Wedge's Gamble (38 page)

Best if I assume that the Rogues
are
up to something. Fine. I wish them all the Force-inspired success they desire. Once they win, once they drop their guard, then we will hit them and hit them hard
. He laughed aloud and returned to his work. “Not much longer from now the Rebels will have what they most desire. And shortly thereafter they will learn they don’t really want it at all.”

The black airspeeder raced through the night-dim streets on a course that brought it parallel to the construction droid’s path, then Emtrey cut the wheel left and pulled back. The airspeeder climbed rapidly, then the nose eased down and Emtrey steered in toward the flat landing surface built behind the droid’s control center. “I will have us down in fifteen seconds, sir.”

Wedge fitted the mask over the right side of his head. He spoke the command that inflated the air bladders that clamped the helmet in place. “How do I look?” he croaked.

“Very Imperial, Colonel Roat.” Iella gave him a nod.

Mirax looked less comfortable with his disguise. “You look very cyborg.”

“Good. That lessens my chance of being recognized.” Wedge rode out the slight bump as Emtrey put the vehicle down on the construction droid. A faint hum filled the
air, but it grew to a hideous din when the airspeeder’s gull-wing doors opened. Wedge got out of the speeder first, then helped both Mirax and Iella disembark.

A man wearing a red helmet and an orange jumpsuit waved both hands at them as he came running over. “You can’t be here. Get going or I call for stormtroopers.”

Wedge leaned forward and frowned, tapping the metal over his right ear. “I cannot hear you.”

“I SAID …”

“Too much noise.”

The workman frowned, then bid all of them to follow him with a curt wave. He led them into a small foyer just outside the command center. The door closed behind them, cutting the noise almost to nothing. “You can’t be here.”

“I am Colonel Antar Roat and these are my aides. I have come for a safety inspection.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

Mirax gave the man a withering stare. “Of course not, idiot. If you did, this inspection wouldn’t be a surprise, would it?”

Iella held a hand out. “Your identification and work permits please.”

“Wait.” The man went for the identification cards and held them out. “I should check with …”

Iella snatched the datacards from him. “Compounding the possible charges against you? Is there a conspiracy between you and your cohorts? How much do they pay you for your part in the smuggling operation?” Iella paced around him like a Thevaxan Marauder stalking prey.

“What smuggling?” The man’s hands came up as he turned to face her. “I don’t know no …”

Wedge’s boxy right hand crashed onto the back of the man’s head, dropping him to the ground. Iella immediately turned to the interior door while Mirax let Emtrey into the foyer. The droid held blaster carbines for each of the others and passed them out carefully. Iella checked
hers, then passed the downed man’s identification card through the coded slot.

The door buzzed. Iella jerked it open and Wedge and Mirax hurried through it, brandishing their weapons at the trio of men lounging at a hologame table. Beyond them, filling the walls of the rectangular command center, mojiitors, gauges, dials, and lights displayed an unending amount of information about every phase of the construction droid’s operation. The multicolored lights tended mostly to be green, which underscored the sick pallor of the men’s flesh tones.

“Lie down on the floor and no one gets hurt.” Mirax pointed her carbine at the men and smiled. “I ask once—after that I have the droid pitch your bodies off the front and you’ll end up as compost in some Ithorian’s indoor garden, understand? That’s it, hug that deck and you won’t have to be enlightened.”

Iella held the door open as Wedge went back through and dragged the unconscious man into the cockpit. The other three looked shocked to see him down, but his snores reassured them somewhat as to their own fate. Iella used some synthetic binders to fasten their hands behind their backs and link their legs together. “They can be tightened, gentlemen, so rest easy and there will be no need to make you more uncomfortable.”

While Iella took over covering the men, Wedge removed his mask and joined Mirax at the command console. “Can you drive this thing?”

Mirax tipped her head to one side, then the other, hesitated, then nodded. “It’s a bit more complex than the one I’ve used before, but I think Emtrey can help me through this. Emtrey, bring this monster around on a new heading for our target.”

“Yes, Mistress Terrik. There, new course is set.”

The main viewscreen showed a nighttime landscape of lights and shadows begin to scroll across as the construction droid executed a ninety-degree turn toward the south. In the distance, between two stocky office towers,
Wedge made out the squat form of Subsidiary Computer Center Number Four. “Right on target.”

“Good.” Mirax looked up and hit a glowing red button. The light started flashing red.

“What’s that?”

“All government buildings are required to have evacuation alarms in the case of a catastrophe.”

Wedge smiled. “Like a construction droid bearing down on it?”

“It’s easy to see how you got that squadron command, Wedge.” Mirax poked him playfully in the stomach with an elbow. “The alarms are going off in every building for ten kilometers along our line of advance. The same evacuation alarms are required in residential areas with a relatively high assessed value. Not so in places like Invisec.”

Emtrey turned from his position. “Sir, I have inserted the auxiliary code into the blueprints here. Our computer center is begun.”

The buildings in their path immediately came alive with lights moving at a variety of speeds. Wedge scanned the console and punched a button, shifting the image over from visible light to infrared. He saw traces from all manner of speeders heading out and away. A solid mass of gold tinged with red at the top and bottom surged across the bridges connecting the doomed towers with safer buildings.

The console’s comm unit came alive. “This is the Ministry of Planning and Zoning. Construction droid Foursixnine, do you have a problem? We’re showing a deviation of your course.”

Wedge hit the reply button. “No problem here, we just have new plans. With Coruscant being under new management, we wanted to get things started early to ease the transition.”

“What are you talking about? Who is this?”

“Rogue Squadron Contracting. X-wings are faster, but they don’t build things as nicely as this does. Antilles
out.” He hit the comm, terminating the conversation. “There, think that will make us a target?”

Iella laughed. “If it doesn’t, that’s just one more example of why the Empire is too stupid to survive.”

Captain Uwlla Iillor of the New Republic Interdictor cruiser
Corusca Rainbow
glanced at the Chronographie display built into the arm of her command chair, then up at the holographic representation of Coruscant hovering in the middle of the bridge. The display indicated there were only twenty standard minutes left before the Rebel fleet would be within range for her to pull them from hyperspace. If she did not, they would continue on into the system and arrive around Coruscant to do battle for the Jewel of the Empire.

The hologram of Coruscant—which was based on Imperial Traffic Control data broadcast to the system—showed the world as a translucent sphere studded with a rainbow of lights. Superimposed over that were two spheres made up of hexagonal tiles. As long as those spheres were there, indicating the presence of shields around Coruscant, Captain Iillor was under orders to power up her ship’s gravity well projectors and pull the fleet from hyperspace prematurely. The situation was desperate enough that Admiral Ackbar had even said a partial shield failure would be sufficient to let the fleet continue on in, provided Captain Iillor felt the shield outage was significant.

The decision she had to make was even more difficult than the choice to defect with her ship and crew to the Rebellion. While Ackbar had been clear in his instructions to her, she knew the conquest of Coruscant would significantly cripple the Empire and correspondingly enrich the New Republic. That she had been placed in such a position of trust and power showed her how different the Republic was from the Empire and because of that difference she didn’t want to make the wrong decision.

Lieutenant Jhemiti, her Mon Calamari First Officer,
held a datapad out for her inspection. “Projector crews have run full system diagnostics on their equipment and we are ready to power up when you give the word.”

She glanced at the times appended to each diagnostics run. “The crew is slow. We can’t have that.”

The Mon Calamari opened his mouth in a smile. “Few believe we’ll be activating the gravity well projectors, Captain.”

Iillor raised an eyebrow. “And why is that, Lieutenant?”

Jhemiti hesitated for a moment. “Rumor has it that the people we have on the ground are Rogue Squadron. They’ve killed Death Stars. They’ll accomplish their mission.”

“Ah, yes, Rogue Squadron.” The Captain smiled slightly. “Let me tell you, Lieutenant, I’ve fought Rogue Squadron. They drove this ship off. They cost me almost all of my TIE fighters, too, in doing so. Were anyone else down there, I would take their failure for granted. With them, I am willing to allow the possibility they will succeed.”

Jhemiti blinked and the gold flecks in his red scales sparkled. “But Rogue Squadron
is
known for accomplishing the impossible.”

“If reputations alone won wars, Lieutenant, Darth Vader would still live and you’d still be a slave.” Captain lillor nodded grimly and looked at the chronometer again. “There are eighteen minutes on the clock—eighteen minutes for a squadron to strip a planet of its defenses. We’ll let them have every second we can, but we will be ready to do our duty if they cannot do theirs.”

41

Gavin jammed his hands against the dashboard of the airspeeder as Inyri flew through the cloud of dust being raised by the construction droid. Even in the enclosed cab of the speeder he could hear the warning klaxons blaring at Subsidiary Computer Center Number Four. As they broke free of the grey cloud he got a good look at all the vehicles jetting away from the computer center and all the people fleeing across bridges to other towers.

Inyri sideslipped the speeder to center it on the balcony situated fifth-floor front. From information supplied originally by Black Sun, Winter had determined the control center they needed was located on the fifth floor. While they expected the whole facility to be abandoned, they assumed a general security lockdown would make entering at the first floor and working their way up difficult.

“Brace for impact.” Inyri cut power to the engine and began to slow the speeder, then let it sail straight over the balcony and into the office beyond it. The transparisteel wall disintegrated into one crystalline wave that washed up and over the speeder’s windscreen. A desk exploded at the front bumper’s casual caress and the room’s far walls
buckled, letting the speeder skid to a stop in the waiting room attached to what had once been the CEO’s office.

Gavin slapped the quick release for his restraining belts and kicked his door open. He slid from the speeder and brought a blaster carbine up. The klaxons obliterated any sounds the opposition might have made and the dust curtain between him and the rest of the building hid possible foes. Hunkered down in the shadow of his opened door he could see nothing, but with each passing second he came to believe everyone had evacuated the building.

Tycho cut to the right, Gavin went left and advanced. Things appeared clear from his new vantage point, so he waved the others forward. Ooryl came up with Winter following close behind him. Inyri brought up the rear, constantly checking back toward the outside to make sure no one followed them in.

Winter was the key to their success because the datapad she held contained the code that would move an orbital mirror to target the nearest water distribution plant and reservoir. Once beyond the area of devastation created by Inyri’s entry, they were able to move along quickly. All the doors along the corridor to the control center were closed. Gavin tried to open all those on his side of the corridor but they were all locked tight. Tycho indicated the situation on the right was the same, but that is what they had been led to expect after the plant was abandoned.

They reached the door to the computer center without opposition. Gavin took a moment to glance through the transparisteel viewport in the heavy door. The room looked empty of life to him, though the computers themselves had lights flickering across their dark surfaces. Holographic streams of data scrolled up from desktop to oblivion above a dozen workstations. Aided by a thin mist hanging in the air, the light from them cast green and red shadows over the rest of the room, making the dimly lit room seem sinister.

Winter dropped to her knees and attached a cable from her datapad to a computer port on the doorjamb.
“The sequencer programs I have will open the door in no time. First, though, I need to run a diagnostic and see what sort of combination I want.”

“Good luck.” Gavin dropped to a crouch and watched the corridor that led farther into the complex. He positioned himself so his body shielded Winter. He felt a twinge in his belly from an old blaster wound and hoped it was not some sort of ill omen for the future.

The datapad beeped and Winter swore. “Sithspawn.”

Tycho crouched at her shoulder. “What?”

“They’ve flooded the control room with gas. Looks like Fex-M3d.” Winter raised a fist but refrained from punching the door. “It’s in a diluted form so it won’t kill you if you get a lungful, but it’ll put you out.”

Gavin jerked a thumb at the door. “To the left, on the wall, there’s a clear case that has breather masks in it. If we could get in, we could get them.”

“That’s the big
if
. The case is coded, just like the door here. By the time a sequencer got it open, you’d have to breathe and you’d be down.” Winter shook her head. “Looks as if this system was installed within the last two weeks, after we were given the data we used to make our attack. There’s nothing we can do. We can’t get in. It’s over.”