Troy's group was preparing to take revenge for their leader according to all the rules of military art. Even on approach, Larius, deeply immersed in the Force, raised her hand with three fingers extended. Nik nodded and raised two more. The mercenary grinned, tossed a gloop grenade in her palm, Nik tossed her another and increased speed. The machine flew out onto the wasteland as if all the cops in the Galaxy were chasing it, and the trunk was packed to the brim with contraband ryl.
"You're taking a risk," Larius dropped, activating the first grenade and choosing a target.
"Their 'colleague' taught them," the navigator gritted out. His gray eyes burned with predatory excitement; he made no attempt to hide how captivated he was by what was to come.
"Is that good or bad?" the mercenary clarified, preparing to throw.
"They'll make the same mistake I would have made in their place," Nik slammed on the brakes, the minivan skidded again, and the first ion blast missed its target. It hit very luckily – on the other side of the wasteland, a portable turret choked on a burst of fire. Nik threw the speeder aside; a moment later, a puff of explosion bloomed among the ruins behind them.
"They're in a hurry..." the navigator exhaled, heading towards the semi-ruined basement. "That's good..."
"Opponent's mistakes are always good..." A gloop grenade, accelerated by the Force, covered the bombardier. A mound of boiling white foam marked the neutralized firing position. "Guns are done."
"Excellent..." Nik steered the minivan under the ruins of an arch, slowing down. "We jump on the count of three. One... two..."
On "three," the doors flew open, and two figures tumbled under the cover of the ruins. The machine, with a clang, entered the gap nose-first and got stuck there. Blurry silhouettes, imperceptible to the eye, darted towards the basement entrance...
Time in Acceleration becomes viscous, like thick molasses. Troy had trained his fighters well – they managed to react to the appearance of the forces, they even started to turn and raise their weapons – but as if they were doing it deep underwater. In the center, tied to a fragment where Troy had recently burned, Muha hung on ropes. He was unconscious, but still alive – the forces didn't deceive themselves about such things.
Larius moved to the prisoner, slashed the ropes, caught the limp body, and jumped out into the gap above. Another jump – and she was at the speeder. Without much tenderness, she dropped her prize onto the back seat, fell into the driver's seat, and put the minivan in reverse. The machine began to extricate itself from cover with a screech.
Nik lingered. He couldn't leave an armed opponent behind. Especially a whole group. He had never been a first-class hand-to-hand fighter, but when your opponent flounders like a fly stuck in honey, you don't need special talents. With a practiced, precise movement, he twisted the heavy rifle out of one fighter's hands, then tore the equipment belt off another, jumped out after Larius, and dropped two grenades. For the capture group, time had completely stopped – not even a rancor could move in gloop. There was no chance anyone would reach the fighters with the foam dissolver before they suffocated in the depths of the foamed bunker.
A torturous death. It would have been more merciful to use fragmentation grenades, but then Troy's men would have had a chance of survival, albeit a minuscule one. Nik was not merciful.
He arrived at the speeder just in time to fall next to the mercenary and release Acceleration, feeling a slight tremor from the strain.
"Go!" the navigator barked, barely managing to press the headset button. "Rick, FIRE!"
Cutting through the air, the heavy speeder ascended almost vertically with a strained howl.
"Chance" hovered a hundred meters above the battlefield. Rick's panel clearly displayed the panorama of events. He marked the approaching speeder and two points with gloop hemispheres:
"Don't touch that, otherwise – have fun," Rick focused on maneuvering the ship out of fire if necessary, opened the cargo hold for the machine, and shifted most of the shield power to the forward hemisphere, which faced the wasteland.
"Sher," Rick activated the ship-wide communication, "a Toydarian will appear in our cargo hold now; he needs medical attention."
There were two more dangerous spots. From one, they tried to fire at the ship with a heavy sniper rifle; it caused no damage, although the speeder itself would have been in trouble with a close encounter. The second was an armored speeder that followed the minivan. Jethro decided it was offended and thoroughly dealt with both the sniper and the racers.
"I'm afraid Muha's contacts with the Sun won't do you any good now," Nik said, appearing in the cockpit and walking to his seat. "They'll find us themselves now..."
"Let them get in line," Rick was busy marking the most dangerous points for the ship for Jethro, though there weren't many of them, "we have a tractor beam here..."
He brought up the control program for this tool to Nik.
"I think we can have a talk with those who are currently in gloop, drag them into the hangar," he marked the spots that Larius had sealed in foam earlier. "While they're still alive."
"You can't get them out of the basement; the ceiling will be in the way," Nik reminded him. "But the grenadier's statue – easily."
"Give me the grenadier," Rick sighed, calculating how much good stuff was being wasted and how many people were killed just because someone conducted their business too harshly, "Jet, keep an eye on the situation."
The counter himself pondered whether to deal with those buried in the basement. And decided not to. Someone had to bear responsibility for all this. And it shouldn't be his team.
"Watching," the pirate's mood improved, but he didn't become any less attentive.
The navigator caught the mound of foam in the ruins with the tractor beam and dragged it into the cargo hold.
Rick, meanwhile, unbuckled his seatbelts and nodded to the navigator as soon as he lifted the grenadier: "Take over control," he got up from his seat, stretching his fingers, "I'll go and look our offenders in the face."
In the cargo hold, he was met by a mound of solidified gloop, in which not even the outline of a human figure could be discerned. There were difficulties in looking this offender in the face...
On the way to the cargo hold, the guy peeked into the workshop and took an aerosol can with a liquid that had been a standard part of the ship's equipment for almost fifty years. A universal solvent and surface cleaner. There was a joke among the technicians that there should only be two things on the ship for repairs. This very solvent, if something wasn't moving when it should, and duct tape, if something was moving when it shouldn't. The tape was also carefully placed in his pocket.
Putting the can on the floor, he examined the structure from head to toe with the Force, paying particular attention to searching for weapons. He didn't need any shooting here. Along the way, he examined the cargo hold for any intruders.
The cargo hold ignored intruders – they hadn't mastered teleportation yet. No shooting was expected either – there was a fresh, not yet completely cooled corpse in the gloop.
Rick felt no compassion for the attacker. He regretted the wasted lives, time, and equipment so carelessly, but it wasn't his fault. He began to slowly unpack the corpse from the gloop's embrace with the aerosol.
In the gloop, besides the body, they found a portable launcher, a couple of unused mines, a blaster in a holster on his thigh, a knife – very similar to the one Rick had previously taken as a trophy from Troy, and an ID card with a couple of credits.
"Nik, how's the view?" Rick contacted the navigator via comlink, sorting everything into different piles.
"Quiet for now," he replied. "Too quiet. Do we really need to stick around here like a zit on an ass?"
Rick thought. It was a shame to leave a pile of weapons and equipment lying around like this. But his skin was more valuable.
"Drag the remains of their machine into the hangar, if anything is left," there was a very good chance that the navigator's memory was intact, and it would be possible to find the location of the group's base.
"Executing..."
Somewhere below, a pile of broken and burned metal, which had recently been a heavy armored speeder, stirred and floated upwards.
Rick waited until the cargo was in the hold, preparing himself for the smell and sight of burned flesh. The temptation to profit from Troy's base was too great to be squeamish about such an attempt. When the remains of the machine were completely inside, he pressed the cargo hold closing button and said briefly:
"Let's fly out of here," after which he went to examine the machine.
"Where are we flying to?" came the clarification from the cockpit.
"There's a lot of junk in orbit, including ship wrecks; we'll drift there for now," the captain decided.
"Understood, received..."
"Lucky Chance" began to gain altitude. Without spectacular maneuvers, on repulsors alone, as if pulled by a thread from above, the ship left the atmosphere.
Rick dragged the corpse aside so it wouldn't be in the way. He needed to get rid of it soon. He didn't need the smell of a corpse on the ship. He sat down near the wreckage and immersed himself in the Force; he needed to find all the surviving electronics and, while the metal was cooling, he could conduct this search.
Not much electronics survived. The good news was that the navigation system was intact. The bad news was that the machine had a tracker. And it was working.
Rick examined the tracker, approaching it through the Force. It was enough to break the power circuits to disable the dangerous object, which he intended to do. However, it turned out that the tracker had its own power source, independent of the machine's generator.
Disconnecting the native power source was no problem for Rick either. He didn't even need to completely destroy the circuit. Breaking the cathode from the power source in accordance with the laws of electrical engineering, he examined the bug: whether the vile insect showed signs of life.
The signal stopped.
Smiling, the young man stood up and now unhurriedly went first to the workshop to grab a sledgehammer, a laser cutter, and a crowbar, and then, securing the cutter and crowbar to his belt, and slinging the sledgehammer over his shoulder, he went to the cockpit to assess the situation.
"Who are you going to hit?" Nik asked, carefully docking "Chance" to the wreck of some transport, sufficiently gnawed to not interest scavengers.
"Did we circle around a lot?" the young man asked the navigator in return, "because I disabled the bug about twenty minutes ago."
"Then we have about fifteen minutes of tangled tracks," Nik replied. "You always bring all sorts of junk aboard..."
"What fell," Rick smiled, correcting the navigator, "in about three hours I'll have the location of our offenders' base. Which I plan to plunder a little."
"And what if it turns out to be a fortified point?" Nik looked back at the captain, lean and tense like a hunting feline. "What if we ourselves... get plundered a little."
"I'll be surprised if it's not there," the counter snorted, shifting his striking tool more comfortably. "But I have a couple of ideas. Besides, half my team are daredevils, we'll manage. Go calm down our doctor; she's so worried that I can even feel the echoes of her emotions here. I'm going to the cargo hold."
"Jethro," the navigator unbuckled his restraints. "Take over."
The Duro willingly moved to the pilot's seat. The seatbelt buckles hadn't even clicked when the door closed behind Nik.
Larius carried Karvo, supporting him with the Force so as not to cause further damage. This time, Weimi opened the door for them, immediately stepping aside so as not to get in the way.
The Toydarian was unconscious. The bioanalyzer monitor showed a slowed pulse, increased venous pressure, shortness of breath... Moreover, as Sher noticed, the Toydarian was only inhaling. The icons on the bioanalyzer screen indicated that the alien's blood was saturated with carbon dioxide. Along with the onset of small muscle twitches, this threatened clonic seizures and irreversible consequences.
"He needs lung ventilation; we don't have the apparatus, so I'll do artificial respiration myself," Sher said almost in a rush, and looking at the alien's crippled wings, she added. "I'll have to put his head on the table. Hold the body suspended."
Larius moved to the table without a word. The alien's head lay on the tabletop, the rest hung in the air, supported by the soft grip of the Force. The mercenary's face was completely impassive – as if she had suddenly forgotten how to feel anything.
"Weimi, please roll up a towel and something else into a cylinder," Sher asked, taking out wipes from her case and preparing syringes with anti-shock drugs. The cylinder, constructed by the lethan from towels, was placed under the Toydarian's head and shoulders. Sher gently, but still noticeably, pressed on Muha's chin, and his mouth opened. "Cadet Karrada... – suddenly, quite inappropriately, she remembered her surgery instructor, an officer with tired eyes. – This is how you'll stroke your guy. Hit him on the chin with your fist!"
His mouth opened with fangs sticking out. The proboscis... The proboscis was crushed... And the tissue damage was quite significant. But this was already noted by the doctor's subconscious. Sher cleared the oral cavity with two quick finger movements, pierced a wipe with a scalpel, and applied it to the Toydarian's lips.
Closing the proboscis with her palm, with two breaths, she took the required volume of air into her lungs and exhaled into the Toydarian's mouth. His chest rose and then fell a second or two later. And Sher inhaled again and exhaled. And continued... On the fifth cycle, the Toydarian's skin turned from pale gray to bluish. And he began to breathe on his own and fully.
"Thank you for your help, Larius," Sher said without looking up, and with a precise, practiced movement, injected the prepared syringe with an anti-shock and analgesic into a vein on Muha's three-fingered thin arm. "But that's not all. If you don't mind, support him a little longer. You can sit half-on the table. We'll try to build him something like a suspended cot, or rather, a hammock with holes for the wings... Did you and Nik get hurt?"
Having said all this in one breath, Sher looked at the mercenary and fell silent. It became clear what thought had been bothering her all this time, but by concentrating on resuscitation, she had pushed it away. Larius wasn't holding Muha with her hands...
"Don't get distracted, doc," the mercenary advised quietly. "I'll hold him as long as needed. Just tell me when it's enough."
The Toydarian's little body hung over the table and began to bend smoothly at what served as the alien's waist. At one point, Karvo gasped – deeper than he had breathed before, jerked his arms, and immediately froze, encased in a tight cocoon of the Force.
"I think that's enough," Larius concluded. Muha opened his watery eyes, blinked shortsightedly, and the mercenary frowned.
"Doc, check his vision. I think he can't see us."
Sher threw her braid back, freeing herself from distracting thoughts and falling strands in one movement.
"We need a strong and sufficiently thin material," she turned her head to Weimi. "Ideally, it wouldn't crawl after being cut. At least for a couple of hours... This blanket might work."
Karvo's noisy sigh made her immediately switch her attention back to the patient.
"Mr. Karvo... This is Eni Wedge, don't worry, you're safe. Can you see me?" she asked softly, nodded to Larius, and took out the analyzer. It revealed no burns on the cornea, no organic or functional vision impairments. "Your visual system just hasn't adapted yet after... Mr. Karvo, what did they do to you?" the doc took a solution from her case and dripped it into the Toydarian's eyes to relieve corneal irritation.