Solo Command (35 page)

She’d done it. She couldn’t keep a smile off her face as she followed in Baron Fel’s wake.

Captain Onoma stood before Solo. “We have found the position
Iron Fist
held throughout the engagement. A wingpair from
Mon Delindo
detected her a few minutes ago.”

Solo came upright. “Alert Rogue and Nova Squadrons, tell them to stand ready. Communicate with
Mon Delindo
. We’ll converge on
Iron Fist’
s position—”

“Sir,
Iron Fist
has already jumped out of system.”

Solo sagged into his chair. “Abandoning his pilots? Not even bothering to pick up survivors off the
Reprisal
?”

Onoma nodded in the awkward Mon Calamari fashion. “Doubtless he’s relying on planetary forces for rescue, and will send a freighter back for his TIE squadrons. He’s gone, sir.”

Solo offered him a disbelieving shake of the head. “He just won’t come in close enough to a system for its mass shadow to delay his departure. He’s that spooked.”

“You should be honored, General. You’re what’s ‘spooking’ him.”

“Failures don’t get honored, Captain.” He shook his head, looked away from the captain. “I have to think about this.”

The crew of the
Millennium Falsehood
—two Corellian men, a Wookiee, and a 3PO droid in a general’s uniform—descended the loading ramp more hastily than usual, as though they expected the battered craft to burst into flame, and turned to look at the freighter.

She had new laser scoring all over her hull. Smoke drifted from beneath the keel and rose to the hangar’s ceiling.

“Not bad,” Wedge said. “I’ve flown worse.”

Squeaky said, “You are joking, I hope, sir.”

Wedge turned his attention to the droid. “And now that
we have a moment or two, Squeaky, would you mind telling me why you said we should allow Lara Notsil to blow holes in our hull?”

“Well, I thought she was trying to tell us something.”

Wedge blinked. Then he turned to the Wookiee. “Chewbacca, go ahead. Pull his legs off and hit him with them.”

“Wait!” Squeaky threw up his arms as if to ward off the blows to come. “Let me explain.”

And he did.

General Solo, Captain Onoma, and Wedge were already in the briefing room when Donos arrived. Within a minute, they were joined by Shalla and Face.

“This meeting concerns Lara Notsil,” Wedge said. “Each of you is here for a different purpose. General Solo and Captain Onoma are here because this pertains to mission planning. Shalla, because of your knowledge of Imperial Intelligence techniques … and mentalities. Donos, because of your familiarity with Lara. Face, because of your training as an actor; we assume that you can recognize your own kind.”

Face managed a smile. “From time to time,” he said.

Wedge said, “Earlier today, the
Falsehood
was fired upon by Lara Notsil, who was acting as a TIE interceptor pilot for Zsinj’s forces. Squeaky, acting as communications officer, noticed that every time she hit us with laser fire, our comm unit stored fragments of a transmission.”

Donos frowned. “Her attacks were also transmissions?”

“That’s right. She had apparently rigged one of her laser cannons to pulse in the fashion of a line-of-sight laser communicator. She had also, according to what we can determine, reduced the strength of her lasers somewhat—else we would have suffered more damage than we did.”

Shalla said, “This is sort of what Donos did with his laser rifle at Halmad.” Above that world, needing to trigger an explosive device but prevented from doing so by comm jamming, Donos had modified the output of his laser sniper rifle to transmit the detonation signal.

Wedge nodded. “That may have been what gave her the idea. Here’s the message. It’s voice only.” He reached over to the terminal keyboard beside the conference table and pressed a button.

First, a hiss suggesting a low-quality recording, then Lara’s voice emerged from the air around them. “This is Lara Notsil, transmitting to Wraith Squadron and
Mon Remonda
.”

Donos tensed. Knowing that the message was from her hadn’t prepared him for actually hearing her voice; he felt almost as though he’d been physically struck. Then he became aware of Shalla’s gaze on him. Face’s, too. They were evaluating him, his reaction.

Once, he would have washed all expression away from his face, giving them nothing to read. But he didn’t care about that anymore. It hurt to hear Lara. It didn’t matter if they could see the bleakness of his expression. He closed his eyes to listen more carefully.

“I was the one who suggested to the warlord that he’d encounter you at Comkin Five. If you did show up there, I hope it’s because it’s part of your mission plan—that you were hoping to engage him. I told him you might also appear at Vahaba. You might want to keep that on your schedule. You should be able to engage him there as well.”

Donos opened his eyes to glance at Solo and Wedge. They were exchanging a look, and Solo shook his head, a trace of confusion to his expression.

“I’m working on a plan now whereby I might be able to transmit you
Iron Fist’
s location, just as we did with the Parasite plan.” That mission, in which Wraith Squadron had planted a program in the computer of a new Super Star Destroyer,
Razor’s Kiss
, had led to the new ship automatically sending its location to Solo’s fleet. Ultimately, it had resulted in the ship’s destruction. “If I die, the plan might be able to continue in my absence, so don’t just give up on it if someone manages to shoot me down. Attached to this message is a data package showing what I’ve done, what conclusions I’ve reached. I hope you can use them.

“Please tell the Wraiths that I’m holding faith with them.” There was a long pause, the distinct sound of Lara swallowing with difficulty. “The rest of this message is for Myn Donos.”

Wedge tapped a key on the terminal and her voice cut off.
He looked apologetically at Donos. “I’m sorry. I’ve heard it already, and it does pertain to her state of mind. We’re all going to have to hear it.”

Donos nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

Wedge tapped the key again.

A little background hiss returned to the air, but Lara didn’t speak for several seconds. Then, “Myn, it’s not likely that we’ll ever see one another again. So I wanted to take this opportunity to say good-bye. Well, more than that. I wanted to explain. About what I did.

“I was fighting a war, the way I’d been trained, and that involved infiltrating the enemy and getting their secrets back to my superiors, or sabotaging the data the enemy possessed. There was never a time I saw a file labeled ‘How to Destroy Talon Squadron’ and thought to myself, ‘Oh, that’s what I want to do.’ To me, it was just data about occupied territories and interplanetary borders.

“Then I infiltrated Wraith Squadron, just a ploy to make myself more valuable to prospective employers, and things started happening. All the furniture that made up the way I’d thought and felt about things all my life started coming loose in my head. Nowadays it slides around and breaks into pieces and I have no idea what parts of it are real and what aren’t.” There was a waver to her voice now, a suggestion she was having trouble keeping it under control. “It hurts, and a lot of the time I don’t know who I am anymore.

“But I know what I have to do. Whoever I am, I’m staying here, like a vibroblade right next to Zsinj’s vitals, and when the right time comes I’m going to stab him deep. That’ll probably be the last thing I do.

“I don’t have any friends here, except one droid, and I don’t have any where you are, or anywhere else in the galaxy, so when I’m gone there isn’t going to be anyone to remember me kindly. So I was just sort of hoping you wouldn’t hate me anymore. I really can’t stand thinking that’s the only way I’ll be remembered.”

There was a long silence, the sound of a sniffle. Her voice finally returned, quieter than it had been. “I wish I’d been someone else. To give you that chance you wanted.

“Lara Notsil out.”

Donos felt his eyes burning. He put his hand over them. He felt tears under his fingers.

They were silent a long moment. Then Wedge, regret in his voice, said, “All right. Opinions. Shalla?”

Shalla cleared her throat. “Tough call. At a certain level, I think Corran Horn was right. Mentally and emotionally, Lara’s not all together. But she seems to be sticking to her plan, to her perception that Zsinj is the enemy. And if I read her words right, she’s resigned herself to death in this effort. That makes it more likely that her words can be trusted.

“Add to that the very interesting way she transmitted data. It was complicated, it was unreliable. It was a desperation measure. If she really was an agent of Zsinj’s, she could have just shot us a tight-beam transmission from her interceptor’s comm system. We would have known that there was very little chance of such a message being detected. The approach she actually used suggests to me that she’s afraid that her interceptor’s comm system is tapped, recording, something, and she wanted to get around whatever measures had been taken that way.”

“All right. Face?”

“She’s a pretty good actress,” Face said. “In her line of work, she’d have to be. But there was a lot of what seemed like very genuine strain in her voice. I’d lean toward the side of her telling the truth.”

“Donos?”

Decorum demanded that he look at them when he answered. To do that, he’d have to put his hand down. If he did that, they’d see his tears. They’d know he wasn’t in control of himself. They’d know—

Well, to hell with what they knew, with what they thought. He slammed his hand down on the tabletop. Shalla and Solo jumped. He looked around the table, defying all to say anything about the tears on his cheeks. “She was telling the truth,” he said.

“I need a little more than that,” Wedge said. “Your reasons?”

“That final bit … if she’s luring us into a trap for Zsinj, what was that last bit for? To make me feel bad? What good
would that do?” He took a deep, shuddery breath. “If she had wanted to manipulate me, to make me come in on her side, she’d have said, ‘If I get out of this alive, I’ll come back to stand trial.’ That gives me everything, puts everything on me. If I just want justice, I win—she stands trial. If I want
her
, I win—I stand beside her at her trial, and I can dream that she’ll get off light. That’s the way to swing me over, but she didn’t do that. She just said good-bye.”

Wedge nodded. “All right. There you go, General. Three opinions, all in the same direction, for different reasons.”

Solo asked, “Why did she think Vahaba would be on our list?”

“I looked at the data file she’d appended to the audio,” Wedge said. “She had done a good job of calculating the criteria we were using, except that she thought that the planets our false Han Solo would be visiting would all be former trading partners with, or recipients of regular trade goods from, Alderaan.”

Solo leaned back. “That makes sense. It does. One of the factors we used was choosing worlds that produced certain types of matériel that are valuable in times of war and times of peace. That would correspond to a certain degree to the types of goods Alderaan was importing after it banned all its weapons. Can you run the numbers on our projections again, substituting trade with Alderaan for what we had?”

Wedge gave him a smile. “Already did. And guess which system, discounting the ones we’ve already visited, jumps to the top of the list? Vahaba.”

“Vahaba.” Solo smiled. “If we can get the
Falsehood
repaired fast enough, we can dangle it like bait for Zsinj again. All right, Nelprin, Donos, thanks for coming. Loran, I need you for a moment more.”

Donos rose, offered a salute, and was the first one out the door.

When the three pilots were gone, Solo turned to Wedge. “If Zsinj wouldn’t come in at Kidriff to get me, he won’t come in anywhere. He’s just too conservative. Protecting
Iron Fist
all
the way. So if we can’t get
Iron Fist
close enough to a gravity well to trap it for a while, we need to bring a gravity well to
Iron Fist
.”

Wedge frowned. “Meaning what? An Interdictor cruiser?” Those vessels, uncommon even in the Imperial fleet where they were most prevalent, possessed gravity-well generators that, when activated, could keep all vessels within range from entering hyperspace.

“That’s right.”

“Does Fleet Command have one available for you?”

“No,” Solo said. He turned to Face. “That’s where you come in.”

“Uh-oh,” Face said.

“I’m going to set up an appointment between you and your Imperial admiral buddy. I want you to go ask him for an Interdictor.”

Face said, “Begging your pardon, sir, but you’re crazy enough to be a Wraith.”

Solo grinned. “Until you’ve crewed with me for a few years, kid, you have no idea what ‘crazy’ means.”

14

Tonin decided that it might be a good thing to be the King of the Droids.

He was now a mighty leader, in command of hundreds of utility droids aboard
Iron Fist
.

He had modified many of them, with magnetic treads replacing their wheels, so that they might maneuver on the outer hull of the vessel. They clustered at the engines and the hyper-comm antennae, using their internal tools to chew and splice their way into external system ports and accesses.

More moved within
Iron Fist
at Tonin’s commands. Some were in the engine compartments. Others had spliced into the computer data cables. One was now in the security system that monitored Lara’s quarters; it fed modified recordings of her to the observers, so she could do whatever she pleased in her quarters while they saw only footage of her sleeping. Others dragged cables and dataports through the walls, giving Lara access to more and more secure portions of the ship and the computer archives.

Even so, half of the utility droids Tonin commanded confined themselves to ordinary ship’s functions … for Tonin had to make sure the ship’s central computer didn’t notice a sudden drop in the utility droid population. If droid MSE-6-P303K
spent its day doing Tonin’s bidding, droid MSE-6-E629L would spend half its day doing the duties assigned by the ship’s computer, then would visit one of the special interfaces Tonin had had installed at points in the ship, assume the identity of MSE-6-P303K, and spend the other half of its day doing that droid’s duties.