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Thud thud thud
Wedge looks up, startled. With an office as close to the main X-wing hangar as this is, banging and other assorted noises aren't uncommon. This sounded a lot less metallic than usual, somehow, and also somehow closer than any maintenance sounds from the hanger below. Anyway it's... he looks at his chrono. Horribly late – any later and it’ll start being early again.
He has a sneaking suspicion that the sounds have been going on for some time, but he’s been too mired in datawork for them to register till now.
Thud thud thud.
He gets up and opens the door to the corridor. There's nothing there.
He doesn't know why he expected there might be something there, especially at this time of night.
Thud thud thud
The sound is... coming from up in the ceiling somewhere. This time it seemed to be accompanied by voices, although Wedge can neither recognise the voices nor make out the words or even the language. It does sound strangely... echoey though, and coming into the office from a direction no voice should be coming from. Certainly no humanoid voice, at any rate.
He squints up at the air outlet grate. Then shrugs and shake his head in self-chastisement at the ridiculous notion.
Air vents are for air, it's in the name. Maintenance shafts are for maintenance, whether by people or by droids. Air vents are much smaller than maintenance shafts.
Funny, that, it's as though they've been designed that way on purpose, to transport air around the ship so that the crew don’t all asphyxiate while they’re in the middle of their very illegal Rebellion against the Empire.
Thud thud THUD-thud
Wedge tosses the datapad he'd been reviewing back onto the desk and watches as it slides to knock a pile of others to the floor, then gets up and slaps the door control for a second time. The corridor is still as empty as ever – well, with the exception of Major Derlin, who gives him a quizzical look as he pauses in the doorway, nonplussed at the unexpected appearance of a senior officer in this part of the ship at this time of night.
“There's no need to pull an all-nighter here, Captain.”
“Uh, no sir, I...”
“Go to bed, Antilles, the datawork will still be there in the morning.”
Major Derlin is more grey-haired now than he was before Hoth. Also more resigned to weirdness, for no reason Wedge can make out. He stalks past, seemingly deaf to the repeated thud-thud Wedge can hear, again.
Wedge can hardly retreat to the office now, having opened the door into the major's path, and steps out, debating momentarily which way to go. Everything else being equal, he turns right, towards the turbolifts. He'd go that way whether he was actually retreating to his own quarters, or whether he was planning to head down to the hangar level. He does neither of those things, pausing as Major Derlin turns a corner at the other end of the corridor and disappears from view.
There is more thudding out here, though it’s more muffled, somehow. Intrigued, he tries to work out where it could possibly be coming from.
He passes the door to the pilots' lounge, which is probably abandoned at this time of night. And then he backtracks. Pilots aren't known for being sensible and going to bed at civilised hours – certainly, his pilots aren't known for being sensible. At any time of day.
The thumping is a little more distinct as he opens the door, though he can see no sign of where it might be coming from at all as he glances around the lounge.
Even at approaching ship's midnight – on second thoughts, and a glance at his chrono, closer to two in the morning – there are still pilots in the lounge. Will Scotian is dealing cards in what looks to be not a new game of sabacc. with Kesin Ommis, Hobbie and Wes... Wait.
No Wes.
Well, that isn't at all ominous.
“I suppose it's too much to hope that Wes has gone to bed already?” he asked.
“Uh, he’s around... somewhere....”
Wedge levels a frown at the card players. “I know we don't have a mission or anything tomorrow – today – but you should think about heading to bed.”
THUD thud
Muffled cursing, and in the ceiling, from the sounds of it. Wedge looks up, frowns, and steps back into the corridor.
It is definitely louder out here, and it is definitely in the ceiling.
And aboard a ship, that means only one thing.
It's still not the loudest of sounds and there's definitely an echo that means it's going to be hard to track down, but Wedge isn't a Rogue for nothing, he's used to impossible missions. He also knows, somehow, that Wes Janson is behind whatever is going on... and someone needs to find him and stop him before Major Derlin (or worse, General Rieekan or Admiral Ackbar) finds him. Which means Wedge because Tycho has more than likely been the sensible Alderaanian he is and taken his sensible Alderaanian behind to bed. Where Wedge would be if his own sense hadn't frozen itself solid on Hoth.
It is surprising how far random thudding sounds can travel in a starship and more surprising that Wedge hasn't encountered anyone on his quest to track down the source and give it kitchen duty for the next... oh, thousand years or so.
He's so busy concentrating on chasing random thuds and muffled curses that he nearly falls over the random access panel someone left lying around after they removed it from the hatch.
Well. That isn't at all suspicious.
The panel normally covers access to… oh Sithspit. The air vents. Of course it’s the stupid air vents.
Who makes air vents that big in a kriffing starship, anyway?
He’s the perfect height for a pilot, which means he’s awkwardly too short to comfortably grab the edge of the vent opening but there’s nothing for it. He’s not hauling a chair out here in the middle of the night on some wild bantha chase Kriff you, Luke Skywalker, where in the nine hells are you?!… on some wild nek chase... but there’s definitely something going on, all his gut instincts are yelling at him that there’s something weird going on and he needs to find out what and end it. Before High Command end him and probably space the Rogues responsible, too, leaving him to recruit an entire squadron from Force only knows what pilots might still be alive and with the fleet.
He backs up across the corridor before taking a running jump to grab the bottom of the opening, kicking at the wall and hauling himself up by sheer willpower and determination, to get one knee up into the opening and pull himself in, lying flat on his stomach with his feet sticking out.
He is not the first person in here, not by several parsecs. It’s dusty – even in a Mon Cal starship, there’s dust and of course that’s going to wind up in the air supply system, even though Mon Cal ships are less…. desiccated, than most human ships. All he has to do is to follow the trail of disturbed dust, not to mention the banging, to figure out what’s going on.
And probably where Wes Janson is, because where he isn’t include: Wedge’s office, the pilots’ lounge, the X-wing hangar and the pilots’ bunkroom. Also crossed off Wedge’s mental list of places Wes is not currently located: the refreshers and the showers.
He has to twist onto his side to access the pocket where he keeps an emergency glow rod and flicks it on. These not being maintenance shafts, like any sane person would use, there’s going to be no light to see by much further in, and Wedge’s own body is blocking most of what little light coming in from the corridor behind him, the ship being on its night part of the cycle. (Why does Dac – Mon Calamari – have such short days? They’re only 21 hours long, the standard day as measured by Coruscant time is 24 hours long. When Wedge complains about not having enough hours in the day he means it completely literally. At least when he’s stationed on a Mon Cal ship, he does.)
He inches forwards. The shaft (it’s horizontal, does that count as a shaft? Or is there a better word that’s not coming to mind at two in the morning, near enough?) tastes of dust and dryness and he can already feel his hands getting dryer than ever. If he can find enough hand cream to bring back any kind of normalcy to his skin after this, he’s going to dock the cost from Janson’s pay, just see if he doesn’t.
Not that they’ve been paid in... forever.
Pay’s on hold along with a good many other things. Like any kind of normal life.
It’s ridiculous, how wriggling through too-small air vents seems in any way shape or form sane, but he’s just spent eighteen months living on a planet in the backside of nowhere that’s nothing more than a frozen ball of ice – if they could take a sample right down to Hoth’s core, the whole thing would be nothing but ice, he’s sure of it.
This is all kind of elbows and toes crawling, even for Wedge who is currently living on ration bars, caf and stim patches and running on approximately five hours’ sleep a night. He’s getting too much exercise, too little sleep, lost his CO just at the limits of Hoth’s frozen atmosphere and his mind somewhere on the last patrol. His patience is wearing as thin as his socks, and they needed darning for the fifth time last week.
He pauses at a junction to examine the scuffing in the dust and listen for the sounds of banging, and wriggles round the corner to the right, trying not to catch himself or his ancient flightsuit (he ran out of other clothing approximately three weeks ago) on the too-sharp edges of the vent. Nobody expected anyone to come crawling through here or the vents would be bigger and the corners more blunt.
Finally there’s a pair of familiar boots kicking in front of him. Well, that explains the source of the thuds he was hearing.
“Wes!”
There’s a shriek, hastily cut off, and then a clatter as Wes convulses in front of him, obviously not having heard Wedge’s approach.
“Sithspit, Wedge!”
Wedge sighs. "Of course it's you. You're making quite a racket, you know. I'm surprised you haven't woken any senior officers up."
There's an aborted wriggle and then in a small voice Wes admits, "Um, I'm stuck."
"You're what?"
"I'm stuck."
Wedge groans, and sets the glow rod down before reaching to tug at We's feet, pulling him backwards, just enough to free him. Wes twists a little and manages to wriggle forwards before going still. “Oh shavit. It’s Mon Mothma’s office!”
“Well, we’re not going to go out through her office door. We’d leave everything covered in dust – and Derlin’s stalking the corridors, too.”
“I dropped the vent cover.”
“See if you can’t get hold of it to pop it back into place, it’s just friction fit.”
“I know that… here…” Wes wriggled forwards, until he was hanging out of the opening.
How had he even fit in here – he was wider in the shoulders than most pilots, and it had been tight for Wedge.
“Oh… oh shavit.”
He’d leaned out too far and fallen out. Training and instinct had made him tuck into a shoulder roll, protecting his head and neck and taking the brunt of the fall on one shoulder, the momentum carrying him across the floor until he was stopped by the corner of the Rebel Alliance commander’s desk.
“Get back up here – you… Oh kriff. Pass me the cover – and try not to make a mess? More of a mess.”
Wes gets to his feet amidst clouds of grey dust and bends to pick the vent cover up, passing it to Wedge who props it against the side of the shaft. (Horizontal or vertical, it’s a damn shaft, it’s too early in the morning to worry about what various bits of the ship are called, especially if we’re caught breaking and entering Mon Mothma’s office, brain, shut up!)
“I’d say to try not to leave dirty footprints on the wall but.” Wedge shrugs. “There’s a junction back the way, I’m going to head back otherwise you won’t get past me – and someone needs to put the cover back in place!”
Thank the Force Wes can see sense sometimes. He’s about as well acquainted with sense as Hobbie is with the finer points of being an optimist, but it happens on occasion.
Wedge marks those occasions off on the calendar.
He wriggles backwards to the junction. It’s a slow progress but Wes has merely waited for him to clear enough room to be able to scramble back up, which will make this marginally quicker, at least.
They pass one another, Wedge trying not to choke on the horrible dry dust that Wes is stirring in his wake. It’s easy enough to pop the cover back into place, though it’s a tight squeeze to turn around, even for Wedge who’s the smallest member of Rogue Squadron (and the one with the most sense, though that’s hardly in evidence right now. Probably hidden under all the dust that’s bound to be making his uniform look like the drab camouflage Page’s Katarn Commandos stalk around in, much good may it do them in the warm white corridors of Home One which are as far from being a forest as Hoth is from being a nice tropical vacation spot.)
Progress back to their entry spot is painfully slow. Wedge still has his glow stick and is loath to relinquish it to Wes, though after ten minutes he gives up and passes it over, plunging himself into semi-darkness.
Hello, darkness, my old friend, at least I know what you look like. And there aren’t any horrible monsters in Mon Cal ships. Wes, you need to ask Supply for a new pair of boots as soon as they’re likely to get any – put your name on the list, at least.
Finally he can see – when Wes’ shoulder or ass aren’t blocking his view – the square of light that indicates where the exit was. Thank the Force nobody has put the access grate back into place.
It's only a matter of mere moments before they are both standing in the corridor, their flightsuits looking more grey than orange, their hair covered in dust, boots less than respectably shiny (though it's only Tycho who really cares about stupid things like highly polished boots. Wedge just cares that they are looked after).
Wes replaces the vent cover.
“I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me what your plan was when you went up there in the first place?”
Wes considers, and shakes his head. “No, I don’t think I do.”
Wedge closes his eyes and lets out a sigh. “Go to bed.”
He doesn’t wait for an answer before turning to retreat back to his own office and the datawork now scattered all over the floor. Wedge sits in his chair, pauses for a moment and then put his folded arms on his desk, rests his head on his arms and bursts out laughing.
* * *
Mon Mothma is astounded when she unlocks her office door in the morning to discover that everything seems to be covered in a thin layer of fine grey dust, and there is a bootprint on the wall, about halfway up between the floor and the air vent, from what appears to be a well-worn flight boot.
She is even more astounded when, a few hours later, the temporary commander of Rogue Squadron is standing before her. He is dressed as smartly as ever, but there seems to be some of that same grey dust lightening his usually dark brown hair, and coating his boots.
She squints, trying not to give away that she’s looking at his boots and not really listening to his words. From what she can see, they’re two sizes too small to match the print she’s since wiped from her wall.
It will just have to remain a mystery.