Star Wars_ Legacy of the Force 04_ Exile - Aaron Allston [70]
“Don’t be silly, Shaker,” the woman said. “What do you bet the owner has anti-theft sensors set up? We probably set one off.”
Mollified, the R2 unit tweetled again and returned its attention to its companion.
In a matter of a few minutes the woman punched her security code into the cockpit side panel, raising the canopy, and then used the hangar’s magnetic winch to lift up the astromech and lower it into its berth behind the cockpit. Ben watched as she undogged side panels along the Y-wing’s fuselage and plugged her own oversized datapad into them, one by one, checking readings as she went. As the R2 went through its own series of checks and analyses, the woman left the hangar for a few minutes; she returned behind the controls of a small fuel tanker and proceeded to refuel the starfighter.
Anxiety began to grow within Ben. The woman and the astromech had to be reaching the end of their duty. Soon she would be removing the R2 from its housing behind the cockpit. Ben needed to decide right away what he was going to do about the woman.
Well, he certainly wouldn’t cut off her head. But he would have to incapacitate her. When both she and the R2 unit were looking away, Ben leapt up into the rafters, made his way to where his holocam was strapped and retrieved it, then worked his way over to a spot directly above the hangar door and waited. When it seemed that both woman and droid had their attention fixed elsewhere, he dropped silently to the permacrete and used that momentum to roll outside the hangar.
Then he walked right back in again, datapad in hand. The astromech was still behind the cockpit; the woman was now readying the refueling vehicle to be driven away. “Hello,” Ben said.
The woman looked him over. “Hello. Aren’t you a little young for a port worker?”
“Trainee.” Ben made his voice sound sullen. “All I’m good for is delivering messages, I guess. And I have one for you.”
“Go ahead.”
“The owner of the Y-wing says his astromech went through a messy programming breakdown and is having its memory wiped. So he needs another one temporarily. He’d like to rent whichever one was used for the vehicle’s computer calibration.”
She wiped her hands on a rag and shrugged. “So why are you telling me?”
“So you can leave the droid here.”
“Oh, he’s getting here that soon.”
Ben nodded.
She looked back over her shoulder at the droid. “Looks like you get to go tootling around the solar system for the rest of the day, Shaker. Lucky rodder.” She tossed the rag aside and returned her attention to Ben. “Got the authorization code for that?” She retrieved her datapad from the refueling tanker’s front seat and held it toward him.
“Right here. Prepare to receive.” Then Ben scowled at his datapad. “Stang. My screen light’s gone out. We have to do it in the sunlight.”
With a sigh—whether for the reliance of others on inferior devices or for the inconvenience of having to walk ten paces, Ben didn’t know—the woman headed toward Ben and the door out.
He led the way and turned left past the door, stopping when they were just out of sight of the R2 unit. In the second he had available before the woman reached him, he took a look around. The closest person he could see, a jumpsuited worker, was at another hangar more than fifty meters away. That was good.
“All right,” the woman said. “Transmit.”
Ben pressed a button on his datapad, though he’d switched the device off. “Transmitted. Anything I need to do to prep the droid?”
“Just take the restraining bolt off. And I’ll do that. Hey, I didn’t get the code.”
Scowling with pretended annoyance, Ben pressed the button again. “How about now?”
“No.”
He stepped closer and was now within arm’s reach of her. “One more time,” he said, and drove his fist into her solar plexus.
Her eyes got big, all the air went out of her in a painful-sounding “Oooosh,” and