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

entertainment holos, some luxury holos, some more ID sets squeezed out of Intelligence, an interceptor simulator module for the TIE-fighter simulator, and that passive sensor set you wanted to monitor the Imperial base." "Good."
"Is everything all right?"
Wedge nodded. "Just feeling my years. Speaking of which,
I think 1'11 get in some simulator practice and beat up on the youngsters."
"That'll make you feel better. It always does me."
Wedge punched his personal code into the keypad located on the hatch of the TIE-fighter simulator. Illstead of being located atop the ball-shaped cockpit, where the standard hatch was on real interceptors, the simulator hatch was at the cockpit's stern, where the twin ion engines would normally be mounted.
The hatch swung open. Beyond, a shadowy figure pointed a blaster at Wedge. Wedge dropped out of reflex, rolled to the side, came up on his knees with his own blaster in hand.
But no enemy emerged to fire upon him. He kept his own aim on the hatch and reached for his comlink.
"Is there a problem, Commander?" That was Face, lean-ing unconcerned against the X-wing simulator only a few me-ters away.
"Get down, there's a hostile in there-"
Face half ducked behind the corner of his simulator, then took another look. "I don't think so, sir." His mouth twitched, a partially successful effort to hide a smile.
Wedge rose and came forward, leaned out far enough for a quick peek into the simulator cockpit, then leaned in again for a longer look.
His intruder was an Ewok.
Not even a living Ew0k. It was a stuffed toy the size and girth of a real Ewok, and designed to look just like one, but just a toy.
It was dressed in a scaled-down version of a New Republic
fighter pilot's uniform, down to the authentic-looking suit sys-
tern control panel on his chest, helmet on his head, and blaster in his paw.
In his other paw was a datapad. Wedge retrieved it and looked at the message. It read:
Lieutenant Kettch reporting for duO4, sir.
Yub, yub, Commanded

Wedge shook his head sorrowfully. "Sometimes I miss my sanity." He retrieved the toy and handed it to Face. "Deal with that."
Face, who was working so hard to repress a laugh that he couldn't speak, simply threw a salute and escaped with the Ewok pilot.
"Transferred to Colonel Repness's group?" Lara glanced again over her orders and feigned ignorance. "I don't understand. I haven't completed my basic training set in X-wings. I'm going to get advanced training now?"
The student leader of her own group, a redheaded man, barely out of boyhood, whom she could outfly on the worst day of her life if she weren't shackled by the demands of the role she was playing, gave her a superior smile. "You don't understand. Repness handles the remedials. Including you. Notsil, you've washed out. All Repness is, he's a temporary re-prieve for you. This time next week, you're going to be an empty bunk."
"Lowan, you're a stain."
"I'll forget you said that. You'll be tossed out of here fast enough without my putting you on report."
Lara stared after him as he departed, and pictured a target painted on his back, a blaster in her own hand, and a sudden improvement in the average merit of this class of candidates.
But, no, that wouldn't be appropriate. Better still to make her way to Zsinj's company, return as a TIE-interceptor pilot, and flame Lowan in a dogfight.



Then again, what if she came up against Lussatte, who was also not her equal as a pilot but was not the blemish Lowan was? A simple matter to vape her... but Lara had the uneasy feeling that such an action would cause her a lingering regret.
She shook off the feeling. Transfer to another group meant transferring to another dormitory. It was time to pack.
7
If this is a reward, Face thought, I need to stop earning them.
He sat in weightlessness, strapped securely into the con-trol seat of one of the captured interceptors, staring at stars and a tiny, distant sun through the starfighter's viewport. The image hadn't changed in an hour, and the music he was playing on the fighter's internal speakers was, on its eighth repetition, getting on his nerves. He resolved to carry more entertain-ments on missions, especially those where keeping corem si-lence was a priority.
In a bar in Hullis, Face had been the one to spot the freighter navigator whose hand trembled with more than ea-gerness when the man reached for his first drink of the night. He'd been the one to get the man so drunk that discretion wasn't an option, and to listen to the fellow's rambling praise of his captain's intelligence.
The ship the alcoholic navigator served on was the Barde-ria, and it hauled cargo on three-way runs out of Halmad with an admirable record for avoiding pirates. With enough liquor in him, the navigator told Face their secret for success. "Leave each system from a random point, enter each system at a ran-dom point. Your courses can't be plotted."
"That makes for pretty complicated courses," Face had said.



"Not really. On arrival in each system, you first drop out of hyperspace just outside the outer planet's orbit to sample the comm frequencies and get any pirate reports available, then make a course correction and jump in where you want to arrive."
"Ah. And this first arrival, before you make your course correction, is to the same spot every time?" "That's what keeps things simple."
Face was nice enough to make sure the man made it back to his ship when all the night's drinking was done and the navi-gator was too far gone to recognize surroundings, friends, or his own features. But first Face played a hunch and assumed that a man sloppy enough to reveal a crucial detail to a stranger might be sloppy in other ways. He copied the encrypted con-tents of the fellow's datapad to his own, and when back at Hawk-bat Base from this intelligence-gathering run, he handed that data over to Castin Donn. Castin cracked the code and the files yielded up no information about freighter routes... but did have a file of specific locations just outside a large number of planetary systems. It was a simple matter to find out to which planets Barderia's next cargo run would take her.
The skin around Face's mouth itched, but he could not scratch it, even if he took his Imperial pilot helmet off. His whole face was crisscrossed with horrible puckering scars- artificial ones, created by painting a makeup chemical across his skin and letting it dry. His own genuine scar was not miss-ing; it was just incorporated into the design of false scar tissue.