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

"And may the best Zsinj win," Face said. "Until he runs into Wraith Squadron, that is."



2
Gara Petothel rechecked the code for the last time, her atten-tion skipping back and forth across screens of data, then sent the command to compile the ungainly-looking mess into what she hoped would be the final version of her program.
A work of art, it was. It would transfer a number of pack-ets of encrypted data from her terminal deep in the low-rent warrens of the city-planet of Coruscant to public computer repositories, disguising the data as ancient archives of account-ing data. Then, once the trail back to Gara's terminal was cold, it would transmit the data out across the New Republic Holo-Net, to HoloNet addresses Gara had committed to memory weeks before... addresses that would lead eventually to the communications station of the warlord Zsinj.
lf he~ a smart man, she thought, and by all accounts he is, within a few weeks I'!! have gainful employment again. Away from this cesspool and away from the Rebel police and Intelli-gence agents-
A heavy knock fell on the door. She jumped. Sign of a guilty conscience, she thought, and tried to school her features back into an expression of innocent curiosity. She switched off power to her terminal's screen.
As she rose to answer the door, she looked into the mirror
to make sure she looked the part she was supposed to be play-ing. Her downy white-blond hair, cut very close, still seemed odd to her, as was the absence of a mole she'd carried on her cheek since childhood-a mole she had secretly had removed when preparing this identity. No, this identity shared only a certain delicacy of features with Gara Petothel, and hair and makeup were sufficiently different that no one should recog-nize her in the time it would take her to leave. She opened the door.
Two Rebel pilots stood outside, both in pilot's jumpsuits topped with transparent slickers more suited to Coruscant's frequent thunderstorms. One had saturnine features and a prosthetic faceplate over the upper left half of his face, a red glow where his left eye would have been. The other would have been startlingly handsome, with luxuriant dark hair framing intelligent, active eyes and features suited to raising heart rates, but his face was marred by a puckered scar-a blaster graze, she guessed-running from his left cheek to his right forehead.
She knew the one with the faceplate, and it was he who spoke first. "Lara Notsil." It was a statement, not a question.
"Yes." She looked beyond them, to the pedestrian traffic in the tenement hallway. Though her tiny quarters were on the fortieth floor of a building, this hallway was part of a tube ac-cess allowing people to walk across kilometers of Coruscant at this altitude, and traffic was always heavy. Her hallway was a place of thefts and assaults, but also a way for her to lose her-self quickly in a crowd, which is why she'd chosen it.
She returned her attention to her visitors. "It's Lieutenant Phanan, isn't it? From the hospital on Borleias? Please, come in before someone sticks a vibroblade in you." She backed away and allowed them to enter, then shut the door against the ceaseless stream of humanity outside.
"Actually, it's just Flight Officer Phanan," her visitor said.
"The smart one here is the lieutenant, Garik Loran."
She froze in mid-handshake and gave the other pilot a closer look. It was him, and it embarrassed her, the way she suddenly felt light-headed. "The Face? You're still alive?"
Face gave her a smile. She knew it was an actor's smile,
carefully rehearsed to suggest amusement, comradeship, and



attraction, but despite the fact it did not fool her, she was still half washed away by the emotions it caused. She felt as though she'd just been invited into his intimate acquaintance. Her light-headedness worse than ever, she sat heavily at her termi-nal chair.
"That's me," Face said. "I get that a lot. No, the story of my death was a sort of propaganda thing cooked up by the Empire to make people think the Rebel Alliance was full of evil people who'd kill a child actor. I'm a pilot these days."
"Obviously." She struggled to bring herself under control. Remember, she thought. You're Lara Notsil now. Farm girl from Aidivy. Former prisoner of Admiral Trigit. That~ what they're here for, more debriefing on Trigit. Phanan had been there, one of the Rebels shooting at Implacable-shooting at me. "Please, sit down. I'm sorry about the mess-it's hard to keep anything clean here. How did you find me?"
Phanan sat on the edge of the bed. Face took the only other chair. Phanan said, "Anyplace you can walk or sit with-out sticking to everything is very hygienic by low-level Corus-cant standards. Believe me, we know. As for finding you-we asked around New Republic Intelligence. They said you'd been discharged and had declined transportation back to your home-world. We ran a search on the worldnet looking for your name and recent employment application. You're working as an in-formation processor for a shipping concern?"
"Yes. It pays"-she gestured at the tidy squalor around her-"for all this."
Face said, "How would you like a better job and the chance to live in better conditions?"
"I'd like that. What would I have to do?"
"Go through New Republic pilot training. The full academy
course."
No, thanks. How would you like to get me a ticket to War-lord Zsinj~ fleet instead? But she had to play her role. "That would be... nice. But it can't happen."
Face gave her another smile, this one full of confidence.
"Why not?"
Gara injected a note of wistfulness into her voice. "When I
was back on the farm on Aidivy, that's something I thought
about every day. Learning to fly. I got to be pretty good on the farm's skimmers. I studied things like voice and Basic to sound less like a farm girl."
"It shows," Face said. "Your Aldivian accent is almost gone."
If you knew that I was born and reared less than a hun-
dred klicks from here, you'd appreciate how much work it
takes to speak with the barest trace of that accent, Gara
thought. "But then, when the Implacable came, destroyed
New Oldtown, and took me away, I sort of lost interest. All I wanted to do was see the Implacable destroyed. And then when Admiral Trigit chose me for his"-she broke eye contact, put an extra rasp into her voice, let a tear fall-"mistress, all I wanted was for him to die.
"You did that. You killed him. Your squadron and the other ones. Thank you." She modulated her voice to sound as though she were feigning nonchalance and concealing pain. "But I guess I don't have anything left. Any ambitions."
"I'm sorry to hear that."
"Besides, since I've been . . . associated with Admiral
Trigit, the New Republic wouldn't trust me." She shrugged fatalistically.
"They cleared you. You were never charged with any crime."
She nodded. And what work it had been, all those weeks ago, to generate the Lara Notsil identity, careful planning ahead just in case her employment with Trigit didn't work out. Hooking her new identity to a real event, Trigit's punitive bombardment of a farm community that had refused to provi-sion him. Finding and modifying the pitiful few records con-cerning a farm girl whose body was now a carbonized mass of powder in a charred Aldivian grainfield, replacing key bits of data with Gara's picture, Gara's fingerprints, Gara's cellular coding. Spinning a tale of secret chambers on the Implacable- so secret other Implacable survivors could plausibly not have known about her-where Trigit imprisoned his "unwilling mistress" and maintained her on a diet of glitterstim and other drugs.