Star Wars_ X-Wing 06_ Iron Fist - Aaron Allston [62]
Not since her parents’ loss had she seen that expression.
And the Wraiths and Rogues weren’t saying it, weren’t deliberately expressing the thought, “You are one of us.” No, it was implicit, a backdrop to whatever else they were saying. Good job noticing that backup squad. Nice shot; how’d you manage it with your lasers on single fire? Your first kill silhouette, congratulations and condolences.
One of us.
She worked her way out from the midst of the crowd and walked, still somehow insulated from the words and physical sensations of the world around her, to the pilots’ quarters she now shared with Tyria.
Maybe she could do it. Maybe she could just be Lara Notsil, forever, with Lieutenant Gara Petothel, that poor, unhappy creature, truly among the dead of the Star Destroyer Implacable.
One of us.
She slept, and in her dreams Gara and Lara argued with one another, speaking words she could barely hear and couldn’t understand, exchanging thoughts that would make no sense when she awoke, and she did not know which of the two wore her face.
When the Wraiths returned to Hawk-bat Station, with their new member in tow, they found that the other members of the squadron had not been idle. On his own initiative, Kell Tainer had plotted and led two missions, all because of Runt.
“We determined that they, the people of Halmad, had made a mistake,” the long-faced alien said, pride in his voice. He stood at the head of the cargo module that served as the Wraiths’ conference room; the pilots were packed in around its narrow oval table. “They had installed a new set of sensor stations on the west coast of Hullis’s continent and decommissioned the older sensor stations out in the western islands. But when we examined the specifications of those new sensors, we discovered that their effective range was a couple of hundred kilometers short of the area they were supposed to cover. Meaning that we now possessed a narrow corridor of airspace we could drop into without any real likelihood of detection. After that, with terrain-following flying to make other sensor tracking difficult, we were able to stage raids on ground emplacements.”
“Raid number one,” Kell said, “was on a port warehouse district in the city of Fellon. Not much booty there, I’m afraid. We picked up a large stock of recreational holos being produced by the Imperials, propaganda dramas to make Face blush—”
“That’d take some doing,” Face said. “I’m shameless.”
“True. But also, in taking off, we strafed the marina where the recreational water vessels of the city’s wealthy—and other people, including the wealthy of the city of Hullis and the officers of Victory Base there—were docked. Did a few dozen million credits’ worth of damage to some very pretty vessels.
“In our second mission, we struck at Hullis herself. We put Castin on the ground the day before to do what he could with security systems, and then Phanan and I flew in, blew a hole in the side of a building, and flew out with as much cargo as we could load without sacrificing the flying speed of our TIE fighters.”
“What cargo?” Wedge asked.
“Imperial credit notes, coin, gems. We hit one of the official money-exchange sites used by the Imperial base.”
Wedge gaped. “You robbed a bank.”
“We did. It was fun, too. Getting clear was a little tricky—that close in, it’s impossible to elude their sensors—but we just took off straight for space, suffered their antiaerial-invasion gun barrage, and outflew the TIEs they sent in pursuit. End result, a few dings and pits in Phanan’s starfighter.”
“To match,” Phanan said, “the few dings and pits in its pilot.”
“Tell them what I did,” Castin said.
“Oh, that’s right. In the day or so he had before his extraction, Castin managed to forge us a high-level account on their global information service. We’re now being bounced visual and sensor data from their planetary defense satellite network. It’s not being beamed straight at us, don’t worry—we’ve set up a relay near one of the existing satellite-belt mining colonies. If it’s detected, we can detonate