Razor's Edge: Star Wars (Empire and Rebellion) (10 page)

“No. But we might be looking to get into it. I wanted to take a look at a working operation, see if something similar would be feasible for us.” This was an even more tenuous combination of a little truth and a lot of lie, and Leia hoped Viest would interpret any faint signs of agitation on her part as normal criminal caginess.

Instead of answering, Viest poured herself another drink and lifted the bottle inquiringly. Keeping her expression neutral, Leia held out her glass for a refill, while silently cursing her own impatience.
I think I made a mistake.

After a short time Han, Sian, and Terae rounded a curve in the docking ring corridor and found themselves out of sight and earshot of the guards at the bay doors. There seemed no benefit to staying up here, so Han hung the grappling hook over the edge of the droid track and they climbed the three meters to the corridor floor. Once they were down, as he was storing the hook and fibercord in the satchel, Terae whispered, “What are we supposed to do if someone sees us?”

“Act like we belong here,” Han told her. It seemed pretty obvious. With so many ships berthed here or in orbit, there was no way anyone could keep track of who might be wandering around, and it wasn't as if the pirates wore uniforms. “That should be easy for you.”

Terae stiffened in offense, but she couldn't manage to find a reply before Han and Sian started down the corridor.

The place was quiet, shadowy, and daunting, and stank of rot and bad recycled air. Though Han had seen worse. The closed bay doors they passed seemed weirdly menacing, as if they concealed something other than empty docking chambers. He was reminded of old stories of dead ports and space stations, abandoned due to plagues or strange catastrophes, and what happened to the idiot crews who landed on them anyway. He could tell Terae was a little unnerved and trying unsuccessfully to hide it. Sian walked with one hand hooked on her blaster like a sensible person, her expression giving nothing away.

Han heard voices and dissonant music echoing from somewhere and then the docking ring split, one section ending in a wall of rock while the second turned into a ramp that curved down to a junction of three corridors. Spot-lumas floated around, lighting the area. And in there, a party was going on.

In the middle of the junction a large piece of machinery lay on its side, so gutted that Han almost couldn't tell what it was from this angle. Then he spotted the arms with mounted tool extensions and thought it must be an old-style mining droid. A bar had been set up inside the gutted machine, and two pale yellow Bith, whose height and large heads made them stand out above the crowd, were serving liquor out of pressure containers. The customers sat on makeshift chairs and tables that had clearly been fashioned from leftover pieces of the dead droid. Off to the side, under an awning made from the domes that had once covered the droid's repulsors, a group of musicians played.

Han swore under his breath. There was no way around this spot without backtracking past the guards at the
Aegis
's bay doors. Keeping her voice low, Sian asked, “We're going to have to go through that?”

“Yeah.” Han wasn't thrilled about it. He only hoped that he was right about this place getting so much traffic that there was no way to tell who should be here and who shouldn't. And that this wasn't a private, invitation-only party.

Terae stepped forward to look down on the bar. “Since we have to go down there anyway, you think we could ask someone where they keep the prisoners?”

Sian said, “
You
could ask them.”

Terae glared at her and started to make an angry reply, but Sian continued, “No, I'm serious. You're supposed to be working with these people. Ask them what you do with a captured merchant crew.”

Terae hesitated, then pasted a tough expression on her face. “All right, I will.”

“Just watch what you say,” Han told her.

Terae's demeanor clearly conveyed that she didn't want or need his advice. As she started down the ramp, Han found himself exchanging an exasperated look with Sian.
These kids really have no clue what kind of game they've bought into.
He wondered if Metara did.

As they walked down the ramp, some of the drinkers paused to eye them, but nobody objected to their arrival. There were a variety of beings scattered around the seating area, a few Han recognized as being from the Mid Rim, like the reptilian Trandoshan, but most others were from farther afield. Near the band, lounging around or dancing languidly, were a number of sentients—some human—wearing slave collars. They were also wearing a lot fewer clothes than any of the patrons at the tables, so it was pretty easy to guess what kind of entertainment they were there to provide.

Han led the way up to the makeshift serving area, mostly to have something to do while scoping out the crowd. The mix of strong, acrid scents from the pressure containers made his throat itch, but it was actually a relief from the rot and mold in the air. The Bith who was serving handed them metal cups without asking what they wanted. Han sniffed his and found it was some kind of alcohol laced with ryll, and strong enough that the fumes almost made his eyeballs melt. The Bith didn't ask for payment, and no money was exchanging hands anywhere in the bar, leading Han to believe this must be a service provided free for the crews who docked here.

Terae downed half her drink in one shot, then split off to approach a group of aliens whom Han recognized as Letaki: bulbous heads, four eyes, beaked mouths that looked like they'd make drinking uncomfortable but not—judging from the drunken way they were waving their tentacles around—impossible. Good choice, he thought: They would likely be too unfamiliar with human expressions to find Terae's behavior suspicious. Han made a mental note not to file Terae away as too ignorant to be dangerous, despite her naïveté about the
Aegis
's current activities.

Han left the bar to look for a spot away from the band area and out of earshot of others, where he and Sian could blend in with the scenery. Near the edge of the crowd, he found a bench made out of one of the dead droid's armatures, and he and Sian took seats on it.

Sian tasted her drink and grimaced. Han didn't know her well. He had seen her on the
Independence
a few times, when he was killing time with Luke and the other pilots. Watching Terae and keeping her voice low, she said, “Solo, do you think the Princess has a chance of pulling this off?”

“Of getting the flightmaster to let us leave? Maybe.” Han figured it was far more likely that they would have to blast their way out at some point. He just hoped they could find a way to do it that wouldn't involve being blown to pieces by all the heavily armed and probably twitchy trigger-fingered ships in orbit.

“No, I mean, does she have a chance of recruiting these Alderaanians into the Alliance?”

Han thought there wasn't much chance of that. He thought Leia more than capable of convincing some of the individual crew members to give up piracy, but as a group they were too stubborn and too attached to Metara. Since saying so felt like he would be undermining Leia without her being there to defend herself, he said, “I don't know. And as long as we get out of here, I don't care.”

“I don't think Metara is going to change her mind. And I talked to some of the crew.” Sian shook her head. “It's just … Maybe I don't understand where they're coming from. My family didn't want me to join the Alliance. They aren't Imperials, but they're comfortable on Commenor and they don't believe in rocking the ship. But I saw and heard enough about the Empire that I knew I had to do something. I don't know how I would have felt if … Well, if my home had been destroyed, much less the whole planet, nothing could have stopped me from joining the Alliance to kill as many Imperials as I could. I can't imagine just sitting on the sidelines.”

Han figured that if there was anything that could get someone to risk it all and join the Rebel Alliance, it would be having their home planet shot out from under them by the Empire. But just because Sian couldn't imagine something didn't mean there weren't people who would do it. He had seen the Alderaanians on Yavin and with the fleet go through shock and survivor guilt, breaking down, burying themselves in their work, or dedicating themselves to revenge.

Leia, though, was a special case. She was the only one who had watched it happen from the front-row seat of the Death Star, and she was the only one who felt personally responsible for it. It was too much for one person, even Leia, and there were times when he had seen the pain of it tearing at her. It frustrated him that she felt it was somehow all her fault, but he knew there was nothing he could say about it that wouldn't make it worse, or just lead to a shouting fight.

She was also the only one who might have a chance of cracking Metara's defenses, but Han couldn't shake the feeling that it was all going to end in disaster. Sian was still waiting for a reply, so he just said, “She might break Metara down—there's no telling yet.”

Sian sighed. “I know the Princess is tough, tougher than most people realize. But I don't know if thinking she can talk sense to Metara is irrational or … inspired.”

“I wonder that a lot myself,” Han admitted. Some days things did fall more on the irrational end of the scale. Though he was pretty certain Leia felt the same way about him, probably with more reason.

They watched Terae work the Letaki crew. Han tossed his drink back just to get rid of it. Sian managed to unobtrusively pour the rest of hers into the armature's innards.

Terae returned, her face flushed from the liquor, and said, “They told me how it works. We need to go down this way, and then cut back toward the docking ring.”

They left the junction and the party behind and started down the ramp. It was darker through this section, the floating lumas less frequent, and there was more debris in the corridor. Smaller doorways led to corridors that were shrouded in darkness or blocked by rubble and metal debris. This place was like a large and unappealing shadowport, only you
knew
that everybody was a pirate, instead of just suspecting it. Han felt his nerves itch even worse than they had before and wished he had brought Chewie. It had seemed more important at the time to get the sensor jammer installed immediately, mostly because he was afraid someone would change their mind and pull it for a more important ship. There were people in the Alliance who didn't like the fact that Princess Leia Organa kept company with a Corellian smuggler, and none of them would be happy that the
Falcon
had gotten one of the coveted jammers, even though it had been in payment for services rendered.

And maybe spending so much time with the Alliance fleet had gotten him out of the habit of places like this. Han was getting too used to being able to walk around without worrying about getting shot in the back or worse.
You're losing your edge, Solo,
he told himself.
You've got to do something about that.

Once they were well out of earshot of the bar, Terae said, “We were on the right track—the holding area is near where the
Wastrel
docked. They bring the people they capture here, mostly crews and passengers off ships, but some of the bigger pirates will raid small backwater settlements. They hold them here until one of the slaving guild ships comes to collect them. The slavers pick who they want and bargain with the flightmaster, who takes the payment and parcels it out to the individual crews. No one is happy with the system, from what I could tell. They all think the flightmaster is cheating them.”

“Of course the flightmaster's cheating them,” Han said. “That's the only reason you set up a system like that—so you can cheat everybody dumb enough to use it.”

Sian said, “What do they do with the people the slavers don't want?”

Terae shook her head. “I didn't ask.”

Han had no intention of letting her get away with that. “They get spaced. Or if they're lucky, they get shot and then spaced,” he said. “What did you think?”

Terae pressed her lips together, then drew breath to answer.

That was when the first figure dropped out of the ceiling. Han ducked sideways and drew his blaster; he fired at the two nearest and hit one. Their attackers were dressed in filthy dark clothing, their heads covered, so ragged Han couldn't tell if they were human or not. They were armed only with old tools, which would have been almost laughable except for the fact that one of those tools was a hand rock drill. One landed on Sian, but she had her hand on her blaster and fired it through the holster as she went down. Wounded in the leg, her assailant jerked backward off her, and she scrambled to her feet.

Terae wrestled with one while another danced around, trying to hit her with an arc wrench. Han shot the dancer, then something hit him from behind hard enough to knock him flat, though pure survival instinct made him keep his grip on his blaster. He twisted and rolled and managed to grab the pry bar with his free hand before it hit his skull. The guy was panting in his face, growling, but Han was mad, too. He jerked his blaster down and fired point-blank. The guy went limp with a cry, and Han wrenched the pry bar away and tossed the body off him. Another landed on him before he could get up, but Sian kicked that attacker in the head. Han shoved him off and rolled to his feet.

Four of their attackers sprawled unmoving on the floor, two limped rapidly off into the shadows, and one had a blaster burn in his leg and struggled to stand. Someone yelled an incomprehensible order and the others broke off, bolting for the nearest openings. Two paused to grab the wounded one and haul him away. Han watched them disappear down the shadowy tunnels and then pivoted, making sure no others were nearby. He remembered to look up this time, too.

Terae eased up out of a crouch and demanded, “What was that?”

Breathing hard, Sian looked at Han. “Dock thieves?”