Star Wars: Shadow Games

by Michael Reaves

  A slender arm the color of burnished bronze thrust over her shoulder, its index finger pointing at the curt warning still hanging in the air. “Chaos Hell, JC! What the blazes is that?”

  Javul only just kept herself from falling out of her chair onto the carpeted deck. “Blast it, Dara! Can’t you make some noise when you enter a room? Can’t you ping?” She killed the message and swung around, catching the crestfallen expression on the other woman’s face.

  “Since when do I have to ping to come into your office? And—hey—language? You talk like that in front of a holocam, and your name will be mud in households from here to the Rim.”

  Javul gestured helplessly. “I’m sorry, but you scared the fr—” She swallowed. “You scared me.”

  “I’m not surprised. Who sent that?”

  “Sent what?” Javul said innocently.

  “Too late. I saw it. Watch your back? What’s up with that? I didn’t see that in your mail.”

  “It was part of a longer communication. There were capitalized words that spelled out this—message.”

  “Warning,” Dara said.

  Javul worried her lower lip with her teeth, reluctant to admit that she’d come to the same conclusion. “I don’t know that warning is—”

  “Oh, it is. Trust me on this one, JC.” Kendara’s dark violet eyes were huge. “You have a stalker. What remains to be seen is how serious he, she, or it is.”

  A stalker. There—the word had been spoken, and made real. Okay. Deeeep breath.

  “Yeah. Looks like it,” she said. “This … this isn’t the first one of these I’ve gotten. There was one in the batch of holomail after the previous concert, too. Remember the black fire lilies?”

  “Do I? Yeah, I should say I do. You mean, that wasn’t a compliment?”

  Javul shook her head, remembering the rain of gleaming black, pungently fragrant blooms that had fallen all around her and her entourage as they’d ascended the landing ramp of her yacht after an appearance on Imperial Center. “I think that was a warning, too. He wanted me to know the sort of thing he could arrange.”

  “He?”

  “I’m assuming—the messages are anonymous.”

  “I see. Then all that stuff about cultural relativity and how the black lilies were especially prized by the Elom as—”

  “I made it up. I didn’t want you guys to … you know.”

  Kendara put her hands on her hips and glared down at Javul, one bright orange curl falling over her forehead. “Yeah, I know. You didn’t want us to know your life was in danger. Which is kinda—what’s the word I’m searching for? Oh, yeah—stupid. Of course, I’m just your road manager, the head of your entourage. What good’s an entourage if you won’t let us take care of you?

  “I can’t believe you’d leave me out of the loop on something like this. I’m not just your road manager. I’m your best friend. I’m the one who’s been pulling you out of scrapes since we were teenagers. Do I have to remind you of the lengths to which obsessed individuals will go? Do you remember any of our so-called adventures on Tatooine? That Zabrak spacer who thought you’d make the perfect little wifey. That guy who wanted to buy out Chalmun and set you up as the house chanteuse? The stormtroopers who—”

  Javul raised her hands against the volley of words. “You’re right. Of course, you’re right. I should have said something before. But … well, at first I was thinking it was just an overzealous fanboy and then … I don’t know. I figured if the guy was on Coruscant—I mean, Imperial Center—and we were leaving …”

  “Yeah, well, apparently he’s taking his show on the road, too.”

  The truth of that statement made Javul’s throat tighten. She clasped her hands together in her lap, flexing her fingers to make the rainbow stones inlaid into each nail glitter and flash. “So now you know. What do you think we should do?”

  Kendara tilted her head to one side in thought. Then she said, “Two things. One, I’d split us into two travel parties. Second, I’d hire bodyguards.”

  “Okay on the splitting up—but bodyguards?”

  “Yeah. Steely-eyed, laser-toting, massively intimidating bodyguards.”

  Javul shook her head. “I don’t know, Dara. It’s already freakishly hard to keep a low profile in this business, and if we contract with a security company, we increase our footprint, our baggage … and the number of people who have to have oversight.”

  “I’m not thinking of hiring from a security firm.”

  “Then where am I supposed to come by these steely-eyed, laser-toting … characters?”

  A smile curved Kendara Farlion’s lips and her teeth showed, white and even in her face. “I never thought I’d say this, but there are advantages to being from Mos Eisley. I know exactly where to look for that kind of character.”

  THREE

  LEEBO OBJECTED TO THE IDEA OF JUMPING TO HYPERSPACE at the very edge of the Maw. Vociferously.

  “Stop shrieking like a stuck mynock and secure the weapons battery,” Dash ordered, while inwardly kicking himself for ever thinking that having a droid whose subroutines included a fear of mortality that bordered on paranoia was in any way a good idea. Especially subroutines so deeply embedded in its firmware that it would require major restructuring to root them out, and would likely leave Leebo the cybernetic equivalent of a ripe purnix.

  Still, at times like these it was hard to see that as a downside …

  To Eaden, Dash said, “Give me a mark at …” He checked the tactical. “Point-oh-three.”

  “A bit close.”

  “You think? Leebo, prepare countermeasures.”

  “You want me to jettison some junk, boss?”

  “Yeah, but prepare countermeasures sounds more professional.”

  “They are continuing to fire on us,” said Eaden.

  “Good. In a moment, they’re going to think they got lucky.”

  “Mark,” said Eaden dubiously.

  Dash adjusted their attitude and increased their speed again. The tactical display tracked the cruiser’s last shot. The ship shivered as it glanced off her shields.

  “Release countermeasures.”

  “Junk away.”

  In the rearview screen, Dash saw the debris field spread across their wake in an arc as gravitational waves and eddies tugged it this way and that. A second later the Outrider began to fight him, the yoke pulling at his hands as if she were yearning to be at the heart of one of the singularity fields—which, in a manner of speaking, she was. He gritted his teeth harder and began to count: “One-one-hundred, two-one-hundred, three-one-hundred, four-one—”

  “Mark point-oh-three.”

  Dash yanked back on the yoke and accelerated, yet again, hauling the ship out of her dive into a shallow reverse arc. They were about as close to superluminal speed as they could get without jumping to hyperspace. The Maw pulled at them like an undertow, drawing the little ship toward its crushing depths. The Outrider quivered; the quivering became a steady vibration that increased until the vessel shuddered as if caught in the throes of a seizure.

  “Our port engine is approaching failure,” said Eaden quietly, his dark gaze on the internal sensor display. Unlike the tactical readouts, those were working just fine.

  Blast. Why couldn’t it have at least been the central drive? That could go belly-up without causing instability, even if they lost some thrust by using just the peripherals. Cursing steadily, Dash wrenched at the yoke, flipping the ship over by ninety degrees and—he hoped—increasing their arc.

  “Port drive intermittent.”

  He could feel that as a series of tiny bumps punctuating the trembling of the ship. There was a moist tickle between his shoulder blades. He was sweating. The realization made him sweat harder. Perspiration stood out on his forehead and began to trickle from his hairline down the sides of his face. He didn’t dare spare a hand to whisk it away—and if they didn’t pull out of this climb into free space in the next several seconds it wouldn’t matter. The dri
ve would fail and they’d go into a spin. But if he cut the drive they’d be sucked into the Maw.

  Unless …

  “Kill the failsafes. We’re going to hyperdrive.”

  “We are too close—”

  “I know! Do it!”

  “We are headed into Wild Space.”

  “I know! Do it!”

  Eaden cut the hyperdrive’s failsafes. Dash activated the drive. Nothing happened.

  Dash glared at the Nautolan. “I said kill the failsafes!”

  “I did.”

  “Then what the hell is—”

  “Clearly, we have sustained damage.”

  “Great. Go to secondary drive.”

  Eaden shunted the power to the backup hyperdrive. It ramped up quickly—more quickly than was strictly safe, especially in this situation—but it still felt like a long, miserable year to Dash. He felt his navigator’s gaze on him.

  “We are in jeopardy of—”

  “I know what we’re in jeopardy of,” Dash snarled, his own eyes never leaving the power-up gauge on the console. The second the drive came fully online, he activated it.

  The ship seemed to hesitate for an instant—an illusion, but terrifying nonetheless—then the stars blurred comfortingly and they leapt out of realspace and away from the Maw and into the Wild.

  “We-e-e-ell,” said Leebo’s voice through the com. “That was a lot of fun. Please tell me we won’t be doing it again in the near future. Or, for that matter, the far—”

  “Hey! A moment of congratulations is in order, okay?” Dash relaxed back on the steering yoke and took a moment to wipe sweat from his forehead and brush his hair back. “We just foiled an Imperial ambush, escaped certain death and …” He checked the chrono. “Hah! And cut point-three-three-three parsecs off the Kessel Run.”

  “Except,” said Eaden, “that we are headed away from Kessel … and Nal Hutta.”

  Dash made a dismissive gesture. He felt exhilarated and lightheaded. “No problem, we’ll drop out of hyperspace as soon as we’re out of this bad neighborhood, then set course for Nal Hutta. We’ll be ahead of schedule and earn enough to get the drive fixed twice over.”

  Eaden was staring morosely at the control console. “Alas, I think not.”

  “And why is that?”

  As if in response, Outrider dropped suddenly and emphatically out of hyperspace, stranding them at the edge of the Wild.

  “Because,” said Eaden, “our secondary hyperdrive has also expired.”

  A cursory examination of both drives showed that there was no hope of swiping enough working parts from one to repair the other. In the end, they were left with no choice but to patch up the ion engines and make the nearest port at sublight speed, which would take—

  “Thirty-two-point-six Standard hours,” Eaden announced after consulting the bridge navicomp. “But there is no repair facility there.”

  So much for the nearest port. Dash stared, unfocused, at the sparse points of light beyond the viewport. “And Nal Hutta?”

  “Forty-four-point-seven.”

  Dash did some quick calculations. With the Imperials patrolling the well-used smuggling corridors, trying to make Nal Hutta on ion power alone was chancy. It severely limited their ability to escape another trap.

  “What’ll it take to get to Tatooine?”

  “Roughly thirty-six hours. Why Tatooine?”

  Why, indeed. Tatooine was the lint-stuffed belly button of the universe, but—

  “Because that’s where Kerlew is. And Kerlew knows these drives inside out. He’s the only mech-tech I trust to mess with Outrider’s innards.”

  “Humans,” observed Eaden, “are so sentimental.”

  “They’re soft in the head, is what they are,” observed Leebo dryly from his post in engineering. “You realize, of course, that the cargo will have to be shipped on to Nal Hutta on a different freighter, which means we’ll have to share the take with another space jockey. I mean, who knows if we’re going to have any creds left after that to even get this bucket fi—?”

  Dash killed the feed from Leebo’s comlink, cutting him off mid-rant. “Well, what are you waiting for?” he asked Eaden. “Set course for Tatooine.”

  FOUR

  THE BAD NEWS WAS THAT THE OUTRIDER WAS GOING TO be in spacedock for a while. The worse news was that it was going to cost them. And since they were now going to have to farm out the cargo delivery to another spacer, it might eat up all their profits. Then, of course, there was the difficulty of finding someone in Mos Eisley who was (a) trustworthy, (b) in need of quick credits, and (c) willing to take freight to Nal Hutta in the middle of a particularly nasty bit of business between the Jiliac and Besadii clans—mostly orchestrated by the ever-scheming Jabba.

  To that end, Dash and Eaden left the ship berthed in Docking Bay 92 behind Spacers’ Row and made their way to Chalmun’s Cantina, just off Kerner Plaza. Few actually called the place Chalmun’s Cantina. It was simply the Cantina or the Mos Eisley Cantina, with emphasis on the. There were other cantinas in Mos Eisley, but of them all, Chalmun’s was the largest and the easiest to lose oneself in. This, when one was doing business that was less than legitimate, was a plus. Chalmun’s possessed a warren of booths and small back rooms for private conferences. And, of course, a back door and a cellar retreat that led to yet another escape route.

  Dash was not in a good mood when he and Eaden stepped down from the cantina’s foyer into the noisy main room, but he plastered a false smile on his face and gave the room a once-over, scanning for familiar faces. He saw quite a few, but only a handful were pilots he’d trust with their cargo. Most of the patrons, in fact, were aging Podracers, recognizable for the most part by their various honorary badges. Which, among other things, entitled them to free drinks.

  “Must be a convention in town,” Dash muttered. “Eaden, how about you take the left side of the room. I’ll take the right. We’ll shmooze a little bit—see if anyone’s looking for a quick turnaround.”

  The Nautolan fixed him with an eloquent maroon stare. “I do not … what was that word? ‘Shmooze.’ ”

  In the many months he’d been working with the Nautolan, Dash had yet to arrive at a definitive list of all the things Eaden considered beneath his dignity. “How do you know you don’t do it? Do you even know what it means?”

  “Whatever it means, I don’t do it. I will ask likely candidates if they are in need of a cargo and are willing to take it to Nal Hutta. That’s all.”

  Dash raked his fingers through his thick hair and sighed. Probably not a good idea to tell him that’s a textbook definition of shmooze. “Okay, look. Let’s at least make sure we’re in the same starlane when it comes to what we’re looking for.”

  His partner gave him another impenetrable look. “Free of current commitments and desperate for credits?”

  “And trustworthy. Don’t forget trustworthy. It’s bad enough we’re losing the full commission. If whoever we hire to take it to Nal Hutta is dishonest …”

  Eaden Vrill surveyed the cantina. Then he turned his oversized eyes back to Dash with a blink so exaggerated it used both sets of eyelids, and produced an audible click—the Nautolan equivalent of an eyebrow raised in irony.

  “Smart guy. Just help me find us a freighter. And a relatively honest pilot.”

  Eaden moved off with the languid grace that was common to his species, leaving Dash to peruse the side of the room he had assigned himself. A number of spacers were standing clustered in the areas between tables, others were seated at those tables, and still others had sought the more private booths. It would be rude—and dangerous—to poke his nose into those dark little cubbies, but he could chat up any folks in the common room and let himself be seen by those in the booths.

  Strolling, trolling, and meeting as many gazes as would allow that privilege, he had gotten about halfway up that side of the large room when he spied a Sullustan spacer of his acquaintance. The Sullustan, Dwanar Gher, saw him at precisely the same mo
ment and waved him over to his table. Seated there as well were a Toydarian Dash didn’t recognize and a human he did—to his considerable chagrin. Her name was Nanika Senoj and they’d had a bit of a thing at one point in time. That had stopped abruptly, for the simple reason that she’d driven him swamp-bat crazy. She was gorgeous, no question about that, with her copper-streaked burgundy hair, milk-pale skin, and big, dark brown eyes. But she also had a competitive nature that was perpetually in hyperdrive. No matter where she was or what she was doing—or who she was with—day or night, awake or asleep, she had to be the best.

  Seeing her sitting there, smiling at him, chin propped on one fist, he almost excused himself and walked away. That would have been the sane move. But he was a man with a mission. “Hey, Nani. How’s the vacuum treating you?”

  “Can’t complain. Except that it’s a bit colder out there without someone to come home to,” she said pointedly. Dash saw Gher turn away to hide a smile.

  “Bantha poo,” he said. “You moved on, babe. I heard all about it from Leebo.”

  “Leebo?” Her eyes widened. “What’s a droid doing spreading gossip? I would never let my droid get away with that—I don’t care who programmed him. And false, malicious gossip at that! I’m telling you, babe—”

  “Cap it,” Dash said. He looked past her at the Sullustan. “Dwanar, what’s up?”

  The Sullustan’s wide mouth turned up in a grin. “My associate here”—he nodded toward the Toydarian, a plump little specimen whose wings Dash doubted could carry him more than ten meters before he dropped dead from exhaustion—“is looking for a pilot of an adventurous bent to take on a particularly lucrative job.”

  Dash’s heart rate spiked momentarily. For a second the tantalizing words lucrative job had made him forget his circumstances. He shook his head. “Love to oblige you, Dwanar, but the Outrider is out of commission at the moment. In fact, I’m looking for someone to take my cargo the rest of the way to Nal Hutta.”

  Gher snorted. “I’m trying to steer clear of Huttdom these days. Very unstable situation.”