Star Wars_ X-Wing 02_ Wedge's Gamble - Michael A. Stackpole [62]
He lowered his cup and kept his voice neutral. “Do you mean Sel?” He abbreviated Tycho’s last name, assuming that even if the conversation were being overheard, the intelligence value of one syllable was tiny.
“Yes, I was thinking of him.”
Erisi smiled. “He is doing well. He recently got me out of a very tight spot. Quite a treasure.”
“Really? That’s good.”
Corran caught a flicker of surprise and hurt in Rima’s eyes. She covered it quickly, but he thought he recognized jealousy in her reaction to Erisi’s flirtatious response to the question. She and Tycho must have some history. “I guess you know him better than either one of us. We’re really just casual acquaintances of his.”
Rima’s eyes sharpened slightly. “Only casual acquaintances? I would have thought you two would have been fast friends.”
“We could have been, but the man has secrets.” Corran shifted his shoulders uneasily. Despite his original resolve to trust Tycho, reality had slowly impinged on him. The preparation for the mission to Coruscant had stressed trust and sharpened his sense of paranoia. At the core of the Tycho problem was the fact that no one save Ysanne Isard knew if Tycho was her puppet or not. Corran had emotionally begun to insulate himself from Tycho, but until now had not realized how far along that unconscious process had gotten. “Secrets establish a distance and undercut trust.”
Hurt returned to Rima’s eyes. “He’s had a hard life.”
“So haven’t we all.”
Rima’s head came up. “You don’t understand. His family died …”
“I do understand.” Corran kept the volume of his voice down, but let the emotions bubbling up in him pour straight through into his words. “I have no family either and do you know what? I saw my father get shot up. Murdered. And I couldn’t do anything about it. I was a hundred meters away, watching him by remote, backing him up, when a bounty hunter walked into the cantina and lit up the booth where he was sitting with two other people. Killed them all and I couldn’t do anything about it. I got there and held my father in my arms, but it was too late. You want a hard life, there’s a hard life for you.”
Corran’s hands contracted into fists and Erisi leaned over to hug him. He stared openly at Rima, daring her to deny his pain. He wanted her to break, to lose that look of superiority she wore. He wanted her to admit that nothing Tycho had been through, even the destruction of his homeworld or his Imperial captivity, could have measured up to what Corran had endured.
Even as Erisi whispered, “I’m so sorry,” in his ear, Corran knew he had overreacted and overreacted badly. What’s gotten into me? He searched his mind for an answer, tracing back fleeting thoughts, and slowly came to a realization that surprised with its simplicity and amazed him with its power.
Tycho, in saving his life and in shepherding him through his introduction to Rogue Squadron, had moved into an august company in Corran’s mind. Corran’s father, his CorSec supervisor, Gil Bastra, and Wedge Antilles were the only other people that Corran saw in the guardian and mentor roles in his life. With his father and Gil both dead, Corran realized he had begun to rely on Wedge and Tycho to serve as touchstones and moral compasses for him.
The fact that Tycho could not be fully trusted had gone to war with the esteem in which Corran had held him. As he had mentally distanced himself from Tycho, he began to feel that Tycho had somehow betrayed him. The anger he felt toward Tycho, the anger that had triggered his outburst, had come from this sense of betrayal and Corran’s guilt at having elevated someone so untrustworthy to a rank equal to that of his father.
This is crazy. I have to sort all of this out. Tycho has not betrayed