“Sentients,” said Leebo. “Who can figure ’em?”
“I think the intent was to do more than frighten,” said Eaden quietly. “I think this was intended to maim or kill.”
Dash let out a gust of breath. “Yeah. That raises the stakes a bit, doesn’t it? But it still doesn’t make sense. It’s overkill—you’ll pardon the expression.”
“And it would still seem to call for operatives in key places,” Eaden observed.
There was a long silence in which Dash could almost feel the several sets of eyeballs behind him exchange wary glances.
Mel broke the silence … and changed the subject. “We never asked—what did you find out at the port authority?”
“That someone rascaled the flight control messages to the Nova’s Heart. And according to Leebo they did it from the communications console in the C and C. So if we’ve got a lovelorn Vigo on our hands, Eaden’s right: he’s got operatives in some very key places.” Dash turned on his heel and headed for the door. “It’s time for me to talk to our boss-lady again. Something’s seriously out of whack here.”
“I will not cancel the show,” Javul said doggedly for the third time. “We can work around this. The seats weren’t badly damaged, and the maintenance super thinks he can have them fixed by tomorrow night.”
“That’s not the worst of the problems,” argued Dash doggedly, “and you know it. Yeah, sure you’ve got redundancy built into your system, but how are you going to make sure something doesn’t happen to the backup equipment?”
“My crew will check every—”
“Someone on your crew,” said Dash, squatting next to her chair in the Holosseum’s luxurious green room, “may very well be on this guy’s payroll—whoever this guy is.”
She looked up at him, silver eyes wide. “No. I don’t—”
“C’mon, Javul! Look at the facts! Somebody was at that iris control when the power went down and timed the iris closing to your fall. Eaden barely got to you in time. If he wasn’t a teräs käsi master, he wouldn’t have and you’d have been sliced in two.”
“Who? Who do you suspect?”
He rose and started to pace, tugging at his lower lip. “Not Dara. She’s had too many other opportunities to do you damage. Unless, of course, your mysterious admirer has only recently gotten to her.”
Javul shook her head. “No. Not Dara. I’ve known her since before I was anybody.”
“Yeah, and she was topside when the iris went rogue. Arruna has the most technical knowledge. How well do you know her?”
“She’s been my engineer for about two years. Mel brought her on.”
“Okay. So she’s a maybe. Except she was allegedly aboard the ship running diagnostics when this whole thing happened. I’ll have Leebo check that. What about Mel?”
She shook her head. “No. It … it just can’t be Mel. He … he’s pulled me out of more situations than I can count. He’s run my backstage since the beginning.”
“He’s got the technical know-how to pull this off. And he had access. No one would have even questioned him being at the controls.”
“It’s not Mel,” she said stubbornly.
“How can you know that, though?” he insisted, equally stubborn.
“I—just—do.” The set of her jaw said she could outstubborn him any day of the week and knew it.
Something about the way she said it made Dash’s hair prickle at the back of his neck. “You know him pretty well, do you?”
“I … yes. I do.”
He took a deep breath. “Are you … close? As in … you know … friends?”
“Of course we’re—” She broke off and looked up at him.
He’d turned to face her. Their gazes locked for a moment and set him pacing again.
“You mean, are we lovers?”
He made a dismissive gesture. “Hey, it’s your own business.”
“No, we’re not lovers. Look, I trust Mel.”
“Is there anyone you don’t trust? What about Tereez? Could she be an operative for whoever’s behind this. After all, she said it herself—she was the last one to handle the antigrav unit. How long have you known her?”
Javul sighed. “Not that long. She came on about nine months ago at Cloud City on Bespin. We had an opening for a costumer and she applied. She does beautiful work. She’s a real artist.”
“On Bespin. That’s kind of unusual isn’t it? A Bothan costumer on Bespin?”
“She’d been working for an administrator of an urban mining corporation—name of Lando Calrissian—designing clothes for him, uniforms for his crew and—What? Don’t tell me you know Lando?”
Dash had stopped in mid-stride and done an about-face. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”
Javul smiled. “Small galaxy.”
“Why’d she leave him?”
“She hated living on a floating platform. Said it made her feel as if the world was going to drop out from under her feet. Leave her treading air.”
As opposed to living in a space yacht? That seemed a thin excuse to Dash, but he didn’t comment on it. He could look more deeply into the Bothan’s background later. Right now, he had more important matters to address. He moved to stand in front of Javul.
“Okay, look, here’s the bottom line: Someone has raised the stakes. The black lilies might have been intended to make you nervous and the fake hull breach to make you respect your saboteur’s power, but this last thing—this could have ended with you and possibly others dead or maimed. I’m thinking if a Vigo is involved and he’s not a local, he’s just overstepped his bounds by messing around in another Vigo’s territory. So a word to whichever of the local guys is at the top of the heap should do the trick.”
She was shaking her head.
“But,” he added, his voice hard, “I’m thinking it’s more likely one of the local kingpins. Which leaves us with two prime candidates—Clezo and the Mandalorian, Hityamun Kris.”
“Hitch,” she said quietly.
“What?”
“He goes by Hitch Kris. He’s powerful. And he’s the one who’s after me.”
“You mean, he’s the one who’s after Alai Jance.” Dash felt a tickle of suspicion that had been growing since she’d told him the story.
She looked up at him, pinning him to the carpet with that gleaming silver gaze. “I mean, he’s after me. I was … am … Alai Jance. And I was also Hitch Kris’s bride-to-be.”
Oddly, Dash’s first impulse was to laugh.
TWELVE
THE GIRL HAD MOXIE, DASH HAD TO ADMIT IT. ENGAGED to marry a Vigo, beginning a career underwritten by a Vigo, and then—poof!—she ends it because of her fiancé’s violent tendencies.
“He was into the worst kind of crime,” she told him. “Murder, assassination, drugs, kidnappings. I just couldn’t handle it.”
He wanted to ask whatever had made her think she could have handled it, but he didn’t. Instead he asked the inevitable: “How’d you meet such a lowlife?”
“I was performing in a club on Coruscant—the Quarek’k, a favorite watering hole run by Neimoidians for all sorts of high-class lowlifes. Black Sun, Imperial, mercenaries—every sentient who considered itself a tycoon came through the place. I can’t even imagine how many business deals went down on an average evening. And to be truthful, I didn’t want to. I just sang and danced and did little dramatic scenes from different cultural mythologies. I think that was my claim to fame—my little send-ups of everybody’s favorite ancestral legend or cultural icon. It’s why Hitch noticed me. I was doing this song cycle about the human immigrants on Mandalore and he said it brought tears to his eyes.”
Dash choked on the sudden urge to laugh. A mercenary ex-Mandalorian Vigo brought to tears by a nightclub chanteuse. That was rich.
“So you thought he was just a big, cuddly art patron, huh?”
“I suppose I did for about five minutes. Until I saw the crowd he did business with. No, I had an inkling of what Hitch Kris was before I … got involved
with him.” She paused, catching his expression of distaste. “Look, you’ve made bad choices, haven’t you? Don’t tell me you haven’t. Everybody makes bad, stupid choices. Sometimes we’re lucky enough to grow out of them.”
“Okay, so what caused you to grow out of Hitch Kris?”
She gave him a searching look, then said: “I thought he’d set me up in a career as a touring entertainer because he loved me. Because he believed I had talent. I came to realize through a series of blunders committed by his operatives that he’d done it because my touring provided him with a way to move certain items around the galaxy without anyone suspecting. His ships were known to the Imperials and to competing Vigos … and they were known to the Underlord Prince Xizor. Anything Hitch needed to move that he didn’t want those parties to know about, he arranged to have placed on my manifest. I was moving drugs, weapons, biological agents … and people. And no one was the wiser. Especially not me.”
“And then?” Dash asked.
“And then a diplomat on the Empire’s hit list turned up dead in one of my shipping containers. We found him completely by accident. We had a spot of trouble that caused us to have to drop out of hyperspace suddenly and the ship took quite a buffeting. The container was damaged, and in setting it to rights Mel found this poor man. Dead.”
“What did you do with the body?”
“We turned it over to the authorities on Coruscant and that was that. The official story was that he was a fan who had stowed away and died of asphyxiation.”
“Yeah. That’s also the story you told me,” Dash reminded her. “So what’s the truth?”
“The truth is that ambassadors to the Imperial court don’t usually stow away in the equipage of some holoshow.”
“Was that your first stowaway?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, blanching. “But not our last.”
Even after she’d parted company with Kris, and gone off on her own to make a new name for herself—literally—she’d been vigilant because her ex-beau had continued to try to use her tours to move his contraband. Dash didn’t press her, but clearly losing his fiancée was the least of the Vigo’s vexations. Losing a means of moving his extra-special secret cargoes without drawing suspicion onto himself was probably all he cared about.
This led Dash to wonder about the intent of the unhappy accidents. Was Kris trying to kill his ex, or simply drive her back into his arms? Sure she might’ve been injured in the fall, but that’s what medical droids and bacta tanks were for—both of which were part of Javul Charn’s retinue. If he’d sabotaged the ship, he did it in such a way that a trip down the escape hatch saved the day. And Dash was willing to bet that Hityamun Kris knew the inside of the Nova’s Heart almost as well as her mistress did. Heart had clearly been a smuggler’s ship at some point in her career—all the extra bells and whistles pointed to that conclusion. And who knew smuggling better than a Black Sun Vigo?
Well, with the possible exception of himself.
No, it made no sense for Kris to maim or kill Javul. If he did, that would be the end of his sweet setup. Which meant that either Kris was acting out of sheer, irrational rage (unlikely), or that the perpetrator was someone who didn’t care about him losing his sweet setup—a rival Vigo, maybe, or possibly a lieutenant with his eyes on a higher rung on the Black Sun corporate ladder.
Javul was spunky and cocky, but Dash believed she had no idea what she was really up against. Finding that dead diplomat might have scared her, but it apparently had not taught her to respect the sheer power of Black Sun and its higher-up operatives. He, on the other hand, had all too clear an idea of what Black Sun operatives were capable of.
He considered bailing out at their next port of call. Considered it a hundred times between his revealing conversation with Javul (or Alai) and the night the show opened, but he needed the money and—who was he kidding?—he cared that Javul didn’t end up as a smudge on some stage floor. And then there was that other impulse—the one that made him want to give Black Sun a bloody nose … or worse.
So instead, he gave the entire crew a blistering speech on awareness, made sure everyone had a communications device, divided all offstage personnel into teams of two, and ordered them to buzz him or Leebo or Eaden if anything—anything at all—looked the least bit out of the ordinary or if they lost sight of their partner. Then he armed himself, assigned himself a territory—anywhere within sight of Javul—and patrolled it all during the performances she insisted on giving.
There were three of these, and Dash ticked them off one by one—uneventful, mostly uneventful (except for a momentarily missing prop), and oh-blast-it-all. For on the third night, with two nerve-stretching performances under their belts—and Dash finally seeing the light at the end of the wormhole—who should show up but Hityamun Kris. The Vigo appeared at the hall with a team of three Mandalorian bodyguards and headed for one of the private skyboxes permanently mounted to the vast inner haunch of the Holosseum.
Dash was curious about Kris. He’d met Mandalorians of several species, but he’d never met one who had left the mercenary clans and set himself up as a master of business, let alone risen to such heights in Black Sun. Kris was, in short, an anomaly.
Dash didn’t like anomalies.
He was standing in the below-stage area, half listening to Javul go over some costume notes with Tereez, when her ex swept into the Holosseum as if he owned the place. Actually, chances were good that he did own a piece of it. Did that necessarily mean he had something to do with the power fluctuations?
Mel, standing at the stage manager’s station, made a hissing sound to catch Javul’s attention. He gestured at a nearby security monitor with his head. Dash saw Kris before Javul did, so his gaze was on her face when she lifted her eyes to the display.
“He’s coming down,” Mel said tersely.
Kris walked right by the lift that would have taken him to the skyboxes and led his retinue toward the restricted-access lift that would bring him down into the broad, carpeted backstage hallway that housed the dressing rooms.
Javul went pale. Her fear of the Mandalorian was apparently sincere. Which made her next move completely unexpected. She handed the bit of fluff she’d been holding to Tereez and started for the hallway.
Dash, caught off guard, had to run to catch up with her. He reached her and grasped her arm. “Where are you going? You want me to run interference?”
She looked up at him. “I’m going to meet him.”
“Meet him? Are you out of your mind? He’s tried to kill you!”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Maybe not? You’ve gone mental if you think—”
She sighed and disconnected his hand. “Look, he’s not going to shoot me in a public venue. Besides, I don’t think he wants to kill me—if he’s even the one behind this.”
“You could’ve fooled me. And, having dealt with Black Sun before,” Dash said, “I can tell you that if he wants to kill you, witnesses will mean nothing. He’ll pull a blaster and burn you where you stand, even if it’s in front of the entire Holosseum. A hundred witnesses—a thousand witnesses—mean nothing to his kind, Javul. Not when he can have an entire planet swear he was a thousand light-years away when the deed was done.”
She put her hand on his arm. “I’m going to go make nice, Dash. You can come guard me, if you like, but stay out of it.”
“Whatever.” He glanced back over his shoulder and waved at Leebo, who was observing an interaction between Mel’s droid and his assistant, Nik. “Leeb, I need you.”
“Right there with you,” said the droid, “normally. But I’m under orders to stay with my buddy Nik here.”
“Yeah, they’re my orders. I’m rescinding them.”
Oto swiveled his round head toward Leebo. “I can monitor the activities of Nik adequately,” he said.
Javul was moving again. “C’mon!” Dash snarled and went after her, leaving the droid to follow or not.
The lift doors opened just a
s Dash stepped out into the hallway behind Javul. She hesitated only for a moment, then squared her shoulders and went on, meeting Kris as he exited the lift with his bodyguards arrayed about him—one behind and one to either side.
Kris saw Javul the moment he stepped out onto the thick carpet and stopped to watch her come to him. When she was a meter away he raised his eyes to Dash, quirked a blond eyebrow, then returned his gaze to the woman. He smiled.
Dash shivered. Those were without doubt the coldest pair of eyes he’d ever seen. They were the blue of ice—the blue of moonlight on a knife blade. His hair was pale, as well. Not the shimmering silver-white of Javul’s, but a shade of brilliant gold that rivaled the sun-washed rocks of Tatooine. They would’ve made, Dash thought begrudgingly, a beautiful couple … except for those eyes. How could she love a guy with eyes like that? It seemed … out of character somehow. But like she’d said, sometimes people made bad choices. Sometimes they grew out of them.
Sometimes they weren’t allowed to.
Javul stopped in front of Kris, leaving a little more than an arm’s length between them. Dash made sure he was closer to her than an arm’s length, himself. He heard the muted whine of Leebo’s servos as the droid took up a position just over a meter behind him.
The Vigo folded his long-fingered hands over his belt. “What? No kiss for me, Alai—or should I say Javul? I didn’t think you had it in you to be so … uncharitable.”
“I have my reasons to be standoffish. I think even you would agree. Why have you come here?”
Kris spread his big hands. “I love to watch you perform. You know that. And a live performance here in this splendid hall—well, that’s more than I could pass up even given our … falling-out. And besides, you know what they say about hope.” He laid a hand over his heart. “It never dies where love remains.”
“Hope?”
Javul turned to look back over her shoulder at Dash and he realized he’d said the word in unison with her. He snapped his mouth shut.
“Who’s this?” Kris asked gesturing at Dash with his chin. “New boyfriend? No. Wait. Not your type, is he? Wannabe boyfriend, maybe. Or bodyguard.”
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