Myri winced.
Trey and Usan reached the residential deck level and stopped his ascent, hanging a few meters ahead. Myri flipped him the trailing end of her cord. Usan flailed but caught it. Myri hauled them in and helped them over the rail.
Thaymes left off his semi-inaccurate covering fire. From a waist pocket he drew a comlink, pressed a button. The lift, now just a few meters overhead, ground to a halt.
All the Wraiths poured covering fire down on the Pop-Dogs, keeping them from targeting Bhindi as she ascended. The Wraith leader made a bad target anyway, a black shape rising on a black cord into a black shaft, but the blaster bolts themselves provided some illumination.
Bhindi reached the rail at the same time as Sharr and Turman. None of them had taken a hit. Myri helped them over. Thaymes started the lift car down again. It passed them, empty but for an unconscious Pop-Dog. Once it was at their level, the sound of alarms from below muted.
Thaymes stopped the car right there. He hopped the rail and dashed over to take possession of the Pop-Dog’s blaster rifle and gear while the others began their staged ascent up the shaft, Trey and Usan first.
Bhindi brought out her comlink. “Sharr, what’s your extraction vehicle?”
Ruefully, Sharr pointed downward. “We came in earlier this evening on a ground transport we’d boarded. We were going to take it out, too. Until someone triggered the alarms.”
“You, probably. I guess you’ll want a lift, then.”
“If it wouldn’t be inconvenient.”
She activated her comlink. “Seven, come get us. Prepare for seven additional passengers.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Voort scrambled to the fruit-laden landspeeder. He undogged the bolts holding the wooden rack to the bed and gave the whole rig a tremendous shove. The rack with all the crates of spotmelons slid backward until almost half of it was out over empty air.
He got behind the pilot’s controls and had the vehicle in the air before its console diagnostics even admitted that the vehicle was awake. He roared out from under the ambience shroud awning and accelerated all the way to the turnoff onto the children’s habitat landing lot. He slewed leftward across the lot.
There were people in the way.
There were at least a dozen men and women in the lot, most wearing sleepwear but carrying blaster rifles or pistols. Some were on foot, running toward the building that had been Bhindi’s target. Others were climbing onto speeder bikes or into airspeeders.
Voort triggered his running lights, shining brightness into the eyes of the enemy, and cranked his repulsorlifts to maximum. The hauler seemed to bounce as it gained another meter of altitude—Trey had done quite a job in rebuilding the old machinery. Voort shoved the thrusters up to full power and headed straight for the line of speeders now being boarded.
The pilots tried to scatter. Some got clear. Most did not. Voort roared over the line of vehicles, his repulsors hammering them down, knocking the speeder bikes flat, slamming pilots down into their seats or onto the pavement.
Some of the men and women on foot hit the ground. Others turned and fired. Voort heard and felt an impact as one rifle shot struck home.
He slewed a little to the left so that he would not hit the shooters full-on. Instead he grazed them, slamming them into the side of the children’s habitat building as he passed.
Seconds later he reached the building. He made the turn onto its eastern facing, decelerating and dropping to boarding altitude in just a few meters. Now he could hear, muffled and distant, a sound of alarms. The building’s sliding door was shut.
Somewhere, during all that maneuvering, he had lost the rack of fruit crates. He hoped it had landed on some of the enemy speeders.
He picked up his blaster rifle and hit the control to open the passenger-side door. He tried to keep his attention simultaneously on the console’s holocam monitors and on the viewports all around him.
The building’s main door slammed open, not a normal thing for a door of those dimensions to do, and dropped off its metal railings. It fell to the ground, barely missing the speeder’s rear panel. The individual who had slammed it open from within—a Wookiee, fur a light brown in the overhead light, wearing a weapons bandolier with a bowcaster hung from it, glowered at Voort.
Voort kept his grip on the rifle, ready to aim.
But then Scut ran out of the building, past the Wookiee, and hurtled into the landspeeder’s bed. Neither he nor the Wookiee reacted to the other.
Voort slid open the rear viewport of the pilot’s compartment. “Be ready to return fire from the other building.”
Scut nodded, scrambled to the rear of the bed, and readied his rifle.
Jesmin, emerging from the building, trotted past the Wookiee as though she hadn’t seen it. She leapt onto the speeder bed and took up position beside Scut.
Wraiths and strangers began cresting the lip of a square gap that dominated the building’s floor. They ran to the speeder, most of them piling into the bed. Trey carried Turman, whose hand motions suggested he thought he was directing an orchestra. Trey saw the blaster damage to the speeder’s front panel; he shot Voort a hurt look before boarding. Voort saw a curly-haired human man, a dark-skinned man with a late-model sniper rifle and a hip-cloak, a male Duros he did not know. All boarded the speeder.
Bhindi and an angular, light-haired man emerged. They clambered into the pilot’s compartment, the man in the center seat, Bhindi on the far side. She shut the boarding door. And still the Wookiee waited where it stood.
Voort looked at Bhindi. “Go?”
“Not yet.”
“Piggy!” That was the angular man. He sounded surprised.
Voort stared at him. “Sharr?”
His onetime teammate smiled. “How did she recruit you? I thought you’d never come back. I didn’t even think to try.”
“It’s Voort now, not Piggy.”
“Right now it’s Seven,” Bhindi spoke through clenched teeth as she stared back past the Wookiee into the building’s interior. “Come on, come on.... ”
Behind Voort, someone opened fire with a rifle. Obviously targets were in range and in view.
Finally, out from the doorway came two more men, a Devaronian and a Duros. They were drenched with sweat and staggering from exhaustion. The Wookiee went into action, helping them to the speeder, lifting them into the bed. Then the Wookiee jumped on just behind the cab, facing forward.
Bhindi nodded, satisfied. “Now.” Her head snapped back as Voort hit the thrusters. There was no tremendous thump from behind; the Wookiee must have known to hang on tight.
Voort steered them out over scrubby terrain, not yet heading back toward the road. “Where to, Leader?” He had to raise his voice to be heard over the sound of the suddenly straining thrusters and repulsors.
Bhindi and Sharr both started talking at once, then glowered at each other.
Voort tried again. “Bhindi? Destination? There will be pursuit from the other building. I can’t have wrecked all the speeders there.”
“And from below when they get the lift topside with vehicles we didn’t wreck.” Bhindi sounded disgusted. “I’m thinking, I’m thinking. We’re probably under satellite observation now. We need to get somewhere we can mix with crowds and traffic ... really fast.”
“Really fast.” Voort glanced at his sensor board. It didn’t show any pursuit yet. “You’re talking about over a hundred kilometers. We’re in the boondocks, Bhindi.”
“What’s the next broken terrain?”
“Foothills start nearby. Real mountains a little farther on.”
Bhindi made an unhappy face. “That might work, but we don’t know those mountains. Unless”—she fixed Sharr with a stare—“you do.”
He shook his head. “We haven’t had time to scope them out.”
There was a beep from the sensor console. Voort saw two blips, then a third, back near the roadside building. There was another blip far ahead, from the vicinity of the
village. “We have pursuit and one incoming from ahead.”
“All right. Mission objective first. We get the data to the authorities now. If Thaal knows it’s all over for him, he may decide not to add killing us to the list of charges.” She craned her neck to look back through the viewport. “Four! Transmit all our recorded data. All comm channels, maximum strength, so they can’t possibly contain it.”
Sharr added, shouting, “Three—my Three—do the same. In fact, you two patch your files together. Give them a big data dump.”
Bhindi, still looking backward, craned her neck. “I see them. The pursuit. Two airspeeders, one swoop. We can take them.”
Voort shook his head. “See how they’re hanging back? Their job is to pace us, not let us out of their sight. So we can’t duck into a ravine somewhere and be gone by the time the real pursuit arrives. Which it will.”
Sharr kept his eye on the sensor board. “Bhindi, we need to set down, scatter, and hide out until the broadcast brings the authorities in.”
“Comm frequencies are being jammed!” That was someone in the bed. Voort didn’t recognize his voice. He thought it was the young man with curly hair.
Sharr gritted his teeth. “Never mind.”
Now the distant pursuers began shooting—blasterfire flashed across night-black fields and stands of trees, hitting soil or plant life near the landspeeder. The shooters seemed to have little accuracy, but Voort began a series of minor course corrections to throw them off.
Nor were the Wraiths and passengers having much more luck returning fire. They were obviously being bounced around too much to get an accurate aim on any of the pursuers.
Bhindi looked back. “Four! What was that historical site again?”
Trey left off firing, turned to shout forward. “Mount Lyss Meteorological Station.”
“Defensible?”
“Deep under stone at the mountain’s summit. I’m guessing it’s defensible for a while. Maybe.”
Myri left off firing, too. She pivoted and clambered her way forward. She gripped the viewport’s rim with both hands to stabilize herself and leaned in past the Wookiee’s furry legs. “If things are hopeless, I have an idea.”
Sharr nodded. “Definitely hopeless.”
Bhindi glared at him but answered Myri. “That’s more than I have! What is it?”
“Get us behind cover and slow down just for a second. I’ll drop off and hide. If I can get clear of the jamming, I can transmit a call for help from one of my personal assets. I’m talking about a full-strength extraction force. I think it’ll get here pretty fast—a few hours at most.”
“We’ll do it. You get clear and send your message. If your asset can’t help or doesn’t reply, then transmit all our evidence data instead and we’ll hope that it does some good.”
“Done.”
Bhindi pulled out her datapad, opened it, brought up a map. “Here’s where we are. Here’s Mount Lyss. Let me switch to topological view ... there.” She pondered for a few moments. “All right, Voort. Up ahead is a drop-off. Make for it. Once we get on the other side, we’ll be out of their direct sight for a few seconds. Slow down so we can drop off a unit. As soon as they’ve deployed, turn to course three-one-five and make for Mount Lyss.”
“Understood.”
Bhindi turned to Myri. “You take Five. She’ll get you through. Sharr, on your team, who’s best with rough terrain?”
“Huhunna. That’s our Wookiee. Kinetic artist with first-rate wilderness skills. Who’s going with her?”
“I am.”
“The hell you are.”
“I have a plan, so shut up. Give Huhunna the order.”
Sharr scowled, then stuck his head out the viewport. “Huhunna! Prepare to jump when we slow down. You’re Bhindi’s wingmate.”
Voort heard an answering rumble. The Wookiee didn’t sound happy.
Voort wasn’t happy, either. “Bhindi, you’re a planner. A trainer. You need an infantryman for this. I’ve done it before; I should go.”
“No back talk, Voort. This is woman’s work. Time?”
“Thirty seconds until the ridge. This is not a good plan.”
She merely looked back through the viewport. “Somebody pass me a rifle!”
One came forward. Myri handed it to her.
“Ten seconds.” Voort kept his eyes on the sensors, saw the ground ahead simply end. He raised his voice in a bellow: “Hang on!” Then they crested the ridge.
The landspeeder was canted downward. It was a steep slope, forty or forty-five degrees off horizontal. Voort let off the thrusters. He disengaged the automatic levelers on the repulsors, revving the port-side repulsors and reducing power to those on the starboard. As the landspeeder began to tilt to starboard, he slewed into a rightward turn. The repulsor thrust kicked up a tremendous cloud of loose stones and dirt, driving it before them as if the speeder were a giant broom. The landspeeder half flew, half skidded down the slope, its left side now its leading edge as it slid. The speeder’s bed remained almost perfectly horizontal.
They hit the bottom of the slope and slid leftward another few dozen meters, but had no forward thrust left. Voort adjusted the repulsors, brought them level again.
The rear thrusters began to put the speeder in forward motion again.
Voort’s second bellow was as loud as the first: “Jump, jump, jump!”
Bhindi went out the starboard passenger door and was lost to sight in the darkness. Voort felt the speeder’s load lighten as three in the back also bailed. Then the vehicle began to get up to speed again.
Sharr scooted rightward, grabbed the door, and yanked it shut. Then he grinned over at Voort. “You’re still pretty deft at the controls, aren’t you?”
Voort glanced at his sensor board. “More contacts. Some big ones, from the installation. What did they have down there?”
“Artillery.”
“Stang. Navigate us to this meteorological station, would you?”
As the landspeeder roared off to the southeast, Bhindi sprinted southwest along the ridgeline, Huhunna lumbering along behind. Bhindi could hear the footsteps, punctuated by clattering rocks, of Jesmin and Myri running northeast along the ridgeline, directly away from them.
Bhindi could also hear oncoming speeder thrusters. She didn’t turn to look—a single misstep on this rough terrain could leave her with a broken leg. She simply shouted. “As soon as they crest the ridge, we separate. When they spot our speeder, they’ll turn to follow, and will present their flanks to us.”
Bhindi’s command of the Wookiee language was not impressive, but she understood Huhunna’s rumble of agreement.
It took only thirty seconds. Then the roar of pursuit became very loud. Bhindi took up position behind a line of knee-high stones. Huhunna, faster when not hampered by a human, got up to full running speed and was thirty meters ahead, behind an outcropping of boulders, when the first pursuing landspeeder crested the ridge.
Bhindi braced her rifle on the rock before her and tracked the speeder, a white closed-top model with at least two rifle bearers inside. It roared down the slope, kicking up its own cloud of dust and pebbles. Just before the ground leveled off, it began a rightward turn in pursuit of the Wraiths. Its maneuver had none of the grace of Voort’s, but the speeder remained upright through its turn. Behind it, a red speeder bike piloted by a stocky blond man in rumpled white clothes topped the slope and roared down in the speeder’s wake.
Bhindi switched her aim to target the speeder bike, leaving the landspeeder to Huhunna. She tracked the speeder bike, led it, and squeezed the trigger.
Her bright blaster bolt hit the vehicle’s rear thruster array. Bhindi saw the speeder bike’s tail end slew toward the left; then the pilot lost control. The speeder rolled down the slope, its front strut hitting stone, and the vehicle began to come apart while still moving at better than two hundred klicks an hour.
There was a loud report behind Bhindi. She turned in time to see the lead landspeeder s
lew to the left, a gaping hole spilling black smoke low on the vehicle’s right side. Huhunna had made her bowcaster shot count; the landspeeder did not crash, but it was definitely down for the count. Bhindi watched as its pilot managed to slow it expertly and bring it in for a skidding, slewing, yet successful landing.
There was still more noise coming. Bhindi swung around and aimed at the spot on the ridge where the previous two vehicles had crossed.
The next speeder, a silver-gray open-air model, crested the ridge about thirty meters north of that spot. Bhindi lowered her rifle’s aim to compensate and fired, but her shot plowed into the stone of the ridge. Then she tracked the speeder as it descended and began a gentle arc to the right. She glimpsed three humans in it, two in the front, one in the rear, and saw the rear passenger turn his own rifle barrel toward Bhindi. He fired. His bolt went high, flashing over the ridge crest.
As the speeder reached the bottom of the slope and banked rightward, both passengers began to fire at Bhindi, rapid and badly aimed shots that still converged on her position. Closer, closer, too close—she went flat. Sharp stones dug into her chest and ribs, and she was grateful for the padding offered by the ambience suit. Two shots flashed over her body and hit the slope just above her.
There was a minor explosion from that vehicle. Daring, Bhindi raised her head to look. The gray speeder was slowing to land, a hole suited to a bowcaster in the right flank. Its pilot and passengers, two men and a woman in civilian dress, rolled out over its top edge, landing on the ground on the vehicle’s far side. They took shelter behind it and continued returning fire.
Bhindi hissed to herself. It was good news, bad news—the constant state of life in Wraith Squadron. Her plan had succeeded brilliantly so far. All three vehicles were stopped and the other Wraiths should make it to Mount Lyss. But there were now five—no, six: she now saw that there had been three people in the white speeder—Pop-Dogs arrayed against two Wraiths, and more were on the way.
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