Star Wars_ X-Wing 05_ Wraith Squadron - Aaron Allston [125]
Abruptly the door jerked and began closing.
Falynn kept her grip on the door edge, letting the metal segment drag her upward while she kept her attention on the hangar. One of the mechanics approached a door on the south wall and waved his hand twice, very precisely, across the doorjamb above his head; the door slid open for him.
Then the door Falynn was holding on to was a mere half meter from closing against its counterpart. She let go, rather than have the closing doors crush her fingers, and tried to hold on by sheer friction.
It didn’t work. When the door edges crashed into place, the jolt shook Falynn free and she began sliding. She grabbed around frantically for purchase, couldn’t find it.
She rolled down the door, then down the roof of the bunker, then off the roof.
It was three long meters to the duracrete ground.
23
Kell, Tyria, and Phanan waited in the shadow of a metal sculpture that depicted, in abstract form, a dance of spirits in Storinal’s mythological past. A block away, Grinder, dressed in black, huddled at the base of the Institute wall just by the hatch leading into the waste-disposal flue.
“Is he actually any good at this?” Phanan asked. “I’ve never seen his record. Never heard of him before joining the Wraiths.”
Kell shrugged, realized no one could see it in the gloom. “I don’t know. But he was good enough for Commander Antilles to pick him.”
Phanan snorted. “Well, if he’s as good a code-slicer and intrusion expert as he is a pilot, he’s, well, mediocre. Sort of warms your heart, doesn’t it? To know our lives are in the hands of a mediocre slicer?”
“I think,” Tyria said, “that you left the profession of medicine because it’s your nature to make everyone feel worse about everything.”
“Ooh.” Phanan’s tone was admiring. “I’ve been skewered. I will now take seventeen hours to reevaluate my life.”
The comlink popped, and Grinder’s voice came across it: “Flue open. Come on in.”
It was an unpleasant entryway.
The flue opened a full two meters above the sidewalk. In opening it, Grinder had spilled out a dozen blocks of compressed garbage, each a meter on a side and smelling of rotted organic material. By the time the other Wraiths arrived, Grinder had stacked them into crude steps leading up to the flue opening.
The flue itself smelled like the blocks, only worse. More concentrated. The Wraiths put on their air-filter masks, spattered with perfume by a thoughtful Tyria, before proceeding.
Phanan was first up the steeply angled metal shaft, not because he was at home with intrusion, but because he was in charge of the powerful spray with which he coated every visible surface of the flue. The spray was not antibacterial, antiviral, or antianything; it was a powerful and fast-setting sealant that he believed would prevent the transmission of any disease agents that might be clinging to the flue’s surfaces.
They gave the stuff a mere minute to set, then began climbing. Once all four were in, they closed the door behind them. Grinder reset the latch, showing the other Wraiths how to unlatch it, and Phanan continued upward, spraying down the sides of the flue.
This shaft took them first into the hard-sided chamber that acted as a trash compressor. A single ill-timed command to the building computer would cause the sides to come together, squeezing the Wraiths into new cubes of garbage, but no such command came. The hatch out of the top of the chamber led to a larger vertical shaft into which trash apparently poured from every floor of the Institute. “See all the ash?” Phanan said. “Most of the accesses into this shaft are through incinerators. So dangerous wastes will be nice safe ash when they’re dropped for disposal.”
One floor up, a hatch gave them access into a small mess featuring a table for six and a food-delivery