Wraith Squadron Read online

  "A roof door retracts. Large enough to let two punch out at a time."

  "How about security on top of that roof?" She shrugged. "I haven't been up there yet. I'd want to wait for nightfall."

  "Do it tonight. But first, have Donos retrieve his laser rifle from the smuggling compartment. I want him on station covering you. If you trigger an alarm—" "Thanks."

  "—he can give you the cover you need to escape." Wedge thought over his options. "All right. Here's the preliminary plan. Tonight, Plague Group, with Grinder, goes in and acquires the biological agents. Meanwhile, Falynn and Donos will do the preliminary test of the TIE bunker's security. If all goes well and the bunker looks like we can crack it, we do the rest tomorrow night.

  "Tomorrow . . ." He counted off on his fingers to make sure he accounted for everyone. "Janson, Kell, Tyria, Phanan, Piggy, and Grinder will get into the Hawkbat's shuttles and infect them. Janson will command that unit. It would also be good if you can find something to do to make it look like some other sort of mission if your presence is detected—some sort of theft, perhaps."

  Kell nodded. "Got it."

  "Myn will find a good, high station from which to provide sniper support to either unit. And Atril, Falynn, Face, and I will enter the TIE bunker and steal all four TIE fighters."

  Falynn looked surprised. "All four?"

  "Yes. Unless you can guarantee that the two we steal will both make it intact offworld."

  She shook her head. "Guarantees are not my business. How do we get in?"

  "Through the doors on top—when the TIE fighter leaves. We'll grab it when it returns."

  "And how do we make sure a TIE fighter will leave when we want it to?"

  Wedge smiled. "I communicate with Runt and ask him to strafe the spaceport."

  Kell nodded. He turned it into Face's head bob. Falynn and Piggy joined him.

  "Stop it," Wedge said.

  Wedge left first, then Kell a couple of minutes later, to help minimize the number of people who would see the Wraiths together.

  "Ready?" Piggy said.

  Falynn nodded.

  Then the music stopped and a spotlight pinned the two of them. Falynn rose and half drew her blaster. Piggy grabbed her hand, stopping her from completing the motion, dragging her back into her seat.

  An amplified voice said, "The management of the Howler would like to congratulate Master and Mistress Wallowlot on the occasion of their fifth wedding marker!"

  Patrons of the Howler offered scattered applause and a fair amount of laughter. A server swept up to deposit a pair of drinks. Falynn peered around the core of the spotlight beam to spot the man on the lighting board, controlling the beam, and Kell standing beside him. Kell offered her a big grin and a thumbs-up, then headed off for the door.

  Then the beam was cut off and the bar patrons' attention returned to their respective drinks and pursuits.

  Falynn glowered at the door through which Kell had fled. "That wasn't funny."

  Piggy kept his translator voice low. "Why not?" "Well . . . well ... he might have compromised our identities."

  "These aren't identities. We leave here in two minutes. You lose your wig and I resume my guard clothes and we're done with them."

  "It still isn't funny."

  "I think it is. Though we must have revenge on Kell, of course." But Falynn looked so unhappy he felt compelled to ask, "Why does this bother you so?"

  "People will think I'm, I'm . . ." She stopped short and looked stricken. She didn't meet Piggy's eyes. "That you're wed to a Gamorrean?" "Honest, Piggy, it's not like that." "I think it is." He kept his tone reasonable, insofar as his translator could express vocal tones and undercurrents. "Tell me the truth. Would this joke have been funny if you had been with, say, Face?"

  "Piggy . . ."

  "Please answer."

  She took a deep breath. "I suppose it might have." "So the difference is that it bothers you to have people think you might stray outside your species?" "No . . ." "Stoop so low as to become the mate of a Gamorrean?"

  She winced, and he knew he had his answer. "I've offended you," she said.

  "Not in the way you think, perhaps. But I can't help thinking that the reason you react with revulsion to the suggestion that we are wed is because of Gamorrean . . . low-ness."

  Finally she met his eyes. "I don't know what to say. I'm sorry."

  "That's good enough for now." He drank his celebratory drink in a single long pull. "Ready to leave?"

  "Yes."

  "Since we are young marrieds, shall we hold hands?"

  She grinned. "All right."

  Once again in the black getup of her bodyguard identity, Falynn crouched in the nighttime shadow of a powered-down landskimmer. In the distance was the near wall of the TIE fighter ready bunker. Between her and that wall were forty long meters of empty duracrete, poorly lit but featureless enough to show clearly the passage of a human, even one dressed as she was. So far as she knew, pressure sensors could be planted under every meter of the open space around the bunker. But she'd manage to cross it if she had to crawl there across a span of four hours.

  She was surprised at the determination she felt. It wasn't just a desire to complete this mission successfully. It was a need to stop being number two at everything.

  With her talent for bypassing simple security systems, such as those that attempted to prevent theft of ground vehicles, she was the Wraiths' number-two security expert. She was number-two TIE pilot behind Wedge . . . and if Atril was the hot stick with a TIE that everyone said she was, Falynn was probably about to become number three. Her girlhood sneaking around Mos Eisley, making a living on whatever she could successfully steal, made her the number-two scout behind Tyria. Even Donos hadn't listened to Falynn, to her protests that he needed to live, until he'd heard the same facts from Tyria and others.

  Never number one, not at anything. But maybe if she accomplished a few more things no Wraith had ever done, such as dragging those TIE fighters under her stolen skiff the other week, people would stop dismissing her as a second-rater.

  She waited there half an hour, seeing one landskimmer arrive at the TIE ready bunker but dismissing the idea of trying to intercept it and jump aboard—the pilot of the small craft would certainly feel it bob when her weight came down on it.

  But then, a few minutes later, a bulbous repulsorlift vehicle the size of a multiple-passenger tourist craft cruised in a leisurely fashion toward the bunker. Letters on the side read THOLAN'S COMESTIBLES, and it appeared as though the side panel swung up to become a metal awning.

  A mobile restaurant of some sort. She'd seen them, not on Tatooine, but at the New Republic Academy. Late-night garrisons like the men of the TIE ready bunker needed to eat, too . . .

  She gathered herself up as the silvery craft neared its closest approach to her. She took off into a fast sprint, catching up to the vehicle's squared-off rear, and found nothing there to hang on to but the rear door's hinges. She leaped up to grab the right top hinge with both hands; her feet swung free.

  But it wasn't far, and she wasn't stepping across sensor-laden duracrete.

  As the repulsorlift food carrier approached the front of the bunker, it slowed, swung to starboard, and continued in sideways, its pilot evidently planning to present the side panel to the bunker's front door. Falynn pulled herself up, scrambling, her boots sliding off the rear panel as she struggled to gain purchase, and managed to pull herself atop the vehicle. When it settled to the ground just a meter from the front door, she stepped off it onto the near part of the bunker roof, then flattened herself on the bunker surface.

  So far, so good. What if there were pressure sensors on top? She'd wait to find out. She froze where she was.

  She heard the bunker's only exterior door hiss open. Metal swung into position with a clank. There was laughter among men working the late-night shift. Hissing of liquids, clanking of coins. Then, finally, the door and panel closed and the flying foodseller maneuvered away f
rom the bunker.

  And no one had come out to investigate an anomalous pressure reading on the roof. Excellent.

  She clicked her comlink. A double-click answered her. She repeated the click to assure Donos that he hadn't responded to random garbage from someone else's sending unit.

  Then, slowly, carefully, she inched herself up the bunker roof to the point where it graduated from duracrete to segmented metal, then slid leftward until she reached the bottom of one of the huge TIE fighter access doors; better to be at the bottom and less likely to be seen when the doors opened.

  If they opened.

  Please, she asked no one in particular, let them have some sort of emergency. Don't let me wait here all night for nothing.

  "Tyria, look up," Grinder said into the mouthpiece of his headset. He sat at the desk in the Wraiths' suite in Scohar, and the picture on the portable terminal in front of him was the jittery view being broadcast from the camera in Tyria's cap. It currently showed the dressed stone rear wall of the Scohar Xenohealth Institute. The view rose along the wall and then became relatively still, now showing the awning and safety light above one of the windowless metal doors on that wall.

  Phanan and Kell leaned over his shoulders to watch. Either of them could have executed the image-gathering march around the Institute, but Grinder pronounced them too memorable: Phanan was too mechanical, Kell too tall. Tyria, with her face dirtied, her hair combed out until it was frowsy, got barely a side look from any of the better-dressed late-night tourists on the Scohar streets.

  Grinder cycled the picture through a variety of different sensory inputs. The picture on screen polarized, became a negative, and finally returned to a more normal view.

  "There's definitely a viewer in the overhang, just like the others. Come on in; I've pegged our intrusion point, and we've got to acquire some materials before we go in."

  Her voice, muted, came over the terminal's speaker. "Which is our intrusion point?"

  "The only one without a viewer on it. The only one without a lock permitting exterior entry."

  "The waste vent," she said.

  "That's the one."

  A persistent whine made Falynn open her eyes. Another annoying alarm. She reached out to swat it and encountered only metal.

  That snapped her eyes open. She'd fallen asleep! She checked her chrono, determined that a couple of hours had passed, and realized that the whining noise was the sound of the metal doors powering up. She took a deep breath and readied herself.

  With a jolt, the seam at the join of the two doors widened and the doors retracted in fitful jerks. Falynn looked scornfully at the door's edge as it retreated toward her. Servicing the motors and lubricating the rails would make the process smoother and quieter; she hoped the TIE fighters were kept up better than their hangar.

  The door slid into place and locked with a distinctive clang of metal. She grabbed the edge and pulled herself partway up, just enough to see over the metal lip.

  Below, a repair and hangar bay. She saw carts full of tools, grease-spattered duracrete flooring, four painted blue circles some eight meters in diameter on the floor with TIE fighters parked upon them. Two of the fighters had men beside them, a crew chief and a mechanic from the look of them. As she watched, the men hurriedly withdrew and the TIE fighters rose slowly, with the rumble of repulsorlift engines, into the air. Their smooth ascent brought them to Falynn's altitude and beyond; when they were a dozen meters above the bunker, they kicked in their twin ion engines and went screaming off into the night sky.

  She shook her head. She wasn't here to watch them. She returned her attention to the remaining TIEs, to the men in the hangar. Those men only watched until the starfighters were out of sight; then one moved to a door on the east wall and another went to a wall-mounted control panel and flipped a switch there.

  Abruptly the door jerked and began closing.

  Falynn kept her grip on the door edge, letting the metal segment drag her upward while she kept her attention on the hangar. One of the mechanics approached a door on the south wall and waved his hand twice, very precisely, across the doorjamb above his head; the door slid open for him.

  Then the door Falynn was holding on to was a mere half meter from closing against its counterpart. She let go, rather than have the closing doors crush her fingers, and tried to hold on by sheer friction.

  It didn't work. When the door edges crashed into place, the jolt shook Falynn free and she began sliding. She grabbed around frantically for purchase, couldn't find it.

  She rolled down the door, then down the roof of the bunker, then off the roof.

  It was three long meters to the duracrete ground.The comlink popped, and Grinder's voice came across it: "Flue open. Come on in."

  23

  Kell, Tyria, and Phanan waited in the shadow of a metal sculpture that depicted, in abstract form, a dance of spirits in Storinal's mythological past. A block away, Grinder, dressed in black, huddled at the base of the Institute wall just by the hatch leading into the waste-disposal flue.

  "Is he actually any good at this?" Phanan asked. "I've never seen his record. Never heard of him before joining the Wraiths."

  Kell shrugged, realized no one could see it in the gloom. "I don't know. But he was good enough for Commander Antilles to pick him."

  Phanan snorted. "Well, if he's as good a code-slicer and intrusion expert as he is a pilot, he's, well, mediocre. Sort of warms your heart, doesn't it? To know our lives are in the hands of a mediocre slicer?"

  "I think," Tyria said, "that you left the profession of medicine because it's your nature to make everyone feel worse about everything."

  "Ooh." Phanan's tone was admiring. "I've been skewered. I will now take seventeen hours to reevaluate my life."

  It was an unpleasant entryway.

  The flue opened a full two meters above the sidewalk. In opening it, Grinder had spilled out a dozen blocks of compressed garbage, each a meter on a side and smelling of rotted organic material. By the time the other Wraiths arrived, Grinder had stacked them into crude steps leading up to the flue opening.

  The flue itself smelled like the blocks, only worse. More concentrated. The Wraiths put on their air-filter masks, spattered with perfume by a thoughtful Tyria, before proceeding.

  Phanan was first up the steeply angled metal shaft, not because he was at home with intrusion, but because he was in charge of the powerful spray with which he coated every visible surface of the flue. The spray was not antibacterial, antiviral, or antianything; it was a powerful and fast-setting sealant that he believed would prevent the transmission of any disease agents that might be clinging to the flue's surfaces.

  They gave the stuff a mere minute to set, then began climbing. Once all four were in, they closed the door behind them. Grinder reset the latch, showing the other Wraiths how to unlatch it, and Phanan continued upward, spraying down the sides of the flue.

  This shaft took them first into the hard-sided chamber that acted as a trash compressor. A single ill-timed command to the building computer would cause the sides to come together, squeezing the Wraiths into new cubes of garbage, but no such command came. The hatch out of the top of the chamber led to a larger vertical shaft into which trash apparently poured from every floor of the Institute. "See all the ash?" Phanan said. "Most of the accesses into this shaft are through incinerators. So dangerous wastes will be nice safe ash when they're dropped for disposal."

  One floor up, a hatch gave them access into a small mess featuring a table for six and a food-delivery wall unit.

  By agreement, Tyria took point; she was to stop whenever she reached a portal or change in flooring so Grinder could check it for sensors. Grinder was second, with Phanan following and Kell bringing up the rear.

  The mess gave way to a hallway. The third door down opened into a terminal room, and Grinder insisted that they crowd into the small chamber so he could try to slice into the building records.

  Despite Phanan's earlier assertions
of his mediocrity, the task only took Grinder a few minutes. "Level A-Four," said Grinder, "that's Aboveground Four for those of you who haven't been paying attention to Storinal nomenclature, is where all test subjects and experiments are kept. A sort of tiered security system. Outermost of three tiers is basically a warehouse of animal subjects, animals not especially dangerous. The middle circle holds more dangerous creatures, like toxic reptiles and ex-doctors from Rudrig."

  Phanan muttered, "Much the same thing, really."

  "The inner chamber is where they store what we want. Kell, you'll be interested to learn that there's a plasma bomb array there. The sensors detect a leak and it may trigger—the Institute's way of keeping the world safe from plagues."

  Kell said, "Can any of your intrusion efforts trigger the bomb?"

  "Sure. If I'm sloppy."

  "Wonderful."

  Grinder stood. "Let's go. There's no time like the dark of night."

  Getting up two floors by a back stairwell was not difficult. Slightly less easy was penetrating the security door from that stairwell into the secure outer circle, but this took Grinder no more time than getting through the trash hatch.

  The outer-tier warehouse was a large area occupying most of the fourth floor. Some areas of it were well lit, thick with cages holding live, alert animals from all over the galaxy; their noise level increased as they became aware of the Wraiths moving in the chamber, but the human guard as- signed to the floor did no more than approach them and shush them. The Wraiths stayed low, then moved away, deeper into the chamber's more shadowy regions.

  Pausing against a stack of plastic-sheathed boxes, Grinder was startled to feel something scratching—actively scratching—at the other side of the surface he was leaning against. Peering down, he saw that he was propping himself up against a stack of small containers labeled STORINI GLASS PROWLER. The picture on the container showed a translucent arthropod that walked upon two legs and apparently seized its prey with the other two in a nearly humanoid fashion. Whatever was inside one of those containers was trying to claw its way out, hence the scratching sensation.