Star Wars_ X-Wing 07_ Solo Command - Aaron Allston [104]
Of course it was motionless. It had no engine, no motivation.
Except for him. And to set it into motion, to make it do what it was designed to do, would be to look stupid.
His legs extended off the back of his jury-rigged vehicle. He brought them down to gain purchase with the floor and kicked off, setting his craft into motion. He kicked again and again, building up speed as he floated between shelves of stored materials toward a distant bulkhead. Halfway down, he kicked once more, sideways, setting his craft into a spin, and drew himself into a ball atop it.
His floating sled spun haphazardly, coming within half a meter of a shelving unit before the sled’s repulsor unit reacted to the proximity of the thing and bounced him back the other way. Like a ball, he careened from shelf to shelf across the open space in between, coming within handspans of impact but never quite hitting, while he floated toward the bulkhead wall.
Eventually, forward momentum almost spent, he floated to within a half meter of the bulkhead and came to a stop.
“Well, that looked good.”
Donos rolled onto his side to get a look at the speaker. Wes Janson stood a few meters away. He must have approached up the walkway that ran along the bulkhead wall.
“I’m amazed it held together,” Donos said. “I expected to have the whole thing fail halfway through and toss me into a stack of crates.”
“Is it fun?”
Donos nodded. “Pretty much.”
“You don’t look too amused.”
“I imagine I did a moment ago.” Donos rose to his feet, gripped his craft by its one handle, and depressed what had once been a pilot’s yoke trigger. The craft dropped as it depowered; he hauled it upright. “But even fun isn’t much fun. I keep wishing Lara were here.”
Janson nodded, sympathy plain on his features. “Yeah. But you’re about to get more people here than you probably want. We’re doing some inventory here in a few minutes. You probably ought to try the main corridor down in Engineering. It’s long enough, and I’m sure the engineers would be interested in seeing your kludge.”
“Probably.” Donos checked his chrono. “A little later, though. I have somewhere to be.”
The moment Donos was out of sight, Wedge slipped out from a second-level shelf full of foodstuff packages. “Well, that was interesting.”
“Wedge! Why don’t you scare the other half of my life out of me? How long were you waiting there?”
“About fifteen minutes. During most of which, Donos just sat there, waiting to decide whether or not to play his game.”
“Well, he did. A good sign.”
“I hope so.” Wedge reached behind the first row of stacked food crates and dragged another one up front. This one, like the others, was labeled BANTHA STEAK, DEHYDRATED, 250 GRAMS RESTORED, INDIVIDUALLY PACKAGED. But the top was ajar and the smell wafting from the crate, something like fruit and leaf compost, was not reminiscent of bantha meat. Wedge reached into the crate’s top and drew out a bowl full of brownish lumps Janson couldn’t identify. “Now, you’ve fed Kettch before, correct?”
“No. You and whatever crew you’ve been using haven’t brought me in before now.”
“That’s right.” Wedge led Janson toward the forward doors out of the cargo area. “There are still some security concerns, since Kettch was supposed to be a Hawk-bat, not a New Republic pilot. So we’re limiting the personnel who see him. He gets one bowlful like this, three times a day. We have him set up near an officers’ mess that General Solo isn’t using, since he doesn’t entertain. So you’ll get water for Kettch from the mess.”
“Right.”
They passed through a small door into a secondary cargo area, this one much smaller than the one they’d left, its shelves full of crates labeled BULK CLOTH. From the rear, they approached a larger crate, one two meters by two meters by one and a half tall, which had been laid out in the aisle between rows of shelves.
“And now,” Wedge said, as they got to the front of the crate, “you meet—uh-oh.”
A door that had obviously