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So far, so good. What if there were pressure sensors on top? She’d wait to find out. She froze where she was.

She heard the bunker’s only exterior door hiss open. Metal swung into position with a clank. There was laughter among men working the late-night shift. Hissing of liquids, clanking of coins. Then, finally, the door and panel closed and the flying foodseller maneuvered away from the bunker.

And no one had come out to investigate an anomalous pressure reading on the roof. Excellent.

She clicked her comlink. A double-click answered her. She repeated the click to assure Donos that he hadn’t responded to random garbage from someone else’s sending unit.

Then, slowly, carefully, she inched herself up the bunker roof to the point where it graduated from duracrete to segmented metal, then slid leftward until she reached the bottom of one of the huge TIE fighter access doors; better to be at the bottom and less likely to be seen when the doors opened.

If they opened.

Please, she asked no one in particular, let them have some sort of emergency. Don’t let me wait here all night for nothing.

“Tyria, look up,” Grinder said into the mouthpiece of his headset. He sat at the desk in the Wraiths’ suite in Scohar, and the picture on the portable terminal in front of him was the jittery view being broadcast from the camera in Tyria’s cap. It currently showed the dressed stone rear wall of the Scohar Xenohealth Institute. The view rose along the wall and then became relatively still, now showing the awning and safety light above one of the windowless metal doors on that wall.

Phanan and Kell leaned over his shoulders to watch. Either of them could have executed the image-gathering march around the Institute, but Grinder pronounced them too memorable: Phanan was too mechanical, Kell too tall. Tyria, with her face dirtied, her hair combed out until it was frowsy, got barely a side look from any of the better-dressed late-night tourists on the Scohar streets.

Grinder cycled the picture through a variety of different sensory inputs. The picture on screen polarized, became a negative, and finally returned to a more normal view. “There’s definitely a viewer in the overhang, just like the others. Come on in; I’ve pegged our intrusion point, and we’ve got to acquire some materials before we go in.”

Her voice, muted, came over the terminal’s speaker. “Which is our intrusion point?”

“The only one without a viewer on it. The only one without a lock permitting exterior entry.”

“The waste vent,” she said.

“That’s the one.”

A persistent whine made Falynn open her eyes. Another annoying alarm. She reached out to swat it and encountered only metal.

That snapped her eyes open. She’d fallen asleep! She checked her chrono, determined that a couple of hours had passed, and realized that the whining noise was the sound of the metal doors powering up. She took a deep breath and readied herself.

With a jolt, the seam at the join of the two doors widened and the doors retracted in fitful jerks. Falynn looked scornfully at the door’s edge as it retreated toward her. Servicing the motors and lubricating the rails would make the process smoother and quieter; she hoped the TIE fighters were kept up better than their hangar.

The door slid into place and locked with a distinctive clang of metal. She grabbed the edge and pulled herself partway up, just enough to see over the metal lip.

Below, a repair and hangar bay. She saw carts full of tools, grease-spattered duracrete flooring, four painted blue circles some eight meters in diameter on the floor with TIE fighters parked upon them. Two of the fighters had men beside them, a crew chief and a mechanic from the look of them. As she watched, the men hurriedly withdrew and the TIE fighters rose slowly, with the rumble of repulsorlift engines, into the air. Their smooth ascent brought them to Falynn’s altitude and beyond; when they were a dozen meters above the bunker, they kicked in their twin ion engines and went screaming off into the night sky.

She shook her head. She wasn’t here to