34

Everything was going perfectly, then the Trandoshan dropped the memory core. Wedge’s heart caught in his throat—it clearly intended to escape him altogether, but the forced smile and gritted teeth prevented it from getting away. The box landed on a corner that immediately crumpled, and there was no mistaking the moan of metal bending out of shape.

The Imperial technician’s face drained of blood. “Oh, now there is trouble.”

Wedge raised a hand. “Perhaps not, friend.”

“I have no time and this incident will have to be reported and checked out.”

“I think, perhaps, I have a solution to your problem.”

“I hope so, for your sake.” The small technician sniffed and looked around nervously. “If there is trouble, I will not be found at blame—you and your alien help will be held responsible.”

The loading process had gone almost without a hitch. Each core had been packaged in individual boxes and a diagnostic datacard had been placed in a clear plastic container fastened to the box. The technician had selected forty Palar memory cores from the fifty-five available at the plant. Each datacard was checked and then a quarter of the boxes were opened and probes were run on these randomly selected cores. If the data on them matched the data on the card, the lot was assumed to be good.

The auxiliary cores were slightly different and only ten of them had been produced. Three of them had been formatted with the special codes and had serial numbers where the last two digits added to ten. The Trandoshan doing the loading had been told to drop a core if none of the specially prepared ones had been selected, but one had.

The one he dropped.

The Trandoshan trundled back to the remaining five boxes and picked one of the other two that had the Rebel coding on it. He started to lift it up, but the technician put his hand firmly on the box and pressed it back down to the ground. “No, you clumsy vermin, you will not select the core. My choice.”

Wedge slapped the Trandoshan hard across the arm, stinging his hand on the creature’s leathery hide. “Back away, Portha. Your clumsiness will be reported.”

The big, lizardly Trandoshan hissed and shuffled back away from the boxes to stand over by Pash. The technician nodded slowly. “Thank you. They so seldom understand our problems.”

“Indeed.” Wedge scratched at the beard he had grown to help disguise himself. “You are quite right to make the choice yourself, but there is insufficient time to run the diagnostics yourself. Their cards have already shown you that they are clean, but you want it clear that you were scrupulous in making your random choice. If not, well, I doubt your superiors would be impressed.”

“That would be very bad indeed.”

“And we can’t have that, so choose you shall. Several times, so there can be no doubt of the randomness of the choice. You’ll see.” Wedge smiled and spread his hands out. “There are five here. Pick three.”

The man frowned for a second, then pointed to the first one and the last two.

Wedge motioned Gavin over. “Take the other two away.”

Gavin slid the two designated units away into the depths of the factory’s warehouse floor. Wedge hastily rearranged the remaining trio into a single line. One of these is the unit I want him to take, two are not. “Pick two more.”

The man designated the two on the end. “I choose them.”

“Good.” He pointed to Pash. “Take that one away. Now pick one.” Wedge wanted him to pick the first box, but the technician tapped the second one.

Wedge nodded, smiled, then turned and scowled at Gavin. “What are you waiting for? Get it into the truck with the others.” As he gave Gavin the command, Wedge rested his foot on top of the chosen memory core. “Hurry up, the man’s on a schedule, a tight schedule.”

“Don’t drop it,” the technician snapped.

Wedge sighed. “The exotics here work hard, but you can’t trust them—then I get a man like him who isn’t much better.”

The technician nodded as he watched Gavin carry the box to the repulsorlift truck and slide it into the back. “It’s the fault of the Rebellion, you know.”

“Do you think?”

“Of course. When the Emperor was still ruling there was no doubt about how things were to be done. Now …” The man shrugged his shoulders eloquently and Wedge nodded emphatically. “The people nowadays have stopped thinking because sloppiness no longer earns the sorts of rewards it did before.”

“I think you are quite correct.” Wedge smiled and rubbed his hands together. Had you been thinking at all, my friend, you’d have seen that I forced your choice of box. You made the choice, but I decided what the choice meant. Had you chosen the two sliced cores at first, I would have discarded the other three. The illusion of choice has you satisfied. He made a mental note to thank Booster Terrik for having so long ago taught him the value of letting people deceive themselves by showing him how to force a choice.

The technician made an entry on his datapad. “Even the stormtroopers are slipping. They tried to prevent me from coming into this sector this evening, but I would not be dissuaded by them, no, sir. I bulled on through and they let me go!”

“Stormtroopers?” Wedge shook his head, then pointed at Gavin. “Do you hear that, son? Even stormtroopers are becoming so undisciplined that you could join them. Perhaps those outside could tell you where their recruiting office is.”

The technician looked surprised. “Son? Is he your boy?”

“Takes after his mother.” Wedge guided the man toward his repulsorlift truck. “Don’t want to keep you.”

Suddenly sparks shot from the loading dock side door and rained down from the warehouse ceiling. A halo of brilliant white fire surrounded the door, then imploded leaving a smoking hole through which stormtroopers began to run. Duracrete and steel rained down from above as teams blasted their way in through the roof and descended on slender lines. Out past the nose of the computer center truck Wedge saw a Mekuun Hoverscout’s blunt prow batter the far gate. It bounced back, fired one burst with its laser cannon, then came on again over the molten remains of the gate.

Wedge gave the technician a shove forward, then spun on his heel and started running back into the warehouse’s shadows. He hurdled a line of memory cores, then cut left and back right as blaster bolts exploded all around him. Leaping over another line of crates, Wedge crouched down behind cover. From his right Iella slid him a blaster carbine, then activated her comlink. “Shiel, Ooryl, Wedge is clear. Open up.”

From deeper in the warehouse both the Gand and the Shistavanen started firing with a pair of Merr-Sonn E-Web Heavy blaster cannons. The weapons were mounted on tripods and had very specific fields of fire. Ooryl raked a stream of fire over the loading dock and out at the Hoverscout. The scarlet blaster bolts burned their way up over the vehicle’s nose and punched through the cockpit windscreen. The cockpit exploded in fire and smoke.

Shiel concentrated his fire on the stormtroopers descending on the lines from the roof. The high rate of fire allowed him to track his shots and pick stormtroopers off the lines. Wedge and Iella added their fire, but concentrated it near the holes to shoot people just beginning their descent.

The exit over at the far corner of the factory exploded. Wedge hit his comlink. “Corran, report.” He got nothing in reply and could see nothing but fire and twisted metal where a stairway had once been. The original evacuation plan had designated that stairway and the area beyond it, which Corran, Mirax, and some of the Black Sunners were holding, as their primary exit. Not anymore.

He looked at Iella. “Plan two. Fall back.”

She passed the signal along via her comlink. Portha, Pash, and Gavin pulled back from their positions first while Iella and Wedge provided covering fire. Once they were set, Iella and Wedge pulled back, but they didn’t get far. Even with covering fire from the heavy blasters and the others, the stormtroopers managed to concentrate enough fire to make it impossible for him to move.

Lying prone on the ferrocrete, with his left cheek pressed against the cool floor and sparks from burning crates stinging his right cheek, everything seemed to collapse in on him at once. Wedge knew that being in the warehouse in Invisec on Coruscant was utterly and completely insane—more so even than sending snubfighters out to destroy a Death Star. He should have been in an X-wing if he was going to be fighting Imperials. Having a firefight with stormtroopers was still one of the best ways he knew of committing suicide, and he was afraid he was going to prove it in the next three or four minutes.

In setting up their operation they had taken into account what would happen if a stormtrooper patrol happened to make a sweep of the Palar factory—and the two heavy blasters should have been more than enough to take care of the threat. The presence of so many stormtroopers meant they’d been sold out at least twice—once so the Imperial operation could be planned and again so the scouts they’d had outside the plant wouldn’t warn them of the impending raid. Corran said having Thyne organize the lookouts was a big mistake.

More blaster bolts scorched the air above him. If I don’t do something fast, we’re done. Wedge pushed up on the bottom of his comlink and gave it a twist, setting the device on a new frequency. “This is Rogue Leader. Things are breaking up here. Track and recover on this signal. Come ready to shuck stormies.”

“I copy.”

Iella crawled over to him and glanced at the comlink. “Do I want to know?”

“I don’t like working without backup.” He smiled, then ducked his head as a blaster bolt scorched the air. “If we hang on we may get out of this fine.”

“You’re the Rebellion’s hero, so I’ll trust you.” She gave him a confident smile. “Thyne sold us out, I’d bet.”

“No takers.” Another trio of bolts burned through the air above them. “Can’t wait here. Let’s move.”

“How?”

Wedge grinned. “Call Shiel. Get him to use that cannon to burn us a path through this maze.”

“Consider it done.” Iella gave Shiel the command and the line of thick red bolts cut over and down. Memory cores exploded casting fiery debris everywhere. The memory platters whirled through the air, hit, and rolled throughout the warehouse. Smoke already coated the ceiling with a grey cotton cloud, but more rose to take it from benign to a darkly menacing thunderhead.

As nearly as Wedge could determine later, Shiel’s firing on crates to clear a path for Iella and him was interpreted by the computer technician as an attempt to destroy the memory cores in the back of the repulsorlift truck. Whoever was driving it started the engine and ran power into the repulsorlift coils. The truck rose from the warehouse floor and started forward gingerly. The aft end began to drift left, but that was clearly preparatory to swinging around the burning Hoverscout.

Suddenly the truck lurched forward. Its right front fender slammed into the edge of the loading dock access port. The truck spun around to the left and backed into the burning Hoverscout. It rode halfway up onto the military vehicle before the repulsorlift coils shorted, dropping the truck down to crush the Hoverscout.

A titanic explosion shredded both vehicles and sprayed shrapnel throughout the loading dock area. The blast’s shock wave sent crates flying and tossed Wedge around like a Chadra-Fan wrestling with a rancor. He landed hard on a crate, shattering it and the memory core it had contained. At the same time he felt something pop on his left side and got a sharp pain with each breath. Ribs, but at least I can still move.

He grabbed Gavin’s proffered hand and got to his feet. The two of them sprayed blaster fire into the black cloud choking the far end of the warehouse, but very little in return fire headed in their direction. The stormtroopers clearly had gotten the worst of the blast, being closest to it when the Hoverscout’s magazine of concussion missiles had blown.

Iella, Pash, and Portha had taken up stations around the doorway heading deeper into the factory complex. Beyond it Nawara Ven and Shiel were wrestling with their heavy blaster cannon. Rhysati and Erisi were out in front with Ooryl close behind. He sported a blaster carbine.

Wedge winced as he waved everyone on. “Go, go! This place is crawling with Imps. We were sold out so now we have to get clear.”

Gavin’s eyes grew wide. “But you’re hurt, sir.”

“I can still move, Gavin, and that’s what we have to do.” Wedge shoved him on ahead. “If we don’t we’re all going to be hurt a lot more.”