Star Wars_ X-Wing 06_ Iron Fist - Aaron Allston [142]
Still, he smiled, revealing a broad stretch of carnivore’s teeth. It was good to be back.
An aide, a human female, approached him and saluted. “Welcome back, sir. I hope you enjoyed your leave.”
“Oh, certainly.” Eyan frowned for a moment, trying to remember just what he’d been up to on his leave, but the moment passed. His gesture took in the vehicle bay and indicated the vessel as a whole. “What sort of shape is she in?”
“One hundred percent, sir. All the admiral has to do is point, and we’ll be on our way.”
“Excellent.”
“I wanted to let you know, you had a communication from your wife come in a few minutes ago. It was flagged as urgent.”
“Is the captain on duty?”
“Not now, sir.”
“Good. I can see to this message before I’m officially on duty again.” Eyan nodded thanks to the aide and headed for his quarters.
What could be the trouble? He’d barely left her—as with many New Republic officers, he’d moved his family to Coruscant after being assigned to the former Imperial throneworld.
Barely left her after spending his entire leave with her, too. But he frowned, trying to recall just how they’d spent their time together. The memory wasn’t coming in too clearly. He had the nagging feeling that something important was slipping by him.
At his quarters, he brought up his personal terminal and opened his mail. In addition to numerous messages related to his duties, there was the priority-flagged message from his wife. He brought it up.
There she sat, in the tacky red high-backed chair that sat before their terminal at home, and she looked distinctly un-happy, her greenish skin a little more pallid than it should have been. She glanced over to the side as though consulting with someone outside recording range. “Jart,” she said, “those Wookiees are dancing in the parlor again.”
Eyan switched off the message, not bothering to hear it in its entirety, and erased it. His fingers typed commands into the terminal keyboard. He watched the process, momentarily interested in how he could be so swift, so sure, and yet have no idea what he was doing. Of course, he thought. How unpleasant. Those blasted Wookiees are dancing in the parlor again. He retrieved his personal sidearm, a small but powerful blaster pistol, and checked it to make sure it was fully charged. He tucked it away in his pocket and departed, certain in what he needed to do to get rid of those dancing Wookiees.
“In terms of pure strategy, there was nothing of particular interest between the capital ships in the Mon Remonda/Iron Fist fight.” The speaker was a Gamorrean, one of the pig-snouted humanoids known for their warlike dispositions, but almost nothing but his appearance characterized him as a member of that species.
He was speaking Basic, which was beyond the capabilities of other Gamorreans. And his voice was not a natural one; his words emerged twice, once in a throaty babble that sounded like gibberish to most people, and once in a mechanical tone from an implant in his throat. Too, he was the only Gamorrean known to wear a New Republic Fleet Command uniform.
On the shoulder of his orange pilot’s uniform he wore a unit patch that was much cleaner, much newer than the rest of the uniform. The main element of the design was a white circle, over which, in light gray, appeared the central symbol of the New Republic, a design like a stylized bird with upswept wings. Over that were twelve X-wing silhouettes, as if viewed from above, in black; one, in the lower left portion of the circle, was large, and the eleven arrayed around it were a third its size. All were oriented the same direction, from lower left to upper right, as though flying in tight, precise formation. Around the white circle was a broad blue ring bordered by two narrow gold rings. It was a brand-new unit patch for a nearly brand-new force, Wraith Squadron.
The being the Gamorrean addressed across the holotable was also unusual, though his kind was certainly