“Worth a look?”
In answer, Eaden moved through the arch, slipping past a clump of patrons clogging the entry. Dash noted their position in case he and Eaden should have to make a hasty exit. The large, long room was dark, lit by tiny table lights and wall sconces that only relieved the gloom within a bare meter radius. It created the effect of hundreds of little pools of illumination around which faces floated in the darkness like disembodied spirits. Occasionally, a hand or its equivalent would flash out into the light to snatch a treat from the array of containers on the table, then dart back into darkness.
There were other, smaller archways along the walls of the big room that hinted at privacy. All were protected by damping fields that served as curtains. You had to pass through the damper to see what was inside. Moving close to one of the fields raised the hair on Dash’s head—they were weak electrostatic fields as well, warning the careless wanderer not to enter.
Eaden led Dash straight to the far end of the room, past little groups of people who talked, drank, smoked scented death sticks—and who seemed to be predatorily intent on one another. Reaching the wall, the Nautolan hesitated, his head tilting first this way then that.
“What is it?”
“Let’s try that one.” He tipped his head toward the door directly before them. It seemed silent inside, but that was an illusion—each patron could be, and probably was, listening to his, her, or its own personal soundtrack, beamed in tightwave hypersound.
Dash resisted the urge to fidget; the various fields were just strong enough to make him antsy. “But is she in there?”
“I don’t know. A certain … energy is within. Akin to what I felt earlier, when she spoke to Kris.”
“Well, then it must be her.” Dash took a step toward the doorway, only to be brought up short as a woman in a glittering and very revealing bodysuit stepped out. Pulses of light like little shivers of lightning ran through the fabric of the outfit, imprinting the shape of that body on Dash’s retinas. The light fed upward through a shock of electrostatically charged hair into a woven cascade of light-emitting filaments that rotated through all the colors of the visible spectrum.
She bumped into him, looked up with an apology on her lips, then gasped in recognition. “Dash? Eaden?”
“Well,” Eaden said, his tentacles weaving a complex pattern in front of her, “she’s not amnesiac.”
“Good.” Dash turned to Javul. “Here I was afraid it had to be amnesia, given that you must’ve forgotten what almost happened to you the other day or who showed up at your gig tonight.”
“Not here,” she said, putting a hand on his arm and glancing about.
“We’ve been looking all over—”
“You found me, okay? Now drop the big, bad bodyguard routine, will you? A girl’s gotta slip the leash once in a while. Right?”
“Slip the leash? Slip the leash? Lady, I think you’ve slipped your—”
The darkness in the doorway Javul had just exited rippled and a tall, slender person of indeterminate gender and species stepped out into the room. On second look, his gender was unquestionably male, but his face was so thickly painted with the same glowing makeup that Javul wore and his hair—or were those feathers?—formed such a massive, wild cascade about his head and shoulders that all features were blurred except for a pair of enormous golden eyes.
“You okay, Night Cat?” the person asked. “These guys bothering you?”
“Night Cat? Night—oof!”
Eaden stepped adroitly in front of Dash to give his partner time to recover from the elbow he’d just received in the solar plexus. “We’re her co-workers.”
“Right,” Javul said. “I guess it’s time for us to get back to the conference hotel. C’mon, boys.” She turned on her heel and strode off down the length of the room, her stride snappy and quick, her hips swinging, her hair changing color rapidly. The two men gave her companion a last once-over before following her.
Dash and Eaden caught up with Javul simultaneously as she reached the outer mall. They flanked her in silence, Dash slipping his arm around her—he was not going to lose track of her again—and pulling her tightly to his side.
She laughed at him.
“What in the name of all that is patently idiotic were you doing out there after everything that’s happened?”
Dash paced behind Javul’s chair as she sat at her vanity console and removed her makeup. She turned off the tiny generator that had charged her hair, peeled off prosthetics that made her nose longer and her face wider, and took out lenses that turned her eyes a pale mauve—a pastel version of the bodysuit she’d worn. That had been discarded as well, and she’d wrapped herself in a long, fluffy tunic that ended just above her knees.
“I told you. I was slipping the leash—blowing off steam. And I needed to do that especially after everything that’s happened. Do you have any idea what it’s like to come that close to dying?”
Dash stopped pacing and glared at her in the mirror.
She blinked back at him. “Oh. Of course you do. Sorry.”
“What were you doing—spice?”
She shook her head.
“That weird guy? Were you and he—?”
She smiled but shook her head again. Well, that tallied with what Eaden had sensed. Dash found that more of a relief than he was comfortable with.
“Then what, Night Cat?”
Javul adopted a look of long-suffering patience. “Everybody uses pseudos in places like that. The guy’s was Rancor’s Wrath. It’s just a bar.”
“Just a bar with enough dark spots, strobe lights, and hypersound to give an assassin all the cover he could ever ask for.”
She lowered her gaze, turned back to her mirror.
He had her on the ropes and knew it. He pressed his advantage. “You didn’t think of that, did you? What if whoever made the attempt on your life knows you well enough to know you’d go out to blow off steam? What if they followed you?”
She stopped, frozen in the act of fluffing out her short hair. After a moment of silence, she lowered her hands and turned to face him. Her face was almost albino white. “Do you think someone did? Other than you and Eaden?”
“No. You’re still alive.”
“Right.” She took a deep breath. “Right.”
Dash sat down on the foot of her bed. “Javul, listen to me. I’ve been thinking a lot about this. Before, the stuff that happened—the lilies, the mail, even the fake emergency—none of it was deadly. But this last one—that was potentially fatal.”
She nodded. “Yeah. I get that.”
“And?”
She shrugged artlessly.
“Blast it, Javul, you’re not a child! You may think of this—this crazy behavior as slipping the leash but it’s likely to get you killed. The leash is what keeps you alive.”
“Yeah. I get that, too, believe it or not. But here’s the problem. Right now, I don’t know who I can’t trust. I only know who I can trust.” She looked him square in the eye. “That’s a select group. It includes you and Eaden and Leebo.”
“Okay. So, what’re you going to do?”
She took another deep breath. “I’m going on with my tour, Dash, because I don’t have a choice. I’ll just have to … keep my eyes open, I guess.”
“You guess.”
“Can I sleep now? I’m really, really tired.”
She looked it.
He stood. Shook his head. Impotent anger roiled his gut. “You’re crazy, lady.”
He thought he heard her crying as he left her room.
FOURTEEN
THE NEXT MORNING A CREW CONSISTING MOSTLY OF droids broke down the concert rig and loaded it back into the tour’s two vessels. Reloading took until early afternoon. Deep Core, being the slower of the pair, was packed up first and sent on her way. Nova’s Heart left Rodia two hours later bound for Christophsis, where Javul planned to do a special open-air performance using the natural properties of the planet’s crystal forma
tions to enhance her holographic and photonic displays.
Arruna recalibrated their communications system to screen for peculiarities in the carrier waves coming out of Rodian space control (and any other source), and Bran Finnick kept a close watch on the live chatter the flight controllers were routing to their helm.
Even with those precautions, Dash was nervous. That whoever was after Javul could dance into Rodian space control and issue spurious orders to incoming vessels implied a level of authority that made his head hurt. He wouldn’t relax until they’d engaged the hyperdrive.
Traveling at flank speed, they’d just cleared the Rodian system, when the proximity alarm sounded.
Captain Marrak sat bolt upright in his command chair, his eyes on the main viewport. “Chaos take it!” he shouted. “Evasive maneuvers! Now!”
Finnick leapt for his controls and executed a hard roll nintey degrees to starboard.
Through the viewport, Dash saw a small, dart-like ship stooping toward them at an extreme angle. It was matte gray—almost invisible against the roiling blur of stars—and unmarked.
How the …?
Nova’s Heart rolled to starboard again as a series of blue-green charged-particle bolts zapped from beneath the little ship’s prow. The Heart jumped and shimmied. Klaxons sounded; Captain Marrak checked his instruments and swore in Zabraki.
“We’re losing pressure. Looks like the cargo area.”
The bridge comm bleeped. It was Mel, confirming their worst fears. “We’ve had a blowout down here. Outer cargo hatch went, damaged the air lock. Oto was able to get a patch on the door, but we don’t dare go anywhere until we can secure it.”
“I’m on my way down,” said Marrak.
Dash followed him into the lift, and they went down to the cargo hold together. As they exited the lift, the cargo master’s Otoga 222 unit was in the process of making fast a hard seal around the edges of the large, clear duraplast bubble he’d affixed as an emergency patch. Mel was checking the seal by dragging a piece of diaphanous fabric over it, looking for flutters and drag on the thin cloth.
“What’s the damage?” Marrak asked the moment he was out of the lift.
Mel finished his survey of the patch job and straightened to face the two men. “Not sure, but it looks as if there was some warping and we lost a little hull integrity right around the hatch. What happened?”
“We were attacked,” Dash said.
“Attacked? By who?”
“Unknown,” said Captain Marrak. “It was a small ship, unmarked. How bad is it?”
“Bad enough,” said Mel. “I’m not sure we’re safe to go into hyperspace. At least not for the long haul.”
Dash moved to the bubble patch and peered through it, scanning the inner hatch. A spot about a meter in length seemed to be the only part of the inner hull that was visibly damaged. Looking beyond the clear surface of the patch and through the air lock window, he could see the emptiness of space and the mangled frame of the blown hatch. The worst damage to the outer frame was also about shoulder height on the left side.
The hatch frame was bent outward.
“That was a lucky shot,” said Mel. “Gunner must’ve been a pro.”
“He had help,” Dash said, turning from his inspection.
Both men stared at him.
“The hatch frame is pushed out. That means there was some sort of explosion on the inside of the air lock.”
Mel’s pale eyes narrowed. “Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure. Take a look for yourself.”
Mel moved to peer through the plastic bubble for a moment, then shook his head. “He’s right, Captain. This is getting uglier by the minute.”
“It’s worse than ugly if we can’t get into hyperspace. We’re stranded over Rodia. It would take forever to get to Christophsis on sublight power alone. We could limp back to Rodia.”
“We’re not going back to Rodia.” Dash blurted the words before he could think better of it.
The Zabrak raised one brow.
“That might be exactly what the saboteur intended. Need I remind you of what happened on our first approach to Rodia? You really want to let them take another shot at us?”
“Can we chance going to hyperspace?” the captain asked.
Mel pursed his thin lips. “Well, I’d have to consult with Arruna, but it’s possible we can … if we don’t try too long a jump. I mean, we could probably make it to Christophsis, but there’s no major SoroSuub repair facility there. We could get a few dents hammered out or get some scarring planed and polished, but we’ll need to replace both the inner and outer hatches.”
The captain nodded. “Then the most logical place to head for would be Edic Bar. The SoroSuub facility there could set this thing to rights better than anybody.”
Mel shook his head. “I can almost guarantee we wouldn’t make it that far.”
Captain Marrak blew out a gust of air. “Exquisite. What about short jumps, though? We can make it to Christophsis, you thought. Fine. We do that. The rest of our jumps are relatively short—”
“Bannistar to Bacrana?” said Dash. “Not my definition of short.”
The corner of Mel’s mouth twitched. “No, it’s not. Besides, cumulative stress is just as bad as prolonged stress in cases like this. The ship essentially has a hole in her side. I’ll send a droid out to patch that, of course, but it’s still not going to take well to the rigors of hyperspace travel. I’d advise against making more than one jump with her in this condition.”
He was right. Captain Marrak acknowledged it with a nod. “I suppose the most logical thing would be to go to Christophsis and keep our appointed schedule. We’ll be there for four days. Maybe during our stay we might make better repairs or locate a replacement hatch or find some other solution to the problem.”
Mel snorted. “Like what—a whole new ship?”
Marrak’s expression said that he wouldn’t consider it out of the question. “Time to bring Javul into the conversation.”
Javul stared at the tabletop before her as if their options were laid out there for her to sort through. Dash had to admit that none of them looked very good.
Javul agreed. She looked up at the group gathered around the table in the crew’s commons, and said, “Tatooine is within reach. We’ll go there.”
Everyone stared at her. Everyone being Dash, Eaden, Mel, Captain Marrak, Bran Finnick, Arruna Var, and Lady Spike. Well, Eaden didn’t so much stare as blink slowly and waggle a couple of head-tresses in Javul’s direction, but the general mood was one of disbelief.
“What’s on Tatooine?” asked the captain.
“A ready supply of scruffy-looking freighters,” said Javul without hesitation.
Dara was nodding. “Sure. I should’ve thought of that myself. Makes perfect sense.”
“No, it doesn’t!” objected Finnick. “What we need is a replacement air lock. Yeah, you might be able to get a stopgap one on Tatooine, but that’s not really a solution, is it?”
“Hence the term stop-gap,” said Spike.
“And it’s better than no air lock at all,” Dash pointed out.
“Hear me out,” Javul said, holding up her hands to quiet dissension. “We’re not going to make it to Edic Bar. It makes more sense to me to send the Deep Core on to Christophsis while we go back to Tatooine, pick up a freighter capable of handling this load, then rejoin Deep Core. We could have a new air lock sent from Edic Bar and installed on Tatooine. I’m sure there are repair bays on Tatooine that could handle the job.”
“Any number of them,” Dash said. “In fact, the guy who’s working on Outrider for me is one of the best.”
“Great. Then maybe he can work on Nova’s Heart. And while he’s at it, he can make sure there aren’t any more hidden booby traps aboard.”
Dash blinked. He hadn’t thought of that, but it made perfect sense.
Captain Marrak said, “All right, yes. That seems reasonable. With the repairs done we can rejoin you on one
of the later tour stops. No later than Corellia, I would hope.” He rose from the table. “I’ll have the helm reverse course immediately.”
The rest of the group dispersed, returning to their duties, but when Dash and Eaden rose to leave, Javul put out a hand to stop them. She watched as the commons cleared, then turned to Dash.
“You said this engineer was working on your ship—the Outrider. How close is she to being refitted?”
“I’m not certain. That is, I’m not sure how much work Kerlew’s done on her. I, uh, wasn’t able to pay the full amount he needed to finish the repairs. That’s why I’m working for you, if you recall.”
“Of course. If I were to pay for the repairs, would the Outrider be able to handle the contents of the Heart’s hold?”
Dash exchanged glances with Eaden, who gave the Nautolan approximation of a shrug.
“Absolutely. With room to spare.”
“Is she fast?”
“The fastest.”
“I think you’re biased. Let me get a second opinion.” She turned to Eaden. “Is she as fast as he thinks?”
“Quite nearly so. There might be one or two as fast.”
Dash glared at him.
“But none appreciably faster,” Eaden concluded.
Javul nodded. “All right, then. When we get back to Tatooine, we’ll look into resurrecting your ship. We’ll see if the Outrider can get us to Christophsis on time.”
When Javul left the crew’s commons, Dash let out a hoot of laughter and drummed exuberantly on the tabletop. “Did you hear that? Did you hear that? We’re gonna get the Outrider back. And it’s not gonna cost us a single millicred.”
“You’re celebrating?” Eaden asked blandly. “You realize, of course, that our lady friend’s enemies will continue to try to get to her. Are you really happy to have to transport her aboard our own ship?”
Thoughts of the Outrider with holes in her hull brought Dash up short. His smile faded. “Anyone ever tell you you’re the biggest killjoy in the galaxy?”
Star Wars: Shadow Games Page 12