Star Wars: X-Wing VI: Iron Fist

by Aaron Allston

  She opened the door.

  Two Rebel pilots stood outside, both in pilot’s jumpsuits topped with transparent slickers more suited to Coruscant’s frequent thunderstorms. One had saturnine features and a prosthetic faceplate over the upper left half of his face, a red glow where his left eye would have been. The other would have been startlingly handsome, with luxuriant dark hair framing intelligent, active eyes and features suited to raising heart rates, but his face was marred by a puckered scar—a blaster graze, she guessed—running from his left cheek to his right forehead.

  She knew the one with the faceplate, and it was he who spoke first. “Lara Notsil.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Yes.” She looked beyond them, to the pedestrian traffic in the tenement hallway. Though her tiny quarters were on the fortieth floor of a building, this hallway was part of a tube access allowing people to walk across kilometers of Coruscant at this altitude, and traffic was always heavy. Her hallway was a place of thefts and assaults, but also a way for her to lose herself quickly in a crowd, which is why she’d chosen it.

  She returned her attention to her visitors. “It’s Lieutenant Phanan, isn’t it? From the hospital on Borleias? Please, come in before someone sticks a vibroblade in you.” She backed away and allowed them to enter, then shut the door against the ceaseless stream of humanity outside.

  “Actually, it’s just Flight Officer Phanan,” her visitor said. “The smart one here is the lieutenant, Garik Loran.”

  She froze in mid-handshake and gave the other pilot a closer look. It was him, and it embarrassed her, the way she suddenly felt light-headed. “The Face? You’re still alive?”

  Face gave her a smile. She knew it was an actor’s smile, carefully rehearsed to suggest amusement, comradeship, and attraction, but despite the fact it did not fool her, she was still half washed away by the emotions it caused. She felt as though she’d just been invited into his intimate acquaintance. Her light-headedness worse than ever, she sat heavily at her terminal chair.

  “That’s me,” Face said. “I get that a lot. No, the story of my death was a sort of propaganda thing cooked up by the Empire to make people think the Rebel Alliance was full of evil people who’d kill a child actor. I’m a pilot these days.”

  “Obviously.” She struggled to bring herself under control. Remember, she thought. You’re Lara Notsil now. Farm girl from Aldivy. Former prisoner of Admiral Trigit. That’s what they’re here for, more debriefing on Trigit. Phanan had been there, one of the Rebels shooting at Implacable—shooting at me. “Please, sit down. I’m sorry about the mess—it’s hard to keep anything clean here. How did you find me?”

  Phanan sat on the edge of the bed. Face took the only other chair. Phanan said, “Anyplace you can walk or sit without sticking to everything is very hygienic by low-level Coruscant standards. Believe me, we know. As for finding you—we asked around New Republic Intelligence. They said you’d been discharged and had declined transportation back to your homeworld. We ran a search on the worldnet looking for your name and recent employment application. You’re working as an information processor for a shipping concern?”

  “Yes. It pays”—she gestured at the tidy squalor around her—“for all this.”

  Face said, “How would you like a better job and the chance to live in better conditions?”

  “I’d like that. What would I have to do?”

  “Go through New Republic pilot training. The full academy course.”

  No, thanks. How would you like to get me a ticket to Warlord Zsinj’s fleet instead? But she had to play her role. “That would be … nice. But it can’t happen.”

  Face gave her another smile, this one full of confidence. “Why not?”

  Gara injected a note of wistfulness into her voice. “When I was back on the farm on Aldivy, that’s something I thought about every day. Learning to fly. I got to be pretty good on the farm’s skimmers. I studied things like voice and Basic to sound less like a farm girl.”

  “It shows,” Face said. “Your Aldivian accent is almost gone.”

  If you knew that I was born and reared less than a hundred klicks from here, you’d appreciate how much work it takes to speak with the barest trace of that accent, Gara thought. “But then, when the Implacable came, destroyed New Oldtown, and took me away, I sort of lost interest. All I wanted to do was see the Implacable destroyed. And then when Admiral Trigit chose me for his”—she broke eye contact, put an extra rasp into her voice, let a tear fall—“mistress, all I wanted was for him to die.

  “You did that. You killed him. Your squadron and the other ones. Thank you.” She modulated her voice to sound as though she were feigning nonchalance and concealing pain. “But I guess I don’t have anything left. Any ambitions.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Besides, since I’ve been … associated with Admiral Trigit, the New Republic wouldn’t trust me.” She shrugged fatalistically.

  “They cleared you. You were never charged with any crime.”

  She nodded. And what work it had been, all those weeks ago, to generate the Lara Notsil identity, careful planning ahead just in case her employment with Trigit didn’t work out. Hooking her new identity to a real event, Trigit’s punitive bombardment of a farm community that had refused to provision him. Finding and modifying the pitiful few records concerning a farm girl whose body was now a carbonized mass of powder in a charred Aldivian grainfield, replacing key bits of data with Gara’s picture, Gara’s fingerprints, Gara’s cellular coding. Spinning a tale of secret chambers on the Implacable—so secret other Implacable survivors could plausibly not have known about her—where Trigit imprisoned his “unwilling mistress” and maintained her on a diet of glitterstim and other drugs.

  They’d accepted it, the whole package, especially eager for the scandalous details of her captivity and Trigit’s evil … lies she’d been happy to offer out of her anger at the man. Trigit had been willing to sacrifice his crew to death when he didn’t have to, a crew that had been efficient and loyal.

  But this whole Lara Notsil identity had only one purpose, to get her out of New Republic hands and back to Imperial service—or service that would someday be acknowledged as Imperial.

  She shook her head. “I don’t think I can help you.” Then she frowned. “Wait. You said ‘trade favors.’ What would I do for you?”

  Phanan leaned forward. “Ah. That’s the tricky bit. We’d want you to struggle a bit with your pilot training. Skirt along at the bottom of your class, sometimes dipping just under acceptable skill, sometimes skimming along just above. Sort of terrain-following flying, if you get my drift.”

  “Why? Why not do the best I can?”

  Phanan said, “Because we think someone will come to you and offer to help train you, improve your scores … and then want to use your pilot’s skills in a deal. Some sort of illegal operation.”

  “You’re setting this person up. I would be bait.”

  Face nodded. “He’s the sort of man who uses people, Lara. Uses them like Admiral Trigit. We thought, maybe, you’d be able to take out on him the vengeance you’d been saving for Trigit.”

  She shook her head. “It wouldn’t be the same, and I wouldn’t—”

  And then the idea hit her, detonating in her mind like a proton torpedo. A plan, a simple one, one that would increase her worth in the eyes of Warlord Zsinj or any Imperial officer to whom she wanted to sell her services. The idea made her as dizzy as her long-faded teenage longing for an actor named Garik Loran had.

  “Lara?” Face asked. “Are you all right?”

  She began to cry. A useful talent, that, being able to cry on cue; her teachers at Imperial Intelligence had been delighted by it. “I can’t do it,” she said. “I’ll lose everything.”

  Phanan leaned forward and took her hands. “What will you lose? What could you lose?”

  “Everyone at home is dead. All I have left are people I’ve met since I was rescued. I was hop
ing for a career in the military, some civilian post. If I do what you say, if I go through pilot’s training, I won’t be able to help myself—it’ll wake up that old wish and the only thing I’ll want is to be a pilot. And then if I set this man up and ruin him, everyone everywhere will say, ‘That’s Lara Notsil. The traitor.’ No one will want me. Everyone will distrust me.”

  “That’s not true,” Phanan said. But Gara saw Face lean back, considering her words, and she knew he recognized the truth of them.

  “It is true,” she said. “What commander would take me on as a pilot? Everyone will think I’m spying on them, and friends of this person you want me to burn down will do what it takes to ruin me. I’ll have terrible scores from doing exactly what you wanted me to do, so the civilian piloting services won’t have anything to do with me.” She stared between them, defiant, allowing tears to continue streaming down her face. “You know it’s true. And you can’t speak for any squadron except your own, and you know Wedge Antilles would never take me on after I’d done what you asked.”

  Face still looked troubled. “We don’t know that.”

  “But you can’t speak for him.”

  “No, we can’t.”

  “So you two want me to trade my entire future for a little piloting training. Thanks for the offer. There’s the door.”

  “Wait.” There was no artifice in Face’s voice or manner now. “What if we could guarantee you a piloting station? Somewhere you’d be accepted for your skills, where the consequences of this operation play in your favor instead of against you?”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t trust that the commander will be as fair as you think. I just don’t believe it.”

  “What if it were Wedge Antilles?”

  She caught her breath. Then: “You just said you can’t speak for him.”

  “Not yet. I haven’t put any details of this in front of him. But I will. And if he says yes?”

  She paused. She already knew her answer, but they had to think she was considering it. Finally, she said, “If it were Wedge Antilles’s command, either Rogue Squadron or that new one, Wraith Squadron, yes, I’d do it.”

  “I’ll talk to him today.” Face rose and Phanan followed suit. “I’ll let you know as soon as I have an answer from him.”

  She gave him a brave little nod.

  And when they’d gone, she clamped both hands over her mouth, the better to hold in the whoops of victory that threatened to escape her.

  When they were a few steps from Lara Notsil’s door, Phanan said, “Commander Antilles is going to take you to pieces.”

  “I know.” Face shouldered his way through the thick stream of pedestrians.

  “You’ll be pulling punishment detail until you’re forty.”

  “Probably.”

  “When you put this idea in front of him, flames are going to come out of his mouth and burn you from head to foot.”

  “That’s true. But one thing makes it easier for me to take.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re going to be there burning with me.”

  Phanan grimaced. “You’re such a good friend.”

  Flight Officer Shalla Nelprin dove toward the ground—as far as the narrowing gaps between Coruscant’s endless sea of buildings would allow her to descend. She could see blurs in the viewports, blurs that had to be startled faces.

  The pair of TIE fighters on her tail pursued her with agility, matching her maneuver with little effort, still firing their linked lasers at her tail. She leveled off, juking left and right as much as the narrow confines would let her, and green laser blasts slammed into buildings on either side of her and into her reinforced rear shields.

  “I can’t shake them, Control,” she said. “They’re good.”

  The voice of Runt Ekwesh came back. “Shalla, why do you think Warlord Zsinj employs so many former Intelligence officers? Implacable, Night Caller, and more ships and officers we’re learning of—”

  Shalla’s snubfighter shuddered as another laser blast slammed into her stern shields and penetrated to reach her hull. She glanced at her diagnostics board. Minimal damage to hull, no indication of other problems. Yet. “Control, do you mind? I’m flying for my life here.”

  “It is only a simulator run. Your scores are not being recorded.”

  “Treat every simulator run like the real thing and stay alive longer. That’s what my daddy says.” She dropped down another ten meters to fly under, rather than through, a walkway connecting two skyscrapers. One TIE fighter mimicked her, the other rose and flew over the obstruction. “All right. First, they were available. Ysanne Isard, head of Intelligence, is killed a few months ago by Rogue Squadron. This gives every one of her subordinates a choice. Work for this council now running what’s left of the Empire, work for one of the warlords, go pirate, or go hide. Wait a second.”

  Below and ahead was another enclosed crosswalk; beyond it, immediately below the crosswalk’s level, two buildings widened so that there was scarcely any room between them. Shalla dove again, came up immediately beneath the walkway, and rotated ninety degrees, her wings now pointing skyward and groundward, to fit in the narrowing gap between buildings.

  As before, one TIE fighter went high and the other followed her closely. But the TIE-fighter profile was not as variable as that of an X-wing; because of its solar array wings, no matter how it was turned, the TIE fighter needed more than six meters of clearance in any direction.

  In this narrow gap, her pursuer didn’t have them. It hit the four-meter opening between buildings and the buildings sheared both wings off, top and bottom. The TIE fighter dropped, its ball-shaped cockpit bouncing between buildings on its way down until it detonated.

  A new voice—Shalla thought it was Kell Tainer’s—came across next. “Good flying, Nelprin. One to go.”

  “Thank you.” The gap between buildings widened. She rotated until she was horizontal again. “So, all of a sudden there are lots of Intelligence operatives and ships available. That’s the supply.

  “Demand is trickier. Zsinj’s records say he’s sort of a compulsive liar. So why hire people who are trained to see through those lies? My guess is that he doesn’t mind. He doesn’t lie to fool people—except his enemies, of course. He does it to entertain. To impress people with his brilliance.”

  The remaining TIE fighter resumed firing on her; lasers flashed past her strike foils to blow through building walls below, and her stern shields took more hits.

  Ahead and above was a crowd of high-altitude skimmers—aerial traffic following one of the posted routes. But these skimmers were all decorated with the colors of Coruscant police.

  “Hey, fair game.” Shalla rose into the cloud of skimmers, flashing just below most of them, using them as a screen.

  Her pursuer’s lasers hit skimmers all around her. Several detonated, raining shrapnel upon her.

  When a skimmer ahead of her blew up, she decelerated as hard as she could and was vibrated by her snubfighter’s shudder. Half on main engines and half on repulsorlift landing engines, she rose through the cloud of flame and debris—

  And as she cleared it she saw the other TIE fighter racing along ahead, not having anticipated her sudden deceleration. It was slowing now, preparing for one of the impossibly tight turns TIE fighters could manage.

  She bracketed the TIE fighter with her heads-up display. The brackets went almost instantly from yellow to red and she fired, sending a proton torpedo straight into the Imperial vehicle’s cockpit. It detonated, a brilliant flash of light and debris.

  Then Shalla’s view spun as she was hurled out of control. She saw a building side rushing toward her, frightened faces in the viewports—and then everything went black.

  The canopy opened over her, admitting light. Runt, Kell, and Tyria stood nearby, all of them wearing headsets. “What happened?” Shalla asked, complaint in her voice.

  Kell smiled. �
��You were hit by a skimmer. It was flying blind through that first explosion and slammed into you from the side.”

  Shalla hissed in vexation and climbed out. “They say the city is a dangerous place.”

  “Otherwise an excellent run,” Kell continued.

  “So,” Runt said, “the Intelligence operatives are available, and Zsinj doesn’t mind that they can see through some of his deceptions. What else?”

  Shalla gave the others a look. “Runt is pretty single-minded, isn’t he?”

  They laughed. Kell said, “No, more like multiple-minded. But any one of his minds might get very focused.”

  “I see.” She didn’t, but she figured she would eventually. She turned back to Runt. “Maybe it’s more than that Zsinj just doesn’t mind. Maybe he likes having an appreciative audience. Someone knowledgeable enough to understand what he’s doing and be impressed by it. He has to have a tremendous ego.”

  Runt frowned. It wasn’t a proper human frown, but his very mobile eyebrows came down over his large, expressive eyes to suggest concentration. “He likes to be appreciated.”

  “I think so.”

  “He would enjoy playing the hero. Hero of the Empire.”

  “Certainly. Why else make all these very public assaults on New Republic colonies and outposts? It’s not all for their strategic value. They’re not all valuable, and he could do more damage by being sneaky. It’s to show somebody that he’s a warrior. His audience, whoever that is.” She bent over, pressing her head to her knees, then straightened, arms high in the air, and began repeating the motion.

  Tyria sighed. “She’s exercising. We have a compulsive exerciser.”

  Shalla didn’t look up. “Just stretching. I get leg cramps when I’m in the cockpit too long.”

  Kell said, “Her sister is like that, too. Always in motion. Want to drive her completely insane? Tie her to a chair for an hour.”