by Jeff Grubb
“Klatooinians, Vodrans, all the various breeds of Niktos,” snapped the matriarch. “All you faithful species that have sworn fealty to the Hutts.”
They were in the main room of a manor complex on Dennogra, on the outskirts of Zio Snaffkin. The city itself was a mud-baked sprawl broken by larger piles of whitewashed complexes owned by the more powerful bandits, pirates, and scoundrels in the area. The Bomu clan’s grandhouse was no different from half a hundred others within five kilometers.
The main room itself was dominated by an elevated dais, upon which sat a single chair, occupied by the wizened crone who had shackled so many of her own kin to the Spice Lord … and who had thrown so many away in foolish attempts at vengeance. Four of her clanchildren stood behind her, blaster carbines at the ready, and Koax could hear others moving around the house.
“With respect,” Koax said, “your Rodians serve the Hutts as well.”
“For better reasons!” hissed the matriarch. “We serve for money, not because we follow after them like tamed dark wolves.”
“And for vengeance,” noted Koax, quietly.
“Vengeance!” hooted the Rodian, her trunk curling up in delight. “Kriffing right!”
Koax reflected that the Spice Lord was correct—the Bomus were explosives just waiting for a spark, and the best she could do was to point them in the right direction. She had wondered once if Matriarch Hedu was dipping into the Tempest herself. Now, in her presence, she knew the ancient Rodian had succumbed to the drug of power long ago.
Koax refused to be beaten down by the old woman’s bombast. She drew herself up to her full height and regarded her with her baleful crystal eye. “Ma Lorda has expressed concern for your health, and that of your clan. Ma Lorda wishes it to be known that you are welcome to seek the Spice Lord’s protection. Ma Lorda requests that you fall back, regroup, gather your forces, and move out of the spotlight cast by the Jeedai.”
“Ma Lorda,” mocked Hedu. “Why doesn’t the Spice Lord just fit you with a collar and be done with it? We are Rodians, members of a proud clan. We do not ‘fall back.’ We do not run. We do not hide. The Jeedai preys on our businesses, businesses we set up for your Spice Lord, and we will strike back hard.”
“Your history says otherwise,” said the Klatooinian calmly. “I have been sent to offer you the Spice Lord’s protection. I have not been instructed to argue if you are too foolish not to take it.”
The older Rodian spat. “Tell your Spice Lord that we are legion, and we are well protected. They will never find us. We will find the Jeedai and we will have our vengeance.”
In the distance there was the thunder of an explosion, and the chandeliers of the manor swayed slightly. The honor guard behind the matriarch looked at one another, puzzled.
“What’s that?” snapped Hedu.
“Hubris,” muttered Koax. “If you reject the kindness of the gods, you will be punished for it.”
Another explosion, and the sound of running feet. Then shouts in Huttese and the staccato of blasterfire.
Hedu rose shakily from her throne and motioned her clanchildren before her. Once assembled, they ran toward the double doors at the far end of the room. Koax stepped up to the dais next to the matriarch.
“Do you have an escape route?” the Klatooinian started to ask, but she was interrupted as the doors sprung open and a surge of Rodians fell backward into the room, firing behind them as they retreated. There was a cascade of blasterfire coming from their weapons and an equally heavy cascade of return fire.
Then their attacker jumped into the room, and it was clear that the return fire was just the deflected shots of the Rodian defenders. It was the Jeedai, his two associates following behind and adding their blaster shots as well.
“Defend me!” shouted the matriarch, and her honor guard dropped to one knee and added their own shots to the onslaught. The Jeedai, who was spinning tornado-fast by now, moved even swifter, catching their bolts and throwing them back effortlessly. Rodians began to fall as the attackers cut a swath toward the dais.
The matriarch turned to Koax and said, “Protect me! I accept the Spice Lord’s offer! We both know too much to be captured! Protect me!”
Protect me, said the Spice Lord, when Koax first met the Hutt. The Klatooinian knew what she had to do and pulled her own blaster pistol.
Leveling it against the Rodian matriarch’s head, she pulled the trigger.
The sound of the shot was lost among the avalanche of sound, and none of the defenders—concentrating on the Jedi and his companions—noticed the old woman collapse to the floor. Koax spun around and ran for one of the doors at the back of the house, hoping that they would lead to a reasonable exit.
“She’s running!” shouted the Bothan.
“I’m on it!” answered the Pantoran.
The Jedi shouted something, but it was lost in the din as the Pantoran leapt around the edges of the conflict, ignoring the Rodians and diving after the fleeing Klatooinian. By this point, the Jedi had fought his way into the front lines of the defending Rodians, and they had other things to worry about.
Koax ran swiftly down the back hall, hoping for a door to an outside courtyard. She would still have to get over the walls, but open space would give her more room to fight. Nothing in the hall, though, so she took the last door on the left.
A study. Clan trophies along the wall. Low divans and chairs. A small holo-chess table, used for storing knickknacks. A skylight high in the ceiling. No windows, as it backed on the outside wall.
Koax cursed and backed into the hall, but a volley of blasterfire from the Pantoran drove her back into the room.
The Klatooinian looked around again. No exit presented itself. She kicked over one of the low divans, turning it into a barricade, and waited for the Pantoran to enter. A shadow appeared in the doorway, and she fired at it, but it dodged back before she could hit it.
There was a pause, and the Pantoran said in Basic, “You might as well give up now. Tell us what you know. Make it easy for yourself.”
Koax watched the door, but the shadow did not move. Why should it? The Klatooinian was bottled up, and soon the Jedi would come and tease all of her secrets out of her brain.
Protect me, the Spice Lord had said.
Koax pulled one of her tribal daggers from her belt, pressed the tip against her belly, and took a deep breath.
“That the last of them?” said Eddey.
Mander Zuma looked around at the carnage of the fallen Bomu warriors. “I think so. No sign of Vago, though.”
“Can’t say I’m surprised.”
“Where’s Reen?”
Eddey nodded toward one of the doors at the back of the room. “She lit off after the Klatooinian, the one who shot the matriarch.”
Mander ran for the door, but Reen appeared. She looked a paler shade of blue.
“What happened?” asked Mander.
“She killed herself,” said Reen. “I had her trapped in one of the rooms, and rather than fight, she …” The Pantoran shook her head.
Mander looked at Eddey, and the Bothan shrugged. The Jedi said, “Search for any tablets and data cubes you can find, but then we have to be off. Dennogra may be a viper’s lair, but sometime soon people are going to come to see what all the noise was about.”
Reen remained quiet most of the way to the jump point, letting Eddey do the piloting while she sat back in the galley and went over the looted datapads, datasticks, cubes, and crystals with a reader.
“How is it going?” asked Mander.
Reen made a face and waved a hand over the pile. “We’ll know more once a slicer gets past security on some of these, but for the most part it is all here. Deliveries, clients, contacts, payoffs—every bit of the Tempest trade that the Bomu clan was involved with.” She let out a sigh.
“Except?”
“Except where it came from,” she said. “Except who this Spice Lord is.”
“Not all the answers come on datasticks,” said
Mander.
“I know,” she said. “I look at all of this and I say—is this enough?”
“Enough?” Mander raised an eyebrow.
“Toro,” said Reen, and Mander nodded. “You thought that by finishing his mission it would be enough. I thought bringing down the people who gave him the spice would be enough.”
“And yet here we are,” said Mander.
They sat in the galley for a long moment, the deep rumble of the ship filling in the need for words. “I’m still mad at Toro,” Reen said at last.
“Mad?”
“Angry,” she said. “I think he did something horrible and foolish and I want him to be here so I can yell at him. I wonder if that goes away.”
“I don’t think so,” said Mander. He sat quietly for a moment. “I want to ask him why.”
“I don’t think those answers are on datasticks, either,” Reen said, shaking her head. “So, now what?”
“We turn over the information to Angela Krin,” said Mander. “She gets it into the hands of the local authorities, and they take it from there. And we keep looking for who is responsible.”
Reen let out a sigh and said, “Well, every girl needs a hobby.”
The intercom beeped and Eddey’s voice said, “We have an incoming message from the Resolute. You might want to be here.”
“Speak of the demon,” said Reen and pushed away from the table, following Mander to the bridge.
When they got to the bridge, Lieutenant Commander Angela Krin was saying “… congratulations on the successful mission. The surviving members of the Bomu clan will likely regroup under a new leader, but hopefully one who doesn’t adhere so much to the idea of vendettas. I wish I had been there.”
“No Vago, though,” said Mander.
“So it was a trap,” said the CSA officer.
“I don’t think so,” said Mander. “They didn’t seem ready for us at all, and both the matriarch and the Klatooinian were surprised when we came in.”
Eddey put in, “I think our Spice Lord leaked the information in the hope we would tie up a couple of loose ends.”
Mander nodded. That made sense.
Angela Krin also nodded and moved on without batting an eye. “I checked out that chemical chain you asked about. It’s very interesting.”
“Interesting? How?” asked Mander.
“It’s an odd organic loop. The sort of thing that shows up in oscillating high-gravity zones. Black-hole radiation.”
Mander thought about it a moment, then said, “I’m guessing there aren’t too many in this region of space near a black hole and a white dwarf.”
“No,” said Angela Krin. “Most planets do not survive their primary falling into itself and becoming a black hole in the first place.”
“So we need a planet that survived a stellar collapse, that’s scarred by radiation, and that’s in close proximity to a black hole,” said Mander.
“Varl,” said Reen, who had been quiet up to this moment.
“Varl?” said Mander. “The original Hutt homeworld?”
“Remember the story I told you?” said Reen. “Evona fell to darkness, and Ardos exploded in rage. Ardos is our white dwarf. Varl is in orbit around Ardos.”
“But Varl is a dead planet,” said Mander. “The Jedi Archives were clear on that.”
“Maybe not as dead as we thought,” said Eddey.
“Didn’t you check out Varl?” Mander asked Krin. “Even without knowing about the black hole, it still has a white dwarf and it’s in the heart of Hutt space.”
In the image, Angela Krin froze for a moment, though Mander thought it might just be spatial interference. Then she lurched forward, punching a few unseen buttons. “We should have. Ah. Here it is. On our list, but we had to get permission to follow up with the Hutt Elders. It is still their planet, even though they are gone. I should have followed up on that.” Even through the distortion of the holoprojector, the lieutenant looked confused. “Funny, that.”
“You’ve been monitoring ship traffic into the Ardos system?”
“Yes,” said Angela Krin, punching a few more unseen buttons. “Nothing leaving the surface of Varl, of course. But here’s something interesting: we have a couple of independent flight manifests that are listed as carrying spice. They pass through the Ardos system, but when they get to their destination, no spice is ultimately delivered. They come into Ardos with a load of spice, and leave empty.”
“And I’ll bet that those independents started running shortly after the plague broke out on Endregaad,” said Eddey. “After the smugglers lost a Skydove Freight ship.”
“And carrying it out using the Indrexu Spiral,” Mander said. “And those jump coordinates were in the hands of the Anjiliacs. There may be others they were unwilling to share.”
“Vago,” said Eddey. “She had the coordinates, and she could make ships disappear from their rosters.”
“And Vago has disappeared as well,” said Mander. “Maybe to Varl.” He looked at the lieutenant commander. “You have a plan?”
“I think so,” said the image of Angela Krin, and Mander could have sworn he saw the ghost of a smile on her face. “We can’t bring the Resolute into Hutt space without a major diplomatic incident, but there are other options. Rendezvous with us at these coordinates, and I think we can get you to Varl.”
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
VOYAGE TO VARL
The Barabi Run came out of hyperspace above Rhilithan on what should have been a milk run, carrying a load of spice that was eventually bound for a dead world. The Hutt defense ships in the neighborhood of their ultimate destination knew they were coming, and to let them through. No blockades to run, no local picket ships to evade, no customs agents, and no serious questions.
Instead the Barabi Run’s captain found the Resolute and its sister ship, the Vigilance—two CSA cruisers far outside their normal patrols—lying in wait. His sensors were spammed white within moments of emerging from hyperspace, and his comlink crackled with the voice of a Lieutenant Commander Angela Krin. IRDs were alongside the Barabi Run before he even had the chance to deep-space his cargo.
The Barabi Run was guided into the huge docking bay and settled down next to a Suwantek TL-1200, a reconditioned model that was in pretty good shape, barring a few scorch marks along the hull. There a spit-and-polish CSA lieutenant made it clear that their ship was being requisitioned by the CSA, and that they were to be the guests of the Resolute until the CSA no longer needed use of the ship.
No, they could not leave.
Yes, the CSA would provide a receipt.
* * *
Reen spent most of the next day scanning the Barabi Run for bugs and tracers. She found a handful of tracking bugs, most of them different models and several of them long defunct, remnants of earlier owners and previous deals. There was also a self-destruct bot—an insect-sized device that had been crawling around the fuel manifold wiring. It had touched a bare wire and fried itself, its mission unknown and uncompleted. And there was some new hardware in the avionic core that she deactivated. She kept the transponder intact with the next set of jump coordinates and the approach to Varl.
Finally, the Resolute cast off the Barabi Run, and the commandeered transport resumed its normal course. Reen was in the pilot’s chair and Angela Krin was copilot, now in civilian clothes again. Mander was with them, seated behind the command seats, while Eddey would shadow them in the New Ambition, in case they needed additional support.
Mander looked at Angela’s sharp features as she and Reen ran down the checklist before hyperjump. He knew that she could have sent them on this mission by themselves, or assigned a subordinate like Lockerbee to oversee them. He wondered if the lieutenant commander herself had been bitten by the adventuring bug as well. Chasing Tempest smugglers was certainly more exciting than guard duty high above a planetary surface.
The ship shook as they entered hyperspace, and Mander gripped the side of his chair as it lurched t
o the left and the stars lengthened ahead of them. Reen let out a brief curse and toggled a few switches.
“Did you miss something?” Angela Krin asked. Her voice was calm, but Mander noted she was gripping her controls with white knuckles.
Reen shot her a look, then said, “Nothing out of the ordinary. This ship is a rust bucket that has seen too many runs. I knew the warp space motivators were gummed up when I first checked it out, but nothing short of a full rebuild would fix them. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.” She pushed back from the controls. “Keep us steady up here, Commander. I’m going back to check the energy stacks.” Without waiting to see if Angela Krin followed her order, she headed for the lift to the engine deck. Angela slid into the now-unoccupied pilot’s chair and the pair of them watched the stars flick by on the forward screen.
“You did the right thing, you know,” Angela said.
“What thing was that?” asked Mander. “Shooting her?”
“That,” said Angela, “and manipulating her to come along. She and the Bothan are both very effective.”
“You assume I manipulated her,” said Mander.
“Isn’t that what Jedi are good at?” Angela said, allowing a stern grin to blossom on her face. “Every time we talk, I check my recordings afterward to determine if you’ve used any mind tricks on me.”
“And have I?” said Mander.
“Not that I can detect,” she said. “So either you don’t, or you are very good at it.”
“The best weapons are those that never need to be used,” said Mander. “But no. I only told her the truth. Though it may be a while before she can trust me fully.”
“The important thing is that she trusts you enough.”
The entire ship gave a shudder, and the shaking reduced from a gut-wrenching lurch to a deep-seated thrum. Reen appeared back on the flight deck, but motioned for the CSA officer to keep the pilot’s chair.
“Loose interweave coupling,” said the Pantoran. “Nothing much to worry about. How are things up here?”
“Going smoothly,” said Angela.