22
As unsettled as things were, Corran felt glad when they headed back to the Hotel Imperial. Erisi, Rima, and he made fairly good time through the city. A freak storm over near the museum slowed them down by cutting power to a moving sidewalk. Like most of the other pedestrians they stood around waiting for it to be repaired, contenting themselves with watching the storm or reading the news as it scrolled past on the readers. Corran noted that while public transport could be disrupted by storms, the news and propaganda machine flowed onward without a hitch.
No one spoke very much as they traveled back to the hotel, but Corran caught Erisi watching him and giving him brave smiles to shore up his feelings. He appreciated the effort, but it only served to remind him what sort of fool he’d made of himself. He almost asked her to stop, but somewhere deep down inside he knew the humiliation was good for him, trimming back ego and forcing him to be more thoughtful.
As they walked along, he reached out and rested a hand on Rima’s shoulder. “I do want to apologize for what went on back there.”
A curtain of white hair slid in back of her shoulder, brushing across the top of his hand, as she looked in his direction. “Perhaps I owe you an apology also.”
“Not at all.”
“I do.” Pink, blue, and silver highlights flashed through her hair as a moving sidewalk conveyed them through a tunnel lit with a random pattern of neon lights. “Everyone from my world carries around some survivor guilt. We do not want to be pitied, but at the same time the sacrifice our people paid seems to demand respect. Among us there are those who have lost a great deal more than others …”
“But you have all lost everything.”
“True, but someone who was with his family in service on another planet has lost less than those who had kin die. Sel, in seeing everyone go, his story is tragic.” Rima glanced down at her open hands. “All of us recall where we were when we heard the news and the tragedy’s impact hit us full at that moment. Sel had thought nothing was amiss, then he learned the significance of what he had experienced. The hours in which he considered it nothing mock him and haunt him.”
In the same way does my failure to avenge my father haunt me. “You were right, his life was hard.”
Erisi rubbed her left hand along his spine. “I think what she means to say is that her people are pitied for something over which they had no control. The gulf between pity and respect is vast. When their tragedy is denigrated, and that seemed to be what you were doing, you strip away respect and reduce them to a pathetic state. And while they do not want to be pitied, their actions cannot be judged without bearing in mind the tragedy that underscores their lives.”
Corran slowly nodded. Working in the Rebellion provides two things for Alderaanians: vengeance and a means to earn the respect they desire from others. They seek the vindication I felt when I brought Bossk in for my father’s murder, and they’re fighting to avoid what I felt when Loor let him go.
He smiled. “We were both wrong.”
Rima shook her head. “We were both underinformed and that condition has been corrected.”
“Agreed.”
They got off the moving sidewalk at one of the Hotel Imperial’s middle entrances. Erisi pointed toward the doorway as Rima slowed her pace. “You will join us for dinner, yes?”
“Can’t.” She gestured vaguely back along their line of travel. “There’s something I have to check on. I’ll be in contact tomorrow morning.”
Corran and Erisi bid Rima farewell and took a lift down to their room. They said nothing to each other, but Erisi stood a bit closer to Corran than she normally did. He didn’t mind that terribly much because her obvious concern told him he wasn’t alone and had, in her, a friend upon whom he could rely. He also read other confusing things in her eyes and posture, but his emotional state was chaotic enough that making sense of much of anything was impossible.
He opened the door to the room and preceded her in. Hitting a light switch he saw no one and confirmed that things had been left the way he positioned them in the morning before they headed out. The triangular nub of a black sock was still caught in the edge of a drawer and the closet’s slide door had been left open to a point that was even with a pair of Erisi’s ecru slacks.
The door clicked shut behind him, then the lights went out. He turned and felt Erisi’s hands slide along either side of his chest, then close gently around his back. Corran felt her body press against his and the feather-light brush of her lips on his forehead, nose, and lips. She pulled him close and again dropped her mouth to his, kissing him with the fierce passion they’d shared in the Grand Hall.
Making no conscious decisions to do so, he let his arms enfold her. His left hand slipped beneath the hem of her jacket and gently stroked her back. His right hand came up and held the back of her head. He breathed in deeply, filling his nose with the spicy scent of her perfume. As she broke off their kiss, arching her head back, he traced his tongue from the hollow of her throat to her earlobe.
Erisi lazily pulled him along with her as she slowly drifted toward the room’s bed. Corran understood her intention and realized he should have resisted the temptation she offered. Rational arguments tried to trip a circuit breaker in his brain, but they all failed. Operational security wasn’t important because if the Imperials decided to take them there was no way for them to elude capture. Sleeping together or separately would not save them if the Empire knew enough about them to know where to find them.
Both of them being members of Rogue Squadron was no bar to involvement. Nawara Ven and Rhysati Ynr had fallen in love and that had not proved an impediment to their skills and performance. Corran and Erisi were of legal age, sound mind, and both consented to what they were about to do. Even the fact that the two of them were from different worlds and different cultures had no bearing on what they were going to do. That we are here, now, is all that matters.
The word “now” began to ricochet around in his skull, releasing all sorts of memories. When he’d been in CorSec he’d heard his father or Gil Bastra or himself tell rookies that most criminals were stupid because they lived for now. Living for now meant they didn’t look ahead to the consequences of their actions. They didn’t take precautions, didn’t plan, and as a result, what they did fell apart on them.
Things went deeper than just that as well. He remembered his father weeping on the anniversary of the death of Corran’s mother. “One of the reasons she was a good woman, wife, and mother was because she didn’t think about herself first. Not a selfish bone in your mother’s body. Everyone else came first and what she wanted was saved for later because we needed her now. And now she has no more later, and there seems little reason in having a later without her.”
Erisi stopped moving backward and Corran felt the foot of the bed against his shins. She slowly sank back on the bed and drew him down with her. He resisted slightly, lowering her softly onto the quilted coverlet. He saw her in soft shades of grey from the dim light splashing in through the window. She was a seductive vision, a dream made real and warm and he fought to use that image to quiet the thoughts raging through his mind.
Powerful though that image was, a feeling of disaster dissolved it. Corran remembered his own relief at not sleeping with Iella back when he was with CorSec because, aside from destroying her marriage, the affair would have changed forever their relationship. The friendship and trust they had developed working together could have never been reclaimed. It was true that they might have stuck together and been stronger for getting together, but their attraction had been as much circumstantial as it had been real, which made for a poor foundation for any permanent relationship.
And this is circumstantial, too. Corran heard Mirax on Noquivzor telling him that Erisi would not be good for him and he’d seen how truly different they were as they came into Coruscant. He’d developed doubts about any relationship with her then, and this situation now did not invalidate those doubts. She’s attractive and I’m attracted, but something is not right here.
Something inside him felt very wrong. His father had told him countless times to trust his feelings and to play his hunches. Corran had taken his father’s advice and had learned to live by what he felt, or to later regret going against those feelings. He had gone against his gut feelings before, and with much less in the way of inducement to do so, but those situations had never turned out right in the end.
Corran let himself fall forward, but he kept his elbows locked and held his chest and head above Erisi. “I can’t.”
Erisi flashed him a shadowed smile. “I think you’re doing fine.”
“Seriously, I can’t.” He bent his right arm and flopped down on his flank beside her. “It isn’t going to work.”
Rolling up on her side, she reached over and stroked his cheek. “What’s wrong? What did I do wrong?”
“It’s not you.” He took her hand and kissed her palm. “It’s not that I’d like nothing better than to be here with you, but …”
“This is just now, Corran. I need this, you need this. It won’t change who we are. No obligations. No recriminations. No regrets.”
Her words poured soothingly into his ears. He had no doubt she meant them and that they would be true for her. “I hear you, Erisi, and I believe you, but I don’t know that I’d be able to leave it in the past. It might not change who we are or what we mean to each other, but I’d bet against it given my past history. As I said, it’s not you, it’s me.”
He rolled onto his back, then sat up. “You have to figure I’m an idiot. We’ve gotten very close a number of times and I keep pulling back.”
He felt her hand on his back as she sat up beside him. “Actually, while it is frustrating, I do find this hesitation one of your more endearing qualities.”
“Decisiveness in men is so off-putting, after all.”
Erisi laughed easily. “Your sense of humor is attractive as well, except when you use it as a shield.”
“Sorry.”
She kissed his shoulder. “You see, Corran, few are the men who allow their emotions to have a part in their decision-making process. Most are expediently logical—emotions motivate them, but do not guide them. With most men there would be no hesitation—if emotions were going to come into play, it would be afterward. Your ability to factor emotions into your choices ahead of time makes you rather unique and worth pursuing.”
“Or a big waste of time.”
“I’m just warming up. You’ll see. Give me time.”
Erisi sighed beside him. “Perhaps that is the best idea, right now, no matter what we think we want. What we need is time alone.”
He smiled in the direction of her silhouette. “How can you be so logical? Aren’t you supposed to be feeling scorned right now?”
“Perhaps I should, but then I don’t always allow myself to be ruled by emotions.” She shrugged. “We’ve just come to a decision to postpone making a decision about us and the nature of our relationship. Depending upon the decision made, I might be scorned, but I don’t think that emotion is worthy of either one of us.”
Corran nodded. “Yeah, you’re right there, on both counts.”
“Well, I’ll leave you here, then …”
“No.” Corran reached over and squeezed her leg just above the knee. “I’m fairly used to taking walks to sort things out. I’ve got a key, so I can let myself back in. I don’t know when I’ll get back.”
“I’ll head out and get some food. I should be here when you get back unless some Hapan princeling comes along and sweeps me away to make me the queen of some distant planet. Then won’t you be sorry?”
“Actually I think I would be.” Corran stood, then leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. “Thanks for understanding.”
“Thank you for letting me understand.”
Guided more by emotion than any sort of rational thought, Corran left Erisi behind in the room, entered a lift, and hit the lowest numbered button he could find. It took him well below the level where they had last seen Rima. The walkway onto which it dumped him didn’t look that bad, though it was deeper than any place he’d been since his arrival on Coruscant.
Shoulders hunched and hands jammed deep into the pockets of a brown bantha-suede jacket, he started wandering. It didn’t matter to him where he was going, but just that he was going. Walking demanded little in the way of mental activity, so it gave him time to think and he’d done scant little of that which was unconnected to the mission for well over a month.
He tried to trace the source of his discomfort, but no easy answer presented itself. Certainly the pressure of being on Coruscant had a lot to do with it. Though precautions had been taken against discovery, something as simple as his nearly being sighted by Kirtan Loor showed that no matter how much care one took, there were times when luck just ran out.
Corran smiled. Back in CorSec they’d adulterated an old Jedi aphorism about luck to answer criminals who claimed they’d been caught because of bad luck. The Jedi Knights maintained there was no such thing as luck, just the Force. In CorSec they’d told criminals there was no such thing as bad luck, just the Corellian Security Force.
Now there’s not even that. In news he had seen scrolling across readouts throughout Coruscant he learned that the Diktat had dissolved CorSec and had allocated most of its resources and some of its personnel to the new Public Safety Service. It didn’t take much to see the change was a purge of people with questionable loyalties to the Diktat, but whatever its purpose, it erased yet one more link he had to his past.
His hand rose to his breastbone, but the gold medallion he normally wore was not there. General Cracken’s people had said that by keeping it he could seriously compromise security, so he’d put it away in Whistler’s small storage compartment. He knew the droid would keep it safe and, for him, knowing where it was had almost the same effect as actually wearing the good luck charm. And the Jedi whose face appears on that coin would say there’s no such thing as luck, so clearly it can’t be a good luck charm.
It occurred to him that he was losing his focus on life. Back when he had been with CorSec things had been simple. He knew who he was and so did everyone else around him. Though things were not all black and white, the number of grey tones were limited. There wasn’t too much for him to handle, which made it that much easier to focus on what he was supposed to be doing.
In cataloging the chaos that had dominated his life over the past five years or so, it was easy to tote things up in the negative column. His father had died. He’d left CorSec and his friends had vanished. He’d slipped in and out of various identities while on the run. After months of training and fighting for the Rebellion—escaping death by the narrowest of margins over and over again—he got stuffed onto Coruscant and nearly got spotted by one of the few people on the planet who could recognize him. He wasn’t flying. He didn’t have his good luck charm and he found himself missing Whistler, Mirax, Ooryl, and the others.
He shivered. If I only look at things on the negative side of the balance sheet, I’ll keep imposing reasons on myself to remain unfocused. The key to getting his focus back was to isolate those things he could control and work with them. Anything else didn’t matter because he couldn’t influence it. Only by doing as much as he could to manipulate the variables under his control could he keep himself in position to make decisions instead of finding himself without options.
What that means now is concentrating on my mission. I’m here to learn about security and that’s what I should be doing. He nodded, then slowly began to realize that his wanderings had taken him farther and lower than he would have consciously chosen to go. Coronet City on Corellia had some seedy spots, but they appeared positively immaculate and safe compared to where Corran found himself. While his location did provide him with a datapoint for his mission—namely that there was no active Imperial security to be seen this deep down—it was a small speck of silver lining in a large cloud.
He decided to get his bearings and moved in off the street. This required him to thread his way through various makes and models of speeder bikes hovering in a wall in front of a cantina. If there was any lettering painted on the wall or door to indicate what the place was, it had long since faded too much for Corran to read it. A series of holograms flickered in sequence showing a stormtrooper’s helmet breaking into four uneven and rather messy sections. What it meant mystified him until he walked inside and down the steps and saw a sizzling orange sign that proclaimed the place to be “The Headquarters,” or, at least, did so when all the letters chose to buzz to life.
Corran had chased fleeing Selonians through sewers with better atmosphere and more consistent lighting than the Headquarters. The narrow stairway broadened out into a foyer that ended where one side of the triangular bar blocked it off. To get farther into the cantina one had to pass through the choke points at either end of the bar. While a fair amount of dense smoke filled the air, Corran could see tables clogging the floor and booths back against the walls. Two curtained doorways were built into the back corners, leading to waste relief stations and, given the sort of clientele drawn to this type of establishment, providing access to dozens of bolt-holes.
Speaking of bolt-holes … Blaster bolts had dotted the walls near the entrance with a dense pattern of holes. Corran noticed they tended to be grouped about a meter up from the floor and tapered off past head height for the average stormtrooper. He found this marginally reassuring, though his gut did not agree with that sentiment at all. The faster I can get out of here, the better I’ll like it.
He kept his gait casual and a bit loose. His hands emerged from his pockets slowly as he approached the bar, slipping into a spot near the end over to the left. A fairly powerfully built Quarren female in a sleeveless tunic planted her hands on the bar right in front of him. “I think you’re lost.”
In an instant Corran was back in CorSec making sweeps of various Coronet City cantinas. “If I wanted thinking, I’d not be in here. Lomin-ale.” He put enough of an edge in his voice to make her question the judgment she’d made of him. As she moved away to comply, with her facial tentacles twitching out a silent curse at him, he realized his clothes were too new for him to fit in easily. Most of the patrons wore cloaks, less out of a concession to fashion than because it concealed their identities, and not many people coming into a place like the Headquarters really wanted to be spotted.
She returned with a small glass of ale, half of which was foam. He tossed a couple of credit coins on the bar and they disappeared instantly in her grey fist. He sipped the ale and found it wasn’t as bad as he expected, though it could have benefited from being colder. His was the only small glass being used in the place, which he took as a not-so-subtle measure of his popularity with the staff. He knew he’d not get served again, and he wasn’t inclined to linger over his drink.
By the same token, if he just turned around and walked out, half the regulars would be all over him like chitin on a Verpine. Running away would have the same effect as flagrantly flashing credits around, or opening his jacket and letting everyone see he didn’t have a blaster with him. He considered, for a moment, trying to buy a blaster from someone, but that would put him in direct contact with gun-carrying criminals who might decide killing and robbing him was easier than selling him a weapon.
Corran leaned on the bar and drank more of the ale. Realizing he was not in a good position, he started to look around and assess the threats suggested by the cantina’s patrons. Dozens and dozens of criminal profiles flitted through his brain. He classified people based on their species, the amount of interest they showed in him, and the kind of hunches he got when he looked at them. The people inside seven meters provided him with two definite class-one threats, a half-dozen class-two threats, and one Gamorrean who appeared scared enough that Corran tried to attach the face to any warrants that had been outstanding when he’d been in CorSec. He came up blank, then started on the booths along the wall to the left.
What? Corran blinked his eyes and shook his head, then took another look. Through the swirling smoke, seated facing a tall, slender figure in a cloak and hood, Corran saw Tycho Celchu. Impossible.
He looked away, then back for a third time. The individual to whom Tycho was speaking stood, eclipsing Corran’s view of the unit’s Executive Officer. In doing so the figure also managed to destroy Corran’s interest in Tycho because despite the dim light and the thick smoke, he knew the hooded and cloaked figure could only be one person.
Kirtan Loor.
Corran set his ale down and began to move around the bar. Loor and Tycho! He is an Imperial agent! I have to get to …
He slammed into a large Trandoshan and rebounded from the reptilian’s chest. Someone clapped a hand on Corran’s right shoulder and he felt the muzzle of a blaster jam into his ribs. The Trandoshan closed in on the left, pinning him against the man with the blaster. “You’re going nowhere, pal.”
Corran looked to his right and couldn’t recognize the man holding the gun on him. What he did notice about the gunman was that he had a comlink clipped to the lapel of his jacket and a small lead to an earphone in his left ear. As Corran looked back to the left to see if the Trandoshan was similarly equipped he saw the cloaked figure disappear out one of the back entrances. Tycho was gone as well.
Depression blossomed full in the pit of Corran’s stomach, yet he knew things could easily continue to get worse.
They did. Very easily.
Through the doorway that swallowed the cloaked man swaggered a person swathed in garish and gaudy clothes. The smoke would have been enough to conceal his identity until he drew closer, but the cantina’s dim light allowed the diamond pupils in his eyes to shine brightly.
Corran shook his head. “What you see when you don’t have a blaster.”
Zekka Thyne didn’t bother to smile. “Your thoughts parallel mine.” He reached back and drew Inyri Forge from his shadow. As she came around him she handed him a blaster pistol. “Of course, now I have a blaster and am just full of ideas about what I can do with it.”