Star Wars_ X-Wing 03_ The Krytos Trap - Michael A. Stackpole [55]
15
It was probably in a place like this that Rogue Squadron plotted the conquest of Imperial Center. Kirtan Loor ducked his head beneath a series of moist, moldy pipes and followed his guide deeper into the rusted-out bowels of Imperial Center. Loor had been driven deeper into the planet-wide city than he thought possible, then had gone several kilometers farther through a hot, wet labyrinth that had him imagining he’d passed through the core of the world and was now working his way up and out the other side.
The Special Intelligence operative leading him through the maze cut to the left and through an oval opening hacked through the wall of the access tunnel. The opening seemed, at first glance, as if it was chopped through the wall; but when Loor grabbed its edges as he climbed through the hole, the striations he felt made him wonder if it hadn’t been nibbled out of the ferrocrete. Unless I can find a way to use it, I don’t want to know what chewed this hole.
The low, wide area into which Loor stepped stank of rust, stagnant water, and mildew. The few standing puddles had an oily slick on them that phosphoresced slightly. The weak light supplemented the temporary floodlights the operatives had arranged to display their motley collection of airspeeders. All in all the tableau was unremarkable and unlikely to attract attention from anyone save a truly desperate airspeeder thief.
And wouldn’t he be surprised at what he got.
The dented and dinged airspeeders, which were of a variety of years and makes, had been carefully worked over by the operatives and transformed into a half-dozen flying bombs. The hollow spaces in the chassis had been filled with explosives. Designed to be flown by remote from a companion airspeeder, they would be driven like proton torpedoes into the various bacta storage facilities around the world.
An operative came walking over to Loor, unable to keep a smirk from his square face. “As you can see, we are prepared to go at any time. We have completed our initial electronic sweep of the target sites and have found them negative for counter-remote tactics or equipment.”
“Very good.” The Empire had long ago perfected precautionary measures to take against bombs that might be set to detonate by remote. The easiest of these was to broadcast strong signals on a variety of comlink frequencies of the sort used by Rebel terrorists to detonate such bombs, causing a premature detonation while the bombs were still in the attackers’ keeping. Broadcasting from patrolling airspeeders in hostile areas had even detonated explosives in bomb factories that Intelligence had suspected existed, but had not been able to pinpoint for a more surgical strike. The harm done to innocents in the area when the bombs went off had been seen as just punishment for the failure of the people to report the Rebels working in their area.
Although they had been unable to detect similar counter-remote tactics in the bacta storage areas, Loor’s people had decided against detonating the bombs by remote. Getting an airspeeder into position and leaving it there long enough for the setup team to get away provided a window for discovery and deactivation. Even though that window would be small, it was felt to be too risky; they intended to hit a number of sites in rapid succession, and if the Rebel forces discovered one bomb and sent out a warning, it would make hitting the others far more difficult. Moreover, the fact that they could not detect anti-remote equipment in their reconnaissance sweeps could have been explained by nothing more sinister than someone forgetting to turn the devices on that day.
The plan they had hit on was actually fairly simple. Commercial speeder-ferry vehicles were not an uncommon sight on Imperial Center, hauling broken air- and land-speeders to repair shops.