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Solo quarters. A captain, even a brevet captain, warranted decent-sized accommodations all to himself. Face felt a tinge of the old guilt, the old feeling that he didn’t deserve any such special consideration, given the good he’d done the Empire back when he was making holodramas … but he suppressed that feeling, burying it under a surge of anger. Ton Phanan had shown him that he needed to leave such thoughts behind. If only knowing what he needed to do were the same as doing it.

A scritch-scritch-scritch noise reminded him of duties he needed to perform. He took a pasteboard box from a drawer and moved to the table where the cages rested.

Two cages, each about knee height, each contained a translucent arthropod that stood and walked on two legs. The creatures were about finger height, with well-defined mandibles and compound eyes. Storini Glass Prowlers, they were called, from the Imperial world of Storinal. Ton Phanan and Grinder Thri’ag had each secretly come away from the Wraiths’s Storinal mission with one of the creatures. Face had found Grinder’s when it had been placed in his cockpit as a prank, and had given it to Phanan. Then Phanan, too, had died, and Face had inherited them. But both creatures were male, more likely to kill one another than coexist peaceably, and Face kept them in side-by-side cages.

He used a spoon to extract some of their food from the box. It was unappetizing-looking stuff, looking like little glass beads with green flecks at their centers. But when he poured a spoonful into each cage’s feeder box, the Glass Prowlers fell upon the food as though it were the most wonderful of treats; the Prowlers’s arms snapped out to scoop up each individual bead and their mandibles chewed away at the transparent coating and green flecks within. Face smiled at their voracity.

There was a knock at his door. “Come,” he said.

It slid open and Wedge stepped in. “Am I intruding?”

“No. Just feeding my roommates. Have a seat.” Face flicked a tunic from one of the room’s chairs. He settled in the other, forgetting for a moment, flinching as his back came in contact with the chair.

Wedge said, “I just came in to see how you were doing. Well, more precisely, to see how you felt about today’s mission.”

“I figured you would. So I’ve been thinking about it.”

“And?”

“And I feel pretty good about it.”

That got him a raised eyebrow from his commander. “Can you explain that?”

“Well, I don’t feel good about the casualty total, obviously. Sithspit. Janson and Runt in bacta tanks, everyone else bandaged and drugged up to the eyebrows … I have only four pilots fit to fly.”

“So what makes you feel good about the mission?”

Face took a deep breath. “We had an objective. Get information. We succeeded, even if that information is going to be difficult to drag out of Doctor Gast. We got out of there with everyone more or less alive.

“Even more, it’s obvious that they’d geared that whole facility to kill us, which is something we hadn’t anticipated. We were channeled to the place they intended to kill us, and they threw everything they had at us—and we took it and got out anyway. That’s a tremendous thing. When my pilots realize that, it’s going to be harder than ever to stop them. To intimidate them.

“And then, again, there’s the fact that the enemy went to such lengths to wipe out the Wraiths. They spent a tremendous amount of money and effort. They may want us dead, but they’re showing us respect—which is something I need to point out to the other Wraiths.” He shrugged, then winced again at the incautious move. “We all feel as though we’ve had the stuffing kicked out of us, then been fried up for someone else’s meal—but we won this one, Commander.”

Wedge nodded and rose. “I guess I don’t have too much to tell you.”

Face stood as well. “You came here to talk me out of a depressive state.” He mimed drawing a blaster and placing it to his temple. “Good-bye, galaxy of cruelty. My pilots are all burned; I must