Wraith Squadron

by Aaron Allston

  He allowed a slow smile to spread across his features. An exotic insect from a faraway world—he could use such a thing. Glancing around to make sure none of his companions was watching, he used a fine set of scissors to cut through the plastic netting holding the cartons together, then slipped the carton with the active inhabitant into his tool bag.

  "So," Falynn said, "I got about four hours of sleep. Two just snoozing on top of the bunker, and two lying in a heap along the south wall."

  Janson whistled. "And no one spotted you." "I assume not. I'm not in prison." She shrugged, then winced at the pain the maneuver caused her.

  Atril scowled at her. "Be still." She returned to painting a healing agent onto the largest of the cuts on Falynn's forehead. Janson continued, "How did you get out?" "When I woke up, it was still a couple of hours before dawn. The little garrison's personal vehicles were all lined up on the north wall, and I figured that they wouldn't put pressure sensors along the wall where all their own people would move all the time, just out in the open area around. So I just walked around, picked the biggest of the groundskimmers, and picked the lock to its storage compartment. Got a little more rest there, too, under a blanket and some boxes before his shift ended and he came out. He stopped in at some place to eat and I crawled out there, the glorious image you see before you." Falynn's hair was plastered to her head by sweat, she had scrapes on her forehead, and she walked, when they let her, like a woman who'd avoided a fall's worth of broken bones but stocked up on bruises and muscle pulls by way of compensation.

  Janson said, "I'll get your information to Wedge. And you get some real sleep." He rose.

  Atril rose and added, "The painkillers should start firing off pretty soon. You'd better be horizontal when they do." She shrugged. "Sorry I can't do more. I wish Dr. Phanan were here."

  "It's fine," Falynn said.

  Janson and Atril left her quarters, but Donos lingered, kneeling beside her chair. "You're sure you're all right?"

  "I'm going to stab the next person who asks me that." But she kept her tone light and there was no sting in her words.

  "You scared me to death. Falling and not moving. I was getting a retrieval team in position when you reached me via comlink."

  "I'm sorry." She reached out to stroke his chin, felt the harsh stubble of a day's worth of beard there. And she began to laugh.

  "What's funny?"

  "That mustache. You look like a complete idiot."

  "Oyah." He bobbed his head in an exaggerated nod and kissed her on the third bob. Then he rose. "Like they said, sleep. We've got more planned tonight."

  "Someone else gets to climb." A wave of tiredness washed across her. She half rose, unwilling to straighten completely up and suffer the muscle pulls such a motion entailed, I and crawled onto her bed. "G'night."

  Plague Group returned from Scohar tired but triumphant. They met with the mustachioed idiots of Yokel Group in Wedge's hostel quarters.

  "Effortless, as I predicted," Grinder said. He clapped his hands and rubbed them together. "My companions, inspired by my sheer versatility and competence, themselves showed acceptable performance—"

  Kell glared at him and he shut up. "We got in," Kell said, "we got out with the goods, and the only thing we did that would indicate someone was there was spray a sealant all over the inside of a trash flue. I even reconnected the plasma bomb."

  Wedge came upright. "The what?"

  "They had a high-temperature device set to trigger if any of the disease agents breached their security seal and threatened to escape the complex. The thing would have instantly incinerated the Institute and a few city blocks around it— which I assume they consider an appropriate measure to keep some of those diseases in check." Kell shrugged. "I bet that little safety feature is a secret to their neighbors. Anyway, I disabled the array so Grinder could foul up if he liked—"

  "Never happen," Grinder said, his voice a growl.

  "And then, once he was very, very sure everything was safe, reconnected it."

  "Where's the plague?" Wedge asked.

  Phanan held up two plastic cylinders, each no larger than a standard comlink.

  "Will those . . . containers . . . hold?"

  The doctor nodded. "Yes. But to be safe, I'll be inoculating all of us and the rest of the Night Caller crew against these little bugs. Kell is going to help me mount these containers in little detonation units, nothing explosive, they'll puncture the sides with a needle. All we have to do is get them into the shuttles' air-circulation gear."

  "Good." Wedge leaned back and tried to relax. "We go tonight, then. The sooner we're offworld, the sooner we can get out of these mustaches."

  Tyria quirked a smile. "Not to mention the lavender short pants."

  "Not to mention them, Flight Officer Sarkin." Wedge pulled his wide-brimmed hat down over his eyes. "Or else."

  They drove at a slow pace toward Bunker 22-Aleph—slow so Piggy, pacing them on foot, could keep up. Not that the Storinal-made refueling and maintenance skimmer was a particularly speedy craft, but it could still outrun a fully armed and armored Gamorrean.

  The two human guards and one leather-clad Gamorrean at the bunker's main entrance came on attention as they neared. In the skimmer's cab, Kell fingered his blaster to make sure it was still snug in its holster. Beside him, Tyria gave him an amused look and refrained from doing the same. Back in the skimmer's main bed, hidden among the refueling hoses and swing-out platforms containing diagnostic gear, Janson, Phanan, and Grinder would be making sure the blankets and covers over them were still tied down tight . . . and making sure their blasters were charged to full.

  Kell kept a bored expression on his face and brought the skimmer to a stop about a meter from the point at which he was sure the guards would bring their weapons to bear. The senior human guard stepped forward. "Orders." Kell handed him his forged datacard. "That's work orders, not orders. We don't take orders. Not like spaceport security boys." He gave Tyria a grin he knew to be irritating I and cocksure.

  "These shuttles aren't due to be serviced until the morn-ing," the guard said. "They depart tomorrow afternoon."

  "It's a slack period," Kell said. It was true; otherwise they wouldn't have been able to find and temporarily steal a maintenance skimmer. There had been others lined up, unused. "Control wants us to get a little ahead before the work piles up tomorrow."

  The guard gave him a sour look and stepped back to slip the card into the door reader.

  Now, their first test. It would have been far too much work to forge a proper set of work orders allowing them to work on the Hawkbat's shuttles—a set that would get proper authorization from the spaceport's main computer. It would have been a mission all by itself to get through that computer's defenses; security on that system was extremely tight to keep malicious code-slicers from doing things like rerout- ing cargo craft to pirates' landing zones or causing craft to crash.

  So Grinder had tried to run completely around the wall of defenses. Just after nightfall this evening, he had climbed to the hangar's roof and sliced into the little retransmitter there. Now, the module he'd planted in that comm device would be intercepting the request for authorization of Kell's codes, waiting an appropriate amount of time, and sending back the authorization ... all without bothering the spaceport computer. The Wraiths had no plans to retrieve the module; it would interfere with no other requests and would let the retransmitter operate normally. It would probably not be found until the next time the transmitter was serviced, whether days, weeks, or months from now.

  The guard returned. "You're clear to work. Under the eye of a spaceport guard."

  Kell gestured toward Piggy. "I thought that was what Smiley there was for."

  "Right." The guard waved at the two remaining at the hangar doors, and a moment later those doors were rolling open. Maintaining his air of boredom, Kell moved the skimmer through and Piggy paced them in. The Gamorrean guard said something in its own language as they passed and Piggy g
runted a reply.

  As the doors shut behind them, Kell maneuvered the skimmer to be directly beside the cockpit of one of the shuttles. When it was in place, he lowered the landing struts and shut off the repulsors. Now, the craft would be braced for its mechanical duties. He and Tyria clambered out of the cab and into the aft machinery, Kell swinging a diagnostic module up against the hull of the Hawkbat's Perch.

  The others didn't emerge from hiding, but Grinder's voice did. "I'm reading one visual-only scanner, up somewhere in the northwest corner."

  Kell resisted the urge to look. "Can you disable it?"

  "From here? Don't be stupid. Wait a second. Unless I miss my guess . . ."

  Kell and Tyria chimed in together, "Which never happens . . ."

  "Shut up. Unless I miss my guess, it's piping its data straight through that same retransmitter . . . Yes! Give me a second. Everybody hold still. I'm recording a few seconds of its transmission . . . looping it ... blending the seam. Now all I have to do is transmit it constantly to my module on the retransmitter and have the module hold the real feed . . . Done!" Grinder emerged, looking sweaty but triumphant.

  Janson and Phanan came out from beneath their respective hiding places. Janson gestured to the side of Hawkbat's Perch. "Why isn't that panel open yet?"

  "Because we don't actually have authorization, remember?" Kell felt, once more, the faint surprise that came when Janson's sudden arrival failed to cause him to tense up. "I need Grinder to run a bypass on it."

  "And on the ramp control."

  Kell shook his head. "It occurred to me as we were driving over here that we can just put the stuff in the air intake scoop. They'll be running on real air for the first few thousand meters, until they can't ram it fast enough in to supply adequate air pressure. That's when they switch to canned air." He smiled. "We don't even have to break in."

  Phanan cocked his head to listen. "We read, Joyride." With his built-in equipment, he didn't have to hear the buzzing of his comlink and bring the thing on-line; he was always receiving. "Good news, Joyride. Plague out." He looked at the others. "Runt is counting down for his run from the moon. If everything goes well, he'll finish his terrain-following run and be here in about an hour."

  "That's our time limit," Kell said. "Don't forget, we actually have to service these shuttles."

  Joyride Group couldn't rely on the help of a passing vendor's skimmer. With four people needing transport and a narrow time frame, they had to make something happen.

  Of all the vehicles crowding Revos's spaceport, none were as prevalent as cargo-hauling skimmers, used for transporting everything from standard bulk containers weighing several tons to piles of passengers' personal bags. It wasn't difficult to find one unattended, wasn't even difficult to get it running and move it off a few dozen meters into the deeper shadow thrown by an unoccupied hangar. But what they were planning next would be tricky.

  "How's it coming?" Wedge asked. He and Face were guards on this operation, keeping blasters at the ready and attention on their surroundings; they didn't often look back at what Falynn was doing.

  "How do you think? Slow!"

  Wedge heard an electronic crackle and a curse from her. "The trick," she continued, "is to fry the circuits controlling braking without wiping out everything else on the same board. Then I've got to do the vehicle programming you want. Tricky stuff. The jump at the end, the self-erasure, and the data you want left behind—well, I wish Grinder were here."

  Wedge managed a smile. If Grinder knew how much his particular skills were appreciated and needed right now, he'd be insufferable. He managed to ride pretty close to insufferable most of the time.

  Atril spoke up. "I handle ship's programming all the time, particularly navigation. Let me do a rough cut on the program and you can fix it up in less time than it would take you to do it from scratch."

  "Please."

  Wedge's comlink beeped. He held it up to his ear, heard the message, said, "Thanks, Six." He turned back to the others. "Thirty minutes and counting."

  "We have a problem," Phanan said.

  Kell lowered the side panel on Hawkbat's Vigil. "Not much of one. We're done." He was covered with sweat and, after only half an hour's work, tired. On a job like this, there were usually two to four trained mechanics and half an hour to an hour per vehicle serviced; he'd done it in half the usual time with a crew of willing but inexperienced hands.

  "Nine says there's a maintenance skimmer coming this way," Phanan said.

  Janson cursed. "Let's move out. We'll bluff them, and if that doesn't work, we'll tear out of here like Falynn in a skiff."

  Kell paused as he was entering the cockpit. Lashed to the bed in back were three plastic containers, each about the size of an R2 unit, that hadn't been there before. "What are those?"

  Tyria grinned. "Our reason for being here. Remember? We're stealing something? Those are recreational holos someone had piled up for loading onto the shuttles. They'll figure we're black marketeers or something."

  "I forgot."

  "You had plenty to do."

  Janson's voice came from underneath his blanket. "Would you two stop smooching up and get us out of here?"

  Kell positioned his skimmer to exit. The argument had already started outside, with some words drifting in around the edges of the steel doors: ". . . tell you, you're already in there." ". . . obviously not, since we just got here."

  Kell nodded to Piggy, who slapped the wall control. The doors ground their way open. The two nearly identical maintenance skimmers faced each other a mere four meters apart.

  The lead guard pointed to Kell's skimmer. "As I told you."

  The driver of the other skimmer leaned out of his cockpit. "Hey! Who are you?"

  "I'm Botkins." Kell glanced again at the name stenciled on the gloves lying in the cockpit. "I'm standing in for Laramont."

  "Laramont's in the cafeteria, waiting to start his shift!"

  "Dammit! They told me he was sick. So he's going to be servicing the shuttles?"

  "No, I am!"

  "Wrong. I just did."

  "Listen, scab, I'm not going to let you cost me my piece- work for the night." The mechanic clambered out of his cockpit. He was nearly as tall as Kell and had as much muscle, though a fair amount of it was swathed in fat. Tools swung on his belt as he straightened up.

  Kell waited until the man reached the window of his cockpit. "Hey," he said, "let's do this like gentlemen. You know, I might not have done such a good job of gauging the hydraulics."

  The mechanic scowled at him. "So?"

  "So, you scrub my work as not up to spec. You get credit for the whole job but only have to redo the work you don't like. But you don't formally log the complaint, so my record stays clean. That way, you get your pay and I still log the time, so I can keep working toward getting a permanent post here. What do you say?"

  The mechanic considered it. "No. I'm just going to scrub your work as not up to spec . . . and report it that way. Right now."

  Kell glanced at Tyria. A call like that to Central would probably alert the spaceport operators to the unauthorized maintenance job they'd just done. He returned his attention to the mechanic and said, in an overly reasonable tone, "Well, now. That's my job vaporized. My career at Revos Spaceport. If you're going to take that from me, I think I ought to have something from you."

  The mechanic twisted his lip in an approximation of a contemptuous smile. "Such as what?"

  "Such as about fifteen square centimeters of your skin, a liter of your blood, and whatever you have left of a reputation." Kell threw open his cockpit door, catching the mechanic off guard and hurling him to the duracrete.

  Kell stepped out over him, took a couple of steps to the side, and stretched. He caught the chief guard's eye. "I say I break three of his bones before he gives up."

  24

  The cargo skimmer swung around to the north of the TIE ready bunker, then angled in straight toward the building. It did not build up speed; i
t maintained a rate just over a walking pace.

  Wedge, Atril, Falynn, and Face clustered at the bow of the thing, braced for the mild collision to come. "I forgot to ask," Wedge said. "Have you ever done anything like this before? The surge at the end?"

  Falynn grinned. "Sure. Tried it with a canyon jump back home."

  "How'd it turn out?" "Broken collarbone." "Just checking."

  By now, the sensors in the TIE bunker would show the oncoming vehicle. Guards might even be leaving by the south entrance to come around and see what was happening. The timing had to be perfect.

  They were thirty meters away, twenty, ten—then they hit the bunker wall, a bump that merely caused them to sway forward, momentarily off balance.

  Falynn counted, "Three, two, one—"

  The skimmer's engines whined as they overrevved, and suddenly the craft bounced an extra two meters into the air.

  The four jumped forward as they felt the skimmer drop from under them. They landed, awkward, on the bunker roof. Atril immediately twisted and started to fall back into the skimmer, but Wedge and Face caught her flailing arms and tugged her toward them.

  Already there were the sounds of oncoming feet. The four flattened themselves as quietly as they could and hugged the roof.

  Then there were voices: "You there! What do you think you're doing?"

  "Wait a second. There's nobody in it."

  "Check under it."

  Laughter. "That'd be funny. Someone being squashed under a skimmer."

  The other voice became resentful. "You just think it's funny because it's never happened to you."

  "That's right. Never has, never will. Smell that? It's like an engine bearing has burned out." The man's voice changed. "Control Aleph-One, it's a cargo skimmer. It's unoccupied. It may be a drifter. Jotay's checking out the autopilot."

  "I am?"

  "You are."

  The other man sighed.