Solo Command (12 page)

“Well, that whole network of infrared beams over Northwest Two. I looked at it through your infra-goggles. The posts that the beams are coming out of are years old. They’re well kept-up, but there’s corrosion on them, and I can see where one of the posts has had to be straightened and realigned when it was knocked over or something.”

“So?” Lara finished her turn and knelt with the holocam. On its built-in screen, she brought up the image she’d just taken. She slid a stylus from the side of the device and began marking her reference points.

“So the roof surface over there is brand-new. It’s not brand-new here or on any of the places we’ve been walking, but it’s brand-new there.”

Lara looked up, suddenly disturbed. “Show me.”

There was no marker to indicate the border between Northwest Two and Northwest Three, but they stopped a meter short of the first post that they knew held the infrared devices. Elassar knelt and Lara followed suit.

“See, here,” Elassar said. He stretched a finger up almost to the point protected by the infrared. “A seam.”

Lara couldn’t see, so she risked a moment’s illumination with her glow rod. Elassar was right: there was a score, straight as a laser beam, running along the roof between the two building sections. It was so thin as to be nearly invisible even in good light.

She switched the rod off. “So the roof material was laid down in sections. It looks just the same as the roof here.”

“Yes, it does. It has been walked on and scuffed a lot, just like the roofing here. But it smells different. Much sharper. It’s new.”

Lara sighed. This had to be some new-pilot prank. But, obligingly, she leaned back and sniffed at the roofing they’d been walking on. It smelled faintly of industrial chemicals. Then she leaned forward and sniffed again at the other section.

The smell was stronger, crisper.

From her wrist sheath she pulled her vibroblade. She did not power it on. She dug at the seam between the two roof sections, prying the new section up. It was a gummy mass perhaps two centimeters deep and resisted her efforts, but finally she was able to turn up a flap of the material. Elassar obligingly pulled at the edge until half a square meter or so was revealed.

The underside of the material was thick with tiny circular devices made of shiny metal. They were spaced at about eight-centimeter intervals and connected by thin silvery wires. “Pressure sensors,” she said.

“Not a problem,” said Elassar. “None of us walked on them. And we didn’t apply pressure to pull them up.”

“That’s not the point. They’ve added a layer of security under the substantial security already in place, and it’s a different type. If they’ve done that throughout the complex, the Wraiths might be dismantling one layer but not the new stuff.”

“So give them a call.”

“Which will probably give our presence away.” She sighed and looked over the boulevard at the rooftop where Donos was. She couldn’t see him, but she’d heard his return with a new speeder a few minutes before. It was so hard, working with people; on her missions for Imperial Intelligence, she’d always been alone. No one else to be responsible for.

She brought up her comlink and thumbed on its scrambler
mode. “Two to Six. Do not acknowledge. Additional security on roof suggests this site is prepared for your arrival. Check for new modifications to your surroundings. Two out.” She grabbed up her holocam and rose. “Let’s move out.”

“Comm signal,” a technician said. His voice was unnaturally shrill.

Dr. Gast blinked and looked around. She’d actually fallen asleep.
Boredom and lack of any decent occupation will do that to you
, she thought, her voice cranky even when expressed only in her own mind.

The control room was antiseptically white, except where the floor and walls were marked by black marks and scores resulting from the haste with which some of this equipment had been assembled. The four walls were occupied by banks of terminals, each dedicated to a different area of coverage or function. Six per wall, twenty-four in all, occupied every hour of the day, and never anything to report except the occasional repairman working on an adjacent roof section or an avian landing on the roof of the protected zone.

Until now, maybe.

Gast’s own console was a nearly complete circle of terminals and controls, her chair in the center. She lazily swiveled until she could look at the back of the technician who’d spoken. “Let’s hear it,” she said.

“It’s encrypted, Doctor.”

“Decrypt it. Where’s it coming from?”

“I have that.” Another technician’s voice. He didn’t bother to wait for permission; he patched through his holocam view to one of Gast’s terminals. She liked that. Initiative. Which one was this? It was Drufeys, the lean one with the lazy eye.

The holocam was an infrared unit. It was a static view of the roof, and showed two blurry red figures, one male and one female, creeping along the roof.

Away
from the protected zone. Gast frowned. That was disappointing. Had they recognized the first line of security and decided to run away?

She turned to the console where her new intelligence specialist, a man on loan from Warlord Zsinj, sat. “Captain Netbers, what are they doing?”

Netbers rose and approached her. He was a huge man, easily two meters tall, with a musculature that suggested he spent more time improving it than he did sleeping. A pity he was so ugly—obviously a fighter, he looked as though he had fallen asleep in an automatic door and it had slammed shut on his face for an afternoon. But the eyes underneath his shaggy brown hair were dark and intelligent. When he spoke, his voice was deep and raspy. “They’ve seen the security perimeter.”

“And it scared them off?”

He smiled. His teeth were regular. She somehow doubted they were original equipment. “No,” he said. “That comm transmission was them informing the other members of their team. They’re getting clear in case we caught the signal.”

“We haven’t seen any sign of other intruders.”

“We will.”

She turned back to Drufeys. “Monitor their progress. When they’ve settled in, have a squad of stormtroopers stand by within striking distance of them.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

She quelled an excitement rising within her and turned back to Netbers. “I have a feeling this is going to be fun, Captain. Is it usually fun?”

He nodded.

Kell swore and pushed his head deeper into the access hatch. He was hanging from sturdy metal rungs in the turbolift shaft, one floor below street level, illuminated only by the glow rod held by Shalla, who stood on the same rung he did and helped brace him as he worked. The panel Kell investigated opened into a maze of wires and circuitry, and his head was missing in that forest of equipment. “Give me more light.”

Shalla leaned in closer to oblige, poking her hand and glow rod through the curtain of wiring. She could see his neck flex as he looked around.

Finally Kell withdrew—slowly, so as not to knock Shalla free of her perch. He twisted to look over his shoulder at the other Wraiths, clustered in the open turbolift door behind him. “Two was right. There’s new wiring throughout. If we’d gone down and disabled the monitors on the panel between lift shafts, we would have set off another alarm.”

Face asked, “Can you disable that alarm?”

Kell considered. Shalla knew this really wasn’t his speciality. He’d said he was lucky to have done as well as he had on this mission. “Maybe,” he said. “But I can’t be sure I’ve identified all the security at that entry point. I think instead we need to go through a non-entry point.”

“Like where?”

“Like here.” He gestured at the curtain of wires. “Beyond this monkey-lizard nest, we have a riveted panel of metal between us and the Northwest Two lift shaft. But it’s not armor quality. I vote we just cut through and descend.”

“Do it.”

Kell brought out his vibroblade and powered it on.

They were within three meters of the bottom of the shaft when Kell spotted the access hatch they would have used had they not changed plans. “Nine, the gauge again?”

He felt Shalla rummage around in the top pocket of his demolitions pack. Then she handed him the sensor device he’d had to use so many times tonight. It read electrical currents and was of vital use to mechanics and demolitions experts, two categories into which Kell fit.

He aimed the device at the panel and swept it all around the bottom of the shaft. It registered a considerable amount of electrical current flow beyond the panel, no surprise, and along the recessed slot used by turbolift cars of this sort to acquire their power.

There was also a suspicious spike of activity on the wall opposite the panel, just above the door out of the lift shaft. It took him a few moments to identify the hemispherical depression, not larger than the end of his thumb, in the metal just
above the door. “Holocam recess,” he said. “But it’s set up to watch the panel. If we get across to the door side and drop beside it, it shouldn’t spot us.”

Face said, “There are no rungs over there, Five.”

“Oh, well. Guess we go home instead.” Kell had Shalla tuck the gauge back in his pack. He checked to make sure that his pack and other gear were secure.

Then he let go of the rung he was holding on to and leaped across the turbolift shaft, slapping into the far wall like a slapstick character from a holocomedy. He dropped the final three meters to the duracrete bottom of the shaft, his large frame easily handling the shock of landing. He gestured up at his comrades as though to say, “Simple.”

He saw Face shake his head ruefully.

One by one they followed his lead. He half caught each of them, fractionally slowing their descents, then got to work on the minimal security on the turbolift door.

The halls were empty, sanitary, still smelling faintly of something antiseptic. The lights were on at half intensity, making even the whiteness of the walls and floor seem dim. All the Wraiths could hear was the distant hum of air-moving machinery and their own faint footsteps.

Face didn’t like it. It felt abandoned, and an empty facility would not yield them any secrets. It also felt somehow wrong. He glanced at Tyria to gauge her response—perhaps her abilities with the Force, however faint or erratic, would tell her something. But he could not read her face; at his own command, all the Wraiths, now that they were moving in what should have been populated areas, were wearing black cloth masks covering everything but their eyes and mouths.

All the Wraiths but Piggy, that is. No mask could conceal his species, and only one member of his species would travel with a commando unit this way.

“I know this floor,” Piggy said. Both his real voice and his mechanical one were modulated so low that Face could barely hear them. “This was the third of four floors. We came down here only when we were injured. The bacta ward was right
down—” He pointed his finger at a blank section of wall to his right and stopped.

Face asked, “Right down where, Eight?”

“Down this hall.”

“That’s a wall.”

“I know.” Piggy stepped up to the wall and looked at it very carefully. Then he bent to look at the flooring beneath it. When he turned to Kell, his expression, to the extent that Face could read Gamorrean expressions, was confused.

Kell obligingly aimed his electrical current detector at that section of wall, waving it about slowly. “Nothing to suggest any sort of door mechanism. There’s some faint electrical activity beyond, but not immediately beyond. Several meters, I think, and no heavy electrical currents.”

Tyria said, “The wear on the floor doesn’t show that anything has turned down a hall here, Eight. And the floor looks as though it’s been through several years of wear.”

“Yes,” Piggy said. But he still stared at the wall as if accusing it of lying. “They’ve taken up the floor from somewhere else and moved it here to conceal the deception.”

“All right,” Face said. “But even so, the only thing down this hall of yours was a bacta ward—correct?”

“Correct.”

“We’ll check it out if we don’t find anything elsewhere. Let’s look at what you never got to see before. All right?”

Piggy nodded.

They continued up the main hall, the only hall, to its end. On the left was a large double door leading into a circular chamber filled with equipment—panels, consoles, and terminals arrayed in a circle around some sort of large chair. The chair was obviously intended for medical usage; it featured brackets to fit around wrist and ankle, and was festooned with equipment on armatures—injectors, viewscreens, racks filled with bottles.

“I know that chair,” Piggy said. “You got your shots there. And performed tests. But it was one floor up.”

“Door’s clear,” Kell said. “No undue security. Do I open it up?”

Face said, “You said three of four. This was the third floor of four. You meant two above this one and one below?”

Piggy nodded.

“How did you get to the fourth floor?”

“By the turbolift.” Then Piggy frowned and looked back down the hallway toward the distant turbolift door.

“But the turbolift ended at this floor,” Face said. “There was duracrete below.”

Shalla said, “It was very clean duracrete. No oil stains. I thought that was odd. But everything here has been so clean it seemed in keeping with the rest.”

“Obviously, it was new,” Face said. “They’ve blocked off the fourth floor. I wonder why?”

The others shrugged. Tyria merely gave him her I-have-a-bad-feeling-about-this look.

“We can leave now,” Shalla said.

“There is no data without risk,” Face said, “as one of my instructors used to say. We always wanted to shoot him for it. All right, Five, let’s go in.”

Kell triggered the door control. The double doors slid open and the Wraiths entered, blasters up, fanning to either side.

“Doctor?” said another technician. “They’re in the First Chamber.” He put through the holocam feed to one of her terminals.

Gast looked at the screen and frowned. “They got through our outer perimeter.”

Netbers leaned over her shoulder. “They’re pretty good. But they’re here. So they’re dead.”