Tales from the New Republic (15 page)

“What is up with this place?” said Platt for what was about the third time in fifteen minutes.

Tru’eb glanced up from the information console. “I said I don’t know,” he told her irritably, although he could understand what Platt was talking about. Passengers and flight crews were roaming throughout the spaceport, checking their cargo specs at public maintenance terminals, slumped in chairs still waiting for their ships to pass muster, rushing to catch the next shuttle. Perfectly normal. But the locals—the maintenance people, the desk personnel, and the green-eyed humans—all had a raw, shaky look about them. Tru’eb usually associated expressions like those, and the scent they gave off, with sheer terror barely held in check.

“I mean we’ve been waiting for four hours now and nobody knows anything. Dirk could be dead somewhere.”

“Harkness strikes me as rather resilient,” said Tru’eb. “I doubt he ran into any serious opposition.”

“Like what? That Imperial garrison nobody knows anything about?”

Tru’eb didn’t answer. The whole point of the mission had been relatively simple; there was a stash of Imperial-issue weapons being transported in, disguised as ship parts. Platt, Tru’eb, and Harkness had planned on liberating the weapons for their own personal use. Platt had a couple of smuggler friends who were only too happy to provide a distraction. At a place like this, with the spaceport personnel totally clouded over by fear or whatever, nobody saw Tru’eb and his friends take custody of the alleged ship parts. Or nobody cared.

The hitch in the plan came with Harkness, after they had the weapons. Platt and Tru’eb hadn’t worked with Harkness for very long, but it wasn’t hard to gather that he had some sort of personal vendetta against the Empire. Where Platt and Tru’eb would not have bothered to ask where the weapons came from (as long as they turned a fair profit), Harkness had to know. Which had led them to some of his contacts within New Republic Intel, and somebody leaked him the information that there was currently a team investigating a probable hidden Imperial garrison on Zelos. While Platt and Tru’eb were discussing terms with an arms dealer at the south end of town, Harkness had rented a repulsorlift vehicle and told them he would be right back. That was four days ago.

“He’s crazy, but he’s a good man,” Platt said. “I like working with him. Despite the vendetta thing.”

“I agree, but I was hoping this trip wouldn’t be—”

“Excuse me, folks?” somebody said. Tru’eb and Platt turned around; standing behind Platt was a green-eyed starport official in a light green uniform, holding a datapad.

“I’ve got the—right here, here’s the—” He held out the datapad.

“Oh, right, you’re the guy I talked to earlier,” said Platt.

“Yes… about the information you requested? First of all, I’m sorry that took so long.”

“Don’t worry about it. Although I wouldn’t have thought skiff rentals would be that hard to track down,” said Platt.

“Well, we’ve had security problems before… there was a shipjacking about four years ago, and some crime lords got involved—”

“What did you find?” asked Tru’eb.

The man swallowed and held his datapad close to his chest. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” he said.

Platt and Tru’eb exchanged glances. “What?” said Platt. “The skiff blew up? What?”

“No, but there’s been a…”

“A what? Tell us!”

“A—a mistake. On the readout.”

Platt visibly restrained herself from striking the man.

“What do you mean?” asked Tru’eb, reaching up and putting a hand on Platt’s shoulder.

“Well, it says here that the gentleman you’re looking for rented a spaceport skiff that he took out past the badlands… all the way north, into the mountains.”

“So what?” said Platt.

“It’s impossible. Nobody goes out there. Ever.”

“Why not?”

He hesitated. After looking over his shoulder a couple of times, he drew himself in close toward Platt and Tru’eb, who drew in close toward him. Their heads were almost touching.

“There,” he said in a low voice, “is where the dead can walk.”

A week earlier, Jai had been sitting in the communications tent at a flimsy metal table, with the comm unit placed in front of her, when her C.O.’s voice came over the channel.

“Raventhorn?” he said. “We’re in Sector Three now. Looks like there’s a couple of scout troopers guarding a bunker.”

Jai put down her protein stick and swallowed. “Well, whatever you do, sir, don’t—”

“Moving in to attack.”

She put a hand over her face. Her C.O. was a Rodian lieutenant who had somehow slipped past Officer’s Candidate School during the New Republic’s post-Endor barrage of promotions. The rest of her teammates had little or no field experience—just training. Great. Three hundred and twenty-seven combat missions, and I never got a splinter. I move to Intel and these idiots are going to get me killed on the first day. “Sir, negative! You shouldn’t compromise your position, is that clear? It’s probably an—”

A shout came over the comm channel, but it wasn’t directed at Jai. “This one’s for Mon Mothma, guys!”

There were faint rallying shouts from the other team members. Jai could actually hear the blasterfire, quick little shots being fired off somewhere off in the distance. Then there was a louder shot, followed by an explosion.

After that, the exploding never stopped; within minutes, the Imperials had moved in and surrounded the command post.

Jai ran outside into the cold, wet mountain air. A flickering glow lit up the sky in the distance.

—
ambush
.

Seconds later a massive blaster bolt, artillery grade, slammed into the tent where Jai’s remaining team members were sleeping. The whole thing was immediately swept into flames and took the munitions tent with it.

Jai didn’t hear the explosion. She just felt herself rising up in the air, and then a numb sensation shot through her body. She never remembered hitting the ground, but suddenly she was lying on her stomach, blinking furiously and spitting out dirt. When she looked up again, there was a bright, artificial light shining into her streaming eyes.

“Get up.”

A gray shape stood over her. His voice was muffled, and the rest of what he said was lost to the ringing in Jai’s ears. She could feel an unbearable heat coming from the burning tents, but the gray-clad person stayed where he was. Several moments later there were about twenty of him all around her. She was jerked to her feet.

“Hands over your head. Do it now.”

Jai had never been cornered before. She should have lunged for somebody, should have made them kill her right then and there—because if there was one cardinal rule about being an Infiltrator, if there was one thing you made absolutely sure that you did, it was to die before you got taken into custody.

But a face flashed into her memory, and she hesitated. Before she had a chance to register who she was thinking of, or to change her mind, one of her captors took a fast step toward her, the butt of his blaster rifle swinging at her face.

Suddenly Harkness shouted her name, and she started.

“What?” she cried. “What is it?”

“Are you still there?” Harkness said.

“Where would I go, idiot?” she said, annoyed.

“I’ve been calling your name for twenty minutes here!”

“Really?”

“Yes! What happened to you?”

“I was just thinking.”

“Well, you could have answered me!” Harkness sounded almost furious.

“Hey, look, I didn’t do it to spite you! I just got to thinking. I’m trying to remember stuff.”

Harkness backed off. “Well… but… I was just—” He floundered for a second. “Okay. As long as you’re not dying of shock over there.”

“Only when you yell real loud like that.”

“What were you thinking about?” Harkness asked.

“Just stuff,” said Jai. “Did it get warmer in here?”

“No,” he said. “Listen—mind if I ask you something?”

“Yeah?”

“You don’t care about your team. You don’t seem to care about the Rebellion anymore.”

“I do care about the Rebellion. It’s the New Republic I hate.”

“And you say you can’t remember if you have any family.”

“Are you taking notes or something?”

“I’m just curious; what made you resist interrogation?”

“Look, just because I don’t like what happened to the Alliance doesn’t mean I’m willing to turn on it.”

“That’s not what I mean,” he said. “What did you focus on?”

“I focused on not telling anybody anything.”

Harkness gave a terse sigh. “Sarge—”

“What is your problem?”

“You are not listening to me.” Harkness slowed his voice down. “In that moment… in the interrogation room… when the drugs had worn off… and you tried to feel sorry for your interrogators… and you tried to hyperventilate yourself into a trance… and you realized that it didn’t matter what you did, because those Imperials were living out their life-long dream of making an Infiltrator scream, and they were having so much fun they might never stop…”

Jai stared at where she thought Harkness’s face probably was.

“Yeah,” she said.

“What was it that you focused on? What image came to your mind?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then think!
Come
on! Was it a person?”

“Yeah, it…” Jai stopped herself. “Yeah!” she said. “It was my little sister.”

Harkness shifted around. “You’re somebody’s older sister?”

“You sound like you think that’s funny.”

“No, no. I can just imagine you ordering some six-year-old around.”

“Well, she’s a little older than that. She’s a major in Special Ops.”

“So she gets to order you around.”

“She wouldn’t dare.”

“Major Raventhorn,” said Harkness. “That name sounds familiar.”

“ ’Course it does,” she said.

“When’s the last time you saw her?”

“I don’t know.” Jai’s brain clouded up as easily as it had cleared, and she felt a throbbing tightness all the way from her shoulders up into the back of her head. “I thought I hadn’t seen her since she was about twelve. But I can see her with an adult’s face… I thought I just talked to her a few months ago… or last week…”

“Keep thinking,” said Harkness.

“What about you?”

“Me?”

“No, the other beat-up merc across the room. How come you didn’t talk?”

“I don’t know.”

“Keep thinking,” Jai said, with more than a trace of sarcasm.

“No, really, I can’t… but I feel like I knew a minute ago…”

“I’d love to know what they did with our heads,” Jai said irritably. She found that she could lift her arms now, and kept trying to massage the tension out of her shoulders with one hand. After a while she began to notice that the pain wasn’t just in the muscles but in the skin, and her hand came away wet. She forgot all about the tension and felt the burning all across her shoulders and her back.

Suddenly Harkness yelled, “Dirk!”

Jai felt her whole body tighten. If she could have sprung to her feet, she would have. “Who? What? Who?”

“Dirk! That’s my first name!”

Jai’s body relaxed, and her limbs shook from the tension release. “Will you quit screaming out like that?”

“Dirk Harkness,” he said. “I’m Dirk Harkness.”

“Dirk Harkness?” Jai finally said, primarily to get him to stop chanting it. “What kind of name is that? You don’t sound like a Dirk.”

“So don’t call me Dirk.” He made some shuffling noises again; Jai imagined that he was lying on his side now.

“Fine, Harkness,” she said. “If you remember your first name, then tell me what kept you from talking.”

Dirk was silent.

“Well?”

“I think,” he said, “it has something to do with this humming in my head.”

“Well, well, well,” Platt said, peering over the ridge. “Our boy Harkness certainly knows how to sniff out Imperials.”

“How many?” Tru’eb asked. He was a short distance below her in the gully.

Platt slid down the steep rock wall and handed him the macrobinoculars. “Look for yourself. I make it about two, maybe three. See them?”

Tru’eb got a foothold in the crags and hoisted himself up into the thick, tufted grass on top of the ridge. “I can’t see anything,” he said. “The fog is even worse over there.”

“The yellow switch polarizes the lenses. See the hill directly across from us? It runs into that cliff, you can’t miss it. Now look at the a ledge sticking out of the cliff, out over the hill. You see the Imperials?”

“No… just trees and plants…”

“They’re sitting in a dugout under a camouflaged lean-to.”

“Ah, yes,” Tru’eb said after a moment. “Army scouts. But I don’t see a garrison.”

“I don’t even see any valley,” Platt said.

Nonetheless, Platt’s chrono indicated they were some 1,200 meters above sea level. This neck of the mountains was permeated by rocky ground and sheer cliffs topped with conifer trees. The Bare Forest, the locals called it. Or at least that was what their guide had called it before he had bolted with the repulsorlift a day earlier. At least he had left them some supplies and a one-person emergency inflation shelter, the latter of which had been an awfully tight fit last night.

Still, Harkness had left a trail of blaster-charred trees and discarded rations. Those clues led Platt and Tru’eb straight into the remains of the Rebel camp—a flat, razed area with scattered ashes, melted tent frames, and smashed comm equipment. The trees were bent and broken, probably crushed by AT-ATs. Platt was hard-pressed to imagine where one of those would have come from. All around was the acrid smell of burned flesh and spent blaster packs; Platt had to avert her eyes from the scattered bodies. Most of them had been shot in the back, Tru’eb told her. The rest were charred beyond recognition.

“Those scouts have an E-web, did you notice?” Tru’eb said, adjusting the sights. “But there are, let’s see, one hundred-thirty meters between us and them. I doubt they would be able to see us from there.”

“They wouldn’t, if I weren’t wearing red. Duck back down.”

“You really ought to rethink your wardrobe one of these days, Platt,” Tru’eb said dryly.

Platt grinned. “I thought you appreciated my keen fashion sense.”

“I do. It’s my whole reason for living.”

Platt took back the macros. Then she looked up at the murky sky. “Say, Tru’eb…”

“Yes?”

“Did everything around here just go really quiet, or is it me?”

They listened, and looked at each other. All morning there had been a constant chattering and hissing of birds, which had suddenly stopped. Platt pulled out her blaster.

“Did our Green Boys notice us?” she whispered.

“Let me have a look—”

Something came crashing through the underbrush behind them. Platt and Tru’eb spun around, but when the thing came out of the mist, they just stood where they were, frozen.

It was a Sullustan in New Republic military fatigues. But something about him was not quite right, and horribly surreal: his eyes were a milky gray and his head tilted at a grotesque angle. His arms hung at his sides, waving around slightly at each step as the head jarred and bobbed.

“Walking Dead!” Tru’eb hissed, backing away from the Sullustan, who seemed to be headed purposefully toward him.

Platt fired a blue stunbolt into the Sullustan’s chest. He gave a wild spasm and then flopped to the ground.

Silence. Platt and Tru’eb looked at each other.

“Was that real?” she whispered, and looked at the ground again. The Sullustan still lay there with his face in a mud puddle. In his back was a week-old blaster wound.

Platt scrambled up the ridge again. One of the guards was situated at the front of the dugout, leisurely wiping down the barrel of the E-web; the other sat off to the side, staring into space, waggling his foot. Occasionally he would lean out and look up at the gray afternoon sky.

“Doesn’t look like they heard,” Platt said.

Tru’eb gingerly approached the Sullustan. He fumbled for a pulse, and then stepped back.

“Come look at this, Platt. It’s incredible.”

Platt gave the guards a final look before sliding back down.

“What?” she asked.

“Look,” he said, pointing.

The Sullustan lay twitching, but not breathing. On closer inspection he turned out to be completely immobile; the appearance of twitching was caused by the presence of hundreds of tiny wormlike creatures swarming around the hole in his back.

Platt felt her gorge rise. She backed away, but there was no escaping the stench of the body or the memory of the worms; she leaned against a tree and vomited.

Then she stood up and coughed a couple of times. “Thank you, Tru’eb. Thank you for sharing that with me. I’m just going to go far away from you right now.”

She ventured a little ways into the woods, until the smell dissipated somewhat. Tru’eb followed her. “But don’t you see?” he said. “This is the source of the Walking Dead illusion. Some parasites can release enzymes which provide electrical stimulation to the brain of a dead host. So this fellow may be biologically deceased, but there are artificial signals going out to his body.”

Platt turned around. “Get outta here.”

“Do you have a better explanation?”

“Worms operating a complex bioelectrical system? You’re making that up.”

“All right, so I’m just guessing. But you know,” said Tru’eb, studying a worm perched on the tip of his index finger, “I have actually heard about a similar incident. Do you remember when I was working on Big Quince’s ship?”

Platt rolled her eyes. “You think I could ever forget?”

“This was before I met you. I was not privy to a great deal of information, of course, but I recall a story that was going around. Apparently some Imperial friends of Big Quince’s were quite traumatized after seeing a squadron of dead stormtroopers stagger across a battle-field. At the time I assumed that the storytellers were spiced. Now I wonder.”

Worms inside your armor. Platt felt her entire body start to pucker.

“Supposedly,” Tru’eb went on, “each corpse walked around aimlessly for a while, then went back to the place where it had been killed.”

“And this guy here was walking toward the Green Boys over there.”

“That does not necessarily mean he died there.”

“No, but something’s definitely up with those guys,” Platt said. “I mean, look at them. If it weren’t for the fog, they’d have the best vantage point in the whole mountain range. You wanna tell me they’re just sitting around guarding nothing?”

Tru’eb held up his hands. “Furthest thing from my mind.”

Platt looked at the Sullustan again. For a moment she thought she was going to vomit again. But instead, she stopped herself and broke into a slow grin.

“Hold on just a second,” she said. “I have an idea.”