Star Wars: Scoundrels (46 page)

Winter was crouched beside one of the airspeeders, working on the lock. Dozer grabbed her wrist as he passed, yanking her to her feet and dragging her after him. Behind them, the garage exploded with the flash and fury of multiple blaster shots, and Dozer winced as several of the bolts blazed past overhead. He thought about looking back to see how close the pursuit was, decided he needed to focus all his attention on running. The turbolifts were no more than thirty meters ahead. The doors slid open, all of them at once—

And with a horrified curse, Dozer stumbled to a halt. In the sudden blink of an eye, the situation had suddenly ended.

The game was over … and he and Winter had lost.

V
illachor had been waiting impatiently in the vault anteroom for nearly two minutes before Sheqoa finally showed up.

Only he wasn’t alone. He’d thoughtfully brought guests.

“What are
they
doing here?” Villachor demanded. “I didn’t call for anyone except you.”

“I didn’t call for anyone, either, sir,” Sheqoa growled. “They invited themselves. And I didn’t think I had time to kill them.”

Villachor glared at the two thugs, sorely tempted to order them away and to back up the command with the Zeds currently standing motionless in front of the vault doorway.

But Sheqoa was right. There would be time to deal with Qazadi’s thugs later.

With a derisive snort, he turned his back on them. They wanted to watch? Fine—let them watch. He was still the master of Marblewood, the Marblewood vault, and everything inside it. And for the moment, at least, there was nothing Qazadi’s men or even Qazadi himself could do about it. Striding to the key Zed, he held his hand up to the droid’s face for the usual scent confirmation. He and Sheqoa would go inside, he decided, double-check that the safe was still secure, and then reconfigure the Zeds inside the vault for possible intrusion. At that point, he could either leave or wait inside with them—

He frowned. His hand was still in the Zed’s face, but the Zed was just standing there. “Smell,” he ordered, moving the hand a little closer. The passcode cologne couldn’t have worn off. It
never
wore off. “I said
smell
,” he repeated, this time pressing his hand right up to the metal.

He barely snatched it back in time as the Zed suddenly came to life, one massive hand reaching for Villachor’s arm, the other going for the neuronic whip coiled at its side.

“Sir!” Sheqoa said, leaping forward.

“I know, I know,” Villachor snarled as he hastily backed up out of the whip’s range. The Zeds were programmed to react strongly if they were touched.

And then the full implications of that reaction turned his blood cold.

The intruder had gotten into the Zed programming, all right, just like the cop in the droid control room had warned. But he hadn’t simply shut all of them down, the way an unimaginative thief would have. Instead he’d reprogrammed their loyalties, flipping them to his side, so that instead of keeping out intruders, they were keeping out
Villachor
.

There was only one reason to do something that complicated and time-consuming: to buy more time at the other end of the road.

The intruder wasn’t hoping to break into the vault.
He was already inside
.

With a curse, Villachor yanked out his comlink and punched for Kastoni. “Is Purvis awake yet?” he snapped.

“I don’t know, sir,” Kastoni said. “Bromley and two of the techs took him and the others to the infirmary—”

“Never mind,” Villachor cut him off. So the intruder thought he could turn the Zeds against their master? Fine. Two could play that game. “Go to the Zed control board and pull up the main status page.”

“Yes, sir.”

Villachor motioned Sheqoa closer. “You still have men on standby in the ready room?” he asked, keeping his voice low.

“Yes, sir, five of them,” Sheqoa confirmed. “Uzior’s in command.”

“Have them suit up,” Villachor ordered. “Full gear, and get them down here as quickly as possible.”

“Yes, sir.” Sheqoa touched his comlink clip, his eyes flicking to Qazadi’s men, standing off to the side. “Sir?”

“I know, and I don’t care,” Villachor growled. “The intruder’s in there, or will be soon, and he’s got the Zeds running interference for him. So we take them out of the equation.”

Sheqoa looked at the double line of Zeds. “Yes, sir,” he said, not sounding at all happy at the idea. “Sir, do you think—”

“I have the status page, sir,” Kastoni cut in.

“Go to the code input box at the upper left,” Villachor directed, closing his eyes and visualizing the sequence. “Input the following numbers: eight, four, five, five, two …”

He ran through the full string, then had Kastoni read it back to him. “Good,” Villachor said. “Now hit activate.”

“May I ask what you’re doing, Master Villachor?” one of Qazadi’s men called.

“I’m solving a problem,” Villachor said, glowering at him. “I trust you’re not planning to become another one.”

“No, sir, not at all,” the man assured him, smiling faintly. But Villachor noticed that the smile didn’t go all the way to his eyes.

And his hand was resting very close to his blaster.

It wasn’t until the heavy footsteps began thudding along the hallway outside the electrical closet that Han really began to believe that this whole thing might actually work.

It was an astonishing thought. Most of the time he figured his plans for about a 50 percent chance of success, and even then only if he scrambled like crazy when the original idea started coming apart at the edges. But this one, for some reason, seemed to be working exactly like it was supposed to.

Minus the couple of small side glitches they’d had along the way, of course.

“Sounds like five of them,” Bink murmured, her ear pressed to the door. “In a hurry, too.”

“I guess Han and his magic data card came through,” Zerba said. He seemed even more astonished than Han that the plan was working. “What was on it, anyway?”

“Just plain simple flux perfume base,” Bink said, sliding a slender optic line under the door and adjusting the eyepiece over her eye. “The kind that adapts to your body chemistry through the day. One touch was enough to get the solvent reagents into the cologne on Villachor’s hand and alter it just enough to be unrecognizable to the Zeds. Okay, looks clear.”

Han nodded. “I’ll go first,” he said.

The hallway was indeed deserted. The guards who’d just thundered past had remembered to lock the ready room on their way out, but it was an ordinary lock and Bink was through it in seconds. The four of them slipped inside, closing and relocking the door behind them.

It was about as close a copy of a standard military ready room as Han had ever seen. Two of the walls were lined with suits of the Zed-droid-mimicking armor Kell had warned them about, set into the same type of multiarmed self-suit frameworks that Imperial spacetroopers used to help them get into their armor. The other two walls were given over to clothing lockers, equipment cabinets, and a refreshment sideboard like the one back in the lounge where he’d been hiding out earlier. In the center of the room were a couple of game tables and chairs, with a group of three-tier bunks visible through an open door in a back room. “Where do we start?” he asked Bink.

She was crouched between the two tables, holding a small sensor just above the floor. “Right here should do nicely,” she said, drawing a small circle on the thin carpet with her finger. “Zerba?”

“How deep?” he asked, crouching beside her and igniting his light-saber.

“About ten centimeters,” she said, attaching a hook to the carpet at that spot. “Doesn’t have to be precise—there aren’t any sensor wires under it.”

He nodded and carefully sliced a circle around the hook. He closed down the lightsaber, and she pulled out the plug. “Now, if they’ve done this properly,” she commented as she inserted the end of her optic line into the hole and moved it around, “they should have a crisscross grid of sensor wires … yep, there they are. Okay, Zerba: a meter-diameter circle from
here
to
here
. This deep.” She held up the plug to demonstrate. “This time, neatness counts.”

“Right.” Igniting his lightsaber again, Zerba got to work.

Han looked around the room, suddenly struck by an odd thought. His part of the field work was supposed to have ended with the delivery of the gimmicked data card to Villachor. In fact, according to the original plan, he should be in the suite right now, watching the Marblewood grounds with electrobinoculars and helping Rachele and Winter coordinate the rest of the operation. Right here, right now, he basically had nothing to do.

His eyes fell on the line of armored suits. Or maybe he did.

“Kell?” he invited quietly, walking over to the nearest suit. It didn’t look that complicated to get into.

“What?” Kell asked, coming up beside him.

“You know anything about these?”

“Nothing specific,” Kell said, running his fingers thoughtfully along the metal of the helmet. “Full life support, probably. Certainly has motion-echo power enhancement, half-face heads-up display, comm capability, and a partial sensor suite. Possibly targeting optics, too.”

“Thanks,” Han said dryly. A shame the kid didn’t know anything specific. “Give me a hand, will you?”

“Going someplace?” Bink asked, looking up from Zerba’s work.

“Thought I’d wander downstairs and see what Villachor’s up to,” Han told her, pulling experimentally on the armor’s torso. It lifted easily on its counterbalanced self-suit arm. “You three look like you’ve got this end pretty well covered. Don’t you?”

“Pretty much,” Bink said as she and Zerba lifted out the circle of flooring and set it to the side.

Han craned his neck to look into the hole as he worked his left leg and hip into the lower section of armor. Beneath the main floor was a multiple zigzag grid of wires a couple of centimeters apart set into a subfloor. “Is that the alarm?”

“That’s it,” Bink confirmed. “A randomized, variable-pulse flicker field, to be specific. You can put jumpers across the lines all day and still not hit all the combinations.”

“So what do we do?” Kell asked.

“We first make sure there aren’t any unwelcome surprises waiting for us below,” she said, tapping a part of the subfloor between two of the wires. “Zerba? A hole straight through here, if you please. As small as you can manage.”

Zerba nodded and again ignited his lightsaber. This time, instead of cutting with the edge, he carefully pushed the blade straight down into the floor. There was a small jolt as he broke through the other side, and he quickly closed it down. “I guess a lightsaber cuts through magsealed armor plate just fine,” he commented.

“Never thought it wouldn’t,” Bink assured him. She slipped her optic line into the hole, turned it around a couple of times.

“Well?” Han asked.

With a puff of exhaled air, Bink pulled out the line and leaned back. “He did it,” she announced. “Villachor shut down the Zeds for us.”

“Awfully nice of him,” Kell said. “What about the alarm?”

“Patience, child, patience,” Bink said. She took another deep breath, puffed this one out as well, and leaned forward again. “First job is to slow everything down to a manageable rate,” she continued, putting her optic line back into the hole and turning it slowly around. “See, the regulator and randomizer cascade switch for the whole thing are … right over there.” She pointed toward the wall beneath the sideboard. “Hitting them in just the right spots will slow the flicker pattern without shutting it down completely, and therefore not trigger any alarms.”

“You need me to cut you a hole over there?” Zerba asked, starting to get to his feet.

“Don’t bother,” Bink said. Pulling her hold-out blaster from its belly holster, she lowered it into the hole, lined it up carefully with the optic line, and carefully squeezed the trigger. The hole lit up briefly with the shot; shifting aim slightly, she fired again. Setting the blaster on the floor beside her, she ran her sensor over the zigzag wires again. “Perfect,” she said.

“Now what?” Zerba asked.

“There are a couple of ways of bypassing a grid like this,” she said. “But they take time, and we’re in a hurry. So we’re going to be clever.” She nodded back toward the equipment cabinets behind her. “Zerba, go find me one of those neuronic whips, will you?”

“A neuronic
whip
?” Zerba echoed, frowning, as he stood up.

Han glanced at the collection of weapons racked beside his armor. Along with a half dozen blasters were two of the whips. “Here,” he said, detaching one from its peg and tossing it across to Bink. “I can’t
wait
to hear this one.”

“It’s really very simple,” she said as she uncoiled it. “Neuronic whips adapt to the neural characteristics of whatever skin they happen to be touching, right?”

Kell’s mouth dropped open. “You’re joking.”

“Not at all,” she assured him as she carefully laid out the whip in a circle on top of the wire grid. “It’s not fast enough to adapt to a normal flicker-field, which is why no one bothers to worry about them. But with the randomizer slowed down, the whip should pick up the incoming pulses and echo them just fine.” Giving the whip’s positioning a final adjustment, she reached in to the handle and activated the switch.