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Hallis shrugged.

“No, really, please. I have to know. It normally takes a vote of the Senate or a planetary collision to get Iella to change her mind. I need to learn how to do whatever you did.”

Iella colored nicely. “Wedge.”

“I’ll show you.” From beneath her sleeve, Hallis pulled out a standard datapad. With her other hand, she reached behind her and dragged a wire with a standard datapad coupler at the end of it. She jacked it into the pad and powered the unit up, then held the screen so Wedge could see. “You’re not going to like this.”

Tycho leaned in to see. Janson, Hobbie, and Cheriss also crowded in behind him to get a look. Iella turned away, perhaps unwilling to see this a second time.

The datapad view wavered across a sea of faces and the backs of heads. Wedge recognized the surroundings as the Outer Court chamber of the perator’s palace.

Finally the view stabilized. Wedge recognized the perator standing at the heart of his knot of advisors. The clothes worn by his advisors defined the scene—this was the last gathering Wedge had attended, the one where he and his pilots had been exiled and effectively sentenced to death.

The recording’s sound kicked in, a meaningless babble of voices. Then the voices dropped out one by one; Wedge presumed that the recorder had to have been using a directional sound recorder to home in on a very few voices.

On the perator’s voice. He was saying, in hushed tones, “… pity they couldn’t have been persuaded to lend us their arts. That would have been spectacular, and Antilles’s name alone would have been enough to cow some of the enemy forces …”

Then Tomer Darpen was at his elbow. “A moment of your time, my lord.”

“Only a moment. Time is pressing.”

“I wish to extend my personal apologies, and General Antilles’s apologies, for what he has just been obliged to do.”

Even in the somewhat blurry recording, the perator looked surprised. “Obliged?”

Tomer nodded. “The general is pinned down between opposing forces. His natural desire is to aid you, of course; he knows it is the only honorable option. But ambiguous orders handed down by his diplomatic corps superiors, orders intended to keep him alive so that he remain valuable to them, prevent him from fighting. The situation has crushed him, has robbed him of all will to live.”

The perator shook his head, his expression shocked. “I cannot believe it.”

Tomer lowered his eyes, his expression sad. “It’s true. He longs for death to burn away his shame. And so General Antilles begs a favor of you.”

“Speak.”

“He begs you to set your forces on him, assaults that he cannot decline … and cannot survive. So that he can die honorably and never again be used as a tool by the diplomatic corps. Do this, and not only will his memory be cherished, but you can be sure that the next pilot-representatives sent here will be unfettered by ridiculous orders restraining them from behaving as true pilots should.”

The perator nodded, his expression sympathetic. “At last I understand. The poor man.”

“It must look like an act of justice on your part. But he will thank you with his dying breath.”

“I understand.”

“Thank you, perator.”

Hallis’s recording view followed Tomer as he left the ruler’s side and moved toward Wedge and his pilots. Her audio lock remained with him, and though his next few words were muffled—doubtless by him holding a comlink up to his face and speaking quietly—Wedge could make out his words. “En-Are-Eye-One to Allegiance, acknowledge. New orders, Allegiance. Do not accept, record, or acknowledge any transmissions from Adumar’s surface or from vehicles not belonging to the New Republic until I rescind this order. Repeat it back to me to indicate you’ve understood … Correct, Allegiance. En-Are-Eye-One out.”

Hallis switched the datapad screen off.

They were all silent for a long moment. Finally Wedge looked at the documentarian. “Thanks, Hallis. But I have to ask—why didn’t you tell me some of this before we left the perator’s palace?”

“The first part, knowing that Tomer had set you up, couldn’t help you. The