Solo Command (30 page)

A voice crackled over her comm unit. It was deep, with a trace of the Corellian accent that occasionally crept into the speech of Han Solo and Wedge Antilles. “That was very good flying. And the last trick, pretending to be out of control, almost fooled me. I commend you.”

“Who am I talking to?”

“My name is Fel. Baron Soontir Fel.”

Lara’s insides went cold. When she was a crewman aboard
Implacable
, she’d never even been aware of the presence of Fel and the 181st there, so secret had their mission been. Now, at last, she’d be able to meet the most dangerous pilot who served her enemies.

With her fear, there was a rush of elation. With Wraith Squadron, Lara had flown in simulators against Wedge Antilles, the best the New Republic had to offer. Now she had flown against Baron Fel. She’d competed against the very best pilots two governments had to offer.

Too bad she lost most of the time.

“A pleasure to meet you,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t offer you more competition.”

“Don’t be,” he said. “You’re very good. More work, and you might train up to the standards of the One Eighty-first. Shall I keep you in my records as a candidate for the group?”

“I’d be honored. Can I buy the victor a drink?”

“Unfortunately, I have more simulations to fly—and it appears that you don’t. Some other time, though.”

The hatch behind Lara opened and Ensign Gatterweld thrust his face in. “Need any help?”

“No, thank you.” She was getting sick of the ubiquitous Gatterweld. Except when she was in her quarters, in the tiny office where she wrote her commentary on her time with Wraith Squadron, and in simulators, Gatterweld was there. Her shadow.

She undipped the netting that, in a real TIE interceptor, would have kept her bound in place on the pilot’s couch, and threw it to one side, then hauled herself backward and out of the open hatch at the rear of the ball-shaped simulator. Outside, the air was cooler and the omnipresent hum of
Iron Fist’
s engines was in her ears again.

Gatterweld handed her the pack in which she carried her datapad and other equipment. He looked at the control board where her standings were displayed. “You did pretty well.”

“Do you fly?”

“I can pilot shuttles now. I don’t have the reflexes for starfighters. Hand to hand is my game. Where to now? The cafeteria?”

Lara checked her chrono. “No, it’s late. I think I’ll just turn in.”

As they walked past the banks of control stations set up to monitor the simulators, she saw what she needed—a device she would kill for. A set of monitor goggles and attached microphone. They lay unguarded on one of the control stations, their owner away, perhaps on break.

As she and Gatterweld passed the station, she contrived to get her left foot tangled in his legs. He tripped forward, swearing, while she stumbled and fell sideways—snatching up the set of goggles and tucking them into her pack as she hit the floor.

He scrambled to his feet. “I’m sorry. Are you hurt?”

She took the hand he offered and let him half haul her to her feet. She winced as she put her weight on her left leg. “A bruise, maybe. Not your fault. I think I had a cramp from all the time in the simulator.”

“Can you walk? I can summon a stretcher—”

“No, I’d better walk it off. Thank you.”

She maintained the pretense of her limp all the way to the door to her quarters, and inside as well—though she hadn’t spotted
the holocam, she knew there had to be one. Or two, or three. She wasn’t trusted, and with Zsinj in charge, that meant there were holocams on her in her quarters.

She set her pack down inside the closet and took a look around. She’d been given sizable quarters, appropriate to a naval lieutenant on track to promotion. She actually had a decent-sized bedroom with a full terminal and a closet, a small office, and a separate refresher chamber. Much better accommodations than she’d enjoyed on
Mon Remonda
.

Tonin, her R2, sat in the middle of the bedroom. He came alive when she entered, offering up whistles and clicks that she interpreted as a polite interrogative. He was almost a stranger to her now, had been so since she’d wiped his memory on Aldivy.

But that would change soon.

“I’m fine, Tonin. Just tired.”

Once in bed, she deliberately changed position every two or three minutes, tossing and turning, a show of insomnia for whoever was monitoring her holocams. She did this for an hour. Then she sat up and ran a hand through her catastrophically tousled hair.

Tonin beeped another question.

“Sorry, but I’m going to need the patch of metal where you’re resting. Scoot into the closet, would you?”

With a series of musical tones suggesting that he was hurt by her suggestion, Tonin rolled into the closet. He turned his head around so his main holocam eye could still observe her.

Lara rose and pulled the mattress from her bed onto the floor, then redistributed pillows and sheets on it. She made sure that one of the sheets reached as far as Tonin’s wheels.

She reached into the bag in her closet and hunted around for something within it with her left hand. With her right, she extracted the monitoring goggles and scooted them under the edge of the sheet on the floor, then plugged the goggles’ cord into a jack in Tonin’s side, hoping—nearly certain—that her body shielded the action from the viewpoint of most of the places holocams might be situated in her room.

Finally she grasped the object that she’d pretended not to be able to find. She stood and stared at it, turning so the
holocams could get a good look at it. A bottle of tuber liquor from Aldivy, nasty stuff the locals there adored.

She stared at it for long moments, as if contemplating its medicinal qualities, then shook her head and placed it on the top shelf of her closet. A moment later, she slipped under the sheets over her mattress, rolled around a moment to find the most comfortable spot, pulled the sheets up over her head, and lay still.

The very junior intelligence officer watching this display began typing, ever so tentatively, into his terminal.
24:00 hours
, he typed.
Subject situated herself on mattress on floor. Entered sleep state almost immediately. First considered alcohol as soporific, but decided against. Cause of sleeplessness unknown. Bed too soft? Guilt?

“Don’t forget simple stress.”

The voice sounded right in his ear and he jumped two handspans. He’d thought he was alone in the room. He looked up into the face of General Melvar. “Uhh, thank you, sir. We’d call that occupational anxiety or excitement from lifestyle transition.”

“Do you get paid more for using more words?”

“No, sir, but the medics like them.”

Melvar snorted. “Well, add it any way you want to.”

“Yes, sir.”

Melvar spared one last look at the overhead view of Lara’s still bed, then left as quietly as he’d arrived.

With movements almost imperceptibly slow, Lara drew the monitoring goggles onto her head and turned them on. The goggles, drawing power from the link with Tonin, activated with a faint hum.

She whispered, “Tonin. Aldivian colloquialism. Definition: Little Atton.”

Then she waited.

If she was right, if she’d done her work correctly, the passwords she’d just spoken would be causing events to transpire deep within her R2 unit. The extra hardware she had buried
within his power unit would be activating. The memory backup it contained would be pouring out across the droid’s circuitry, appending itself to and overwhelming Tonin’s current programming.

And in a few moments, once again, she would have a—

A single word,
READY
, appeared before her eyes. It looked as though it were sculpted out of metal and floating in darkness a meter from her, but she knew that it was merely being projected onto the goggles she wore.

“Don’t communicate audibly,” she whispered, though Tonin’s transmission of his first query as text suggested that he understood the need for secrecy. The fact that all data being transmitted between them was going across a direct wire connection made it very unlikely that her observers would be able to detect their communication. “Before we do anything, I want to apologize.”

FOR WHAT?

“For being selfish,” she whispered. “I shouldn’t have brought you. I’ve put you in danger. I may get myself killed here, and if I do, the same will probably happen to you.”

I’M GLAD I’M HERE
.

“Me, too. You’re my only friend, Tonin.” She closed her eyes for a moment, all too aware of how pathetic that sounded. Then she forced them open. “I also have to apologize for what I’ve done to you. I wiped your main memory on Aldivy. Anytime anyone but me puts a restraining bolt on you or opens you up, your memory will wipe. Anytime I say the right words, your backup memory will reload. So you may experience some memory gaps. I’m sorry. It’s the only way to keep you safe.”

I UNDERSTAND, LARA
.

“I had an idea as to how we can destroy
Iron Fist
. You’ll have to do most of the work. But if we succeed, you may become the most famous R2 unit ever. Well, maybe second, after Artoo-Detoo.”

THAT WOULD BE NICE. WOULD THE WRAITHS LIKE YOU AGAIN?

“No. They’ll never like me again. So I have to do this for myself. I have to do this because it’s right. I have to do this because I have nothing else to do.”

WHAT DO I DO?

“Well, Zsinj, except when he’s paying for really good employees and mercenaries, is notoriously cheap. Which means he probably won’t have my quarters monitored when I’m not in them. If I stay away from my quarters all day long, that gives you plenty of time to work. I’ll tell you what you need to do. But first … when we’re alone like this … could you call me Kirney?”

YES, KIRNEY
.

12

Half an hour after Lara’s departure from her quarters the next morning, Tonin became active. He rolled out of the closet to the door, deployed and extended his fine-work grasper arm, and got to work on the door controls. Within minutes, he had rewired the controls and mechanism so he could open the door and close it fractionally as well as fully.

He opened the door a bare three centimeters and extended his video sensor through it nearly at floor level, giving him a 360-degree view of the corridor. A passerby was not likely to notice the slight gap in the doorway or the protrusion from it.

He waited.

It was nearly an hour before his first opportunity arose. Certainly, in that time, many of the trapezoidal MSE-6 utility droids passed his doorway, but always under the eye of a passerby. This time, one little droid, rodentlike in its scurrying motion and nervousness, was alone, unobserved.

Tonin signaled it, a chirp that constituted a come-here order. The droid stopped its forward progress, turned toward the doorway, ran the request through its very simple processor, and determined that accepting this new order was not likely to delay accomplishment of its standing orders significantly. It approached the door.

Tonin snapped his heavy grasper arm out through the gap and snared the little droid. It gave a squeal of alarm and spun its wheels into reverse, but he hauled it up off its wheels. Tonin opened the door wide enough to accommodate his prey, then dragged the little droid through and closed the door.

Then he got to work.

He laid the utility droid on its back. Its wheels spun in helpless panic. With his fine-work arm, he popped open the access hatch on the droid’s underside and extended his scomp-link into the opening.

As new programming flooded its tiny brain, the utility droid quieted.

By day’s end, Tonin was in command of three of the utility droids, and one had managed to bring him some of the components—magnetic track strips to replace wheels—he needed to begin their modifications.

Wedge’s four squadrons—Rogue, Wraith, Polearm, and Nova—executed mission after mission, one after another, sometimes two in a single day. Most missions involved only one squadron. In others, one squadron would escort and protect the B-wings of Nova, or Wraith Squadron would be inserted at ground level and then ground-guide the precise bombing runs of one or two of the other starfighter units. Some missions involved nothing more than carefully inserting the
Falsehood
, then very publicly escorting the ship, usually with Wedge and Chewbacca at the controls, out into space and safety.

By the end of one week, the fighter pilots of
Mon Remonda
began to lose track of what day of the calendar it was, and had little time left to them for anything but mission briefings, the missions themselves, and sleep.

By the end of one week, between Wedge’s missions and those an Imperial admiral was executing in another part of the galaxy, the Warlord Zsinj had lost more millions of credits than any New Republic fighter pilot could ever hope to accumulate.

•    •    •

Melvar entered the warlord’s office as silently as ever. Zsinj, turned to stare into his terminal, didn’t react. Melvar took the chair before his desk, no longer bothering to keep his movement quiet, and still there was no reaction. Finally, Melvar coughed.

“They’re killing me.” Zsinj shook his head sorrowfully as he stared at the data on the terminal screen beside his desk. “They want me dead, Melvar.”

“Of course they do,” the general said. “You’re their greatest enemy. It is to your considerable credit that they want you dead.”

“Look at this. My businesses are being seized up and down Imperial space—
and
Rebel space. The
Counterpunch
puts in at Vispil and is blown out of space by planetary authorities who refused to stay bribed. A half dozen of my best earners bombed out of existence on worlds within my own borders. Eight percent of my income eliminated in a week. And everywhere, the
Millennium Falcon
flitting around, fomenting more rebellion.” He sighed. “And my Funeral Project crews around Coruscant? Suddenly, completely ineffectual. A half dozen acts of terrorism or sedition closed down almost before they’re enacted. The rifts between humans and nonhumans in the Rebel government are healing. All my work, years of work, coming undone.”