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Wedge helped him put his jacket back on. “That was it?” he asked. “You staked the entire fight on the assumption that you could block his first shot at you?”

Janson nodded. “Pretty much. I just couldn’t see him throwing his best attack on the very first attack of the match. That gave me one crack at him, maybe two.” He tied his belt back around him.

“You shouldn’t have humiliated him,” Tomer said.

Janson peered at him. “This whole world is full of ‘shouldn’t haves,’ Tomer. Without that humiliation, there was no chance he’d learn anything. With it, I figure he has about a five percent chance of realizing that he’s a big bag of Hutt droppings. Which is five percent more than he had a few minutes ago.” He shrugged. “Who’s hungry?”

Wedge grinned. “Let’s get out of here. I’m buying.”

9

The rest of the day offered hopeful news, and more than once.

By the time Wedge and Janson, joined by Hobbie, found a dining establishment where a small private room would afford them a certain amount of peace, the verdict was in on Cheriss. “She’ll make it,” Tycho explained via comlink. “She’s responding well to the bacta and should be released in a day, maybe less.”

“Good,” Wedge said. “Make sure the medical staff knows to notify me when they’re to release her. I want to be there as a friendly face when they cut her loose.”

“Will do.”

“And get down here. We have plenty to do today.”

“Have you ever thought about sleeping, boss?”

Wedge grinned. “Which is, exactly, what?”

“Sort of like being shot until you’re unconscious, except there’s no bacta, and you often end up feeling better than when you started.”

“Sounds good. I’ll give it a try someday. Call in when you reach groundside. Out.” Wedge folded up his headset and returned his attention to the menu, a flexible flatscreen that showed the evening’s available dishes as a series of animations running around the screen engaged in blastsword duels with one another. “I don’t think I want to eat anything that looks like it wants to cut its way back out of me.”

Hobbie gave him a dubious look. “Did you say we had plenty to do still?”

Wedge nodded.

“What, exactly?”

“We’re going to try to subvert an Imperial admiral.”

“Oh,” Hobbie said. “Something easy. While you’re doing that, why don’t Wes and I smuggle ourselves aboard Agonizer and destroy her with thrown rocks?”

Wedge gave him a grin. “With the right tools—say, a hundred thousand Ewoks and a month to prepare—you could probably do that. In the meantime, we have the right tools to subvert our Imperial admiral.”

“What tools?”

“Oh, Wes’s maturity, your optimism, and my diplomatic skills.”

Hobbie buried his face in his hands. “We’re doomed.”

Though he picked up a more powerful comlink from his quarters, Wedge kept its power output turned low, so that his signal could not possibly carry as far as Agonizer or even the nearest Cartann city. And every half hour, he or one of his pilots put in a call for Admiral Rogriss.

Shortly after Adumar’s sun sank and the first of her two moons rose, he got an answer and arranged an appointment.

An hour later, he stood alone at the periphery of a Cartann plaza—not the one where he and his pilots had landed, days ago, but another of the same size some distance away. Its central feature was a large fountain; at its center was a round island of something like duracrete supporting a sculpture made of some brassy metal. The sculpture showed the perator in his younger days, wearing a Blade fighter-craft pilot’s suit, waving to a crowd that was not present at this hour; behind him was a semicircle of seven fungus-shaped explosion clouds, representing, Wedge assumed, seven military campaigns or bombing runs.

Admiral Rogriss was not too long in coming. Wedge saw two silhouettes approaching from the opposite side of the plaza; one, larger, stayed back in the vicinity of the fountains, while the other moved unsteadily forward toward Wedge. Soon enough, moonlight illuminated his features, revealing him to be the admiral.