Star Wars_ Legacy of the Force 04_ Exile - Aaron Allston [69]
It didn’t take him too long to find the craft he thought best suited to carry him to Ziost. It was an old Y-wing starfighter, carefully maintained, its hull paint unscarred. It rested beneath an environment blanket covered by a thick layer of dust.
The hangar’s door computer listed the owner as Hemalian Barkid of Drewwa and indicated that his last flight with the Y-wing had been half a standard year earlier. A little time on the planetary net tracked down personal data for Hemalian Barkid. He was an employee of Trang Robotics, and messages to him were now being forwarded to Kuat. Clearly he had been assigned offworld and left his personal vehicle behind.
The Y-wing’s astromech was nowhere to be seen, and its weapons systems were dismantled and missing, probably due to local ordinances about private citizens having lasers, ion cannons, and proton torpedoes. But its hyperdrive was intact, and the little glow on the control board Ben could see through the cockpit canopy made it clear that the computers were charged—probably diagnostics running on a battery.
And this, at last, told Ben what he needed to do to get the Y-wing operational. “In the field, when you can’t do something yourself,” his mother had told him once, “your obvious solution is to find someone who can do it for you.”
He downloaded contact information for Hemalian Barkid into his datapad, then spent several more hours searching on the planetary database for more information he needed and letters like the one he had to write. Carefully, doggedly, he extracted a fact here, a sentence there, and ended up with something that, to his eye, seemed authentic.
From: Hemalian Barkid
Account 7543 BH (Hangar 113)
To: Hangar Manager, Drewwa Spaceport
I will be returning home tomorrow. I’d really like my Y-wing to be ready when I get there. Please do a power-up, standard maintenance check, and astromech analysis of the computer, particularly the nav computer, and bill at your standard rate to my account.
It was that last part that Ben thought would sell the spaceport managers on this task. Everyone said that people loved doing last-minute tasks at their standard rates, because last-minute standard rates were always three or four times what standard rates would be if arranged in plenty of time.
Ben sent the message from the hangar door computer, which could plausibly have received and relayed the message from the real Barkid. He took his pocket holocam, the one he’d been carrying ever since his mission with Jacen to Adumar, and affixed it to the rafters, pointed down at the Y-wing’s security access panel, then made sure it would accept commands transmitted from his datapad. Finally he restored the environment blanket to the top of the Y-wing, smoothed out the dust as much as he could, and made himself a hiding hole behind some discarded plasteel crates to wait.
It didn’t take too long. Three hours later, the hangar door rolled open and two shapes entered—a female human mechanic in the standard yellow jumpsuit and an R2 astromech.
Ben’s heart sank. He’d assumed, based on how automated things were around here, that an operation as simple as a routine vehicle check would be handled by a mechanic droid. He’d planned to wait until the droid was finished with its task and then cut its head off, preventing it from leaving with the R2.
But he couldn’t cut the woman’s head off.
Well, technically he could. He just shouldn’t. Though if it came down to a question of doing that or failing in this mission—an important mission—what would he do? He frowned, struggling with the answer.
The woman—thirtyish, muscular, dark hair up under a yellow cap—swept the environment blanket off the Y-wing, sending a tremendous amount of dust into the air. She immediately began sneezing. Her R2 unit tweetled at her.
As the airborne dust reached Ben, he felt like sneezing, too. He held a finger under his nose and scowled at the woman.
As the woman moved up to