Star Wars_ X-Wing 07_ Solo Command - Aaron Allston [39]
All the Wraiths but Piggy, that is. No mask could conceal his species, and only one member of his species would travel with a commando unit this way.
“I know this floor,” Piggy said. Both his real voice and his mechanical one were modulated so low that Face could barely hear them. “This was the third of four floors. We came down here only when we were injured. The bacta ward was right down—” He pointed his finger at a blank section of wall to his right and stopped.
Face asked, “Right down where, Eight?”
“Down this hall.”
“That’s a wall.”
“I know.” Piggy stepped up to the wall and looked at it very carefully. Then he bent to look at the flooring beneath it. When he turned to Kell, his expression, to the extent that Face could read Gamorrean expressions, was confused.
Kell obligingly aimed his electrical current detector at that section of wall, waving it about slowly. “Nothing to suggest any sort of door mechanism. There’s some faint electrical activity beyond, but not immediately beyond. Several meters, I think, and no heavy electrical currents.”
Tyria said, “The wear on the floor doesn’t show that anything has turned down a hall here, Eight. And the floor looks as though it’s been through several years of wear.”
“Yes,” Piggy said. But he still stared at the wall as if accusing it of lying. “They’ve taken up the floor from somewhere else and moved it here to conceal the deception.”
“All right,” Face said. “But even so, the only thing down this hall of yours was a bacta ward—correct?”
“Correct.”
“We’ll check it out if we don’t find anything elsewhere. Let’s look at what you never got to see before. All right?”
Piggy nodded.
They continued up the main hall, the only hall, to its end. On the left was a large double door leading into a circular chamber filled with equipment—panels, consoles, and terminals arrayed in a circle around some sort of large chair. The chair was obviously intended for medical usage; it featured brackets to fit around wrist and ankle, and was festooned with equipment on armatures—injectors, viewscreens, racks filled with bottles.
“I know that chair,” Piggy said. “You got your shots there. And performed tests. But it was one floor up.”
“Door’s clear,” Kell said. “No undue security. Do I open it up?”
Face said, “You said three of four. This was the third floor of four. You meant two above this one and one below?”
Piggy nodded.
“How did you get to the fourth floor?”
“By the turbolift.” Then Piggy frowned and looked back down the hallway toward the distant turbolift door.
“But the turbolift ended at this floor,” Face said. “There was duracrete below.”
Shalla said, “It was very clean duracrete. No oil stains. I thought that was odd. But everything here has been so clean it seemed in keeping with the rest.”
“Obviously, it was new,” Face said. “They’ve blocked off the fourth floor. I wonder why?”
The others shrugged. Tyria merely gave him her I-have-a-bad-feeling-about-this look.
“We can leave now,” Shalla said.
“There is no data without risk,” Face said, “as one of my instructors used to say. We always wanted to shoot him for it. All right, Five, let’s go in.”
Kell triggered the door control. The double doors slid open and the Wraiths entered, blasters up, fanning to either side.
“Doctor?” said another technician. “They’re in the First Chamber.” He put through the holocam feed to one of her terminals.
Gast looked at the screen and frowned. “They got through our outer perimeter.”
Netbers leaned over her shoulder. “They’re pretty good. But they’re here. So they’re dead.”
“Alert your stormtroopers,” Gast said, then issued commands to the others. “Prepare the Second Chamber. Activate comm jamming as soon as the door to the Second Chamber is opened. No, wait: Alert the other team of stormtroopers to take the intruders on the rooftop, then activate