Star Wars: Shadow Games (10 page)

“Well, fine then. If it’s a rival or a lieutenant, then the thing to do is let this Vigo know about it and let
him
take care of the problem.”

She grimaced. “I did mention that she’s his ex-girlfriend, right? He doesn’t really care what happens to her … much less to me.”

“If he’s a fan, he might. I mean, look—you’re big business. Chances are good he’s already got credits invested in you, right? If he thinks the galaxy is about to lose the considerable talents of Javul Charn because of some rival of his—or worse yet, one of his own guys …”

“Trust me,” she said. “He won’t care. Alai Jance, wherever she is right now, is of no concern to her notorious ex.” She straightened away from the window and brushed her hands off on her tunic as if wiping the problem away. “Look, we’re going to be docking on Rodia soon. I need to be thinking about my performances.”

“You’re kidding me, right? You’re not seriously going to go through with these gigs?”

She shrugged. “I don’t have a choice, Dash. I’m under contract. A lot of people are depending on me. I can’t let them down.”

She turned away from him and disappeared through the sliding doors that gave onto the quarterdeck, her head held high.

The performances on Rodia were in Equator City. No surprise there … except that Equator City was a hotbed of Black Sun activity—mostly credit laundering—that centered on the network of casinos operating there. Dash would have thought that, under the circumstances, Javul
Charn would want to steer clear of the Rodian capital. He was surprised she’d brought her tour anywhere on Rodia.

He said as much to her as they took a shuttle to the venue from the ultraprivate landing facilities at the spaceport. The venue—the Holosseum—was a huge structure of transparisteel and durasteel big enough to house three
Nova’s Hearts
, the
Outrider
, and the
Millennium Falcon
all at once. It looked, Dash thought, like a giant crystalline egg half buried in the ground, pointy-end up.

“Actually,” she told him, “I feel a bit safer here than elsewhere. Whoever’s after Alai Jance is apparently afraid of the Vigos headquartered here.”

Dash glanced at her sharply. “Vigos headquarter here?”

“One or two—or so I’m told.”

“Yeah? By who?”

“By me, as it happens,” said Spike.

He looked across the shuttle to where the road manager sat facing him. Beside her, Eaden sat cross-legged on the couch, seemingly half asleep. That’s what his lidded eyes said, but his head-tails told a different tale. They were poised in an attitude that Dash thought of as
stealth mode
.

“You? What do
you
know about Black Sun?”

“I was raised on Tatooine. My daddy owned a grog shop until he got bought out by Chalmun.”

“The Cantina?”

She shook her head. “Naw. Little place in Kerner Plaza—Chalmun turned it into a café for his wife. Daddy made a pretty pile of credits on the deal, too. Anyway, you hear lots of interesting things in a grog shop.”

“Yeah. Did you hear which Vigos are holed up on Rodia?”

“I’ve heard a few names tossed around.”

Blasted spiky fem
. “Which names?”

“Guy named Clezo, for one. A Rodian.”

“Sounds familiar—little wiry guy with buggy eyes?”

“Yeah, Clezo’s pretty short. And
all
Rodians have buggy eyes.”

“His are buggier.” Dash thought about the implications of this for a moment. Then he asked, “Who’s the other one?”

She made a face, thinking. “Not a native. Lemme see … oh, a
former
Mandalorian named … what was it?” She looked at Javul, who shrugged and shook her head.

“I try not to pay attention to stuff like that,” Javul demurred.

Dash kept his mouth shut, because if he opened it the frustrated scream that would result would be audible only to an Ortolan.

Spike snapped her fingers. “Kris. That was it, I think. Rumor had it that he sort of wandered in and out of Rodian space and made Clezo nervous.”

“As I recall, just about anything makes Clezo nervous,” Dash said.

Javul turned to look at him. “You know a Vigo? And you were concerned because you thought
I
knew one? Isn’t that kind of a double standard?”

“I wasn’t concerned because I thought you
knew
a Vigo. I was concerned because I thought you’d
crossed
a Vigo. There’s a big difference.”

“But you know a Vigo.”

“Not socially.”

Javul laughed and turned to look out the shuttle window as the vehicle pulled up at the front of the giant crystal egg that was the Holosseum. “And that, I suspect, is Dash-Rendar-ese for I-don’t-wanna-talk-about-it.”

Dash stifled a retort and asked, “Why are we pulling up to the front of the building? Shouldn’t we enter through the stage area?”

“The front is more public. Look.” She canted her head
toward a barricade behind which a large crowd of devoted fans waved and jumped up and down and did whatever else it was that devoted fans did—all at the tops of their lungs, air sacs, bronchi, or whatever respiratory organs they owned.

“You like being noticed, don’t you?”

“I like being
safe
. I figured our zealot wouldn’t be likely to try something major in such a public place—and besides, I can’t exactly sneak past these guys, can I?”

“Sneak past them? You let them know you were coming.”

“No—the adverts did that.”

“Down to the day and hour?”

Spike leaned across the space between them. “They’ve been there all night, laserbrain. Look at the camp gear.”

Dash looked. She was right, of course. Most of the people at the front edge of the crowd had vac-paks, canteens, and expandable sleep-cocoons with them. He even saw a couple of little enviro-tents pitched along a grassy sward. These were the hard-core fans, obviously here for the long haul.

They stepped out of the shuttle onto a broad swathe of glittering duracrete. The humidity hit Dash like a soggy mallet. He looked up at the energy dome over the city. It seemed that, no matter how many advances in technology the Rodians acquired, they couldn’t quite govern their homeworld’s environment. The entire planet seemed like a bog to most humans—a cool, misty bog in the extreme southern and northern climes and a hot, steamy one at the equator.

Dash and Eaden stood flanking Javul Charn, while she waved at the cheering crowds gathered to see her. They were meters away and behind a force barrier, but still, Dash’s gaze swept the fringes and beyond, looking for anything that might be a weapon.

“You’re too exposed here,” he said, taking Javul by
the upper arm. “Let’s get inside.” He was a little surprised when she didn’t resist the suggestion.

It was measurably drier inside the Holosseum, and cooler as well. They made their way into the main hall through a gigantic circular atrium that rose to immense heights, creating the impression of an egg within an egg. Inside, Dash revised his estimate of how many ships the place could hold—he’d been too stingy. The entire broad bottom of the venue was taken up by the stage. The audience would sit in antigrav seats arranged in sections in the curve of the dome. At the moment, those seating sections were sunk into the floor, stacked one atop another so that only the topmost ones were visible. When the audience was admitted, they would file into the seats, filling each section, which would then lift toward the ceiling. Most holo-halls were like this, but Dash had to admit being awfully impressed with the Rodian venue. The only one bigger was the Holodome on Coruscant, and it was of an older design—the audience had to take lifts and mono-jets to fixed seating built into the walls or suspended from high-tensile cabling.

Javul smiled as she stepped up onto the stage. It was made of white, translucent plasteel that glowed like the shell of a Nautolan moon-snail, lit from beneath with soft, ambient light.

“I love performing here. It’s like a shrine.”

Dash followed her onto the stage, peering suspiciously at the gleaming surface underfoot. “Yeah, right. I feel like I’m about to have a religious experience.”

The words were no sooner out of his mouth than a hole appeared in the middle of the stage and irised out as if they stood on the eye of a titanic beast.

“
Drop
!” he shouted, going into a half crouch, blaster already aimed steadily at the hole—out of which appeared the heads and shoulders of Yanus Melikan and his cargo droid.

“Come on,” said the cargo master, his pale eyes focused on the business end of Dash’s weapon. “Do you have to draw that blasted thing
every
time something surprises you?”

Dash glanced at Javul, who was staring at him, wide-eyed … and obviously holding back laughter. Spike didn’t bother to hold it back. She burst into a cascade of unfeminine guffaws that grated on his ears. A second later Javul was laughing, too, though much more attractively. She held out a pacifying hand to Dash, who could only glare from the women to Mel and back again.

“I’m—I’m sorry, Dash, but the look on your face …”

He holstered his weapon and turned to look behind him as a strangely musical hissing caught his ear. Eaden blinked at him, lips drawn into a straight line.

“You did
not
just laugh at me,” Dash told him, pointing an accusing finger.

The Nautolan blinked and said, “As you wish.”

“Well, what am I
supposed
to do? A hole opens up in the floor—”

“We have to bring the equipment in from somewhere,” said Mel mildly. “In a three-dimensional performance space, that somewhere must be below.”

Dash and Eaden explored that “below” as much as possible as the stage gear and holo-emitters were put in place by a mixed stage crew of droids and sentients. It was big and open with few places to hide … until flat after antigrav flat moved Javul Charn’s equipment into place. Then it became a warren.

“Do you have to travel with all this stuff?” Dash asked the star of the show as she watched her setup grow. “Isn’t the whole point of a holoperformance that it’s all—you know—holo?”

“That’s just it,” she said earnestly, leading Dash to discover another
look
that made it hard to remain professional. “Holography has reached such a level that
nothing
is real. I mean, if those people hadn’t seen me walk in the front door, they’d have no way of knowing—if I didn’t make a point of showing them—that I’m really here and not in some studio in Imperial Center. To enhance that effect, I do some of my acts with real props. Wire frames and gantries and fly-hooks.”

“Fly-hooks?” He was confused. “You mean skyhooks?”

She pointed up into the gigantic rotunda, which Dash was sure was big enough to have its own weather system. “I fly. I literally fly, Dash. Not virtually, but really. Not antigrav, either. I use an opti-fiber tether.” She grinned at his horrified expression, then leaned toward him and added, “It’s so thin, it’s invisible.”

For at least the second or third time that day, Dash was speechless. He’d played catch-as-catch-can with Imperial cruisers, navigated asteroid fields, confronted pirates, bounty hunters, Imperial goons, Black Sun operatives, rancor beasts, and even an Inquisitor, but this … For a moment his mind held a horrible image of her dangling, hundreds of meters above a very public stage, suspended by a glowing opti-fiber the thickness of a Gamorrean’s nose hair. If someone were to cut that slender lifeline …

“Under normal circumstances, Javul, none of this would bother me—well, okay, it would bother me a little. But these aren’t normal circumstances. If they were I wouldn’t be here.”

She put a hand on his arm. “I’m a pro at this, Dash. I’ve done it hundreds of times. I’m as much in my element up there—” She nodded at the faraway ceiling. “—as you are piloting your ship. Don’t you have
anything
you do that most people think is just nuts, but you do it anyway … because you
can
?”

He flashed for a moment on the Kessel Run and the maneuver that had gotten him and Eaden into this situation. He hated that what she said almost made sense to him.
Almost
.

“Eaden,” he said.

His first mate responded with a grunt.

“You stay here and keep an eye on our little holostar. I’m going to take Leebo and head back to the Rodian flight control office at the spaceport. I want to see if I can scare up any intel on that coded piece of sabotage we picked up. Like for instance who sent it.”

Javul made a pouty face. “You’re going to miss my rehearsal.”

He gave her an icy look. It had been known to terrify younger, less experienced space jockeys. She just laughed.

The Equator City Flight Control Authority was abuzz with activity. Dash’s polite request to review the outgoing messages to the
Nova’s Heart
got him exactly nowhere. Frustrated, he filed a formal complaint with flight control, stating that the ship had been sent erroneous information. That at least got him some attention.

“What sort of erroneous information?” asked the midlevel Rodian functionary.

“Information that caused the ship to register an imaginary hull breach. Our security systems went berserk and shut off part of the ship. The ship’s owner was almost suffocated in her own quarters.” A bit of an exaggeration never hurt.

The Rodian flight admin consulted his holo-terminal. “The
Nova’s Heart
docked two standard hours ago. Presumably this exchange of false information occurred somewhat earlier?”

“On planetary approach. It was part of the second packet of instructions our navicomp received from your control.”

The Rodian shrugged. “A diagnostic would have been run since then. I’m sure the anomaly was cleared up.”

“This wasn’t an anomaly,” said Dash carefully, just managing to quell the urge to drag the bug-eyed imp out
of his seat and dig into the guts of the system himself. “It was a very specific and very dangerous instruction set.”

The Rodian blinked. “You’re suggesting it was deliberate?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. Now if you’d be so kind as to let me go back over the communications between this facility and the
Nova’s Heart
?”