[Thrawn Trilogy] - 02(93)
But beneath the surface glitter the rot showed straight through. Showed in the slightly furtive manner of the locals; in the halfhearted swaggering of the uniformed security men; in the lingering stares of the plainclothes but just as obvious quiet security men. The whole spaceport-maybe the whole planet-was being held together with tie wire and blaster power packs.
A petty totalitarian regime, and a populace desperate to escape it. Just the sort of place where anyone would betray anyone else for the price of a ticket off planet. Which meant that if any of the locals had tumbled to the fact that there was a smuggling ship sitting here under Security’s nose, Mara had about ten steps to go before the whole place came down on top of her.
Walking toward a faded door with the equally faded sign “Landing Pit 21” over it, she hoped sardonically that it wasn’t a trap. She would really hate to die in a place like this.
The door to the landing pit was unlocked. Taking a deep breath, acutely conscious of the two pairs of uniformed security men within sight of her, she went inside.
It was the Etherway, all right, looking just as shabby and decrepit as it had when Fynn Torve had had to abandon it in Landing Pit 63 of this same spaceport. Mara gave it a quick once-over, checked out all the nooks and crannies in the pit where an armed ambush squad could be skulking, and finally focused on the dark-haired young man lounging in a chair by the freighter’s lowered ramp. Even in that casual slouch he couldn’t shake the military air that hovered around him. “Hello, there,” he called to her, lowering the data pad he’d been reading. “Nice day for flying. You interested in hiring a ship?”
“No,” she said, walking toward him as she tried to watch all directions at once. “I’m more in a buying mood, myself. What kind of ship is this flying hatbox, anyway?”
“It’s a Harkners-Balix Nine-Oh-Three,” the other sniffed with a second-rate attempt at wounded pride. “Flying hatbox, indeed.”
Not much of an actor, but he was clearly getting a kick out of all this cloak-and-blade stuff. Setting her teeth firmly together, Mara sent a silent curse down on Torve’s head for setting up such a ridiculous identification procedure in the first place. “Looks like a Nine-Seventeen to me,” she said dutifully. “Or even a Nine-Twenty-Two.”
“No, it’s a Nine-Oh-Three,” he insisted. “Trust m my uncle used to make landing gear pads for them. Come inside and I’ll show you how to tell the difference.”
“Oh, that’ll be great,” Mara muttered under her breath as she followed him up the ramp.
“Glad you finally got here,” the man commented over his shoulder as they reached the top of the ramp. “I was starting to think you’d been caught.
“That could still happen if you don’t shut up,” Mara growled back. “Keep your voice down, will you?”
“It’s okay,” he assured her. “I’ve got all your MSE droids clattering around on cleaning duty just inside the outer hull. That should block out any audio probes.”
Theoretically, she supposed, he was right. As a practical matter : well, if the locals had the place under surveillance they were in trouble, anyway. “You have any trouble getting the ship out of impoundment?” she asked him.
“Not really,” he said. “The spaceport administrator said the whole thing was highly irregular, but he didn’t give me any major grief about it.” He grinned. “Though I suppose the size of the bribe I slipped him might have had something to do with that. My name’s Wedge Antilles, by the way. I’m a friend of Captain Solo’s.”
“Nice to meet you,” Mara said. “Solo couldn’t make it himself?”
Antilles shook his head. “He had to leave Coruscant on some kind of special mission, so he asked me to get the ship sprung for you. I was scheduled for escort duty a couple systems over anyway, so it wasn’t a problem.”
Mara ran a quick eye over him. From his build and general manner:”B-wing pilot?” she hazarded.
“X-wing,” he corrected her. “I’ve got to get back before my convoy finishes loading. Want me to give you an escort out of here?”
“Thanks, but no,” she said, resisting the urge to say something sarcastic. The first rule of smuggling was to stay as inconspicuous as possible, and flying out of a third-rate spaceport with a shiny New Republic X-wing starfighter in tow didn’t exactly qualify as a low-profile stance. “Tell Solo thanks.”
“Right. Oh, one other thing,” Antilles added as she started past him. “Han also wanted me to ask you if your people might be interested in selling information on our friend with the eyes.”