“I could.”
“What, tell them you’re looking for a present for your girlfriend?”
“Don’t push your luck. Is there a back way out?”
Sev stepped into a doorway and shielded Fi while he took a quick look at the holochart and snapped off the image quickly.
“No, but there’s a landing platform for deliveries.”
Sev dropped to a whisper. “Bardan, you with us yet?”
Jusik’s voice was almost a chuckle. “Fascinating,” he said. “I’m waiting at the delivery platform. A taxi is just what she needs right now.” Sev and Fi looked at each other. They could hear Jusik, but the taxi wasn’t visible even when they stood back and glanced up discreetly at the roofline. Then they heard his voice, utterly level, utterly calm—utterly worrying. “Yeah? Yeah, I am, lady… where d’you want to go? I’ve got a booking, but…”
“Sev, tell me he isn’t doing what I think he is.”
“He’s doing it.”
“He’s nuts.”
Sev lowered his voice to a whisper in the comlink. “Bardan, if we lift her now, we’ll blow this op. Don’t overplay it.”
“Okay, lady, but the spaceport isn’t my regular run, so that’ll be extra.”
There was the sound of someone getting into the taxi and a woman’s voice. “Yes, just drop me off at the domestic terminal, please.”
Fi wondered for a moment if ordinary people had shared thoughts like the one he knew Sev was sharing with him. They’d been trained to think the same way, the soldier’s way. Where was Jusik going with this? If he dropped her off like a normal taxi, they’d lose her in the terminal anyway. He couldn’t follow her in there and check where she went without blowing his cover. And if he didn’t drop her off…
Sev was staring past Fi. “Lizard on your six,” he said quietly.
Fi turned very, very slowly and stopped when he caught the Falleen male in his peripheral vision at the point where the plaza funneled into a spiral ramp down to another level. He was searching. So the woman hadn’t caught up with him when he expected, and he was looking for her. And that meant she had no comlink, or she’d have used it.
“Now he’s going to be bad news. He’s carrying some serious cannon. Look at the line of his jacket.”
Jusik’s voice was a quiet descant to Fi’s pulse pounding in his head. “Oh, fierfek. That’s great. Being rerouted again… this is going to cost, lady… another detour…”
“He’s way too smart for his own good.” Sev looked exasperated. “Bardan, are you doing what I think you’re doing? Are you heading back our way?”
“I pay good license money not to have to use automated lanes,” said Jusik’s voice in their ears. He really didn’t sound at all like a nice Jedi Temple boy now. “And then I still get diverted. What do we pay our taxes for?”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
The Falleen moved off, pausing occasionally to look around, and ambled slowly down the ramp. Fi and Sev leaned on the edge of the parapet like any tourist might to take in the view below.
Fi dropped his voice. “He’s calling someone.” The Falleen had the back of his hand raised to his mouth. Oh, for a helmet comlink. Fi might have been able to pick up the frequency. “Is it her? Or backup?”
“We could call this in and get Niner and Scorch to pick him up.”
“And then we drag another team off station. No, let’s see this through.”
Sev sat down on a bench, looking suitably disoriented. “Bardan, where are you?”
“Let me try this shortcut, lady… hey, who you calling? You making a complaint about fares already?”
“I bet she’s calling Lounge Lizard. Great.”
“Yeah, and now that our driver’s got a very dodgy passenger, has he thought what we’re going to do with her?”
“Same as we did with Orjul and the Nikto,” Sev said, getting up to walk across to the taxi platform at the end of the plaza. They had to get in fast when Jusik appeared and opened that hatch. Fi had visions of the potential grief that would be unleashed if a passenger was screaming her head off when the taxi hatch opened in a very public place.
“Land at ninety degrees, Bardan. Sev will access via the port hatch and I’ll go in the other, and we’ll pin her down.”
“Yeah, I think Fi can manage to subdue a civilian,” Sev said.
“Remind me to show you my unfunny side later, ner vod.”
“Skirata’s going to kill us for this—”
“Better get it right then,” Fi said.
“Here he comes…”
“Steady, Bardan.”
“Too fast.”
“He’s a Jedi. There’s no such thing as too fast.”
The battered taxi, its anti-surveillance gauze now showing a human driver that wasn’t Jusik, dropped onto the platform scattering dust and grit. The two commandos ran to their respective sides.
Jusik’s voice filled their heads now. “Hatches in three… two… one!”
They threw themselves in. The hatches snapped shut so fast that Fi felt his pant leg snag in the seal but he was flat on top of a squealing, struggling woman and then she went quiet because Sev clamped his hand over her mouth.
“You waiting for a tip?” said Fi.
The taxi lifted in a straight vertical and nearly shaved the paintwork off another cab trying to drop off passengers. It was just as well that Enacca had done something creative about the identity transponder.
“Fi, I don’t suppose you brought any restraints?”
“No, but this usually works.” Fi freed his right arm and put his blaster to Jiss’s head. “Ma’am, shut up and stop struggling. I have no problem shooting women.”
No, he didn’t. Enemies were enemies. Females were soldiers, too.
Jusik took the taxi high into what appeared to be a commuter lane and shot off in a complex loop that first took them away from Qibbu’s and relative safety, and then dropped down between lanes where the layers of traffic overhead gave some protection against visual surveillance.
“We’ve been tagged,” Jusik said. He shut his eyes, far too long for Fi’s comfort. It was the first time he’d seen the Jedi fly with his eyes closed, and the fact that the good ones could do that didn’t reassure the simple animal part of him that said it shouldn’t be possible. “Yes, we’re being followed.”
Fi wanted to ask how he knew but Jiss had no reason to know Jusik was a Jedi, and the less she knew, the easier it would be to process her, as Skirata put it.
“You can evade them, right?”
“About as well as anyone can.”
“Any idea who they are?”
“None, other than they’re very persistent, and if it’s CSF, it’s an unmarked vessel.”
“You can sense all that information?”
He opened his eyes again. “Yes, because they’re only two or three speeders behind us and I can see them in the mirror.”
Sev looked at Fi with the unspoken count of one, two, three. Sev released his grip on Jiss as Fi clamped his arm tight around her neck, blaster pressed so hard into her temple that the muzzle was ringed with a little patch of white bloodless skin. He could feel her heart pounding through her back against his chest even through the thin sheet of body armor under his tunic. He wondered for a moment if it was his own frantic heartbeat.
Sev reached under the rear seat for his DC-17 and took out the grenade attachment. “Okay, it lacks finesse, but we’re late for lunch. And if they track us, we’re finished.”
“Here? In daylight, in traffic?” Jusik said.
“Not yet.” Sev tried to aim his Deece and snapped on the grenade launcher. “Open the rear screen a crack. Can you hold steady?”
“You wanted me to outrun them—”
“Can’t. We’ve got to drop them.”
Jusik looked in the rearview. “In a skylane? You haven’t got a clear shot and the debris will—”
“Me sniper, you pilot. Understand the difference?”
Jusik’s grip on the steering vane tightened. “Too many vessels and too much debris. Let’s head for somewhere less crowded.”
“Maybe Qiilura?” Fi said.
“Hold on tight.”
Jusik dropped the taxi like a stone and plummeted ten, then fifteen, then twenty levels to the lower skylanes, slipping in between two transports and then jumping between horizontal lanes.
“Still there,” said Sev. “Three vehicles behind.”
“Have they alerted anyone?”
“I can’t sense anything.” Jusik kept shaking his head as if trying to clear it. “They might not want to risk using comlinks.”
“Who the fierfek are they?”
“I don’t know! I’m not a mind-reader and if you’d just shut up because I’m trying to concentrate on flying and listening and—” His voice trailed off. “Just aim.”
Fi pressed his blaster harder into the woman’s head. She flinched and shut her eyes tight. He could feel no emotion whatsoever, just the cold clarity of his life and his comrades’ against her existence, and it seemed an easy equation.
“Move and you’re dead, ma’am, okay?” Move? Even Fi wasn’t sure he could make an escape from a speeder moving this fast and this erratically—and not at this height, either. “Start thinking of all the helpful information you’re going to give us.”
Jusik broke from the automated lane and fell another five levels like a stone, drawing screaming protests of klaxons as he skimmed other vessels. But the speeder dropped with them, delayed only by a few seconds. Then he banked right into a service vessel tunnel, and Fi had no idea where they were. It was enclosed. And that was bad. Fi wasn’t a pilot but flying fast down a tube struck him as suicide.
“Look, I know where I’m heading,” Jusik said, as if he were suddenly telepathic. Fi wondered if he had protested aloud and hadn’t realized. “I know. And they can’t get a signal through down here.”
And then he fell silent. And this was where it became very, very frightening to have a Jedi on the squad, because Jusik had shifted from a skill that Fi could see to something beyond his comprehension.
Jusik was now skimming a meter above the surface of a conduit lit at regular intervals by a dim green light. Sev was struggling to get a steady shot through the narrow opening in the rear screen. All Fi could do was watch one madman or the other while he held a gun to a woman’s head, and Fi didn’t enjoy not being in control of his environment. He thought of Sicko again and the moment when he and Omega were helpless and utterly dependent on that pilot’s skill. Poor Sicko.
“Sev, he’s twenty meters behind us, right?” said Jusik.
“Spot on.”
“Are you going to be ready when I say fire?”
“Try me.”
“Only on my mark.”
“Get on with it, sir.”
Fi felt his left arm going numb around the woman’s neck, and he struggled to keep the blaster hard against her head. The taxi was veering from side to side. “I just hope they’re not CSF.”
“They’re not ours…,” Sev said. “And they’re in pursuit. So they’re a target.”
Fi dug the blaster into the woman’s skin. “Are they your people, ma’am?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know!”
“If they are, it’s too bad,” Sev said. “We can’t let them track us back.”
Jusik speeded up. “Stand by.”
Fi noticed that he had his eyes shut again.
“Fierfek.”
“Fire!” Jusik said, and the taxi suddenly flipped up ninety degrees and climbed in an agonizing vertical. Fi braced for impact.
They had to be dead.
But the taxi was still climbing.
They were in a vertical shaft and a ball of blue-white flame roared beneath them. Fi was thrown against Sev but he locked his arm tight around the woman’s neck, and all three of them hit the partly open rear screen as the sound of ricocheting debris faded behind them in the service duct.
The light dimmed fast beneath them and suddenly disappeared as Jusik slammed the taxi into another right angle and they were flying horizontally along a channel again.
“Target down.” Sev shut his eyes.
“That better not be CSF,” Fi said. “That’s going to be very messy.”
Suddenly they were bathed in hazy sunlight. Jusik brought them out into passenger traffic and slipped into the automated lanes of private speeders again.
“What do we look like from the outside now?” Sev asked.
Jusik wiped his forehead with his palm and looked as breathless and battered as he ever had after performing the Dha Werda. Fi could have sworn he looked just as elated, too.
“Family of Garqian tourists with a Gran driver,” the Jedi said. “Now let’s try to explain this to you-know-who without getting our heads ripped off.” He opened his comlink. “Returning with a prisoner, Kal…”
Sev grumbled in his throat. “Never use real names.”
“Least of our worries now,” Fi said.
So Jusik was scared of Skirata, too. It was supposed to be a quiet obs job, as he’d put it, observation duty; it had turned into kidnapping and blowing up unidentified vessels. Scared wasn’t the right word, though.
He’ll be disappointed with us. We let him down.
Fi, like anyone who came into Skirata’s circle, desperately wanted Kal’buir to be proud of him. It was more effective motivation than fear any day.
“Remember he even shoves Wookiees around,” said Fi. He adjusted his grip on the woman’s neck to stop the tingling in his fingers. “And they take it.”
The taxi was silent except for the occasional whimpering gulp from Jiss and the rumble of the vessel’s hard-pressed drive. Eventually Jusik came to a shuddering halt on the platform at the top level of Qibbu’s Hut. Sev called on his comlink for a hand with the woman, and Atin came running out with Fixer.
“What have you been playing at? Skirata’s going nuts in there.” Atin slid into the taxi and put cuffs on Jiss. “Get out and we’ll take her to the safe house. You’ve got some explaining to do.”
Safe house for them, maybe. Safe for her? No. But then she had picked the wrong side. She wasn’t a helpless victim.
So much for whining that we never get to see the enemy.
The taxi lifted off, leaving Fi, Sev, and Jusik standing on the platform, exhausted by adrenaline.
“Thank you for flying Jedi Air.” Jusik grinned, and shook their hands. “Have a nice afternoon.”
“You’re all insane,” said Sev, and stalked off.
Chapter Twelve
Definitely not one of our speeders, Kal. Look, I know why you think I don’t need to know what your boys are getting up to. But someone’s going to notice you blew up their people. And so is CSF. What do you want me to tell them?
—Captain Jaller Obrim, to Kal Skirata
Operational house,
Qibbu’s Hut,
1600 hours, 380 days after Geonosis
“You’re sure nobody followed you?” Skirata said quietly.
The strike team, minus Ordo, was assembled in the main room, sitting where they could. For a moment Skirata was distracted by the way Darman and Etain were positioned. It told him something, but he had more pressing issues right now.
He’d calmed down, too. Red Watch was back safely. Jusik, predictably, was taking his roasting like a man.
“I’m sure, Kal. I felt it.”
“Don’t go mystic on me. Did you go through the procedures? Give me tangibles.”
“I didn’t return via a direct route. I looped back on myself several times. Nothing.”
There was no point yelling at them. Skirata knew he probably would have done the same. It was all very well to talk about painstaking surveillance and meticulous planning before resolving a threat, but when a truly ripe target walked in front of your scope—no, he would have done the same.
And he was simply relieved that they’d made it back in one piece.
; “Okay, surveillance is off for the day. We change vehicles again, and we’ll start defense watches, just in case the Force has deceived Bard’ika and we’ve got a load of bad guys on our case now. Enacca is identifying a second location we can pull back to if this place is compromised.”
Jusik looked crushed. “I’m sorry, Kal.”
“You weren’t in command. I should have made sure you were ready for this.” Skirata turned to Fi and Sev. Fi looked crestfallen; Sev was complete blank insolence. “And what have you two got to say for yourselves?”
“It won’t happen again, Kal.” Fi looked at Jusik. “And it was me and Sev who decided to go for it. If Bardan hadn’t done some clever flying, we’d all be dead now and the op would be over.”
“And you, Sev?”
Sev turned his head with slow deliberation. “What he said.”
“Son, I know you think you’re a hard case because you survived Walon Vau, and you probably are. But anti-terrorist ops are more about this.” Skirata walked over to him and rapped his head so hard with his knuckles that the thunk of bone was audible. Sev blinked but didn’t move a muscle. “If you’d thought about it for two minutes, you could have relayed that identification back here and we could have planned some intelligent surveillance. But now we’ve got another prisoner plus a bunch of dead guys, and we have to explain why a GAR employee isn’t going back to the office anytime soon. Because if she wasn’t working alone, then some di’kut is going to notice she’s absent. Have I missed anything?”
Niner, arms folded, looked up. “Yes, who’s helping Vau now? He must have his hands full.”
“Enacca. Wookiees are good at looking like a crowd.”
Boss had been remarkably quiet for the last ten days. He’d worked his watches without complaint and had shown none of the swaggering confidence that the Delta boys were known for. Now he was pacing up and down the length of the window, slow and deliberate, and glancing occasionally at Niner. Skirata wondered if it was the displacement from the sergeant role that was getting to him.
Might as well lance the boil. “You want to say something, Boss?”
“With respect, Kal, we have different approaches, don’t we?”