sense of satisfaction. "They banned me from the Imperial Engineering
Academy. They laughed at me. Well, does this look like the work of a
madman to you?"
Brixie stared hard at the device. Cutter looked up at her, perhaps
sensing the thoughts crossing her mind. A crooked little smile formed
across his lips.
"Don't bother answering that."
A crashing sound from the nearby bushes startled all of them into
silence. Kempo growled over to them, "Keep down. Someone just set off
one of my door bells."
Tigereye pulled out a set of macrobinoculars. Keeping his view on the
trail they had just come from, he waited for several long moments.
He saw a brief movement and focused. Through the viewfinder, he saw a
scaly head sniffing the ground. Moving the binocs slowly, he finally
caught the rider wearing a camosuit to blend against the jungle
backdrop. The rider was clenching a long force pike in his free hand
as he examined Kempo's "door bell," a tree limb tied across the trail
with thin cord.
"What is it?" Kempo whispered.
"Looks like a tracker. Riding some kind of two-legged reptoid."
Kempo used the targeting sight on his stormtrooper rifle to watch the
newcomer.
"I see him now. Another might be close by," he whispered.
"Another won't make any difference. All it takes is one report to
bring the whole slaver camp down on our heads."
"Those odds are good enough for me." Kempo un-snapped the scabbard on
his back and handed Brixie a very sharp vibrocutlass, its blade and
edges blackened for
military duty. She dubiously took the weapon in
her hands.
"What's this for?"
"You get to watch my back for a change. I've had enough of this mud
crawl." Kempo started running toward the trees. "The rest of you take
down the fence.
I'll handle the bad guys!"
"Kempo! I didn't . . ." Tigereye snarled at him just as the
pathfinder took off. Brixie and Cutter looked to him for guidance.
"Don't just sit there! Hugo, disarm the fence. Brixie, you cover
him!" No sooner had he said that when he too had disappeared through
the thick growth.
Kempo dropped to one knee as he sprang through the trees, startling the
tracker and his mount. He fired the blaster rifle at short range, but
missed the rider.
The rider spurred the trained reptoid and. charged.
The creature snapped at the open air just by his head, then tried to
cleave him open with serrated feet claws.
Kempo fired back, his stolen set of Imperial scout armor taking the
brunt of the beast's charge as it sent him sprawling. The impact
knocked the blaster rifle out of his hands.
Poised above him, the tracker raised his force pike to strike. A
howling, fur-covered missile burst from the trees, turning the
tracker's attention away. Sully Tigereye crashed against both tracker
and beast, his vibro-ax swinging and connecting against the creature's
thick hide. The reptoid screamed from the terrible injury and bolted
away, carrying its rider reluctantly along with it. With the tracker's
back turned to them now, Kempo picked up his fallen weapon and fired.
A screaming burst of energy struck the tracker square in the back,
killing him before he struck the ground. The injured reptoid, now
riderless, kept on crashing loudly away through the foliage.
Tigereye brandished his vibro-ax at Kempo.
"I should have let that thing take a bite out of you, if only to teach
you a lesson."
"I was doing just fine before you showed up."
"Let me guess--you had him exactly where you wanted him," the Trunsk
snorted as he caught his breath.
"Check the body. If we're lucky, he didn't have a chance to report
in."
"We're never that lucky," Kempo retorted as he headed over to the body
of the dead tracker.
Hugo got to his feet, holding up the contraption. Brixie looked on,
eyeing him and his spontaneous invention dubiously.
He began to move slowly toward the sensor mast, fumbling for the power
switches that would activate the united parts. He suddenly stopped in
his tracks.
"What's wrong?" Brixie half-whispered to him, trying to watch him and
their surroundings at the same time.
"Something about this type of sensor mast."
He took another step. A whine came from the ' datapad's power
coupling. The device was not used to handling the power requirements
of the other components.
The two and a half meter tall mast loomed over his head as he slowly
approached. An expression of recognition came over Cutter. He stopped
in his tracks, making quick adjustments to the components in his
hands.
"Now I remember!"
"Remember what?" Brixie sputtered: An intense beeping came from Hugo's
contraption. Before Brixie's eyes, an alternating pattern of light
began to phase from the sensor mast. She gasped as the solid-looking
ground before their feet suddenly evaporated, exposing a cargo
speeder-sized ditch trap. Explosives and mines lay at the bottom of
the excavated pit. Hugo smirked.
"A holographic trap. Very sneaky. Very expensive.
These slavers have better security than I thought. Did you
see how I
set the multiphase emitter to turn off the hologram?"
Brixie had been watching Hugo so intently that she almost did not hear
the sound of dead leaves and underbrush being crushed behind her.
She spun around, Kempo's vibrocutlass in her hands. A second tracker
and his reptoid leered at her like predators about to pounce.
A threatening rumble echoed in the sharp-toothed beast's throat as the
tracker leveled the point of his force pike at Brixie's throat.
"Ah, Hugo?" she gulped.
The sound of a female scream cut through the jungle air like the edge
of Sully Tigereye's polished vibro-ax. The Trunsk plunged through the
jungle, back toward the sensor perimeter.
Tigereye stumbled into a clearing in time to see Lex Kempo drop from
the trees and fall on the tracker. The reptoid bucked underneath them
as the pathfinder slapped a now familiar-looking organism on the
tracker's head. The tracker, his eyes completely covered by the filmy
creature, knocked Kempo off as he swung the force pike wildly.
The whole scene looked completely ridiculous until the blinded tracker
spurred the reptoid forward. A shot from Tigereye's own heavy blaster
brought the tracker down, but the creature still charged into and over
a shrieking Brixie.
"Brixie!" Tigereye bellowed, leaping forward.
The beast suddenly became quiet and rolled away from the startled girl
in a heap--Kempo's vibrocutlass buried up to its hilt in its scaly
chest. She looked more terrified than hurt as Tigereye ran up to
her.
"Are you okay?"
She gulped once and fought to bring her fear under control.
"Yes yes I'm fine."
Even Cutter was stunned as he looked up at the tree branch where Kempo
had jumped from.
"And
I thought I was crazy," he muttered.
Kempo had gotten to his feet. Brixie watched him for some time, trying
to think of some way to thank him without sounding petty.
Shrugging the incident away, the pathfinder turned his back to her and
retrieved his vibrocutlass. He then moved to the body of the fallen
tracker, switching off his comlink. Exhaling hard, Brixie collected
her medkit and gear, not desiring to look on the scene anymore.
In the meantime, Cutter and Tigereye had turned their attention to the
disarmed sensor mast and the exposed pit trap.
"Can we go around it?" Tigereye had exchanged his vibro-ax for the map
locator. Cutter triumphantly held up his device.
"No problem. Those slavers are probably scratching their heads,
wondering how we did it."
"If the slavers stick around long enough to wonder."
Tigereye interjected. "We have only one shot at this.
Karazak slavers aren't stupid. Once they figure out we bypassed their
perimeter, they will probably leave their paid guns behind to pick us
off while they jump planet with their valuables--including the
children."
"Sully," Brixie slung a medical pack over her shoulder.
"Before we go any further with this, I have to know who these children
are. The least you can do is tell us why their lives are more
important than ours."
"The kid's right," Kempo added as he sheathed the vibrocutlass in its
carrier. "I'm deliberately jumping out of perfectly good trees for
these pups. You owe us that much."
Tigereye sighed. "They're the children of the ambassador to Cantras
Gola."
"Cantras Gola is a corporate world." Brixie found herself getting
angry. "An Alignment world. What's so important about that?"
"Everything," Tigereye silenced her. "Kempo is right, Brixie.
We're soldiers. We don't ask questions. We supply answers. With an
entire corporate world about to sway over to the New Republic, and the
New Republic unable to openly confront the Pentastar Alignment, you
need someone else to fight the battle. We are that someone else."
"But I thought the reason why the Red Moons broke away from the New
Republic was because the New Republic wasn't doing enough. Now we're
fighting their battles for them!"
"Helping the New Republic win Cantras Gola helps everyone.
Like it or not, returning these kids alive to the Cantras Gola
ambassador is crucial. We need to take that slaver ship before it gets
away. It's the only way to save those kids and for us to get off this
planet. Now are there more questions from the ranks?"
The four of them looked at each other, the faint odor of ozone from
blaster fire still in the air around them.
"I suppose it's too late to request a transfer?" Kempo remarked.
The longer he waited, the more Greezim Trentacal nervously paced about
the deluxe stateroom aboard Atron's Mistress. The trackers sent out to
investigate the crashed freighter's missing escape pod had not reported
in for several hours. There was more to the mysterious, downed vessel
than even Vex had anticipated.
"They must be soldiers. Or worse. Mercenaries." He shuddered at the
thought. The incentive of credits and personal fortune that drove
beings to enslave other beings also drove them to fight for foolish
causes.
"Well?" He looked to Vex, still poised like a dark statue beside the
stateroom's viewports. He dropped the comlink from his ear.
"The tracker team is still not responding. In addition,
one of the
perimeter sensors seems to have malfunctioned, although I do not know
why yet."
"They're here!" Trentacal put a hand over his mouth, completely
alarmed now. "Lords of Atron! They're here already! Give the order
to debark. Immediately!"
"As I pointed out earlier," the Defel spoke quietly but firmly, "we
have not loaded the latest shipment of slaves." He gestured at the
large prefabricated building that served as a temporary clearing-house
for the newest arrivals. "They have to be tagged and medically
scanned.
Many slaves from this shipment are to be sold to the Hutts. You know
how displeased the Hutts become when they are sent inferior wares."
"You can medically scan them after they have been loaded. Do as I
command!"
Vex's expression did not change. He bowed slightly.
"I will give the order personally, master. We shall depart
immediately."
Trentacal rushed out of the stateroom to his own sleeping quarters.
The Defel wraith looked upon the ambassador's children, still chained
to the cabin wall. Expressions laden with fear and loathing gazed back
up at him. The girl, several years older than her brother, tried to
protectively shield him from Vex's penetrating, awful stare.
Suddenly, the wraith was gone. The girl blinked, uncertain whether or
not to believe her eyes. She had not imagined the disappearance.
Abruptly, the cabin door bolts clanged solidly shut, locking them in
darkness again. Her brother whimpered. She held him a little tighter,
silently wondering what would become of them.
Something touched her shoulder. The girl gasped loudly, if only long
enough for a hand to clamp down over her mouth. She recognized the
pained expression of Trentacal's favorite slave girl. How long had she
been hiding here, waiting for Vex to leave? The slave pressed a key
into her hand and made a gesture with her finger to her lips.
Before she could say a word of thanks, the door to
Trentacal's private chamber was suddenly shoved aside, the slave master's bulky outline
filling the doorway. His face was masked in shadow.
"What's going on in here?"
Lying prone in the foliage ahead of the assault team, Lex Kempo aimed
the macrobinoculars at the clearing in the jungle growth before him.
"What do you see?" 'Brixie whispered beside him.
The slaver camp consisted of several watchtowers, a few prefabricated
buildings and a currently vacant landing pad for a snubfighter-sized
craft. In the middle of the camp, the jungle's heavy humus had been
pressure-formed flat to provide room for the large cargo transport
situated there. Beings of all origins were being rushed into the ship,
which was not a good sign.
Kempo chewed slowly on a bit of protein survival wafer as he continued
to sight the camp through the binocs.
"Looks like we're outgunned maybe seven to one. There are four
watchtowers armed with blaster cannons: two close to us, two past the
freighter. The camp is crawling with thugs. See that bunker right
beside the ship? Looks like their command center. All sensors,
communications and defensive controls are probably housed in there."
"Are those hatches on the side?"
Kempo frowned as he zoomed the binoculars. "You've got laser eyes,
kid. Those are definitely gun ports. It doesn't matter, that bunker
might as well be half a light year away. We'll get cut down before we
even reach the freighter."
"Not if I can keep them occupied," Cutter's voice murmured behind
> them.
Kempo and Brixie looked around in unison at Cutter and his bag of magic
tricks. In his hands he had one of the oddly concave Mesonics
focalized explosives, the kind used to demolish structures. Squatting
beside Hugo, Sully Tigereye made a hand gesture, fingers spread open
wide
which he turned into a fist. Kempo snorted derisively, but still nodded in agreement. Confused, Brixie poked at Kempo.
"I'm not familiar with that hand signal," she whispered to him.
"What does it mean?"
The pathfinder smiled grimly as he switched the safety off on the
grenade launcher mounted to his storm-trooper blaster rifle.
"It means hang on to your pretty head. We're about to make some
noise."
The slave girl lunged at Trentacal, a slender metal object in her
hands. Despite his size, the slave master could move quickly if he
wanted to. In seconds, he had the girl's arms pinned. She strained
silently against his grip, trying to bite his hands. Trentacal held
Tales From The Empire Page 25