Star Wars_ X-Wing 06_ Iron Fist - Aaron Allston [93]
Face turned back to Melvar. “My apologies.”
The general shook his head. “No need to apologize. The trooper was not instructed to behave this way toward honored guests. I think a little experience with electricity will do him some good.” He gestured for another stormtrooper to attend to the unconscious man, then for Face to fall in step beside him. “How much do you pay for this man Dissek’s services?”
“I’ll never tell,” Face said. “If you want to try to hire him away, you’ll have to offer him a bribe without knowing my own economies.”
Melvar offered a little sigh of vexation.
They landed in a grove of fruit trees less than a kilometer from the charred oval of dirt that now lay where the community of New Oldtown had once stood. It was night, and only the crescent of a single moon afforded Lara and Donos any light.
Together, they approached the area of char from the east, where a rise overlooked the destroyed town. Lara assured Donos that a farmhouse had once stood there; she didn’t tell him that she knew this only from publicly available information taken from the community’s main computer shortly before Admiral Trigit bombarded the town out of existence. At the summit of the rise, they got down on hands and knees to crawl until the ruined area was beneath them.
What had been New Oldtown was as black as cloudy night. What she could see of the terrain suggested that the onetime community and outlying farms were now a series of charred furrows and craters—certainly, the nearest terrain was like that.
In the midst of it all, though, was a house—a prefabricated brick-shaped dwelling of an incongruous blue, cheery lights in the windows. It looked like a cheap dollhouse.
Donos sighted in on it with his sniper rifle, adjusting the range on his sight. He did not speak, but worked with confidence and precision. Lara could tell he’d done this many times in similar circumstances.
“They’ll probably scan for large life-forms when I arrive,” she said. “In case I brought allies. Which I have.”
“We’re nearly a kilometer out,” Donos said. “They might have a scanner that could find me, but probably not. Have you got your comlink to broadcast continuously?”
“No. They’re sure to check for that. I’m going in with it off, and I’m leaving it off.”
He looked at her, one eye visible in the shadow of his face. “That’s not a good idea. If you get in trouble—”
“If I hold up a fist, it means I’m in trouble. Come to the rescue. If I don’t, I have the situation under control.”
He sighed, obviously unhappy. “All right. But call for help the instant you feel the situation spin out of control.”
“If it does.” She hesitated, at a loss for what to say next. His tone suggested that he wasn’t just being professionally methodical—he actually cared about what happened to her. She wasn’t used to that and didn’t know how to respond. No words suggested themselves, so she simply rose and headed down the hill toward the ludicrous blue house.
Castin Donn watched Zsinj’s scanner team go over the interior of Narra. The picture on his handheld screen wasn’t good—a flickery blue and white, limitations imposed by the microminiaturized holocam lens he had set up to observe the shuttle’s cabin—but it did allow him to see which of the cockpit’s control panels they popped open so as to install the machinery they’d brought with them. A tracking device, probably. They brought up the shuttle’s master control program, too, but didn’t spend much time with it—probably just erasing the record of their entry and exit. Not that such a tactic would work; Castin had done considerable work on Narra’s systems, so that now what appeared to be the standard interfaces to all shuttle programs were actually a false layer. Code-slicers could adjust those layers all they wished, but their modifications would be trapped and later presented to the shuttle’s authorized operators for confirmation or deletion.
The scanning team departed and the boarding ramp rose into