Star Wars: Scoundrels (50 page)

“Alert!” a taut voice came suddenly over the suit’s comlink. “The vault has been breached from above. Repeat, the vault has been breached.”

“Sir, the vault’s been breached,” Sheqoa relayed urgently to Villachor. “Sounds like they got in through the ready room.”

For a heartbeat Villachor just stared at him. Then he spun around to the men straining at the frozen Zeds. “Get that door open now!” he snarled.

He jabbed a finger at Han. “And put that man under arrest.”

T
he blasterfire was getting louder and more intense, Lando noted uneasily as he charged up the stairs three at a time. So far he hadn’t spotted any of Villachor’s guards coming up from behind. But that was bound to change soon.

Ideally, the blasterfire should have been over by the time he reached the fourth floor of the northeast wing. Halfway down the hallway was the reason it hadn’t. One of the two airspeeders had ground to a halt in the center of the floor, blocking the one behind it. Chewbacca and Eanjer were crouched behind the rear vehicle, Chewbacca working the remote as he tried to get it past the damaged one. At the far end of the hall, a Falleen and a pair of human guards were crouched behind an F-Web repeating blaster that was sending a continual spray of fire at the airspeeders, while a second Falleen lay prone beside them sniping with what looked like a knockoff version of a BlasTech T-21.

Lando skidded to a halt beside Eanjer. “What’s the holdup?” he shouted over the scream of the blasterfire.

“Got in a lucky shot,” Eanjer shouted back. “Chewie thinks he can fix it, but it’ll take some time, and we need to get the other one past it if we want to keep pressure on the gunners down the hall.”

“Why can’t you—” Lando strangled off the question. Of course Eanjer couldn’t do that for him. The remote pad took two hands, and Eanjer’s medsealed right hand was useless. “Chewie, give it to me,” he told the Wookiee. “I’ll get it around. You get the other one fixed.”

Chewbacca rumbled and thrust the controller into Lando’s hands, then dropped to the floor and crawled toward the downed airspeeder.

With a normal airspeeder, Lando could have simply rammed the second one over the top of the first, crushing or shattering the first vehicle’s canopy and creating whatever room he needed. But Villachor’s airspeeders were too heavily reinforced and armored for that, which not coincidentally was also the reason they hadn’t already been cut to ribbons by the blasterfire from the other end of the hall. Chewie’s efforts had already smashed away part of the ceiling; unfortunately, the between-floors gap hadn’t given him quite enough extra space to get the airspeeder past.

But he hadn’t yet tried ramming the walls. If they were thin enough, and if there was enough room along the hallway’s sides, that might do the trick.

Backing up the hovering airspeeder a few meters, Lando angled it toward the wall and prepared to ram.

The end of the dumbwaiter conduit was no more than twenty meters ahead when the hallway to Bink’s left erupted in the sound of muffled blasterfire.

She swore again, trying to get a little more speed out of her sideways crawl. Lando and Chewie had started their assault, and Tavia’s time was rapidly running out. Even a Black Sun vigo could put two and two together, and an assault on Qazadi’s suite while he was hosting a prisoner was too obvious a connection to miss.

The war outside had settled down into a steady rhythm, with at least one heavy repeating blaster in operation, by the time she reached the end of the conduit. Stripping off the friction gloves, she drew her hold-out blaster. Setting her teeth, she put her other hand on the conduit door and pushed.

She’d worried that it would be locked and that she would have to waste precious seconds working a probe around the rubber seals to trip the catch. But there was no lock and no catch. She eased the door the rest of the way open, listening as best she could over the noise for any indication that the amazing self-opening door had been spotted.

Nothing. Getting a grip on the edge, she pulled herself the rest of the way through.

She found herself in probably the most gorgeous dining room she’d ever seen. There were two doors leading out of it, one of which was ajar. Moving silently across to the half-open door, she peeked through the gap.

And felt her stomach tighten. Tavia was there all right, seated on a low-backed couch with her back to Bink’s door. Bink couldn’t see her face, but she could see the tension in her sister’s shoulders. Seated in a high-backed chair across from her was a Falleen in full intimidating royal-type garb. Qazadi, without a doubt. His eyes were on the hallway door to his right, his expression cool and calculating, a hint of a macabre smile about his lips.

Between him and the door, facing the muffled blasterfire with their own weapons drawn and ready, were two Falleen bodyguards.

Bink was a ghost burglar, not a soldier, assassin, or even a smuggler. She normally carried a blaster on the job, but only because it was an occasionally useful tool. She’d fired at another living being exactly twice in her life, and in both instances her full intent had been to keep the person pinned down so she could make her getaway. As far as she knew, none of those shots had even connected, let alone caused any actual damage.

Now she was going to have to shoot two Falleen. In the back.

To kill.

But there was no other way. Not if she was going to get herself and Tavia out of this alive. With her throat so tight it felt like she was strangling, she got a two-handed grip on her blaster, lined up the muzzle on the first guard, and squeezed the trigger.

He jerked as if he’d been slapped across the face, his legs collapsing and dropping him without a sound to the floor. The second guard was starting into a sort of spinning sideways leap when her second shot blew a small cloud of vaporized cloth and skin from his torso. He landed full-length on the floor, hitting hard enough to make Bink wince in sympathetic pain. Shoving the door the rest of the way open with her foot, she swiveled the blaster to point at Qazadi. “Don’t move,” she warned.

“I wouldn’t think of it,” the Falleen said coolly. He and Tavia were both looking at Bink now, Qazadi from the depths of his chair, Tavia over the low back of her couch. Qazadi was openly smiling, his eyes flicking between Bink and Tavia. Tavia’s expression, in contrast, was tense and frightened. “Now at last we have the solution to the puzzle,” Qazadi continued. “Very clever.” He held out a hand to Bink. “You, I take it, are the thief with the tracking dye on her hands?”

“Just don’t move,” Bink ordered. The adrenaline rush of the brief battle was fading, and as her brain started working again, she realized she had no idea what she was going to do next. Obviously she and Tavia couldn’t leave the same way Bink had arrived—all Qazadi had to do was saunter into the dining room, fire a few shots down the conduit, and call it a day.

But with the noisy war going on in the hallway, that way wouldn’t be an especially healthy direction to run either.

Unless the two women brought along a hostage. “On your feet,” she ordered Qazadi, stepping all the way into the room. The Falleen’s smile was positively radiant, she noted suddenly. Odd that she hadn’t picked up on that before. “You’re going out that door …”

She trailed off. The smile wasn’t just radiant—it was borderline saintly. Saintly, forgiving, loving—

And then, abruptly, she understood.

But it was too late. It was far too late.

Cursed kriffing Falleen pheromones.

“Please,” Qazadi invited, gesturing to the couch beside Tavia. “We have so very much to talk about. Master Villachor, Lord Aziel, and this.” He nodded toward a side table, where Winter’s fake cryodex was prominently displayed.

Bink looked at Tavia’s strained face. There was no hope there—her sister was as deep into Qazadi’s chemical spell as she was. Probably even deeper.

Bink had a blaster, ready in her hand. She’d already used it twice. Surely she could use it again.

Only she couldn’t. Even as her brain ordered her hand to raise the weapon and fire, her heart was ordering the hand to remain at her side.

And for once her heart was stronger.

Which meant it was over. She and Tavia were finished. So, probably, were the rest of Han’s team.

And as she sank down onto the couch beside her sister, it occurred to her that she’d just killed two living beings. For nothing.

There were still two Zeds frozen in front of the vault door, but the path was finally clear enough for Villachor to get to the keypad. He folded it out from the wall and punched in the access code, jabbing the keys so hard that Han found it slightly amazing that his fingers didn’t punch all the way through the pad. The door swung open, and Han craned his neck to look.

The safe had stopped near the center of the vault, the platform that normally carried it around the room now hovering motionlessly. The fold-down segment of the sphere that opened up into the Hijarna-stone cabinet in the middle was hanging wide open, and Han didn’t need his helmet’s audio enhancements to hear Villachor’s vicious curse as he saw that his safe had been breached. Right at the edge of Han’s vision, two security men were sliding down the syntherope line that Bink had left dangling, their blasters ready as they scanned the room. “Careful, sir,” one of them called toward the door. “Give us a moment to make sure it’s clear.”

Villachor ignored them. He gestured three of the armored guards forward, and as they strode into the vault, he pointed the other two back to Han, just in case they’d forgotten he was supposed to be taken into custody. Spinning back around, Villachor strode into the vault behind the three guards, Sheqoa and Villachor’s two usual bodyguards close beside him.

The two guards clumped toward Han, their massive hands resting warningly on their holstered blasters. Han reached his hands up to his head, just to show that he knew proper prisoner procedure.

And as his hand passed the helmet’s right cheek flange, he slipped a finger around to Bink’s trigger and gently pushed it forward.

With a final lunge and a crash of wood and stone, the airspeeder bashed out enough of the hallway’s side wall to open a path past the stalled vehicle. Giving the control a final shove, Lando bounced the vehicle through one last half meter of wall surface and got it in front of its downed partner.

And with that, they were finally ready to take on the other end of the target range. F-Webs came with built-in shield generators, but he would bet heavily that a shield designed to deflect small-arms fire wouldn’t do a bit of good against an armored airspeeder rocketing in on it at a hundred kilometers an hour.

He had started the airspeeder on its way, and the fire from the F-Web had suddenly intensified as Qazadi’s guards saw the armored black death coming at them, when Eanjer abruptly leapt up and charged after the roaring vehicle.

“Eanjer!” Lando shouted after him. “Get back here!”

But it was too late. Eanjer was off and running, his legs pumping with a strength and speed Lando wouldn’t have guessed the man had in him, pounding after the airspeeder like an Imperial Center bureaucrat trying to catch an airbus.

Lando hissed out a curse. He’d planned to keep the airspeeder right at the ceiling until the last second, presenting as much of the armored underside to the blasterfire as he could in hopes of protecting it from the same kind of lucky shot that had taken out the first one. But with Eanjer running like a maniac straight into the line of fire, that was no longer an option. Scowling, he dropped the vehicle nearly to the floor, moving its bulk into position to provide Eanjer with as much cover as possible.

And, of course, leaving the airspeeder more vulnerable to attack. If the guards nailed it before he could flip it up on its side and sweep both them and the F-Web out of action, as he was hoping to do, he and Chewbacca might just have to use Eanjer himself as their shield when they stormed Qazadi’s suite.

With a suddenness that strongly implied to Dayja that it had been prearranged, Marblewood’s massive fireworks display kicked off in all its full, brilliant glory. Not just the lower-flying rockets he’d seen being fired earlier, but also the high, elaborate, all-but military-grade explosives.

The problem was that the umbrella shield was still in place. And as the rockets hit the invisible energy field, bursting prematurely and showering fire onto the ground, the crowd below finally hit the breaking point. With shouts, curses, and a scattering of hysterical screams, the whole mass dissolved into chaos.

A piece of flaming debris crashed to the roof barely five meters from Dayja’s chimney spire. He twitched back from it, grabbing his comlink. Enough was finally enough. Whether this was Eanjer’s doing or just an accident, he couldn’t sit by and watch any longer.

Another misfire burst against the shield, raining fragments down on the crowd, and with a sense of resignation Dayja put away the comlink. It was too late. The panic had started, and there was nothing he, the police, or any of Iltarr City’s other emergency services could do about it now.

All he could do now was watch.