Part 17 (2/2)
”Ma'am? Time to move on and track down the others. This is going to be a long, fiddly job.”
”Okay.” Etain needed a moment. She stared down at the compressed pink snow where Ven had lain while his buddies worked on keeping him alive. There was more blood than she'd expected, but it was hard to tell when it had stained the snow and spread. Blood in water or slush always looked worse than it was. ”I'll be with you shortly.”
She stood thinking of Darman, picturing him so that the baby might possibly see what she saw in the Force, and then made her way to the LAAT/i guns.h.i.+p. The speeder buses had already left empty, with no farmers to evacuate. Levet walked behind.
”Ma'am,” he said. ”Hang on.”
”What?”
”You've been hit, ma'am. Look...”
Etain turned around to face the commander and saw what he'd spotted: she'd left a trail of blood droplets in her wake. Instinctively, she looked for injuries, knowing how easy it was to be numbed to them until the adrenaline wore off.
Then it dawned on her. The blood wasn't coming from an injury, but running down her leg. She could feel its brief warmth now as it cooled on her skin and froze where it soaked into her clothes. A searing cramp seized her and doubled her up.
She was hemorrhaging. She was losing the baby.
Nar Hej s.h.i.+pping Company, Napdu, fourth moon of Da Soocha, Hutt s.p.a.ce, 476 days after Geonosis Sev stood to one side of the entrance, staring at Fixer on the other side as he had so many times before.
He couldn't remember the last time he'd walked through an unknown door without blowing it up, kicking it open, or melting its locks with a blaster bolt. One day he'd use the controls like everyone else. Scorch knelt between the two of them, edging the thin blades of the hydraulic spreader into the crack between the two halves of the door.
”I need an explosive fix,” Scorch said. ”I'm fed up with opening things quietly.”
”We don't want an audience arriving to admire your work.”
”Sev, I'm a surgeon among rapid entry artists.” Scorch grunted with the effort as he braced the spreader against his chest and leaned on it. The blades finally slipped into the gap. ”You're a nerf butcher.”
”Want to be on the menu, too?”
”Patience. Or we'll lock you in a room with Fi and let him talk you to death.”
Fixer let out a long sigh, one of his eloquently wide repertoire of nonverbal responses, and held up his hand to do a mute countdown: four, three, two ...
One.
Scorch pumped the hydraulics and the blades separated, sliding apart along the length of the bar. The doors were now open far enough for him to wedge the hydraulic ram between them and part them wide. Sev stepped over him, focused on not letting Ko Sai's trail go cold.
So ... they couldn't let Skirata know about this.
Or Omega, come to that.
It bothered Sev a lot. He understood the need to know and not know, but something that had to be kept from specific people he knew and trusted-and who wouldn't trust a brother commando?-troubled him.
We 're not like ordinary men. We 're professionals. We don't play games.
But what puzzled him most was the order not to tell Vau, either. Maybe Zey thought Skirata would wheedle it out of him. The Jedi certainly didn't trust Mandalorians, but maybe that was inevitable given the free-range nature of Vau's and Skirata's black ops activities. They might have been old but they were still thoroughly bad boys.
The office was in darkness. Sev's helmet spot-lamp picked out desks, grubby mats on the floor, and doors that led to what his sensors told him was a long hollow s.p.a.ce-a corridor. It probably led to living quarters. It wasn't unusual for traders to live in the same building as their offices on Napdu, because it was just a staging post for the sector's freight-no nice residential neighborhoods. Sev knew that because his HUD-linked database said so, under a red glowing header that read LOCAL CONDITIONS. He saw too little of the galaxy's day-to-day life to judge for himself, so he still relied on intel. He could see Scorch and Fixer's view of the dark office in their point-of-view HUD icons, and Fixer was already slicing into the computer records.
And Ko Sai's trail led here, after it was shaken and beaten out of reluctant informants. Vaynai, waterworld and smugglers' haven, stopping off at Aquaris, another waterworld rife with piracy and other sc.u.m, to ... Napdu.
Fixer took a probe from his belt and slid it into the computer's port, then stood in a pose of frozen concentration as he watched the screen. ”Business is booming,” he said. ”They really ought to shut the system down at night and pa.s.sword-protect the start-up.”
Scorch prowled, taking flimsi out of files. Anyone who still used flimsi either had data they didn't want to commit to a sliceable medium or was neurotic about keeping backups for the tax office. ”And that would slow you down how long, exactly? Thirty seconds?”
Fixer grunted meaningfully. Sev, half his attention on points of entry and exit, and the other half on Fixer's HUD view of the scrolling spreadsheets, could hear Boss clearing his throat. Their sergeant was a hundred meters away, wait-ing in a TIV-a special ops traffic interdiction vessel-that masqueraded as a packet courier, and the disembodied sound of someone coughing and swallowing irritated Sev a great deal.
”Boss . . .”
”Problem, Sev?”
”You, Boss ...”
”When I can take my bucket off, I'll gargle with bacta. Got a cold. Okay?”
Fixer came to life again. ”That's the contents of his data storage copied across. Scorch?”
Scorch was still sifting through a pile of flimsi, moving it from one stack to another and pausing to stare at each sheet. He was scanning the contents on his HUD holorecorder. ”This is just old stuff. Might as well grab what I can, though.”
Boss's voice rasped on the comlink. ”This cesspit is...o...b..ting another waterworld, Delta ... Da Soocha. See a trend?”
Sev heard a faint creak and padded up to the interior doors. He listened carefully, then pressed a sound sensor to the panels. ”Prepare to bang out. I detect signs of unintelligent life, and it's not Scorch ...”
Fixer shut down the computer, grabbed a trashy ornament- a souvenir faux crystal vase from Galactic City with long-dead insects piled up in the bottom-and broke open a cash credit box to pocket the contents. Vau had taught them to make in-filtrations look like robberies if they could, and Sev remained impressed by his old training sergeant's unerring eye for the choicest deposit boxes on Mygeeto. Whatever Vau did, he did it exceptionally well.
He s the best. Why should he expect any less from us? He made me what I am. He cares, whatever Skirata thinks.
”Okay, we're gone,” said Fixer, and vanished through the doors with Scorch. Sev backed out after them, DC-17 aimed, in case the owner walked in and became another unfortunate statistic in a lawless sector. Burglars didn't usually wear Katarn armor; it would have been hard to leave a live witness.
The three commandos sprinted down the road-no street lighting, all properties shuttered, no prying eyes-and down a dark alley to catch up with Boss. The TIV sat like a crouching animal in a gap between two repulsor trucks. The hatch opened, and they piled inside.
”Okay, let's thin out and run through the data.” Boss punched in the coordinates to take the TIV into a freight lane out to Nar Shaddaa and held his hand out for the datachip.
”C'mon, Fixer. Got to transmit it back to base for General Jusik to sift through.”
Fixer dropped it into Boss's palm. ”Bet I find it before he does.”
”You can have a techies' race between you,” Scorch said, taking off his helmet and rolling his head to ease his neck muscles. ”He's okay, ol' Jusik.”
Fixer pounced on the chip as soon as Boss had transmitted the contents and slotted it into his datapad. Sev, sliding across the bench seat in the crew bay to lean on his shoulder, noted that there were an awful lot of freight and pa.s.senger transactions.
Fixer shrugged him away. ”Gerroff. Go pester Scorch.” Sev heard his comlink click off and Fixer was in a world of his own, searching for all traffic that came from or connected with Vaynai in the last six months.
Sev eased off his helmet and gazed at the starscape. It was pretty. There were things out there he wanted to see and do, and probably never would, but he was determined not to think about it or else he'd end up a whiner like Fi, always regretting what he couldn't have. His life was too short to waste it like that. It took an effort to steer away from speculation and longing, but Sev prided himself on his single-mindedness even when it hurt-especially when it hurt.
”So what's Zey's problem with Skirata?” Scorch asked, kicking the back of Sev's seat. The benches were arranged . one behind the other. ”Doesn't he trust him?”
<script>