10

Gavin Darklighter felt his gorge rising as the miasmal stench from the darkened hovel stabbed through his nostrils and into his brain. He reeled away from the doorway and fell to his knees, puking up what felt like every last bit of food he’d eaten since his return to Coruscant. His stomach muscles clenched again and again, wringing his guts empty, but doing nothing to soothe the prickly sensation in the back of his throat that prompted him to heave once more.

A piercing wail from a female Gamorrean drilled through his skull and reminded him where he was and why he was there. Gavin coughed once and spat, then croaked a command to the black M-3PO droid behind him. “Emtrey, don’t let them go in there. Tell her I’ll do all I can.”

Gavin wiped his mouth with his hand, then weakly crawled up the hovel’s exterior wall. He pressed his back against the ferrocrete and slowly straightened up. He coughed again and his body tried to make him heave yet again, but he clenched his jaw and refused to vomit. Never seen one that bad before. Though he hoped he never would again see such a case, he knew that was one hope that had no chance of becoming reality.

The M-3PO droid succeeded in guiding the Gamorrean female and her tusky children to the other side of the walkway, then turned back toward Gavin. The droid’s nonstandard clamshell head—a refit from a spaceport control droid—canted slightly to the left. “Is there anything I can do for you, Master Darklighter?”

“I’ll be fine in a minute, Emtrey. Just keep them back.” Gavin again spat, trying to rid his mouth of the sour taste. “Ask her when she last heard from her husband.”

The protocol droid swiveled his head around and grunted the question out to the Gamorrean female. She replied in subdued and broken tones, which Emtrey translated for Gavin. “She says she and the children had been visiting kin elsewhere. The last time she spoke to her husband it was by comlink. He had sniffles, but was not alarmed. I’m gathering, from the words she’s using, sir, that there was some domestic discord, which is why a lapse in communication would not be surprising.”

“Got it, Emtrey. How long was she gone from here?”

“A standard month, sir—she left well before the liberation.”

Gavin nodded. A month meant the chances she’d been infected by her husband were nil—if she had been, she’d already be showing signs of the Krytos virus. “Tell her to get to a bacta center for evaluation. She doesn’t want the kids sick.”

“I’ve told her, sir. She wants to know if Tolra will recover.”

Gavin sighed and pushed himself away from the wall. “Tell her he’s very sick. The prognosis is not good, but we will do what we can. Then call Asyr and tell her we’ll need a clean team here.” He forced himself to smile. “And, Emtrey, tell Tolra’s wife she did the right thing. Tolra was brave and smart, and together they saved many people.”

The words rang hollow in his ears, but he knew they would not in hers. What he said was correct: when the Gamorrean in the hovel recognized how sick he had become, he sealed his home’s entrances and scrambled the lock-codes, preventing anyone else from getting in and becoming infected. In that he had indeed saved many lives.

Except for his own. Gavin forced his fists to unclench. Had the Gamorrean used his comlink to summon medical help, he might have been saved. That he was lucid enough to entomb himself meant that he was not so far gone that bacta therapy couldn’t have helped him. He needn’t have become what Gavin had seen in shadows.

The pilot realized the blame lay not entirely with the Gamorrean himself. The black-market price for bacta was astronomical, so far out of reach for the average citizens that they could not imagine there was any bacta available for them. Those who did summon help, or had it summoned for them, were often so far gone that no therapy could help, so they never returned. As a result, other citizens saw the medivac units as thinly disguised extermination units that took the sick away and destroyed them.

Ignorance is killing these people.

Gavin forced himself to step forward and reenter the Gamorrean’s hovel. The fetid stink returned to his nose and found accompaniment in the horrible sights and sounds that greeted him. The single-room hovel itself was scarcely larger than his own room in the squadron headquarters—and he found that a bit cramped for one. It had two doors—the one he’d opened using a lock-descrambling unit and a back door. A heating plate and water spigot to the left of the doorway marked the extent of the dwelling’s kitchen facilities. The refresher station stood farther along that wall, in the corner.

Spattered blood covered all of it, sprayed along the floor, up the walls, and across the ceiling. It had dried and taken on a black hue, making the room look as if a shadow had exploded. The explosion’s epicenter lay in the back corner, on a raised black platform that glistened in what little light made it in past Gavin.

A wet, gurgling sound pulsed arhythmically from that corner. On the platform, restrained by bedding twisted about him while in the throes of agony, the mortal shell of the Gamorrean named Tolra somehow clung to life. Gavin could see where the flesh had split, allowing leg and arm bones to protrude. The skin itself had thinned to a green-grey translucency and hung in ragged ribbons from ribs and fingers.

The Gamorrean seemed to sense Gavin’s presence, because he turned to look at him. With a thick sucking sound, like cold grease being slathered over machine gears, the skull turned toward him while the fleshy sac encompassing it did not. The Gamorrean’s horns and tusks gashed his own skin, then the thick muscles on the creature’s neck snapped, leaving the massive skull to loll unnaturally in a puddle of viscous tissue.

A chill settled over Gavin. Though he knew Tolra was dead and that the disease had long since eaten away any trace of sapience, he nodded toward the Gamorrean. “You saved them. You did it. May the Force be with you.”

Shivering, he turned and walked from the room. He sat down outside and stripped the filmplast covering off his boots, then tossed them back through the darkened doorway. He didn’t bother to look up when a shadow fell over him. “He’s dead.”

Asyr crouched down beside him. “The clean team will get here shortly. Are you all right?”

Gavin thought a moment before he answered. “I will be, and I think that scares me.”

“No reason it should.”

“I think there is.” He jerked a thumb toward the hovel. “There is a Gamorrean in there who has been turned into a mass of jelly. The disease killed him, but it did so in a way that didn’t let him die until he could experience every fragment of pain possible. There’s nothing left to him, but he was still breathing when I went in there. He was so tough, he probably lasted longer than a week in the end stages of the disease.”

The Bothan stroked Gavin’s cheek. “He fought the disease. That’s good.”

“Sure, but the fact that we can find something noble in this seems twisted.” He shook his head. “I’ve seen more death in my time with Rogue Squadron than I have ever seen before, but nothing was so hideous as this. A year ago I would have run screaming. Now I just clean my boots and wait for guys with sterilizer units to show up. I’m changing and I’m not sure I like it.”

Asyr smiled gently at him. “It’s called maturing, Gavin, and not everyone likes it. Now me, I think you’re maturing very well.”

Gavin half-coughed a laugh. “Thanks, but I still have to wonder if it’s right that we can see something like that and just continue on.”

“We continue on, my dear, because we must.” Asyr’s voice developed an edge. “The Gamorrean, he summoned up the strength to lock others out and protect them. That was good. You and I, though, have a different mission. This disease doesn’t appear to affect our species, so we have volunteered to help out during this public health crisis, but that is not our primary purpose here. Our mission is to fly our X-wings, to locate and destroy the kind of monsters who would do this kind of thing to others. Doing that requires all the maturity we can muster.”

“I know.” He rubbed a hand along her spine, then looked over to where Emtrey was conversing with an Emdeeoh and two men carrying portable plasma-incinerator units. The droid would take samples; then the men would burn everything in the hovel, including the first five millimeters of ferrocrete, to a white ash that would be vacuumed up and disposed of safely.

Gavin let Asyr help him to his feet. “You’re right, of course. I hope we can accomplish our mission. If we don’t, I’m afraid we’ll have to take Coruscant down to bedrock, and I don’t think even that will erase the scourge of the Empire from the galaxy.”

I think even stormtroopers would find my men terrifyingly efficient. From the dark security of the grav-car’s interior, Kirtan Loor watched as four Special Intelligence operatives clad in civilian garb approached the building’s door. As huge and imposing as they were, they moved with a lethal fluidity their armor normally hid. Almost casually, one of them placed a thermite boring charge on the door lock and set it, then accepted a blaster carbine from a compatriot and flattened himself against the building’s wall.

A red light blinked three times on the thermite charge, then a smoke-shrouded gout of white fire burst to hissing life. The harsh light transformed the shadowed Imperial Center street into a chiaroscuro landscape burned clean of imperfections but still full of menace. One of the operatives punched a hooked prybar through the center of the fire and yanked the door open, then his three compatriots dashed through.

The blue backlight of stun-fire strobed momentarily through the doorway and gaps in the window shading. Loor waited for a moment, then saw two more flashes. A human figure appeared in the doorway and nodded in his direction, then retreated into the shadows of the building’s interior.

Loor opened the grav-car’s door and emerged. He gathered a cloak about himself and pulled the hood up to conceal his face from incidental observation. He strode forward purposefully, but he imagined himself a pale imitation of Darth Vader. Tall and skeletally slender, with dark hair, he had been told he resembled a young Grand Moff Tarkin. While that comparison had been one he had used to his advantage, he would have preferred to inspire Vaderian terror in those with whom he dealt.

He squeezed past the two operatives at the doorway and stepped over the drooling Ithorian lying in the center of the antechamber. Beyond it, through a short corridor and past a third operative, he arrived in a room that resembled a rodent nest more than it did a human dwelling. It stank of mildew and old, musty sweat, though the occupant’s new terror added piquant elements to the room’s stale bouquet.

Loor looked down at the small, balding man pinned to the stained mattress by the muzzle of a blaster. “Your surroundings are so miserable, I am almost moved to pity you, Nartlo, but then, pity is wasted on the dead, isn’t it?”

“What are you talking about?” The man’s brown eyes bulged with terror. “I don’t know you. What did I do?”

“True, you do not know me, but you have brokered some cure for friends of mine. It has been selling at a high price, but they tell me that you have told them the market has crashed. At the same time they noted that the supply of cure you returned to them had gone from 95 percent purity to 75 percent purity.” Loor shook his head slowly, mournfully. “My friends feel you have lied to and cheated them.”

“No, no, I didn’t do that.” Nartlo tried to claw his way into a sitting position, but the operative beside the makeshift bed kept him rooted in one spot. “I drew off some of the bacta as a sample, but a deal went bad and I lost it. I didn’t figure they’d believe I lost it, so I tried to cover up what I’d done. I’m sorry.”

“And stupid if you expect me to believe a story that was ancient when the Old Republic was born.” Loor let anger into his voice and won a groan from his victim. Because of the surveillance he had on Nartlo, Loor did know that the story was not wholly false. Some of the bacta had been lost when a deal went sour, but only some. The rest of the missing cure had been donated to an alien pleasure house for the employees’ own use. Nartlo had spent a week basking in their considerable gratitude. “Tell me we won’t find a Rodian concubine’s sucker-marks on your back if we strip off your shirt.”

Nartlo accompanied his curling up into a fetal ball with a low moan. “I owed some favors.”

“You gained some favors, more than you owed.” Loor took a step closer to the bed, forcing Nartlo to crane his neck back to look up at him. “Now you owe me favors.”

“Anything you want, anything.”

“Good.” Loor turned to the right and nodded at the operative menacing the small man. The operative withdrew a step and Nartlo coughed as the pressure eased on his rib cage. “You told my friends that the market for cure had crashed. Explain.”

“The Rebels picked up a lot of cure. I don’t know when or where, but it was recent and was really very quiet. Rogue Squadron was involved, though, I know that much. I’ve been selling some of your cure to people who do business with people who work for people in the Provisional Council, see. They’ve been buying to be able to keep themselves and their supporters healthy—no matter the plague doesn’t seem to affect them.”

Loor smiled within the dark sanctum of his hood. The New Republic government had put into place programs that were designed to be fair to the victims of the Krytos virus. The scarcity of bacta meant virtually all of the public supply went to individuals who were infected, with the goal being to save their lives. By curing them, public health officials could limit the spread of the disease. Others, mostly those from uninfected populations, argued that a prophylactic use of bacta to prevent the spread to new populations would be best. Public health officials argued that there was no proof pre-exposure bacta therapy could prevent someone from becoming infected with the virus, but that did nothing to stem the desire to get bacta and use it as preventative medicine.

Nartlo swiped at spittle flecking the corners of his mouth. “Seems there’s going to be enough now so the provos think they won’t need their own supply.”

Loor frowned. “Impossible. It would take a decade of bacta cartel production to satisfy the demand here.”

“Could be, sir, could be, but right now the word is out that the New Republic’s government has things under control.”

“It’s a lie, of course, but a good one.” Loor slowly sank down onto his haunches, letting his cloak pool around him. “You believe this bacta supply exists?”

“I think some does, sir, yes, sir.”

“You will learn about it. All about it.”

Nartlo’s eyes grew large again. “I don’t know as I can, sir. Security is tight.”

“You owe me, little man.” Loor’s growl cowed Nartlo. “You will go to your contacts and this time offer to buy cure at a good price.”

“What if they don’t want to sell?”

“Tell them that they will find exposure of their previous black market bacta dealings rather painful and embarrassing. If that is insufficient, perhaps making an example of one or more of them would be persuasive. I can and will do that.” Loor nodded toward the operative to his right. “Blasters have more than just a stun setting on them, you know.”

Nartlo licked at dry lips with a dry tongue. “Yes, sir, I know.”

“Good. I want to know how much they have, how long they think their supply will last. I need to estimate when the price will climb again.”

“I can understand that, sir.”

And with that information I can begin to project how large a facility they would need to store it and how best to destroy it. Loor began to smile. I could even just spread the rumor that they have more than enough bacta to cure everyone, then reveal the true amount they have in their stores. The gap between what is hoped for and what is real should create a lot of unrest. That is a suitable fall-back plan, and one which I can pursue while seeking out and destroying the containment facility.

“And, Nartlo, you will try to find out whatever you can about their storage, transport, and distribution network. If I do go buying more bacta as a hedge against shortage, I would prefer to go directly to the source. I would like to cut out the middlemen, no offense intended.”

“No, sir, none taken.”

“Good, good. I’m glad we understand each other.” Loor straightened up again. “I will be interested in hearing what you can find out.”

Nartlo nodded enthusiastically. “You can count on me.”

“I am counting on you. See to it that you do not fail me.”

“Yes, sir.” The small man shivered. “But, sir, I was wondering …”

“Yes?”

“How do I …”

Loor laughed in as sinister a manner as he could manage. “We will find you. Have something for me in two days.”

“But that’s not enough time.”

“But it is all the time you have, Nartlo.” Loor turned and swept from the room. The operatives crowded behind him and the two at the door preceded him to his grav-car. Loor climbed into the back, one of them got behind the controis, and the other three disappeared into the night. “Drive.”

Inertial forces pushed Loor back into the car’s plush upholstery. He began composing the report he would send off to Ysanne Isard. The fact that the Rebellion had gotten its hands on a new supply of bacta would not please her. She had wanted the demand for bacta to bankrupt the Rebellion, but Rogue Squadron’s capture of more bacta meant it was not nearly as pricey for the Rebels as Iceheart desired. The only way to counteract that bit of luck was to locate and destroy the bacta store, which was exactly what he intended to do.

The problem is that no matter how quickly I resolve this matter, it will not be quick enough for her. It occurred to him that her messages to him suffered little reduction in their venom, despite having to be recorded and transmitted instead of being delivered in person. He would have thought that the distance between them would have insulated him from her criticisms, but it had not. She seemed to have a preternatural ability to point up to him errors he had made, no matter how slight, and that kept him constantly off balance.

He realized that if he told her he was having some of his people train for a strike on the bacta facility before he knew what that mission would take, she would point out that he was wasting time and resources. He decided he would put men into training for smaller missions that could serve as diversions or that would, at the very least, provide the training framework upon which the bacta strike mission could be built. Iceheart might maintain that he was wasting resources that could be better used to locate the bacta facility in the first place. But trying to argue that stormtroopers could be used as spies was not the sort of blunder Isard would make.

The grav-car broke free of sub-urban roadway and shot up into the night sky. Countless towers flashed past, each lit as brilliantly as the fire of the thermite charge, but not nearly as harshly. He wondered how many of the people and aliens living in those towers were rejoicing over the secret word that their worries about the Krytos virus would soon be over. Many. Too many.

Loor let his own laughter become a parody of the sound he imagined echoing through those towers. It struck him that laughter and sobbing were really not that different, and decided that he would do his best to see to it that others gained first-hand knowledge of this insight.

Before they die of the virus for which I will destroy the cure.