Project Boussh: In The Middle of Nowhere
by Zeynep Dilli/'Morwen' and Prophet Kristy

BWI airport was almost completely closed down, preparing for the
touchdown of literally the last planes for the night.  The only open
food place was a Burger King, and there were people waiting only in
front of two gates.  Among the small group waiting for passangers
coming from Denver was a young woman with long dark hair and dark
brown eyes.  Wearing a black T-shirt embroidered with the silver
words "Star Wars" and holding a comic book that showed a
brown-haired man in an orange flight suit with X-wings flying in the
background, she had an intense look while she stared through the
gate, as if to make the plane land and park faster with her gaze.  
Time was critical tonight, and too much was at stake.  And there had
already been enough delay.

  She was so tense that when the first group of people appeared
through the gate, she almost jumped.  Her eyes darted with almost
despair from person to person, scanning clothes and faces.  And when
she finally saw a T-shirt with Obi-Wan Kenobi and a lightsaber, and
recognized the familiar, warmly pretty face of the wearer, she
darted to grab her with an immense hug, without even waiting for her
to notice the embroidery or the comic book cover that was supposed
to identify her.

  "Welcome to Maryland, my Prophetess."

  The slighter, brown-haired woman with lighter eyes, Prophet
Kristy, smiled at Morwen and hugged her again.  "Thanks!!"  It was
so nice to finally put the sound of a real voice with the words in
cyberspace...  Morwen spoke with an accent that was "medium"--not
thick, not light--that sounded vaguely Russian to Kristy's
backcountry ear.  The woman's narrow chin, high cheekbones, and
narrow eyebrows gave her a quiet, dusky beauty.  "I listened to Air
Traffic Control on the way down--pretty interesting!  Now we know
what sort of chatter Wedge gets to deal with.  Speaking of which,"
Kristy lowered her voice a bit, "I hope we're still okay on the
timeline?"

  "Your plane was early, the Force must have been with us," Morwen
responded as she began leading Kristy deeper into the airport
terminal.  "As long as things keep going our way, we should be all
right."

  After the baggage claim, they went to secure the shuttle that
would take them to their first destination for the night. They were
shown into a waiting room--where Morwen promptly began to fidget.  
"This can get ugly," she whispered when Kristy finally shot her a
bemused glance, "if we're late there.  Or if they failed to do their
homework, or parts of it, and forgot the anti-radar coating.  Or if
we're too early--I won't pretend I'm not afraid.  TAWG, so much can
go wrong now that I--"

  "Dilli," the shuttle dispatcher announced.  That was Morwen's
name--their shuttle was ready to pick them up.

  It turned out that it was also ready to pick up two other
couples--one pair of seniors and one middle-aged pair.  The seniors
were going roughly in the direction the two AFWers wanted to go.  
Morwen wasn't too pleased about that.  She and Kristy would have to
be let off first--which meant that both pairs would see where they
were being dropped, along with the driver.  But she did not have a
car, she did not want to explain what she was up to there to any
friend, and so they did not really have any choice.

  They went down the Baltimore/Washington Parkway, towards
Washington.  Morwen found herself thinking about the maps she had
pored over for hours, with a compass in one hand and calculator in
the other, calculating radar ranges, minimal risk ratios, trying to
find and verify and reverify the precise location of the latitude
and longitude she had been given as the optimal landing point
between BWI Airport, Fort Meade Military Reserve, the USAF
Transmission Center, Andrews AFB, and the numerous other
Army/Navy/Air Force bases and communication centers that dotted the
Washington DC Metropolitan Area.

  Needless to say, it hadn't been easy.  She also had the
disadvantages of not precisely being an RF engineer and not having a
better understanding of the counter-technologies the New Republic
representatives were going to use.  So she had to go, in a great
amount, on trust.

  Kristy, too, was quiet on the ride.  First of all, she was in a
strange area--and the face that it was after midnight wasn't
stopping her from looking around at her surroundings, trying to get
a glimpse of what life across the country was like.  Most of her
thoughts were occupied in tying herself into increasingly small
knots of nervousness.  By all that was holy, she was on her way to
meet *them*.  Wedge Antilles and Tycho Celchu.  And their ladies.  
What was she going to *say*?!!

  Both were jolted out of their musings by the shuttle slowing down
to take the Bowie Road exit to the east.  Almost immediately their
surroundings became dark, the street lights becoming sporadic and
then disappearing altogether, all signs of human habitation
vanishing.  They were, Morwen knew, passing through the Patuxent
Environmental Science Center grounds--which was by far the largest
of the many magical areas dotting the DC Metro area in which you
could almost forget you were in the middle of miles and miles square
of almost uninterrupted settlements.  (Kristy had to quickly revise
her mental image of the area.  It was nice to not have to have
big-city claustrophobia!)  It had been very fortunate that one radar
nodal point that they determined to be optimal happened to be
somewhere near the middle of this great nature reserve, and even
more fortunate that--

  "I don't remember this road being... this long," the driver said,
and the other two couples laughed.  A bit nervously.  There were no
other cars--or human beings--to be seen where they were.  Morwen had
started watching the right side of the road sharply, glancing to the
handheld GPS device she was holding from time to time. Her friend
did not know why he had loaned her this, beyond "curiousity of a
technology geek."

  "Here," Morwen called about another hundred yards down the road.  
"This is where we should get down."

  The driver _did_ stop the car, but then turned around to stare at
her and Kristy, making no move to open the doors or help with the
luggage. "Here?" he said, "you said you'd give me directions where
on Bowie Road--"

  "Here," Kristy said decisively, nodding her head toward what she
had just caught sight of to the right of the road.

  It took some peering on the part of the other passengers of the
shuttle to see the abandoned gas station there.  Morwen had been
overjoyed to discover it in her research.

  "23647 Bowie Road," she said with a smile.

  "But this is..." the senior man said haltingly, "...in the middle
of nowhere," his wife finished for him.

  Kristy smiled at them.  "Seems that way, doesn't it?"

  The hesitation in the small vehicle was palpable--letting down two
young women, apparently by themselves, to where there was nothing
but the call of night-birds, not even a good streetlight?  In the
end, there was no gainsaying the two, however (Morwen was about
ready to grab Kristy's suitcase and run, time _was_ of the essence)
and the shuttle moved off, leaving the two of them by the side of
the road with a heavy suitcase between them.  Morwen could see that
both the married couples were looking back.

  "Let's get out of sight and get this done before one of them gets
worked up enough to call the police,"  Kristy murmured.

  Morwen dug out two pencil-beam flashlights from the deep pocket of
her coat.  Praying inwardly that some bum really hadn't decided to
take refugee from the cold in the abandoned station for the night,
she led the way to the little attendant building.  No bum had--but
no bum would be seeking for anything in the middle of nowhere
anyway.  Bums were urban phenomena, not rural.  They left the
suitcase in there.  Dragging it cross-country wouldn't be nice.

  Bundled up well against the night's chill, they plunged into the
light forest to the south of the road, behind the attendant booth.  
Morwen monitored their progress on the GPS device while Kristy
steadied her with a hand on her arm--they wouldn't stop walking to
read, and the path was hardly smooth.  The gas station was not the
only thing abandoned in the National Agricultural Research Center.  
Great swathes of land that weren't being used in current projects
were left to fend almost to themselves, adding to the wilderness
aura of the large landplot.  Where they were aiming for, about
half-a-mile south of Bowie road, was such a part of land.

  They stumbled into the medium-sized clearing, just in time to
see--

  Morwen found her voice.  "When all is said and done," she said
breathlessly, "They are just so graceful--"

  "They are just so graceful," Kristy said along, thinking, **wow**,
and they stared each other for a moment.  Then they grinned, like
mirror images.  But even yet another incidence of speaking each
others' minds was not big enough to take their minds from what was
unfolding before them.

  Two X-Wings with muted parking lights, painted a weird, shimmery
gray-black that made them appear as silhouettes, were descending to
the clearing in the majestic way they had.  Behind them was a larger
silhouette, shaped like some weird sea-animal--which was, of course,
precisely what it was modeled after.  The _Pulsar Skate_.

  The canopies of the X-Wings popped open.  Two human forms
rose--they looked down for a moment at the women standing mute,
holding their flashlights so that they could be seen clearly.  They
seemed to glance at each other.  Then they jumped lightly down to
the grassy floor of the clearing, as the hatch of the _Skate_
started descending.  No one appeared outlined there, however, while
the two pilots approached their greeters.  A portion of Morwen's
numbed mind thought, "They are out of sight, providing cover, in
case we prove to be hostile."  She could not even weakly laugh at
the idea.

  The shorter of the two men removed his helmet and shook his floofy
brown hair free.  The taller man repeated his movement as the two
came to stand in front of the women.  There was silence, and a calm
descended upon Morwen and Kristy. Amazingly.

  _These are people we respect.  These are people we will work with,
and people we love._

  "We are Prophet Kristy and Morwen of AFW," the two greeters said
in unison--then they broke off to stare at each other again.  But
for once, they did not mind taking the words off of each other's
minds. They did not mind at all.

  The men extended hands.  "I am General Wedge Antilles of the New
Republic Starfighter Command," said the smaller man.  "This is
Colonel Tycho Celchu."

  Hands were shaken all around.  Tycho put a small comlink to his
mouth and spoke quietly into it, and then the pilots led the way to
the _Pulsar Skate_ to meet the three women coming down it halfway.  
Kristy's heart skipped a beat--**I cannot believe this is
happening**--but she willed herself calm.  There were more important
things at stake than meeting several of her greatest heroes.

			*************************

  Half an hour later, all three vessels were under camo-nets, and
the small group were clustered around the dusty payphone in the gas
station.  The newcomers had taken turns to change into Terran
clothing in the attendant booth earlier, their flightsuits and ship
garb replacing those new clothings in the humongous suitcase the
greeters had had to drag.  They all had knapsacks that mostly looked
normal.  If no one took a look inside, that is.

  "We were in quite a bit of a fix, you understand," Kristy was
saying as Morwen dialed a number, "when we received your urgent
message that the hyperdrive of the _Skate_ had to undergo repairs.  
We had to change plans, so I decided to meet you two here as well,
and take you back to Idaho after break.  Originally, Morwen would be
greeting only the ladies here.  And we were worried it would throw
the timeline off seriously.  As it happens, apparently, not much
harm done, but--" she broke off, not wanting to even think about all
the things that could have gone wrong.  Thank TAWG for
PriceLine.com.

  "23647 Bowie Road," Morwen was saying said to the cab dispatcher,
and then proceeded to give detailed directions which she made sure
the woman took note of.  She did not mind irritating her.  The cab
drivers would be spooked enough, she figured.

  Indeed they were, when they found the small group they were
supposed to find where they were told to find them--five women, one
of them quite exotic looking with her long white hair, and two men,
in a dark, abandoned gas station.  Morwen and Kristy had no idea
what they thought--didn't even want to think about it, really.  
But, as Morwen exchanged smiles with Winter, Iella and Mirax in the
lead cab she had taken to provide directions, she realized she was
too happy to care.  For all their worries, for all their concern
about Quiara, she felt it would be all right.  With Wedge, Tycho,
and the three fab females added to all the Rogues and Wraiths all
over the planet, the best the New Republic had to offer were finally
on Terra.

  Kristy was, naturally enough, thinking along mostly the same
lines.

		************************

  The small flat Morwen called home was partly overcrowded with
seven adults in it.  The five elder people were trying not to gape
at many things they found in the den, with varying degrees of
success.

  Wedge was turning a toy X-Wing over and over in his hands, making
it draw swooping arcs in the air, an almost wistful smile on his
face.  He turned his head to see Kristy watching him.  "This is
almost beyond belief," he said, "I knew something of this sort was
going on, but I guess the whole magnitude had never hit me."  He let
his gaze wander over the Legos, the posters, the quotes and books
all over the place. "Your people have made such a..." he hesitated,
searching for the word.

  "Business?" Mirax supplied. "Cult?" Winter said with a half-smile.
"Whatever it is, it is large, and surprisingly well-organized,"
Iella remarked.

  "I think the word you're looking for is 'culture',"  Tycho
intercepted, as Morwen drifted in from the kitchen bearing a tray
with various drinks. "They've got an economics, they've got some
hierarchy they set themselvelves, they've got in-jokes..." His
additional insight, Morwen knew, came from browsing Kristy's AFW
archive for the past two hours.

  "I'm really sorry to interrupt this conversation, since I would
really love to discuss these with you at one point," she broke in
with a smile.  "I'd been wondering about how you'd view all this for
quite a while, actually.  But other things are of the essence at the
moment, simply because we have so much to catch up to..."  She
offered the next-to-last cup on the tray to Kristy, then sat down
with the last one herself.  "Quick briefing about what's been going
on," she started, and Kristy added, "and we'll put you in contact
with those you deem safe to contact at this point..."

  In the end, the briefing turned out to be not so quick.  And, in
light of the data coming from Piggy, the extraterrestrials thought
it would be best to keep their contact minimal.  Winter and Mirax
put their heads together, struggling a little because of Morwen's
Turkish keyboard--they had been briefed only for a standard US
QWERTY--and started the process of contacting Corran.