Chapter Eleven
Chief of State Cal Omas today authorized new emergency measures to crack down on continuing unrest in Galactic City. Corellian passport holders now have forty-eight hours to report to their local CSF precinct and opt for repatriation or face internment. The move has been condemned by Senate representatives from Altyr Five. Obreedan, and Katraasii. Meanwhile, anti-terrorist squads raided homes in the Adur quarter overnight and seized explosives and blasters. Ten men and three women have been charged with conspiracy to cause explosions.
-HNE lunchtime news bulletin
ARKANIAN MICROTECHNOLOGIES HEADQUARTERS, VOHAI.
If there was a weak point in any perimeter, Boba Fett would find it. And he had.
He watched a small bird-a hummer, bright scarlet-perch on the top of the four-meter-high perimeter fence that ran for six kilometers around Arkanian Micro’s headquarters and noted that there was no reaction from the guards in the gatehouse.
There was no point having a security system so sensitive that birds could set it off. And if a bird could get over that fence, then so could Fett.
Security cams didn’t cover much beyond a hundred meters around each guarded gate. It all depended on the sensors that detected entry at any unsupervised point along or over the fence, and that was a weak point for a man with a custom disrupter.
The sensors projected a slim movement-sensitive ellipse along the entire cross section of the fence, generated from ground level and extending two meters on either side of it and-if the sweep from orbit by Slave I’s scanners was correct-two hundred meters above it to thwart aerial incursions.
Or intruders with jet packs, of course. Fett didn’t take that personally.
But the sensors didn’t react to small objects. Fett stood back from the two-meter line and took two long wires with gription clips. He cast one like an angler, looping it out from shoulder height just as he had when fishing for devees from the landing pad of his Tipoca City home as a kid. The clip snapped on to the mesh of the fence, insubstantial as a hummer. Then Fett cast the other wire two meters along the fence, attaching a second gription clip.
He now had two long lines that enabled him to attach his disrupter without breaching the sensor field. Standing inside the bight of the wires, he plugged them into the casing of the disrupter and pressed the key. He was now as good as inside. As far as the detection system could tell, there was an unbreached perimeter; the wires were effectively a loop in the fence, and the bypassed section of fence itself didn’t exist.
Fett adjusted the controls of his jet pack and soared over the fence, landing carefully within the bypassed zone. He memorized the section, visible only by looking for the gription clips. The palm-sized disrupter itself nestled unobtrusively in the grass beyond.
Fett sprinted to the cover of the wall and jetted to the flat roof. Normally he would have fired his grappling hook and climbed, but speed mattered now. It was worth the extra jet pack fuel. He lay on his belly and crept across the roof, his visor almost touching the gravelly surface as the penetrating radar scanned for people within.
It was a huge area to cover. He pressed a medical sound sensor, more sensitive than the military ones, to the roof to pick up what signal he could. From the sound of the conversation immediately below him-a woman recording someone’s educational details-he had landed over the personnel department. And he was still crawling across offices that had external windows. Taun We would be somewhere far from daylight, right at the center.
It took him more than two hours to edge his way across what seemed to him a featureless charcoal-gray cinder plain, listening for clues to what lay beneath and watching the radar outlines of bodies moving. He hoped that the disrupter would still be there when it came time to leave, but if it wasn’t, it would be far easier to make a run for it on the way out than on the way in.
This is really hurting my hips. And my chest.
Fett lifted his body slightly and took his weight on his knees and elbows. He heard the clink of glass dishes and the wusshh and umppp of chiller cabinets opening and closing. He saw people sitting, probably at a long bench and others clustered around a table. The outlines of the inorganic objects were almost impossible to make out, but he was used to assembling a mental image from the scant cues provided by the movement and shape of bodies.
He’d seen a few labs in his time. He knew how Taun We liked hers laid out. When she’d had a leg cloned for him a few years before, her Tipoca laboratory had still been just like it was when he was a kid and she had first shown him around.
He heard the occasional word that sounded like a conversation about a scanning microscope. Could mean anything. But I’m over the labs, that’s for sure. Next vent I find, next point of entry, I’m going down there.