Rogue Squadron (6 page)

“You’re wrong, Kirtan. I’m a black hole that’s sucking your career down into its heart.” Bastra sagged back down onto the cot. “Remember that when I’m dead, because I’ll be laughing about it for all eternity.”

This cannot continue. I will not be humiliated any longer!
“I’ll remember your words, Gil Bastra, but your laughter will be a long time coming. The only eternity you’ll know is your interrogation, and I guarantee—personally guarantee—you’ll go to your grave having betrayed those who trusted you the most.”

4

Corran made a vain grab at the hydrospanner with his right hand as the tool slipped from the X-wing’s starboard engine cowling. His fingertips brushed the spanner’s end, sending it into a spin toward the ferrocrete deck of the hangar. A half second later, when his right knee slipped and unbalanced him, he realized having failed to catch the tool was the least of his problems. He tried to hook his left hand on the edge of the open engine compartment, but he missed with that grab, too, leaving him set to plummet headfirst in the hydrospanner’s wake.

Still trying to prepare himself for the agony coming from a fractured skull, he was surprised to find pain blossoming at the other end of his body. Before he could figure out what had happened, his flailing left hand caught hold of the cowling it had missed before, aborting his long fall to the ground. He hauled himself back onto the S-foil and lay there on his belly for a moment, considering himself very lucky.

As the pain in Corran’s rump lessened, Whistler’s scolding gained volume. Corran rubbed a hand
back over his left cheek and felt a small tear in the fabric of his flight suit, prompting him to laugh. “Yes, Whistler, I am very lucky you were quick enough to catch me. Next time, though, can your pincer catch a little less of me and a bit more of my flight suit?”

Whistler blatted a reply Corran chose to ignore.

The pilot twisted around onto his seat with only mild discomfort. “So, do I still need the tool, or did the last adjustment do it?”

The droid’s tone ran from high to low in a fair imitation of a sigh.

“No, of course I still need it.” Corran frowned. “You should have caught it, Whistler, not me. I can climb back up here by myself. It can’t.” Even as he said that and slid toward the S-foil’s forward edge, it occurred to him that he’d not heard the hydrospanner hit the ground.
That’s odd
.

Peering over the edge of the wing, he saw a smiling, brown-haired woman holding the hydrospanner up in his direction. “This belongs to you, I take it?”

Corran nodded. “Yeah. Thanks.”

She handed it to him, then climbed up on the cart he’d used to get up on top of the S-foil. “Need some help?”

“No, I’ve pretty much got it handled, despite what the droid says.”

“Oh.” She extended her hand toward him. “I’m Lujayne Forge.”

“I know, I’ve seen you around.”

“You’ve done a bit more than that. You flew a dupe against me in the
Redemption
scenario.” She leaned her slender body against the side of his fighter, bisecting the green and white wording that indicated the X-wing was the property of the Corellian Security Force. “You put the
Korolev
down.”

Corran tightened the hydrospanner over the primary
trim bolt on the centrifugal debris extractor and nudged it to the left. “That was luck. Nawara Ven had already taken the shields down with his missiles. It was more his kill than mine. You still did well.”

Her brown eyes narrowed ever so slightly. “I guess. I have a question for you, though.”

Corran straightened up. “Go ahead.”

“The way you took that bomber after me, did you do that just as part of the exercise, or was there something more to it?”

“Something more?”

Lujayne hesitated, then nodded. “I was wondering if you singled me out because I was from Kessel?”

Corran blinked in surprise. “Why would that make any difference to me?”

She laughed and tapped the CorSec insignia on the side of the fighter with a knuckle. “You were with CorSec. You sent people to Kessel. As far as you’re concerned, everyone on Kessel is either a prisoner or a smuggler who ought to have been a prisoner. And when the prisoners and smugglers liberated the planet from the Imps, well, that didn’t change anything in your eyes, did it?”

Setting the hydrospanner on a safe spot, Corran raised his hands. “Wait a minute, you’re jumping to a lot of conclusions.”

“Maybe, but tell me, you didn’t know I was from Kessel?”

“Well, I did.”

“And tell me that didn’t make a difference to you.”

“It didn’t, honest.”

“I bet.”

The firm set of her jaw and the way she folded her arms across her chest told Corran she didn’t believe
him. There was a fair amount of anger in her words, but also some hurt. Anger he could deal with—there wasn’t a smuggler or criminal who hadn’t been angry when he was around. The hurt, though, that was unusual and made Corran feel uncomfortable.

“What makes you think I hold your coming from Kessel against you?”

“The way you act.” Lujayne’s expression softened a bit, and some of the anger drained away, but that just let more anxiety and pain bleed into her words. “You tend to keep to yourself. You’re not associating with the rest of us—beyond a narrow circle of pilots you think are as sharp as you are. You’re always watching and listening, evaluating and judging. Others have noticed it, too.”

“Ms. Forge, Lujayne, you’re making meters out of microns here.”

“I don’t think so, and I don’t want to be judged for things over which I had no control.” Her chin came up and fire sparked in her eyes. “My father volunteered to go to Kessel under an Old Republic program where he taught inmates how to move back into society upon their release. My mother was one of his students. They fell in love and remained on Kessel—they’re still there, along with most of my brothers and sisters. They’re all good people and their work with inmates was designed to make your job easier by giving criminals other skills so they’d not return to crime when they were released.”

Corran sighed and his shoulders slumped. “I think that’s great, I really do. I wish there were thousands of people like your parents and kin doing that sort of work. The fact is, though, that even if I’d known that, I’d still have gone after you in the exercise.”

“Oh, my being from Kessel had
nothing
to do with it?”

He almost dismissed her question with a glib denial, but he caught himself and she clearly noticed his hesitation. “Maybe, just maybe, it
did
have something to do with my flying. I guess I decided that if you were from Kessel and could fly, you had to be a smuggler, and it was important for me to fly better than you could.”

She nodded once, but her expression did not shift from one of concern to smug triumph as he had expected it would. “I believe that, and I can understand it. Still, there’s something more there, right?”

“Look, I’m sorry if what I did made you look bad in the exercise, but I really don’t have the time to talk about this now.”

“No time or no inclination?”

Whistler hooted something in an utterly carefree manner.

“
You
stay out of this.” Frustration curled his hands into fists. “You’re not going to let this go, are you, Ms. Forge?”

With a smile blossoming on her face, she shook her head. “If you’d gotten this far in an interrogation, would you give up?”

Corran snorted a laugh. “No.”

“So, explain yourself.”

He definitely heard a request for more than an explanation of his conduct in the
Redemption
scenario in her voice. For a split second he flashed on the times at CorSec when his human partner, Iella Wessiri, had made similar demands of him.
Iella had been a conciliator—always the one to be patching up the disagreements between folks in the unit. That’s what Lujayne is trying to do, which means I’ve managed to alienate a number of the other pilots trying to get into the unit
.

“Concerning the exercise, I really just wanted to see how good you were. I’d been able to figure out where some of the other pilots stood in relationship to me, but I’d not flown against you. You know, you’re not bad.”

“But I’m not in a class with you and Bror Jace.”

Corran smiled quickly, then covered it with a frown. “True, but you’re still very sharp. I’d like to think the rest of the pilots are going to be at least that sharp. I’d even be set up to fly against that Gimbel kid in his
Redemption
scenario tomorrow but Jace volunteered before I could.”

“His name is Gavin, Gavin Darklighter.”

“Gavin, then.”

“And you didn’t want to be following Jace’s lead?”

“Would you?”

Lujayne smiled. “Given a choice, no, I guess not. Next to you, he’s the most standoffish person in the group.”

Corran felt uneasy inside. “I’m not as bad as he is.”

“No? At least he has the good graces to deign to join us in DownTime for some recreation. He’s a sliced and blown datafile compared to you.”

Corran turned to the left and pointed his finger at the astromech droid. “Don’t even start.”

Lujayne raised an eyebrow. “So your droid thinks you should get out more, too?”

Something halfway between a snarl and a growl came from Corran’s throat, but it lacked the power to make it menacing. “Whistler has the ability, from time to time, to be a nag. His problem is that in the time since I left CorSec I’ve been in situations where I’ve had to be very careful. I moved through a number of identities that didn’t allow me to be
very open with people. For example, most recently, I spent over a year as the confidential aide to a succession of incompetent Imp officials governing a Rim world. One slip, one crack in my identity, and I’d have been caught. And when you get out of the habit of trusting folks and relaxing around them, well …”

“I understand.”

“Thanks.” Corran gave her a grateful smile. “On top of that, I’m learning a lot of new things here and I’ve been trying to concentrate on my flying. That’s not easy—there’s a whole new set of slang to get used to and people from species I barely knew existed that I now have to work with and even share living quarters with.”

“That
is
difficult—my roommate is a Rodian.”

“That’s rough, but I’ll bet she’s less idiosyncratic than my roommate.” Corran whistled at the Gand pilot entering the hangar. “Ooryl, come over here, please.”

The pilot’s grey-green flesh clashed with the bright orange of his flight suit, and the knobby bits of his exoskeleton poked bumps in odd places from beneath the fabric as he walked. “May Ooryl assist?”

“I’ve been curious about something since we were assigned the same quarters, but didn’t think to ask you about it until right now.” Corran frowned. “I hope you don’t mind—you might take it personally and I don’t mean to embarrass you.”

The Gand just watched him with multifaceted eyes. “Qyrgg would hope to avoid embarrassment as well, but you may ask.”

Corran nodded in what he hoped was a friendly manner. “Why do you speak of yourself in the third person?”

“Qrygg is embarrassed by not understanding your question.”

Lujayne smiled. “You do not seem to refer to yourself with the pronoun ‘I.’ ”

“And you alternate the names you use.”

The Gand’s mouth parts clicked open in what Corran had decided was a Gand’s best approximation of a human smile. “Ooryl understands.”

“And?”

Ooryl crossed his arms, then tapped his trio of fingers against his body’s deltoid armor plates. “On Gand it is held that names are important. Any Gand who has achieved nothing is called Gand. Before Ooryl was given Ooryl’s name, Ooryl was known as Gand. Once Ooryl had made a mark in the world, Ooryl was given the Qrygg surname. Later, by mastering the difficulties of astronavigation and flight, Ooryl earned the right to be called Ooryl.”

The woman frowned. “This still does not explain why you do not use pronouns to refer to yourself.”

“Qrygg apologizes. On Gand only those who have achieved great things are permitted to use pronouns for self-designation. The use of such carries with it the presumption that all who hear the speech will know who the speaker is, and this assumption is only true in the case where the speaker is so great, the speaker’s name
is
known to all.”

Corran found the system curious, but somehow satisfying.
It always does seem that those who use
I
the most are the ones who have the least in the way of accomplishments to justify it. The Gands have formalized a system we should have come up with long ago
. “So Ooryl is the equivalent of Corran, and Qyrgg is the same as Horn for me?”

“Exactly.”

“Then why do you sometimes refer to yourself by your family name, and sometimes by your own name?”

The Gand looked down for a moment and his mouth parts closed. “When a Gand has given offense, or is ashamed of actions, this diminishes the gains made in life. Name reduction is an act of contrition, an apology. Ooryl would like to think Ooryl will not often be called Qyrgg, but Qyrgg knows the likelihood of this is slender.”

Whistler tootled jauntily at Corran.

“People would know my first name was Corran even if we did use this system.” He rolled his eyes. “And any droid who wanted to keep his name would have run his little diagnostic program and told me if the extractor was adjusted correctly or not by now.”

Lujayne glanced over at him. “Trouble with the engine?”

“Nothing major.” Corran pointed down into the hole. “I had to replace an extractor a while back and keeping it trimmed up over the first fifty parsecs is important.”

Lujayne nodded. “Until it seats itself properly. Looks like you’re working on the housing when you really ought to be just putting a spacer on the axle.”

“You know about fixing these things?”

She shrugged. “Landspeeder repair was one of the trade skills my father used to teach. The T-47 uses virtually identical debris extraction systems for the engine. What you’re doing will work, but you’ll keep making adjustments for another six months. I can measure up a spacer and have it ground down to size for you in a half an hour or so.”