Star Wars_ X-Wing 06_ Iron Fist - Aaron Allston [9]
Face gave her a smile. She knew it was an actor’s smile, carefully rehearsed to suggest amusement, comradeship, and attraction, but despite the fact it did not fool her, she was still half washed away by the emotions it caused. She felt as though she’d just been invited into his intimate acquaintance. Her light-headedness worse than ever, she sat heavily at her terminal chair.
“That’s me,” Face said. “I get that a lot. No, the story of my death was a sort of propaganda thing cooked up by the Empire to make people think the Rebel Alliance was full of evil people who’d kill a child actor. I’m a pilot these days.”
“Obviously.” She struggled to bring herself under control. Remember, she thought. You’re Lara Notsil now. Farm girl from Aldivy. Former prisoner of Admiral Trigit. That’s what they’re here for, more debriefing on Trigit. Phanan had been there, one of the Rebels shooting at Implacable—shooting at me. “Please, sit down. I’m sorry about the mess—it’s hard to keep anything clean here. How did you find me?”
Phanan sat on the edge of the bed. Face took the only other chair. Phanan said, “Anyplace you can walk or sit without sticking to everything is very hygienic by low-level Coruscant standards. Believe me, we know. As for finding you—we asked around New Republic Intelligence. They said you’d been discharged and had declined transportation back to your homeworld. We ran a search on the worldnet looking for your name and recent employment application. You’re working as an information processor for a shipping concern?”
“Yes. It pays”—she gestured at the tidy squalor around her—“for all this.”
Face said, “How would you like a better job and the chance to live in better conditions?”
“I’d like that. What would I have to do?”
“Go through New Republic pilot training. The full academy course.”
No, thanks. How would you like to get me a ticket to Warlord Zsinj’s fleet instead? But she had to play her role. “That would be … nice. But it can’t happen.”
Face gave her another smile, this one full of confidence. “Why not?”
Gara injected a note of wistfulness into her voice. “When I was back on the farm on Aldivy, that’s something I thought about every day. Learning to fly. I got to be pretty good on the farm’s skimmers. I studied things like voice and Basic to sound less like a farm girl.”
“It shows,” Face said. “Your Aldivian accent is almost gone.”
If you knew that I was born and reared less than a hundred klicks from here, you’d appreciate how much work it takes to speak with the barest trace of that accent, Gara thought. “But then, when the Implacable came, destroyed New Oldtown, and took me away, I sort of lost interest. All I wanted to do was see the Implacable destroyed. And then when Admiral Trigit chose me for his”—she broke eye contact, put an extra rasp into her voice, let a tear fall—“mistress, all I wanted was for him to die.
“You did that. You killed him. Your squadron and the other ones. Thank you.” She modulated her voice to sound as though she were feigning nonchalance and concealing pain. “But I guess I don’t have anything left. Any ambitions.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Besides, since I’ve been … associated with Admiral Trigit, the New Republic wouldn’t trust me.” She shrugged fatalistically.
“They cleared you. You were never charged with any crime.”
She nodded. And what work it had been, all those weeks ago, to generate the Lara Notsil identity, careful planning ahead just in case her employment with Trigit didn’t work out. Hooking her new identity to a real event, Trigit’s punitive bombardment of a farm community that had refused to provision him. Finding and modifying the pitiful few records concerning a farm girl whose body was now a carbonized mass of powder in a charred Aldivian grainfield, replacing key bits of data with Gara’s picture, Gara’s fingerprints, Gara’s cellular coding. Spinning a tale of secret chambers on the Implacable—so secret other Implacable survivors could plausibly