It wasn’t nearly as bad as he’d expected. With typical smuggler’s finesse, Pinchers bad modified the Y60’s engines and control surfaces to make the freighter faster and more maneuverable than its ungainly appearance would have implied, and even with the central drive section removed there was more than enough power Left to do the job. The ship easily bandied the sharp turns and backtracks necessary to keep it out of reach of the pirates’ defense setup, as well as the more mundane problem of not bumping into any of the asteroids rolling past.
The whole trip rather reminded Luke of one of Leia’s war stories, the one about the Falcon’s dizzying escape through the asteroid field after the Rebels’ evacuation of Hoth. But of course, he wasn’t flying full-bore through the floating rock pile the way they had, with TIE fighters and Imperial Star Destroyers breathing down his neck.
On his way out, of course, things might be different.
He reached the center of the maze to find himself approaching a large but otherwise undistinguished asteroid. According to New Republic Intelligence’s meager information and supplemented by the snippets he’d pulled from Pincher’s mind, the pirates’ base consisted of a series of tunnels and chambers originally burned into the rock by some enterprising but unsuccessful pre-Clone Wars mining operation. The landing bays were camouflaged as valleys in the uneven surface, and as Luke approached the asteroid a ring of lights came on between two sharp-edged ridges to indicate his designated landing site. He eased the freighter into the opening-felt a brief jolt as he passed through an atmosphere barrier-and with a multiple bump of landing legs he was down.
A lone man was waiting for him at the bottom of the landing ramp. “You Mensio?” he demanded gruffly, giving Luke’s disguised face a quick once-over. His hand, Luke noticed, was resting with total lack of subtlety on the butt of his holstered blaster.
“You expecting someone else?” Luke countered, resting his hand on his own blaster in response and looking around the landing bay. The room beneath the atmosphere-shield ceiling was more or less circular, roughly carved from the rock of the asteroid, with a half-dozen pressure doors spaced more or less evenly around the perimeter. Austere in the extreme. “Yeah, I’m Mensio. Nice place you got here.”
“We like it,” the man said. “We just talked to Wesselman.”
“No kidding,” Luke said, still looking around. The New Republic Intelligence agent on Amorris was supposed to have locked Wesselman away incommunicado for the next few days. If he’d failed&mdashor if the supplier had somehow escaped&mdash “I hope you said hi for me.”
“Yeah, we did,” the pirate said darkly. “He says he’s never heard of you.”
“Really,” Luke said casually, reaching out to the other with the Force. There was a level of suspicion in the pirate’s mind, but no hint of the certainty that would mean such a conversation had actually taken place. This had to be a bluff.
Or rather, a test. “That’s funny, you talking to him and all,” Luke went on, finishing his inspection and focusing his gaze on the pirate. “Wesselman told me he was going to be out of touch for the next few days.” He probed the other’s mind a little deeper&mdash “Heading out to Morshdine sector, as I recall. Something about picking up a load of unregistered Tibanna gas for you?”
The pirate gave him a smile that was half sneer, and as he did so his suspicion faded away. “Yeah, that’s where he’s going, all right,” he conceded. “Hasn’t gotten there yet, though. We’re still trying to contact him.”
Luke shrugged, wishing he knew what Wesselman’s exact itinerary was supposed to have been. If the supplier got too far behind schedule, the pirates’ suspicions would probably start rising again. Too late to do anything about that now, though. “Well, when you do, say hi for me,” he said. “So. Did I pass?”
The pirate sneered again and lifted his left hand. Four of the six pressure doors slid open and four tough-looking thugs stepped through into the landing bay. Holstering their drawn blasters, they headed toward Luke’s freighter. “Yeah, you passed,” he said. “You got any fancy locks or booby traps on your cargo hold we should know about?”
“Nope, everything’s clear,” Luke said. “Help yourselves. You got any food around here? That shipboard stuff gets worse every day.”
“Sure,” the pirate said, pointing to one of the two doors that hadn’t had a guard waiting behind it. “Snack area’s through there. Don’t drink it dry-we’ll have you unloaded in a couple of hours, and I don’t want you tackling the out-route half-drunk. It’d make a mess, and I’d be the one who’d have to clean it up.”