Death Star (15 page)

He was in his shack, alone and brooding. The pitiful interior was illuminated by a glow stick, which gave barely enough light to show the backless chair, the large cable spool that served as his table, with his cracked plate and two mismatched and chipped mugs, and the crab spider as big as his hand nestled in one of the upper corners near the roof. Night had fallen, and the predators that liked the dark were out hunting. Some were prisoners, some animals, and none of them was apt to wish you well. And yet for the path Ratua needed to be upon, he would have to venture out in the night. Moreover, he was going to have to do it real soon, because the only chance he had of getting
off this rock was the tiniest of loopholes that could close at any moment. The effort would cost him everything he owned—which wasn’t much, and that was part of the problem—and if he failed, yet still somehow survived, he would be starting over again from point zero, with nothing save the clothes he was wearing.

Ratua sighed, staring at the makeshift wall of his hut. Was the life here worse than the risk of trying to leave it? Nothing ventured, nothing gained, but also nothing lost …

A tap on the door interrupted his meditation. He grabbed his capacitor, walked two steps to the entrance, and peered out through the peephole. The capacitor, salvaged from a broken gel-cam’s battery pack, wasn’t much of a weapon. It required contact with an attacker, which was closer than Ratua wanted to be against somebody with a knife, say, but it was better than nothing. The device, once triggered, built up an electrical charge within a couple of seconds. The amperage was low, but there was still enough voltage to knock a full-sized human onto his backside—assuming you could touch bare skin with the contact points. His quickness made it a somewhat better weapon than it might be in the hands of someone with normal reactions, but it was good for only a single zap before it had to be recharged, which would be far too slow in a fight if you couldn’t stall the attack long enough to let the juice build back up.

As good a scrounger as he was, he had never been able to score a blaster. Not that he’d tried all that much. Carrying a firearm wasn’t the best way to keep under the radar. Still, there were times, like now, when he regretted not having scrounged harder.

He glanced through the tiny fish-eye lens in the door, salvaged from the same cam as the capacitor, and relaxed. It was Brun, the cargo crew boss on the night shift. The one he’d been expecting.

Ratua opened the door, checked to make sure nobody was behind Brun, and quickly shut and barred the door behind the man.

Brun was human, kind of; he looked like nothing so much as a normal-sized male who’d been sat upon by something large and heavy. His trunk was shaped like a canister, and his head was almost wider than it was tall. He was from some planet that Ratua had never heard of before they’d met. Brun had been on the prison world for years, and had worked his way up to a position of some trust in that he was allowed inside the compound to help in the loading and unloading of cargo supplies for the dirtside guard posts.

The only way off the world was by ship, and the guard supply craft were the most likely conveyances. There had been organized breaks in which whole ships had been commandeered, but that was, in Ratua’s considered opinion, stupid past the point of suicidal. The Empire had all kinds of firepower up there, and they weren’t shy about using it if they knew a transport had gone rogue. That had happened six months or so ago, and there hadn’t been any survivors of that attempted escape.

If you couldn’t sneak past, you weren’t going to get very far. And in a stand-up with Imperial warships, you were going to lose.

Brun was not a man for pleasantries. “Krovvy me th’ bit-ska, floob. M’hitch revs inna cyke.”

Whatever world Brun was from was either too far out on the Rim for a decent education program, or its indigent population really didn’t care about being understood all that much. After months of conversation, Ratua had picked up enough of Brun’s patois to understand the gist of his statement, which was something along the lines of
Tell me your idea, friend. My shift starts in an hour
. The term
floob
was considerably less benign than “friend,” but
Ratua was willing to overlook that. He pointed at one of the two chairs. As Brun sat, the wood creaking under his weight, Ratua went to his stashbox and came out with a bottle of wine. It wasn’t a great wine, but it was from off-world and not a local vintage, so it was better by far than what was available to most prisoners. Ratua had been saving it for a special occasion, and this was about as special as it was going to get.

He unsealed the cap and poured some in the two mugs, handing one to his guest.

“Starry,” Brun said, tasting it.
Not bad
.

“Keep the bottle.”

Brun nodded. “ ’Shuwan?”
What do you want?

Ratua took a deep breath, composing himself as best he could.
Nothing ventured, nothing …
“I want you to get me onto the supply ship before it leaves in the morning.”

A long heartbeat of silence; then Brun laughed, shook his bread-loaf-shaped head, had another sip of the wine, and replied, to Ratua’s surprise, in perfectly understandable Basic, “I can do that, but what’s the point? It’s not going anywhere except back to the freighter parked up in geo-sync. Any ship leaving the system’ll be scanned down to the rivets, and you’ve probably heard that none has been leaving lately. You can’t
go
anywhere, Ratua. Life in a warehouse won’t be any better than here. You do know that every now and then, they open the doors to vac and let it get real cold in the noncritical storage units? Just to get rid of, uh, vermin?”

Ratua shrugged. “Yeah, I know.” He wasn’t going to stay in the stores area, but he saw no point in telling Brun his plans. The less the squat humanoid knew, the better. “Let me worry about that. Do we have a—”

Brun waved the cup. “Hold up, hold up. Haven’t said I’d do it. If they catch you alive and you give me up, I’m back in the pack, with no perks. Why would I risk that?”

Ratua had expected him to make just that point. He went back to his stashbox and dug out a small electronic device, which he showed to Brun. “Know what this is?”

Brun was in for a raft of crimes, one of which was piracy, specializing in stripping and then reselling the electronics from captured ships. He nodded. “Looks like an embedder.”

“Exactly right. Onetime spy-killer. Check it out.” He handed it to Brun to examine.

“Where’d you get this?”

“You know me; here, there, I get around.”

Brun nodded again. That was Ratua’s talent, everybody knew that. He could scrounge just about anything. Brun touched some controls on the hand-sized device and nodded at the readout. “Charge is up. Looks good. How much you want for it?”

“Not for sale. It’s your guarantee,” Ratua said. “I’ll let you embed me and set the implant to your name.”

Brun looked thoughtful. With a spy-killer installed, Brun didn’t need to worry much about Ratua ratting him out if he was caught. The embed unit, about the size of a baby’s fingernail, would sit harmlessly in Ratua’s skull for the rest of his life. But it would be tuned to a certain word, and if that word was spoken by Ratua, and only Ratua, the device would explode. Not much of an explosion—just enough to fry his brain up nice and crispy.

“So what do I get out of it?”

Ratua waved at the interior of the shack. “I’ve got some prime stuff here—food, drink, electronics, death sticks. And I’ll give you a list of my dealers. I’m gone, they’ll talk to you; there’s nobody else. It’s worth a lot.”

“All that’ll happen is you’ll freeze to death up there.”

“That’s my worry. Do we have a deal?”

Brun sat there, his short, thick legs barely reaching the floor, wine cup in one hand and embedder in the other.
Ratua knew he was weighing the risks. There were some, yes—but if Ratua was dead, he wouldn’t be pointing fingers. Greed fought with worry, and Ratua watched the battle play out on Brun’s face.

Greed won.

“All right. South Gate, midnight, and keep out of sight until you see me. You see anybody else with me, stay away.”

Ratua let out the breath he’d been holding. “Done.”

“Don’t pack a big bag,” Brun added. “Now turn around.”

Ratua took the last drink of his wine and did as he was told. Brun put the embedder’s muzzle against the back of Ratua’s head; he could feel the cold pressure, and then a moment of mild pain as Brun injected the unit into his skull.

“So,” Brun said, pocketing the embedder, “how do you know I won’t just kill you anyway?”

“Because you’re not a killer,” Ratua replied. “One reasonably civilized being can usually recognize another.”

Brun grunted. “Lem’ scan th’ fiddymon,” he said.
Let me see the goods
. He didn’t reply to Ratua’s evaluation of him, but Ratua knew it was the truth. He didn’t have to worry about the device going off and painting whatever room he was in with his brains. Even if Brun was a killer, it still wasn’t a worry, because the device wasn’t properly armed. That little bit of reprogramming, and the part needed so that the embedder showed that the chip was armed when it wasn’t, had cost him a small fortune in trade goods, and would have been cheap at twice the price. He could jump up and down and yell “Brun!” until his lips fell off and nothing would happen—at least not as far as that bogus implant was concerned. No way was he going to walk around the rest of his life with a bomb in his head, waiting for a slip of the tongue. Brun wasn’t a killer, true enough.
He also wasn’t the brightest star in the cluster, not by several orders of magnitude.

If they captured Ratua, he’d give Brun up in a Jawa’s heartbeat. As much as the little humanoid was going to make on this deal, he could stand a little risk for it.

As long as he didn’t know about it.

S
ergeant Nova Stihl had slept badly. A dream had troubled him; he could not recall the full substance of it, only that he had been in danger, his weapons empty and his fighting art useless. That was all it took to qualify as a nightmare for a soldier.

Likely it was the heat. Even this late, near midnight, the air outside was near body temperature, and the barracks’ air exchangers were malfunctioning yet again. There was something wrong with the transformer, apparently; the techs had not been able to keep the coils harmonized properly. When they fluctuated, the coolers couldn’t keep up, and it quickly grew hot inside the windowless rooms. Probably hotter in here now than outside.

For a moment, he considered his holos—he was halfway through a discourse on eclectic deontology by Gar Gratius—but he knew that wouldn’t put him back to sleep. He arose and pulled on a pair of shorts. Maybe there was a breeze outside; at the least, even though it was warm, the air probably wouldn’t be so stuffy in the yard.

He left the barracks building and walked into the yard, which had a grassy, genetically engineered short lawn that felt cool under his bare feet. The charged fence surrounding the compound gave off a pale glow, punctuated now
and then by a spark as Despayre’s equivalent of an unlucky insect blundered into the field.

The night was cloudy, the overcast sky keeping it dark where there was no artificial light and also acting like a blanket to keep the day’s heat in. In the distance a thunderstorm rumbled, following heat lightning that flashed dimly at this remove. A little rain would be welcome—it would cool things off.

Nova timed the flashes to the thunder, to gauge the distance. He made it fifteen to sixteen kilometers, moving closer.
It’ll probably rain itself out before it gets this far
, he thought.
Too bad
.

There was a bright pool of light at the dock, where the supply ship was still being off-loaded. They used prisoners for that, droids being in short supply and prone to breaking down in the tropical heat and humidity quicker than they could be replaced. The prisoners were guarded, of course, to make sure none of them decided to hitch a ride offworld when the transport left—not that they had anywhere to go, since the transport was a short-hop vessel incapable of making the jump to lightspeed.

Nova did some stretching, sinking down into a split on the cool grass, rolling over onto his back and then into a shoulder stand, then letting his legs drop until his knees rested by his ears. He held the pose for a few minutes, then rolled to his feet without using his hands.

He felt a little better after that. His shift started early, so he turned to head back to bed. Maybe the coolers were working again.

He caught a glimpse of movement to his left. He glanced that way, toward the South Gate.

Nothing. Nova stood still for a moment, waiting, looking …

He didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

Had he imagined it?

Probably a flit, one of the flying poisonous reptiles that
sometimes got past the fence and into the compound—no one knew how. If it was a flit, then he’d best take himself inside; the critters were almost impossible to dodge in the dark, and one prick of their poisonous dorsal barbs could put down even a man his size.