by Timothy Zahn
Caaldra.
She studied him another minute, watching the way his eyes moved around the room, noting how his hands stayed close to the weapons whose positions she could read in the subtle folds of cloth and slight bulges of boot leather, sensing the automatic flow of contingency combat plans through his mind as the other inhabitants of the warehouse moved about their tasks.
One of the pirates watching the procedure turned and started in Caaldra’s direction. From his age and the number of souvenir trinkets Mara could see glittering on his chest, she guessed he was high up in the organization. Keeping a wary eye on the rest of the room, staying in the shadows behind the stacks of crates, she moved closer.
She had reached a spot two stacks away from Caaldra when the pirate arrived. Sinking into a crouch, she eased an eye around the edge of the lowest crate and stretched out with her sensory enhancement techniques.
“—almost done,” the pirate was saying. “Be glad to get those furs out of here.”
“Not much profit in it,” Caaldra commented.
“Any profit’s fine with me,” the pirate countered. “Floogy things take up way more room than they’re worth.” He gestured to Caaldra. “So you got our next targets?”
“Right here,” Caaldra said, pulling out a data card and handing it over. “Ten ships, the first and third for me.” He paused. “That’s everything in the first and third, Shakko. Make sure the Commodore explains to your people what’ll happen if there’s any, shall we say, leakage this time.”
Commodore. Mara’s lip twisted in contempt. Pirate chieftains did so enjoy taking on pseudo-military titles and airs.
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll tell him,” Shakko growled. “Don’t worry—I’ll take the first target myself.”
“Fine,” Caaldra said. “It leaves port in three days, with your optimal ambush point in five. Plenty of time. And the other targets should be in easy range of your other ships.”
“Plenty of time if we can get these flanked smugglers hoofing, anyway,” Shakko muttered, turning back. “Hey! Tannis!”
One of the other pirates detached himself from the section of wall he’d been leaning on and strode over. “Yes?”
“Take Vickers and one of the speeders back to the ship and send this list to the Commodore,” Shakko ordered, handing him the data card. “Then comm Bisc and tell him he’s got half an hour to finish picking up the supplies and get them stowed.”
“Want me to start engine prep?”
“Might as well wait till we’re finished here,” Shakko said. “I’ll comm and tell you when.”
“Okay.” Tannis headed for the warehouse door, grabbing one of the other men along the way.
Mara didn’t wait to hear any more but quickly retraced her steps through the shadows toward her satchel and her private entrance. It was clear that the smugglers, the pirates, and Caaldra would soon be going their separate ways, and even the Emperor’s Hand couldn’t follow three quarries at once.
She could, of course, return to her ship and call it in. But even if there were Imperial forces in the area who could react quickly enough, it was unlikely they would be set up for the kind of subtle tracking and surveillance work that was called for here. For all intents and purposes, Mara was on her own.
Fortunately, there wasn’t any real question about which way she should go on this one. Intriguing though Caaldra might be, it was clear the pirates were about to head off on a frenzy of attack and murder. That was where the immediate danger to the Empire and its citizens lay, so that was where Mara would go.
Besides, Caaldra had told Shakko that the first and third targets were his. It would be interesting to find out what those targets were.
Three minutes later she was back in her borrowed landspeeder, following the two pirates at a discreet distance as they drove along the storage facility’s outer drive.
Shakko’s ship was parked in a docking bay on the west side of the storage complex, close enough to the warehouse for easy access but far enough away that a casual observer wouldn’t immediately make the connection between it and the smugglers. It was a Corellian HT-2200 medium freighter: almost sixty meters long with four climate-adjustable cargo holds, a solid pack beast of a ship. As with the smugglers’ vehicle, though, appearances were undoubtedly not to be trusted.
The pirates hadn’t left any guards on outside duty, but it was quickly clear that there was at least one man still inside. Even before Tannis coasted the landspeeder to a stop by the leftmost of the two forward-jutting cargo arms a boarding ramp had lowered to meet them. Parking the landspeeder, the two pirates hopped out and trotted up the ramp, which immediately lifted shut behind them. There was another ramp on this model, Mara knew, over on the right cargo arm, probably as vigilantly watched as the other one.
But then, she hadn’t really planned on using any of the usual entrances.
Her landspeeder’s present vector would take her past the ship’s stern, with her nearest approach being about twenty meters away. Adjusting her direction slightly, she aimed the vehicle past the edge of the next section of the storage complex, where it would be out of view of the pirate ship when it either coasted to a halt or crashed. Getting a grip on her satchel, she gunned the vehicle; as it passed directly behind the freighter she tossed out the satchel and leapt out after it.
She hit the ground, rolled twice to kill her momentum, then rolled back to her feet. Satchel in hand, she sprinted to the pirate ship’s stern, pausing beneath the four large drive nozzles for a final check of the area. Then, heaving the satchel up into the lower-rightmost nozzle, she reached to the Force for strength and leapt up beside it.
The nozzle wasn’t big enough for her to stand upright, but there was plenty of room for her to crouch. For a moment she looked around, stretching out with her senses and trying to determine whether she’d been spotted. There wouldn’t be any out-hull visual sensors back here, she knew—the high radiation level during flight would fry them in double-quick time. But she could have been wrong about the pirates having posted outside guards.
Still, if anyone had noticed her unorthodox arrival, they were being quiet about it. Moving the satchel out of her way, she pulled out her lightsaber and set to work enlarging the opening between the nozzle and the reaction chamber.
It was a tricky operation, one she’d practiced only a few times and never actually performed in the field. The key was to cut away some of the extra sideward insulation and shielding—which would reduce the operating lifetime of the engine but not endanger anyone inside—while leaving the flow, coolant, and sensor lines intact.
Fortunately, with engines this big there was plenty of extra room to play with. She’d whittled away no more than a quarter of the shielding before she had an opening big enough to squeeze through. Closing down the lightsaber, she wriggled her way through and found herself in the engine’s reaction chamber.
With some engines there would be at least one more stage to go before she could get to the ship’s interior. But the Corellian Engineering Corporation had thoughtfully included a human-sized circular access hatchway into the reaction chamber along with the more standard hopper holes suitable only for maintenance and cleaning droids.
The hatch was several centimeters thick, of course, and sealed from the other side, but that wouldn’t be a problem. Again igniting her lightsaber, Mara slipped the glowing blade between the hatch and frame, trying to damage the material as little as possible, feeling the blade poke through the far end. She eased the tip up and down until she felt the brief resistance that indicated she’d found and cut through the catch. Closing down the weapon, she drew her sleeve blaster and cautiously pushed the hatch open.
It opened into a small, cramped, and surprisingly clean engineering area. No one was visible, but with Tannis already here and Shakko and the rest of the gang soon to be on their way she knew the solitude wouldn’t last.
Her first task was to reseal the hatch. Borrowing a welding torch from a compact machine shop tucked
away in one corner, she carefully reconnected the sections of the hatch she’d cut. The weld was far from perfect, but it should stand up to anything but a close examination.
More importantly, it would also hold the hatch closed against the pressures of the reaction chamber behind it. It would be of small comfort for her to successfully infiltrate the pirates, only to have their ship blow up beneath her.
The engineering section opened forward into the crew common room—a comfortable, relatively open area flanked by the galley, medical bay, and eight sets of crew quarters. Directly forward was the blast door into the step-up cockpit; angling past it to right and left were twin corridors leading to the starboard and portside cargo arms. Satchel in one hand, sleeve blaster in the other, Mara took the right-hand corridor, passing the cockpit area and heading into the starboard cargo arm. She could hear muffled voices now, along with the faint sounds of movement, and picked up her pace. Directly ahead, the corridor narrowed and curved around what appeared to be another crew cabin snuggled up against the cargo arm’s inner wall. She started toward it—
The sudden tingle of the Force was her only warning. Half a second later, the cabin door gave a soft snick and slid open.
And she found herself face-to-face with Tannis.
He hadn’t seen her yet, his eyes focused downward on the data card in his hand as he started out of the cabin. But discovery was as imminent as it was inevitable. There was no way for Mara to get past him around the side of the cabin and down the corridor, not without him spotting her, and it would be equally impossible to back up and duck around the side of the cargo hold before he looked up.
Which left her only one option. Reaching out with the Force, she slammed the side of his head against the edge of the doorway.
He went down without a sound, collapsing into a heap on the floor. Mara crouched beside him, automatically checking his pulse as she looked around for inspiration. Her move had bought her a little time, but only a little, and at the additional cost of now having to come up with a plausible explanation for Tannis’s accident. She peered into the cabin, glanced again around the corridor, and then looked up.
There was the answer: a group of five pipes running together along the upper corridor wall, curving to follow the bulge of Tannis’s cabin and then continuing around it into the cargo arm. If the colored rings on the pipes followed standard shipboard code, two of the conduits carried water, one had cryo fluid for the cargo bays’ temperature controls, one contained laser coolant, presumably for whatever concealed weaponry the pirates had up there, and the last carried backup hydraulic fluid for the boarding ramp.
And everyone who flew the galaxy knew that hydraulic fluid plus water made for a dangerously slippery combination.
There was an attachment clamp right at the corner by Tannis’s cabin where the pipes started their bend. Igniting her lightsaber, Mara worked the tip of the blade behind the clamp where vibration might possibly have worn a hole, scratching delicately at the metal of one of the water pipes until a trickle appeared and began dribbling down the wall. Another careful scratch, and it was joined by an equally small trickle of hydraulic fluid. Stepping over the dribbles now beginning to inch their way across the deck, she twisted Tannis’s legs around and gave the soles of his boots a good coating with the stuff.
As deceptions went, it was a pretty weak one. If the pirates decided to be suspicious, they could probably tear the whole scenario apart in ten minutes.
But Shakko hadn’t struck her as having that much imagination. Besides, she was pretty sure she would eventually end up killing them all anyway. If they figured it out, that judgment would simply be administered a few days early. Making sure not to touch the fluid herself, she continued down the corridor to the forward-most of the two cargo holds in this arm.
As she’d already surmised from the coolant line, the pirates had installed some extra weaponry aboard their ship. What she hadn’t expected was the sheer scope of the refitting that had been done. The entire forward hold had been turned into a weapons bay, with two sets of quad lasers, a small ion cannon, and a highly illegal Krupx MG7 proton torpedo launcher. Most of the remaining space was taken up by a boxy Cygnus 5 short-range transport standing ready to deliver boarders once the prey was pounded into submission. In one rear corner was a small armory with grenades and blaster rifles; along the back wall was a wardrobe containing vac suits, helmets, and oxygen tanks. Apparently the drill was to swing down the entire front bulkhead for attack, opening the cargo bay to space and bringing the full range of weaponry to bear.
There was no place in the weapons bay with enough concealment for her to safely set up housekeeping. Fortunately, the cargo hold directly aft of the weapons bay was another story. A quarter of its volume was filled with crates and barrels of stolen plunder, some of them bearing the scars and burns of close-in blasterfire. A few minutes’ rearrangement, and she had constructed herself a snug little burrow inside one of the stacks.
Her gray jumpsuit had been rather badly stained and rumpled by her trip through the engine nozzle. She had another in her satchel, plus a set of business wear that could be converted into something more formal should the need arise.
But for the situation at hand, she had an even more appropriate outfit.
A few minutes later she was in her combat suit: skintight black, with high boots, a weapons belt, and knee pads for the kind of violent exercise she tended to get into in these situations. A compact BlasTech K-14 blaster was holstered against her right hip, her lightsaber rode her left, and a pair of small knives waited hidden in the sides of her boots.
It probably wasn’t as impressive an arsenal as Caaldra’s, but it should be adequate for her needs. She removed the outfit’s detachable sleeves, anticipating the extra heat that freighters this size usually produced, and left the cloak in the satchel as well. Aboard ship, people seldom fought in the kind of near-complete darkness where the cloak would help obscure her outline, and unless the pirates had weapons with autotargeting systems, the material’s passive sensor confusers wouldn’t be necessary.
And with that, her preparations were complete. According to Caaldra, the pirates had five days until their attack. Somewhere in that time, she needed to find and get a look at the data card he’d given Shakko. After that, she could decide what her own move would be.
The mission had started out as a search for a possible connection between Moff Glovstoak and the Rebellion. Now it had taken on a different flavor entirely. Idly, she wondered if there would be any more twists before it was resolved.
Stretching out on the deck inside her new burrow, her head pillowed comfortably on her satchel, she unwrapped a ration bar and settled down to wait.
Chapter Seven
“THE FORCE,” LEIA COMMENTED DRILY, “DOES indeed have a sense of humor.”
“Or at least a sense of irony,” General Rieekan said, frowning at his datapad. “Are we sure these stormtroopers didn’t know who it was they were rescuing?”
“Wouldn’t they have arrested Porter’s group if they had?” Luke asked.
“They might have let them go in order to leave the supply line open,” Leia told him, studying the farm boy’s face. There was something bothering him, she could see, something beyond this mission they were preparing for. Beyond even the strange stormtrooper rescue of the Rebel group on Drunost. “Leaving them on the vine in the hope of finding bigger fruit.”
“Still, Casement said no one tracked his ship,” Rieekan pointed out. “And Porter has been in touch with Targeter since then and didn’t indicate any trouble at his end.”
“It still might be a good idea to shut down that entire supply line,” Leia said. “At least for now.”
“I’m not sure we can,” Rieekan warned. “There’s a lot of pirate and raider activity going on right now in Shelsha sector. If we shut down this line, we may not be able to open another one.”
“That’ll put Chivkyrie in a good mood for the negotiations,” Luke murmured.
“For starters, they seem to be pretty much everywhere,” Rieekan said. “Casement mentioned a group called BloodScar, but a single group can’t possibly be big enough to be doing this much damage across the sector. My guess is that we’ve got several groups who’ve carved up the sector into individual territories.”
“Sounds like the first thing we need is better intel,” Leia said. “Someone needs to go out there, talk to our supply people directly, and see if we can get a handle on what exactly is going on.”
“And it should be someone who knows more about fringe types than the rest of us,” Luke added.
Leia frowned at him with sudden understanding. “Are you talking about Han?”
Luke shrugged uncomfortably. “Mostly,” he admitted. “I mean, I don’t like the idea of throwing him into danger like this—”
“It shouldn’t be that dangerous,” Rieekan put in. “He’d be there to gather intel, not take on the pirates single-handed.”
“I know,” Luke agreed, looking only marginally relieved. “The point is—he just doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere around here. If we can’t make him feel useful, I think we’re going to lose him.” He looked at Rieekan. “I don’t think we want that to happen.”
“In that case, we definitely want to give him this,” Rieekan said.
“I agree,” Leia said, bracing herself. Over the short period of time that she’d known Luke, she’d developed a pretty good feel for him, and she was quite sure he wasn’t going to like what she was about to say. “And if he accepts, I think Luke should go with him.”
Luke’s jaw dropped a few millimeters, his eyes widening by roughly the same amount. “I thought I was going with you.”