Star Wars: Shadow Games

by Michael Reaves

  After half an hour waiting for Han to finish “negotiating,” Dash was fed up. He didn’t realize how fed up until Leebo leaned toward him and stage-whispered: “Hey, boss, I had no idea humans were steam-powered.”

  “What?”

  “There’s steam coming out of your ears.”

  Nik sniggered. Mel merely smiled into his drink.

  “If Han’s behavior bothers you so much,” said Eaden reasonably, “why don’t you go ask him to expedite his negotiations?”

  Dash shoved his tankard of Corellian spiced ale—his second tankard of Corellian spiced ale—away from him, half consumed. “Y’know what? I’m gonna do just that.”

  He got up and crossed to the bar. It was perfectly clear that the negotiation phase of the proceedings was over and they were entering the social phase. Han was telling jokes.

  “A Wookiee and an Ewok walk into a cantina, see—”

  Dash tapped him on the shoulder. “I’ve heard this one. The punch line is ‘I was talking to the Wookiee.’ ”

  The Wookiee threw back her head and made a sound like metal bending. The Advozse scratched the base of his sagittal horn and said, “What? What? I don’t get it.”

  “We need to move this along,” Dash told Han. “We have other business to transact.”

  “Hey, if it doesn’t pay, it’s not business.”

  “She’s already paying you, nerf-for-brains.”

  “I’m just doing a little on the side. You got a problem with that?”

  “I do if it—” His comlink pinged. “I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.”

  Dash moved to the end of the cantina’s long, gleaming black bar and opened the link.

  Javul emerged from the refresher to find that D’Vox had poured drinks. She regarded the glass of amber liquid he handed her skeptically. “What’s this?”

  “It’s called ambrostine. It’s sweet and rich—like you.”

  Ambrostine. Yeah—sweet, rich, and potent. She’d heard all about the stuff from Dara. It reduced inhibitions to zero—something Javul knew she couldn’t afford. Beyond whatever personally repugnant situation she might find herself in, it was what she might say about her connection with the Rebellion that frightened her the most.

  She took the glass gingerly, stalling. Any moment now (she hoped) Dash would comm her and tell her there was a problem with the holo-emitter setup and that she needed to weigh in on it. And right now, too, or they’d be behind schedule and would never mount a performance by the following evening.

  She smiled at D’Vox; he’d just proposed a salute to something. “To our …” she began.

  “Mutual admiration,” he finished.

  She put the glass to her lips and sipped. The ambrostine was like fiery honey. She held it on her tongue as long as she could, pretending to savor it, before swallowing the tiny mouthful. It burned all the way down—not unpleasantly. Not at all.

  “Come sit down,” he said and put a hand to her arm to draw her to the plush divan that afforded a view of space from between two of the module’s fuel tanks.

  Blast Dash Rendar! Where is he?

  She took a step toward the divan and was chilled to discover that the ambrostine was already making her feel light-headed. Or was it his karking pheromone-laden cologne? She moved with slow, calculated grace, trailing D’Vox and making him turn back to watch her walk. The expression in his eyes might have been welcome at another time—in other eyes. At this moment, in his eyes, it was terrifying.

  She sat. He sat.

  His door chime rang.

  Javul started. Had Dash decided to appear in person to cart her away? She hoped not. As capable as he was in some ways, she doubted that his skills ran to acting. In fact, one of the things she most liked about him was the way he felt his emotions all the way out to his skin.

  D’Vox stood, swearing, and rounded the divan to face the door. “Come!”

  The door opened, but it wasn’t Dash who entered. It was Security Chief Rishyk. His face—not all that pleasant to look at in any situation—was screwed into a scowl of epic proportions.

  “Did you give the order to move the blasted rigs into a square?” he asked before D’Vox could ask why he’d come.

  “Of course I gave the order. Who else would give it?”

  “D’you realize how many fuel ports that cuts off? Are you aware that you’ve got three Imperial tankers queued up in low orbit, waiting to refuel?”

  From her perch on the couch, Javul could see the back of D’Vox’s neck flush a deep, angry red. “Refueling is my responsibility, not yours. This has nothing to do with security.”

  “The hell it doesn’t! You get those Imperial captains in an uproar and they’ll want to investigate us up one side and down the other.”

  Javul stood suddenly and turned to face the two men. “I should …” The look she got from Rishyk made her stomach twist. “… leave you to your conversation,” she finished, then moved swiftly to the door, wishing she didn’t have go past Rishyk to get there.

  “Javul, stay,” said D’Vox, putting out a hand to stop her. “This will only take a moment.”

  “The hell it will!” snarled Rishyk. “Does she have something to do with this asinine maneuver?”

  “What if she does? I’m commander of this facility, Security Chief Rishyk. I suggest you try not to forget that.”

  Javul made it to the door and paused a beat to offer a parting shot. “Let me know if you’re not going to be able to make that change.” She glanced at Rishyk, looking him swiftly up and down. “I’ll understand if you can’t.”

  She dodged out the door then, hoping she’d said just enough to ensure that D’Vox would go ahead with the reconfiguration out of sheer ego. It was no longer important to the retrieval of the container, but they might be able to use the opportunity to move the Millennium Falcon to a new dock.

  Out in the corridor, Javul quickly rounded the corner, dashed into her suite, and collapsed against the wall. Her comlink beeped.

  “You’re a little late,” she told Dash.

  “What? What do you mean, I’m a little late? You don’t mean—” The cantina seemed suddenly stiflingly hot.

  “I mean I had to take another opportunity to leave. I suspect that D’Vox and Rishyk are circling each other like a couple of rancors in bloodlust right now, arguing over the reconfiguration.”

  That was a relief. “Rishyk thinks it’s a bad idea, does he?”

  “Ha. You could say that. He came in snarling and snapping like a boarwolf. I think D’Vox is going to go for it, though—his male ego’s got its back up. And I hope it will give us an excuse to move the Falcon.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  He could hear the smile in her voice. “I’m counting on you, Captain Rendar.”

  An idea struck him between the eyes. “Yeah, well, I’m counting on Han.”

  He signed off and returned to where Han was still trading jokes with the Wookiee and her partner.

  “… So he says to the Baragwin, ‘Hey! Why the long face?’ ”

  This time it was the Advozse who laughed so hard he nearly choked on his drink. Dash helped the alien by pounding on his back for a few seconds, then asked, “So Captain, what’s going down with this deal? Where’re we going to make the drop?”

  Han looked at him. “What drop?”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, Captain, there are Imperials all over the place. It would be in our customer’s interests to be discreet.”

  The Wookiee said something, to which Han replied, “Of course I’m discreet. I’m always discreet.” To Dash he said, “What’d you have in mind?”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  WHETHER D’VOX WON HIS SNARLING MATCH WITH Rishyk or pulled rank on him, the result was that the four great clusters of fuel tanks were pulled carefully toward one another. Mel and Nik moved to oversee the setup of the holographic equipment and piece scenery. Han and his “crew,” meanwhile, prepared to pilot the Millennium Falcon over to Module
4B, where they had instructed their customers to reserve a section of storage compartment 19 for their “delivery.”

  “You don’t have to move the ship,” D’Vox told Dash when he announced their plans. “It’s perfectly safe where it is.”

  “Yeah, well, Captain Solo is—shall we say—a little paranoid about his ship’s well-being. Besides we’ve got some cargo to off-load.”

  “Really?” D’Vox’s eyes betrayed sudden curiosity. “As part of the show?”

  “No, no. As part of a business deal. As it happens, Captain Solo was transporting some goods for a couple of your regulars here—Captain Kyobuk and her buddy, Sars Tarquhar.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  Dash sincerely hoped the commander did not see. “Yeah. So we’re just gonna take the Falcon on over to their storage facility and unload the goods.”

  D’Vox seemed not to care, and Dash didn’t think it was an act. Even if the commander had been warned by the Imperials to keep an eye on them or stop them from doing whatever it was they were doing, he’d surely try to cut a deal—demanding something from them in order to be persuaded to look the other way. That he hadn’t was a good sign.

  As the huge modules rotated into position for the performance, the Millennium Falcon left her dock at the main hub module and moved down to Module 4B, compartment 19. The storage unit had already been opened by Captain Kyobuk, who met them at the air lock.

  They made a big deal out of unloading the rather large container of goods Han had sold the Wookiee merchant. Han and Leebo moved it to the front of the bay, toward the inner portal. Dash was relieved in the extreme when the good captain insisted that she and her associate open the crate then and there to inspect the contents. With the Wookiee and the Advozse focused entirely on Han’s floor show and demo, Dash, Eaden, and Leebo set about locating their target container.

  They found it in a recess near the external hatch, easily accessible and completely inoffensive in appearance. It was as tall as Dash and twice as wide and deep—large enough, he thought, to hold two people. Three, if they were Sullustan. As they moved it quietly onto the ship, Dash wondered if the “cargo” was live.

  “Blasted thing’s heavy,” Dash complained as they settled it into one of the secret compartments beneath the Falcon’s decking. “What’s it got in it?”

  “You’re asking me?” Leebo replied. “Do I have X-ray vision now? Huh. I should pay more attention. When did you install that mod?”

  “It was a rhetorical question. You two get this buttoned up. I’m going to check on Han’s progress.”

  Han was just bumping foreheads with Sars Tarquhar—the traditional seal of a gentleman’s agreement among the Advozse—when Dash emerged from the ship. Tarquhar, evidently well pleased with their purchase, gave Han a particularly enthusiastic head-butt.

  Deal done, Han accompanied Dash back onto the Falcon, checking the credit balance on his account card. His forehead, Dash noted, was red and showing the beginnings of a bruise. Dash grinned. Han, being human, didn’t possess the Advozse sagittal horn. He was going to have one heck of a headache.

  They waited in the ship, watching the conclusion of the dance of the titans as the control module and her three ponderous sister units were locked safely together. Then they returned to their original docking port beneath Module 1A.

  Dash breathed a sigh of relief. Another obstacle out of the way. He wondered if he could convince Javul to forget the performance and leave now. He wondered if they were under surveillance. He wondered if D’Vox knew the Empire wanted them. He wondered a huge amount of things, none of them particularly happy. He finally decided to stop wondering and help Mel with the setup.

  The newly linked tank modules formed a square. Each had its tanks rotated toward the outside of the formation to allow people in the towers a clear view of the performance area. Additional platforms had been run out within the massive new cluster’s hollow core to provide outdoor space for those who wanted an unobstructed view. In the towers, galleries of seats had been set up in conference rooms, recreational facilities, and restaurants, while enterprising entrepreneurs whose private quarters had the luxury of windows converted these into intimate viewing salons. And, of course, there was a holocom feed that would pipe the entertainment to inner rooms.

  Mel and Nik oversaw the positioning of holo-emitters and flying set pieces while Oto and his team of droids carried out their placement and calibration. Hoping to help speed things up, Dash brought Leebo over to assist.

  “You are rated to handle these calibrations?” the Otoga unit asked Leebo blandly.

  “Hey, you tin pot,” Leebo responded, “I can calibrate anything you can give me the specs for.”

  Oto considered the statement. “You are also a tin pot, LE-BO2D9.”

  Leebo made a queer rattling sound, prompting Dash to step in. “Just give him the specs for the next emitter, Oto. You can fix it if he messes it up.”

  “Messes it up?” repeated Leebo. “Highly unlikely.”

  The Otoga 222 reached out a digit to Leebo’s dataport. There was a split second of complete silence from both droids, then Oto said, “Those are the specs for the next two emitters. See if you can set them properly.”

  As if respecting Dash’s sense of diplomacy, Leebo didn’t respond with some scathing commentary on the other droid’s genesis. Instead, he just cocked his head curiously and headed for the next emitter in the array.

  Dash shook his head and went about his own business—walking the galleries looking for possible dangers. He saw nothing. This did not, however, set his mind at ease.

  “You still get pre-show jitters?” Dash asked Javul later that evening as she awaited her cue to go “onstage.”

  “Yeah. Now more than ever.”

  They stood in a comfortable lounge that D’Vox had set aside as a backstage area. Here gathered the needful members of the stage crew—Dara Farlion and her gofers, the props people, Tereez Dza’lar and her team of under-costumers. They had everything laid out or hung in order of use to either side of the wide doorway that opened onto the private catwalk-cum-balcony just outside the lounge where Mel had set up his control console. From there, he could monitor the myriad pieces of the physical apparatus, from the holo-emitters to the piece scenery.

  The centerpiece of that was a gleaming spiral staircase of transparisteel, six stories tall, that was suspended in the center of the quad formed by the tank modules. It was a fantastic thing—gleaming, lacy, and transparent—that looked as if it were made of water and ice crystals. From it, Javul would perform the bulk of her concert—acting, singing, dancing … and flying.

  Dash stared at it now and shook his head. “Yeah, that thing alone would give me the vapors.”

  “You mean the Helix? That doesn’t make me nervous in the least. It’s … you know. The other thing.”

  “The item?”

  “Yeah, that. Every second between now and the end of the tour, every kilometer between here and the end of the line—seems an eternity. A forever road.”

  Dash sincerely wished she hadn’t said end of the line.

  “Too late to pack it in and—?”

  “Yeah. Way too late.” She turned to look at him, her eyes—outfitted with dazzling lenses that contained a set of state-of-the-art miniaturized holo-emitters—seemed to turn like wheels. “We have to do this thing, Dash. Just like always. Just like normal. I go on, I dance and sing and act out stories, then we pack up and on we go.”

  Except that only the Deep Core would go to the next venue on Bacrana. The Millennium Falcon would go directly to Alderaan. He prayed the Imperials—if they were watching closely—would follow the Deep Core. But if there were Imperial agents watching their every move, he still hadn’t seen them. Leebo had found no record of them in the station communications logs—not even in D’Vox’s and Rishyk’s private ones. Which meant exactly nothing, Dash supposed, except that they weren’t in on any Imperial plotting.

  Perhaps it was because of all this no
nstalking by the Empire that Dash had made sure Han and the Falcon were ready to take off at a moment’s notice. The Falcon sat with her docking field on loose-lock, meaning that her magnetic clamps were dialed down. The soft dock would break instantaneously if Han made a run for it. It was an old smuggler’s trick.

  At which point they’d learn whether the station had been upgraded with tractor beams …

  “Time,” said Spike, arriving behind Dash and Javul and making Dash jump.

  Javul turned her most brilliant smile on him. “Wish me smooth spacing.”

  He tried to exorcise the bad feeling in his gut, couldn’t, gave up and kissed her instead. “Smooth spacing.”

  He watched her go out onto the balcony from which she’d sail to the crystalline Helix in full view of the thousands who had gathered in galleries and on catwalks to watch her perform. He watched as she stood, momentarily silhouetted against the play of colorful lights sweeping up and down the four looming towers.

  When he’d kissed her, he’d felt her fear. It trembled on her lips, quivered in her breathing. It wasn’t his manly charms that had made her shake, he knew. Tonight, Javul Charn had more than stage fright.

  Dash took a deep breath and looked around for Eaden. The Nautolan was standing at Mel’s shoulder, watching him begin the start-up sequence for the artificial intelligence that ran the performance. Dash moved to stand next to them as Javul stepped off the balcony seemingly into midair, her antigrav harness activating.

  In that moment that her feet went from solid metal to thin air, Dash’s gut twisted spasmodically, then relaxed. The harness was good. The harness was fine … for now.

  He let out a sigh as she began her opening song, a whimsically wistful number about a lonely moisture farmer. Her bright, clear soprano seemed to come from everywhere at once: “I’ve got no real life. I live on Tatooine …”