Star Wars
X-Wing Book 9
Starfighters of Adumar
by Aaron Allston
1
She was beautiful and fragile and he could not count the number of times
he had told her he loved her. But he had come here knowing he had to hurt her
very badly.
Her name was Qwi Xux. She was not human; her blue skin, a shade lighter
than her eyes, and her glistening brown hair, downy in its softness, were
those of the humanoids of the planet Omwat. She was dressed for the occasion
in a white evening gown whose flowing lines complemented her willowy form.
They sat at a table in a balcony cafe three kilometers above the surface
of the planet Coruscant, the world that was a city without end. Just beyond
the balcony rail was a vista made up of skyscrapers extending to the horizon,
an orange sky threatening rain, and the sun setting beyond one of the more
distant thunderheads. Breezes drifting across the two of them smelled of rain
to come. At this early-evening hour, he and Qwi were the only diners on the
balcony, and he was grateful for the privacy.
Qwi looked up from her entree of factory-bred
Coruscant game fowl, her soft smile fading from her lips. "Wedge, there
is something I must say."
Wedge Antilles, general of the New Republic, perhaps still the most
famous pilot of the old Rebel Alliance, breathed a sigh of silent thanks.
Qwi's conversational distraction would give him at least a few more moments
before he had to arm his bad news and fire it off at her. "What is it?"
Her gaze fixed on him, she took a deep breath and held it until he was
sure she would begin to turn even more blue. He recognized her expression a
reluctance to injure. He gestured, not impatiently, for her to go ahead.
"Wedge," she said, her words all in a rush, "I think our time together is
done."
"What?"
"I don't know how to say it so that it doesn't seem cruel." She gave him
a helpless shrug. "I think we must go our separate ways."
He remained silent, trying to restructure what she'd said into something
he understood.
It wasn't that her words were confusing. But they were the words he was
supposed to be saying. How they'd defected from his mind to hers was a
complete mystery to him.
He tried to remember what he'd thought she would say when he spoke those
words to her. All he could manage was "Why?" At least his tone was neutral, no
accusation in it.
"Because I think we have no future together." Her gaze scanned his face
as if looking for new cuts or bruises. "Wedge, we are good together. You bring
me happiness. I think I do the same for you. But whenever I try to turn my
mind from where we are to where we will be someday, I see no home, no family,
no celebration days special to us. Just two careers whose bearers keep
intersecting out of need. I think of what we feel for one another and every
time it seems 'affection' is the proper word, not 'love.' "
Wedge sat transfixed. Yes, those were his thoughts, much as he had been
marshaling them all day long. "If not love, Qwi, what do you think this
relationship meant to us?"
"For me, it was need. When I left the Maw facility where I designed
weapons for the Empire, when I was made to understand what sort of work I had
been doing, I was left with nothing. I looked for something to tractor me
toward safety, toward comfort, and that tractor beam was you." She dropped her
gaze from his. "When Kyp Durron used his Force powers to destroy my memory, to
ensure I could never engineer another Death Star or Sun-crusher, I became
nothing, and was more in need of my tractor beam than ever."
She met his gaze again. "For you, it was a simulator run."
"What?"
"Please, hear me out." Distressed, she turned away from him to stare at
the cloud-mottled sky and the distant sunset. "When we met, I think your heart
told you that it was time for you to love. And you did, you loved me." Her
voice became a whisper. "I understand now that humans, in their adolescent
years, fall in love long before they understand what it means. These loves do
not usually endure. They are learning experiences. I think perhaps that you,
shoved from your childhood home straight into a world of starfighters and
lasers and death, missed having those learning loves. But the need for them
stayed with you.
"Wedge, I was the wrong one for you. Whatever your intent, whatever your
seriousness, I think that all you have felt for me has been a simulator run
for some later time, for some other woman. One with whom you can share a
future." Her words became raspy. She turned
her attention back to Wedge, and he could see tears forming in her eyes.
"I wish I could have been her."
Wedge sagged back against his chair. At last her words had become her own
again.
"And I am at fault," she continued. "I haveoh, this is hard to say."
"Go ahead, Qwi. I'm not angry. I'm not going to make this harder for you.
"
She flashed a brief smile. "No, you wouldn't. Wedge, when we came
together I was a different woman. Then, when I lost my memory, I became
someone else, the woman I am now, and you were therebrave and modest and
admired, my protector in a universe that was unfamiliar to meand after I
realized this, I could not bring myself to make you understand..."
"Tell me." Unconsciously, he leaned over to take her hand.
"Wedge, I feel as though I inherited you. From a friend who passed away.
You were her choice. I do not know if you would have been mine. I never had
the chance to find out."
He stared at her for a long moment. Then a laugh escaped him. "Let me get
this straight. I look on you as a comfortable old simulator, and you look on
me as an inheritance that doesn't match the rest of your furniture."
She started to look stricken, then she laughed in return. She clapped her
free hand over her mouth and nodded.
"Qwi, one of the things I truly admire is courage. It took courage for
you to say what you've said to me. And it would be irresponsible, even cruel,
of me if I didn't admit that I came here tonight to break up with you."
She put her hand down. Her expression was not surprised. Instead, it was
a little wondering, a little amused. "Why?"
"Well, I don't think I have your eloquence on this matter. I don't think
I've thought it through the way you have. But one reason is the same. The
future. I keep looking toward it and I don't see you there. Sometimes I don't
see we there."
She nodded. "Until just now I had a little fear that I was wrong. That I
might be making a mistake. Now I can be sure I was not. Thank you for telling
me. It would have been so easy for you not to have."
"No, it wouldn't."
"Well... maybe it wouldn'
t for Wedge Antilles. For many men, it would
have been." She turned a smile upon him, a smile made up, he thought, of pride
in him. "What will you do now?"
"I've been thinking a lot about that. I've been looking at the two sides
of my life. My career and my personal life. Except for the fact that I'm not
flying nearly as much as I want to, I have no complaints about my career."
That wasn't entirely true, and hadn't been ever since he'd been convinced to
accept the rank of general, but he tried not to burden her with frustrations
he was convinced arose from his own selfishness. "I'm doing important work and
being recognized for it. But my personal life..." He shook his head as though
reacting to the death of a friend. "Qwi, you were the last part of my personal
life. Now there's nothing there. A vacuum purer than anything in space. So I
think, in a few weeks, I'm going to take a leave of absence. Travel a bit, try
to sneak a visit into Corellia, not think about my work. I'll just try to find
out if there is anything to me except career."
"There is."
"I'll believe it when I see it."
"Keep your visual sensors turned up, then."
He laughed. "What about you?"
"I have friends. I have work. I am acquiring hobbies. Remember, the new
Qwi is less than two years old. In that way, I'm still a little girl
experiencing the universe for the first time." She looked apologetic. "So I
will learn, and work, and see who it is I am becoming."
"I hope you'll still consider me a friend," he said. "Always."
"Meaning you can still call on me. Send me messages. Send me lifeday
presents." She laughed. "Greedy." "Thank you, Qwi." "Thank you, Wedge."
He packed as though he were still an active pilot. Everything went into
one shapeless bag, a bag chosen for its ideal fit within the cargo compartment
of an X-wing fighter. Nothing his life would depend upon went into the bag
just clothes, toiletries, a holoplayer. More crucial itemsidenticards,
credcards, hard currency, comlink, a holdout blaster pistolhe kept on him, so
that a sudden separation from his bag would be an inconvenience rather than a
crisis.
He sealed the bag and looked around his quarters. They were spacious, as
befitted a general of the New Republic, and well situated high in a Coruscant
skyscraper. He had only to speak a word and the quarters' computer would
change the polarity of the wall-to-wall viewports to give him a commanding
view of sky, endless cityscape, ceaseless streams of vessels large and small.
These quarters were clean and spare as a military man kept them. They
were
They weren't home. Neither were the smaller but equally lavish quarters
he enjoyed on the Super Star Destroyer Lusankya, the seat of his military
operations though he was still assigned to Starfigh ter Command, the special
task force he commanded kept him in circumstances and settings more suited to
a Fleet Command officer.
Here, as there, the presence of a few mementos, of a framed holo showing
his parents in a happy embrace, of friends captured at celebrations or launch
zones, didn't conceal the impersonal nature of the furniture. If he received a
new posting while he was away on leave, he wouldn't even have to come back
here. He'd send a short message to the right department and an aide or droid
would pack everything up and ship it off, and an identical one would receive
it all and unpack it into a new set of quarters on some other world or
station, and that would become the place where he lived.
But not home. Home was a family-owned refueling station, destroyed half
his life ago with his parents still aboard, and nothing had ever come along to
replace it.
He slung his bag over his shoulder. While on leave, maybe he'd be able to
see in the faces and hear in the words of those he visited what it was that
had turned their housing into their homes. Maybe
His door chimed. He set the bag down again. "Come."
The door slid up. Beyond was a man, muscular, graying, a bright and often
cheerless intelligence in his eyes. He wore the uniform of a New Republic
general.
Wedge approached, hand extended. "General Crac-ken! Come in. Have you
come to see me off? I wasn't expecting a military escort."
Airen Cracken, head of New Republic Intelligence, entered and took
Wedge's hand. His expression did not brighten; he looked, if anything,
regretful. "General Antilles. Yes, I'm here to see you off."
Something in his tone sounded a quiet alarm in Wedge's mind. "Should I be
going evasive?"
That brought a faint smile to Cracken's face. "Probably. I have an
assignment for you."
"I'm on leave. It's already begun."
Cracken shook his head.
"General Cracken, you're not in a position to issue assignments to me. So
what you're saying is you have something you'd like me to volunteer for."
"I have something you're going to volunteer for."
"I don't think so."
"The following information is for your ears only. You're not to discuss
it outside these quarters until you reach your rendezvous point."
"That explains it."
Cracken frowned. "Explains what?"
"When I was packing this morning. Why things seemed a little different.
As if a cleaning detail had been through and picked up everything, putting it
back almost exactly where it was before. Your people were through here when I
was out, weren't they? Making sure there were no listening or recording
devices present."
Cracken didn't reply to that. He just looked a little surly. He
continued, "The world of Adumar is on the near edge of Wild Space. It was
colonized as long as ten thousand years ago by a coalition of peoples who had
staged a rebellion against the Old Republic, been defeated, and been spared...
so long as they went far away and never caused any more trouble."
Wedge just stared. Perhaps if he demonstrated continued indifference
Cracken would go away. That wasn't usually the way it worked, of course.
Cracken said, "According to what we've been able to gather, their spirit
of rebellion and divisiveness didn't end when they found a world worthy of
settling. Their history suggests they fought among themselves a number of
times, eventually reducing themselves to poverty and barbarismnot once, but
twice at least. Though apparently their ancient teaching-recordings survived
for thousands of years; their language is recognizably a dialect of Basic." He
paused as if anticipating questions from Wedge.
"I'm not curious."
"Anyway, they were completely forgotten by the Old Republic. There is no
mention of them in Imperial archives, either. We were fortunate that one of
our deep-space scouts stumbled across them when returning from a mapping
mission into the Unknown Regions."
"If you continue to map the Unknown Regions, you'll have to call them
something else."
Cracken blinked, his expression suggesting that he didn't know whether to
interpret that comment as humor or not. "Adumar is heavily industrialized, and
a large portion of its industrial development is
military. Their weapons are
oriented around high-powered explosives. Our analysts suggest that it would be
a simple matter to convert a portion of their industry over to the production
of proton torpedoes. General, how would you like it if the New Republic's X-
wings never had to face a shortage of proton torpedoes again?"
Wedge suppressed a whistle. Lasers were the most often-used weapons of
starfighters, the means by which they shot one another down... but it was
proton torpedoes that gave some starfighters the punch necessary to damage or
even destroy capital ships. "That would... be helpful."
"You've pushed for years for increased production of proton torpedoes.
Since you made the rank of general, people have even been listening. But the
New Republic has so many demands on its resources that efforts to boost
production of the secondary or tertiary weapon of choice among all
starfighters tends to get lost in the shuffle. It wouldn't keep getting lost
if we could bring Adumar into the New Republic; then, it would just be some
industrial retooling."
"So send a diplomatic mission and work things out with them."
"Ah, that's the trouble." Cracken rubbed his hands together. "The people
of Adumar have no respect for career politicians. A very sensible attitude, in
my opinion though if you tell anyone I said that, I'll merely have to deny
it. Do you know what sort of individual they hold in highest regard?"
"No."
"Fighter pilots. The Old Republic had its Jedi; Adu-mar has its fighter
pilots. They love them, a case of hero worship that spans their whole culture.
Their entertainments revolve around them. Social promotion, properties,
titles, all accompany military promotion in their pilot corps."
"That sounds like a reasonable arrangement. Let's implement it in the New
Republic."
"And so they'll talk with a diplomat. But only if he's also a pilot. Our
best."
Wedge sighed. "I'm no diplomat."
"We'll assign you an advisor. A career diplomat, already on station at
Adumar, named Darpen. By the terms by which the Adumari are allowing our
diplomatic mission, you'll be accompanied by three other pilots, your choice,
a crew of aides, including that advisor, and one shipyou'll be in command of
the Allegiance, an Imperial-class Star Destroyer"
"I remember her. From the Battle of Selaggis."
Star Wars - X-Wing - Starfighters of Adumar Page 1
