Solo Command (13 page)

“Alert your stormtroopers,” Gast said, then issued commands to the others. “Prepare the Second Chamber. Activate comm jamming as soon as the door to the Second Chamber is opened. No, wait: Alert the other team of stormtroopers to take the intruders on the rooftop,
then
activate comm jamming as soon as the Second Chamber is opened.” She frowned, angry with herself for her mistake.

“You’re getting the hang of it,” Netbers said.

Kell waved an all-clear signal to the others. The walls and ceiling offered no circuitry suggesting additional security.

Dia and Shalla covered the door with their blasters. The others looked at the equipment in the room.

“I was never in here,” Piggy said. “I don’t know what the chamber was for. The chair wasn’t here. The chair was one floor up, where they did a lot of testing. I solved math problems in that chair while drugged or while being electrocuted.”

“Charming,” Face said.

“There’s something awful about this room,” Tyria said. “Not in the room itself. Nearby.”

“This is a game-table unit,” Kell said. He was on one knee, looking intently at one of the pieces of equipment around the chair. “The table itself has been taken off and the unit repainted.”

“So it broadcasts to the screen on the chair?” Face asked.

“Maybe.” Kell looked over the unit, puzzled. “It doesn’t seem to be fastened down, but it’s powered.”

“This machine washes clothes.” Runt was staring with equal concentration at a silver-gray metal cube two-thirds the height of a human. “They had one like it on the ship
Sungrass
.”

Kell waved his current detector at Runt’s device, then at the floor around it. “It’s self-powered. Like the game table. It’s battery-powered or something.”

“Why?” Face asked. He looked at Piggy, but the Gamorrean looked blankly back at him.

“Transfer control to my terminal,” Gast said.

Then she caught the hurt look on the face of Drufeys and she relented. “Oh, very well, you do it.”

Drufeys brightened and pressed a button on his console.

Face felt the floor give way beneath him. All around him, Wraiths and equipment dropped. There was blackness and heat beneath him. When his feet hit he tried to roll and absorb some of the shock of impact, but he did a bad job of it and landed on his chest, the wind knocked out of him. He felt something heavy and sharp slam into his back and he grunted from the blow. There were cries and sounds of crashing all around him.

Awkwardly, he rolled to his back. The floor of the room above had split down the middle. Hinges to either side had allowed it to open like a door, dropping them what looked like a fall of six or seven meters.

And now stormtroopers were lining up at the edges of the room above. They aimed their blasters down at the Wraiths. One called out, “Throw up your demolitions gear or we open fire.”

Face looked around. The Wraiths were in no position to resist. Only Kell and Shalla were already on their feet. Beyond Kell, Runt was unmoving, apparently unconscious. Beside him, a piece of machinery on her back, was another fallen Wraith—

“Dia!” Face was suddenly on his feet despite the pain. He knelt beside Dia, saw at once that she was unconscious, that her left arm lay at an angle that was not right. She was still breathing.

“Demolitions bag,” the stormtrooper repeated. “Or you’re all dead.”

Face caught Kell’s attention and nodded.

But Kell turned to Shalla, and said, “Do what they say, Demolitions.”

Shalla didn’t hesitate. She shucked off her own pack, which contained her infra-goggles, spare glow rods, and preserved food. She swung it around at the end of its straps and hurled it up to the stormtroopers above.

The speaker caught the bag. He and the others retreated. The ceiling began to close.

“What are you doing?” Face asked. “In thirty seconds they’ll know we’ve lied. They’ll open it up and start shooting.”

“In thirty seconds we’re supposed to be dead,” Kell said. He pulled off his own pack and rummaged around in its contents. “Take a look around, One. You know what this place is?”

Face forced himself to look away from Dia.

The floor was some sort of grating. It seemed to be continuous, not made up in sections, and was sturdy enough not to flex beneath the weight of the Wraiths and all the equipment from the chamber above. The walls were heavy, dark metal with a tight grid of nozzles protruding from them.

As he looked, the floor grating beside the walls began glowing red. The redness spread toward the center of the room
at a quick rate. Heat from the glowing portions of the grate swept across Face and the other Wraiths.

“They burn organic material here,” Piggy said. He struggled to his feet, holding his side. “It’s an incinerator.”

Lara knelt and fretted. Still no communication of any sort from the team. Of course, they were supposed to keep comm transmissions to a minimum. But she wanted to know what was happening down below.

It didn’t help that Elassar was so calm. The Devaronian junior pilot lay on his back, admiring the stars. “A shooting star!” he whispered. “That’s good luck.”

“Is it still lucky if it’s one of the asteroids we shot into the atmosphere as cover?” Lara asked.

He frowned, considering. “I don’t know.”

Sixty meters away, there was a terrific metal crash and two hinged pieces of roof slammed open. An open-sided turbolift rose into view. The dozen stormtroopers within it jumped out, turning toward Lara and Elassar.

“I guess not,” Elassar amended.

Face lifted Dia, as mindful as he could be of her broken arm. “Sorry I said anything, Five. Blow us out of here.”

Kell slipped his bag back over one shoulder. He held two charges, one in each hand. He tucked one charge into a pocket and tapped something into the keypad of the other.

Tyria hopped up on a boxy piece of metal equipment as the redness of the floor neared her feet. She peeled off her face mask. The other Wraiths began following suit. Face could see that they were already sweating heavily. So was he, but burdened as he was, he couldn’t do anything about it. Tyria said, “What if the chamber is magnetically sealed?”

“It’s not,” Face said. “If it were, they wouldn’t have bothered to demand our demolitions.”

Kell said, “One?”

“What?”

“Where do I place this?”

“Your best guess. You’re the demolitions expert. But this deep down, we may have stone and dirt on all sides.”

“Imperial architecture is kind of conservative,” Kell said. “One floor is often like another. Meaning that the main hall above may have a parallel on this floor. Which was—where?” He looked around blankly. In the fall and the Wraiths’s subsequent disorientation, he’d lost track of directions.

Piggy pointed at one wall, then yanked Runt up before the heat in the floor grid reached him. The Thakwaash pilot looked groggy, but mobile.

Flame erupted from every nozzle along the chamber walls. The flames were no more than half a meter in length, but the temperature in the room rose instantly. Several Wraiths swore and all flinched away from the new heat.

“Three seconds,” Kell said. “Find cover.” He threw his package against the wall and moved to crouch behind one of the ruined metal cases of false lab equipment.

Face followed suit. He felt the floor grating begin to burn its way through his shoes the moment they made contact. He crouched and leaned back against the experiment chair, keeping it between him and the explosive charge, trying to keep Dia’s limbs from trailing against the floor.

One floor up, a stormtrooper opened Shalla’s pack and extracted a tube of processed nutrients. He pawed through the other contents of the pack, then held out the nutrient tube to his commander for inspection.

The commander said, “Uh-oh.”

6

“I wasn’t too sure about this crematorium idea,” Netbers said. “But I must admit it seems to have come off rather well. Though the warlord might have preferred a better souvenir than several kilograms of ashes.”

Dr. Gast nodded. “But I think he’ll be pleased that they didn’t just die—that they died very, very painfully.”

“True.”

The building rocked and the sound of a muffled detonation reached them. Technicians jumped up and looked around as though deciding whether to situate themselves in doorways.

Netbers sighed. “Not good,” he said. “I’m going to lead the stormtroopers down to the crematorium level.”

Gast stood. “I’m going with you. You’ll need me for access to all levels.”

“Come along.”

The explosion hit before Face heard it, before he comprehended it. All he knew is that something hard, the frame of the experiment chair, hit his back and propelled him forward—launching Dia toward the burning floor, the burning wall. He
rolled with the impact, tumbling, trying to keep Dia from contacting the glowing floor grid.

He succeeded. His shoulder hit the grid and he felt the flooring burn through his light tunic, branding him. He continued the roll and the burning sensation tore down his back, across his buttocks.

There was a burning in his throat, too. It had to have been from his scream. He felt as though his back had been torn completely free, revealing bones and blood for all the world to see. He almost gave up then, as the pain told his body to tighten up into a tight ball and lie there until he died, but he felt his heels hit the floor and he rose, instinct and adrenaline giving him the energy to keep moving.

He turned back toward the source of the explosion. The flames on the walls were now growing, extending toward him, but in the center of them there was a different sort of light—whiteness, not redness. He lurched toward it, gaining speed.

There it was in his mind, an absurd image—his childhood visit to an arena on Coruscant where animals from all the planets of the galaxy did tricks for the entertainment of men. One of those tricks was leaping through fiery hoops and frameworks. Now he was doing it.

The floor grating disappeared two steps ahead, ending in a broken edge of red-glowing metal. He leaped over the edge into the white void beyond—

And hit something. White, cold hardness. He bounced off it and landed on his back.

And there the pain from his burns hit him. His back arched and he shrieked. His body would not obey him, would do nothing but writhe and shout.

He could not even look down to see if Dia was still with him, if he’d managed to carry the woman he loved out of that inferno.

Lara drew her blaster pistol and fired. Her first shot missed the leading wave of stormtroopers but checked their progress—most of them dropped to skid behind antennae, air-conditioning equipment, and other rooftop gear. The first of them returned
fire and Lara realized rather belatedly that she had no cover before her.

Elassar had his blaster out in a two-handed grip. He fired, tearing uselessly into the side of the metal housing between him and his target. Lara grabbed his tunic at the shoulder and tugged him toward another metal housing.

They ducked down behind the landskimmer-sized equipment case and heard blaster shots hammer into the far side. “We’re in trouble,” Lara said.

“True. Should I charge them and wipe them out for you?”

“Oh, if you think you could, that’d be really decent of you.” Lara popped up, took a quick shot, was rewarded with the image of a pair of stormtroopers ducking behind cover. “I’ll help too,” she said. “I’ll call the troops.”

“Deal.”

Lara brought out her comlink. “Wraith Two to Rogue Leader. Emergency. Emergency. Do you read?”

The only answer was a hiss of static.

Face forced himself to look around. He was in a hallway.

There, to his right, lay Dia. She was moving, her eyes half-open. Beyond her was a jagged hole in a once-pristine white wall. It was three or four meters in diameter, starting at knee height and continuing up into the ceiling and beyond, and it was lined in flames. Heat rolled out of it, a steady wind from a manmade hell.

Out from the fire shot Wes Janson, crashing into the same wall Face must have hit, but he kept his feet when he landed. His right shoulder and back were on fire. He dropped to the floor and rolled, swatting at the flame.

Then came Tyria. She landed short of the wall, her blaster rifle in hand. Poised as a heroine from an action holodrama, she swept up and down the hall with the rifle. There was no sign of fire, even of burn upon her.

Four out. Four to go. Face heaved himself to his feet, leaving Dia where she lay for the moment. There was blood all over the flooring where he’d fallen. He decided not to think about that for the moment. Or about the pain—he swore and
brought out his blaster pistol, then reached down and began dragging Dia out of the path of oncoming Wraiths.

Seconds later, Kell landed where she had just been. His hair was charred and his eyebrows were gone, singed away. There were burn stripes on his chest, stripes identical to the flooring in the crematorium—and not only on his chest. His palms and fingers were also black and red with the marks, and shook uncontrollably.

Piggy came flying out of the inferno and crashed into the wall. He bounced off and slammed to the floor atop Face’s blood slick. A fraction of a second later, Shalla landed atop him. She was on fire and had burn stripes along her right side from armpit to knee, and she shrieked as she rolled to extinguish the flames. Piggy slapped at her, trying to help.

Seven of eight. The Wraiths looked at one another as, in their pained and distracted states, they tried to calculate who was missing.

“Oh, no,” Kell said. “Runt—”

Then Runt was among them, his chest and left side fully engaged in flame, his fur blackening away as it fed the fire. He landed on his knees atop Piggy, howling in pain, swinging arms as though to strike the enemy burning away at him.

Kell leaped at Runt, a body check that took him from atop the Gamorrean. Piggy got up to his feet and fell atop Runt, hammering away at patches of flame his corpulent body didn’t smother.

They just stood there breathing for a moment. Then Face straightened, despite what it cost him in agony to his back. When he spoke, he found that his voice cracked with pain and exertion. “We’re moving out,” he said. “There have to be access panels or stairs near where the turbolift used to be. First, open communications with our other team and the Rogues.”