Star Wars_ X-Wing 07_ Solo Command - Aaron Allston [34]
“That makes sense. Tyria?”
She didn’t meet his gaze. “I just know it.” She seemed huddled in her chair. Kell reached over to take her hand, but she barely acknowledged him.
Face said, “That’s not good enough, Tyria. What do you know? How do you know it?”
She shook her head hard, sending her blond ponytail flipping across the features of Donos beside her, and finally looked at Face directly. “I felt it. When we cruised past. There’s something there. A residue of … pain. Of things so badly hurt that they desperately wanted to die. Not test animals, either. There was awareness there.”
Face suppressed a shudder.
Kell said, “You felt something from the Force.”
Tyria nodded. “I’ve been working so hard, to learn to relax into it, not to push at it … not to force the Force, as it were. Sometimes, now, I can put myself into a flow state where I’m almost not myself. I’m just reacting to what I’m feeling. I’d managed to do that when we cruised past. I almost wish I hadn’t. I almost lost my last meal.”
“Well, that’s a good thing,” Kell said. When Tyria looked at him, confused, he amended, “Not the throwing-up part. The flow-state part. That sounds like an improvement.”
She managed a faint smile for him.
“Northwest Two,” Face said. “That’s our best entry.”
“No,” Lara said.
Face held up a hand. “Wait a second. Next to Northwest Two. Northwest One or Three. Where the security is likely to be less substantial.”
“Yes,” Lara said.
Face sagged in relief. “She said yes,” he said. “You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting to hear her say yes.”
Donos murmured something under his breath and Lara flushed red.
Under cover of darkness, they emerged from beneath the sheeting covering the speeder’s cargo bed. The speeder was parked between refuse containers in the parking area of a warehouse; across the thoroughfare was Binring’s northwestern quadrant. This was the last the Wraiths would see of the speeder; at some point during the day its loss, and the disappearance of its owner, had to have been reported, and there was too much danger in piloting it around avenues of Lurark left almost deserted at nightfall. They’d acquire other transportation for their departure from the city.
Shalla, kneeling in the shadow of one of the refuse containers, scanned the empty street and darkened Binring buildings below through a set of holorecording macrobinoculars. “Downward-facing holocams with overlapping coverage,” she said. “Standard placement. For Imperial forces, that is. Overkill for a pharmaceutical-fabrications plant. Wait a second.”
Face knelt beside her. The second turned into several, then finally she spoke. “There’s a gap in the coverage. The most northern holocam on the western wall is positioned so it can’t really see around the corner. The most western holocam on the northern wall isn’t far enough west to make up the gap … I don’t think.” She lowered the goggles and brought out a glow rod so she could look at the hand-drawn map they’d assembled that afternoon. “That’s right. If we come in from the north, along this narrow approach, the holocams can’t pick us up.”
“It’s a lie,” Tyria said. Her voice was a whisper, a sad whisper.
Shalla shot her a look. “What do you mean?”
Tyria started as if out of some reverie and gave her a nervous smile. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way. It’s not your lie, Shalla. It’s theirs.” Her wave indicated the Binring building. “There’s a big … watchfulness over there waiting for us. It’s laughing.”
Shalla said, “You’re getting weird, Tyria.”
“Yes, but let’s take her at her word,” Face said. “Shalla, could they have set up the mistake in coverage deliberately, as a lure?”
“Yes.”
“What would they be doing?”
“They’d have a secondary set of holocams in a less-obvious place.”