• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The first man directed them down the hallway to a doorway allowing access to the maintenance lifts.

Mirax nodded. “Very nice. I bet Wooter didn’t even know he was being watched. Just like Isard to think of that sort of thing.”

The lead man let the comment pass, but one of the others hitched for a second. The leader caught the hesitation as quickly as Iella did and stopped. “You two can keep quiet, or we stun you and carry you out of here in trash bins. Your choice.”

Another of the men summoned the freight lift as they assembled in the little tiled room that looked all the more dingy and cheap because of the contrast with the rest of the building. All four of the men were tall and strongly built—Iella guessed they trained on a high gravity world—but they were different enough that she didn’t figure them to be clones. They could have passed for stormtroopers had they been wearing armor, which made Iella think they were probably Special Intelligence operatives, which were just the sort of people Isard had employed on Coruscant and elsewhere to do her dirty work.

All six of them piled into the freight lift and it descended. The blaster carbines all retreated inside jackets for appearance’s sake, but Iella knew that making any sort of a move in the crowded lift would be insane. Crossfire might get some of them, but we’d be in the middle of it, which would hurt a lot.

The freight lift opened onto a freight dock area at the rear of the building. The scent of rotting garbage assaulted Iella’s nostrils, and a hand in the middle of her back propelled her forward. As she stepped from the turbolift she saw one of the Verpine maintenance workers from the lobby. One of their kidnappers flashed his carbine at the Verpine and the creature chittered and bowed his way into a retreat while the others led Iella and Mirax out into the alley behind the building.

A trio of wheeled trash bins along the right side of the alley narrowed it appreciably, and a pair of twitching legs sticking up out of the nearest open one brought a smile to several faces. Beyond the trash bins Iella saw a pair of black hovercars and assumed they were their destination. The doors on the hovercars opened and two more individuals exited each vehicle. She looked around and saw another alley leading off to the left about halfway down to the vehicles. The main street lay behind them, with two of the kidnappers between her and it. Another street capped the alley back beyond the hovercars.

If they get us into the hovercars, they can take us wherever they want to, interrogate us, and kill us. As desperate as she knew the situation to be, there wasn’t anything she could do about it. One kidnapper led the group, followed by Mirax and a second guard. Iella came next with the last two kidnappers following her. And in this narrow alley, shooting us down would be easy. Still, if I had a diversion …

They’d moved past the first trash bin when the diversion came. The grubby figure of a man who had been digging in the bin skipped and capered his way past them, then asked each of them for money. “I’m not a glitbiter, just something to see me by.” He tugged on the sleeve of the first man in line, then swept on down, grabbing at Iella’s right hand. A snarled command from the man behind her brought a shocked look to the derelict’s face, then he backed off, pressing his spine against the middle trash bin.

“Wish I could help,” Iella said slowly.

“You will, kind lady.” The man lunged for the last kidnapper in line, slamming him across the alley and into the ferrocrete wall on the other side.

The kidnappers all turned as their comrade yelped and the men by the vehicles pointed down the alley toward them. Iella brought her right hand up and slid her index finger onto the trigger of the holdout blaster the derelict had slipped her. She shot the third kidnapper in the middle of his back, pitching him forward into the derelict and last kidnapper. She spun to shoot the second kidnapper, but Mirax had already scythed a booted foot through the man