Star Wars_ X-Wing 06_ Iron Fist - Aaron Allston [8]
Phanan didn’t look abashed. “Oops.”
“General Cracken’s field investigators are trying to backtrack their expenditures and movements; maybe that will turn up some leads for them. Not our problem. Anything else? No? Dismissed.”
In the organizational chaos that followed, Runt chose Kell and Tyria as his partners; Face took Phanan and Janson; and Piggy chose Myn, and rounded out his group by adding Squeaky, the unit’s 3PO quartermaster, to his roster. By silent agreement, each of the three virtual Zsinjes took one of the new squadron members: Runt took Shalla, Piggy chose Castin, and Face took the Twi’lek Dia.
“And may the best Zsinj win,” Face said. “Until he runs into Wraith Squadron, that is.”
2
Gara Petothel rechecked the code for the last time, her attention skipping back and forth across screens of data, then sent the command to compile the ungainly-looking mess into what she hoped would be the final version of her program.
A work of art, it was. It would transfer a number of packets of encrypted data from her terminal deep in the low-rent warrens of the city-planet of Coruscant to public computer repositories, disguising the data as ancient archives of accounting data. Then, once the trail back to Gara’s terminal was cold, it would transmit the data out across the New Republic HoloNet, to HoloNet addresses Gara had committed to memory weeks before … addresses that would lead eventually to the communications station of the warlord Zsinj.
If he’s a smart man, she thought, and by all accounts he is, within a few weeks I’ll have gainful employment again. Away from this cesspool and away from the Rebel police and Intelligence agents—
A heavy knock fell on the door. She jumped. Sign of a guilty conscience, she thought, and tried to school her features back into an expression of innocent curiosity. She switched off power to her terminal’s screen.
As she rose to answer the door, she looked into the mirror to make sure she looked the part she was supposed to be playing. Her downy white-blond hair, cut very close, still seemed odd to her, as was the absence of a mole she’d carried on her cheek since childhood—a mole she had secretly had removed when preparing this identity. No, this identity shared only a certain delicacy of features with Gara Petothel, and hair and makeup were sufficiently different that no one should recognize her in the time it would take her to leave.
She opened the door.
Two Rebel pilots stood outside, both in pilot’s jumpsuits topped with transparent slickers more suited to Coruscant’s frequent thunderstorms. One had saturnine features and a prosthetic faceplate over the upper left half of his face, a red glow where his left eye would have been. The other would have been startlingly handsome, with luxuriant dark hair framing intelligent, active eyes and features suited to raising heart rates, but his face was marred by a puckered scar—a blaster graze, she guessed—running from his left cheek to his right forehead.
She knew the one with the faceplate, and it was he who spoke first. “Lara Notsil.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Yes.” She looked beyond them, to the pedestrian traffic in the tenement hallway. Though her tiny quarters were on the fortieth floor of a building, this hallway was part of a tube access allowing people to walk across kilometers of Coruscant at this altitude, and traffic was always heavy. Her hallway was a place of thefts and assaults, but also a way for her to lose herself quickly in a crowd, which is why she’d chosen it.
She returned her attention to her visitors. “It’s Lieutenant Phanan, isn’t it? From the hospital on Borleias? Please, come in before someone sticks a vibroblade in you.” She backed away and allowed them to enter, then shut the door against the ceaseless stream of humanity outside.
“Actually, it’s just Flight Officer Phanan,” her visitor said. “The smart one here is the lieutenant, Garik Loran.”
She froze in mid-handshake and gave the other pilot a closer