Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order_ Rebel Dreams_ Enemy Lines I - Aaron Allston [80]
She nodded. “I’ll be setting up Resistance cells on Coruscant.”
Luke suppressed a shudder. Going into Coruscant would be bad enough. The thought of being left behind among enemies so antagonistic and alien, deliberately staying there, was not a pleasant one. Bhindi looked faintly pleased at having discomfited a Jedi Master.
They’d gathered, the Wraiths and Luke, in a chamber deep within the Borleias complex—a chamber that, from its pristine condition, had not, Luke suspected, been found by the Yuuzhan Vong during their brief occupation. How the Wraiths had discovered its existence was not something he knew; all he did know was that it was accessed through a sliding panel in the back of a laboratory. The hidden chamber, too, had been a laboratory; on the shelves on its walls were the left-behind remnants of biomedical gear. Luke saw bacterial culture dishes, injectors, neural monitors … at the back of the chamber was a full-sized bacta tank, empty, the transparisteel of its main compartment scuffed and abraded through hard use so that many portions of it were almost opaque.
“So,” Face said, seating himself on one of the stools at the chamber’s main table. “Let’s show him what we’ve got. Kell, you first.”
The big man hefted a green cloth bag roughly two meters long. From its open top he pulled an object like a very shallow one-person boat. It was thick, perhaps thirty centimeters in depth for most of its length, thinning to some ten centimeters all along the edge. Its red underside was both gummy and reflective; it took Luke a moment’s study to see that a thick layer of transparent red material had been closely fitted over a smooth silvery surface. Its top side was a dull gray, with two shoe-shaped clamps protruding from it.
Kell dropped this apparatus on the table in front of Face. It made a boom as it hit the table; it had to be heavy. Face shot Kell a sardonic look and said, “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.” Kell turned his attention to Luke. “This is something we’ve been working on for some time. We mount them in shells resembling meteorites or debris. Together with the shells, they act as individual atmospheric intrusion pods.”
Luke gave them a skeptical look. “Meaning what, exactly?”
“Meaning you ride them from orbit into a planet’s atmosphere.”
“In what?”
“In the shells I mentioned. Nothing more. The red stuff is an adhesive that affixes to the interior of the shell. The shell doesn’t even have to be airtight. One person rides it in a vac suit, his feet gripped here.” Kell indicated the clamps. “The underside is an ablative heat shield. Slowly ablative, you understand. Layered between the heat shield and the top are a simple repulsor unit and a power cell. The repulsor keeps it angled correctly toward the planet’s surface. You drop into atmosphere at the correct angle and ride it all the way down. The shell burns up from friction with the atmosphere—it’s designed to keep the heat from cooking the occupant. The heat wash also conceals your true nature from most sensors—ours and theirs. When the shell gives way, the silvery surface is your secondary heat shield; it’s ablative, too, so the visual illusion that you’re a burning meteorite continues. In other words, you look and act just like a piece of space debris punching into the atmosphere.”
“Until you get near the planet’s surface,” Face added. “At which time the repulsor puts out its final effort and slows you down so you crash quite slowly into the surface.”
“Crash,” Luke said.
“Quite slowly.”
“And these have been successfully tested.”
Face glanced around, looking a bit nervous. “Well, tested, sure. They’ve been tested. Each time they’re tested, we assemble what data we can, and the next generation of pods comes back just a bit more intact.”
“We’re sure they have them right this time,” Bhindi said.
Luke looked among them, and it was Bhindi who broke first, losing her worried expression, snickering at Luke’s.
“We’ve made insertions