Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order_ Rebel Dreams_ Enemy Lines I - Aaron Allston [30]
The headache grew in strength so suddenly that it felt as though he’d been stabbed. He cried out, clutched his head, and struggled to keep from falling.
He knew why the headache was back. It was because he wasn’t obeying. His instructions were clear. He dropped the holocam back into his bag.
Tam weaved his way between the ships in the kill zone to reach his—well, really, Wolam’s—shuttle.
Of course, it was a shuttle in function, not a shuttle in design. It had begun its career as a Sienar-built Skipray blastboat, an Imperial four-person gunship. An ungainly-looking thing, it had a bow that looked like an eccentric cam gear, the narrowest portion pointed forward and broadened by a pair of fixed wings angled downward at a sharp angle. The bow was attached to a stern that was little more than a huge axle. Mounted on the axle were the stabilizer fins, forward-sweeping wings that could rotate to be horizontal for landing or vertical for stabilization in atmospheric flight.
When it had been a machine of war, it had been heavily armed. But years ago, after Wolam Tser had stolen it when escaping with recordings of Imperial base-building activities that the Empire didn’t want him to retain, he’d begun modifying the boat. The proton torpedo and concussion missile tubes had been removed to give the boat more cargo and cabin room. The laser cannon turret on top had been replaced with a transparisteel dome, opening up more cabin room and offering those beneath it another view of the stars. The controls had been simplified, making the optimum crew size two instead of four.
Behind the command cabin, room that had been needed for missile racks was now converted into two smallish cabins, one for Wolam and one for his holocam operator.
Tam offered a false smile and a wave to the mechanics now welding metal plates over the holes in the wings, repairing damage sustained when one of the boat’s companion vehicles had exploded under coralskipper fire. He climbed up the port-side bow wing to the main hatch and entered, his movements hurried. Only if he hurried would the headache be kept at bay.
He didn’t pause as he entered the command cabin but headed into the aft passageway. In two paces he was at the door to his cramped cabin. He entered in a rush—Hurry, hurry—and sealed the door behind him.
He lifted the mattress of his bunk to reveal the storage compartment beneath. In it was a large, roughly spherical piece of rock—“A souvenir of Corellia,” he’d explained to Wolam.
Of course, he’d lied. He’d had to.
He set the stone, which was lighter than it should be, atop his bunk and rapped three times on its surface. A moment later, he rapped again, twice.
The stone split along an invisible center seam. It opened like an ocean bivalve, but instead of revealing two linings of flesh and perhaps a pearl, it showed only an amorphous blobby mass of material in the bottom.
His stomach lurching at the thought of touching it again, Tam reached out and found the slight protrusion at the top of the blob. He stroked it, feeling the living thing react to his touch. He snatched back his hand and wiped it on his pants, though there was no residue on his fingers from the smooth thing.
Moments later, the blobby material stretched up and assumed the approximate shape of a human head. Tam didn’t think it was a Yuuzhan Vong female’s head; the forehead was too pronounced, the features not made irregular by mutilation.
The villip looked at him with the face of his controller. “Report,” it said, its speech unaccented.
Tam felt his headache fade to almost nothingness, but the turmoil in his stomach, the turmoil in his emotions kept this from being the relief it otherwise would have been. “We are on Borleias,” he began.
Borleias Occupation, Day 6, Predawn
There was a rap at the door. Wedge jolted upright, his eyes opening, his mind momentarily cloudy about where he was, what he should be doing.
He was still