As they filed out of the briefing chamber, Elassar said, “I don’t know. I have a bad feeling about this one, a bad feeling.”
“Why?” Face asked. “When we were going into the briefing, you were as happy as a bantha on a mountain of blumfruit.”
“Runt sneezed.”
Face looked the younger pilot. “Why, yes he did. I forgot about that. Doomed the whole lot of us, did he?”
“No, this is serious. He sneezed right when the commander got to the point where the commander asked about flaws in the plan. That means there is such a flaw, and we didn’t notice it, and Runt will be in trouble then.”
“No, no, no.” Face shook his head. “That’s what it would have meant had it been an accidental sneeze. But it wasn’t. It was a deliberate sneeze.”
Elassar looked at him, his expression puzzled. “Why would he sneeze deliberately?”
Lara said, “He was clearing his chamber.”
“What chamber?”
Face leaned in, his expression conspiratorial. “We’re working on a secret weapon for desperate situations on our commando raids. Runt is strengthening his lungs, his sinus cavities.”
Lara said, “Before each mission in which we go into the field, we load Runt’s nose with plasteel ball bearings.”
“Then,” Face said, “if we’re captured and end up in the hands of just a couple of guards, Runt can take in a deep, deep breath and sneeze those ball bearings out at them.”
Lara nodded, her own expression earnest. “In secret tests, we’ve clocked the ball bearings erupting from his nose at just over five hundred klicks per hour. Definitely subsonic, but still fast enough to penetrate flesh and light stormtrooper armor.”
Elassar looked back and forth between them. “Hey, wait a minute. That would never work.” The two conspirators dissolved into laughter, and he continued, his voice petulant, “I was being serious. Can’t you be serious? Someone’s going to be in trouble.”
“You just summon us up some luck,” Face said. “We’re relying on you.”
Rostat Manr was good at his job. As a Sullustan, he was supposed to be adept at piloting, at navigating, but he knew that he and his fellow Sullustan ship handlers had gotten their reputation far more through hard work than through natural inclination.
Rostat had been rewarded for his hard work, too. For four years he’d flown Y-wings for the Rebel Alliance—now known as the New Republic. Less than a year ago, sick of war, certain that he’d done his duty for the cause he believed in, he accepted a position flying tugs for a civilian firm: Event Vistas, a cruise-vessel line. Only a few months ago, he’d been promoted to chief pilot aboard Nebula Queen, one of the line’s newest and most beautiful cruise vessels.
But now, he was in danger of losing all he had gained. The thought, as he stared out the viewport at the growing circle of color that was the planet Coruscant, made him sad.
He couldn’t tell anyone. They’d laugh at him. Then they’d demote him … at best.
For no one wanted to employ a pilot with Ewoks in his nose.
He could feel them dancing, hear the faint, tinny sounds of their music and singing as they made merry in his nostrils. All the digging he’d done had failed to dislodge them. He couldn’t think about anything but the Ewoks, and what it would take to rid himself of them.
All he had to do was crash Nebula Queen down upon Coruscant’s surface. Then everything would be all right. He smiled. Soon, soon.
As the cruise ship reached the point it should have maneuvered into high Coruscant orbit, Rostat kept her headed into the atmosphere. A carefully calculated approach, the precise speed and angle needed for her to breach the planetary atmosphere without igniting. He really needed for enough of the ship to be left to hit the planet’s surface, after all.
“Rostat?” That was his captain, a human female originally from Tatooine. Other humans described her as old and leathery, but Rostat didn’t have their perspective on human features. “What are you doing?”
Rostat looked at her, trying to mask his alarm. “You know, don’t you?”
“I know you’re out of your approach plane.”
“No. I mean, about my nose.”
She gave him a look that suggested she didn’t know. But she had to be shamming. She had to be in on it. Perhaps she’d even been the one who put the Ewoks up his nose.
Seized with a sudden fear of what she was, what she might do to him next, he drew his duty blaster and fired on her. It was point-blank range; he would have had to go to some effort to miss. His shot took her in the side and she fell over.
But it wasn’t a blaster shot. He looked curiously at his issue sidearm. It was set on kill, but a stun-level beam had emerged. Curiously, he flipped the switch between blast and stun, but no sound emerged. Perhaps the mechanism was broken.
No matter. She was unconscious, and she would stay that way long enough for the ship to crash. And relief would be his.
But the Nebula Queen’s control board now showed her altitude gaining, not dropping. He stared curiously at the numbers, then took the pilot’s controls again.
They didn’t respond. The cruise liner began climbing back up into her proper orbit. He ran a quick diagnostic. It indicated that the auxiliary bridge currently had control.
He brought up the ship’s intercom and called the auxiliary bridge. When the picture swam into focus, it showed that bridge’s control seat. In the command chair was another Sullustan, a very junior officer Rostat knew. “Nurm,” he said. “What are you doing?”
Nurm looked uncomfortable and glanced off-screen. “I’ve seized control of the ship,” he said.
“Return control to the main bridge,” Rostat said. His nose was really itching. The Ewoks had to be mounting a major celebration in there.
“No,” Nurm said.
“Give me control right now,” Rostat said.
“Make me,” Nurm said.
“However you want it. Your career is at an end.” Rostat switched off.
He waited for a moment, settling his temper, and then made a sudden motion, driving his finger into his nose as fast and deep as he could.
No good. The Ewoks got away, leaping up above his probing finger, as they always did. He sighed, took up his blaster, and headed aft.
Moments later, he charged into the auxiliary bridge with his blaster at the ready.
There was no one in the control chair. But there was motion to his right. He spun—
Too late. Nurm fired first, his stun blast washing across Rostat’s chest. Rostat felt his body go numb and watched with a detached sort of interest as the floor angled up and knocked at his head.
Then he knew only blackness.
Nurm looked anxiously at the fellow officer he’d just shot. “Will he be all right?”
The man to whom he spoke, a human in the uniform of a colonel, rose from behind the communications console. He moved over to Rostat’s body and prodded it with his toe. “He should be. If we can figure out what’s wrong with him.”
“I couldn’t believe it. You showed it to me, and I still can’t believe it. He wanted to crash us.”
“I don’t think he did. There’s something very wrong going on in his head, though. But you’ve saved him from scandal, or death, or both.”
“Why did you want me to shoot him? I’ve barely qualified with blaster pistols! I’m a civilian!”
The officer gave him an enigmatic smile. “It’s important. Believe it or not, the fact that you shot him instead of me may save additional lives. Just remember the story as I’ve given it to you.”
He brought out his comlink to summon members of ship’s security to take Rostat into custody, then transmitted a few words, a mission-accomplished code, to his commander.
In an orbital station in high orbit above the far side of Coruscant, General Airen Cracken, head of New Republic Intelligence, received the officer’s signal. He responded with a few words of congratulation and signed off. He’d get the full report and offer
more appropriate words of praise later.
He returned to the ancient, scarred desk that served him as a reminder of his many campaigns and years of service, and felt the first stirrings of relief. Suddenly, a picture once made up of shadows and inexplicable shapes was beginning to assume a form he could understand.
On his personal terminal, he called up a communications file, a full holo, and advanced it to a mark he’d placed earlier.
Wedge Antilles’s face and upper body appeared at one-third scale just above Cracken’s desk. The pilot seemed to be seated behind a desk of his own, and there was nothing but white bulkhead wall behind him.
“Now that the Warlord has persuaded the New Republic to institute measures that can be used as precedents when dealing with future incidents, his next step must inevitably be to make a breach between the New Republic and one of the member species that has contributed significantly to our success.
“Logic suggests that the Mon Calamari would be the best choice, since without their engineering expertise and their heavy cruisers we would have had a much harder time of this war than we’ve had. But we suspect that this brainwashing treatment may be confined for now to mammalian and near-mammalian species—it would be much, much harder to devise a treatment that was equally functional across the wide range of all sapient species types. So our prediction is that it won’t be Mon Calamari or Verpines at this time.
“Our best guess is that the next attack will come from Sullustans or Bothans. And we have some ideas about that.” Wedge typed something into the datapad before him; Cracken supposed that he was consulting notes.
“Gotals are known as expert hunters. And for the last several years, Twi’leks, who have traditionally been thought of by Imperial humans as traders, and not particularly bold beings in general, have been trying to impress on human cultures the importance of their warrior tradition. We think it’s significant that the Twi’lek and Gotal disasters have involved single warriors wreaking havoc. In our opinion, the assaults to come will correspond in some way to popular stereotypes and misconceptions about the species whose members initiate them. If the next attack is Bothan, it will involve computer slicing—such as, perhaps, falsified data transmissions that cause disasters. If the next attack is Sullustan, it’s likely to involve a piloting or navigating mishap costing hundreds or thousands of lives. Either way, if it is remotely possible, it’s important that the agents of these attacks be taken alive. Our hope is that they are under compulsion to do what they’re doing, and that the brainwashing technique leaves some consistent physiological evidence that New Republic medics can detect.”
Antilles shut his datapad. His gaze, unsettlingly enough, seemed to seek out Cracken’s. “That’s the best we have to offer, General. But if our predictions come anywhere close to the reality of the next set of mystery terrorist activities, you can rely on it being an attempt by Zsinj to create more chaos within the New Republic, and you can head off the damage his effort might otherwise cause.
“Thank you for your time, General. Antilles out.” The hologram of Wedge faded.
Cracken sat motionless for long moments. The first time he’d heard this transmission, he’d shaken his head and wished, once again, that flyboys would just keep their attention on their cockpits and out of Intelligence affairs. The second time, after Cracken had reviewed the evidence on the Twi’lek and Gotal assaults, it had made a frightening kind of sense … and Cracken had begun devoting resources to an investigation based on the possibility that the Antilles theory was correct.
Now, Cracken wished that one flyboy, Wedge Antilles, would pay less attention to his cockpit and devote some more of his thinking to Intelligence affairs.
Perhaps he could be lured out of Starfighter Command and over to Intelligence.
Cracken made an exasperated noise and shut down his terminal. No, not in this lifetime.
He turned his attention to the ongoing search for evidence of an upcoming Bothan code-slicing effort that would end in disaster.
Face Loran woke to the sound of passerby conversation out in the corridor. He stretched, enjoying the luxury that was to be his—a few minutes of lazy rest before his alarm went off.
Then he glanced at the chrono beside his bed. The time was half an hour after his alarm should have awakened him. He hadn’t set it.
He swore and threw his sheets off. He had just enough time to clean up and dress before mission briefing, if he hurried.
A portion of his terminal’s screen blinked at him—sign of new mail, not yet reviewed. He typed in a command to transfer it all to Vape, his astromech—he’d read it when nothing else was going on during the Kidriff mission.
• • •
The launch bay assigned to the Rogues and Wraiths hummed—not just with activity, but with the bone-cutting whine of X-wing repulsorlift engines being tested as pilots went through their prelaunch checklists. And it was cold, the launch door opened to space, only the magnetic-containment field keeping the atmosphere safely within … and magcon fields did an inadequate job of retaining heat.
Wedge watched the activity, looking for undue stress or worry on the part of his pilots.
Gavin Darklighter. The young Rogue would be flying without a wingmate. He’d been sobered by Tal’dira’s death, and still looked unusually serious, but showed no sign of distraction.
Corran Horn. It had been only days since he’d killed a squadmate, and the speculation that Tal’dira had been brainwashed, not a traitor, and therefore theoretically possible to save, had to be eating at him. He showed no sign of it, his real emotions safely hidden behind the mask of professional civility that CorSec and other police personnel wore when dealing with strangers.
Tyria Sarkin. She’d also been forced to kill a fellow pilot. She made no secret of her distress, and even now, as she donned her helmet and climbed into her X-wing cockpit, there was a sad look to her eyes. But, unlike Horn, she hadn’t had to kill a squadmate, a friend. And she hadn’t been as isolated as Horn; Kell had been there for her. Kell had even persuaded her to talk to Wes Janson, the man who had been obliged, many years before, to kill Kell’s own father under not dissimilar circumstances. Janson had said it had helped her. Though Tyria wore her emotions very close to the surface, Wedge felt he had little to worry about with her.
Dia Passik. She would not be flying today; the decision handed down by the Provisional Council made it impossible for her to come along. But it didn’t prevent her from participating in other ways; she was present, out of uniform, moving from starfighter to starfighter, offering a recommendation here, a wish for good luck there. And, when she thought no one was looking, a kiss for Face.
Elassar Targon. The Devaronian pilot was busily sticking figurines made of hard-baked bread on various portions of Runt’s X-wing’s hull while the Thakwaash pilot ineffectually tried to shoo him away. More charms. Wedge sighed.
“You can’t just stay here and avoid it,” Janson said.
Wedge lookechat the Wraiths’s XO. “Come again?”
“You can’t just hang around here, Commander. You have to get to the Falsehood and face your mistake.”
“What mistake is that?”
Janson grinned. “Well, of course, you’re taking Han Solo’s place in piloting the Falsehood because he really can’t keep on relinquishing command of the fleet for joyrides.”
“Correct. No mistake I can see so far. I have more experience with Corellian freighters than anyone on Mon Remonda, excepting Han Solo.”
“And you asked him if Chewbacca would be interested in coming along as copilot and mechanic. He has all that experience keeping disintegrating junk together as it flies.”
“Correct so far.”
“And the general said, sure, Chewie would be happy to come along.”
“You’re three for three.”
“Wedge, you don’t speak Wookiee.”
“I—oh, Sithspit.” Wedge felt some color rising into his face. Janson was right: In all the mission planning th
ey’d done, he’d failed to remember that he wouldn’t be able to understand anything his copilot said, though Chewbacca could certainly understand Basic.
Janson just stood there, his expression merry.
Wedge sighed. “Check with Squeaky and Emtrey. I can’t issue orders for them to go, but if either is willing to volunteer, I’d appreciate it. Preferably Squeaky.” Though 3PO units normally had protocol skills as part of their programming, including diplomacy and instantaneous translation of a staggering number of languages, Emtrey’s programming was optimized for military functions; Squeaky’s was better suited to this mission.
“Will do.”
“You haven’t mentioned this to the pilots?”
“Well, yes, I sort of blurted it out when it occurred to me.”
“And what did they say?”
“They put down bets on what you’d do. So then I had to go to all the other pilots so they could get their own bets down.”
“Who won?”
“Tyria Sarkin. She said you’d say ‘Sithspit.’ ”
“You know, you’ve finally earned my gravest revenge.”
“You don’t ever take revenge. That’s beneath Wedge Antilles, Hero of the New Republic.”
Wedge gave him a smile, one full of teeth, and Janson’s own grin faltered. Wedge said, “Dismissed.”
Kell took point, Elassar tucked in behind and beside him as wingman, and led his TIE interceptor unit in toward Kidriff Five. The other wingpair, Janson and Shalla, stayed off to their starboard at the distance prescribed by Imperial regulations.
The world called Kidriff Five gradually grew in their viewports. The planet, at least the hemisphere they could see, seemed to be dominated by three colors: blue for seas and rusty red for vegetation, and a lesser amount of gray-white where the planet’s greatest cities lay.
Comm traffic also increased as they neared the planet. First was an automated signal directing them into one of the preapproved approach vectors. As soon as that signal arrived, Kell transmitted a tight-beam signal back to the Falsehood indicating where they could expect first comm contact.
As they entered the approach vector, they could see, far ahead of them, tiny lights—at the distances shown on their sensors, these had to be massive cargo vessels approaching the planet.
Star Wars: X-Wing VII: Solo Command Page 18
