X-wing_ Iron Fist Part 26

From underneath his tunic, Tavin brought out a small blaster and aimed it at her. Rossik glanced at Tavin, his expression openly derisive, and merely placed his own hand on the b.u.t.t of his own blaster. "You don't appear to be in a position to make such demands, Petothel. Your partner is a kilometer away and may not even be watching. I know you haven't been broadcasting; my scanner would have told me."

Lara looked at the blaster in Tavin's hand and raised her arms, a gesture that was half surrender, half insolent stretch. "I'll give you two just one chance. Throw down your weapons now."

Rossik said, "Keep her covered and take her blaster. I'm doing what I told you-leaving through the rear of the house and circling around behind her partner. Just keep her here and quiet until then."

"Easily done," Tavin said.

"You should have surrendered," Lara said.

She closed her hands into fists.

A brilliant lance of light from the hill took Tavin right in the stomach.

The sudden explosion of superheated tissues threw the man down and back; his blaster dropped to the charred ground.

Rossik turned toward the source of the laser fire and took a step forward. Lara drew her blaster. Rossik was in the air, throwing himself to the ground, when Lara's blast took him in the side. He hit the ground and lay there unmoving.

Lara rose and kept the two men covered as Donos ran down from his sniper position. She didn't need to; it was clear to her that both men were dead. She tried to simulate rattled nerves and was surprised to discover that she had them for real. Part of her reaction, she knew, was the sudden relief that her secret was once again safe for the time being.

"Are you all right?" Donos asked.

Lara nodded. "They wanted..."

Her voice broke and once again it was a genuine reaction. "They wanted me to go back to Iron Fist with them. They weren't going to leave me an option where I could feed them false information. I was just going to disappear." She shuddered. "I couldn't do that."

Donos prodded Rossik with a foot. The body rolled halfway over, displaying staring, vacant eyes. He reached down to take the man's blaster away. "Why did your brother draw on you?"

"I said no. I said I wouldn't go back with this man, Rossik. Apparently my brother wasn't going to get paid unless I went back with Rossik. If he wasn't going to be paid, he was going to kill me."

"Not exactly a loving brother." Donos looked over Tavin's body and took his weapon, too. Then he looked back over his shoulder at Lara. "I'm sorry. That was a callous thing to say."

"That's all right. The Tavin I loved just stopped existing when I was a little girl; he turned into this. I miss him... but you didn't kill him."

"We can't be sure there's not more to Rossik's team. Let's grab their papers, give the house a quick look, and then head back for the X-wings.

I want to get off this world as soon as possible."

Castin had to keep a certain amount of attention on the hall-way behind him as he continued to hammer away at Iron Fist's computer security from the terminal. So far, none of the scientists or technicians from the rooms beyond the viewports had stepped out into the hall, but he couldn't count on his luck lasting forever.

And the computer security here was good. Someone nearly as skilled as he had set up the multilayered defense that so far kept him from sliding his program into place in the communications system. And while Castin was certain that he was superior to this unknown code-slicer, that individual had had weeks, months, or years to perfect his code; Castin was trying to bypa.s.s it in a matter of minutes. Even with his superior skills and the tools he'd brought, it wasn't going well.

So he was upset. Barely able to concentrate on what he was doing. No, that didn't make sense. Tough systems were a challenge to him, not an aggravation, and sharpened his concentration rather than diminis.h.i.+ng it.

So why was he upset? He leaned back, away from the screen with its unhelpful rejections of all his most reasonable requests, to think about it. Even his stomach was upset, and that, finally, pointed him to the source of his emotion. It was what he'd seen moments ago. The creatures in the cages. The Talz on the operating table, a peaceful being maddened by chemicals until it was full of rage.

It was ridiculous. He didn't care about such things. They weren't human, they weren't particularly important, and if the scientists decided to work on them, that was fine. But the sick feeling persisted.

That Talz's life was over. Even if it miraculously escaped its captivity, it would be forever changed by what had happened to it. Could it return home to its world, its family, knowing how it had been violated, knowing what it had been made to feel and do, and still go back to the way of life it had known before? Castin didn't think so.

He swore to himself. He didn't have time for this. And he didn't need to concern himself with the fate of a grab bag of nonhumans Zsinj decided to perform tests on.

But the images persisted, crowding out the techniques and procedures he needed to use for his current mission, filling him with an unwanted emotion.

Sympathy.

Sympathy for those hairy, smelly, and most unhuman beings crowding those cells he'd seen. They were a concentration of tragedy.

Caught up as he was in these thoughts, Castin still heard the hiss of the turbolift door far behind him. He powered down the terminal, grabbed up his datapad and helmet, and scuttled around the corner to the right before peering back the way he'd come.

A half squadron of stormtroopers, dimly visible in the pa.s.sageway's gloom, advanced toward him. Their steps were unhurried. Halfway toward him along the pa.s.sageway, the leader rapped smartly against the nearest transparisteel. Having apparently gained the attention of someone beyond it, he tapped the side of his head, an obvious signal for someone inside to get to a comlink to receive his transmission.

d.a.m.n it. They had to be looking for him. What had he done wrong? He was certain he'd covered his tracks when powering up the corner terminal.

No, wait. When he'd first popped the cover on the control box inside the turbolift shaft and discovered the heavy-duty security there-he hadn't known about that level of security until he'd opened the box in the first place. If there was a sensor on the box itself, a sensible precaution for a set of controls leading into a very secure area, he would have set it off without ever realizing it.

He drew away from the corner. Behind him was another viewport, this one into an office area, currently unoccupied. Beside it was an armored door with a standard set of controls beside it. tie tapped the "open" b.u.t.ton and the little screen on the control pad read ENTER AUTHORIZATION CODE.

At the stormtroopers' rate of approach, they'd be oil him before he could break through that security and get into the office.

What was it to be-bluff or fight? There was no way a bluff would work; it would only serve to keep him in one place while the rest of the stormtroopers approached. He readied his blaster rifle.

The lead stormtrooper came around the corner and froze momentarily.

"What's your..."

Castin fired. His shot took the stormtrooper in the gut and threw him back against the far wall.

Castin didn't wait for the next trooper to appear. He fired again, this time into the viewport, shattering it inward, and leaped, following the broken transparisteel into the office beyond.

He landed and spun, aiming back through the broken viewport. Two more stormtroopers rounded the corner, bringing their long arms to bear on the spot where he'd stood a moment before. He fired again twice, his first shot taking the nearer stormtrooper in the chest. The other trooper dove for the deck, out of sight below the rim of the viewport, and Castin's second shot missed him.

A shrill Klaxon alarm sounded and the lights in the office began flickering in time to it.

There was another door out of the office, leading in the general direction of the turbolift, and its control panel was responsive. It opened into what appeared to be a scrub room, all sinks and lockers and decontam chambers, with no viewport out into the pa.s.sageway.

The next door opened just as readily-into the operating theater. The medical technicians there had ceased their ministrations to the Talz and were watching the activity on the other side of the picture viewport-the last of the stormtroopers pa.s.sed by, heading toward the scene of the action Castin had just left.

A blaster bolt went over Castin's shoulder and hit one of the technicians in the back of the head. Castin saw the man, his head now a black ma.s.s of char, topple forward as slowly as if sinking into heavy oil, saw the other technicians as they turned toward him in similar slow motion.

He spun, firing before he could even see his target. A stormtrooper stood in the open doorway between office and scrub room, a perfect target, and Castin's unaimed blast took him in the knee. The man toppled with a shriek.

Castin slapped the near control panel and the door slid shut. He turned back to the technicians; they already had their hands up. One couldn't take his eyes from the smoking ma.s.s that had once been the head of his colleague.

It would take just one blast to blow out the near viewport. He could leap through and get back to the turbolift before the three stormtroopers still mobile were likely to catch up to him. That was it, then. But as he traversed to aim at the viewport, he saw the Talz looking at him. Its four eyes seemed to be holes leading to a world of pure pain.

He hesitated, then pulled his vibroblade from a belt pouch.

He cut through the Talz's ankle restraints, then went to work on its wrist straps.

"Don't!" That was one of the technicians, his eyes wide.

"That's not a Talz anymore, it's a killer-"

"Right." Castin finished with the last strap, then backed away.

The technician who'd spoken bolted, got to the doorway, slapped the control. The door opened... and the technician caught a blaster bolt just beneath his gut. He folded over, still alive, and began screaming.

The Talz rolled tlp off the table, tubes still gruesomely inserted into its skull. It glared with malevolence at Castin, then turned toward the remaining technicians and advanced on them. The rolling carrier holding the bottle of drip chemicals tipped over and was dragged along. The Talz spotted something through the door, probably the stormtrooper who'd last fired, and paused, obviously trying to decide what foe to attack first.

Castin fired at the viewport, blowing it out, and leaped through the hole he'd made. There was nothing between him and the turbolift door. He dropped his vibroblade and dragged out his datapad as he ran.

Then there was pain, an agony so intense he couldn't even tell where it began, and he was falling, slamming down onto the pa.s.sageway floor.

Pain bent him as though he were a puppet in the hands of a malevolent child. He could see, and even barely understand, the spot on the back of his left thigh where a blaster bolt had cut through the stormtrooper armor and the flesh beneath. He could see the stormtrooper who'd shot him; the man was advancing at a walk, his rifle ready for another shot.

And then there was the turbolift door, too far away for a man reduced to crawling.

They had him. They had him, and they had his datapad, which contained everything Zsinj would need to know about him and his mission here.

Hands twitching from the pain, he held his datapad out before the barrel of his blaster rifle and squeezed the trigger.

"Now," Zsinj said over the iced pastry that was their dessert course, "to the matter which has led to our meeting."

Face sat back, a.s.suming a false expression of contentment.

"Please."

"I am about to embark on a mission. It will be a large-scale military engagement."

"You're going to attack your Rebel enemies?"

"That's correct. I antic.i.p.ate starfighter and capital s.h.i.+p response and need all the starfighter support I can get-especially considering my recent squadron losses." He made a growl of that last statement. "But if you're as effective against my enemies as you have been against me, I will have lost effectively no strength." An aide appeared over his shoulder and whispered to him. His expression did not change, but he rose. "I must attend to business for a few moments. Melvar, please continue this briefing." He took a few steps away with the aide.

Melvar smiled, an expression that suggested he'd be happiest if pulling the wings off insects.

"It's an orbital refueling and trade station. In its warehouses is a considerable quant.i.ty of material we need-critical supplies. We also need some time to load that material into our cargo vessels - not a lot of time, but enough time for the planetary defenses below to begin sending up squads of starfighters from the surface... and to bring in more squadrons from capital s.h.i.+ps arrayed around the planet."

Face whistled. "You're after valuable cargo. What is it?"

Melvar shook his head. "That's a secret... until you're at the mission site."

"What we need to know," Zsinj said, returning to his seat, "is how many starfighters you can bring to bear in support of this mission."

"Six," Face said. He noted that Zsinj's merry demeanor now seemed forced.

"Only six?"

"We fight like twenty."

"You fight like thirty. And we'll pay you like thirty."

"Meaning..."

"Your commission is four hundred thousand Imperial credits, deliverable immediately upon completion of the mission."

Face tried to keep from displaying the surprise he felt.

That was a fortune, enough to purchase two X-wings plus replacement supplies. "And if your mission fails, no payment at all?"

"No, you get the entire amount regardless-a.s.suming you don't let me die in the engagement."

"I'm still impressed. If I didn't know my unit's skills, I would suspect you were overpaying us."

Zsinj dropped his false smile. "I am overpaying. I predict that some of yours, and some of mine, will die in this engagement. I intend to pay enough that all our pilots go into battle eager to succeed, happy to risk their lives - and comforted that if they die, their widows and children will be amply compensated."

Face considered it. "I'd be happy to earn still more. I have more Hawkbats than I do starfighters. Many with technical proficiency. Many with other skills."

"Intrusion skills ?"

Face smiled. "I was right. You're going to position a team before your fleet arrives."

Zsinj shrugged. "We obviously think alike. Yes, of course."

"I have intrusion experts. Some with experience with both Imperial and New Republic systems."

"And also," Melvar interrupted, "you have him." He extended one silvery nail toward Kell.

"And his teacher," Face said.

Melvar looked surprised.

"His... teacher?"

Kell brushed his hair back, his signature gesture, and looked miffed.

"His teachen Deadliest unarmed combatant I ever met. A woman, deceptively sweet of appearance, which makes it easy to insert her in most environments. Not his equal as a pilot... but I once saw her kill a Wookiee. Unarmed."

Zsinj and Melvar exchanged glances. Zsinj said, "Surely you're exaggerating."

"He's not," Kell said, his first words since they sat.

"A Wookiee's incredibly strong by human standards, but no faster... and has just as many vulnerabilities. Pressure points. Joints. You can't wrestle with one-that's automatic death. And its longer reach means you constantly have to drop in and out of its range. But it can be done.

"Qatya, that's my teacher, started with a shot to the spine that compressed its spinal cord and apparently damaged a cou-ple of its vertebrae, all of which partially paralyzed it... especially its legs.

The next time it swung at her, she trapped its hand at a position to give her advantageous leverage, then twisted it to break its wrist. She broke two of its fingers then, too, just for fun. You know how women are.

Then..."