Star Wars: Scoundrels (30 page)

“Which means no popping in, grabbing the loot, and popping back out without anyone noticing,” Tavia added. “Once we start the operation, our footprints will be all over it.”

“What kind of security has he got inside the vault?” Bink asked.

“Oh, you’re going to love this,” Rachele said. She keyed her datapad again, and a dozen figures appeared around the edges of the vault. “Remember those Zed police droids Kell said Villachor’s got? Here’s where they hang out.”

“Plus the ten on guard outside the door,” Lando said. “Armed with blasters and TholCorp OT-7 neuronic whips, just to make things interesting. Getting past that group is the first step in the entry procedure.”

Chewbacca turned to Han and warbled a question.

“I don’t know,” Han said. “Kell? You know any way to knock out a Zed?”

“I’d have to look into it, but I’m sure it’s possible.” Kell waved a hand. “Of course,
anything’s
possible. It’s in the execution where you get hung up.”

“A high-power jab in the motivator or memory core will do it for most droids,” Bink pointed out.

“Hard to do through the kind of armor Zeds have, though,” Kell said.

“And don’t forget the whips,” Lando added. “Those things pack a serious punch, and Villachor would hardly give them to his guards if they could be used against them. That implies extra electrical shielding.”

“Actually, it’s worse than that,” Kell said. “Remember I told you the Zeds I saw had sheathings on their upper arms, thighs, and waists? Those limb parts are where the droids have thin parallel cylinders instead of a single wider limb part, and the waist is where the torso also gets extra narrow.”

“So?” Bink asked.

“So with those sheathings in place, you can’t tell whether they’ve got the original parallels and torso tube, or something wider,” Kell said. “In other words, you can’t tell whether or not that’s really a Zed.”

“Whoa,” Dozer said, his sandwich momentarily forgotten. “Are you saying some of those Zeds might actually be armored
human
guards?”

“Exactly,” Kell said. “It’s really pretty clever. You go in with a tight-spectrum motivator punch like Bink said, all set to knock out a droid. Only the human inside the armor isn’t bothered in the slightest and knocks you on your butt.”

“While something designed to stun or paralyze a human won’t work on a droid,” Han said.

“And only Villachor will know which are which,” Kell said.

“Speaking of droids, is there any way to deal with those floating cam droids outside?” Dozer asked. “I don’t like the idea of someone in a monitor room watching everything we do in there.”

“Not a problem,” Tavia assured him. “We’ve got a gadget designed to fog their view. Not enough to trigger any alarms or self-diagnostic sequences, but enough to wipe out facial recognition. With all the dust, extra body heat, and repulsor containment fields they’ll have out there, they should assume that’s all that’s bollixing their holocams.”

“Is that going to be good enough?” Dozer asked, looking at Han.

“It should be,” Han said. “We’ll just have to make sure we don’t stand out of the crowd.”

“Until we need to,” Lando murmured.

“Right,” Han nodded.

“So how do we get it into the grounds?” Kell asked.

“Already done,” Bink said calmly. “I planted it two days ago, on our first trip in.”

“You could have told us,” Dozer growled.

Bink shrugged. “I assumed it would be obvious.”

“Let’s get back to the Zeds,” Zerba said. “Do we have any idea whether those were droids or humans outside the vault? More important, do we have any idea what kind of entry code they were running? There wasn’t anything obvious I could see.”

“You’re right, it wasn’t obvious,” Rachele agreed. “Turns out there was a scent on Villachor’s fingers that the Zed was sniffing.”

“A
scent
?” Lando echoed, feeling his mouth drop open. “You mean like perfume?”

“Cologne, actually,” Rachele said. “Either Rezi Eight or Rezi Ten—the two formulas are very similar.”

Kell looked at Tavia. “You’ve got to be kidding. You put in a
scent sniffer
?”

Tavia shrugged. “Han said full-spectrum,” she reminded him. “We gave him full-spectrum.”

“Though we were mostly looking for airborne material cues,” Winter added. “We didn’t expect to pick up Villachor’s preferences in vanity adornments.”

“Just as well you did,” Rachele said. “Unfortunately, I’m guessing the scent cue changes every day, and unless we can get into his private ’fresher cabinet I don’t know how we’re going to figure out which one we need.”

Kell shook his head. “This just gets better and better.”

“We haven’t even started,” Rachele warned. She keyed her datapad, and a large sphere connected by a short pillar to a wide, flat platform appeared in the center of the room. “Here’s the safe itself,” she said. “It’s a six-meter-diameter sphere, the outer part made of duracrete poured over a hullmetal mesh.”

“A
sphere
?” Winter asked. “Sounds a little crazy.”

“Crazy like a Twi’lek,” Zerba said sourly. “A square or rectangle has corners you can cut off for quick entry. A sphere doesn’t. Even with a full-length lightsaber it’d take you forever to whittle off enough to get inside.”

“And you’d probably run into honey traps along the way,” Tavia added. “Poured duracrete is perfect for tucking in hidden gas pockets and shaped detonite charges.”

“You said the outer part was duracrete,” Han said. “What about the inner part?”

“That’s even worse,” Rachele said. “At the center of the sphere is the actual safe: a rectangular, closet-sized cabinet made entirely of Hijarna stone.”

Lando looked around. From the puzzled looks on the rest of the faces, the others weren’t any more familiar with the term than he was. “Which is?” Dozer prompted.

“A hard, black stone that’s exceptionally hard to cut and absorbs blasterfire without even noticing it,” Rachele said. “The most prominent example is a partially ruined fortress on the planet Hijarna. The point is that even Zerba’s lightsaber isn’t going to get through that. Not in the amount of time we’ll have.”

“Well,
Villachor
doesn’t cut his way in each time,” Bink pointed out. “Why should we?”

“Exactly,” Tavia agreed. Her face held her usual quiet disapproval for these things, Lando noted. But at the same time, he could see some professional interest starting to peek through. This was a tactical challenge, and if there was one thing Tavia liked, it was a challenge. “Can you run us through his routine?”

“Sure,” Rachele said. “He comes into the vault after being vetted by the Zeds outside—”

“Or by the human guards,” Lando murmured.

“By whoever or whatever’s inside the armor,” Rachele agreed. “The vault’s magnetic seal goes off when he opens the door, of course. He crosses the floor to the hover platform, and—”

Chewbacca gave a sharp rumble.

“Oh—right,” Rachele said. “Sorry, I forgot to mention that part. The safe is set onto this ten-meter-diameter platform that hovers about a meter and a half off the floor on repulsorlifts and slowly moves around the room. I don’t know whether it follows a constant circuit or runs a random path.”

“Okay,
now
it’s just getting ridiculous,” Dozer said.

“Not really,” Tavia said. “Back when we first started this thing someone mentioned the possibility of tunneling in from underneath. The other obvious approach is to cut through the ceiling and try to drop onto the safe from above without the guards spotting you. With the safe constantly moving around the room, both of those tactics are now useless.”

“Those must be really impressive repulsorlifts,” Bink commented. “A sphere of duracrete that size probably weighs upward of a hundred fifty tonnes.”

“Easily,” Rachele said. “And yes, the repulsorlifts are extremely powerful, so much so that they have their own fusion generator built in, probably in and below that thirty-centimeter pillar attaching the sphere to the plate.”

“The guy’s smart, all right,” Bink agreed. “So he walks to the hover platform?”

“As he approaches the platform, the nearest set of stairs unfolds from beneath it,” Rachele said. “By my count, there are fifty of those. Because while the platform is moving around the room it’s also slowly rotating.”

“Randomly, I assume?” Winter asked.

Rachele nodded. “I caught two small shifts in rotational speed while he was moving across the room. It’s a slow rotation, but the speed isn’t really important. The bottom line is that because of the rotation, the average intruder won’t have any way of knowing where the safe’s actual entrance is.”

“But we do, right?” Bink asked.

“I think so,” Rachele said. “There are multiple sets of paired finger-sized holes, spaced about four centimeters apart, all the way around the sphere at about chest height. Villachor goes to the proper set and inserts the first two fingers of his right hand, and the lower part of one of the sphere segments unfolds down onto the platform, leaving a gap about a meter and a half wide and two meters high through the duracrete that extends all the way in to the Hijarna stone center.”

“Is the cabinet exactly in the middle of the sphere?” Zerba asked.

“No, it’s about half a meter farther back,” Rachele said, looking puzzled. “Why do you ask?”

Zerba shrugged. “Just curious.”

“Do we know if the holes are fingerprint keyed?” Tavia asked.

“I don’t think so,” Rachele said. “The finger positioning seemed casual, and he never held them steady enough for a good print reading. Best guess is that it’s a body-heat trigger, and you just have to know which ones to use.”

“Or you do all of them,” Zerba said.

“No need,” Winter said, pointing. “There are two small scuff marks over the pair just to the left of the ones he’s using.”

“I see them,” Bink said. “What’s next?”

Rachele again keyed her datapad, and the holoprojector image zoomed in on the sphere, where a segment unfolded the way she’d just described. “We now have a short tunnel,” she continued, “at the end of which is the door to the inner closet, another slab of Hijarna stone with a standard alphanumeric keypad set into it.” The image zoomed in yet again, giving a close-up of the keypad.

“Done up in High Galactic letters, I see,” Zerba commented.

“Aurebesh is for the common folk,” Lando said dryly. “Snobs like Villachor are way too upper-level for that.”

“We
did
get the code, right?” Tavia said.

“We’ve got this afternoon’s code, anyway,” Rachele said. “But given the rest of his security, I imagine the code changes regularly.”

“Probably twice a day,” Bink said, standing up and moving forward for a closer look at the image. “That particular model allows for a preset pattern with twice-daily changes.”

“What do you mean by preset?” Kell asked.

“I mean that instead of some computer elsewhere in the house spitting out a random set of numbers every day that has to be transmitted to the safe—”

“And memorized by Villachor,” Tavia added.

“And memorized by Villachor,” Bink agreed, “he can precode the safe for weeks’ or even months’ worth of changes.”

“How does he keep track of all of them?” Dozer asked.

“Two likely possibilities,” Rachele said. “First, one of the Zeds inside could also have the sequence, and it feeds him the code on his way in. I didn’t see that happen, but my angle might not have been right.”

“Sounds risky,” Kell said. “Especially since the droids probably get swapped out regularly for recharging and repair.”

“And transmitting the sequence to a droid is no better than transmitting it directly to the keypad,” Tavia added.

“Agreed,” Rachele said. “The more likely possibility is that the sequence relates to some pattern Villachor already knows. Dates from family history, names of old girlfriends, vintage years of the wine in his cellar. Something like that.”

“So now we have to read his mind, too,” Dozer said heavily. “Great.”

“Not his mind,” Winter corrected calmly. “Just his history.
And
we have a known code to start from.”

Dozer shook his head. “Still sounds like a candle in a canyon to me.”

“True, but it’s only one canyon,” Winter said.

“And once we get through
that
,” Rachele continued, “it looks like everything in the safe is exit-tagged.”

“What does that mean?” Eanjer asked.

“It means that taking anything past the mansion’s walls will trigger alarms all across Marblewood,” Zerba explained.

“More than just alarms,” Rachele said. “From the old purchase records, it looks like Villachor has also installed a spike-ring fence around the mansion. It’s like a forest of close-spaced vertical poles a few centimeters apart that pop straight out of the ground when triggered,” she added, looking at Eanjer. “The posts usually carry enough current to stun or kill.”

“High-security places sometimes use them as a last-ditch defense against theft,” Bink said. “You need an airspeeder to get over one, and even then you can’t get too close or the current will arc up to you and fry your repulsorlifts.”

“Depending on how high this one is, it may squeeze you close enough against the umbrella shield that you’d be effectively trapped inside,” Tavia said.

“So we’ll definitely want to shut the system down before we make our move,” Eanjer concluded, nodding.

“Which we probably can’t,” Rachele said. “This kind of system usually includes a fine mesh throughout all the walls, which runs a low-level electrostatic field through all the doors and windows. It’s self-contained and decentralized, and the only way to knock it out is to basically cut back the wall for about two meters around whatever door you plan to use.” She considered. “Of course, once you do that, I suppose you really don’t need the door anymore.”

“So what we need to do is make sure that when the alarm goes off no one’s in any shape to respond,” Zerba said. “Maybe we could gas the place.”

Bink shook her head. “You’ll never get that much gas in without getting caught.”

“And it wouldn’t work on the droids, anyway,” Kell added. “We’ll also need enough detonite to blow up a section of the fence, and enough time to plant it.”