Scut’s brow seemed to deepen as he frowned. “As a child, at the height of the war, I was on a work crew. The warriors left us behind as a diversion. Most of us died in a New Republic counterattack. I was captured. Given to a human couple. So I have Yuuzhan Vong parents who rejected me as my body rejected Yuuzhan Vong implants, and human parents who raised me. I am of two people. As you are.”
Voort gave him a look he hoped the Yuuzhan Vong understood, a look that said, Come one centimeter closer and I’ll kill you. “You’re nothing like me.”
“Voort.” Bhindi’s voice was suddenly chilly. “Are you questioning my judgment?”
Yes, I am. Yes, yes, yes. Voort wanted nothing so much as to leave right now, even if that meant jumping from the side door and hoping he’d find a speeder underneath while falling.
But he kept that thought to himself. He knew Bhindi. She would not respond well to having her decisions challenged.
Of course, Voort could leave, immediately return home and get back to teaching. But that would leave Bhindi, someone he cared about, and Myri and Jesmin, children of people he cared about, associating with this Yuuzhan Vong.
So he composed himself and shook his head. “No.”
“Good. Scut’s a biofabricator. He made the mask and gloves you saw—”
“Ooglith masquers.” It took an effort on Voort’s part not to spit out those words. During the Yuuzhan Vong War, alien Vong wearing ooglith masquers to pass as member species of the New Republic had infiltrated, sabotaged, assassinated.
Scut’s voice remained neutral. “Neoglith masquers. The concept is similar. But I use tissues of species native to this galaxy. Nor are they complete organisms unto themselves, as ooglith masquers were. They have no brains, they do not suffer. When the nutrients suffusing their tissues are absorbed, they die—they do not propagate as species.”
Voort suppressed a shudder. “Perhaps we should talk about our objectives. I’m … behind.”
“Soon.” Bhindi glanced through the small forward viewport into the cockpit. “When we’re at our safe house.”
It was the sort of safe house Voort was used to from his years with the Wraiths, a small tapcaf whose operators, already struggling on the edge of insolvency, had been financially ruined by a fire. The fire had damaged the tapcaf interior, blistering one duraplast wall with signs of char, embedding a sharp smoke odor in all the cheap furnishings, but it had not affected the structural integrity of the midlevel skytower floor where the business had been housed. Bhindi, posing as a repair crew operator, had offered a low, low bid on repairs. Now the Wraiths were free to move in and out of the tapcaf’s vicinity, using its loading dock, arriving and departing with all variety of vehicles, and the owners of surrounding businesses paid them no mind so long as they wore workers’ garments.
Nor were they entirely abusing the business owners with this deception. While Voort moved from booth to booth, wiping down sparkly purple flexiplast tabletops with a cloth dipped in a fluid that smelled like flowers—chemicals that would remove the stink of smoke now embedded in the flexiplast—other Wraiths also moved around the main room, working as they talked. Trey removed and replaced wall sensors, chronos, attachment points for powered advertisements. Scut, now somewhat leaner with the padding portions of his disguise discarded, was visible on the other side of the midsection-high barrier separating main room from kitchen, mopping. Turman Durra—that was how the Clawdite had been introduced, and Voort had heard his name in the past, the name of a well-regarded stage actor—methodically removed smoke-discolored sound-absorbing tiles from the ceiling and tossed them into a waste receptacle. Jesmin and Myri sat at a booth, a datapad before them, scanning HoloNet News and other news streams for reports on the spaceport shutdown and the army hauler hijack.
Bhindi, sitting opposite Voort at another booth, kept her voice pitched very low. “Piggy, is this going to be a problem?”
“The only problem will be if you keep calling me Piggy. You know better. You were there.”
“Don’t deflect my question.”
He met her gaze square-on. “No. If you’re certain he’s not an insane genocidal freak who belongs in another galaxy altogether, I’ll take your word for it.”
“That’s not very reassuring.”
“Then I’ll spell it out for you. This will not be a problem. You just surprised me, that’s all. Imagine that we held a celebration for you, we wheeled in a giant pastry, and Emperor Palpatine popped out of it. That kind of surprise. But it’s not a problem.”
Bhindi took a deep breath, then apparently chose to let the matter pass for the time being. She turned her attention to the others and cleared her throat. The Wraiths gathered around, Myri sliding into the booth beside Voort and Turman beside Bhindi. The rest pulled up chairs in a semicircle beside the booth.
Bhindi indicated her own datapad on the tabletop before her. “The recordings burst-fired to us by the holocams we left behind outside the engagement zone show the army hauling off the blasters and bringing in a forensics team. Everything there seems to be going as planned, assuming we didn’t mess up on any of the evidence we planted. So let’s turn our attention back to the next stage: determining General Thaal’s guilt or innocence. Voort, what does the old school have to say about this?”
Voort switched his implant to a normal conversational volume. “Assuming he’s guilty, we don’t know his precise motivation. So in the old days, what we’d do is set up a series of baits for him, each designed to appeal to one of his most likely motivations, and see which, if any, he bites on. In other words, we run a series of confidence games until we see which one he wants to play.” He saw some nods from the others.
Bhindi nodded, too. “Good. So what are his likely motives for joining the Lecersen Conspiracy, what is he likely to be doing now, and what sorts of bait will draw him out?”
Jesmin was first. “Wealth. He might want to be made an Imperial Moff or just given a payoff from the Empire. Either way, he would become a very, very rich man.”
Bhindi gave her a little smile of sympathy. “You really have been scarred by dealing with the black market, haven’t you?”
Jesmin ignored the comment. “So we set up a bogus big-credit score, something that would require him to betray the Alliance.”
“Good. Next?”
Turman sat up a little straighter. “Reestablishment of the Empire as it was at the height of its powers.” His voice, like Face Loran’s, was indeed that of an actor—controlled and vibrant. “If he’s an Imperial patriot, he may have no profit motive to speak of. He’s in a position to betray army secrets, maybe even the security of the entire Alliance, to the Empire … but he’s not going to do that until the Empire has settled down under a stable leadership. We might have to convince him that this stable leadership is actually already in place or waiting for him to assume that throne.”
Bhindi gave him an approving look. “So all we’d have to do is simulate the wealth and grandeur of a resurgent Empire on our available budget of pocket change and lint.”
“That’s about the size of it, yes.”
“Next?”
Scut spoke next, the harsh tones of his voice at odds with what seemed to be well-considered words. “Many Alliance veterans carry grudges against the instigators of wars they fought. Deep down, Thaal may want to destroy the Yuuzhan Vong … or the Jedi who once supported Jacen Solo. Politics will not let him do that now. But given an opportunity to strike such a blow, to end a perceived menace once and for all …”
Bhindi winced. “But that calls for running at least two confidence schemes, one for each major likely target.”
Scut shrugged. “Or determining what it is he truly hates before launching the confidence game.”
Myri shook her head. “If it’s one of those two, it’s the Yuuzhan Vong. No offense.”
Scut blinked. “I take no offense. But why the Yuuzhan Vong above the Jedi?”
“It’s in his history. Thaal was an army colonel stat
ioned here on Coruscant when the Yuuzhan Vong invasion came. Instead of evacuating, he volunteered to lead a unit of elites to set up on Vandor-Three.”
Scut frowned. “Where?”
“It’s actually here in the Coruscant system. The next planet sunward. Lightly populated by Coruscant standards. It has old links to the armed forces—back in the Clone Wars, there were clone trooper training grounds near Vangard, the capital. But now it’s mostly agricultural, with a petroleum industry. It supplies Coruscant with a lot of its food and raw material for plastic products. Most people here consider Vandor-Three to be beyond the borders of civilization and culture. Like an uneducated cousin who doesn’t bathe.” She shrugged. “Anyway, he and his unit hid in a base built years earlier by the Tech Raiders, a crime organization.
“Thaal’s group reported on the Yuuzhan Vong occupation of the system, data vital to the New Republic. They launched raids. They called themselves the Pop-Dogs, after a burrowing rodent from Carida—pop-dogs pop up out of their burrows, run over, grab their prey or food that’s been left unguarded for just a second, and scurry back to their burrows. The Pop-Dog unit was very brave and very useful, and when that war was over, Thaal was promoted to the rank of general. And he built up elite army units nicknamed the Pop-Dogs. My guess is that he still hates the Yuuzhan Vong for all the suffering he saw.”
Jesmin looked unhappy. “That’s logical, but it doesn’t clear up the situation for us at all. The same logic would make him hate the Jedi more.”
Myri looked at her, clearly confused. “How?”
“A little detail buried in his career history. You mentioned that the pop-dogs, the rodents rather than the military unit, were from Carida. So was Thaal. He was an Imperial officer, a small-unit tactics instructor at the Imperial Academy there.”
Myri grimaced. “That does make a difference.”
Jesmin nodded. “He was on Carida when Kyp Durron destroyed the system. He was on one of the last shuttles to evacuate successfully before the Sun Crusher hit. He defected to the New Republic during all that chaos, and his record suggests he’s been a loyal officer ever since. But when you’ve been through that kind of horror … Who knows what it does to your mind?”
Voort frowned, thoughtful. That did complicate the picture. Kyp Durron, at the time only a Jedi trainee but a very powerful Force-user, had performed a horrifying act of vengeance. He had used an experimental superweapon to destroy the star of Carida, a world where an Imperial military academy was situated, and the star’s destruction had obliterated Carida itself. Evacuation efforts saved a portion of Carida’s population. Though many people believed then and still believed today that Durron should have been tried and punished for the action, the destruction had been a boon for the New Republic, still at war at the time with the Empire; that, and support for Durron from Luke Skywalker, who testified to Durron’s redemption, secured Durron’s freedom.
Bhindi sighed. “All right. Any other likely motivations?”
There was a general shaking of heads.
“So Thaal’s motivation is still unclear.” Bhindi pulled a datachip from her breast pocket and handed it to Myri. “I want you, Voort, and Trey to take charge of the droid subversion effort on Vandor-Three. The rest of us will begin putting together operations to expose Thaal’s motivation. Break and scatter, people.”
On the trip back to the spaceport, Voort, up in the delivery speeder’s cockpit, glowered over at Myri in the center seat. “I don’t want to complain.”
She grinned at him. “You know what people do, one hundred percent of the time, immediately after saying they don’t want to complain? They complain.”
“I got to Coruscant this morning. I’m leaving in the afternoon. Who comes to Coruscant for a few hours? Does that make any sense?”
“I suppose not.”
“I just wanted to point that out.”
“You might as well stop frowning. For good.”
Voort stared at her, confused. “Why?”
“Almost nobody but another Gamorrean can tell when you’re frowning. I can because I learned the expressions, the body language, and especially the species tells of lots and lots of races when I was gambling for my living. But—Trey, can you tell when he’s frowning?”
Trey, at the pilot’s controls, shook his head.
“See?” She fell silent for a second and just watched the skytowers sweep by on either side. “You could smile once in a while. You never smile.”
“Give me something to smile about.”
“I’ll have to work on that.”
CHAPTER SIX
ACKBAR CITY, VANDOR-3
The shuttle flight from Coruscant to Vandor-3 had been brief, but that was the last thing Voort found favorable about this phase of their mission.
The civilian spaceport lay halfway between Fey’lya Army Base to the north and Ackbar City to the southwest, about twenty kilometers in either case. It actually was a massive spaceport for a world with a population so small, and most of its traffic came in the form of container ships hauling grain, other produce, and meats offworld. The terminal building for visitor and other noncargo traffic was actually quite small, a two-story gray truncated pyramid with two associated landing pads.
The three Wraiths were delayed nearly an hour in that terminal while a small landspeeder rental booth struggled to find them a vehicle. Voort spent that time staring balefully at the hologram projected overhead, a tourism program extolling the virtues of the planet, especially the army base and the nearby city.
The hologram program, on infinite loop, confirmed again and again that there hadn’t been an army base on Vandor-3 prior to the Galactic Alliance regaining control of the Coruscant system at the end of the Yuuzhan Vong War. But when General Thaal decided to make Vandor-3 the system’s new base of army operations, the base—named for Borsk Fey’lya, Chief of State of the New Republic at the time of Coruscant’s fall—had sprung up and flourished rapidly.
Finally the attendant brought the Wraiths outside and presented them with their speeder, a huge, clanking, deep-bedded hauler, its cab spacious enough for the three of them. Finally they could escape. With Myri at the controls and Trey in the middle, they flew out of the spaceport, following the route map displayed on Trey’s datapad.
They all kept silent, Voort in irritation and the others sensing his mood, until they reached the first large sign leading from the spaceport, pointing in one direction toward Fey’lya Army Base and the other toward Ackbar City. Myri followed the second arrow. Voort offered the sign a rubbery noise of contempt.
“What is it with you?” Myri glowered across Trey at Voort. “You’ve been on the verge of a killing spree since we got here.”
“Fey’lya Army Base. Newest, best-funded army base out there.” Voort shook his head. “Named for Borsk Fey’lya, a conniving, self-centered son of a wampa if ever there was one. The fact that he should be honored like that …”
Myri shrugged. “So?” She returned her attention to the treetop-level signs that marked the airspeeder lane to their destination. The signs paralleled a paved ground-vehicle roadway beneath. All around them were grain fields being worked by humans, Gamorreans, droids, and self-guided farm machinery. Close to harvesttime, the fields reflected a brilliant yellow-white in the sunlight. “I was pretty young when it happened, but didn’t he die, you know, heroically? Blowing himself up with a bunch of Yuuzhan Vong warriors?”
“Some people live and die heroically and are never honored for it. Fey’lya managed one act of contrition, of redemption, at the end of a life of scheming. Myri, he made decisions that affected people in the field. Soldiers, spacers, spies. He would make choices based on self-interest and get people killed.”
“Oh.” She kept her voice mild. “Well, people remember what they choose to remember. I guess they choose to remember him blowing up the enemy as the capital fell.”
“I’m just saying …” Voort tamped down his irritation. He didn’t need to be venting it against some
one who hadn’t earned his anger. It wasn’t as though Myri were one of his students, after all. “I met Admiral Ackbar several times. I worked with his niece Jesmin. She was one of the first Wraiths, and died in combat.”
“I know; Jesmin Tainer is named for him.”
“I’m just saying that if they’re going to name a huge, over-funded, state-of-the-art army base for Fey’lya, the city named for Admiral Ackbar had better be glorious.”
They spotted the city from a couple of kilometers off. A broad brown patch in the midst of glowing white-and-yellow fields, it was heralded by a sign reading ACKBAR CITY. MAXIMUM AIRSPEEDER ALTITUDE SIX METERS.
“You have got to be kidding.” Grudgingly, Myri brought the speeder’s altitude down to the legal limit.
Then they reached the outskirts, a strip of dusty ground bordering a haphazard accumulation of buildings, mostly sheet durasteel bolted onto metal frames, set into permacrete foundations, and painted in a variety of dull colors. Some of those coatings of paint, beaten upon by a few years of summertime sun, were beginning to crack and peel. Some streets were paved, others covered in a rough coating of gravel, others hard-packed soil.
Myri scanned their surroundings as she piloted. When she spoke, her voice was glum. “There’s nothing else flying even at this altitude. Going to landspeeder mode.” She dropped altitude to a mere meter off the ground. When they passed dirt-topped cross-streets and alleys, their repulsors kicked up great clouds of brown dust. Civilians on the pedestrian walkways shouted and made rude gestures at them. “You win, Voort. I’m prepared to hate this place.”
“Maybe it gets better farther in.” Trey’s tone was mild, more conciliatory. “Hey, that’s better.” He pointed through the forward viewscreen.
Myri and Voort looked in that direction. All Voort could see was a business, perhaps more gaudily painted than the others, a two-story dome whose marquee sign announced it as EAT’S.
Voort glowered. “Unless the owner is named Eat, the apostrophe is superfluous. I’m inclined to beat up the owner for bad grammar. Why, Trey, is that better?”
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