Mird stayed put. It’ll never leave me. Not until the day I die. Vau gave up and tugged the line as a signal to the commandos to haul away. He didn’t have time to argue with a strill.
“If I’m not out of here in two minutes,” he said, “get all this stuff to Captain Ordo. Understood?”
There was a brief silence on Vau’s helmet comlink. “Understood,” said Boss.
The next few moments felt stretched into forever. The staccato clatter of approaching droid guards grew louder. Mird rumbled ominously and stared toward the doors, poised on its haunches as if to spring at the first droid to appear.
It would defend Vau to the last. It always had.
Eventually the length of thin fibercord snaked back down the shaft and slapped against the floor. Boss sounded a little breathless. “Up you come, Sergeant.”
Vau reattached the line to his belt and scooped Mird up in both arms, hoping his winch would handle the extra weight. As he rose, kicking away from the shaft wall, the machinery groaned and spat. He could see the cold gray light above him and a helmet not unlike his own Mandalorian T-shaped visor peering down at him, picked out in an eerie blue glow.
Now he could hear the throb of the snowspeeder’s drive, Fixer was right above them. As Vau squeezed his shoulders through the top of the vent, Mird leapt clear. Scorch and Sev dropped to the rock-hard snow with their DC-17s trained on something Van couldn’t yet see. When he hauled himself out, a blaster bolt seared past his head and he found himself in the middle of a firefight. A ferocious wind roared in his throat-mike.
Vau slammed the vent’s grille shut and seared it with his custom Merr-Sonn blaster, welding the metal tight to the coaming. Then he dropped a small proton grenade down the shaft through a gap. The snow shook with the explosion below. Nobody was going to be coming up behind them.
But everyone and his pet akk now knew the Dressian Kiolsh bank had intruders-Republic troops.
A distant boom followed by the whomp-whomp-whomp of artillery almost drowned out the blasterfire and howling wind. The Galactic Marines were right on time.
“Okay, Bacara’s started,” Scorch said. “Nice of him to stage a diversion.”
Mygeeto’s relentlessly white landscape gave no clue that it housed cities deep below. Only a few were visible on the surface. The packed snow of eons was pierced by jagged mountains that formed glass canyons like extravagant ice sculptures. A surface patrol-six droids on snowshoe-like feet, ten organics who were probably Muuns under the cold-weather gear-had cut them off from the snowspeeder just meters away. Rounds zapped and steamed off the vessel’s fuselage; Fixer, kneeling beside it, returned a hail of blue Deece fire that kept the security patrol pinned down.
If that snowie gets damaged, we’re never getting off this rock.
Vau checked his panoramic vision. Mird was close at his side, pressing against him. He could see only the patrol; nothing else showed up on his sensors. That didn’t mean there weren’t more closing in on them, though.
The big bundle of plunder lay on the snow where Delta had dropped it. Right then, it was simply convenient cover-Vau crawled behind his oversized multimillion-credit sand-bag and took aim. The bdapp-bdapp-bdapp of blasters and ragged breathing filled his helmet-his, Delta’s?-but there was no chatter. Delta Squad exchanged few words during engagements lately. They’d been born together, raised together, and they’d come as close to knowing one another’s thoughts as any normal humans could. Now they were laying down fire exactly as he’d trained them while Fixer defended their getaway vessel, all without a word.
How the Muuns would explain away a Mandalorian fighting with Republic forces Vau wasn’t sure, but then everyone knew that Mandos would fight for anyone for the right price.
Scorch clipped a grenade launcher on his Deece.
“Not good,” he said. “More droids.”
Vau now saw what Scorch could. His HUD picked up shapes moving in rigid formation, almost invisible to infrared but definitely showing up in the electromagnetic spectrum. Then he saw them rounding an outcrop of glittering crystal, clanking ludicrous things with long snouts, a platoon of them. Scorch fired the grenade, smashing into the front rank of four. An eruption of snow and metal fragments fanned into the air and were whipped away by the wind. The rank behind was caught by the shrapnel from their comrades; and two toppled over, decapitated by buckled chunks of metal.
But the rest kept coming. Vau checked the topography on his HUD. They were approaching down an ice wadi almost opposite the first patrol’s location, about to cut across the path between Fixer and the rest of them, and that meant the only way to the speeder now was to run the enemy gauntlet.