"Aaron Allston "Iron Fist" (STARWARS. X-Wing #6)" - читать интересную книгу автора

were her enemies. But her fellow candidates had such naive en- ~i
thusiasm, such a light of life within them, that it was growing J
increasingly hard not to like them. i
She felt a little tickle at the back of her neck. She turned to look through the simulator's rear viewport.
At the back of the classroom, a man in an Alliance uniform ~ was turning away, heading toward the room's rear exit. From his height and build, she recognized him as Colonel Repness. ~ When had he come into the classroom? Had he been watching her in the moments after her exchange with Captain Sormic? She watched until he was gone, until she was alone in t the room.
She checked her chrono. There were no classes scheduled !
in this room for an hour. She pulled up the instrument panel
before her and did a little bit of deft rewiring, a bit of electronic
trickery at which she was becoming quite adept. Then she
clicked the panel back into place and manually pulled the
canopy back down.
When she hit the button that, on a real X-wing, would ini-tiate an emergency restart, the simulator came back online. But now it would not transmit its results and recordings to the training facility's central computers. Whatever she accom-plished here would remain her secret.
The world with the ruined city came into view again, and once more she was surrounded by a squadron of X-wings.



5
Shalla tried to interpret every sway, every course change taken by the skimmer in whose enclosed bed she rode. Eventually the vehicle had to return to a motor pool or other vehicle hangar. Eventually she'd be able to begin her portion of the mission... a portion she had to accomplish alone.
The vehicle went through a protracted right turn, then slowed and settled to the ground with an unmusical metallic clang. Shalla raised her blaster rifle to cover the door. Some stormtroopers were thorough and efficient enough to police their vehicles; others weren't.
Hers apparently fell in the latter category. The door re-mained resolutely closed. Then the lights went out.
She heard, from outside the skimmer, a man's laughter. She tensed. But the laughter was the type that came in response to a joke, not malicious laughter directed at a trapped enemy.
When she heard the heavy footsteps of stormtrooper compos-ite armor falling on duracrete, she relaxed.
She gave it another minute. She wanted the stormtroopers to be well away from the skimmer, but couldn't afford them too much time to realize that something was wrong. Then she rose, used her glow rod to find the door switch, and pressed the switch.
Nothing, not even a beep. It had been deactivated with the rest of the power to the skiminer's enclosure. She swore to herself, but it was only a minor inconvenience.
She switched off her helmet comlink. She took off her storm-trooper helmet and spent a couple of minutes carefully extract-ing the comm gear inside it, then detached the miniature power pack from the gear. It took another couple of minutes to remove the door-switch cover and wire the power pack into it. Then she put the now comm-free helmet on again and took up her rifle.
This time, the door opened smartly. Outside was the slab-like side of an identical skimmer just barely far enough away to let this skimmer's door descend as a ramp. When Shalla peered out, to the right she saw another row of skimmers of various types, some small and sporty, and the motor-pool wall beyond; to her left was open duracrete and then closed hangar-style doors of the motor-pool building. Voices reached her; she couldn't make out the words, but they were male, two or three at least, raised in laughter and amused comment. They came from the rear of the motor-pool building. She thought she also heard a man's voice, in conspicuous speech, from the front.
So far, so good. She stepped out, alert to trouble, and hit the button to close the door again. But the ramp raised only halfway up, then made a whining noise and stopped. It slowly began to sag back toward the duracrete floor.
She got under it and lifted. The power pack from her hel-met was obviously not up to powering door machinery. By sheer strength she got the door lifted back into place. Though it did not lock, it fit snugly and would look normal to casual inspection.
Now, three problems to solve: two groups of Imperial workers or stormtroopers, plus whatever security was installed within the motor-pool building. She looked around for the places, often at corners and on the metal beams supporting the curved ceiling, where sensors tended to be set up.
Nothing. She breathed a sigh of relief. Skimmers weren't valuable enough to this base to require constant surveillance. One problem down. She walked forward, toward the source of the droning speech, and wished she had Tyria's aptitude for near-silent movement.



The Wraiths kept themselves flat against the exterior wall of the hangar, deep in the darkest shadow cast by the building.
Wedge, one man back from the building's front corner, suppressed a snort. The glossy white stormtrooper armor they were wearing practically glowed in the dark. Even in deep shadow they would be impossible to miss if a passerby glanced in their direction. Still, old habits of stealth died hard, and Wedge didn't want them to die at all.
Janson, ahead of him, helmet off, turned back and held up two fingers, then shook his head. Two guards on the front of the building, and they weren't going to be easy pickings.
Wedge traded places with him and took off his own helmet, luxuriated for a moment in the sensation of air moving once again on his face, and hazarded a peek.
The front of the hangar was well lit by two overhead sources of light, both attached to the building's front wall. The center of the wall was dominated by a large sliding door in two sections; one section would slide right, the other left. The du-racrete leading up to the door was decorated with many thin scorch marks, sign of numberless too-hasty departures by TIE fighters shooting out of the hangar and angling immediately for the sky. That suggested the pilots on-base considered them-selves hotshots and had a commander who encouraged such behavior, also not a good thing for the Wraiths.
On either side of the door, perhaps twenty meters apart, were guards in stormtrooper armor. Their stances were angled in toward the door, and each had the other plus most of the front of the building in sight. They might have been chatting over a private channel on their helmet cornlinks, but otherwise they were very much on duty.
Wedge dismissed the simplest of tactics for such situations,
the make-a-noise-and-one-of-them-will-come gambit. Guards
like these, professionally on duty even when out of sight of
their officers and fellows, would certainly investigate, but first
they'd call in the anomaly. If the investigating guard didn't re-
port back continuously to his fellow, the other one would call
that fact in, too. Within moments the place would be swarm-
ing with stormtroopers. Wedge and the Wraiths needed some considerable uninterrupted time with the vehicles inside- perhaps as much as half an hour.
There was another door on the building front, immedi-ately left of the leftmost guard, but it was securely shut and looked like an armored door-quite defensible if someone in-side wanted to make a stand of it.
Wedge switched places with Janson again and let the man act as guard. In a whisper, he explained the situation to the oth-ers and asked, "Ideas?"
Castin said, "I might be able to slice into the base's main computer and have them relieved of duty; we just march two of us in and dismiss them or blast them."