Star Wars_ I, Jedi - Michael A. Stackpole [6]
The Glimmerstar requested an escort all the way to Coruscant, which Home One agreed to supply. This meant our return trip would be at the leisurely pace dictated by the liner instead of the faster speed of which the Mon Calamari Cruiser was capable. The Rogues could have taken our X-wings home, but the trip would have locked us in the cockpit for a full twenty-four hours, which I looked forward to with the same enthusiasm I had for discussing old times with Mirax’s father. It would have been nice if the Glimmerstar had allowed us to spend the extra day of travel time on the liner, but their gratitude extended only as far as letting us study the ship’s beautiful lines from afar.
We had duties enough to keep us busy anyway, and despite the oppressive humidity, the Mon Cal Cruiser’s accommodations were not that bad. After landing my X-wing and getting Whistler set up for recharging, I caught a quick meal in the galley, then joined the rest of the squadron in a briefing room for our debriefing. We all rode Reme for going EV, but we were glad to have her back and enjoyed her descriptions of the Glimmerstar’s blast boat. After that I grabbed some rack time, slept for eight hours, worked out a bit and headed for the galley for some breakfast.
Ooryl raised a three-fingered hand and waved me over to the table he occupied all by himself. I smiled and nodded to him, then grabbed some breakfast cakes and an artificial nerfmilk protein beverage. I almost balked at it, because consuming anything that doesn’t sit well on the stomach can be a mistake when eating with a Gand, but I was very thirsty.
I dropped into the chair opposite Ooryl and did my best not to glance down into the bowl from which he was feeding. “Anything interesting happen while I’ve been down?”
Ooryl’s mouth parts moved apart in his approximation of a smile and his compound eyes glittered brightly. His grey-green flesh was of a hue slightly darker than the sauce on the tentacles he was fishing out of the bowl, and contrasted sharply with the bright orange of his flight suit. Knobby bits of his exoskeleton poked at odd angles from within the fabric, as if his flesh were having an allergic reaction to the color.
“Nothing Ooryl considers out of the ordinary.”
I frowned. The Gands had a tradition of speaking of themselves in the third person and not using the pronoun “I” because they thought it was the height of arrogance to do so. Only those Gands who had committed acts so great that all Gands would know of them were allowed to speak of themselves as “I.” The whole of Rogue Squadron had even gone to Gand and been part of Ooryl’s janwuine-jika, the ceremony that conferred that right upon him. For him to have reverted to third person meant something was bothering him.
“What is the matter?” I narrowed my green eyes and stared into his black faceted orbs. “You can’t be embarrassed about getting shot by that Invid.”
Ooryl slowly and deliberately shook his head. “Ooryl is ashamed that he has not been able to help you with your problem.”
“My problem?”
“You have been distracted, Corran.” Ooryl perched his hands on the tabletop like two armored spiders. “You and Mirax desire offspring. If Ooryl was on Gand, Ooryl could help solve this problem.”
I stuffed a crumb from one of the cakes into my mouth, chewed quickly and swallowed. “Back up here. How do you know about the child thing?”
The Gand remained rock-still for a moment, then lowered his