Madlands

19. Level Twenty-One

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Grey peeled her clenched hands off the straps of her seat harness and looked out the side viewport, trying to catch sight of Case and Ingrid's ship. She wasn't used to such small vessels, doing most of her interplanetary travel on cargo haulers, passenger vessels, or even by negotiating boss-doesn't-need-to-know rides with company work crews. This experience was dramatically different and more immediate—like strapping into a bottle-rocket, feeling every bump and surge of the thrusters.

She craned forward, and the bow of the second skiff came into view as she felt the pitch of both ships soften as they exited Rin's atmosphere. She heard Kayliff exhale to her left as he eased off the throttle. The two seats in the ship were side-by-side in the cockpit, with a half-metre between them. She didn't bother to turn away from the side viewport as she spoke.

How long to Cereda?

Just over thirty minutes. We're going in slow to give ourselves time to react in case we pick up anything unexpected on the way.

Such as?

Ships we don't recognize, signs of new radar detectors, angry Mandalorians.

Grey's head whipped to face him, and her look washed the smile from his face.

He is off-limits.

Kayliff raised his hands in mock surrender.

Understood.

Grey had been doing everything she could, focusing on her present situation as much as she could, to avoid imagining the moment when Mando found her gone, found the note, and realized that he'd put his faith in the absolute wrong person. And yet, she'd probably already played and replayed the awful scene two-hundred times in her mind. Kayliff was determined to make it worse. He was a brave yet selfish man.

I know very little about what we're heading into, if anything at all.

True, and I can fill you in now; we couldn't say much until you'd actually joined the mission—there was still the chance you could betray us. Even though I knew you wouldn't. The Ministry base on Cereda, they didn't build it, they took it over. They're using a decommissioned research silo from back when the Ceredans were working to perfect their cave-crops... improved yields and all that. Like almost everything on Cereda, most of the silo is underground, and it goes deep—forty-three levels below the surface, and only one above. From our surveillance, we're pretty sure that our Ministry guests are only using the surface-level access points. But, we only started watching a week or so ago, admittedly well after the strange events began. So, there might have been more activity when the whole thing was still off our radar.

What do you think they're doing there?

That's what we're going to find out.

Do you have a guess though?

Ingrid and I have a bet—she thinks spice storage, and I think she's nuts. I say training camp, and she says I'm dreaming. You might just be looking at the soon-to-be owner of Ingrid's prized sabacc deck.

And Case?

Case is no fun, refuses to speculate.

So this is recon?

Recon pure and simple. Get in and get out, quietly. Both teams have thirty minutes once we get inside the silo, and nothing more. No matter what we do or don't find, we are back at the rendezvous point in the caverns after thirty-five minutes.