by Paul S. Kemp
He chuckled. “That makes two of us.”
His response threw her off. “How do you mean?”
“Never mind. Coruscant isn’t exactly Jedi-friendly at the moment.”
“No. And this … isn’t sanctioned by the Order.”
Her response threw him off. He’d never known Aryn to buck orders.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“You’ll want to wait until the negotiations on Alderaan are completed, right? See how things shake out? In a week—”
“I can’t wait.”
“No? Why?”
She sat back in her chair as if to open some distance between them, room for a lie maybe. “I need to get something from the Temple.”
“What?”
“Something personal.”
He leaned forward, closing the gap between them, reducing the room for falsehoods. “Aryn, we haven’t seen each other in years. You show up out of a nebula and tell me you want my help to get to a world just conquered by the Empire and that getting you there isn’t sanctioned by the Jedi Order.”
He let her stew in that for a moment before continuing. “Maybe I want to help you. Maybe I can.”
She looked up at that, hope in her eyes.
“You were there for me when I went through a tough time. But I need to understand what’s really happening here.”
She smiled and shook her head. “I missed you and didn’t know it.”
He felt his cheeks warm and tried to hide his discomfiture. Of course, he could hide nothing from her. She would feel the warmth her words put in him.
She slid her chair forward and crossed her hands on the table. He was very conscious of how close her hands were to his. It seemed he had missed her, too.
“The attack killed someone I cared about.”
The sinking feeling he felt surprised him.
“A husband?” Could Jedi even marry? He didn’t know.
She shook her head. “My master. Ven Zallow.”
“I’m sorry.” He touched her hand in sympathy and it put such a charge through him that he pulled away. Surprisingly, he did not see pain in her expression, but anger.
“The Temple will have vids of the attack. I need to see how he died.”
“It could’ve been bombs, Aryn. Anything.”
She shook her head before he finished his sentence. “No. It was a Sith.”
“You know this?”
“I know it. And I want to see that Sith, know his name.”
Insight dawned. “You want to kill him.”
She did not gainsay it.
He blew out a whistle. “Blast, Aryn, I thought you’d come here to arrest me.”
“Arrest you? Why?”
“Never mind,” he said. “No wonder the Order didn’t sanction your going to Coruscant. What would this do to the peace negotiations? You’re talking about assassinating someone.”
The coldness in her eyes was new to him. “I’m talking about avenging my master. They murdered him, Zeerid. I will not let it stand. Do you think I don’t know exactly what I am doing? What it will cost?”
“No, I don’t think you know.”
“You’re wrong. I want help from you, Zeerid, not a lecture. Now, I need to get to Coruscant. Will you help?”
He’d been working alone since he’d mustered out. Preferred it that way. But working with Aryn had always felt … right. If he was going to fly with anyone, it would be her.
His comm buzzed. He checked it, saw an encrypted message from Oren, decrypted it.
Goods are aboard Fatman. Leave immediately. Cargo is hot.
He looked across the table at Aryn. “Your timing is good.”
Her eyes formed a question.
“I’m flying to Coruscant, too. Right now.”
“What?” She looked dumbfounded.
He pushed back his chair and stood. “Coming?”
She stayed in her chair. “You’re flying to Coruscant? Now?”
“Right now.”
She stood. “Then yes, I’m coming.”
“Whatever you flew here, you need to leave it. We’re taking only my ship.”
Aryn tapped on her comlink and spoke over the sound of the casino.
“Tee-six, put the Raven in lockdown. I am going offplanet. Monitor our usual subspace channel, and I will contact you when I can.”
The droid’s answering beeps were lost to the cacophony.
They started picking their way through the crowd.
Aryn took him by the bicep and pulled his ear to her mouth. “It can’t be coincidence, you know. Consider the timing. The Force brought us here at this moment so that we can help each other. You see that, don’t you?”
At a table near them, bells rang and a Zabrak raised his arms high, shouting with joy.
“Jackpot!” the Zabrak said. “Jackpot!”
Zeerid decided that he had to tell her. He shouted over the noise. “If the Force brought us together, then the Force has an odd sense of humor.”
Her eyes narrowed in a question. “What are you talking about?”
He dived in. “Listen, what I’m doing makes what you’re doing look like charity work.”
Her expression fell and her body leaned backward slightly. “What do you mean?”
“I’m going to give you another chance to ask that question before I answer it. Before you do, realize that I would make this run whether you came or not, Aryn. I am not proud of it, but I have to do it. Now, do you want to know?”
“Yes,” she said, and blinked. “But later. Right now—and do not look around—there are people watching us.”
An effort of will kept his eyes on her. Oren had told him the cargo was hot, but he didn’t realize it was that hot. He feigned a smile. “Where? How many?”
“Two that I can see. A human male at the bar, brown jacket, long black hair. To my right, a human male in a long black coat and gloves.”
“You sure?” He nodded as if he was agreeing with something she said.
“Mostly.”
“How do we play it?” he asked her.
Funny how they so easily fell back into old roles. She giving the orders and he obeying them.
“We play dumb and make for the spaceport. We’ll evaluate as we go. Then …”
“Then?”
Her hand went under her cloak, to the hilt of her lightsaber. “Then we improvise.”
He took mental stock of all the weapons he bore and their location on his person.
“Good enough,” he said, and they headed for the exit.
THE SHUTTLE TOOK Eleena and Malgus skyward to Malgus’s cruiser, Valor. Malgus stared out one of the viewports as they broke through the atmosphere. He felt Eleena’s eyes on him but did not turn to her. His thoughts were on the Force, on the Empire, and how the two seemed to be diverging before his eyes. The question for him was singular—what would he do about it?
The pilot’s voice carried over the speaker. “Darth Malgus, Darth Angral wishes to speak to you.”
Malgus cocked his head in a question. He looked to Eleena but she looked away, out a viewport at the receding surface of Coruscant.
“Put him through.”
The small vidscreen in the shuttle’s passenger compartment lit up and projected a holographic image of Darth Angral. He sat at the same desk in the Chancellor’s office from which he had previously lectured Malgus. Malgus wondered if Adraas remained there still.
“My lord,” Malgus said, though the words felt false.
“Darth Malgus, I see you have recovered your … companion. I am pleased for you.”
“I am returning her to Valor, then I will return to the surface to assist—”
Angral held up a hand and shook his head. “There is no need for that, old friend. Your presence on Coruscant is no longer necessary. Instead, I need you to command the blockade and ensure the safety of the hyperspace lanes.”
“My lord, any naval officer could—”
“But I am
ordering you to do this, Darth Malgus.”
Malgus stared at the image of Darth Angral for a long while before he trusted himself to answer. “Very well, Darth Angral.”
He cut off the connection, and the image sank back into the screen.
A headache rooted in the base of his skull. He could feel the veins in his head pulsing, each beat amplifying his disillusionment, his growing rage.
He did not need to be skilled in political maneuvering to understand that Angral ordering him into an unimportant role was a way of sending the clear message that he was out of favor. Angral had used him just long enough to ensure the success of the sacking of Coruscant, and now he was being edged aside in favor of Lord Adraas. In the span of a day he had gone from the conqueror of Coruscant to a second-tier Darth.
He glanced over at Eleena once more, wondering how much of it she understood.
She did not look at him, just continued to look out the viewport.
PEDESTRIANS THRONGED the misty street outside the casino. The smell of the lake was strong: dead fish, other organic decay. Zeerid swept the crowd with his eyes, seeking anyone else that struck him as suspicious. He saw twenty men in the crowded street who might have been eyeing him.
“I can’t make anyone in this crowd,” he said.
Two drunk Houks staggered by, shouting a song in their native tongue. A young Bothan revved his swoop engine and blasted into the air. Ubiquitous aircar taxis lined the street. Private aircars and a public speeder bus flew above them.
“Keep moving,” Aryn said. “No urgency, though.”
The spaceport occupied several blocks beginning across the street from them. Digital billboards affixed to its side played advertisements for everything from vacation homes to energy bars to debt relief counseling. Zeerid sympathized with that last.
Moving with forced casualness, they cut across the street, eliciting the honk of a signal horn and a raised fist, and headed for the nearest entrance to the spaceport.
“Don’t look back,” Aryn said. “They’re there.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
The doors to the spaceport opened. Baggage trams pulled by droids rolled through the doors, followed by a dozen or so recent arrivals of several different sentient species. The doors closing behind them cut short the pitches of the taxi drivers.
VRATH SAT ON A BENCH inside the spaceport, pressed between a female Rodian on his left and a male Ithorian on his right. The Ithorian smelled like leather and hummed a tune through his two mouths.
Vrath endured, and watched Zeerid and the woman enter the spaceport. Zeerid glanced around, suspicion in his eyes. But Vrath had spent years perfecting his own inconspicuousness, a skill invaluable to a sniper, and Zeerid’s eyes moved over and past him.
He whispered commands, the sound inaudible above the commotion of the spaceport. The implant in his jaw amplified the words and sent them to the earpieces of his team.
“He is wary. Keep your distance.”
Vrath did not want Zeerid to sense danger and bolt before Vrath located the cargo. His team had stolen aboard Zeerid’s ship hours earlier and searched it. They’d found nothing and, other than a routine visit from one of the port’s maintenance inspection droids, no one had been aboard since. Two of his team were stationed near the ship, keeping an eye on it.
Vrath watched Zeerid and the woman with his peripheral vision and, using his audial implant, listened to them as best he could over the sounds of the port.
ZEERID STUDIED THE FACES of those around them, looking for anyone else who might be watching them. Faces blurred into one another. He felt as if their pursuers were breathing right down his neck. Unable to stop himself, he turned and shot a glance backward.
Through the sea of faces, he glimpsed the two men Aryn had described in the casino. Both saw him looking at them.
He looked away, cursing himself.
“They know we know,” he said.
Aryn was staring at a wall-mounted vidscreen that showed a news piece about the negotiations on Alderaan.
A BREAKTHROUGH IN NEGOTIATIONS? read the caption.
A human man, his dark hair combed back over a wrinkled face, was speaking. Zeerid did not recognize him. The tag below his image named him LORD BARAS.
“Did you hear what I said, Aryn?”
She pulled her eyes away from the screen with difficulty. “I heard you. What do you think they want?”
Zeerid had made a lot of enemies since signing on with The Exchange, but he figured those pursuing them wanted the engspice.
“They want the cargo we’re taking to Coruscant,” he said.
They hopped on an autowalk that sped them across the port. Through the transparisteel windows along one wall, they could see freighters and other small starships sitting on the port’s landing pads. Crane droids loaded and unloaded cargo.
He used the reflection in the transparisteel to determine if the men were still behind them. They were. But he still could not tell if there were more or just the two.
“They just got on the autowalk behind us,” Zeerid said, as the men followed them onto the belt.
“Tell me what it is, Zeerid. The cargo.”
He did not hesitate, though he did not look at her when he answered. Instead, he stared at his own reflection in the transparisteel. “Engspice.”
She said nothing for a time, and he disliked the import of the silence.
“How did you get into running engspice?” she asked finally.
He disliked even more the accusation he heard in her tone and turned to face her. “How did you fall out with the Order and go off looking to murder? It’s a long story, yes? Well, so is this.”
She stared into his face, those open green eyes. He saw more pain in them than he’d ever seen before. “You’re right. I’m sorry, Zeerid. I didn’t mean—”
“I’m not proud of it, Aryn.”
“I know.”
She would know. She would sense his guilt, his ambivalence.
“We do what we do,” she said.
“We do what we must.”
“Right,” she said. “What we must.”
They switched walks, took an autostair up a floor. He continued to watch the two men behind them. They made no move to close the distance between them.
“What are they waiting for?” Aryn asked.
Zeerid had wondered the same thing but realization soon dawned. “They don’t know whether I know where the spice is.”
Ahead, he saw the landing pad where Fatman as Red Dwarf was docked. A long cargo tram rolled past. A platoon of maintenance droids trudged near it. A man and woman before it waved to each other, smiled, embraced, and moved on.
Another two men near it drew his attention. One sat on a chair near the door that led out to the landing pad. A portcomp sat open on his lap, but he paid it no heed. The second faced the transparisteel window, ostensibly looking out on the landing pad. Zeerid imagined him watching them approach in its reflection.
“Do you know where it is?” Aryn asked.
“It’s on my ship,” he said. “The Exchange uses jacked maintenance droids to sneak illicit cargo onto their mules.”
VRATH WALKED BESIDE a Twi’lek women carrying a small travel bag. He stayed close to her and let his body language suggest that they were together. When he heard Zeerid’s words via his audial implant, he cursed himself for missing the obvious—the maintenance droid had been hijacked with stealth programming to load the engspice.
Vrath did not have the firepower on hand to destroy Zeerid’s ship, so he’d have to do things the hard way.
“The cargo is on the target’s ship and the target is not to get aboard,” he said, his words loud enough that the Twi’lek looked at him askance and moved away.
“Keene,” he said to the driver of the speeder he had stationed outside. “Be ready with an evac off the target’s landing pad.”
Vrath drew his blaster and pushed through the crowd.
&nbs
p; “Everybody down!”
THE MAN FACING the transparisteel window turned while the man on the bench set aside his portacomp and stood.
“Here they come,” Zeerid said.
Aryn let her hand fall to the hilt of her lightsaber. “I see them.”
Zeerid glanced back and saw the two men who had trailed them out of the casino moving at a jog, then a run, through the crowd. Both reached behind their backs for weapons.
A third man Zeerid had not noticed before, but who looked vaguely familiar to him, shouted for everyone to get down and fired a blaster shot into the high ceiling.
Panic gripped the crowd. Screams erupted from all around and people dived to the ground or ducked behind benches and chairs. The dozens of droids in the vicinity stopped in their work and glanced about in confusion, their programming leaving them slow to respond to the unexpected.
The two men between Aryn and Zeerid and the ship had blasters in hand, firing as they approached. Aryn’s lightsaber hummed to life, spun a rapid arc before them, and deflected the shots into the ceiling and floor.
More screams. The acrid stink of discharged blasters.
Zeerid pulled his blaster from under his armpit and put two shots into one of the two men. The impact blew the man from his feet and left a charred shirt and two black holes in his chest.
Zeerid grabbed Aryn and pulled her down behind the box-shaped body of a stationary maintenance droid while the surviving man in front of them returned fire and the three men closing from behind opened up. A shot grazed the sole of Zeerid’s boot and left it smoking and black. The droid they sheltered behind vibrated under the impact of multiple shots.
“Do not move, droid,” Zeerid said.
But it could not have moved had it wished to. Smoke rose from the holes in its body, and sparks shot out.
“We have to get to my ship,” Zeerid said.
“The authorities will be coming …”
Zeerid shook his head. “Too many questions, Aryn. I’ve got engspice aboard. They’ll seize the ship and arrest us both. We have to go. Now.”
The men from behind were closing, using benches, chairs, and the bodies of passersby and droids for cover as they closed the distance. The screams and shouts of the civvies made it hard to think.
