by Джуд Уотсон
She would know what he was asking. Adi could be high-handed at times. She could be dismissive of other ideas than her own. But they had worked together often enough to be able to put their minds in sync when they needed to.
"Yes."
Qui-Gon turned. "Obi-Wan, Siri, Taly, get all the soft material you can and bring them to the cockpit. Flotation devices, roll-up sleep couches, bedding, pillows, cushions. Fast."
Obi-Wan, Siri, and Taly dashed out of the cockpit. The Republic cruiser was built as a diplomatic ship. There were plenty of cabins to raid. Within minutes, the cockpit had filled up with soft bedding. Qui-Gon directed the three to place it around the walls and hard surfaces as carefully as they could.
"We're going to have take a missile blow," he told the others. "Brace yourself."
Adi maneuvered the ship so that the blow would fall on the cargo hold. It would take perfect timing and a lot of guesswork. She had to make the bounty hunter think that he had outmaneuvered them and struck the death blow.
The ship screamed through space, twisting like a corkscrew. The Force filled the cabin as Adi concentrated, beads of perspiration on her high forehead. They saw the flash as the laser cannon boomed. They had less than a split-second to prepare.
The blast shook the ship and blew them like durasheets through the cabin. They bounced off the cushions and mattresses. Qui-Gon felt helpless as his wrist slammed against the edge of the console. He pulled in the Force to give him stability and balance. Adi crawled to the pilot chair.
"I didn't expect to do quite this good a job," she muttered, gripping the controls.
"Jettison some smoke," Qui-Gon said.
Adi put the ship into a death spiral. She released the salon pod. They were close to a planet now, twisting down toward it.
Qui-Gon had his eyes on the radar. "He's not chasing the pod. Not yet."
Adi looked at him worriedly. "He's waiting for us to flame out or crash."
Qui-Gon nodded. "So let's crash."
Adi gripped the controls. Siri strapped Taly down and belted down cushions around him. She and Obi-Wan covered themselves as best they could.
The ship was screaming now, belching smoke. But Adi still had control. She mimicked a dying ship, narrowing the circles until Qui-Gon had to close his eyes against the dizziness he felt. He opened them once to see the surface of the planet looming. He closed them again quickly.
"Here we go!" Adi shouted.
He never knew how she did it. The grace and precision of it were amazing. She was able to pull up slightly at the last minute, enough for the ship to shudder into a modified crash landing instead of slamming into the planet's surface. But from the upper atmosphere, it would look like a crash. She jettisoned the fuel early so that it sent up a fireball. The smoke would cover their escape.
Qui-Gon took out his lightsaber and cut a hole through the wall. Obi-Wan joined him, then Siri and Adi. Taly stood back, his eyes huge with shock.
Qui-Gon picked up Taly and jumped out the hole after the others. They took shelter behind some rocks as the ship exploded.
"Now what?" Siri asked.
"Let's start with the basics," Qui-Gon said. "I'd say we need to locate new transportation."
Taly still wore an expression of shock. "Don't you Jedi take a minute to recover?"
"He took off after the pod, but we should still take precautions," Adi said. "I think Taly should remain in hiding with Siri and Obi-Wan. We don't want to leave a trail. We know there is more than one bounty hunter involved."
"Good point," Qui-Gon said.
They walked toward town. The road was dusty and deserted, winding through a rocky canyon. Halfway there, Adi suddenly stopped. She leaned over and pressed her hand against the ground.
"There's water close to here," she said. "Follow me."
She took off through the rocks. They followed, Taly sometimes slipping and helped by Siri. Adi led them up a stony ridge and then down again. The air smelled fresher. Around a large boulder was a small, bubbling spring.
"A water source if you need it," she said. She glanced around. "There are caves around us. I can feel them."
She walked to a cleft in the rocks. Qui-Gon never would have noticed it. He would have thought it was a shadow. Adi melted inside and they saw only her hand beckon them.
It was a cave, small and snug. Although the sand was cool and damp, farther into the cave it was dry.
"A perfect hiding place," Adi said. "Invisible from the air. Easy to exit and close to town." She slipped off her survival pack. "We'll be back for you as soon as we locate transport. You'll be comfortable here."
Siri looked around the cave dubiously. "If you say so." Qui-Gon couldn't help smiling at Siri. "We'll return soon," he promised.
Qui-Gon and Adi left the cave and continued on the road to the city of Settlement 5. The city had no outskirts. It simply rose in the middle of a convergence of roads. There seemed to be no green spaces, no culture centers or amusements, just businesses and homes, all built on a grid of streets and lanes.
The city was more like an overgrown village than a sophisticated center. Qui-Gon and Adi walked through the streets, their hoods up, trying to blend in. It wasn't hard. They were taller than the average Quadrant Seven, but that wasn't a problem. All the Quadrant Sevens wore practical and neutral-colored robes, just as the Jedi did. Most of them walked with their hoods over their faces. Qui-Gon felt anonymous in the crowd, and he soon realized why.
"They're all trying to blend in," he murmured to Adi.
"Even if they recognize us as outlanders, they won't show it."
Usually in a main city of a world in the Core or Mid-Rim, there were plenty of opportunities to buy or rent speeders, and often dealers in spaceworthy cruisers clustered around the landing platforms of the city. But there was a strange absence of such dealers on this planet. It took Adi and Qui-Gon some time to find a seller of speeders tucked away down a narrow lane off a secondary road.
A laserboard outside discreetly flashed specials. "Nothing spaceworthy," Qui-Gon said. "But no doubt he can tell us where to purchase a ship."
They walked inside. The dwellers of Quadrant Seven were humanoid, with small, pointed ears and short, whiskery antennae that gave the appearance of bristly hair but were finely attuned to disturbances in the air. The dealer turned, his antennae quivering.
He didn't ask them what they wanted, or if he could help them. He just stood, waiting for them to speak. "We're looking for a space cruiser," Qui-Gon said. "I don't sell that here," the dealer said.
"We thought you could tell us where in Settlement Five we could purchase one."
"Nowhere. There's no call for selling of space cruisers. Quadrants don't like to travel out of their own atmosphere."
"But surely," Qui-Gon said patiently, "there is a way to get off planet."
"Well, of course there is."
Adi kept her tone even. "Maybe you could tell us what that is."
"Wait for the freighter. It comes once a month." Qui-Gon felt his heart fall. "Once a month?"
The dealer seemed to feel that he had no need to elaborate.
"Can you tell us when it will stop again?" Adi asked.
The dealer consulted a calendar on his datapad. "Ah, that would be market day."
"And market day is…"
"In five standard days time."
Qui-Gon took out his comlink. "Can you tell us where on Quadrant Seven we could find a space cruiser? We could contact them and — "
"Ah, that would be Settlement Twenty-three. That's where you'd be able to bargain for a ship. But you can't contact them by comlink. There's a BlocNet on Quadrant Seven. Comlinks are licensed. Ordinary citizens aren't allowed to carry them, just emergency personnel. Your comlink won't work here."
"But why outlaw comlinks?" Adi asked.
"Don't believe in 'em. Comlinks make distances shorter. And when distances get shorter, problems get bigger. We like to slow things down on Quadrant Seven. Which reminds me, you
need a permit to send a HoloNet message off planet. It will be monitored and archived, too."
"And who has access to the archives?" Adi asked. "Everyone. Makes beings nicer if they know they can't send out messages that aren't public."
Adi and Qui-Gon stared at each other in frustration. That meant if they sent a message to the Temple, everyone would be able to see it. The bounty hunters could trace them.
"Can we buy a speeder to travel to Settlement Twenty-three?" Qui-Gon asked.
"Sure. But you have to apply for a permit. All outlanders do."
"How long will it take to get a permit?"
"Hard to say. Could be a week."
Adi was becoming used to the dealer's way of talking. "Or…?
"Could be a month. Hard to say."
"This is ridiculous," Adi muttered. "What a way to run a planet."
"We haven't had a war in five hundred and seventy-three years," the dealer said. "Don't have toxic pools or chemical air. Everybody pretty much gets along. That doesn't sound too ridiculous, does it?"
Adi just sighed.
"If I were you, I'd wait for the freighter. Quadrant Seven is a nice place to visit. Of course we don't have much in the way of hotels or cafes. And we don't go in for amusements the way they do in other places. There's not much to do. But still."
"Look, we don't have time to wait," Qui-Gon said. "Can't you find a way to help us?"
"Nope." The dealer's face was still blandly polite. He would be friendly, but not help them. That much was clear. They walked out of the shop.
"Looks like we're waiting for the freighter," Adi said. "We'll just have to lay low. We could send a coded communication to the Temple… "
"But why risk it?" Adi completed the sentence. "If by some chance the bounty hunter searches the planet, that's the first place he'd investigate. Even a coded message would stand out."
"We can canvass the area, look to see if anyone owns a ship and try to buy it," Qui-Gon said.
Adi nodded. "It doesn't appear that Quadrant Sevens travel, but we might get lucky."
"It's only five days," Qui-Gon said. "The assassination will take place in a week. This can all work, if nothing else goes wrong."
He felt the dark side surge as a warning just as Adi pulled him back from walking out into the watery sunlight. The bounty hunter was striding by on the street, his pale eyes flicking into the shadows.
"Something else just went wrong," Adi said.
Chapter 7
"Let's follow him," Adi murmured. "Better to know where he is — and perhaps we'll learn something."
Qui-Gon nodded. They melted into the crowd in the street. It was rare that a being knew when he was being followed by a Jedi. They were able to use the Force to direct objects to move into their path if someone turned to look behind them. They were able to move before their prey could track their steps. After a short time, the Jedi were able to so absorb their quarry's way of moving that they could predict it and easily avoid discovery.
The bounty hunter was good. He was careful. Yet he was no match for them. Adi and Qui-Gon followed him easily as he walked to the opposite edge of Settlement 5 and then struck out across the hills and rocks.
This area was even more rugged than where they'd left Obi-Wan and Siri. They trailed him through a series of small, deep canyons. The boulders offered plenty of hiding places. At last he slipped into a narrow opening and disappeared. Qui-Gon and Adi carefully moved forward. Positioning themselves behind an outcropping, they peered into the opening.
It led to a canyon that was just a cleft in the landscape. They recognized the bounty hunter's light freighter. Next to it was a slightly larger ship. Together they took up nearly the entire width of the canyon.
The bounty hunter disappeared into the larger ship. The ramp was down, and Qui-Gon and Adi slowly made their way there. With a glance at each other, they agreed to try to observe what was going on. It was worth the risk.
They crept up the ramp and slipped inside the ship. They heard raised voices coming from the cockpit.
Good, Qui-Gon thought. If a group was arguing, they would be too distracted to stay alert.
Tall and graceful, Adi moved ahead of him down the hall, her boots soundless on the polished floor. She beckoned to him. She had found a vent at eye level, in a storage room right off the cockpit. Qui-Gon could see quite clearly into the next room.
His heart fell. There were five bounty hunters in the cockpit, including the one chasing them. Among them was one he recognized — Gorm the Dissolver. He was a formidable presence, dwarfing the others in his plated armor and helmet. Created by Arkanian Renegades, he was half-bio, half-droid. His bio parts were made up of six different aliens. His droid components allowed him to be a nearly invincible killing machine. Gorm's tracking skill was legendary and his merciless attacks were spoken of in whispers in spaceports throughout the galaxy.
All of these bounty hunters in one place, for one assassination? Qui-Gon wondered again who the target could be.
"We've only got a week," one of the bounty hunters said. It was a humanoid woman, small and compact, dressed in a leather tunic and leggings. Her fair hair was twisted in many braids that fell to her shoulders. She appeared to be completely ordinary, if you didn't notice the firepower strapped to her waist, her wrist gauntlets with an array of weapons systems, or the armored kneepads she wore. By the look of her armor, Qui-Gon guessed she was a Mandalorian, or at least that she had somehow procured some of the warrior army's famous weaponry. "You shouldn't have blasted that escape pod, Magus," she went on. "Now we don't know for sure if you got the kid."
The bounty hunter who had chased them on Cirrus turned slowly and rested his steely gaze on the female.
"Don't give me that black-hole look, Magus," she said. "You know I'm right. We need proof that the kid has been neutralized. If he's still alive, he could compromise the mission. I don't mind pulling this off, but I don't want anybody to know I was involved. Those Senatorial committees can get touchy about political assassinations."
"We're only a week away from our hits," another bounty hunter said. He was a tall creature with green-tinged skin and a cranial horn on top of his head. "I for one don't relish the thought of assassinating a world leader if security is waiting for me. And we've got twenty targets. That's twenty times the security."
Qui-Gon and Adi exchanged a glance. Twenty planetary leaders?
"I told you, they won't have their regular security," Magus said.
"We still have no way of knowing how much this kid knows and who he's alerted," the female bounty hunter continued.
"You promised they wouldn't be expecting us, that we'd have the element of surprise," the third bounty hunter said to Magus. He wore a greasy cloak and his leggings were thick with grime. Tufts of wiry hair stood out on his head like horns. On his grimy face gills flapped open and closed with his breathing. He looked like a large, unkempt fish. A name floated into Qui-Gon's head. Raptor. This could be the bounty hunter he'd been hearing about, the one who was willing to take any job, no matter how dangerous or cruel. "That's one reason we agreed. Well — that and the fee. But if security gets tipped off, I'm heading back to the Core and picking up another job. What does our employer say?"
Magus rose slowly. If he was bothered by the dissension in the others, it wasn't apparent. "Our employer leaves the details to me. As you should."
"We did that," the being with the cranial horn said. "And now we don't know if the kid is dead or not. We don't know if he blabbed yet or not. We don't know if he's on his way to the Senate to testify."
"I heard you the first time, Pilot," Magus said, the anger now clear in his tone.
"Really? Because it doesn't seem like you're listening," the female said irritably.
"Lunasa is right," Raptor said. "You've got a problem listening to any voice but your own."
Magus slammed a vibroblade down on the table. "Enough whining!" he exploded. With the exception of Gorm, the bounty hunters all look
ed unnerved. "I said I would take care of the boy. First we need to complete the preparations we discussed. There's still much to be done, and we're wasting time here."
Without waiting for agreement, Magus simply strode off. Qui-Gon and Adi had to scurry back along the corridor to avoid him. He strode down the ramp and headed for his own ship.
"Who elected him king, I'd like to know," Lunasa muttered.
"He recruited us," Pilot said. "But the employer talks to me, too. I can go to him anytime." A bragging note had entered his voice.
"Whoa, and that makes you so special," Raptor said. "I'm keeping track of what Magus does," Pilot said huffily. "That's all I'm saying."