"This is all wrong!" Mike insisted, not for the first time, as he, Vickie, and Becki waited at a sidewalk table of a café just down the street from the last of their leads.
"What is?" Becki asked, only half-attentive to her wingmate as she focused on the datapad before her. "The prices they charge for sitting on the terrace?"
"Don't encourage him," Vickie grumbled, sipping her cocoa and bracing herself to hear this particular tirade from Mike again.
"This whole setup," Mike continued, undaunted. "It's a warehouse, for pity's sake. An old, abandoned warehouse, if we're lucky. And here we are in broad daylight!"
"You have a problem with daylight?" Becki asked, then glanced up to take in his all-black outfit, complete with dark glasses and his infamous trenchcoat. "Okay. Maybe you do. But I don't see what's wrong with checking this lead now."
"The principle of the thing. An old warehouse. We should investigate the place in the dead of night, if we're to be proper spies. That's when you find all the good stuff. Not half an hour after lunch." Mike punctuated his point by thrusting his hands back into the pockets of the trenchcoat.
Becki rolled her eyes and looked away from him, back in the direction of the warehouse that they had found occupying the address that came last on Mike's list of leads. Within a moment, a smile replaced the look of annoyance that his arguments had brought to her face. "There he is," she said, nodding with relief to where Josh was approaching their table.
"How does it look?" Vickie asked their leader.
"Did you find a way in?" Mike asked.
"Any idea yet why it was on the list?" Becki asked.
"Easy," Josh answered, holding up his hands as if to fend off their inquiries. He sat down at their table's fourth chair and then continued. "No, no ideas yet why it's on the list. Usually that's easier to determine from the inside," he teased.
"Well, it was worth a try; we might've been lucky, for once," Becki grinned in response.
"And as for getting in to determine such . . . ?" Vickie prompted.
"Not going to be easy. Security guard at the public entrance and the main freight entrance, and the scanner detects surveillance systems on both that and the back door."
"Wait," Mike said. "No surveillance system at the front door, the public entrance?"
"Apparently they think the guard is sufficient for that," Josh nodded.
A feral grin broke out on Mike's face. "Well, then. Even in the daylight, this should be no trouble. Not for us."
Becki and Vickie strolled down the street, right past the guarded entrance of the warehouse, then suddenly stopped, frowned at the map they held between them, turned all about as if hopelessly lost, and then finally looked back to the warehouse entrance.
Vickie approached the guard first, with Becki following, intent on the map. "Excusy-moi, M'sieur," said the Jedi in her least Parisian of accents, "parley Anglais?"
"Oui, Madame," said the guard, sighing at the blatant tourist-like-ness of the two women. "You require assistance?"
"Yes, please," Vickie nodded. "We are looking for an address, and it doesn't seem to be where it should be. From the map it looks like 170 St. Germain should be right around here, but . . . well . . . it isn't, instead there's your shop here."
"St. Germain?" The guard scratched his head and peeked over Becki's shoulder at the map.
"Yes," Becki said, "isn't that the address for Deux Magots? You know, that café?"
"Ah! That!" The guard laughed and shook his head. "It's the Boulevard St. Germain you want, for that. This is the Rue Germain Pilon, here. Not the saint at all."
"Oh dear!" Becki smiled. "That explains it. Oh, but . . . oh my. I don't suppose you could show us how to get to that other street from here? We seem to have taken a wrong turn."
"Quite," said the guard dryly. "Deux Magots lies on the other side of the Seine. Here, let me show you the route. . . ."
The guard thus occupied with Becki and her map, it was as simple as Mike had sworn it would be for Vickie to slip into the man's mind, erasing any memory of her own presence there, all while she herself was slipping past him into the warehouse.
On this side of the building, just inside its public entrance, Vickie found herself in a short hall with offices opening to either side. She reached for her lightsaber but didn't yet activate it, just held it ready as she made her way quietly down the hall. Stretching out with the Force, she catalogued every sentient presence within her range--just behind her, Becki still distracting the guard; ahead, presences she could identify as human but nothing more specific; and farther away, faintly, even Mike and Josh. She focused on those unidentified presences, making sure to pass each office window or open door when she was sure that the people within were busy looking elsewhere. In this way she moved quickly past the doors of receptionists, sales representatives, managers and others. Halfway to the end, she realized that something was wrong when a twinge of alarm appeared in one of the Force presences she was sensing--and quickly spread to others, nearer to her. Had she been sighted? No alarms were sounding that she could tell, no lights flashing, nothing on the surface seemed out of the ordinary. Just that sudden alarm in minds touched by her own. Vickie ran the rest of the way to the end of the hall. One door was unlabeled; the other, marked with the international symbol for a stairwell. She took the stairs.
The second floor featured a hall like a mirror image of that on the first, save that in place of the unlabeled door was a window stretching from shoulder height up to the ceiling; through this, Vickie could just make out the shapes of shelves and, higher up, rafters in the warehouse beyond. She turned back to the hall, and there on the right was the door she wanted, the one marked "Sécurité." She listened for a moment, both with ears and the Force. Two people inside--she'd have to be careful, for here she felt the Force-alarm most strongly. But nevertheless, the quick way would be the best way, so in one smooth movement she opened the door and stepped into the security office.
A bank of monitors faced her from the other end of the room, showing several locations in the building and two outside it, at the back door and the freight entrance--but none out front, so Vickie couldn't tell if Becki had moved on yet. Little time to think of that, however, as two uniformed men sitting before the monitors had risen quickly at the sound of the door, turning to face her. One shouted, "C'est elle! [1]" while the other started to bring up a weapon. Vickie was quicker, her lightsaber springing to life to deflect the blaster bolts--
--Blaster bolts? her mind throbbed with the recognition of it. What have we blundered into?
But then, it looked as if the security officers were wondering the same sort of thing, especially after Vickie had quickly disarmed the both of them and right before she convinced them, with a well-practiced wave of her hand, that now would be a very good time for a nap. Then, having dragged the unconscious pair back to their chairs, she blotted from their minds all memories of her, just as she had done with the guard at the front entrance.
And then she gave a longer moment's consideration to the monitors and the other controls in front of the sleeping men's chairs. With a sinking feeling she recognized the view in one of the monitors: there might be no surveillance camera outside at the front entrance, but there was certainly one in the hall right inside it. She recognized the path she'd walked past those first-floor offices, and realized that the two men she'd faced in this room would have seen her walking there. So the feelings of alarm she'd sensed . . . no sirens or flashing lights, perhaps, but the security officers must have triggered some sort of silent alarm. The building was on alert; they knew she was here.
"Sithspit," she grumbled, "can't anything ever be simple?" as she set about figuring out how to work the security system for the building.
Becki skidded to a stop where her teammates waited, around a corner in the alley behind the warehouse. Josh, watching the end of the alley from which she'd approached, nodded a greeting and pulled her down into a crouch next to them. Mike, watching the other end, in the direction of the warehouse's back door, flicked his gaze in her direction only briefly, along with one of his cryptic smiles, then looked back to the door.
"How'd it go?" Josh whispered.
"She's in," Becki whispered back. "As far as I could tell, when he sent me on my way to Deux Magots, the guard had no idea there'd ever been another person with me. He told me to take care, wandering around Paris alone like this," she explained with a grin.
"Now we wait," Josh nodded.
"Not for long," Mike muttered. "Look!"
As the back door slowly opened, the Terra Group agents braced themselves, ready to spring forward--or away, if need be. Then the door suddenly swung open the rest of the way, and there was Vickie, waving at them to approach.
They joined her at the door and slipped quietly into the building. Vickie shut the door behind them, whispering, "Cameras are off now, and so are the guys watching them. Off in la-la land, that is. But we don't have much time anyway. I think I triggered some sort of alarm on my way in."
"Oh great, just great," Josh muttered.
"Look, let's just grab some of the uniforms the workers we saw outside were wearing. That ought to let us walk around a little more freely if Vickie was only seen by the two she knocked out."
"Sure, Mike, great idea. No one will notice four new workers wandering around together right after the silent alarm goes off," said Vickie, accentuated with an exaggerated roll of her eyes.
"Do you have a better idea?" he shot back at her.
"No, but I do," Josh broke in. "You two look around the warehouse floor," he said, indicating Vickie and Mike. "Becki and I will go through the offices upstairs."
"You and Becki. Convenient that it always works out that way, isn't it?" Mike said.
"It's just because I greatly prefer her company to the both of you," Josh replied as he led Becki towards the stairs.
He just barely caught Mike's reply of "So what's new about that?"
Becki and Josh stood in a long, stark-white hallway with a dozen doors on either side and another at the end. One led to a copy room, another to a conference room, and all the rest were offices. "So where do we start?" Josh asked as he scanned the hallway uncertainly.
"The one at the end," Becki said immediately. "It's the biggest, so it probably belongs to someone important."
Josh flashed an impressed smile at her. "Hey, good thinking," he said.
"Try not to sound so surprised," she replied with a smile of her own. "Hope no one's in there."
Just as they approached the door, a mustached Frenchman came barreling out, nearly knocking over the two agents in the process. He moved with all the speed of a person who had mere moments to make an urgent appointment, despite being more than a few pounds overweight. Quickly he turned down a side hallway and disappeared from view. Josh smirked at Becki. "There isn't anymore," he said.
They slipped quickly and quietly inside the office, closing the door behind them. "How did you get him out?" Becki asked.
"Gave him the distinct impression that if he didn't get to the restroom very soon he'd have a mess to clean up in here."
"Which would be a shame," Becki said. She was too busy admiring the spacious office they found themselves in to pay Josh much attention. The wall opposite the door was lined with windows looking out onto the street in front of the warehouse from which Becki and Vickie had entered. The wall next to the door featured an enormous fish tank practically overflowing with brightly colored fish of all sizes and descriptions. The tank was built into the wall, and for an insane moment Becki wondered how the fish were fed. Deciding there were likely more important matters to consider, though, she continued her scan of the office and for the first time noticed the desk that dominated the end of the room. It was easily as long as Josh was tall and made of very solid-looking wood. It sat on a raised platform, so that anyone entering the room would be forced to look up at whoever sat behind it.
Josh was already situating himself in the high-backed leather chair behind the desk. "Executives are the absolute worst about data security. I bet this guy never locks his system," he remarked as he tapped at the keys on the laptop on the desk. "Dammit, no such luck. But he is using Windows."
"You think you can get into it?" Becki asked. She stepped up onto the platform and began searching through the credenza behind Josh.
"Well, I was a computer technician before I joined this crazy team, you know," he said.
Becki paused for a moment in her search to look over her shoulder at the back of Josh's head. "Actually, I didn't know that. And such a useful thing to know, too."
"Yeah, I worked in tech support for a couple of years after I was kicked out of the Air Force. I'd just come home from a bad day at work when I decided it would be a good idea to steal a plane and get involved in your little war," he said, still bent over the computer.
"That must have been an especially bad day, yes," she chuckled, shoving aside a pair of wine glasses to inspect the back of the credenza. "Hey, look!" she said, suddenly excited. "This thing has a false back."
"No kidding?"
"Locked. But not much of a lock. Hm. . . ."
Josh looked away from the computer to find Becki on her knees, half inside the large cabinet, pulling out a hairpin from somewhere within her hair. "Don't tell me you're going to--" he laughed and she looked up, grinning.
"Learned this from Tyria. Now, let me see. . . . Yeah. There we go!" The lock opened with a barely audible click. Becki pushed the panel aside and reached into the opening, then frowned in disappointment.
"Find anything?" Josh asked.
She shook her head and tossed him the contents of the secret compartment: a single bottle of tequila. "Guess he thought that was important enough to hide."
Josh chuckled and set it on the desk. "Everyone's got something to hide, it seems."
"Apparently. Speaking of which," Becki said, sweetly but with a relentless note, as she returned to her search, sifting through a stack of papers in one of the desk's drawers, "you know, you've never talked much about your life before you joined us, except that you were once an Air Force pilot and that you have an impossibly cute cat. "
"It's not that I'm trying to keep things from you guys, really. Sci and Vickie know quite a bit about my life. I guess I've just never felt close enough to the rest of the group to tell them much about it."
She raised an eyebrow and moved to the next drawer. "So who's kept you from getting to know us better? Us, or you?"
Josh sighed. "Fair question. Me mostly, I guess."
"You do seem to keep yourself separated from the rest of us most of the time. Of course, you realize, that's just the sort of situation to inspire rampant curiosity. . . ."
He blanched and glanced over at her. "That doesn't sound good."
"We all have our theories," she grinned, "to substitute for actual knowledge. But you'll excuse me if I don't repeat any of them, especially some of the more colorful ones."
"Well, now you know a little more than you did," he said. "For all the good it's doing us," he added as he sighed in frustration.
"Not having any luck?" she asked.
"Not really. You?"
"Not a bit," she replied, shoving another drawer shut in disgust.
"Their security is pretty good. I've tried every trick I know to bypass it and I'm not getting anywhere. I'm afraid to do much more because I don't want to leave too much in their security logs."
"Yeah, it'd probably be better not to leave too much evidence," Becki said as she turned from the drawers to look at the computer. Placing a hand on Josh's right shoulder for balance, she peered over his left shoulder at the laptop. "Did you get anything out of it?"
"They're using Windows 2000 Professional desktops on an NT-based network running Active Directory and all the cool new Windows 2000 security enhancements. Every trick in the book from the factory, plus a few that have to be add-ons. The drive's encrypted, so even if we took it out of this system we'd never be able to see what's on it." Josh turned his head slightly to look at Becki, and couldn't suppress a chuckle at the glazed-over look in her gray eyes. "Basically, we can't get in. If we had a slicer with us, maybe, but I can't do it on my own."
"And you were a computer technician?" she teased.
"I was mostly a hardware guy. But I'm certified in Windows 2000, and that's how I know we won't get into this thing without someone noticing."
"Oh, well. . . ." Becki became aware then of just how close her face was to Josh's. She turned away, slightly embarrassed, and caught sight of the telephone on the desk and a notepad sitting next to it. On top was a hand written note three lines long.
Alba Varden
Mardi
La Seine
"Hey Josh, look at this," she said as she picked up the pad.
Mike was still grumbling as he and Vickie entered the main floor of the warehouse, at which point Vickie decided she'd had enough. "Mike, would you shut up already!? I'm sure everyone in the building can hear you whining."
Mike stopped short at her harsh rebuke. "Sorry. It's just I think there are better ways we could be going about this."
"Yes, I know. I got that. Half an hour ago. Really, do you think I'm deaf?"
"Sometimes I wonder. . . ." he muttered.
She sighed in resignation and moved further into the warehouse. The room was large, but not as large as it might be. Certainly not as large as many warehouses Vickie had seen. The room was about four times as wide as it was deep, the long side being the front and back of the building. Along the back wall were a series of loading doors, each with a red and a green light next to it. At the moment all the doors were closed and the red lights lit. Two stories above them a mobile crane clung to the ceiling, waiting for a heavy piece of cargo to move. At the level of the second floor a metal walkway ran around two sides of the room, with various hallways, windows, and doors leading into the office portion of the building. In the corner of the two walkways a single metal staircase led down to the floor. The main floor itself was crowded with all manner of wooden crates and cardboard boxes, some small enough to be stacked one on top of another and others so large they had their own cargo pallets built-in. They were arranged neatly into rows plenty large enough for a forklift to pass through, though there were none in evidence anywhere.
"Why don't you go look through the boxes, and I'll check around the edges of the room," Vickie suggested.
Mike took a deep breath and opened his mouth as if to say something more substantial, but finally settled for a curt "Okay." The two went off in their happily separate directions, each not-so-secretly glad to be away from the other.
Vickie started her search by going down the line of cargo doors, looking for anything that seemed out of place. Through their unique Force connection, she could feel Mike's boredom as he searched through the cargo containers. Apparently he wasn't finding anything useful. For that matter, neither was she. The warehouse was kept almost obsessively clean. The area was free of the bits of paper and wads of packing tape that would usually seem to spontaneously generate in a place like this. There were no signs on the walls warning employees not to ride the pallet jacks or to be careful with box knives. No e-mailed jokes or funny cartoons were taped to the walls. The walls and the bare concrete floor shone as if they were brand new. She couldn't even find any outside dirt around the loading doors, much less anything of use in their investigation.
As Vickie continued her trip around the outside edges of the warehouse, Mike walked slowly through the boxes and crates that filled the space. He found them as unremarkable as Vickie had so far found the perimeter. Almost too unremarkable, in fact. None of the containers had labels or markings of any kind on them. Several times he walked all the way around a container, or picked up some of the smaller ones, to examine them from all angles. Nothing. No shipping labels, no barcodes for routing, and no packing lists in clear plastic envelopes.
"Damn weird," Mike muttered to himself.
Having passed the entire line of shipping doors and the short, blank wall at the end of the warehouse without finding anything even remotely interesting, Vickie turned to walk down the long wall opposite the doors. The wide metal walkway was above her, shielding her from view of the office windows on the second floor. A few feet from the end of the wall she found another roll-up door, similar to the cargo doors on the opposite wall but only two-thirds as wide. Like everything else she'd seen it was plain and featureless, lacking even a handle or a button to open it. A front loading door? she wondered. But no, that didn't make any sense. With the office space in the front of the building it was easily thirty feet to the street, and she hadn't seen a corresponding door there.
Brushing that mystery aside, as the team seemed to do with all of the mysteries it had encountered on this mission, Vickie moved on down the wall. The remainder of its length was as uninteresting as the rest of the building had been until she reached its far end. Just before the metal stairway up to the second floor stood a workbench nestled beneath the overhead walkway. Under it was a padded rubber mat designed to reduce back and leg strain for anyone standing at the bench for a long period of time. It was, Vickie noted, the first sign she'd seen that this place was ever inhabited by humans. The workbench was empty, except for a computer with a large flat screen monitor and a dot matrix printer. Vickie was unsurprised to note that the printer, despite its apparent age, looked like it had just come out of the box.
And from the top of the printer flowed several printed pages, hanging over the back of the desk nearly to the floor.
"Hey Mike, come take a look at this!" she called out. Before she even heard Mike's approaching footsteps she was standing at the bench, scanning the pages as quickly as she could.
"None of the boxes in this place are marked," Mike grumbled as he approached. "How do they find anything?"
"It's cleaner than the High Palace in here, too. Here, look at this," she said, pointing to the printer.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Looks like cargo manifests. Each page has a container number at the top," she said, pointing to the top of one of the pages. Then pointing at a list further down the page she continued, "and this looks like a list of what's in the container."
Mike scanned through several of the pages quickly, his frown deepening as he read. "None of this stuff makes any sense."
"Take a look at number 8311," she suggested. "Second page."
Mike flipped quickly to the second page and found it had only one part listed. "'Focusing matrix'? Wonder what that is."
"I dunno," Vickie admitted. "But does it sound like something you might find in a shield generator?"
"Hm." Mike glanced at the shipping details printed at the bottom of the page. "Carrier, AlbVar. Destination, Leb. What is this, some kind of code?"
"Hé!" a voice called out in French. "Qu'est-ce que vous faites!? [2]" Vickie and Mike spun to see a short, chubby Frenchman with a mustache on the second floor walkway near the back corner of the building. His expression was one of shock and a good bit of fear, although he was trying his best to inject a commanding tone into his shouts. He snatched a small radio from his belt and yelled into it, "Sécurité! A l'entrepot! [3]"
"Oh hell!" Mike exclaimed as he yanked the pages from the printer and hurriedly began stuffing them into one of his jacket pockets.
"L'entrepot?" asked a confused voice through the radio. "N'êtes-vous pas a votre bureau, monsieur? [4]"
"Non! Imbécile! Je- [5]" The angry Frenchman, who was beginning to turn a florid shade of red, was cut off mid-sentence as Vickie yanked the radio out of his hand with the Force and smashed it against the walkway's safety railing. The man stood staring in open fear at the two Terra Group agents for a moment until the sound of running feet - and not just a few, either - caught everyone's attention.
"Well this sounds like fun," Vickie said as she pulled her lightsaber from its hiding place.
"What's it mean?" Becki asked as Josh stared at the note she'd found. "Alba Varden. . . . Wasn't that the name of Hitler's girlfriend?"
"No, that was Eva Braun," Josh corrected absently.
"Hm. . . . Hey, Romulus and Remus! They were born in--no, never mind. That was Alba Longa."
Josh spared her one dubious glance before returning to the note. "Mardi is Tuesday. Hmmm. Something happening on the river tomorrow?"
"Then maybe Alba Varden's the--" She stopped short as Josh suddenly stiffened. "What is it?"
"Trouble," he said. "I think we better go."
Josh turned and ran for the door, stuffing the notepad in his pocket as he went. Becki followed close behind him, pulling out her blaster at the same time he did. They raced through the door and found the hallway in front of them empty. Down the longer hall to their left, though, three armed men rushed towards them, shouting for them to stop. Both agents fired a few random shots in the direction of the approaching men before Josh pushed Becki towards the empty hallway. "Go!" he shouted as he turned his attention back towards the onrushing men. Instead of firing on them again, though, he blasted away at the wall several feet from the door they'd just exited.
The blaster bolts tore straight through the drywall and into the fishtank on the other side of the wall. The backside of the tank shattered and hundreds of gallons of water blasted out into the hallway. The sheer force of the water knocked the three approaching men to the ground and threw them against the opposite wall. A split second after the first shot was fired the area was filled with running water, aquarium plants, millions of small blue rocks, and several very unhappy fish.
In moments, Mike and Vickie were pinned down by half a dozen men with heavy blasters crouched on the facing walkway. Their fire was constant. It didn't allow the Terra Group agents a moment's respite to take action of their own. They huddled down beside the workbench, out of the direct line of fire of the men above. But just barely. The gunmen were being very careful not to hit anything on the bench, so all their shots were hitting the wall on the other side of Mike and Vickie. It was effective at keeping the pair in place, but wasn't doing much for the spotless condition of the warehouse.
"They shouldn't have blasters!" Mike protested.
"Why don't you go out there and tell them that, then!" Vickie replied. Before she could see Mike's rolling eyes or hear his exasperated sigh she jumped out from their hiding place and activated her lightsaber. She deflected every bolt coming at them, giving Mike the chance to return fire from behind the cover she created. That he did enthusiastically, stunning a pair of the gunmen almost immediately. The unconscious were quickly dragged away and replaced by fresh troops.
"How many of them are there!?" Vickie complained.
"More than enough," Mike said. "D'you think you could focus a bit more? That last one almost got through!"
"I could concentrate more if I didn't constantly have to worry about you shooting me instead of them!" Vickie punctuated her complaint by whipping her blade around to absorb an uncomfortably close shot from Mike's blaster.
"That was nowhere near you!"
As Mike lined up another shot, four of the gunmen were thrown off their feet and pitched over the railing to crash headlong into the containers below. "Josh is here," Mike said as he took down another opponent with a shot that barely grazed his leg.
Vickie nodded. "Showoff."
Now it was their adversaries who were pinned down as the two remaining gunmen cowered down at the end of the walkway, taking fire from two directions. The one Mike had grazed tried to stand but his leg collapsed out from under him, apparently numb from the glancing stun blast. Becki and Josh moved farther down the other side of the walkway, trying to get a better angle on their opponents. They finally took up a position almost directly above the other two agents and laid down a near constant barrage.
At the same time, the men Josh had thrown over the railing were sorting themselves out and getting back to their feet. Three of them were, anyway. The fourth lay in a heap on the floor, his neck twisted at a ghastly, unnatural angle. A pair of the survivors shot at the two groups of Terra Group agents, forcing them to duck back and making their own fire more erratic. The third tore into the boxes around him, opening and discarding the first three. The fourth one he reached into and withdrew something from, and flung his prize at Becki and Josh.
Realizing the danger the moment the round object left the man's hand, Josh bellowed, "Grenade!" He reached out with the Force to deflect the device, but he'd barely touched it when it detonated. He'd managed to push it a little off course, and it exploded several feet on the other side of Becki. The force of the explosion turned a large section of the metal walkway into a modern art sculpture, twisting and tearing it into a new shape its designers never imagined. Hot shards fell on Vickie and Mike, forcing them from their relatively comfortable hiding place. The walkway beneath Becki's feet gave way, throwing the startled agent off balance and threatening to pitch her to the floor below. Josh's hand shot out and grabbed her wrist, pulling her back onto sturdier ground but knocking her blaster away. The weapon bounced off a newly curled section of the walkway and spun out into the middle of the warehouse floor.
"Here, take mine," Josh said, handing his blaster to Becki. "I'll do this the old fashioned way," he continued as he pulled his lightsaber out from under his leather jacket.
"But isn't that more the newly-fashioned way?" Becki asked as Josh ignited the saber and immediately began deflecting blaster bolts.
On the floor below them, Mike and Vickie scurried behind a large wooden crate. Both tried furiously to brush away the hot metal embers the explosion had rained down on them. Vickie was barely suppressing a howl of pain at the shower of sparks that landed on the right side of her face and in her hair. Mike was more fortunate, suffering nothing worse than a singed trenchcoat. As soon as both had their backs pressed against the crate, Mike tried to examine Vickie's wounds but she pulled forcefully away from him.
"I'll be fine," she snapped. "Just watch for more grenades."
Mike paused to consider that for a second. "They're not shooting at us anymore. I wonder. . . ." He lunged forward and yanked a three foot long wooden crate from a stack across the aisle down to the floor in front of him.
There was a crescendo in blaster fire and suddenly Becki and Josh were with them. The moment the other two agents were behind the stack of crates a deafening silence fell.
"Where did you two come from?" Vickie demanded.
"Up there," Josh said, pointing needlessly up at the walkway. "You hurt?"
"Not bad," she grunted.
Josh nodded. "What's in that?" he asked Mike.
"A theory," the Brit replied.
"Do you always keep your theories in wooden boxes?" Becki asked him.
"Only the really good ones," he shot back. He popped the latches and swung the box open. Inside, packed in foam, was a dark green tube about four inches around with a few rudimentary controls on top.
Vickie whistled softly. "Nice rocket launcher."
"This was your theory?" Josh asked.
"Think for a second," Mike admonished. "What kind of a warehouse has rocket launchers and grenades, and guards that won't shoot at you if you're hiding behind a crate?"
"Oh hell," Josh and Vickie said simultaneously. "I have a very bad feeling about this," she concluded.
"That makes four of us," said Becki. "We have to get out of here."
"This place may be the clue we need," Josh reminded her.
"Won't do us much good if we don't make it out of here alive," Mike grunted. "Where are they?"
Josh shook his head. "Don't know. I nailed one when we came down, but that still leaves two more."
Vickie closed her eyes and stretched out with the Force, searching for their attackers. "There's still two of them up on the catwalk, and another over at the computer. The other's. . . ."
A laser blast slammed into the floor less than an inch from her knee, and the room again dissolved into pandemonium. Both Jedi ignited their lightsabers and began to leap up, but were forced back down by withering fire from the two gunmen on the walkway. Mike and Becki whirled around, looking for the source of the first shot. It couldn't have come from the two above - the crate shielded the team from those two. Mike spotted the lone gunman first, a dozen yards away in the opposite direction. He snapped off a quick shot that took the man full in the chest, dropping him to the floor in blissful unconsciousness.
Before the echoes had faded the whirring sound of an approaching electric motor reached the team. Becki spotted the source first, and her eyes widened in horror. "Mike! Look out!"
Mike saw instantly the reason for her alarm: an unmanned forklift was bearing down on them at high speed, its tines raised just to the approximate chest height of a person crouching behind a cargo container. He fired a short burst at the forklift and it stopped dead in its tracks. He turned back to Becki--
Only to see her yanked up into the air by the overhead cargo crane. She was lifted ten feet into the air, fully exposed to enemy fire. Her screams pierced the air as the first shots from the men on the walkway missed her by mere inches.
"Becki!" Josh shouted in shock and fear. Without thinking he leaped straight up into the air, catching onto the crane's cables with one hand just above the pincher that held her. Hanging there with his body between her and the gunmen he desperately warded off shot after shot with the lightsaber in his free hand.
Mike was lining up for a shot at his teammates' attackers when the forklift behind him rumbled back to life and sped towards him again. He fired shot after shot into it but still it kept coming. A split second before the forklift plowed into the crate Mike jumped across the aisle and clear of its path. Impossibly, the forklift stopped short of the crate and turned to track him.
"Oh you've got to be kidding!" he cried. The forklift charged him once again, but this time Mike was ready. He dropped his blaster and ignited his lightsaber. Again waiting until the last second, he jumped to the side of the forklift and brought his saber smashing down through the unoccupied driver's seat and into the machinery below. A great shower of sparks and various mechanical fluids spilled out over Mike's feet and the floor around him. The forks on the front of the machine dropped to the floor, and the whole machine ground to a halt. Not trusting a simple victory over his mechanical foe, Mike swept his lightsaber through its guts a few more times for good measure.
Above him Josh was still knocking blaster bolts away from Becki like a crazed, one-armed batter. "If I could just . . . get . . . a break, could . . . cut us down," he muttered. Next to him Becki nodded her understanding, though she was too busy tugging at the robotic claw that held her shirt and jacket to respond properly. Finally there was a long enough pause between shots - not more than a split second really, but time enough - and Josh swung his lightsaber up through the cables attached to the claw holding Becki. He barely managed to cushion their fall with the Force before they hit the ground.
"Nice of you guys to drop in," Mike said when they landed in a pile next to him.
"Oh shut up," Josh said. "Where's Vickie?"
Mike looked about and realized he hadn't seen her in the last few minutes. "I don't know," he admitted. He stuck his head up above the crate briefly, drawing fire from the gunmen on the walkway but still managing to spot Vickie as she rushed from one cover to the next back towards the computer terminal she'd found earlier. Every time she rushed forward she was chased by a volley of blaster fire from above.
During one of these distractions Mike scurried back across the aisle to the crate they'd originally been hiding behind. He pulled the rocket launcher from the case he'd opened earlier, and after just a moment's study he figured out how to arm it. The next time Vickie jumped forward he slung it up onto his shoulder and aimed it at the pair of distracted gunmen on the upper walkway. Their eyes widened in fear. The uninjured one drug his wounded comrade off the walkway just as Mike hit the launch button.
From the corner of her eye Vickie saw the missile streak down the middle of the warehouse and blow the walkway at the far end of the building apart. Mike's aim was perfect; the resulting fireball engulfed the spot where the gunmen had been just moments before. She turned her full attention back to the man at the computer terminal she'd discovered earlier. He threw a worried glance back over his shoulder, towards the other Terra Group agents, and his hands flew over the keyboard. Behind her the crane started moving again, dropping a much heavier grasping claw towards her friends. With nothing remaining to stop her, Vickie lit her saber and sprinted towards the terminal.
She reached it a heartbeat later, as the claw retracted and prepared to drop again. She shouted incoherently at the man at the terminal, who turned a startled look towards her. Before he knew what was happening her saber dropped, slicing his right arm off above the elbow. The man fell to the floor screaming in pain.
Vickie barely noticed as she stepped over him to take his place at the terminal. It was unlocked now, and the screen displayed controls for both the crane and the forklift. The latter set of controls flashed red in a warning that the forklift was inoperative. Following the prompts onscreen she told the crane to return to its power down position just as the rest of the team joined her.
"The whole place is automated," she said over her shoulder. "They probably don't need anyone but a single computer operator to run this place. If I just had a few minutes. . . ."
The injured man on the floor was still screaming, producing a sound that set the hair on the back of Josh's neck on end. "I think we better just get out of here now," he said, straining his ears for the sound of more reinforcements. "There are still more people here."
Vickie nodded, her disappointment obvious. "All right, let's go," she said as she entered a last series of commands on the terminal. A quiet whirr announced the opening of one of the cargo doors, and the Terra Group agents beat a hasty retreat from the scene of their latest battle.
Once they'd wandered far enough from the warehouse to consider themselves safe from pursuit, the four of them regrouped, swapping notes on their findings as they walked slowly back toward their apartment. The cargo manifests Mike and Vickie had found were cryptic enough taken alone, as was the note that Josh and Becki had found; taken together, it was a simple deduction that "AlbVar" meant Alba Varden. "Leb," combined with an olive leaf lost in Becki's pocket, suggested a country just north of Israel and well within the range of all the other clues Team Paris had found. "La Seine" suggested a port of departure; "Mardi" suggested, very strongly, tomorrow. And that suggested the team's plans for the following day.
"What if it isn't the name of a boat?" Mike argued. "They could be shipping the thing by plane, or truck, or . . ."
"It's just a hunch, okay?" Josh growled. "You two both trained with Corran Horn; you should have respect for hunches. But boat or no boat, we need to be at the Seine tomorrow if we want to track down this part of the shield."
"And what if want to track down Cheriss?" Vickie asked. "We're still no closer to finding her."
"Well, we have a few more hours of daylight today. . . ." Josh shrugged. "You mentioned fencing earlier, Vickie. We may as well give that a try. When all else fails, the crazy ideas usually are the ones that work."