“You’re clear to continue.” The E-wing abruptly banked, a hard maneuver for such a peaceful situation. His wingmate banked to join him on the return flight to Kuratooine.
Myri watched them depart, her smile replaced by a hard stare. She switched her comm board to transmit on very low power on a little-used frequency, encrypted. “Did you hear all that? They have no jurisdiction in this area; it’s a Starfighter Command issue. They didn’t even identify themselves. They had no right. They are rodents, just like they’re named for!”
“Keep your mind on the exercise, Gambler.” Voort’s voice was now matter-of-fact.
“I just want to smash them. They shouldn’t have licenses to pilot a hovering snack stand.”
Tildin was entirely devoid of other spacecraft when they arrived. There was a sensor station on the side facing Kuratooine, but at Voort’s direction Myri led the way to the far side. It was half in shadow and half in sunlight.
Voort chose a stretch of lunar surface several hundred kilometers long in the sunlight. “This exercise will be all terrain-following mode. We’re going to need to be very good at that for the Skifter Station run.”
“And what do I get if I’m better than you?”
“Enough cute talk, Gambler. This is deadly serious.”
Myri sobered. “Yes, sir.”
“But good work scamming those Pop-Dogs.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Planetside, on a low hard-rock mountain at the western edge of where Chakham Base bordered on Kura City’s south end, two Pop-Dog troopers, one human and one Quarren, both female, examined the small hypercomm antenna inset into a patch of stony, treeless ground. The antenna, a durasteel-mesh bowl ten meters across, was now decorated with a fallen tree. Small by the standards of the forest verge surrounding the antenna, this tree had evidently been uprooted by one stiff wind too many. The dead tree lay half in, half out of the depression.
A maintenance droid, barely waist-high to a human, its head a round vertical plate with a single optical sensor, lay under the tree trunk just where it touched the stone rim around the antenna. Pinned, the droid flailed, its metal arms clanking against the stone. A series of musical notes that might have been pleas for help or droid curses emerged from its vocal synthesizer.
The Quarren trooper laughed. The sound, filtered through the nest of tentacles over her mouth, was muted and rubbery. “That explains the interference.”
The human trooper shook her head, clearly saddened by the futility of dealing with droids. She stooped, getting her arms under the tree trunk, and lifted. The tree rose only half a meter, but the droid was able to scramble free. He stood, pointed accusingly at the tree, and continued his harangue.
The Quarren gestured to catch the droid’s attention. “What happened?”
The droid put his hands where hips would be on a human and turned his harangue on the Quarren.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” she asked.
The human assumed an expression of disbelief. “What does he mean, he doesn’t know?”
The Quarren shrugged. “He says he was headed up here from the droid access tunnel. He was still fifty or sixty meters downslope when he experienced an emergency shutdown. He woke up under the tree.”
The human rolled her eyes. “Here’s what probably happened. He came up here, the tree fell on him, and he reinitialized. When he was online again, his memories were cross-linked or corrupted.”
“That’s probably it.”
“Come on, give me a hand. The tree’s still too heavy for the droid.”
Together, they dragged the tree completely clear of the antenna depression. Throughout, the droid offered counterproductive advice and complaints about the troopers’ interpretation of events.
Then the Pop-Dogs left, the droid stomping along behind them, all three crushing fallen leaves underfoot with the stealth and grace of drunken banthas.
Two minutes passed, then Jesmin stood, letting the synthcloth blanket and the leaves spread across it slip to the ground.
Huhunna, beside her, also rose. She offered a single word: “Kreekkraakkruump.” The word was onomatopoeia, the Wookiee sound of someone falling through a succession of tree branches before hitting the ground—hence, a klutz.
Jesmin, whose own command of Wookiee was pretty good, grinned and responded in the same language. “Yes. Kind of like listening to a construction droid learning to tiptoe.”
“But you were right.” Huhunna’s words, echoing softly off tree trunks, would sound to most people like a distant animal growl of warning.
Jesmin nodded. “Abandoned mines closed for safety reasons don’t usually have hypercomms, droid workers, or Pop-Dog guards. This is the place.” She looked northeast. Through the trees, some of Kura City’s few skytowers could be glimpsed in the distance. “Over there somewhere will be the old entrance to the mine. Probably not as sealed off as people think.” She turned to the southeast. Chakham Base lay in that direction, though it could not be seen for the trees. “And I’m betting there’s another entrance down there.”
Huhunna rumbled her reply: “Let’s finish this operation and get off this world of spindly little trees.”
“They’re not that spindly. Come on.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Voort and Myri brought their starfighters in on a slow, tediously lethal approach to the Wraiths’ base of operations. They descended on repulsors to land in the quarry. It took a few minutes to extract their astromechs, Fuzzy and the dented black R5 unit Voort called Dustbin, and cover the starfighters with large sheets of tan flexiplast. They loaded themselves and the droids onto the railed open-air turbolift that had been original equipment when the quarry was a going concern. It rose, clanking, to clifftop level.
The two Wraiths, still clad in orange-and-white X-wing pilots’ gear, their helmets in hand, walked into the main building—and a storm of activity.
Overhead in the ops room was a hologram of the Kura City–Chakham Base boundary. Huhunna had her hand up in the image as if grasping a low mountain at the western edge of the boundary.
Jesmin looked up as Voort and Myri entered. “That’s their base. We’re working on the accesses.”
Voort nodded. “Excellent. Muscle Boy, kiss their hands.”
Trey, sprawled in a puffed chair, ignored him. “You’ll need a case for the jewels.”
Voort waved his comment away. “I want a crystal case. Not your department. I want you up on Skifter Station as soon as possible to plant the sensor disruptors on the exterior. And what about proton torpedoes?”
Trey shook his head. “Not likely. But I can attach new hardpoints to the S-foils and put together some rocketry for them.”
“That’ll have to do.” Voort caught sight of Drikall. “Drug Boy! Can you mess up Turman’s vital signs?”
“Of course.” The medic smiled, showing an impressive array of sharp teeth. “What would you like? Tachycardia a specialty.”
Turman looked up from his own chair, his expression alarmed. “Wait a minute—”
“Don’t worry about it.” Thaymes looked back and forth from his monitor screen to the hologram Huhunna continued to poke at. “I’ve recoded a child’s noisemaker. Tack it to the inside of the Embass suit and it’ll make Turman sound like he has two heartbeats. You want three? I can give him three heartbeats.”
Drikall looked betrayed.
From the adjoining room, the combined kitchen and dining space that Wran had dubbed the Catastrophic Mess, came Scut’s voice: “Do not drug the Clawdite. No good can come of it.”
Then someone emerged from the Mess—not Scut, but a lean human man now in the shadowy halfway zone between middle age and old age. His hair was white but not yet thin, and his suit, silver-gray and in a contemporary Coruscant style, was well fitted and clean. He emerged holding out a hand toward Voort. “Professor. So good to see you again.”
“Doctor Cheems.” Voort shook his hand. “How was your shuttle flight?”
&nb
sp; “Tedious, thank you. And call me Mulus. Please.”
“I’m Voort. Are you all settled in?”
“And on the job. Come, I’ll show you.” Mulus led the way back to the Mess.
The dining table was almost covered in diagrams, machinery halfway through fabrication, various hand and blaster weapons. At one end rested a device that could have been a pistol-grip soldering iron if the barrel were a heating element instead of a tiny transparent dish. Beside it were several small duraplast boxes filled with what looked like precious and semiprecious stones, some cut and faceted, some rough.
Mulus seated himself beside the pistol-grip tool. Voort took the chair next to him, and the other Wraiths gathered around, some standing.
“So.” Mulus held up one box of uncut stones. “Assorted samples of Kuratooine stones that Viull acquired for me.”
“Viull ...” Voort frowned. “Oh, you mean Scut.”
Mulus glared at his Yuuzhan Vong son. “You know your mother hates that nickname.”
Scut shrugged, smiled. It was an odd expression on a Yuuzhan Vong face.
“Anyway.” Mulus set the box down. “Standard distribution of gemstones for a world of this type. Kuratooine sapphires are especially appreciated. Though I really like the amber found here.”
Voort shook his head. “Amber won’t work for us. It’s organic. We need mined, inorganic stones.”
“Pity. I’ll have to take some amber home.” Mulus set the box down. “But, to the point, if you’re going to convince people—what did you call them?” He looked at Scut.
“The marks.”
“If you’re going to convince the marks that they’re seeing gems mined and crafted in absolute isolation, hitherto completely unknown, you have two basic approaches. You need either a material they’ve never seen before or a crafting technique they’ve never seen before. To have both would be even more convincing, of course. Materials they’ve never seen before are tricky, because either you have to have actually found materials no one has ever seen before ...” His voice trailed off and he waited for a response.
The Wraiths shook their heads.
“Blast. I was hoping you’d thrill me. Or you use something created in a laboratory. And that’s tricky, too. Such a material would have to have been developed in secret. No published descriptions of the stuff to thrill fellow gemologists or justify the government grant money. You can see how that would be rare. As you probably know, scientists in a specific field tend to know what others are doing. Clearly, what we need to overcome this problem is more startlingly rich mad scientists, and I’d like to apply for that job.”
“Father.” Scut sounded impatient. “Few of us have much more than a century to live, and you’re off on one of your tangents.”
“Oh. Sorry. And even if you had a helpful mad scientist, some artificial gem production techniques reveal themselves under the microscope.”
“So the other approach—” Trey looked like he was struggling to remember. “You said, crafting techniques no one’s seen before.”
“Correct. There I think I can help you. Over the years, I’ve developed several sonic devices whose purpose is cutting gems. In the right hands, they’re better than cutting them physically. In the wrong hands, you end up with a small pile of pretty but valueless gemstone chips.”
Voort frowned. “These devices are commercially available?”
“Oh, yes. In fact, sales of and training on the Cheems Sonic Chisels are paying for a lot of my in-name-only retirement.”
“My point is, they’re well known and won’t fool anybody.”
Cheems smiled. “But they’re not the only sonic gem-shaping technology I’ve invented. There’s another that I’m still fooling around with. I don’t know if there’ll be a market for the results. You take a sonic chisel apparatus with micrometer positioning control and a fractal mathematical set for guidance and let them loose on a gemstone. Here, I’ll show you.” He opened another box, removed from it a small object wrapped in black velvet, and extracted the object. “Does anyone but my boy here know anything about gems?”
Myri raised a hand. “I can spot lots of kinds of fakes.” At Voort’s confused look, she explained. “Any gambling environment, people try to pass off fake jewelry as valuable. So they can stay in a game or pay off debts.”
Cheems passed the object to her. He also handed her an optical device, a small single-eye scanner.
She held the first item up so it was fully in the light from the overhead glow rods. It looked to Voort like a sprig from a bush. There was a main stem two centimeters long, with tiny branchlike extrusions radiating from it at random intervals and in random directions. It was red, a creamy hue.
“It looks and weighs kind of like coral.” Myri sounded thoughtful.
Cheems shook his head. “Ah, but it’s a Hapan form of ruby.”
“And it looks organic, like coral.” Myri held it under Cheems’s optic. “Interesting. Under magnification, you can see the facets. Thousands and thousands of them.” She handed the two objects to Jesmin, sitting beside her. “I really haven’t seen anything like it.”
Cheems beamed. “No one has. Except Viull, and my wife, who has several pieces. But she’s helping orchestrate my grand debut of the technique by keeping them to herself, never wearing them in public, until I’m ready to have a showing. The beauty of the technique is that flawed stones yield results as beautiful as flawless. Cracks and imperfections become part of the final design ...”
Voort watched the gem as it was handed around the table. “Scut, the Embass suit. Could it incorporate some of those pieces as decoration? As if the Embass people practiced self-modification like the Yuuzhan Vong.”
Scut considered. “That would be beautiful. And yes. I can do that.”
“It’s not your top priority. Keeping the suit from digesting Turman is still number one.”
Turman jerked up from looking at the gem. “What?”
“And the Thaal masquer—also more important.”
Scut nodded. “Decorations will be priority three, then.”
“Digest me?”
Voort returned his attention to Cheems. “This is definitely what we want. You can perform the technique with what we have here?”
“With what I brought with me. Though anyone working with me will need total isolation ear protection.”
“We’ll get it. Mulus, thanks for coming. You may end up helping save a lot of lives.”
Cheems beamed. “Just paying back a favor.”
A day later, they had more answers.
Thaymes, digging through old, offline geological surveys made before the planet had a name, found sonic interpretation maps of caves below the Chakham Base property. Some were deep and seemed to have no access to the surface. Others, closer to ground level, had openings at base level. A few of those entrances were located in stands of woods well away from the base’s buildings.
Trey, tracing some of the cave and tunnel passageways on Thaymes’s monitor with his finger, nodded. “Since it doesn’t have to be a very big explosives package, I think we can get it pretty deep.”
Voort looked between him and the map. “Not so deep the base seismographs won’t detect it.”
“Oh, they’ll detect it.”
“The crawler has to be the very first thing ready, then.”
Trey nodded. “Boom.”
“And the Thadley Biolan recorded messages to Ledina Chott—you’ve been studying them? Can you do it?”
Off duty after a day of serving drinks at a bar frequented by Pop-Dogs, Turman sat, weary, in an operations center chair beside Voort’s.
Voort didn’t look up. He continued studying the diagrams Jesmin had given him earlier in the day. They showed a large building housing water pumps. Jesmin had said the building was in the northwest quadrant of Chakham Base, on the lowest slope of Black Crest Mountain. One diagram, which Jesmin had admitted was partly theoretical, showed a concealed turbolift shaft that supposedly descended to
the old mine works beneath the mountain and its surroundings. “Stage Boy. How’s that all-liquid diet working for you?”
Turman groaned. The sound went on awhile. He paused for a breath. “I’m not here to talk about that. It’s Ledina Chott.”
“Thaal’s next mistress, unless we get to him first. What about her?”
“Just recently the Pop-Dogs have received orders, unofficial orders, about her. She’s off-limits. Word has filtered down to the rank and file that the Pop-Dogs, to a man and woman, are supposed to be respectful and very, very hands-off if they ever encounter her. It’s also considered good luck to scare off anyone else showing interest in her. This is as of just a few weeks ago.”
“Soon, soon, soon ... He’ll be abandoning Thaal and becoming Thadley very soon now.” Voort sounded almost smug.
“Thaal’s operating procedures are changing. He killed his last mistress just to make a point. What if he approaches Ledina Chott and she refuses him?” Turman looked distressed. “Is she safe?”
“I don’t know.” Voort set the diagrams aside. “We can’t cover every eventuality with eleven Wraiths. You can’t be there to protect her. You’re more important somewhere else.”
“I know.” Turman rose. “I just wanted someone to complain to.”
The next morning, Huhunna and Jesmin delivered a package to within ten meters of the army base’s forest-side sensor fence.
Behind a tree, they removed the package’s contents from the bag that held it.
It was a droid of sorts. A lozenge half a meter long, it was fitted with a score of articulated durasteel legs radiating from all along its body and in all directions. There were green globes housing optical sensors at either end of the body.
Jesmin twisted one of the optical sensors until it clicked into place. The droid went active, standing up on a few of its limbs. It oriented itself, facing its distant destination. Unfortunately, there was a tree only centimeters away, blocking its path.
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