Star Wars: Scourge (28 page)

“Ma Lorda,”
mocked Hedu. “Why doesn’t the Spice Lord just fit you with a collar and be done with it? We are Rodians, members of a proud clan. We do not ‘fall back.’ We do not run. We do not hide. The
Jeedai
preys on our businesses, businesses we set up for
your
Spice Lord, and we will strike back hard.”

“Your history says otherwise,” said the Klatooinian calmly. “I have been sent to offer you the Spice Lord’s protection. I have not been instructed to argue if you are too foolish not to take it.”

The older Rodian spat. “Tell your Spice Lord that we are legion, and we are well protected. They will never find us. We will find the
Jeedai
and we will have our vengeance.”

In the distance there was the thunder of an explosion, and the chandeliers of the manor swayed slightly. The
honor guard behind the matriarch looked at one another, puzzled.

“What’s that?” snapped Hedu.

“Hubris,” muttered Koax. “If you reject the kindness of the gods, you will be punished for it.”

Another explosion, and the sound of running feet. Then shouts in Huttese and the staccato of blasterfire.

Hedu rose shakily from her throne and motioned her clanchildren before her. Once assembled, they ran toward the double doors at the far end of the room. Koax stepped up to the dais next to the matriarch.

“Do you have an escape route?” the Klatooinian started to ask, but she was interrupted as the doors sprung open and a surge of Rodians fell backward into the room, firing behind them as they retreated. There was a cascade of blasterfire coming from their weapons and an equally heavy cascade of return fire.

Then their attacker jumped into the room, and it was clear that the return fire was just the deflected shots of the Rodian defenders. It was the
Jeedai
, his two associates following behind and adding their blaster shots as well.

“Defend me!” shouted the matriarch, and her honor guard dropped to one knee and added their own shots to the onslaught. The
Jeedai
, who was spinning tornado-fast by now, moved even swifter, catching their bolts and throwing them back effortlessly. Rodians began to fall as the attackers cut a swath toward the dais.

The matriarch turned to Koax and said, “Protect me! I accept the Spice Lord’s offer! We both know too much to be captured! Protect me!”

Protect me
, said the Spice Lord, when Koax first met the Hutt. The Klatooinian knew what she had to do and pulled her own blaster pistol.

Leveling it against the Rodian matriarch’s head, she pulled the trigger.

The sound of the shot was lost among the avalanche of sound, and none of the defenders—concentrating on the Jedi and his companions—noticed the old woman collapse to the floor. Koax spun around and ran for one of the doors at the back of the house, hoping that they would lead to a reasonable exit.

“She’s running!” shouted the Bothan.

“I’m on it!” answered the Pantoran.

The Jedi shouted something, but it was lost in the din as the Pantoran leapt around the edges of the conflict, ignoring the Rodians and diving after the fleeing Klatooinian. By this point, the Jedi had fought his way into the front lines of the defending Rodians, and they had other things to worry about.

Koax ran swiftly down the back hall, hoping for a door to an outside courtyard. She would still have to get over the walls, but open space would give her more room to fight. Nothing in the hall, though, so she took the last door on the left.

A study. Clan trophies along the wall. Low divans and chairs. A small holo-chess table, used for storing knickknacks. A skylight high in the ceiling. No windows, as it backed on the outside wall.

Koax cursed and backed into the hall, but a volley of blasterfire from the Pantoran drove her back into the room.

The Klatooinian looked around again. No exit presented itself. She kicked over one of the low divans, turning it into a barricade, and waited for the Pantoran to enter. A shadow appeared in the doorway, and she fired at it, but it dodged back before she could hit it.

There was a pause, and the Pantoran said in Basic, “You might as well give up now. Tell us what you know. Make it easy for yourself.”

Koax watched the door, but the shadow did not move.
Why should it? The Klatooinian was bottled up, and soon the Jedi would come and tease all of her secrets out of her brain.

Protect me
, the Spice Lord had said.

Koax pulled one of her tribal daggers from her belt, pressed the tip against her belly, and took a deep breath.

“That the last of them?” said Eddey.

Mander Zuma looked around at the carnage of the fallen Bomu warriors. “I think so. No sign of Vago, though.”

“Can’t say I’m surprised.”

“Where’s Reen?”

Eddey nodded toward one of the doors at the back of the room. “She lit off after the Klatooinian, the one who shot the matriarch.”

Mander ran for the door, but Reen appeared. She looked a paler shade of blue.

“What happened?” asked Mander.

“She killed herself,” said Reen. “I had her trapped in one of the rooms, and rather than fight, she …” The Pantoran shook her head.

Mander looked at Eddey, and the Bothan shrugged. The Jedi said, “Search for any tablets and data cubes you can find, but then we have to be off. Dennogra may be a viper’s lair, but sometime soon people are going to come to see what all the noise was about.”

Reen remained quiet most of the way to the jump point, letting Eddey do the piloting while she sat back in the galley and went over the looted datapads, datasticks, cubes, and crystals with a reader.

“How is it going?” asked Mander.

Reen made a face and waved a hand over the pile. “We’ll know more once a slicer gets past security on some of these, but for the most part it is all here. Deliveries,
clients, contacts, payoffs—every bit of the Tempest trade that the Bomu clan was involved with.” She let out a sigh.

“Except?”

“Except where it came from,” she said. “Except who this Spice Lord is.”

“Not all the answers come on datasticks,” said Mander.

“I know,” she said. “I look at all of this and I say—is this enough?”

“Enough?” Mander raised an eyebrow.

“Toro,” said Reen, and Mander nodded. “You thought that by finishing his mission it would be enough. I thought bringing down the people who gave him the spice would be enough.”

“And yet here we are,” said Mander.

They sat in the galley for a long moment, the deep rumble of the ship filling in the need for words. “I’m still mad at Toro,” Reen said at last.

“Mad?”

“Angry,” she said. “I think he did something horrible and foolish and I want him to be here so I can yell at him. I wonder if that goes away.”

“I don’t think so,” said Mander. He sat quietly for a moment. “I want to ask him why.”

“I don’t think those answers are on datasticks, either,” Reen said, shaking her head. “So, now what?”

“We turn over the information to Angela Krin,” said Mander. “She gets it into the hands of the local authorities, and they take it from there. And we keep looking for who is responsible.”

Reen let out a sigh and said, “Well, every girl needs a hobby.”

The intercom beeped and Eddey’s voice said, “We have an incoming message from the
Resolute
. You might want to be here.”

“Speak of the demon,” said Reen and pushed away from the table, following Mander to the bridge.

When they got to the bridge, Lieutenant Commander Angela Krin was saying “… congratulations on the successful mission. The surviving members of the Bomu clan will likely regroup under a new leader, but hopefully one who doesn’t adhere so much to the idea of vendettas. I wish I had been there.”

“No Vago, though,” said Mander.

“So it was a trap,” said the CSA officer.

“I don’t think so,” said Mander. “They didn’t seem ready for us at all, and both the matriarch and the Klatooinian were surprised when we came in.”

Eddey put in, “I think our Spice Lord leaked the information in the hope we would tie up a couple of loose ends.”

Mander nodded. That made sense.

Angela Krin also nodded and moved on without batting an eye. “I checked out that chemical chain you asked about. It’s very interesting.”

“Interesting? How?” asked Mander.

“It’s an odd organic loop. The sort of thing that shows up in oscillating high-gravity zones. Black-hole radiation.”

Mander thought about it a moment, then said, “I’m guessing there aren’t too many in this region of space near a black hole
and
a white dwarf.”

“No,” said Angela Krin. “Most planets do not survive their primary falling into itself and becoming a black hole in the first place.”

“So we need a planet that survived a stellar collapse, that’s scarred by radiation, and that’s in close proximity to a black hole,” said Mander.

“Varl,” said Reen, who had been quiet up to this moment.

“Varl?” said Mander. “The original Hutt homeworld?”

“Remember the story I told you?” said Reen. “Evona fell to darkness, and Ardos exploded in rage. Ardos is our white dwarf. Varl is in orbit around Ardos.”

“But Varl is a dead planet,” said Mander. “The Jedi Archives were clear on that.”

“Maybe not as dead as we thought,” said Eddey.

“Didn’t you check out Varl?” Mander asked Krin. “Even without knowing about the black hole, it still has a white dwarf and it’s in the heart of Hutt space.”

In the image, Angela Krin froze for a moment, though Mander thought it might just be spatial interference. Then she lurched forward, punching a few unseen buttons. “We should have. Ah. Here it is. On our list, but we had to get permission to follow up with the Hutt Elders. It is still their planet, even though they are gone. I should have followed up on that.” Even through the distortion of the holoprojector, the lieutenant looked confused. “Funny, that.”

“You’ve been monitoring ship traffic into the Ardos system?”

“Yes,” said Angela Krin, punching a few more unseen buttons. “Nothing leaving the surface of Varl, of course. But here’s something interesting: we have a couple of independent flight manifests that are listed as carrying spice. They pass through the Ardos system, but when they get to their destination, no spice is ultimately delivered. They come into Ardos with a load of spice, and leave empty.”

“And I’ll bet that those independents started running shortly after the plague broke out on Endregaad,” said Eddey. “After the smugglers lost a Skydove Freight ship.”

“And carrying it out using the Indrexu Spiral,” Mander said. “And
those
jump coordinates were in the hands of the Anjiliacs. There may be others they were unwilling to share.”

“Vago,” said Eddey. “She had the coordinates, and she could make ships disappear from their rosters.”

“And Vago has disappeared as well,” said Mander. “Maybe to Varl.” He looked at the lieutenant commander. “You have a plan?”

“I think so,” said the image of Angela Krin, and Mander could have sworn he saw the ghost of a smile on her face. “We can’t bring the
Resolute
into Hutt space without a major diplomatic incident, but there are other options. Rendezvous with us at these coordinates, and I think we can get you to Varl.”

The
Barabi Run
came out of hyperspace above Rhilithan on what should have been a milk run, carrying a load of spice that was eventually bound for a dead world. The Hutt defense ships in the neighborhood of their ultimate destination knew they were coming, and to let them through. No blockades to run, no local picket ships to evade, no customs agents, and no serious questions.

Instead the
Barabi Run
’s captain found the
Resolute
and its sister ship, the
Vigilance
—two CSA cruisers far outside their normal patrols—lying in wait. His sensors were spammed white within moments of emerging from hyperspace, and his comlink crackled with the voice of a Lieutenant Commander Angela Krin. IRDs were alongside the
Barabi Run
before he even had the chance to deep-space his cargo.

The
Barabi Run
was guided into the huge docking bay and settled down next to a Suwantek TL-1200, a reconditioned model that was in pretty good shape, barring a few scorch marks along the hull. There a spit-and-polish CSA lieutenant made it clear that their ship was being requisitioned by the CSA, and that they were to be the guests of the
Resolute
until the CSA no longer needed use of the ship.

No, they could not leave.

Yes, the CSA would provide a receipt.

*   *   *

Reen spent most of the next day scanning the
Barabi Run
for bugs and tracers. She found a handful of tracking bugs, most of them different models and several of them long defunct, remnants of earlier owners and previous deals. There was also a self-destruct bot—an insect-sized device that had been crawling around the fuel manifold wiring. It had touched a bare wire and fried itself, its mission unknown and uncompleted. And there was some new hardware in the avionic core that she deactivated. She kept the transponder intact with the next set of jump coordinates and the approach to Varl.

Finally, the
Resolute
cast off the
Barabi Run
, and the commandeered transport resumed its normal course. Reen was in the pilot’s chair and Angela Krin was copilot, now in civilian clothes again. Mander was with them, seated behind the command seats, while Eddey would shadow them in the
New Ambition
, in case they needed additional support.

Mander looked at Angela’s sharp features as she and Reen ran down the checklist before hyperjump. He knew that she could have sent them on this mission by themselves, or assigned a subordinate like Lockerbee to oversee them. He wondered if the lieutenant commander herself had been bitten by the adventuring bug as well. Chasing Tempest smugglers was certainly more exciting than guard duty high above a planetary surface.