Vision of the future

the canister mouth.

Finally, he was ready. Strapping the mawkren cage awkwardly to his back, he dropped into the hole he and Klif had dug and turned on the disintegrator.

The beam cut through the soil beneath his feet like a blaster bolt through snow, sending a gale of microscopic dust flowing up past his face. Fleetingly, he wished he'd thought to bring a filter mask with him. Too late now. Squinting against the eye-burning wind, he kept going, wondering what the Bothans were doing about the myriad of alarms he was undoubtedly setting off. Running around uselessly, no doubt, particularly once they saw that the source of the intrusion was totally inaccessible to them.

And some of them would probably sit back and relax, smugly secure in the knowledge that losing the power conduit he was digging toward wouldn't affect their precious shield in the slightest. Possibly they were even having a hearty laugh at the foolish Imperial agent who thought he could shut them down so easily, or who perhaps thought he could crawl through a ten-centimeter-diameter conduit. They wouldn't be laughing that way for long.

It took only a few minutes to dig the rest of the way down to the power conduit. The conduit shell was heavily armored, and it took nearly ten minutes more for the disintegrator beam to eat its way through. The power cables themselves flash-burned almost instantly once that happened, of course—they were, after all, only normal power cables, not designed to withstand anything more strenuous than high-power electrical current. He kept at it until he had carved himself a decently sized hole in the outer shell, then shut off the disintegrator and switched on the coolant pack built into the bottom. A few minutes of systematic spraying, and the area was once again cool enough to touch. He shut off the coolant and sat down by the opening... and in the sudden silence, he heard a quiet new sound.

The beep of a comlink. Coming from the disintegrator.

He frowned, checking the device. There it was, wedged into the refill intake for the coolant pack. Smiling tightly, he pulled it out and turned it on. 'Hello, there,' he said. 'Everything running to your satisfaction?'

'What in the name of Alderaan dust are you doing?' the old woman's voice demanded. He smiled more broadly, wedging the comlink into his collar and opening the mawkren cage's false bottom. 'What's the matter?' he asked, pulling out a small tube of food paste. 'I didn't actually take you by surprise or anything, did I? That was a cute trick with the smoke at the pet shop, by the way. I take it you planted that before you left this morning?'

'Yes,' she said. 'I figured you had all your good stuff upstairs with you, or else had it hidden behind walls or ceilings.'

'So you planted a delayed-action smoke bomb so the Extinguishers would come in and open up the walls for you,' Navett said, opening the cage and extracting one of the tiny lizards. 'Very clever.'

'Look, you haven't got time for this chitchat,' she growled. 'In case you haven't noticed, that building is burning like a torch over your head.'

'Oh, I know,' Navett said. Holding the lizard with one hand, he dabbed a drop of the food paste onto the end of its nose and set it down into the hole he'd cut, pointing it in the direction of the generator building. A touch on one end of the cylindrical bomb activated it, setting it to explode when the lizard reached the blockage where the conduit passed through the reinforced wall and sent its individual power cables splitting off into a dozen different directions. He released his grip, and the mawkren scrambled away through the narrow space between the power cables and the conduit shell, following the scent it was too stupid to realize was attached to its own nose.

'What do you mean, you know?' the woman asked. 'Unless you do something real clever real fast, you're going to die in there. You know that, too?'

'We all have to die sometime,' Navett reminded her, dabbing the nose of another mawkren and sending it to follow the first. It had barely vanished down the conduit when the faint sound of a small explosion echoed down the tube.

There was nothing wrong with the old woman's ears. 'What was that?' she asked.

'The death of Bothawui,' Navett told her, dabbing another mawkren and releasing it as a second explosion sounded. Now that the fumes of disintegrated dirt were dissipating, he could tell that the odor of smoke was getting stronger. 'You know, we never did figure out what your name was,' he added, pulling out another mawkren and wondering uneasily just how fast the fire above him was spreading. If either the flame or smoke got to him before the mawkrens and their tiny bombs were able to blow a hole through the group of unarmored power cables just inside the generator building, he could still lose. 'So what is it?'

'What, my name?' she asked. 'You tell me yours and I'll tell you mine.'

'Sorry,' he said, releasing the mawkren. 'My name might still be of use to someone down the line, even after I myself no longer am.' There was another explosion—

And then, to his relief and immense satisfaction, a breath of cool air drifted up into his face. The power cables had been blown apart inside the wall, and the generator building had been laid open to him.

'Look, Imperial—'

'Conversation's over,' Navett cut her off. 'Enjoy the fire.' He clicked off the comlink and tossed it aside. Then he