Mercy Kil Read online

  “I need to check this out.” Trey 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.”

  Myri couldn’t see his face, but Trey’s shoulders seemed to stiffen. “I know who your father is. Everyone knows who your father is.”

  “I beg your pardon?” She looked at him, startled.

  “Some of us don’t have famous relatives to admire. Or nonfamous relatives to admire.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. It was a joke.”

  “All right.”

  Jesmin and Bhindi kept to the shadows along the wall when they were deep enough, switching to the trench when they were not. The two worked their way northward. In short order, they passed a succession of doors into darkened areas on either wall.

  “So quiet.” Bhindi raised her head a little from the trench and looked around before ducking again. “I hear distant voices and music. Recorded music, I think. Echoing.”

  Jesmin peered under the lip of the trench edge. With one gloved hand, she reached for the lump she saw adhering there and tugged at it, levering it free of the metal above. It came loose with a faint ripping noise, and she presented it to Bhindi.

  It was an irregular mass, centimeters thick, of some material Bhindi obviously couldn’t at first make out—layers of different colors, white and tan and gray and black. Bhindi peered more closely at it.

  “Paint.” Jesmin squeezed it in her hand, causing the edges to buckle, warp, and peel away. “Scores or hundreds of layers.” She sniffed at it, detected the dim smell of solvents and durasteel treatments. “This complex is very old.”

  Bhindi’s eyebrows rose, disappearing under her hood. “I know what this place is.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “A Tech Raiders base. The black marketeers from long ago. Thaal and his original Pop-Dogs hid out in one of their bases near the city of Vangard to do their guerrilla activities against the Yuuzhan Vong. While I was flitting all over the galaxy with your dad and Piggy and the other Wraiths, Thaal was squatting in a place like this and harming the enemy his own way. But not from this base. This one doesn’t appear in his history anywhere.” Bhindi blinked, considering. “That would explain why he had Fey’lya Base built so far from Vangard and the old clone trooper facilities. He wanted to be conveniently near here—his own black-market staging area.”

  Jesmin offered her a nearly silent whistle. “He found more than one base and never reported it. He’s been corrupt ever since the end of the Yuuzhan Vong War.”

  “At least. I wonder ...” Bhindi shifted as she thought. “Maybe there were still some old Tech Raiders here when he arrived. They might have helped him learn the lay of the land, taught him smuggler stealth techniques ... and convinced him to become one of them. Maybe his Pop-Dogs are the Tech Raiders of a new generation.”

  Jesmin nodded. “And maybe Thaal is just the man to put them through a massive expansion. Make them a galactic-class crime syndicate.”

  The first two chambers Jesmin and Bhindi examined turned out to be dormitories, each occupied by a dozen bunk beds now shrouded in transparent flexiplast. Dust collected in a thin layer on all surfaces.

  The third chamber, on the far side of the trench, was free of dust. Bhindi slid the corridor door shut behind her and switched the door-side control panel so that the glow rods overhead would stay shut off even though there were people in the room. Then the two women moved from shelving rack to shelving rack, navigating by the light from their glow rods, looking at what was warehoused there.

  High-grade, military-specification electronics parts, repair and replacement components for comm systems, sensor systems, and power generators. Opaque black transport cases marked only with the dates they were sealed; the planet of origin on each was shown as Kessel. Bhindi actually seemed to pale in the light from Jesmin’s glow rod. “Glitterstim cases,” she told Jesmin.

  Several shelves held bacta—lots of bacta, black-and-pink cylinders identical to those loaded on the airspeeder. Each cask of the miracle healing drug was clearly marked with the name of a military base. Most numerous were those marked FEY’LYA ARMY BASE, VANDOR-3. And on nearby shelves were crimson casks marked VRADIUM and AMBORI.

  Suddenly tired, Jesmin rested her forehead against one shelf.

  Bhindi moved closer. “Five, you look like you want to cry.”

  “I do.” Jesmin drew a couple of ragged breaths, trying to get control of herself.

  Bhindi frowned. “I’m not familiar with—what are they? Vradium and ambori.”

  “Mix them together and they offer up the chemical cues that tests use to determine if a fluid contains bacta. Mix them with an inert pink fluid medium, and they look just like bacta. And so those two drugs are part of what is referred to as the Bacta Three-Way, or the Bacta Triangle Scam.”

  Bhindi shook her head. “I haven’t heard of that one.”

  “Pretty much confined to the black market. It’s a triangle because it’s a three-component scam. You need new bacta, and bacta nearing the end of its useful life, and quantities of these two chemicals. Say you’re the receiving officer for supplies at a hospital or military base. New bacta comes in. You take the new bacta and pour it all into containers marked as something else. Then you sneak them out of storage and sell them on the black market. You take the old bacta and put it in the new bacta containers. And you put the vradium-ambori-inert-compound mix in the containers that are supposed to hold old bacta. When those containers go through their periodic tests, one test confirms that they’re bacta, but a second test indicates that they’re past their effectiveness and should be destroyed.”

  “Oh.”

  “And it’s worse even than just stealing a hospital’s bacta. Because anywhere this scam is run, the medics requisition a cask of new bacta. It’s sent up, used on a patient—or, in a crisis, like the aftermath of a battle, a bunch of patients—and the patient sickens or dies, because in the meantime that batch, which is actually old bacta, has gone bad. People die.” Jesmin turned away for a moment so Bhindi would not see her face. “My fi ... friend ... was murdered while looking into an instance of that exact scam. During the last war.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The door slid open. Jesmin looked in that direction. A Pop-Dog, a datapad in his hand, walked in.

  The man, a Twi’lek, his skin blue and his brain-tails hanging loose, approached the aisle where the Wraiths stood. He did not look their way at first.

  Then the door slid shut, plunging the chamber into blackness.

  “Stang.” There was a clank as the Pop-Dog, probably turning back toward the door, hit a metal shelf. A duraplast object clattered on the floor.

  Jesmin fixed the scene, everything she
had seen just before the room went black, in her mind. She darted up the aisle, brushing past Bhindi, and turned where she thought the intersection to the Twi’lek’s aisle was.

  She was right. She dashed forward, unimpeded.

  Then she ran into him. He seemed to have grown shorter in three seconds—he barely came up to her waist and she tripped over him, crashing headfirst down on the hard floor. The thick ambience suit hood cushioned the impact, but she still saw little pinpoints of light dance around in the darkness like embers drifting up off a fire.

  “Who’s that? Who’s there?” The Twi’lek moved forward, stumbled across Jesmin in turn, and slammed down on top of her.

  She grabbed at him, found his neck, tried to catch him in a choke hold. But one of his brain-tails impeded her.

  A shaft of light blinded Jesmin. Then there was a familiar sound, a blaster being fired. The entire chamber illuminated for a moment, blue light flickering across the Twi’lek’s chest, Bhindi silhouetted by light from her own shot. Then the Twi’lek went limp and the chamber went dark again.

  Jesmin froze, listening.

  All she heard was Bhindi’s breathing. Then, Bhindi’s voice: “Five?”

  “Here.” She rolled the Twi’lek off her and rose. By memory, she moved to the door. It opened at her approach, allowing light to pour in; cautious, she leaned out, looked both ways.

  There was no one in sight.

  She withdrew, and when the door closed, she adjusted the wall switch to disable the door’s proximity sensor.

  She turned back toward Bhindi, who now stood in the light cast by her own glow rod. “I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault.”

  “Yes, it was. I got emotional. Clouded my ability to sense others. My fault.” She moved to grab the unconscious Pop-Dog and drag him to the back of the chamber. “I’ll tie him up. You record everything.”

  In a darkened warehouse chamber toward the southern end of the installation, Myri stared at the shelves full of blaster rifle cases, power pack cases, grenade crates. For someone like Myri, who liked her mayhem occasional but loud, the chamber was a playroom of unrealized promise.

  Then she noticed that Trey had stopped talking. Instead, he was leaning forward, his forehead pressed against a heavy-duty, locking transparisteel cabinet.

  Myri moved until she could see his face. “Four? You suddenly look like you want to cry.”

  “I do.” He stepped back from the cabinet and shone his glow rod on its contents.

  The cabinet had two shelves, themselves transparisteel. On the top shelf were two silvery bowl-like stands, and in each rested a globe larger than a balled human fist—a globe with dials and a depressible button.

  Myri stared at them for a moment, then clamped her hand over her mouth to suppress a gasp. “Thermal detonators.”

  “Two of them.” Trey’s voice was almost rapturous. “Two, I have to steal these.”

  “Is there security on that cabinet?”

  “It looks like ... Yes. Really good security, too.” Trey peered at the locking mechanism, which was made of durasteel and not transparent. He crouched to give it a good look.

  “You just want them for yourself.”

  He stood up, put a finger to his lips, and walked as quietly as possible to join her. He turned her toward the exit door and preceded her there. He slid the door open manually—they’d taken a moment to disengage its proximity sensor—scanned the main corridor beyond, and led her out. Only when the door was shut again did he speak. “There was a listening device in the case’s security system.”

  Myri felt a chill pass through her. “So base security is already on to us—”

  “I don’t think so. That type of device isn’t very sophisticated. I bet it just noted that someone was talking in the vicinity of the case and broadcast that fact to the central security computer. It dropped a flag saying, That was a little odd.”

  Myri blew out a breath of relief. “But not until enough flags are dropped around the base—”

  “—does the computer say, Things are getting stranger. I’d better wake everybody up.”

  “Let’s not drop any more flags.”

  “Good idea, Three.”

  Continuing on, they found more warehouses, both of them empty and dusty, and a dormitory block—two large chambers for men, one for women, both dark but sparsely occupied. Myri could hear the regular breathing of sleepers within. One door farther on led to a communal refresher. Myri could hear the hiss and feel the flow of moist air from an old-fashioned water sprayer; the old base had nothing so modern as a sanisteam. She and Trey crept past, not alerting whatever soldier was within.

  In the last cross-corridor before the main hall ended, they discovered the cell block.

  It wasn’t a big tunnel, only three meters wide and three tall, lined with metal doors. Each door had a metal crossbeam at waist height and a metal mesh grate, through which some air and light could pass, at head height. Only one door, the one farthest from the main corridor, was lit from within.

  Trey checked his chrono. “Almost time to rendezvous. And we have the proof we need. Private ownership of thermal detonators is kind of illegal. Suggests terroristic impulses.”

  “Look, all our recordings can’t explain why we’ve only had to duck two Pop-Dogs while exploring this whole wing. Why we keep finding sealed-off, empty dormitories and officers’ quarters. The farther we get away from the central shaft, the emptier the place is. Why?”

  “Because nobody wants to live close to a pair of thermal detonators?”

  “Nice answer, but I want some confirmation. The kind of confirmation only a willing witness can give us. Like a prisoner.”

  Trey sighed. “Let’s make this fast.”

  They moved silently up the corridor and paused outside the door that showed light from the room beyond. Both took long moments examining the door exterior, the surrounding walls for holocams and audio pickups, but there were none. In fact, the entire arrangement here looked primitive—doorway carved by long-ago lasers out of living stone, doors and fittings made from heavy, armor-quality durasteel.

  While Trey looked over the door’s locking mechanism—a large metal lock, crude but effective, it clamped down over the center of the metal crossbar that held the door in place—Myri stood on tiptoes to peer through the metal grate. Yes, the chamber was lit inside, and Myri could see two stuffed chairs, a low table between them, a gridded game board on the table. In each chair sat a man, both Duros males with large black eyes and gray features.

  One of them glanced up to look at the door just as Myri caught sight of him.

  She ducked down again.

  A voice, thin but musical, floated out through the grate. “Who’s out there?”

  Trey glared up at Myri. “Stealth not being one of your skills.”

  “Four, I notice you never go on intrusions with the same member of the team twice. Diplomacy not being one of your skills.” Myri stretched on tiptoes again and brought her mouth close to the grate. Her reply was a whisper: “Be quiet if you want to live.”

  “Very well.”

  Trey made a faint noise of disgust. “These guys make me sick. The jailers, I mean. This is a low-tech nightmare. No electronic security on it at all. The lock and the end caps keep the bar from being moved. The keyhole is for a huge, simple metal key. Ordinary lock picks won’t budge the mechanism. And if I can get it unlocked, the bar’s got to weigh a hundred and fifty kilos. The Pop-Dogs must use a lifter droid to move it.”

  Myri put some sweet-sounding mockery into her voice. “Big, strong man like you, you can clean-and-jerk a hundred and fifty.”

  “Of course I can. But I was thinking about someone of more average abilities. You, for instance.”

  “Ooh, you’ll pay for that.”

  “If I had Five’s lightsaber, I could cut through this in sixty seconds.”

  “Just unlock the door, Four.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Trey thought about it for a moment, then pu
lled his vibroblade out of a waist sheath. “Give me your blade.”

  “You’ve got yours.”

  “I need both. To disassemble.”

  “Oh.” She drew her weapon from its sheath and handed it to him.

  While Myri watched both him and the surrounding corridor, Trey took apart the vibroblades, separating the metal blade components, which could still stab and cut with reduced efficiency even if the weapon’s ultrasonic augmenter or battery failed, from the electronics. He slid both blades into the key aperture and began prying and twisting with them.

  Two minutes later there was a clunk, too loud by far for Myri’s taste, and Trey withdrew the blades, which were now bent and scarred, their edges ruined. He dropped them into his pack and flipped up the main body of the lock so that it no longer held the bar.

  He stood and bent to grip the metal bar, both his hands cupped along its underside. He straightened with a grunt, heaving the bar clear of its brackets, and carried it a few meters along the wall. With similar care, he set it down again, making less noise than the lock had.

  Myri drew her blaster. She waited until Trey had done the same. Then, cautious, she pulled the cell door open.

  Bright glow rod light poured out. Her quick glimpse showed social room furnishings, side tables loaded with computer equipment. The chairs, their occupants, and the game table had not changed. The Duros men stared at Myri with their big, dark, alien eyes, their faces schooled into expressionlessness.

  Myri entered the chamber. From her new vantage point, she could see side doors that probably led to auxiliary chambers.

  Trey entered behind her, pulled the door shut, and pressed his face against the grate to keep an eye on the exterior.

  Myri lowered her blaster just enough that she was not pointing directly at either Duros. The men wore orange-and-yellow-striped jumpsuits, easy to see in any environment, suitable for prisoners.

  Myri knew a little about Duros physiology, enough at least to distinguish age. She turned to the older man, recognizable as such by the extra wrinkling of his face, his slightly more sallow complexion. “Who are you?”