Star Wars: Knight Errant
Page 35
Amateurs, then. Pirates, maybe.
Zeerid knew he would have to answer to Oren, his handler, not only for the deal going sour but also for the lost grenades.
Kriffing treadmill just kept going faster and faster.
He considered throwing Fatman’s ion engines on full, clearing Ord Mantell’s gravity well, and heading into hyperspace, but changed his mind. He was annoyed and thought he had a better idea.
He wheeled the freighter around and accelerated.
“Weapons going live,” he said, and activated the over-and-under plasma cannons mounted on Fatman’s sides.
The men on the ground, having assumed he would flee, did not notice him coming until he had closed to five hundred meters. Faces stared up at him, hands pointed, and the men started to scramble. A few blaster shots from one of the men traced red lines through the sky, but a blaster could not harm the ship.
Zeerid took aim. The targeting computer centered on the crate.
“LZ is hot,” he said, and lit them up. For an instant pulsing orange lines connected the ship to the island, the ship to the crate of grenades. Then, as the grenades exploded, the lines blossomed into an orange cloud of heat, light, and smoke that engulfed the area. Shrapnel pattered against the canopy, metal this time, not ice, and the shock wave rocked Fatman slightly as Zeerid peeled the ship off and headed skyward.
He glanced back, saw six, motionless, smoking forms scattered around the blast radius.
“That was for you, Arigo.”
He would still have some explaining to do, but at least he’d taken care of the ambushers. That had to be worth something to The Exchange.
Or so he hoped.
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