Star Wars_ X-Wing 07_ Solo Command - Aaron Allston [123]
“Good.” Face changed the timbre of his voice, dropping it a register, making it smooth, insidious. “ ‘Please don’t insult my intelligence. Please don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about.’ ” He forced a falsetto. “ ‘I don’t, I really don’t. Please put down the blaster. You’re frightening me.’ ” He dropped into the lower register again. “ ‘Fright is the least of what you will suffer.’ ”
“Are we wrong?” Runt asked. “Or is this as terrible as we think? The writing is awful. You are not improving on it.”
“Sometimes you rise above your material, sometimes you don’t. I had to learn this when I was seven. It has never left me.” He dropped his voice again. “ ‘Now, tell me where the map is, or I—’ ”
“New contact, course thirteen degrees, down eighty-two.” Runt’s voice was suddenly crisp, professional.
“Roll for visual inspection, kill forward thrust, kill cockpit lights, passive sensors only.”
“Acknowledged, One.”
Face rolled his X-wing upside down. It would have been an unsettling experience in a vessel not equipped with an inertial compensator, but to his perspective it appeared only that the universe rotated around him. He shut down most of his vehicle systems and visually scanned the area of space Runt had indicated.
Nothing; the target was too far away. He brought up the visual enhancer on his sensor board and directed it toward the target area.
A minute’s worth of careful panning and searching yielded the target: a group of four ships in close formation. The smallest of them was too tiny to identify by class, but the other three were not. Three Star Destroyers, one of them an ancient Victory-class, one an Imperial-class, and the other—
“We have her,” Face said. “Iron Fist. Give me a minute while I calculate range, Six.”
“Yes, sir.”
Face ran numbers through his navigational computer and compared them with what he knew about the likely sensor ranges of Imperial capital ships. “All right,” he said. “Six, I want you to run ahead at one-third acceleration for ten minutes, then set your course to Mon Remonda’s station and transit back there. You were recording, weren’t you?”
“Yes, sir! Wait, let us check. Yes, we have it.”
“Good. Go.”
The news hit Mon Remonda’s bridge like a concussion missile. Solo came up out of his chair, began issuing orders. Captain Onoma did the same. Often their words overlapped one another.
“Recall all starfighters in close range,” Solo said. “Launch our hyperdrive-equipped shuttles to the regions we sent recon units to and have them transmit the new coordinates.”
“Battle stations,” Onoma said. “All spacetight doors to be closed in three minutes.”
“Transmit our course to Contact M-317,” Solo said. “Dispatch Skyhook and Crynyd to form up with M-317. They’re to shadow her at all times, protect her at all costs, not to interfere with her operations.”
“Bring our course to one-oh-six-point-two-two-four, elevation thirty-six-point-oh-nine-nine. Transmit same to fleet.”
“Tell the Falsehood crew to stand down and go to their secondary mission parameters; we won’t need them as bait.”
A low, unsettling rumble filled the bridge. Solo felt the hair on his arms and the back of his neck rise. He swung around to see Chewbacca standing in the doorway, his expression happy, uttering the jubilant hunting call. “That’s right, Chewie,” he said. “It’s our best shot yet.”
15
Lara was nearly jolted out of her seat by the high pitch and panic in the voice of the sensor officer, three seats down from her in the crew pit. “Contact, contact, a drop out of hyperspace, I read four, five, seven vessels cruiser size or better, total fleet size thirteen vessels. They’re already deploying starfighters.”
Boots clattered on the command walkway overhead and Lara saw Zsinj, General Melvar, and Captain Vellar, the stern-faced man who would have been master of Iron Fist had not Zsinj chosen the vessel as his flagship, running forward, toward the main bow viewports.