“There an easy way?”
Mel chuckled ruefully and shook his head. “Maybe—maybe not. But you’d know something about that, wouldn’t you?”
Dash stopped and swung to face the other man, pretty sure he wasn’t going to like the sudden turn the conversation had taken. “What d’you mean?”
“I read about what happened to your brother in the newsies. Hardly seemed fair, what Palpatine did to you and your family afterward. There was talk at the time … people saying Stanton got off easy, dying in the wreck. I don’t imagine you feel that way about it.”
Dash scanned the other man’s face but saw no hint of derision. “No. I’m glad Stan wasn’t around to be punished by the Empire, though. And I’m glad he didn’t have to see what happened to the family or the family business.”
“You were at the Academy on Carida then, weren’t you?”
“Yeah. It was a long time ago. How’d you know?”
“You’re kidding, right? Your family wasn’t exactly anonymous, Dash. It was in all the newsies: Native Son Accepted to Academy. Takes some talent to be accepted at Carida. I suspect you’re a good pilot.”
Dash pulled himself a little straighter. “The best, as it happens.”
Mel grimaced. “With your ship under repair, I understand. Tough luck.”
Dash nodded, glad to be tacking away from the previous subject. “That’s why we were available for this gig. Charn caught us at just the right moment.”
Mel nodded and turned to continue down the aisle between stacks of cargo.
Dash moved with him. “So, about your system: Who loads the crates—sentients or droids?”
“Both. After the incident with the stowaway we’ve made sure there’s one droid for every sentient in the cargo crew. New rule is—never leave a container open if you have to go do something else. And never open a container that you’re not planning to load or unload immediately.”
Dash stopped and rested a hand against the side of a large carboplas container the size of a ship’s life pod. Half a dozen people could cram themselves in there if they tried, he knew. “Do you think there’s any way that could happen again? I mean that a fan with a deep desire to get close to Charn could distract someone and either sneak in or … leave her a nice, deadly little present?” Melikan gave Dash a positively bone-chilling look from his almost colorless eyes. “That’s not fannish adoration. It’s sabotage.”
“Can’t they go hand in hand?”
The cargo master raised a ginger-colored eyebrow. Before he could comment, a klaxon pierced the hold’s quiet, making Dash just about jump out of his boots. A calm, female voice followed, expressing every spacer’s worst nightmare in dulcet tones: “Hull breach on the aft quarter deck. Venting atmosphere. Hull breach on the aft quarter deck. Venting atmosphere.” The klaxon resumed its wailing as the Nova’s Heart dropped back into realspace.
“Shut that stupid thing off!” Mel bellowed, racing for the turbolift with Dash on his heels.
“Sir?” An owl-eyed young Sullustan crewman and an Otoga 222 series maintenance droid met them just outside the door to the cargo master’s office. “Did you mean—?”
“Yes, blast it! Shut the klaxon off and stay here.”
“But if there’s a hull breach—”
“Stay on the comm, Nik. If it’s bad, you’ll be told to abandon ship. If it’s not you’ll get the all-clear. In either case, do not leave this area unless and until you’re ordered off the ship. Do you understand?”
“Yessir!”
“Do you wish me to stay, too, Cargo Master Melikan?” the droid asked politely as Mel and Dash stepped into the turbolift.
“Yes!” roared the cargo master as the door slid shut. “Droids,” he added for Dash’s benefit. “Gotta spell everything out for them.”
Despite the fact that Nik had turned off the klaxon in the hold, it was going full-tilt on the upper decks, nearly deafening the two Corellians as they stepped from the lift onto the forward section of the quarterdeck. They were not the first ones to respond. Arruna Var and her new Nautolan sidekick were some meters up the corridor, as were Leebo and the med droid, Gea.
Arruna, her face covered by a breathing apparatus, was in the process of obtaining atmospheric readings from the aft section of the deck, which had self-sealed automatically after the alarm sounded. As new as he was to the ship, it didn’t take Dash more than a moment to recognize his surroundings. His quarters were on the other side of those emergency doors … as were Javul Charn’s.
He ran.
He reached the group clustered about the emergency doors with Yanus Melikan at his side. He was just in time to see Arruna rip off her breath mask and turn her attention to the doors’ controls, which were in a panel set into the port bulkhead. She was reaching for the emergency override.
Dash put out a hand to stop her. “What’re you doing?” he shouted above the klaxon. “You want this whole section to vent?”
She shook her head, making her lekku swing. “There’s no leak. Ask your droid.” She pulled her arm away from him and hit the override. Nothing happened.
“Frang!” she said explosively.
The klaxon cut out just then, and the expletive echoed harshly in the suddenly silent hallway. Mel slid into the corner beside Arruna as she began punching codes into the control pad.
“What’s she mean there’s no leak?” Dash asked Leebo. “The ship seems to think there is.”
“With all due respect, the ship is wrong. There’s no difference in pressure on that side of the bulkhead and no sign that the air is going anywhere it doesn’t belong.”
Dash pointed at the emergency doors. “Is Javul Charn in there?”
“We don’t know.”
“Well, have you tried to communicate with her?”
“Communications seems to have been affected by the event,” said Eaden. “Whatever the event was.”
Dash turned to Mel and Arruna, who were still poking at the control panel.
“Any luck?”
Arruna glanced back over her shoulder. “The controls are dead.”
Dash nodded. “Leebo, open it.”
The droid’s head swiveled toward him, optics glowing. “What—you mean by brute force? Like that’s gonna happen. Do I look like an 11-88 factory droid to you?”
“Move back,” Dash said sharply, waving aside Mel and Arruna.
They moved back. He pulled his blaster pistol, aimed, and drilled the control panel right above its transparent faceplate. It flew open with a small explosion of sparks and a fizzle. He holstered his pistol.
“Now open it,” he told Leebo.
“You didn’t say the magic wo—”
Dash’s blaster was back in his hand. Leebo finished smoothly, “—but you’re under a lot of stress. I understand.” As the droid spoke, it moved to the door control and inserted an index finger into the servo mechanism. Nothing happened.
“Huh. That’s odd. There appears to be no power reaching this panel at all.”
He put a second hand to the controls, completing the circuit, and fed a jolt of energy into it. The servo whined, and the doors began to slide open. They got no more than a half a meter apart when they stopped.
“That’s all I got, boss.”
“It’s enough.” Dash slipped through the breach and into the aft section of the quarterdeck. It was dark—the emergency lights had apparently been affected as well—and eerily quiet. The air was devoid of the countless background noises—the muffled clicks of relays, the gentle exhalation of recycled air, the felt-more-than-heard thrum of generators—that are a starship’s usual ambience. More than just the lights had been shut down in this section. Eaden came through right behind Dash, every tendril on his head on full alert.
All along the corridor the doors were sealed shut. At the far end, Dash could see the blur of light and dark as they hurtled through hyperspace. Leak or no leak, his skin still crawled and his jaw hurt from gritting his teeth. He tried to relax his face.
Didn’t help much.
He waved Eaden to the starboard side of the corridor while he stepped to port. He sensed Mel and Arruna behind him. “Arruna,” he whispered to the Twi’lek, “get up to the engineering station and see if you can figure out what happened to the power back here.”
“You got it,” she said, and headed back. She sounded relieved. Sensible, he thought.
“Mel, how good are you with a blaster?”
“Scale of one to ten? Twelve.”
“Good.” Dash pulled a second pistol out of the hidden holster inside his jacket and handed it to the cargo master. “Just in case.”
Mel examined it somewhat dubiously. “Of course, that’s a scale where one is the best …”
Dash stopped short and looked at him. The other gave a sheepish shrug. “Sorry. Can’t hit a cargo hold wall—from inside.”
Dash blew his breath out, and noticed that it fogged the air. Even with the yacht’s state-of-the-art insulation, it was getting cold fast. He quickly adjusted Mel’s hand on the weapon, ensuring that the man’s finger was inside the trigger guard. “Squeeze here; death and destruction comes out here. Right? Good. Leebo, stand by.”
“No worries, boss. I was planning on doing just that.”
Dash passed the door to his own quarters, moving with intent toward Dara’s rooms. Eaden was slightly ahead of him and reached Dara Farlion’s door first. He raised several tendrils, tapping their tips lightly across the smooth surface and taking on an attitude of intense listening.
After a moment he withdrew his tendrils and shook his head. “No one in there. At least, no one eager to get out.”
“If Spike was home, we’d’ve heard it all the way from the cargo hold.”
“Spike?” repeated Mel.
“Pet name.” Dash stepped closer to Javul’s door. He didn’t need head-tresses to tell him what his ears and fingertips could—someone was behind that door making a very noisy, violent effort not to be behind that door.
He signaled Eaden, who crossed the corridor to join him. “I make two voices,” he said.
Eaden nodded. “Agreed. It would seem they’re both in there. And very much alive—at least as long as life support holds out.”
Dash moved to inspect the exterior control panel. Dead.
“Dash.” Eaden stood with one hand and a couple of tresses in contact with the door. “They’ve stopped shouting.”
“What?” Dash turned back to the door and pounded on it with his fist. “Javul! Dara! Hey!”
No response. He pounded the door again. “Hey! Javul! Dara! If you can hear me, bang on the door!”
Nothing.
“Leebo!”
The droid pushed through the half-open emergency doors and moved down the corridor at less than top speed. “Oh, yes, Master. Of course, Master.”
Dash gestured at the door. “Can the chatter. I need you to work on this door control.”
“My pleasure. But let me take care of the faceplate this time. Your methods are so … brutish.” The droid eyed Dash’s blaster while moving to the control panel and pressing an index finger to the upper left-hand corner of the defunct control plate. There was a tiny tink! and the plate popped out. Leebo poked an index finger into the guts of the door control. There was a zap! followed by a hum and, with a whisper of sound, the chamber doors slid back—to reveal an empty room. The lurid glow of emergency lights washed into the corridor; here, at least, they worked.
Not that they helped much, as Dash, Eaden, and Mel quickly learned by checking the entire suite.
There was no sign of either Dara Farlion or Javul Charn.
EIGHT
“OKAY, FACT ONE,” DASH SAID. “THE SHIP’S SECURITY system thought it detected a hull breach on this deck and set off an alarm. Fact two: there was no hull breach, which means that either there was a malfunction in the security system, or someone tinkered with it. Fact three: the power was cut to the aft quarterdeck just after the emergency doors slammed shut. Which might have been caused by the aforementioned malfunction … or by something else. Fact four: Javul and Dara were locked in this suite by the emergency shutdown. Fact five: they’ve disappeared.”
“Fact six,” Leebo added. “We are in so much trouble …”
“The power was not shut down from either the bridge or engineering,” offered Arruna, who’d returned to the quarterdeck as soon as she’d restored the deck’s functionality. “It was interrupted at the section hub.”
Dash frowned. “Manually?”
“I’ll have to check the hub. I was able to push a power-up command through from the bridge to the terminus amidships, but only a physical inspection of the terminus itself will tell us if it was spliced manually or remotely.”
“Wait. What are you suggesting?” First Officer Bran Finnick had come down from the bridge with Arruna, while Mel had returned to his cargo bay to run through his own security protocols. “You think someone’s stowed away again?”
“Maybe not,” Arruna said. “It could’ve been done remotely, as I said.”
“How? We were in hyperspace when this happened. If it was triggered by another vessel, they’d have to have set this up before we jumped. Which means they’d have been shadowing us. Closely. We’d have detected them.”
“Not if they were outfitted like this boat,” Dash observed. “Might’ve been pirates.”
“Who got onto the ship and sabotaged it?” asked Finnick dubiously.
“Or somehow got access to its passcodes.”
Arruna was shaking her head. “If it had been pirates, they would have forced us out of hyperspace and tried to board us. More likely it was a timed event.”
“Or an inside job,” Dash mused.
Everyone turned to stare at him. He raised his hands as if to ward off the intensity and incredulity of their looks. “I’m just sayin’ … anyway, we won’t know until we’ve done some more detective work, will we? Meanwhile, I think we need to broaden our search for the missing women.”
“Broaden our search?” repeated Finnick. “They were in this room. You heard them.”
“Yeah, and now they’re not in this room. Meaning that somehow they got out.”
Finnick snorted in disbelief. “How?”
Dash gazed around the luxurious quarters in which they now stood, trying not to look as if he were mentally scratching his head. This was absurd. There was no place the women could have gone. There were no exterior hatches in the room; they’d searched the closet and peered under every article of furniture that had an under. The two women had vanished as thoroughly as if they’d been vaporized.
Maybe they had …
Dash slapped his hands together in a single brisk clap. “Oh-kay, we’ve checked all the furniture for hiding places; now let’s check it for possible exits.”
“Exits?” Finnick repeated, and Dash bit back a sarcastic crack about echoes.
“Tables that are on movable plates,” he explained. “Wardrobes with false bottoms. Wall shelves that slide or swing and—look, can we just have everybody check for that kind of stuff?”
Finnick snorted again; Dash was getting extremely tired of that particular mode of disagreement. “Spy story nonsense,” the first officer muttered. Nevertheless, he started to search, as did Leebo. The droid stopped when Dash added, “Not you, Leebo. I want you to scan for hidden weaponry.”
That stopped everything. Dash once again became the cynosure of everyone’s gaze. “What are you thinking?” asked the first officer.
“Let’s get real,” said Dash. “The previous owner of this ship was most likely doing less-than-aboveboard business. The stealth shuttle is sort of a clue, right? That, and the amount of ablative shielding and other safety features that your boss didn’t have to install because they were already here. At a guess, I’d say Nova’s Heart belonged to a smuggler—who just might have installed a high-security system in this suite that included defensive weaponry to take out intruders. Maybe something tripped it before or during the emergency
and—”
All the color had leached out of Bran Finnick’s face. “And it thought Javul and Dara were intruders? No. There was no such system.” He looked at Arruna. “Right?”
The Twi’lek looked paler as well. “There’s no record of it in the original schematics.”
“Doesn’t mean it’s not there,” said Dash. “I don’t like the idea any more than you do, but it has to be either validated or invalidated.” He turned to the droid. “Leebo, call up the schematics and see if there are any logical places to hide surveillance and defensive equipment.”
Leebo uttered a chirp of assent and brought up the schematics’ holos without argument. Dash watched for a moment as Eaden, Arruna, and Finnick began pushing and pulling at the cabin’s furniture. Then he began a slow tour of the perimeter of the room. It struck him, as he turned from the interior bulkhead between the living room and the bedroom in the small but luxurious suite, that there was something odd about the room, but he could not, for the life of him, put a finger on what it was. As he was trying to figure it out, Leebo’s head came up with a snap.
“Huh.” The droid turned to face the interior bulkhead on the opposite side of the cabin. “Hey, boss—check this out.”
Dash moved to where the droid stood, the quarterdeck schematics projected onto the burnished brown surface of the wall in front of them. “What is it?”
“That area I’ve so helpfully highlighted in red for you is the original schematic for this row of suites.”
“Yeah, so what am I looking at?”
“Boss,” Leebo said, in what was, for the droid, a patient tone. “What’s wrong with this picture?”
Dash peered at the red area and noticed something right away. He also realized why the room had struck him as peculiar.
Star Wars: Shadow Games Page 6