The single man standing between them and the ship fired once, twice, and Aryn deflected both shots. Zeerid leveled the E-9 and fired. The shot hit the man in the brow and he fell backward, eyes wide open, blood pooling, dead.
As they pelted to the ship, more blaster shots rang out and Aryn’s blade hummed. The energy of the weapon caused Zeerid’s hair to stand on end.
They bounded over the dead man and through the transparisteel doors to the landing pad. The doors slid shut behind them, shutting off the screams of the civvies. Zeerid was grateful for it. Blaster shots thudded into the doors. The sound of speeders, swoops, and other nearby ships put a thrum in the air.
Shots rang out from above and to the right. A bolt clipped Aryn in the calf and knocked her legs out from under her.
An unmarked open-topped speeder flew in from the right, the pilot, a human male, firing over the side.
Zeerid crouched, one hand on Aryn, as he fired three shots with the E-9, trying to target one of the grav-thrusters on the speeder but hitting only the surrounding fuselage. The shots did no damage so he targeted the cockpit. Trying to avoid Zeerid’s fire, the pilot overcompensated and the speeder turned hard right. While the pilot scrambled to regain control, Zeerid grabbed Aryn with his good arm and pulled her to her feet.
“I’m all right,” she said. “Go, go.”
Sirens screamed in the distance, presaging the arrival of the port authorities.
Supporting each other arm in arm, they limped to the entry door and Zeerid punched in the code. Behind them, the doors to the landing pad slid open. Shots rang off the hull of Fatman. Zeerid fired a few blind bolts behind him. Aryn deflected another two shots into the bulkhead.
The ship’s door slid open too karking slow. Zeerid grabbed Aryn and climbed in before the door was all the way open. He hit the button to close it and the door stopped and reversed itself.
“I’ve got to get us out of here. You’re all right?”
“I’m fine,” she said.
The wound on her calf was ugly but looked like a graze. The pink, raw meat of her flesh was bordered by black lines of charred skin.
He pelted through Fatman’s corridors until he reached the cockpit, slammed himself into the pilot’s seat, and fired up the engines. His numb arm made it difficult, but he managed. He looked out of the cockpit for the speeder, saw it above him.
He’d ram it if it didn’t get out of the way.
The thrusters engaged and Fatman rose off the pad. The speeder wheeled to the side. The pilot fired wildly at the cockpit, but Fatman’s transparisteel canopy turned the shots without so much as a mark.
Zeerid considered blowing the speeder from the air with Fatman’s plasma cannons, but the falling debris might hurt an innocent.
“Consider yourself fortunate, fella.”
When he had ten meters of altitude, he engaged the ion engines and Fatman blazed skyward. He monitored the scanners to ensure no one was following them.
When he saw nothing, he let himself uncoil. He tested his arm, found it unbroken, just badly bruised. The feeling was already beginning to return to his hand.
Once the ship broached the atmosphere, he gave her to the autopilot and hurried back to the hold to check on Aryn.
Vrath holstered his still-warm weapon while he watched Zeerid’s ship lift into Vulta’s night sky. The ship’s ion engines flared blue and the freighter sped into the darkness and mingled with the rest of the night traffic.
He cursed as he surveyed the ruins of their ambush: two of his men dead, one wounded, the authorities en route, and he’d neither seized nor destroyed the engspice.
The Hutts would be unhappy.
Hundreds of faces stared out at them through the transparisteel windows of the spaceport. Behind the faces, he saw security droids and blue-uniformed security officers speeding along the autowalks. Some of the gawkers turned to the officers, pointed fingers outside at Vrath and his men. He could hear sirens in the distance.
“Time to get clear, boss,” said Deron.
Vrath nodded. He regretted leaving his dead behind, but their identities would tell the authorities nothing. They’d all been surgically altered several times over. Their current identities would not be traceable to the Hutts.
Keene set the speeder down on the landing pad. Vrath, Deron, and Lom hopped in.
“Move,” Vrath said.
Keene brought the speeder up and punched the acceleration. The wind whipped over them. Keene kept the speeder low and mixed with the traffic in the heart of Yinta Lake. Vrath kept an eye behind them for pursuit but saw none.
“We are clear,” he said.
Keene slowed the speeder and changed course, heading for their safehouse.
Lom started a stream of expletives that lasted three minutes. When he finished, Deron said, “The Hutts said nothing about Jedi involvement.”
“No, they didn’t,” Vrath agreed, though he doubted his contact with the Hutts had known.
“What are the Jedi doing with a spicerunner?” Deron asked.
Vrath shook his head, pondering. Jedi involvement made no sense, unless …
“Maybe the Jedi want to put their agent on Coruscant and they’re using a spicerunner to get her there.”
Deron harrumphed, seemingly unimpressed with the explanation.
“So how do they get through the Imperial blockade and get to Coruscant? He can’t just fly up to an Imperial cruiser.”
“No,” Vrath said, still thinking. “He can’t. But he’s got to have something in mind. The spice needs to get there and get there fast.”
“Right.”
Vrath made up his mind. “Keene, get me to Razor.”
“Why? What are you going to do?” Deron asked.
“I’m going to fly right up to an Imperial cruiser.”
“Huh?”
Vrath did not waste time with further explanation. The authorities would be searching for them once they analyzed video of the battle in the spaceport. Probably The Exchange already had the video, too. They’d be hunting Vrath and his team also.
“Get to your ships and get offplanet,” Vrath said. His team had landed in the bush outside Yinta Lake, and had not registered with planetary control.
“We rendezvous in three standard days at the usual place on Ord Mantell.”
He would get one more chance at stopping the engspice.
Zeerid found Aryn limping through the corridors toward the cockpit.
“We’re away,” he said. “Safely, it seems. I got nothing but normal traffic on the scanners.”
“Good. Now what?”
“Now we go to Coruscant.”
She said, “How will we get through the Imperial blockade?”
“Ah. Well, that’s complicated. Why don’t you go take care of that leg?”
“Why don’t you take care of that arm?”
“I need to eyeball the cargo. You don’t need to come.”
“I think I won’t.”
He nodded. “Medbay is forward and starboard.”
She smiled. “Kolto for your cuts.”
“Kolto for your cuts,” he echoed, a soldier’s phrase for medical care in the field.
“There’s food in the galley,” he said. “Protein bars and glucose supplements, mostly. Help yourself.”
“You’re still eating like a soldier.”
“I still do lots of things like a soldier.”
Just not the most important things.
She headed off and he headed toward the cargo bay, sneaking up on the crates as if they were an easily startled animal. They were small, maybe a meter on a side, tiny in the otherwise empty hold. He didn’t know what he had expected. Something bigger, he supposed. They seemed like a great deal of trouble for such small containers. He ran his hands over them and decided he did not want to see the spice after all.
He headed back to the cockpit to pilot his ship. The hail from Oren was already blinking. He punched it.
“Go,” he said.
“Incident? I was shot. Twice.”
“Facial recognition on the apparent leader of the hit team gives an ID of Vrath Xizor.” Oren chuckled. “Apparently he’s an elementary school teacher from the Core.”
“I think we can safely assume that is fake. Who is he, Oren?”
“Free agent, we think. Probably works for the Hutts. They wouldn’t want the engspice to get to Coruscant. They’re … at odds with our buyer.”
The Hutts. It seemed they were into everything.
“Is that all you have?” Zeerid asked him.
“That’s all I have. How are you planning to get the spice to Coruscant, Z-man?”
“I’m not telling you a kriffin’ thing, Oren. You have a leak in your organization. I’ll get it there. That’s all you need to know.”
Oren chuckled. “Good-bye, Z-man.”
Behind him, Aryn cleared her throat. Zeerid could not bring himself to make eye contact with her. He started punching coordinates into the navicomp and Aryn eased into the copilot’s seat. It had been a long while since anyone had shared the cockpit with him. She had bandaged up her calf.
“Bandage looks good,” he said.
“Thanks.” She eyed the math in the navicomp. “That’s not going to get us to Coruscant.”
“No,” he said. “It’s going to take us to the Kravos system.”
“That’s a dead system,” she said. “On the edge of Imperial space.”
He nodded. “Supply convoys stop there to skim the gas giants for hydrogen.”
“I don’t understand. What’s the plan to get to Coruscant?”
“I thought you had the plan,” he said.
“What?”
He smiled. “I’m joking.”
“Not funny. The plan, Zeerid.”
He nodded. “It’s dangerous.”
Aryn seemed unbothered. She stared out the cockpit as they flew into the velvet of space, waiting for him to explain. He tried.
“I’m going to piggyback Fatman on an Imperial ship.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means what it sounds like. I heard about it in flight school, back in the service.”
“You heard about it?”
Zeerid continued as if she had said nothing. “Centuries ago, smugglers used to jump into and out of hyperspace milliseconds after a Republic ship, say a big supply ship, heading for Coruscant. Smuggler comes out of hyperspace and goes cold except for thrusters.”
Aryn considered it. “Hard to pick up on sensors.”
“Right, but only if you come out in the supply ship’s shadow. And only if you come out and get cold right away.”
“You’d have to know right where they’d come out.”
“And they did then. And we do now.”
Zeerid knew all the details of every hyperspace lane in the Core. If he knew where the Imperial ships entered hyperspace and their ultimate destination, he knew where they would come out.
“Then what?”
“Then you latch on.”
Aryn’s eyes looked as wide as a Rodian’s. “You latch on?”
“An electromagnetic seal. That part’s easy to do.”
“They’ll feel it.”
Zeerid nodded. “Gotta be a big enough ship and you’ve got to latch onto a cargo bay or something similar. Something likely to be empty. Then, once you get through the atmosphere, you disengage the seal and float away into clear sky.”
It sounded ridiculous when he spoke it aloud. He could not believe he was contemplating it.
Aryn blew out a sigh, stared out the cockpit. “This is your plan?”
“Such as it is. You have something better?”
“Who’s ever done it?”
“No one I know. When the Republic learned of it, they adjusted their sensor scans to look for it. No one’s done it in centuries.”
“But the Empire won’t know about it.”
“So I hope.”
He tried hard not to see the doubt in her expression. It echoed his own.
“This is all I’ve got, Aryn. It’s this or nothing.”
She stared out the cockpit, the turn of her thoughts visible behind the green veil of her eyes.
Fatman was almost clear of gravity wells.
“I can still drop you somewhere,” he said, hoping she would not take him up on it. “You don’t have to hitch a ride with me.”
She smiled. “This is all I’ve got, too, Z-man.”
“Aren’t we a pair, then.”
She chuckled, but it faded quickly.
“Aryn? You all right?”
“I feel like I left Alderaan a lifetime ago,” she said. “It’s been hours.”
“A lot can happen in a handful of hours,” he said.
She nodded, drifted off.
“Aryn?”
She came back to him from wherever she’d been. “I’m with you,” she said. “And I think I can help make this work.”
Vrath turned Razor’s navicomp loose, and it generated a course to Coruscant. Even if Zeerid jumped into hyperspace right away—which Vrath doubted—Vrath’s modified Imperial drop ship would still beat Fatman to Coruscant. His work required much travel. Razor had the best hyperdrive credits could buy.
When the navicomp had finished its calculations, he engaged the hyperdrive and the ship blazed through hyperspace. He dimmed the cockpit and watched a bulkhead-mounted chrono tick away the seconds, the minutes. After a short time, he disengaged the hyperdrive and the black of normal space replaced the cerulean churn of hyperspace. In the distance, day-side Coruscant gleamed against the black of space.
The planet, entirely coated in duracrete and metal, always reminded Vrath of a giant cog, the mainspring of the Republic. He wondered what would befall the Republic now that the spring had been fouled.
For a moment, he turned nostalgic for his time in the Imperial Army, when he had turned Republic soldiers into rag dolls at over three hundred meters. He’d had fifty-three confirmed kills before getting thrown out of the service and regretted not one. He’d hated everything about the service except for the killing and how he felt after winning a battle. He imagined how it must feel for Imperial forces to walk as conquerors on Coruscant’s surface, for the navy to own the space around the jewel of the Republic.
Even from a distance, Vrath could see the silver arrows of two Imperial cruisers patrolling the black around Coruscant. A third orbited a moon. Ordinarily a flotilla of satellites whirled around the planet, too, but Vrath saw none. Perhaps the Empire had destroyed them as part of its forced communications blackout of the planet.
Two of the dozen or so fighters escorting the nearest cruiser, the new Mark VII advanced interceptors, peeled off and sped toward Vrath’s ship. He made sure his weapons systems were powered down and put his communications gear on open hail. Almost before he lifted his hand from the control panel, the navy pinged him.
“Unidentified vessel,” said a stern voice that sounded like every Imperial communications officer he’d heard during all his time in the corps. “You are in restricted space. Power down your engines and deflectors completely and prepare to be towed. Any deviation from that instruction will result in your immediate destruction.”
Vrath did not doubt it. “Message received. Will comply.” He powered down his engines and deactivated his deflectors. “I need to speak to the OIC. I have information of interest to the Empire.”
The fighters buzzed his drop ship. One of them swooped around and under Razor. As it pulled out in front of him, it activated an electromagnetic tow. A glowing blue line formed between the two ships, and the Mark VII started pulling him through space. The other fighter maintained position behind Razor so he could blow Vrath from space should it prove necessary. Ahead, the tunnel of the cruiser’s landing bay loomed.
The fighter pulled Vrath through the throat of the cruiser’s landing bay until they reached an is
olated landing pad where two dozen troopers in full gray battle armor awaited him, along with a tall, redheaded naval officer. He nodded at them through the canopy, unstrapped from the chair, disarmed himself of both his blaster and his knives, and headed out.
By the time Razor’s landing ramp clanged off the metal deck of the cruiser, he was staring at the dead eyes of fourteen TH-17 blaster rifles.
“Secure him,” the naval officer said.
Two of the armored troopers shouldered their weapons and rushed him. He did not resist as one put flex binders on his wrists and the other patted him down.
“He is unarmed,” the one said, his voice the modulated mechanical sound of the helmet’s speaker.
“Search the ship,” the naval officer said. “I want to see his flight records.”
“Yes, sir,” responded the troopers, and seven of them boarded the ship to search.
“There is nothing of interest aboard,” Vrath said. “I came from Vulta. That’s as far back as the records go.”
The naval officer smiled, a tight, false gesture, and walked up to Vrath. His unwrinkled uniform smelled freshly cleaned. The freckles on his pale face looked like a pox.
Vrath could have killed him with a high kick to the trachea, but he thought it unwise.
“I am Commander Jard, first officer of the Imperial cruiser Valor. You are under arrest for flying in restricted space. Whether your punishment is execution or mere imprisonment is entirely at my discretion and depends upon how satisfied I am with the answers you provide to my questions.”
“I understand.”
“What is your name? Where did you come from?”
He barely remembered the name his mother had given him. He offered the one his profession had most recently given him. “Vrath Xizor. As I said, I flew here directly from Vulta.”
“What brought you here, Vrath Xizor?”
“I have information of interest to the OIC.”
The naval officer cocked his head. “Are you military, Vrath Xizor?”
“Former. Special detachment from the Four Hundred and Third. Company E.”
“An Imperial sniper?”
Vrath was impressed that Jard knew his unit designation. He nodded.
“Well, Vrath Xizor of the Four Hundred Third, you may tell me your information.”
The Old Republic Series Page 55