5

The landspeeder Seteem Ervic drove along the old country road was old and slow, but it was still powerful enough to haul a several-ton load of grain cakes from his family business to his customers in Lurark.

He ran a hand through what was left of his hair. He could buy a newer, sportier speeder, of course. But he hadn’t inherited the family’s failing concern and then built it into a flourishing business by throwing money away on nonessentials. He was almost rich. He’d never be rich if he loaded up on luxuries.

True, it had taken him years. Cost him his first wife, who said he was boring, that they never had anything to talk about. Cost him his hair, which had fallen away as the seasons had passed. At least his hair was something to talk about. And, true, nothing ever really happened to him. But he was almost rich, and that was what counted. If his brightest daughter turned out the way he expected her to, she’d take his solid business and make a worldwide concern out of it. And she’d be rich for real.

He rounded a bend in the dusty road and something happened to him.

There, a hundred meters up, something lay in the road. As he got closer, in spite of the glare from the sun, he could see it was a body—a human body. He slowed, and when he was a mere handful of meters away, locked the landspeeder down in hover mode and hopped out to take a look.

Human female, dark-skinned, eyes closed, lying in the dust as though she’d been thrown—from what? A speeder? There was no recent sign of repulsor traffic on this road. A riding animal? No hoof marks. In fact, there were no footprints around her.

She was wearing a black jumpsuit like a TIE fighter pilot’s, and her pose—lying on her back, one arm behind her head—suggested she was sleeping rather than injured. There was no sign of gross injury. She wasn’t even dusty.

He leaned closer. Maybe she wasn’t hurt. Maybe he wouldn’t have to interrupt his trip to the city. “Young lady?”

Her eyes popped open. She smiled, showing deep dimples, becoming insufferably cute. “Yes?”

“Are you hurt?”

“Oh, no. Just resting.”

He straightened. “Ah. Well, good. Can I offer you a ride?”

She brought her hand from behind her head. In it was a snub-nosed blaster pistol. “Sure. In fact, you can offer me your whole landspeeder.”

He turned to look back at his vehicle. A half dozen people were clustered around it, looking at the control board, peering under the reflective sheets tied down over the cargo bay. He hadn’t heard them arrive; they might have materialized out of thin air.

He turned back to the young woman, who was on her feet. He offered her a weak smile and raised his hands. Well, at least this would be something to talk about.

By midafternoon, the human members of the Wraiths had been around Binring Biomedical several times and had spent long hours surveying the facility.

It was huge, easily two kilometers wide by one deep, most of that area taken up by fabrication plants. There were staging and loading areas for landspeeders and other transports. The place had its own light-rail depot.

Face, Lara, Donos, Tyria, Kell, Shalla, and Wes sat around a large circular table at an open-air café separated from the main Binring Biomedical entrance by a broad traffic thoroughfare. Speeder traffic was constant. Everyone on this world seemed to own a personal speeder, and the city was huge and sprawling, though not densely built up or occupied. Face estimated that he hadn’t seen more than a half dozen buildings more than three stories in height. “All right, people,” he said. “We have too much factory over there to search in one night. We need to have a good idea where Zsinj’s special facilities are, or where we can find out that information, before we go in tonight. If the special facilities aren’t at this site, we’ll definitely need to get into their computer center. Any ideas?”

Lara said, “I see six likely places for a special facility, all connected to exterior docking areas. West Sixteen, Northwest Seven, Northwest Two, Northeast One, East Thirty, or East Thirty-One.” Her designations referred to loading and unloading areas—West Sixteen, for instance, meant Western Quadrant, Loading Area Sixteen.

Wes said, “Just Northwest Two or East Thirty-One. We can eliminate the others.”

Shalla said, “Just Northwest Two.”

Tyria looked unhappy, but nodded. “Northwest Two.”

Face sighed. He hadn’t seen anything to suggest likely prospects, and their assessment baffled him. “Let’s take that again, in the same order. Lara?”

“The places I noted lack power meters on the roof. Everywhere else in that complex, you get external power meters under lockdown cases. Backup meters for the city power managers to get their data, probably if the standard meter transmitters fail. I bet they’re analog rather than digital and retain data even if their own power fails. Anyway, they’re at regular intervals … except in those six places. This suggests that those zones have separate generators and don’t depend on the city grid.”

Face gave her a close look. “Lara, are you all right? You don’t look too good.”

He was right; she seemed paler than usual, with dark half circles under her eyes. She gave him a wan smile. “You always know the right thing to say. No, I just didn’t sleep well. I’ll be fit to go tonight.”

“All right … Wes?”

The baby-faced lieutenant took a final sip of his caf and grimaced. “Cold. Um, it has to do with privacy and defensibility. Northwest Two and East Thirty-One have advantages that way. The loading-dock areas are down recessed alley accesses that can be closed, remotely or directly, by gates. Both have roof access for flying vehicles but mesh screens can be dragged across them, as well, to limit access. The alleys don’t have doors or viewports, so the traffic down them can be private.”

“Right. Shalla?”

She waved toward the east facing of the complex, which was around the corner to their right. “East Thirty-One had some vehicle traffic when we were looking at it. Really expensive landspeeders with reflective viewports. One of them was large enough to put a swimming tank in. I think that’s the private entrance for corporate executives, board members, and so on. The really wealthy. Also, East Thirty-One opens onto one of the busy thoroughfares, while Northwest Two opens onto a back street with nothing but warehouse buildings facing it. Like Wes said, privacy issues.”

“That makes sense. Tyria?”

She didn’t meet his gaze. “I just know it.” She seemed huddled in her chair. Kell reached over to take her hand, but she barely acknowledged him.

Face said, “That’s not good enough, Tyria. What do you know? How do you know it?”

She shook her head hard, sending her blond ponytail flipping across the features of Donos beside her, and finally looked at Face directly. “I felt it. When we cruised past. There’s something there. A residue of … pain. Of things so badly hurt that they desperately wanted to die. Not test animals, either. There was awareness there.”

Face suppressed a shudder.

Kell said, “You felt something from the Force.”

Tyria nodded. “I’ve been working so hard, to learn to relax into it, not to push at it … not to force the Force, as it were. Sometimes, now, I can put myself into a flow state where I’m almost not myself. I’m just reacting to what I’m feeling. I’d managed to do that when we cruised past. I almost wish I hadn’t. I almost lost my last meal.”

“Well, that’s a good thing,” Kell said. When Tyria looked at him, confused, he amended, “Not the throwing-up part. The flow-state part. That sounds like an improvement.”

She managed a faint smile for him.

“Northwest Two,” Face said. “That’s our best entry.”

“No,” Lara said.

Face held up a hand. “Wait a second. Next to Northwest Two. Northwest One or Three. Where the security is likely to be less substantial.”

“Yes,” Lara said.

Face sagged in relief. “She said yes,” he said. “You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting to hear her say yes.”

Donos murmured something under his breath and Lara flushed red.

Under cover of darkness, they emerged from beneath the sheeting covering the speeder’s cargo bed. The speeder was parked between refuse containers in the parking area of a warehouse; across the thoroughfare was Binring’s northwestern quadrant. This was the last the Wraiths would see of the speeder; at some point during the day its loss, and the disappearance of its owner, had to have been reported, and there was too much danger in piloting it around avenues of Lurark left almost deserted at nightfall. They’d acquire other transportation for their departure from the city.

Shalla, kneeling in the shadow of one of the refuse containers, scanned the empty street and darkened Binring buildings below through a set of holorecording macrobinoculars. “Downward-facing holocams with overlapping coverage,” she said. “Standard placement. For Imperial forces, that is. Overkill for a pharmaceutical-fabrications plant. Wait a second.”

Face knelt beside her. The second turned into several, then finally she spoke. “There’s a gap in the coverage. The most northern holocam on the western wall is positioned so it can’t really see around the corner. The most western holocam on the northern wall isn’t far enough west to make up the gap … I don’t think.” She lowered the goggles and brought out a glow rod so she could look at the hand-drawn map they’d assembled that afternoon. “That’s right. If we come in from the north, along this narrow approach, the holocams can’t pick us up.”

“It’s a lie,” Tyria said. Her voice was a whisper, a sad whisper.

Shalla shot her a look. “What do you mean?”

Tyria started as if out of some reverie and gave her a nervous smile. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way. It’s not your lie, Shalla. It’s theirs.” Her wave indicated the Binring building. “There’s a big … watchfulness over there waiting for us. It’s laughing.”

Shalla said, “You’re getting weird, Tyria.”

“Yes, but let’s take her at her word,” Face said. “Shalla, could they have set up the mistake in coverage deliberately, as a lure?”

“Yes.”

“What would they be doing?”

“They’d have a secondary set of holocams in a less-obvious place.” She brought up the macrobinoculars again. “I’d put them in those overhanging spotlights. There’d be no way to see them without getting right up to them … and turning the lights out, of course.”

There was a whine of machinery behind them and their stolen speeder moved off into the avenue, Donos at the controls. His job was to pilot it some distance away, acquire another one, and return, then set himself up in a position to snipe if the Wraiths experienced pursuit when they departed. Face noted Lara staring after Donos long after the speeder was gone and wondered what was going on between them. Something cheerful, he hoped.

“All right,” Face said. “We’re going in by the high road.”

Minutes later, the entire crew of black-clad Wraiths stood atop the near warehouse, one that was, mercifully, far less thoroughly defended than their target. It was also one story taller than the Binring building, which would work in their favor.

Kell spent a few minutes mounting a device at the edge of the roof. It looked something like a small projectile cannon on a swivel mount, but the repulsorlift-based clamping system at the base of the mount was like nothing seen on a normal cannon. “This had better work,” Kell murmured.

“It’ll work,” Shalla said.

“How do you know?”

“My sister and I had one when we were little girls. They’re very reliable. Proven technology.”

“You and your sister come from an odd family, Shalla.”

She smiled at him, teeth gleaming. “Don’t be jealous.”

Kell made a final adjustment to the weapon and peered through its scope. “Ready, Captain.”

Face said, “Numbers only from now on, people. Five, fire at will.”

Kell slowly squeezed the trigger. The device made a noise like a protracted sneeze and launched a missile across the street; the missile dragged a length of black fibra-rope behind it. There was the faintest sound of a metallic clank atop the Binring building; then a motor started up in the gun and drew the fibra-rope taut.

Shalla clipped two devices to the cable: sleeve housings with handlebars hanging from them. “Crawler ready to go.”

“Go. Ten, cover her.”

Janson drew his blaster pistol and aimed in at the far roof. For most people this would be considered a tricky shot with a pistol—thirty-five or more meters in darkness. But the other Wraiths knew Janson to be an expert pistol shot.

Shalla carefully gripped the handlebars of the lead crawler device and swung herself out over empty space. Nimbly, she brought her legs up so her knees were over the bars of the second device. Then she thumbed a control on the handles she gripped … and the crawler sped out along the fibra-rope, carrying her to the roof of the far building. A moment later, the two devices came back, the hand device pushing the knee device before it.

One after another, they took the crawler across, each Wraith settling in a crouch on the far roof. By the time Face arrived, halfway through the pack of Wraiths, Lara, Shalla, and Kell had already examined their surroundings for accesses and other sensors.

And found some. “Standard roof hatches at intervals,” Kell said. “And infrared beams just over there.” He pointed. “On the roof over Northwest Two.”

“I find myself shocked,” Face said. “No, really.”

“We’ll need to leave L—Two—one of the sets of infra-goggles so she can get through the beams.”

“Give her yours. We’ll rely on Four and her set when we’re in.”

Once they were assembled, Face directed Kell to disable security on the nearest roof access adjacent to Northwest Two. Within moments he had bypassed the basic security system there. Tyria led the descent down an access ladder, Face and Shalla close behind her.

And that was already a problem. Ever since Tyria had indicated that her fleeting control over the Force had given her some insight into what went on at Binring, Face knew he had to put her on the intrusion team. But she’d originally been assigned to planting tracers on the roof. Face had switched her duties with Lara’s. But that cost the intrusion team some of its technical proficiency, Lara being more mechanically adept than Tyria. Kell, their demolitions expert, and Shalla, their intelligence expert, now had to share much of the security work Lara would have been handling.

The change also cost them some faith in their tracer team. Tyria was an old enough hand to have managed her temporary partner, Elassar, but Lara’s abilities to handle an unknown quantity like the new pilot were unproven.

Face shrugged. It was done. It would do him no good to worry.

Lara placed the fourth transmitter-marker against the knee-high barrier that served as inadequate warning to people that they should not go over the edge and fall off the roof. She activated it and watched it run through its self-test. Then she pulled back away from it in a crouch, making it more difficult for people at street level to see her.

Elassar was already four meters back from the edge, seated, popping something that looked suspiciously like candy into his mouth. “All done?” he asked.

“Not quite. I’m going to take a holo of the rooftop and surrounding area, then show on it where the markers are and transmit that to the Rogues. That’ll give them a visual reference to go with their sensor readings. Why don’t you make yourself useful? Or is that unlucky?”

He smiled at her, showing his fangs. “Not unlucky. I’ve done everything I can for this mission in the field of luck. I’ve cast all the charms I could manage, and unlike the rest of you, I’ve refrained from doing anything unlucky. And I’ve made myself useful, too. I found something out.”

Lara readied her holocam, held it steady before her eye, and began a slow, careful 360-degree turn. Once this special surveyor’s holocam caught the panoramic image she wanted, she would be able to mark points on the image and type in numeric values related to their relative altitude and distance from one another. Then the gadget’s internal computer would generate a proportionally correct image that any navigational computer, such as an astromech, could look at from any relative altitude. “What did you find out?”

“Well, that whole network of infrared beams over Northwest Two. I looked at it through your infra-goggles. The posts that the beams are coming out of are years old. They’re well kept-up, but there’s corrosion on them, and I can see where one of the posts has had to be straightened and realigned when it was knocked over or something.”

“So?” Lara finished her turn and knelt with the holocam. On its built-in screen, she brought up the image she’d just taken. She slid a stylus from the side of the device and began marking her reference points.

“So the roof surface over there is brand-new. It’s not brand-new here or on any of the places we’ve been walking, but it’s brand-new there.”

Lara looked up, suddenly disturbed. “Show me.”

There was no marker to indicate the border between Northwest Two and Northwest Three, but they stopped a meter short of the first post that they knew held the infrared devices. Elassar knelt and Lara followed suit.

“See, here,” Elassar said. He stretched a finger up almost to the point protected by the infrared. “A seam.”

Lara couldn’t see, so she risked a moment’s illumination with her glow rod. Elassar was right: there was a score, straight as a laser beam, running along the roof between the two building sections. It was so thin as to be nearly invisible even in good light.

She switched the rod off. “So the roof material was laid down in sections. It looks just the same as the roof here.”

“Yes, it does. It has been walked on and scuffed a lot, just like the roofing here. But it smells different. Much sharper. It’s new.”

Lara sighed. This had to be some new-pilot prank. But, obligingly, she leaned back and sniffed at the roofing they’d been walking on. It smelled faintly of industrial chemicals. Then she leaned forward and sniffed again at the other section.

The smell was stronger, crisper.

From her wrist sheath she pulled her vibroblade. She did not power it on. She dug at the seam between the two roof sections, prying the new section up. It was a gummy mass perhaps two centimeters deep and resisted her efforts, but finally she was able to turn up a flap of the material. Elassar obligingly pulled at the edge until half a square meter or so was revealed.

The underside of the material was thick with tiny circular devices made of shiny metal. They were spaced at about eight-centimeter intervals and connected by thin silvery wires. “Pressure sensors,” she said.

“Not a problem,” said Elassar. “None of us walked on them. And we didn’t apply pressure to pull them up.”

“That’s not the point. They’ve added a layer of security under the substantial security already in place, and it’s a different type. If they’ve done that throughout the complex, the Wraiths might be dismantling one layer but not the new stuff.”

“So give them a call.”

“Which will probably give our presence away.” She sighed and looked over the boulevard at the rooftop where Donos was. She couldn’t see him, but she’d heard his return with a new speeder a few minutes before. It was so hard, working with people; on her missions for Imperial Intelligence, she’d always been alone. No one else to be responsible for.

She brought up her comlink and thumbed on its scrambler mode. “Two to Six. Do not acknowledge. Additional security on roof suggests this site is prepared for your arrival. Check for new modifications to your surroundings. Two out.” She grabbed up her holocam and rose. “Let’s move out.”

“Comm signal,” a technician said. His voice was unnaturally shrill.

Dr. Gast blinked and looked around. She’d actually fallen asleep. Boredom and lack of any decent occupation will do that to you, she thought, her voice cranky even when expressed only in her own mind.

The control room was antiseptically white, except where the floor and walls were marked by black marks and scores resulting from the haste with which some of this equipment had been assembled. The four walls were occupied by banks of terminals, each dedicated to a different area of coverage or function. Six per wall, twenty-four in all, occupied every hour of the day, and never anything to report except the occasional repairman working on an adjacent roof section or an avian landing on the roof of the protected zone.

Until now, maybe.

Gast’s own console was a nearly complete circle of terminals and controls, her chair in the center. She lazily swiveled until she could look at the back of the technician who’d spoken. “Let’s hear it,” she said.

“It’s encrypted, Doctor.”

“Decrypt it. Where’s it coming from?”

“I have that.” Another technician’s voice. He didn’t bother to wait for permission; he patched through his holocam view to one of Gast’s terminals. She liked that. Initiative. Which one was this? It was Drufeys, the lean one with the lazy eye.

The holocam was an infrared unit. It was a static view of the roof, and showed two blurry red figures, one male and one female, creeping along the roof.

Away from the protected zone. Gast frowned. That was disappointing. Had they recognized the first line of security and decided to run away?

She turned to the console where her new intelligence specialist, a man on loan from Warlord Zsinj, sat. “Captain Netbers, what are they doing?”

Netbers rose and approached her. He was a huge man, easily two meters tall, with a musculature that suggested he spent more time improving it than he did sleeping. A pity he was so ugly—obviously a fighter, he looked as though he had fallen asleep in an automatic door and it had slammed shut on his face for an afternoon. But the eyes underneath his shaggy brown hair were dark and intelligent. When he spoke, his voice was deep and raspy. “They’ve seen the security perimeter.”

“And it scared them off?”

He smiled. His teeth were regular. She somehow doubted they were original equipment. “No,” he said. “That comm transmission was them informing the other members of their team. They’re getting clear in case we caught the signal.”

“We haven’t seen any sign of other intruders.”

“We will.”

She turned back to Drufeys. “Monitor their progress. When they’ve settled in, have a squad of stormtroopers stand by within striking distance of them.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

She quelled an excitement rising within her and turned back to Netbers. “I have a feeling this is going to be fun, Captain. Is it usually fun?”

He nodded.

Kell swore and pushed his head deeper into the access hatch. He was hanging from sturdy metal rungs in the turbolift shaft, one floor below street level, illuminated only by the glow rod held by Shalla, who stood on the same rung he did and helped brace him as he worked. The panel Kell investigated opened into a maze of wires and circuitry, and his head was missing in that forest of equipment. “Give me more light.”

Shalla leaned in closer to oblige, poking her hand and glow rod through the curtain of wiring. She could see his neck flex as he looked around.

Finally Kell withdrew—slowly, so as not to knock Shalla free of her perch. He twisted to look over his shoulder at the other Wraiths, clustered in the open turbolift door behind him. “Two was right. There’s new wiring throughout. If we’d gone down and disabled the monitors on the panel between lift shafts, we would have set off another alarm.”

Face asked, “Can you disable that alarm?”

Kell considered. Shalla knew this really wasn’t his speciality. He’d said he was lucky to have done as well as he had on this mission. “Maybe,” he said. “But I can’t be sure I’ve identified all the security at that entry point. I think instead we need to go through a non-entry point.”

“Like where?”

“Like here.” He gestured at the curtain of wires. “Beyond this monkey-lizard nest, we have a riveted panel of metal between us and the Northwest Two lift shaft. But it’s not armor quality. I vote we just cut through and descend.”

“Do it.”

Kell brought out his vibroblade and powered it on.

They were within three meters of the bottom of the shaft when Kell spotted the access hatch they would have used had they not changed plans. “Nine, the gauge again?”

He felt Shalla rummage around in the top pocket of his demolitions pack. Then she handed him the sensor device he’d had to use so many times tonight. It read electrical currents and was of vital use to mechanics and demolitions experts, two categories into which Kell fit.

He aimed the device at the panel and swept it all around the bottom of the shaft. It registered a considerable amount of electrical current flow beyond the panel, no surprise, and along the recessed slot used by turbolift cars of this sort to acquire their power.

There was also a suspicious spike of activity on the wall opposite the panel, just above the door out of the lift shaft. It took him a few moments to identify the hemispherical depression, not larger than the end of his thumb, in the metal just above the door. “Holocam recess,” he said. “But it’s set up to watch the panel. If we get across to the door side and drop beside it, it shouldn’t spot us.”

Face said, “There are no rungs over there, Five.”

“Oh, well. Guess we go home instead.” Kell had Shalla tuck the gauge back in his pack. He checked to make sure that his pack and other gear were secure.

Then he let go of the rung he was holding on to and leaped across the turbolift shaft, slapping into the far wall like a slapstick character from a holocomedy. He dropped the final three meters to the duracrete bottom of the shaft, his large frame easily handling the shock of landing. He gestured up at his comrades as though to say, “Simple.”

He saw Face shake his head ruefully.

One by one they followed his lead. He half caught each of them, fractionally slowing their descents, then got to work on the minimal security on the turbolift door.

The halls were empty, sanitary, still smelling faintly of something antiseptic. The lights were on at half intensity, making even the whiteness of the walls and floor seem dim. All the Wraiths could hear was the distant hum of air-moving machinery and their own faint footsteps.

Face didn’t like it. It felt abandoned, and an empty facility would not yield them any secrets. It also felt somehow wrong. He glanced at Tyria to gauge her response—perhaps her abilities with the Force, however faint or erratic, would tell her something. But he could not read her face; at his own command, all the Wraiths, now that they were moving in what should have been populated areas, were wearing black cloth masks covering everything but their eyes and mouths.

All the Wraiths but Piggy, that is. No mask could conceal his species, and only one member of his species would travel with a commando unit this way.

“I know this floor,” Piggy said. Both his real voice and his mechanical one were modulated so low that Face could barely hear them. “This was the third of four floors. We came down here only when we were injured. The bacta ward was right down—” He pointed his finger at a blank section of wall to his right and stopped.

Face asked, “Right down where, Eight?”

“Down this hall.”

“That’s a wall.”

“I know.” Piggy stepped up to the wall and looked at it very carefully. Then he bent to look at the flooring beneath it. When he turned to Kell, his expression, to the extent that Face could read Gamorrean expressions, was confused.

Kell obligingly aimed his electrical current detector at that section of wall, waving it about slowly. “Nothing to suggest any sort of door mechanism. There’s some faint electrical activity beyond, but not immediately beyond. Several meters, I think, and no heavy electrical currents.”

Tyria said, “The wear on the floor doesn’t show that anything has turned down a hall here, Eight. And the floor looks as though it’s been through several years of wear.”

“Yes,” Piggy said. But he still stared at the wall as if accusing it of lying. “They’ve taken up the floor from somewhere else and moved it here to conceal the deception.”

“All right,” Face said. “But even so, the only thing down this hall of yours was a bacta ward—correct?”

“Correct.”

“We’ll check it out if we don’t find anything elsewhere. Let’s look at what you never got to see before. All right?”

Piggy nodded.

They continued up the main hall, the only hall, to its end. On the left was a large double door leading into a circular chamber filled with equipment—panels, consoles, and terminals arrayed in a circle around some sort of large chair. The chair was obviously intended for medical usage; it featured brackets to fit around wrist and ankle, and was festooned with equipment on armatures—injectors, viewscreens, racks filled with bottles.

“I know that chair,” Piggy said. “You got your shots there. And performed tests. But it was one floor up.”

“Door’s clear,” Kell said. “No undue security. Do I open it up?”

Face said, “You said three of four. This was the third floor of four. You meant two above this one and one below?”

Piggy nodded.

“How did you get to the fourth floor?”

“By the turbolift.” Then Piggy frowned and looked back down the hallway toward the distant turbolift door.

“But the turbolift ended at this floor,” Face said. “There was duracrete below.”

Shalla said, “It was very clean duracrete. No oil stains. I thought that was odd. But everything here has been so clean it seemed in keeping with the rest.”

“Obviously, it was new,” Face said. “They’ve blocked off the fourth floor. I wonder why?”

The others shrugged. Tyria merely gave him her I-have-a-bad-feeling-about-this look.

“We can leave now,” Shalla said.

“There is no data without risk,” Face said, “as one of my instructors used to say. We always wanted to shoot him for it. All right, Five, let’s go in.”

Kell triggered the door control. The double doors slid open and the Wraiths entered, blasters up, fanning to either side.

“Doctor?” said another technician. “They’re in the First Chamber.” He put through the holocam feed to one of her terminals.

Gast looked at the screen and frowned. “They got through our outer perimeter.”

Netbers leaned over her shoulder. “They’re pretty good. But they’re here. So they’re dead.”

“Alert your stormtroopers,” Gast said, then issued commands to the others. “Prepare the Second Chamber. Activate comm jamming as soon as the door to the Second Chamber is opened. No, wait: Alert the other team of stormtroopers to take the intruders on the rooftop, then activate comm jamming as soon as the Second Chamber is opened.” She frowned, angry with herself for her mistake.

“You’re getting the hang of it,” Netbers said.

Kell waved an all-clear signal to the others. The walls and ceiling offered no circuitry suggesting additional security.

Dia and Shalla covered the door with their blasters. The others looked at the equipment in the room.

“I was never in here,” Piggy said. “I don’t know what the chamber was for. The chair wasn’t here. The chair was one floor up, where they did a lot of testing. I solved math problems in that chair while drugged or while being electrocuted.”

“Charming,” Face said.

“There’s something awful about this room,” Tyria said. “Not in the room itself. Nearby.”

“This is a game-table unit,” Kell said. He was on one knee, looking intently at one of the pieces of equipment around the chair. “The table itself has been taken off and the unit repainted.”

“So it broadcasts to the screen on the chair?” Face asked.

“Maybe.” Kell looked over the unit, puzzled. “It doesn’t seem to be fastened down, but it’s powered.”

“This machine washes clothes.” Runt was staring with equal concentration at a silver-gray metal cube two-thirds the height of a human. “They had one like it on the ship Sungrass.”

Kell waved his current detector at Runt’s device, then at the floor around it. “It’s self-powered. Like the game table. It’s battery-powered or something.”

“Why?” Face asked. He looked at Piggy, but the Gamorrean looked blankly back at him.

“Transfer control to my terminal,” Gast said.

Then she caught the hurt look on the face of Drufeys and she relented. “Oh, very well, you do it.”

Drufeys brightened and pressed a button on his console.

Face felt the floor give way beneath him. All around him, Wraiths and equipment dropped. There was blackness and heat beneath him. When his feet hit he tried to roll and absorb some of the shock of impact, but he did a bad job of it and landed on his chest, the wind knocked out of him. He felt something heavy and sharp slam into his back and he grunted from the blow. There were cries and sounds of crashing all around him.

Awkwardly, he rolled to his back. The floor of the room above had split down the middle. Hinges to either side had allowed it to open like a door, dropping them what looked like a fall of six or seven meters.

And now stormtroopers were lining up at the edges of the room above. They aimed their blasters down at the Wraiths. One called out, “Throw up your demolitions gear or we open fire.”

Face looked around. The Wraiths were in no position to resist. Only Kell and Shalla were already on their feet. Beyond Kell, Runt was unmoving, apparently unconscious. Beside him, a piece of machinery on her back, was another fallen Wraith—

“Dia!” Face was suddenly on his feet despite the pain. He knelt beside Dia, saw at once that she was unconscious, that her left arm lay at an angle that was not right. She was still breathing.

“Demolitions bag,” the stormtrooper repeated. “Or you’re all dead.”

Face caught Kell’s attention and nodded.

But Kell turned to Shalla, and said, “Do what they say, Demolitions.”

Shalla didn’t hesitate. She shucked off her own pack, which contained her infra-goggles, spare glow rods, and preserved food. She swung it around at the end of its straps and hurled it up to the stormtroopers above.

The speaker caught the bag. He and the others retreated. The ceiling began to close.

“What are you doing?” Face asked. “In thirty seconds they’ll know we’ve lied. They’ll open it up and start shooting.”

“In thirty seconds we’re supposed to be dead,” Kell said. He pulled off his own pack and rummaged around in its contents. “Take a look around, One. You know what this place is?”

Face forced himself to look away from Dia.

The floor was some sort of grating. It seemed to be continuous, not made up in sections, and was sturdy enough not to flex beneath the weight of the Wraiths and all the equipment from the chamber above. The walls were heavy, dark metal with a tight grid of nozzles protruding from them.

As he looked, the floor grating beside the walls began glowing red. The redness spread toward the center of the room at a quick rate. Heat from the glowing portions of the grate swept across Face and the other Wraiths.

“They burn organic material here,” Piggy said. He struggled to his feet, holding his side. “It’s an incinerator.”

Lara knelt and fretted. Still no communication of any sort from the team. Of course, they were supposed to keep comm transmissions to a minimum. But she wanted to know what was happening down below.

It didn’t help that Elassar was so calm. The Devaronian junior pilot lay on his back, admiring the stars. “A shooting star!” he whispered. “That’s good luck.”

“Is it still lucky if it’s one of the asteroids we shot into the atmosphere as cover?” Lara asked.

He frowned, considering. “I don’t know.”

Sixty meters away, there was a terrific metal crash and two hinged pieces of roof slammed open. An open-sided turbolift rose into view. The dozen stormtroopers within it jumped out, turning toward Lara and Elassar.

“I guess not,” Elassar amended.

Face lifted Dia, as mindful as he could be of her broken arm. “Sorry I said anything, Five. Blow us out of here.”

Kell slipped his bag back over one shoulder. He held two charges, one in each hand. He tucked one charge into a pocket and tapped something into the keypad of the other.

Tyria hopped up on a boxy piece of metal equipment as the redness of the floor neared her feet. She peeled off her face mask. The other Wraiths began following suit. Face could see that they were already sweating heavily. So was he, but burdened as he was, he couldn’t do anything about it. Tyria said, “What if the chamber is magnetically sealed?”

“It’s not,” Face said. “If it were, they wouldn’t have bothered to demand our demolitions.”

Kell said, “One?”

“What?”

“Where do I place this?”

“Your best guess. You’re the demolitions expert. But this deep down, we may have stone and dirt on all sides.”

“Imperial architecture is kind of conservative,” Kell said. “One floor is often like another. Meaning that the main hall above may have a parallel on this floor. Which was—where?” He looked around blankly. In the fall and the Wraiths’s subsequent disorientation, he’d lost track of directions.

Piggy pointed at one wall, then yanked Runt up before the heat in the floor grid reached him. The Thakwaash pilot looked groggy, but mobile.

Flame erupted from every nozzle along the chamber walls. The flames were no more than half a meter in length, but the temperature in the room rose instantly. Several Wraiths swore and all flinched away from the new heat.

“Three seconds,” Kell said. “Find cover.” He threw his package against the wall and moved to crouch behind one of the ruined metal cases of false lab equipment.

Face followed suit. He felt the floor grating begin to burn its way through his shoes the moment they made contact. He crouched and leaned back against the experiment chair, keeping it between him and the explosive charge, trying to keep Dia’s limbs from trailing against the floor.

One floor up, a stormtrooper opened Shalla’s pack and extracted a tube of processed nutrients. He pawed through the other contents of the pack, then held out the nutrient tube to his commander for inspection.

The commander said, “Uh-oh.”