Star Wars: Shadow Games (6 page)

The PLY-3500 was everything the SoroSuub press campaign said and more. As they were greeted by the ship’s steward—an E-3PO protocol droid—and shown
to their quarters just forward of the observation deck, Dash noticed quite a few “enhancements” that weren’t in the manufacturer’s literature. He made a mental note to get the ship’s schematics and acquaint himself with the vessel, paying close attention to any nook or cranny in which a stowaway might hide. When he’d brought up the idea that someone might sneak aboard her ship unobserved, the celebrity had denied that such a thing was possible—but she had blanched at the suggestion, her skin becoming, if possible, paler than it already was. He’d scared her, but the fact that she hadn’t considered the possibility that Fanboy might be able to get
real
close only showed that she deserved to be scared.

Dash and Eaden were quartered in a suite of rooms at the head of the aft quarterdeck immediately abaft a set of emergency doors. Kendara Farlion’s suite was next door to theirs, while Javul Charn’s chambers took up the opposite side of the aft quarterdeck, her door cattycorner to Dash and Eaden’s.

“Rarefied water,” said Eaden philosophically as he surveyed the surface of Tatooine from the expanse of transparisteel that ran the entire outer wall of their quarters. Softly lit by clever indirect lighting, the stunning main chamber featured adjustable coloration and lighting schemes, original work from a dozen well-known artists, and sleek, designer furniture, which included state-of-the-art antigrav form couches upholstered in the finest Corellian leather.

“Yeah, there’re definite perks to the position of royal bodyguard—having to room near the royal mark being one of them.”

“You’d be wise not to let her hear you call her that,” observed Eaden.

“Not to worry, I’ll be a good boy.”

The Nautolan smiled—a peculiar curling of his wide
mouth. “Highly unlikely. Perhaps you should practice saying,
Yes, boss.
”

A strange, metallic sigh issued from just inside the door to the opulent quarters, making both men turn. Leebo stood behind them, looking somehow bereft; an attitude communicated almost entirely by posture, as of course the droid’s facial features were immobile.

“What’s wrong with you?” Dash asked him.

“Like you care. So engrossed in your silly sentient squabbles while I stand here doing everything. I mean, really,
you
two may have jobs, but me? I might as well be turned off and used as a clothes rack.”

“There’s a thought,” said Dash. “What do you want me to do?”

Leebo’s head came up with a faint squeak. “Introduce me to the ship’s engineer. Tell him what a genius I am. That you’d never be able to keep the
Outrider
in trim without me, that—”

“Excuse me,” Dash said, interrupting the droid’s recitation. “Okay, point one: I’d never be able to keep the
Outrider
in trim without you? I hate to spoil this droid fever-dream you’re having, boyo, but I kept the
Outrider
shipshape long before you came on the scene. And point two: may I remind you where the
Outrider
is at this moment? Hardly great advertising for your genius.”

“That,” said Leebo, drawing himself to his full height, “was not my fault.”

“Are you saying it was
mine
?”

“
I
wasn’t the one who piloted the ship into an ambush then tried to get out of it by sideswiping a singularity … or three.”

“Now, that just hurts. Look, you whiny bucket of bolts—”

“Do you realize that you’re arguing with a mechanism?” Eaden said.

Eaden’s question, mildly asked, brought swift embarrassment. “Yeah, yeah, you’re right. I oughta just turn him off.”

“Hey!”

“When he might actually be useful?” Eaden asked. “Unwise. At the very least, he’s another pair of eyes—metaphorically speaking. And he doesn’t need to sleep.”

Dash grinned. “Night watch, huh? Good idea.” He turned back to Leebo. “Looks like you’ll earn your keep after all.”

“I’m ecstatic with relief.”

The door chimed just then and, to Dash’s affirmative, slid open to reveal Kendara Farlion. She’d removed her pinwheel lenses to reveal deep violet eyes that exactly matched her sequined eyebrows. “You know, I can hear you arguing all the way out in the hall. And this ship is pretty well insulated. You sure you can all work together?”

“We’re fine,” said Dash. “Just fine.”

“Glad to hear it. Ready for a tour of the ship?”

“More than ready,” Dash said, and followed her from the cabin.

D
ASH WAS PREPARED TO BE DISAPPOINTED IN, EVEN DISPARAGING
of, the
Nova’s Heart
. It was, after all, not a
working
vessel. It was a yacht, which in Dash’s mind translated to toy. But five minutes after the tour began, he was grudgingly willing to admit that the ship was pretty well put together, and ten minutes in he’d decided that
Nova’s Heart
was a stunning piece of craftswork. He kept that assessment to himself, however.

Every angle was precise and smooth, every curve delighted the eye, every joint was flush. The interior was a tasteful combination of brushed durasteel and fabrics that emulated the metal’s satiny sheen. He’d been aboard Lando Calrissian’s
Lady Luck
—a PLY-3000—and had been amused at the way the gambler had hidden the secret muscles of the craft beneath layer upon layer of opulent, even gaudy, luxury appointments.
Nova’s Heart
was a different sort of creature. Her trim, muscular, graceful frame was draped only lightly with opulence. She was, in a word, a lady: sleek, feline, and—though not afraid of showing off her strength—unmistakably feminine. Definitely not the transportation equivalent of an odalisque.

Dash gave the quarters and living areas of the ship only the most cursory examination. It was the working decks, engineering, and the bridge that fascinated him. He assumed these also interested Eaden, but really, who knew?

In engineering, Dash slowed the tour to a crawl by checking out every nuance of the ship’s drives and systems. This caused Spike to roll her eyes roughly every twenty seconds, but the captain, an imperturbable Zabrak named Serdor Marrak, seemed … well, imperturbable. Having the captain and Eaden Vrill standing on each side of him made Dash feel as if he were getting serenity in stereo—an eerie feeling. Spike’s prickly impatience was almost a relief.

“Your shield generators are Chempat-6s, I see,” Dash observed as he crawled around the gleaming deflector system. “But that resonator coil up there doesn’t look stock to me.” He pointed upward to where a meter-long, half-meter-wide coil of flat optical-quality transparisteel wound its way around the power conduit to the deflector array.

“It’s not,” said Marrak placidly. “It’s a modified Chem-6. I’d almost call it a 6.5.”

“Why do you have to call it anything?” asked Spike, glancing at her chrono. “It’s a machine.”

“Yeah?” said Dash, ignoring her. “May I ask about the nature of the modifications?”

The captain said, “Javul Charn has sufficient reason to want to run silent and to be … difficult to track or trace. We modified the unit along those lines.”

Dash looked over sharply from the resonator coil. “A
cloaking
device? You modified this to be a cloaking device?”

The captain shrugged. “More of a smudging device. It kicks in once we’re in open space. We’ve installed maximal confounders; the coils have been torqued and the harmonics realigned so that they distort and blur our communications signature … among other things.”

“What other things?” asked Eaden, betraying his own interest in the ship’s construction.

“We beefed up the ablative capacity of the shields while
we were at it. They’re virtually impenetrable to communications signals when we want them to be. They’ll also fling off pretty big space debris and, if we ever should find ourselves under attack for some reason, they’ll do a fine job of repelling energy weapons fire as well.”

Dash frowned, puzzled. “They block communications. Why, exactly?”

“Keeps people from eavesdropping on us,” said Spike. “We don’t want everybody to know Javul’s plans, do we? I can’t begin to tell you what a pain it is to get into a port of call and find a literal fleet of overeager fans waiting in orbit. Javul likes to keep a low profile. I think you can appreciate that.”

Dash moved to peer out through a long, narrow viewport at the port engine nacelle. “Combined ion/hyperdrive, huh?”

The captain nodded while, behind him, Leebo gave an ecstatic sigh. Dash stifled a grin. “Those modified, too?” he asked.

“A bit. They were rated to just lightspeed. We managed to push them a bit farther than that. My engineer is quite an innovator.”

Dash nodded. “I’d like to meet him.”

“Her.”

“Oh. Droid brain?”

The captain blinked. “Excuse me?”

Dash laughed. “Not your engineer—although I guess she might have a droid brain. Mine does.” He jerked a thumb back toward Leebo, who was gazing around like a lovesick Wookiee. “I meant the ship. I have a … an acquaintance who installed a full-faculty droid autopilot and system controller in his ship.”

“Ah, I see. As it happens my engineer is a Twi’lek named Arruna Var. Our steward has a droid brain, though. So does the ship’s doctor.”

“It’s too bad
you
don’t have a droid brain,” Spike told
Dash, “we could download all this information right to your cortex. Save a lot of time.” She checked her chrono again.

Dash grinned at her. “That is a fantastic idea. In fact, if you could take Leebo, here, and get those schematics downloaded into his neural net, that’d be stellar. Eaden and I can go over them with him later.”

She stared at him a moment. “All right, but do you think you could hurry this tour up just a bit? We need to make sure we’re secure before we leave Tatooine.”

“What did you think I was doing? This
tour
, as you like to call it, is my way of making sure we’re secure. If I don’t go over every centimeter of this ship, how can I foresee problems?”

She aimed those violet laser cannon eyes at him for a moment more, then ordered Leebo to follow her back to the upper decks.

“Nervous little thing, isn’t she?” Dash murmured.

Somehow she heard him. She turned on her heel and marched back to meet him nose-to-nose, eyes narrowed to slits. “Who’re you calling
little
, space-monkey? I’m not little. I’m almost as tall as you are.”

He glanced down. “You’re cheating. You’re standing on your toes.”

She let herself down to her heels with a bump, pivoted, and marched away again, pulling Leebo into her wake.

“These schematics you mentioned,” the droid said as she led him away, “would they happen to be holographic schematics? Three-dimensional schematics?”

“Sure.”

Dash, Eaden, and Captain Marrak continued making their way from stem to stern, even going out over the fantail on the observation deck to gaze back at the hull from that extreme point. Dash cocked his head to one side and eyed the lower hull.

“She seems … deeper than the average 3500. More girth below the centerline.”

“Indeed,” said Eaden, tilting his head in the same direction.

The captain joined them in peering down the ship’s graceful flank. “Another modification the boss made. Increased stowage. Takes a lot of equipment to stage one of her shows. And a good-sized crew. Of course, we’re only part of the picture.”

“What do you mean?”

“We recently split the setup between two vessels: the
Nova’s Heart
and a freighter—the
Deep Core
. Each carries just enough equipment for her to be able to pull off a creditable performance if something should happen to the other ship or its cargo. Javul hates to let her fans down.”

“Has she ever?” Dash asked.

“No, but we had a near disaster about six months ago when one of our containers turned up empty. It was supposed to house a setup for a big cityscape performance framework that she uses. But somehow that got left behind … or stolen.”

Dash wondered how much the captain knew of more recent developments. “Has Charn told you why we’re here?”

“Of course. You’re security consultants.”

Dash nodded. “So you’ll understand why I’m asking you if anything else … suspicious or strange—or even dangerous—has happened recently.”

Marrak gave him a knowing look. “You mean the sort of thing that might have led to hiring a security consultant?”

“Yeah. That sort of thing.”

The Zabrak captain showed the first sign of emotion since Dash had met him. The emotion was unease. “Well, she will have told you about the black lilies … yeah, I
thought so. So I knew perfectly well that if the person who arranged that little present understood the symbolism … let’s just say it could be construed as a threat. But before that—about three weeks before that—we had a stowaway. A fan concealed himself in one of the containers and wasn’t found until we reached our next port of call. I understand he was in pretty bad shape when they found him. No food, water … little oxygen.” The Zabrak shuddered, his ritual tattoos horripilating as though momentarily imbued with life.

“Really? Anybody aboard now who’d know more about the incident?”

Marrak shrugged. “Dara would. And of course, the cargo master—Yanus Melikan. Since that incident he’s double-checked every container.”

“Well, I may just have him triple-check it,” Dash said and drew a droll sidewise look from Eaden.

“Would they have informed Javul Charn of this incident?” the Nautolan asked.

Captain Marrak snorted. “Don’t know. Farlion will go to great lengths to keep our holostar from being rattled by stuff like that. She can be very protective.”

“Really? I hadn’t noticed,” said Dash wryly. Chances were good Dash was going to find out to exactly what lengths Spike would go to protect her stunning boss.

They worked their way from the observation deck down to the well-deck where Dash, in inspecting the life pods, discovered that the
Nova’s Heart
was equipped with a secondary shuttle—a prettier, glossier counterpart to the stubby little planet-hopper they’d arrived in. This shuttle was about eight meters long, held six people and a nav droid, and was sleek as a dart. Its long, tapered hull ended in a deadly-looking point that, slanting down as it did from its backswept stabilizer planes and V-shaped forward viewport, gave the little ship the threatening look of a raptor. He was convinced he was looking
at a fighter—not the kind of vehicle you took on a pleasure outing.