Star Wars_ X-Wing 06_ Iron Fist - Aaron Allston [112]
“You’re very welcome.” Why had that been so hard for her? Face tried to put himself in her place—stolen child, then slave of an Imperial master, then pilot fighting for a place for herself among people she did not know, few of whom even belonged to her species. Nor had she ever spoken a favorable word about the Twi’leks; perhaps she blamed her own kind for the way she had been stolen from their midst.
Understanding where she had come from, with his limited knowledge, was too great a task for Face, but an idea emerged from his effort. “Dia, when was the last time you relaxed?”
“I relax many days.”
“When you’re alone.”
“Yes.”
“I meant, when was the last time you were really at ease among others? The last time you felt safe in someone else’s company?”
Her gaze drifted off into the distance of time. “At ease? I don’t know. When I was a child, I suppose. And safe?” She looked startled and came back to herself, to the present time. She tried to remove her hands from his. “Thank you for the dance. It’s time for me to go.”
He did not release her. “I know I’m prying, Dia. But if you won’t open up to me, will you open up to someone?”
“I don’t think I can.”
“You could talk to Squeaky. He could use a friend.”
She looked up at him, unbelieving, then smiled and stopped trying to break away. “You’re joking again. It is sometimes so hard to tell when you are serious.”
“For me, too.”
They danced in silence for a few moments, long enough for the music to give way to a slower, more intimate dance from Chandrila. Then she said, her voice so low that he had to strain to hear her, “The last time I felt safe was not so long ago.”
“When was that?”
“It was when I was at my worst. When I had shot Castin, when I’d desecrated the corpse of a brave man and pretended to do it with glee. When I tried to kill myself and you would not let me. Just before I fell asleep, I knew that you would not let anyone hurt me. You would not even let me hurt myself. And in that moment I knew myself safe, for the first time since I was a child.”
He looked down into her eyes—eyes that were too large and luminous to be Dia’s, eyes that were familiar to him yet opened up into a woman he didn’t know. A woman who had come into being only since the mission to Iron Fist.
“That’s what I wanted to say to you, what I didn’t know how to say before,” she said. “That I know that you feel you failed Ton Phanan. But you did not fail me.”
He took her head in his hands and kissed her, and was swept away by the sweetness of her kiss, by the spicy taste of her, so different from human women. He felt her arms encircle his neck. And they stood motionless beneath the twinkling stars as the dancers swirled around them.
17
“Our target,” Wedge said, “is almost certainly a Kuat Drive Yards facility in the Kuat system.” He nodded at the holographic display, showing a central sun orbited by numerous planets and space stations, which floated above the table in the crowded conference module. Again he wished for a full-sized briefing room.
He took a pointing stick and drew a circle through a ring of space stations, an astonishing number of them, surrounding the system outside the orbit of its most distant planet. “This, collectively, is Kuat’s main shipyard facility, the famous Kuat Drive Yards. It is not, however, the only place the yards build their vessels.”
He gestured at one of the planets. “This is Kuat itself. There are also secondary facilities in orbit above it. Now, the data Zsinj provided the Hawk-bats, including a gravity-well delay for hyperspace jumps more lengthy than we’d experience out in the chain of satellites, and showing speed of response of a fleet arriving at the site being attacked, makes planetary orbit the most likely prospect. However, since New Republic Intelligence hasn’t been able to confirm that there even is a new Super Star Destroyer under construction there, we can’t be sure of this. Another planet in the system, a station not orbiting a planet, any such thing