Star Wars - Credit Denied - Unpublished

by George R. Strayton

  Halfway down the corridor she stopped at the hatch to bay 919-A, where she had docked her ship. She checked the control panel on the wall and found there had been one access since she’d left.

  She turned to issue Nopul and the aliens instructions when the bay door suddenly slid upward, revealing the wicked muzzle of a blaster carbine pointed at her chest.

  “Maex. What a coincidence. I was just looking for you.” The Nimbanel spoke in his native tongue, but she understood every word—she’d had more than enough experience with Hutts and their Nimbanese underlings than she cared to recall.

  She tried to hide the fact that she had been in the midst of signing to someone outside of the Nimbanel’s view, but in doing so she had sacrificed her chance to quick-draw her blaster.

  “Please, come in,” the Nimbanel said with his mouth and insisted with his weapon. “You know, GalactiCore isn’t very happy with you at the moment. You seem to have missed…” he glanced at the datapad in his other hand, “three payments.”

  As soon as she stepped inside, the bay door slid shut behind her, locking with a hollow thud.

  “Uh,” she said, cycling through every con and outright lie she could think of. Unfortunately, nothing useful came immediately to her mind, leaving her with the weak, honest approach. “Look, I don’t have the money right now. But I just took on a job that will make me enough to pay back all of those payments, plus two more.”

  A hollow whine sounded from somewhere behind her ship, and she glanced over the Nimbanel’s shoulder to see an espionage droid hover into view, its ocular scanners whirring as they took in every square inch of the vessel. That task now complete, it turned toward Rendra and its owner to capture data on their verbal transaction. She’d had to use such precautions on several of her own jobs before, sometimes for legal reasons, sometimes because her benefactor wanted to watch his target squirm.

  “Oh yes,” the Nimbanel said, stealing her attention away from the droid. “My informants placed you on Eryso in the Hedya system thirty-two hours ago. Let’s see, you met with several beings from a ship called Chasa Riv, BoSS registry 52462474-245. You left twenty-three standard minutes later carrying a datapad you didn’t have when you arrived, and then, according to vector calculations based on your ship’s maximum hyperdrive speed, you immediately jumped here.”

  She had to admit: the Nimbanel was thorough. But as he was wasting time reading off the log of her recent activities, a plan had begun to take shape in her mind. She just needed a few more pieces of information to make sure it would have at least a chance of working.

  “You’ve been keeping track of me,” she said, maneuvering slowly into a conversation. “I’m surprised you didn’t pick me up twenty minutes ago while security was doing that background check.” She did her best to hide that fact the her statement was an outright fabrication.

  He regarded her with a forced smile. “Yes, well. It doesn’t seem to matter now, does it?”

  Perfect, she decided. He must not have any informants here on the station or he would have known she was lying—which means he doesn’t know about my newly acquired mercenaries.

  “So,” he continued as he pocketed the datapad, “I’ll take the scandocs and the pass-keys to your ship. Now.” He punctuated the request with an almost imperceptible heft of his blaster carbine.

  Her eyes tracked down to her own blaster—

  “Do I have to take the keys from your dead body? That’s not in my contract—although I don’t really have anything against it, other than having to fill out those tedious security reports.”

  “Look, uh…” she said, fishing for his name. When he didn’t offer, she continued. “Let’s work out a deal. You and me. I’m going to earn a lot more than I need right now. I’ll cut you in if you’ll just give me three days to—”

  She saw him flick a switch on the carbine—she didn’t know exactly what it did, but it couldn’t be good—and she knew she’d run out of time.

  She turned and leaped for the door controls as a blaster bolt zinged over her head, blowing a fist-sized chunk of duracrete out of the wall. From her prone position she reached up and clicked the release mechanism.

  And nothing happened.

  Another blaster bolt exploded from his carbine, this time striking the floor and spewing a cascade of debris across her back. She rolled several turns to her right as the Nimbanel continued to take shots at her.

  Finally, she pushed herself to her feet and snapped the blaster from her holster. Before he could fire another shot, she had loosed a pair of laser bolts straight for his chest.

  The first slammed into an invisible barrier that showed itself by flaring a pattern of visible-light static, as if the molecules in the air in front of him had momentarily erupted into a chaotic frenzy and then returned to normal. The second bolt met the same fate, leaving the Nimbanel completely unharmed. Rendra had always wanted her own personal shield, but she’d found the prices exorbitant. Apparently this bounty hunter was good at what he did if he could afford such a device.

  Her mind raced as the Nimbanel smiled and took aim at her once more, moving slowly as if to signal his confidence of his inevitable success. Why hadn’t Nopul and the others charged in once they’d heard the exchange of blaster fire? She glanced to the door… and then down to the control pad. Oh yeah, she realized, it’s coded. Let’s see what we can do about that…

  She raised her weapon to fire again, but rather than targeting her opponent, she tracked across the room to the door release.

  The Nimbanel smiled at her obvious mistake, and took an extra moment to aim at her head.

  Rendra fired, but the alien paid the shot no attention as he sighted her through the targeting guides. He squeezed the trigger—

  And then a barrage of blaster fire lanced across the bay from the open doorway and knocked him halfway across the room toward her ship, where he crashed to the floor and lay motionless.

  Rendra looked back to the bay entrance as Nopul and the mercenaries walked in with weapons still readied for any further trouble.

  “So,” Nopul said, looking innocent. “You need any help in here?”

  She smirked. “Exactly what was your plan? Wait ’til I come up with one and then get involved?”

  “Well, if I knew that was going to be your attitude…”

  Rendra noticed that Vakir had walked up to the Nimbanel’s body and was searching through his belongings. After grabbing a few small items, he put the muzzle of his blaster pistol against the Nimbanel’s temple.

  “Hey!” Rendra shouted, startling everyone including herself. “What’re you doing?” She marched over to the Nikto and pulled his blaster away from the Nimbanel’s head. “If he’s still alive, let him be. He had a job to do—I don’t take it personally. Besides, we’ll be long gone by the time he wakes up.”

  Vakir looked down at the Nimbanel, shrugged, and then walked away.

  A thought suddenly crossed Rendra’s mind, and she scanned the bay for the espionage droid. “Anyone see a little annoying droid flying around?”

  Her companions searched the bay, but came up empty.

  “Well,” she said, heading for the ship, “I guess it doesn’t matter much now. All right, everyone, let’s go. We’ve got a lot of work to do and not much time to do it in.”

  Rendra wandered back into the Zoda’s—now the Runaround’s—roughly circular recreation area to find the Nikto, the Dresselian, and Nopul engaged in a multiround sabacc hand, judging by the number of credits in the pot.

  “Who’s winning?” she asked as she plopped herself down onto a nearby couch.

  “Oro,” Nopul said without letting his eyes stray from his card-chips. “For now.”

  The Dresselian laughed—a staccato shushing sound that made Rendra wonder for a moment whether the alien was actually having trouble breathing. But when Vakir threw him a hard look and Oro suddenly shut up, she knew she didn’t have to worry.

  She watched as Vakir pulled a card-chip out of his h
and and then looked to his two opponents, apparently searching for some hint of their reaction. Whether he had learned anything or not Rendra had no way of knowing, but he slipped the card back into his hand, selected another, and promptly shoved the new choice into the interference field in front of him.

  For a moment, no one said a word, Oro and Nopul staring at Vakir as he regarded his pile of credits while clicking his sharp nails against the table.

  “You bet or no bet?” Oro demanded.

  Vakir slowly raised his gaze toward his fellow alien—and then suddenly reached across the table and grabbed the Dresselian by the throat.

  “Okay, okay,” Oro managed to gag out, “take as much time as need.”

  Satisfied, Vakir released his death grip. He watched his credits as he mulled something over in his mind, and then apparently came to a conclusion as he tossed the rest of his credits into the pot. “Twenty,” he said, although the word could have been just a grunt as far as Rendra was concerned.

  The other two matched the bet, and then turned over the card-chips in the interference field in front of each of them.

  “Looks like Oro wins again,” Nopul said, pushing himself back from the table. “Deal me out.”

  As Oro gleefully pulled the pile of credits toward himself, Vakir slumped back in his chair with a definitively dejected look on his face. Oro continued to make various happy sounds until he noticed the Nikto sitting silently next to him.

  Oro looked at the credits, at Vakir, and back to the credits. With his hand he cut the pile in half and pushed the credits that fell on one side over to Vakir, whose eyes lit up as the winnings came his way.

  Nopul watched in utter confusion. “What in the stars are you doing?”

  Oro looked at him as if it were obvious. “Vakir no credits, Oro no play. No fun for either of us.”

  Nopul shook his head as if to clear his mind of the bizarre logic, while Rendra chuckled at the entire series of events.

  “I get the impression you two have worked together before,” she said.

  “Many times,” Oro said as he stuffed his half of the credits into a compartment in his belt. “And always.”

  Vakir simply nodded as he collected the remainder of the pot and started stacking the credits in hand-high columns.

  “Good,” she said, “because we can’t afford not to trust each other. What we’re about to do is dangerous. Any one of us slips up and we all go down.”

  She pushed herself up from the couch and walked over to the wall of storage compartments. “And we only have one chance at this. If we fail the first time, we’re out of luck.”

  “You haven’t mentioned what we are to accomplish,” Vakir said.

  “Yes… I know. Well.” she started and then cleared her throat. As she leaned her back against the bulkhead, she risked a glance in Nopul’s direction and saw exactly what she expected: a look that begged her to reconsider one last time. She responded with an expression of her own: we don’t have a choice. When she thought she had given Nopul enough time to catch the gist, she turned back to the mercenaries. “We’re going to assassinate Uli Aaregil, the clan-leader of the Weequay.”

  She let the statement hang in the air for a moment to allow for reactions, but Oro and Vakir only looked at her expectantly.

  “So,” she continued, “we’ve got about nine hours until we reach the Sriluur system. Why don’t the two of you get some sleep while Nopul and I take care of some of the final preparations.”

  The two aliens nodded, got up from the table, and headed back into the sleeping compartment without so much as a word. Rendra found their silence somehow discomforting.

  “So,” she said after they had left. “They took that pretty well.”

  “Yeah, I guess they did,” Nopul said as he brushed down the two strips of hair running across his scalp. “Too well. I would say.”

  “We don’t need people who are going to question what we ask of them.”

  He cast her a strange glance. “We don’t?”

  Rendra found herself shaking her head. “Do we have to go over this again? I thought we’d straightened everything out.”

  “Yes, you did spell out the entire reasoning in explicit and extremely logical terms.”

  He was giving her that look again, the one that made her want to reach out and strangle him. She knew she had to take her eyes off him to stop herself from acting on her instinct, so she opened one of the storage units in the wall and pulled out a case filled with electronic devices.

  “You can’t even face me,” Nopul said. “Doesn’t that tell you something?”

  She spun on him before she could even think. “Yeah, it tells me I should start looking for a new partner.”

  “Oh, I see, you call this a partnership. I was under the impression that partners had equal say—”

  “All right, fine. This isn’t a partnership—it never was. I’m the one who always has to do the planning, who has to figure out how we’re going to make it to the next job without getting killed, running out of credits, or losing the ship.”

  “And I sit around and do nothing, just follow you on these ‘jobs’ as you call them, sucking up your hard-earned money. I’m just another worthless alien feeding off the underbelly of humanity.” Contempt flashed across his face. “Maybe you should take a closer look at yourself before you decide the value of someone else.”

  She threw the case of electronics onto the table, scattering the card-chips onto the floor. “I don’t need you to be my moral compass. Maybe I am devoid of ethics. I don’t know. But you’re no better than me, and your righteous attitude is starting to get on my nerves.”

  “Fine then, excuse me for trying to stop you from making a mistake that could haunt you for the rest of your life. And you’re right, I’m not any better than you. You want to kill Aaregil for money sign me up. I’ll take my share and start up my own little legitimate business.”

  Nopul’s last inflection almost sent Rendra completely into a rage, but she managed to control herself long enough to say, “Just get these jammers working.” And with that she headed aft to her personal quarters, her emotions seething just below the surface—much closer than she liked.

  One of her father’s sayings about something or other started to coalesce in her mind, but she quashed it before it could fully form. Whatever it was wasn’t going to make her feel any better—that was one thing she never doubted about her father’s remarks.

  Once alone inside her quarters with the door closed, she walked straight over to one of the valla-wood crates containing her personal gear, and punched it as hard as she could. The old wood splintered at the point of impact, revealing the ancient clothing stored inside. As her mind filled up with memories sparked by the sight of the old clothes, she began to sense something, as if she were being—

  A buzzing whine from behind her brought her full around, blaster extended toward the source of the sound.

  Hovering before her—and looking completely innocent—was the Nimbanel’s espionage droid, its ocular scanners whirring as they recorded.

  Rendra holstered her blaster. “So, this is where you decided to hide out,” she said. “I guess we think alike.”

  “This place is busy,” Nopul said as he surveyed the crowds overflowing the city streets. Looking down from their open-air docking platform, they could see a majority of the metroplex. Hundreds of thousands of beings congested the avenues and crossstreets, blocking up the surface-bound traffic for kilometers in every direction. Even the skyways were filled with planetary vehicles of every shape and function, from tiny swoop bikes to the most elaborate repulsorcraft.

  “It is expected for such an event,” Vakir offered.

  Everyone turned toward him with expressions of mild surprise.

  “What?” he said in response. “You did not listen to the public channel’s METOSP?”

  Oro and Nopul continued to look confused, so Rendra added what little she could to the unfolding information. “That’s ‘Mess
age To Spacers,’ the frequency that informs incoming traffic about space lane vectors, local regulations and laws, and recent events that could affect interplanetary travel.”

  “And?” Nopul prompted Vakir, pointedly ignoring Rendra.

  “And,” the Nikto said, “Today marks the…” He stopped to think for a second, and then continued in the slow, dry speech pattern of a comm announcer. “The historic peace agreement between the Weequay and the Houk, who have long been arrayed against each other, especially here on Sriluur.”

  “That’s a pretty good impression,” Nopul commented. “Can you do an Imperial stormtrooper?”

  Rendra silenced Nopul with a look. “Well, this isn’t going to make things any easier. Security’s going to be tight. These sensor jammers had better work.”

  “They work,” Nopul said simply and—at least from Rendra’s perspective—forcefully.

  “Good, then let’s not waste any more time,” she said, and then headed for the turbolifts that would take them to ground level.

  An hour later—twenty minutes later than Rendra had anticipated—the quartet arrived at the Coliseum of Witness deep within the city. The edifice rose high into the bluish sky in a vaguely mushroom-like shape, a combination of angles and curves woven together so gracefully that the building seemed more like an artist’s masterpiece than a bureaucratic afterthought. Apparently the Weequay were a more creative race than her previous experiences had indicated.

  “This it?” Oro said from behind her.

  She kept her gaze on the structure, still marveling at its beauty. “Yep. Power up your sensor jammers. We’ve got a job to do.” She lingered for another moment, then flicked a switch hidden on the inside of her belt and marched toward the Coliseum’s gaping archway, which was already thick with pedestrians seeking entrance.