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lot of momentum, but he loses control and his Y-wing rolls. Comes to a stop on its belly and he’s safe. Then”—Janson’s face became more merry as he relived the incident—“his ejector seat malfunctions and shoots him off toward space. With grav that low, he achieves escape velocity. We had to send a rescue shuttle up after him or he’d still be sailing through the void, one cold cadaver.”
    “I saved the astromech,” Tomer said. “And the Y-wing was repairable.”
    “Sure,” Janson said. “But seeing you as that wishboneskidded to a stop, seeing you sag in relief—and then, poof! you’re headed toward the stars—”
    Tomer caught Wedge’s eye. “As you can see, I’ve provided amusement for years.”
    “Efficient use of effort,” Hobbie said. “When do we eat?”

3
    One of those processional vehicles—a giant flatbed that rode the ground on wheels, with a raised front control panel where the driver stood, and with braces for the passengers to lean back against as they rode—conveyed Red Flight, Tomer, and Hallis from the plaza. It wasn’t fast going; the crowd did not want to part to admit them, but preferred to shout and jump and wave to attract the pilots’ attention. Wedge solved that problem by moving to the vehicle’s side and reaching out to shake hands as they passed; suddenly the members of the crowd wanted to be beside the vehicle rather than before it, and the vehicle’s speed increased. The other pilots moved to the sides as well, and within minutes the vehicle was beyond the edges of the crowd and heading out into the city’s avenues.
    Wedge saw that the city’s love affair with balconies was not limited to the avenues they’d flown above. Every building on every street facing was thick with balconies. Some had rope bridges hung between adjacent balconies, and a few had such strung across streets. Wherever theydrove, people thronged their balcony rails and waved down at them. The building exteriors were also decorated, on the ground floor at eye level, with panels about a meter wide by half a meter high that showed two-dimensional images. Tomer called them flatscreens, and some buildings had continuous banks of them all around their exteriors.
    “I am so glad the people of this planet like to wave and shake hands,” Janson said.
    Wedge gave him a curious glance. “Why is that?”
    “Well, what if their usual greeting for visiting dignitaries was to throw paint?”
    “Point taken.”
    Their conveyance pulled up before one of the taller and more richly appointed buildings they’d seen, and minutes later Tomer led the four pilots into a suite of rooms on an upper floor; their support crew had already been separated off, installed in rooms lower down in the building. “These are the quarters of a bachelor half squad recently reduced in combat,” Tomer said. “The survivor gladly abandoned it for the duration of your stay, for your comfort.”
    Wedge took a look around. The floor, again, looked like stone, this time a green marble thickly decorated with silvery veins, but like the plaza flooring it gave slightly when stepped upon. There was one main room, mostly open, with a few padded chairs around the edges. Several arched exits led to round-topped doors of a silver hue. The walls were hung with light blue draperies; just behind the top of the drapes, banks of lights shone up on the off-white ceiling, offering indirect lighting for the chamber.
    Tomer pointed to four of the doorways. “Bedchambers there, there, there, and there.” Two of the building porters, adolescent boys who could not stop grinning, obligingly carried the pilots’ bags to those chambers.Tomer gestured to the bank of drapes opposite the entry into the main chamber: “Your balcony there. It’s a pilot’s balcony, by the way.”
    Wedge said, “Which means what?”
    “Extra-broad and reinforced, and with nothing, including cables, for a level or two above—so you can land your starfighters on