The Bacta War (14 page)

Booster frowned. “He’s using those Jedi sorceries to addle her mind.”

“The only person confused about his Jedi heritage is Corran.” Wedge shook his head. “Luke Skywalker has been transmitting material about the Jedi to him to keep alive the possibility that Corran will train to become a Jedi, but Corran’s a bit focused right now on getting at Isard and freeing her prisoners. He’s almost obsessive about it—a trait you know something about.”

Booster planted his massive hands on the arms of the chair. “If you want to scold me about disapproving of the man my daughter is seeing, the message is received. Anything else?”

“That wasn’t my intention—that would be like teaching a rancor to dance. It probably won’t work, you will get your head bitten off, and even if you do succeed, the result won’t be very pretty.” Wedge shivered. “Actually, I wanted to offer you the chance to pilot the
Mimban Cloudrider
on the run to Thyferra.”

Booster sat back and brushed the fingertips of his left hand over his chin. The
Mimban Cloudrider
was one of the Thyferran tankers. Wedge had pulled the crew from it and, with Booster’s help, had gotten identification files sliced together that listed Mirax, Corran, Elscol, Sixtus, and Iella Wessiri as the crew under various pseudonyms. Once in orbit at Thyferra, they could make planetfall in a shuttle and hook up with the Ashern. Wedge still needed someone to command the mission and thought Booster would be invaluable in that position because of his experience and instincts.

Booster lowered his left hand to the arm of the chair. “No.”

“No? You’ll be able to chaperone your daughter.”

“She can take care of herself.”

“You’ll get to pilot a ship again.”

Booster smiled and his body convulsed with silent laughter. “Closer, but still off the mark. The
Cloudrider
is too small. Too little to do.”

Wedge frowned. “Wait a minute. When I got my freighter and started hauling cargo, weren’t you the one who told me that being the master of my own ship and fate was the greatest thing to which I could aspire?”

Booster nodded and sat forward. “I did, but that was before Kessel. Five years in the spice mines changed me.”

“Five years spicing would change anyone.” Wedge frowned. “Don’t tell me Kessel broke your spirit, because I flat refuse to believe it.”

Booster’s booming laughter filled the office. “Broke me? It would take more than no air and lots of work to break Booster Terrik. The mines could be a brain cracker for a lot of folks, especially the pols the Empire tossed in there. Others of us were content to wait our time out. Fliry Vorru, for example, is very patient, which makes him very dangerous. We knew the Empire would never let him out, but he was confident he’d be out someday. I knew I would get out, but the time there still ground on me.”

The flesh around his eyes tightened, leaving the red light in his left eye burning like a laser in the darkness. “The time I spent in Kessel was unbelievably boring, Wedge. Monotony. Day after day the same things would happen with the same people. There was no night, no day, just shift after shift after shift. Prisoners might come and go, but that was it. Pain I could handle and fight against, but boredom? It was the enemy, and it had me mashed flat.”

Wedge winced. “I can’t imagine …” There certainly were times when Wedge would have welcomed less excitement in his life, but not year after year of it.
I’d have gone out of my mind
.

“When I got out, I made one trip on the
Pulsar Skate
, but the solitude of hyperspace reminded me too much of Kessel. That’s why I retired and gave Mirax the ship. Now I travel
and do deals for friends because it means I’m constantly meeting folks and getting to know them and learn about them. I’m trying to fill the void that Kessel left in me, and piloting
Cloudrider
isn’t going to do that for me.”

Wedge nodded. “I understand, though I wish it were otherwise. You’ve got skills I need.” He sat back in his chair. “Having someone I can rely on doing a job that badly needs to be done would be a big help.”

A smile slowly grew on Booster’s face. “I have an idea for you that might serve both of us and cover up some loose ends.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Let me run this station.”

“What?”

“Look, you have this station that’s been a trade staple in this region for a very long time. You’ve got the Republic thinking it’s been destroyed, which means your enemies think that, too, but ships that come in-system to make navigational adjustments can still see it here. You’re fooling no one, and the fact that you’ve shut the station down to folks who have been here a lot means you’re making them angry. That, in turn, means that someone is going to sell you out to Iceheart.”

“We figured that.”

“Well, you should also figure this: Pretty soon no one is going to want to be trading with Thyferra. You’re giving away what Vorru wants to charge for. His only recourse is to cut off the bacta supply going to folks who deal with you. Once he does that, you’re dead.” Booster pressed his hands together. “On the other hand, if we open this station to trade, we start generating capital for this operation
and
we have people bringing us information and equipment. We develop suppliers who are in our debt because of this station—which means they won’t want to betray you—and who bring the material here to us instead of having us go out and get it.”

“And running the station would mean you’d be anything but bored.”

“There’s that, too.”

Wedge closed his eyes and thought for a moment. He’d
known all along that the location of his base would get out, but Booster’s idea of making the secret’s preservation valuable to smugglers and traders did suggest it might last longer.
All the years the Empire searched for Rebel bases, it wasn’t our trade partners who sold us out
. And the prediction of Vorru’s action was pretty much what Wedge had figured Vorru’s response would be. Wedge had been gambling that gratitude for the free bacta would keep trade channels open, but he agreed that supplying a profit motive would go much further in that regard.

He opened his eyes. “Okay, that works for me. What do we use as a cover story for why part of the station is restricted?”

Booster shrugged. “Does it matter? We can start all manner of rumors, from your desire to emulate Warlord Zsinj and carve out your own empire to your desire to build a force to wrest Corellia away from the Diktat or even that you and Isard are working a racket to spike the price of bacta. The greater the number of rumors the better, quite frankly, since they will armor the truth and result in folks bringing us information to further our plans—whatever they might be. As long as there is some mystery here, and folks smell profits in trying to figure it out, we’ll be covered.”

Wedge nodded thoughtfully. “I suspect that your taking this position means you’ll be pitted against Vorru in this war to control trade and information.”

“And that won’t be boring at all.” Booster’s smile broadened to the edges of his face. “This will be grand.”

“I hope you’re correct.” Wedge stood and stepped away from the station manager’s chair. “Booster Terrik, this station is all yours. May the Force be with you.”

13

The shuttle ride down to Thyferra from the
Mimban Cloudrider
left Corran a bit uneasy. A rising storm made the air turbulent and being strapped into a seat in the back made Corran want to scream. He glanced over at Mirax and saw she was having as much trouble as he was sitting still.
Either one of us could pilot this Lambda-class cargo shuttle through this storm front without this much bumping around
.

Mirax placed her hand over his and gave it a squeeze. “We’ll get down.”

“I figure. Crashing and dying wouldn’t be nearly as interesting as the rest of this run.” Corran closed his eyes and concentrated on regulating his breathing. He tried to convince himself he was doing that just to settle his stomach—and that he’d done such things countless times before for exactly the same reason. It was true, but he also knew his choosing to do it now was a result of reviewing the datacards Luke Skywalker had sent to him.

Corran admired Skywalker’s ability to read him. Very little of the material sent had been dry, boring, procedural stuff—examples of the breathing exercises were pretty much the only things that fell into that class. By and large Luke had
provided him with stories of Jedi Knights that pointed to their long tradition of law enforcement and their dedication to virtue and justice and not a little to the bold, heroic tales that had made the Jedi legendary throughout the galaxy.

The selection is perfectly focused to inspire me to join him
. The problem with it was that Corran found it rather daunting. It also caused him to start second-guessing himself, which was something he seldom did and hated whenever he did do it. Before reading the Jedi material, Corran would have put the dread coiling his belly down to a reaction to the bumpy ride. Now he wondered if he wasn’t anticipating some disaster through the Force, which in turn made him wonder if he was leading his friends into an ambush.

I know just enough about the Force to be dangerous—more so to myself than my enemies
. He had really appreciated Skywalker including information about lightsaber maintenance and fighting styles. He’d gotten a chance to practice with the weapon in the
Cloudrider
’s galley and began to feel comfortable with it. He was notoriously bad when fighting against a remote—recalling his failure at picking off its stinging bolts made him shift uncomfortably in his seat—but four days of practice had made him feel confident enough with the lightsaber that he sincerely doubted he’d lop off any of his own limbs using it in a fight.
In my hands it’s more of a lightbludgeon, but it will do in a close fight
.

The shuttle’s wings creaked as the pilot began to retract them. The viewscreens on the interior of the shuttle’s cabin showed a heavily forested landscape up through which occasionally thrust very inorganic stone and transparisteel towers. The buildings didn’t look so much inappropriate for the setting as they did
alien
to it. Corran knew instinctively these were the human dwellings on Thyferra, because no Vratix could live in one.

Mirax indicated one particularly blobby building with a nod of her head. “I bet
she
lives there.”

Corran hesitated for a second, wondering which
she
Mirax meant, but the cold anger in her eyes took the choices from two to one. Anyone else might have been pointing out where Ysanne Isard lived; but Mirax had no use for Erisi
Dlarit, so Corran knew it was Erisi to whom Mirax referred. While Corran had not been at all pleased to become a guest of Ysanne Isard’s through Erisi’s efforts, Erisi had engineered the destruction of a whole convoy of freighters specifically to kill Mirax.

Corran turned his right hand over and held Mirax’s left tightly as the ship settled down on the landing pad. “Might want to throttle back there just a hair. You’re probably right, but we’re not going to go on a social call just to find out.”

Mirax gave him a sweet smile. “I was thinking of sending a gift.”

Corran returned the smile. “Ah, but how does one gift wrap a bomb?”

“Bomb?” Mirax shook her head. “Nope, too quick. I want her to linger.”

“Remind me never to make you angry.”

She raised his hand to her lips and kissed it. “You’ll never do that, love … at least not more than once.”

Corran and Mirax slid from the seats and followed the rest of the passengers out of the shuttle. It brought in crews from a half-dozen tankers parked in orbit around the planet, most of which were returning from runs they completed after the Rogues had hijacked their convoy. Of main concern for most of the crews was whether or not they’d be docked pay by their employers for making unauthorized runs. The majority opinion seemed to be that they would be because the Thyferrans never lost sight of the bottom line and were willing to cut costs anywhere and everywhere.

The five infiltrators did not appear to be that different from the rest of the crews going dirtdown. While Thyferrans owned and ran the shipping companies, they hired laborers from throughout the galaxy to actually do the work. On Thyferra these foreign workers were restricted to certain areas around the spaceport, but none of them seemed to find these restrictions that tough to bear. Most of the crews found the Thyferrans arrogant—the word
Imperial
was used to punctuate this point several times on the trip down—and preferred to keep with other spacers.

Once outside the shuttle, Corran picked up his luggage
satchel. He opened it and pulled out the heavy tool belt and looped it over his left shoulder. A big hydrospanner hung at his left hip. He picked the bag up with his left hand, leaving his right hand free to deal with his identity card.

Or the lightsaber
. To disguise the weapon, he’d grafted the working end of a hydrospanner onto the butt of the lightsaber. One quick, smooth draw and he had a working weapon in hand. Elscol had pronounced his work useless and suggested he would do better being able to produce a blaster in a pinch. He’d replied that a blaster and hydrospanner don’t look a lot alike.

A tall, slender Thyferran man with blond hair looked down his long, skinny nose at Corran. “State your name and the nature of your business.”

Corran hesitated for a second and immediately felt heat flush up from within his jumpsuit. “Eamon Yzalli. I am here to wait for my ship to be refilled and head out again.”

The Thyferran snatched the identity card from Corran’s hand and ran it through a datapad’s card slot. “Ship’s mechanic?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you always bring your tools with you when you come to a planet?”

“Well, sir, not always, sir, but I have a friend who might get me a berth on another ship so …”

The Customs official’s eyes darkened. “You would not think of overstaying your welcome here and trying to go into business for yourself doing repairs, would you?”