Death Star (29 page)

The pilot put his right hand on the big drunk’s chest and shoved. Since the other was hopping on one foot, clutching his insulted leg and yelling, it took very little effort to move him backward, where he sat down heavily into his seat.

Before he could do more than blink in bleary surprise, a
very
large man appeared as if by magic directly behind the storageman and laid a hand the size of a wampa’s forepaw on the seated man’s shoulder. “Is there a problem here?” he asked in a quiet voice. It was a pleasant voice, with no anger in it, but it nevertheless made Teela think of a sheath covering a razor’s edge.

“Nope,” the pilot said. “Our friend here is a little over his limit, and felt unsteady on his feet. The lady and I were just helping him regain his seat safely.”

The bouncer standing behind the storageman smiled. “Ah. Well, then, enjoy the rest of your evening.” He looked down at the befuddled storageman. “And you were just leaving, weren’t you?”

“Whuh?”

“Nicely put. Let me help you to the exit.”

When they were gone, Teela said to the pilot, “I don’t want to seem ungracious, but that wasn’t necessary.”

“When a man lays unwanted hands on a woman, I believe it is. It’s discourteous at best; brutality, at worst.” He smiled. “I’m Lieutenant Vil Dance, by the way.”

She had to admit that his smile was attractive.
Down, girl
, she cautioned herself, but despite that she couldn’t deny the tingling that had started in her stomach.

“Teela Kaarz,” she replied. “And I appreciate the sentiment, Lieutenant, even if I don’t necessarily agree with it.”

“Appreciation, even without agreement, is certainly better than a poke in the eye. Would you allow me to buy you a drink?”

“Thanks, but no. I’m not much of a drinker.”

“Me, neither, really. I’d rather be in my cube studying technical journals.”

“Really?”

He grinned again. “Actually, no. But I’m hoping that if you believe I’m the serious sort, maybe you’ll think better of me.”

His smile was infectious. Teela couldn’t help smiling in return. “Does that work for you often?”

“Pretending to be studious?”

“No, pretending to give away your pickup line that way.”

Now he laughed. “Oh, I like a smart and funny fem.” He dimmed the smile a little. “Let me buy you a caf or sucosa. Water, even. Sit and visit with me for a little while.”

“I don’t know …” Which was a lie; she knew very well what she wanted to do. In her mind’s eye, the small mental projection of her conscience and common sense gaped in disbelief.
I can’t believe you’re seriously contemplating this
, it scolded.

“Come on. It’s war, I’m a pilot, my number could be up any moment. Wouldn’t you feel better knowing I went out to meet my end smiling at the memory of you?”

You just barely escaped a dangerous situation with one man
, her conscience avatar said,
and here you are letting yourself be sugar-talked by another
.

Teela laughed at Dance’s line. “You pilots and your platinum tongues. All right. I suppose it won’t hurt anything.”

Her conscience threw up its hands in resignation and stalked off into the gray corridors of her brain.

As they approached the table, she saw the other pilots look at them. More than a few looked twice, or closer, and all were blatantly impressed. They stood. “Hey, Vil,” one of them said. “We have to shove off. See you back at the barracks.”

Dance eyed him. “You’re sure about that?”

“Oh, right. Um …” The flier was obviously uncomfortable, and the concealed smiles of the others, not to mention the glare he was getting from Dance, weren’t making things any easier for him. “Right. We have to, uh … go over our technical specs. Down in the hangar.”

The five pilots left. Teela gave Dance a measured look.
“You had a bet going with your friends,” she said. It was not a question.

He shrugged. “Of course. First man back with a woman wins the table. They’ll go see if the odds in the pub on Level Six are better. One doesn’t need a bunch of comrades cramping his run if one gets lucky.”

“You aren’t going to get
that
lucky, Lieutenant. Not tonight, anyway.”

He flashed that high-wattage smile at her again. “You’re too sharp for me, Teela Kaarz. I really like a woman who makes me have to stretch.”

She sighed. No way was she getting into anything remotely serious with a navy pilot. No way.

But a cup of caf couldn’t hurt …

M
emah Roothes was aware that she was—well, not to put too fine a point on it—primping. That was a bad sign, she knew, when she started to care what a new male thought of her appearance. The actions themselves didn’t look like much: a slight adjustment of her posture, a little brush over the brow to smooth out a bit of makeup, a quick glance at her reflection when she passed a mirror to check her lekku positions. Nothing major. But she knew. She wanted to look good, and she wanted Ratua to notice that she did.

She wasn’t too old, ugly, or fat, and she wasn’t stupid. He already did like her—you didn’t run cantinas for as long as she had without being able to feel the heat come off a male when he looked at you. Still, the fluttery sensation she felt, the quickening of her heartbeat and breath—those were all bad signs. She didn’t need a new complication in her life right now.

And Green-Eyes was definitely that. For one thing, he didn’t exist, according to what Rodo had found—or hadn’t found—in his HoloNet search, and that meant he was a bad boy of some kind. Could be a legal bad boy—a sub-rosa agent for the Empire, say. Or he could be a Rebel spy. Or some kind of criminal …

But he made her laugh, he was quick and clever, and
those eyes … she’d never seen any quite that color before. They were like liquid emerald, bright and alert.

Hence, the primping.

At the end of the bar, a pair of CPOs were talking about a rumored prison break in the detention area. Memah overheard one of them say, “Way I heard it, nine guys broke out, one of them a Jedi.”

The other petty officer laughed. “Hate to point it out, but Jedi are real scarce these days.”

“Just telling the story, Tenn.”

“Yeah, I heard it, too. Only I heard it was fifty guys, all captured Rebels, led by five Jedi. And they took over the superlaser and started blasting Star Destroyers. ’Course, the big gun isn’t even operational yet. Anyone knows that, it’s me. But hey, why let facts get in the way of a good story?”

The first chief laughed and sipped at his ale. “Sounds almost like a sim run, don’t it? A really wacky sim run.”

The second CPO said, “Time this war’s over, want to bet that story’ll have a Rebel army nearly destroying the station? Every action I ever been in, stories like that pop up. One floob spits on the slidewalk, by the end of the cycle it’s turned into a crack unit of Rebels knocking over a fortress.”

The first one laughed again. “Yeah. Next they’ll be saying it took the Five Hundred and First to put ’em down.”

Both men laughed.

Memah smiled. She had heard some of those stories, too. Why people felt the need to embellish the truth, or even fabricate something completely different, when reality was all too often quite fantastic enough, was light-years beyond her.

She happened to be looking at the door when Ratua came ambling in as if he owned the place. He caught her
glance, smiled, and headed for the bar. Once there, he looked her up and down in frank appreciation.

“You,” he said to her, “look like the reason the riot started.”

She realized to her astonishment that she was blushing. “Well,” she replied, “
you
look like you could use a drink. What’ll it be?”

He laughed. “I’ll have the unusual.”

“Which means what, exactly?”

“Surprise me. Something exotic. Expensive enough to justify me sitting here and occupying your bar and attention.”

“I don’t think we have anything worth that much.”

“You wound me. Right here.” He put a hand over his heart, or at least where a human’s heart would be. “Here I am, seeking sanctuary, trying to stay out of trouble—”

Memah said, “I think you
are
trouble, Ratua. It would probably be much better for me if I stayed as far away from you as I could.”

“Probably,” he agreed, in a more serious tone. “But where’s the fun in that?”

She built him a drink, a simple one, with a lot of alcohol and some sweeteners and colors. It was potent stuff. So far she’d never seen him drunk—at least, not so she could tell.
Must have a hyperdrive metabolism
, she thought.

She put down his glass, then planted both hands on the pleekwood bar and leaned toward him. “Fun starts with the truth. Who are you?”

He sighed, and didn’t say anything for a couple of seconds. “I’ve always found truth to be highly overrated.”

“Nevertheless …”

“Okay.” He took a fortifying swig of his drink, then said, “I’m Celot Ratua Dil, second son of the First Counselor Nagat Keris Ratua and his Tertiary Wife, Feelah Derin. Of late, I resided on the planet Despayre, where I
was incarcerated for a crime I actually did not commit—though in balance, I can’t claim to be an upstanding citizen.”

“So you weren’t kidding before?”

“Nope.”

“What was the crime?”

“Guilt by association. Wrong place, wrong time.”

“And how did you come to be here?”

“I escaped.”

“Really. Just like that?”

“Well, I won’t bore you with the details—”

“Oh, please—bore me. I so seldom find myself bored these days.”

“It doesn’t bother you that I’m an escapee?”

Memah stood back and folded her arms. “You were pretty sure it wouldn’t, weren’t you? Or you wouldn’t have told me.”

“I was hoping. And you did demand the truth.”

“So I did. And I’m wondering when I’m going to get it.”

Ratua studied the drink for a moment, then looked up at her, and she had to physically tense up to resist the earnestness in those remarkable eyes. “Now, if you want it.”

“What have you done for which you might have deserved to be imprisoned?”

“I was a smuggler. Among other things. Nothing violent.”

“That’s good.” She refilled his drink. He smiled into it, then at her.

Smile and use those eyes as much as you want
, she thought.
If I have to turn you in, I will
. “Think hard before you say anything more, Celot Ratua Dil. If you’re guilty of any crimes against the Empire, then I could be endangering my cantina just by talking to you. You might want to turn around and walk out of here right now, because if your presence is a danger to me and my livelihood, you’ll find out where this place got its name.”

He stared at her. “I believe you’re the kind of person who’d do it.”

Memah nodded. “That I am.”

“Good,” said Ratua. “If you weren’t, I wouldn’t be talking to you.”

S
ergeant Nova Stihl was tired. The fighting classes he taught weren’t part of his regular duties, and now that word had gotten around he had four full sessions, with about twenty-five students per class. Each of these ran an hour and a half, and he had two sessions every evening after his shift ended. He didn’t eat until after the second class, after which he would go back to his cube, shower, and hit the sleep pad.

Such a schedule made for busy light and dark cycles.

He kept himself in shape, but he hadn’t been sleeping well. The bad dreams he’d sometimes had back on the prison planet had grown more frequent on the battle station, and some of them were extremely realistic and violent. More than a few times he’d come out of a sleep to find his heart pounding rapidly and his coverlets drenched in sweat.

He didn’t understand why it was happening. He had considered having medical run a check, to make sure there wasn’t something amiss going on in his brain, but he kept hoping the sleep sorties would ease off. He’d give it a little more time, and then he would go see the medics, he told himself. Maybe there was something in the air, some trace element the filters weren’t straining out.