It didn’t appear that the Weequay had been employed here. The droid sorted all the charges and oversaw the blasting. On an upturned crate were the remains of a meal, eaten off makeshift plates fashioned from box lids. It looked like the Weequays had been hiding out here, and Niner was pretty sure he knew who they had been avoiding.
Atin checked the various charges and detonators, selecting what appeared to take his fancy and piling it in a clear space on the muddy floor. He was a connoisseur of technology, especially things with complex circuitry. “Lovely,” he said, with genuine satisfaction. “Some dets here that you can set off from fifty klicks. That’s what we need. A bit of a pyrotechnics show.”
“Can we carry as much as we need?”
“Oh, there’s some beauties here. Darman would think they were pretty basic, but they’re going to work fine as a diversion. Absolute beauts.” Atin held up spheres about the size of a scoopball. “Now this baby—”
Crash.
Something fell to the floor in one of the rooms off the main one. Atin held his rifle on the doorway and Niner drew his sidearm. He was edging toward the door when a sudden voice almost made him squeeze the trigger.
“Ap-xmai keepuna!” The voice was shaking, and judging by the accent it probably belonged to a Weequay. “Don’t kill! I help you!”
“Out. Now.” Projected from his helmet, Atin’s voice was intimidating enough without a rifle to back it up. A Weequay stumbled out from behind a stack of crates and sank to his knees, hands held up. Atin pushed him down flat with his boot, Deece aimed at his head. “Arms behind your back and don’t even breathe. Got it?”
The Weequay appeared to have got it very quickly. He froze and let Niner cuff his wrists with a length of wire. Niner did a sweep of the rooms again, worried that if they’d missed one target they might have missed more. But it was clear. He walked back and squatted down by the Weequay’s head.
“We don’t need a prisoner slowing us down,” he said. “Give me a good reason why I shouldn’t kill you.”
“Please, I know Hokan.”
“I’ll bet you know him pretty well if you were hiding out here. What’s your name?”
“Guta-Nay. I were right-hand man.”
“Not anymore, though, eh?”
“I know places.”
“Yeah, we know places, too.”
“I got key codes.”
“We’ve got ordnance.”
“I got codes to Teklet ground station.”
“You wouldn’t be messing around, would you, Guta-Nay? I don’t have time for that.”
“Hokan kill me. You take me with you? You Republic guys nice, you gentlemen.”
“Steady, Guta-Nay. All those syllables might burn you out.”
Niner looked at Atin. He shrugged.
“He’ll slow us down, Sarge.”
“Then we either leave him here or kill him.”
The conversation wasn’t designed to scare Guta-Nay, but it had that effect anyway. It was a genuine problem: Niner was reluctant to drag a prisoner around with them, and there was no guarantee the Weequay wouldn’t try to buy back favor from Hokan with intelligence on their strength and movements. He was an unwelcome dilemma. Atin clicked his Deece, and it started to power up.
“I get you Neimie boss, too!”
“We definitely don’t need him.”
“Neimie’s really mad at Hokan. He put droids in his nice shiny villa. Floors messed up.”
Guta-Nay’s breathing rasped in the silence of the room. Niner weighed the extra baggage against the prospect of some edge in gaining access to Uthan.
“Where’s Uthan now?”
“Still in villa. Nowhere else to hide.”
“You know a lot about Hokan, don’t you?”
“Everything.” Guta-Nay was all submission. “Too much.”
“Okay,” Niner said. “You got a reprieve.”
Atin waited a couple of seconds before powering down his rifle. He seemed doubtful. Niner couldn’t see his expression, but he heard the characteristic slight exhalation that was Atin’s silent oh-terrific.
“He’ll leave a trail a worrt could follow.”
“Ideas?”
“Yeah.” Atin leaned over Guta-Nay, and the Weequay turned his head slightly, eyes wide with terror. He seemed more terrified by the helmet than the gun. “Where do the droids take the raw rock?”
“Big place south of Teklet.”
“How far south?”
“Five klick maybe.”
Atin straightened up and indicated with a pointed finger that he was going outside. “Technical solution. Wait one.”
His predilection for gadgets was becoming a blessing. Niner was tempted to take back the unkind thoughts he’d had about the man’s training sergeant. He followed him outside. Atin jogged alongside one of the excavation droids, matching its pace before jumping up scrambling onto its flatbed. The machine rumbled inexorably up the slope as if nothing was going to divert it from its progress to the screening plant. Then it stopped and swung around, narrowly missing the droid bringing up its rear. It paused a couple of meters from Niner; Atin, kneeling on the flatbed, held up two cables.
“You can’t get it to do tricks,” he said. “But you can start, steer, and stop it now.”
“Brain bypass, eh?”
“I’ve seen a few people with those …”
“So we ride it into town?”
“How else are we going to move all this explosive?”
They couldn’t pass up the chance. Niner had plans for the charges, places to lay them all around the Imbraani countryside. They also had a temptingly neat window of opportunity to take out the ground station at Teklet, and rendering Hokan’s troops deaf to what was happening around them would double their chances of pulling off the mission. It meant they could use their own long-range comlinks at last.
“Tell you what,” Niner said. “I’ll take this one to Teklet. You hotwire another and take Fi and our friend as far back down the road to Imbraani as you can get with as much as you can carry.” He took out his datapad and checked the chart. “Lay up here where Jinart suggested, with the droid if you can, without it if you can’t.”
A bulldozer droid on a steady path to the screening plant would attract no attention. It just had to overshoot by a few kilometers. It would be dusk soon, and darkness was their best asset when it came to moving around.
Niner hauled Guta-Nay out of the building. “Is the ground station defended in any way?”
Guta-Nay had his head lowered, looking up from under his brows as if blows to the head normally accompanied questions. “Just fence to stop merlies and thieving. Only farmers around, and they scared anyway.”
“If you’re lying to me, I’ll see that you get back to Ghez Hokan alive. Okay?”
“Okay. Truth, I swear.”
Niner summoned Fi from his cover position, and they loaded two droids. One carried enough explosives to reduce the ground station to powder several times over, and the other took everything they could lay their hands on, except for some detonators and explosives to keep the blasting droid busy for a few more hours. There was no point letting the quarry’s silence advertise the fact that they had liberated some ordnance. It would spoil the whole surprise.
They loaded Guta-Nay last, bundling him into the huge bucket scoop with his arms still bound. He protested at being stuck on top of spheres of explosive.
“Don’t worry,” Atin said dismissively. “I’ve got all the dets here.” He bounced a few detonators up and down in his palm; Guta-Nay flinched. “You’ll be fine.”
“Jinart’s quite an asset,” Fi said. He took off his helmet to drink from his bottle, and Guta-Nay made an incoherent noise.
“She could be right behind us now and we’d never know. I hope they stay on our side.” Niner removed his helmet, too, and they shared the bottle before handing it to Atin for a last swig. “What’s that Weequay whining about now?”