Piggy spent a moment fishing several items of gear from the murky fluid in his bucket. He left mop and bucket behind and headed back to the tower.
The guard on duty didn’t look up as Piggy entered. “You done?”
“No, you idiot, I’m just getting started.”
The guard looked at him, astonished to hear a humanlike voice emerging from a Gamorrean mouth. He still wore that surprised expression when Piggy raised his compact blaster pistol and put a stun bolt into his chest.
It took only a couple of minutes to make the walk, balancing precariously, from Tower Three to Tower Two and repeat the process with the guard there.
Back at his bucket, he tore open the container that kept his rope dry. At one end was a container of quick-acting adhesive. He pressed a length of rope to the wall top and, with a small vibroblade, cut the bag. Adhesive ran down across rope and wall. The stuff began to heat up as it made contact with the oxygen in the air, cooking into a hard surface.
Piggy counted off three minutes, keeping his eyes open for anyone returning to the tables or the towers. No one did. He tossed the remainder of the length of rope down the outside of the wall. Within seconds it went taut.
A furry hand crested the wall top, then Runt pulled himself up. “You took long enough.”
“The martinet with the cleanliness fetish didn’t take his break until late.”
Next up was Shalla, grinning with good cheer. Like Runt, she was mostly garbed in clingy black material. Piggy gave her a hand up to the top of the wall.
Runt took the rope in both hands and began hauling. It was obvious he was pulling up a tremendous weight, and Piggy winced as he heard the load occasionally rub against the wall exterior. Then a large woven basket filled with durable cloth bags came into view. He helped Shalla maneuver it as Runt pulled it the rest of the way up.
In minutes they were down at ground level, inside the base of Tower Three, each laden with a cloth bag. Runt’s was largest.
While Runt peered out the window in the armored door, Shalla leaned over to whisper in Piggy’s ear. “I took the promotion.”
“Oh, no.” Piggy let his shoulders sag. “I thought you were going to be with us forever.”
“It has been forever. Twelve years. Next week, I become an investigative officer. No more beating people up.”
“But you’re so good at it.”
“Aww.” She gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Empire’s on the verge of surrendering, Piggy. Everything’s going to change anyway. I might as well take the opportunity. Start a new stage in my life.”
“It won’t be as much fun.”
Runt glared back over his shoulder. “Will you two be quiet? This is still a mission. Oh, and there’s somebody coming.”
“Mine.” Shalla shook as if seized in the grip of a massive shiver, but Piggy knew she was merely loosening up. Runt withdrew up the metal stairs. Piggy took a couple of steps back to the foot of the stairs and raised his hands as if surrendering.
When the door slid open, the trooper who’d activated it—dressed in an enlisted man’s uniform identical to those of the guards Piggy had shot and holding a tray with half a dozen cups of steaming caf on it—stared blankly at Piggy. “Hey. What are you up to?”
Shalla stepped out of the shadows and hit him low.
Piggy didn’t even bother to try to save the caf. He lunged and hit the door-closing button. The door snapped shut before the cups hit, clattering all across the floor.
By that point Shalla had thrown her second blow, unnecessary as it might have been. Runt descended, hefted the unconscious man, and carried him upstairs to deposit him beside the first.
The three Wraiths crept around the bottom of the wall and entered the scientific section. Shalla, a dozen meters in front of the others, overpowered a pair of civilian scientists, one-punched an on-duty guard at the next hallway intersection, kicked a naval captain in the throat just outside the main computer laboratory.
Piggy shook his head, baffled. “How can she give this up? She enjoys her work so.” He watched as Shalla slid silently into the computer lab.
Runt nodded. “My spy agrees with you. But my family man says, how can I have a family this way? Perhaps she has a family woman in her. My pacifist says, for all the good I’m accomplishing, all I do is hurt people. Perhaps she has a pacifist in her. The self in you who is used most gets tired, Piggy. The selves of you who are used least get restless.”
Shalla stuck her head out the doorway and waved them forward.
In the computer center, Piggy sat at the main console and began entering the code and command sequences Face had given him. The console obligingly transmitted them to faraway sensor facilities.
Soon enough, each of them—orbital deep-space scanners, stellar light harvesters and interpreters, comm-frequency listening posts—would begin to experience malfunctions. Some would transmit disinformation to the naval High Command Center, under Admiral Pellaeon’s indirect control. Some would initiate self-destruct sequences. Some would shut down all transmissions and reposition themselves, burning all their fuel in ultimately successful efforts to fly into the nearest sun.
Yes, the war was all but over. But until it was completely over, the armed forces and New Republic Intelligence had their jobs to do.
Runt headed downstairs with his huge payload of explosives.
Piggy turned to Shalla again. “It won’t be the same without you.”
She gave him a sad smile. “Every time someone leaves, you say it won’t be the same. But it might be if you’d figure out how to get close to the new Wraiths. Piggy, will anyone be there with you at the end?”
From a kilometer away, they watched Mulvar Sensor Station go up.
The entire station didn’t blow. Runt had placed his explosives very precisely, just as Kell had taught him to. The detonation rose from meters deep in the ground, obliterated the laboratory building, collapsed one section of outer wall, and damaged the motor pool. There were probably some deaths, but as few as possible.
Shalla turned to Piggy. “Voort. Voort.”
“Since when am I Voort to you?”
She reached over to shake him. “Voort.”
ABOARD THE CONCUSSOR, OUTER RIM TERRITORIES
44 ABY (Today)
Voort came awake gradually, realizing that he’d fallen asleep in the navigator’s chair, that Bhindi was shaking him.
It was her voice, not Shalla’s. “Voort.”
“Sorry.” He blinked at her. “I fell asleep.”
“Turn on your implant—I can barely understand you.”
He did. “I regret to confess that I fell asleep at my station. It is your duty to relieve me of duty and confine me to quarters.”
She laughed. “You wish.” She sat in the captain’s chair. “What were you dreaming? You were twitching like a battle dog.”
He looked out the forward viewport. It showed starfield rather than the blur of hyperspace. They waited, light-years from any sun, for Turman, Scut, and Jesmin to return from the smugglers’ station. The captured Concussor crew were already cooling their heels on the habitable moon of a distant gas giant. Most of the ship’s food and water stores were there with them.
Voort took a few moments to answer. “It doesn’t matter what I was dreaming. It just makes me understand, the roles are always the same. Only the faces get replaced.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“The strongman. The actor. The technician. The hand-to-hand combat expert. The explosives expert. Sometimes the roles get broken into pieces, recombined, handed off, inherited. But they’re always there, surviving the departure or disappearance or death of whoever embodied them.”
“It’s clear that it’s a bad idea for you to stay awake for sixty hours straight. It turns you into a melancholy philosopher.”
A blinking light on the control board drew Voort’s eye. “The shuttle’s transponder signal just popped up. They’re back.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ACKBAR CITY, VANDOR-3
Myri nursed her first drink, a weak fizz-and-brandy, and looked around the chamber from her perch at the bar.
Things weren’t really under way yet. Troopers at the army base were just now changing shift, and those with leave to go into Ackbar City were heading for the sanisteams, putting on fresh clothes, plotting their strategies for the evening. So the bar was comparatively quiet, expectant.
Here at Jokko Haning’s Emporium, a grandiose name for a decidedly plain drinking and dancing establishment, the locals were planning their own strategies. Myri counted twenty locals who clearly intended to attract the eyes of troopers for the eventual purpose of marriage and escape from Vandor-3—nesters, they were called in the local parlance. Six were men, fourteen women, and Myri was dressed and in character as woman number fifteen.
Nesters were not the only locals in the taproom with predatory ambitions. Myri spotted a handful of men and women whose body language suggested they had less binding affections available for rent. A spindly droid—a converted medical droid painted the exact hue of a good dark beer—stood behind the bar washing tumblers and transparent mugs. Two cocktail servers in minimal-coverage garments—one was a Wookiee female who, Myri thought, looked decidedly odd in her serving outfit—were not yet hurrying or working hard as they kept the early-evening crowd supplied with drinks. A four-armed green-furred musician from who-knew-where, a tip jar prominently displayed atop his upright keyboard rig, cracked four sets of knuckles simultaneously. An overweight, gray-haired human man at a table by himself straightened and re-straightened a short stack of colorful flimsi printouts; Myri could see the text and graphics on the top page showing lush green countryside properties.
She snorted. A land agent, anxious to sell cheap acreage to troopers foolish enough to consider staying on this planet. Perhaps he’d have some success here for the sheer audacity of offering a product so very different from the others.
A man, human, settled onto the stool next to Myri’s and turned toward her. “I’ve seen you before.” He was lean, in shape, his features almost pretty, his head capped by black curls that stirred under the flow of cool air from the vent overhead. He wore good attract-the-eye dancing clothes, black pants and a V-necked tunic that glittered with tiny white speckles, like a monochromatic starfield. He looked to be in his twenties, like most of the other nesters in the bar.
“Really?” Myri sipped her drink. She knew the answer was no, that this was just a conversational ploy. Each time she’d gone out to gather intelligence, especially to a crowded nester bar, she’d been someone different. Tonight her hair was pure white, obviously a dyed affectation, and her skin as dark as ebony.
The man nodded. “Sure. But two nights ago you had red hair and amazing freckles.”
Fierfek. He had seen her before, and somehow he had recognized her despite her new disguise. But she affected disinterest. “I like different looks. Why are you talking to me? Nesters don’t congregate. Except when it’s girls looking out for one another.”
He lowered his voice, tried to sound more dramatic. “Maybe I’m not a nester. Maybe I’m with Galactic Alliance Security, tracking down the Quad-Linked Militant Pacifists.”
Suddenly Myri was glad for her temporary dark coloration. She was certain that she was successfully keeping surprise—and alarm—off her face. But her face felt warm.
She was blushing, blast it, reacting emotionally to an unexpected confrontation.
She giggled as if he’d said something silly. That gave her a second to run through a mental checklist. Hold-out blaster in its waistband holster, right at her spine under the frilly white top she wore. Vibroknife against her left calf under matching pants and white boots. The tumbler in her hand was thin transparisteel, not glass, so she couldn’t shatter it and drive it into the man’s neck if she needed to.
Backup … she had none.
She grinned conspiratorially at the man. “I’m not with them,” she told him, keeping all worry from her voice. “I’m a freelancer. I lure men to their doom and leave their bodies in ridiculous poses.”
“I thought that was you.” He saw that the bartender was momentarily unoccupied and waved. “Sledgehammer, please.” He turned back, extended a hand. “Kirdoff.”
She shook it. His hand was soft, uncallused. Not common for a nester male, most of whom made their livings as industrial laborers or farmers. “Rima.”
“Is red and freckles your real look?”
“Nature hasn’t touched my hair since I was sixteen. And my complexion is flawless. Sorry.”
“Well, the Fey’lya Base boys love that. You’ll do great.” He received his drink, rolling a credcoin to the droid in return. He raised his glass to Myri in a salute. “Good luck, Rima.”
“You, too.”
She watched him cross the room and slide into a dimly lit booth. She tried not to show on her face the fact that her stomach was suddenly churning.
If he actually was some sort of investigator, leaving now was the absolute worst thing she could do. In fact, if she was suspected of something, she might be under surveillance by multiple agents, and they could trade off in shadowing her, making it fiendishly difficult to spot them.
No, she had to stay here for the evening and go through the routine of flirting, drinking, dancing, teasing, talking about army life in the hope that some useful fact would spill out during an unguarded moment … and then letting the dirty-minded, clean-skinned trooper boy know that she had marriage on her mind. Marriage above everything.
Then there would be a reaction. Disappointment, reinvigorated attempts at persuasion, anger, maybe even assault. The reaction she dreaded most was eager acceptance. We can get married tonight. I know a place.
And all this, with her stomach roiling because of what might have been nothing but a polite inquiry by a slightly atypical nester boy.
She sighed, waved down the bartender, and ordered a stomach-settling powder.
She accepted a drink invitation from the first soldier who asked her, a lean sergeant with creases at the corners of his eyes. She got him talking about his work as a drill instructor and his home on Commenor. At a crucial moment in the conversation, she asked a leading question and listened to his first couple of wistful comments about his wife and kids.
Then he realized what he’d done and looked up guiltily.
She gave him a not-unsympathetic smile. “I think we’re here for different things.”
He shrugged. “Same thing, I guess. I want something from you. You want something from me. So we try to get the other to offer it. We leave out facts to accomplish that. Have you told me all the strikes against you?”
“There are too many to list.” She raised her glass to him, a toast. “Here’s to being goal-oriented. Good night, Sergeant.”
There. Anyone watching her would see that she’d been through the nester’s routine of flirting, conversing, and deciding. She could leave now and not be conspicuous. She used the trooper’s departure as excuse enough to escape the possible scrutiny of Kirdoff and unseen observers. But another trooper followed her out the front doors—a human man, younger and taller than the sergeant, with the Pop-Dog tooth design on his collar. His tone was matter-of-fact. “I’ll walk you home.” He fell in step beside her.
“I actually know the way. Forget what you’ve heard about local girls—some of us have more than two brain cells to rub together.”
He laughed. It was a strange, artificial noise, like something just learned by a nonhuman who’d only ever heard laughter on a holodrama. “You don’t understand. I wasn’t asking.” Now there was an undertone of menace to his voice.
“Ah.” She forced her voice to remain steady. “Do you know who I am?”
“Not yet.”
“So, as a prelude to an assault, this is basically a random one. A privileged-class serviceman who imagines that he’s an alpha male seizing what he wants, preying on a local population that’s been conditioned to accept this beh
avior.”
“A university girl. I hate university girls.” The dark tone in his voice grew more intense. “I think it’s time for you to shut up.”
Myri took her bearings. The walkway they were on was clear of other pedestrians for twenty meters ahead and behind.
She stopped at the opening to a dark, narrow gap between buildings and pointed up the walkway. “You’re going that way—” She pointed into the gap. “I’m going this way. Good night, Poop-Dog.” She immediately walked into the darkness.
He caught up with her after three steps, seized her arm, and swung her around to slam her into the side of a building. She couldn’t see his features in the deep shadow, but his voice was suddenly full of anger. He jabbed a forefinger at her. “You do not insult the—”
She put one hand on the back of his and seized his index finger with her other hand. She bent his finger up, a sudden, all-out effort, and bones snapped.
He started to look at his stricken hand, started to make a pained noise, but she immediately drew her blaster, thumbed its side switch to make sure it was still set on stun, and fired into his stomach. The stun bolt briefly illuminated the alley and his shocked expression. Then he fell.
She looked down at him and holstered her weapon. “Sorry, Army. My heart belongs to Starfighter Command.” Then she stepped over him and returned to the street.
It took her quite a while to get home. She took a circuitous route, making sure she was not being followed. In another dark alley, sure she was not being watched, she discarded her wig and outer garments, shoving them deep into a waste bin. She broke the seal on a packet, half the size of a deck of cards, that was always to be found in her footwear, and unfolded its brown polyfilm contents out into a voluminous hooded robe. She left the alley a different woman—hair black, garment brown, feet bare.
There were more trooper patrols out on the streets, joined by Pop-Dog patrols, as she traveled the rest of the way to the Wraiths’ rented shop. Several of them looked at her as she passed, but none spoke to or followed her. She entered the office building sure she was in the clear.
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