Behind it the music stops, cut off in mid-wail. It tells me much of the band members: Clearly they are unaccustomed to such places as Chalmun’s cantina, or they would know never to stop. Experienced musicians would play a counterpoint to the shouts, the shrieks, the squalls, using the cacophony, no matter how atonal, to build a new melody.
Then a wholly unexpected sound is born, a sound such as I have not heard for a hundred years: the low-pitched, throbbing hum of an unsheathed and triggered lightsaber.
—soup—
I turn instantly, seeking … proboscii quiver, extrude, withdraw reluctantly at my insistence. But they know it even as I know it: Somewhere in Chalmun’s cantina is the vessel I need.
It is a quick, decisive battle, a skirmish soon ended. With but a single stroke of the lightsaber, the Aqualish is—well, unarmed. One-armed, if you will.
The boy hangs back. I scent him again, wild and uncontrolled. But there is more here now, far more than expected, hovering at the edges, tantalizing me with its presence, with the repression of its power … and then I see the old man quietly putting away the lightsaber, and I realize what he is.
A Master despite his reticence, seeking no battles in word or deed; Master of what is, in such times, left wholly unspoken, lest the Emperor suspect. But I know what he is: Jedi. I could not but know. He is too disciplined, too well shielded against such intrusions as Anzati probing, and in that very shielding the truth, to me, is obvious.
I leave it its due: unspoken. I see no need to speak it. Let him be what he is; no one else will suspect. He is safe a while longer.
The boy has earned my study. If they have true business together it is information worth knowing. If the old man has taken a pupil there is indeed cause to fear—if you are part of the Empire, and recall the old ways.
If not, as I am not—save I recall the old days, the even older ways—it matters not at all. Unless you care to count the coin Jabba would pay, or others, including Darth Vader.
Including the Emperor.
Braggadocio. It is a staple of such places, the ritual boasting of entity to entity to save face, or to build face; to request a place in the world, or to make a place; an attempt to create of oneself something more than what one is.
There are those who are indeed more—as Anzat I am far more than anyone might suspect (or comfortably imagine)—but only rarely do they resort to braggadocio, because everyone else knows who they are and what they have done. To say anything at all is redundancy, which dilutes the deeds.
But even those most skilled, even those most notorious may well be pressed to resort to braggadocio in the implacable face of a Jedi Master dubious of those deeds. Such entities as the old man can reduce the strongest to crèche-born, and with little said or done.
The band has recovered itself, or is under pain of reduced payment if the musicians do not immediately resume playing. The music, less strident now, mutes all conversations but those closest to me, but I need not rely on words and tone for information. In braggadocio is often borne the scent of soup.
I exhale, feel proboscii quiver, turn slowly to take my measure of the cantina. The direction is easily gained, and as I mark it I cannot help but smile; the old man and his pupil have gone into one of the cubicles. It is not them I scent now, but those with whom they speak: a hulking Wookiee, and a humanoid male.
—soup—
It boils up quickly, powerfully, so quickly and so powerfully I cannot help but mark it. It leaves me breathless.
Not the old Jedi, who is disciplined, and shielded. Not the boy, who is young and unripe. Not the Wookiee, who is passive in all but loyalty. The humanoid. The Corellian.
Anzati are long-lived. Memory abides.
A curl of smoke winds its way from my pipe. Through the wreath of it I smile. He is wanted, as is the Wookiee, but all entities in Chalmun’s cantina are wanted somewhere. Even I am wanted, or would be; no one knows who or what I am, or what I am wanted for, and in that there is continuance.
I am careful in the hunt, always meticulous in those details others ignore, and too often die of; I require confirmation. I commit nothing until I am certain.
In this instance confirmation and certainty need little time and less patience. The Jedi and his pupil depart, but are immediately replaced by a Rodian. He is nervous. His soup is so insubstantial as to be nonexistent; he is servant, not served.
He is coward. He is fool. He is incompetent. He is slow to commit himself. And thus he is dead in a burst of contraband blaster in the hand of a wholly committed and consummate pirate.
—soup—
I exult even as proboscii twitch expectantly. It is here, here—and now, right now, this moment … the hue, the tint, the whisper, the shout, the evanescence of soup incarnate, enfleshed and unshielded, and rich, so rich—
I need only to go and to get it, to drink it, to embrace as Anzati embrace, to dance the dance with the Corellian whose soup is thick, and hot, and sweet, sweeter by far than any I have tasted for too long a time—
Now.
Now.
But haste dilutes fulfillment. Let there be time, and patience.
—such soup—
The band wails on. There is the sharp scent of smoke; the acrid tang of sweat; the smut-dusty stench of dune sand, of city sand; the blatancy of blaster death but newly encountered, redolent of the Rodian’s cowardice and stupidity. It was a poor death worth no comment; he will not be mourned even by the entity who hired him.
He is—was—the Hutt’s, of course. Need you ask? There is none other who would dare to hire assassins in Mos Eisley, on Tatooine.
None but Lord Vader, and the Emperor.
But they are not here. Only Jabba.
The Hutt is in all things; is of himself all things, and everywhere, on Tatooine, in Mos Eisley, in Chalmun’s cantina.
—such soup—
A final inhalation of t’bac, sucked deep inside and savored, as is the moment, the knowledge, the need itself savored. A brief glare of searing sunlight illuminates the interior as the Corellian pirate and his Wookiee companion depart with alacrity Chalmun’s premises, wary of Imperial repercussions. It is Jabba’s spaceport in all but name, and that name is the Emperor’s, who need know nothing of such dealings as the Hutt’s; or who knows, and does not care.
It is dusk again inside. They will clear the body away; and someone will report to Jabba that his hireling is dead.
Has reported; he knows it by now, and by whose hand it was done.
—such soup—
But what sense in paying for it of my own pocket? Jabba’s is deeper.
Indeed, the Hutt will pay well. But it is I who will drink the soup.
—such soup—
Proboscii quiver as I exhale the twinned smoke-stream slowly, steadily, with quiet satisfaction and the frisson of my own soup as it leaps in anticipation.
—Han Solo’s soup—
Ah, but it will be a hunt worth the hunting … and soup such as I—even Dannik Jerriko, Anzat of the Anzati, Eater of Luck, of Chance—have never, ever known.
At the Crossroads:
The Spacer’s Tale
by Jerry Oltion
The Infinity was hot in more ways than one. BoShek smiled as he prepared to drop out of hyperspace over Tatooine. He’d just beat Solo’s time on the Kessel run.
Of course he was running empty, bringing in just the ship to have its transponder codes altered, but even so, it would be fun to tell the braggart Corellian and his furry sidekick he’d broken their record.
The cockpit fit like a glove around him. He could reach all the controls from the single pilot’s chair, and everything was right where instinct made him reach first. The windows wrapped around to give him almost a full circle of view, and a heads-up holo filled in the gap to the rear. In his three years of piloting smugglers’ ships for the monastery-cum-forging operation, BoShek had never flown one so well designed as this.
The computer counted down the last few seconds
, then automatically switched to the sublight engines. Elongated starlines snapped back to points of light, and high to the left the bright yellow-white disk of Tatooine swelled into being. Holy bantha breath, it was close! Another second in hyper and he’d have popped out underground.
He swung around so the navcomputer could get a straight shot at the orbiting beacons, but he was willing to bet it already knew where they were. Sure enough, within seconds the planetary image in the navscreen filled with longitude and latitude lines, then showed a sparse dotting of oases and settlements across the desert planet.
Mos Eisley was about a third of an orbit away. BoShek was just about to accelerate toward it when the navcomputer buzzed a warning and two bright white wedges slid into view from around the curve of the planet. Imperial Star Destroyers. BoShek glanced out the windows and shuddered. They were so big he could actually see them with the naked eye.
Where had they come from? Tatooine was so far off the beaten track, the Empire hardly ever sent a tax collector, much less a pair of warships. Somebody must have caused some major trouble while he was gone.
And now their trouble was his too, because the Infinity was still running under hot transponder codes. If the Imperials bothered to scan for its engines’ unique emission signature—and they no doubt would—then they would know it was a smuggler’s ship, wanted throughout the galaxy for tariff violation, tax evasion, gun-running, and dozens of other crimes. The fact that BoShek was merely piloting it to Tatooine for someone else wouldn’t save him in a trial. If he ever got a trial.
For that matter, neither the monastery nor the Infinity’s owners would be happy with him if he let the Empire confiscate the ship. His job was to bring it in undetected so the monastery’s technicians could alter its codes and give it a clean record, not to lose it to the first patrol that happened along.
Without hesitation, he aimed straight down and accelerated hard. In space he wouldn’t stand a chance against the destroyers’ short-range TIE fighters, but down in the atmosphere, with the planet to help confuse their sensors, he might be able to lose them.
Tatooine grew from a sphere to a close, mottled wall. The Infinity began rocking gently as it reached the top of the atmosphere, then a bright flash came from the starboard side and the ship suddenly lurched to port. The destroyers had opened fire.
BoShek kept the Infinity aimed straight down, diving deep before he leveled out, knowing that the more air he put between him and the destroyers, the more shielding he would have from their turbolasers. His passage left a glowing, ionized wake behind him, but when he slowed to just a few times the speed of sound he left no trace.
He wasn’t free yet, though. Four TIE fighters from the warships arced into the atmosphere after him, and their closer range made up for the air’s energy absorption. The Infinity once again shuddered under Imperial fire.
Fortunately, they weren’t trying to kill him yet. Confident that he couldn’t get away, they were just trying to disable the ship and force him down. They were probably even trying to contact him by radio, but BoShek left the receiver switched off. Any transmission he could make would only give them his voiceprint; as it was, if he could lose them he might remain anonymous.
He shoved the throttles forward again, at the same time corkscrewing down and underneath the fighters to skim the sand. He was over the vast Dune Sea, far to the west of civilization; the wavelike dunefield erupted into clouds of roiling sand as his shock wave passed over it.
Lining up directly behind him for another salvo, the flat-winged fighters plowed straight through the clouds, the airborne particles etching away their instruments and control surfaces and pitting their windows. They immediately rose up above the billowing sand, but BoShek chose that moment to pull back on the throttles, letting them overshoot him. He banked left, waited until they had committed to a left turn, then banked hard right and shoved the throttles down again, racing for the Jundland Wastes to the east.
The TIE fighters were catching up again by the time the jagged canyonland slid toward him over the horizon. BoShek dodged a few last energy bolts, then dived into the first canyon he reached and wove his way up it at top speed. The Infinity handled like a dream, hugging the ground as if on rails, but the TIE fighters were just as maneuverable. Only the damage they’d taken in the sand cloud kept them from catching him.
Then one of them made a mistake. Closing in for a crippling shot, it crossed into the Infinity’s shock wave, and the turbulence against its wide vertical wings tossed it like a leaf into the side of the canyon. The explosion sent another fighter into the ground, leaving only two to follow him.
Losing half their number had changed the rules, though. Now they weren’t shooting just to cripple; they were out for blood. BoShek frowned as he tried to think of a way to take them out first, but the Infinity was built for speed, not fighting.
Fleetingly, he thought of calling upon the Force, of trying to use its ancient mystical powers to throw his pursuers off, but he knew it would be useless. He’d been meditating and concentrating on the Force ever since he’d heard of it from one of the few real monks at the monastery in Mos Eisley, but he’d never yet gotten any indication that it even existed, other than a faint awareness of other people’s presence from time to time. The old Jedi might have been able to draw from it to subdue their enemies a long time ago, but the Force hadn’t protected them from the advancing Empire. No, he needed something more concrete, something physical he could do to escape.
Then he remembered a story Solo had told him once, about how he’d faked out a bounty hunter in an asteroid belt. Yeah. The same thing might work here.
He led the fighters deeper and deeper into the canyon, until its high walls boxed them in on either side. The Infinity shuddered under more and more impacts, and a flashing light on the instrument board warned of a shield about to fail, but instead of speeding up, BoShek intentionally slowed down. He rested his finger on the emergency escape-pod launch button, and just as he rounded a sharp bend, he hit it. The escape pod blew free and continued straight into the canyon wall, where its fuel supply exploded in a spectacular fireball. BoShek kept his eye on the heads-up rearview, but neither of the TIE fighters emerged from the flames. Either they’d been swallowed up in the explosion, or they’d pulled up and were circling around to examine what they no doubt assumed was the wreckage of the entire Infinity.
Smiling, BoShek pulled up out of the canyon, aimed straight east, then cut his engines completely. He had enough velocity to fly ballistic all the way to Mos Eisley if he had to, and with his engines dead the TIE fighters would never spot him.
“Solo,” he said aloud in the close control cabin, “I owe you a drink.”
BoShek knew right where to find him, too. Whenever the Millennium Falcon was onplanet, either Solo or Chewbacca—and sometimes both—would be at the Mos Eisley Cantina, trying to drum up business. After he’d dropped off the Infinity at the monastery, leaving instructions for the mechanics to modify its engine transponders immediately, BoShek headed straight there, not even taking the time to change out of his flight suit first. The monastery was south of the city’s center; he stopped for a moment at the ancient wreckage of the first colony ship, the Dowager Queen, to pass a sealed note from the abbot to one of the street preachers there, then hurried on.
The streets were lousy with stormtroopers, but they didn’t seem to be looking for BoShek. He saw four of them hassling an old hermit and a kid and two droids in a beat-up old landspeeder, but they evidently weren’t too interested in them either, because they let them go after just a few questions. BoShek ducked into the cantina before the stormtroopers could take an interest in him.
It took his eyes a minute to adjust to the dark interior, but Chewbacca was easy to spot, towering above the other beings at the bar the way he did. BoShek wove his way through the crowd and leaned up against the bar next to him.
“I beat your record,” he said without preamble.
Chewbacca grunted th
e Wookiee equivalent of “Get lost,” but then BoShek’s voice registered and he turned his head to ask what record BoShek meant.
“The Kessel run,” BoShek said, grinning. “I beat your time by a tenth, and I had to take out four TIE fighters when I got here to boot.”
Chewbacca growled appreciatively. He howled a long, ululating phrase that BoShek translated as “You’d better not let the customers catch you wringing out their ships, or they’ll start taking their business elsewhere.”
“Hey, we’re the best there is, and you know it,” BoShek told him. He waved at the bartender, who shot him a surly look and turned away. “So how’s the Falcon holding up? You need another code job yet?”
The Wookiee shook his shaggy head, then hooted in laughter. He howled another phrase that BoShek tentatively translated as: “After what you charged us last time, we’ve been keeping our noses clean. It’s cheaper.”
“Think of it as life insurance,” BoShek said, echoing the abbot’s favorite sales pitch. He was about to shout at the bartender when he felt an unmistakable awareness of someone behind him. It was the strongest presence he’d ever felt.
He turned as casually as he could and saw the old hermit and the boy in the doorway. The hermit’s eyes met his, and just a hint of a smile showed on his grizzled face. Leaving the boy with their droids, he walked straight up to BoShek and said in an astonishingly rich voice, “May the Force be with you, my friend.”
The Force? Had he really felt it just now? “I—uh—thanks,” BoShek stuttered. “How did you know …?”
“Your struggles are as plain as words for someone who is trained to see them. I could teach you much, but I fear my time here is short. I need passage off the planet. However, since I believe you have a ship, perhaps we could further both our quests at once.”
BoShek could hardly believe what he was hearing. This old guy was practically reading his mind. BoShek had never told anyone about his fascination with the Force, yet here came this complete stranger who picked up on it immediately. But he’d gotten part of BoShek’s story wrong. “I wish I did have a ship,” he said. “But I’m just a pilot.”
Tales from Mos Eisley Cantina Page 29