Triple Zero Page 5

  “So?”

  “It’s what I can’t sense that bothers me.”

  “Which is?”

  “Malevolence. The enemy is absent. The enemy was never here, in fact.”

  Republic Fleet Protection Group traffic inderdiction vessel (TIV) Z590/1, standing off Corellian–Perlemian hyperspace intersection, 367 days after Geonosis

  Fi really didn’t like zero-g ops.

  He took off his helmet with slow care and put one hand on the webbing restraints that stopped him from drifting away from the bulkhead of the anonymous utility vessel that had been customized for armed boarding parties. If he moved a little too quickly, he drifted.

  Drifting made him… queasy.

  Darman, Niner, and Atin didn’t seem bothered by it at all; neither did the pilot, who, for reasons Fi hadn’t yet worked out, was called Sicko.

  Sicko had shut down the drives. The unmilitary, unmarked, apparently unimpressive little TIV—a “plain wrapper,” as the pilots tagged it—hung with drives idling near an exit point of the hyperspace route, cockpit panels flickering with a dozen weapons displays.

  Externally, it looked like a battered utility shuttle. Under the rust, though, it was a compact assault platform that could muscle its way onto any vessel. Fi thought that traffic interdiction operations was a lovely euphemism for “heavy-duty military hijack.”

  “I do like a noncompliant boarding to start the day,” Sicko said. “You okay, Fi?”

  “I’m sorted,” Fi lied.

  “You’re not going to throw up, are you? I just cleaned this crate.”

  “If I can keep field rations down, I can handle anything.”

  “Tell you what, chum, put your bucket back on and keep it to yourself.”

  “I can aim straight.”

  Fi had learned the skills of maneuvering in zero-g late in life—just before he turned eight and sixteen, not all that long before Geonosis—and it didn’t come as naturally to him as those troopers trained specifically for deep-space duties. He wondered why the others had come through the same training with more tolerance of it.

  Niner, apparently impervious to every hardship except seeing his squad improperly dressed, stared at the palm of his glove as if willing the wrist-mounted hololink from HQ to activate.

  The squad now wore the matte-black stealth version of the Katarn armor that made them even more visibly different from the rest of the Republic Commando squads. Niner said it was “sensible” even if it made them pretty conspicuous targets on snow-covered Fest. Fi suspected he liked it better because it also made them look seriously menacing. Droids didn’t care, but it certainly put the wind up wets—organic targets—when they saw it.

  If they saw it, of course. They usually didn’t get the chance.

  An occasional click of his teeth indicated Niner was annoyed. It was Skirata’s habit, too.

  “Ordo’s always on time,” Fi said, trying to take his mind off his churning stomach. “Don’t fret, Sarge.”

  “Your buddy…,” Darman teased.

  “Rather have him for a friend than an enemy.”

  “Ooh, he likes you. Hobnobbing with ARC officers from the Bonkers Squad, eh?”

  “We have an understanding,” Fi said. “I don’t laugh at his skirt, and he doesn’t rip my head off.”

  Yes, Ordo had taken a shine to him. Fi hadn’t fully understood it until Skirata had taken him to one side and explained just what had happened to Ordo and his batch on Kamino as kids. So when Fi had thrown himself on a grenade during an anti-terrorist op to smother the detonation, Ordo had marked him out as someone who’d take an awfully big risk to save comrades. Null ARCs were psychotic—bonkers, as Skirata put it—but they were unshakably loyal when the mood struck them.

  And when the mood failed to strike them, they were instant death on legs.

  Fi suspected that Ordo was bored out of his brain, stuck in HQ on Coruscant for most of the last year with nothing to kill except time.

  So Fi stared at Niner’s glove, too, willing his stomach to stay put. At precisely 0900 hours Triple Zero time, right on cue, Niner’s palm burst into blue light.

  “RC-one-three-zero-nine receiving, sir,” Niner said.

  The encrypted link was crystal clear. Ordo shimmered in a blue holoimage, apparently sitting in the cockpit of a police vessel, helmet beside him on the adjoining seat. But he didn’t look bored. He was clenching and unclenching one fist.

  “Su’cuy, Omega. How’s it going?”

  “Ready to roll, sir.”

  “Sergeant, latest intel we have is that the suspect vessel left Cularin bound for Denon and is headed for your position. The bad news is that it appears to be traveling with a couple of legit vessels as a smokescreen. Commercial freight is getting very edgy about piracy so they’re forming up into convoys now.”

  “We can weed out the target,” said Niner.

  “It would be very awkward if you decompressed a civilian freighter at the moment. It’ll be the Gizer L-six.”

  “Understood.”

  “And we need the di’kute alive. No slotting, no disintegration, no accidents.”

  “Not even a good slap?” asked Fi.

  “Use the PEP laser and keep it nonlethal if you can. Somebody’s very keen to have a frank chat with them.” Ordo paused, head tilted down for a second. “Vau’s back.”

  Fi couldn’t stop himself from glancing at Atin and noted that Darman had done the same. Atin had his chin tucked into the padded rim of his chest plate and was idly scratching the scar that ran from just under his right eye and across his mouth to the left side of his jaw. It was a thin white line now, a faint memory of the raw red welt it had been when Fi first saw him: and Fi suddenly realized something he hadn’t worked out before.

  I think I know how he got that.

  Atin was from Sergeant Walon Vau’s training company, not Skirata’s. And over the months, as casualties mounted and more partial squads were regrouped with men from other companies, they all swapped stories. The Vau stories didn’t get a laugh at all.

  “You okay, ner vod?”

  “Fine,” Atin said. He looked up, jaw set. “So how many bandits are we going to not slot, disintegrate, or speak harshly to, then, Captain?”

  “Five, best intel says,” said Ordo.

  “We’ll assume ten then,” said Niner.

  Ordo paused for a moment as if he thought Niner might be resorting to sarcasm. Fi could see it in the way his shoulders braced. He was a knife-edge kind of man, Ordo. But Niner was simply in literal mode, as he tended to be when things were getting intense. He always wanted to err on the side of caution.

  Ordo obviously knew that: he didn’t bite. “By the way, General Tur-Mukan is operating around the Bothan sector, and appears to be coping, according to Commander Gett,” he said. “And she’s still packing the conc rifle, so your lesson wasn’t wasted.”

  “Beats swinging the shiny stick,” Fi said, winking at Darman. “It’d be fun to see her again, eh, Dar?”

  Darman smiled enigmatically. Atin was staring in slight defocus at the bulkhead, jaw clenched. Fi thought it was high time the bad guys dropped out of hyperspace and took their minds off the individual things that were troubling them, which included his stomach.

  “Ordo out,” the blue holo said, and Niner’s glove held nothing but air again.

  Darman prepped his helmet, resetting the HUD with a prod of his finger. “Poor Ord’ika.” He called him by the affectionate nickname Skirata used in private, a kid’s name, Little Ordo. In public, it was strictly Captain and Sergeant. And you could call your brother vod’ika in the Mandalorian way, but nobody else could, and never in front of strangers. “Who’d want to be doing the filing when the rest of your batch are off saving the galaxy?”

  “Well, I hear Kom’rk is out at Utapau, and Jaing’s cannoned up and gone hiking with extreme prejudice in the Bakura sector,” said Fi.

  “Fierfek.”

  “Knowing him, he’s doing it for the fun of
it. And as for Mereel—well, why has Kal sent him out to Kamino?”

  Niner clicked irritably again. “Anyone else you want to discuss classified intel with, Fi?”

  “Sorry, Sarge.”

  The cabin was silent once more. Fi slid his helmet back on, sealed the collar, and concentrated on the artificial horizon of his HUD to convince his stomach which way was up. The Mark III Katarn armor now had more enhancements and was rated blaster-resistant up to light cannon rounds. Every op was full of new surprises from GAR Procurement—like a birthday, according to Skirata, although Fi, like all his brothers, had never celebrated one.

  Now they even had a nonlethal pulsed energy projectile, or PEP, for the DC-17 that didn’t exactly kill the targets, but certainly made their eyes water. It was police riot control kit, a deuterium fluoride laser: it would probably just annoy a Wookiee, but it sorted out humanoids in short order.

  Fi focused on the icons in the frame of his HUD and blinked one into action, sending chilled air across his face. That soothed his nausea. Then he isolated his audio channel and accessed a particularly thumping piece of glimmik music.

  Niner cut in on the comm channel override. “Now what are you listening to?”

  “Mon Cal opera,” Fi said. “I’m improving my mind.”

  “Liar. I can see you nodding to the beat.”

  Relax, Sarge. Please. “Want to listen in?”

  “I’m psyched up enough, thanks,” Niner said.

  Darman shook his head. Atin looked up. “Later, Fi.”

  Sicko glanced over his shoulder, excluded from the squad’s conversation by their secure helmet-to-helmet comlink. But he could obviously see the body language that indicated they were chatting. Fi flicked to his frequency with a couple of blinks directed at the sensor inside his visor.

  “How about you, ner vod? Want some music?”

  “No thanks.” Sicko had much the same neutral accent as most of the infantry trooper clones. They’d learned Basic from flash-instruction and had rarely been exposed to outsiders with interesting accents. “But it’s decent of you to offer.”

  “Anytime.”

  Commandos owed their lives to the guts of these pilots—Omega had been extracted under heavy fire by their astonishing skill a number of times—and the TIV pilots were the most daring of the lot. Any gulfs among clone trooper, specialist, and the elite commando units had now been swept away by shared hardship and they were an vode now—all brothers. Fi was happy to indulge them.

  He killed the music feed and switched over to the open squad comlink again. The waiting was eating at him now. If—

  “Got trade,” said Sicko. “They should be jumping out of hyperspace anytime now. Three contacts.” He flicked the tracking display from his console into a holoprojection so they could see the pulses of color that represented the ships—no outlines or shapes, just a flickering array of numbers and codes to one side, awaiting a ship to tag. “Intercept in two minutes. They should all be less than a minute apart.”

  “Bring us in starboard-side-to, please,” said Niner.

  “There you go… the L-six is coming out first.” Sicko pressed a pad on the console and Fi heard the grapple arms extend and retract like an athlete flexing muscles before an event. The display picked up the ship, then another. “But the second profile looks like an L-six, too…”

  “Intel said—”

  “Intel has occasionally been known to be less than one hundred percent accurate, apparently…”

  Atin sighed a ffft of contempt. “You reckon?” Fi could see that he was checking ships’ configuration data via his HUD. “I’m glad I’m shockproofed.”

  “But we like intel,” said Fi. No, not again. Let it be right this time. “Sergeant Kal never read us bedtime stories, so intel satisfies our innate boyish need for heroic fantasy.”

  “Is he always like this?” Sicko asked.

  “No, he’s pretty quiet today.” Darman clutched a magnetic frame charge to his chest plate—his hatch persuader, as he liked to call it. “So are we going to jump the first crate or what?”

  “Play it by ear,” said Niner, who always seemed to resort to Skirata’s voice under pressure. He hit the release on his restraints. “Let’s see how it reacts when we approach. Pressure up helmets, gentlemen, and we’re in business.”

  “Coming about,” said Sicko. “And if I can’t disable its drive, blow the navigation power conduit. The access ought to be outside the engineering compartment, but it’s sometimes inside the port-side bulkhead, three meters from the hatch. So knock the rotten thing out, will you? Or they’ll bolt and drag us across ten star systems.”

  Then the pilot punched the TIV into a ninety-degree roll and the apparently fixed constellations Fi had been watching tilted before his eyes. He understood instantly why they called the man Sicko.

  Fi grabbed a restraint instictively and his backpack hit the bulkhead.

  “Oh fierfek—”

  “Whoaaa!”

  “Uhhh…”

  Fi could see through the cockpit screen as he steadied himself alongside the hatch. A box-like freighter—yes, a Gizer L-6—loomed out of black nothing.

  “Interdict that,” Niner said.

  Fi reached for his jet-pack controls, hanging right beside Darman in free fall.

  Sicko powered the TIV into a slow head-on approach and corkscrewed slowly to line it up and bring the deckhead hatch against the port side of the freighter, landing lights on. The freighter slowed, too. Darman stood ready, fingers flexing over the jet-pack controls on his belt. He’d be first out, blowing the hatch controls when the blastproof coaming sealed against the target’s hull, pulling aside to let the others storm in. As the TIV moved sedately along the freighter’s flank, the landing lights picked out the bright orange livery of VOSHAN CONTAINERS.

  “Oops,” said Sicko. “Looks like the legit one.”

  “Back off, then,” Niner said. “If the other ship sees this, we’ve lost—”

  A flash caught Fi’s eye at the same time it did everyone else’s. The second vessel was heading their way.

  “Another L-six,” Sicko said. “Please don’t let there be three of them.”

  The first L-6 suddenly altered course with a rapid burn. It had probably picked up the wrong idea about a scruffy little ship in an area of space that was frequently populated by pirates. One of its spars wheeled ninety degrees almost instantly, looming in the TIV’s viewscreen on collision course.

  “Abort abort abort!” Sicko yelled. “Brace brace brace—”

  He was cut short by a screech of tearing alloy that shuddered through the TIV, and suddenly it wasn’t the tight gut-exhilaration of a boarding but the desperate scramble to survive. The impact spun the TIV off and the last thing Fi saw as he somersaulted involuntarily was Sicko pulling on the yoke and punching a stabilizing burn to stop the spin.

  There was nothing Fi or the squad could do. It was all down to the pilot. Fi hated that moment of helpless realization every time. The display in his HUD shuddered like a cheap bootleg holovid as he hit the bulkhead harder than he thought possible in zero-g.

  “Incoming! Returning fire.”

  And then there was light: brilliant blue-white light. The instant hot rain of fragments peppered and pecked on the hull. Sicko had neutralized the incoming missile. The second L-6 powered up and punched back into hyperspace in a flare of light.

  “Chew on that,” Sicko said, and slapped his fist hard on the console. “Foam deployed… hull breach secure.”

  “What’s that?” Fi said, suddenly ice-cold and focused, and not nauseous at all.

  “BRB.”

  “What?”

  “Big Red Button. Emergency hull seal.”

  The remains of the freighter’s missile cartwheeled slowly into the distance, trailing vapor. It was the kind of self-defense many freighters felt the need to carry these days: wars created useful opportunity for the criminal community.

  Niner sighed. “Oh, fierfek, everyone knows we
’re here now…”

  “Anyone get his license number?” Fi said. “Maniac.”

  “Yeah, and more maniacs along shortly, too.” Sicko turned his head toward the scanner readout. “Next one’s due in sixty seconds… and the next one two minutes later, I reckon. I hope he doesn’t call for assistance, or we’re going to have to bang out of here really fast.”

  “Tell me they’re not going to notice that little fracas.”

  “They’re not going to notice that little fracas.”

  “Vor’e, brother.”

  “You’re welcome.” The pilot didn’t take his eyes off the scanner. “Happy to lie to a comrade anytime, if it makes him feel better—there you go…”

  The next freighter fell out of hyperspace fifteen hundred meters from their port bow, and its pilot definitely noticed. Fi knew that because the immediate bright arc of laser cannon shaved the elint mast mounted on the TIV’s nose just as Sicko let loose a sustained volley into the freighter’s under-slung drive. It was still showering debris as Sicko brought the TIV about and swung back under the freighter to loop over its casing from its starboard quarter and bring the TIV, totally inverted, to rest hatch-to-hatch with the target.

  And there was nothing the crippled freighter could do about it. Sicko was too close in, too far inside the minimum range of its cannon, and now riding a very angry Ralltiiri tiger.

  “This is where you get off.” Sicko’s voice was just a little shaky. “End of the line.”

  “Stand to!” Niner said. The skirt of coaming shot out of the TIV’s hatch housing and sealed tight against the freighter’s hull while the grapple arms held it secure. The pressure equalization light flashed red and the TIV’s blastproof inner hatch opened, then the outer one. “Dar, take it!”

  Dar slapped the frame charges on the freighter’s hatch, the inner hatch snapped shut again, and a muffled whump vibrated through the TIV.

  How Sicko had managed to bring the TIV alongside the port hatch without ramming the vessel—or ripping the deckhead out of the TIV—Fi would never understand, but that was what trooper pilots did, and he was in awe of them. The inner hatch opened again. Darman bowled in two flash-bangs—blinding, deafening stun grenades—and Niner was first through the hatch.