by Logan Jacobs
He nodded, but I didn’t trust him to hold up his end of the bargain, so I fired two more shots at the crowd swarming us, and by the time I ducked back down, Honey Bee had finished her calculations. I popped up again, but this time, I shot a laser round at the elaborate crystal chandelier in the center of the room.
I hit the chain that secured it to the ceiling. The heat of the laser burned straight through the rusted metal, and it plunged down on top of the crowd of gamblers. I didn’t wait for it to reach the floor.
I sprung up from behind our hiding spot, sprinted toward the piano, and jumped on top of the ivory. The instrument made a loud clang when I landed on the keys, but I also heard the chandelier shatter on the floor behind me, and I guessed she took out at least a dozen of the fuckers with her. I checked my angle as I bounded to the top of the piano, and then I fired three projectile rounds at the skylight overhead.
The glass exploded all around me. I was already in the air, and my momentum from jumping on top of the piano carried me toward the skylight. Leon actually gave me cover fire from below, but I knew I would have been dead if I hadn’t thought to blow the chandelier.
I caught myself on the edge of the skylight and hauled my body up onto the roof. I shouted back through the busted skylight for Leon to follow me. He looked up at me like I had lost my mind, but I just shouted again and fired off a few rounds to show him I would cover his ass.
“Dominion’s coming!” the guard yelled from outside the saloon doors. “Cops too!”
Well, that couldn’t be good.
“Some time today, old pal!” I shouted again.
Leon ran toward the piano and managed to spring off the back of it. He didn’t make it all the way to the skylight, but I was ready for him. I grabbed his arms just as he was about to fall back down on top of the broken chandelier, and I pulled him onto the roof beside me. More bullets crashed into the ceiling beside us, but we rolled out of the line of fire just in time.
“I don’t suppose the Dominion are any friends of yours?” I asked. I heard sirens in the distance, and I didn’t particularly want to be caught by either the Dominion or the local cops.
“No,” Leon scoffed. “I’m a smuggler, remember? And a galaxy-class one at that, so the Dominion isn’t exactly--”
“I get it,” I interrupted. “You’re on their most wanted, they hate your existence, you’re the greatest smuggler there is, sure.”
“Well, they’re not friends of yours, are they?” the lean-faced man asked defensively.
“Yeah, that’s why I busted my ass to get us both out of there, just so I could walk straight up to the law and say, oh so sorry for shutting down the saloon again, but no hard feelings?”
“That’s a joke, right?” Leon asked. His half-smile was really starting to irritate me.
“Of course it’s a joke,” I groaned. “Now come on, they’ll be here any minute.”
I took off across the roof. When I was sure Leon was right behind me, I jumped over an alley and landed on the next roof. The smuggler kept up, and I wondered if the shootout in the Petty Talon had sobered him up at all.
My chip told me the distance every time I had to jump to another roof, so I knew exactly when to leap off one to land successfully on the other. I figured Leon was taking his cues from me, or he’d already be splattered on some dirt-paved alley down below.
The sirens were closer now. Honey Bee didn’t detect any airborne crafts, but I already felt too exposed on the roofs of the city, with nothing between me and the setting sun but a lot of empty air, so I didn’t want to take the risk.
“You got a ship around here or something?” I asked and stopped to let Leon catch his breath. “We gotta get off the roof. We’re too easy to track right now.”
“Who said anything about a ship?” Leon grunted.
“Are we really gonna play this game?” I growled.
A bullet spat into the air from below us. It missed Leon by just inches, and I risked a glance down into the alley to see who had caught up to us. It was either the law or the gamblers, and one was just about as bad as the other. At least the gamblers wouldn’t have body armor to contend with.
I stepped back out of the line of fire and crouched down on the safety of the roof with Leon beside me. I hadn’t gotten a good look at our attackers, but I knew my chip had, so I waited for her to relay the information to me.
“Look, I don’t know who--”
“Shut up,” I told him flatly. I didn’t have time for this.
“Non-law enforcement,” Honey Bee chimed in my ear. “Only three, but more approaching. They all have speeders.”
“Of course they do,” I muttered with an eye roll. I should have asked Grith for more money.
“Of course, what?” Leon asked as he reloaded his gun.
“Of course those fuckers have speeders,” I growled. “And of course they followed us. So, you either admit that you have a ship and tell me how to get there, or I pitch you off this rooftop and see if that’ll slow them down.”
Leon’s half-smile faded like an old sunburn.
“Care to revise your answer?” I challenged.
“Yeah, I’ve got a ship,” the lean-faced man admitted.
No shit.
“Where is it?” I demanded. I heard more speeders pulling up into the alley below, and I knew we needed to move fast if we wanted to lose them.
Leon gave me the coordinates, and I was relieved when Honey Bee told me it registered as a smaller shipyard. We might have had a problem if we’d had to go back to the main dock in Thage and all the Dominion troops there. I had left the passenger shuttle back at the Petty Talon, but I didn’t regret it. A passenger shuttle would never be able to outrun a speeder.
“That’s a private shipyard, right?” I asked Leon, as if Honey Bee hadn’t just told me. I needed to find out if there would be any security hiccups waiting for me at the docks.
“You bet,” the smuggler agreed. “It’s small, but the security’s private, so no cops.”
“But still tight security?” I asked innocently.
“Oh yeah,” Leon said eagerly. “They’ve even got retinal scanners that you’ve gotta pass to get into the shipyard, and onto your ship itself.”
I rolled my eyes behind my glasses. It looked like I was going to need Leon a little longer than I would have liked, after all.
“Then if we’re gonna get away from these assholes, we better get moving,” I announced.
I took a few steps back and soared across the alley when Honey Bee told me that it was clear. Leon followed right behind me, but he was just a little too slow. A laser round split his vest open across the back, and the smuggler tumbled to the rooftop screaming.
“They got me!” he gasped painfully. “I’m going to die!”
“Shut up,” I groaned as I reached over and tore part of his vest away. “It’s just a minor burn. You’ll be fine. Just a couple more roofs to go.”
“But it just hurts so bad!” he groaned again as he tried to reach around to his back.
“We have to keep moving,” I groaned as I grabbed him by the vest to haul him up.
“How am I supposed to move with a critical injury?” He acted like he’d been shot through the heart, but as I held onto his vest, I realized it was only decorative. The damned thing didn’t even have pockets.
“Seriously?” I exhaled. “Come on, or don’t. It’s your funeral.”
Leon recovered his legs and hurried after me. After I jumped to the next roof, I veered to the right and crossed that way to get away from the main street. I hopped across two more alleys until I found the perfect side street.
Below us was a dead end. If our pursuers flew into this alley, it would take them a second to turn their speeders around to chase us back in the other direction. I doubted any of them knew how to override the controls, so they wouldn’t be able to fly up to the roof to continue the chase. Only a lucky fuck like me knew how to get a speeder to hover more than just a few feet above th
e ground.
I turned again and ran along the length of the rooftop. Leon lagged behind me, but he was still close enough that he could hear me shout back.
“On my mark!” I yelled.
“On your mark, what?” he groaned.
I waited until the three speeders in the lead came flying around the corner. They tore down the alley so fast that I thought they might just explode themselves against the dead end wall. But at the last second, they slammed on the brakes and stopped just short of a fiery crash.
“Jump!” I shouted.
Leon clearly didn’t know if he should scratch his head or his balls, so I just leaped off the roof. He’d either catch up, or he wouldn’t.
I landed squarely on top of one of the speeders that had braked to a halt in the alley. The driver cushioned my fall, and I kicked his unconscious body to the ground. It took the drivers of the other two speeders a second to figure out what had just happened, so by the time they pulled out their weapons, it was already too late.
I shot the first man squarely between the eyes. Then I kicked the speeder into a quick reverse to dodge the second man’s bullet, and my next two rounds ripped a hole in the left side of his chest. The rest of the crowd from the Petty Talon would be here soon, so I looked up to see if Leon had decided to live or not.
I didn’t need the smuggler to steal his ship. Now that I had the coordinates of the shipyard, it wouldn’t take me that long to figure out which piece of garbage craft the Skyhawk was. It was a small shipyard, so it shouldn’t be hard. Then once I found it, I could just hack in and take that fucker off-world.
Of course, there was the small matter of the retinal scanners at the shipyard entrance and at the ship itself. I could bypass them both with Honey Bee’s help no problem, and I knew that if any of the security guards at the dock caught me, I could handle them too. But that would all take time, and between the angry gamblers and the cops probably right behind them, I’d just as soon get the fuck out of there. So if Leon could keep up, I was perfectly happy to let him lead me right to his ship and clear all the security for me.
The slack-jawed smuggler hesitated on the lip of the roof. I shifted gears on my own speeder, but as soon as I started out of the alley, I heard a solid thud behind me, and I grinned. Leon must have found his balls after all.
I tore into the next street but didn’t look back to make sure the smuggler followed. I zig-zagged down the next side street as a laser round buzzed past my head.
“What’s the word, sweetness?” I asked my chip.
“Four speeders approximately two dozen yards behind you,” Honey Bee answered. “Now seven speeders.”
“Then I guess we better put some distance between us,” I growled.
I swung a hard left to fly down an alley that almost double-backed on the way I had come. The harsh sound of scraping metal came from behind me, and I figured at least one asshole had been too slow to make the turn.
“What’s the status on Leon?” I asked Honey Bee.
“Approximately ten yards behind us,” my chip chimed.
We darted in and out of side streets and back alleys. Even as the gamblers gained on us, I knew we at least wouldn’t have any law enforcement to deal with. These back streets were so narrow and twisted that there was no way anyone from any official channel could follow them.
The gamblers might have been able to keep up, but their aim sure as hell couldn’t. Bullets buried themselves in crumbling bricks on my left and right. A few laser rounds grazed the speeder itself, but it was nothing a little subtle correction couldn’t fix.
I took a sharp right at the next intersection, and the angle was so steep that Leon actually caught up to me since he was on the inside track. I leaned heavily enough into the corner that my shoulder almost touched the smuggler’s speeder. I was about to override my craft’s grounding controls to take her up to the roofs, but at the next corner, I had the inside track and Leon slammed into the side of my speeder when he overcorrected.
I scraped against the side of the brick building as Leon shouted some attempt at an apology, but I just rolled my eyes and kept going.
“You would think the most amazing smuggler in the galaxy would have better control of his craft,” Honey Bee chimed wryly.
My speeder was just beside Leon’s now, and the corners made it almost impossible for one of us to get ahead of the other. So when we had to fly our crafts up a flight of stairs, I decided to try to take her up to the roofs again. I worked to override the grounding, but before I finished, the gamblers behind us fired half a dozen laser rounds at the back of our speeders. Leon’s craft blocked me when I tried to pull out of the way, so the lasers all hit their targets.
Our speeders both dropped to the ground with their hover drives burned out, but I kicked on the emergency wheels, and they spat out to the ground just in time to swerve around the next corner. It took Leon a little longer. When I drove the craft down another flight of stairs, I heard his speeder jolting along with his wheels on the ground.
“This asshole’s gonna get me killed,” I growled.
“Not today,” my chip chimed in cheerfully.
She alerted me to heavy traffic two streets ahead, and I knew that would be the best place to lose our tail. We’d lost several of our pursuers in the twisted back streets of Thage, but more had caught up to take their places. The only way out of this mess was deeper into the shit.
Driving a craft with wheels wasn’t that much different from driving one that flew. Sure, I couldn’t take her up to the roofs of the city, but I could steer her straight onto a main highway through Thage. And being ground-bound meant I didn’t have to work as hard to avoid the fuzz.
I saw our escape route up ahead. There was an honest-to-god train track across the road a few blocks up, and I heard an incoming train coming from the left. All vehicles on the road were slowing down as the bars lowered to block off the track. When the train came in sight, I realized why we all couldn’t just fly over it and keep going.
Trains on Ineocca weren’t like Wild West trains at all. This one was so tall it was almost like a floating city, with some cars that looked like skyscrapers and others like needle-high apartment buildings. One car was even windmill-shaped, and I guessed it must help supply some of the power to the train.
There were only a few seconds before it reached the train crossing and we’d all be stuck in this traffic jam together. I risked a glance over my shoulder. The mob of gamblers were gaining ground as we all crawled to a halt to let the train pass.
This was our chance. I didn’t even try to communicate the plan to Leon. If the self-important smuggler couldn’t figure out what this opportunity meant, then he was just shit out of luck.
I revved the speeder’s engine and took her into the thickest part of the crowd of vehicles ahead of us. Since I was ground-bound, I was able to duck under some of the higher-hovering crafts, and I just zipped around the lower-hovering vessels.
Then I saw two hovering busses blocking my path. For half a moment, I thought I was going to be stuck in traffic, but then Honey Bee showed me a racing line, and I tilted my speeder on her side to pass between two hovering buses as I held my breath. Then I was through, and the wheels sparked as I crashed them all back down to the pavement.
The train had almost reached the crossing. I gauged the distance between me and the crossing bars, and Honey Bee seemed to like my plan. As soon as I was just feet away from the crossing, I jumped high and let my speeder slide under the crossing bar. My arms flailed as I soared over the bar, and I smacked back into my seat once I was safely on the other side of it.
The wind of the passing train whipped across my face just after I drove my speeder safely across the tracks, and then I slowed down a bit to see if the lean-faced smuggler had made it. He was on the same side of the tracks as me, but he was doubled over and covered in splinters.
I grinned. He’d made it, alright, but it looked like he’d gotten a crossing bar to the chest in the proces
s. He nodded at me as he panted to catch his breath, and I gave a little salute to the train. It was a long fucker, so it would be a few minutes before the gamblers could pick up our trail. By then, we ought to be well gone.
I shifted the speeder forward again and headed for the coordinates of the shipyard. It was easy work to maneuver the wheeled vehicle now that we didn’t have a bunch of assholes chasing after and shooting at us, so a few minutes later, we skidded neatly into the small shipyard where the Skyhawk was docked.
We paused at the shipyard entrance long enough for the security scan of his retinas, and then we moved quickly through the small shipyard until Leon stopped his craft. The smuggler jumped to the ground and gestured to the spaceship in front of us.
“What do you think?” He grinned with pride as he looked up at the small spacefaring ship, and I was glad my shielding glasses kept my real expression to myself.
“Well, I’ll tell you one thing, old pal,” I sighed as I hopped off my speeder. “I sure haven’t ever seen anything like her before.”
Reports about the Skyhawk had not been exaggerated. She really was a floating lump of space garbage, and I was surprised she could even get airborne, let alone blast around through space.
She was a round ship, but she was slightly flattened on the top and bottom. I guessed it was part of the design, but it made her look a little like an overdone pancake. Burn marks were scorched across her hull right alongside long scratches, and the cockpit window was so scuffed up that it was a wonder anyone could see out of the damn thing.
I didn’t know what a man like Favian Grith wanted with such a piece of shit ship, but I planned to find out in the time it took me to get back to the Alexandria.
Leon gave me an odd half-smile, and I realized he was waiting for my full approval.
“Of course he is,” Honey Bee observed.
“She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” the smuggler sighed.
“Abso-fucking-lutely,” I lied. “I mean, just look at her, right? She is just a… well, she’s just a marvel of modern engineering, isn’t she?”
