Looking at her projected image in an offstage holodisplay, Javul joined in. The Imperial getup clashed horribly with the wings, an irony that was not lost on her. “Wow, now there’s a new concept: an Imperial sprite. Think we could build a show around that?”
Tereez shook her head. “I think it would be shuicide to try. The Emperor would never approve. Try the Firsht Act coshtume. The cap was cutting out lasht time.”
Javul complied and faced her costumer wearing a green tunic with green leggings and a jaunty green cap with a bright red feather that nearly matched the new color of her hair. This time the costume accommodated the wings by making them seem to disappear. They weren’t programmed to do that with the Imperial intel costume because she never wore wings with that during the live show.
“Looksh good. Everything sheems to be functioning perfectly.”
Javul looked up at the rigging again, hyperaware of that old show business axiom that the one thing a performer didn’t want right before a performance was a perfect rehearsal. She found herself hoping something would go wrong.
“Places please!” she called to the crew. “Let’s take the first number, okay?”
Everyone faded from sight … except for Eaden Vrill, who stood impassively at the extreme edge of the stage, arms folded over his broad chest, tentacles waving gently about his shoulders.
Dara appeared behind him at the edge of the stage and tapped on his foot. “Sorry, big guy—you can’t stand there.”
With a last look up into the dome, the Nautolan bodyguard descended from the stage into the shadows between two sections of seating, his head-tresses dancing as if in an eddying wind.
Javul felt a tingle of apprehension. Where was Dash and what had he found out at the spaceport?
“It’s trashed,” said Finnick. He returned to the spot in the comm readout where the sub rosa message began. There was no clear instruction there, just a string of jumbled garbage that neither Leebo nor the ship’s communications computer could make anything of. “I’d guess it was programmed to deteriorate after broadcast.”
“But we’ve still got the substance of it on our end, right?” Dash asked.
“I doubt it.” Finnick called up the ship’s transceiver records and went to the time index in question.
More garbage.
Dash sat back in his seat next to Finnick on the bridge of the Nova’s Heart. “Then we’re stumped. There’s nothing we can determine from this.”
“Yeah there is,” said Arruna, leaning over Finnick’s shoulder to point at the very beginning of the message in the flight control record. “This was keyed in. Probably from the sender’s console.”
“How can you tell?” Dash asked, frowning.
“If it were sliced in from a remote source, you’d see some artifacts from the tunneling. There’d be, um, slicing and transport code, basically. That is, the code that created a hole in the data stream, then inserted the message. As you can see”—she pointed from the flight control readout to the one from the ship’s transceiver—“these two pieces of code, while pure garbage, are identical pieces of pure garbage. They’re deteriorating in the same predefined way.”
“Yeah. I get it,” said Dash. “There was no slicing code in our message, so if there was any in the port’s exchange, we’d see it as … different garbage.”
“Exactly.”
“But that means that whoever was sitting on the console in flight control deliberately sabotaged us. They’re part of the conspiracy.” He hated the word, but there it was.
“It might have been a flunky who was just told to enter this code without realizing what it would do,” said Finnick, “but yeah, there’s a chance it was someone who knew exactly what they were doing.”
Dash stood up and moved away from the console. “And they might’ve been doing it because they wanted to do it or because they were paid to do it or because they were ordered to do it by a superior. And there’s no way for us to know which.”
“One thing we do know,” said the Twi’lek engineer. “Someone with tentacles in the port authority set this up. Which suggests—”
“Someone with almost unlimited resources,” said Dash. Like a Vigo, for example. He rubbed at the back of his neck. This whole situation was giving him a headache.
Javul flew at the end of her lifeline high up in the dome, adorned in her sprite costume, her wings trailing glitter through the star-spangled ersatz heavens. Music soared around her—the opening strains of the centerpiece of the second act in which the sprite bemoaned the loss of her free-spirited love to the groundlings who could not fly and who therefore sought to keep all others from the sky.
Borne upward on the winds of melody and harmony, she opened her mouth and began to sing:
I see you in your tiny box;
My heart falls and breaks and bleeds.
The opti-fiber line played out and she plummeted right on cue, drawing up mere meters from the floor.
I would come to you.
I would rage for you.
I would free you.
She raised her arms in a graceful dancer’s pose and shot skyward again.
But if I come and if I rage and if I seek to free,
Will they not spring the tender trap?
Your pain is only bait … for me.
She’d reached the apex of the dome again and let the last note of the verse ring out long and mournfully before swooping into the aerial “steps” of her dance. She worked in a spiral, pushing the circumference of the dance out and out. With the seating in place, it would seem to her watchers that they sat within the forest of Kashyyyk or cloud city on Bespin or the heights and depths of Imperial Center. She would pass so close to them that they could almost reach out and touch her.
She looked down as she soared through the forest of Kashyyyk and saw the holographically projected trunks of the great trees reaching down and down.
Then she saw something else. She saw the aperture in the middle of the stage begin to iris open.
Before she could wonder what Mel was doing moving scenery during rehearsal, she felt a deep thrum, a mechanical rumble. The air trembled and the concert seats—all of them—shot out of their storage pits into the great, open dome.
Javul shrieked and jerked out of her spiral into a back-flip that carried her toward the center of the space. The seats were moving many times faster than intended … and all at once. Chaotic air currents struck her, buffeted her, redirecting her flight. She tumbled, saw a bank of seats flying up toward her, and pulled into a somersault. The seat assembly missed her, but clipped her wing, tearing at the fabric and twisting the aluminum struts.
She twisted—out of control for a moment—and reached up to grasp the opti-fiber. It cracked like a whip, then snagged on the corner of the topmost seating unit as it hit the limits of its flight. The unit swung in a crazy arc, dragging Javul with it at the end of her glowing leash … directly into the path of another careening bank of seats.
She was out of options. She reached up through the holographic fabric of her costume and twisted the emergency catch on her harness. It released. She plunged downward.
She heard someone else scream then, far below on that seemingly tiny stage. Dara. She heard an answering yowl from Tereez. She activated the antigrav unit in her wings. It caught her in an invisible net of buoyancy, stopping her descent. She was still falling, but in slow motion now. It was okay. She’d make it.
She tried to reposition herself so as to land on the stage rather than falling through the opening iris. No luck. She was in an antigrav bubble. There was no way to swim through the air outside of it. But that was okay, too. The iris was starting to close. She relaxed. She could see Dara and Tereez and Mel and Eaden awaiting her and could make out the shadows of others emerging from the sidelines in a gabble of speculation and shouted orders.
“Open it!” Mel was yelling at someone. “Open it!”
The antigrav generator gave out when she was about twenty-six meters from th
e stage floor, plunging her once again toward the closing iris. If it closed completely …
She was mere centimeters from the collapsing maw when somebody collided with her in midair, grasped her in a set of powerful arms, and turned her head over heels. She heard the iris snap shut and her rescuer utter a gasp of surprise or pain. She landed atop his body and the two slid to a stop.
There was a moment of silence, then a rush of sound—talking, crying … swearing. She realized her eyes were squeezed shut and opened them as hands explored her limbs. She looked up into Dash Rendar’s ashen face.
“I don’t think anything’s broken,” he said and lifted her away from …
She turned and looked down. Eaden Vrill, his face pulled into a tight grimace, sat up, then stood in a movement so fluid she wondered if he had antigrav tech built into his clothing.
“Oh. Oh, Eaden, thank you!” She shuddered as a sudden chill swept through her body. She needed to sit down or her body was going to shake apart.
“Yeah, big guy,” Dash said. “Way to guard the princess. That was one amazing leap you performed … You okay?”
“I am not okay. I am … injured.” The Nautolan glanced down at the several head-tresses that were sorting themselves out. One of them was missing about two centimeters of its tip, which had been sliced through as cleanly as if it had been taken off with a vibroblade.
Javul raised her hands to her face and trembled harder. Tears pressed for release. She held them in check with a will. “Oh. Oh, Eaden. I’m so sorry.”
Dash put his arms around her. “Hey. Hey. He’s just doing his job. Besides, it’s not that bad. Tell her it’s not that bad, Ead.”
The Nautolan looked at Javul, his facial expression softening very slightly. “It is not that bad.”
Not that bad? It was horrible. She felt her knees going wobbly. “I need to sit down.”
In seconds Dara and Tereez were flanking her, leading her away from the scene of her near-death experience.
Behind her she heard Eaden say, in an impossibly deadpan tone: “It’s not that bad?”
“It’s just one tiny bit of one little tentacle.”
“Really? What if someone were to cut off the tip of one of your little fingers. Not much, just the pad, just the part with all the nerves in it. The part you use to feel things.”
“Well, yeah,” said Dash, “but I’d still have nine fingers left. You got—lemme see …”
“Don’t. I doubt you can count that high.”
Javul giggled. And kept giggling. And wondered if she’d ever stop.
ELEVEN
“THE FIRST FAILURE WAS IN THE HOLOSSEUM AUDIENCE and stage subsystems. Specifically, there was a power surge that somehow triggered all the seating mechanisms to fire and then essentially put them into overdrive.”
Arruna Var sat cross-legged in a formchair in the main venue control center of the huge stadium. The large, crescent-shaped room—situated high up on the curve of the rotunda—offered a breathtaking view of the hall. Gathered around the engineer were Dash, Eaden, the costumer Tereez, and Yanus Melikan. Leebo, and Mel’s service droid, Oto, stood unmoving at the outer fringes of the group. Dara had whisked Javul off to the green room.
“The second failure,” Arruna continued, pointing out power linkages in the visual display of the building’s vast systems, “was in the iris control for the stage door.”
“Was the surge responsible for the iris malfunctioning?” asked Mel.
Arruna shook her head. “Not impossible, but improbable. The two systems are separate at the control level. Yeah, they’re ultimately linked through the power grid, but the stage door has an independent backup power supply in case of emergency. So if the main grid goes down for some reason, it can be opened to allow for evacuation. It also serves as a power modulation trigger. When hit with a surge of the type the diagnostic recorded, it’s supposed to cut itself loose from the system and go to the backup power supply. It appears to have done just that. I think it was instructed to open … and close … through the control net.”
Behind Dash, Leebo uttered the droid equivalent of a grunt. Dash glanced back at him. “You got something?”
“I scanned the stage door controls for genetic residue and fingerprints,” said the droid. “Nothing.”
“Okay, well, who had access to the controls?”
Mel looked down at his hands, fisted atop the venue control console. “We all did. Every member of the crew did. And, to be fair, so did the maintenance crew for the facility, though they were relegated to second-level support. The primary controls are beneath the stage in the pit, but those can be overridden from here. And that doesn’t address the second level of failures—Javul’s umbilical and her antigrav unit.”
“I was the lasht pershon to touch that,” said Tereez, the irises of her great golden eyes narrowing to slits. “If I did shomething to damage the unit—perhapsh when I attached the opti-fiber …”
“Whatever happened,” said Dash, “this was no accident. So it’s unlikely anything you did unintentionally caused the shorting out in the antigrav.”
Dash didn’t miss the fact that Tereez’s ears flattened at the word unintentionally. Well, too bad if her feelings were hurt. If this was sabotage, everyone was a suspect.
“The timing, also, was too perfect,” said Eaden. “But we must remember that Javul Charn, herself, disconnected the umbilical.”
“Yes,” said Arruna, “but she did it because the cable had fouled the seats, which wouldn’t have happened if not for the power surge.”
Dash frowned. “But even assuming the seats were sabotaged, whoever triggered that couldn’t count on the cable getting caught in them.”
“True, but the same surge that launched the seating arrays also charged the metal framework in the vault. Watch.”
Arruna rattled off a command to the diagnostic program she was running to display what had happened in the superstructure of the hall during the incident. The diagnostic showed a simulation of the power flow. The power surge, indicated by a flood of golden light, ran up the spines that supported the “eggshell,” into the coupling for the opti-fiber cable, and down into the cable itself. In the sim, the cable gleamed like molten metal, whipping through the air as if its passenger weighed nothing.
“Four separate failures then,” said Mel. His voice was tight, the glacial expression in his pale eyes somehow infusing his quiet words with violence. “Four well-timed or improbably coincidental failures.”
“Depends on how you do the math,” said Dash. “The power surge triggered the seats, and took the stage iris offline. Might it have kicked enough juice through the circuit as it did to short the iris and force it open?” He looked to Arruna, who nodded with a shrug of her lekku.
“Unlikely,” she said. “But …”
“But possible,” he finished. “The power surge also caused the opti-fiber to misbehave, so the only variable the power surge absolutely can’t account for is the failure of the antigrav unit.”
“Actually, boss,” said Leebo, “I think it can. If the power in that opti-cable hit the wing framework with enough of a charge, it might’ve destabilized the antigrav unit. I know I’m just a hunk of metal, but in my humble opinion the only facet of this fascinating sequence of mechanical events the power surge is unlikely to have caused is the freakishly well-timed closing of the stage iris.”
“I think he’s right,” said Arruna. “The power surge might have caused the iris to open, but once the backup power supply had kicked in it would have to have been closed from the stage control. In fact,” she said, paging back to the functional display of the venue’s control grid, “it could only have been closed from that console, because the stage system was independent at that point.”
Dash considered that. “I suppose it’s possible that someone saw the iris opening and, not realizing anything else was wrong, tried to close it.” He looked up and met Mel’s gaze.
The cargo master’s eyes narrowed. “An unfor
tunate sequence of accidents? Do you really think that’s what this is?”
“Nope. Not at all. I mean, it could be that, but it would be stupid to act as if it were. I’m saying I think whoever planned this was very clever. Maybe even clever enough to count on our reactions to make matters worse. The saboteur knows that once the iris goes offline, he loses control …”
Mel raised an eyebrow. “So he uses the power pulse to open the iris and hopes someone in the pit will try to close it? That’s a little risky, isn’t it?”
“Maybe it’s the best he can do. Unless, of course, he’s in the pit himself.”
Mel’s gaze was icy. “What are you insinuating?”
Dash raised his hands. “Not a thing. Not a blasted thing. I’m just saying—whoever closed the iris would’ve had to do it from the pit, right?”
Mel sat back, apparently deciding not to take umbrage over these insinuations. “Not necessarily. Frankly, it’s more likely that it was triggered remotely in some way. For one thing, if that closure was triggered from the console in the pit, whoever did it would have had to clean up after themselves well enough to pass a scan for traces of organic material.”
Dash turned to Arruna. “You’ve looked at the engineering involved in this. What sort of resources would have been necessary to pull this off?”
Arruna met his gaze levelly. “The power surge came from the city grid, Dash. The city grid. That’s beyond an irked ex-boyfriend. Even a Vigo.”
It was also beyond a single member of Javul’s troop. Which meant what—a conspiracy?
“Depends on which Vigo, though, doesn’t it?” Dash asked. He rose to pace the carpeted floor of the control room, looking down into the hall where the Holosseum maintenance staff—droids and sentients, alike—scurried to secure the rogue seating sections. “An offworld Vigo messing around on another guy’s turf would have to be nuts to try something like this. I mean, who’d risk it just to scare an ex-girlfriend?”
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