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  The instant the visual flash of the explosion occurred, Voort began counting seconds. Just short of six seconds, the boom of the blast reached his ears.

  He nodded. “That’s about right.” He turned to Wran. “Great shot.” Then he ducked behind the wall.

  “Thank you.”

  “Now everyone get under cover.” Sharr did so, turning away from the tableau.

  “Hmm?” Wran looked at him. “Why?”

  “Because experience shows that military personnel, honest or crooked, become cranky when their toys are taken away, and if it’s from enemy action, they may retaliate.”

  “Ah.” Wran settled down behind the wall.

  A rain of blasterfire began hammering into the wall.

  They endured a stepped-up artillery barrage that lasted an hour. Then it tapered off.

  The two Duros endured the siege pretty well. They sat at the center of the Observatory chamber, their backs to the sturdiest stone wall, near the stairwell in case they felt the need to flee downstairs. Turman, lying against the wall nearby, rolled over in restless sleep. Voort spent some time there and decided that the pounding was comparatively endurable at that spot, and the Joyls demonstrated no fear.

  They did have questions, Usan especially. “Can they batter their way through the mountain with their weapons?”

  Voort shook his head. “Not those weapons, not in the time frame we have to concern ourselves with. They may be trying to beat us up psychologically so we’ll surrender. But they really just need to keep us here a few days. We’d die of thirst.”

  “Ah. Far more pleasant.”

  “Myri, in her investigations, found out that they have some skyhoppers over at the army base, but if they loft any air support against us, the planetary government and Starfighter Command will notice them and get curious. Which Thaal doesn’t want. And so on. No, their plan is just to wait us out.”

  “Ah.” Usan nodded. “You fill me with hope.”

  Turman sat up and gestured at Usan like a Sith from a bygone age rousing a dragon to action. “The virtues of irony are only evident when irony itself is. Those who know not the face of Duros grasp not your meaning.”

  Voort frowned at him. “Turman, that was almost comprehensible. Are you back with us?”

  “I am. Wherever and whoever us is. But I do not wish to stand.” He did still look wobbly.

  “Stay where you are. Keep recovering.”

  “So, how did your Wraiths find that installation?” Voort kept his face pressed to the small vertical gap in the wall but spoke to Sharr.

  They were a level down from the Observatory, in the rubble-strewn cable car receiving chamber. The wreckage of a cable car rested on the floor. What had once been a lifting door of solid stone in the outside wall was now permanently closed, but it had jammed shut with a gap eight centimeters high at the bottom, and it was out through that gap that Voort stared. The chamber was almost as black as a cave now, and Voort’s eyes had adjusted, giving him a good view of the distant Pop-Dogs and artillery emplacements.

  Sharr, propped against the wall by the doorway out of the chamber, offered a half cough, half laugh. “We wondered if Thaal was comprehensively crooked, top to bottom. Which would mean stealing everything he could get his hands on. Thaymes worked up some transponders embedded in transparent flexiplast, sticky on one side. We broke into an army receiving warehouse on Coruscant and attached them to bacta casks, among other things. We tracked the signal to several locations where they were supposed to go, including Fey’lya Base … but then we saw signs that too many had been diverted to Ackbar City.”

  “Which is why you went there.”

  “Which is why we didn’t go there, initially. I’m guessing now that he gave us the order to stay away from Ackbar City because he didn’t want us to bump into you. But when he vanished, we decided to check that lead out. Found a warehouse in Ackbar Base they were staging stolen stuff through. Earlier today we managed to get in there and conceal ourselves in a hauler delivering food and fuel to a mystery destination—that underground site. And thus tonight’s dream date with your Wraiths.”

  “They’re good men and women, Sharr.”

  “I’m sure they are. How’d you get there?”

  “Trey ran a variation on Lara Notsil’s King of the Drlids scam. He didn’t even know about Lara.”

  “Punk.”

  “Yeah.” Voort pulled back from the gap and looked in the direction of Sharr, though he couldn’t see the man in the darkness. “Come on, you’re the master of psychological warfare. Face Loran, two Wraith Squadrons—why?”

  “Not because it would be more efficient this way, obviously.” He sighed. “I can’t believe he’d deliberately set us up for failure. But he didn’t make our lives any easier, and because of that, we’re here. You make sense of it, I’ll call you the master of psychological warfare.” Noises suggested that he was standing up. “Come on. Back to the wall.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  A tap on Voort’s shoulder awakened him. He looked around.

  He was stretched out on one section of the walkway behind the Weather Walk, his head on Trey’s backpack.

  He could dimly make out the features of Trey above him. “Anything new?”

  “Signs of dawn in the east. Which makes it your shift.”

  “I meant wake me at dawn in a couple of days.”

  “Good try.”

  Voort sat up.

  Thaymes, to Voort’s right, looked his way. “Good news or bad news?”

  “Good news.”

  “The Pop-Dogs aren’t moving any closer.”

  “Bad news?”

  “This makes it harder to shoot them.”

  A bolt of energy from below hit the rocky ceiling directly above Thaymes. It expired in a loud bang-crack. Stone chips dislodged from the point of impact, superheated, rained down on Thaymes. He yelped and rolled, getting clear of the white-hot debris.

  Wran, on the other side of Thaymes, dissolved into silent laughter.

  Voort heaved himself partway over the wall. “They’ve crept up to the base of the hill …” He let his eyes and brow show over the wall as he scanned the slope below.

  Near the bottom of the stairs, behind the same rock Wran had used to brace his shot against an oncoming speeder, shone a light. It was a glow rod, held to shine up into a face—a Wookiee face, staring up at Voort.

  “Huhunna?” Voort pulled back, then looked at Wran. “Your Wookiee’s down there.”

  Wran leaned into a gap in the wall at knee height, a hole just larger than his head. He peered down the rocky slope and scanned. “There she is, waving. She’s with what’s-her-name, your commander.”

  “Bhindi.” Voort peered downward again. His eyes evidently weren’t as good as Wran’s, but he could see a plate-sized palm waving up at them.

  “They’re both behind cover.” Wran paused. “She made it back here through the grain field, but she won’t have enough visual cover climbing the stairs to rejoin us. I’ll bet she wants some covering fire. Can’t tell us on comlinks because of the jamming.” He withdrew from the gap and looked at Voort. “I don’t think Bhindi’s moving. Huhunna’s just waiting there.”

  Voort dropped back down and turned toward the doorway into the Observatory. “All guns to the wall!”

  Sharr sounded hurt. “I’m supposed to say that.”

  “Well, say it.”

  “Never mind.”

  Voort waited while the Wraiths abandoned their stony beds or explorations of the station’s remote tunnels. They assembled, groggy and hollow-eyed, on the wall. During that time, distant Pop-Dogs began peppering Huhunna’s surroundings with opportunistic blasterfire.

  Voort addressed the Wraiths. “In a moment, we’re going to begin providing covering fire. Huhunna and Bhindi are going to come up and join us. Our job is to identify Pop-Dogs firing on them and send them running—or send them to another life. This means not returning fire on those firing at us. Except Wran and me�
�that’s our job.”

  Wran, Thaymes, and Drikall glanced toward Sharr for confirmation. He nodded.

  Voort waited until they were all arrayed along the full span of the wall. Then he rose, leaned over the wall, and waved Huhunna up.

  Blasterfire began to hit the wall, converging on Voort. He crouched and returned fire. He could no longer see Huhunna, but he could spot emplacements firing on her. So could the other Wraiths, and they rained blasterfire against those sites.

  Voort went through the steps again and again. Acquire a target. Check the rangefinder in the scope. Look around the target, gauging the movement of the grain stalks to estimate wind direction and speed. Reacquire the target. Settle, calm, become as still as the stone, breathe out.

  Squeeeeeeze …

  The other Wraiths fired more often. Voort hit more often. A mixed blessing—he wasted few shots, diminished the numbers of the enemy more rapidly.

  But he was killing people, not just making them duck.

  He had counted up six kills when Huhunna reached the top of the stairs, carrying Bhindi in her arms like a sleeping child. She hustled through the gap in the wall, moved to the side to be out of the Pop-Dogs’ line of sight, and knelt. She raised her voice in a Wookiee rumble that rose to a high-pitched peak.

  Voort did not speak Wookiee, but, like many individuals with wide travel or wartime experience, he knew curse words in a startling number of languages. Curses, requests for food and drink, demands for or offers of surrender, and the word Huhunna had roared: “Medic!”

  The smell of burned flesh and incinerated cloth was already forcing its way down Voort’s nostrils.

  The Devaronian, Drikall, holstered his blaster pistol and, scrambling on hands and knees, followed Huhunna through the door into the Observatory.

  “Everyone else, stay here.” Voort scrambled after the medic. “Wran, direct them, rotate their fire.”

  Unbidden, Sharr and Scut followed him, Sharr igniting his glow rod and holding it high so the others could act within its pool of light.

  Drikall, standing, peeled off his black tunic, revealing a black undershirt. He wadded the tunic up and set it down on the tile floor, then nodded at Huhunna. She laid Bhindi there, head on the tunic. Bhindi’s eyes were closed.

  Drikall knelt beside her and unclipped his medpac from his belt. He spoke as if to a recorder: “Patient is a female human apparently in good physical condition, age forty-five or fifty. We have an abdominal blaster wound, rifle intensity by the look of it.” He glanced up at Huhunna for confirmation, received her nod, and returned his attention to the patient.

  With a pair of small shears from the bag, he carefully cut Bhindi’s ambience suit hood away from her face and pressed a small object to the side of her neck. Voort recognized it as a field-grade vital signs monitor. Flexible like a bandage, the size of a large credcoin, it adhered to her skin. Its surface was mostly translucent red flexiplast, and it began to pulse with a glow at the center in the rhythm of Bhindi’s heartbeat—a rhythm that was too slow by far to offer Voort any reassurance.

  Bhindi’s ambience suit top was already unsealed. With precision and delicacy, the Devaronian used the shears to cut away the lower portions of her tunic. The action revealed that a portion of her abdomen, to the right of her navel, was covered with a bandage patch; the center of the patch was brown with crusted blood, and the skin around it alternated between healthy pink and burned brown-black. Drikall began a quick but gentle removal of the patch.

  Once the patch was set aside, Voort, even with his minimal first-aid skills, could see that the wound was bad—it was broad and black and deep. Though it had been mostly cauterized by the energy discharge of the blaster bolt that had done the damage, there were places where it was still welling with blood. The smell of burned flesh became more intense.

  Despite himself and his profession, Drikall winced. “We’ll start with a pain suppressor and a shock blocker. They should … help.” One after another, he pressed two micro-injectors against her neck.

  Then he looked up, glancing between Sharr and Voort. “If you want her to survive … we’re going to have to surrender and turn her over to them. Right now. Only a full medlab can do the job. The wound’s too severe.”

  Voort and Sharr looked at each other.

  “I … heard … that.” Bhindi’s voice was faint and her eyes were still closed, but she was clearly conscious. “You will not do that.”

  Voort approached, knelt beside her. “Bhindi …”

  “Those are my orders. We know Thaal’s dirty. They know we know. Surrender to save me, and every one of you is dead. Not just me.” Her eyes fluttered open and she looked up at the medic. “What’s your name?”

  “Drikall. Drikall Bessarah.”

  “That anesthetic is good stuff. I actually don’t feel too bad.” She returned her attention to Voort and Sharr. “Get these kids home safe. I’m transferring command …”

  She stopped talking; she just stared into empty air between Sharr and Voort. The monitor on her neck ceased pulsing.

  “Bhindi?” Voort fell tears well up. “Bhindi?”

  “She’s gone.” Drikall reached up to close her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  Huhunna stared up at the ceiling and offered a low, almost musical moan.

  “Kark it.” Voort slammed his fist against the floor hard enough to hurt himself. He ignored the pain and stood. He felt himself shaking so badly, he wondered if he could articulate clearly enough for his implant to translate his words.

  “Drikall …” Sharr’s voice was raspy, as though his throat had become coated with sand. “Step outside and find out if anyone has any sort of cover, a survival blanket or something. To cover her.”

  The Devaronian nodded, walked out into the darkness.

  “We need to elect a new leader.” That was Scut. His voice was subdued, even pained.

  Those words jarred Voort, forcing him from the nest of his own misery. Images of the other Wraiths ran before his eyes like numbers.

  Sharr will be elected. Sharr’s strength is mounting slow, meticulous capers that cause people to doubt their own sanity or their trust in others. Everyone else is too young, too green. Elect any of them to deal with this situation and everybody dies.

  Voort found his voice. He turned to stare at Scut, but spoke to everyone. “To hell with that. I’m taking command.”

  Scut stared back at the Gamorrean. If ever there had been a time when the preposterous smile on his face did not match his eyes, now was it—from the nose up, he was all sorrow and anger. “No, you are not. Perhaps Sharr will lead. If not, we must elect. Sharr was leader of his team, as Bhindi was of ours. You are just a member. And not fit to lead.”

  “War leaders aren’t elected, idiot.” Voort looked at Sharr. “I’m assuming command. You want to take it from me?” Though he had worked with Sharr through much of the Yuuzhan Vong War, though he counted the man as a friend, his tone was now one of pure menace.

  Sharr shook his head. “You’re senior in years of experience. And mass.”

  “You’ve got that right.”

  Drikall returned, Wran’s cloak in his hands. He spread it over Bhindi, covering her from waist to head.

  Voort continued. “Everyone, back to what you were doing before. Except you, Scut. You come with me.” Stiff-legged, he turned and marched to the stairs.

  Voort entered the cable car receiving room and waited only until Scut stepped through the doorway. Then Voort spun, grabbed Scut by the shoulders, slammed him into the wall, and held him there. “I have had enough.”

  Scut’s voice was a little hoarse, but his tone stayed defiant. “I don’t think you have.”

  Voort gave him a final shove, then let go, but he did not retreat a centimeter. “Take off that idiotic face. Let me look at your true self. Your Yuuzhan Vong self.”

  Scut reached under his ambience suit collar and peeled his merry face away, revealing the hard, angular features and glaring eyes of a Yuuzhan Vong.r />
  Voort enunciated very clearly. “This is a direct order. I want it all. Everything you don’t like about me. Every reason you think I’m not fit to lead. I want every one of those maggots of complaint to spill out of your mouth, and I’m going to crush them under my boots. Start.”

  “First, you are a quitter. You quit the Wraiths before. Too sad to continue. Bhindi told me that story. She should never have invited you back. Now she is dead, you will be sad again; you will quit. Again.

  “Second, you are an illogical fool.”

  “Strange words to hear from a Yuuzhan Vong mouth—your kind has no idea what logic is.”

  “There. There!” Scut’s voice rose. “I am Yuuzhan Vong like you are Gamorrean. In part. I have human family, too.”

  “Adopted. You had plenty of years before they came along to become twisted, a sociopath.”

  “Oh. Well, if I am all Yuuzhan Vong despite how I was reared, you are all Gamorrean. Lazy, stupid, fat, amoral, coarse. Grunt for me, pig-man.”

  “Is that the best you have? No, you’re not done yet. Keep going. I’ll know when we’ve gotten to the truth. If there’s any truth in you.”

  “Very well.” Scut returned his voice to normal pitch and volume. If being pressed against the wall by Voort, being physically intimidated, was making him uncomfortable, he did not show it. “I knew of you, you personally, from when I was a child. From when I first met my human parents.”

  “How?”

  “Not important yet. But I knew about the Wraiths. Heroes! They outwit those who enslave and destroy. You think I lie? You lie. Tell me, did you become a teacher because you love it?”

  “Because I love it. Yes. Because I needed to turn to the next phase of my life. All Wraiths do that eventually. The ones who survive, anyway.”

  “I have met teachers who love teaching. Tell me now, the whole truth like you want from me. When you are through with your students, do they go forth, engines roaring, filled with a love of numbers that you have taught them?”

  “Not … many.” Thoughtful, Voort finally took a half step backward.