• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 480 0

made him uneasy because of more than his gender making him feel utterly out of place there. For the past seven plus years he had been at war. While there had been relaxing times and he’d been given leaves, he’d never slipped out of his identity of being a pilot. Without family to visit—his parents were dead, and because of his connection to the Rebellion, visiting any other relatives would put them in jeopardy—he’d taken time off but not time away. Wandering through the byways of Coruscant was as close as he had come to what others might see as normal life since his parents were killed.

He smiled. Even the time he had put in as a touring hero for the Rebellion had been far from normal. He found himself whisked around from planet to planet, banquet to banquet, wearing a dress uniform he didn’t even know the Rebellion had. At receptions and parties and dinners he found himself congratulated for his part in the Rebellion by creatures he never knew existed before. Gifts had been bestowed upon him, honors given him, and opportunities provided him to do things he’d never had the courage to even dream about as a child.

He watched as Iella and Mirax played with a garment-fabricator holo-unit, lengthening and shortening, trimming and coloring dresses they’d never order. They laughed and were having fun. Just the way normal folks do when enjoying a normal life.

The word “normal” stuck in his brain for a moment and he realized that “normal” was a goal for most folks that had no definition. When Rogue Squadron’s chief tech, Zraii, ran diagnostics on Wedge’s X-wing, normal was defined by a series of benchmark readings established in Alliance specifications and Incom performance manuals. There was a way to determine if the fighter was performing normally or not. And if it was deficient in some way or other, that defect could be corrected.

Normal in terms of life, on the other hand, was not so easy to determine. For Mirax, hauling contraband between worlds was normal, yet to someone like Iella or Corran, that was grossly abnormal behavior. For his parents normal life had been owning a fueling depot and raising a family. That version of normal, or some minor variation of it, seemed to fit most folks’ view of what life should be.

But does that mean that anything else is not normal? For him, living the life of a pilot fighting against the Empire seemed normal. Moreover, it seemed to be a life that was based on reality. The Empire, weakened though it was, cast a pall over the entire galaxy and until it was eliminated, the home, job, and family sort of normal would always be in jeopardy. A hint of wrongdoing could shatter the cocoon of normalcy most people tried to spin around themselves and disrupt their lives forever.

Wedge and Pash trailed silently in the women’s wake as they moved on. Iella seemed to move a little more deliberately, and as they emerged from a stairwell onto a promenade that hung out over an urban canyon with a river of shadow filling it, a repulsorlift cab came to a stop. The doors opened and Iella motioned them all into it. Wedge didn’t recognize the driver, but that somehow made him feel better about the situation than not.

Without instructions from Iella, the driver took the vehicle away from the building and down. The route he flew seemed as twisted and circuitous as the one Iella had employed, but the journey ended quickly. The driver dropped them on another walkway, but this one was several kilometers down and away from where they’d been picked up, leaving them submerged in the thick shadows of the undercity.

Iella led them along to an alley, then down it and into a building. Three floors up she opened a door and led them into a sparingly furnished room. Its most impressive features were the two large picture windows that dominated the far walls. They provided a rather panoramic view of the intersection that the apartment overlooked, or underlooked, depending upon one’s perspective.

Iella closed the door, then nodded toward the two couches that faced each other in the center of the room. “Please be seated.