Star Wars: Shadow Games

by Michael Reaves

  “Ask,” Dash insisted. “That’s an order. I want to know if anyone so much as breathed on those droids.”

  “Breathed on them, sir? Do you wish me to inquire—”

  “It’s a figure of speech. Just ask if anyone attempted to enter the cargo holds. Or, in fact, did enter. Or approached the droids. Got that?”

  “Yeah, we got it,” said Leebo, sounding annoyed. “We’re not a couple of food service units here, you know.”

  “I was trying to be precise. The last thing I need is for someone to plant a bomb in one of the cargo bays and not find out about it until it goes off because I failed to ask the right question.”

  He left the two droids to their task—Oto blessedly silent and Leebo lauding the virtues of “sensible programmed persons.” He made a quick tour of the ship, ascertaining where everyone was. Mel was asleep in the quarters he shared with Nik—a makeshift berth in a corner of the forward hold; Nik was doing his schoolwork; Spike was up in the cockpit pestering Eaden—and of course he knew exactly where Han and Javul were.

  That done, he started on the holds, beginning with the main hold on the port side. He determined that Leebo had been here already asking a series of questions. No one else had come except, of course, himself. He went into the hold anyway and prowled around the containers, looking for anything that seemed amiss. He found nothing. The droid he’d stationed in the loading bay between the forward and number two holds gave the same report, as did the one in hold number three.

  Dash wondered if it was even worth his while to go into the number three hold. He sighed and checked his chrono. If he’d done his time estimation right, they’d be coming out of hyperspace fairly soon to make a course adjustment. He should have just enough time to do a quick walk-through.

  He slipped into the hold and closed the hatch behind him. Everything looked completely normal. The number three hold—actually the freight cargo chamber, located immediately behind the Falcon’s huge electromagnetic mandibles—was a pretty good-sized space. He made his way through it carefully, peeking into crevices between containers, rapping on the individual boxes, checking the floor, the ceiling, the blinking access panels. He stifled a yawn.

  Who would do this kind of work full-time?

  He wasn’t sure whether he should be in awe of Mel or feel sorry for him.

  He was just going to check the environmental control panel by the cargo bay door when the ship shuddered. He felt a moment of vertigo as it dropped out of hyperspace. That was pretty much as he expected. What he didn’t expect was that the cargo bay grav-plate stopped working at precisely the same moment. Dash’s feet left the deck and the suddenly airborne contents of the bay were in frantic motion. Dash tumbled among them, out of control.

  He was no stranger to zero-g. He’d trained in zero-gravity at the Academy and had experienced any number of weightless situations on EVAs. But on none of those occasions had he had to dodge large, inimical objects. The only fortunate aspect of the situation was that he was headed toward the control panel by the door. He reached it too quickly, colliding painfully with the bulkhead and rebounding into the path of a large cylindrical container. He flailed, thrust out his hands, and pushed away from it, sending it toward the ceiling in a slow spin.

  Good news: he rebounded again.

  Bad news: he rebounded toward the deck.

  He bounced on his hands and knees, struggled to pull his feet under him, to gain some altitude before the grav-plate snapped back on … with all that stuff careening around overhead. The toes of his boots slid on the textured metal of the decking, just barely allowing him enough purchase to push off toward the hatch again. Unfortunately, he also thrust himself upward, which put him directly beneath the cylinder he’d banked off a moment before.

  It was rotating lazily, its metal fittings glinting in the now dim light of the bay. But—wonder of wonders—it was rotating in just the right direction. Dash lowered his head and let it catch the back of his jacket. It gave him an ungentle shove forward and down. He sailed toward the control panel, this time having the time and presence of mind to put out his hands to grasp the hatch frame and buffer the collision. His right hand met the bulkhead, palm flat, fingers splayed. He allowed his arm to bend, using his left hand to grab the hatch frame. He was secure … for the moment. Hopefully, a moment was all he needed.

  He found the grav controls and started to manipulate them, then stopped in confusion. According to the readout on the panel, the plate was still engaged and set to standard Corellian gravity. He grasped the slider anyway and started to pull it downward to increase the gravity. Some sense stopped him. If he turned the gravity up and it kicked back in, some of those crates could do serious damage to the ship … and to him. He glanced up at the clutter of smaller crates that were collecting above him. He pushed the slider full up to zero-g, then started to bring it slowly back down—to absolutely no effect.

  Oh, fine then.

  He hit the hatch control. The brightly lit indicators that showed it to be operational lied; the hatch stayed closed.

  Dash took a deep breath, took his right hand off the panel, and reached slowly for his comlink. The ship braked suddenly and made a sharp starboard turn. This was when he learned the local inertial field dampers were off as well; all the floating junk in the cargo bay collided high on the port wall of the hold.

  The ship dipped and ducked again, this time to port. The containers, hanging in zero-g, stayed put until the starboard bulkhead moved to connect with them. They flew outward from that more violent impact. A loose glow rod someone had left somewhere they shouldn’t have hurtled past Dash’s head and careened off the inner bulkhead.

  He brought the comlink to his mouth and thumbed it on.

  “Eaden—Dash. You got gravity out there?”

  There was a long enough silence that Dash began to fear that there was something screwy elsewhere in the ship as well; then Eaden’s voice came back to him sounding slightly puzzled: “What do you mean—out there?”

  “In the cockpit. In the rest of the ship! Is there gravity where you are?”

  “Yes. There is not gravity where you are?”

  “No. I’m in the number three hold. The plate’s gone down and the hatch won’t open. There are some very large objects floating around over my head, Eaden, and I’d really like them not to suddenly come plummeting down.”

  The ship juked again and those very large objects reacted. Dash gave a yelp of pure, cold fear and shouted, “I need out, Ead! I need out now!”

  He heard a hurried discussion, recognizing Han’s voice—raised in annoyance or excitement—then Eaden came back on.

  “We’re going to brake, Dash. As gently as possible, considering that we are in rather tight quarters. We are approaching an asteroid field.”

  “Cancel that,” said Han in the background. “I’m gonna land on that big guy over there. Give the hold a bit of gravity.”

  “I don’t want gravity!” shrieked Dash, his eyes going to the cylinder now moving inexorably toward him. “I want out!”

  “Relax,” said Han. “I know what I’m doing.”

  “What?” yelled Dash. “What are you doing? Eaden? What’s he—”

  “He is maneuvering, Dash. I’m on my way to you.”

  “But what—?”

  The ship performed some sort of fluttering maneuver, and the stuff in the cargo bay banked off several bulkheads at once. A second later it all bobbed downward under the effect of a small gravity field. With every ounce of strength in his left arm, Dash yanked himself sideways into the hatch access, spinning so that his back was to the door. It was only half a meter deep, but it was all the cover the hold offered.

  He’d just barely hauled himself into the meager alcove when the ship stopped moving, the grav-plate came back on, and the containers slammed to the floor with a sound like the shot of a laser cannon. The cylindrical container—a good two meters in length and as wide as Dash was tall—had bounced off the floor and was rolling tow
ard him, one end angling into the hatchway where he stood. He pressed himself back against the hatch.

  “Eaden!”

  The hatch behind him opened, spilling him onto the deck beyond, then slapped shut again—an act punctuated by a bone-jarring thud of the container rolling against it. Dash lay on the deck panting, his heart rocketing around in his chest.

  Eaden offered him a hand up. “What happened?”

  “The chamber gravity failed when we dropped out of hyperspace. And if your next question is if I think this was an accident, the answer is no.” He turned, then, on the solitary cargo droid he’d left posted to guard the hold. “Did you allow anyone else access to this hold?” he demanded.

  “Negative,” the droid responded curtly.

  “Negative,” Dash repeated, adrenaline pushing his temper higher. “Look, you bucket of mismatched bolts—”

  Eaden’s hand came down on his shoulder. “As I have previously noted, verbally bludgeoning a droid is a futile gesture. I suggest we check the other cargo bays.”

  Dash nodded. They made their way forward to cargo bay number two and opened the hatch. Every container was in its place. The main hold and belowdecks compartments were similarly untouched.

  Dash turned from the orderly stacks of equipment to meet Eaden’s gaze. “Well, this is special.”

  The Nautolan blinked slowly. “You have a talent for understatement.”

  SEVENTEEN

  WITH THE MILLENNIUM FALCON PARKED ON THE pocked surface of a large asteroid, Dash gathered everyone in the crew’s commons. Except for Leebo, everyone looked grim. The sudden loss of gravity in the cargo bay seemed clearly to be sabotage. The questions now were: when had it been done, how, and by whom?

  Leebo was able to answer the second question through the simple expedient of uplinking with the Falcon’s system and tracking down the anomaly. It was indeed in the artificial gravity system, but not at the control panel in the affected cargo bay. It was in a circuitry box in the engineering station off the main hold, which meant …

  “Anybody could have messed with it,” muttered Dash.

  “Anybody, of necessity, being one of us.” The quiet observation came from Mel.

  Dash turned to look at the group gathered around the table in the crew’s commons. Mel, Nik, Javul, and Spike. Eaden leaned against the aft bunks looking inscrutable, his tresses subtly sniffing the air. Leebo stood next to him. Han lounged in the doorway, mostly watching Javul.

  “Either that or we’ve got a stowaway,” said Spike.

  “I can’t say that’s impossible, but it’s highly improbable,” argued Mel. “We checked the contents of every single container before we put it aboard.”

  “I suppose someone could have snuck aboard while we were doing preflight prep,” said Dash. “Run up the landing ramp as it was being raised or climbed up one of the landing struts.”

  “Is that likely?” asked Javul.

  Han made a rude noise and straightened from the doorway. “It’s impossible. There’s no way anybody could sneak aboard this ship without me knowing it.”

  Dash found himself wishing ardently that that was a big fat exaggeration and that they did have a stowaway, because the alternative was thoroughly unpleasant to contemplate. He scanned their faces again—Spike, Mel, Nik. He didn’t know either the Farlion woman or Melikan nearly as well as Javul did—or thought she did. And Mel’s access to the equipment and his look-the-other-way policies made him an especially likely suspect. But if Mel was working for Hitch Kris, then logically he was only responsible for what was annoying and inconvenient, not what was potentially fatal.

  Until now.

  And this last nastiness had been aimed at Dash, not Javul Charn.

  Dash felt a little niggle of something like pride at the thought. Apparently, someone felt he was getting too close to discovering them and had decided to take him out of the picture. One of the people in this room was probably disappointed right now. He just needed to figure out which one.

  Nik? He balked at suspecting the Sullustan. He was just a kid. Still, even a kid could be coerced or coaxed into doing heinous things if the incentives were right.

  Leebo uttered a soft bleep. “Pardon me for interrupting and all that, but this particular sabotage didn’t require the saboteur to stay on board. The grav-plate and the panel controls were impeded by an itty-bitty damper in the hold’s power bus where it was routed through the engineering terminal. The damper was set to detect state changes in the hyperdrive, so it kicked in when we dropped out of hyperspace and let only the minimum of power through.”

  Dash nodded. “To keep from triggering the system alarms.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking,” said Leebo. “But here’s the deal, boss—if that trap was set up before we even left Tatooine, then it’s not much of a trap, is it? How would the saboteur know anyone would be in the hold at the moment we dropped out of hyperspace?”

  Dash shot the droid a narrow look. “I thought you were arguing for a hit-and-run saboteur. If the plate was meant to go belly-up while I was in the hold, then you’re saying it couldn’t have been preset.”

  “I know this will be a blow to your colossal ego,” the droid retorted, “but what I’m saying is that maybe you weren’t the target.”

  “Why else would someone want the containers in that particular hold to go flying and none of the others?”

  “Good question. I suppose it could’ve been a coincidence.”

  “I so don’t believe in coincidence.” Dash turned to Mel. “What’s in that chamber? What sort of equipment?”

  The cargo master answered without pausing to think about it. “The largest pieces of the framework, the antigrav generators—primary and backup—the big holographic arrays …”

  “Could the intent have been to damage them?”

  Mel shrugged. “I suppose. But if any of it sustained damage—which we’d find before we used any of it again—then we’d either pull in the backup units from Deep Core, restructure the performance so as to not require that equipment, or cancel.”

  Dash met the other man’s eyes in a long, challenging look. “You mean you’d find the damage. You’d tell us whether it was dire or not. Kind of like you told us what happened in the Heart’s hold during that stealth fighter attack. Or like you were the one who indirectly routed us back to Tatooine by saying we’d never make Edic Bar.”

  Mel didn’t rise to the bait, but Spike did.

  “Oh, for the love of—” she sputtered. “You’re completely mad, you know that? I mean, you might as well suspect me.”

  “Who says I don’t?”

  Javul shook her head. “I will not believe—”

  Mel put his hand on her arm. “No, Javul. Dash is right to suspect me. Quite honestly, if I’d been doing my job right … most of this stuff shouldn’t have happened. I should have caught it. If I were in your shoes, Dash, I’d suspect me, too. But Dara can’t be a suspect—she’s been with Javul since the beginning.”

  “Since before the beginning,” corrected Spike coldly. The glare she gave Dash would have soldered a lesser man to the deck.

  Javul, meanwhile, had turned her pale gaze on Yanus Melikan, the two of them trading a long, significant look that Dash couldn’t begin to decipher. It ended when Mel dropped his gaze with a slight shake of his head. What did that mean? And what was Dash to make of that sudden wrinkling of Javul’s brow?

  Whatever it meant, he still had insufficient evidence to accuse anyone—even the cargo master—of the sabotage. He turned back to Leebo.

  “So you think the sabotage was in place before we left and the damper was set to fire when we dropped out of hyperspace.”

  “Or went back into hyperspace. State change, remember? That much I can say for sure. What I can’t tell you is if there was a second trigger. Say, someone entering the cargo bay … or someone triggering the impedance remotely.”

  “So there’s no way to know if the sabotage was aimed at a person or at the equipmen
t,” said Dash.

  “Well, I guess we won’t know that unless whoever it was is on board and tries again,” said Han. Then the expression on his face did a flip-flop that Dash would have found comical under other circumstances. “Wait—state change? We have to go back into hyperspace. What if there’s another one of those power dampers somewhere in the system? Or something worse?”

  Leebo swiveled his head toward Han. “That would be bad.”

  Han moved to stand face-to-faceplate with the droid. “Could you detect it?”

  “Maybe. Probably, now that I know what to look for.”

  Han pointed a finger at the spot between Leebo’s optics. “Then get down to the engineering console and start going through the systems. I’m gonna get us off this rock as soon as I can—which means you’d better have the systems completely checked out before we reach the far edge of this field.”

  “Why don’t you ask me to teleport us to Christophsis while you’re at it?”

  Han was starting to visibly seethe. “You got a problem, tin man?”

  “Yeah, skin job, I got a problem. It will take us approximately three hours and forty-two minutes to cross this asteroid field, allowing for orbital fluctuations. Which is insufficient time to do more than a spot check of the ship’s systems.”

  “Then split the duty with the other droid—what’s-his-name, Oto? You should be able to do it in half the time.”

  “Your grasp of higher mathematics is stunning, Captain Solo,” Leebo said. “I’m sure Oto will appreciate your vote of confidence.”

  Leebo left to retrieve Oto from the number three hold, managing to look stiffer than was normal for a droid. Han gave Javul a deferential and insipid bow, then went to the cockpit.

  Dash, who’d watched the interchange with amusement, pulled his mind back to the matter at hand. “Javul, what would happen if your equipment was so badly damaged that you couldn’t perform on Christophsis?”

  “Like Mel said: Worst case, we’d have to cancel. Best case, we’d go with a scaled-down performance. Either way, we’d have to replace or repair the equipment.”