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

"Good point." Face straightened and glared at the captain.
"Rhanken, have your cargo handlers assemble lots twenty-eight through one hundred twenty-seven and two hundred at your cargo bay. Two, call Sungrass and have them move in to accept delivery."
"And then what?" asked Captain Rhanken.
"Then we leave."
"Leaving us to drift, without communications, without
enough power to limp into the system, to die out here?"
Face gave him a tight smile. "You have escape pods suffi-cient to get a message to your rescuers. But we'll save you some time and call in an emergency signal. Wouldn't want you to be inconvenienced. And you can tell your fellow captains, whom I'll be meeting in the foreseeable future, that the Hawk-bats don't kill. Unless we're annoyed. Or become bored. They can take that under advisement."
Colonel Atton Repness, leader of the Screaming Wookiee train-ing squadron aboard the New Republic frigate Tedevium, pointed the device at Lara as though it were a miniature blaster.
She looked curiously at it. It was shaped like a standard cylindrical comlink, but that's not what it was. She was sure of this because she'd examined the device inside and out, and done far more than that, when she'd broken into Repness's quarters two days ago. "I'm sorry, sir. Should I be putting up my hands? Or making a speech?"
He smiled. "Very funny. This isn't a weapon. It just en-sures that we aren't being recorded."
"Who would want to record us?"
The colonel looked around, though he and Lara were the lightly furnished conference room's only inhabitants. "You'd be surprised. I'll just keep this on."
"You're the colonel." But, inwardly, she smiled. He wasn't speaking as a colonel; his mannerisms had shifted, probably without him realizing it, to those of a friend. Or conspirator.
"You're aware that your scores have come up since trans-ferring to the Screaming Wookiees." "Yes, sir."
"Well, this is in part from improvement in your skills."
"Only in part?" She affected surprise.
"Only in part." Repness pulled a datapad from a pocket
and slid it over to her.
The file it displayed was her training record. But the scores from after her transfer were shown in two columns, labeled "True" and "Adjusted."
She gave him a troubled look. "I don't understand, sir. The 'True' column would indicate that I'm still failing. Just barely failing. What are the adjustments from the other column?"
"Oh, I merely wanted your scores to be higher."
She let her features go slack, as if caught so far by surprise
that she didn't know how to react or what to say.
"You see," he said, "I think you have the potential to be-come a good pilot. So I've temporarily adjusted things to keep you from being booted. But I don't think you can do this with-out help. It will take a team effort... and you haven't been a team player, have you?"
"Well, I'd... like to be. I just don't know how. Things are so different here."
"Excellent! We could use you on my team. Working on my team calls for some extra effort on your part... but it comes with rewards you can't get from any other unit."
And then he told her of a mission. It would be a milk-run
training mission within the atmosphere of the nearest unin-
habited planet in an A-wing. Her control boards would regis-
ter a critical failure of the engines, which would overheat and
threaten detonation. She'd be ordered by Repness to eject,
which she would-well after the trouble-free A-wing was




safely on the ground. An ion bomb detonated in the atmo-sphere would give investigators the evidence they needed to corroborate the fighter's utter destruction, and a rescue crew would pick her up well after Repness's crew ferried the expen-sive fighter away for sale in some distant black-market port.
Lara listened, bored, to the whole inevitable deal, feigning puzzlement, shock, indignation, futile resistance, and finally pained acceptance as the hopeless nature of her situation was made clear to her.
And she knew, with a growing glee that was hard to con-ceal, that every word she and Repness said was being sent, by the very device he thought was a transmission-detecting sweeper, to a file under a forged pilot account on the frigate's main computer.
Contact Wraith Squadron for help when matters with Repness came to a head? Why bother, when she could engineer his destruction and her own career's salvation with far more panache than those pilots could ever manage ?
It was a different star system-the Halmad system, well out-side the orbit of its outermost planet-but the situation was very familiar.
Captain Rhanken could not maintain an expression of im-perturbability the second time the Hawk-bats boarded his freighter. His voice was one of pure despair: "How did you know where we'd be?"
"We asked the right people," Face said. "Your trade guild has a security breach in it I could pilot a Death Star through."
It was a lie, a big one. Castin Donn had downloaded a number of the cargo ship's records the last time they were aboard, and covered his tracks. The records didn't say how Barderia's master would adjust his schedule to account for the act of piracy committed upon him... but they did show how he'd reacted in the past to such situations. And now the Hawk-bats had taken him a second time, on his return leg home.
If the analysts of the trade guild didn't believe the lie, that
was all right; nothing would change. But if they did, they might
institute a sweeping change in the guild's standards for secure transmissions and information flow. Eventually that would be an impediment to the Hawk-bats' piracy, but in the short term, possibly as long as the Hawk-bats were to exist as a pirate band, it would cause disruption and confusion in the guild, changes that New Republic Intelligence had a couple of agents ready to examine and take advantage of. It was a good time to be a pirate.
Face said, "Rhanken, have your cargo handlers deposit lots forty-three through seventy-nine at your cargo door. Then we'll be on our way. Good doing business with you again."
When Lara Notsil examined the file containing the recording of Colonel Repness's offer to her, it seemed much larger than their conversation should have accounted for. Perhaps, she thought, he's been using his transmission-detecting sweeper in conversations with others.
He had. In the file were her conversation with Repness, plus the colonel's subsequent discussions with one of his "team" subordinates, an instructor captain named Teprimal; in their talk, they noted details of their plan for the hiding and subsequent sale of the A-wing.