Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order_ Rebel Dreams_ Enemy Lines I - Aaron Allston [100]
“I’ve got a thousand credits that say you don’t.”
FIFTEEN
Borleais Occupation, Day 47
It was the dead of night, but the former biotics facility was never truly asleep. Tam could hear movement down side corridors, distant conversations, a rumble in the walls that signified the takeoff of a patrol of starfighters outside.
But this corridor was comparatively still. Guarded day and night against entry by unauthorized personnel, it was empty of traffic at this hour.
Tam paused outside the door to Danni Quee’s laboratories and felt himself rocking in place, moved by the racing of his heart.
But pausing was failure to comply, and the faintest throbs of a new headache joined the rhythm of his heart.
He cursed and moved to the wall opposite the doorway. Reaching up, he brushed his fingers along the wall’s surface, near the ceiling, until he found it—a slick patch as though someone had sprayed oil there.
It wasn’t oil. It was a thing of the Yuuzhan Vong, another living apparatus that they had given him. It had a texture much like the villip—smooth, slick. He rubbed it until he found the crease that was its activation point, and he stroked that more deliberately. Then he wiped his hand on his shirt.
That spot on the wall changed color. Though he knew it remained flat as a sheet of fine flimsiplast, it seemed to him as though it gained depth, transforming into a duplicate of the security keypad and blue readout beside Danni’s door.
As though it were a holorecording, a hand came into view and punched numbers into the keypad. It was a woman’s hand, young, unlined, probably Danni’s. Tam watched the keys as they were depressed, memorizing the sequence, and glanced at the readout that showed the values of the keys.
They weren’t the same. He repeated the letters and numbers he’d seen pressed, and they differed from the ones on the readout in two places.
That meant—what? Either he’d misread the keys as they were being punched, or the readout played back an incorrect sequence.
He nodded, satisfied. It was a security measure. A recording of the readout would yield a password that either wouldn’t work or would alert a security office of an intrusion in progress. Only Tam’s visual memory, very strong and accurate, one of the reasons he’d become a holocam operator in the first place, had saved him from being trapped by this subterfuge.
He wished he’d been trapped. He wished he’d failed.
The headache began to increase in intensity.
He touched the Yuuzhan Vong recording apparatus and watched it fade away to transparency. Then he keyed the password—the correct password—into the keypad. The door slid aside.
Tam froze. Inside the room, two meters from him, Danni Quee sat at her usual desk. But she was motionless, her head down, colors from the monitor before her playing across her hair.
Danni didn’t move, other than from the rhythm of her breathing, and Tam forced himself to enter the office.
It was dim, lit only by monitors and desk lights, and no one other than Danni was present. Tam moved around her station to stand beside her, taking great care not to brush against anything; if he moved slowly enough, he could compensate for his awkwardness. Awkwardness that had caused him to trip when he was being pursued on Coruscant. Awkwardness that had led to his capture. His enslavement.
Danni’s monitor showed something, an object with facets like a gem. There was a lot of writing on the screen, technical terminology he couldn’t grasp, phrases like reflectivity index and refraction and power augmentation.
He squinted at it. His eyes were fine, but he had to squint to alert the little creature now sharing his ocular orbit with his eye that now was the time for it to wake up and begin recording. He felt the thing twitch; then his stomach twitched as nausea rose within him.
Tam moved through the laboratory, looking at each of the other screens in turn, looking at handwritten notes and datapad