“This schematic shows these cabins as all being the same size.” He swept an index finger down the line of renderings. “But they’re not. This one is smaller than our suite. Or at least the front room is smaller, by about half a meter.”
“Hurrah—you’re teachable,” said Leebo.
Dash stepped through the schematic’s lines of light and pressed his hands to the wall. “There’s something behind here,” he said. He moved to the front corner of the quarters as the others left off their poking and prodding and came to see what he was doing.
“The schematics show this wall as being about half a meter farther aft,” he said as he continued to run his hands over the surface, searching for unevenness or seams.
“Unless you’ve got bionic fingers, boss, I’m pretty sure I’m better qualified to find what you’re looking for.”
“The droid’s right,” said Finnick. “If all else fails we can burn through the metal.”
“I really wish you wouldn’t. I just had it refinished.”
The entire group turned as one to see Javul Charn standing nonchalantly in the doorway of her suite. Dara and Mel were with her.
Dash just kept from letting loose with a scalding expletive. “Where have you been?”
Dara rolled her eyes. “Sounds like my dad.”
Mel stepped into the room. “They scared the hell out of me by appearing in the cargo bay, literally out of nowhere.”
“Not nowhere,” Javul corrected, looking contrite. “We came out of a escape panel that connects—”
Dash pointed at the wall. “Here.”
“We didn’t know what was happening, Dash,” Javul said. “The alarm went off, the power cut out, and we thought there was a hull breach back here. We tried to raise somebody by banging on the door, but then we figured if there really was a hull breach, we might be in pretty bad shape if the doors failed. So we used the escape tube.”
“I’ve already explained to them,” Mel said, “that there wasn’t a hull breach. It was something else.”
“Yeah. Sabotage, apparently,” said Dash and was gratified when Javul paled, her flesh looking almost translucent.
“Is there any way to be sure?” she asked.
“I’m going to go check that power terminus, first off,” said Arruna grimly. “I’d like some company. Someone with a blaster and more than a little experience using it would be nice.” Her gaze turned to Eaden, who bowed, then followed her from the room.
“You’re sure you’re all right?” Finnick asked Javul.
She nodded. “I’m … I’m fine. Why don’t you secure the ship, run diagnostics on everything, then get us back in hyperspace as soon as you and Arruna and the captain feel it’s safe. We don’t want to be late for our Rodian engagements.”
The ship’s systems showed no sign of damage or further sabotage, the hull was fine, and a G2 repair droid was scrambled to fix the broken door panels. Arruna determined that the power outage in the aft quarterdeck had been triggered remotely, and immediately disappeared into a conference with First Mate Finnick to pore over the computer records. If an event had triggered the outage, she reasoned, it would show up somewhere as a surge, a blip, or even, if they were far luckier than they deserved, a clear command sequence.
Meanwhile, Dash and Eaden examined the access tube that led from Javul’s suite to the cargo hold—Dash wondering how his easy celebrity-sitting job had suddenly become dangerous.
The tube was pretty slick, actually, equipped with hand- and footholds that would serve a broad variety of sentients (Hutts being an obvious exception), a standalone air filtration system (which allowed it to double as a hiding place), and a strip of light-emitting plasteel that required very little energy to burn virtually forever. The ship’s a-grav had been shut off within the tube so as not to register as an inexplicable power drain.
“I gotta get me one of these,” Dash said as they finished their inspection and emerged into the ship’s cargo bay. “Straight shot from the Outrider’s bridge right down to the hold.”
“And what would you propose we gut to make room?” asked Eaden mildly. “The dimensions of the Outrider won’t allow for this sort of … excess.”
Dash grinned. “We could take it down through your quarters. You keep bragging about how little sleep you need.”
“I do not brag,” returned Eaden. “It is a statement of simple fact. The teräs käsi discipline allows me to sleep less and more lightly than most diurnal sentients.”
Dash was about to offer a sarcastic retort when he looked down the aisle between shipping crates and saw Yanus Melikan striding toward them with a grim expression on his long face.
“Arruna and Bran have found something,” he said before Dash could ask. “They want you up on the bridge.”
“Approximately one minute and twenty seconds before the alarm sounded, we contacted the Rodian Space Authority for approach protocols,” said Finnick. “We sent the standard approach sequence and received the standard acknowledgments. Except that this came in, riding a subsidiary carrier wave.” He indicated a long string of Rodian characters that scrolled down the flat display of the bridge engineering terminal he, Dash, and Arruna were hovering over.
Arruna leaned in and ran a finger along the sequence of symbols and numbers. “It exchanges the correct protocols, here, then tells the ship’s system there’s been an event of some sort in the aft section of the quarterdeck, which the ship interpreted as a hull breach. Then it tells the system to shut down power to the affected area.”
“It actually targeted a specific area of the ship?” asked Dash. Arruna tapped the code with a pale blue fingernail. “This command, right here, targets the quarterdeck abaft the beam. Where Javul, her guests, and the officers are housed.”
“That’s pretty specific.”
Arruna’s left lekku quivered. “And peculiar. The command sequence doesn’t cause a disaster—which, theoretically, it could have. It simply fakes one. Why?”
“Sending a message?” suggested Dash.
“What message? It’s not exactly along the lines of I’m your biggest fan.”
“No. It’s more along the lines of I’m your biggest threat.”
The Twi’lek’s lekku twined about each other—a sign, Dash knew, of extreme anxiety. “Again, why?” Arruna asked.
“I don’t know, but I have to think someone does.”
He excused himself from the bridge and went aft to find Javul Charn. She was on the observation deck with her road manager, but she dismissed Dara as soon as she saw the look on Dash’s face.
“Talk to me, Javul,” he said when Spike had left the deck. “Tell me everything you know about this overeager fan of yours.”
“I’ve already done that.”
“Okay. Then let me tell you what I know about him … or her, or it. He isn’t just overzealous. He’s obsessed. And he’s not just a nut. He’s clever. And he’s not just wealthy. He’s got resources some small planetary governments don’t have.”
She paled. It made her eyes look huge in her heart-shaped face. Dash swallowed. Whoa. That was some look she had there. Once again he was reminded why fans became obsessed with her.
“What makes you say that?” she asked.
“The black lilies might’ve taken some credits—buying and bringing in all the flowers, bribing port officials, setting up the stasis field over your docking slip. But that was a parlor trick compared with this. The signal for the ship to respond to a fake hull breach and shut down power to the quarters was riding the carrier wave from the Rodian controller. It gave all the appropriate handshakes, and it knew where in the ship you lived … or at least the guy behind it did.”
“What do you want me to say?” she said, her voice unsteady. “I guess I have overzealous fans with too much time and credits on their hands.”
“Banthaflop.”
She blinked. “What?”
“You have something a lot worse than that and I think you know it.”
“What do you think I have?”
“Someone with a serious gripe against you. The kind of someone who can and does hold grudges for life—and beyond, if he can possibly manage it.” Dash folded his arms. “It’s time to come clean, little miss Star Bright. It’s not that this guy likes you too much—it’s that this guy really doesn’t like you. And I’m not real happy myself,” he added. “I don’t like flying backward and blind through an asteroid field, I don’t like facing a rancor with one hand tied behind me, and I don’t like this. At all. So ’fess up. What’d you do—kick someone out of your backup band? Refuse to date some high roller? Trash his pad? Break his heart?”
She stood silently for a long moment, her forehead resting on the transparent canopy of the observation deck, gazing out into space while Dash watched her reflection in the transparisteel surface. Then she said, “Not exactly.”
Dash exhaled sharply. “Not exactly what? You didn’t exactly trash his pad or you didn’t exactly break his heart?”
“I didn’t do anything.” She lifted her head to glance at him before returning her gaze to the stars. “It’s like this—there was this Vigo—”
A prickling of primal hatred crawled up Dash’s spine. “A Vigo? As in Black Sun?”
Javul made a face. “Is there any other kind?”
Dash wanted nothing to do with the notorious and powerful interstellar crime syndicate—even once-removed. He wasn’t afraid of Black Sun … but he was afraid of his own deeply buried hunger for revenge.
“How soon do we get to Rodia? If you’ve got bad blood with a Vigo, I’m catching the next transport back to Tatooine.”
NINE
JAVUL EYED DASH NARROWLY. “YOU DIDN’T LET ME FINISH. This Vigo had a girlfriend—her name was Alai Jance, as I recall. She started out the same way I did—as a small-time singer on the Corellian circuit. She hooked up with this Vigo—I don’t remember his name—and her singing career took a turn for the better. Then she dumped the Vigo and dropped out of sight, which probably wasn’t her best career move.”
“And this has to do with you, how?”
“I’m getting to that,” she said patiently, as if she were talking to a one-function service droid. “When I … burst onto the scene, I occasionally got mistaken for her. Apparently, we bear a striking resemblance to each other. As a result, I had to do a massive PR campaign establishing that I wasn’t a pirate’s brat from Nar Shaddaa, my hair wasn’t really red, I wasn’t just a glorified lounge singer, and I wasn’t the same woman who’d stupidly hitched herself to a Black Sun crime boss and was now trying to make a comeback.”
“Really.”
“Yes, really. I had no idea about any of this until I started getting increasingly strange holomail. And then, the black lilies …” She rubbed her hands up and down her arms as if she were suddenly cold.
“So you’re suggesting your stalker is somebody who doesn’t believe you. Big surprise there.” He held up a hand to halt her protest. “Any idea who that might be?”
She shook her head. “A rival maybe. Maybe one of this guy’s lieutenants—someone who thinks he might get in good with the boss if he—I don’t know—teaches the boss’s ex a lesson. Maybe none of the above. I don’t know for sure.”
“Well, fine then. If it’s a rival or a lieutenant, then the thing to do is let this Vigo know about it and let him take care of the problem.”
She grimaced. “I did mention that she’s his ex-girlfriend, right? He doesn’t really care what happens to her … much less to me.”
“If he’s a fan, he might. I mean, look—you’re big business. Chances are good he’s already got credits invested in you, right? If he thinks the galaxy is about to lose the considerable talents of Javul Charn because of some rival of his—or worse yet, one of his own guys …”
“Trust me,” she said. “He won’t care. Alai Jance, wherever she is right now, is of no concern to her notorious ex.” She straightened away from the window and brushed her hands off on her tunic as if wiping the problem away. “Look, we’re going to be docking on Rodia soon. I need to be thinking about my performances.”
“You’re kidding me, right? You’re not seriously going to go through with these gigs?”
She shrugged. “I don’t have a choice, Dash. I’m under contract. A lot of people are depending on me. I can’t let them down.”
She turned away from him and disappeared through the sliding doors that gave onto the quarterdeck, her head held high.
The performances on Rodia were in Equator City. No surprise there … except that Equator City was a hotbed of Black Sun activity—mostly credit laundering—that centered on the network of casinos operating there. Dash would have thought that, under the circumstances, Javul Charn would want to steer clear of the Rodian capital. He was surprised she’d brought her tour anywhere on Rodia.
He said as much to her as they took a shuttle to the venue from the ultraprivate landing facilities at the spaceport. The venue—the Holosseum—was a huge structure of transparisteel and durasteel big enough to house three Nova’s Hearts, the Outrider, and the Millennium Falcon all at once. It looked, Dash thought, like a giant crystalline egg half buried in the ground, pointy-end up.
“Actually,” she told him, “I feel a bit safer here than elsewhere. Whoever’s after Alai Jance is apparently afraid of the Vigos headquartered here.”
Dash glanced at her sharply. “Vigos headquarter here?”
“One or two—or so I’m told.”
“Yeah? By who?”
“By me, as it happens,” said Spike.
He looked across the shuttle to where the road manager sat facing him. Beside her, Eaden sat cross-legged on the couch, seemingly half asleep. That’s what his lidded eyes said, but his head-tails told a different tale. They were poised in an attitude that Dash thought of as stealth mode.
“You? What do you know about Black Sun?”
“I was raised on Tatooine. My daddy owned a grog shop until he got bought out by Chalmun.”
“The Cantina?”
She shook her head. “Naw. Little place in Kerner Plaza—Chalmun turned it into a café for his wife. Daddy made a pretty pile of credits on the deal, too. Anyway, you hear lots of interesting things in a grog shop.”
“Yeah. Did you hear which Vigos are holed up on Rodia?”
“I’ve heard a few names tossed around.”
Blasted spiky fem. “Which names?”
“Guy named Clezo, for one. A Rodian.”
“Sounds familiar—little wiry guy with buggy eyes?”
“Yeah, Clezo’s pretty short. And all Rodians have buggy eyes.”
“His are buggier.” Dash thought about the implications of this for a moment. Then he asked, “Who’s the other one?”
She made a face, thinking. “Not a native. Lemme see … oh, a former Mandalorian named … what was it?” She looked at Javul, who shrugged and shook her head.
“I try not to pay attention to stuff like that,” Javul demurred.
Dash kept his mouth shut, because if he opened it the frustrated scream that would result would be audible only to an Ortolan.
Spike snapped her fingers. “Kris. That was it, I think. Rumor had it that he sort of wandered in and out of Rodian space and made Clezo nervous.”
“As I recall, just about anything makes Clezo nervous,” Dash said.
Javul turned to look at him. “You know a Vigo? And you were concerned because you thought I knew one? Isn’t that kind of a double standard?”
“I wasn’t concerned because I thought you knew a Vigo. I was concerned because I thought you’d crossed a Vigo. There’s a big difference.”
“But you know a Vigo.”
“Not socially.”
Javul laughed and turned to look out the shuttle window as the vehicle pulled up at the front of the giant crystal egg that was the Holosseum. “And that, I suspect, is Dash-Rendar-ese for I-don’t-wanna-talk-about-it.”
Dash stifled a retort and asked, “Why
are we pulling up to the front of the building? Shouldn’t we enter through the stage area?”
“The front is more public. Look.” She canted her head toward a barricade behind which a large crowd of devoted fans waved and jumped up and down and did whatever else it was that devoted fans did—all at the tops of their lungs, air sacs, bronchi, or whatever respiratory organs they owned.
“You like being noticed, don’t you?”
“I like being safe. I figured our zealot wouldn’t be likely to try something major in such a public place—and besides, I can’t exactly sneak past these guys, can I?”
“Sneak past them? You let them know you were coming.”
“No—the adverts did that.”
“Down to the day and hour?”
Spike leaned across the space between them. “They’ve been there all night, laserbrain. Look at the camp gear.”
Dash looked. She was right, of course. Most of the people at the front edge of the crowd had vac-paks, canteens, and expandable sleep-cocoons with them. He even saw a couple of little enviro-tents pitched along a grassy sward. These were the hard-core fans, obviously here for the long haul.
They stepped out of the shuttle onto a broad swathe of glittering duracrete. The humidity hit Dash like a soggy mallet. He looked up at the energy dome over the city. It seemed that, no matter how many advances in technology the Rodians acquired, they couldn’t quite govern their homeworld’s environment. The entire planet seemed like a bog to most humans—a cool, misty bog in the extreme southern and northern climes and a hot, steamy one at the equator.
Dash and Eaden stood flanking Javul Charn, while she waved at the cheering crowds gathered to see her. They were meters away and behind a force barrier, but still, Dash’s gaze swept the fringes and beyond, looking for anything that might be a weapon.
“You’re too exposed here,” he said, taking Javul by the upper arm. “Let’s get inside.” He was a little surprised when she didn’t resist the suggestion.
It was measurably drier inside the Holosseum, and cooler as well. They made their way into the main hall through a gigantic circular atrium that rose to immense heights, creating the impression of an egg within an egg. Inside, Dash revised his estimate of how many ships the place could hold—he’d been too stingy. The entire broad bottom of the venue was taken up by the stage. The audience would sit in antigrav seats arranged in sections in the curve of the dome. At the moment, those seating sections were sunk into the floor, stacked one atop another so that only the topmost ones were visible. When the audience was admitted, they would file into the seats, filling each section, which would then lift toward the ceiling. Most holo-halls were like this, but Dash had to admit being awfully impressed with the Rodian venue. The only one bigger was the Holodome on Coruscant, and it was of an older design—the audience had to take lifts and mono-jets to fixed seating built into the walls or suspended from high-tensile cabling.
Star Wars: Shadow Games Page 7