Star Wars_ X-Wing 02_ Wedge's Gamble - Michael A. Stackpole [116]
“Today he didn’t warn me about what would happen at the factory. If you two hadn’t been there in the garage, I would have died. And when we got here, his central concern was killing you, not the fact that I’d survived. I realized that Thyne did respect me, but only for my usefulness to him. He thought he could trust me implicitly, which is rare among the members of the Black Sun.”
She shrugged. “So, he saved me from Kessel, but you saved me from the Imps and, through that, saved me from thinking I was worthless. That was worth more than Thyne’s respect … or his life. I guess that favor you said you owed my sister has been redeemed.”
“That favor I owe your sister, that’s one that will take a lifetime to pay off. What you did here, as far as I’m concerned, nulls the datacard between us. We’re even.” Corran smiled, then shook his head. “Of course, we’re still on Coruscant, we’re being hunted by Imperial stormtroopers, and Thyne told me we have yet another traitor in our midst. Seems to me this is the perfect time to be settling up accounts and making sure all our affairs are truly in order.”
Mirax nodded. “Never put off to tomorrow what you can do today.”
Inyri raised an eyebrow. “Except, perhaps, dying.”
“Good point.” Corran headed toward the door into the building. “Let’s get cleaned up and then we can go see if anyone else procrastinated their way past death.”
36
If the Force is with us, Gavin thought as he ducked around a corner, it’s definitely the dark side. Blaster bolts gnawed away at the wall, leaving the corner serrated and flaming. Looking to his right, he saw Ooryl and Nawara positioned inside a doorway, so he dove between them and rolled on past as they opened fire on the stormtroopers chasing them down the corridor.
Pursuit began almost immediately after they left the factory. They entered and moved through a number of buildings and thought they were in the clear when Portha shot a stormtrooper who challenged them. The stormtrooper went down but apparently lived long enough to report their location to his headquarters. Stormtroopers began to converge on the area, giving the Rogues few choices of where to run and even less time to consider them.
Wedge had insisted on going up, but the building they’d picked to give them access to the bridges on higher levels was probably the worst choice they could have made. A transparisteel and ferrocrete monolith, at the lower levels it stood absolutely alone, with no attachments, walkways, or links to other buildings. Up on the fiftieth level it branched out and gave them the access to other avenues of escape they desired, but getting to the fiftieth level proved to be the problem.
Coming up into a crouch, Gavin looked around and his heart sank. As with several previous floors, this one was an open square space centered on a lift and stairwell core. The floor-to-ceiling windows provided a lovely view of the shadowed levels of Coruscant—a view he found decidedly claustrophobic.
Especially with an Imperial Troop Transport gravtruck floating up to their level. An armored side panel snapped down on the truck’s boxy cargo pod. A stormtrooper framed himself in the opening and tossed something at the window. It stuck for a second, appearing to be a black amoebic blob, then it exploded, spraying transparisteel fragments into the room.
Gavin had already dived to the floor, but he still felt the sting of the shards on his left flank and face. We’ve had it.
“Stay down,” Wedge shouted above the din, “everyone stay down!”
Though he had no intention of making himself a target when trapped between two stormtrooper squads, he wondered if the Commander had snapped. Staying down was tantamount to surrendering, which would make sense except that the stormtroopers