Star Wars_ X-Wing 04_ The Bacta War - Michael A. Stackpole [123]
She opened the central drawer on her datapad desk and pulled it all the way out. On the back panel she slid aside a finger-length wafer of duraplast, revealing a small cavity. From it she pulled out a slender, silver capsule approximately the size of her smallest finger. She put it on the desk, then returned the duraplast wafer and the drawer to their proper places.
From her personal gear she got two small batteries and a transparisteel flask with a chrome bottom and capped with a chrome tumbler. She worked two screws loose on the bottom of the bottle and pulled the base off. Into the hollows in the base she snapped the batteries and the capsule. She fastened the flask’s base back on the transparisteel bottle, then tossed the whole assembly into the refresher station’s bowl and evacuated it.
The flush of disinfectant washed the flask down into a holding tank. As the Diadem came about on its exit vector, the pilot hit a switch that dumped the holding tank’s contents out into space. The fluid immediately froze into a mass of blue ice that slowly began to drift in toward the system’s sun. It would be months before the debris finally evaporated in the solar engine.
The sudden drop in temperature around the flask immediately started the capsule issuing orders. A tiny port opened in the tip of the flask’s cap and a spark from the batteries ignited enough of the Savareen brandy to burn the flask free of the ice and jet it away. At the same time, a panel on the bottom of the flask opened up to expose electromagnetic sensors that started feeding system data to the capsule.
The capsule itself was really the heart of a probe droid. Stripped of the armor and devices necessary to let it enter an atmosphere and operate in a hostile environment, the droid took up a minimum of space and could easily function on batteries for a dozen hours. Its mission was simple: pinpoint the location of the system in which it was dropped, locate a hidden HoloNet transmission station, and pulse out a tight-beam message conveying that information to the station. The automated station would, in turn, deliver that information through the HoloNet to Fliry Vorru within seconds of its reception.
With the sensors, it mapped the sky and compared the configuration of stars with what would be available at various systems in the galaxy. While a complete catalog of systems would have required far more storage than the probe droid possessed, Vorru and his people had ruthlessly eliminated systems that lacked habitable worlds, had settlements that were insufficiently developed to help maintain the Rogues and their ships, or that otherwise appeared to be inappropriate.
Within an hour of beginning its mission, the probe droid found a match in its star catalog. It knew it was in the Yag’Dhul system. It oriented itself so it could pulse its message out to a clandestine HoloNet transmission site, but found an obstacle in its way. It did pick up comm frequencies emanating from the obstacle and also saw how many stars it blotted out of the sky, but had no way to identify it as a space station. It did catalog the item’s presence, then it jetted up to a point where it could locate the relay station.
Once it found its target, the droid pulsed its message out. It continued to do so for the next three standard hours before a meteorite shattered the transparisteel flask and reduced the droid to so much junk orbiting Yag’Dhul.
Wedge looked out over the assembly of pilots in the station’s amphitheater. They all looked eager, which was good, but that surprised him. When he began the briefing he expected their hungry expressions to melt into disappointment. “So, there it is: within the next twenty-four to thirty-six