Star Wars_ X-Wing 05_ Wraith Squadron - Aaron Allston [55]
Even Wedge Antilles had been impressed—at least, more impressed than annoyed.
The jump was long enough, though, that he couldn’t just reflect on his recent victory. There was Tyria to consider.
How would he persuade her that she was wrong about his feelings for her? First, obviously, he’d have to think about her more during the day, to answer her objection on that score … What else did he need to do?
He considered that, approaching the problem from a dozen logical angles, but an answer he had not expected and did not like began to lurk at the periphery of his thinking. Finally it moved in, squeezing aside his other trains of thought, and demanded that he pay attention to it.
Tyria hadn’t been wrong. She was right. You don’t actually love her.
Kell frowned at the traitorous voice. What are you, one of Runt’s leftover minds?
You don’t love her. You feel about her the way you did about Tuatara Lone when you were fifteen.
Tuatara Lone was a holo actress on Sluis Van. Short, shapely, so cute she was toxic, she was particularly adept at portraying madcap girls with odd lifestyles or nosy investigators capable of bluffing their way out of any problem. For three years, Kell had been mesmerized by her, seeing every one of her comedies and dramas, agonizing at night over her beauty, projecting himself into fantasy situations where he’d rescue her from harm or solve a crisis threatening her happiness.
Then he’d learned that the actress was in fact extremely happily married, with two children and another on the way. Kell, finding himself out of the running in a race he had actually never entered, was crushed. He moped around his home and was nearly fired from his job as a mechanic. Only when he entered the New Republic armed forces and was too busy to do anything but work and sleep had he forgotten his pain.
Now she was back, Tuatara Lone in all her beauty, hovering before him alongside Tyria. And that drove it home, his two obsessions side by side, as no previous argument had: He really was in love with holograms, images that only dimly reflected the real women they represented.
Tyria was right. You don’t love her.
I know. Shut up. Just go away. He sighed, dejected.
Thirteen beeped at him. Startled out of his painful reverie, he saw the timer on his main monitor counting down one standard minute—time until arrival in the Xobome system, the uninhabited first stop on their route to Doldrums. He did a visual check around his X-wing, seeing only the usual effect of a hyperspace jump, the corridor of light formations in endless, beautiful motion. Everything normal, and he had enough fuel, just barely, for the two farther stages on to Doldrums.
At twenty-seven seconds until the end of the jump, the stars appeared as elongated columns like millions of laser beams extending into infinity, and then snapped into a motionless starfield. Immediately a bright glow swallowed the stars, erased them.
Kell’s instrument panels and forward viewports went dark. A bright flash of light rocked his snubfighter. A shower of sparks erupted from his main monitor, landing on his flight suit, threatening to set his legs on fire. There was more smoke in the cockpit than those sparks could have produced.
He cursed and batted at his legs to put out the sparks. His vision and the viewports cleared, the starfield outside returning to normal. In the distance, he could see one star that was noticeably brighter than all others; if this was indeed the system they were aiming for, that was Xobome, but they’d arrived well outside the region they’d targeted. He could see another X-wing half a klick or so to his starboard, drifting slowly away; he couldn’t make out the pilot, but if it was the closest snubfighter to him, it should be Runt.
His instruments remained dead, and there was no hiss of air to indicate his life-support systems were functioning. Glancing back, he could see lights flickering on Thirteen; the droid seemed