Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order_ Rebel Dreams_ Enemy Lines I - Aaron Allston [31]
He rubbed sleep from his eyes and turned to the door. “Come.”
The door slid over and out of sight, but there was no one in the corridor beyond. Then his visitor showed himself, peeking in from around the doorjamb.
The man was of average height and bald—shaven bald, Wedge knew, rather than prematurely bald. His mustache and goatee were close-cropped and black, giving him a sinister appearance, but his smile, all cheer flavored with wicked humor, dispelled any sense of dread. He was handsome in a way that only celebrities and a few extraordinarily successful businessmen and criminals could be.
Wedge rose. “Face! I was afraid you were lost back on Coruscant. Come in.”
Garik “Face” Loran, leader of the covert Intelligence team known as the Wraiths, shook his head. “Later. For now, I’m just here to drop off a package.”
“What package—”
She moved around Face, entering the office at just short of a dead run. She was tall, Wedge’s average stature making them the same height, and slender, with dark blond hair now frosted attractively with gray. In her youth she’d been an extraordinary beauty; now, to Wedge’s perception, lines of laughter and worry accentuated that beauty rather than detracted from it.
Suddenly he was on the other side of the desk—by running or vaulting, he could not recall—and enfolding her in his arms. “Iella …”
There was more noise than two voices could account for, cries of “Daddy!” Wedge released his wife, crouched, and grabbed up his dark blond, blue-eyed daughters, who had magically appeared on either side of Iella; he stood with one in either arm, Syal in the left and Myri in the right.
A few days before, when he’d picked them both up in their quarters on Coruscant, he’d complained that they were getting big, too heavy for him to lift. Now, their arms around his neck, he could barely detect their weight.
A moment ago he’d had nothing but a mission. Now he had a future again, a future he could hold to himself, a future he could squeeze and hear and smell. Wedge glanced over at Face, but the Wraith leader had, appropriately, vanished while attention was elsewhere, and the door was sliding closed where he’d been.
They lay in the darkness of Wedge’s quarters. Moonlight spilled in through the turquoise transparisteel, casting everything in shades of blue, bed and walls and skin.
“It’s not the same as watching your home dying,” Iella said. Her voice was thoughtful. She stared at the blue-tinged ceiling as if staring far beyond it, staring all the way back to Coruscant. “Not the same as if they’d descended on Corellia. But seeing orbital platforms drop onto the city, knowing that millions were dying with every impact, knowing that the few who were streaming into space in private vessels and leaving their homes behind were the lucky ones … Coruscant is dying. Wedge, I don’t know if I can describe the misery of it.”
“You don’t have to,” he said. “I know what it was like to leave you behind. To have to tell myself, ‘I can’t find them, I can’t help them, I can keep people alive up here.’ ”
She turned a smile on him. “Didn’t you trust me to get us out alive?”
“Yes. But trust doesn’t keep worry from eating you up from inside.”
She kissed him, rested her head on his shoulder. “What do we do now?”
“Well, you were just promoted to head of Intelligence for my operation here, which frees up Mara to make the Vong suffer in her own inimitable way. I’m going to need you to spread information among our people and see if the Yuuzhan Vong act on any of it—if we have any traitors among us, I want to find out who they are as fast as possible, to use them for our own purposes or eliminate them as a threat.”
“Is that going to be here or at some other station?”
“Here.” And he told her of the meeting with the Advisory Council.
She was silent for a long time as she thought about what he’d said. “Wedge, you’re doing what you never like to do. Fighting a two-front war. The Yuuzhan