Star Wars: Shadow Games (9 page)

“Exits?” Finnick repeated, and Dash bit back a sarcastic crack about echoes.

“Tables that are on movable plates,” he explained. “Wardrobes with false bottoms. Wall shelves that slide or swing and—look, can we just have everybody check for that kind of stuff?”

Finnick snorted again; Dash was getting extremely tired of that particular mode of disagreement. “Spy story nonsense,” the first officer muttered. Nevertheless, he started to search, as did Leebo. The droid stopped when Dash added, “Not you, Leebo. I want you to scan for hidden weaponry.”

That stopped everything. Dash once again became the cynosure of everyone’s gaze. “What are you thinking?” asked the first officer.

“Let’s get real,” said Dash. “The previous owner of this ship was most likely doing less-than-aboveboard business. The stealth shuttle is sort of a clue, right? That, and the amount of ablative shielding and other safety features that your boss
didn’t
have to install because they were already here. At a guess, I’d say
Nova’s Heart
belonged to a smuggler—who just might have installed a high-security system in this suite that included defensive weaponry to take out intruders. Maybe something tripped it before or during the emergency and—”

All the color had leached out of Bran Finnick’s face. “And it thought Javul and Dara were intruders? No. There was no such system.” He looked at Arruna. “Right?”

The Twi’lek looked paler as well. “There’s no record of it in the original schematics.”

“Doesn’t mean it’s not there,” said Dash. “I don’t like the idea any more than you do, but it has to be either validated or invalidated.” He turned to the droid. “Leebo, call up the schematics and see if there are any
logical places to hide surveillance and defensive equipment.”

Leebo uttered a chirp of assent and brought up the schematics’ holos without argument. Dash watched for a moment as Eaden, Arruna, and Finnick began pushing and pulling at the cabin’s furniture. Then he began a slow tour of the perimeter of the room. It struck him, as he turned from the interior bulkhead between the living room and the bedroom in the small but luxurious suite, that there was something odd about the room, but he could not, for the life of him, put a finger on what it was. As he was trying to figure it out, Leebo’s head came up with a snap.

“Huh.” The droid turned to face the interior bulkhead on the opposite side of the cabin. “Hey, boss—check this out.”

Dash moved to where the droid stood, the quarterdeck schematics projected onto the burnished brown surface of the wall in front of them. “What is it?”

“That area I’ve so helpfully highlighted in red for you is the original schematic for this row of suites.”

“Yeah, so what am I looking at?”

“Boss,” Leebo said, in what was, for the droid, a patient tone. “What’s
wrong
with this picture?”

Dash peered at the red area and noticed something right away. He also realized why the room had struck him as peculiar.

“This schematic shows these cabins as all being the same size.” He swept an index finger down the line of renderings. “But they’re not. This one is smaller than our suite. Or at least the front room is smaller, by about half a meter.”

“Hurrah—you’re teachable,” said Leebo.

Dash stepped through the schematic’s lines of light and pressed his hands to the wall. “There’s something behind here,” he said. He moved to the front corner of
the quarters as the others left off their poking and prodding and came to see what he was doing.

“The schematics show this wall as being about half a meter farther aft,” he said as he continued to run his hands over the surface, searching for unevenness or seams.

“Unless you’ve got bionic fingers, boss, I’m pretty sure I’m better qualified to find what you’re looking for.”

“The droid’s right,” said Finnick. “If all else fails we can burn through the metal.”

“I really wish you wouldn’t. I just had it refinished.”

The entire group turned as one to see Javul Charn standing nonchalantly in the doorway of her suite. Dara and Mel were with her.

Dash just kept from letting loose with a scalding expletive. “Where have you
been
?”

Dara rolled her eyes. “Sounds like my dad.”

Mel stepped into the room. “They scared the hell out of me by appearing in the cargo bay, literally out of nowhere.”

“Not nowhere,” Javul corrected, looking contrite. “We came out of a escape panel that connects—”

Dash pointed at the wall. “Here.”

“We didn’t know what was happening, Dash,” Javul said. “The alarm went off, the power cut out, and we thought there was a hull breach back here. We tried to raise somebody by banging on the door, but then we figured if there really was a hull breach, we might be in pretty bad shape if the doors failed. So we used the escape tube.”

“I’ve already explained to them,” Mel said, “that there wasn’t a hull breach. It was something else.”

“Yeah. Sabotage, apparently,” said Dash and was gratified when Javul paled, her flesh looking almost translucent.

“Is there any way to be sure?” she asked.

“I’m going to go check that power terminus, first off,”
said Arruna grimly. “I’d like some company. Someone with a blaster and more than a little experience using it would be nice.” Her gaze turned to Eaden, who bowed, then followed her from the room.

“You’re sure you’re all right?” Finnick asked Javul.

She nodded. “I’m … I’m fine. Why don’t you secure the ship, run diagnostics on everything, then get us back in hyperspace as soon as you and Arruna and the captain feel it’s safe. We don’t want to be late for our Rodian engagements.”

The ship’s systems showed no sign of damage or further sabotage, the hull was fine, and a G2 repair droid was scrambled to fix the broken door panels. Arruna determined that the power outage in the aft quarterdeck had been triggered remotely, and immediately disappeared into a conference with First Mate Finnick to pore over the computer records. If an event had triggered the outage, she reasoned, it would show up somewhere as a surge, a blip, or even, if they were far luckier than they deserved, a clear command sequence.

Meanwhile, Dash and Eaden examined the access tube that led from Javul’s suite to the cargo hold—Dash wondering how his easy celebrity-sitting job had suddenly become dangerous.

The tube was pretty slick, actually, equipped with hand- and footholds that would serve a broad variety of sentients (Hutts being an obvious exception), a standalone air filtration system (which allowed it to double as a hiding place), and a strip of light-emitting plasteel that required very little energy to burn virtually forever. The ship’s a-grav had been shut off within the tube so as not to register as an inexplicable power drain.

“I gotta get me one of these,” Dash said as they finished their inspection and emerged into the ship’s cargo bay.
“Straight shot from the
Outrider
’s bridge right down to the hold.”

“And what would you propose we gut to make room?” asked Eaden mildly. “The dimensions of the
Outrider
won’t allow for this sort of … excess.”

Dash grinned. “We could take it down through your quarters. You keep bragging about how little sleep you need.”

“I do not brag,” returned Eaden. “It is a statement of simple fact. The teräs käsi discipline allows me to sleep less and more lightly than most diurnal sentients.”

Dash was about to offer a sarcastic retort when he looked down the aisle between shipping crates and saw Yanus Melikan striding toward them with a grim expression on his long face.

“Arruna and Bran have found something,” he said before Dash could ask. “They want you up on the bridge.”

“Approximately one minute and twenty seconds before the alarm sounded, we contacted the Rodian Space Authority for approach protocols,” said Finnick. “We sent the standard approach sequence and received the standard acknowledgments. Except that
this
came in, riding a subsidiary carrier wave.” He indicated a long string of Rodian characters that scrolled down the flat display of the bridge engineering terminal he, Dash, and Arruna were hovering over.

Arruna leaned in and ran a finger along the sequence of symbols and numbers. “It exchanges the correct protocols, here, then tells the ship’s system there’s been an event of some sort in the aft section of the quarterdeck, which the ship interpreted as a hull breach. Then it tells the system to shut down power to the affected area.”

“It actually targeted a specific area of the ship?” asked Dash.
Arruna tapped the code with a pale blue fingernail. “This command, right here, targets the quarterdeck abaft the beam. Where Javul, her guests, and the officers are housed.”

“That’s pretty specific.”

Arruna’s left lekku quivered. “And peculiar. The command sequence doesn’t
cause
a disaster—which, theoretically, it could have. It simply
fakes
one. Why?”

“Sending a message?” suggested Dash.

“What message? It’s not exactly along the lines of
I’m your biggest fan.
”

“No. It’s more along the lines of
I’m your biggest threat.
”

The Twi’lek’s lekku twined about each other—a sign, Dash knew, of extreme anxiety. “Again, why?” Arruna asked.

“I don’t know, but I have to think someone does.”

He excused himself from the bridge and went aft to find Javul Charn. She was on the observation deck with her road manager, but she dismissed Dara as soon as she saw the look on Dash’s face.

“Talk to me, Javul,” he said when Spike had left the deck. “Tell me everything you know about this overeager fan of yours.”

“I’ve already done that.”

“Okay. Then let me tell you what
I
know about him … or her, or it. He isn’t just overzealous. He’s obsessed. And he’s not just a nut. He’s
clever
. And he’s not just wealthy. He’s got resources some small planetary governments don’t have.”

She paled. It made her eyes look huge in her heart-shaped face. Dash swallowed.
Whoa
. That was some look she had there. Once again he was reminded why fans became obsessed with her.

“What makes you say that?” she asked.

“The black lilies might’ve taken some credits—buying
and bringing in all the flowers, bribing port officials, setting up the stasis field over your docking slip. But that was a parlor trick compared with this. The signal for the ship to respond to a fake hull breach and shut down power to the quarters was riding the carrier wave from the Rodian controller. It gave all the appropriate handshakes, and it knew where in the ship you lived … or at least the guy behind it did.”

“What do you want me to say?” she said, her voice unsteady. “I guess I have overzealous fans with too much time and credits on their hands.”

“Banthaflop.”

She blinked. “What?”

“You have something a lot worse than that and I think you know it.”

“What do you think I have?”

“Someone with a
serious
gripe against you. The kind of someone who can and does hold grudges for life—and beyond, if he can possibly manage it.” Dash folded his arms. “It’s time to come clean, little miss Star Bright. It’s not that this guy likes you too much—it’s that this guy really
doesn’t
like you. And I’m not real happy myself,” he added. “I don’t like flying backward and blind through an asteroid field, I don’t like facing a rancor with one hand tied behind me, and I
don’t
like this. At all. So ’fess up. What’d you do—kick someone out of your backup band? Refuse to date some high roller? Trash his pad? Break his heart?”

She stood silently for a long moment, her forehead resting on the transparent canopy of the observation deck, gazing out into space while Dash watched her reflection in the transparisteel surface. Then she said, “Not exactly.”

Dash exhaled sharply. “Not exactly what? You didn’t exactly trash his pad or you didn’t exactly break his heart?”

“
I
didn’t do anything.” She lifted her head to glance at him before returning her gaze to the stars. “It’s like this—there was this Vigo—”

A prickling of primal hatred crawled up Dash’s spine. “A Vigo? As in
Black Sun
?”

Javul made a face. “Is there any other kind?”

Dash wanted nothing to do with the notorious and powerful interstellar crime syndicate—even once-removed. He wasn’t afraid of Black Sun … but he was afraid of his own deeply buried hunger for revenge.

“How soon do we get to Rodia? If you’ve got bad blood with a Vigo, I’m catching the next transport back to Tatooine.”

J
AVUL EYED
D
ASH NARROWLY
. “Y
OU DIDN’T LET ME FINISH
. This Vigo had a girlfriend—her name was Alai Jance, as I recall. She started out the same way I did—as a small-time singer on the Corellian circuit. She hooked up with this Vigo—I don’t remember his name—and her singing career took a turn for the better. Then she dumped the Vigo and dropped out of sight, which probably wasn’t her best career move.”

“And this has to do with you, how?”

“I’m getting to that,” she said patiently, as if she were talking to a one-function service droid. “When I … burst onto the scene, I occasionally got mistaken for her. Apparently, we bear a striking resemblance to each other. As a result, I had to do a massive PR campaign establishing that I wasn’t a pirate’s brat from Nar Shaddaa, my hair wasn’t really red, I wasn’t just a glorified lounge singer, and I wasn’t the same woman who’d stupidly hitched herself to a Black Sun crime boss and was now trying to make a comeback.”

“Really.”

“Yes, really. I had no idea about any of this until I started getting increasingly strange holomail. And then, the black lilies …” She rubbed her hands up and down her arms as if she were suddenly cold.

“So you’re suggesting your stalker is somebody who doesn’t believe you. Big surprise there.” He held up a hand to halt her protest. “Any idea who that might be?”

She shook her head. “A rival maybe. Maybe one of this guy’s lieutenants—someone who thinks he might get in good with the boss if he—I don’t know—teaches the boss’s ex a lesson. Maybe none of the above. I don’t know for sure.”