Star Wars_ X-Wing 06_ Iron Fist - Aaron Allston [85]
“Well, a debt. It’s as though I incurred this tremendous debt account. Now I’m paying it off bit by bit.”
“The account doesn’t need balancing.” There was scorn in Ton’s voice. “You can’t reduce sapient lives to numbers and exchange them like credits. You can’t measure what a boy did in innocence against what a man has to do for the rest of his life.”
“Now you’re raving.”
“Ah. That’s good to know. Hey, we’re stopped again.”
A bit farther, and Phanan said, in a hoarse whisper Face could barely hear over the whine of the repulsorlift, “It’s up there again.”
“Iron Fist?” Face looked up. The Super Star Destroyer was making another orbit.
It was distant, pristine, like the giant spearhead of some supernatural being from the long-forgotten mythologies of a hundred worlds. It drifted by, not caring about the lives and deaths and victories and tragedies of the humans below. And when it descended, it would bring death. That, Face decided, was Iron Fist. And such a thing had no right to exist.
If it took him forever, he would see it destroyed.
He made sure his sudden revulsion did not make it to his voice. “Not too intimidating from this far away, is it?” he asked.
Phanan didn’t answer.
“I said, not too intimidating from here, is it?”
Phanan still did not respond.
Face stood where he was, unwilling to turn and look, to walk back on his cold-numbed legs to confirm what he feared.
But the speeder bike slowly drifted forward until it was beside him.
Phanan’s chest did not rise or fall. But his organic eye was still open, directed upward, and his expression—for once lacking pain, lacking the shields of sarcasm or manufactured self-appreciation—was that of a child wondering at the glittering beauty of the stars.
Face’s vision blurred as his own eyes filled with the first tears he’d shed since he was a boy.
13
At dawn, Face rose from his makeshift camp. He took one last look at the bundle he was leaving behind—ruined speeder bike, ruined pilot, and the combination of his own datapad and a Raptor comlink he’d laboriously programmed by moonlight, all beneath the thin thermal blanket he’d retrieved from the bike’s cargo—and then headed into the trees.
In spite of the pulsing aches that seemed to have replaced his muscles and bones while he slept, he would be able to travel swiftly. He had good directional sense. He did not have an injured comrade to tow through difficult, slow terrain.
Within an hour, he passed by the gutted hulk of Phanan’s TIE fighter. There were no bodies here. Zsinj’s investigators had come and gone, and had posted no one to guard a valueless, burned-out hull. There were no distant sounds of speeder bikes or TIE fighters. The search had moved or been called off.
When morning was still young, he swam out to where his interceptor lay partially submerged, and took a long and lonely time going through the routine power-up checklist.
But when that was done, he had to act fast. His window of opportunity would be a narrow one.
The murky water behind his interceptor boiled as he cut in his engines; he could see bubbles and foam drift around to his front viewport as his interceptor strained. Then the repulsors overcame the muck that trapped his vehicle. He rose to the water’s surface and then shot into the air.
Up, southwest across a narrow band of forest, a mere few moments until he found the river. Downriver just a few more moments as terrain blurred beneath him.
When he recognized the approximate area of his camp, he sent a signal across his comlink. The distant Raptor comlink responded with the signal he’d programmed into its companion datapad and a moment later he hovered over the glade where he’d spent the night.
There it was, the black thermal blanket atop his friend.
He could not wait. Revulsion for the deed he was about to perform had been his companion last night; he did not have time for it now. He rotated so that his interceptor was pointed straight down, as though it were about to fly into the ground.
Repulsor