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  Scut frowned. Myri felt a twinge of sympathy for him. He was wearing his neoglith masquer face and gloves with the ambience suit over them; perhaps he wasn’t overheating, but Myri decided she’d be on the verge of claustrophobic panic in such a rig.

  Scut touched the points where the line representing the rut crossed the curves representing the sensor fences. “Can we dig through deep enough to crawl under?”

  “I think so. And quietly. Deep enough for me, One, Two, and Three certainly. I don’t know about you and Four. You’re kind of thick-chested.”

  Trey snorted. “Thank you for not saying thickheaded.”

  “I thought about it.”

  Bhindi began to tug her hood back into place. “Let’s do it. Hands only for the digging, no tools. And no talking. That means you, Two. Let’s go.”

  Turman sniffed as if offended, but he did not reply.

  They set their blasters and other hard equipment aside and dug as quietly as they could, slowly, painstakingly deepening and widening the loose soil packed around the fence base. They did not worry about being seen by unaugmented eyes. In deep shadow in their black ambience suits, against a black permacrete wall with a black metal mesh sensor layer on top, they were invisible to anything short of special light-gathering sensors.

  Jesmin was quietest, as befitted an Antarian Ranger with extensive wilderness experience. Turman remembered not to practice soliloquies. The task seemed to take forever; the stars wheeled by overhead as the Wraiths dug. Myri could see artificial objects up there with them—capital ships, illuminated by the system’s sun, approaching or departing the atmosphere, space stations in their orbits, all of them tiny shapes.

  Eventually the gap under the meter-high sensor fence became large enough for even Trey to slither through. Permitting themselves no noise-increasing haste, they crawled under, transferred their bags and blaster rifles across, and moved on.

  They elbow-crawled along the repulsor rut, taking advantage of the slight visual cover it offered, until they were at the second sensor wall. This time things went a bit faster; their experience with the first wall had developed their stealthy digging technique. This wall took only half an hour to dig beneath.

  They were halfway between it and the inner wall when the landspeeder appeared.

  Scut, in the rear, was first to notice. He rapped on Myri’s leg and pointed back. Just turning off the ground-vehicle road into the landing area of the children’s habitat was a long, sturdy landspeeder, one optimized for cargo hauling. Its running lights were not on; it became visible only when it passed under the pole-top glow rods around the long yellow building. Myri could now hear its repulsors humming.

  The Wraiths froze where they were.

  Bhindi kept her voice a whisper. “I’ll bet Four’s left arm they’re running with infrared sensors on, and that they’re coming this way—yes.” The landspeeder floated across the landing lot and then onto the rut. “Everyone do exactly as I do.” She resumed her elbows-and-knees crawl toward the inner fence, moving faster now.

  By the time the landspeeder floated over the middle fence, the Wraiths were beside the innermost fence. They lay motionless in the rut, arrayed in two ranks of three. Myri, on the left of the front rank, kept her attention on Bhindi in the middle. Jesmin, on the other side, did the same.

  The hum of the oncoming landspeeder grew into a low roar—and then Myri felt sudden pressure from the repulsors passing above her. It started at her feet and ankles, moved quickly up her body. She imagined the sensation to be like having a rancor-sized baker try to flatten her with a giant rolling pin.

  Then it was past, just barely past, and Bhindi sprang to her feet only centimeters behind the landspeeder’s rear panel. Myri and Jesmin scrambled up. Together the three women leapt over the sensor wall, hit the ground in a roll, and then went flat again. There were more impacts as Trey, Turman, and Scut hit the ground behind them, and one of them—Myri thought it was Turman—went flat with half his body weight across Myri’s legs.

  They lay still and silent while the landspeeder continued on toward the square building. Myri heard a metallic rolling and scraping noise from the east face of the building, probably the door being opened. The landspeeder made the turn to the east wall of the building and floated out of Myri’s sight.

  The repulsor noise began to echo and diminish. The scraping-rolling noise resumed and continued for quite a while. Then, finally, all became silent.

  Myri turned her head to see who had fallen on her. But half a meter away was a spider. A ten-legged arachnid, it was as large in diameter as a Wookiee’s open hand and almost as hairy. As Myri stared, wide-eyed, it raised its front four legs skyward in a threat display.

  Myri cringed and didn’t move.

  The spider’s forelegs wavered, but otherwise the creature remained still.

  Myri tugged her face mask away from her mouth and blew, a steady stream of breath that flowed across the arachnid, causing its hair to stir. Myri hoped the action would be a deterrent, not an invitation to leap on her face.

  It was. The arachnid’s forelegs wavered again, and then the creature turned around and ran away from the rut.

  The Wraiths waited a dozen meters away while Jesmin finished her reconnaissance around the square building’s exterior. Then she appeared at the northwest corner and waved them forward. Myri and the others joined her at the west—back—wall. They huddled midway along the wall, where Jesmin showed them a sheet of wall metal with most of the rivets torn out, probably from years of being flexed by winds. Jesmin pulled the metal sheet a few centimeters to one side, and light streamed out.

  Through the gap they could see that the interior was a single chamber, thirty meters on a side, dominated in the center by the darkened top of a cargo lift shaft, itself twenty meters on a side.

  Jesmin pointed at a spot directly above the east-side door, and at locations about six meters up on the north and south walls as well. In each place, a bracket bolted to the wall held a good-sized holocam unit, its lens pointed out through a round hole cut in the sheet metal of the wall, aimed outside. She kept her voice so low that Myri could barely hear her. “I think there’s one overhead, too.”

  Trey eased her out of the way and trained his macrobinoculars at each of the three holocams in turn, flipping between several filters and enhancement options as he did so. Then he lowered the device. “Infrared. We’re covered. And I don’t see any cams monitoring the interior.”

  There were no people, either military or civilian, to be seen. Bhindi nodded. “Six, pull back twenty meters and prepare to offer us warning or covering fire. And you don’t need tissue samples from the spiders. Everyone else, we’re going in.”

  Inside, the chamber was eerily silent. Only a few metallic clanks and the waver of distant voices, too faint to be understood, floated up from the lift shaft. Myri crept up to its edge. The permacrete all around was curiously clean and was marked with holes, two to three centimeters in diameter, whose edges were even cleaner—almost white.

  Trey edged up beside her, looking at the same holes. “Something was bolted down all over the floor until recently. I’m guessing it was flooring, maybe concealing the lift. The holes are deep for strength.”

  Jesmin leaned over the shaft. From her pack she withdrew one of the winches Trey had bought. About the size and shape of a human shoe, it consisted of a coil of industrial-strength cord a hundred meters long, high-torque gripping rollers, and a power pack, with simple controls on one surface. The trailing end of the black cord had a black grappling hook attached. She leaned over the shaft edge with the hook in hand, attached it to something underneath, and clipped the winch to her belt. “Ready.”

  In moments all five of them, one by one swung themselves over the edge, into the darkness. Far below a square of light showed them their destination.

  As she descended, Myri decided that it would have been a serious misstatement to refer to the shaft as part of a turbolift. Turbo did not enter its descripti
on at any point. Myri had occasionally seen lifts like this, on backrocket worlds and in industrial complexes. At the four corners of the square shaft were durasteel tracks, something like gigantic chains with regular sprocket holes. Presumably, far below, there would be a large, square lift car, probably open-top, with motors at each corner driving gears that spun slowly and engaged the sprockets. Ascending or descending might take one minute or several, but the lift could haul tremendous weights.

  As the square of light below grew larger, what lay within it resolved into objects Myri could recognize. The lift car had reached bottom and the late-arriving landspeeder was still upon it. Men and women in brown moved on the lift-car floor, hauling cylinders—half a meter high, perhaps the same in diameter, black at the ends and pink in the middle—and stacked them in the landspeeder’s lengthy bed. Myri saw a total of six workers doing the loading. None of them looked up. When she drew closer, she could see the stylized tooth design of the Pop-Dogs on the workers’ collars.

  When Myri was about twenty-five meters above the landspeeder, Jesmin, five meters below her, stopped her descent. Myri could only see her eyes as Jesmin looked up at the other Wraiths. Moments later Myri reached her level and switched off her winch. As they arrived, the other three Wraiths did likewise.

  Jesmin pointed toward the side of the shaft directly ahead. Peering, squinting, Myri could barely see that there was some sort of horizontal gap there. She drew out her macrobinoculars and looked through them, cycling through different light-amplification modes.

  Ahead was a railed metal balcony. It would be beyond the edge of the lift car when it rose or descended. On the other side of the balcony were doors at intervals—open doors with blackness beyond. Myri put her macrobinoculars away.

  Jesmin reached for her, and Myri caught her hand. Awkward, unable to brace herself, Myri swung Jesmin forward. Jesmin swung free and came within a couple of hand spans of the metal rail. When she swung back, Myri pushed her again, and this time Jesmin caught the rail.

  In two minutes, all five Wraiths were at and over the rail. Jesmin and Trey disappeared through the nearest door. Myri and the others waited at the rail, watching below.

  It looked as though the lift car was at the floor of a chamber much larger than the lift shaft; sturdy square durasteel columns took the lift’s tracks all the way to the floor, but Myri could see open space beyond them in all four directions. Open space, and the noses or tails of vehicles. Some were very large; others seemed to be ordinary airspeeders. It looked as though a metal trench, deeper than the floor by at least a meter, ran north and south from the lift shaft. Myri thought that the trench might meet in the middle, directly beneath the lift car. When Myri spotted the rails along either side of the trench, she knew what it was for, had seen its like in some old cities: it was a slot to guide vehicles that traveled laterally along it, probably also hauling cargo.

  The stacks of pink-and-black cylinders grew higher. When the first of them protruded well above the landspeeder’s cargo bed, the Pop-Dogs threw a blanket across it, then tied the stack firmly in place.

  Jesmin and Trey returned from their scouting run. Jesmin leaned close to Bhindi to whisper in her ear. Trey did the same with Myri. “It’s a residential floor. Empty. Stripped of furnishings. Air ducts closed down and power off.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Some dust on the floor, but not thick. A few weeks?”

  Bhindi drew another twenty meters of cord from her winch, then clipped the end of the cord. She tied it off to the metal rail so it would be loose but not dangle into the shaft. She gestured for the others to do as she did.

  Finally the loading of the landspeeder was done; blankets secured and concealed four stacks of cylinders. The Pop-Dogs talked among themselves until a seventh individual, a human man in civilian dress, stepped onto the lift car from a spot out of the Wraiths’ view. He spoke briefly to one of the Pop-Dogs and climbed into the cockpit of the speeder. The Pop-Dogs stepped off the lift car and moved to the side, out of Myri’s view.

  Bhindi waved the Wraiths back through the doors. Before they were quite through the doors, the lift was in motion, rising slowly and noisily.

  In the darkness of the abandoned residential level, Myri breathed a little more easily. “This is some sort of distribution center.”

  “The cylinders are military casks for bacta.” Jesmin sounded grim. “A hot commodity on the black market.”

  “I think this will be the proof we need.” Bhindi sounded happy. “If we prove that Thaal is in an operation trading military bacta to the black market, he’ll be ruined, dishonorably discharged, imprisoned, and investigated from his scalp to his soles. It’ll be so thorough that there’s no way he’ll be able to keep an association with the Lecersen Conspiracy secret. Record everything you see here … and I think we’ve won.”

  The lift car rose clanking past their level. The noise gradually declined as the car climbed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Two minutes later, the Wraiths rode their winches down their lines to the floor, landing silently at the edge of the loading area. Jesmin was first, landing in the shadow of one of the track columns, and she took a few moments to scan her surroundings before waving the others down. Coming to rest on the permacrete floor, Myri also scanned their surroundings.

  It was a large chamber, a motor pool by the looks of it. Most of it was a broad permacrete shelf with that gash of a metal trench running down its middle, dividing it in half. The trench continued north and south along the center of a broad, high, arch-topped corridor lit by ancient glow rod fixtures, many of them flickering with age and lack of maintenance. The corridor extended to the limits of Myri’s vision in this gloom, and she could see doors, some human-scale and some six or seven meters high and wide, dotting the walls every twenty to thirty meters. She also thought she glimpsed cross-corridors in either direction.

  The vehicles around her—she saw full-sized plasma artillery batteries, modern units that rode easily on repulsorlifts. There were hauler landspeeders, expensive personal airspeeders, speeder bikes, and armored personnel speeders.

  There were no people to be seen, and the place was eerily quiet. The only noise came from the lift car now reaching the top of the shaft.

  The Wraiths tied their cords off to metal rings at the base of one of the columns, then gathered in the deepest shadows, which were on the wall beneath the abandoned residential level.

  Bhindi looked around at the bounty of the motor pool and shrugged. “We’ve won.”

  “We’re not out of here yet.” Myri didn’t know whether or not to be appalled at Bhindi’s assumption of victory.

  “True. But look. Artillery units. I’ll give you hundred-to-one odds that they were reported destroyed in field exercises. Now they’re going to the black market. All that bacta.”

  “Why is it so empty?” Though his whisper could not carry much emotion, Trey sounded distracted, bothered. “Why was the top-side floor pulled out?”

  “We’ll find out. Orders.” She pointed to Turman. “He gets all the explosives with comm-based detonators. The simple ones. Four, check him out on them to make sure he knows how not to blow himself up. Two, you’ll stay here in this chamber and put charges beneath the repulsor motivators on as many of these vehicles as you can—military vehicles first. As we leave, we’ll set them off so they can’t fly the evidence away on short notice. Then, Four, you and Three check out everything interesting to the south while Five and I do the same to the north. Record everything. Don’t get caught. We’ll muster back here in an hour. Clear?”

  Myri nodded. “Clear.” But her confirmation did nothing to diminish the unease she felt.

  Myri crept with Trey a few dozen meters down the south corridor. They peered into the first doorway, an open rectangle of black, and within it saw only a storeroom whose shelves held crates of food—cereal products, dried fruits, sweeteners, powders meant to be mixed with drinks.

  “I need to check this out.” T
rey turned his back on the storage room and moved in a crouch over to the trench. He slipped down into it, disappearing from Myri’s view.

  She followed, landing beside him in the shadowy gap. “I told you, I know what it’s for.”

  “Yes, you did, and you were right.” Trey gave her an enigmatic look—enigmatic only because she couldn’t see his face and interpret his whole expression. “But do you know everything it’s for?”

  He pointed to the trench side, which was beneath an overhang perhaps ten centimeters deep. He flicked on the glow rod in his hand, illuminating a section of metal trench wall. “See those bolts? They’re securing a panel a meter wide, a meter tall.”

  Myri nodded. “Sure.”

  “A panel to an access tunnel. Under the permacrete floor. Probably a lot of them. Some will handle drainage, some will give access to infrastructure machinery. As empty as this place is, I bet many of them aren’t ever looked in. When we pull out, we ought to leave one of us behind to continue surveillance. Our evidence will be a lot stronger if we do.”

  “Tell Leader.”

  “I will.” He crawled southward, keeping well below the trench lip above.

  Myri followed, occasionally peeking up above the rim to see her surroundings. “My father was on the Death Star Trench Run. You know, the famous one. Me, I get the General’s Basement Trench Crawl.”