Part 11 (2/2)
Captain Rhanken met his eyes unflinchingly. ”I antic.i.p.ate 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 amus.e.m.e.nt and contempt from his expression. The captain wanted to play the unerring officer and was willing to let his subordinates a.s.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 pa.s.sed while the officer brought up the correct manifest and Castin verified it by scutting through the computer's defenses and slicing his way down to the original file. They matched and Face and Castin looked through their winnings while Phanan kept the bridge officers under guard.
”Look at this,” Face whispered. ”Halmad Prime, s.h.i.+pped by the ton.
Halmad's best and most expensive grain alcohol. You can't get it on-planet except through the black market; they s.h.i.+p it to other Imperial worlds as one of their major exports. 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 Sungra.s.s.
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 computer when I was verifying the current manifest. It's an estimated 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 a.s.semble lots twenty-eight through one hundred twenty-seven and two hundred at your cargo bay. Two, call Sungra.s.s 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 advis.e.m.e.nt.”
Colonel Atton Repness, leader of the Screaming Wookiee training 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 s.h.i.+fted, probably without him realizing it, to those of a friend. Or conspirator.
”You're aware that your scores have come up since transferring 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 become a good pilot. So I've temporarily adjusted things to keep you from being booted.
But I don't think you can do this without 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 uninhabited planet in an Awing. Her control boards would register 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 atmosphere 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 expensive 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 conceal, 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 outside the orbit of its outermost planet-but the situation was very familiar.
Captain Rhanken could not maintain an expression of imperturbability 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.”
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