Star Wars_ X-Wing 09_ Starfighters of Adumar - Aaron Allston [26]
Tomer frowned, obviously trying to figure out how to phrase a refusal, then shrugged. “Contact me by comlink if you need me.” He increased his pace, said a word or two to Cheriss as he passed her, then disappeared into pedestrian traffic ahead.
“It’s Iella, all right,” Janson said. “She wants to see you. I mean, it didn’t seem to be an urgent thing. I think she was happier to see me, of course. She even asked about Hobbie.”
Hobbie brightened. “She did?”
“Oh, yes. ‘How’s old Bugbite?’ she asked.”
Hobbie’s shoulders slumped. When first he’d met Iella, years ago, on a covert mission to Corellia, he’d been stung in the face by a local insect. Iella’s partner Corran Horn, both of them then investigators with Corellian Security, had shot him down with that nickname. “She did not.”
Janson’s grin deepened, but he returned his attention to Wedge. “And she did want to talk to you. Underneath the shortest of the flat displays around the plaza where we landed, at midnight tomorrow. You have to make sure that you’re not being shadowed. You can’t compromise her cover identity.”
“What is her cover identity?”
“She’s some sort of computer slicer. Hired a while back to develop programs to translate and interface between Cartann computers and New Republic and Imperial computers.”
“Define ‘a while back,’ ” Wedge said.
Janson shrugged. “I’m not sure. At least several weeks, possibly several months.”
Wedge looked between his pilots. “There’s something very odd going on here. I had the impression from General Cracken that a mapping ship accidentally discovered this planet—which had been cut off from the rest of galactic civilization for thousands of years—a short time ago. Immediately afterward, the New Republic was supposed to have dispatched a diplomatic delegation, which immediately discovered that they preferred dealing with pilots, which immediately resulted in our being sent here. Quick, quick, quick.
“But now I find that the Adumari people have hyper-drives; they even have some hyperdrive-equipped fighters. They’ve brought in specialists to link up their computer systems with ours. They’ve contrived to bring in pilots from the Empire at the same time we’re here, and even set things up so that the two opposing groups of pilots wouldn’t know about one another until we bumped into one another tonight. What do you want to bet that we haven’t been brought here chiefly because they love pilots? We’ve been brought here to duel with our opposite numbers.”
“It’s worse than that,” Hobbie said.
The others looked at him. “You know,” Janson said, “whenever the name of Derek ‘Hobbie’ Klivian comes up, the words ‘It’s worse than that’ ring in my ears. Sometimes I hear them when I’m dreaming.”
Hobbie ignored him. “Wedge, while Janson was politely asking Iella about her love life—”
“I wasn’t!”
“—I was talking to people about things. Asking questions instead of answering them. And I found out that Adumar doesn’t even have a world government. The perator of Cartann doesn’t represent the whole world.”
“That would certainly explain why they all seem to identify more with this nation than with their world,” Wedge said. “What do they have?”
“Well, remember that all the answers I got were from Cartann loyalists.” Hobbie shrugged, apologetic. “But if you read past the text stream to the data stream, it looks as though Cartann is the biggest of a large number of nations, and it controls several other nations besides. Through tradition and military. It controls something like more than half the planet. So they could set up trade treaties, that sort of thing, for Cartann, but they couldn’t negotiate to bring all of Adumar into the New Republic.”
“You’re right,” Wedge said. “It was worse than I thought.”
Janson grinned. “Oh, it’s even worse than that.”
Wedge sighed. “Look, this is your last one. The next person after Wes who has bad news, we all just shoot him. Go ahead, Wes.”
“Cheriss is sweet on