THE SHUTTLE TOOK Eleena and Malgus skyward to Malgus’s cruiser, Valor. Malgus stared out one of the viewports as they broke through the atmosphere. He felt Eleena’s eyes on him but did not turn to her. His thoughts were on the Force, on the Empire, and how the two seemed to be diverging before his eyes. The question for him was singular—what would he do about it?
The pilot’s voice carried over the speaker. “Darth Malgus, Darth Angral wishes to speak to you.”
Malgus cocked his head in a question. He looked to Eleena but she looked away, out a viewport at the receding surface of Coruscant.
“Put him through.”
The small vidscreen in the shuttle’s passenger compartment lit up and projected a holographic image of Darth Angral. He sat at the same desk in the Chancellor’s office from which he had previously lectured Malgus. Malgus wondered if Adraas remained there still.
“My lord,” Malgus said, though the words felt false.
“Darth Malgus, I see you have recovered your … companion. I am pleased for you.”
“I am returning her to Valor, then I will return to the surface to assist—”
Angral held up a hand and shook his head. “There is no need for that, old friend. Your presence on Coruscant is no longer necessary. Instead, I need you to command the blockade and ensure the safety of the hyperspace lanes.”
“My lord, any naval officer could—”
“But I am ordering you to do this, Darth Malgus.”
Malgus stared at the image of Darth Angral for a long while before he trusted himself to answer. “Very well, Darth Angral.”
He cut off the connection, and the image sank back into the screen.
A headache rooted in the base of his skull. He could feel the veins in his head pulsing, each beat amplifying his disillusionment, his growing rage.
He did not need to be skilled in political maneuvering to understand that Angral ordering him into an unimportant role was a way of sending the clear message that he was out of favor. Angral had used him just long enough to ensure the success of the sacking of Coruscant, and now he was being edged aside in favor of Lord Adraas. In the span of a day he had gone from the conqueror of Coruscant to a second-tier Darth.
He glanced over at Eleena once more, wondering how much of it she understood.
She did not look at him, just continued to look out the viewport.
PEDESTRIANS THRONGED the misty street outside the casino. The smell of the lake was strong: dead fish, other organic decay. Zeerid swept the crowd with his eyes, seeking anyone else that struck him as suspicious. He saw twenty men in the crowded street who might have been eyeing him.
“I can’t make anyone in this crowd,” he said.
Two drunk Houks staggered by, shouting a song in their native tongue. A young Bothan revved his swoop engine and blasted into the air. Ubiquitous aircar taxis lined the street. Private aircars and a public speeder bus flew above them.
“Keep moving,” Aryn said. “No urgency, though.”
The spaceport occupied several blocks beginning across the street from them. Digital billboards affixed to its side played advertisements for everything from vacation homes to energy bars to debt relief counseling. Zeerid sympathized with that last.
Moving with forced casualness, they cut across the street, eliciting the honk of a signal horn and a raised fist, and headed for the nearest entrance to the spaceport.
“Don’t look back,” Aryn said. “They’re there.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
The doors to the spaceport opened. Baggage trams pulled by droids rolled through the doors, followed by a dozen or so recent arrivals of several different sentient species. The doors closing behind them cut short the pitches of the taxi drivers.
VRATH SAT ON A BENCH inside the spaceport, pressed between a female Rodian on his left and a male Ithorian on his right. The Ithorian smelled like leather and hummed a tune through his two mouths.
Vrath endured, and watched Zeerid and the woman enter the spaceport. Zeerid glanced around, suspicion in his eyes. But Vrath had spent years perfecting his own inconspicuousness, a skill invaluable to a sniper, and Zeerid’s eyes moved over and past him.
He whispered commands, the sound inaudible above the commotion of the spaceport. The implant in his jaw amplified the words and sent them to the earpieces of his team.
“He is wary. Keep your distance.”
Vrath did not want Zeerid to sense danger and bolt before Vrath located the cargo. His team had stolen aboard Zeerid’s ship hours earlier and searched it. They’d found nothing and, other than a routine visit from one of the port’s maintenance inspection droids, no one had been aboard since. Two of his team were stationed near the ship, keeping an eye on it.
Vrath watched Zeerid and the woman with his peripheral vision and, using his audial implant, listened to them as best he could over the sounds of the port.
ZEERID STUDIED THE FACES of those around them, looking for anyone else who might be watching them. Faces blurred into one another. He felt as if their pursuers were breathing right down his neck. Unable to stop himself, he turned and shot a glance backward.
Through the sea of faces, he glimpsed the two men Aryn had described in the casino. Both saw him looking at them.
He looked away, cursing himself.
“They know we know,” he said.
Aryn was staring at a wall-mounted vidscreen that showed a news piece about the negotiations on Alderaan.
A BREAKTHROUGH IN NEGOTIATIONS? read the caption.
A human man, his dark hair combed back over a wrinkled face, was speaking. Zeerid did not recognize him. The tag below his image named him LORD BARAS.
“Did you hear what I said, Aryn?”
She pulled her eyes away from the screen with difficulty. “I heard you. What do you think they want?”
Zeerid had made a lot of enemies since signing on with The Exchange, but he figured those pursuing them wanted the engspice.
“They want the cargo we’re taking to Coruscant,” he said.
They hopped on an autowalk that sped them across the port. Through the transparisteel windows along one wall, they could see freighters and other small starships sitting on the port’s landing pads. Crane droids loaded and unloaded cargo.
He used the reflection in the transparisteel to determine if the men were still behind them. They were. But he still could not tell if there were more or just the two.
“They just got on the autowalk behind us,” Zeerid said, as the men followed them onto the belt.
“Tell me what it is, Zeerid. The cargo.”
He did not hesitate, though he did not look at her when he answered. Instead, he stared at his own reflection in the transparisteel. “Engspice.”
She said nothing for a time, and he disliked the import of the silence.
“How did you get into running engspice?” she asked finally.
He disliked even more the accusation he heard in her tone and turned to face her. “How did you fall out with the Order and go off looking to murder? It’s a long story, yes? Well, so is this.”
She stared into his face, those open green eyes. He saw more pain in them than he’d ever seen before. “You’re right. I’m sorry, Zeerid. I didn’t mean—”
“I’m not proud of it, Aryn.”
“I know.”
She would know. She would sense his guilt, his ambivalence.
“We do what we do,” she said.
“We do what we must.”
“Right,” she said. “What we must.”
They switched walks, took an autostair up a floor. He continued to watch the two men behind them. They made no move to close the distance between them.
“What are they waiting for?” Aryn asked.
Zeerid had wondered the same thing but realization soon dawned. “They don’t know whether I know where the spice is.”
Ahead, he saw the landing pad where Fatman as Red Dwarf was docked. A long cargo tram rolled past. A platoon of maintenance droids trudged near it. A man and woman before it waved to each other, smiled, embraced, and moved on.
Another two men near it drew his attention. One sat on a chair near the door that led out to the landing pad. A portcomp sat open on his lap, but he paid it no heed. The second faced the transparisteel window, ostensibly looking out on the landing pad. Zeerid imagined him watching them approach in its reflection.
“Do you know where it is?” Aryn asked.
“It’s on my ship,” he said. “The Exchange uses jacked maintenance droids to sneak illicit cargo onto their mules.”
VRATH WALKED BESIDE a Twi’lek women carrying a small travel bag. He stayed close to her and let his body language suggest that they were together. When he heard Zeerid’s words via his audial implant, he cursed himself for missing the obvious—the maintenance droid had been hijacked with stealth programming to load the engspice.
Vrath did not have the firepower on hand to destroy Zeerid’s ship, so he’d have to do things the hard way.
“The cargo is on the target’s ship and the target is not to get aboard,” he said, his words loud enough that the Twi’lek looked at him askance and moved away.
“Keene,” he said to the driver of the speeder he had stationed outside. “Be ready with an evac off the target’s landing pad.”
Vrath drew his blaster and pushed through the crowd.
“Everybody down!”
THE MAN FACING the transparisteel window turned while the man on the bench set aside his portacomp and stood.
“Here they come,” Zeerid said.
Aryn let her hand fall to the hilt of her lightsaber. “I see them.”
Zeerid glanced back and saw the two men who had trailed them out of the casino moving at a jog, then a run, through the crowd. Both reached behind their backs for weapons.
A third man Zeerid had not noticed before, but who looked vaguely familiar to him, shouted for everyone to get down and fired a blaster shot into the high ceiling.
Panic gripped the crowd. Screams erupted from all around and people dived to the ground or ducked behind benches and chairs. The dozens of droids in the vicinity stopped in their work and glanced about in confusion, their programming leaving them slow to respond to the unexpected.
The two men between Aryn and Zeerid and the ship had blasters in hand, firing as they approached. Aryn’s lightsaber hummed to life, spun a rapid arc before them, and deflected the shots into the ceiling and floor.
More screams. The acrid stink of discharged blasters.
Zeerid pulled his blaster from under his armpit and put two shots into one of the two men. The impact blew the man from his feet and left a charred shirt and two black holes in his chest.
Zeerid grabbed Aryn and pulled her down behind the box-shaped body of a stationary maintenance droid while the surviving man in front of them returned fire and the three men closing from behind opened up. A shot grazed the sole of Zeerid’s boot and left it smoking and black. The droid they sheltered behind vibrated under the impact of multiple shots.
“Do not move, droid,” Zeerid said.
But it could not have moved had it wished to. Smoke rose from the holes in its body, and sparks shot out.
“We have to get to my ship,” Zeerid said.
“The authorities will be coming …”
Zeerid shook his head. “Too many questions, Aryn. I’ve got engspice aboard. They’ll seize the ship and arrest us both. We have to go. Now.”
The men from behind were closing, using benches, chairs, and the bodies of passersby and droids for cover as they closed the distance. The screams and shouts of the civvies made it hard to think.
“I just want the cargo,” one of the men, the leader apparently, shouted above the tumult.
For answer, Zeerid popped up from behind the droid and fired three quick shots. He hit no one but he drove all three of the men behind them to the ground. He whirled on the man before them just in time to see the red muzzle flare of the blaster shot that slammed into his chest and sent him sliding three meters along the floor. The impact blew the breath from his lungs and left him gasping. Black smoke spiraled up from the hole ablated in his armored vest.
He’d been hit before and kept his wits, despite the pain and difficulty breathing.
“I’m hit,” he said.
He rolled over onto this stomach and fired as rapidly as he could pull the trigger at the three men behind them. They responded in kind. Blaster bolts put holes in the floor around him. Chunks of floor tile flew into the air. He could barely hear anything over the sound of blasterfire and the screams of the civvies.
A shot from the attack’s leader, the man who looked so familiar, caught Zeerid’s shoulder. Once more his armor spared him serious injury but the impact sent a jolt of pain down the length of his arm, left his hand numb, and sent his blaster skittering over the floor.
It stopped directly before a Zeltron female who lay flat on the floor. He met her wide-eyed gaze and saw the mindless fear. She made no move toward the blaster.
He rolled for cover away from the woman as more and more shots from the three men caged him in. Near him, a civilian moaned, presumably hit in the crossfire. A woman shrieked.
He had to get clear.
But before he could stand Aryn was over him, her blade a blur of motion that formed a cocoon of green light around them, deflecting blaster shots in all directions. She grabbed him under his armpit and helped him to his feet while still deflecting shots.
“Up,” she said. “Up.”
He still had not caught his breath enough to reply, but with her assistance he got to his feet. His right arm hung from his shoulder like a slab of meat. Reaching behind to the small of his back, he pulled the E-9 he kept there and took it in his left hand.
“The ship,” he said, still struggling for air.
Aryn gestured at a cargo tram near the three men shooting at them from behind. The six cars of the tram rushed toward the men, propelled by Aryn’s power. They scrambled aside, and Aryn and Zeerid dashed for Fatman.
The single man standing between them and the ship fired once, twice, and Aryn deflected both shots. Zeerid leveled the E-9 and fired. The shot hit the man in the brow and he fell backward, eyes wide open, blood pooling, dead.
As they pelted to the ship, more blaster shots rang out and Aryn’s blade hummed. The energy of the weapon caused Zeerid’s hair to stand on end.
They bounded over the dead man and through the transparisteel doors to the landing pad. The doors slid shut behind them, shutting off the screams of the civvies. Zeerid was grateful for it. Blaster shots thudded into the doors. The sound of speeders, swoops, and other nearby ships put a thrum in the air.
Shots rang out from above and to the right. A bolt clipped Aryn in the calf and knocked her legs out from under her.
An unmarked open-topped speeder flew in from the right, the pilot, a human male, firing over the side.
Zeerid crouched, one hand on Aryn, as he fired three shots with the E-9, trying to target one of the grav-thrusters on the speeder but hitting only the surrounding fuselage. The shots did no damage so he targeted the cockpit. Trying to avoid Zeerid’s fire, the pilot overcompensated and the speeder turned hard right. While the pilot scrambled to regain control, Zeerid grabbed Aryn with his good arm and pulled her to her feet.
“I’m all right,” she said. “Go, go.”
Sirens screamed in the distance, presaging the arrival of the port authorities.
Supporting each other arm in arm, they limped to the entry door and Zeerid punched in the code. Behind them, the doors to the landing pad slid open. Shots rang off the hull of Fatman. Zeerid fired a few blind bolts behind him. Aryn deflected another two shots into the bulkhead.
The ship’s door slid open too karking slow. Zeerid grabbed Aryn and climbed in before the door was all the way open. He hit the button to close it and the door stopped and reversed itself.
“I’ve got to get us out of here. You’re all right?”
“I’m fine,” she said.
The wound on her calf was ugly but looked like a graze. The pink, raw meat of her flesh was bordered by black lines of charred skin.
He pelted through Fatman’s corridors until he reached the cockpit, slammed himself into the pilot’s seat, and fired up the engines. His numb arm made it difficult, but he managed. He looked out of the cockpit for the speeder, saw it above him.
He’d ram it if it didn’t get out of the way.
The thrusters engaged and Fatman rose off the pad. The speeder wheeled to the side. The pilot fired wildly at the cockpit, but Fatman’s transparisteel canopy turned the shots without so much as a mark.
Zeerid considered blowing the speeder from the air with Fatman’s plasma cannons, but the falling debris might hurt an innocent.
“Consider yourself fortunate, fella.”
When he had ten meters of altitude, he engaged the ion engines and Fatman blazed skyward. He monitored the scanners to ensure no one was following them.
When he saw nothing, he let himself uncoil. He tested his arm, found it unbroken, just badly bruised. The feeling was already beginning to return to his hand.
Once the ship broached the atmosphere, he gave her to the autopilot and hurried back to the hold to check on Aryn.
VRATH HOLSTERED his still-warm weapon while he watched Zeerid’s ship lift into Vulta’s night sky. The ship’s ion engines flared blue and the freighter sped into the darkness and mingled with the rest of the night traffic.
He cursed as he surveyed the ruins of their ambush: two of his men dead, one wounded, the authorities en route, and he’d neither seized nor destroyed the engspice.
The Hutts would be unhappy.
Hundreds of faces stared out at them through the transparisteel windows of the spaceport. Behind the faces, he saw security droids and blue-uniformed security officers speeding along the autowalks. Some of the gawkers turned to the officers, pointed fingers outside at Vrath and his men. He could hear sirens in the distance.
“Time to get clear, boss,” said Deron.
Vrath nodded. He regretted leaving his dead behind, but their identities would tell the authorities nothing. They’d all been surgically altered several times over. Their current identities would not be traceable to the Hutts.
Keene set the speeder down on the landing pad. Vrath, Deron, and Lom hopped in.
“Move,” Vrath said.
Keene brought the speeder up and punched the acceleration. The wind whipped over them. Keene kept the speeder low and mixed with the traffic in the heart of Yinta Lake. Vrath kept an eye behind them for pursuit but saw none.
“We are clear,” he said.
Keene slowed the speeder and changed course, heading for their safehouse.
Lom started a stream of expletives that lasted three minutes. When he finished, Deron said, “The Hutts said nothing about Jedi involvement.”
“No, they didn’t,” Vrath agreed, though he doubted his contact with the Hutts had known.
“What are the Jedi doing with a spicerunner?” Deron asked.
Vrath shook his head, pondering. Jedi involvement made no sense, unless …
“Maybe the Jedi want to put their agent on Coruscant and they’re using a spicerunner to get her there.”
Deron harrumphed, seemingly unimpressed with the explanation.
“So how do they get through the Imperial blockade and get to Coruscant? He can’t just fly up to an Imperial cruiser.”
“No,” Vrath said, still thinking. “He can’t. But he’s got to have something in mind. The spice needs to get there and get there fast.”
“Right.”
Vrath made up his mind. “Keene, get me to Razor.”
“Why? What are you going to do?” Deron asked.
“I’m going to fly right up to an Imperial cruiser.”
“Huh?”
Vrath did not waste time with further explanation. The authorities would be searching for them once they analyzed video of the battle in the spaceport. Probably The Exchange already had the video, too. They’d be hunting Vrath and his team also.
“Get to your ships and get offplanet,” Vrath said. His team had landed in the bush outside Yinta Lake, and had not registered with planetary control.
“We rendezvous in three standard days at the usual place on Ord Mantell.”
He would get one more chance at stopping the engspice.
ZEERID FOUND ARYN limping through the corridors toward the cockpit.
“We’re away,” he said. “Safely, it seems. I got nothing but normal traffic on the scanners.”
“Good. Now what?”
“Now we go to Coruscant.”
She said, “How will we get through the Imperial blockade?”
“Ah. Well, that’s complicated. Why don’t you go take care of that leg?”
“Why don’t you take care of that arm?”
“I need to eyeball the cargo. You don’t need to come.”
“I think I won’t.”
He nodded. “Medbay is forward and starboard.”
She smiled. “Kolto for your cuts.”
“Kolto for your cuts,” he echoed, a soldier’s phrase for medical care in the field.
“There’s food in the galley,” he said. “Protein bars and glucose supplements, mostly. Help yourself.”
“You’re still eating like a soldier.”
“I still do lots of things like a soldier.”
Just not the most important things.
She headed off and he headed toward the cargo bay, sneaking up on the crates as if they were an easily startled animal. They were small, maybe a meter on a side, tiny in the otherwise empty hold. He didn’t know what he had expected. Something bigger, he supposed. They seemed like a great deal of trouble for such small containers. He ran his hands over them and decided he did not want to see the spice after all.
He headed back to the cockpit to pilot his ship. The hail from Oren was already blinking. He punched it.
“Go,” he said.
“Our hackers have the film from the spaceport. I have seen your little incident.”
“Incident? I was shot. Twice.”
“Facial recognition on the apparent leader of the hit team gives an ID of Vrath Xizor.” Oren chuckled. “Apparently he’s an elementary school teacher from the Core.”
“I think we can safely assume that is fake. Who is he, Oren?”
“Free agent, we think. Probably works for the Hutts. They wouldn’t want the engspice to get to Coruscant. They’re … at odds with our buyer.”
The Hutts. It seemed they were into everything.
“Is that all you have?” Zeerid asked him.
“That’s all I have. How are you planning to get the spice to Coruscant, Z-man?”
“I’m not telling you a kriffin’ thing, Oren. You have a leak in your organization. I’ll get it there. That’s all you need to know.”
Oren chuckled. “Good-bye, Z-man.”
Behind him, Aryn cleared her throat. Zeerid could not bring himself to make eye contact with her. He started punching coordinates into the navicomp and Aryn eased into the copilot’s seat. It had been a long while since anyone had shared the cockpit with him. She had bandaged up her calf.
“Bandage looks good,” he said.
“Thanks.” She eyed the math in the navicomp. “That’s not going to get us to Coruscant.”
“No,” he said. “It’s going to take us to the Kravos system.”
“That’s a dead system,” she said. “On the edge of Imperial space.”
He nodded. “Supply convoys stop there to skim the gas giants for hydrogen.”
“I don’t understand. What’s the plan to get to Coruscant?”
“I thought you had the plan,” he said.
“What?”
He smiled. “I’m joking.”
“Not funny. The plan, Zeerid.”
He nodded. “It’s dangerous.”
Aryn seemed unbothered. She stared out the cockpit as they flew into the velvet of space, waiting for him to explain. He tried.
“I’m going to piggyback Fatman on an Imperial ship.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means what it sounds like. I heard about it in flight school, back in the service.”
“You heard about it?”
Zeerid continued as if she had said nothing. “Centuries ago, smugglers used to jump into and out of hyperspace milliseconds after a Republic ship, say a big supply ship, heading for Coruscant. Smuggler comes out of hyperspace and goes cold except for thrusters.”
Aryn considered it. “Hard to pick up on sensors.”
“Right, but only if you come out in the supply ship’s shadow. And only if you come out and get cold right away.”
“You’d have to know right where they’d come out.”
“And they did then. And we do now.”
Zeerid knew all the details of every hyperspace lane in the Core. If he knew where the Imperial ships entered hyperspace and their ultimate destination, he knew where they would come out.
“Then what?”
“Then you latch on.”
Aryn’s eyes looked as wide as a Rodian’s. “You latch on?”
“An electromagnetic seal. That part’s easy to do.”
“They’ll feel it.”
Zeerid nodded. “Gotta be a big enough ship and you’ve got to latch onto a cargo bay or something similar. Something likely to be empty. Then, once you get through the atmosphere, you disengage the seal and float away into clear sky.”
It sounded ridiculous when he spoke it aloud. He could not believe he was contemplating it.
Aryn blew out a sigh, stared out the cockpit. “This is your plan?”
“Such as it is. You have something better?”
“Who’s ever done it?”
“No one I know. When the Republic learned of it, they adjusted their sensor scans to look for it. No one’s done it in centuries.”
“But the Empire won’t know about it.”
“So I hope.”
He tried hard not to see the doubt in her expression. It echoed his own.
“This is all I’ve got, Aryn. It’s this or nothing.”
She stared out the cockpit, the turn of her thoughts visible behind the green veil of her eyes.
Fatman was almost clear of gravity wells.
“I can still drop you somewhere,” he said, hoping she would not take him up on it. “You don’t have to hitch a ride with me.”
She smiled. “This is all I’ve got, too, Z-man.”
“Aren’t we a pair, then.”
She chuckled, but it faded quickly.
“Aryn? You all right?”
“I feel like I left Alderaan a lifetime ago,” she said. “It’s been hours.”
“A lot can happen in a handful of hours,” he said.
She nodded, drifted off.
“Aryn?”
She came back to him from wherever she’d been. “I’m with you,” she said. “And I think I can help make this work.”