Star Wars: Shadow Games (19 page)

Dash felt lucky to finally get Javul alone at roughly the midpoint of their voyage to Christophsis. Han had created a little guest lounge in a storage compartment between his quarters and the cabin Javul shared with Spike. Dash found Javul there, frowningly studying a datapad … or maybe just reading a book or watching a vid. She shut the little machine off when he entered the room and smiled up at him.

“How’s my shadow?” she asked brightly.

He stopped just short of sitting down at the small makeshift table Han had fashioned out of a cylindrical container and an emergency hatch cover and stared at her. “Your shadow?”

“You haven’t talked to me much, but I know you’re there. Following, watching—”

“You make it sound creepy.”

“No, it’s nice. Makes me feel safe. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt safe.”

You’re not safe
, he wanted to tell her.
You may have brought the mole with us
. Should he tell her that? He used the act of pulling over a chair to sit in to cover his deliberations.

I should tell her
.

No, I shouldn’t. It would just scare her needlessly
.

Yes, I should. I don’t want her to relax too much, become complacent
.

“Well, are you gonna tell me?” she asked when he’d gotten himself settled.

He glanced at her sharply. Her eyes were mischievous. “What?”

“That little argument you were just having with yourself. You gonna tell me what it was about?”

Was he
that
transparent?

“It was about how much to tell you.”

She raised an eyebrow. “About …”

“When we did this—split up the tour—I’m pretty sure you were thinking that maybe we’d left the spy behind. Am I right?”

She made a wry face and bit her lip. “Yeah. The thought had crossed my mind.”

“I’m not sure we’ve done that. And I’m not sure the attack on the
Nova’s Heart
wasn’t purposeful.”

She looked at him oddly. “Of course it was purposeful. Someone wanted to damage the ship.”

“Or someone wanted to drive you back to Tatooine and/or separate you from the rest of your entourage.”

“Who?”

He hesitated. This wasn’t going to be pleasant. “How well do you know Yanus Melikan?”

She stared at him, her eyes wide. After a long moment of silence, she laughed. Normally, the happy trill would have mesmerized him. Now it grated.

“Mel? You think I should distrust Mel? Why?”

“Because he’s been the one person in a position to figure in just about every one of your little incidents—most especially this last one. He’s the master of that hold,” he added as she screwed up her face in denial. “He knows everything that goes in and everything that comes out. And he routinely tells Nik and Oto not to notice things.”

“You mean my little field trips? He only does what I’ve asked him to do so that I have some privacy.”

“Are you sure?”

Before she could answer, Han Solo stepped through the hatch into the chamber, a crooked grin on his face.

“Am I interrupting anything?” he asked, glancing between the two seated at the table.

“Would you care if you were?” asked Dash in return.

Han grinned unrepentantly. “Nope.”

“Shouldn’t you be up in the cockpit steering this crate,
Captain
Solo?”

“Shouldn’t you be checking shipping crates or something … 
Security Chief
Rendar?”

“I’ve checked them, thanks.”

Han shook his head, moving farther into the room. “Oh, but you can never be sure about these things, Dash, old buddy. I mean, you can’t be watching all the holds all the time.”

“I’ve got a maintenance droid posted at every entrance.”

“Droids? Man, you’ll be up a wormhole without a hyperdrive if your saboteur knows how to fool a droid. Which doesn’t exactly take a degree in Neural-Net Psych One-Oh-One.”

He had a point. A good point. One Dash hadn’t even considered.

“It’s about time for my rounds anyway.” He rose and gestured at his chair. “All yours, Han, old buddy.”

Han smiled and took the chair.

“Dash?”

He turned back at the sound of Javul’s voice.

“I’m sure,” she said.

He hesitated a moment, trying to remember where they’d left their conversation when Han had strolled in. He’d asked if she was sure she could trust Mel. In the moment their eyes had met, he thought he’d read doubt in hers.

“I’m gonna go check the holds again anyway,” he said.

He checked in with Leebo and Oto first—asked them to examine the droids he’d posted outside the various holds, dividing the duty between the two of them.

“And what exactly is it I’m supposed to be checking for?” asked Leebo. “Oto’s got an uplink to all of them and they haven’t so much as peeped.”

“Find out if they recorded any peculiar comings and goings.”

“Peculiar comings and goings? Oh, now there’s a real clear description. What d’you think, Oto? You think the droids will understand what we mean by
peculiar comings and goings
?”

“I am uncertain how to respond to that, LE-BO2D9. I have no internal description of what constitutes
peculiar comings and goings.
”

Leebo swiveled his head toward Dash. “There, you see? Clear as mud. Care to try again?”

Dash blinked at the droid. Tried to remember that it really wasn’t being a smart-mouth—it was the programmed personality. This was just a request for more information; Leebo’s way of saying
Please specify
. He took a deep breath.

“Inquire as to whether the droids have observed anyone—and I do mean
anyone
—entering the holds or tampering with the containers, or with the droids themselves, in any way.”

Leebo tilted his head sideways. “There, now. Was that so hard?” He started to turn away.

“Wait.” Dash tapped him on one metal shoulder. “Ask if anyone even
approached
them. I mean, there’s a chance maybe someone messed with the droids’ memory. Did something to the containers then wiped their record of it.”

Oto made a hostile-sounding clicking noise. “Such reprogramming would require that Cargo Master Melikan was the aforementioned someone. Likewise, if they were instructed not to notice something, the cargo master would have had to deliver the instruction.”

“Ask,” Dash insisted. “That’s an order. I want to know if anyone so much as breathed on those droids.”

“Breathed on them, sir? Do you wish me to inquire—”

“It’s a figure of speech. Just ask if anyone attempted to enter the cargo holds. Or, in fact, did enter. Or approached the droids. Got that?”

“Yeah, we got it,” said Leebo, sounding annoyed. “We’re not a couple of food service units here, you know.”

“I was trying to be precise. The last thing I need is for someone to plant a bomb in one of the cargo bays and not find out about it until it goes off because I failed to ask the right question.”

He left the two droids to their task—Oto blessedly silent and Leebo lauding the virtues of “sensible programmed persons.” He made a quick tour of the ship, ascertaining where everyone was. Mel was asleep in the quarters he shared with Nik—a makeshift berth in a corner of the forward hold; Nik was doing his schoolwork; Spike was up in the cockpit pestering Eaden—and of course he knew exactly where Han and Javul were.

That done, he started on the holds, beginning with the main hold on the port side. He determined that Leebo had been here already asking a series of questions. No one else had come except, of course, himself. He went
into the hold anyway and prowled around the containers, looking for anything that seemed amiss. He found nothing. The droid he’d stationed in the loading bay between the forward and number two holds gave the same report, as did the one in hold number three.

Dash wondered if it was even worth his while to go into the number three hold. He sighed and checked his chrono. If he’d done his time estimation right, they’d be coming out of hyperspace fairly soon to make a course adjustment. He should have just enough time to do a quick walk-through.

He slipped into the hold and closed the hatch behind him. Everything looked completely normal. The number three hold—actually the freight cargo chamber, located immediately behind the
Falcon
’s huge electromagnetic mandibles—was a pretty good-sized space. He made his way through it carefully, peeking into crevices between containers, rapping on the individual boxes, checking the floor, the ceiling, the blinking access panels. He stifled a yawn.

Who would do this kind of work full-time
?

He wasn’t sure whether he should be in awe of Mel or feel sorry for him.

He was just going to check the environmental control panel by the cargo bay door when the ship shuddered. He felt a moment of vertigo as it dropped out of hyperspace. That was pretty much as he expected. What he didn’t expect was that the cargo bay grav-plate stopped working at precisely the same moment. Dash’s feet left the deck and the suddenly airborne contents of the bay were in frantic motion. Dash tumbled among them, out of control.

He was no stranger to zero-g. He’d trained in zero-gravity at the Academy and had experienced any number of weightless situations on EVAs. But on none of those occasions had he had to dodge large, inimical objects.
The only fortunate aspect of the situation was that he was headed toward the control panel by the door. He reached it too quickly, colliding painfully with the bulkhead and rebounding into the path of a large cylindrical container. He flailed, thrust out his hands, and pushed away from it, sending it toward the ceiling in a slow spin.

Good news: he rebounded again.

Bad news: he rebounded toward the deck.

He bounced on his hands and knees, struggled to pull his feet under him, to gain some altitude before the grav-plate snapped back on … with all that
stuff
careening around overhead. The toes of his boots slid on the textured metal of the decking, just barely allowing him enough purchase to push off toward the hatch again. Unfortunately, he also thrust himself upward, which put him directly beneath the cylinder he’d banked off a moment before.

It was rotating lazily, its metal fittings glinting in the now dim light of the bay. But—wonder of wonders—it was rotating in just the right direction. Dash lowered his head and let it catch the back of his jacket. It gave him an ungentle shove forward and down. He sailed toward the control panel, this time having the time and presence of mind to put out his hands to grasp the hatch frame and buffer the collision. His right hand met the bulkhead, palm flat, fingers splayed. He allowed his arm to bend, using his left hand to grab the hatch frame. He was secure … for the moment. Hopefully, a moment was all he needed.

He found the grav controls and started to manipulate them, then stopped in confusion. According to the readout on the panel, the plate was still engaged and set to standard Corellian gravity. He grasped the slider anyway and started to pull it downward to increase the gravity. Some sense stopped him. If he turned the gravity up and it kicked back in, some of those crates could do
serious damage to the ship … and to him. He glanced up at the clutter of smaller crates that were collecting above him. He pushed the slider full up to zero-g, then started to bring it slowly back down—to absolutely no effect.

Oh, fine then
.

He hit the hatch control. The brightly lit indicators that showed it to be operational lied; the hatch stayed closed.

Dash took a deep breath, took his right hand off the panel, and reached slowly for his comlink. The ship braked suddenly and made a sharp starboard turn. This was when he learned the local inertial field dampers were off as well; all the floating junk in the cargo bay collided high on the port wall of the hold.

The ship dipped and ducked again, this time to port. The containers, hanging in zero-g, stayed put until the starboard bulkhead moved to connect with them. They flew outward from that more violent impact. A loose glow rod someone had left somewhere they shouldn’t have hurtled past Dash’s head and careened off the inner bulkhead.

He brought the comlink to his mouth and thumbed it on.

“Eaden—Dash. You got gravity out there?”

There was a long enough silence that Dash began to fear that there was something screwy elsewhere in the ship as well; then Eaden’s voice came back to him sounding slightly puzzled: “What do you mean—
out there
?”

“In the cockpit. In the rest of the ship! Is there gravity where you are?”

“Yes. There is not gravity where you are?”

“No. I’m in the number three hold. The plate’s gone down and the hatch won’t open. There are some very large objects floating around over my head, Eaden, and I’d really like them not to suddenly come plummeting down.”

The ship juked again and those very large objects reacted.
Dash gave a yelp of pure, cold fear and shouted, “I need
out
, Ead! I need out now!”

He heard a hurried discussion, recognizing Han’s voice—raised in annoyance or excitement—then Eaden came back on.

“We’re going to brake, Dash. As gently as possible, considering that we are in rather tight quarters. We are approaching an asteroid field.”

“Cancel that,” said Han in the background. “I’m gonna land on that big guy over there. Give the hold a bit of gravity.”

“I don’t
want
gravity!” shrieked Dash, his eyes going to the cylinder now moving inexorably toward him. “I want
out
!”

“Relax,” said Han. “I know what I’m doing.”

“What?” yelled Dash. “
What
are you doing? Eaden? What’s he—”

“He is maneuvering, Dash. I’m on my way to you.”

“But what—?”

The ship performed some sort of fluttering maneuver, and the stuff in the cargo bay banked off several bulkheads at once. A second later it all bobbed downward under the effect of a small gravity field. With every ounce of strength in his left arm, Dash yanked himself sideways into the hatch access, spinning so that his back was to the door. It was only half a meter deep, but it was all the cover the hold offered.