Mercy Kil

by Aaron Allston

  There—a man from the gray speeder sprinting north, toward the slope to Bhindi’s left. It was the enemy’s first attempt to flank the Wraiths.

  Bhindi shot him. She wasn’t sure where her bolt took him—in the ribs, she thought. She was sure that the runner fell and stayed down. Five Pop-Dogs to go.

  There was a scream from the white speeder. Bhindi glanced that way, saw that the speeder was smaller than it had been before. Huhunna appeared to be taking it apart with methodical bowcaster fire. A man sprawled behind, on his back, smoke rising from his chest. Four to go.

  But now more roaring was audible, both from the west and the northeast. In the latter direction, in the distance ahead, Bhindi could see a brown airspeeder cruising at an altitude of about two hundred meters. It wasn’t headed her way, but off at an angle toward the right ... toward Voort’s even more distant speeder. And the noises from the west were mixed, shrill speeder repulsors and a deeper rumble. Something big was approaching.

  Another shooter behind the gray speeder opened up on Bhindi, firing rapidly, carelessly. Bhindi crawled a few meters to her left, and the shots did not track her; they continued hammering on the stones near her original position. She peered through a gap in the stones. The female trooper from the same vehicle ran in the direction the first had taken.

  Bhindi fired at the runner, once, twice. Her second shot took the runner in the thigh, throwing the woman to the ground. Three to go—fewer, if Huhunna had managed to tag any of the other Pop-Dogs behind the white speeder.

  Bhindi ducked as the sniper offering covering fire from the gray speeder targeted her new position. His shots slapped into stones, superheating them, only centimeters from where she lay.

  Then the enemy fire stopped. Things fell almost silent as Huhunna stopped shooting, too. Now there were only the repulsor whines and rumbles from oncoming vehicles.

  Bhindi raised her head to peer over the stones. She could hear little gasps of breath from the woman she’d shot. But nothing moved.

  Nothing but a pebble, clattering down toward her from above.

  Bhindi rolled onto her back, brought up her rifle. Meters above her, at the top of the ridge, stood the silhouette of a man with a rifle.

  He fired.

  She fired. Simultaneous with the kick of the rifle against her shoulder was a kick to her gut.

  She saw her enemy fold up around his rifle. He collapsed and fell, rolling down the slope. He fetched up against stones only two meters away from her.

  Bhindi looked down at herself. Steam rose from a hole in her midriff. Funny that it wouldn’t hurt.... and then it did. Pain shoved its way through her like a hydraulic ram, forcing a moan from her throat.

  She tried to call Huhunna’s name, but all that emerged was a low wail.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Voort’s sensor board showed a growing number of probable enemies. Two blips now sped toward them from Kreedle, one close. Two big blips and four small ones were en route from the underground installation. All the small blips were significantly faster than Voort’s speeder. And Trey reported that the comm jamming was as strong as before.

  Voort glanced at Sharr. “Sixty seconds to Mount Lyss.”

  Sharr nodded. He turned to face back into the bed. “You, uh, Four. Where’s the station access?”

  Trey didn’t consult his datapad. He answered instantly. “Cable car. Northeast at plains level. Or stairs if you want the exercise. North face.”

  Sharr turned forward again. “Another joker.”

  “Tell me you don’t have a single joker on your team and I’ll buy you a bottle of sixty-year-old Corellian brandy.”

  “I don’t have a joker on my team.”

  “But it has to be the truth.”

  Sharr offered an annoyed sigh and said nothing more.

  When they reached the site—not truly a mountain, despite its name, it was a hill a couple of hundred meters high protruding from comparatively level ground surrounded by grain fields—what must have been the cable car building was a decades-old ruin, no cabling still strung from it. Voort swung around westward. In moments, Sharr, with his macrobinoculars up, pointed to the spot where permacrete stairs and tube-metal rails led from ground level to the summit.

  Voort set the speeder down near the base of the stairs. The Wraiths scattered from the speeder and started up.

  The Devaronian peered up the slope. His words came out as a moan. “Not.... more ... stairs. Kill me now.” Then he began climbing.

  Voort, who’d chosen the role of rear guard, stayed behind for a moment. So did Wran, the man in the hip-cloak, who braced himself against an outcropping one step from the stairs and sighted in with his rifle scope on a distant target Voort could barely see, a set of tiny running lights well off the ground.

  Voort squinted at the target. “Speeder from the village?”

  “Uh-huh. And they’ll get here before we’re halfway up the slope.”

  Voort took up position behind another slab of stone. He switched his rifle over to grenade mode. “I’m your wingmate.”

  “Thanks. But they’re running in a straight line. Morons ...” Still as a rusted droid with only one digit still functioning, Wran squeezed the trigger.

  The bright light from the rifle dazzled Voort’s eyes. When they cleared, he saw the distant target coming to ground at a steep angle.

  It didn’t level off. It hit the grain field. Moments later, Voort heard the crump of its impact. “You shot out the repulsors?”

  “I killed the pilot.” Wran turned and began the climb.

  Puffing, his chest heaving, Voort reach the top of the stairs. The landing at the top led through a gap in a waist-high wall partly cut from natural stone and partly made of textured permacrete. Behind it was a walkway, twenty meters long and four meters deep, with a natural stone overhang three meters above. The walkway fronted the north wall of the station, also cut from living stone; one doorway and two broad windows, empty of glass or transparisteel, led into a dark chamber beyond.

  As Voort reached the walkway, the first four speeders were reaching the hill. One landed three hundred meters away. The others split up, circling the hill.

  The Wraiths and the two Duros stood on the walkway, Sharr issuing orders. “We are now the distraction for Myri and the others down there. Our job is to prevent the Pop-Dogs from killing us while the ladies do their business. I want three teams. Shooters on the wall here.” He pointed at Voort, Trey, Wran, and Scut. “Explorers, you scope out every centimeter of this base and report resources, weak spots, possible escape routes to me.” He pointed to Thaymes and the Devaronian. “Civilians and the ... injured.” He pointed at the Joyls and Turman. The Clawdite, whom Trey had set down on the walkway, seemed to be fast asleep. “And dispense with the number designations, they’ll drive us crazy until we get the two teams sorted out. Break. Go.” He clapped his hands.

  The Wraiths scattered. Voort picked a spot on the wall and peered out into the night.

  Trey had his macrobinoculars up and was surveying the situation. “Two big things, I won’t call them speeders, just crossed the ridge. Artillery of some sort. The Pop-Dogs down in the fields are spreading out, but they’re not aiming their rifles.”

  “Containing us.” Voort peered through his scope. He could see one landspeeder, a small sporty model, with one human woman, hard and military by the look of her, in its main compartment.

  Wran sat down, his back to the wall. He glanced at Voort. “Wran Narcassan.”

  “Voort saBinring. Narcassan—are you any relation to a woman named Shalla?”

  “My aunt. Her sister, Vula, is my mother. But my father was kind of a waste of breathable air, so I took my grandfather’s family name. You’re the math-genius pilot guy, aren’t you?”

  “That’s me.” Voort glanced at him. Wran was relaxing, not bothering to sight in on any enemies. “You could probably pick off one or two before they catch on to you.”

  “I could! But I don’t think they
realize we have a long-range weapon yet. I brought down that speeder, but I don’t think its crew survived or that anyone else was close enough to see that a laser did it.”

  “Ah ... so you’re saving up for a valuable target.”

  Wran smiled, showing lots of white teeth. “You guessed it.”

  Trey lowered his optics and knelt behind the wall. “By the way, this is the Weather Walk. That’s what the diagram in the tourist information said. The Weather Walk on Apex Level. The room through there is the Observatory, which was actually not an observatory but a lounge. Stairs go down into the equipment and computer chambers, the quarters, the top of the cable car run, and so on.”

  Sharr sat on the wall top as if daring distant snipers to fire on him. “The artillery won’t stay.”

  Voort frowned. “How do you mean?”

  “They’re stolen. We ran their identifier numbers while we were down there. Reported destroyed in military exercises. Thaal probably uses the same wreckage over and over again, across a span of years, setting the junk out for the inspectors to see while hiding and selling the stolen ones. There were four down there, though.” Sharr frowned, too. “That’s a lot.”

  “He’s stepping up his black-market activities.” Trey sounded sure of his statement. “He’s stolen thermal detonators. He must know thefts like that, as bold as that, have to be detected soon. It can’t be long before he bolts.”

  “About that ...” Voort looked at Sharr. “By the way, what the hell?”

  Sharr smiled. “You mean, why are there two Wraith teams, both investigating General Stavin Thaal?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “I have no idea. Bhindi and I exchanged short forms of our mission objectives. Our stories were almost identical. Face recruited us, told neither one of us about the other. I think we almost met a few days ago—my comm and computer guy Thaymes spotted Myri a couple of times, flirted with her in a bar, but thought she was just an unusually adventuresome nester.”

  A blaster bolt hit the exterior surface of the overhang. Two meters lower and it would have hit Sharr instead. Pretending not to notice, he slid off the wall top and sat behind it. “I’m sorry we screwed up each other’s insertions. But Voort, it’s good to see you.”

  “Likewise.”

  Across the next hour, Voort met the other strangers as they came up to report to Sharr.

  There was the Devaronian medic Drikall Bessarah, who had darted Turman. “Don’t call me Doctor. You only get that honorific if you’re licensed to practice medicine.”

  The curly-haired man was Thaymes Fodrick, a Corellian who said he’d decided not to follow the family tradition of becoming a perpetual student. “I got well known for slicing into secure computer systems for fun. Got caught by a security consultant named Garik Loran, who shook a finger at me and let me go. Two years later, Sharr recruits me.”

  Huhunna, the Wookiee, wasn’t on hand to introduce herself. Sharr told Voort, “I heard about this Wookiee aerialist who’d been on Kashyyyk when Jacen Solo tried to burn the planet up. Since then, just as a civilian, she’s brought down a couple of military officers who abuse their privileges, which makes her very unpopular in certain circles. But when Face told me about Thaal, I thought she’d be ... motivated.”

  In that same hour, a total of four blaster artillery units arrived, setting up at four cardinal points around the hill. Numerous airspeeders and landspeeders joined them, all bearing Pop-Dogs. None approached closer than two hundred meters, but now they set up a slow, steady barrage of blasterfire.

  And more than that. From two kilometers out, the artillery units began beating on the hilltop and slopes. Every few minutes, a plasma pulse, large enough to look fiery rather than like a bolt of coherent light, would launch from one of the units. It would make a noise as if it were ripping the sky open as it flew, then would crash onto nearby stone, detonating. The impacts shook the hilltop, causing stone chips, tiles, and pieces of plaster to break off ancient, decaying walls and ceilings.

  The Observatory chamber was shaped like an X—two long, relatively narrow chambers that intersected in the middle. The north, south, east, and west extensions ended in balconies with windows looking out over plains, with the north extension connecting with the Weather Walk. The tiled floor was littered with years of debris and even rodent nests, and stairs led down from the intersection. But there were no furnishings, no water fixtures. There was no power, and Usan thoughtfully lit the chamber intersection with Turman’s glow rod.

  And all the while, the comm jamming continued.

  Voort switched off his comlink and the hiss that was the only noise it offered. “Let’s assume that not every Pop-Dog is in on Thaal’s secrets. They may all be arrogant bullies with a sense of entitlement, but a secret spread too far never stays a secret, so we can assume there’s an inner core of trusted Pop-Dogs. They operate places like that installation, which Thaal uses as staging areas for black-market operations.”

  Sharr nodded. “Reasonable.”

  “What we’re facing right now is that inner core. They’re as treasonable as Thaal is, just not as powerful or important. I have no sympathy for them. But Thaal using them here works in our favor. He can’t have an infinite number of them, and he won’t bring them all to bear against us. He’ll be calling in more to that installation to empty it. Clear out all evidence that it was a black-market warehouse. Thaal will do that so if there is any investigation for any reason, there’s no proof of his activities at that site. At this point, he can’t absolutely count on no evidence getting out.”

  Sharr thought that over. “I really envy you getting rescue vehicle duty last night. It means you got to wear comfortable clothes. These stretch things my team has on are uncomfortable and make me self-conscious. Those ambience suits your guys have—when the power packs run out, they’ll be in hell.”

  “Tell me you’re not drifting off into dementia.”

  “No. That came up by way of association. Intrusion. The installation. Mostly empty. It’ll be fast to empty, because Thaal was almost there anyway. Your man Trey thinks they even removed a false floor topside to make moving goods faster. He’ll get it done by morning, I’m sure.”

  Wran looked over at them, frowning. “So it’s important to them to get those artillery units away from here—so they won’t be found and identified as stolen.”

  Voort nodded. “Yes. Why?”

  “Thinking. Thinking.”

  Sharr leaned over to Voort, and his voice became a conversational whisper. “Wran’s a deep thinker. And even better with hands and feet than with that rifle.”

  “I’m not surprised. I remember Shalla in the field. And she said her sister—Wran’s mother—was even better.”

  “My backup plan is to have Wran go down to ground level and just kill everybody. If he can clean a wide enough gap in the enemy lines before they get him, we can sneak out.”

  “I heard that.” Then Wran considered. “Though I am at least that good.”

  Sharr leaned back. “Blast it, Piggy—I’m sorry, I mean Voort—we had him. General Thaal. Recordings of stolen goods. But now ... the longer we’re pinned here, the more our evidence evaporates.”

  “That’s actually why I hope Myri doesn’t broadcast the evidence. That would cause Thaal to flee, and we might not catch him. I don’t just want him out of business, I want him punished, made an example of. But if he thinks there is no evidence and we can get away, we might have another chance to bag him.”

  The sky-ripping noise came again, this time from the east. Voort hunkered down, bracing himself.

  The eastern slope of the hill thundered. More stones rained down from above. Then the moment was past.

  “You want to cause the general some grief? Maybe leave some more evidence?” Wran had his rifle up again, staring through the scope at the northern artillery unit.

  “I’d love to.” Sharr sounded enthusiastic. “How?”

  “It’s a long shot, both literally and figurati
vely. But we’ve been giving them return fire only from the blasters. They’ve got the mobile artillery piece out there at two klicks, and they’re not running the deflectors because they think we’re out of their range. In fact, they’ve got some side panels open so the power plants will run cooler.”

  Voort raised his head to look. Though his own scope, he could see that Wran was correct. “Can you make that shot?”

  Wran shrugged. “I give it one chance in three.”

  “Would it increase your odds to have a spotter?”

  Wran glanced at him. “You’re trained in that?”

  “Don’t teach your grandfather to root tubers, son.”

  Wran grinned. “Two chances in three.”

  Voort used his macrobinoculars for his tasks. The distant artillery unit had landed at an angle, its front and left side both visible to the Wraiths. Venting panels were propped open. Through one of them Voort could see components that Trey explained to him—main capacitor, capacitor charger, cooling for the capacitance system. He calculated range with the macrobinocular rangefinder, double-checked it with his blaster rifle scope, returned to the macrobinoculars. “Range to the main capacitor is two point oh oh three four seven klicks at the left edge of the unit, two point oh oh five four four to the right.”

  Wran, his eye to his own scope, didn’t move, but he did blink. “Oh oh three four seven? How do you get centimeter readings on that?”

  “Measuring by eye. I take an average of the heights of the Pop-Dogs in the immediate vicinity, compare that with the average heights of military men of their respective species—”

  “Which you’ve memorized?”

  “Which I remember—and compare that to my readings. Then I calculate distances from those Pop-Dogs to the target and adjust for the difference.”

  “Will you do my taxes?”

  “Wind—wait. You’re firing a laser. You don’t need wind or angle, do you?”

  “No.” Wran’s voice became quieter, even silky. “Ready for nonlethal ranging shot.”