Star Wars_ X-Wing 07_ Solo Command - Aaron Allston [88]
Face’s voice was still strong, and this time was not accompanied by alarms—he’d obviously taken steps to quiet the sirens in his cockpit. “I read you, Two.”
“I want you to understand something. I don’t care if you understand it now. I want you to understand it later. I have never betrayed the Wraiths. I will never, ever betray the Wraiths. Do you read me?”
“I … hear what you say.”
A moment later, she said, “Myn?”
Donos jolted. He opened his mouth to answer, but he didn’t know whom he’d be talking to. Lara, the woman he’d wanted to come to love, or Gara, the woman he’d sworn—and now attempted—to kill.
“Myn?”
He sat there, paralyzed by indecision, and did not answer.
Lara’s X-wing leaped out of sight and off the sensors as it made the jump into hyperspace.
In the Rogue and Wraith squadrons’s landing bay, Donos climbed down out of his cockpit. His back was so straight it hurt. He needed that pain. He needed the constant reminder that he had to get himself back under control.
He’d lost control. He’d lost Lara. He’d lost everything.
Wedge waited for him at the foot of the ladder. Donos turned to face him and took a step back without intending to. Wedge’s body was as still as if carved from ice, but there was nothing cold about his eyes. They were full of anger, more intense anger than Donos had ever seen in them.
“One reason,” Wedge said. “I’d like to hear one reason why I shouldn’t ship you off to Coruscant and put you up on charges of gross insubordination.”
Donos stood at attention, every muscle he was aware of locked into place. He kept his gaze fixed above Wedge’s head and took a deep breath as he got his thoughts in order. “Logically speaking, I should not be tried for insubordination, sir, because insubordination is generally a deliberate act. I do not believe I was in my right mind when I fired upon Flight Officer Notsil. I can’t even remember doing that.” He couldn’t bring himself to refer to her as Gara Petothel, even in his own mind. His hard-won control might slip again.
“Temporary insanity?” The tone of Wedge’s voice suggested the frown Donos could see only in his peripheral vision. “That sounds like a dodge to me, Lieutenant.”
“I’m not sure it’s temporary, Commander.” Donos couldn’t keep the dejection out of his own voice. “You and Face, Captain Loran I mean, are aware of my … earlier difficulty.”
“Difficulty” was something of an understatement. Weeks after the destruction of Talon Squadron, when Donos’s R2 unit, Shiner, the only other survivor of the Gravan mission, had been destroyed, Donos had lapsed into a near-catatonic state. Only the intervention of Kell, Tyria, and Falynn Sandskimmer—herself now dead for many weeks—had brought him out of that withdrawal. “I submit,” Donos continued, “that I was not in my right mind when I fired on her, and I no longer have any confidence that I’m in my right mind at other times. With respect, sir, I tender the resignation of my commission and of my place in Wraith Squadron.”
Wedge didn’t answer immediately. Donos could see the top of his head as the commander looked right and left, communicating with the other senior officers by what might have been a combination of shared experience and telepathy.
“I’ll consider your request,” Wedge said, “while you consider a question I may oblige you to answer at some later time. If we encounter Lara Notsil in the future, in a combat situation, which of the Wraiths would you prefer to vape her in your place?”
The question was like a blade of ice thrust straight into Donos’s gut. He opened his mouth to respond, but Wedge said, “Quiet. I don’t require your answer yet. Dismissed.”
Donos turned away, past the eyes of the Rogues and his fellow Wraiths.
He saw anger in some of them, confusion in others. A sort of sick pain in Tyria’s. What he’d almost made her do—kill a second fellow pilot.
She’d never forgive him.
It didn’t matter much. He’d never forgive himself.
Behind him, he heard Wedge directing his anger against another target. “Captain Loran. You and I need to talk. My office.