Enemy Lines II_ Rebel Stand - Aaron Allston [53]
She scrambled down the makeship ladder to the vehicle’s stern. A hatch into the stern compartment lay at her feet. She struggled with its locking bar and then hauled the heavy hatch open.
Below was a storage compartment with restraining nets to either side and a hatch at the far end. Doubtless the hatch gave access to the vehicle’s thrusters. Viqi didn’t care. Her attention was riveted by what she saw in the nets.
Rations. Military rations, carefully packed into individual meals, guaranteed to survive for years on the shelf.
With a moan, she clambered down into the compartment, grabbed the nearest meal at hand, and tore into the wrapping flimsy around it.
EIGHT
Aphran System, Aphran IV
Aphran IV was a heavily forested world whose green landmasses stood out in stark contrast from her blue seas. She was a warm world, lacking polar ice, with no moons to contribute tides. And she was a comparatively poor world whose people were noted chiefly for mastery in woodworking, whose artistic inlays were prized by collectors.
All this Han knew from a brief look at the star map records in the Falcon’s computer. The records suggested that Aphran would never survive even a weak Yuuzhan Vong attack. Considering how close she was to the Yuuzhan Vong zone of control, not far from Bilbringi, only her relative unimportance had kept her from being conquered by the enemy.
Han glanced at his wife. She looked very different than usual: her hair was long, black, and straight, her eyebrows broader and darker to match, and she wore garments that Senator Leia Organa Solo would never have been caught dead in.
They started with a bodysuit that was black and glossy. Though synthetic, it creaked like hide when she moved. Her boots, low-slung blaster holster, and gloves were of a similar material, but matte rather than glossy. In the spirit of the character she was to portray, she had her feet up, crossed at the ankle, on the copilot control board before her. She fixed Han with a forbidding stare. “What are you looking at, ground-pounder?”
Han shook his head. “If your daughter could see you now …”
Leia broke character for a moment and grinned. “I’ll make sure Artoo gets a holo for her. He’ll have to get you, too.”
Han nodded. “I am magnificent.” He’d spent enough time in front of the mirror both to make sure that his disguise was adequate and to be certain that his costume provided sufficient dash and drama.
He wore a close-trimmed beard. His real hair and his false facial hair were a matching, distinguished shade of silver-gray. But he was not trying for the look of an elder statesman; his uniform was a dark gray, two shades more somber than the old Imperial Navy uniform, and thick with accoutrements: a brand-new pistol on his hip, twin vibroblades on the other hip, a brace of alternating vibroblades and small backup blasters across his chest. The metal gauntlet on his left hand looked like a commercial robotic replacement and contained enough circuitry to read as a prosthetic to most scanners. The contact lens on his left eye made the eyeball silver-reflective; the false puckering scar reaching upward and downward from the eye suggested the violence that had caused the mechanical replacement to be installed.
C-3PO, in the passenger seat behind the pilot’s chair, spoke up. “So that I do not jeopardize your mission through misstatement or omission, Princess, may I ask, why the deception?”
“Aphran is something of an unknown quantity,” Leia said. “The smugglers we’re going to meet and try to persuade to act as our local resistance organizers say that there’ve been a lot of surreptitious comings and goings with government envoy ships. What does that suggest to you?”
“That matter is rather outside my fields of expertise,” the droid replied. “But it would seem to me that the planetary government does not need to be surreptitious when sending representatives to the New Republic. That would suggest that they are sending their envoys to someone they wish the New Republic to know nothing about.”
Leia nodded. “Very