Star Wars: Shadow Games (11 page)

The little toady was shaking his head. “I’m sorry, Captain … I didn’t catch your name.”

“Dash. Dash Rendar.”

The functionary pushed and stroked the virtual buttons and pads that floated in the air between them. “Pardon me,
Captain
Rendar, but the commander of the
Nova’s Heart
is registered as a Serdor Marrak.” He pulled up a flat image of Marrak, not bothering to perform even the small courtesy of spinning the pic toward Dash so that the stats weren’t reversed. “A Zabrak. You,” he continued, “are not Zabrak. Or, if you are, you should shoot your cosmetic surgeon.” He uttered a rude quack intended for a laugh.

“I’m not the ship’s captain. Never claimed otherwise. I’m Charn’s security officer.”

The bug eyes blinked. “Charn? As in Javul Charn?”

Now
he was getting somewhere. He smiled. “The very same. She’s setting up over at the Holosseum even as we speak. She asked me to come down here and see to this matter. So if I might go over those flight logs?”

“I’m sorry, Rendar, but I can’t let you do that.”

Dash regarded the admin for a moment, cast a glance at the silent Leebo, then pulled on a jaunty smile. “I can make it worth your while.”

“No, you cannot.” The Rodian sounded genuinely regretful, but he also sounded firm. “There are regulations to uphold. I cannot grant civilians access to the system. Under any circumstances. You’ve filed an official complaint. It will take several days to process, but it
will
be dealt with.”

“In several days, we’ll be moving on to our next stop!”

“That is not my affair. Good day.”

Stung by the dismissal, Dash removed himself to the corridor outside the flight control office. Of all the admins that might have been on duty, he had to trip over an honest one. “What are the odds?” he asked himself softly.

“Well, what now, boss?” asked Leebo.

“I suppose we could wait for the next admin shift. Find someone willing to be bought off. Of course, that’ll take hours.”

“Seven-point-oh-four-four, to be exact,” offered the droid. “We don’t—”

“—have that kind of time,” they finished in unison.

Dash frowned, peering up the corridor, wondering where the communications systems were housed. “If we could find the communications hub, we might be able to slice in and—”

He stopped. Leebo was shaking his head slowly. “There’s a reason they call it Comm Central, Boss. It would be too well guarded—not to mention having security protocols up the exhaust pipes.”

There was a moment of silence as Dash pondered the situation; then Leebo uttered a tinny sigh. “Do I have to say it?”

“Say what?”

“I’ve got an idea, boss. Of course, I
always
have an idea.”

Dash glared at him. “So spit it out.”

“Housekeeping.”

“Excuse me?”

“Housekeeping bots and droids have to plug into protocol terminals to receive instructions. The ports are unguarded. Who cares if someone steals the trash compactor schedule? You see, all systems are connected at some level in a facility like this. They have to be, because if it’s ever necessary to reboot the entire system or to power
it up after a disaster, you can’t initialize every system independently; it’d take forever—well, actually, only seventeen-point-nine hours, but still—I’m sorry; did you just make a noise?”

Dash made the noise again. “I get it,” he said. “There’s built-in redundancy and subsystems that tie the whole mess together. Like housekeeping.”

“You
do
get it. Imagine my delight.”

“Shut up,” said Dash, “and find a terminal.”

Even down in the sublevels of the building there weren’t many maintenance droids of Leebo’s class engaged directly in the housekeeping activities. They were overseers, leaving it to the smaller, simpler service droids to scurry about doing the grunt work—cleaning floors, scooping up trash, sucking up dust. Noting this, Leebo snatched up an MSE-6 cleaning droid, tucked it under one arm, and pretended, quite credibly Dash thought, to be adjusting its communications port.

Such a task required that the droid plug the MSE-6 into one of the many maintenance ports integrated into each doorway along the service corridors. Leebo did this with mechanical panache, uttered the droid equivalent of a “Tsk,” then sliced in himself, using the MSE-6 as a conduit.

Dash, watching from where he pretended to be awaiting a lift, froze when a Rodian maintenance supervisor stopped to see what Leebo was doing.

“What’s wrong with the MSE unit?” he asked. “If it’s broken, just take it down to the shop and have them issue a new one. It’ll save time.”

“Not necessary, sir,” Leebo said. “It seems merely to be misinterpreting its instruction set. I believe I can have it set to rights in moments once I determine the source of the problem. I am currently,” he added as the Rodian’s
gaze took in the fact that he was linked into the system through the maintenance droid, “ascertaining that the fault does not lie in the instruction set itself.”

“Oh. Yeah. Sure. Good idea. Carry on, then.” The Rodian departed, Dash relaxed, and Leebo continued his tunneling through the port authority’s housekeeping system.

Dash’s hope that the hallways would remain empty was a forlorn one; when the lift opened for a trio of Sullustan mech-techs, he was forced to enter and ride it up several levels until they got off. Then he rode it down again. In fact, he rode it up and down several times while waiting for Leebo to finish.

He’d returned to the maintenance level for perhaps the fourth time when the doors of the lift opened and Leebo stepped in.

“Mission accomplished.”

“You got the records?”

The droid tapped his durasteel skull with a finger. “Got ’em.”

“Anything interesting?”

“I didn’t have time to analyze them. That maintenance super came back.”

Dash glanced down. “You still have a cleaning droid tucked under your arm.”

“Yes. I do, don’t I? Can I keep it? I’ve always wanted a pet.”

“You’re joking.”

“Droids don’t joke—not really. We just regurgitate learned responses. Fact is, I may have to keep it. I told the maintenance super I was taking it down to the shop after all, but this lift is going up … and up and up. He may have noted this.”

“So just turn the thing loose when we get out.”

“Bad idea. It’s got a unique ID. If anyone suspects I
was tampering with it, they could track it down and discover that that’s just what I was doing—using its protocols to slice into the system.”

“You
can’t
have left fingerprints.”

“Shows what you know. In connecting to the MSE-6, I left my own indelible mark on the little guy. Unless I completely wipe its core, they might be able to identify me by
my
unique ID.”

“So? Wipe its core.”

Leebo reacted with a shocked stance. “How rude.” He patted the top of the droid’s metal casing. “Pretend you didn’t hear that, Mousie.”

“
Mousie
?”

“An MSE-6 cleaning droid. Serial number E3E3EEK.
Mousie
seems an appropriate, if unimaginative, name.”

“Uh-huh. And you’re going to get it out of here how?” The lift doors hissed open, and Dash nodded to the broad, crowded hallway that gave onto the port authority’s entry.

“It’s rather a warm day, sir,” said Leebo blandly. “Allow me to carry your jacket.”

J
AVUL WAS NERVOUS
. N
ERVOUS IN A WAY SHE HADN’T
felt since she’d embarked on her career. Before a performance she was always keyed up, always edgy, amped, eager to be onstage. That came with the territory. But right now, she was just plain jumpy. “Jinky,” as Dara would say.

And why not? Before she’d acquired her “stalker,” the most she’d had to fear was a missed lyric, a missing prop, a mechanical glitch. Now … now she didn’t know what to expect.

She stood on the stage below the Holosseum dome and looked up into the vast scaffolding that served as the framework for her show. Flown in the ether beneath the crown of the Holosseum were four separate sets. One was a stylized forest with treetops suggested by vertical masts of aluminum swathed in synthsilk. “Clouds” of zoosha fabric—able to be rendered invisible at a command from the rig master—floated in among the tree limbs.

The second set was a balcony that formed the only solid surface in a cloud city described in sheets and streamers and billows of translucent material.

The third and fourth pieces represented the duality of Coruscant/Imperial Center—the first gleaming and grand, reaching up toward the distant sun; its alter ego dark and enigmatic with edges that were cold and hard and unforgiving.

These, Javul had designed herself. She didn’t openly
proclaim that they represented Coruscant’s past and present, of course. That would have been subversive, and Javul Charn stayed as far from subversive in her stage act as possible. But she was not averse to admitting a little nostalgia.

The costumer brought out a pair of wings and began securing them to her back, carefully adjusting them so they wouldn’t foul the opti-fiber cable attached to Javul’s ultralight harness. They looked like gossamer—slender arcs of the finest metal overlaid with panels of zoosha. A tiny power generator poured colored light into the threads of the fabric and up the length of the tether, cycling through all the colors of the spectrum—even colors visible only to nonhuman eyes. The little power source also generated an emergency antigrav field just in case the opti-fiber were to fail. In the average venue, the field would let Javul down to the stage gently.

The Rodian Holosseum was no average venue, either in size or opulence. It was easily the largest, most luxurious indoor concert hall she’d ever performed in, and that domed ceiling seemed a kilometer away just now.

She took a deep breath, voice-activated the antigrav field, and bobbed up from the floor.

“Make sure of the coshtumes, please,” said the wardrobe designer, a Bothan woman named Tereez Dza’lar. “I’d hate to have you acshidentally turn thish into a holo-peep-show.”

Javul smiled and murmured, “Act One, Scene Two.”

The pale gray one-piece body stocking she wore shimmered out of existence to make way for a diaphanous dress of sky blue with a shower of golden glitter that seemed to migrate over the surface of the fabric. The ragged hem of the skirt floated about her hips and knees. Her hair framed her face in a pale, lustrous gold.

“Good,” said Tereez. “Try shomething a bit more opaque.”

“Act Two, Scene Three.”

The dress dissolved, and was replaced by a regulation Imperial uniform of the type worn by intelligence officers. In drab brown with gleaming rank insignia, it was about as far removed from the insubstantial fey blue gown as it could get.

Tereez laughed out loud—a sound somewhere between a hiss and a purr. “The wings!”

Looking at her projected image in an offstage holodisplay, Javul joined in. The Imperial getup clashed horribly with the wings, an irony that was not lost on her. “Wow, now there’s a new concept: an Imperial sprite. Think we could build a show around that?”

Tereez shook her head. “I think it would be shuicide to try. The Emperor would never approve. Try the Firsht Act coshtume. The cap was cutting out lasht time.”

Javul complied and faced her costumer wearing a green tunic with green leggings and a jaunty green cap with a bright red feather that nearly matched the new color of her hair. This time the costume accommodated the wings by making them seem to disappear. They weren’t programmed to do that with the Imperial intel costume because she never wore wings with that during the live show.

“Looksh good. Everything sheems to be functioning perfectly.”

Javul looked up at the rigging again, hyperaware of that old show business axiom that the one thing a performer didn’t want right before a performance was a perfect rehearsal. She found herself hoping something would go wrong.

“Places please!” she called to the crew. “Let’s take the first number, okay?”

Everyone faded from sight … except for Eaden Vrill, who stood impassively at the extreme edge of the stage, arms folded over his broad chest, tentacles waving gently about his shoulders.

Dara appeared behind him at the edge of the stage and tapped on his foot. “Sorry, big guy—you can’t stand there.”

With a last look up into the dome, the Nautolan bodyguard descended from the stage into the shadows between two sections of seating, his head-tresses dancing as if in an eddying wind.

Javul felt a tingle of apprehension. Where was Dash and what had he found out at the spaceport?

“It’s trashed,” said Finnick. He returned to the spot in the comm readout where the sub rosa message began. There was no clear instruction there, just a string of jumbled garbage that neither Leebo nor the ship’s communications computer could make anything of. “I’d guess it was programmed to deteriorate after broadcast.”

“But we’ve still got the substance of it on our end, right?” Dash asked.

“I doubt it.” Finnick called up the ship’s transceiver records and went to the time index in question.

More garbage.

Dash sat back in his seat next to Finnick on the bridge of the
Nova’s Heart
. “Then we’re stumped. There’s nothing we can determine from this.”

“Yeah there is,” said Arruna, leaning over Finnick’s shoulder to point at the very beginning of the message in the flight control record. “This was keyed in. Probably from the sender’s console.”

“How can you tell?” Dash asked, frowning.

“If it were sliced in from a remote source, you’d see some artifacts from the tunneling. There’d be, um, slicing and transport code, basically. That is, the code that created a hole in the data stream, then inserted the message. As you can see”—she pointed from the flight control readout to the one from the ship’s transceiver—“these two pieces of code, while pure garbage, are identical
pieces of pure garbage. They’re deteriorating in the same predefined way.”

“Yeah. I get it,” said Dash. “There was no slicing code in
our
message, so if there was any in the port’s exchange, we’d see it as … different garbage.”