Star Wars: Shadow Games (32 page)

Great, now
both
his cheeks hurt. And now Javul was glaring at him, too, gripping the edge of the sofa until her knuckles were white.

“Black Sun is
already
in it, Dash. Xizor is in it. Up to his neck.” She raised her eyes to D’Vox again, while Dash wiped blood from a split lip. “They were running contraband in my ship. Turning me into a mule for their secret business. I decided I was tired of being the only one who wasn’t benefiting from the situation. So, I decided to … take things into my own hands.”

Dash gaped at her.
What
?

He got it when D’Vox’s eyes widened, showing a combination of unease and respect. “You stole from Black Sun?”

“Let’s just say I took a cut. Xizor didn’t like it. He made
Hitch pay out of his own deep pockets. Which, well …” She smiled. “Let’s just say Hitch wasn’t too happy with me, either.”

“Which one hired Edge?” growled Rishyk. He spoke to Javul, but his eyes were still on Dash, as if he was just waiting for the other man to do something stupid that he could punish him for.

“We don’t know,” Dash mumbled. “All we know is that when their attempt to kill her on Rodia failed, they got sore and blew up the venue she was performing in.”

Okay, a bit of a stretch, but it had the desired effect. Both D’Vox and Rishyk took a semi-step back from Javul as if they suddenly didn’t want to be quite so close to her.

“We came here because we thought it was safer,” added Javul. “We figured with the Imperial presence here, they wouldn’t try anything. I guess we were wrong.”

“So,” said D’Vox after a moment of thought, “if we turn you over to Xizor, everyone is happy, right? Well, except you two, of course.”

Dash nearly groaned aloud. That was not the desired effect. He glanced at Mel, who had turned from his view of the balcony to listen. Mel gave Javul a look and reached up to scratch the back of his neck.

“In case you hadn’t noticed,” Javul said quietly, “Xizor is not asking to have me turned over to him. He’s trying to kill me and he doesn’t much care who comes along for the ride. His agents are probably somewhere on the station already. They’ll know that Edge failed, of course …”

Rishyk growled like a dog and made a frustrated gesture. “Let’s get them off the station, D’Vox, before Black Sun takes their failure out on us.”

That’s more like it
.

D’Vox was shaking his head. “No, we can make sunshine out of this, I’m sure of it. We just need to let Xizor and Kris know that we’ve got their pretty little playmate. I have to hand it to you, though, girl. You’ve got some
amazing gall to pull this sort of thing off in such a public way.”

She smiled at him, but Dash could see the fear in her eyes. “Thank you. But I’ve also got an amazing amount of credits to my name. Enough to make you very forgetful about everything that’s happened.”

D’Vox was shaking his head again, which caused Rishyk to get right up in his face—literally standing nose-to-nose with him.

“Blast you, D’Vox! What are you playing at? You’re commander of an Imperial fracking fuel dump on the backside of nowhere. You do
not
want to get directly involved with Black Sun. Turning a blind eye to their business here is one thing, but doing business
with
them is suicide. I say we take the credits she’s offering and get them off the station.”

“And
I
say—” D’Vox began, but they never heard what he was going to say because at that moment the chamber doors hissed open.

The two guards, who’d been focusing their entire attention on the argument, were taken completely unawares when Dara and Nik appeared, both armed with a blaster in each hand. To the kid’s credit, his hands didn’t even shake. He held his blasters steadily on the party in the room while Spike ran the show.

“Everyone just drop your weapons, okay?”

Rishyk’s blaster muzzle wavered slightly.

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said a voice from the other side of the room. “I just had the firing mechanism on this old piece of mine fixed and I’m not quite comfortable with the new trigger action yet.” Han Solo stood in the balcony doorway. His “old piece” was aimed at Rishyk’s midsection. “Pulls a bit easier than I’m used to.”

The DL-44 “accidentally” went off, drilling a smoking hole in the bulkhead right beside Rishyk, who flinched.
“Okay,” Han continued, “it pulls a
lot
easier. Sorry; I’ll try’n make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Mel was armed now as well, with a hold-out blaster that had appeared magically out of the collar of his jacket. Spike relieved the guards, D’Vox, and Rishyk of their weapons, then marched them into the refresher. She closed the doors, fused the controls with a blast from her pistol, then herded Javul and Dash toward the balcony.

“We’ve got all kinds of chatter on Imperial bands,” she told Javul. “Something’s shaking and we can’t afford to get caught up in it.”

As Dash limped across the threshold and stepped out into the night, he saw that Han had brought the
Millennium Falcon
right up the central core of the station’s rearranged modules. She hovered at balcony height, her hatch wide open and spilling welcoming light across the duracrete surface. They were aboard within thirty seconds. Han relieved Leebo of the pilot’s seat and dropped them down out of the station core. They hurtled into hyperspace the moment they were clear of the planet’s gravity well.

“Can I have a word?” Dash stood in the hatchway of the
Millennium Falcon
’s “guest” quarters, his eyes watchfully on the two women who sat, cross-legged, on the bunks facing each other.

If he’d come across them in another setting, under other circumstances, he’d have said they looked like a couple of girlfriends—one consoling the other after a tragic breakup. It was hard to believe that less than half an hour ago Javul had been literally a knife’s edge away from death.

Spike made a crooked grimace and pointed at Javul. “A word with her, you mean?”

He nodded.

The obviously weary road manager rose from her bunk
and moved past him out the door. “Don’t freak her out any more than she is already,” she warned him. “And don’t take too long. We both need to sleep.”

He nodded, slipping into the room to sit next to Javul on her bunk. “Hey,” she said. He thought her eyes were wary, haunted.

“You okay?” he asked. “I mean, really okay? That was … tough … out there.”

“Me? Are
you
? I mean, you …” She put her hand over his where it rested on his thigh. “I’m so sorry. About Eaden. He was … he was …” A tear ran down her cheek. She tried to wipe it away and missed.

Dash reached up reflexively and brushed it aside with his thumb. “I’m … I’ll be all right. In a while. I’ve lost friends before. It …” He laughed humorlessly and shook his head.

“You were going to say it gets easier, weren’t you? But it doesn’t.”

She sounded so sure of that, he turned his head to look at her. “Who did you lose?”

“My mother and father. When I was fourteen. We were living on Nar Shaddaa at the time.”

He frowned. “I thought you were born and raised on Coruscant.” Light dawned. “Cover story.”

She nodded. “My younger brother, Ayx, and I went to Tatooine to live with Dara’s family. Our fathers were close friends. Served together in the Republic space corps.”

“Let me guess—the Imperials had something to do with it.”

She nodded again. “The Imperials always have something to do with it.”

“Yeah. Seems like they’re at the bottom of everything dark and scary.” It struck him suddenly that even Prince Xizor thought the Empire was dark and scary. He wondered if the prince was reminded of his own loss every
time he had a brush with Vader or Palpatine. “What happened?” he asked.

She shrugged. “The Empire didn’t want to risk an uprising. All those well-trained ex-soldiers and ex-pilots were a threat. Even if they were just farmers and merchants and musicians now, maybe someday, under the right circumstances, they could be incited to fight again. So …” Again, the eloquent shrug. “They got rid of them. Mom and Dad were musicians. They toured the Mid and Outer Rim. Hutt space, sometimes. Trying to keep a low profile. Wasn’t low enough; Imperials staged a raid on the venue they were playing on Bothawui. When the shooting stopped, Mom and Dad and three members of their band were dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me, too. But they knew what they were doing was dangerous. Ayx and I both understood they were doing it for us.”

He peered into her face. “You’re saying they were in the resistance.”

“The rambling life of a musician makes a great cover for running information.” She grimaced. “Mel didn’t exactly recruit me. When I was old enough, I went looking for him.”

“And your brother?”

“He’s working with a cell on Alderaan. I was hoping I’d get to see him. If we’d been able to stick to our original plan, that might’ve worked out.” Javul stifled a yawn. “Is your family … I mean, I know you lost your brother, Stanton.”

“My parents are still alive … after a fashion. I haven’t seen them for years. I’m not even sure where they are. Losing Stanton and the business at the same time … changed them. Changed all of us.”

He felt Javul’s weight against his shoulder and shifted to put his arm around her. He looked down, expecting
to find the large silver eyes trained on him, filled with compassion, maybe something more—

And then her eyes slowly closed, her head became a deadweight against his arm. He sighed and lowered her gently to the bed. She didn’t wake. Dash kissed her forehead, hesitated a moment, then set a kiss on her lips for good measure.

Out in the corridor, he headed immediately for the cockpit. He had to talk Han into getting them at least as far as Corellia. They’d be able to get another ship there, he was sure of it.

He found Han in the pilot’s seat, hands on the steering yoke, staring moodily out into the void. He dropped into the copilot’s station and succumbed to inertia.

“You can’t sleep there,” Han said.

The edge in the other man’s voice made Dash sit up and study him. He looked grim. And who could blame him?

“Look.” Dash sighed. “I know you’re itching to off-load us at the earliest opportunity. You’ll be rid of us as soon as we can rendezvous with the
Nova’s Heart
. I wish I could tell you when that will be exactly, but I’m not in Javul’s inner circle. Captain Marrak will call us when—”

“You trying to be insulting, Rendar? Why would you want the
Nova’s Heart
when you’ve got the
Millennium Falcon
?”

“What?”

“I’m taking you to Alderaan.”

Dash sat forward in the copilot’s seat and studied the side of Han’s face. “Why? Before, you couldn’t get rid of us fast enough. What changed?”

Han was silent for a moment, then turned to look at him, his gaze impenetrable. “Y’know what I’ve been thinking about, sitting up here alone?”

“No.”

“That empty copilot’s chair.” He nodded toward the seat Dash now held. “I’ve been thinking about how I’d
feel if it was permanently empty—if it’d been Chewie out there tonight.”

Dash nodded, meeting Han’s eyes dead-on. No more needed to be said.

Han turned back to the view through the forward viewport. “I picked up some subspace chatter from Bannistar. They haven’t retrieved the bodies yet. They think they fell into a loch on the outskirts of a refinery complex.”

Dash took a deep breath. “I hope they never do find them. Edge doesn’t deserve a ritual burial and Eaden … Eaden’s at home in the water.”

Several moments of silence elapsed before Han said: “That was the good news. The bad news is they’ve scrambled two Imperial corvettes and a Dreadnought from Bannistar to chase us down. The even worse news is there’s a Star Destroyer en route from Byblos.”

“Squeeze play, huh?”

Han’s grin was wicked. “Not if we’re not there to be squeezed. Besides, from what I can tell, they’re heading for Bacrana. Of course, they’ll realize we’re not with the
Deep Core
at some point, but by then I hope we’ll be off their star charts. After all, we could be going to any number of places.” He swept Dash with a wry gaze, then added, “You look like a rancor’s leftovers, Dash. Why don’t you go get some chow and some sleep? I’ll get us to Alderaan.”

Dash
was
tired. Soul-weary, mind-numb, bone-tired. He nodded and dragged himself out of the seat.

Leebo met him as he stepped into the corridor behind the cockpit. “Where you going, boss?”

“To sleep, Leebo. I’m going to sleep. It’s this thing organics do.”

“I need you to take a bit of a detour first.”

Dash sagged against a bulkhead. “Can it wait?”

“Not really.”

“All right, but make it quick, okay? I’m about to fall asleep on my feet.”

“Thanks, boss. I got something in the forward hold I think you should see.”

Leebo led the way. There, amid the jumble of containers, stood Mel’s Otoga 222 unit, unmoving and seemingly dormant. After a moment of inspection, Dash realized he’d been fitted with a restraining bolt.

“What’s wrong with Oto?”

“That’s a matter of opinion, but offhand I’d say somebody seriously tinkered with his programming.”

“What do you mean—tinkered with his programming?”

“Well, boss, for one thing, while you and the lady were having your wild ride on the Helix, he was trying to shoot through your lifeline.”

D
ASH WAS FULLY AWAKE BY THE TIME
M
EL RESPONDED
to his hail and came forward to the cargo hold. If it pumped up Dash’s adrenal gland, Leebo’s revelation was enough to knock the cargo master’s props out from under him. He sat down hard on his makeshift bunk, staring at his droid.

“
Oto
?
Oto
was shooting at the Helix tether?”

Leebo nodded, servos humming softly.

“Why? Why would he do that?”

“Maybe the same reason he picked my brain when he gave me the specs for the holo-emitters.”

“Explain,” said Mel.

“When we got back from getting your container, Dash had me help Oto set up the holo-emitters for the show. When Oto passed me the specs, he picked my brain—literally. He tapped my memory core to see what I’d been doing. Kind of rattled me. I mean, how
rude.
”