by Timothy Zahn
“That’s handy.” Solo looked at Zerba. “You think you can get us a keycard?”
Zerba puffed contemptuously. “With guests walking in and out all the time? In my sleep.”
“Good,” Solo said. “Rachele, I want you to go back to the suite and watch Villachor’s compound. Let us know when the Falleen and his convoy arrive and when they leave.”
“Sounds like I get the boring duty,” Rachele said.
“Don’t worry, I’ve got another job that should keep you busy,” Solo assured her. “Winter, Eanjer, you go with her. Chewie, you and Lando stay here with Bink and Tavia. Zerba, Kell, Dozer—you’re with me.”
“I’d like to stay here instead of going with Rachele, if I may,” Winter spoke up.
“Any particular reason?” Solo asked.
“As I said earlier, I know a fair amount about security systems.” Winter inclined her head toward Bink. “Not as much as Bink and Tavia do, of course. But three sets of eyes are better than two, and I might spot something they missed.”
Solo looked at Bink and raised his eyebrows in silent question.
“It’s fine with me,” Bink said, eyeing Winter. The white-haired woman was right about the correlation between success and the number of knowledgeable eyes on the scene.
Besides, Bink didn’t like working with enigmatic people. Keeping Winter here might give her an opportunity to get a better feel for her.
“Okay, then,” Solo said. “Chewie, Lando—keep an eye out for trouble. Everyone else, we’ve got places to go. Let’s get to them.”
The sky had darkened to full night, though the streets and buildings of Iltarr City were as bright as ever.
Which, Winter thought as she stood well back from the window, could be a problem.
Not that Bink in full camo gear was particularly easy to see. In fact, even knowing where she was, Winter had a hard time keeping track of her position. Most of the time she was pressed close to one of the tall trees out there, the outfit she’d chosen blending almost perfectly with the spots and shadows of the city’s lighting. It was only when she was swinging between the trees that she was really noticeable, and those moments passed quickly.
But the moments were still there. And there was something about the brightness of city lights combined with the instinctive fear of the night that made that combination particularly dangerous.
“Seems to be doing all right,” Tavia murmured from her side.
Winter nodded. Outwardly Tavia was as cool as Bink had been as she slipped out the window and began her trek around the edges of the park. But beneath the calm exterior, Tavia was worried about her sister. Winter could see it in the other woman’s anxious glances out the window, in the silent drumming of her fingers, and in her slight back-and-forth rocking even when she was trying to stand still.
The others could see it, too. Across the room, Chewie rumbled soothingly, and Lando looked up from his datapad. “She’ll be fine,” he assured Tavia. “She’s done this a thousand times.”
“I know,” Tavia said tightly. “But usually I’m right there with her. Not with her, but—you know what I mean. Wired in and watching to make sure it goes all right.” She shook her head. “I feel helpless just watching. Helpless and useless.”
“You two been doing this long?” Winter asked.
“Since we were ten,” Tavia said. “Not the ghost burglar stuff, not at first. But the whole life-on-the-fringe thing.” She looked sideways at Winter. “We didn’t have a choice,” she added, a defensive edge in her voice. “Our father was killed in the Clone Wars, and Mom died a few years later. We had no other relatives and no friends. It was this or starve to death.”
“Luckily, Bink proved to have some hidden talents in the field,” Lando murmured.
Winter eyed Tavia, noting the tightness around her mouth. “And she also discovered she liked it?”
Tavia lowered her gaze. “Why shouldn’t she?” she said. “Everyone likes doing the things they’re good at.” She smiled wanly at Winter. “I’m sure you do, too.”
“I suppose,” Winter said, looking back toward the window. There was a flicker of movement, and Bink had made it one more tree toward her goal.
Yes, Winter enjoyed her job. Or at least she had once.
But there was enjoyment, and there was passion, and there was duty. Right now, all Winter had left was duty. Duty, and a simmering hatred she didn’t want and couldn’t afford to feel.
Alderaan. Her home, her friends, a lifetime of memories. All of it, all of them, gone.
A haze of red flowed across her vision, flickering with a thousand faces she couldn’t forget and a million memories that would now forever be stained with fire and blood. Princess Leia and the other leaders of the Rebel Alliance had always been in awe of Winter’s perfect memory, of her ability to memorize shipping manifests with a glance and reproduce details of the most complex schematics or transfer operations without effort. None of them had truly grasped the horrible downside of being unable to forget anything.
Long ago, Winter had occasionally tried explaining the reality of her gift to some of the people around her. Now she no longer even made the effort.
The one exception to that rule was Leia. The Princess had enough troubling memories of her own that she might actually understand and appreciate Winter’s burden.
If she was still alive.
More images flicked across Winter’s indelible memory, pictures and events of all the times she and Leia had worked or played or gotten into trouble with Leia’s father, Bail, while they were growing up together.
Had Leia been on Alderaan when that insane monster Tarkin had destroyed it? That was the crucial, horrible question. Leia had been in the area around that time, but she might have been sent on some other mission before her world was destroyed. Winter desperately needed to know the truth, one way or the other, so that she could either get some relief or else add Leia’s face to the collection of bloodstained images in her mind. For her, uncertainty was a killer, an enemy that sapped focus, strength, and determination.
Only Winter had no way of finding the truth. All she knew was that Alderaan was gone, that there were rumors the Death Star was gone, and that neither the Imperials nor the Alliance had quite figured out how they should react to the doubly unexpected situation.
But who had died and who had lived, Winter had no way of knowing. The people she worked with in Procurement had been deliberately isolated from the Alliance command structure and all direct lines of communication. Until some kind of official word came down from Imperial Center, or until she received the less official but usually more accurate information from Alliance HQ, all Winter could do was hope, worry, and pray.
And continue to do the job she’d been given. For now, that meant maintaining her cover as a smuggler’s assistant and doing whatever Mazzic told her to do. Even if the task had nothing to do with bringing down the Empire she had learned to despise.
By the time Rachele reported that the three-landspeeder convoy had once again left Marblewood, Bink had reached the far corner of the park. By the time Han reported from outside the Lulina Crown that the convoy had arrived, she was two trees away from her target window.
She was resting more or less comfortably in her chosen tree, three meters back from the window, when the lights in the suite came on and the Falleen they’d seen earlier strode back into the room.
“Don’t worry, she’ll pull it off.” Lando’s voice came softly from behind her.
Winter looked around. He’d come up from the other end of the room and was standing between her and Tavia. Closer than he needed to be, far closer than Winter liked strangers getting.
But his eyes weren’t on her. They were on the windows across the park. “I’ve seen her pull off crazier stunts than this,” he continued. “Like I said before, she has talent.” He pulled his gaze back long enough to flash Winter a charming, slightly roguish smile. “Both of them do,” he amended, resting his hand on Tavia’s shoulder.
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“Yes,” Winter said, turning her own gaze back to the window. It was annoying, though hardly surprising, that Han had been smart enough to insist on the group sticking to first names. There were no fewer than fifteen Landos in the criminal databases she’d memorized over the years, most of those files unfortunately without any decent holos in them. Briefly, she wondered if this Lando was one of those fifteen or someone who hadn’t yet caught the Imperials’ attention.
The Falleen across the way had taken off his coat, revealing an expensive-looking thigh-length tunic beneath it. Winter studied his neck, hoping there would be a clan or loyalty tattoo somewhere that might give some clue to his identity or affiliation. Some groups of Falleen went in for that sort of thing.
But there was nothing, at least nothing she could see from her distance. The Falleen dropped his coat on a low table beside the room door, then reached into a hip pouch and pulled out an odd-looking datapad, setting it beside the coat. Hunching his shoulders once, as if shaking away the residual weight of the coat, he stepped to the safe and disappeared around its side.
Winter frowned at the datapad. Something about it seemed familiar.
Abruptly she stiffened. “Electrobinoculars,” she snapped, tearing her gaze from the datapad and looking wildly around. Where had the devices gotten to?
“Here,” Tavia said, pressing a set into her hand.
Winter jammed them to her eyes, her fingers keying in the focus control. The image settled down; then an alien hand appeared from the side and snatched the datapad out of her field of view. Before she could refocus, the Falleen had again disappeared around the side of the safe, taking the datapad with him.
“What is it?” Tavia asked tightly. “What’s wrong?”
“That datapad,” Winter said, lowering the electrobinoculars and looking over at the section of floor where Bink and Tavia had laid out their equipment. “I need a closer look to be sure. But if it’s what I think it is, we’ve got trouble.”
“But Bink can’t bring it here,” Tavia objected. “The power sensors—”
“I know,” Winter cut her off, thrusting the electrobinoculars back at her and hurrying over to the equipment. “I’ll have to go to her.”
“How?” Lando asked. “Bink has the only unpowered harness.”
“So I’ll have to improvise.” Winter picked up the powered grapple harness and gave it a quick assessment. If she removed the central framework, then unplugged the shoulder-mounted targeting rangefinder …
The Wookiee growled a question.
“It’s more than just important,” Winter said. “It’s absolutely vital.” She got a grip on the framework and glanced around for a knife—
And twitched back, startled, as the Wookiee stepped to her side and plucked the harness from her hands. Three seconds later, he’d pulled off the framework, the rangefinder, and a section of trim that she hadn’t realized was powered. He thrust it at her, gestured for her to put it on, and unlooped the bandoleer from his shoulder.
“You sure you know what you’re doing?” Lando asked. “That’s a long way.”
Chewie gave an impatient roar.
“Okay, okay,” Lando said hastily, holding up his hands, palms outward. “Tavia, get the window open.”
The light had gone out in the room across the way by the time they were ready. Chewie and Winter stood facing each other in the open window, Winter secured in her harness with the harness’s outer anchor straps wrapped securely around the Wookiee’s massive shoulders.
He looked down at her, murmured a last-chance question.
“I’m ready,” she said, nodding. He nodded back.
And an instant later, he leapt out of the window into the night air.
Winter gasped despite herself, her hands clutching reflexively at the hair around Chewie’s ribs. An elongated second later her grip was nearly jerked loose as his hands and feet slammed into the nearest tree. For another instant it felt like they were going to slide off and plummet to the park below. Then there was another jerk as the Wookiee somehow caught them. Winter started to take a deep, shuddering breath—
And with a shove and violent twist of his body, the Wookiee flung them away toward the next tree in line.
Winter had been wrong. She was not in any way ready for this.
But one of the side effects of a perfect memory was that she could quickly adjust to new experiences, especially repetitive ones. By the time they reached the end of their building and turned the corner she knew when to brace herself, when to grip her harness, and when to let herself go limp. She also knew exactly how many trees stood between them and Bink, which meant she was able to count down the number until the ordeal was over. Psychologically, knowing the end point helped immensely.
Even so, for most of the trip she kept her eyes tightly closed.
Bink saw them coming, of course. And it was quickly clear that she wasn’t happy about it. “What are you doing?” she demanded in a loud whisper as Chewie settled onto the final tree.
“The datapad in there,” Winter said, struggling to turn around in the strictures of the harness. Bink, she saw, had the outer window open and was in the process of cutting a small circular hole in the transparisteel barrier behind it. It was hard to tell from her angle, but it looked like she was most of the way through. “Did you see it?”
“Yeah, I saw it,” Bink said. “So what?”
“I need a closer look,” Winter said. “It’s important.”
Bink’s lip twisted, but she nodded reluctantly. “It better be,” she warned. “Okay. Give me two minutes after I’m inside, then you can come in. You can get her to the window, Chewie?”
The Wookiee growled an affirmative. “Fine,” Bink said. “Just don’t make any noise once you’re in there. And don’t break anything.” Turning around again, she got back to work on the window.
Winter had done a fair amount of breaking and entering during her years with the Rebel Alliance. But most of those sorties had been into low-security areas like foodstuff or spare-parts warehouses, and most of the time she’d had someone more experienced along to help. Never had she tried to break into a place with this kind of security.
Lando had been right. Bink definitely had a talent.
Carving a hole in the transparisteel barrier was only the first step. After that came the use of some gummy substance to get the circle out of its place. A pair of long probes slipped through the opening tweaked aside a pair of trackers, while a jumper cable on the end of an even longer probe bypassed some kind of detector Winter didn’t recognize.
Finally, when all the backup sensors and detectors had been stifled, confused, or distracted, one final probe tripped the release and swung the transparisteel plate out of the way. Getting a grip on the sill, Bink unhooked her harness from the adhesive anchors she’d fastened to the outside wall and climbed nimbly through the opening and into the room. She closed the window and transparisteel plate most of the way, flashed Winter a look, and slipped around the side of the big floor safe.
“How do we work this?” Winter murmured to Chewie.
In answer, he motioned toward the nearest branch. “I was afraid of that,” Winter said, wincing as she got a firm grip on the branch. Chewie waited until she was ready, then slipped the harness straps one at a time off his shoulders. Moving carefully and, for her, unusually awkwardly, she moved around and climbed onto his back, reaching over his shoulders and catching hold of the clumps of hair over his collarbones.
She’d read once that those were the safest and least painful ways to hold on to a Wookiee. Fervently, she hoped the author of that particular article hadn’t gotten it wrong.
Bink’s two-minute countdown ran down. Chewie rumbled a warning, then threw himself away from the tree toward the window. His hands caught the lower edge, and his body slammed into the side of the building with a jolt that nearly broke Winter’s grip.
Luckily, the Wookiee had already anticipated that danger. Even as she struggled to hold on,
he bent his knees and brought his feet up beneath her, giving her something to brace her own feet against. Waiting until she had resettled her grip, he bent his elbows and pulled them both face-level with the lower edge of the window.
Winter had a grip on the window and was starting to open it when, across the room, the door opened and a big, rough-looking man strode in.
She froze, knowing how horribly exposed she was, but also knowing that any movement would instantly catch the man’s eye. Chewie apparently knew that, too, and also froze. The man walked past the back of the safe to a pair of chairs flanking a small table, pulling out a datapad as he did so. He started to sit down, turning his back briefly to the window—
An instant later, Winter’s view was cut off as Chewie took advantage of the man’s turned back to drop them back down to a hanging position, where everything but his fingertips would be out of sight.
But she’d seen enough. The good news was that the man had clearly not been suspicious. The bad news was that he’d had the look of someone about to settle in for a while, either to read, do some work, or maybe just take a nap.
All of which would leave Bink trapped on the far side of the safe.
Winter craned her neck to look behind her. At this distance, and with the trees partially blocking her view, she couldn’t tell whether or not Tavia and Lando had spotted the problem. She could only hope fervently that they had.
And that they could come up with something to do about it.
“Got it,” Dozer acknowledged. Clicking off his comlink, he pulled open the stairwell door, exchanged nods with Zerba, and strode out onto the plush carpet and into the delicate scent pattern drifting through the Lulina Crown’s sixth-floor hallway.
And as he walked, he smiled tightly to himself. Calrissian might have the looks and the smile and the easy charm, and maybe that was all Solo wanted for this job. Or at least all he thought he wanted.
But Calrissian was nothing more than a smuggler and occasionally lucky gambler. Boosting ships was the job that took real con artist skills.