Star Wars: Shadow Games

by Michael Reaves

  Javul smiled as she stepped up onto the stage. It was made of white, translucent plasteel that glowed like the shell of a Nautolan moon-snail, lit from beneath with soft, ambient light.

  “I love performing here. It’s like a shrine.”

  Dash followed her onto the stage, peering suspiciously at the gleaming surface underfoot. “Yeah, right. I feel like I’m about to have a religious experience.”

  The words were no sooner out of his mouth than a hole appeared in the middle of the stage and irised out as if they stood on the eye of a titanic beast.

  “Drop!” he shouted, going into a half crouch, blaster already aimed steadily at the hole—out of which appeared the heads and shoulders of Yanus Melikan and his cargo droid.

  “Come on,” said the cargo master, his pale eyes focused on the business end of Dash’s weapon. “Do you have to draw that blasted thing every time something surprises you?”

  Dash glanced at Javul, who was staring at him, wide-eyed … and obviously holding back laughter. Spike didn’t bother to hold it back. She burst into a cascade of unfeminine guffaws that grated on his ears. A second later Javul was laughing, too, though much more attractively. She held out a pacifying hand to Dash, who could only glare from the women to Mel and back again.

  “I’m—I’m sorry, Dash, but the look on your face …”

  He holstered his weapon and turned to look behind him as a strangely musical hissing caught his ear. Eaden blinked at him, lips drawn into a straight line.

  “You did not just laugh at me,” Dash told him, pointing an accusing finger.

  The Nautolan blinked and said, “As you wish.”

  “Well, what am I supposed to do? A hole opens up in the floor—”

  “We have to bring the equipment in from somewhere,” said Mel mildly. “In a three-dimensional performance space, that somewhere must be below.”

  Dash and Eaden explored that “below” as much as possible as the stage gear and holo-emitters were put in place by a mixed stage crew of droids and sentients. It was big and open with few places to hide … until flat after antigrav flat moved Javul Charn’s equipment into place. Then it became a warren.

  “Do you have to travel with all this stuff?” Dash asked the star of the show as she watched her setup grow. “Isn’t the whole point of a holoperformance that it’s all—you know—holo?”

  “That’s just it,” she said earnestly, leading Dash to discover another look that made it hard to remain professional. “Holography has reached such a level that nothing is real. I mean, if those people hadn’t seen me walk in the front door, they’d have no way of knowing—if I didn’t make a point of showing them—that I’m really here and not in some studio in Imperial Center. To enhance that effect, I do some of my acts with real props. Wire frames and gantries and fly-hooks.”

  “Fly-hooks?” He was confused. “You mean skyhooks?”

  She pointed up into the gigantic rotunda, which Dash was sure was big enough to have its own weather system. “I fly. I literally fly, Dash. Not virtually, but really. Not antigrav, either. I use an opti-fiber tether.” She grinned at his horrified expression, then leaned toward him and added, “It’s so thin, it’s invisible.”

  For at least the second or third time that day, Dash was speechless. He’d played catch-as-catch-can with Imperial cruisers, navigated asteroid fields, confronted pirates, bounty hunters, Imperial goons, Black Sun operatives, rancor beasts, and even an Inquisitor, but this … For a moment his mind held a horrible image of her dangling, hundreds of meters above a very public stage, suspended by a glowing opti-fiber the thickness of a Gamorrean’s nose hair. If someone were to cut that slender lifeline …

  “Under normal circumstances, Javul, none of this would bother me—well, okay, it would bother me a little. But these aren’t normal circumstances. If they were I wouldn’t be here.”

  She put a hand on his arm. “I’m a pro at this, Dash. I’ve done it hundreds of times. I’m as much in my element up there—” She nodded at the faraway ceiling. “—as you are piloting your ship. Don’t you have anything you do that most people think is just nuts, but you do it anyway … because you can?”

  He flashed for a moment on the Kessel Run and the maneuver that had gotten him and Eaden into this situation. He hated that what she said almost made sense to him. Almost.

  “Eaden,” he said.

  His first mate responded with a grunt.

  “You stay here and keep an eye on our little holostar. I’m going to take Leebo and head back to the Rodian flight control office at the spaceport. I want to see if I can scare up any intel on that coded piece of sabotage we picked up. Like for instance who sent it.”

  Javul made a pouty face. “You’re going to miss my rehearsal.”

  He gave her an icy look. It had been known to terrify younger, less experienced space jockeys. She just laughed.

  The Equator City Flight Control Authority was abuzz with activity. Dash’s polite request to review the outgoing messages to the Nova’s Heart got him exactly nowhere. Frustrated, he filed a formal complaint with flight control, stating that the ship had been sent erroneous information. That at least got him some attention.

  “What sort of erroneous information?” asked the midlevel Rodian functionary.

  “Information that caused the ship to register an imaginary hull breach. Our security systems went berserk and shut off part of the ship. The ship’s owner was almost suffocated in her own quarters.” A bit of an exaggeration never hurt.

  The Rodian flight admin consulted his holo-terminal. “The Nova’s Heart docked two standard hours ago. Presumably this exchange of false information occurred somewhat earlier?”

  “On planetary approach. It was part of the second packet of instructions our navicomp received from your control.”

  The Rodian shrugged. “A diagnostic would have been run since then. I’m sure the anomaly was cleared up.”

  “This wasn’t an anomaly,” said Dash carefully, just managing to quell the urge to drag the bug-eyed imp out of his seat and dig into the guts of the system himself. “It was a very specific and very dangerous instruction set.”

  The Rodian blinked. “You’re suggesting it was deliberate?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out. Now if you’d be so kind as to let me go back over the communications between this facility and the Nova’s Heart?”

  The little toady was shaking his head. “I’m sorry, Captain … I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Dash. Dash Rendar.”

  The functionary pushed and stroked the virtual buttons and pads that floated in the air between them. “Pardon me, Captain Rendar, but the commander of the Nova’s Heart is registered as a Serdor Marrak.” He pulled up a flat image of Marrak, not bothering to perform even the small courtesy of spinning the pic toward Dash so that the stats weren’t reversed. “A Zabrak. You,” he continued, “are not Zabrak. Or, if you are, you should shoot your cosmetic surgeon.” He uttered a rude quack intended for a laugh.

  “I’m not the ship’s captain. Never claimed otherwise. I’m Charn’s security officer.”

  The bug eyes blinked. “Charn? As in Javul Charn?”

  Now he was getting somewhere. He smiled. “The very same. She’s setting up over at the Holosseum even as we speak. She asked me to come down here and see to this matter. So if I might go over those flight logs?”

  “I’m sorry, Rendar, but I can’t let you do that.”

  Dash regarded the admin for a moment, cast a glance at the silent Leebo, then pulled on a jaunty smile. “I can make it worth your while.”

  “No, you cannot.” The Rodian sounded genuinely regretful, but he also sounded firm. “There are regulations to uphold. I cannot grant civilians access to the system. Under any circumstances. You’ve filed an official complaint. It will take several days to process, but it will be dealt with.”

  “In several days, we’ll be moving on to our next stop!”

  “That is not my affai
r. Good day.”

  Stung by the dismissal, Dash removed himself to the corridor outside the flight control office. Of all the admins that might have been on duty, he had to trip over an honest one. “What are the odds?” he asked himself softly.

  “Well, what now, boss?” asked Leebo.

  “I suppose we could wait for the next admin shift. Find someone willing to be bought off. Of course, that’ll take hours.”

  “Seven-point-oh-four-four, to be exact,” offered the droid. “We don’t—”

  “—have that kind of time,” they finished in unison.

  Dash frowned, peering up the corridor, wondering where the communications systems were housed. “If we could find the communications hub, we might be able to slice in and—”

  He stopped. Leebo was shaking his head slowly. “There’s a reason they call it Comm Central, Boss. It would be too well guarded—not to mention having security protocols up the exhaust pipes.”

  There was a moment of silence as Dash pondered the situation; then Leebo uttered a tinny sigh. “Do I have to say it?”

  “Say what?”

  “I’ve got an idea, boss. Of course, I always have an idea.”

  Dash glared at him. “So spit it out.”

  “Housekeeping.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Housekeeping bots and droids have to plug into protocol terminals to receive instructions. The ports are unguarded. Who cares if someone steals the trash compactor schedule? You see, all systems are connected at some level in a facility like this. They have to be, because if it’s ever necessary to reboot the entire system or to power it up after a disaster, you can’t initialize every system independently; it’d take forever—well, actually, only seventeen-point-nine hours, but still—I’m sorry; did you just make a noise?”

  Dash made the noise again. “I get it,” he said. “There’s built-in redundancy and subsystems that tie the whole mess together. Like housekeeping.”

  “You do get it. Imagine my delight.”

  “Shut up,” said Dash, “and find a terminal.”

  Even down in the sublevels of the building there weren’t many maintenance droids of Leebo’s class engaged directly in the housekeeping activities. They were overseers, leaving it to the smaller, simpler service droids to scurry about doing the grunt work—cleaning floors, scooping up trash, sucking up dust. Noting this, Leebo snatched up an MSE-6 cleaning droid, tucked it under one arm, and pretended, quite credibly Dash thought, to be adjusting its communications port.

  Such a task required that the droid plug the MSE-6 into one of the many maintenance ports integrated into each doorway along the service corridors. Leebo did this with mechanical panache, uttered the droid equivalent of a “Tsk,” then sliced in himself, using the MSE-6 as a conduit.

  Dash, watching from where he pretended to be awaiting a lift, froze when a Rodian maintenance supervisor stopped to see what Leebo was doing.

  “What’s wrong with the MSE unit?” he asked. “If it’s broken, just take it down to the shop and have them issue a new one. It’ll save time.”

  “Not necessary, sir,” Leebo said. “It seems merely to be misinterpreting its instruction set. I believe I can have it set to rights in moments once I determine the source of the problem. I am currently,” he added as the Rodian’s gaze took in the fact that he was linked into the system through the maintenance droid, “ascertaining that the fault does not lie in the instruction set itself.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Sure. Good idea. Carry on, then.” The Rodian departed, Dash relaxed, and Leebo continued his tunneling through the port authority’s housekeeping system.

  Dash’s hope that the hallways would remain empty was a forlorn one; when the lift opened for a trio of Sullustan mech-techs, he was forced to enter and ride it up several levels until they got off. Then he rode it down again. In fact, he rode it up and down several times while waiting for Leebo to finish.

  He’d returned to the maintenance level for perhaps the fourth time when the doors of the lift opened and Leebo stepped in.

  “Mission accomplished.”

  “You got the records?”

  The droid tapped his durasteel skull with a finger. “Got ’em.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  “I didn’t have time to analyze them. That maintenance super came back.”

  Dash glanced down. “You still have a cleaning droid tucked under your arm.”

  “Yes. I do, don’t I? Can I keep it? I’ve always wanted a pet.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Droids don’t joke—not really. We just regurgitate learned responses. Fact is, I may have to keep it. I told the maintenance super I was taking it down to the shop after all, but this lift is going up … and up and up. He may have noted this.”

  “So just turn the thing loose when we get out.”

  “Bad idea. It’s got a unique ID. If anyone suspects I was tampering with it, they could track it down and discover that that’s just what I was doing—using its protocols to slice into the system.”

  “You can’t have left fingerprints.”

  “Shows what you know. In connecting to the MSE-6, I left my own indelible mark on the little guy. Unless I completely wipe its core, they might be able to identify me by my unique ID.”

  “So? Wipe its core.”

  Leebo reacted with a shocked stance. “How rude.” He patted the top of the droid’s metal casing. “Pretend you didn’t hear that, Mousie.”

  “Mousie?”

  “An MSE-6 cleaning droid. Serial number E3E3EEK. Mousie seems an appropriate, if unimaginative, name.”

  “Uh-huh. And you’re going to get it out of here how?” The lift doors hissed open, and Dash nodded to the broad, crowded hallway that gave onto the port authority’s entry.

  “It’s rather a warm day, sir,” said Leebo blandly. “Allow me to carry your jacket.”

  TEN

  JAVUL WAS NERVOUS. NERVOUS IN A WAY SHE HADN’T felt since she’d embarked on her career. Before a performance she was always keyed up, always edgy, amped, eager to be onstage. That came with the territory. But right now, she was just plain jumpy. “Jinky,” as Dara would say.

  And why not? Before she’d acquired her “stalker,” the most she’d had to fear was a missed lyric, a missing prop, a mechanical glitch. Now … now she didn’t know what to expect.

  She stood on the stage below the Holosseum dome and looked up into the vast scaffolding that served as the framework for her show. Flown in the ether beneath the crown of the Holosseum were four separate sets. One was a stylized forest with treetops suggested by vertical masts of aluminum swathed in synthsilk. “Clouds” of zoosha fabric—able to be rendered invisible at a command from the rig master—floated in among the tree limbs.

  The second set was a balcony that formed the only solid surface in a cloud city described in sheets and streamers and billows of translucent material.

  The third and fourth pieces represented the duality of Coruscant/Imperial Center—the first gleaming and grand, reaching up toward the distant sun; its alter ego dark and enigmatic with edges that were cold and hard and unforgiving.

  These, Javul had designed herself. She didn’t openly proclaim that they represented Coruscant’s past and present, of course. That would have been subversive, and Javul Charn stayed as far from subversive in her stage act as possible. But she was not averse to admitting a little nostalgia.

  The costumer brought out a pair of wings and began securing them to her back, carefully adjusting them so they wouldn’t foul the opti-fiber cable attached to Javul’s ultralight harness. They looked like gossamer—slender arcs of the finest metal overlaid with panels of zoosha. A tiny power generator poured colored light into the threads of the fabric and up the length of the tether, cycling through all the colors of the spectrum—even colors visible only to nonhuman eyes. The little power source also generated an emergency antigrav field just in case the opti-fiber were to fail. In the average venue, the field
would let Javul down to the stage gently.

  The Rodian Holosseum was no average venue, either in size or opulence. It was easily the largest, most luxurious indoor concert hall she’d ever performed in, and that domed ceiling seemed a kilometer away just now.

  She took a deep breath, voice-activated the antigrav field, and bobbed up from the floor.

  “Make sure of the coshtumes, please,” said the wardrobe designer, a Bothan woman named Tereez Dza’lar. “I’d hate to have you acshidentally turn thish into a holo-peep-show.”

  Javul smiled and murmured, “Act One, Scene Two.”

  The pale gray one-piece body stocking she wore shimmered out of existence to make way for a diaphanous dress of sky blue with a shower of golden glitter that seemed to migrate over the surface of the fabric. The ragged hem of the skirt floated about her hips and knees. Her hair framed her face in a pale, lustrous gold.

  “Good,” said Tereez. “Try shomething a bit more opaque.”

  “Act Two, Scene Three.”

  The dress dissolved, and was replaced by a regulation Imperial uniform of the type worn by intelligence officers. In drab brown with gleaming rank insignia, it was about as far removed from the insubstantial fey blue gown as it could get.

  Tereez laughed out loud—a sound somewhere between a hiss and a purr. “The wings!”