Star Wars: Shadow Games (20 page)

He’d just barely hauled himself into the meager alcove when the ship stopped moving, the grav-plate came back on, and the containers slammed to the floor with a sound like the shot of a laser cannon. The cylindrical container—a good two meters in length and as wide as Dash was tall—had bounced off the floor and was rolling toward him, one end angling into the hatchway where he stood. He pressed himself back against the hatch.

“
Eaden
!”

The hatch behind him opened, spilling him onto the deck beyond, then slapped shut again—an act punctuated by a bone-jarring thud of the container rolling against it. Dash lay on the deck panting, his heart rocketing around in his chest.

Eaden offered him a hand up. “What happened?”

“The chamber gravity failed when we dropped out of hyperspace. And if your next question is if I think this was an accident, the answer is
no.
” He turned, then, on the solitary cargo droid he’d left posted to guard the hold. “Did you allow anyone else access to this hold?” he demanded.

“Negative,” the droid responded curtly.

“Negative,” Dash repeated, adrenaline pushing his temper higher. “Look, you bucket of mismatched bolts—”

Eaden’s hand came down on his shoulder. “As I have previously noted, verbally bludgeoning a droid is a futile gesture. I suggest we check the other cargo bays.”

Dash nodded. They made their way forward to cargo bay number two and opened the hatch. Every container was in its place. The main hold and belowdecks compartments were similarly untouched.

Dash turned from the orderly stacks of equipment to meet Eaden’s gaze. “Well, this is special.”

The Nautolan blinked slowly. “You have a talent for understatement.”

W
ITH THE
M
ILLENNIUM
F
ALCON
PARKED ON THE
pocked surface of a large asteroid, Dash gathered everyone in the crew’s commons. Except for Leebo, everyone looked grim. The sudden loss of gravity in the cargo bay seemed clearly to be sabotage. The questions now were: when had it been done, how, and by whom?

Leebo was able to answer the second question through the simple expedient of uplinking with the
Falcon
’s system and tracking down the anomaly. It was indeed in the artificial gravity system, but not at the control panel in the affected cargo bay. It was in a circuitry box in the engineering station off the main hold, which meant …

“Anybody could have messed with it,” muttered Dash.

“Anybody, of necessity, being one of us.” The quiet observation came from Mel.

Dash turned to look at the group gathered around the table in the crew’s commons. Mel, Nik, Javul, and Spike. Eaden leaned against the aft bunks looking inscrutable, his tresses subtly sniffing the air. Leebo stood next to him. Han lounged in the doorway, mostly watching Javul.

“Either that or we’ve got a stowaway,” said Spike.

“I can’t say that’s impossible, but it’s highly improbable,” argued Mel. “We checked the contents of every single container before we put it aboard.”

“I suppose someone could have snuck aboard while we were doing preflight prep,” said Dash. “Run up the
landing ramp as it was being raised or climbed up one of the landing struts.”

“Is that likely?” asked Javul.

Han made a rude noise and straightened from the doorway. “It’s impossible. There’s no way anybody could sneak aboard this ship without me knowing it.”

Dash found himself wishing ardently that that was a big fat exaggeration and that they
did
have a stowaway, because the alternative was thoroughly unpleasant to contemplate. He scanned their faces again—Spike, Mel, Nik. He didn’t know either the Farlion woman or Melikan nearly as well as Javul did—or
thought
she did. And Mel’s access to the equipment and his look-the-other-way policies made him an especially likely suspect. But if Mel was working for Hitch Kris, then logically he was only responsible for what was annoying and inconvenient, not what was potentially fatal.

Until now.

And this last nastiness had been aimed at Dash, not Javul Charn.

Dash felt a little niggle of something like pride at the thought. Apparently, someone felt he was getting too close to discovering them and had decided to take him out of the picture. One of the people in this room was probably disappointed right now. He just needed to figure out which one.

Nik? He balked at suspecting the Sullustan. He was just a kid. Still, even a kid could be coerced or coaxed into doing heinous things if the incentives were right.

Leebo uttered a soft bleep. “Pardon me for interrupting and all that, but this particular sabotage didn’t require the saboteur to stay on board. The grav-plate and the panel controls were impeded by an itty-bitty damper in the hold’s power bus where it was routed through the engineering terminal. The damper was set to detect state changes in the hyperdrive, so it kicked in when we
dropped out of hyperspace and let only the minimum of power through.”

Dash nodded. “To keep from triggering the system alarms.”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” said Leebo. “But here’s the deal, boss—if that trap was set up before we even left Tatooine, then it’s not much of a trap, is it? How would the saboteur know anyone would be in the hold at the moment we dropped out of hyperspace?”

Dash shot the droid a narrow look. “I thought you were arguing for a hit-and-run saboteur. If the plate was meant to go belly-up while I was in the hold, then you’re saying it couldn’t have been preset.”

“I know this will be a blow to your colossal ego,” the droid retorted, “but what I’m saying is that maybe
you
weren’t the target.”

“Why else would someone want the containers in that particular hold to go flying and none of the others?”

“Good question. I suppose it could’ve been a coincidence.”

“I
so
don’t believe in coincidence.” Dash turned to Mel. “What’s in that chamber? What sort of equipment?”

The cargo master answered without pausing to think about it. “The largest pieces of the framework, the antigrav generators—primary and backup—the big holographic arrays …”

“Could the intent have been to damage them?”

Mel shrugged. “I suppose. But if any of it sustained damage—which we’d find before we used any of it again—then we’d either pull in the backup units from
Deep Core
, restructure the performance so as to not require that equipment, or cancel.”

Dash met the other man’s eyes in a long, challenging look. “You mean
you’d
find the damage.
You’d
tell us whether it was dire or not. Kind of like you told us what happened in the
Heart
’s hold during that stealth fighter
attack. Or like you were the one who indirectly routed us back to Tatooine by saying we’d never make Edic Bar.”

Mel didn’t rise to the bait, but Spike did.

“Oh, for the love of—” she sputtered. “You’re completely
mad
, you know that? I mean, you might as well suspect me.”

“Who says I don’t?”

Javul shook her head. “I will not believe—”

Mel put his hand on her arm. “No, Javul. Dash is right to suspect me. Quite honestly, if I’d been doing my job right … most of this stuff shouldn’t have happened. I should have caught it. If I were in your shoes, Dash, I’d suspect me, too. But Dara can’t be a suspect—she’s been with Javul since the beginning.”

“Since
before
the beginning,” corrected Spike coldly. The glare she gave Dash would have soldered a lesser man to the deck.

Javul, meanwhile, had turned her pale gaze on Yanus Melikan, the two of them trading a long, significant look that Dash couldn’t begin to decipher. It ended when Mel dropped his gaze with a slight shake of his head. What did that mean? And what was Dash to make of that sudden wrinkling of Javul’s brow?

Whatever it meant, he still had insufficient evidence to accuse anyone—even the cargo master—of the sabotage. He turned back to Leebo.

“So you think the sabotage was in place before we left and the damper was set to fire when we dropped out of hyperspace.”

“Or went back
into
hyperspace. State change, remember? That much I can say for sure. What I can’t tell you is if there was a second trigger. Say, someone entering the cargo bay … or someone triggering the impedance remotely.”

“So there’s no way to know if the sabotage was aimed at a person or at the equipment,” said Dash.

“Well, I guess we won’t know that unless whoever it was is on board and tries again,” said Han. Then the expression on his face did a flip-flop that Dash would have found comical under other circumstances. “Wait—state change? We have to go
back
into hyperspace. What if there’s another one of those power dampers somewhere in the system? Or something worse?”

Leebo swiveled his head toward Han. “That would be bad.”

Han moved to stand face-to-faceplate with the droid. “Could you detect it?”

“Maybe. Probably, now that I know what to look for.”

Han pointed a finger at the spot between Leebo’s optics. “Then get down to the engineering console and start going through the systems. I’m gonna get us off this rock as soon as I can—which means you’d better have the systems completely checked out before we reach the far edge of this field.”

“Why don’t you ask me to teleport us to Christophsis while you’re at it?”

Han was starting to visibly seethe. “You got a problem, tin man?”

“Yeah, skin job, I got a problem. It will take us approximately three hours and forty-two minutes to cross this asteroid field, allowing for orbital fluctuations. Which is insufficient time to do more than a spot check of the ship’s systems.”

“Then split the duty with the other droid—what’s-his-name, Oto? You should be able to do it in half the time.”

“Your grasp of higher mathematics is stunning, Captain Solo,” Leebo said. “I’m sure Oto will appreciate your vote of confidence.”

Leebo left to retrieve Oto from the number three hold, managing to look stiffer than was normal for a droid. Han gave Javul a deferential and insipid bow, then went to the cockpit.

Dash, who’d watched the interchange with amusement, pulled his mind back to the matter at hand. “Javul, what would happen if your equipment was so badly damaged that you couldn’t perform on Christophsis?”

“Like Mel said: Worst case, we’d have to cancel. Best case, we’d go with a scaled-down performance. Either way, we’d have to replace or repair the equipment.”

“Which would throw you off schedule.”

“Yeah. Yeah, it would.” She was looking at her hands folded on the table—smoothing the gleaming, light-emitting fingernails she affected.

“Is that a big deal?”

“Are you kidding?” asked Spike. “We’d lose millions of credits. Ticket refunds, pay-or-play for venues we didn’t use, possibly having to rent them again for a makeup performance—if that was even possible. There’s no telling how the promoters and shareholders in the enterprise might react. Plus, it would be a public relations disaster.”

“Oh, c’mon,” Dash objected. “I’m sure you could spin it so that Javul’s adoring public would just be glad she was alive. Stealth attacks on your ship, equipment tampering, black lilies—even I can see value in that sort of publicity.”

“We have to keep to our schedule,” Javul said adamantly. “If we don’t—the saboteur wins.”

There was a measured silence, broken when Eaden said, “It appears we can’t even be certain of the motive or motives for this continued sabotage, let alone the perpetrator. Is the saboteur among us, or hiding aboard somewhere—or, having done his work, has he simply gone on his way?”

If only
, Dash thought,
it could be that simple
.

“I saw you sniffing around over there,” he told the Nautolan later. “You get anything from the room?”

“Just a sense that almost everyone in it was concealing something.”

“Almost? Who’s
not
concealing something?”

“Han Solo. His attraction to Javul Charn is palpable.”

“Great. That makes me feel
so
much better.”

T
HEY REACHED
C
HRISTOPHSIS WITHOUT FURTHER INCIDENT
. Leebo and Oto found no more dampers or other surprises in the
Millennium Falcon
’s systems. Did that mean, Dash wondered, that the saboteur had been left behind on Tatooine—or that the saboteur merely wanted them to
think
that?

He’d asked everyone aboard—one by one—if they’d observed any other members of the
Nova’s Heart
crew near the
Falcon
’s berth on Tatooine before they lifted off. The results were inconclusive. Arruna had been there—Dash had seen that—but he’d swear she’d done nothing but fraternize with Eaden. And Dara had acknowledged that Captain Marrak had “been around.” But being “around” and getting access to the secondary engineering terminal were two different things.

Christophsis was one of Dash’s favorite ports of call, despite the fact that it was an Imperial mining hub. He liked the scenery. The entire surface of the planet was covered with huge crystals upon, within, and around which the major cities were built. He also liked the underground. He’d smuggled cargoes of raw crystals and ore out of Crystal City in the
Outrider
more than once. The thought made him wistful for his ship. He was beginning to wonder if he’d ever fly the old girl again.

Javul’s concert was set in an amphitheater in the capital city of Chaleydonia, otherwise known as Crystal City. There they reunited with the rest of the tour—something
that made Dash’s stomach feel as if it were trying to eat itself from the inside out. He assigned Leebo and Oto to keep an eye on things, and oversaw Leebo’s reprogramming of the cargo droids to be especially aware of the actions of any sentients within range of their optics and aural units. He even ordered them to keep their olfactory detectors at maximum, and to report anything that smelled funny.

The venue was a wonderland, Dash had to admit. The entire amphitheater was constructed out of the native crystal—including the encircling fence of spires. Lit by Javul’s light show and used as a backdrop for her holograms, those spires shimmered and pulsed, reaching toward the sky and seeming, sometimes, to connect with space itself. The sense of being planetbound evaporated, leaving the audience gasping as Javul floated, flew, and walked among stars and planets, a creature of light and mist.