The Bacta War

by Michael A. Stackpole

  Karrde returned her smile, his pale blue eyes sparkling. “I could hardly forget you, Mirax Terrik. Because of your efforts, those cases of Alderaanian wine cost me well more than I had expected to pay.” He took her right hand and gently kissed it—his black moustache and goatee tickled her hand and fingers.

  “I didn’t realize you were the other person bidding for them.”

  “But if you had, you’d not have fought any less tenaciously for them.” Karrde shrugged easily enough that Mirax was almost willing to believe he had dismissed the matter. “What you cost me I put down as the fee paid for a lesson in dealing with exotic items. If you weren’t in the business of hauling things for the Rebellion, I might have had a chance to test what I learned against you again.”

  “And my girl would have made you pay even more in your next meeting.” Booster Terrik rested his big hands on Mirax’s shoulders. “I would have expected you to be using something bigger than an old hollowed-out asteroid for your headquarters, Karrde. You can afford it.”

  “Pleased to see you again, too, Booster.” The hint of a smile played across Karrde’s lips. “As for this asteroid, Tapper found it, but before he could exploit it he ran into some Imperial problems. After our groups merged, he brought it to my attention. We’re using it until we find something more suitable.”

  Quelev Tapper came around from behind Booster and stood next to the chair to the left of Karrde’s massive desk. “While most of the ore has been mined, there’s enough metal in the rock to give sensors trouble.” Though as slender as Karrde, and almost as handsome, Tapper’s manner contrasted sharply with Karrde’s polite grace. “It will do in the interim.”

  Karrde opened his hands and indicated the pair of chairs facing the desk. “Please, be seated.”

  Mirax accepted his invitation and looked around the office as she sat. The chamber’s stone walls had been smoothed to an obsidian glassiness, but still had a significant texture in the bumps and recesses the mining process had left behind. The room’s furnishings—characterized by Karrde’s desk—were heavy and blocky, more of an industrial grade than they were elegant. Despite that, however, the artifacts and items displayed on shelves and atop tables, did provide an air of sophistication to the surroundings. Mirax noted on the sideboard a cut-crystal decanter full of a pale green liquid and four goblets, prompting a smile.

  Karrde’s gaze followed hers and he gave her a slight nod. “Might I offer you some of the wine I paid so dearly for? The best is a dry green from Aldera.”

  Mirax nodded. “Please.” She glanced at her father.

  Booster perched in his chair as if it were a slender pole and he was a bird topping it, but he nodded. “Thank you.”

  Karrde poured from the crystalline decanter. It looked to Mirax to be of Quarren manufacture. She knew from the styling it came from Mon Calamari, but the purple tint to the glass told her the Quarren had made it, not the Mon Cals. Quarren crystal rarely makes it off Mon Calamari. Karrde definitely fishes for items with a very wide and fine net.

  She accepted her glass of wine from Karrde, then raised her glass with the others as Karrde offered a toast. “May the bargaining be as sweet as the profit and the next deal not long in coming.”

  In tasting the wine Mirax found it very dry, but surprisingly tart without being truly sour. “Perfect with game.”

  Karrde sat at his desk and nodded. “I’ve heard it said this vintage was originally intended for a banquet featuring krayt dragon.”

  “Oh? What happened, too much wine and not enough krayt?”

  “No, too much krayt and not enough hunter.” Karrde held the glass up and let light sparkle through the wine’s receding legs. “The wine was ordered prior to the hunt. The dragon got the hunter, and the widow used the vintage at the memorial service. The wine won praises and since has been a very popular vintage. This particular year was considered very good, but the wine laid down the year of Alderaan’s demise was supposed to be even better.”

  Booster cleared his voice. “It’s amazing what you know, Karrde. I’m very impressed. I was wondering if your encyclopedic knowledge includes where I can get some supplies I need.”

  Karrde’s blue eyes narrowed slightly. “You need or things Wedge Antilles needs?”

  “They’re things that are needed, Karrde.” Booster brought his hands together. “Let’s trim some parsecs off the course of this conversation, shall we? You know I think of you like the son I never had.”

  Karrde snorted. “Like the son you never had killed.”

  Mirax suppressed a laugh, and her father smiled. “True, I’ve not forgotten how you managed to pick up pieces of my network while I was harvesting spice on Kessel. That did anger me, but it also convinced me that Mirax was right in wanting me to retire.”

  “Yet here you are bargaining for Antilles and his band of mercenaries.”

  Booster frowned. “They’re not mercenaries.”

  “No?”

  Mirax shook her head. “Actually, to be mercenaries, they’d have to be paid. They’re doing what they’re doing because of obligations they feel to the Vratix and others.”

  Karrde shot a glance at Tapper, then the two of them shook their heads. “Idealists cause a lot of trouble in this galaxy.”

  “Just remember it was one of those idealists who killed Jabba.”

  “Good point, Booster, but I’ve got no desire to end up like Jabba.”

  “Nor will you.” Booster sipped more of his wine. “Wedge and the others may be idealists in some respects, but they’re also practical when they need to be, and I’m here to put that practicality into terms you can understand and respect. What I’m looking for is missile- and torpedo-sensor packages, launch-tube assemblies, and a supply of proton torpedoes and concussion missiles.”

  Mirax noted no reaction by Karrde, but Tapper’s eyes widened quite a bit.

  Karrde raised his hand to cover a yawn. “I’ve heard that you made a mess of the bacta refinery on Qretu 5.”

  “Care to know how much bacta we hauled away?”

  “I have my estimates. I also know where you sent a great deal of it.”

  Mirax smiled. “It doesn’t take a genius to know we’ve shipped a lot to Coruscant.”

  “But it will take a genius to get the rest of it, eh?” Karrde set his glass of wine down. “What sort of numbers are you looking at with your equipment?”

  Booster leaned back in his seat. “Three hundred launchers and sensor packages: fifty should be snubfighter systems, the rest can be capital ship systems. Right now I want two thousand proton torpedoes and a thousand concussion missiles, though I expect those numbers to change.”

  “Upward, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  Karrde’s expression sharpened. “You going to be arming your freighters, Booster?”

  “Try taking one of them off and find out, Karrde.”

  Talon Karrde smiled broadly. “I’m a smuggler, not a pirate.”

  “Thin line between them.” Booster thrust his chin forward. “Pirate steals from his suppliers, smuggler just cheats them.”

  “You’ve distilled that difference to its essence, Booster.” Karrde sat back in his chair. “You’ll be paying with bacta?”

  Booster nodded. “Not a problem, I assume?”

  “Not really. The price now is so high that much of what I would be trading for is being sold to buy bacta from the cartel. Oddly enough, with the New Republic somewhat strapped for liquid capital, military surplus and munitions are actually dropping in price. It’s a buyer’s market. I shouldn’t be telling you that, of course.”

  Mirax laughed. “Except you know we already know that, and you want to rub in the fact that you’ll be gouging us on the prices.”

  Karrde’s eyes glittered with amusement. “She’s very sharp, Booster. You should be proud.”

  “I am. You can get us what we want?”

  Karrde nodded. “Not all at once, of course.”

  “Installments are f
ine.” Booster glanced at a thumbnail, then looked back up. “Delivery will be a bit peculiar. We’ll arrange for exchanges at various places where your ships will offload material for us. We’ll be transporting it to our final destination ourselves.”

  “Not that you don’t trust me.”

  “But we don’t trust you.” Booster smiled. “I know you’ve already learned more about our operation than I wanted you to, and I also know that Vorru is trying to learn as much about us as he can. I don’t want you to find we’re a commodity you can trade to him for a profit.”

  Karrde held his hands up. “So far I have avoided taking sides in the civil war, and I see this as a simple extension of it even though Antilles has resigned from the New Republic’s military. Since the cartel really isn’t interested in selling bacta to me, and since you need my services, it isn’t going to do me any good to sacrifice you to them.”

  “Provided we still are a profit center for you.”

  Karrde frowned. “Booster, you make it sound like I don’t value our history together.”

  “Oh, I think you do, and the history of your making a profit off me is what you value.”

  Mirax raised an eyebrow. “The fact that either one of you would sell the other for a bucket of warm dewback drool isn’t really germane here. Betting against Wedge Antilles’s abilities lost Iceheart the Imperial homeworld and sent her packing for Thyferra. Talon, you’re too smart not to back him, especially since his victory will break the cartel and open up the bacta trade. A little gratitude toward you from the Ashern rebels won’t hurt when distribution is set up.”

  “Point taken.” Karrde picked up the datapad on his desk and punched a few keys. “I’m going to have you liaise with Melina Carniss on the delivery details.”

  Booster frowned. “Carniss? I don’t know her. Never heard of her.”

  “She worked for Jabba on Tatooine. She filled a niche that would have been in the middle of his security apparatus, but she was Jabba’s own agent. Formally, she was his dance coordinator. Good head on her shoulders. She understands a lot of the business, but is a bit shy on experience.” Karrde stood and waved his left hand toward the doorway. “Here she is. Come in, Melina, my dear. This is Booster Terrik and his charming daughter, Mirax.”

  Mirax shook the woman’s hand and returned her smile. Several inches shorter than Mirax, Melina wore her dark hair in a rather short cut. It accentuated a white stripe that started with scar tissue near the corner of Melina’s right eye and shot straight back beyond her ear. Her green eyes and full mouth made her pretty and the way Tapper looked at her suggested he was smitten.

  “Pleased to meet you both.”

  Karrde waited until Tapper slid a chair from over by the wall beside his own and Melina seated herself before he continued. “Melina, you’ll coordinate shipments of material to Booster. He’ll give you the details. The cargo and the delivery points will be hazardous, but we’ll not charge him our normal rates for such things. He’s part of our family—albeit a rather distantly related one.”

  She nodded. “I understand.”

  Mirax smiled. Great, this means what we don’t pay for transport we will pay for the cost of the items. And Karrde said it was a buyer’s market.

  Karrde looked up from his datapad. “Is there anything else you need, Booster?”

  Tapper laughed. “Perhaps he wants Another Chance or the Death Star’s womb. I mean, as long as your aim is to break the Bacta Cartel, you might as well go in for other things you can’t get.”

  The brow over Booster’s artificial left eye rose. “It’s important in this business for you to be able to tell fable from fact and wishing from thinking. From what I’ve heard, about six months before I got out of Kessel, just after the Imps hurt the Rebels at Derra IV but before they ran them off Hoth, some treasure hunters searching the Alderaan graveyard found Another Chance and turned the ship and its arms over to the Rebels. That’s fact. The location of the shipyard that built the Death Star is likely a fact as well, but it’s one I don’t know and it’s my wish that it’s a fact that went to the grave with the Emperor. I don’t think that’s likely.

  “Now it’s Iceheart’s wish we won’t break the cartel and destroy her power.” Booster smiled coldly. “I think—no, I know—she’s not going to get her wish. Her fall will not be fast, and it won’t be bloodless, but it’s coming. Count it as fact.”

  Tapper raised his hands. “Sorry, I meant no offense.”

  “And none was taken.” Mirax patted her father on the arm and felt the tension begin to flow out of him. “My father just wanted to make sure that you knew betting against Wedge was a mistake.”

  Karrde pressed his hands flat against his desktop. “A lesson we have all learned, I am certain. Now let us attend to the details that make sure we all profit from it.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Corran Horn felt tired enough from the recent raid and run home that he knew he should just turn in, but the idea of hitting the small suite of rooms he shared with Mirax didn’t appeal. On his approach back to the Yag’Dhul station he’d gotten a message she’d recorded saying she was taking her father out on another trip to finalize arrangements for supply shipments. She expected to be gone for three days.

  Which means I’m alone when I could use a good hug and some sympathy. Corran knew what was happening to him, and he wanted to fight against it, but even by trying some of the breathing exercises Luke Skywalker had recommended to him, he had a hard time putting a dent in his downward emotional spiral. It’s like flying into a fireball. You have to hang on and hope you come out in one piece on the other side.

  The fourth anniversary of his father’s death had snuck up on Corran and ambushed him. A lot of hydrogen had been melted into helium in a lot of stars since his father’s death, but the memory of holding his father’s dead body in his arms had the immediacy of an event that had occurred moments before. Corran could still feel his father’s weight pressing against him. The man’s stillness, the stink of blood and blaster-burned flesh, the screams of those in the cantina, including his own, all pounded in on him.

  The previous year, things had not seemed to be so bad to him, but he’d just started with Rogue Squadron at that time, so he had a legion of distractions to dull the pain. He also realized that his liaison with Mirax and meeting her father made it tougher on him. Though he loved her and wouldn’t give her up for anything, Corran couldn’t help feeling that his father would have felt betrayed by his love for Mirax. While he knew his father would have accepted her eventually, the fact that he didn’t have his father’s approval gnawed away at him.

  Getting to see Booster and Mirax together compounded the problem. Corran was happy for Mirax that her father was around because the love they shared was obvious enough that a blind Givin frozen in carbonite could have seen it. She was lucky to have her father, and he was equally lucky to have her. As much as Corran wanted Mirax to be happy, what she shared with her father reminded him of what he had lost. I thought the void inside me had been filled, but it had just scabbed over and is now plenty open.

  On top of that, the next step in the evolution of the Bacta War was pushing him to the limit. Wedge had teams, from full squadrons down to single two-ship flights out harassing the Bacta Cartel. The whole strategy was to hit and run, which worked exceedingly well. Because the Thyferrans scheduled their bacta shipments it was possible for the Rogues to show up, force the Star Destroyers to scramble their fighters, pop off some proton torpedoes to take out a few TIEs, then scatter. He knew the strategy had to be frustrating for Iceheart’s people, since they were taking losses here and there without killing any of the Rogues; but it wasn’t much better for Corran or the rest of Wedge’s people.

  Engaging in a straight-up fight with even a Victory-class Star Destroyer like the Corrupter would be suicide for a squadron of X-wings. It was true that the large Star Destroyers were not particularly good at defending themselves against snubfighters—hence the development of the
Lancer-class frigates—but even accidentally shooting down one or two X-wings would hurt the Rogues significantly. Conversely, aside from repeated proton torpedo salvos, there was no way snubfighters could cripple or destroy a Star Destroyer. If the whole squadron fired a salvo of torpedoes at the same time, they could certainly bring the Star Destroyer’s shields down, but any captain worth his rank cylinders would roll the ship to present undamaged shields and keep shooting. If all his shields were stripped away he could still go to lightspeed before another torpedo could hit.

  Corran had no wish to commit suicide in an attack on a Star Destroyer, but cutting and running made him feel criminal. He knew that was stupid, but he figured the judgment was based in the fact that Wedge hadn’t given anyone a clear timetable concerning when they would move into the war’s final phase—the phase where Iceheart left Thyferra and the Bacta Cartel would be broken. If I knew how long we were going to run, I could see it as a tactical advantage. Right now it seems as if we’re doing something so we won’t be doing nothing.

  Realizing he had no desire to be alone, he headed for the tapcaf known as Flarestar. He hoped other members of the squadron would be there, though the chances of that were slim. Ooryl seemed to spend most of his time with the ruetsavii. Nawara Ven and Rhysati as well as Gavin and Asyr Sei’lar spent most of their time being couples. Tycho and Wedge were either on missions or planning yet other missions. Bror Jace and Corran had never been close, while Inyri Forge and the Sullustan Captain Aril Nunb had discovered they shared a passion for obscure games of chance like contract sabacc and double-draw fendoc. As stunning as they were as pilots, their ability to separate other gamblers from their credits was so remarkable that two of the ships in the Rogues’ growing collection of freighters had joined the fleet to pay off bad debts.

  Corran smiled to himself as he entered the Flarestar’s darkened interior. Inyri’s sister Lujayne would just tell me I was holding myself back from getting to know the others, but I’m not sure it’s that simple. I’m just without my close friends—Mirax, Iella, Ooryl—and not really of a mood to make new friends.