Star Wars: Scoundrels (51 page)

Han had warned Kell that the whole thing had to go quickly. The kid had taken him at his word.

The detonite beneath the floating platform went first, a set of deceptively small charges that knocked out the power lines to all the repulsorlifts on the forward half. The platform held position for maybe half a second, and then the front edge dropped to the floor with a booming crash. Almost buried in the thunderous echo was an even deeper creaking as the lightsaber-weakened connecting pillar bent and distorted under the sudden and unexpected stress. Another half second, and Kell’s final charges went off, blowing away chunks of duracrete from the rear of the safe and triggering a pair of ear-numbingly powerful shaped-charge explosions from booby traps that had been buried just beneath the surface.

Looking like a miniature Death Star on afterburners, with a rumble that seemed to shake the whole mansion, the safe broke loose from its pillar, rolled down the slanted platform, and headed across the floor.

For a frozen second, Villachor and his men stared in disbelief at the six-meter sphere bearing down on them. Then, in almost perfect unison, they scrambled madly to get out of the way.

Villachor and his two bodyguards made it. Sheqoa and the three other guards didn’t.

Even before they disappeared beneath the sphere, Han was in motion, stepping forward and planting himself between the two guards now gaping at the drama going on inside the vault. He put a hand on each of their chests and shoved as hard as he could to either side.

The suits were heavy, but Han’s strength enhancements were more than up to the job. The two guards flew backward a good three meters each before sprawling onto the floor—maybe far enough to be out of the way of the approaching sphere, but Han really didn’t care that much one way or the other.

Right now he was far more concerned with the lives of the hundreds of citizens who could be unknowingly walking or standing directly in the path of the rolling juggernaut about to crash through the mansion wall. The fireworks triggers Kell and Zerba had set up earlier should have most of the crowd moving toward the exits, but there were always a few who were too brave, too casual, or too stupid to know when it was time to get out.

For those people, the rolling safe was likely to be the last miscalculation they ever made.

The safe was nearly to the armored vault wall. Spinning around, Han raced for the anteroom side door, emptying his borrowed Caliban blaster into the wall around it as he ran. The weapon ran dry; tossing it aside, Han threw himself at the door, hoping his armor was as tough as it looked.

It was. He crashed through the door with barely a jolt, a large section of wall coming down with him. The nearest exit to the outside was thirty meters away to the south; recovering his balance, he angled toward it, hoping fervently that he could beat the sphere outside. Behind him, he heard the violent grinding crunch as the sphere ground its way through the vault’s armor plating—

And then he was through the door, out into the courtyard, and angling back toward the sphere’s path.

He’d been right about the crowd. Most of them were already far in the distance, racing for the gates as fireworks continued to splash spectacularly against the umbrella shield above them. But a few dozen of them were still hanging around, watching the misfires with studied casualness or bravado.

Han rolled his eyes. Even he knew enough to come in out of the rain, especially when the rain consisted of live coals. Still, if random overhead explosions weren’t enough to get these last stubborn few moving, maybe something closer and more personal would.

Grabbing the neuronic whip from his belt, he activated it and whirled it high over his head.

Most of the loiterers had already spotted Han in his gleaming armor.
All
of them spotted the whip’s crackling blue-white sizzle. “Go!” Han bellowed, spinning the whip over his head. “Get away from here—now!”

They were finally on the move, running like frightened Toong, when the sphere crashed through the mansion’s outer wall and rolled across the courtyard, crushing the flagstones beneath it as it went. Ten meters ahead of it, where the flagstones gave way to textured grass, the spikering fence slashed its way upward out of the ground, encircling the mansion in a six-meter-tall crackling forest of electrified death.

The safe rolled through it without even slowing down.

Ducking through the still sizzling gap, pushing his armor’s speed and power enhancements to the limit, Han sprinted around past the safe and got in front of it. Again thrashing the whip wildly above his head, he charged.

It was about as crazy a stunt as he’d ever pulled. But it was working. In the darkness, with the distraction of the fireworks, a lot of the people in the sphere’s path probably would never have seen the danger until it was way too late. But an armored figure with a glowing blue whip was impossible to miss. They scattered in front of him, most taking the hint and heading for the exits, the others dashing in all directions except the vector Han and the safe were on.

He kept going, watching the safe in his rear display, hoping he could stay ahead of it until it finally ran out of steam. Hoping, too, that it wouldn’t catch up with the rear of the main crowd heading for the exits, mow a wide swath of death through them, then shatter the outer wall and roll out into the heavy Iltarr City traffic.

He really,
really
hoped that didn’t happen.

From out in the hallway came a horrendous crash, accompanied by the kind of piercing, metal-on-duracrete scraping that Bink had sometimes heard when a wrecked airspeeder hit a landing platform and skidded along it.

And as the scraping sound faded away, she realized the blasterfire had also ceased.

She looked at Qazadi. His eyes were on the door, his expression hard and cold. “Be silent,” he told the two women. “No noise.” His hand dipped into his robe and emerged with a blaster. “Sit quietly and watch your friends die.”

Bink swallowed hard, fighting against the unreasonable calm and even more unreasonable sense of love and contentment flowing through her. Those were her teammates out there. She couldn’t let them simply walk into the fire from Qazadi’s blaster. She had to do something to stop him.

Only she couldn’t. She couldn’t even get her voice to work, let alone her hand.

Her hand. She looked down at her lap, at the hold-out blaster lying there. Qazadi had permitted her to keep the weapon, knowing she would be unable to use it against him.

And he’d been right. She willed her hand to move, willed it with all the strength she had in her. But her hand stayed where it was. The blaster would sit there uselessly, and she would sit here uselessly and watch her teammates come through that door and die.

“There’s one thing you’re forgetting, Master Qazadi,” Tavia said.

Bink jerked her head, staring in disbelief at her sister. Tavia’s face was pinched and strained, so much so that it was hardly recognizable. Her voice was low and hesitant, the words sounding like they’d been ground out individually from beneath a grain farmer’s millstone.

Qazadi had ordered her not to speak. And yet she was speaking. Out of the corner of her eye Bink saw Qazadi turn to look, apparently as surprised as she was. “I told you to be silent,” he said.

“You’re forgetting,” Tavia ground out, all but panting with the incredible mental exertion, “that we didn’t come here alone. You’re forgetting … that they
are
our friends.”

“I said
be silent
!” he snarled. He swung his blaster to point at her.

With a violent shattering of wood and stone, the hallway door blew inward.

Qazadi was caught by surprise, his arm jerking with impacting debris as he tried to bring his blaster back on target. Through the cloud of smoke, Bink saw a figure step calmly into the room.

She caught her breath. She’d assumed it would be Chewbacca or Lando who would be risking his life to save them. But it wasn’t either of them.

It was Eanjer.

His hands were stretched out in front of him as if he were surrendering, his misshapen right hand wrapped in its medseal, his left hand open and empty. “I bring you an offer, Your Excellency,” he called over the muffled clatter of door shards hitting the floor and furniture.

“I don’t make deals,” Qazadi snarled. He got his blaster lined up on the intruder—

Green fire erupted from Eanjer’s distorted right hand, flashing across the room squarely into the center of Qazadi’s face.

And with the defiant snarl still in place, the Falleen slumped in his chair.

Dead.

Bink looked at Eanjer, her eyes dropping to the smoking hole in his medsealed hand. The hand hadn’t looked the way it did because it was mangled, she realized now, or even because it had been replaced by some strange alien prosthetic.

It had looked that way because it was a normal, fully functional human hand curled around a hold-out blaster.

She looked up at Eanjer’s good eye. “You—”

“It was him or us,” he said calmly. “You two okay?”

“We’re fine,” Tavia assured him. Her voice still sounded ragged, but Bink could hear it starting to recover.

As was Bink’s own brain. Without the pheromones, she could feel the fog rapidly lifting. “What’s the plan?” she asked, grabbing her blaster from her lap and standing up.

“To get out of here,” Eanjer said, nodding toward the ragged hole behind him. “Lando and Chewie are waiting beside the other airspeeder. Move.”

Bink nodded, taking her sister’s arm and helping her to her feet. “What about you?” she asked as she guided Tavia over the debris.

“I want to get the cryodex,” Eanjer said. His half mouth half smiled. “Might as well leave them wondering. Go on—go.”

Bink got her sister to the hallway, noting peripherally the half-crushed airspeeder to their right and the mangled F-Web blaster poking out from underneath it. To their left, Lando and Chewbacca were crouched behind a hovering airspeeder, their eyes and blasters focused the other way down the hall. She turned Tavia in that direction. As they headed away from the suite, she paused for a final look at Qazadi, wondering how her mind could ever have been fooled into thinking he was good and kind and loving.

And because she was looking in that direction, she saw Eanjer standing over the Falleen’s body.

She couldn’t be sure, not with the single quick glance she had. But it looked very much like he was taking holos …

It was like something out of an insane holodrama, Dayja thought numbly as he watched the scene unfold below him. An armored figure cracking a neuronic whip over the last remnants of the evening’s crowd, driving them out of the path of the giant sphere rolling inexorably across the Marblewood grounds.

He’d expected Eanjer’s team to steal the contents of Villachor’s safe. He’d never dreamed they might try to steal the safe itself.

He’d also never dreamed that when the theft went down, he would be stuck on the mansion roof half a kilometer from the action.

So much for getting in and grabbing the blackmail files before the thieves made their getaway.

Still, it wasn’t over yet. Eanjer had promised him the files, and Eanjer surely was still on the scene. Somewhere.

The safe was mostly invisible now as it rolled beyond the range of the lights from the mansion and the shimmering crackle of the spike-ring fence. But the distinctive glow of the neuronic whip more than made up for that, and the safe itself was sporadically visible in the brief flare-ups from the fireworks.

Picking up his electrobinoculars, Dayja began a careful scan of the area. If Eanjer was out there, he was going to find him.

It was, Han thought more than once, like something out of a crazy holodrama.

He’d expected the safe to roll in a nice, neat straight line. It didn’t. The open sphere segment occasionally caught on the ground, sometimes slowing its forward momentum, other times drastically changing its direction. Han had to keep a close eye on his helmet’s rear display to keep from losing the thing entirely, all the while continuing to play the berserk-droid role as he scattered people out of harm’s way.

A couple of times he thought he spotted some of Villachor’s security men, but they were gaping as hard as the visitors. None of them made any effort to stop him. About halfway across the grounds the dangling segment finally hit the dirt hard enough to break off. After that, the sphere’s path was a lot more predictable.

For a few bad moments Han thought his earlier concern would be borne out, that the sphere would indeed crash through the wall and out into the city. But for once the worst-case scenario didn’t happen. The sphere slowed and finally came to rest about fifty meters from the wall. Shutting off the whip, Han turned and headed back to it.

He was peering down the tunnel at the Hijarna-stone cabinet when the door swung open and Zerba and Kell crawled unsteadily out. “You all right?” Han asked.

“Just great,” Kell said, sounding and looking drunk. “Remind me to never do that again.”

“Still beats walking,” Zerba offered. “Especially when there are people shooting at you.”