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

tion's Site A3, tasked with bringing high-quality metals up from the depths of a large asteroid formed during the long-ago destruction of one of the Halmad system's outer planets. The asteroid had a thick outer shell of stone and a center made up mostly of cooled nickel and iron. Tonheld Mining Corpora-tion, all too efficient, had removed the majority of the useful metals, leaving only those that were trapped in veins and pock-ets within the stone shell. Then the company had dismantled its machinery and housing modules and departed, leaving the site deserted and cold for forty years.
Now, when approached by spacecraft, it still seemed the same. Its thick stone sheath, still intact, was sufficient to block sensors from detecting the life-forms and vehicle emissions now within it.
Halfway down the main shaft, a side tunnel, once a stag-ing area for the mining corporation, turned off at a ninety-degree angle, running parallel to the asteroid's surface. This was now sealed off by a duracrete plug perforated only by large motor-driven doors at either end.
Beyond, inside, where the side shaft was broadest and tallest, was the hangar area where the Hawk-bats' vehicles rested. There were two TIE fighters and five TIE interceptors, and the biggest vessel on site, a Xiytiar-class freighter named Sungrass.
Among the least elegant of all cargo vessels serving in the galaxy, the Xiytiar-class freighter consisted of a long blocky bow that was mostly cargo space, an equally long connective spar in the middle, and a short blocky component that was mostly engines at the stern. Sungrass didn't improve the vehicle line's reputation for stylishness; scarcely a centimeter of its once-gleaming surface was unmarked by scrapes, sloppy paint-work, ion scoring from too-close passes alongside other ves-sels, or old blaster burns.
But its hull was solid, its engines were recently rebuilt and in fine tune.
Once it had belonged to an Imperial shipping corporation.
It had been in dry dock in a repair hangar when the entire site
was destroyed by elements of New Republic Intelligence. Its



bow cracked, its superstructure buried under the wreckage of the hangar, it had been reported as destroyed by reconnais-sance units of the Empire. Now, after a couple of seasons of re-pair, it flew again, its name changed, its history fabricated, its mission to support Wraith Squadron.
On its bridge, Wedge Antilles snorted. He supposed that was symbolic of the New Republic as a whole. Making use of the Empire's castoffs, getting a few extra years of functionality out of them, almost always making do with scraps and crumbs in a way that confounded the remnants of the Empire. Yet it was a far cry from the pretty vision of an Empire-free future that the New Republic still doggedly pursued. He wondered if that image, where everything was new and gleaming and free of any memories of the Empire, would ever come to pass.
He glanced over at the man in the captain's chair. Captain Valton seemed ideally suited to command of this ship. He, too, looked weathered and battered but still fit for many years of useful service. His long, tanned face was unmemorable, though his eyes were sharp, possessed of intelligence. Wedge thought that if they put him in a janitor's uniform he'd blend right in with the service personnel of any New Republic or Im-perial station, and wondered if the Wraiths might someday make use of that fact.
And, mercifully, he didn't apparently have a need to hear himself talk. He saw Wedge's side glance, looked over in case Wedge were trying to get his attention, and when he saw that was not the case, returned to the datapad on which he was cal-culating fuel-mass ratios, all without saying a word.
Wedge turned his attention to his Wraiths, visible through Sungrass's forward viewports, hard at work painting the stolen interceptors. The one Tyria and Kell worked on was now deco-rated with a red spiderweb pattern, a design that was at once rakishly dangerous-looking and a little unsettling. Phanan and Face left the basic paint job of their interceptor unchanged but had added a ludicrous number of kill silhouettes to the hull- including a number of X-wing silhouettes to rival the genuine kills of Baron Fel, the Empire's greatest ace after Darth Vader.
Shalla and Donos were painting theirs with fake blaster scor-
ings and had even painted the engine to look as though it were
slightly askew, as if knocked out of alignment by enemy fire. Wedge wondered about the advisability of that; it would proba-bly convince some enemies the interceptor was damaged, per-haps persuading some opportunistic pilots to finish it off when otherwise they might treat it with more caution.
He decided not to interfere. It was an experiment. They'd see how the enemies responded to their "damaged" interceptor.
His personal comlink crackled into life. "Commander."
"Yes, Runt."
"Narra returning. ETA fifteen minutes."
"Thank you. Please set up the conference module. Out."
He exited Sungrass through its docking tube and passed
through the hangar, where the sharp smell of the paints
scratched at his sinuses and the chatter of his pilots was so much more immediate. Good men and women in a brief respite from making war. He wished such respites were the norm.
Then, passing their interceptor, he saw Tyria finish an-other line of red spiderwebs, set her brush down atop her paint can, and wrap her arms around Kell to kiss him.
Wedge stopped short, a rebuke on his lips, a reminder that public displays of affection were not appropriate... and then he turned away and kept walking.
Such a warning might have been appropriate for other units, but not elite squadrons under his command. There were no restrictions against relationships between pilots, even when there was some disparity between their ranks, as was the case with Tyria and Kell. There were no regulations against demon-strations of affection in off-duty and most light-duty situa-tions, such as this little painting exercise. They were doing no wrong.
Then why was he so annoyed? Why had he been ready to drop kitchen duty on either of them, had his warning been protested?
He passed through the third set of motorized doors, lead-ing deeper into the shaft, into what Wraith Squadron called the Trench.
It had been a squarish tunnel bored out of solid stone, a
straight shaft notable only for its featurelessness. Now its two
walls were lined with medium-sized locking cargo modules



stacked three high and stretching for some distance down the shaft. Some had been outfitted as living quarters, some as re-freshers, others as conference chambers or communications of-rices or storage lockers. Roll-away staircases gave pilots easy access to the upper tiers of modules.
Face had been the first to note that if you flew a toy X-wing down between the rows of modules, the shaft would look a little like one of the deadly surface trenches of the origi-nal Death Star. Then, a few days later, when returning from a scouting mission to the surface of Halmad, Wedge had discov-ered that some joker had painted the shaft's ceiling black, except for the lights, and had strung strings of miniature twin-kling lights here and there, creating an illusion of star-filled sky.
Wedge had let the decoration stand. It was a bad idea to interfere with things his pilots did to make a gloomy place like this more inhabitable, or, so long as it didn't interfere with morale or efficiency, with things they did to make their lives happier.
Yet he'd been ready to do just that a few moments ago, and he grew increasingly annoyed with himself because he couldn't figure out why.
The main conference module was on the second tier of the left-hand bank of modules. He took the stairs up and found Runt still there, still sweeping bottles and wrappers from someone's impromptu meal into a bag. The long-faced alien gave him a salute before finishing up.
Wedge settled into a seat beside the main table. "Runt."
Runt straightened. His ponytail swayed. "Sir."
"Do your minds ever confuse one another?"
The alien grinned. At least, that was how Wedge and the others had learned to interpret it when Runt pulled his lips back over his enormous teeth in an expression that looked more like a prelude to a biting attack. "Yes, Commander.
Often. If they were meant to be the same, and therefore easily comprehensible to one another, none of us would have more than one."
"Right... What do you do when one acts in a confusing manner and its answers don't really explain why?"