“You’ll want Narlowe, then. Talk your ear off but she’ll take it all off your hands. Third street on your right if you head straight out, end of the block.”
The stranger nodded, slipped a hand into his pocket without adjusting the balance of the duffels, and withdrew a single Imperial credit chip. He slid it across the bartop toward the Cerean. “That’s the last I’ve got,” he said. “But I’ll be back for a drink when I’m through selling.”
The Cerean said nothing. The stranger left, maintaining the same steady pace with which he’d entered, moving out of the gloom of the cantina and into the gloom of the rain. He passed two intersections, then turned into an underpass running beneath a decrepit tram line.
The tunnel smelled of acrid mildew. Perhaps on Mrinzebon, the stranger thought, that was a natural scent. If so, it couldn’t have helped attract colonists.
He was twelve steps into the dark when a rough voice demanded, “Turn around. Drop the bags.”
The stranger turned around. He did not drop the bags. Wreathed in shadows were two bulky forms: One a jawless, toothy, and funnel-mouthed humanoid whose species the stranger failed to recognize; the other a Meftian in black leather, ivory hair matted by the rain. Neither carried a visible weapon.
“Drop the bags,” the Meftian repeated.
“I have a right to my belongings,” the stranger said. “I’m not looking for trouble.”
The two figures approached. The Meftian grasped a duffel by its straps and yanked it from the stranger’s shoulder, tossing it aside with a grunt. He repeated the motion with the second bag as the funnel-mouthed being circled behind the lone human.
“You have no rights,” the Meftian said, and drove his fist into the stranger’s stomach. The human bent over but did not fall. The Meftian struck him again.
Then again.
The stranger fell to his knees. The Meftian kicked his shoulder with a booted foot; slammed both fists atop the stranger’s skull. Soon the funnel-mouthed humanoid joined the assault. The stranger absorbed each blow, protecting his vitals as well as he could and offering no resistance. When his attackers stepped away, his lip was bloody and his left eye was bruised and swollen. His poncho was torn and covered in mud.
The two assailants left the stranger behind, taking the duffels with them.
A short while later, the stranger rose. He gingerly touched his face, ribs, and legs, examining his injuries. He swayed when he took his first few steps, but steadied quickly before returning the way he had come.
Back past two intersections. Back to the waving droid arm and through the doorway to Gannory’s Cantina.
“Hello?” he called, and again the topknotted Cerean emerged.
Upon seeing the stranger’s injuries, the barkeep stepped back abruptly. “What happened?” he asked.
“You know what happened,” the stranger said. His voice was uninflected yet rigid as iron. “You informed them I was coming.”
“I did nothing!” the Cerean cried. He marched forward and slapped a trembling palm onto the bartop. Thick veins lined the back of his hand. “You should leave, sir. If you go into Xnapolis proper, you’ll find a clinic and—”
The Cerean stopped speaking. From beneath his poncho, the stranger had drawn a hold-out pistol. He gripped it in a steady hand, aiming squarely at the barkeep’s chest.
“You informed them I was coming,” the stranger said.
Very slowly, the Cerean nodded.
The stranger canted his head toward the empty tables.
“We should talk,” he said.
* * *
—
The Cerean introduced himself as Gannory. The stranger called himself Devon, and didn’t show his pistol again after they sat down with two cups of caf. “No one deserves to weather what you weathered,” Gannory said as they settled in, and this was the closest he came to an apology.
Devon didn’t press for contrition. “Are you in league with them?” he asked, and when Gannory hesitated he clarified: “Are you part of an organization? Do you receive a cut of their take?” The Cerean assured him that, no, he was not in league with the beings who had stolen from Devon. He was neither victim nor perpetrator, but somewhere in between.
“They ask that I supply information,” Gannory said, “that they may use to line their pockets. If I refuse, they’ll burn my establishment to the ground; or burn me to the ground and take my establishment. If I hadn’t turned you over, I’d have given them someone else this week—someone local. A friend, perhaps, or a friend of a friend.”
“Better to protect your people and sacrifice a stranger,” Devon said. There was no judgment in his voice.
“Better,” Gannory agreed, “but not best.”
Devon’s attackers, Gannory said, belonged to a gang with no name—a gang of significance only to the people of Tinker-Town. “Once, the Empire kept their sort under control. There was still crime, of course, but criminals’ ambitions were curtailed.”
Gannory described, between sips of his beverage, the abandonment of Mrinzebon’s garrison after the news of the Emperor’s death; the riots and looting that followed in Greater Xnapolis; and the establishment of a new status quo. “Not quite anarchy, not quite order,” Gannory said. “Strange, how swiftly it becomes normal.”
“I can imagine,” Devon replied. He’d commented little during the bulk of Gannory’s story, simply listening and studying the Cerean. Now he tapped his empty tin caf cup like he was sending a coded message, producing unpredictable, staccato beats. “Would you go back, if you could?”
“Would I return the Empire to Mrinzebon?”
Devon nodded.
“If I had such power,” Gannory said, “I’d use it to change a great many things. But I don’t, so I don’t think on it.”
Devon grunted. The sound might have been a laugh. “No one fights the gang?” he asked.
“We’ve seen clones and battle droids march through these streets before,” Gannory said. “No one here has an appetite for war.”
“Self-defense, then,” Devon said. “To protect your establishment.”
“We’ve few weapons, and no training. Those who did joined the Rebellion—or joined the gangs.”
Devon stopped tapping, then steepled his hands. His eyes fixed on his nails, three of which were encrusted with dried blood.
“I could train you,” he said. Gannory began to object, but Devon continued, “You and anyone else who wants it. Not well—not as soldiers—but well enough to convince your gang to go elsewhere in Xnapolis. Some other neighborhood with easier prey.”
He spoke with unflinching certitude despite the bruises on his face and the stains on his poncho. Gannory stared at the stranger who’d marched twice into his cantina and shook his head in refusal or disbelief.
“And your price?” Gannory asked.
“The credit chip I gave you,” Devon said. “Return it, and we’ll call the price paid.”
* * *
—
The stranger Devon did as he promised.
Gannory found Devon his students—his recruits—as Gannory had once found Tinker-Town’s gang its victims. In chatting with his customers and conversing with his family, he located neighborhood residents whose resentment contained the seed of determination. He sent these on to Devon, who spent his days in the Cerean’s garden behind the cantina.
There, Devon taught. Devon fought.
He showed Gannory how to construct a single-shot stun weapon from the corroded blaster batteries that lined the garden’s flower boxes, and how to judge whether an opponent could absorb the bolt and stay conscious. He showed Narlowe the junk dealer how to improvise a shock prod from an R2 unit’s arc welder. He showed Shonessa and Brorn, who lived above the tram stop, where to strike to do maximum damage to human or Mefti
an anatomy.
He taught these people and others how to estimate their odds of winning a battle. He taught them when and how to run; when and how to join together and back one another up. Their goal, he explained, was not victory but deterrence; where deterrence failed, their goal would be survival. The lessons he taught were simple ones, but Devon had met the opponents the people of Tinker-Town would face. “Simple lessons,” he told them, “will be enough.”
He did not befriend his students. He told them nothing of how he’d learned his skills and didn’t ask about their dreams or the tragedies in their pasts. Only with Gannory did he let his guard down, and then only twice—once as they returned the garden furniture to its proper place after a day’s lessons, when they spoke of the incessant rain and their shared love of the weather-orchestras of Cousault; and once when Gannory saw Devon wince in pain from turning his bruised torso, and the human allowed the Cerean to bring him painkillers and ice.
Just as Devon did not befriend his students, neither did he protect them. When their first confrontation with the gang’s thugs occurred, he was dining on baked tubers on the balcony of his flophouse. He heard a report of the scuffle the next morning and critiqued the performance of those involved—they had, he said, been overeager to protect their shop’s earnings, but they’d done well all the same.
During the following week, his classes doubled in size. He began allowing his students to become instructors.
He was not surprised when, one night after he’d retired to his room, the Meftian pried his door open and said, “Come with me.”
Devon touched his eye, recalling pain and swollen skin. He chose to cooperate.
* * *
—
They marched him through the streets to a teetering communications tower on the border between Tinker-Town and Little Neimoidia. There were three of them—the Meftian, the funnel-mouthed humanoid, and a short, stubby human woman who wore cheap cybernetics like a shirt. They pushed Devon and yanked him by the arm and generally abused but did not harm him during the walk. The few witnesses on the road swiftly hurried on.
They strode past guards and onto a cargo lift and emerged in a room part penthouse and part command center. Aging consoles and grease-stained machinery stood beside lounge chairs and coolers and holographic displays. Bull’s-eye windows admitted pink and emerald light from billboards passing by on their Xnapolis circuit. Seated atop an intricately carved wooden desk at the room’s center was a skinny human male barely older than Devon, wearing a fashionable Coruscanti jacket over a soiled engineering jumpsuit.
“Devon the troublemaker!” the man cried as he hopped to the floor. “So good to finally meet.”
The Meftian held Devon while the cyborg woman waved a boxy scanner over his body. When she was done, she snatched Devon’s pistol from where it was concealed at the small of his back. The Meftian released him, and Devon said to the man, “You lead them?”
“I do,” the man said. “Call me Vryant.”
Devon cocked his head and looked the man up and down. When his eyes reached Vryant’s boots his thin lips twitched. “Who’d you kill for those, Vryant?” he asked.
Vryant furrowed his brow, then laughed as if he understood. “I’m ashamed to say I got them the slow way, by earning them. Six years on Herdessa, two in the trenches of Phorsa Gedd before I was shipped here.”
“You’re Imperial Army?” Devon asked. His words, normally crisp as winter, sounded breathy and inchoate.
“I was,” Vryant said. “But the Imperial Army isn’t on Mrinzebon anymore. It’s just me.”
Devon stared at Vryant awhile, as if turning over the claim in his mind. Finally he nodded.
“Why am I here, Vryant?”
The Meftian shoved him between the shoulder blades. Devon stumbled. Vryant cast the Meftian a look of disapproval. “Don’t do that,” he said. “I’m sorry, Devon. I—well. We’ve got a way to go but I don’t want this conversation to be hostile.”
“Tell me why I’m here,” Devon said.
“My impression—correct me if I’m wrong—is that you’re only a visitor in Tinker-Town. You came in, found trouble, and decided to make trouble back. That’s almost admirable in its simplicity. Like the echo when you yell in a cave, or the recoil on a blaster.”
Devon did not correct him. Vryant continued.
“You probably thought you’d earn a few credits making weapons for the locals and move on. We stole your salvage, after all. You’ve got no love of us, and you have to make a living. But that’s the thing of it—” Vryant furrowed his brow again. “Do you have a plan, Devon? A place to move on to after Tinker-Town?”
Devon said nothing.
“Because if you do,” Vryant said, “I’ll pay you back for your lost salvage right now and get you a shuttle schedule. I mean it—it’s no loss for me and if it ends this feud cleanly, why not?”
“Why not, indeed?” Devon asked.
“But if you don’t have a place to go, I have another offer.” He paused, apparently waiting for Devon to prompt him. When Devon remained silent, he kept going. “Work for me. Live here—not in Tinker-Town, of course, but in the better parts of Xnapolis—and help me build something. Get rich if you like. Make a name for yourself if you like. Train my people. Bring a little order back to Mrinzebon.”
“Order,” Devon repeated.
Vryant heard the skepticism. “I kept these people—” He waved a hand at the gangsters. “—on a leash when the Empire was here. Mrinzebon has always been a cesspool, and our job was to keep the bacteria under control. Gangs would rise up, we’d stamp them back down.
“I still keep these people on a leash; it’s just a little longer.”
“Is that why you stayed when the rest of the garrison left?”
“I saw an opportunity,” Vryant said. “If I hadn’t stepped in, my subordinates here would still be looting shops and marking their territory. The difference would be a lot more bloodshed.”
The enhanced human spoke for the first time. “All true,” she said. The Meftian seemed to laugh, emitting a series of growls and grunts.
Devon picked his way around the furniture and approached one of the windows. He turned his back on Vryant and the others and stared out onto Tinker-Town as billboard lights colored him in garish pastels.
“What about the Rebellion?” Devon asked. “The New Republic?”
“Am I afraid of them, you mean? No—”
“That’s not what I mean.” Devon kept his eyes on the window. “I mean—why not look to them for assistance?”
He wanted to ask more: Did they ignore Mrinzebon’s calls for help after the Empire left? Were the gangs here so vicious, so lawless, that they had to be controlled immediately? Did you simply refuse to consort with the enemies of the Empire? Yet he remained silent. He allowed Vryant to answer.
“Devon,” Vryant said, in a tone of charmed bemusement. “The rebels are far away, and besides—do you really think they would’ve let me keep all this?”
Devon heard a sound very like a blaster sliding from its holster. He continued staring at the rusting structures and broken tramway and bright advertisements for businesses long since abandoned.
“Payment if I leave,” he said, “or a job if I stay?”
“That’s my offer, yes,” Vryant said.
Devon nodded joylessly.
“I’ve made my decision.”
* * *
—
The communications tower on the edge of Tinker-Town burned. Smoke billowed from the top, stinking and stinging. The lower floors of the tower hadn’t all caught, but the structure was groaning loud enough to be heard over the flames. It would collapse soon.
The stranger Devon strode away from the tower and Gannory watched. Devon possessed a fresh limp and often brought his
sleeve to his mouth to filter out the smoke. His expression revealed nothing.
“They brought you in there, didn’t they?” Gannory asked. The rain was picking up, and the old Cerean wrapped his arms around his chest. “What happened?”
“The man had a second chance,” Devon said. “I wasn’t going to give him a third.”
Gannory stared in bafflement, then looked past Devon to the tower. “Is anyone else coming out?”
“No,” Devon said.
Devon stopped four paces from Gannory. The Cerean took a step back. Part of Devon thought of their conversations in the garden; part of him hoped to hear the Cerean say, We’ll get you to the cantina. Get you warm. You can be as cryptic as you like when you’ve got a mug of caf in you.
Instead Gannory closed his eyes as if to listen to the moaning of the broken tower. He said, “There’s a freighter that delivers to the spaceport once a week. Should be arriving tomorrow morning. On the way out in the afternoon.”
“I’ll be there,” Devon said, and stepped around Gannory to keep walking.
He didn’t look back. He didn’t ask the Cerean to check in on his students. He didn’t lash out and speak of ingratitude, or demand he be compensated for all he’d done. He thought of these things, but that wasn’t who he was.
And in Gannory’s place, he’d have done the same.
There was no place for him in Tinker-Town. That was well enough; Tinker-Town could find its own way, and there was plenty of room in the galaxy.
CHAPTER 8
DISUNITY OF PURPOSE
I
Hera Syndulla had always known victory wouldn’t come easy. It was a lesson reinforced by every hard choice, every sacrifice she’d made and loss she’d endured over a decade of war. This is the beginning, she’d told an aide before the Battle of Endor, and weren’t beginnings the hardest part?
Alphabet Squadron (Star Wars) Page 17
