Allegiance

by Timothy Zahn

  “Caaldra is mostly noise,” Tannis said contemptuously. “Well, noise and credits.”

  “Any idea how much he’s dropped on the whole operation?”

  “Not really,” Tannis said. “But it’s one to five million straight up front to every group that signs on, plus a bonus if they’ve got a lot of ships or special skills or something.”

  And Moff Glovstoak had shelled out a good six to eight hundred million in embezzled money for the artworks Mara had found in his safe. Depending on how much of that Caaldra and the BloodScars had gone through, they could be looking at a coalition of more than a hundred raider gangs.

  All of them apparently in this single sector. What was so special about this sector? “Well, I’m sure the Commodore knows all that,” she said.

  Tannis snorted. “Question is, can you get him to tell you?”

  Mara shrugged. “We’ll find out.”

  Gepparin was a cold, dark world circling a red star, one of a trinary system that also included a small yellow star and a brilliant blue-white one. Tannis had threaded them neatly between the two brighter stars and was bringing them in toward the planet when the first challenge came.

  It was, not surprisingly, perfectly civil. “Incoming Rendili freighter, this is Gepparin Landing Control,” a cultured voice said. “Please identify yourself and your parent transport corporation.”

  “Hey, Capper, it’s Tannis,” Tannis said. “Is the Commodore around?”

  There was a brief silence. “What are you doing here, Tannis?” Capper asked. He didn’t sound nearly so cultured now. “Where’s Shakko?”

  “Still with the Cavalcade—they had some work to do on it,” Tannis told him, throwing Mara a sideways look. “We’ve got some possible new allies aboard.”

  “Possible allies?” Capper said ominously. “You brought them here and they’re only possible allies?”

  “Laser cannons coming online,” Brock murmured from the sensor station behind Mara.

  “Where?” Mara murmured back.

  “Midway up those drill derricks,” he said, pointing at the intricate framework of buildings and support structures on the main display.

  “Hey, chill out, Capper,” Tannis chided. “They want to join—trust me. They just need to work out the details.”

  “Fine—we’ll play,” Capper said. “Pad Eight. Don’t lower your ramp until the reception committee gets there.”

  The comm clicked off. “What kind of ships are we reading down there?” Mara asked.

  “Aside from five small insystem ore transports, I see two actual freighters,” Brock reported. “Probably both are pirates.”

  “They are,” Tannis confirmed tightly. Now that he was no longer having to play a role, the tension was back in his voice. “That size, I’d say fifteen to twenty crewers each. Means there could be as many as seventy pirates total on the ground.”

  “I’m more interested in this reception committee,” Gilling said darkly.

  “Were you expecting an open door and the key to the Commodore’s quarters?” Tannis growled back. “They don’t trust you. I wouldn’t, either, if it was me down there.”

  “Calm it, everyone,” Mara ordered. “We go in unarmed and let them convince themselves we’re harmless.”

  “What do you mean, unarmed?” Gilling demanded.

  “The word is straightforward enough,” Mara told him. “No weapons, no equipment that anyone might think could be weapons, no harmless devices that could be turned into weapons.”

  “They’d take anything like that away from you anyway,” Tannis said.

  “Exactly,” Mara said. “And above all, relax. We’re not here to start a fight. We’re here to talk politely with possible allies, pull a little information, and leave.” She looked at Tannis. “Peaceably,” she added.

  Pad 8 was a circle of heavy gridwork mesh surrounded claustrophobically on three sides by derricks and catwalks and connecting support girders. It was a difficult area to get into and would be even harder to get out of.

  Tannis, fortunately, was up to the challenge, easing them through the obstructions without trouble. As he set the freighter down in the center of the grating, Mara could see the promised reception committee emerging from the buildings and maintenance hangars in front of them. There were about two dozen men and aliens total, half of them crowded into a pair of approaching landspeeders, the others spreading out on foot a cautious distance back. All of them were armed with belted sidearms, blaster rifles, or both.

  “And they’ll have heavier stuff pointed at us from the derricks and catwalk supports,” Tannis warned as he shut down the systems. “Try anything, and you’ll be slagged where you stand.”

  “No one’s going to try anything,” Mara promised, peering out the canopy. The structural maze around them, plus the relatively dim light from Gepparin’s red sun, was creating a labyrinth of small shadows that stretched all the way across the mining area to the pirate base half of the complex. “As soon as you finish shutting down, get to the ramp,” she ordered Tannis as she headed to the cockpit door. “Brock, Gilling, go with him.”

  “Where are you going?” Tannis asked suspiciously.

  “I’ll be there before you have to open up,” Mara told him and left.

  The pirates, she knew, would be watching the hatches and access panels for any tricks their visitors might have planned. Fortunately, Mara had something else in mind.

  She reached the engine room and popped the maintenance access cover leading to a thermal vent beneath the engines. Pulling a pair of black combat gloves from her dark green jumpsuit, she slipped one over each end of her lightsaber haft, leaving only the middle few centimeters of shiny metal uncovered. In the relative darkness out there, the gloves should adequately shield the weapon from unfriendly eyes. Sliding the weapon into the opening, she used the Force to maneuver it down the narrow passageway and around the corner toward the outlet.

  The others were waiting at the hatchway when she arrived. “Anything?” she asked as she quickly gathered her hair into a ponytail where it would be out of the way and secured it with a decorative fan-shaped comb.

  “They haven’t knocked yet, if that’s what you mean,” Tannis said. “Probably looking over the hull for anything cute we might have done.”

  “They’re welcome to do so,” Mara said calmly. It would take a very close examination of the vent to spot the glove-covered lightsaber, and she wasn’t expecting them to be that thorough. At least, not until they’d had a good hard look at the ship’s crew.

  From outside came the dull thud of a blaster grip against metal. “Here we go,” Tannis said, taking a deep breath and keying the release. Motioning Brock and Gilling to bring up the rear, Mara followed him out.

  The dozen men from the landspeeders were waiting, spread out in a standard guard semicircle a few paces back from the end of the ramp, their weapons drawn and ready. “Hey, Bobbler,” Tannis said, nodding to the large man in the center of the arc. “You guys mind pointing those things somewhere else?”

  “That’s far enough,” Bobbler ordered, his eyes flicking between Mara and the two ISB men. “Tannis, come here. Alone.”

  Silently, Tannis obeyed. The pirate to Bobbler’s right stepped forward with a handheld scanner and ran it quickly over Tannis’s body. “Looks clean,” he announced.

  “Yeah, and looks can get you killed,” Bobbler said, his eyes shifting to Mara. “We’ll check him inside. You—girl—come here.”

  “The name’s Celina,” Mara said as she walked over to him.

  “Whatever,” Bobbler said, looking her up and down. “What are you, the extra bonus prize?”

  “She’s part of a gang—” Tannis began.

  “Shut up,” Bobbler cut him off. “Vinis, Waggral—search her.” He grinned evilly. “See if she’s got anything interesting in there.”

  Two of the pirates holstered their blasters and swaggered forward. “Wait a second,” Tannis said, his voice rising with alarm. “Jorhim could
just scan her—”

  “If I have to tell you to shut up again, it’ll be with my blaster butt,” Bobbler growled. “Is she special to you or something?”

  Tannis closed his mouth firmly, but Mara could see his throat working. Turning slightly, she sent warning looks at Brock and Gilling, then turned back to face Bobbler. “You really shouldn’t deal with guests this way,” she commented.

  “Oh?” he countered. “What way is that?”

  The two men reached Mara, and the first man’s fingers started to close around her right upper arm. Mara moved her arm inward in response, the motion breaking his partial grip even as it pulled him slightly off balance. Cursing under his breath, he lunged toward her, grabbing again for the arm. Mara leaned a little farther out of his reach, then dropped suddenly into a crouch as the second man also tried to grab her. Both sets of hands swept uselessly through the air above her head; snapping her own hands out to both sides, Mara delivered a double punch into their exposed stomachs, then deftly yanked their blasters from their holsters.

  The men recovered from the punches and tried again. But again they were a fraction of a second too late. Mara stood upright, swinging the blasters upward as she did so to deliver solid blows to their jaws.

  And as they staggered backward, she flipped the weapons around into firing position and pointed both of them at Bobbler.

  For a second she held that pose, stretching out with her senses as she gauged the stunned silence around her. Before any of the pirates could recover enough to start wondering if he should try to be a hero, she raised the weapons to point at the sky. “I meant your men should disarm themselves before searching people,” she said mildly. Flipping the blasters around again in her hands to grip the barrels, she stepped forward and offered them to Bobbler.

  He ignored the weapons, his eyes hard on her. “Was that supposed to impress us?” he demanded.

  “I certainly hope so,” she said. “Shakko said you pay sign-up bonuses to people with special talents.”

  Bobbler snorted derisively. Still, Mara could see a new level of respect in his eyes. “Nothing special I can see,” he said with a sneer as he finally took the blasters from her. “And you’re still not getting in without a search.”

  Silently, Mara held her arms out to the sides. Bobbler hesitated, then caught the eye of the man with the scanner and gestured him forward. Mara held her pose as he quickly and a little gingerly ran the scanner over her body. “She’s clean,” the man said. “You want me to do the others?”

  Bobbler sent a speculative look at Brock and Gilling. “You two also feeling like trouble today?” he challenged as he motioned Vinis and Waggral over and handed them back their blasters.

  “They do nothing without my orders,” Mara said before either could answer. “If you want to search them the old-style way, be my guest.”

  She’d half expected Bobbler to back down. Instead he nodded and gestured, and four more men left the line. This time, one of each pair handed his blaster to his partner first. The partners, for their part, made sure to stay back out of reach.

  The searches were quick and thorough. Mara tried to read the two Imperials as the pirates ran rough hands through their clothing, but if either of them was angry or discomfited, she couldn’t sense it. “Tannis, you go with Rer’chof,” Bobbler ordered when they were finished. “Jorhim, take a squad and check out the ship, and I mean all the way down to the rivets. You”—he pointed at Mara and the Imperials—“come with me.”

  He led them to one of the two landspeeders, motioning Mara, Brock, and Gilling into the backseat as he climbed into the driver’s seat. One of the other pirates got in beside him, turning around and resting the muzzle of his blaster warningly on the seat cushion. Vinis and Waggral climbed up onto the back, blasters in hand. Tannis and one of the other pirates got into the second landspeeder, and they were off.

  Mara let them get about twenty meters, then half turned in her seat to look back at the Happer’s Way. “I hope they know how to properly search a ship,” she commented to no one in particular. Shifting her eyes aft, she stretched out with the Force and slid her glove-covered lightsaber out from the thermal vent.

  Bobbler grunted. “Don’t worry, they won’t wreck anything.”

  There were no shouts of reaction at the lightsaber’s appearance. Lowering the weapon nearly to the mesh of the pad, Mara sent it speeding silently to a nearby gantry and along its side, keeping it in shadow as much as she could.

  “Unless it needs wrecking,” Vinis added, jabbing his blaster into her shoulder for emphasis.

  “Glad to hear it,” Mara said. The lightsaber was nearly to the gantry operator’s station; shifting direction, she ran it over to one of the horizontal support girders and began paralleling the landspeeders’ own course.

  Bobbler drove them around one of the support buildings, between a pair of separator towers, and across an arched bridge to the other half of the complex. Through it all Mara kept the lightsaber pacing them, the small section of uncovered metal just visible. As they pulled away from the taller structures and machinery she sent the weapon into the shadow of a guy cable, and as the cable angled off toward a section of cliff face she jumped it finally across a short stretch of empty air to the cluster of linked two- and three-story buildings Bobbler was driving toward. Many of the windows showed lights; picking a dark section on the top floor of one of the taller buildings, she eased the lightsaber into concealment in the rain catcher running along the roof just above the window.

  Bobbler parked outside one of the doors and led the way inside to what had probably once been a miners’ prep room. It had been converted into a pirate-style welcoming center, complete with scanners, wall restraints, and a dozen more armed pirates. Under their watchful eyes Mara and her companions were run through each of the scanners in a sequence designed to progressively study them, from clothing and skin down to the near-molecular level. The pirates took special care with her hair comb, taking it away for its own set of scans.

  “Looks good,” Bobbler said when they were finished. “You—Celina—come with me.”

  “What about my men?” Mara asked.

  “They’re going somewhere else,” Bobbler said, handing her back her comb and waiting while she fixed it into her hair again. Then, picking out a four-man escort, he led her through an armored door into a maze of rooms and corridors and connection tubes. Finally, two buildings over, they reached a large, hot, humid room. In the center of the floor was a large, sunken oval pool, which seemed to be generating most of the heat and all of the humidity. Four large, armed men stood around the head of the pool, their faces and clothing damp as they watched Mara and her escort approach.

  Floating in the pool was a man.

  A smallish, slender, clean-shaven man, Mara noted as Bobbler led her toward the pool. He was dressed in a plain white floater suit, his arms and legs splayed slightly apart as he drifted on the gently rippling water. A soft blindfold mask, also white, covered his face from forehead to nose. At each side of the room, apparently taking advantage of the heat and steam, were five more men dressed in thick white robes with towels over their heads. The backup bodyguards, undoubtedly.

  “Come in,” the man in the pool called as they approached. “Is this our audacious little ship thief?”

  “It is, Commodore,” Bobbler confirmed, motioning Mara to step to the end of the pool. “She calls herself Celina.”

  “A nice name,” the Commodore said approvingly. “You have a voice, Celina?”

  “I do, Commodore,” Mara said.

  “Excellent,” the Commodore said. “Describe yourself for me.”

  Frowning, Mara looked at Bobbler. The other nodded and gestured for her to proceed. “I’m about medium height—” she began.

  “How tall exactly?” the Commodore interrupted.

  “One point six meters,” Mara told him. “I have a slender build, red-gold hair, and green eyes.”

  “How is your hair arranged?”
<
br />   “At the moment, it’s in a ponytail fastened with a fan comb,” Mara said.

  “I prefer a woman’s hair to be down,” the Commodore said. “You sound quite attractive. Are you?”

  Mara looked at Bobbler, who merely shrugged. “Various acquaintances have said so on occasion,” she said.

  “Good,” the Commodore said. “Please don’t dismiss me as an eccentric or, worse, insane. What I am doing here is silencing all my other senses, the better to hear your voice and judge your honesty. Does that worry you?”

  “Not really,” Mara said, not entirely candidly. Some members of the Emperor’s court had experimented with similar sense-deadening tricks for the same purpose, and a few of them had gotten quite adept at it. Depending on the Commodore’s skill, he might even be able to sniff out the lies of a trained Imperial agent.

  Or, at least, those of a normal Imperial agent. For Mara, there were tricks of equal subtlety she could use against him. Reaching out with the Force, she began to gently stir the water.

  “So: to business,” the Commodore said. “I understand you like to hijack ships.”

  “We don’t necessarily like it,” Mara said. “But yes, it is our job.”

  The Commodore’s mouth hardened. “I understand you like to hijack my ships.”

  “My apologies,” Mara said, starting to stir some of the water in the other direction. The gentle ripples took on an equally gentle crosshatch appearance as the new pattern collided with the old. “In my defense, let me remind you that it wasn’t yet your ship when we started our operation. Certainly if we’d known the BloodScars were interested, we’d have kept our hands off.”

  “What were you planning to do with the cargo?”

  “Sell it, of course,” Mara said, letting her eyes drift. There were a handful of louvered vents spaced around the room where the walls and ceiling intersected. Stretching out again, she opened two of the louvers a little farther than the others. “We ourselves certainly have no use for AT-STs.”