“You did,” Boss said, “but you look like you need a hand. Anyway—you’re not our sergeant any longer. Technically speaking. No disrespect… Citizen Vau.”
I was hard on them because I cared. Because they had to be hard to survive. Kal never understood that, the fool.
Vau still had trouble breathing some days thanks to the broken nose Skirata had given him. The crazy little chakaar didn’t understand training at all.
The next droid patrol wouldn’t come this way for a few hours. Security droids trundled constantly through the labyrinth of corridors deep under the Mygeetan ice, a banking stronghold the Muuns claimed could never be breached. It still made sense to get out sooner rather than later. And Delta should have banged out by now; they’d called in air strikes and sabotaged ground defenses, and Bacara’s Marines were moving in again. They’d achieved their mission, and it was extraction time.
“I should have thrashed more sense into you, then,” Vau said. He unfolded a plastoid bivouac sheet and knotted the corners. It was always a bad idea not to plan for the most extreme situation: he’d been certain he would only take what was rightfully his, but this was too good to pass up. “Okay, you and Scorch hold this between you while I fill it.”
“We can empty the—”
“I steal. You don’t.”
It was a fine point but it mattered to Vau. Skirata might have raised a pack of hooligans, but Vau’s squads were disciplined. Even Sev… Sev was psychotic and lacked even the most basic social graces, but he wasn’t a criminal.
As Vau tipped the first likely-looking box into the makeshift container—cash credits and bonds, which would do very nicely indeed—the whiff of oily musk announced the arrival of his strill, Lord Mirdalan. Fixer stepped back to let the animal pass.
“Mird, I told you to wait by the exit,” said Vau. All strills were intelligent, but Mird was especially smart. The animal padded down the narrow passage in velvet silence and looked up expectantly, somehow managing not to drool on the floor for once. It fixed Vau with an intense, knowing gold stare, making any anger impossible: who couldn’t love a face like that? That strill had stood by him since boyhood, and anyone who didn’t see its miraculous spirit had no common decency or heart. They said strills stank, but Vau didn’t care. A little natural musk never hurt anyone. “You want to help, Mird’ika? Here.” He slipped his flamethrower off his webbing. “Carry this. Good Mird!”
The strill took the barrel of the weapon in its massive jaws and sat back on its haunches. Drool ran down to the trigger guard and pooled on the floor.
“Cute,” Sev muttered.
“And clever.” Vau signaled to Mird to watch the door, and slid the drawers of the Vau deposit box from their runners. “Anyone who doesn’t like my friend Mird can slana’pi.”
“Sarge, it’s the ugliest thing in the galaxy,” Scorch said. “And we’ve seen plenty of ugly.”
“Yeah, you’ve got a mirror,” said Sev.
“Ugliness is an illusion, gentlemen.” Vau began sorting through his disputed inheritance. “Like beauty. Like color. All depends on the light.” The first thing that caught his eye in the family box was his mother’s flawless square-cut shoroni sapphire, the size of a human thumbprint, set on a pin and flanked by two smaller matching stones. In some kinds of light, they were a vibrant cobalt blue, while in others they turned forest green. Beautiful: but real forests had been destroyed to find them, and slaves died mining them. “The only reality is action.”
Sev grunted deep in his throat. He didn’t like wasting time and wasn’t good at hiding it. His HUD icon showed he was watching Mird carefully. “Whatever you say, Sergeant.”
The strongroom held a treasure trove of portable, easily hidden, and untraceable things that could be converted to credits anywhere in the galaxy. Vau stumbled on only one deposit box whose contents were inexplicably worthless: a bundle of love letters tied with green ribbon. He read the opening line of the first three and threw them back. Apart from that one box, the rest were a rich man’s emergency belt, the equivalent of the soldier’s survival kit of a fishing line, blade, and a dozen compact essentials for staying alive behind enemy lines.
Vau’s hundred-liter backpack had room enough for a few extras. Everything—gems, wads of flimsi bonds, cash credits, metal coins, small lacquered jewel boxes he didn’t pause to open—was tipped in unceremoniously. Delta stood around fidgeting, unused to idleness while the chrono was counting down.
“I told you to leave me here.” Vau could still manage the voice of menace. “Don’t disobey me. You know what happens.”
Boss hung manfully to his end of the plastoid sheet, but his voice was shaky. “You can’t give us an order, Citizen Vau.”
They were the best special forces troops in the galaxy, and here Vau was, still unable to manage the thank you or well done that they deserved. But much as he wanted to, the cold black heart of his father, his true legacy, choked off all attempts to express it. Nothing was ever good enough for his father, especially him. Maybe the old man just couldn’t bring himself to say it, and he meant to all along.
No, he didn’t. Don’t make excuses for him. But my boys know me. I don’t have to spell it out for them.
“I ought to shoot you,” Vau said. “You’re getting sloppy.”
Vau checked the chrono on his forearm plate. Anytime now, Bacara’s Galactic Marines would start pounding the city of Jygat with glacier-busters. He was sure he’d feel it like a seismic shock.
“Looking for anything in particular?” Sev asked.
“No. Random opportunism.” Vau didn’t need to cover his tracks: his father didn’t know or care if he was alive or dead. Your disappointment of a son came back, Papa. You didn’t even know I disappeared to Kamino for ten years, did you? There was nothing the senile hut’uun could do about it anyway. Vau was the one better able to swing a crippling punch these days. “Just a smokescreen. And make it worth the trip.”
He knew what their next question would have been, if they’d asked it. They never asked what they knew they didn’t need to be told. What was he going to do with it all?
He couldn’t tell them. It was too much, too soon. He was going to hand it all over to a man who’d kill him for a bet—all except what was rightfully his.
“I’m not planning to live in luxurious exile,” Vau said.
Scorch stepped over Mird and stood at the door, Deece ready. “Donating it to the Treasury, then?”
“It’ll be used responsibly.”
Vau’s backpack was now stuffed solid, and heavy enough to make him wince when he heaved it up on his shoulders. He tied the plastoid sheet into a bundle—a bundle worth millions, maybe—and slung it across his chest. He hoped he didn’t fall or he’d never get up again.
“Oya,” he said, nodding toward the doors. “Let’s go.”
Mird braced visibly and then shot out into the corridor. It always responded to the word oya with wild, noisy enthusiasm because that meant they were going hunting, but it was intelligent enough to know when to stay silent. Mirdala Mird: clever Mird. It was the right name for the strill. Delta advanced down the corridor toward the ducts and environmental control room that kept the underground bank from freezing solid, following Mird’s wake, which—even Vau had to admit it—was marked by a trail of saliva. Strills dribbled. It was part of their bizarre charm, like flight, six legs, and jaws that could crunch clean through bone.
Sev skidded on a patch of strill-spit. “Fierfek…”
“Could be worse,” Scorch said. “Much worse.”
Vau followed up the rear, his helmet’s panoramic sensor showing him the view at his back. There was an art to moving forward with that image in front of you on the HUD, an image that sent the unwary stumbling. Like the men he’d trained, Vau could see past the disorienting things the visor displayed.
They were fifty meters from the vents that would take them back to the surface and Fixer’s waiting snowspeeder when the watery green lighting flickered and Mird skidded to a ha
lt, ears pricked. Vau judged by the animal’s reaction, but Sev confirmed his worst fears.
“Ultrasonic spike,” he said. “I don’t know how, but I think we tripped an alarm.”
Fixer’s voice filled their helmets. “Drive’s running. I’m bringing the snowie as close to the vent as I can.”
Boss turned to face Vau and held his hand out for the bundle. “Come on, Sergeant.”
“I can manage. Get going.”
“You first.”
“I said get going, Three-Eight.”
No nicknames: that told Boss that Vau meant business. Sev and Scorch sprinted down the final stretch to the compartment doors and forced them apart again. The machine voice of rotors and pumps flooded the silent corridor. Everyone stopped dead for a split second. They could hear the clatter of approaching droid and organic guards, the noise magnified by the acoustics of the corridors. Vau estimated the minutes and seconds. It wasn’t good.
“Get your shebse up that vent before I vape the lot of you,” Vau snapped. Osik, I put them in danger, all for this stupid jaunt, all for lousy credits. “Now!” He shoved Boss hard in the back, and the three commandos did what they always did when he yelled at them and used a bit of force: they obeyed. “Shift it, Delta.”
The vent was a steep vertical shaft. The service ladder inside was designed for maintenance droids, with small recessed footholds and a central rail. Boss looked up, assessing it.
“Let’s cheat,” he said, and fired his rappel line high into the shaft. The grappling hook clattered against the metal, and he tugged to check the line was secure. “Stand by…”
The shaft could only take one line at a time. Boss shot up the shaft with his hoist drive squealing, bouncing the soles of his boots against the wall in what looked like dramatic leaps until he vanished.
The hoist stopped whining. There was a moment of quiet punctuated by the clacking of armor plates.
“Clear,” his voice echoed. Sev shot his line vertically; it made a whiffling sound like an arrow in flight as it paid out. Metal clanged, and the fibercord went tight. “Line secure, Sev.”
Sev winched himself up the shaft with an ungainly skidding technique. Scorch waited for the all-clear and then followed him. Vau was left standing at the bottom of the shaft with Mird, facing a long climb. Mird could fly, but not in such a confined space. Vau fired his line, waited for one of the commandos to secure it, and then attached the bundle of valuables to it. Then he held out his hands to Mird to take the flamethrower from its mouth.
“Good Mird,” he whispered. “Now, oya. Off you go. Up, Mird’ika.” The strill could hang on to the line by its jaws alone if necessary. But Mird just whined in dissent, and sat down with all the sulky determination of a human child. “Mird! Go! Does no shabuir ever listen to me? Go!”
Mird stayed put. It’ll never leave me. Not until the day I die. Vau gave up and tugged the line as a signal to the commandos to haul away. He didn’t have time to argue with a strill.
“If I’m not out of here in two minutes,” he said, “get all this stuff to Captain Ordo. Understood?”
There was a brief silence on Vau’s helmet comlink. “Understood,” said Boss.
The next few moments felt stretched into forever. The staccato clatter of approaching droid guards grew louder. Mird rumbled ominously and stared toward the doors, poised on its haunches as if to spring at the first droid to appear.
It would defend Vau to the last. It always had.
Eventually the length of thin fibercord snaked back down the shaft and slapped against the floor. Boss sounded a little breathless. “Up you come, Sergeant.”
Vau reattached the line to his belt and scooped Mird up in both arms, hoping his winch would handle the extra weight. As he rose, kicking away from the shaft wall, the machinery groaned and spat. He could see the cold gray light above him and a helmet not unlike his own Mandalorian T-shaped visor peering down at him, picked out in an eerie blue glow.
Now he could hear the throb of the snowspeeder’s drive. Fixer was right above them. As Vau squeezed his shoulders through the top of the vent, Mird leapt clear. Scorch and Sev dropped to the rock-hard snow with their DC-17s trained on something Vau couldn’t yet see. When he hauled himself out, a blaster bolt seared past his head and he found himself in the middle of a firefight. A ferocious wind roared in his throatmike.
Vau slammed the vent’s grille shut and seared it with his custom Merr-Sonn blaster, welding the metal tight to the coaming. Then he dropped a small proton grenade down the shaft through a gap. The snow shook with the explosion below. Nobody was going to be coming up behind them.
But everyone and his pet akk now knew the Dressian Kiolsh bank had intruders—Republic troops.
A distant boom followed by the whomp-whomp-whomp of artillery almost drowned out the blasterfire and howling wind. The Galactic Marines were right on time.
“Okay, Bacara’s started,” Scorch said. “Nice of him to stage a diversion.”
Mygeeto’s relentlessly white landscape gave no clue that it housed cities deep below. Only a few were visible on the surface. The packed snow of eons was pierced by jagged mountains that formed glass canyons like extravagant ice sculptures. A surface patrol—six droids on snowshoe-like feet, ten organics who were probably Muuns under the cold-weather gear—had cut them off from the snowspeeder just meters away. Rounds zapped and steamed off the vessel’s fuselage; Fixer, kneeling beside it, returned a hail of blue Deece fire that kept the security patrol pinned down.
If that snowie gets damaged, we’re never getting off this rock.
Vau checked his panoramic vision. Mird was close at his side, pressing against him. He could see only the patrol; nothing else showed up on his sensors. That didn’t mean there weren’t more closing in on them, though.
The big bundle of plunder lay on the snow where Delta had dropped it. Right then, it was simply convenient cover. Vau crawled behind his oversized multimillion-credit sandbag and took aim. The bdapp-bdapp-bdapp of blasters and ragged breathing filled his helmet—his, Delta’s?—but there was no chatter. Delta Squad exchanged few words during engagements lately. They’d been born together, raised together, and they’d come as close to knowing one another’s thoughts as any normal humans could. Now they were laying down fire exactly as he’d trained them while Fixer defended their getaway vessel, all without a word.
How the Muuns would explain away a Mandalorian fighting with Republic forces Vau wasn’t sure, but then everyone knew that Mandos would fight for anyone for the right price.
Scorch clipped a grenade launcher on his Deece.
“Not good,” he said. “More droids.”
Vau now saw what Scorch could. His HUD picked up shapes moving in rigid formation, almost invisible to infrared but definitely showing up in the electromagnetic spectrum. Then he saw them rounding an outcrop of glittering crystal, clanking ludicrous things with long snouts, a platoon of them. Scorch fired the grenade, smashing into the front rank of four. An eruption of snow and metal fragments fanned into the air and were whipped away by the wind. The rank behind was caught by the shrapnel from their comrades; and two toppled over, decapitated by buckled chunks of metal.
But the rest kept coming. Vau checked the topography on his HUD. They were approaching down an ice wadi almost opposite the first patrol’s location, about to cut across the path between Fixer and the rest of them, and that meant the only way to the speeder now was to run the enemy gauntlet.
Sev and Boss began working their way to the snowspeeder on their bellies, pausing to fire grenades high over the ice boulders and then scrambling a few more meters while the droids paused and the Muuns took brief cover. Shots hissed around the commandos as blaster bolts shaved paint off their plates and hit the snow, vaporizing it. One round deflected off Vau’s helmet with an audible sizzle. He felt the impact like being slapped around the head.
All he felt at that moment was… foolish: not afraid, not in fear for his life, just stupid, stupid for g
etting it wrong. It was worse than physical terror. He’d overplayed his hand. He’d put Delta in this spot. He had to get them out.
“You’re conspicuous in that black armor, Sarge,” Scorch said kindly. “It’s worse than having Omega alongside. What say you back out of here and leave me to hold them?”
If anyone was going to do any holding, it was Vau. “Humor an old man.” He fumbled in his belt for an EMP grenade. “I stop the droids, you pick off the wets.” Wets. Organics. He was talking like Omega now. “Then we all run for it. Deal?”
Scorch twisted the grenade launcher to one side and switched his Deece to automatic, forcing the Muun guards to scatter. Two dropped behind a frozen outcrop. He fired again, shattering the ice, which turned out to be a brittle crystalline rock that sent shards flying like arrows. There was a shriek of agony that turned into a panting scream. It echoed off the walls of the canyon.
He grunted, apparently satisfied. “Sounds like nine wets left in play.”
“Eight, if one’s taking care of him,” Vau said.
“Muuns aren’t that nice.”
“Fixer, you okay?” Vau waited for a reply. The world had suddenly gone silent except for that screaming Muun. The droids seemed to be regrouping behind a ten-meter chunk of dark gray ice. “Fixer?”
“Fine, Sarge.”
“Okay, here goes.”
Vau fired. This EMP grenade had enough explosive power to make a mess of a small room, but its pulse was what really did the damage over a much larger area. It fried droid circuits. The small explosion echoed and scattered chunks of ice, and then there was a long silence punctuated only by the distant pounding of cannon as the Galactic Marines smashed their way into Jygat.
Vau refocused on the EM image in his HUD. He crawled to the bundle, dragging it into cover and strapping it back on his chest. It was way too much to carry, and he couldn’t move properly. He knelt on all fours like a heavily pregnant woman trying to get up. “I don’t see movement.”
“It’s okay, Sarge, they’re zapped.”
“Okay, just the wets to finish off, then.” He switched back to infrared. The Muun guards would show up like beacons. “I’ll warm them up while you make a move.”
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