Star Wars_ X-Wing 02_ Wedge's Gamble - Michael A. Stackpole [76]
“Or a big waste of time.”
“Not so far.”
“I’m just warming up. You’ll see. Give me time.”
Erisi sighed beside him. “Perhaps that is the best idea, right now, no matter what we think we want. What we need is time alone.”
He smiled in the direction of her silhouette. “How can you be so logical? Aren’t you supposed to be feeling scorned right now?”
“Perhaps I should, but then I don’t always allow myself to be ruled by emotions.” She shrugged. “We’ve just come to a decision to postpone making a decision about us and the nature of our relationship. Depending upon the decision made, I might be scorned, but I don’t think that emotion is worthy of either one of us.”
Corran nodded. “Yeah, you’re right there, on both counts.”
“Well, I’ll leave you here, then …”
“No.” Corran reached over and squeezed her leg just above the knee. “I’m fairly used to taking walks to sort things out. I’ve got a key, so I can let myself back in. I don’t know when I’ll get back.”
“I’ll head out and get some food. I should be here when you get back unless some Hapan princeling comes along and sweeps me away to make me the queen of some distant planet. Then won’t you be sorry?”
“Actually I think I would be.” Corran stood, then leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. “Thanks for understanding.”
“Thank you for letting me understand.”
Guided more by emotion than any sort of rational thought, Corran left Erisi behind in the room, entered a lift, and hit the lowest numbered button he could find. It took him well below the level where they had last seen Rima. The walkway onto which it dumped him didn’t look that bad, though it was deeper than any place he’d been since his arrival on Coruscant.
Shoulders hunched and hands jammed deep into the pockets of a brown bantha-suede jacket, he started wandering. It didn’t matter to him where he was going, but just that he was going. Walking demanded little in the way of mental activity, so it gave him time to think and he’d done scant little of that which was unconnected to the mission for well over a month.
He tried to trace the source of his discomfort, but no easy answer presented itself. Certainly the pressure of being on Coruscant had a lot to do with it. Though precautions had been taken against discovery, something as simple as his nearly being sighted by Kirtan Loor showed that no matter how much care one took, there were times when luck just ran out.
Corran smiled. Back in CorSec they’d adulterated an old Jedi aphorism about luck to answer criminals who claimed they’d been caught because of bad luck. The Jedi Knights maintained there was no such thing as luck, just the Force. In CorSec they’d told criminals there was no such thing as bad luck, just the Corellian Security Force.
Now there’s not even that. In news he had seen scrolling across readouts throughout Coruscant he learned that the Diktat had dissolved CorSec and had allocated most of its resources and some of its personnel to the new Public Safety Service. It didn’t take much to see the change was a purge of people with questionable loyalties to the Diktat, but whatever its purpose, it erased yet one more link he had to his past.
His hand rose to his breastbone, but the gold medallion he normally wore was not there. General Cracken’s people had said that by keeping it he could seriously compromise security, so he’d put it away in Whistler’s small storage compartment. He knew the droid would keep it safe and, for him, knowing where it was had almost the same effect as actually wearing the good luck charm. And the Jedi whose face appears on that coin would say there’s no such thing as luck, so clearly it can’t be a good luck charm.
It occurred to him that he was losing his focus on life. Back when he had been with CorSec things had been simple. He knew who he was and so did