by Timothy Zahn
“I wouldn’t think of it,” the Falleen said coolly. He and Tavia were both looking at Bink now, Qazadi from the depths of his chair, Tavia over the low back of her couch. Qazadi was openly smiling, his eyes flicking between Bink and Tavia. Tavia’s expression, in contrast, was tense and frightened. “Now at last we have the solution to the puzzle,” Qazadi continued. “Very clever.” He held out a hand to Bink. “You, I take it, are the thief with the tracking dye on her hands?”
“Just don’t move,” Bink ordered. The adrenaline rush of the brief battle was fading, and as her brain started working again, she realized she had no idea what she was going to do next. Obviously she and Tavia couldn’t leave the same way Bink had arrived—all Qazadi had to do was saunter into the dining room, fire a few shots down the conduit, and call it a day.
But with the noisy war going on in the hallway, that way wouldn’t be an especially healthy direction to run either.
Unless the two women brought along a hostage. “On your feet,” she ordered Qazadi, stepping all the way into the room. The Falleen’s smile was positively radiant, she noted suddenly. Odd that she hadn’t picked up on that before. “You’re going out that door …”
She trailed off. The smile wasn’t just radiant—it was borderline saintly. Saintly, forgiving, loving—
And then, abruptly, she understood.
But it was too late. It was far too late.
Cursed kriffing Falleen pheromones.
“Please,” Qazadi invited, gesturing to the couch beside Tavia. “We have so very much to talk about. Master Villachor, Lord Aziel, and this.” He nodded toward a side table, where Winter’s fake cryodex was prominently displayed.
Bink looked at Tavia’s strained face. There was no hope there—her sister was as deep into Qazadi’s chemical spell as she was. Probably even deeper.
Bink had a blaster, ready in her hand. She’d already used it twice. Surely she could use it again.
Only she couldn’t. Even as her brain ordered her hand to raise the weapon and fire, her heart was ordering the hand to remain at her side.
And for once her heart was stronger.
Which meant it was over. She and Tavia were finished. So, probably, were the rest of Han’s team.
And as she sank down onto the couch beside her sister, it occurred to her that she’d just killed two living beings. For nothing.
There were still two Zeds frozen in front of the vault door, but the path was finally clear enough for Villachor to get to the keypad. He folded it out from the wall and punched in the access code, jabbing the keys so hard that Han found it slightly amazing that his fingers didn’t punch all the way through the pad. The door swung open, and Han craned his neck to look.
The safe had stopped near the center of the vault, the platform that normally carried it around the room now hovering motionlessly. The fold-down segment of the sphere that opened up into the Hijarna-stone cabinet in the middle was hanging wide open, and Han didn’t need his helmet’s audio enhancements to hear Villachor’s vicious curse as he saw that his safe had been breached. Right at the edge of Han’s vision, two security men were sliding down the syntherope line that Bink had left dangling, their blasters ready as they scanned the room. “Careful, sir,” one of them called toward the door. “Give us a moment to make sure it’s clear.”
Villachor ignored them. He gestured three of the armored guards forward, and as they strode into the vault, he pointed the other two back to Han, just in case they’d forgotten he was supposed to be taken into custody. Spinning back around, Villachor strode into the vault behind the three guards, Sheqoa and Villachor’s two usual bodyguards close beside him.
The two guards clumped toward Han, their massive hands resting warningly on their holstered blasters. Han reached his hands up to his head, just to show that he knew proper prisoner procedure.
And as his hand passed the helmet’s right cheek flange, he slipped a finger around to Bink’s trigger and gently pushed it forward.
With a final lunge and a crash of wood and stone, the airspeeder bashed out enough of the hallway’s side wall to open a path past the stalled vehicle. Giving the control a final shove, Lando bounced the vehicle through one last half meter of wall surface and got it in front of its downed partner.
And with that, they were finally ready to take on the other end of the target range. F-Webs came with built-in shield generators, but he would bet heavily that a shield designed to deflect small-arms fire wouldn’t do a bit of good against an armored airspeeder rocketing in on it at a hundred kilometers an hour.
He had started the airspeeder on its way, and the fire from the F-Web had suddenly intensified as Qazadi’s guards saw the armored black death coming at them, when Eanjer abruptly leapt up and charged after the roaring vehicle.
“Eanjer!” Lando shouted after him. “Get back here!”
But it was too late. Eanjer was off and running, his legs pumping with a strength and speed Lando wouldn’t have guessed the man had in him, pounding after the airspeeder like an Imperial Center bureaucrat trying to catch an airbus.
Lando hissed out a curse. He’d planned to keep the airspeeder right at the ceiling until the last second, presenting as much of the armored underside to the blasterfire as he could in hopes of protecting it from the same kind of lucky shot that had taken out the first one. But with Eanjer running like a maniac straight into the line of fire, that was no longer an option. Scowling, he dropped the vehicle nearly to the floor, moving its bulk into position to provide Eanjer with as much cover as possible.
And, of course, leaving the airspeeder more vulnerable to attack. If the guards nailed it before he could flip it up on its side and sweep both them and the F-Web out of action, as he was hoping to do, he and Chewbacca might just have to use Eanjer himself as their shield when they stormed Qazadi’s suite.
With a suddenness that strongly implied to Dayja that it had been prearranged, Marblewood’s massive fireworks display kicked off in all its full, brilliant glory. Not just the lower-flying rockets he’d seen being fired earlier, but also the high, elaborate, all-but military-grade explosives.
The problem was that the umbrella shield was still in place. And as the rockets hit the invisible energy field, bursting prematurely and showering fire onto the ground, the crowd below finally hit the breaking point. With shouts, curses, and a scattering of hysterical screams, the whole mass dissolved into chaos.
A piece of flaming debris crashed to the roof barely five meters from Dayja’s chimney spire. He twitched back from it, grabbing his comlink. Enough was finally enough. Whether this was Eanjer’s doing or just an accident, he couldn’t sit by and watch any longer.
Another misfire burst against the shield, raining fragments down on the crowd, and with a sense of resignation Dayja put away the comlink. It was too late. The panic had started, and there was nothing he, the police, or any of Iltarr City’s other emergency services could do about it now.
All he could do now was watch.
Han had warned Kell that the whole thing had to go quickly. The kid had taken him at his word.
The detonite beneath the floating platform went first, a set of deceptively small charges that knocked out the power lines to all the repulsorlifts on the forward half. The platform held position for maybe half a second, and then the front edge dropped to the floor with a booming crash. Almost buried in the thunderous echo was an even deeper creaking as the lightsaber-weakened connecting pillar bent and distorted under the sudden and unexpected stress. Another half second, and Kell’s final charges went off, blowing away chunks of duracrete from the rear of the safe and triggering a pair of ear-numbingly powerful shaped-charge explosions from booby traps that had been buried just beneath the surface.
Looking like a miniature Death Star on afterburners, with a rumble that seemed to shake the whole mansion, the safe broke loose from its pillar, rolled down the slanted platform, and headed across the floor.
For a frozen second, Villachor an
d his men stared in disbelief at the six-meter sphere bearing down on them. Then, in almost perfect unison, they scrambled madly to get out of the way.
Villachor and his two bodyguards made it. Sheqoa and the three other guards didn’t.
Even before they disappeared beneath the sphere, Han was in motion, stepping forward and planting himself between the two guards now gaping at the drama going on inside the vault. He put a hand on each of their chests and shoved as hard as he could to either side.
The suits were heavy, but Han’s strength enhancements were more than up to the job. The two guards flew backward a good three meters each before sprawling onto the floor—maybe far enough to be out of the way of the approaching sphere, but Han really didn’t care that much one way or the other.
Right now he was far more concerned with the lives of the hundreds of citizens who could be unknowingly walking or standing directly in the path of the rolling juggernaut about to crash through the mansion wall. The fireworks triggers Kell and Zerba had set up earlier should have most of the crowd moving toward the exits, but there were always a few who were too brave, too casual, or too stupid to know when it was time to get out.
For those people, the rolling safe was likely to be the last miscalculation they ever made.
The safe was nearly to the armored vault wall. Spinning around, Han raced for the anteroom side door, emptying his borrowed Caliban blaster into the wall around it as he ran. The weapon ran dry; tossing it aside, Han threw himself at the door, hoping his armor was as tough as it looked.
It was. He crashed through the door with barely a jolt, a large section of wall coming down with him. The nearest exit to the outside was thirty meters away to the south; recovering his balance, he angled toward it, hoping fervently that he could beat the sphere outside. Behind him, he heard the violent grinding crunch as the sphere ground its way through the vault’s armor plating—
And then he was through the door, out into the courtyard, and angling back toward the sphere’s path.
He’d been right about the crowd. Most of them were already far in the distance, racing for the gates as fireworks continued to splash spectacularly against the umbrella shield above them. But a few dozen of them were still hanging around, watching the misfires with studied casualness or bravado.
Han rolled his eyes. Even he knew enough to come in out of the rain, especially when the rain consisted of live coals. Still, if random overhead explosions weren’t enough to get these last stubborn few moving, maybe something closer and more personal would.
Grabbing the neuronic whip from his belt, he activated it and whirled it high over his head.
Most of the loiterers had already spotted Han in his gleaming armor. All of them spotted the whip’s crackling blue-white sizzle. “Go!” Han bellowed, spinning the whip over his head. “Get away from here—now!”
They were finally on the move, running like frightened Toong, when the sphere crashed through the mansion’s outer wall and rolled across the courtyard, crushing the flagstones beneath it as it went. Ten meters ahead of it, where the flagstones gave way to textured grass, the spikering fence slashed its way upward out of the ground, encircling the mansion in a six-meter-tall crackling forest of electrified death.
The safe rolled through it without even slowing down.
Ducking through the still sizzling gap, pushing his armor’s speed and power enhancements to the limit, Han sprinted around past the safe and got in front of it. Again thrashing the whip wildly above his head, he charged.
It was about as crazy a stunt as he’d ever pulled. But it was working. In the darkness, with the distraction of the fireworks, a lot of the people in the sphere’s path probably would never have seen the danger until it was way too late. But an armored figure with a glowing blue whip was impossible to miss. They scattered in front of him, most taking the hint and heading for the exits, the others dashing in all directions except the vector Han and the safe were on.
He kept going, watching the safe in his rear display, hoping he could stay ahead of it until it finally ran out of steam. Hoping, too, that it wouldn’t catch up with the rear of the main crowd heading for the exits, mow a wide swath of death through them, then shatter the outer wall and roll out into the heavy Iltarr City traffic.
He really, really hoped that didn’t happen.
From out in the hallway came a horrendous crash, accompanied by the kind of piercing, metal-on-duracrete scraping that Bink had sometimes heard when a wrecked airspeeder hit a landing platform and skidded along it.
And as the scraping sound faded away, she realized the blasterfire had also ceased.
She looked at Qazadi. His eyes were on the door, his expression hard and cold. “Be silent,” he told the two women. “No noise.” His hand dipped into his robe and emerged with a blaster. “Sit quietly and watch your friends die.”
Bink swallowed hard, fighting against the unreasonable calm and even more unreasonable sense of love and contentment flowing through her. Those were her teammates out there. She couldn’t let them simply walk into the fire from Qazadi’s blaster. She had to do something to stop him.
Only she couldn’t. She couldn’t even get her voice to work, let alone her hand.
Her hand. She looked down at her lap, at the hold-out blaster lying there. Qazadi had permitted her to keep the weapon, knowing she would be unable to use it against him.
And he’d been right. She willed her hand to move, willed it with all the strength she had in her. But her hand stayed where it was. The blaster would sit there uselessly, and she would sit here uselessly and watch her teammates come through that door and die.
“There’s one thing you’re forgetting, Master Qazadi,” Tavia said.
Bink jerked her head, staring in disbelief at her sister. Tavia’s face was pinched and strained, so much so that it was hardly recognizable. Her voice was low and hesitant, the words sounding like they’d been ground out individually from beneath a grain farmer’s millstone.
Qazadi had ordered her not to speak. And yet she was speaking. Out of the corner of her eye Bink saw Qazadi turn to look, apparently as surprised as she was. “I told you to be silent,” he said.
“You’re forgetting,” Tavia ground out, all but panting with the incredible mental exertion, “that we didn’t come here alone. You’re forgetting … that they are our friends.”
“I said be silent!” he snarled. He swung his blaster to point at her.
With a violent shattering of wood and stone, the hallway door blew inward.
Qazadi was caught by surprise, his arm jerking with impacting debris as he tried to bring his blaster back on target. Through the cloud of smoke, Bink saw a figure step calmly into the room.
She caught her breath. She’d assumed it would be Chewbacca or Lando who would be risking his life to save them. But it wasn’t either of them.
It was Eanjer.
His hands were stretched out in front of him as if he were surrendering, his misshapen right hand wrapped in its medseal, his left hand open and empty. “I bring you an offer, Your Excellency,” he called over the muffled clatter of door shards hitting the floor and furniture.
“I don’t make deals,” Qazadi snarled. He got his blaster lined up on the intruder—
Green fire erupted from Eanjer’s distorted right hand, flashing across the room squarely into the center of Qazadi’s face.
And with the defiant snarl still in place, the Falleen slumped in his chair.
Dead.
Bink looked at Eanjer, her eyes dropping to the smoking hole in his medsealed hand. The hand hadn’t looked the way it did because it was mangled, she realized now, or even because it had been replaced by some strange alien prosthetic.
It had looked that way because it was a normal, fully functional human hand curled around a hold-out blaster.
She looked up at Eanjer’s good eye. “You—”
“It was him or us,” he said calmly. “You two okay?”
“We’re
fine,” Tavia assured him. Her voice still sounded ragged, but Bink could hear it starting to recover.
As was Bink’s own brain. Without the pheromones, she could feel the fog rapidly lifting. “What’s the plan?” she asked, grabbing her blaster from her lap and standing up.
“To get out of here,” Eanjer said, nodding toward the ragged hole behind him. “Lando and Chewie are waiting beside the other airspeeder. Move.”
Bink nodded, taking her sister’s arm and helping her to her feet. “What about you?” she asked as she guided Tavia over the debris.
“I want to get the cryodex,” Eanjer said. His half mouth half smiled. “Might as well leave them wondering. Go on—go.”
Bink got her sister to the hallway, noting peripherally the half-crushed airspeeder to their right and the mangled F-Web blaster poking out from underneath it. To their left, Lando and Chewbacca were crouched behind a hovering airspeeder, their eyes and blasters focused the other way down the hall. She turned Tavia in that direction. As they headed away from the suite, she paused for a final look at Qazadi, wondering how her mind could ever have been fooled into thinking he was good and kind and loving.
And because she was looking in that direction, she saw Eanjer standing over the Falleen’s body.
She couldn’t be sure, not with the single quick glance she had. But it looked very much like he was taking holos …
It was like something out of an insane holodrama, Dayja thought numbly as he watched the scene unfold below him. An armored figure cracking a neuronic whip over the last remnants of the evening’s crowd, driving them out of the path of the giant sphere rolling inexorably across the Marblewood grounds.