Star Wars_ X-Wing 07_ Solo Command - Aaron Allston [139]
“They won’t need to.” The voice, cultured and self-assured, came from behind her, from the hangar corner nearest the door.
She whirled. General Melvar stood there, a blaster pistol in his hand, and Ensign Gatterweld, looking surly and betrayed, held a blaster rifle at the ready beside him. Both men moved toward her.
“You had to come back here for your souvenir X-wing,” Melvar said. “Perhaps your only mistake in a skillful escape attempt. I knew your arrival was pending when you or your droid falsified the radiation leak for this deck.”
Lara saw shadows congregating behind the two men, at the door into the bay. She raised her hands. “That’s why the hangar doors were not secured. You were waiting for me.”
“Correct.”
“Will you be killing me now?”
“No. That’s the warlord’s prerogative.” Melvar looked sad, and Lara had the unsettling feeling that the emotion was genuine. “I do wish you’d been faithful. You could have helped the warlord lock down this quadrant of the galaxy. He’s generous with those he respects. You could have owned a world.”
“I wish I had something witty to say to you,” she told him. “But the thought of helping Zsinj is turning my stomach.”
The humanoids moved forward, a nonhuman mob, the sounds of their passage masked by the alarm sounding in the corridor.
“I think—” Melvar stopped, his eyes darting right, where one of the Gamorreans had just moved up within his peripheral vision.
He turned, brought the blaster around. The other Gamorrean, the female, grabbed his forearm and slammed him to the hangar’s metal floor. Gatterweld spun, panic on his face—
And then the nonhumans were all over the two men, pounding them, raking claws across their faces, biting at limbs and heads and torsos.
“Stop it!” Lara yelled.
The humanoids looked up at her.
“Just bind them. Leave them. They’ll die when Iron Fist is destroyed.”
They looked at each other, then rose from the downed men.
In minutes, she and Tonin had the two vehicles ready for departure. She fitted a ladder to the side of her X-wing. “You’re sure you can fly this thing.”
The Ewok, standing at the base of the shuttle’s boarding ramp, nodded. He carried the objects he’d brought with him from the hidden medical facility—four prosthetic extensions, two with articulated hands at the ends, two with long-toed feet.
Tonin rolled up to her and whistled a question.
She didn’t have to know the musical speech of droids to understand. “No, Tonin. You’re going with them. You have to broadcast all that data I recorded about Zsinj’s projects. The medical data.”
He whistled again, more urgently, shrilly, a complicated message.
She drew her goggles from her pack, put them on, plugged the trailing wire into Tonin’s side.
WHERE ARE YOU GOING?
“I’m going to rejoin my unit.”
YOU SAID THEY HATED YOU. THEY WILL BE YOUR ENEMIES. THE WARLORD’S FORCES ARE YOUR ENEMIES. YOU’LL DIE IF YOU DO THIS.
“Maybe,” she said. “Probably.”
DON’T.
She stared down into his holocam eye, and suddenly found it, and Tonin’s stance, to be as expressive as any human mannerism. “Oh, Tonin. I have to. I have to do this to be who I decided I want to be. Do you understand?”
NO. YOU’VE ALREADY REPROGRAMMED YOURSELF. THAT’S ENOUGH.
“I wish it were. But an intention isn’t anything unless you carry it out.” She knelt, wrapped her arms around the droid, gave him a squeeze she knew he could not feel.
YOU WILL TELL US IF YOU NEED HELP. WE WILL HELP.
“I have my comlink,” she said. “I’ll tell you.” Tears blurred her vision for the first time in days. She rose, pulled her goggles free of Tonin’s jack, and hurriedly climbed up into her cockpit, unable to face the droid again.
Tonin wheetled one last, sad sound and rolled toward the landing craft.
17
On Wedge’s sensor board, the interceptors of the 181st had a commanding lead; they were already entering the atmosphere of the moon, once home to Selaggis’s colony.
Four friendly starfighters trailed the 181st, not losing ground to them—Kell, Elassar, Shalla, and Janson, flying four