Star Wars_ X-Wing 06_ Iron Fist - Aaron Allston [43]
She shook off the feeling. Transfer to another group meant transferring to another dormitory. It was time to pack.
7
If this is a reward. Face thought, I need to stop earning them.
He sat in weightlessness, strapped securely into the control seat of one of the captured interceptors, staring at stars and a tiny, distant sun through the starfighter’s viewport. The image hadn’t changed in an hour, and the music he was playing on the fighter’s internal speakers was, on its eighth repetition, getting on his nerves. He resolved to carry more entertainments on missions, especially those where keeping comm silence was a priority.
In a bar in Hullis, Face had been the one to spot the freighter navigator whose hand trembled with more than eagerness when the man reached for his first drink of the night. He’d been the one to get the man so drunk that discretion wasn’t an option, and to listen to the fellow’s rambling praise of his captain’s intelligence.
The ship the alcoholic navigator served on was the Barderia, and it hauled cargo on three-way runs out of Halmad with an admirable record for avoiding pirates. With enough liquor in him, the navigator told Face their secret for success. “Leave each system from a random point, enter each system at a random point. Your courses can’t be plotted.”
“That makes for pretty complicated courses,” Face had said.
“Not really. On arrival in each system, you first drop out of hyperspace just outside the outer planet’s orbit to sample the comm frequencies and get any pirate reports available, then make a course correction and jump in where you want to arrive.”
“Ah. And this first arrival, before you make your course correction, is to the same spot every time?”
“That’s what keeps things simple.”
Face was nice enough to make sure the man made it back to his ship when all the night’s drinking was done and the navigator was too far gone to recognize surroundings, friends, or his own features. But first Face played a hunch and assumed that a man sloppy enough to reveal a crucial detail to a stranger might be sloppy in other ways. He copied the encrypted contents of the fellow’s datapad to his own, and when back at Hawk-bat Base from this intelligence-gathering run, he handed that data over to Castin Donn. Castin cracked the code and the files yielded up no information about freighter routes … but did have a file of specific locations just outside a large number of planetary systems. It was a simple matter to find out to which planets Barderia’s next cargo run would take her.
The skin around Face’s mouth itched, but he could not scratch it, even if he took his Imperial pilot helmet off. His whole face was crisscrossed with horrible puckering scars—artificial ones, created by painting a makeup chemical across his skin and letting it dry. His own genuine scar was not missing; it was just incorporated into the design of false scar tissue.
That real scar made things a little difficult. Every disguise he wore had to conceal it or incorporate it. A simple, if somewhat pricey, cosmetic skin abrasion and bacta treatment would eliminate it. But it was part of him now, a constant reminder of the debt he would never be able to pay off. As a child star of holodramas, he had unknowingly helped boost Imperial morale, promote Imperial projects, even improve Imperial military recruitment. Crimes he’d never be able to erase. The scar was the living sign of those crimes. Look at me. I know what I did.
Regardless, all the extra scars, the false ones, made a good disguise, but they itched. And itched. While the same music played over and over again.
His sensor board lit up as an eighth blip suddenly joined the seven waiting there in space. Barderia had arrived, within range of his guns, of Wedge’s.
His comm crackled as he reached for his yoke. “This is One, targeting engines. Shields still down. Firing!”
As Face brought his interceptor around, he saw the bulk of Barderia, a boxy Corellian freighter about a hundred meters long, below him and to his starboard.