“Wraith Three. You’re Wraith Seven, by the way. You need to go catch up with her.”
“You’re staying here?”
Face nodded. “In two and a half minutes, this bag will ignite. Safety workers will put out the fire. Soon after, they’ll examine the burned bags, finding evidence that will tie in to a munitions heist that’s happening in a few minutes, and they’ll review the holocam images of who was with these bags, so they’ll see you and me. Remember not to scrub off your makeup and appliances until after you’re through with the heist.”
“Wait. Heist—now?”
“Go catch Three, she’ll fill you in.”
“Right.” Voort extracted his travel bag from the pile of containers on the hover-rack and dashed off in Myri’s direction.
Face turned and headed back along the spaceport tunnel, leaving the rack hovering where it was.
Voort caught up to Myri at the pickup lane where arriving travelers could arrange airspeeder trips to homes and hostels. She was in the act of waving down an oncoming speeder, an enormous blue thing so scratched and dented that no other traveler seemed to want to engage it. She smiled up at Voort. “Hello, Seven. No need to trigger your speaker. I understand Gamorrean.”
Voort stared at her. The face under that preposterous wig was faintly familiar, despite the effects of too-thick green makeup surrounding her eyes and making them look like hieroglyphs rendered by a child—Voort could see traces of Wedge and Iella, her parents, in her fine-boned features. But he shook his head. “I did not give you permission to become an adult.”
“Silly. If I’d grown up, would I be doing this?”
“You make a good point.”
The battered blue speeder descended to curb level and slowed to a halt before them. Voort opened the door for Myri like any dutiful porter, then tossed his bag into the baggage compartment at the rear. He clambered into the rear seat and slid the door shut. The speeder slid smoothly away from the spaceport crowd and rose into a traffic lane.
The pilot was a human man. From behind, Voort could see that he had fair skin, short brown hair that clearly lightened toward yellow in sunlight, and a tanned neck. And he had shoulders so broad and muscular that Voort had only ever seen their like in holoventure actors, muscle models, and hardworking narcissists. Voort glanced at Myri, an interrogation—One of us or a civilian?
She grinned at him. “Voort saBinring, Seven, this is Trey Courser, Wraith Four.”
Trey glanced over his shoulder and offered a brief wave. His features suggested he was younger than Voort would have guessed—barely out of his teens. “Heard a lot of stories about you, Seven.” His voice was light, pleasant.
Voort snorted and activated his throat implant. “Either you’ve already swept this vehicle for listening devices or we’re already in trouble.”
Trey returned his attention to the traffic lane. “Both, probably. But I rebuilt this junker from bow to stern and I sweep it regularly. We’re good.”
Myri rested her chin on her seat back. “Four’s our machine and droid fabricator. Light-duty computer slicer. Come to think of it, most of us are light-duty computer slicers. And he’d be our trainer, if any of the rest of us ever exercised.”
The words unit strongman crossed Voort’s mind, but he didn’t speak them. “Where are we going and what are we doing?”
“We’re not going, we’re there.” Trey slid the airspeeder sideways until it was out of the traffic lane. Moving in beside a low permacrete wall, he cycled the speeder’s repulsors and thrusters, causing the vehicle to buck, nose down, and descend awkwardly. He set the speeder down and killed the motivators. Landspeeders and airspeeders swung wide of it as they passed.
“… and what are we doing?”
Myri pulled a chrono out of a pocket and checked it. “Four’s about to hide under a blanket. You and I are going to exit this vehicle, not allowing ourselves to be smashed flat by other pilots, and stand at its back. You’re wearing something on your palms and fingers to prevent prints, yes?”
“As per instructions.”
“Good. C’mon.” She exited the speeder on the side away from traffic, leaving her door open, and dashed to the rear of the vehicle.
Sighing, Voort followed. “Face sort of left out until the last moment the fact that I’d be arriving in the middle of an operation in progress.”
Myri gave him a blank look. “Face? Face who?”
“The man you slipped the overheating datapad to. Face Loran.”
Her eyes got wide. “That was Face Loran? He’s in on this?”
“Don’t you know?”
“No. Now I need you to menace me. Loom over me. Give me some good Gamorrean insults.” As if he’d already begun, she leaned away from him, bending backward over the tail of the speeder, and assumed a frightened expression, her hands near her face as if anticipating a blow.
Voort was startled into silence for a moment, then struggled to comply. He switched off his translator implant and began bellowing in Gamorrean. “You have the color sense of a monkey-lizard and I suspect you pour sugar on your meat loaf.”
Myri giggled. “Insults are not your field of expertise, are they?” Then she schooled her expression back into a frightened look. She raised her head a bit to peek over his shoulder, then slumped backward again. “Ten more seconds. Wave your fists.”
Voort felt a prickling sensation in the small of his back. He was sure trouble had to be arriving from behind, but he couldn’t break character to look. He merely raised two meaty fists and waved them as if deciding where to punch Myri first. “Your scores in calculus are an atrocity, and you think square roots refer to artificial hair!” Actually, there was no Gamorrean word for “calculus,” but he made do with an expression meaning “big nasty math.”
Through gritted teeth, Myri told him, “Don’t make me laugh …”
Voort heard a set of repulsors approach from behind. Instead of gaining altitude or sideslipping to the left to pass, these roared with the application of retrothrust; then the vehicle, a big one by the sound of it, set down heavily on the permacrete lane behind Voort. Boots clattered on the permacrete and a loud, resonant voice sounded: “Is this man troubling you?”
Finally Voort did turn.
A few meters behind Trey’s speeder, a military hauler-speeder had set down, its doors lifting to admit three men and one woman, all human and all wearing the uniform of the Army of the Galactic Alliance. The speaker, who’d been piloting, was already approaching; he was a big human male, and his right hand rested meaningfully on the holster on his right hip.
Voort suppressed a rueful sigh. He’d been on Coruscant for less than half an hour and already he was about to be beaten to a pulp.
“Save me!” Myri’s voice was an uncharacteristically high squeak. She maneuvered past Voort and ran to stand behind the tall trooper.
The trooper and two of his comrades advanced on Voort. The fourth put his arms around Myri, a gesture that was half false comfort, half self-gratification.
The soldiers advanced on Voort. Voort glanced at Myri, his eyes asking the question: Do I give them a beating, or take one?
Then the troopers stopped where they were, their eyes growing wide as they looked past Voort.
Myri put her elbow into the solar plexus of her would-be comforter. As he sagged away, gasping, she gestured at Voort—a lowering-hand get down motion.
Voort got down. He hit the permacrete lane so fast and so hard that it knocked the wind from him. He wondered if the appliance he was wearing to change the look of his snout might have been jarred loose by the impact.
The lead trooper took a rifle-intensity stun bolt, fired from Trey’s speeder, in the chest. He went down as hard as Voort had—harder, since he made no effort to diminish the impact.
Myri’s comforter tried ineffectually to grab a holstered blaster pistol. Myri smoothly drew a hold-out blaster from her jacket pocket and shot him, a stun bolt that took him right where her elbow had landed a mom
ent before. He staggered back into the side of the military hauler and collapsed.
The female trooper charged toward Trey’s speeder, while her companion dived back to seek shelter in the hauler. A second rifle stun bolt took the woman in the gut, dropping her. Myri vaulted into the open front door on her side of the hauler, firing as she leapt, and the last trooper fell back out of the vehicle, his eyes closed.
Trey, a blaster rifle in his hands, raced past Voort and slid into the front passenger seat of the hauler. He shot a glance back at Voort. “Get your bag!” The speeders roaring by in the lanes beside and above the stopped vehicles swung even farther to the side.
Voort growled. He heaved himself upright, retrieved his bag from the blue speeder, and trotted back to the military hauler. Only the door beside the pilot’s seat was still open. Voort climbed in, tossing his bag to Trey, and reactivated his implant. “My—Three, your briefing skills are inadequate.”
Myri, in the rear seat, modulated her voice, making it sound like that of a holodocumentary narrator. “Seven, you’ll become pilot at this stage of the operation.”
“Thank you.” Voort slammed his door shut, sealed it, and activated the hauler’s repulsors. The hauler lifted into the air.
Trey tossed his blaster rifle and Voort’s bag into the backseat with Myri. Then he inverted himself, ending up head-down in the passenger-side foot well, and began reaching into and tearing things out of the instrumentation wiring behind Voort’s controls.
Voort kicked in the thrusters, slowly bringing the ungainly hauler up to speed. “Where to?”
“Your next step will be to ascend two traffic lanes, to the western exit traffic lane. In a few moments, if our distractions don’t all work, you’ll be pursued and threatened by all the military police vehicles within thirty kilometers.”
Voort felt his shoulders begin to relax. “Better.”
Trey jammed his hand into the wiring and chips that governed the proper operation of a high-tech, mil-spec speeder. His body spasmed as his hand contacted something it probably shouldn’t have. “Ow.”
Voort glanced at him. “Should you be doing that?” There was no sign of pursuit yet on the sensors, and most pilots in the lane into which he’d merged were apparently unaware of the violence of a moment earlier; they did not shy away from the military hauler.
“Unless you want to broadcast our position to the army, yes.”
“As you were.” Voort experienced an unsettling feeling of familiarity. This was a lot like the old days. Face Loran had operated on the principle that no one should be told anything he didn’t need to know. The result had been improved security and a lot of temporarily confused Wraiths. “What distractions?”
“Well, the overheating datapad and luggage fire was one. The whole spaceport will be shut down and in confusion for an hour or so. As for the other distraction …” Myri began counting off on her fingers. “Three, two, one, zero …”
In the rearview holocam monitor, Voort saw Trey’s battered blue speeder disappear in a vast cloud of gray-black smoke. There was no sound of an explosion—the cloud had to be from a smoke bomb, not an explosive charge designed to destroy.
“There are going to be some minor wrecks as a result of that.” Myri sounded matter-of-fact. “One fire, spaceport shutdown, hauler theft, four troopers knocked unconscious … they could sue us for so much. Let’s not get caught.”
Voort joined the westbound flow of airspeeder traffic leaving the spaceport surroundings. He snorted, amused. “Let’s not get caught. Replacing What do we blow up first? as the Wraith motto for a gentler era.”
“No, I like the blowing up one better.” Trey tugged, and all of Voort’s gauges flickered. Then Trey’s hands came up, cupping a small, gleaming blue cube with wires trailing from it. “Military transponder. Catch.” He tossed it up and back.
Myri caught it. She hit a button on her door. When the viewport there slid down, filling the hauler’s cab with fast-moving air that beat at Voort’s eardrums, Myri tossed the box out, then sealed the viewport shut. “Oops.” She looked around, gauging their current location; the speeder was entering a deep skytower zone, mostly commercial, its skies thickly populated with airspeeder traffic lanes, self-motivated flying advertisement banners, floating traffic-monitor droids, and rigid pedestrian walkways that crossed the gaps between buildings at intervals. “Seven, go one block south, turn west again, ascend to the middle westbound traffic lane.”
Obligingly, Voort banked into a leftward turn, joined a southbound lane for one long block, banked rightward, and climbed to the designated lane. He performed all these maneuvers with brisk, starfighter precision.
Meaning that Myri had to hold on to the seat back with both hands to avoid being tossed around. Trey, in the act of climbing up into a normal seated position, didn’t grab a stable surface in time. He bounced into the cab’s ceiling and ended up in the backseat.
Myri cleared her throat and leaned forward. “What, exactly, was that?”
Voort shrugged. “A Wraith from long ago, Sharr, would have called it a passive-aggressive response.”
“Ah. I get it. I’ll play nice. Up ahead two blocks, between this lane and the next one above, there will be a banner stretched between buildings. A yellow banner advertising nothing. Fly directly into it.”
“Center?”
“Center.”
“I feel we’re communicating better already.”
There it was, a broad stretch of what looked like yellow flexiplast fluttering in the wind at about the one-hundred-story level. Voort waited until the last moment, then rose out of his lane, sideslipped into the middle of the gap between business towers, and hit the banner straight-on.
The flexiplast stretched and then, as the tension became too great, snapped free of the cords holding it to the buildings. It collapsed around the military hauler, fitting as snugly as if vacuum-sealed.
Voort felt his heart lurch, then checked his gauges. “We’re not dropping … It’s vulnerable to thruster and repulsor wash?”
Myri nodded. “Melted away from the thrusters and repulsors, not impeding them. So we’re now a yellow civilian hauler.”
“That’s new. And clever.” Voort gestured at the viewports all around, which were coated in a yellow surface that was translucent but not transparent. “But I can’t see.”
“Fly on sensors.” Myri scrambled over the seat back and dropped into the front passenger seat. She withdrew a datacard from a jacket breast pocket and slid it into the hauler’s onboard computer.
Voort put the sensors on the vehicle’s main display. It showed other airspeeders all around as wire-frame images. As soon as the computer read Myri’s card, the sensors also showed a dotted yellow line in the air, a line not corresponding to any airborne objects.
Voort returned to his westbound lane, where the dotted line hovered. “That’s our path?”
“It takes us right to the unsafe house.”
“… Maybe a safe house instead?”
“That’s for later.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Ten minutes later and thirty stories down in the twilight cast by permacrete canyons between long stands of office and industrial complexes, a wire-frame grid representing a warehouse door slid up and open ahead of the hauler. Voort slowed and turned into the opening. Beyond was a medium-large warehouse chamber, virtually empty but for two wire-frame blobs, their exact shape and function unclear. One was bipedal and moving—an organic being or a droid.
Voort set the hauler down in the center of the open space. Hearing the main door grinding down into place, he opened his door, tearing the yellow material clinging to it, and could finally see the warehouse interior.
The moving blob was indeed a person—a human male with pale skin. He was big, his head bald, his ears a trifle large and protruding, and he wore a baggy gray jumpsuit and an incongruous smile. Another blob turned out to be a hover cart, bigger than but otherwise similar in function to the one Voort had been pushi
ng in the spaceport. The bald man pushed the hover cart up to the rear of the hauler, then began ripping yellow material off the hauler’s rear.
Metal sections had been pulled off the left warehouse wall to reveal an old-fashioned incinerator unit. Voort could feel the heat radiating from the thing the moment he pushed his way out of the hauler.
“Don’t forget your bag.” Trey climbed from the rear seat and ran back to join the bald man.
Myri exited and stretched. Then she cupped her hands around her mouth and raised her voice. “Phase Three! Open up!”
A durasteel panel on the wall not far from the incinerator swung open. Its seams and hinges had not been visible to Voort. Three people emerged, two females and a male, all humanoids. Voort recognized their baggy gray jumpsuits as breakaway garments. Made of flash-cloth, the clothes would burn away in an instant if exposed to fire; they were a danger to their wearers in any environment that included sparks or flames but an invaluable tool to an Intelligence unit that needed to perform quick changes.
The man was an exotic—humanoid but not human. His rough-textured skin was a light green. His eyes, with narrow, slitted pupils, were blue. He was hairless, with a skin crease running from the center of his forehead to the top portion of his narrow nose. His mouth was small, a narrow horizontal line in his face. Voort’s hairless eyebrows rose toward his horns; he hadn’t seen many Clawdites in his day. But the man’s role with the Wraiths was instantly obvious. Clawdites could exert great control over their skin, its color, texture, and features, and thus could appear to be any of many humanoid races. A chameleon like that would be a valuable spy. Watching the Clawdite run over to join Trey and the bald human, Voort barely registered the approach of the two women.
Then one of them spoke, her voice familiar. “I think I’m being insulted.”
Voort turned to look. Two fair-skinned human women, a generation apart in age, stood there. The older one was lean, her face angular. She had dark hair cut short and dark eyes that he knew looked judgmental even when she was thinking of nothing more profound than what to order for dinner. Her features, by human standards, would be classed as striking, perhaps even unlovely, features suited to a senior military officer or a captain of industry. But she wore a smile for Voort.
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