X-wing_ Iron Fist Part 10

But no one seemed inclined to question a well-disciplined group of five stormtroopers running with purpose.

Up ahead, two squads of stormtroopers, more than twenty, turned onto the Wraiths' lane and headed toward them. "Stay alert," Face said. "If they address us, respond on the run. If they challenge us, open fire and run harder."

But a skimmer with an enclosed bed turned onto the same lane behind the dual squadron and accelerated into them, flattening some of the stormtroopers, knocking others hard out of the way. The skimmer accelerated toward the Wraiths. Runt said, "We think our ride has arrived."

The skimmer pulled up and swerved as it settled, placing its port and rear sides between the Wraiths and the nest of an-gry stormtroopers. The door was already half down when the skimmer touched the ground.

"Good work, Ten," Face said. "I'11 take gunner position. Everyone else in back." Face slid into the seat beside Shalla; the rest trotted into the bed.

Face heard one of them, Donos from his voice, trip, fall, and swear. He glanced at Sha!la. She shrugged. "I had to leave a couple of casualties back there," she half explained. A moment later, the first of the blaster shots from the pursuing stormtroopers. .h.i.t the vehicle's rear and side armor, and Donos came over the corem: "Go - go - go!"

They exited via the same gate by which they'd entered. This time, though, they didn't stop to get authorization or for the guards to open the gates. As they approached at full speed, Face raked the guardhouse with blaster fire, forcing the officer on duty to duck, preventing him from activating the magnetic locks, magnetic containment fields, repulsor-activated land mines, or other traps the Imperials routinely had laid out for vehicles approaching or departing a base in an unfriendly fas.h.i.+on.

They hit the spare metal gates, slamming them open and off their hinges, and roared up the road out of the base.

But a mere half klick away, around the first of the bends in the road and sheltered from sight by the very hill Wedge had earlier used for reconnaissance, Shalla set the skimmer down again. The Wraiths scrambled out. Shalla keyed a code into the keypad on the control panel and the skimmer rose once more, winging off into the night toward the distant lights of the city.

"What course is it taking?" Face asked.

Shalla shook her head. "I wrecked most of its higher processes when I destroyed the comm system. All I was able to do was give it a ballistic course toward the city."

"That should be enough. Let's get out of sight."

The Wraiths were in a ditch, helmets off, only the eyes and the tops of their heads showing, when the three pursuit skimmers flew by, following the skimmer's course.

A minute later, they were with Piggy at the site of the civilian skimmer that had brought them here. Captain Wanatte, still unconscious, was trussed up in back.

The Wraiths peeled out of their stormtrooper armor, leaving them in sweat-drenched street clothing appropriate to the world of Halmad. They quickly loaded all the armor components into a plastic crate in the back of the skimmer. Then they boarded.

"Back to the s.p.a.ceport," Face said. "Slowly. Sedately. As befits a bunch of tourists who've been off drinking and recreating all evening and are now too tired to twitch."

Shalla nodded. "Pretty close to an accurate description."

Hawkbat Base was situated on a large spherical rock deep in the asteroid belt of the Halmad system. Years before, it had been the Tonheld Mining Corporation's Site A3, tasked with bringing high-quality metals up from the depths of a large asteroid formed during the long-ago destruction of one of the Halmad system's outer planets.

The asteroid had a thick outer sh.e.l.l of stone and a center made up mostly of cooled nickel and iron. Tonheld Mining Corporation, all too efficient, had removed the majority of the useful metals, leaving only those that were trapped in veins and pock-ets within the stone sh.e.l.l. Then the company had dismantled its machinery and housing modules and departed, leaving the site deserted and cold for forty years.

Now, when approached by s.p.a.cecraft, it still seemed the same. Its thick stone sheath, still intact, was sufficient to block sensors from detecting the life-forms and vehicle emissions now within it.

Halfway down the main shaft, a side tunnel, once a staging area for the mining corporation, turned off at a ninety-degree angle, running parallel to the asteroid's surface.

This was now sealed off by a duracrete plug perforated only by large motor-driven doors at either end.

Beyond, inside, where the side shaft was broadest and tallest, was the hangar area where the Hawk-bats' vehicles rested. There were two TIE fighters and five TIE interceptors, and the biggest vessel on site, a Xiytiar-cla.s.s freighter named Sungra.s.s.

Among the least elegant of all cargo vessels serving in the galaxy, the Xiytiar-cla.s.s freighter consisted of a long blocky bow that was mostly cargo s.p.a.ce, an equally long connective spar in the middle, and a short blocky component that was mostly engines at the stern. Sungra.s.s didn't improve the vehicle line's reputation for stylishness; scarcely a centimeter of its once-gleaming surface was unmarked by sc.r.a.pes, sloppy paintwork, ion scoring from too-close pa.s.ses alongside other vessels, or old blaster burns.

But its hull was solid, its engines were recently rebuilt and in fine tune. Once it had belonged to an Imperial s.h.i.+pping corporation. It had been in dry dock in a repair hangar when the entire site was destroyed by elements of New Republic Intelligence. Its bow cracked, its superstructure buried under the wreckage of the hangar, it had been reported as destroyed by reconnaissance units of the Empire. Now, after a couple of seasons of repair, it flew again, its name changed, its history fabricated, its mission to support Wraith Squadron.

On its bridge, Wedge Antilles snorted. He supposed that was symbolic of the New Republic as a whole. Making use of the Empire's castoffs, getting a few extra years of functionality out of them, almost always making do with sc.r.a.ps and crumbs in a way that confounded the remnants of the Empire. Yet it was a far cry from the pretty vision of an Empire-free future that the New Republic still doggedly pursued. He wondered if that image, where everything was new and gleaming and free of any memories of the Empire, would ever come to pa.s.s.

He glanced over at the man in the captain's chair. Captain Valton seemed ideally suited to command of this s.h.i.+p. He, too, looked weathered and battered but still fit for many years of useful service. His long, tanned face was unmemorable, though his eyes were sharp, possessed of intelligence. Wedge thought that if they put him in a janitor's uniform he'd blend right in with the service personnel of any New Republic or Imperial station, and wondered if the Wraiths might someday make use of that fact. And, mercifully, he didn't apparently have a need to hear himself talk. He saw Wedge's side glance, looked over in case Wedge were trying to get his attention, and when he saw that was not the case, returned to the datapad on which he was calculating fuel-ma.s.s ratios, all without saying a word.

Wedge turned his attention to his Wraiths, visible through Sungra.s.s's forward viewports, hard at work painting the stolen interceptors. The one Tyria and Kell worked on was now decorated with a red spiderweb pattern, a design that was at once rakishly dangerous-looking and a little unsettling. Phanan and Face left the basic paint job of their interceptor unchanged but had added a ludicrous number of kill silhouettes to the hull - including a number of X-wing silhouettes to rival the genuine kills of Baron Fel, the Empire's greatest ace after Darth Vader.

Shalla and Donos were painting theirs with fake blaster scor-ings and had even painted the engine to look as though it were slightly askew, as if knocked out of alignment by enemy fire. Wedge wondered about the advisability of that; it would probably convince some enemies the interceptor was damaged, perhaps persuading some opportunistic pilots to finish it off when otherwise they might treat it with more caution.

He decided not to interfere. It was an experiment. They'd see how the enemies responded to their "damaged" interceptor.

His personal comlink crackled into life. "Commander."

"Yes, Runt."

"Narra returning. ETA fifteen minutes."

"Thank you. Please set up the conference module. Out."

He exited Sungra.s.s through its docking tube and pa.s.sed through the hangar, where the sharp smell of the paints scratched at his sinuses and the chatter of his pilots was so much more immediate. Good men and women in a brief respite from making war. He wished such respites were the norm.

Then, pa.s.sing their interceptor, he saw Tyria finish an-other line of red spiderwebs, set her brush down atop her paint can, and wrap her arms around Kell to kiss him.

Wedge stopped short, a rebuke on his lips, a reminder that public displays of affection were not appropriate... and then he turned away and kept walking.

Such a warning might have been appropriate for other units, but not elite squadrons under his command. There were no restrictions against relations.h.i.+ps between pilots, even when there was some disparity between their ranks, as was the case with Tyria and Kell. There were no regulations against demonstrations of affection in off-duty and most light-duty situations, such as this little painting exercise. They were doing no wrong.

Then why was he so annoyed? Why had he been ready to drop kitchen duty on either of them, had his warning been protested?

He pa.s.sed through the third set of motorized doors, lead-ing deeper into the shaft, into what Wraith Squadron called the Trench. It had been a squarish tunnel bored out of solid stone, a straight shaft notable only for its featurelessness. Now its two walls were lined with medium-sized locking cargo modules stacked three high and stretching for some distance down the shaft. Some had been outfitted as living quarters, some as refreshers, others as conference chambers or communications offices or storage lockers. Roll-away staircases gave pilots easy access to the upper tiers of modules.

Face had been the first to note that if you flew a toy X- wing down between the rows of modules, the shaft would look a little like one of the deadly surface trenches of the original Death Star. Then, a few days later, when returning from a scouting mission to the surface of Halmad, Wedge had discovered that some joker had painted the shaft's ceiling black, except for the lights, and had strung strings of miniature twinkling lights here and there, creating an illusion of star-filled sky.

Wedge had let the decoration stand. It was a bad idea to interfere with things his pilots did to make a gloomy place like this more inhabitable, or, so long as it didn't interfere with morale or efficiency, with things they did to make their lives happier.

Yet he'd been ready to do just that a few moments ago, and he grew increasingly annoyed with himself because he couldn't figure out why.

The main conference module was on the second tier of the left-hand bank of modules. He took the stairs up and found Runt still there, still sweeping bottles and wrappers from someone's impromptu meal into a bag.

The long-faced alien gave him a salute before finis.h.i.+ng up.

Wedge settled into a seat beside the main table. "Runt."

Runt straightened. His ponytail swayed.

"Sir."

"Do your minds ever confuse one another?"

The alien grinned. At least, that was how Wedge and the others had learned to interpret it when Runt pulled his lips back over his enormous teeth in an expression that looked more like a prelude to a biting attack.

"Yes, Commander. Often. If they were meant to be the same, and therefore easily comprehensible to one another, none of us would have more than one."

"Right... What do you do when one acts in a confusing manner and its answers don't really explain why?"

Runt sobered and thought about it for a moment, taking the opportunity to pick up one last piece of wrapping.

"We have to remember that there are many paths to every answer. The thought path. The emotion path. The memory path. The biology path - we cannot rule out hormones and natural cycles. And every problem might be made up of combinations of those four things."

"Good point." Wedge gave him a nod, his leave to depart.

And Runt might be right. He couldn't think of a logical reason to protest Tyria's show of affection. Nor had witnessing a kiss ever caused him emotional turmoil in the past. He ruled out biology; he was not irritable with fever, had experienced nothing to unsettle him.

That left emotion, and he already knew what emotion he'd felt.

Or did he? He'd recognized irritation. Had it masked something else? He thought back over the incident, Tyria's unthinking affection....

Jealousy.

He shook his head, trying to dismiss the thought. Nonsense.

There was nothing for him to be jealous of.

He'd never entertained any notions about Tyria. She was, to be sure, physically attractive, but she was a very junior officer under his command, and he preferred to steer clear of the extra complications a relations.h.i.+p like that might bring. Too, she was just not the type of woman he was drawn to; she was a little too unsure, too self-critical.

Nor had he felt any jealousy when it became obvious that Kell and Tyria had fallen in love. If any time were the time to be jealous, that would have been it. So it wasn't jealousy.

Except that was what he was feeling. A hard little knot of envy.

Maybe it was just the fact that he had no one of his own. Every so often, he would indulge himself and wonder about the man he would have been had his parents not died in the mishap that had destroyed their refueling station. Who he'd be had he not turned first to smuggling, then to piloting fighter craft for the Alliance and discovered a tremendous apt.i.tude for it. Had he not dedicated himself to a cause that must inevitably kill him. This other Wedge Antilles was probably safe in the Corellian system, owner of a chain of refueling stations, with personal wealth and a waistband measurement that expanded in relations.h.i.+p with one another, with a wife and who knows how many children. A happy man. That was the person Wedge was envious of.

Not that the real Wedge was unhappy. He was content... but alone.

Probably best if he kept it that way. He'd beaten the odds for so many years, years in which literally hundreds of pilots he'd known had died in battle around him, as though they were living s.h.i.+elds for his X-wing.

Someday his luck would run out and the deadly statistics would catch up to him.

Yet marriage and family and some sort of normalcy could be his. All he had to do was accept Admiral Ackbar's offer of a generals.h.i.+p and a staff position.

Angrily he pushed the idea away. That was a selfish thought. His life meant more as a pilot and squadron commander than it would as a deskbound planner. More citizens of the New Republic were alive and more Imperial enemies were dead because he was the master of a pilot's yoke instead of a datapad. So long as that remained the case, he didn't have the right to accommodate himself or pursue his own wishes.

"Wraith Three to Wraith One."

Wedge jolted out of his reverie and stared up into the face of Wes Janson. Behind Janson, Dia Pa.s.sik stood at attention. Wes was grinning, and even Dia's stone face suggested amus.e.m.e.nt.

There were drinks, still in the bottle, on the table, with condensation collecting on their surfaces. Wedge hadn't even noticed whether it was Janson or Runt who had brought them in.

Wedge cleared his throat to cover his momentary discomfiture, then asked, "What's the word from Coruscant?"

"Well, they're cracking down hard on officers caught napping on the job."

Wes handed over a sealed case. "Orders."

Wedge popped the seal. From within the case he drew a datapad.

Dia asked, "Should I leave, sir?"

"No. Have a seat. You can be the pilots' official spy for the moment. If there's anything sensitive here, I'll discuss it with Lieutenant Janson later."

Janson and Dia made themselves comfortable as Wedge scanned the text on the datapad.

"Congratulations on the raid on the base at Halmad. They seem to think that five interceptors is a better haul than projections called for.

Authorization to fund our continued operations from our pirate activities."

Janson said, "Whoa. You don't see that very often."

Dia's brow furrowed. "If I may ask, why is that so unusual ?"

"It's the place where a lot of long-term secret operations go off course," Wedge said. "The mission commander sets up a private means of income and funds his operations with it. Then he begins reporting less income than he's actually taking in. He stashes the surplus away somewhere or uses it for missions not authorized by his control. Soon enough, he has some of his subordinates working with these unauthorized activities, and they're coming up with more effective means of generating money-such as spice smuggling-that will never get reported. Left long enough, an operation like this can become a full-fledged criminal syndicate within a few years. That's why the New Republic, particularly Intelligence, doesn't like doing that. They're putting a lot of faith in us."

Janson glanced at Dia. "In us, he says. He actually deludes himself that anyone's reputation but Wedge Antilles's figured into that equation."

She managed another cool little smile.

Wedge returned his attention to the orders. "Authorization to conceive and execute missions against the Imperial and governmental forces in the Halmad system and other systems. In addition, we have a couple of missions here to perform as Wraith Squadron, strikes in collaboration with Rogue Squadron and the Mon Remonda. And no word on replacement X-wings."

He shut down the datapad. "Pretty much as expected. Pa.s.sik, questions?"

"No, sir. Thank you for letting me stay, sir."

"I know all about the relative value of fresh news. Dis-missed."

When she was gone, Janson said, "I've got some of the mad painters unloading the Narra. We came back with some entertainment holos, some luxury holos, some more ID sets squeezed out of Intelligence, an interceptor simulator module for the TIE-fighter simulator, and that pa.s.sive sensor set you wanted to monitor the Imperial base."

"Good."

"Is everything all right?"

Wedge nodded. "Just feeling my years. Speaking of which, I think I'll get in some simulator practice and beat up on the youngsters."

"That'll make you feel better. It always does me."

Wedge punched his personal code into the keypad located on the hatch of the TIE-fighter simulator. Instead of being located atop the ball-shaped c.o.c.kpit, where the standard hatch was on real interceptors, the simulator hatch was at the c.o.c.kpit's stern, where the twin ion engines would normally be mounted.

The hatch swung open. Beyond, a shadowy figure pointed a blaster at Wedge. Wedge dropped out of reflex, rolled to the side, came up on his knees with his own blaster in hand. But no enemy emerged to fire upon him. He kept his own aim on the hatch and reached for his comlink.

"Is there a problem, Commander?" That was Face, leaning unconcerned against the X-wing simulator only a few me-ters away.

"Get down, there's a hostile in there..."