Teradoc glanced back at Hachat. “I’m convinced.”
“Excellent.” Hachat extended a hand. “Partners.”
“Well … we need to negotiate our percentages. I was thinking that I’d take a hundred percent.”
Hachat withdrew his hand. Far from looking surprised or offended, he smiled. “Do you Imperial officer types study the same How to Backstab manual? You are definitely doing it by the book.”
“Captain, you’re going to experience quite a lot of enhanced interrogation in the near future. You’ll endure a lot of pain before cracking and telling me where the Palace is. If you choose to antagonize me, I might just double that pain.”
Hachat shook his head wonderingly. “What I don’t get is this whole Grand Admiral Thrawn thing. Every hopped-up junior naval officer tries to be like him. Elegant, inscrutable … and an art lover. Being an art lover doesn’t make you a genius, you know.”
“That’s an extra week of torture right there.”
“Plus, unlike Thrawn, you’re about as impressive as a Gungan with his underwear full of stinging insects.”
“Three weeks. And at this moment, my guard has a blaster leveled at your gut under the table.”
“Oh, my.” Hachat glanced at the guard. He raised his hands to either side of his face, indicating surrender. “Pleeeeease don’t shoot me, foul-smelling man. Please, oh please, oh pleasepleaseplease.”
Teradoc stared at him, perplexed.
Onstage the porcine Gamorrean dancers moved through a new rotation, which brought the slenderest of them up to the forward position. He was slender only by Gamorrean standards, weighing in at a touch under 150 kilos, but he moved well and there were good muscles to be glimpsed under his body fat.
With the rest of the troupe, he executed a half turn, which left them facing the rear of the stage, and followed up with a series of fanny-shakes, each accompanied by a lateral hop. Then they began a slow turn back toward the crowd, the movement accentuated by a series of belly-rolls that had the Gamorrean women in the crowd yelling.
Just as, with a final belly-roll, he once again faced forward, the slenderest dancer could see Hachat’s table … and Hachat with his hands up.
He felt a touch of light-headedness as adrenaline hit his system. Things were a go.
Near Hachat’s table, the dark-skinned server moved unobtrusively toward Teradoc.
The Gamorrean dancer, whose name was Piggy, stopped his dance, threw back his head, and shrilled a few words in the Gamorrean tongue: “It’s a raid! Run!”
From elsewhere in the room, the cry was repeated in Basic and other languages. Piggy noted approvingly that the fidelity of those shouts was so good that few people, if any, would realize they were recordings.
Alarm rippled in an instant through the crowd, through the dancers.
Suddenly all the Gamorreans in the place were heaving themselves to their feet, sometimes knocking their table over in panicky haste, and the non-Gamorrean patrons followed suit. Confused, Teradoc took his attention from Hachat for a moment and turned to look across the sea of tables.
There were booms from the room’s two side exits. Both doors blew in, blasted off their rails by what had to have been shaped charges. Tall men in Imperial Navy Special Forces armor charged in through those doors.
A flash of motion to Teradoc’s right drew his attention. He saw the dark-skinned server approach and lash out in a perfectly executed side kick. Her sandaled foot snaked in just beneath the tabletop. Even over the tumult in the room, Teradoc heard the crack that had to be his guard’s hand or wrist breaking. The guard’s blaster pistol flew from his hand, thumped into Teradoc’s side, and fell to the floor.
The server stayed balanced on her planted foot, cocked her kicking leg again, and lashed out once more, this time connecting with the guard’s jaw as he turned to look at her. The guard wobbled and slid from his chair.
Then the server dived in the opposite direction, rolling as she hit the floor, vanishing out of Teradoc’s sight under the next table.
Teradoc grabbed for the blaster on the floor. He got it in his hand.
Hachat hadn’t lost his smile. He turned to face the glasses on the table and shouted directly at them: “Boom boy!”
One of the drink glasses, mostly empty, erupted in thick yellow smoke. Teradoc, as he straightened and brought the blaster up, found himself engulfed in a haze that smelled of alcohol and more bitter chemicals. It stung his eyes. Now he could not see as far as the other side of the table.
He stood and warily circled the table … and, by touch, found only empty chairs. Hachat was gone. Cheems was gone.
The statuette was still there. Teradoc grabbed it, then stumbled away from the table, out from within the choking smoke.
While the dancers and patrons ran, Piggy stood motionless onstage and narrated. He subvocalized into his throat implant, which rendered his squealy, grunty Gamorrean pronunciation into comprehensible Basic. The implant also transmitted his words over a specific comm frequency. “Guards at Tables Twelve and Forty maintaining discipline and scanning for targets. But they’ve got none. Shalla, stay low, Table Forty’s looking in your direction.”
Small voices buzzed in the tiny comm receiver in his ear. “Heard that, Piggy.” “Got Twelve, Twelve is down.” “Forty’s in my sights.”
Now the guard who had brought Cheems to Teradoc approached that table once more. This time he had a blaster pistol in one hand. With his free hand, he shoved patrons out of his way. He reached the verge of the yellow smoke, then began circling it, looking for targets.
He found some. His head snapped over to the right. Piggy glanced in that direction and saw Hachat and Cheems almost at the ruined doorway in the wall. The guard raised his pistol, waiting for a clear shot.
Well, it was time to go anyway. Piggy ran the three steps to the stage’s edge and hurled himself forward. He cleared the nearest table and came down on Teradoc’s guard, smashing him to the floor, breaking the man’s bones. The guard’s blaster skidded across the floor and was lost, masked by yellow smoke and patrons’ fast-moving legs.
Piggy stood. He’d felt the impact, too, but had been prepared for it; and he was well padded by muscle and fat. Nothing in him had broken. He looked at the guard and was satisfied that the unconscious man posed no more danger.
Now he heard Hachat’s voice across the comm. “We have the package. Extract. Call in when you get to the exit.”
Most of the bar patrons, those who weren’t running in blind panic, were surging toward and through the bar’s main entrance, which inexplicably had no Imperial Navy troopers near it. Piggy turned toward the exit Hachat and Cheems had used. That doorway did have a forbidding-looking Imperial trooper standing beside it. Heedless of the danger posed by the soldier, Piggy shoved his way through toppled furniture and scrambling patrons. He made it to the door.
The armored trooper merely nodded at him. “Nice moves, Dancer Boy.”
Piggy growled at him, then passed through the door, which still smoked from the charge that had breached it.
Once in the dimly lit service corridor beyond, Piggy headed toward the building’s rear service exit. “Piggy exiting.” He reached the door at the end of the corridor. It slid open for him, and he stepped outside into cooler night air.
“Freeze or I’ll shoot!” The bellow came from just beside his right ear. It was deep, male, ferocious.
Piggy winced, held up his hands. Unarmed and nearly naked, his eyes not yet adjusted to the nighttime darkness, he didn’t stand a chance.
Then his assailant chuckled. “Got you again.”
Piggy turned, glaring.
Situated by the door, armed not with a blaster but with a bandolier of grenades, stood a humanoid, tall as but not nearly as hairy as a Wookiee. The individual was lean for his two-meter-plus height, brown-furred, his face long, his big square teeth bared in a triumphant smile. He wore a black traveler’s robe; it gapped to show the brown jumpsuit and bandolier beneath.<
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Piggy reached up to grab and tug at the speaker’s whiskers. “Not funny, Runt.”
“Plenty funny.”
“I’ll get you for that.”
“You keep saying that. It never happens.”
Piggy sighed and released his friend. His eyes were now more adjusted. In the gloom, decorated with distant lights like a continuation of the starfield above, he could make out the start of the marina’s dock, the glow rods outlining old-fashioned watercraft in their berths, not far away.
Much nearer was the team’s extraction vehicle, an old airspeeder—a flatbed model with oversized repulsors and motivators. It was active, floating a meter above the ground on motivator thrust. Signs on the sides of its cab proclaimed it to be a tug, the sort sent out to rescue the watercraft of the rich and hapless when their own motivators conked out. There were sturdy winches affixed in the bed.
In the cab, a Devaronian man sat at the pilot’s controls. He turned his horned head and flashed Piggy a sharp-toothed smile through the rear viewport. Cheems and Hachat were already situated in the cab beside him.
Piggy moved up to the speeder and clambered into the cargo bed. The vehicle rocked a little under his weight. He looked around for the bundle that should have been waiting for him, but it was nowhere to be seen. He sighed and sat facing the rear, his back to the cab. Then he stared at the club’s back door, at Runt situated beside it. “Come on, come on.”
The door slid open long enough to admit the dark-skinned server. Unmolested by Runt, she ran to the airspeeder, vaulted into the bed, and settled down beside Piggy. “Shalla exited.” She glanced at Piggy. “Weren’t you supposed to have a robe here?”
He knew his reply sounded long suffering. “Yes. And who took it? Who decided to leave me almost naked here as I wait? I’m betting I’ll never know.”
Shalla nodded, clearly used to the ways of her comrades. “You made yourself a lot of fans tonight. Those Gamorrean ladies were screaming their brains out. And not just the Gamorreans. You could have had so much action this evening …”
Piggy rolled his eyes. As far as he was concerned, those Gamorrean women had no brains to scream out. Augmented by biological experiments when he was a child, Piggy was the only genius of his kind. And unlike some, he could not bear the thought of pairing up with someone whose intelligence was far, far below his.
So he was alone.
Hachat turned to glare back through the cab’s rear viewport. “Kell …”
Piggy heard the man’s response in his ear. “Busy, Boss.”
“Kell, do I have to come in there after you?”
“Busy.” Then the door slid open for Kell, the armored trooper who had let Piggy pass. He fell through the doorway, slamming to the ground on his back, one of Teradoc’s guards on top of him.
Runt reached down, grabbed the guard by the shoulder and neck, and pulled, peeling the man off as though he were the unresisting rind of a fruit. Runt shook the guard, and kept shaking him as Kell rose and trotted to the speeder.
By the time Kell was settling in beside Shalla, the guard was completely limp. Runt dropped him and regarded him quizzically for a second. Then he pulled two grenades free from his bandolier. He twisted a dial on each and stepped over to stand in front of the door. When it slid open for him, he lobbed them through the doorway. He waited there as they detonated, making little noise but filling the corridor entirely with thick black smoke. Then he joined the others, settling in at the rear of the speeder bed, facing Piggy. “Runt exited. Team One complete.”
Cheems expected them to blast their way as far as possible from the Imperial Navy base and the city that surrounded it. But they flew only a few hundred meters along the marina boundary. Then they abandoned their speeder in a dark, grassy field just outside the marina gates and hurried on foot along old-fashioned wooden docks. Soon afterward, they boarded a long, elegant yacht in gleaming Imperial-style white.
Within a few minutes, they had backed the yacht out of its berth, maneuvered it into the broad waters of the bay, and set a course for the open sea beyond.
Eight in all, they assembled on the stern deck, which was decorated with comfortable, weather-resistant furnishings, a bar, and a grill. Cheems sat on a puffy chair and watched, bewildered, as his rescuers continued their high-energy preparations.
The Devaronian, whom the others called Elassar, broke topgrade bantha steaks out of a cold locker and began arraying them on the grill. Piggy the Gamorrean located and donned a white robe, then began mixing drinks. Kell shed his armor, dumping it and his Imperial weapons over the side. Hachat disappeared belowdecks for two minutes and reemerged, his hair now short and brown, his clothes innocuous. Runt shed his traveler’s robe and set up a small but expensive-looking portable computer array on an end table. A yellow-skinned human man who had not been on the speeder joined Kell and stripped off his own Imperial armor, throwing it overboard. Shalla merely stretched out on a lounge chair and smiled as she watched the men work.
Cheems finally worked up the courage to speak. “Um … excuse me … not that I’m complaining … but could I get some sort of summary on what just happened?”
Hachat grinned and settled onto a couch beside Cheems’s chair. “My name isn’t Hachat. It’s Garik Loran. Captain Loran, New Republic Intelligence. Runt, do you have the tracker signal yet?”
“Working on it.”
“Put it up on the main monitor, superimpose the local map.”
No less confused, Cheems interrupted. “Garik Loran? Face Loran, the boy actor?”
Face did not quite suppress a wince. “That was a long time ago. But yes.”
“I love The Lifeday Murders. I have a copy on my datapad.”
“Yeah … Anyway, what do you think this was all about?”
“Getting me out of the admiral’s hands, I suppose.” Cheems frowned, reconstructing the sequence of events in his mind. “Two days ago, as I was being led from my laboratory to my prison quarters, I felt a nasty sting in my back. I assume you shot me with some sort of communications device. Little buzzy voices vibrating in my shoulder blade.”
Face nodded. He gestured toward the man with yellow skin. “That’s Bettin. He’s our sniper and exotic-weapons expert. He tagged you from a distance of nearly a kilometer, which was as close as we could get to you.”
Bettin waved, cheerful. “Kriffing hard shot, too. Crosswind, low-mass package. Piggy was my spotter. I had to rely pretty heavily on his skills at calculation.”
“Yes, yes.” Face sounded impatient. “So, anyway, that was step one. Getting in contact with you.”
Cheems considered. “And step two was telling me that I was going to be called on to authenticate an artifact, and that I absolutely had to do that, regardless of what I was looking at. You told me that doing this was the only way I’d ever get off that naval base alive.”
Face nodded.
“What was I looking at? The material had a crystalline structure, definitely, but it wasn’t diamond or any other precious stone. In fact, it looked a bit like crystallized anthracite.”
Kell, standing at the bar, grinned at Cheems. No longer concealed by his helmet, his features were fair, very handsome. His brown hair was worn in a buzz cut, retreating from a widow’s peak. “Very good. It’s a modified form of anthracite in a crystallized form.”
“So I was within centimeters of ten kilos of high explosive?” Cheems thought he could feel the blood draining from his head.
“Nearer fifteen. Plus a transceiver, power unit, and some control chips in the base.” Kell shrugged, accepted a drink from Piggy.
Cheems shook his head. “And I was passing it off as a work of art!”
Kell stared at him, clearly miffed. “It was a work of art.”
Face caught Cheems’s attention again. “Teradoc’s habits and methods are well known to Intelligence. We had to have bait that required a gem expert to authenticate; we had to have a sneaky profit motive so Teradoc would bring you off base to do the a
uthentication; and we had to have the bait be very valuable so when trouble erupted he’d grab it and run.”
“Back to his base.” Cheems felt a chill grip him. “Back to his most secure area, where his treasures are stored. His personal vault.”
Face gave him a now you get it smile. “Which is where, exactly?”
“Directly beneath his secure research-and-development laboratories.”
“Where, if Intelligence is right, his people are experimenting with plague viruses, self-replicating nonbiological toxins, and the project for which Teradoc kidnapped you, Dr. Cheems.”
“A sonic device. The idea was that sound waves pitched and cycling correctly could resonate with lightsaber crystals, shattering them.”
For once, Face looked concerned. “Could it actually work?”
Cheems shook his head. “Not in a practical way. Against exposed crystals, yes. But lightsaber hilts insulate the crystals too effectively. I couldn’t tell the admiral that, though. To tell him This can’t work would basically be to say, Kill me now, please, I’m of no more use to you.” Belatedly Cheems realized that he’d said too much. If this miracle rescue was itself a scam, if he was currently surrounded by Imperial Intelligence operatives, he’d just signed his own execution order. He gulped.
Runt turned to Face. “I have it.” He repositioned the main monitor at his table so others could see.
The monitor showed an overhead map view of the planet’s capital city, its Imperial Navy base, the huge bay that bordered both to the east. A blinking yellow light was stationary deep within the base. Then, as they watched, the light faded to nothingness.
Cheems glanced at Face. “Did your device just fail?”
Face shook his head. “No. It was taken into a secure area where comm signals can’t penetrate. Its internal circuitry, some of which is a planetary positioning system, knows where it is—the research-and-development labs. Atmospheric pressure meters are telling it how deep in the ground it is. At the depth of Teradoc’s personal vault, well …”
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