Shadows of the Empire (42 page)

“Is largely the result of
my
expert modifications.”

“Beg to differ,” the Nautolan replied. “The improvements are almost entirely the result of repairs carried out by LE-BO2D9. The rest is unarguably the result of my superior navigation skills.”

Dash glanced at his navigator. “
Now
who’s overweening? Hubris, my—”

“You imply that I’m boasting. I’m not—but feel free to correct me if I’ve misinterpreted your colorful patois. I am concentrating.” He hesitated, then added: “We’re entering the Pit.”

Reason enough to concentrate, Dash knew. He rocked his seat forward, hitting the comm button on the pilot’s console as he did. “Hey, Leebo, we’re headed into the Pit.”

“Imagine my excitement.” The reply came back in the sarcastic voice of the repair droid’s previous owner, Kood Gareeda—a stand-up comic who toured the Rim perpetually. Dash had seen Gareeda’s routine; he was wise to keep moving.

“I guess I’ll have to,” he said in response.

“Try not to break the ship—again,” Leebo added. “And try especially hard not to give me anything to shoot at.”

“Do my best.” Dash took the steering yoke and turned off the autopilot. “Course?” he prompted Eaden.

The Nautolan navigator locked the course coordinates into the navicomp, and Dash watched them appear as a bright saffron arc on the tactical display. He frowned at the solid yellow line. “Hey, this isn’t a leisurely holiday tour.”

“You refer to the relative course of our trip?”

Dash sighed and pointed at the navicomp monitor. “Look at the blasted line. Do you see red?”

Eaden looked. “I see no red.”

“That’s because the course you set is
safe
.”

“And this is a problem because?”

“Because safe isn’t gonna better Solo’s time.”

Eaden Vrill blinked his extraordinarily large maroon eyes. Two of his fourteen tentacle-like tresses lifted their tips toward Dash. “You wish me to recalculate?”

“What I wish is to beat Solo’s alleged record.”

“I’m simply being careful. We have an expensive cargo that we have yet to be paid for.”

“All the more reason to get it to port
quickly,
” Dash said. He gestured at the monitor. “So reset the course, please. We have to skate as close to the Maw as Solo did. Closer, if possible.”

Eaden made an almost subsonic rumble of disapproval and ran nimble fingers over the console. The arc of light on the tactical display shot forth again. The curve was more pronounced now, running closer to the Maw, where the color deepened from yellow to orange to a satisfying shade of crimson.

“Keep in mind,” Eaden cautioned, “that nothing in the galaxy is static. The orbital trajectories of stars, systems—”

“Are negligible within the context of human and humanoid life spans. If I were a Cephalon, say, it might be something to worry about.” Dash took the steering yoke in hand, aimed the
Outrider
along the flaming arc, and punched the hyperdrive.

It was just a microjump to put them in the vicinity. To fly hyper along the edge of the Pit was almost impossible. For one thing, the gravity well could yank you out of hyperspace in a heartbeat even if you’d tinkered with your failsafes—which, of course, Dash had. Then there was the fact that the hard radiation from the nebula that cradled the asteroid field played havoc with instrumentation—adhering to a set sublight course that skirted the fringes of the Pit was about the only way Dash knew he could come through in one piece. Deviation on one side could result in clipping a wandering asteroid; deviation on the other would send the ship into the gravitational pull of the Maw, a cluster of black holes that warped local space. Fly too close to one of those singularities and all kinds of bad things could happen—not the least of which was having one’s atoms stretched to an infinite length by the tidal forces that waited to suck everything in.

He was counting down to the end of the jump when the
Outrider
trembled abruptly the unexpected vibration passing through Dash’s hands and up his arms. He frowned. That wasn’t right. He opened his mouth to say something to Eaden when the ship bucked like a fractious tauntaun and dropped out of hyperspace.

“
What the—
”

“Oh, mother of chaos!” Leebo’s bleat came through the com in a wash of static. “Incoming!”

“Incoming
what?
” Dash looked frantically at the tac display—which made no sense. There was no gravity well here—

“Incoming Imperials! There’s an Imperial cruiser bearing down on us from astern—
Interceptor-
class!”

Dash swore in three languages—adding several choice moans in Wookieespeak. The
Interceptors
had gravity generators—four of them—that could suck a smaller ship right out of hyperspace or keep it from fleeing by producing a false gravity well. They’d flown right into a trap—probably set up here at the top of the Kessel run for the express purpose of catching smugglers.

The ship rocked violently to port and Leebo uttered a shrill, metallic squeal.

Before Dash’s eyes the tac display finally made sense.
Outrider
had dropped back into realspace close enough to the contents of the Pit that they were practically kissing the asteroid field. If the cruiser’s gravity well had hit them a few seconds sooner, they might have hit something big enough to hurt. Bad.

He pushed the thought down and focused on the display. A slowly rotating planetoid the shape of an egg and the size of an old-style generation ship lay several hundred klicks off their port bow. It was moving lazily across the general flow of rocky traffic, rolling on its long axis. In a split second, he’d made his decision. They’d hide behind that and use it to guard their flank while they made their getaway.

He manhandled the steering yoke hard to port and hit the ion drives hard. The
Outrider
leapt toward the egg-shaped planetoid, nosing down slightly in anticipation of dropping beneath the great rock.

When they were close enough that the bulging flanks of the planetoid filled the forward viewport, there was a resonant ping from the proximity sensors and Eaden sat bolt upright. “Target dead ahead!”

“And up!” Leebo screeched through the intercom. A barrage of laser fire erupted from the
Outrider’
s cannon emplacement at the upper horizon of the planetoid. Dash looked up and felt his blood run cold. Over the close horizon of the great gray egg loomed the bow of an Imperial light cruiser, its laser ports glowing red. Leebo’s useless salvo had pattered harmlessly against its heavy shielding.

Dash thrust the steering yoke forward. The ship plummeted in response, accelerating as she dived beneath the planetoid. A trail of laserfire from the Imperial ship lit up her wake.

“What are you
doing?
” cried Leebo.

“Proving that size isn’t everything!”

Dash continued to accelerate, giving the
Outrider
even more juice as they passed beneath the long axis of the planetoid and began ascending. The cruiser was five times bigger than the
Outrider
, which meant it was, at minimum, at least five times less maneuverable. By the time the captain figured out what Dash was doing and was able to turn the ship or order up a new firing solution, the target would be gone.

He hoped.

The
Outrider
described a perfect semicircle in the void of space, pressor beams providing maneuverability in the vacuum. It sailed around the planetoid upside down relative to the cruiser and whizzed over it toward the Maw.

“I need a quick course adjustment,” he told his navigator, then spared a second to glance at the rearview screen. As he had hoped, the Imperial captain had read his move as an attempt to flee and had started to turn his ship in anticipation of pursuit into the Pit. He was still swinging to port as the
Outrider
streaked away in the opposite direction, toward the cluster of black holes.

“I sometimes think,” said Eaden, as his webbed fingers played over the instrumentation, “that you are a certifiable madman. I assume you want a course that the Imperials will be loath to follow.”

“I want the Imperials to think I’ve chosen death over dishonor.”

The Nautolan gave him a sidewise glance. “You may well have done just that.”

“Cute. Range to the rim of the Maw?”

“Two-point-three light-hours and closing.”

Dash’s gaze swept the tactical display, taking in the diffuse rims of the gravity wells, depicted in the display as broad, glowing bands of faded orange. If they eluded the cruiser, and went to hyperspace at the right moment and dived into the Maw at just the right angle, they could, with more luck than anyone had any right to expect, use their superluminal velocity to skip them along the outer edge of the region like a flat stone across a lake. Theoretically, anyway.
If
the gravitational waves generated by the various collapsed masses didn’t muck up their navigation or suck them out of hyperspace again.
If
they could maintain a safe course through the complicated orbital arabesques being performed by the singularities.
If
they could get far enough from the Imperial’s gravity generators to make the jump in the first place.

Eaden pointed out these various risks with maddening calm, and Leebo chimed in over the comm with even more maddening hysteria. Dash shouted them both down. “As much as I hate to quote an adversary,” he said, “remember what Han says in situations like this?”

“Enlighten me,” Eaden replied. It was, Dash thought, hard to believe that an amphibious humanoid could manage so dry a tone.

“Never tell me the odds.”

The navicomp beeped, and he punched the ion drives. Hard.

I
LOVE TO
W
ATCH
Y
OUR SHOW, AND WILL ALWAYS COME
back for more. I’ll be Coming For about the tenth time to see You At Your Next Concert. —a Die-Hard fan

Javul Charn stared at the holographic message that hovered in the air before her face. On the surface it looked just like all the other fan mail she’d gotten in this packet, but her gut told her it wasn’t fan mail at all. It was a warning.

Reading it over for the second time, she used the tip of her finger to select the oddly capitalized words from the text and drag them to a separate line, wondering how it had gotten past Kendara Farlion, her road manager and professional worrywart. Dara was used to seeing quirky holomail, but quirkiness usually had a pattern to it.

This wasn’t a pattern.

Javul looked at the finished sentences hovering before her eyes:
Watch Your Back. Coming For You At Your Next Concert. Die-Hard
.

Was that last just a throwaway line or something more? A clue, perhaps?

At your next concert
, the message said, but that didn’t guarantee that something wouldn’t happen before then. Her next concert was a little over a week away on Rodia, and would kick off a tour that would take them all the way to the Core Worlds, ending on Alderaan.

Panic fluttered beneath Javul’s breastbone and she felt suddenly, unutterably alone. Beyond the door of the luxurious cabin on her equally luxurious private yacht, the
Nova’s Heart
—named after her first holo-album to sell ten billion copies—her entourage and crew went about the hundreds of daily tasks that were integral to producing and maintaining her seemingly endless cycles of live concerts, holocasts, personal appearances, and travel. And yet—here, in her private sanctum, no less—someone had managed to breach the battlements of her life.

A slender arm the color of burnished bronze thrust over her shoulder, its index finger pointing at the curt warning still hanging in the air. “Chaos Hell, JC! What the blazes is
that?
”

Javul only just kept herself from falling out of her chair onto the carpeted deck. “Frag it, Dara! Can’t you make some noise when you enter a room? Can’t you
ping?
” She killed the message and swung around, catching the crestfallen expression on the other woman’s face.

“Since when do I have to ping to come into your office? And—hey—language? You talk like that in front of a holocam, and your name will be mud in households from here to the Rim.”

Javul gestured helplessly. “I’m sorry, but you scared the fr—” She swallowed. “You scared me.”

“I’m not surprised. Who sent that?”

“Sent what?” Javul said innocently.

“Too late. I saw it.
Watch your back?
What’s up with that? I didn’t see
that
in your mail.”

“It was part of a longer communication. There were capitalized words that spelled out this—message.”

“Warning,” Dara said.

Javul worried her lower lip with her teeth, reluctant to admit that she’d come to the same conclusion. “I don’t know that
warning
is—”

“Oh, it is. Trust me on this one, JC.” Kendara’s dark violet eyes were huge. “You have a stalker. What remains to be seen is how serious he, she, or it is.”

A stalker. There—the word had been spoken, and made real.
Okay. Deeeep breath
.

“Yeah. Looks like it,” she said. “This … this isn’t the first one of these I’ve gotten. There was one in the batch of holomail after the previous concert, too. Remember the black fire lilies?”

“Do I? Yeah, I should say I do. You mean, that wasn’t a compliment?”

Javul shook her head, remembering the rain of the gleaming black, pungently fragrant blooms that had fallen all around her and her entourage as they’d ascended the landing ramp of her yacht after an appearance on Imperial Center. “I think that was a warning, too. He wanted me to know the sort of thing he could arrange.”

“He?”

“I’m assuming—the messages are anonymous.”

“I see. Then all that stuff about cultural relativity and how the black lilies were especially prized by the Elom as—”

“I made it up. I didn’t want you guys to … you know.”

Kendara put her hands on her hips and glared down at Javul, one bright orange curl falling over her forehead. “Yeah, I know. You didn’t want us to know your life was in danger. Which is kinda—what’s the word I’m searching for? Oh, yeah
—stupid
. Of course, I’m just your road manager, the head of your entourage. What good’s an entourage if you won’t let us take care of you?