Star Wars - X-Wing - Iron Fist

by Aaron Allston

  His response was not long in coming. A man's voice, raspy and dismayed, replied, "This is Captain Rhanken of the inde-pendent cargo vessel Barderia. I surrender my vessel. Port and starboard docking ports standing by."

  It seemed like such a small boarding party. Face, Castin, and Phanan, wearing only gray versions of the standard TIE-fighter pilot's uniform, arrayed against whatever forces occupied the cargo ship. But five sets of starfighter guns in the hands of the other Wraiths kept Barderia in their sights, and the freighter, lacking engines to power its shields, stardrive, and weapons, would be easy prey to any one of them.

  The Wraiths, led by a visibly trembling navigation and communications officer, the very man who had inadvertently given Face the information he'd needed for this act of piracy, entered the freighter's spotless bridge. Waiting there were other members of the bridge crew the captain, a middle-aged, gray-ing man with the look of a former Imperial officer about him, and a younger chief pilot whose hard look and demeanor sug-gested that he was also the ship's master at arms and would like nothing more than to eradicate the pirates.

  Face took off his helmet, revealing his gloriously horrible makeup job, and was rewarded with sudden intakes of breath from the two younger officers. "I am," he said, "the glorious General Kargin, founder and leader of the Hawk-bats." He kept his voice low, gravelly. "Captain?"

  The freighter's master did not salute, but he straightened with pained formality. "Captain Rhanken of the Barderia." "Captain?" Face injected a note of menace into his voice.

  "And I am obliged to surrender this ship to you."

  Face extended a hand. "Cargo manifest?"

  The communications officer, jolted into action by the de-

  mand, searched his uniform pockets increasingly frantically until he found the object he was searching for-a datapad, which he handed to Face.

  Face handed it in turn to Castin. "Two, slice into their master computer and find the cargo manifest there. If it does not agree one hundred percent with this list, we execute them all." Face turned his gaze back to the captain. "Though I can be forgiving. If you anticipate any errors in your list, you can tell me about them now and avoid unpleasantness."

  Captain Rhanken met his eyes unflinchingly. "I anticipate no problems. If my crew has done its customary good work." He glanced at the communications officer. "Will there be a problem, Lieutenant?"

  The communications officer, no master of concealing his emotions, went pale. "I d-d-don't recall whether I called up the final inventory-match manifest or used last week's projected manifest, sir."

  "Get the final manifest and give it to him. Just to be sure."

  "Yessir." The officer bent to his task.

  Interesting. Face had to work to keep both amusement and contempt from his expression. The captain wanted to play the unerring officer and was willing to let his subordinates as-sume responsibility for a tactic that had to be the captain's own decision. Depending on the pirates involved, that could have led to the lesser officer's death.

  Long minutes passed while the officer brought up the cor-rect manifest and Castin verified it byScutting through the com-puter's defenses and slicing his way down to the original file. They matched and Face and Castin looked through their win-nings while Phanan kept the bridge officers under guard.

  "Look at this," Face whispered. "Halmad Prime, shipped by the ton. Halmad's best and most expensive grain alcohol. You can't get it on-planet except through the black market; they ship it to other Imperial worlds as one of their major ex-ports. Various medicines. Duracrete sprayers. Prefabricated shelters. We'll take all the Halmad Prime and a cross section of the medicines; that's about all we can load on Sungrass. See anything else we need?"

  "TIE fighter and interceptor parts."

  "What ? Where ?"

  Castin turned his datapad so Face could see the screen. It showed a different inventory list. "I pulled this off their com-puter when I was verifying the current manifest. It's an esti-mated inventory from the second leg of their voyage. We could really use some spare parts and maintenance gear."

  "True, but our little raid here is bound to change their schedule for the rest of their mission."

  "But if we can figure out what they'll change it to..."

  "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 destruct
ion, 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.

  And there was more. Lara discovered, with glee mixed with a measure of professional horror, that Repness tended to turn on his sweeper whenever doing his most private work at his computer terminal. His paranoia about unseen listeners was his undoing, because he tended to mumble to himself, ver-balizing his passwords and secret computer account names when working this way.

  Within minutes of listening to the recording, Lara could ac-cess all of the man's recordings that concerned his lucrative side business. It was a black-market business,' well entrenched on Coruscant but just getting under way on the training frigate Tedevium, in which cargo was diverted from its intended desti-nation-not even making it onto incoming-supplies manifests- and sold, profits making their way into the pockets of Repness and his team.

  She found records of her own scores as a pilot trainee, plus those of a dozen other pilots Repness had subverted or tried to subvert this way. Some, like Wraith Squadron's Tyria Sarkin, had refused to steal for him... but had been blackmailed into keeping silent. Others had joined his team. The records didn't indicate whether they had been willing or reluctant. Still oth-ers, pilot trainees Lara knew, were going through the ensnaring process even now.

  There was no sign that Repness had any allies in the Intel-

  ligence division of the armed forces, or in the Inspector-General's

  office. She wrote a letter to both General Cracken of Intelli-

  gence and to the latter military division. It read,

  i am the unseen, the unknowable, the unstoppable.

  no computer can stand before me. gates open for

  me. back doors are revealed to me. knowledge willingly

  spools itself out for my inspection. i am the jedi of the

  electronic world.

  i have found evil aboard tedevium. i have found cor-ruption. like the jedi, i shall cut it down.

  examine these files. test them for integrity. you will

  find they are the truth.

  go where these files lead you.

  do what you must do, as i do what i must do.

  signed, white lancer

  She went back in and inserted some random misspellings and some painful grammatical errors. When it was done, it was, she decided, a note typical of code-slicers who performed anony-mous sabotage on computer systems. The true extent of her computer skills were not known on Tedevium, and those of many other crewmen and pilot candidates were; many of them would be suspected of this act, and in order to boost their repu-tations, some would probably allow the investigators to be-lieve that they were, in fact, the secretive White Lancer.

  To the letter, she attached Repness's recordings and all the passwords and account names she had so far uncovered.

  Then there were the files demonstrating how Repness had ensnared other pilots. She paused over those.

  Best to expose all those pilots, she decided. Their careers would be ruined, at tremendous training cost to the New Re-public-that is, the Rebels-and this would help deplete the Empire's enemy of skilled pilots. Besides, if they became pilots, most of them would eventually die in action against Imperial pilots. They were better off having their careers torpedoed. If they knew she'd done it to them, someday they'd thank her for it.

  Still her hands paused over the keyboard. As a child, she'd hoped to be a starfighter pilot. When she'd followed her par-ents' career path instead, going into Imperial Intelligence, she'd demonstrated skills necessary to become a pilot and had undergone basic pilot training, which her controllers had de-cided would be a valuable side skill... and there she'd discov-ered a genuine love for flying. But her request for permanent transfer to the pilot corps was denied. Her intelligence-related skills were better and rarer than her pilot's skills, so against her wishes she'd been obliged to stay in Intelligence. Believe us, it better this way, her instructors had told her. Someday, you'll thank us for this.

  It came before her, the face of pilot candidate Bickey, in her class under Repness. He'd been transferred to the remedial training unit just days after Lara had. If Repness kept true to form, in just a few days, Bickey would be approached on some similar scheme of theft. He was such a young, eager, boyish pi-lot, anxious to demonstrate his skill and bravery. He had once said he'd prefer to die young, in battle against his enemies, than old and content on a farm somewhere. No, he'd never thank her for what she was about to do.

  Uneasy, Lara attached her own file of scores to the letter she was sending General Cracken, then systematically destroyed the original and backup files implicating other pilots and pilot candidates now serving. Let them die as they choose, she told herself. Let them die as pilots.

  She arranged for the package of letter and files to make its way through secret routes to the offices of General Cracken. It would be at his headquarters office and under the eyes of one of his subordinates by day's end.

  Which left her one thing to do today.

  She looked at the sweeper in Repness's hand and let an expres-sion of contempt cross her face. "Careful as always, aren't we, Atton?"

  The colonel looked around, concealing nervousness, though the classroom was empty of other
personnel. "You'll address me as Colonel Repness and show respect."

  "I'll address you as Colonel Bantha Sweat and show you whatever I want."

  He looked at her, mouth open, but didn't respond immedi-ately. Lara pressed on "I've decided not to join your team, Repness. I'm not going to steal an A-wing for you. In fact, I'm going to tell your superiors about what you're up to."

  He managed to laugh. "That won't do you much good.

  There's no proof. And that's the end of your flying career.

  You'll never sit in a cockpit again. Think about what the rest of your life will be like."

  "I don't care. I can live without flying. I can't live without honor." For a moment, she was troubled as the unwelcome possibility flashed through her mind that the words she'd just spoken had come from her true self, not the role she was play-ing. She suppressed the thought, shoving it aside. "That's the end of your career."

  "I don't think so. When they look over your psychological profile-a new one I'll be working up over the next few days- and see what a compulsive liar you are, they wouldn't believe you if you told them that hard vacuum is bad for the lungs."

  She gave him a mocking smile. "And you think I'll give you those few days to falsify my records?"

  "Certainly. You'll be sleeping." His blow was so fast that she saw it only as a blur. His fist struck her high on the cheek. She felt her skin part under the force of the blow.

  Everything went white, her vision gone, sudden shock de-priving her of most of her senses. She drifted a moment, aware that she may have overplayed this hand, and dimly felt her back and head hit the floor. It should have hurt, but it didn't.

  Her vision cleared a little, momentarily, and all she saw was Repness standing over her, his leg drawn back.

  Then his booted foot swung forward to connect with her temple and that was the last she knew.

  The X-wings of Wraith Squadron-the eight snubfighters re-maining in the unit-made one pass before the bridge of the Mon Calamari cruiser, waggling S-foils as a show of respect, then curved around smartly and lined up, by pairs, for their ap-proach to the vessel's portside landing bay.