Step one: Remind them who everyone is in case they’ve forgotten. “People of Adumar, I am Wedge Antilles, and it’s my pleasure to meet you at last.” His words blasted out from speakers set up on four strategically positioned metal poles around the plaza.
The audience roared again, but the noise quickly modulated into a chant: “Car-tann… Car-tann… Cartann…” Wedge wondered what that was all about, but dismissed it from his mind. That answer would wait.
Step two: Remind them what you’re here for. “And as a representative of the New Republic, I’m pleased to be present at this historic meeting of our great peoples.”
The cheering became more generalized, with the “Car-tann” chants slowly dying out.
Step three: Something personal, so they’ll know you’re paying attention. Wedge gestured out at the flat display panels. “I must admit, I find this display very heartwarming. It’s possibly the best greeting I’ve ever received. I’ll have to find out if I can replicate it on the walls of my quarters back home.” Some laughter mixed in with the shouting and cheering.
Step four: Wrap it up before you make a fool of yourself. “I expect to have more to say once I’ve settled in, but for now, thank you for this warm welcome.” He waved again and took a step back, as if abandoning a lectern, then switched off the comlink. The crowd’s cheers continued.
His pilots advanced to flank him and joined in waving at the crowd. He heard Tomer’s voice from immediately behind him: “This is good. If you can just stand here and wave for a while, that’ll satisfy diplomatic obligations, and then we can get you to your quarters.”
“All right.” Wedge took some time to look at the crowd.
They were men, women, and children, all ages, consistently light-complected, though their hair color ranged throughout the color spectrum—Wedge suspected that many of the colors were artificial in origin. Facial hair was common among the men, especially elaborate mustaches.
There was a wide variance in the color and cut of their clothing, but some consistencies as well. Males and many females wore tights and close-fitting boots in black, with long shirts with flowing sleeves. Other women wore long dresses, tight from the torso down but again with the broad, rippling sleeves. About half of the people wore headgear, some sort of tight-fitting cloth or leather skullcap matching one color from the rest of their attire; many of the skullcaps featured a sort of visor, a curved band of what looked like heavily polarized transparisteel, that fell before the wearer’s eyes or could be raised up to their foreheads.
Belts were common, usually narrow single-color loops with no buckle or attachment showing. Some people wore three or four in different colors; others wore them looping from one hip to the opposite shoulder; others still wore both waist and shoulder belt rigs.
And weapons were everywhere. From most of these belts hung sheathed long blades, short blades, pistols of some variety. Wedge could see few in the audience who were not armed in some way; even the children had knives at their belts.
It occurred to Wedge, belatedly, that he could see no security detail on duty around this stage. He glanced at Tycho; the colonel’s return glance indicated that he, too, noticed the lack.
Wedge said, “Tomer, I suppose I’m not concerned if you’re not, but what are you using for security here?”
Tomer’s answer was tinged with amusement. “Why, the crowd.”
“Ah. And what if they wanted to cause a problem?”
“Others would stop them,” Tomer said. “For instance, let’s say someone jumped on the stage with the intent of killing you. He’d give you fair warning, of course, and choice of weapons.”
“Of course,” Wedge repeated.
“Then you could choose to kill him yourself or refuse him. If you refused, he should withdraw, but might theoretically press the issue, if he was stupid.”
“That’s where security issues become a trifle more important,” Wedge said.
“If he pressed the issue, which is a grave breach of etiquette—”
Wedge heard Janson snort in amusement.
“—then someone in the crowd would probably shoot him dead, just to please you.”
Wedge glanced back at the diplomat. “Just like that.”
“Just like that.”
“Oh, stop worrying, Wedge.” Janson’s grin was infectious. “It’s obvious they adore you. You could throw up all over yourself and they’d love it. By nightfall they’d all be doing it. They’d call it the ‘Wedge Purge.’ They’d be eating different-colored foods just to add variety.”
Wedge felt his stomach lurch. He half turned to glare accusingly at Tycho. “I thought maybe you’d be able to do what I never could. Get Wes up to an emotional age of fourteen, maybe fifteen.”
Tycho gave him a tight little shake of the head. “No power in the universe could do that. Not Darth Vader and the dark side of the Force, not the nuclear devastation of an exploding sun.”
Janson waved at the audience. “They’d be competing for distance and volume.”
“Wes, just shut up. Tomer, how is it that you know this reprobate?”
The diplomat offered a rueful shake of his head. “I was once a pilot. Briefly. Tierfon Yellow Aces. My talents lay elsewhere, though, so I ended up in a less violent service.”
Janson nodded amiably. “His talents certainly did lie elsewhere. They weren’t in landing. Tomer here made the Aces’ list for a landing almost horrible enough to kill him two different ways.”
Tomer sighed and ignored him.
“His Y-wing was shot to pieces and his repulsorlifts were dead,” Janson continued. “Had to land, though, or he’d never get dinner. Luckily we were based on a low-grav moon at the time, big long stretch of duracrete serving as a landing zone. All the other Y-wings clear off the landing zone and he lines up on it, descends toward it like he was landing an atmospheric fighter without repulsorlifts. Drops his skids as he gets close. The skids take the initial impact but he bounces, so he’s like some sort of hop-and-grab insect all down the duracrete. But he’s lucky enough that he stays top side up. Finally he’s bled off a lot of momentum, but he loses control and his Y-wing rolls. Comes to a stop on its belly and he’s safe. Then”—Janson’s face became more merry as he relived the incident—“his ejector seat malfunctions and shoots him off toward space. With grav that low, he achieves escape velocity. We had to send a rescue shuttle up after him or he’d still be sailing through the void, one cold cadaver.”
“I saved the astromech,” Tomer said. “And the Y-wing was repairable.”
“Sure,” Janson said. “But seeing you as that wishbone skidded to a stop, seeing you sag in relief—and then, poof! you’re headed toward the stars—”
Tomer caught Wedge’s eye. “As you can see, I’ve provided amusement for years.”
“Efficient use of effort,” Hobbie said. “When do we eat?”
Chapter Three
One of those processional vehicles—a giant flatbed that rode the ground on wheels, with a raised front control panel where the driver stood, and with braces for the passengers to lean back against as they rode—conveyed Red Flight, Tomer, and Hallis from the plaza. It wasn’t fast going; the crowd did not want to part to admit them, but preferred to shout and jump and wave to attract the pilots’ attention. Wedge solved that problem by moving to the vehicle’s side and reaching out to shake hands as they passed; suddenly the members of the crowd wanted to be beside the vehicle rather than before it, and the vehicle’s speed increased. The other pilots moved to the sides as well, and within minutes the vehicle was beyond the edges of the crowd and heading out into the city’s avenues.
Wedge saw that the city’s love affair with balconies was not limited to the avenues they’d flown above. Every building on every street facing was thick with balconies. Some had rope bridges hung between adjacent balconies, and a few had such strung across streets. Wherever they drove, people thronged their balcony rails and waved down at them. The building exteriors were also deco
rated, on the ground floor at eye level, with panels about a meter wide by half a meter high that showed two-dimensional images. Tomer called them flatscreens, and some buildings had continuous banks of them all around their exteriors.
“I am so glad the people of this planet like to wave and shake hands,” Janson said.
Wedge gave him a curious glance. “Why is that?”
“Well, what if their usual greeting for visiting dignitaries was to throw paint?”
“Point taken.”
Their conveyance pulled up before one of the taller and more richly appointed buildings they’d seen, and minutes later Tomer led the four pilots into a suite of rooms on an upper floor; their support crew had already been separated off, installed in rooms lower down in the building. “These are the quarters of a bachelor half squad recently reduced in combat,” Tomer said. “The survivor gladly abandoned it for the duration of your stay, for your comfort.”
Wedge took a look around. The floor, again, looked like stone, this time a green marble thickly decorated with silvery veins, but like the plaza flooring it gave slightly when stepped upon. There was one main room, mostly open, with a few padded chairs around the edges. Several arched exits led to round-topped doors of a silver hue. The walls were hung with light blue draperies; just behind the top of the drapes, banks of lights shone up on the off-white ceiling, offering indirect lighting for the chamber.
Tomer pointed to four of the doorways. “Bedchambers there, there, there, and there.” Two of the building porters, adolescent boys who could not stop grinning, obligingly carried the pilots’ bags to those chambers. Tomer gestured to the bank of drapes opposite the entry into the main chamber: “Your balcony there. It’s a pilot’s balcony, by the way.”
Wedge said, “Which means what?”
“Extra-broad and reinforced, and with nothing, including cables, for a level or two above—so you can land your starfighters on it,” Tomer said. “You can move your X-wings here at your leisure, or I can get a member of the support crew to do it—”
“We’ll move them,” Wedge said. “Speaking of those cables—what are they for?”
Tomer grinned. “Private communications from building to building, informal communications. Say you’re a young lady in one building, and your young man lives in the next—”
“You run a comm cable.” Wedge shook his head wonderingly. “There are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of them out there.”
“None to your quarters, though; we’ve had them removed. You can put some in if you choose.” Tomer gestured again. “Kitchen through there, though I doubt you’ll have the opportunity to feed yourself much while you’re here. If you choose to dine here and you prefer not to cook, the building comlink is behind that drape.” He pointed to one of the main chamber’s long walls, near the center. “Servants are standing by for any of your needs.”
“Any of them?” Janson asked.
“No,” Hobbie said. “Some of your needs stray too far outside human norms.”
“Meaning,” Tomer continued, just a trace of testiness creeping into his voice, “that a cook, a courier, a dresser, and a few others are always standing by. If you want a late-night meal or something, press the button and ask for a cook. That’s all it takes.” He gestured to another door. “The refresher. You’ll be dealing with unfamiliar plumbing, which you’ll probably think of as backworld stuff, so I’ll need to show you how the devices work.”
Hobbie nodded. “A refresher course.”
Janson made a face. “You beat me to it.”
Wedge gestured at the two doors not already identified. “And those?”
“Extra bedchambers. This was essentially a dormitory for six unmarried pilots.”
“Good.” Wedge nodded. “We’ll set up one for workouts, and the other will be our operations center. These quarters have been swept for listening devices?”
“Oh, yes.” Tomer smiled. “And they were, of course, thick with such gadgets. We’ve removed them.”
“It sounds as though we’re set up, then,” Wedge said. “What’s next on our agenda?”
“Get cleaned up and get into your dress uniforms; your court dinner with the perator at his palace is in about two hours.”
“Ugh,” Janson said. Hobbie made an unhappy face.
“They’re not reacting to the idea of meeting the perator,” Tycho was quick to explain. “It’s the dress uniform.”
“I understand.” Tomer nodded, sympathy evident on his face. “I got out of Starfighter Command before the dress uniform was even designed. Umm, if you’re looking for alternatives, I’m certain that the court would consider it a sign of honor if you wore local dress instead of your dress uniforms.”
“Yes,” Hobbie said.
“Yes yes yes,” Janson said.
Wedge repressed a smile. The New Republic pilots’ dress uniform wasn’t too bad, but it had been designed in the depths of some government public relations department, without the input of those who would have to wear it, and many pilots just did not care for it. He cleared his throat. “That’s a possibility. If you’d be so kind as to send up some examples of local dress…?”
Tomer smiled. “One snap of my fingers and you’ll have your very own fashion show. I’ll see right to it.” He gestured for the porter, who had been hovering at the exit, to proceed him, and he left.
Wedge turned to Janson. “How well did you know him? Do you trust him?”
Janson considered. “Let’s just say that he’s cleaned up better than I expected.”
“No, let’s not just say that. Let’s be a little more informative.”
Janson’s gaze wandered back in time. “Well, in the Tierfon Yellow Aces, he always had something going. Floating sabacc games, trade in the newest holodramas and comedies, a locker that always seemed to have some liquor in it no matter how much he sold. I never had the impression that he was a black marketeer, but he was only one notch above that. When he mustered out and no one ever heard from him again, we figured he’d gone smuggler.” He shrugged. “But the diplomatic corps seems ideal for him. He can persuade and convince and scam and manipulate, and yet remain a patriot.”
Hobbie offered up a rare smile. “Not a bad metaphor for the early days of the Rebel Alliance.”
Tycho offered him a mock glower. “Cynic.”
They were four very different men as they walked toward the Outer Court of the Royal Residence, or palace, of Cartann.
Wedge had chosen green for most of his outfit—boots, hose, belt—and had chosen a tunic in a creamy off-white. He chose to remain bareheaded. His service blaster was holstered at his hip; Tomer seemed to think that wearing weapons was more than appropriate in a social situation, though he had said Wedge would have to surrender it when in a chamber occupied by the perator.
Beside it hung a device Tomer had said was commonplace in Cartann, the comfan. It was a small hemisphere with a handle. On the flat side of the hemisphere were numerous little vents; at the bottom of the handle were an on-off switch and an intake vent. When switched on, the device would draw air in through the intake vent, cool it, and expel it through the other vents, making it a handy personal comfort device. Tomer had said that handling the comfan was itself an art form, with every possible gesture assigned a meaning by the Cartann court… but outsiders such as Wedge would be known not to understand the language of comfan manipulation. The warmth of Wedge’s tunic suggested to him that he’d be better off carrying such a thing.
Tycho’s tunic was a material that shimmered and changed color as it moved; depending on the angle at which one viewed it, portions ranged in hue from sky blue to a pearlescent royal blue. Most of his other garments, including a rakish-looking hip cloak, were black, but he also wore a skullcap in the same material as his tunic. The skullcap came forward in a peak over his brow, an extension that looked like the sharp beak of a bird of prey, a comparison Wedge decided was apt, and the semitransparent visor over his eyes lent him a distant, mysterious look.
Hobbie was a riot of lines and angles. His boots, tights, and belt were a basic blue, his tunic a glorious red; but every hem of every garment was decorated with trim of eye-hurting yellow, making it almost a dizzying experience to look at him walk. “There are three types of dress clothing,” Hobbie had said. “The kind that offends the wearer, the kind that offends the viewers, and the kind that offends everybody. I’m going for the third type. Fair is fair.”
Janson had chosen what Wedge had first misunderstood as a minimalist approach. His tights, his tunic, all his accoutrements were black—most of them a matte black, though the tunic offered a little shine. He wore no headgear. But then he capped it off with a hooded cloak that made up for the rest of his outfit’s lack of drama. Nearly floor-length, it was a curtain of nebular red-purple shot through with crystalline stars that blinked on and off with internal light.
He carried his service blaster on his right hip, but also carried a new weapon. On his belt at his left hip was a sheath carrying the Adumari blastsword, “preferred weapon for settling personal disputes in Cartann,” as Tomer had explained. It looked much like a vibroblade the length of a man’s arm, but the hilt was protected by a curved metal guard. The blade was sharp starting a few centimeters above the guard, but the tip of the weapon was not a sharp point; rather, it was a small flared nozzle. When the device was powered up—by turning on a switch at the pommel, the knob at the very base of the hilt—the tip would fire off something like a blaster bolt whenever it contacted a solid object.
“So it’s like a blaster you have to hit someone with,” Janson had said. “I have to have one.”
Tycho had shaken his head, looking as mournful as Hobbie for a moment. “Don’t give him a new kind of weapon,” he had told Wedge. “It would be like giving a lightsaber to a two-year-old.”
But Wedge had allowed it, and now Janson’s customary swagger swung the blastsword’s sheathed blade around behind him, making it precarious to walk close to him.
Starfighters of Adumar Page 4
