He was aware only of the gleaming pendulum as it flashed toward him. Then it was beneath him, slowing …
He jumped.
His feet hit first, landing him on the narrow inner lip of a translucent tread. He flung himself forward, face-first, grasping at the smooth surface with desperate fingers.
Fortunately the transparisteel wasn’t as slick as it looked. He grabbed the center post of the spiral with both hands and hauled himself upright. The force of his landing had lent more momentum to the swing of the Helix—Dash felt the wind rushing past him as he strove to orient himself. He was between Javul and Edge on the structure, closer to the assassin than to his target.
He braced himself against the stair and drew his blaster, peering down through the transparent struts and lacy treads, trying to see what the Anomid was doing. He had a weapon in his hand—Dash couldn’t tell what it was. Something small. It wasn’t until Edge leaned back and cocked one thick arm that Dash realized it was one of those throwing razors.
He pointed his blaster down and fired.
The crystal Helix may have looked delicate and lacy, but it was not. It deflected the energy bolt and showered his adversary with molten bits of transparisteel, causing him to flinch momentarily. Edge made no reaction when he looked up and saw Dash crouched above him, and Dash realized he had only managed to postpone the inevitable for a few seconds. Once the spatter of molten steel had ceased, Edge cocked his arm again and threw the razor.
TWENTY-FIVE
DASH WATCHED THE RODIAN THROWING RAZOR FLASH past his position on the swinging staircase—followed the shallow curve of its arc upward. Above him, Javul continued to climb. She hadn’t seen it. In a moment, however—if he didn’t do something—she would definitely feel it.
Dash raised his blaster again and shouted, “Javul! Under the steps!”
She glanced down at him, saw the gun in his hand and ducked beneath the treads above her.
Dash peered up at the razor. It was slowing, reaching the top of its arc about four meters above Javul’s head. He eyeballed the arc, led the thing with his pistol. No big deal. Easier than shooting snake bats on Naboo’s swampy moon. With the bats, you had to guess where they were going to be in a split second, and then you—
Dash fired. The razor exploded in a shower of sparks, shooting shrapnel in all directions. Dash felt something sting his cheek and scorch a trail along his neck. His right eye burned and watered. He ignored the pain and turned his attention back to Edge.
He drew in a hiss of breath. The assassin had used his enemy’s focus on the razor to get closer—at least three meters closer. As Dash watched, blinking, the assassin pulled another razor from his belt.
The spiral was near the center point of its arc. Dash thrust his blaster grip between his teeth and scrambled upward. He got about two meters higher when the tilt of the structure became too much to manage. As he grasped the tread above him, hooking his foot around the center post to keep from falling, Edge threw the second razor.
This time Javul saw it coming and tucked herself tightly beneath the treads above her. She was tearing at her jacket with one hand. Dash prayed that meant she had a weapon, but he was disappointed. Instead, she pulled the jacket off and wadded it up. Was she going to try the same trick she’d pulled with the robe? No way it would work.
Dash glanced back at Edge. The masked humanoid was on the move again, drawing closer with every lunge of his long, pale body.
Blast!
Dash took quick and shaky aim and fired down at the Anomid, stopping his upward progress. But the razor …
He glanced up—cursing his right eye, which was all but blind now—to see Javul fling both jacket and antigrav harness away from her. He tried to focus, realizing that the lack of depth perception was going to be his downfall. The razor adjusted course subtly to track the jacket. It acquired the target and sliced into it, missing Javul by mere centimeters and carrying her shredded gear back to its master. Just as the razor reached Edge and he put out his hand to retrieve it, Dash leaned out from the Helix and fired another blaster volley. It struck the treads very near the assassin’s masked head and sheared off a bit of slag.
Edge jerked his arm up to cover his eyes—and the razor bit him. It caught him in the right shoulder, spraying blood onto the bright crystalline surfaces. Then it plummeted, uncaught, to the planetoid’s surface far below. The watching crowd roared.
Dash expelled a gust of pent-up breath.
Someone fired a blaster from the sidelines. The bolt of energy hit the swinging structure just above Edge’s head with the inevitable results.
Dash wanted to cheer.
There was another bolt, this one closer. Dash took aim again, himself … just as the stage lights went out, plunging the performance quad into darkness.
“Oh, that’s not good,” Dash muttered.
He fired anyway. The bolt momentarily lit up the crystal stair, allowing him to see that Edge was in motion again, climbing inexorably toward them. And, as if that weren’t bad enough, people continued to fire from the catwalks. Only now they couldn’t see what they were shooting at. In fact, when he looked up to see if he could find Javul, he could swear someone was firing at the guy wire that secured the spiral.
He had more pressing concerns—he realized he could see Javul very well, indeed, despite his weeping eye. Her hair and lenses were glowing—emitting a rainbow of light and making her far too obvious a target. As if realizing this, she tore off the wig and dropped it, but the lenses were problematic. They gave Edge something to aim for and he was coming straight up the pike—Dash could see him as a moving body of darkness illuminated slightly by the lights from the station and silhouetted dully against the roil of the planetoid’s poisonous atmosphere. His continued silence, despite his wounds and effort, added to the overall eeriness.
Dash swore and fired again. And again. An answering bolt from the sidelines nearly parted his hair. “Hey! I’m the good guy!” he shouted, as if anyone had a chance of hearing him.
He tried to holster his weapon, but the swinging staircase bucked suddenly as if it had hit something. In the darkness, clinging to the thing for support, he missed the holster. The blaster fell away, disappearing as soon as it left his hand. He leapt upward, grasping the treads above him and hauling himself toward Javul as fast as he could go. What he’d do when he got there was anybody’s guess, but her gleaming eyes beckoned to him.
He reached her, got an arm around her, tried to shield her with his body.
“Close your eyes,” he told her, “and listen.”
She did.
“They’ve got to be trying to get us off this blasted thing,” he murmured in her ear. “And we’re not defenseless yet. I’ve still got this.” He pulled his hold-out blaster—a compact Q2—and pressed it momentarily against Javul’s hand so she’d know what it was.
She nodded. “Where is he?” she whispered, her voice almost lost in the flow of wind around the Helix’s convolutions.
“About three meters below us.” He wished he could have her open her eyes and project some light from the holo-emitters in her lenses, so he could see exactly where. But that was a bad idea, of course.
Unlesss …
He glanced up at her face. In the dim light of the station it was tense and drawn. “Javul, listen. Tilt your head down about two centimeters. Right there. When I say open, open your eyes and project something, then close them again immediately, okay?”
“I’m disconnected from the control board. I don’t have anything to project.”
“Doesn’t have to be anything specific. Just light.” He didn’t tell her he couldn’t see well enough from his right eye to make out more than light, shapes, and movement.
She made a soft sound of assent.
He looked down at the assassin’s silhouette, drawing inexorably closer. “Come on, you ugly son-of-a-tairn,” he told Edge. “Come on!”
Two meters below them, the Anomid drew a vibroblade. Dash could see
the blade’s edge as a haloed blur, feel the prickle of energy in the air.
The hold-out blaster would do no good until the assassin reached the spot on which Javul had trained her eyes. Until then he would be shielded by the curve of the stairs.
Dash found himself counting seconds as he swung, half blind, through the air. The Helix bucked again. What was that? Dash couldn’t let himself be distracted. He had to time this just right.
The Anomid rounded the curve of the spiral one meter below.
“Now!” Dash shouted.
Javul opened her eyes and directed their holographic blaze directly at the spot where Edge clung. She was a bit off, so that the light caught the Anomid at about shoulder level, but she quickly adjusted so that she was looking directly into his eyes and he into hers.
Dash fired. The bolt from the Q2 hit the Anomid’s body armor and was deflected, though not without inflicting a bit of damage. He fired again. A clean hit to the same spot.
Edge loomed just below them now. Clinging to the Helix with his legs, he reared back, now with a vibroblade in each hand. Javul opened her eyes again and, for a breath, the assassin was caught in the blaze of her regard before the knives descended.
Dash had one charge left in the Q2. He aimed, willing his hand to be steady—
As he squeezed the trigger, the assassin swept upward with one long arm, lunging as he did. He caught the muzzle of the hold-out blaster with the vibroblade’s tip and knocked it away, his blade continuing downward to slice through the calf of Dash’s boot and into his flesh. Dash roared in pain and jerked his legs upward.
The masked face loomed over him, eyes blazing. Edge raised both vibroblades and—
The ululating sound that cut through the air was one Dash had expected never to hear again. For a split second he thought Edge was making it. But then the Anomid was broadsided by another large body. Dash recognized the mass of tresses and the huge, seemingly lidless eyes of a Nautolan.
“Never turn your back on an enemy,” Eaden rasped as his arm came around the assassin’s neck. “Especially a dead one.” Then the momentum of his attack broke Edge’s hold, and carried both men off the crystal Helix and into the darkness below.
Javul closed her eyes, her body going limp beneath Dash’s. They swung back and forth in the dark for several more moments before the Helix trembled yet again, then tilted crazily, finally coming to a stop on an off-kilter diagonal, its lower end at last tethered by a grapple.
“It’s over,” murmured Javul.
Dash barely heard her. His one good eye was trying to find the spot in the moonlit gray cloud-tops below where Eaden Vrill and the assassin had fallen. He hoped that his friend had died before he hit the ground.
TWENTY-SIX
“THAT WAS A PAID ASSASSIN. WHICH ONE OF YOU HAS A price on his or her head?”
In the backstage lounge, Arno D’Vox held court, his security chief at his side and a couple of armed guards flanking the door that Dash was eyeing nervously. Dash and Javul, injuries patched—including a temporary one on his right eye—and nerves minimally restored, sat side by side on a padded bench along an inner wall. Yanus Melikan stood near the balcony doors staring out at the devastation. He’d sent everyone else to safety. The Deep Core was gone—spirited away during the fracas, Bacrana-bound.
Arno D’Vox and his security chief were both grim with rage—D’Vox probably more so because Rishyk had warned him against honoring Javul’s request to moor the tank modules together. Their indignation was righteous to some degree. Their crew’s attempts to lash down the crystal Helix had resulted in damage to several of the station’s platforms, and the façades of all the units showed scorch marks from errant blasterfire.
D’Vox repeated his question.
Dash and Javul exchanged glances, then Dash mumbled, “Ask her.”
D’Vox moved to tower over Javul. Rishyk continued to glower at Dash as if he was counting the seconds until he could tear him apart. Dash hardly cared what Security Chief Rishyk was counting. He was holding in a roil of violent emotions, none of which he wanted to examine more closely. Rage, loss, fear … if D’Vox and Rishyk got it into their heads to hold Javul, her mission was over.
And Eaden would have died for nothing but revenge.
Nothing but revenge.
There’d been a time—maybe five minutes ago—when Dash would’ve thought revenge was a fine reason to die. Hadn’t he occasionally contemplated revenge on Xizor and Black Sun? In the final analysis, hadn’t that played into his decision to take this job with Javul’s tour? Hadn’t he liked the idea that he’d heroically protect her from Black Sun’s mistaken identification? And when that had turned out to be no mistake at all, hadn’t he welcomed the opportunity to get back at a Black Sun Vigo? Hadn’t he been downright tickled when he discovered that she’d hurt Xizor’s operation in the quadrant?
Dash might easily have died seeking revenge. Instead, Eaden—stoic, rational Eaden—had done it. And if his Nautolan friend were standing in front of him right now, what would Dash say to him?
He shook his head. That ship had spaced. The only person he could counsel about revenge now was himself, and his counsel would be: Revenge is a zero-sum game. Everybody loses.
He glanced over at Javul, watched her meet D’Vox’s intimidation eye-to-eye. He could tell himself that Eaden had died to save her, but deep down inside he knew that Javul’s involvement had only given Eaden permission to live for a few more minutes before he died. That, and to take Edge down with him.
“Well, Javul,” said D’Vox, his voice a threatening growl, “I’m asking. Can you explain to me why you had a Grade A assassin after your pretty head?”
She looked him right in the eye and said, “Prince Xizor.”
Dash turned to stare at her. What the hell was she doing?
D’Vox straightened, his face going blank for a second. “What’s Xizor got to do with any of this?”
“You asked why the guy was after me. I’m telling you.”
Dash wriggled uncomfortably. “Javul …”
Rishyk raised his blaster and aimed it at Dash’s head. “Shut up and let her talk.”
“It’s like this: I was engaged to marry one of Xizor’s Vigos. A guy named Hitch Kris. Maybe you’ve heard of him.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of him,” said D’Vox. “What’s this got to do with—”
“I’m getting to that, okay? I was engaged to this Vigo and I broke it off. He tried to get me back and he … did some dumb things to mess up my tours, like smuggling—”
“What’re you doing?” Dash asked sharply. “Don’t bring Black Sun into this.”
Rishyk stepped past D’Vox and backhanded Dash across the face with his pistol hand, toppling him off the couch and onto the floor. “I said: shut up!”
Great, now both his cheeks hurt. And now Javul was glaring at him, too, gripping the edge of the sofa until her knuckles were white.
“Black Sun is already in it, Dash. Xizor is in it. Up to his neck.” She raised her eyes to D’Vox again, while Dash wiped blood from a split lip. “They were running contraband in my ship. Turning me into a mule for their secret business. I decided I was tired of being the only one who wasn’t benefiting from the situation. So, I decided to … take things into my own hands.”
Dash gaped at her. What?
He got it when D’Vox’s eyes widened, showing a combination of unease and respect. “You stole from Black Sun?”
“Let’s just say I took a cut. Xizor didn’t like it. He made Hitch pay out of his own deep pockets. Which, well …” She smiled. “Let’s just say Hitch wasn’t too happy with me, either.”
“Which one hired Edge?” growled Rishyk. He spoke to Javul, but his eyes were still on Dash, as if he was just waiting for the other man to do something stupid that he could punish him for.
“We don’t know,” Dash mumbled. “All we know is that when their attempt to kill her on Rodia failed, they got sore and blew up the venue she was performing
in.”
Okay, a bit of a stretch, but it had the desired effect. Both D’Vox and Rishyk took a semi-step back from Javul as if they suddenly didn’t want to be quite so close to her.
“We came here because we thought it was safer,” added Javul. “We figured with the Imperial presence here, they wouldn’t try anything. I guess we were wrong.”
“So,” said D’Vox after a moment of thought, “if we turn you over to Xizor, everyone is happy, right? Well, except you two, of course.”
Dash nearly groaned aloud. That was not the desired effect. He glanced at Mel, who had turned from his view of the balcony to listen. Mel gave Javul a look and reached up to scratch the back of his neck.
“In case you hadn’t noticed,” Javul said quietly, “Xizor is not asking to have me turned over to him. He’s trying to kill me and he doesn’t much care who comes along for the ride. His agents are probably somewhere on the station already. They’ll know that Edge failed, of course …”
Rishyk growled like a dog and made a frustrated gesture. “Let’s get them off the station, D’Vox, before Black Sun takes their failure out on us.”
That’s more like it.
D’Vox was shaking his head. “No, we can make sunshine out of this, I’m sure of it. We just need to let Xizor and Kris know that we’ve got their pretty little playmate. I have to hand it to you, though, girl. You’ve got some amazing gall to pull this sort of thing off in such a public way.”
She smiled at him, but Dash could see the fear in her eyes. “Thank you. But I’ve also got an amazing amount of credits to my name. Enough to make you very forgetful about everything that’s happened.”
D’Vox was shaking his head again, which caused Rishyk to get right up in his face—literally standing nose-to-nose with him.
“Blast you, D’Vox! What are you playing at? You’re commander of an Imperial fracking fuel dump on the backside of nowhere. You do not want to get directly involved with Black Sun. Turning a blind eye to their business here is one thing, but doing business with them is suicide. I say we take the credits she’s offering and get them off the station.”
Star Wars: Shadow Games Page 24