Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 01_ Outcast - Aaron Allston [96]
Jag and Winter entered the tunnel and walked its length, finding no sign of sabotage at the security station end. Seff had clearly been at work at the prison end, however.
Sophisticated bypass gear had been attached to the access console beside the blast door. Winter activated it and ran through its memory, determining that it had been testing thousands of possible activation codes at a rate designed to prevent the security station's central computer from flagging the events as intrusion attempts. “It shouldn't take him much longer,” she told Jag. “A few hours, a day, maybe two.”
In silent response, he pointed up. She looked that way and saw what he had found: two small thermal detonators, one affixed to the ceiling above the blast-door controls, one in the ceiling twenty meters down the tunnel.
“He brings Valin out, shuts the door if he can, and if there's pursuit, he triggers the detonators,” Jag explained, “bringing the roof down and preventing further pursuit. There's another one, past the hole he cut, that will keep security station personnel from following.”
Winter nodded. “So that's his plan. What's ours?”
“This tunnel is a perfect trap. We follow him in here—the two of us and Tahiri. We confront him, capture him, and spirit him back to the Jedi Temple.”
“Which is simple and brilliant as long as everything goes right. Now let's get out of here and start planning for everything that might go wrong.”
Jag signed. “I really thought that when I got out of flying for my living, I'd also get out of mission planning.”
“You aren't that lucky.”
CALRISSIAN-NUNB MINES, KESSEL
SEATED AROUND THE TABLE WAS A WHO'S WHO OF NEW REPUBLIC–ERA piloting history, and Leia was so cheered to see them all that she could not stop smiling.
Wedge Antilles sat to Han's right. More relaxed now since his retirement was proving to have some staying power, he had his feet up on the table before him—scuffed, ancient boots on the elegant stone top, much to Lando's unspoken dismay. Wedge sipped from a tumbler of Corellian brandy. Lean and graying, he still had the sharp, angular features and piercing gaze of his youth. He was dressed in the flight uniform of a New Republic X-wing pilot, orange jumpsuit and mostly white accoutrements—but then, most of the pilots present had been dressed in the service uniforms appropriate to their starfighters when they arrived, and not all had had time to change into civilian clothes. Not all wanted to.
Next to Wedge was Derek “Hobbie” Klivian, still somber—some said mournful—of appearance, on a brief break from his duties as a Coruscant spokesman for the Zaltin Corporation, the bacta manufacturer.
Beside Hobbie sat Inyri Forge, a former Rogue Squadron pilot who had been born on Kessel—her parents and surviving siblings were among those who had been evacuated from the planet as the ground-shakes grew worse. They were temporarily quartered in old Imperial barracks on the garrison moon. Brown-haired and fine-boned, she looked almost too delicate to be a pilot, but her kill record made a lie of that assumption.
At the far end of the table was Kell Tainer. A large man about Leia's age, he was bald on top; he wore his long gray hair in a ponytail and had a drooping mustache. He looked far more like a pirate than a former member of New Republic Starfighter Command, but his experience as a pilot, demolitions expert, and mechanic made him invaluable for the process of converting thermal detonators into warheads for other types of missile systems.
Then there was Cheriss ke Hanadi, an Adumari pilot who was said to be deadlier with her vibroblade than with a starfighter; short, dark-haired, and freckled, she looked like she should be managing a farm goods store.
Next to Cheriss was Nrin Vakil, a Quarren whose watertight flight suit sloshed because it was filled