Wraith Squadron (39 page)

As the doors shut behind them, Kell maneuvered the skimmer to be directly beside the cockpit of one of the shuttles. When it was in place, he lowered the landing struts and shut off the repulsors. Now, the craft would be braced for its mechanical duties. He and Tyria clambered out of the cab and into the aft machinery, Kell swinging a diagnostic module up against the hull of the
Hawkbat’s Perch
.

The others didn’t emerge from hiding, but Grinder’s voice did. “I’m reading one visual-only scanner, up somewhere in the northwest corner.”

Kell resisted the urge to look. “Can you disable it?”

“From here? Don’t be stupid. Wait a second. Unless I miss my guess …”

Kell and Tyria chimed in together, “Which never happens …”

“Shut up. Unless I miss my guess, it’s piping its data straight through that same retransmitter … Yes! Give me a second. Everybody hold still. I’m recording a few seconds of its transmission … looping it … blending the seam. Now all I have to do is transmit it constantly to my module on the retransmitter and have the module hold the real feed … Done!” Grinder emerged, looking sweaty but triumphant.

Janson and Phanan came out from beneath their respective hiding places. Janson gestured to the side of
Hawkbat’s Perch
. “Why isn’t that panel open yet?”

“Because we don’t actually have authorization, remember?” Kell felt, once more, the faint surprise that came when Janson’s sudden arrival failed to cause him to tense up. “I need Grinder to run a bypass on it.”

“And on the ramp control.”

Kell shook his head. “It occurred to me as we were driving over here that we can just put the stuff in the air intake scoop. They’ll be running on real air for the first few thousand meters, until they can’t ram it fast enough in to supply adequate air pressure. That’s when they switch to canned air.” He smiled. “We don’t even have to break in.”

Phanan cocked his head to listen. “We read, Joyride.” With his built-in equipment, he didn’t have to hear the buzzing of his comlink and bring the thing on-line; he was always receiving. “Good news, Joyride. Plague out.” He looked at the others. “Runt is counting down for his run from the moon. If everything goes well, he’ll finish his terrain-following run and be here in about an hour.”

“That’s our time limit,” Kell said. “Don’t forget, we actually have to service these shuttles.”

Joyride Group couldn’t rely on the help of a passing vendor’s skimmer. With four people needing transport and a narrow time frame, they had to make something happen.

Of all the vehicles crowding Revos’s spaceport, none were as prevalent as cargo-hauling skimmers, used for transporting everything from standard bulk containers weighing
several tons to piles of passengers’ personal bags. It wasn’t difficult to find one unattended, wasn’t even difficult to get it running and move it off a few dozen meters into the deeper shadow thrown by an unoccupied hangar. But what they were planning next would be tricky.

“How’s it coming?” Wedge asked. He and Face were guards on this operation, keeping blasters at the ready and attention on their surroundings; they didn’t often look back at what Falynn was doing.

“How do you think? Slow!”

Wedge heard an electronic crackle and a curse from her. “The trick,” she continued, “is to fry the circuits controlling braking without wiping out everything else on the same board. Then I’ve got to do the vehicle programming you want. Tricky stuff. The jump at the end, the self-erasure, and the data you want left behind—well, I wish Grinder were here.”

Wedge managed a smile. If Grinder knew how much his particular skills were appreciated and needed right now, he’d be insufferable. He managed to ride pretty close to insufferable most of the time.

Atril spoke up. “I handle ship’s programming all the time, particularly navigation. Let me do a rough cut on the program and you can fix it up in less time than it would take you to do it from scratch.”

“Please.”

Wedge’s comlink beeped. He held it up to his ear, heard the message, said, “Thanks, Six.” He turned back to the others. “Thirty minutes and counting.”

“We have a problem,” Phanan said.

Kell lowered the side panel on
Hawkbat’s Vigil
. “Not much of one. We’re done.” He was covered with sweat and, after only half an hour’s work, tired. On a job like this, there were usually two to four trained mechanics and half an hour to an hour per vehicle serviced; he’d done it in half the usual time with a crew of willing but inexperienced hands.

“Nine says there’s a maintenance skimmer coming this way,” Phanan said.

Janson cursed. “Let’s move out. We’ll bluff them, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll tear out of here like Falynn in a skiff.”

Kell paused as he was entering the cockpit. Lashed to the bed in back were three plastic containers, each about the size of an R2 unit, that hadn’t been there before. “What are those?”

Tyria grinned. “Our reason for being here. Remember? We’re stealing something? Those are recreational holos someone had piled up for loading onto the shuttles. They’ll figure we’re black marketeers or something.”

“I forgot.”

“You had plenty to do.”

Janson’s voice came from underneath his blanket. “Would you two stop smooching up and get us out of here?”

Kell positioned his skimmer to exit. The argument had already started outside, with some words drifting in around the edges of the steel doors: “… tell you, you’re already in there.” “… obviously not, since we just got here.”

Kell nodded to Piggy, who slapped the wall control. The doors ground their way open. The two nearly identical maintenance skimmers faced each other a mere four meters apart.

The lead guard pointed to Kell’s skimmer. “As I told you.”

The driver of the other skimmer leaned out of his cockpit. “Hey! Who are you?”

“I’m Botkins.” Kell glanced again at the name stenciled on the gloves lying in the cockpit. “I’m standing in for Laramont.”

“Laramont’s in the cafeteria, waiting to start his shift!”

“Dammit! They told me he was sick. So he’s going to be servicing the shuttles?”

“No, I am!”

“Wrong. I just did.”

“Listen, scab, I’m not going to let you cost me my piece
work for the night.” The mechanic clambered out of his cockpit. He was nearly as tall as Kell and had as much muscle, though a fair amount of it was swathed in fat. Tools swung on his belt as he straightened up.

Kell waited until the man reached the window of his cockpit. “Hey,” he said, “let’s do this like gentlemen. You know, I might not have done such a good job of gauging the hydraulics.”

The mechanic scowled at him. “So?”

“So, you scrub my work as not up to spec. You get credit for the whole job but only have to redo the work you don’t like. But you don’t formally log the complaint, so my record stays clean. That way, you get your pay and I still log the time, so I can keep working toward getting a permanent post here. What do you say?”

The mechanic considered it. “No. I’m just going to scrub your work as not up to spec … and report it that way. Right now.”

Kell glanced at Tyria. A call like that to Central would probably alert the spaceport operators to the unauthorized maintenance job they’d just done. He returned his attention to the mechanic and said, in an overly reasonable tone, “Well, now. That’s my job vaporized. My career at Revos Spaceport. If you’re going to take that from me, I think I ought to have something from you.”

The mechanic twisted his lip in an approximation of a contemptuous smile. “Such as what?”

“Such as about fifteen square centimeters of your skin, a liter of your blood, and whatever you have left of a reputation.” Kell threw open his cockpit door, catching the mechanic off guard and hurling him to the duracrete.

Kell stepped out over him, took a couple of steps to the side, and stretched. He caught the chief guard’s eye. “I say I break three of his bones before he gives up.”

24

The cargo skimmer swung around to the north of the TIE ready bunker, then angled in straight toward the building. It did not build up speed; it maintained a rate just over a walking pace.

Wedge, Atril, Falynn, and Face clustered at the bow of the thing, braced for the mild collision to come. “I forgot to ask,” Wedge said. “Have you ever done anything like this before? The surge at the end?”

Falynn grinned. “Sure. Tried it with a canyon jump back home.”

“How’d it turn out?”

“Broken collarbone.”

“Just checking.”

By now, the sensors in the TIE bunker would show the oncoming vehicle. Guards might even be leaving by the south entrance to come around and see what was happening. The timing had to be perfect.

They were thirty meters away, twenty, ten—then they hit the bunker wall, a bump that merely caused them to sway forward, momentarily off balance.

Falynn counted, “Three, two, one—”

The skimmer’s engines whined as they overrevved, and suddenly the craft bounced an extra two meters into the air.

The four jumped forward as they felt the skimmer drop from under them. They landed, awkward, on the bunker roof. Atril immediately twisted and started to fall back into the skimmer, but Wedge and Face caught her flailing arms and tugged her toward them.

Already there were the sounds of oncoming feet. The four flattened themselves as quietly as they could and hugged the roof.

Then there were voices: “You there! What do you think you’re doing?”

“Wait a second. There’s nobody in it.”

“Check under it.”

Laughter. “That’d be funny. Someone being squashed under a skimmer.”

The other voice became resentful. “You just think it’s funny because it’s never happened to
you.
”

“That’s right. Never has, never will. Smell that? It’s like an engine bearing has burned out.” The man’s voice changed. “Control Aleph-One, it’s a cargo skimmer. It’s unoccupied. It may be a drifter. Jotay’s checking out the autopilot.”

“I am?”

“You are.”

The other man sighed.

They were silent for a couple more minutes, then Jotay said, “It looks like it was slaved to another skimmer, part of a cargo convoy, and its memory was not correctly purged. It would have shot off as soon as it was activated. Maybe even still be receiving signals from the convoy master.”

“Well, flush the program and take it back where it belongs.”

“Why me?”

“Privilege of rank, sonny. I was hired three days before you.”

Wedge heard the skimmer power up and go gliding off, its driver still complaining. The other man wandered back toward the bunker’s south face, chuckling and muttering to himself.

Falynn chuckled, too. She whispered, “He’s going to have a fine time parking that thing with the brakes not working.”

Kell’s opponent stood, his face red, twisted with anger.

“I really ought to stop you,” the guard said.

“Well, you can do that, or you can get your bets down.” Then Kell twisted to avoid the mechanic’s charge. He swatted the man’s outstretched hand away, continued the twist into a full twirl, and gave the man a slap to the back of his head as he passed. The mechanic staggered, off balance from the extra momentum, and went to his knees.

The mechanic came up with a belt hydrospanner in his hand. This wasn’t a small, around-the-house tool, but a heavy metal implement two-thirds the length of a man’s arm.

Kell dropped his pose of aggressive amiability and assumed a proper fighting posture, left foot forward, hands up, weight balanced. He’d hoped that potentially deadly weapons wouldn’t enter the mix. He’d obviously hoped in vain.

The mechanic charged again, but something in his body language told Kell he was changing tactics. Instead of sidestepping, Kell held his pose, ready to stop-thrust or body-check the man. It was the mechanic, though, who stopped short, swinging the hydrospanner in a horizontal arc that would have connected solidly with Kell’s rib cage if he’d duplicated his earlier move.

Kell twisted aside—and the head of the spanner hit him a glancing blow, an impact that kicked the breath out of him and sent him staggering back. He thought he felt a rib give way.

The mechanic, confident now, followed up instantly with another swing.

Kell didn’t try to dodge this one. Despite the pain in his left side, he twisted, adding energy to the punch that connected with the mechanic’s wrist. Kell felt and heard something break in the wrist. The hydrospanner flew free, clanking into the side of Kell’s maintenance skimmer.

Kell followed through with a left that rocked the mechanic’s
head, then spun around in a kick. He tried to make it look more awkward than it had to, but gave it full force when it connected against the mechanic’s jaw. The man uttered a grunt and fell hard to the duracrete.

Kell turned to the guard. “Call this in. He just assaulted me with intent to kill. My career here may be shot, but I’m taking his with me. Get me Central.” He suddenly felt drained and was having a hard time breathing.

The guard shrugged and moved to comply. Tyria took a breath, preparing to jump in with an objection, but the mechanic’s partner, who’d exited his skimmer during the fight, spoke up first. “Wait. Please.”

The guard paused.

Kell said, “Why?” He tried to bring his labored breathing under control. It wasn’t working. Still, that added to his act, made it easy for him to simulate fury.

“He’s a good man. Just tense. Let him sleep this off, I’ll redo the servicing on the shuttles, nobody will report anything, you keep your job, he keeps his job—what do you say?”

Kell took a couple of breaths, as deep as he could bear, and turned to Tyria.

She shrugged. He could read worry for him in her eyes, but her tone was light. “Might as well. Fewer reports.”

The guard in charge said, “Fewer reports.” He made it sound like a goal of considerable merit.

Kell gave a reluctant nod. “Fewer reports. Sounds good.” He moved back to his cockpit door. “I’m doing him a favor, you know that?”

The mechanic’s partner, already struggling to pull the unconscious man upright, said, “Yeah, sure.” He could not have sounded less interested.