Face circled around the table in the salon for perhaps the hundredth time, sighing loudly.
'Would you stop doing that?' Ka'iulani said, exasperated, looking up from the holographic star chart hovering over the table, 'it's getting on my nerves.'
'Sorry,' replied Face. 'It's just,' he sighed again. He could almost hear her gnashing her teeth. He went to the end of the room directly opposite the entrance, the foremost part of the ship, directly underneath the cockpit, and sat, facing in to the rest of the room. For the hundredth time, he asked himself how he would do it. To his right was the stripped bulkhead. On one of his previous inspections, he had noticed a panel was loose. On the outside of the ship, he knew, would have been a large navigational dish, linking directly to the cockpit, with its subsystems branching down alongside the main forward sensors, on the nose of the ship. Even though the dish had long been removed - probably during its retrofit in the Clone Wars, or perhaps when the Empire had standardised cross-galaxy communications - it had taken no great leap of deductive skill for him to deduce that the spy had repurposed the old systems to send messages outside of the main network. He and Vix had quickly disassembled the rigged system so that now no messages could be sent that way, as well as disabled the main communications array so that the spy couldn't send anything, at all, without spending an hour re-enabling it. If only they had access to a New Republic base, the military police could use their forensic skills to lift fingerprints, perhaps detect particles of sweat still lingering on the cold durasteel casing, but alas, they had no such resources to call upon.
So that told him why Fenn was shot. They had probably walked in mid-communication. The only question this room refused to answer. His best guess? The maintenance crawl shafts that honeycombed through the ship, but that was tenuous, and not at all helpful. Face himself had crawled through one, and though he had struggled, that was more to do with age rather than any other limitation. Anyone, save Vix, could have got through them more or less with ease. They could crawl in one, disappear, and reappear near the crew quarters, making it seem that they had come with the others when they heard the shots. He sighed again.
'For the love of the gods,' Ka'iulani screamed, 'get the fu-'
'I'm leaving,' Face said hastily, holding his hands up in surrender. He stood and, as he passed her to leave, looked over her shoulder, down at the datapad in her hand. 'Bastion?!'
Ka'iulani shrugged. 'What of it?'
'You know why they call it Bastion, right?' Face asked nervously.
'Yeah,' she replied, unfazed. 'It means they've got the good stuff everyone wants.'
Face continued on, but paused at the door. Perhaps putting her in charge of the plan to raid a medical facility had been a mistake, he thought. 'It seems like a risky place to try,' he offered.
'Go big or go home,' she shrugged, turning her attention back to the datapad in her hand. 'And I don't intend on going home without my people.'
Face opened his mouth to reply, then frowned as a thought occurred to him. 'Maintenance shafts,' he muttered, then left. Ka'iulani ignored him.
Face found Garan in the upper midships, in the small room that housed the interior access panel to the deflector shield, above the engineering compartment. As he climbed up the ladder rungs, Vix met him at the top, giving him a hand up. 'How's he been?' Face asked Vix quietly, so that Garan couldn't hear.
'Just been working steadily,' Vix muttered, 'doing what we've asked of him, best as I can tell.'
Face nodded and crawled further into the small room. Garan looked around at the commotion, but said nothing.
