Atin checked outside with the endoscope again, then stepped through the opening with his Deece raised. “Clear.”

Darman dismantled the ram and hurriedly hooked it back into his webbing. “Room by room, then. Killing House time.”

That was something they’d done many, many times before. Each time they entered the Killing House on Kamino for an exercise, the walls and doors had been reconfigured. Some­times they knew what they were going to find, and some­times it was like a real house clearance, a sequence of nasty surprises that they had to take as they came.

But there was a lot more at stake now than their individual lives.

Atin gestured left. The inner corridor was a ring with doors leading off it and a single passage to the front en­trance. At least there were no stairs or turbolifts to cover. They moved almost back-to-back, pausing at the corner to slide the endoscopic probe out far enough to check.

“Oh boy,” Atin said, just as the first droid swung around and blasted. Darman heard the clatter of metal feet from ex­actly the opposite direction, and for a frozen moment he found himself staring down his scope at a very surprised Umbaran officer.

Darman fired. So did Atin. They both kept firing down their respective ends of the corridor.

“Okay, plan D,” Atin said. “Niner, we’re pinned down here, over.”

“We’re concentrating fire on the front.” Niner’s voice cut back in with a background of explosions both near and far­ther away. That was why Darman didn’t like a having a four-way open comlink during an engagement. The noise and chatter were overwhelming. “They’ve pulled back inside. But nobody’s coming out.”

“We haven’t located Uthan yet.”

“Can you hold the position?”

“Can you see where we are? West side corridor, left of the entrance.”

Atin emptied a clip into two droids that came around the corner. Then there was no noise except for their respective panting.

“Dar?”

“Still here, Niner.” Back-to-back with Atin, he waited and stared down the polished hallway twenty meters ahead. There were two doors on the right, unconventional hinged doors. He glanced up at the ceiling to locate the emergency bulk-heads: one was on the other side of Atin, and the next was be-tween them and the inner chamber. If those were activated, they’d be cut off on both sides, boxed in and waiting to be picked off. And then anyone could easily enter the biohaz chamber and defuse the implosion device.

It seemed that someone had the same idea at the same time, because there was an uh-whump noise and then the quiet whine of a small motor.

The bulkheads were descending from their housing.

“Atin, chamber, wow!” Darman yelled, even though he didn’t need to, and they both sprinted back toward the cham­ber. The bulkhead was down to waist level when they reached it and skidded under on their knees.

It sealed with a clunk behind them. It was suddenly so silent that Darman knew another bulkhead had closed some­where along the ring, sealing them in. There was the sound of a door unlocking manually, a real clunk-click noise, and then nothing.

“Start again,” Darman sighed. “Let’s see what’s around there.”

Atin moved forward and edged out the scope. He paused. He sat back on his heels and shook his head.

“Show me,” Darman said, and switched his HUD to the scope view, expecting disaster.

“I think it’s called irony.”

Darman crawled up to him and patched the endoscope into his own helmet.

Yes, irony was a good word for it. He almost laughed. Be­tween the corner and the next bulkhead, he could see two doors, one closed and one partly open. Someone—someone humanoid—was peering around the edge of it.

“Women don’t half look different, don’t they?” Atin said. “That’s the most amazing hair I’ve ever seen.”

Darman agreed. They hadn’t seen a lot of females in then-lives, but this one would have been memorable even if they had seen millions. Her blue-black hair was streaked with brilliant red stripes. They were trapped with Dr. Ovolot Qail Uthan.

And she was clutching a Verpine shatter gun.

CO Majestic to Coruscant Command

Techno Union vessel is now drifting. Damage assessment is in­complete but it is no longer returning fire. Vengeance is standing by to dispatch a boarding party. Will continue to provide turbolaser gunnery support to Omega Squad.

“Who activated the emergency systems? Which di’kut hit the button? Tell me!” Ghez Hokan found himself shouting. He had abandoned dignity. “Open this di’kutla bulkhead!”

Captain Hurati’s voice was strained. They were both on the wrong side of the first safety bulkhead, in a single unfor­giving corridor that led to the entrance, and the main doors were jammed shut. It was a very secure building: and, as Uthan had said, it was designed to stop anything from getting out if things went wrong. It was doing that well.

“We’ve been infiltrated, sir.”

“I worked that out for myself, di’kut.” He was interrupted by a grenade exploding against the front wall. “How in the name of—”

“I don’t know yet, sir, but the bulkheads activated because the containment chamber doors weren’t registering on the system as closed, and it triggered the emergency systems.”

“Stuck open, in other words.”

“Yes.”

Hokan swung around on the nearest droid. “Anyone up on the surface see signs of entry?”

A pause. “Negative.”

Oh, how he longed for decent communications again. He could guess from the strength and direction of some of the explosions that the area was coming under laser cannon fire, which meant the Republic assault ship had finally showed its hand. It could even be landing more troops.

But that wasn’t his immediate concern. The bad news was that somebody had already managed to get in, and not through the front door. They couldn’t have come in through the drains. They shouldn’t have been there. But there was firing, and droids were reporting casualties.

There were Republic commandos inside the facility.

Hokan had never thought himself infallible, but he had at least imagined he was exceptionally competent. He’d locked down the facility and they’d still found a way in. His first thought was that Uthan had wanted a live subject so badly that she was prepared to lure them in and trap one, but that was ludicrous: she hadn’t the means or the opportunity to by­pass security.

The nanovirus was out of Hokan’s reach behind bulkheads that wouldn’t yield. Droids patiently fired blasters into the face of the alloy. But, as in his earlier test, they were making no impression beyond heating the sealed corridor to tropical temperatures.

“Do we know if all the bulkheads are down?” he asked the droid. Its comlink with its peers made it suddenly a lot more useful than Hurati. “All of them?” Hokan was trying to work out if he had any way of getting to Uthan or the nanovirus. The control board in the office off the main corridor was showing red throughout, but he didn’t know whether to be­lieve it or not.

“All of them. Droids trapped in sections four, five, seven, and twelve.”

It felt like being in the middle of a brawl and then finding yourself dragged off your opponent. The enemy couldn’t get at him, but now he couldn’t get at them, either. And if the bio-hazard chamber doors were open, then both the nanovirus and Uthan were on the commandos’ side of the barrier. If they had managed to get in, they could probably get out the same way.

The front wall shuddered.

Even if any droids had survived the assault on the villa, how would reinforcements help him now?

Hokan turned to Hurati. “Can you get into the system and override the safety controls?”