Refugee: Force Heretic II (28 page)

“Do you have any idea what’s going on?” she asked.

“No. Security has been on edge since Cundertol’s kidnapping. I haven’t worked out who was behind it, but I know it wasn’t Malinza Thanas. That’s not her style.”

“Then who?”

“I’m not sure.”

After walking awhile in silence, Tahiri switched to a private channel and ventured another question.

“You always get around in these things?” she asked as they trundled along, steel boots clomping heavily on the reinforced floor. “There must be easier ways to travel.”

“Unfortunately the security scare has shut down my usual sources,” he said. “Especially with the arrival of the Keeramak and today’s ceremony. It’s crude, I know, but it’s all I have left for now. I just hope it doesn’t result in me getting caught and my activities being discovered.”

“What would happen if you were discovered? Would you be replaced?”

“Once word got out, then yes, another of my kind would be sent to replace me.”

“But how would word get out? If communications are down like they are now, I can’t see how that could be possible.”

“Well, the first thing we do when we arrive at our posts is set up plans to cover such emergencies. Those of my family don’t use the Force; nor do we rely on conventional communications. That, you see, is our strength. We get into places we’re not supposed to simply because we are ignored, not by virtue of arcane technology or powers, which people are always looking for. In the same way, who notices a note or two slipped into a cargo manifest? A whisper from a dock handler to a droid? Or a story innocently exchanged in a tavern? Even during communications embargoes, Bakura receives its fair share of freighters and traders. Everyone needs repulsors. I use the simplest and most universal techniques of spreading my word via those travelers. It may be slow at times, but it is effective.”

Tahiri fumbled with the concept. “Are you telling me you’re sort of a pan-galactic gossipmonger?”

“You make it sound like a bad thing. It’s actually very effective. If one of my regular messages fails to arrive at a certain place at a certain time every day, then a message will be sent to the next Ryn along the chain, who will request a replacement.”

“Who from?” Tahiri was unable to suppress her curiosity about the Ryn network. Their existence had been completely unsuspected until Galantos, but their influence seemed to be as insidious as the Peace Brigaders had been.

Goure chuckled softly. “I can’t tell you too much, Tahiri. A secret organization can only operate efficiently if its workings
remain
secret. Since you already know we exist, I can tell you that we Ryn don’t have a strictly hierarchal system like the Jedi. We do have, however, a leader
who ultimately receives the information each of us supplies. It is he who makes all the major decisions.”

“Does your leader have a name?”

“Of course. But to reveal it would compromise his safety. Toward this end not even
we
know his real identity. We know that someone perceived the need for such a network of information seekers; it was that same someone who trained me—and many others like me—in the art of infiltration and sent us to our posts. Mark my words: a time will come when there will be songs sung about him, if they aren’t already.”

Goure stopped as they reached the second turbolift. It was as battered and well used as everything else on this level. With a deep groan it slid open; when they were inside it lurched upward. Tahiri found her hands reaching for the sides to steady herself; every muscle tensed uneasily. She distracted herself with another question.

“How can songs be sung about someone who has no name?”

A noise like wheezing issued from Goure’s HE-suit speakers that, while it might not have particularly sounded like it, Tahiri knew nonetheless to be a laugh. “You’re so practical, aren’t you?” Before he could answer her question, however, Arrizza had raised a hand and waved the two of them to silence.

“We’re almost there,” he said. “Remember the arrangement.”

Tahiri nodded inside her all-encompassing helmet. From now on, they were to address each other only as Yon, Gaitzi, and Scod, members of an underground cleaning gang nicknamed the Tripod.

The lift platform grated to a halt a second later, and the massive doors slid open again, revealing another service corridor that seemed little different from the one they’d left below—except this one terminated in a set of thick blast doors after only a few meters. Tahiri followed
Arrizza as he approached it, imitating the heavy lope of his HE-suit in the hope of radiating the impression that she was as comfortable in the bulky outfit as she would have been in normal clothing.

“Identify,” a voice blared from the other side of the door. Laser beams tracked the suits, reading ident codes painted in various reflective paints.

“Tripod duty,” Arrizza said in a bored tone. After only a few seconds’ waiting, he added gruffly, “Come on, Schifil! Let us in, will you? I haven’t got all day.”

“And so much important work to do, eh?” The double door slid open with a hydraulic hiss. “There’s a block in Compactor J earmarked for your attention, Yon. You must’ve been a bad boy last night.”

Arrizza just grunted as he led them past the security checkpoint. Two guards in an open booth watched them pass, weapons slung across their laps and smirks on their faces. The HE-suits could have crushed them like bugs, but physical strength was no match for superior social status.

Tahiri filed subserviently past, putting a hunched sway to her heavy lurch that she thought suitable for a low-grade worker. So focused was she on her performance that it took her a moment to realize that one of the guards was talking to her.

She stopped, turning slowly, using the seconds to reach into the guard’s mind to discover that he thought he was talking to the cleaner called Gaitzi.

“Got a kiss for me today, Gaitzi?” the guard asked, puckering grotesquely while his partner laughed.

Tahiri improvised a suitably moist smacking sound with her lips before turning away and moving on.

“Delightful,” Goure muttered once they had cleared the checkpoint and were safely following Arrizza into the underbelly of the Bakuran Senate Complex. “It never ceases
to amaze me what happens to the males of most species when you give them a gun and put them in a uniform.”

“I suppose the male Ryn are above all that, are they?” Tahiri said dryly.

“Actually, we are!” he defended indignantly. “That’s why we work in secrecy, with no fancy titles or privileges. We exist to oppose such self-aggrandizing methods used by groups like the Peace Brigade. In fact, rumor has it that our founder was inspired by the Great River—the network of safe houses and escape routes founded by Master Skywalker in order to save the Jedi from betrayal.”

“Is that why the Ryn helped us back on Galantos?”

“News of what happened there has yet to filter down to me,” he said. “But yes, if the Peace Brigade were there then we would have done what we could to resist them. Look on it as our contribution to the war effort. We can’t take on the Yuuzhan Vong directly—not even we could infiltrate
their
society—so we aim lower, at those who rot the Galactic Alliance from within.”

“A second line of defense,” Tahiri suggested.

“We like to think of it as the first line,” he countered. “There’s no point defeating the Yuuzhan Vong if we defeat ourselves in the process.”

As cryptic as that sounded, it echoed Jacen’s philosophical uncertainties regarding the consequences of winning the war by violence alone. It also hit a little close to where her own problems lived.

“We’re not really going to have to unclog that garbage compactor, are we?” she asked by way of changing the subject, thinking not just of the mounds of steaming refuse but the closing walls as well.

“No,” Arrizza said. “You just go about your business. I’ll make sure the chores get done.”

“We have signals we can send each other if we’re needed at either end,” Goure explained.

“If you’re bothered by anyone,” the Kurtzen added,

“or you split up, just tell security that your localizers have been scrambled and you’re looking for Sector C. I’ll find you there.”

Tahiri nodded.

They reached a T-junction and split up without another word: Arrizza heading off to the right to perform the functions of the cleanup crew, Tahiri and Goure stomping down the left corridor to begin their reconnaissance. From that moment on, Tahiri knew, the risk multiplied. She didn’t know how closely the cleaning crews were monitored, or how deeply they could move through the complex before someone noticed that they weren’t following the usual routine; all she could do was work quickly, and hope that they were given enough time to do what they’d come to do.

Goure led her on a long and winding route through the sub-basement levels, occasionally taking turbolifts up or down floors, or detouring through warehouses full of sealed containers.

“There’s more to the complex than meets the eye,” she commented after passing through an enormous underground bunker packed to the ceiling with food rations.

“After the war with the Ssi-ruuk, it was redesigned as a shelter,” Goure explained. “The Senate and a large proportion of the population of Salis D’aar could survive down here a considerable length of time—as long as the barriers to the surface weren’t breached, of course.”

“And if they were?”

“There’s a weapons cache, too,” the Ryn replied. “Enough for a small army. Believe me: they wouldn’t go down without a fight.”

Given the horrors of entechment, Tahiri could understand the lengths the Senate had gone to avoid them. With the specter of enslavement and death hanging over them for decades, fear of a return invasion must have been deeply entrenched. No wonder, then, that some
people were reluctant to have anything to do with the P’w’eck, whether they were former slaves themselves or not.

So why the sudden turnaround?
she wondered. Princess Leia had commented that Prime Minister Cundertol had been anti-alien when serving on the New Republic Senate, so why had that changed now?

She forced herself to put the matter aside and concentrate on the issue at hand. “If they put food and weapons down here,” she said, “there must be some sort of command hub as well.”

“Exactly,” Goure replied. “And that’s where we’re headed.”

They took a small detour to gather a floating floor-polishing machine, then continued on their way. They passed through an empty security checkpoint and went down one more turbolift. Tahiri constantly checked the spaces around them for any sign of habitation, but the sub-basement was uniformly empty. They could have been wandering the well-preserved ruins of an ancient, abandoned city, for all she could tell.

But there were still security cams at every corner. All it would take was for one person to become suspicious …

Two large, molded doors slid aside to reveal the unused command hub. Tahiri and Goure strode confidently inside, as though they visited there every day. Rather than crane her hydraulic neck, she sent her HE-suit sensors sweeping across the empty workstations and dormant holoprojectors. There was room for fifty or more people to work around a raised circular dais where, she presumed, the Prime Minister and his chief officers would conduct business in times of war. Although it had clearly been empty for many years, there was an air of preparedness to the place—a hint of anticipation in the dusty durasteel—as though it was waiting for its moment to come.

It might yet
, she thought cynically,
if the Keeramak’s intentions are not what they seem
.

Goure came to a halt in the middle of the vast room and activated the cleaning machine. Swinging it back and forth, he spoke over its patient whine:

“Look like you’re cleaning. I’ll slice into the systems and see if I can find Jaina. Switch your monitors to channel seventeen so that you can monitor my progress.”

“Won’t someone notice what we’re doing?”

“Not if I’m good enough.” He smiled at her through his faceplate. “And I
am
good enough.” More seriously he added, “Although we need to be in the hub to access its networks, we don’t want to do anything obvious like switch on the displays. The HE-suits can do the job for us.” Again the heavy shoulders of his suit flexed. “I suspect we’re only going to get one shot at this, so we have to make it count.”

Tahiri acknowledged the instruction and did as he told her, making a big show of using her suit’s strength and flexibility for the sake of anyone that might be watching. All the time she was working, she kept one eye on Goure’s progress, using the upper half of her helmet’s interior as a crude VR hood. At first, she saw nothing but line after line of complex machine code as he used a number of simple techniques to infiltrate the complex’s low-security networks. From there the job became much tougher, and it took him a while to break into the next layer. There he gained access to administrative data, such as arrests and releases, but there was no mention of Jaina.

Another twenty minutes’ code work took Goure right into the heart of the Bakuran bureaucracy, where he said the true secrets were stored. At first Tahiri was amazed at his ability, until she remembered that the Ryn had a reputation for being capable slicers. Not only that, but Bakura, a system on the isolated edge of the Rim worlds,
probably didn’t possess the sophisticated software required to guarantee silence—the kind she took for granted back on Mon Cal. Nevertheless, peeling back the system’s strongest defenses in under an hour and a half was still impressive.

“Interesting,” he muttered at one point.

“You found something?” Tahiri was immediately interested. She was growing tired of polishing and dusting.

“Not about Jaina, I’m afraid. I’ve managed to access hidden holocams in rooms that aren’t supposed to have them.” The view through the top half of her hood changed to a video feed, and she saw a wide, circular bed surrounded by lush drapes.

“Looks like someone has been doing a little spying,” Tahiri said.

“I doubt it. Probably just an overzealous security chief. You see this kind of thing wherever you go. It’s a case of the left hand not trusting the right.”