But no. Hestiv had warned him about spies inside the main base. If he went there, one of them would surely get him.
And besides, he remembered suddenly, he couldn't go anywhere. He'd triple-sealed the single access door, passwording it with a layer of computer locks that would take any enemy hours to slice through. Even he, who'd set the blocks up in the first place, would probably need half an hour to undo them.
And half an hour would be too late. Far too late.
For another minute he watched the incoming ship, wondering distantly what they would do to him. Then, with a sigh, he turned away. He was trapped here, they were coming for him, and there was nothing he could do.
Returning to the work area, this time closing the door behind him, he went back to his seat. The Wickstrom K220s had finally finished the complex analysis he'd set for them to do before all this happened. Keying the results over to the Masterline-70, pushing the events outside once again into the back of his mind, he got back to work.
* * *
It took Navett half an hour to locate and purchase the pressurized tank of flammable fluid he needed and another fifteen minutes to fit it with a sprayer hose. Forty-five minutes gone, during which time the alarm over the dead Bothans in the pet shop had probably spread to every corner of the city. But that was all right. The ugly furry aliens couldn't stop him now; and the more time it took him to get ready here on the planetary surface, the more time Klif and Pensin and Horvic would have to wheedle their way aboard that Ishori ship overhead.
They would die there, of course. They knew that. But then, he would soon be dying down here, too. What was important was that, before they died, they would complete their task. The streets around the Ho'Din tapcafe, so quiet and deserted in the late night, were buzzing with activity here in the early afternoon. With the fluid tank pressed into the seat beside him, wedged at an awkward angle against the low roof, Navett drove slowly down the deserted alleys along the sides and back of the tapcafe, systematically spraying a thick layer of the liquid along the lower walls and the ground around them. The front wall, facing as it did onto a busy street, was too public for him to do the same there without arousing instant suspicion. But he had other plans for that area anyway. Returning to the back alley, again making sure he was unobserved, he fired a blaster bolt into the fluid as he drove past the tapcafe.
He took his time circling through the alleyways until he came around again onto the main street, with the result that by the time he let the landspeeder coast to a stop across from the tapcafe the fire he'd started was blazing furiously away along the outer walls. Pedestrians were running frantically to and fro, waving and yelling as they either fled from the flames or formed themselves into ghoulish knots at a safe distance to watch; and as Navett retrieved the Nightstinger from the back seat the tapcafe's front doors swung open and a crowd of equally hysterical customers and waitstaff began streaming out through the smoke. Checking the Nightstinger's indicator, confirming that he still had three shots left, Navett settled down to wait.
He didn't have to wait very long. The stream of refugees from the tapcafe had barely begun to dwindle when a white Extinguisher speeder truck came roaring around the corner and braked to a hard stop at one corner of the building. Through the side window Navett could see the driver gesticulating as his partner scrambled out and started climbing the outside ladder toward the pressure turret on top.
He never made it. Resting the muzzle of the Nightstinger on the seat back for stability, Navett shot him down. His second invisible blast took out the driver; his third and last blew off the speeder truck's filler tube cap, sending the fire suppressant gushing onto the street to flow uselessly away from the flames.
He lowered the now empty blaster onto the floor, giving the crowd around him a quick look. But no one was paying the slightest attention to the human sitting alone in his landspeeder. Every eye was locked solidly on the blazing building, with probably only an occasional brief thought turned to the puzzle of the two Bothan Extinguishers who had suddenly and inexplicably collapsed. The flow of customers from the tapcafe had stopped now. Navett gave it thirty more seconds, just to make sure everyone was out. Then, drawing his blaster and laying it ready on the seat beside him, he started the landspeeder and eased his way through the crowd toward the tapcafe's front doors.
He was through the main part of the crowd before anyone even seemed to notice what he was doing. Someone shouted, and a Bothan wearing the green/yellow police sash jumped out in front of him, waving his arms violently. Snatching up his blaster, Navett shot him, veered around the body, and leaned hard on the accelerator. Someone behind him was screaming now; bracing himself, Navett increased his speed—
He hit the tapcafe doors with bone-jarring force, smashing them into shards as the landspeeder ground to a halt right in the middle of the destruction. He was out before the debris finished bouncing off the vehicle's roof, snatching the cage of mawkrens from the back and sprinting through the smoke and heat toward the door to the basement and the subbasement beyond it.
He was halfway down the first flight of stairs when, behind him, he heard the explosion as the heat set off the remaining fluid in the pressurized tank he'd left in the landspeeder. And with the front of the tapcafe now as engulfed in flames as the rest of the building, he was truly and irrevocably cut off from the outside world.
No one in the universe could stop him now.
There was just a hint of smoke in the subbasement—nothing serious, just a foreshadowing of what would inevitably come. Their equipment was just where they'd left it, but he took a minute first to run a quick check on the fusion disintegrator.
It was a good thing he had. The old woman had been here again, gimmicking the device to overload and burn out the main control coil when it was first started. Grinning humorlessly to himself, Navett ungimmicked it, then spent a few more precious minutes reconfiguring the focus to extend the disintegration beam a few centimeters out from
