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“And on the ramp control.”

Kell shook his head. “It occurred to me as we were driving over here that we can just put the stuff in the air intake scoop. They’ll be running on real air for the first few thousand meters, until they can’t ram it fast enough in to supply adequate air pressure. That’s when they switch to canned air.” He smiled. “We don’t even have to break in.”

Phanan cocked his head to listen. “We read, Joyride.” With his built-in equipment, he didn’t have to hear the buzzing of his comlink and bring the thing on-line; he was always receiving. “Good news, Joyride. Plague out.” He looked at the others. “Runt is counting down for his run from the moon. If everything goes well, he’ll finish his terrain-following run and be here in about an hour.”

“That’s our time limit,” Kell said. “Don’t forget, we actually have to service these shuttles.”

Joyride Group couldn’t rely on the help of a passing vendor’s skimmer. With four people needing transport and a narrow time frame, they had to make something happen.

Of all the vehicles crowding Revos’s spaceport, none were as prevalent as cargo-hauling skimmers, used for transporting everything from standard bulk containers weighing several tons to piles of passengers’ personal bags. It wasn’t difficult to find one unattended, wasn’t even difficult to get it running and move it off a few dozen meters into the deeper shadow thrown by an unoccupied hangar. But what they were planning next would be tricky.

“How’s it coming?” Wedge asked. He and Face were guards on this operation, keeping blasters at the ready and attention on their surroundings; they didn’t often look back at what Falynn was doing.

“How do you think? Slow!”

Wedge heard an electronic crackle and a curse from her. “The trick,” she continued, “is to fry the circuits controlling braking without wiping out everything else on the same board. Then I’ve got to do the vehicle programming you want. Tricky stuff. The jump at the end, the self-erasure, and the data you want left behind—well, I wish Grinder were here.”

Wedge managed a smile. If Grinder knew how much his particular skills were appreciated and needed right now, he’d be insufferable. He managed to ride pretty close to insufferable most of the time.

Atril spoke up. “I handle ship’s programming all the time, particularly navigation. Let me do a rough cut on the program and you can fix it up in less time than it would take you to do it from scratch.”

“Please.”

Wedge’s comlink beeped. He held it up to his ear, heard the message, said, “Thanks, Six.” He turned back to the others. “Thirty minutes and counting.”

“We have a problem,” Phanan said.

Kell lowered the side panel on Hawkbat’s Vigil. “Not much of one. We’re done.” He was covered with sweat and, after only half an hour’s work, tired. On a job like this, there were usually two to four trained mechanics and half an hour to an hour per vehicle serviced; he’d done it in half the usual time with a crew of willing but inexperienced hands.

“Nine says there’s a maintenance skimmer coming this way,” Phanan said.

Janson cursed. “Let’s move out. We’ll bluff them, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll tear out of here like Falynn in a skiff.”

Kell paused as he was entering the cockpit. Lashed to the bed in back were three plastic containers, each about the size of an R2 unit, that hadn’t been there before. “What are those?”

Tyria grinned. “Our reason for being here. Remember? We’re stealing something? Those are recreational holos someone had piled up for loading onto the shuttles. They’ll figure we’re black marketeers or something.”

“I forgot.”

“You had plenty to do.”

Janson’s voice came from underneath his blanket. “Would you two stop smooching up and get us out of here?”

Kell positioned his skimmer to exit. The argument had already started outside, with some words drifting in around the edges of the steel doors: “… tell you, you’re already in there.” “… obviously not, since we just