X-wing_ Iron Fist Part 8

"I would have fired a proton torpedo..."

"The Imperial fliers were already behind you, Lussatte."

Lara saw Lussatte take a deep breath. "Yes, Captain. Let me explain. I figure I can't outfly the Imps. I figure that if I make a rapid deceleration, they'll make an even more rapid one, because they're better fliers in more maneuverable craft. But if I drop a torp about a city block up, that gives me a smoke cloud to fly through and a few moments where they can't see me. If I have the impact site visualized well enough, I can risk a turn down a side street, throw them off, maybe get turned around so I can get them under my guns before they're on me again."

Captain Sormic paused, then gave her a brief nod.

"Pay attention to what she just said, cla.s.s. It would give her a one-in-four, maybe one-in-two chance of surviving the next ten seconds and perhaps bagging one of the TIE fighters. Which is a much better chance than she had following Deadstick Notsil here. Dismissed."

Pilot candidates rose from the cla.s.sroom seats; others climbed from the simulators. Lara didn't rise; Captain Sormic still stood outside her simulator, blocking her exit.

He turned back to face her, and his expression was suddenly sympathetic.

He dropped his voice nearly to a whisper.

"Candidate Notsil, you earn great scores in astronautics and communications. Just say the word and I'll transfer you over to officer training in one of those divisions. You have a tremendous career ahead of you as a technical specialist on a capital s.h.i.+p's bridge."

"No, sir. I'm going to be a pilot."

" It's not as though you'll be was.h.i.+ng out. It's just a transfer. And you'll be a real a.s.set to the Alliance there."

"No, sir. I'm going to be a pilot."

His face hardened. "Then I have one piece of advice for you."

"Yes, sir?"

"You think about Candidate Lussatte and anyone else you might have made friends with. You think about how you're going to feel if you get them killed for real. Trust me, the kind of pilot you're shaping into, it's going to happen. And that's not the worst thing that could happen to you.

The worst thing it would be for you to survive a bad decision that kills everybody you care about." He turned away and followed the last departing pilot candidates from the room.

Lara sagged into the simulator seat. Only part of her dejection was simulated. It felt bad to be considered such a I screwup when she was capable of doing so much better.

She shouldn't even care what these Rebels thought; they were her enemies.

But her fellow candidates had such naive enthusiasm, such a light of life within them, that it was growing increasingly hard not to like them.

She felt a little tickle at the back of her neck. She turned to look through the simulator's rear viewport.

At the back of the cla.s.sroom, a man in an Alliance uniform was turning away, heading toward the room's rear exit. From his height and build, she recognized him as Colonel Repness.

When had he come into the cla.s.sroom? Had he been watching her in the moments after her exchange with Captain Sormic? She watched until he was gone, until she was alone in t the room.

She checked her chrono. There were no cla.s.ses scheduled in this room for an hour. She pulled up the instrument panel before her and did a little bit of deft rewiring, a bit of electronic trickery at which she was becoming quite adept. Then she clicked the panel back into place and manually pulled the canopy back down.

When she hit the b.u.t.ton that, on a real X-wing, would initiate an emergency restart, the simulator came back online. But now it would not transmit its results and recordings to the training facility's central computers. Whatever she accomplished here would remain her secret.

The world with the ruined city came into view again, and once more she was surrounded by a squadron of X-wings.

5.

Shalla tried to interpret every sway, every course change taken by the skimmer in whose enclosed bed she rode.

Eventually the vehicle had to return to a motor pool or other vehicle hangar. Eventually she'd be able to begin her portion of the mission... a portion she had to accomplish alone.

The vehicle went through a protracted right turn, then slowed and settled to the ground with an unmusical metallic clang. Shalla raised her blaster rifle to cover the door. Some stormtroopers were thorough and efficient enough to police their vehicles; others weren't.

Hers apparently fell in the latter category. The door remained resolutely closed. Then the lights went out.

She heard, from outside the skimmer, a man's laughter. She tensed. But the laughter was the type that came in response to a joke, not malicious laughter directed at a trapped enemy.

When she heard the heavy footsteps of stormtrooper compos-ite armor falling on duracrete, she relaxed.

She gave it another minute. She wanted the stormtroopers to be well away from the skimmer, but couldn't afford them too much time to realize that something was wrong. Then she rose, used her glow rod to find the door switch, and pressed the switch.

Nothing, not even a beep. It had been deactivated with the rest of the power to the skiminer's enclosure. She swore to herself, but it was only a minor inconvenience.

She switched off her helmet comlink. She took off her storm-trooper helmet and spent a couple of minutes carefully extracting the comm gear inside it, then detached the miniature power pack from the gear. It took another couple of minutes to remove the door-switch cover and wire the power pack into it. Then she put the now comm-free helmet on again and took up her rifle.

This time, the door opened smartly. Outside was the slab-like side of an identical skimmer just barely far enough away to let this skimmer's door descend as a ramp. When Shalla peered out, to the right she saw another row of skimmers of various types, some small and sporty, and the motor-pool wall beyond; to her left was open duracrete and then closed hangar-style doors of the motor-pool building.

Voices reached her; she couldn't make out the words, but they were male, two or three at least, raised in laughter and amused comment. They came from the rear of the motor-pool building. She thought she also heard a man's voice, in conspicuous speech, from the front.

So far, so good. She stepped out, alert to trouble, and hit the b.u.t.ton to close the door again. But the ramp raised only halfway up, then made a whining noise and stopped. It slowly began to sag back toward the duracrete floor.

She got under it and lifted. The power pack from her helmet was obviously not up to powering door machinery. By sheer strength she got the door lifted back into place. Though it did not lock, it fit snugly and would look normal to casual inspection.

Now, three problems to solve: two groups of Imperial workers or stormtroopers, plus whatever security was installed within the motor-pool building. She looked around for the places, often at corners and on the metal beams supporting the curved ceiling, where sensors tended to be set up.

Nothing. She breathed a sigh of relief. Skimmers weren't valuable enough to this base to require constant surveillance.

One problem down.

She walked forward, toward the source of the droning speech, and wished she had Tyria's apt.i.tude for near-silent movement.

The Wraiths kept themselves flat against the exterior wall of the hangar, deep in the darkest shadow cast by the building.

Wedge, one man back from the building's front corner, suppressed a snort.

The glossy white stormtrooper armor they were wearing practically glowed in the dark. Even in deep shadow they would be impossible to miss if a pa.s.serby glanced in their direction. Still, old habits of stealth died hard, and Wedge didn't want them to die at all.

Janson, ahead of him, helmet off, turned back and held up two fingers, then shook his head. Two guards on the front of the building, and they weren't going to be easy pickings. Wedge traded places with him and took off his own helmet, luxuriated for a moment in the sensation of air moving once again on his face, and hazarded a peek.

The front of the hangar was well lit by two overhead sources of light, both attached to the building's front wall. The center of the wall was dominated by a large sliding door in two sections; one section would slide right, the other left. The duracrete leading up to the door was decorated with many thin scorch marks, sign of numberless too-hasty departures by TIE fighters shooting out of the hangar and angling immediately for the sky. That suggested the pilots on-base considered themselves hotshots and had a commander who encouraged such behavior, also not a good thing for the Wraiths.

On either side of the door, perhaps twenty meters apart, were guards in stormtrooper armor. Their stances were angled in toward the door, and each had the other plus most of the front of the building in sight. They might have been chatting over a private channel on their helmet cornlinks, but otherwise they were very much on duty.

Wedge dismissed the simplest of tactics for such situations, the make-a-noise-and-one-of-them-will-come gambit. Guards like these, professionally on duty even when out of sight of their officers and fellows, would certainly investigate, but first they'd call in the anomaly. If the investigating guard didn't report back continuously to his fellow, the other one would call that fact in, too. Within moments the place would be swarming with stormtroopers. Wedge and the Wraiths needed some considerable uninterrupted time with the vehicles inside-perhaps as much as half an hour.

There was another door on the building front, immediately left of the leftmost guard, but it was securely shut and looked like an armored door-quite defensible if someone inside wanted to make a stand of it.

Wedge switched places with Janson again and let the man act as guard. In a whisper, he explained the situation to the others and asked, "Ideas?"

Castin said, "I might be able to slice into the base's main computer and have them relieved of duty; we just march two of us in and dismiss them or blast them."

Wedge considered it.

"That could work, but you'd have to maintain the computer breach or execute another one just a few minutes later when we sort out our escape vector."

"True."

Dia said, "I vote we wait until we can be sure there's no cross traffic nearby and no one observing them..."

"Which means waiting until we also know they're not in communication with someone else over their headsets," Kell said. "Demand just step out and shoot them. Two shooters, no waiting. Run out, grab them and haul them back beside the building, subst.i.tute a couple of us for them. Then take as long as we need to get their access keys and codes and go in."

Wedge shook his head. "Sounds too simple." Then he reconsidered. "On the other hand, that's probably a virtue. All right, we'll do it that way.

But first, Runt, can you find out whether those two are broadcasting?

Search nonstandard frequencies in the Imperial ranges and look for low-powered signals; if they're just chatting, they're not going to be on the usual bands."

Runt nodded and, from a belt pouch, brought out the field dispatcher's comlink that was among the latest toys the New Republic had given him when he volunteered to be the squadron's new communications specialist.

The item looked like a slightly bulkier datapad. It had nowhere near the range of features of the field communications unit their former comm specialist, Jasmin Ackbar, used to carry, but it was the biggest comm unit they could carry inconspicuously while in stormtrooper armor.

Runt tapped through a series of functions, grew impatient with the device, and traded places with Wes. There, he could set the device on the ground and protrude its nose just beyond the building corner. Finally he nodded. "We have it," he whispered back at the others. "Their signal sounds like dispatch information, but it is confusing. Set your coralinks to oh-three-oh-seven-four if you want to hear."

Wedge did so, and immediately picked up the two guards' traffic.

One of them, his voice a mellow ba.s.s, said, "Light a.s.sault vehicle twelve to block alpha two."

The other, whose hoa.r.s.e voice probably started in the baritone range, replied, "TIE four to block delta sixteen."

"That's outside your range."

"It is not."

"So you're crossing through the plasma wall and exploding? Nice of you to concede a piece that way."

"Uh... make that TIE four to block delta twelve."

"Heavy eraplacement one fires on TIE four. Scratch TIE four."

"d.a.m.n. Target-paint heavy emplacement one."

Wedge switched off the channel and looked at the others.

"Anyone recognize that traffic ?"

Dia nodded. Wedge imagined that she had to be quite uncomfortable with her brain tails stuffed up in her stormtrooper helmet, but she hadn't made a noise of complaint. She said, "It's called Quadrant. It's a game out of the Imperial Academy. An old game, but it has recently become all the rage."

Wedge asked, "Runt, is there a data transmission accompanying that vocal signal?" Runt shook his head.

Wedge snorted. "They're playing just by visualization.

Wonderful. We get the hangar guarded by intellectuals. All right, here's how we play our game. Wes, Donos, you're our shooters. Wes, march around to the far front corner and situate yourself. We're not going to use a comlink signal - it might be picked up. We'll time it. You two set your blasters to stun. Sync your chronos and fire at three minutes from sync... unless you hear or see anything anomalous, in which case you duck under cover and try again at six minutes. If no opportunity presents itself by six minutes, scrub the mission and get back here. Tainer, you go with Wes to haul off the other guard; Phanan, you take the place of the other guard. Runt, at this end you'll haul off the unconscious guard; Face, you'll take his place."

It was a long three minutes. Halfway through it, a flatbed skimmer hauling two stormtroopers and some sort of laser artillery piece cruised by the hangar. Wedge and the others flattened themselves against the building wall, but the skimmer's occupants didn't even glance in their direction.

Wedge saw Donos keeping a close eye on his chrono. At twenty seconds of three minutes, Donos pulled his helmet off. At fifteen seconds, he checked his blaster rifle to make sure it was switched to stun and ready to fire. At ten seconds, he peeked around the corner, and did so again at five seconds. Then, precisely on cue, he stepped around the corner.

The sound of the stun blast was impossibly loud; Wedge was sure it could be heard off in the city of Hullis. Wedge stayed flat against the wall while Runt and Face ran past him. Only then did he peek around the corner, his own blaster ready in case his squadmates needed cover.

Runt almost tripped as he skidded to a halt over the unconscious form of his target; he picked the man up with inhuman ease, slung him over his shoulder, and came charging back toward Wedge. Beyond him, Kell arrived from the far corner, repeated his action with less speed and less pure strength, but was still swift. He arrived mere seconds behind Runt, his un-conscious cargo bouncing painfully across his shoulder.

Now there were just two guards in front of the hangar, angled toward one another, at attention. Wedge checked his chrono. Fifteen seconds had pa.s.sed, and the world was, cosmetically at least, the same as it had been at the start of those brief seconds.

"Castin," he said.

"I'm way ahead of you," his computer and security expert informed him.

"Helmets off, no traffic from their control, I'm checking now for their orders and pa.s.scards. No pa.s.scards. That means a transmitted or spoken pa.s.sword. Let's hope it's transmitted. Hmm..."

Shalla stayed in a crouch behind a self-powered tool cart. Not four steps away was the doorway into the motor-pool office. Two stormtroopers-she suspected they were the ones who'd been in charge of the vehicle she'd ridden in - were within, one seated, both with helmets off. One, tall and fair-skinned, stood by the door, holding a gla.s.s with blue liquid on the inside and condensation on the outside. The other, apparently of average height and with skin as dark as Shalla's, was seated at the main terminal, dictating in a bored tone. Shalla could catch most of his words. It sounded like a routine report, which made him the ranking officer.

"... without struggle. No charges expended. Net expenditure: skimmer fuel, total of seventy-eight klicks." The other said something Shalla didn't catch. The seated man nodded, then continued, "On return, about half a klick from base, stopped to offer aid to patrol of Sergeant-what was his name?"

The other one shrugged.

"I'll put a placeholder there for now. Sergeant Placeholder, whose skimmer had broken down; gave him, his squadron, and his prisoners, including Lieutenant Cothron, transportation to base. Additional expenditure: fuel of hauling ma.s.s of five extra prisoners and ten additional stormtroopers..."

"Eleven," said the other man.

"Ten." The seated man thought about it. "Well, you were paying attention and I wasn't. Eleven additional stormtroopers, distance of two kilometers." He frowned, then shook his head. "End of report. Let me go through and edit out redundancies and program that placeholder to fetch the name of that squad leader, and we're done for the night." But he didn't reach for the keyboard yet.

"You're sure about the eleven thing."

"I'm sure."

Shalla stood and walked, as confidently as though she were the base commander, to the door. She shouldered aside the man standing there and tapped the door switch. The office door dropped into place with the disconcerting suddenness of Imperial engineering.

Both men looked at her. The man she'd shoved aside said, "You know, it's been a long time since I taught a neff-herder like you some manners."