“That’s it.”
“Well, they don’t in the official report. And that will be declassified as soon as our current mission is done.”
“Well, I have a complaint,” Kell said. “I hit my artillery unit dead on and by the time I came around for a second pass, all the ULAVs were gone.”
Wedge gave him a skeptical look. “That’s hardly grounds for complaint.”
“I still don’t have an aerial kill! Three strike missions and a score of zero!”
The others laughed at him.
Face’s comlink beeped. He activated it. “Yes?”
“Loran, this is the bridge. You have a HoloNet communication for Captain Darillian. It’s Admiral Trigit.”
“Night Caller,” the admiral said, “will join the corvette Constrictor and the frigate Provocateur as our forward close support line. As soon as we drop out of hyperspace into the Morobe system, launch your TIE fighters to join theirs; they’ll serve as our escort force.”
“I understand,” Face said. “And your own TIE fighters will be the primary attack force?”
“Correct.” The hologram of Admiral Trigit leaned forward and his tone became more confidential. “Now, I have something further to ask. How might I persuade you to give me the details of your, shall we say, unrecorded adventures at each of your stops?”
Face froze. The admiral had guessed—
No. Trigit had only learned something about Captain Darillian’s private negotiations on behalf of Warlord Zsinj. If he had suspected the true identity of Night Caller’s crew, he would never have given Face the plan of attack for Talasea.
Face swallowed. “Sir … You can’t.”
“I could make it well worth your while.”
“Sir, let me explain.” Face tried to compose himself, to make his lines authentic. “First, if I sold you my honor, I could never buy it back. Second, I realize I may be displeasing you … but I want you to understand that I’ll keep faith with the warlord until I die. People look at me, and see my little habits, and think I am a shallow man, but I am an honorable officer, and will not break faith with my commander.” He gave Trigit his most intent stare, abandoning all of Darillian’s florid mannerisms. “It may be, sir, that I will leave Zsinj’s employ sometime in the future. It may be that I will enter yours. If I do, you will know from this encounter that I will always keep faith with you.”
Trigit drew back. He did not seem to be angered. “Point taken, Captain.”
“Thank you, sir. And may I say, I would be pleased to serve under you in any formal capacity. But until I do …”
“Until you do, let us make no more assaults, no matter how well intended, upon your honor.” Trigit gave him a faint smile. “You surprise me, Captain Darillian.”
“I intend to do so again, sir.”
“Very well.” Trigit gave him an uncommonly gracious half bow. “I’ll see you at the rendezvous.”
“I look forward to it.”
Trigit winked out.
Face swiveled toward the comm center doorway, where Wedge stood waiting.
“We have him,” Wedge said.
Scritch, scritch, scritch.
Grinder awoke with a start. There was the sound again, no dream, no hallucination, but an intermittent scratching.
Scritch, scritch, scritch.
He opened the door to the hall. There was nothing beyond it.
Scritch, scritch, scritch.
No, the sound was coming from up in the ceiling, just above his bed, beyond plates of durasteel. After another few moments, it stopped.
Grinder tore through his pile of personal possessions until he found the datapad that had come with the Storini Glass Prowler. He scrolled his way through the information. What to feed the creature. How many hours of light and dark it should endure each day. What its preferred temperature ranges were. How to tell male from female.
Nothing about how it could find its way out of an X-wing cockpit and come to a chamber it had never visited to find the man who had taken it from its homeworld.
He switched on the chamber’s terminal to the ship’s computer. It was not likely that the computer would contain information about the creature, but it was possible …
And the index popped up the name Storini Glass Prowler.
He brought the data up on his monitor.
Nothing much that he hadn’t seen on the instructional datapad, except for a sophisticated hologram showing the creature’s exterior; on-screen controls allowed Grinder to move his point of view into the creature’s insides and look at its physical structure at a variety of magnifications.
But at the bottom of the entry was a link labeled, “See also Storini Crystal Deceiver.” He activated it.
And read, in growing dismay, the description.
Often mistaken for its nearest relative, the Glass Prowler, the Storini Crystal Deceiver is far less common and far more dangerous.
He skipped down past the description of the creature’s natural habitat.
The Crystal Deceiver’s jaws secrete a poison that is dangerous both to the native life-forms of Storinal and to mammals from other worlds. The creature feeds on creatures that prey on the Glass Prowler. It simulates the Glass Prowler’s movements, luring predators to it; only when they strike does it revert to its natural speed and ferocity, eluding all attacks and ferociously biting its attacker. Its poison is a powerful paralytic that keeps its enemies helpless while it literally eats them alive.
Crystal Deceivers are a particular danger to mammalian life-forms because of their unusual olfactory-based memory retention. A Crystal Deceiver encountering the scent of a mammal will remember it for the rest of its life and follow it whenever it encounters the scent. This unfortunate trait has led to many instances of Crystal Deceivers following wilderness observers from the wild into communities and attacking them in their residences.
The poison of these creatures is not dangerous to healthy individuals. The life of a victim of a Crystal Deceiver assault can be saved by medical treatment if the creature has not devoured an irreparable quantity of the victim’s body mass.
No. Grinder shook his head. The box had said Glass Prowler. Surely the corporation that had captured the insect for resale would not have made a mistake and boxed up a Crystal Deceiver instead.
Rattled, he switched off the terminal, then the overhead light, and returned to bed.
Scritch, scritch, scritch.
He switched the light back on. This time, the noise had come from the bulkhead beside his bed.
He took a close look at the wall. Were there any gaps in the bulkhead, any apertures through which a medium-sized insect could enter?
Yes. Power access ports. Slight gaps in durasteel panel welds. Above, poor fits around lighting fixtures. Night Caller was not a new ship; there would inevitably be ways for the thing to get in.
Ton Phanan answered on Grinder’s third knock, sliding open the panel to his quarters and glaring with his one eye. “What?”
“Do you still have that spray sealant from Storinal?” Grinder asked.
“I see you remembered to wrap a towel around yourself this time.”
“Never mind that. Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Can I have it?”
“You have a middle-of-the-night plastic sealant emergency?”
“That’s right.”
Phanan sighed. “All right. Hold on.” He returned to the door a minute later with the spray bottle.
“Thanks, Ton. I owe you.”
“You owe me about an hour’s sleep.”
“I’ll stand a watch for you sometime.”
Grinder returned to his room and spent the next hour methodically plugging every gap, no matter how tiny, in his ceiling, walls, and floor—except for the air vent. He ran a power cable to the vent so that any creature touching it would be electrocuted. He heard no scratching in the meantime. Perhaps the creature had wandered off.
He switched off his lights.
T
his time there was no noise.
It took him another hour, but finally he dropped off to sleep.
Scritch, scritch, scritch.
For a moment he was too groggy to understand his own sense of alarm—too groggy, really, to remember his own name. Then he remembered both.
Scritch, scritch, scritch.
The noise was louder this time. Unmuffled. As if—
As if the creature was within his room.
Cold fear gripped him. While he was out getting the sealant from Ton Phanan, the Crystal Deceiver had slipped into his room.
Now it was trapped here, with him. It couldn’t escape if it wanted to.
And it wouldn’t want to. It would crawl on him and bite him and make a meal of his paralyzed body—
With a moan, he reached out to turn on his side-table lamp.
It clicked, but didn’t come on.
He peered around the room, but there wasn’t even the faint green glow from his terminal power key.
Power was out to his quarters. Had the creature chewed through power cables to get in at him? No—it would have been electrocuted.
Was it smart enough to—No. Couldn’t be.
Maybe it was a dream.
Scritch, scritch, scritch.
The creature was under his bed.
He shrieked and leaped up. He charged blindly across his quarters, slammed into the door before he realized he was upon it, and slapped the door switch.
Nothing.
He grabbed the door where it slid into the wall. He tugged at it, trying to accomplish with friction and finger pressure what it normally took servomotors to accomplish, and dragged it open—a fraction of an inch. Beyond was empty corridor.
Scritch, scritch, scritch. Behind him. Still under the bed? Or coming for him, tottering on its glassy legs, with jaws distended?
He got his fingers into the door gap and heaved, slamming the doorway fully open.
A glassy, chittering mass swung into his face from ahead and above.
He screamed and fell backward. He felt himself hit the hard floor of his quarters.
Then darkness claimed him.
26
“He suffered some sort of fit, I think. Tests may tell us more.”
It was Ton Phanan’s voice, and Grinder could see light through his closed eyelids. Cautiously, he opened them.
A ceiling, like the one in his quarters, but this was Night Caller’s sick bay. He turned his head to see Phanan, standing by the door, talking to Wedge and Face, who were just inside the door, and Kell and Janson, who were just outside. All looked concerned.
Kell reacted to Grinder’s motion and the others looked. “Ah,” said Phanan. “He’s awake. I won’t have to amputate.”
Grinder half rose in alarm. “Amputate what?”
“Well, it’s your head that seems to be malfunctioning.”
Grinder cautiously felt his face to make sure there was nothing remaining of the insect. “Don’t joke. I was attacked.”
Wedge asked, “By what?”
“A Storini Crystal Deceiver. It’s an insect. Something like a Glass Prowler, but a lot deadlier.”
The other pilots looked at one another dubiously. Grinder felt irritation rise within him. “You can look it up on the ship’s computer. And unless I killed the thing, it’s somewhere in the ship. Maybe behind the bulkheads.”
Phanan moved to the terminal and tapped his way through a series of menus. “I don’t find anything about a Crystal Deceiver.”
“It’s a link from the entry for the Glass Prowler.”
“I don’t find an entry for the Glass Prowler.”
Grinder stood unsteadily and stared over the doctor’s shoulder.
Phanan was right; there was no entry in the ship’s encyclopedia for any life-form from Storinal.
“I suggest,” Phanan said, “that it was a dream. Something stress-induced, perhaps. But I think I’d like to keep you under observation tonight.”
“I’m fine,” Grinder snapped.
“Do as he says,” Wedge said. “Grinder, your scream woke up half the ship. You cooperate with Phanan or I’ll have him certify you unfit to fly until you do.”
“Sir, that bug is a killer. It bites you and paralyzes you and you lie there while it eats you. If you don’t hunt it down and kill it right now, it’ll make Night Caller its own banquet hall.”
Wedge glanced at Phanan, who shook his head. “You have your orders,” Wedge said. “Get some sleep.” He gestured for the other pilots to accompany him, and left.
Janson followed, but Face lingered and shut the door.
“Face, I’ve got to make you believe me—”
“Sit.”
Grinder flopped down on his sick-bay cot. “Please—”
“Let me show you something.” From his jumpsuit pocket, Face pulled a crude assembly of small mechanical parts. Grinder recognized a standard speaker from New Republic–issue datapads, a tiny battery, trailing wires.
Face touched the bare ends of two wires together.
The speaker said, “Scritch, scritch, scritch.”
Grinder was suddenly standing. He didn’t remember rising, but now he was advancing on Face. “You—”
Phanan seized his shoulders, dragged him back down onto the cot. Grinder struggled and glared up at Phanan. “What the hell is going on?”
“Payback,” Face said. “Do you deny that you put that bug in my cockpit?”
“I—What? What bug? I don’t know—” Grinder saw the implacable expression Face wore and gave up the pretense. “All right. I did. So what?”
“So you also did all that other stuff. The dummy in Falynn’s closet. The leaping tubes and wires in Kell’s locker. Plenty of other tricks. All the while sneering at the idea of pranks.”
“I did not.”
“No one else could have done it without leaving a trace on the ship’s computer. You cracked passwords right and left to do it.”
Grinder set his jaw and didn’t answer.
Face shrugged. “So, payback. My way of saying I don’t appreciate it. My way of saying stop. Because this is about the lowest setting of payback I know.”
“How’d you do it?” Grinder asked.
“Which part?”
“All of it.”
Face finally grinned. “To start with, when that Glass Prowler crawled out from under my seat and onto me—”
“Right, why didn’t you react?”
“Well, I thought it was Phanan’s.”
Grinder turned to the doctor.
Phanan shrugged. “You remember when we were sneaking back out of the Scohar Xenohealth Institute? We passed by a pallet full of little boxes holding these things. The sheeting covering the pile was ripped, so I just took one of the boxes. I’ve always been intrigued by insects, ever since, as a boy, I learned they can make some girls jump. I kept the little thing in a cage in my room. Face, since he’s my wingman, comes in from time to time. He’s familiar with the thing.”
Face said, “Like I told you, I thought it was Phanan’s. I turned my comm transmissions way down and told him. We smuggled it back to his quarters so Wedge wouldn’t see. And we found his bug still in its cage, so we knew it was another prank. And how had the prankster gotten my cockpit open without leaving a trace? It was someone who knew the pass code … and after I cleared Cubber and Kell, that left only someone with the skills of a code-slicer.”
Grinder grimaced. “A case of being too perfect. What about the scratching noise?”
Face tapped the pocket where he’d put away the speaker. “Kell worked the little gadgets up. He was tired of the pranks, too. He put some in your room. He also got up into the ductwork and lowered a couple with comlink controls down into the gaps between bulkheads. We could have made it sound like the creature was crawling all around outside or inside your room if we’d wanted. Kell also built the sensor that told us when you switched your lights on and the little mechanism that swung down into your face when you came out of
your room, and he killed the power to your quarters. Which he restored right after you screamed, by the way.
“The encyclopedia entry was something I did, just entering it with my comm center access. If you’d sliced into the entry records, you’d have seen those items were recent additions to the encyclopedia. I got the real data off the datapad that came with Phanan’s creature. Phanan did a medical scan on his insect for the graphic. We made up all the text on the Crystal Deceiver; there is no such thing.”
Grinder sighed. “Well, maybe that does make us even.” He glared at Phanan. “But that doesn’t mean you can drug me, knock me out. That goes over the line.”
The doctor smiled. It was a sinister expression. “I didn’t.”
“Who did?”
“No one. Or, in a sense, you did. Grinder—you fainted.”
“No.”
Phanan nodded. “Brave Wraith Squadron pilot fainted dead away. Now, can we consider your career as a prankster at an end … or shall we tell everyone how you faint when bugs come at you? That’ll be an interesting topic of discussion among Bothan females in the New Republic armed forces, I bet.”
“You—you—”
“You bet? You have a deal? Just what are you trying to say?”
Grinder slumped, defeated. “You have a deal.”
“Well, then. I imagine that when you wake up in the morning I’ll be able to certify you fit to fly.” The doctor rose and stretched. “In the meantime, I’m going to get some sleep in the hours we have remaining.”
“Mynock.”
“Stop muttering, Grinder. It’s bad for your mental health.” Grinning in a fashion Grinder found completely irritating, Phanan led Face from the sick bay and switched out the lights.
Scritch, scritch, scritch.
“Face! Come back here and pick up your little toy!”
It was the most elaborate deception they’d attempted to date.
Captain Hrakness was in the command seat of Night Caller’s bridge, but he was dressed in one of Darillian’s uniforms, his hair dyed to match Darillian’s. This was so that if one of the other ships in Admiral Trigit’s fleet pointed a visual sensor at Night Caller’s bridge, it would see something matching Darillian’s description—something matching the hologram the ship broadcast whenever in communication with the others.
Star Wars: X-Wing V: Wraith Squadron Page 33