Star Wars_ X-Wing 06_ Iron Fist - Aaron Allston [38]
They hit the spare metal gates, slamming them open and off their hinges, and roared up the road out of the base.
But a mere half klick away, around the first of the bends in the road and sheltered from sight by the very hill Wedge had earlier used for reconnaissance, Shalla set the skimmer down again. The Wraiths scrambled out. Shalla keyed a code into the keypad on the control panel and the skimmer rose once more, winging off into the night toward the distant lights of the city.
“What course is it taking?” Face asked.
Shalla shook her head. “I wrecked most of its higher processes when I destroyed the comm system. All I was able to do was give it a ballistic course toward the city.”
“That should be enough. Let’s get out of sight.”
The Wraiths were in a ditch, helmets off, only the eyes and the tops of their heads showing, when the three pursuit skimmers flew by, following the skimmer’s course.
A minute later, they were with Piggy at the site of the civilian skimmer that had brought them here. Captain Wanatte, still unconscious, was trussed up in back.
The Wraiths peeled out of their stormtrooper armor, leaving them in sweat-drenched street clothing appropriate to the world of Halmad. They quickly loaded all the armor components into a plastic crate in the back of the skimmer. Then they boarded. “Back to the spaceport,” Face said. “Slowly. Sedately. As befits a bunch of tourists who’ve been off drinking and recreating all evening and are now too tired to twitch.”
Shalla nodded. “Pretty close to an accurate description.”
Hawk-bat Base was situated on a large spherical rock deep in the asteroid belt of the Halmad system.
Years before, it had been the Tonheld Mining Corporation’s Site A3, tasked with bringing high-quality metals up from the depths of a large asteroid formed during the long-ago destruction of one of the Halmad system’s outer planets. The asteroid had a thick outer shell of stone and a center made up mostly of cooled nickel and iron. Tonheld Mining Corporation, all too efficient, had removed the majority of the useful metals, leaving only those that were trapped in veins and pockets within the stone shell. Then the company had dismantled its machinery and housing modules and departed, leaving the site deserted and cold for forty years.
Now, when approached by spacecraft, it still seemed the same. Its thick stone sheath, still intact, was sufficient to block sensors from detecting the life-forms and vehicle emissions now within it.
Halfway down the main shaft, a side tunnel, once a staging area for the mining corporation, turned off at a ninety-degree angle, running parallel to the asteroid’s surface. This was now sealed off by a duracrete plug perforated only by large motor-driven doors at either end.
Beyond, inside, where the side shaft was broadest and tallest, was the hangar area where the Hawk-bats’ vehicles rested. There were two TIE fighters and five TIE interceptors, and the biggest vessel on site, a Xiytiar-class freighter named Sungrass.
Among the least elegant of all cargo vessels serving in the galaxy, the Xiytiar-class freighter consisted of a long blocky bow that was mostly cargo space, an equally long connective spar in the middle, and a short blocky component that was mostly engines at the stern. Sungrass didn’t improve the vehicle line’s reputation for stylishness; scarcely a centimeter of its once-gleaming surface was unmarked by scrapes, sloppy paintwork, ion scoring from too-close passes alongside other vessels, or old blaster burns.
But its hull was solid, its engines were recently rebuilt and in