Star Wars_ X-Wing 05_ Wraith Squadron - Aaron Allston [123]
“Piggy …”
“Please answer.”
She took a deep breath. “I suppose it might have.”
“So the difference is that it bothers you to have people think you might stray outside your species?”
“No …”
“Stoop so low as to become the mate of a Gamorrean?”
She winced, and he knew he had his answer. “I’ve offended you,” she said.
“Not in the way you think, perhaps. But I can’t help thinking that the reason you react with revulsion to the suggestion that we are wed is because of Gamorrean … lowness.”
Finally she met his eyes. “I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry.”
“That’s good enough for now.” He drank his celebratory drink in a single long pull. “Ready to leave?”
“Yes.”
“Since we are young marrieds, shall we hold hands?”
She grinned. “All right.”
Once again in the black getup of her bodyguard identity, Falynn crouched in the nighttime shadow of a powered-down landskimmer. In the distance was the near wall of the TIE fighter ready bunker. Between her and that wall were forty long meters of empty duracrete, poorly lit but featureless enough to show clearly the passage of a human, even one dressed as she was. So far as she knew, pressure sensors could be planted under every meter of the open space around the bunker. But she’d manage to cross it if she had to crawl there across a span of four hours.
She was surprised at the determination she felt. It wasn’t just a desire to complete this mission successfully. It was a need to stop being number two at everything.
With her talent for bypassing simple security systems, such as those that attempted to prevent theft of ground vehicles, she was the Wraiths’ number-two security expert. She was number-two TIE pilot behind Wedge … and if Atril was the hot stick with a TIE that everyone said she was, Falynn was probably about to become number three. Her girlhood sneaking around Mos Eisley, making a living on whatever she could successfully steal, made her the number-two scout behind Tyria. Even Donos hadn’t listened to Falynn, to her protests that he needed to live, until he’d heard the same facts from Tyria and others.
Never number one, not at anything. But maybe if she accomplished a few more things no Wraith had ever done, such as dragging those TIE fighters under her stolen skiff the other week, people would stop dismissing her as a second-rater.
She waited there half an hour, seeing one landskimmer arrive at the TIE ready bunker but dismissing the idea of trying to intercept it and jump aboard—the pilot of the small craft would certainly feel it bob when her weight came down on it.
But then, a few minutes later, a bulbous repulsorlift vehicle the size of a multiple-passenger tourist craft cruised in a leisurely fashion toward the bunker. Letters on the side read THOLAN’S COMESTIBLES, and it appeared as though the side panel swung up to become a metal awning.
A mobile restaurant of some sort. She’d seen them, not on Tatooine, but at the New Republic Academy. Late-night garrisons like the men of the TIE ready bunker needed to eat, too …
She gathered herself up as the silvery craft neared its closest approach to her. She took off into a fast sprint, catching up to the vehicle’s squared-off rear, and found nothing there to hang on to but the rear door’s hinges. She leaped up to grab the right top hinge with both hands; her feet swung free.
But it wasn’t far, and she wasn’t stepping across sensor-laden duracrete.
As the repulsorlift food carrier approached the front of the bunker, it slowed, swung to starboard, and continued in sideways, its pilot evidently planning to present the side panel to the bunker’s front door. Falynn pulled herself up, scrambling, her boots sliding off the rear panel as she struggled to gain purchase, and managed to pull herself atop the vehicle. When it settled to the ground just a meter from the front door, she stepped off it onto the near part of the bunker roof, then flattened herself on the bunker