Star Wars_ X-Wing 06_ Iron Fist - Aaron Allston [30]
So far, so good. She stepped out, alert to trouble, and hit the button to close the door again. But the ramp raised only halfway up, then made a whining noise and stopped. It slowly began to sag back toward the duracrete floor.
She got under it and lifted. The power pack from her helmet was obviously not up to powering door machinery. By sheer strength she got the door lifted back into place. Though it did not lock, it fit snugly and would look normal to casual inspection.
Now, three problems to solve: two groups of Imperial workers or stormtroopers, plus whatever security was installed within the motor-pool building. She looked around for the places, often at corners and on the metal beams supporting the curved ceiling, where sensors tended to be set up.
Nothing. She breathed a sigh of relief. Skimmers weren’t valuable enough to this base to require constant surveillance. One problem down. She walked forward, toward the source of the droning speech, and wished she had Tyria’s aptitude for near-silent movement.
• • •
The Wraiths kept themselves flat against the exterior wall of the hangar, deep in the darkest shadow cast by the building.
Wedge, one man back from the building’s front corner, suppressed a snort. The glossy white stormtrooper armor they were wearing practically glowed in the dark. Even in deep shadow they would be impossible to miss if a passerby glanced in their direction. Still, old habits of stealth died hard, and Wedge didn’t want them to die at all.
Janson, ahead of him, helmet off, turned back and held up two fingers, then shook his head. Two guards on the front of the building, and they weren’t going to be easy pickings. Wedge traded places with him and took off his own helmet, luxuriated for a moment in the sensation of air moving once again on his face, and hazarded a peek.
The front of the hangar was well lit by two overhead sources of light, both attached to the building’s front wall. The center of the wall was dominated by a large sliding door in two sections; one section would slide right, the other left. The duracrete leading up to the door was decorated with many thin scorch marks, sign of numberless too-hasty departures by TIE fighters shooting out of the hangar and angling immediately for the sky. That suggested the pilots on-base considered themselves hotshots and had a commander who encouraged such behavior, also not a good thing for the Wraiths.
On either side of the door, perhaps twenty meters apart, were guards in stormtrooper armor. Their stances were angled in toward the door, and each had the other plus most of the front of the building in sight. They might have been chatting over a private channel on their helmet comlinks, but otherwise they were very much on duty.
Wedge dismissed the simplest of tactics for such situations, the make-a-noise-and-one-of-them-will-come gambit. Guards like these, professionally on duty even when out of sight of their officers and fellows, would certainly investigate, but first they’d call in the anomaly. If the investigating guard didn’t report back continuously to his fellow, the other one would call that fact in, too. Within moments the place would be swarming with stormtroopers. Wedge and the Wraiths needed some considerable uninterrupted time with the vehicles inside—perhaps as much as half an hour.
There was another door on the building front, immediately left of the leftmost guard, but it was securely shut and looked like