Star Wars The Old Republic Fatal Allianc

THERE WAS NO SHORTAGE of cantinas on Tatooine, nor of cantina brawls. Akshae Shanka had come in second in yet another combat tournament, and emotions were running high. There had been riots around the arena, and several full-blown shoot-outs had rivaled those of the contest itself.

Dao Stryver wasn’t there to fight, however.

From the shadowy depths of the Wing and Wanderer, the Mandalorian watched the arrival of the human who called himself “Jet Nebula” with a keen eye.

The smuggler had a sandy air, as most people did on the desiccated planet. His gray hair was as wild and his uniform as spaceworn as ever. The droid trailing him had earned a couple of extra dents in his travels since Sebaddon. But they looked much as Stryver had expected. They were watchful in a way that older warriors learned to be.

“Jet Nebula” looked around the bar, saw the impassive Gektl sitting alone, and performed a subtle double take.

Then he held up two fingers to the bartender, who chattered confirmation, and he and the droid pressed through the dusty crowd.

“Fancy meeting you here.”

“You recognize me?”

“Dao Stryver, in the flesh. You looked better with your helmet on.”

Stryver showed teeth in a way that might have been mistaken for a smile. “In my culture, this expression is considered a challenge.”

“Come on. I know you can take a joke.” He pulled up a chair. “Besides, you’re obviously waiting for me. I reckon I’m safe at least until you tell me what you want.”

“I’ve come for the droid.”

Nebula raised an eyebrow. “He’s not for sale.”

“I’m not offering you money.”

Two tiny glasses clunked down between them. Stryver made no move to pay, and neither did he. He obviously had a tab.

“Good fortune in battle,” Nebula toasted. “May all your eggspawn hatch as soldiers.”

“You know about that, too?”

“I’ve got a good sense of smell. And I transported some life-paintings from Hoszh Iszhir once. You’ve a nice planet, there, if you breathe poisonous gas.”

Stryver raised the other glass and tipped the fiery liquid down her throat.

“I was wrong to take you for granted,” she said.

“It’s not your fault. I go out of my way to give a certain impression.”

“I am not apologizing. I am offering you a compliment. Few deceive me.”

“We both have our masks. Do you keep your tail trimmed to fit into that armor or have you had it permanently removed?”

She shook her head, unwilling to be deflected. “I’ve been looking for you ever since the Sebaddon affair.”

“I’m gratified it’s taken you so long to find me.”

“The word on the grapevine is that you have been shopping technical data to the black market. What kind of data?”

He shrugged. “Everything I had on the hexes, which wasn’t much. Chemical analyses, video footage, a sample of their subspace code. I sold it as a job lot to a character called Shavak. Don’t worry: there’s nowhere near enough for him or anyone else to rebuild them.”

She let him believe that this was her concern—if he did in fact believe it. He was a man of many masks. In Tassaa Bareesh’s palace he had been careful not to play things too smart lest he be considered a threat, while at the same time he was reinforcing his value as the man who found the Cinzia, and who might find other bounties like it, in order to avoid being conveniently disappeared. While the Hutts had been watching the envoys, the smuggler in their midst had kept his eyes and ears carefully open.

In the same way, he had pulled the strings of the Republic’s puppet envoy, making certain the Xandret affair ended to his advantage. He might be doing much the same thing right now.

“You know, I’d make an excellent Mandalorian,” Nebula said, “were I that way inclined.”

Stryver stiffened in her seat, resisting the urge to reach across the table and tear his puny head right off.

“Explain,” she growled.

“We both have a sense of irony.” He signaled at the bartender for another round of drinks. “And our goals are the same. I mean, seriously. You engineered the whole Sebaddon thing from the start, right? You gave Xandret coordinates for a meeting that would take her through privateer-infested space. You knew where the ship would end up once it was caught, and what the Hutts would probably do with it. Then you hopped around the Empire and the Republic, escalating the situation. You wanted people to think that you were chasing the Cinzia to stop it from falling into anyone else’s hands, but in fact you were doing the exact opposite. That’s why you didn’t kill any of the players you came across. You wanted a fight over the hexes just as much as you wanted to erase your own involvement in it.”

The drinks came. Stryver let hers sit untouched on the table as Nebula went on.

“You were testing the Empire’s and the Republic’s responses to the hexes. You wanted to see who has the edge, these days. Has the Republic recovered from the near-beating you gave them a decade ago? Has the Empire grown strong enough to be considered a serious contender in your next campaign? I’d say the results were tied, which suits me. What do you think? Who’s Mandalore going to fight next, when he gets tired of working for everyone else? That’s the question I bet every Jedi and Sith would like answered right now.”

He skulled the contents of his glass without taking his eyes off her.

She was careful not to give him an answer. “Where does the irony come into it?”

“We have no leader. Do you remember that? I’m sure you do, and I’m sure it struck a chord. Your kind is of a fairly individualistic bent, as is mine. We sympathize with Lema Xandret’s desire to follow her own path, even if we don’t share her methodology. After all, we don’t have the army of droids that allowed her political indulgences—an army that was probably more about building and terraforming originally than fighting anyone, until we showed up. And that’s where the irony lies.

“The Emperor certainly didn’t endorse Xandret’s egalitarian aspirations, and I’m positive the Supreme Chancellor would have disapproved, too. Empires and Republics dislike those with the capacity to overturn their regimes. In that sense, our two squabbling friends are more alike than they prefer to think—and Xandret’s political meme might have been even more dangerous than her hexes, had it escaped.”

Stryver nodded, thinking of the stratified hierarchies, bureaucracies, and underclasses she had witnessed in both Empire and Republic, all foaming with discontent, not all of it brought about by the cold war that had existed for more than a decade now. It wasn’t impossible to imagine either regime being overturned by rebellion from within.

Just as dangerous, however—and far more important—was the possibility that the two rival factions might one day unite against a common enemy, as they had against the hexes. Keeping the two at each other’s throats was therefore vital, from a Mandalorian perspective.

“Are you nodding off,” Jet asked, “or agreeing with me?”

Stryver focused her thoughts. “I am thinking that the most dangerous thing in the galaxy is an ambitious serf.”

“As every exploitative regime discovers to its cost, when those who do the work decide they want to keep the profits for themselves.”

“What would happen if droids ever came to the same decision?”

“It would mean the end of civilization as we know it. Luckily, the hexes weren’t ambitious per se—just badly programmed.”

“I’m not talking about the hexes. I’m talking about Clunker.”

Nebula showed enough teeth to suggest that his smile might be a threat, too. “Don’t you think we’d already be his slaves, if that’s what he wanted?”

“You tell me what he wants. What motivates a machine that can take over Imperial and Republic ships at will, and then just run away?”

“Not power or glory, obviously. Or profit, otherwise I’d be a trillionaire. Sometimes he does what I ask him to, and sometimes he doesn’t, so it’s not about obeying me. To be honest, I’ve been trying to figure him out for years and maybe no closer to the answer than I was when I started.”

“You didn’t make him like this?”

“Not a chance. He was a mistake, some kind of factory error, and he’d been scheduled for melting when I found him. His brain had a reset problem, apparently. Every few minutes, he’d shut down and lose his memory. A droid with no capacity for storing incriminating evidence appealed to me, so I nicked him and patched him up as best I could. These days, he can manage days at a time without flatlining, but it still happens. The only things he remembers are me and the ship, I guess because we were where his life really started.”

Stryver peered up at the stationary droid. “So he won’t remember Sebaddon and what happened there?”

“No. He’s reset four times since then. I’ve come to think it’s all connected—like his thoughts get too big for his brain to handle, so it shuts itself down periodically to stop him going crazy. After all, what could be worse than a droid with ambition, as you put it? You’ve seen what people do to them when they get ideas.”

“And with good reason, when it came to the hexes.”

“Clunker is no hex. He’s just a damaged droid struggling to cope in a big, bad universe.”

“Then perhaps the time has come to relieve him of his burden.”

“I advise against trying.”

“I advise against resisting, Jeke Kerron.” Something hardened in his eyes. Stryver stood and reached for her carbonizer.

She was never entirely sure what happened next.

Clunker moved. That was expected. She had planned for that. But the attack didn’t come from his direction. It came from four other angles simultaneously and she was flung back into her seat by convergent energy pulses. Her suit sparked and smoked; her limbs shook. For a potentially fatal moment, her vision grayed out into nothing.

Then she recovered, and the crowded cantina was exactly as it had been—except that the smuggler and his droid were gone.

“Better drink up,” the bartender chittered, indicating the glass still sitting before her. “He asked us not to kick you out immediately, but there’s a limit to my generosity.”

“He asked—?” She snapped her mouth shut as her brain caught up. He had been coming here for days. That was how she had found him. She had thought him wasting money on fellow gamblers and lowlifes, when in actual fact he had been preparing a trap. For her.

The crowd studiously avoided her challenging stare.

Stryver laughed on the inside, profoundly pleased on two points.

One: she was still alive.

Two: it was good to have a worthy adversary.

Dao Stryver had come a long way from her pit fighting days, when a young Gektl’s life was cheap and expected to last not even a single week. She had accrued considerable glory since then, and considered herself the living embodiment of the Mandalorian creed. War was fought by individuals, not by Emperors and politicians. Battles were decided by people whose names might never be recorded in history. But the point wasn’t history, or even who won. Anyone who strove hard enough could become a hero. That was the point.

Her enemy understood. It was important to her that he did. She had traced his history backward from captain to first officer of a very different vessel, where the trail had ended. But the captain of that ship, Jeke Kerron, had had a reputation for being entirely too smart for his own good. He had made enemies among several cartels and ultimately disappeared. It was a simple leap to wonder if one had taken the place of the other.

They might never be on the same side again, Stryver thought, but at least from now on they would be playing the same game.

She downed the liquor and shouldered her way out of the Wing and Wanderer, into the dry glare of Tatooine. With her helmet back in place, she was just another Mandalorian, one among many on the gladiatorial world. She would search every spaceport in the city as a matter of course, even though she suspected the Auriga Fire would slip through her fingers once more. Then she would report to the Mandalore. If required to do so, she would hunt her enemy to the ends of the galaxy, and she would be ready for him when they met again. If not, she would go back to studying the Empire and the Republic, safe in the knowledge that there would soon be glory enough for everyone.

War was coming. The certainty of it warmed her warrior’s soul.

She raised her eyes to stare at the sun and wished the man who called himself “Jet Nebula” good fortune in battle.





ABOUT THE AUTHOR



#1 New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, SEAN WILLIAMS has published thirty novels for readers of all ages, seventy short stories across numerous genres, and even the odd poem. He has been called “the premier Australian speculative fiction writer of the age,” the “Emperor of Sci-Fi,” and the “King of Chameleons” for the diversity of his output. Best-known internationally for his award-winning space opera series, such as Evergence, Geodesica, and Astropolis, he is also the author of ten linked fantasy novels inspired by the landscapes of his childhood: the dry, flatlands of South Australia, where he still lives with his wife and family.





BY SEAN WILLIAMS



The Unknown Soldier (with Shane Dix)

Metal Fatigue

The Resurrected Man



EVERGENCE (with Shane Dix]

The Prodigal Sun

The Dying Light

The Dark Imbalance



THE BOOKS OF THE CHANGE

The Stone Mage & the Sea

The Sky Warden & the Sun

The Storm Weaver & the Sand



ORPHANS (with Shane Dix)

Echoes of Earth

Orphans of Earth

Heirs of Earth



THE BOOKS OF THE CATACLYSM

The Crooked Letter

The Blood Debt

The Hanging Mountains

The Devoured Earth



GEODESICA (with Shane Dix)

Ascent

Descent



THE BROKEN LAND

The Changeling

The Dust Devils

The Scarecrow



ASTROPOLIS

Saturn Returns

Earth Ascendant

Remaining in Light



COLLECTIONS

Doorways to Eternity

A View Before Dying

New Adventures in Sci-Fi

Light Bodies Falling

Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams



Star Wars: Force Heretic I: Remnant (with Shane Dix)

Star Wars: Force Heretic II: Refugee (with Shane Dix)

Star Wars: Force Heretic III: Reunion (with Shane Dix)

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed



THE FIXERS

Castle of Zombies

Planet of Cyborgs

Curse of the Vampire (forthcoming)

Invasion of the Freaks (forthcoming)





STAR WARS— The Expanded Universe



You saw the movies. You watched the cartoon series, or maybe played some of the video games. But did you know …

In The Empire Strikes Back, Princess Leia Organa said to Han Solo, “I love you.” Han said, “I know.” But did you know that they actually got married? And had three Jedi children: the twins, Jacen and Jaina, and a younger son, Anakin?

Luke Skywalker was trained as a Jedi by Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda. But did you know that, years later, he went on to revive the Jedi Order and its commitment to defending the galaxy from evil and injustice?

Obi-Wan said to Luke, “For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic. Before the dark times. Before the Empire.” Did you know that over those millennia, legendary Jedi and infamous Sith Lords were adding their names to the annals of Republic history?

Yoda explained that the dreaded Sith tend to come in twos: “Always two, there are. No more, no less. A Master, and an apprentice.” But did you know that the Sith didn’t always exist in pairs? That at one time in the ancient Republic there were as many Sith as Jedi, until a Sith Lord named Darth Bane was the lone survivor of a great Sith war and created the “Rule of Two”?

All this and much, much more is brought to life in the many novels and comics of the Star Wars expanded universe. You’ve seen the movies and watched the cartoon. Now venture out into the wider worlds of Star Wars!

Turn the page or jump to the timeline of Star Wars novels to learn more.





FATMAN SHIVERED, her metal groaning, as Zeerid pushed her through Ord Mantell’s atmosphere. Friction turned the air to fire, and Zeerid watched the orange glow of the flames through the transparisteel of the freighter’s cockpit.

He was gripping the stick too tightly, he realized, and relaxed.

He hated atmosphere entries, always had, the long forty-count when heat, speed, and ionized particles caused a temporary sensor blackout. He never knew what kind of sky he’d encounter when he came out of the dark. Back when he’d carted Havoc Squadron commandos in a Republic gully jumper, he and his fellow pilots had likened the blackout to diving blind off a seaside cliff.

You always hope to hit deep water, they’d say. But sooner or later the tide goes out and you go hard into rock.

Or hard into a blistering crossfire. Didn’t matter, really. The effect would be the same.

“Coming out of the dark,” he said as the flame diminished and the sky opened below.

No one acknowledged the words. He flew Fatman alone, worked alone. The only things he carted anymore were weapons for The Exchange. He had his reasons, but he tried hard not to think too hard about what he was doing.

He leveled the ship off, straightened, and ran a quick sweep of the surrounding sky. The sensors picked up nothing.

“Deep water and it feels fine,” he said, smiling.

On most planets, the moment he cleared the atmosphere he’d have been busy dodging interdiction by the planetary government. But not on Ord Mantell. The planet was a hive of crime syndicates, mercenaries, bounty hunters, smugglers, weapons dealers, and spicerunners.

And those were just the people who ran the place.

Factional wars and assassinations occupied their attention, not governance, and certainly not law enforcement. The upper and lower latitudes of the planet in particular were sparsely settled and almost never patrolled, a literal no-being’s-land. Zeerid would have been surprised if the government had survsats running orbits over the area.

And all that suited him fine.

Fatman broke through a thick pink blanket of clouds, and the brown, blue, and white of Ord Mantell’s northern hemisphere filled out Zeerid’s field of vision. Snow and ice peppered the canopy, frozen shrapnel, beating a steady rhythm on Fatman’s hull. The setting sun suffused a large swath of the world with orange and red. The northern sea roiled below him, choppy and dark, the irregular white circles of breaking surf denoting the thousands of uncharted islands that poked through the water’s surface. To the west, far in the distance, he could make out the hazy edge of a continent and the thin spine of snowcapped, cloud-topped mountains that ran along its north–south axis.

Motion drew his eye. A flock of leatherwings, too small to cause a sensor blip, flew two hundred meters to starboard and well below him, the tents of their huge, membranous wings flapping slowly in the freezing wind, the arc of the flock like a parenthesis. They were heading south for warmer air and paid him no heed as he flew over and past them, their dull, black eyes blinking against the snow and ice.

He pulled back on the ion engines and slowed still further. A yawn forced itself past his teeth. He sat up straight and tried to blink away the fatigue, but it was as stubborn as an angry bantha. He’d given the ship to the autopilot and dozed during the hyperspace run from Vulta, but that was all the rack he’d had in the last two standard days. It was catching up to him.

He scratched at the stubble of his beard, rubbed the back of his neck, and plugged the drop coordinates into the navicomp. The comp linked with one of Ord Mantell’s unsecured geosyncsats and fed back the location and course to Fatman. Zeerid’s HUD displayed it on the cockpit canopy. He eyed the location and put his finger on the destination.

“Some island no one has ever heard of, up here where no one ever goes. Sounds about right.”

Zeerid turned the ship over to the autopilot, and it banked him toward the island.

His mind wandered as Fatman cut through the sky. The steady patter of ice and snow on the canopy sang him a lullaby. His thoughts drifted back through the clouds to the past, to the days before the accident, before he’d left the marines. Back then, he’d worn the uniform proudly and had still been able to look himself in the mirror—

He caught himself, caught the burgeoning self-pity, and stopped the thoughts cold. He knew where it would lead.

“Stow that, soldier,” he said to himself.

He was what he was, and things were what they were.

“Focus on the work, Z-man.”

He checked his location against the coordinates in the navicomp. Almost there.

“Gear up and get frosty,” he said, echoing the words he used to say to his commandos. “Ninety seconds to the LZ.”

He continued his ritual, checking the charge on his blasters, tightening the straps on his composite armor vest, getting his mind right.

Ahead, he saw the island where he would make the drop: ten square klicks of volcanic rock fringed with a bad haircut of waist-high scrub whipping in the wind. The place would probably be underwater and gone next year.

He angled lower, flew a wide circle, unable to see much detail due to the snow. He ran a scanner sweep, as always, and the chirp of his instrumentation surprised him. A ship was already on the island. He checked his wrist chrono and saw that he was a full twenty standard minutes early. He’d made this run three times and Arigo—he was sure the man’s real name was not Arigo—had never before arrived early.

He descended to a few hundred meters to get a better look.

Arigo’s freighter, the Doghouse, shaped not unlike the body of a legless beetle, sat in a clearing on the east side of the island. Its landing ramp was down and stuck out of its belly like a tongue. Halogens glared into the fading twilight and reflected off the falling snow, turning the flakes into glittering jewels. He saw three men lingering around the ramp, though he was too far away to notice any details other than their white winter parkas.

They spotted Fatman, and one waved a gloved hand.

Zeerid licked his lips and frowned.

Something felt off.

Flares went up from the freighter and burst in the air—green, red, red, green.

That was the correct sequence.

He circled one more time, staring down through the swirl of snow, but saw nothing to cause alarm, no other ships on the island or in the surrounding sea. He pushed aside his concern and chalked his feelings up to the usual tension caused by dealing with miscreants and criminals.

In any event, he could not afford to mess up a drop of several hundred million credits of hardware because he felt skittish. The ultimate buyer—whoever that was—would be unhappy, and The Exchange would take the lost profits from Zeerid in blood and broken bones, then tack it on to the debt he already owed them. He’d lost track of exactly how much that was, but knew it was at least two million credits on the note for Fatman plus almost half that again on advances for Arra’s medical treatment, though he’d kept Arra’s existence a secret and his handler thought the latter were for gambling losses.

“LZ is secure.” He hoped saying it would make it so. “Going in.”

The hum of the reverse thrusters and a swirl of blown snow presaged the thump of Fatman’s touching down on the rock. He landed less than fifty meters from Arigo’s ship.

For a moment he sat in the cockpit, perfectly still, staring at the falling snow, knowing there’d be another drop after this one, then another, then another, and he’d still owe The Exchange more than he’d ever be able to pay. He was on a treadmill with no idea how to get off.

Didn’t matter, though. The point was to earn for Arra, maybe get her a hoverchair instead of that wheeled antique. Better yet, prostheses.

He blew out a breath, stood, and tried to find his calm as he threw on a winter parka and fingerless gloves. In the cargo hold, he had to pick his way though the maze of shipping containers. He avoided looking directly at the thick black lettering on their sides, though he knew it by heart, had seen such crates many times in his military career.

DANGER–MUNITIONS.

FOR MILITARY USE ONLY.

KEEP AWAY FROM INTENSE HEAT

OR OTHER ENERGY SOURCES.





In the crates were upward of three hundred million credits’ worth of crew-served laser cannons, MPAPPs, grenades, and enough ammunition to keep even the craziest fire team grinning and sinning for months.

Near the bay’s landing ramp, he saw that three of the four securing straps had come loose from one of the crates of grenades. He was lucky the crate hadn’t bounced around in transit. Maybe the straps had snapped when he set down on the island. He chose to believe that rather than admit to his own sloppiness.

He did not bother reattaching the straps. Arigo’s men would have to undo them to unload anyway.

He loosened his blasters in their holsters and pushed the button to open the bay and lower the ramp. The door descended and snow and cold blew in, the tang of ocean salt. He stepped out into the wind. The light of the setting sun made him squint. He’d been in only artificial light for upward of twelve hours. His boots crunched on the snow-dusted black rock. His exhalations steamed away in the wind.

Two of the men from Arrigo’s freighter detached themselves from their ship and met him halfway. Both were human and bearded. One had a patched eye and a scar like a lightning stroke down one cheek. Both wore blasters on their hips. Like Zeerid, both had the butt straps undone.

Recognizing neither of them rekindled Zeerid’s earlier concerns. He had a mind for faces, and both of the men were strangers.

The drop was starting to taste sour.

“Where’s Arigo?” Zeerid asked.

“Doin’ what Arigo does,” Scar said, and gestured vaguely. “Sent us instead. No worries, though, right?”

No Scar shifted on his feet, antsy, twitchy.

Zeerid nodded, kept his face expressionless as his heart rate amped up and adrenaline started making him warm. Everything smelled wrong, and he’d learned over the years to trust his sense of smell.

“You Zeerid?” Scar asked.

“Z-man.”

No one called him Zeerid except his sister-in-law.

And Aryn, once. But Aryn had been long ago.

“Z-man,” echoed No Scar, shifting on his feet and half giggling.

“Sound funny to you?” Zeerid asked him.

Before No Scar could answer, Scar asked, “Where’s the cargo?”

Zeerid looked past the two men before him to the third, who lingered near the landing ramp of Arigo’s ship. The man’s body language—too focused on the verbal exchange, too coiled—reinforced Zeerid’s worry. He reminded Zeerid of the way rooks looked when facing Imperials for the first time, all attitude and hair trigger.

Suspicion stacked up into certainty. The drop didn’t just smell bad, it was bad.

Arigo was dead, and the crew before him worked for some other faction on Ord Mantell, or worked for some organization sideways to The Exchange. Whatever. Didn’t matter to Zeerid. He never bothered to follow who was fighting who, so he just trusted no one.

But what did matter to him was that the three men standing before him probably had tortured information from Arigo and would kill Zeerid as soon as they confirmed the presence of the cargo.

And there could be still more men hidden aboard the freighter.

It seemed he’d descended out of atmospheric blackout and into a crossfire after all.

What else was new?

“Why you call that ship Fatman?” No Scar asked. Arigo must have told them the name of Zeerid’s ship because Fatman bore no identifying markings. Zeerid used fake ship registries on almost every planet on which he docked.

“ ‘Cause it takes a lot to fill her belly.”

“Ship’s a she, though. Right? Why not Fatwoman?”

“Seemed disrespectful.”

No Scar frowned. “Huh? To who?”

Zeerid did not bother to answer. All he’d wanted to do was drop off the munitions, retire some of his debt to The Exchange, and get back to his daughter before he had to get back out in the black and get dirty again.

“Something wrong?” Scar asked, his tone wary. “You look upset.”

“No,” Zeerid said, and forced a half smile. “Everything’s the same as always.”

The men plastered on uncertain grins, unclear on Zeerid’s meaning.

“Right,” Scar said. “Same as always.”

Knowing how things would go, Zeerid felt the calm he usually did when danger impended. He flashed for a moment on Arra’s face, on what she’d do if he died on Ord Mantell, on some no-name island. He pushed the thoughts away. No distractions.

“Cargo is in the main bay. Send your man around. The ship’s open.”

The expressions on the faces of both men hardened, the change nearly imperceptible but clear to Zeerid, a transformation that betrayed their intention to murder. Scar ordered No Scar to go check the cargo.

“He’ll need a lifter,” Zeerid said, readying himself, focusing on speed and precision. “That stuff ain’t a few kilos.”

No Scar stopped within reach of Zeerid, looking back at Scar for guidance, his expression uncertain.

“Nah,” said Scar, his hand hovering near his holster, the motion too casual to be casual. “I just want him to make sure it’s all there. Then I’ll let my people know to release payment.”

He held up his arm as if to show Zeerid a wrist comlink, but the parka covered it.

“It’s all there,” Zeerid said.

“Go on,” said Scar to No Scar. “Check it.”

“Oh,” Zeerid said, and snapped his fingers. “There is one other thing …”

No Scar sighed, stopped, faced him, eyebrows raised in a question, breath steaming out of his nostrils. “What’s that?”

Zeerid made a knife of his left hand and drove his fingertips into No Scar’s throat. While No Scar crumpled to the snow, gagging, Zeerid jerked one of his blasters free of its hip holster and put a hole through Scar’s chest before the man could do anything more than take a surprised step backward and put his hand on the grip of his own weapon. Scar staggered back two more steps, his mouth working but making no sound, his right arm held up, palm out, as if he could stop the shot that had already killed him.

As Scar toppled to the ground, Zeerid took a wild shot at the third man near the Doghouse’s landing ramp but missed high. The third man made himself small beside the Doghouse, drew his blaster pistol, and shouted into a wrist comlink. Zeerid saw movement within the cargo bay of Arigo’s ship—more men with ill intent.

No way to know how many.

He cursed, fired a covering shot, then turned and ran for Fatman. A blaster shot put a smoking black furrow through the sleeve of his parka but missed flesh. Another rang off the hull of Fatman. A third shot hit him square in the back. It felt like getting run over by a speeder. The impact drove the air from his lungs and plowed him face-first into the snow.

He smelled smoke. His armored vest had ablated the shot.

Adrenaline got him to his feet just as fast as he had gone down. Gasping, trying to refill his lungs, he ducked behind a landing skid for cover and wiped the snow from his face. He poked his head out for a moment to look back, saw that No Scar had stopped gagging and started being dead, that Scar stayed politely still, and that six more men were dashing toward him, two armed with blaster rifles and the rest with pistols.

His armor would not stop a rifle bolt.

A shot slammed into the landing skid, another into the snow at his feet, another, another.

“Stang!” he cursed.

The safety of Fatman’s landing ramp and cargo bay, only a few steps from him, somehow looked ten kilometers away.

He took a blaster in each hand, stretched his arms around to either side of the landing skid, and fired as fast he could he pull the trigger in the direction of the onrushing men. He could not see and did not care if he hit anyone, he just wanted to get them on the ground. After he’d squeezed off more than a dozen shots with no return fire, he darted out from the behind the skid and toward the ramp.

He reached it before the shooters recovered enough to let loose another barrage. A few bolts chased him up the ramp, ringing off the metal. Sparks flew and the smell of melted plastoid mixed with the ocean air. He ran past the button to raise the ramp, struck at it, and hurried on toward the cockpit. Only after he’d nearly cleared the cargo bay did it register with him that he wasn’t hearing the whir of turning gears.

He whirled around, cursed.

In his haste, he’d missed the button to raise the landing ramp.

He heard shouts from outside and dared not go back. He could close the bay from the control panel in the cockpit. But he had to hurry.

He pelted through Fatman’s corridors, shouldered open the door to the cockpit, and started punching in the launch sequence. Fatman’s thrusters went live and the ship lurched upward. Blasterfire thumped off the hull but did no harm. He tried to look down out of the canopy, but the ship was angled upward and he could not see the ground. He punched the control to move it forward and heard the distant squeal of metal on metal. It had come from the cargo bay.

Something was slipping around in there.

The loose container of grenades.

And he’d still forgotten to seal the bay.

Cursing himself for a fool, he flicked the switch that brought up the ramp then sealed the cargo bay and evacuated it of oxygen. If anyone had gotten aboard, they would suffocate in there.

He took the controls in hand and fired Fatman’s engines. The ship shot upward. He turned her as he rose, took a look back at the island.

For a moment, he was confused by what he saw. But realization dawned.

When Fatman had lurched up and forward, the remaining straps securing the container of grenades had snapped and the whole shipping container had slid right out the open landing ramp.

He was lucky it hadn’t exploded.

The men who had ambushed him were gathered around the crate, probably wondering what was inside. A quick head count put their number at six, so he figured none had gotten on board Fatman. And none of them seemed to be making for Arigo’s ship, so Zeerid assumed they had no intention of pursuing him in the air. Maybe they were happy enough with the one container.

Amateurs, then. Pirates, maybe.

Zeerid knew he would have to answer to Oren, his handler, not only for the deal going sour but also for the lost grenades.

Kriffing treadmill just kept going faster and faster.

He considered throwing Fatman’s ion engines on full, clearing Ord Mantell’s gravity well, and heading into hyperspace, but changed his mind. He was annoyed and thought he had a better idea.

He wheeled the freighter around and accelerated.

“Weapons going live,” he said, and activated the over-and-under plasma cannons mounted on Fatman’s sides.

The men on the ground, having assumed he would flee, did not notice him coming until he had closed to five hundred meters. Faces stared up at him, hands pointed, and the men started to scramble. A few blaster shots from one of the men traced red lines through the sky, but a blaster could not harm the ship.

Zeerid took aim. The targeting computer centered on the crate.

“LZ is hot,” he said, and lit them up. For an instant pulsing orange lines connected the ship to the island, the ship to the crate of grenades. Then, as the grenades exploded, the lines blossomed into an orange cloud of heat, light, and smoke that engulfed the area. Shrapnel pattered against the canopy, metal this time, not ice, and the shock wave rocked Fatman slightly as Zeerid peeled the ship off and headed skyward.

He glanced back, saw six, motionless, smoking forms scattered around the blast radius.

“That was for you, Arigo.”

He would still have some explaining to do, but at least he’d taken care of the ambushers. That had to be worth something to The Exchange.

Or so he hoped.