Wedge's Gamble (16 page)

The official’s head drew back, trapping an extra chin against her throat.
“Telbun?
”

“Exactly. My
telbun
bore me here on Imperial Center so, in keeping with my family’s tradition, I have come here with this
telbun
to conceive.”

“To conceive? A child?”

“You understand.”

“Telbun
. I see.” The official looked at Corran and he averted his eyes.
“Telbun.
”

Telbun
were drawn from the middle classes on Kuat. They were raised and trained by their families to excel in academics, social manners, and athletics. When they reached the appropriate age, they underwent a battery of tests that produced a ranking by combining scores for intelligence, grace, health, and genetic makeup. The upper classes of the great Kuat merchant houses then purchased
telbun
from their families for the purpose of parenting a child with a member of the merchant family, then raising that child. The child would be an heir of the merchant house, thereby getting all the benefits of its birth, while the
telbun
’s family would be greatly enriched by the fees paid for the
telbun
’s service.

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 alliances
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-class
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 displays
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.”