Star Wars_ X-Wing 06_ Iron Fist - Aaron Allston [46]
“You’re aware that your scores have come up since transferring to the Screaming Wookiees.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, this is in part from improvement in your skills.”
“Only in part?” She affected surprise.
“Only in part.” Repness pulled a datapad from a pocket and slid it over to her.
The file it displayed was her training record. But the scores from after her transfer were shown in two columns, labeled “True” and “Adjusted.”
She gave him a troubled look. “I don’t understand, sir. The ‘True’ column would indicate that I’m still failing. Just barely failing. What are the adjustments from the other column?”
“Oh, I merely wanted your scores to be higher.”
She let her features go slack, as if caught so far by surprise that she didn’t know how to react or what to say.
“You see,” he said, “I think you have the potential to become a good pilot. So I’ve temporarily adjusted things to keep you from being booted. But I don’t think you can do this without help. It will take a team effort … and you haven’t been a team player, have you?”
“Well, I’d … like to be. I just don’t know how. Things are so different here.”
“Excellent! We could use you on my team. Working on my team calls for some extra effort on your part … but it comes with rewards you can’t get from any other unit.”
And then he told her of a mission. It would be a milk-run training mission within the atmosphere of the nearest uninhabited planet in an A-wing. Her control boards would register a critical failure of the engines, which would overheat and threaten detonation. She’d be ordered by Repness to eject, which she would—well after the trouble-free A-wing was safely on the ground. An ion bomb detonated in the atmosphere would give investigators the evidence they needed to corroborate the fighter’s utter destruction, and a rescue crew would pick her up well after Repness’s crew ferried the expensive fighter away for sale in some distant black-market port.
Lara listened, bored, to the whole inevitable deal, feigning puzzlement, shock, indignation, futile resistance, and finally pained acceptance as the hopeless nature of her situation was made clear to her.
And she knew, with a growing glee that was hard to conceal, that every word she and Repness said was being sent, by the very device he thought was a transmission-detecting sweeper, to a file under a forged pilot account on the frigate’s main computer.
Contact Wraith Squadron for help when matters with Repness came to a head? Why bother, when she could engineer his destruction and her own career’s salvation with far more panache than those pilots could ever manage?
It was a different star system—the Halmad system, well outside the orbit of its outermost planet—but the situation was very familiar.
Captain Rhanken could not maintain an expression of imperturbability the second time the Hawk-bats boarded his freighter. His voice was one of pure despair: “How did you know where we’d be?”
“We asked the right people,” Face said. “Your trade guild has a security breach in it I could pilot a Death Star through.”
It was a lie, a big one. Castin Donn had downloaded a number of the cargo ship’s records the last time they were aboard, and covered his tracks. The records didn’t say how Barderia’s master would adjust his schedule to account for the act of piracy committed upon him … but they did show how he’d reacted in the past to such situations. And now the Hawk-bats had taken him a second time, on his return leg home.
If the analysts of the trade guild didn’t believe the lie, that was all right; nothing would change. But if they did, they might institute a sweeping change in the guild’s standards for secure transmissions and information flow. Eventually that would be an impediment to the Hawk-bats’ piracy, but in the short term, possibly as long as the Hawk-bats were to exist as a pirate band, it would cause disruption and confusion in the guild, changes that New Republic Intelligence had a couple of agents ready to examine and take advantage of.
It was a good time to be a pirate.
Face said,