Get her whatever instructional holos and equipment she"ll need for the task.
"And ask her to keep an eye on him, to watch out for signs of undue distress or any sort of overreaction to Phanan"s death. But she needs to keep it very surrept.i.tious. We can"t have him feeling that we"re all spying on him."
"Even though we are."
"Correct."
Moments after Janson had gone, there was a rap at the door.
"Come."
Donos entered and saluted.
Wedge returned the salute and tried to keep from frowning. There was something different about the pilot. The somber expression was the same, the thick mop of black hair over brooding dark eyes was the same-though lacking the air of defeat Donos had worn when he joined Wraith Squadron.
Then Wedge caught it. Donos was in casual dress, mostly black, his jacket still bearing a patch for Talon Squadron, and Corellian Bloodstripes on his pants.
Donos had earned the decorations while serving with distinction as a sniper with the Corellian armed forces. He hadn"t worn them in the first several weeks of his service with Wraith Squadron, demonstrating the lack of selfesteem that followed the destruction of his former squadron. That injury to his spirit seemed to have healed. A good sign. But Donos still wasn"t the ostentatious sort and wouldn"t have worn a decoration like this, even though it was his right, with his ordinary dress. Wedge gave him a suspicious look and gestured for him to sit.
"This obviously isn"t about Face."
"That"s right, sir. It"s about Lara."
Donos told him about Lara"s brother, who shouldn"t have survived but did, who shouldn"t have found her again but did. And he described a possible mission to Lara"s homeworld of Aldivy.
Face rose after a long time. Most of it had not been spent sleeping. Nor had he been truly awake; he"d been in a restless state where conscious thought could not take hold, but neither could sleep, for his mind was fully occupied by images of the last two days.
The light on his terminal was blinking, a sign of messages or files received. He brought the terminal up.
A dispatch from the commander. Lara, Wraith Thirteen, was now his wing, and the replacement medic. No surprise there.
A copy of Ton Phanan"s will. Face skipped it.
A message from Phanan. It was dated and timed less than an hour before his death. Face took a deep breath and brought it up.