Really, on the whole, I could do without the bantha smell. It’s a bit tricky trying to lose a game of pazaak on purpose without anyone working out that’s what I’m doing, when all I can think of is how I’m going to stink of bantha for the next … forever.
So thought Myri Antilles, behind a carefully constructed expression of anxiety as she pretended to dither over whether or not she should draw another card from her main deck.
Sitting opposite, her opponent — a Balosar man whose scarred, shriveled antennae and prematurely wizened humanoid features betrayed a tragic and probably terminal addiction to death sticks — drummed his not-quite-clean fingernails on the gaming table, whistling tunelessly. Around them, there were growing hints of impatience from the handful of onlookers who’d abandoned their own risky pursuits to drink searingly colorful cocktails and eat illegal appetizers and gawk for a while.
With a little gasp, Myri fluttered her outrageously enhanced eyelashes in a tell-tale sign of panic. Time to wrap this up. She’d learned all she was going to from her jittery fellow player.
The Balosar waved his antennae with ill-concealed bad temper. “Come on, doll, I ain’t got all day.”
Mutterings from the crowd commented on his breach of manners. Shoulders drooping, Myri shook her head. “I’m sorry.” Up came her chin. “All right. I’ve decided. I’m going to do it!”
With breathless bravado she snatched the precise card she needed from her main deck and turned it over.
The gamblers gathered behind her, shamelessly ogling, let out an almost sympathetic groan.
“Six,” said the Balosar, and revealed his chipped, stained teeth in a grin. “Pushes you to twenty-four, doll. I win.”
It didn’t take much acting for Myri to make the crowd feel her pain as the Balosar scooped credit-chips into his already laden basket. Losing always hurt, good cause or not.
“Oh, well,” she said, looking around with a pathetic smile. “I did say I was no Mebla Dule, didn’t I?”
“A gambler who wasn’t kidding?” one of the oglers said loudly in Corellian-accented Basic, her voice ripe with amusement. “Somebody catch me. I think I’m gonna faint.”
Ripples of laughter. A babble of conversations. Myri slid out of her chair, gave a ‘good luck’ nod to the Rodian hustler who eagerly took her place, then threaded her way through the jostling, multi-specied throng of gamers, and the gaudy droids tasked to serve them, towards the females ‘fresher on the far side of the gambling hall. Well. What Captain Oobolo, the treble-eyed Gran, liked to call the gambling hall. Really it was just the converted upper deck of his ancient light freighter. Sadly for him, though, not even curtains of Kashyyykian spider-silk and dangling chandeliers crafted from Manaxian amber and Fondorian crystal would fool a blind passenger into thinking the Galactic Princess was a cruise liner. And nothing, not even the overburdened air scrubbers, could counter the stink of corraled dwarf bantha in the cargo hold beneath her feet.
Still. Transporting the smelly little beasts around both galactic rims made for an effective cover … as did Captain Oobolo himself. A Gran, financing interplanetary political and corporate espionage? She’d scoffed at the idea when Commander Bilpin from Galactic Alliance Security had briefed her. But she’d swallowed her skepticism after hearing what he had to say. Security’s evidence was only circumstantial so far, sure, but it was also compelling. And the situation was deemed urgent enough to warrant an in-person investigation.
So here she was, gambling again, only this time not just with money … but with her life. Because Oobolo might look like a mild-mannered Gran, and the Princess might seem like a harmless system-hopping freighter, but in this case looks — so Commander Bilpin had claimed with confident authority — were deceiving.
The ‘fresher door groaned open at her touch. Gritting her teeth, Myri squeezed past the bevy of females — bald, skull-ridged Dresselian, and Twi’lek with their head-tails glitter-painted, insectoid Aqualish and leather-clad Dug, their large, square teeth spangled with gems — all fighting for space in front of the wall mirror and dived into an empty stall. Blessedly alone, she closed her eyes for a moment and resisted the urge to rub at the experimental recording crystals implanted in her face. Bilpin had assured her the ruby and emerald look-alikes wouldn’t cause any trouble.
“Guess what, genius?” she muttered, as the implants tingled her skin almost painfully. “You were wrong.”
But she couldn’t afford to fret about that now.
Suck it up, Antilles. It’s not like you’re gut shot in a down below Coruscant alley, or plummeting through atmosphere in a burning, out-of-control X-wing.
Uncoding the secured pocket in the leg of her slinky green jumpsuit, she checked how much Alliance money she had left after two days on board Gran’s seedy gambling palace. Nearly four hundred in loose chits, and an untouched card worth a thousand. Plenty, then. She’d been careful to lose more than she won, but not look like a desperate no-hoper. Of course, if she’d been playing properly she’d need an extra credit belt by now, to hold her takings. For a heartbeat, pride stung. Ruthlessly she smothered it.
The noise level beyond her stall had dipped so she came out, freshened up at the tiny hand basin, then inspected herself in the equally tiny mirror. A stranger’s face looked back at her: long silver hair intricately braided into loops, luridly green eyes, ridiculous swooping lashes, pouting aqua lips, and those extraordinary crystals, sparkling above her eyebrows and along her cheekbones’ sculptured ridges. Inert until she fed them a biofeedback activation signal, to Captain Oobolo’s security team and its scanners they’d looked like harmless body adornment.
Live and learn, Captain. Live and kriffing learn.
She was the first agent to use the crystals in the field. If they worked as well as the lab techs claimed, they’d give the Galactic Alliance a much-needed advantage over the enemies of peace.
Please, let them work. We need all the help we can get.
A headache was brewing behind her enhanced eyes, partly from the crystals, partly from the smoke and noise of the gambling hall and a little — just a little — from the stress of worrying that she’d not succeed in her mission. And she had to succeed. Not only because Security needed the intel she was after, but because — because —
I love my dad, I do. But it’s not always easy being his daughter.
Wedge Antilles cast a long shadow. One of these days she’d have to sit down with Syal, ask her big sister how she dealt with filling his shoes.
Only let me wrap up this assignment first.
She squeezed her way back into the gambling hall, and swept her gaze around the games of chance on offer as a raucous tide of noise washed over her. Piped-in music, elated winners’ laughter and heartfelt losers’ wails, the irritatingly cheerful chatter of Oobolo’s droids as they plied his customers with food and drink.
Today was turning into a replay of yesterday. Before spending an hour losing at pazaak, she’d stood for nearly that long feeding credits into a succession of greedy machines in the lugjack bar.
No winnings, and no hint of illegal dealings either, or questionable conversations for the biocrystals to record. During that time, after cruising just past Malastare, they’d docked with a shuttle, waved goodbye to the gamblers who’d emptied their pockets, and picked up a few more hopefuls eager to throw their money at Captain Oobolo. Might be an idea to go for a leisurely stroll, check out the new arrivals.
So she wandered past the binspo players, furrow-browed and intense. Past the suckers losing their shirts and jewelry over games of Imperial Commander. Back through the lugjack bar, just in case. Played three rounds of dejarik for a loss, a win, a loss. Paused to eat a nerf-burger, then accepted a tall g
lass of fizzy from a passing droid, and kept wandering. All the while, she could feel the hot buzzing of Commander Bilpin’s embedded crystals, recording faces, voices and vital signs. She didn’t let her green gaze rest, swept it casually over every gambler in the hall. Found wild hope and misplaced confidence, elation and despair. Everything she’d expected to find in a gambling den … but nothing to make Bilpin bare his teeth in a hunter’s smile.
At least not until she stopped at the sabacc table.
Danger-honed instinct woke, and she stared at the players: a Corellian, a Besalisk, two Dugs, two Rodians and a Kaminoan. All but the Corellian were new arrivals — and something about one of them had tripped her alarm. The Besalisk. There was something subtly not right about the Besalisk.
But what? A greenie might look at the jovial gambler, with her wide-mouthed, sharp-toothed grin, and gaudily sequined tunic and the flashy gold rings smothering the fingers of the two hands that by the rules were kept flat on the table and think There’s an easy mark. Being no greenie, Myri looked past the distracting exterior, looked instead at the flamboyant Besalisk’s deepset amber-colored eyes. Cold. Sharp. Calculating. Cruel. Not gambler’s eyes, those. They were the lethal eyes of a killer. She’d seen eyes like that too many times to be mistaken.
But it wasn’t just the eyes that gave the Besalisk away. The glitz and glitter might be shouting Don’t mind me, I’m harmless, but singing softly beneath that was a far deadlier song. Tension thrummed in the Besalisk’s deceptively saggy body, a readiness to act with swift violence if violence was needed. Seeing it, sensing it, Myri felt her own muscles go taut with absolute certainty.
Gotcha.
Pretending to overbalance on her silly, spiky high heels, giggling apologies, she positioned herself at the front of the gathered sabacc spectators and activated a direct biofeedback pulse that would instruct the recording crystals to hone in on her quarry. The crystals buzzed in response. So far, so good.
The game of sabacc continued. As the stakes climbed to stratospheric heights and the other players started to sweat and swear and slap their cards to the table with growing concern, the crowd of watchers grew until Myri was being pressed hard from all sides. Surreptitious bets broke out among the oglers, credits changing hands swiftly and discreetly before they were picked up by a surveillance cam and a security droid hauled them away to be evicted when the next shuttle docked.
An hour later, the Besalisk took everything with an Idiot’s Array, one of the rarest and trickiest feats in gambling. Pandemonium ensued. Bells rang, streamers popped, sparklers ignited and showered the hall with bright, brief light.
‘It’s a jackpot!’ the game’s dealer droid announced, photoreceptors flickering in rainbow excitement. “The biggest win in Galactic Princess history. Huzzah!”
Myri watched, insides churning, as the Besalisk accepted her accolades from the droid, the chagrined defeated players and the crowd. She couldn’t prove it, she couldn’t even say for sure how it was done, but every instinct was screaming that the Besalisk had cheated. And she’d bet all the credits in her pocket that Captain Oobolo’s dealer droid was key to the swindle. Which meant— which had to mean—
“Congratulations, Hamajum!” Captain Oobolo boomed, his mottled skin flushed with pleasure, as the crowd parted as he approached. “A fine victory indeed. It’s not every day we see someone pull off an Idiot’s Array! Come, give me a few moments to tell me how you managed it. Everyone else? One drink on the house!”
Under the cover of noisy celebration, Myri followed in the two criminals’ wake as they headed for the bar. Behind them, the dealer droid announced a new game of sabacc, another dealer droid drummed up trade for more pazaak, server droids began handing out the free drinks, and the bantha-scented air rang with the trilling of lugjack machines. The crowd broke apart only to reform elsewhere, and the gambling continued.
“I’ll have a fizzy,” Myri told the bar droid, handing over her empty glass. Taking its replacement, keeping Oobolo and the Besalisk in the corner of her eye, she wormed her way towards them, as close as she dared get. Close enough to see the Besalisk pass Oobolo a data crystal in a slick sleight-of-hand move worthy of a Jedi. If she’d not been looking for it she’d never have seen the exchange, never captured the moment with Bilpin’s experimental crystals, and—
A jostle, an exclamation, and somebody’s drink tipped down her back.
“Hey!” she protested, turning. “Why don’t you watch what —”
Then the words died, because she was looking into a face she’d never seen before … and eyes she knew almost better than her own. They belonged to the one and only Wedge Antilles.
“Sorry, sorry,” her father gabbled. “All my fault. Clumsy. Let me help clean you up!”
With a last look at Oobolo, merrily slapping his Besalisk contact on the shoulder, the perfect picture of a gracious host and good loser, Myri let the skinny, bald, mauve-skinned man hustle her to the other end of the bar, and waited until a droid had given him a damp cloth.
“What are you doing here?” she whispered fiercely, as her father sponged her free of sticky, sickly sweet cocktail. “And don’t you dare say watching my back because —”
“Mission’s blown,” he replied, keeping his voice too low for eavesdropping. “Bilpin’s crystals aren’t as secure as he thought. Or Oobolo’s tech is better. Or both.”
Stang. “I’m being jammed?”
“Both directions. With no way to reach you, I had to drop in.”
Despite her jumping nerves, Myri felt a surge of relief. This wasn’t personal, then. He’d have come to save whoever Bilpin had sent. But if she was being jammed, then chances were Oobolo’s security team was even now looking for the signal’s origin. She sent a biofeedback signal to deactivate the crystals, then risked a glance over her shoulder.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said, still whispering. “I got the intel hand-off.”
“The Besalisk?”
“Right,” she said, turning round. But the Besalisk was gone, and so was Oobolo.
Eyes warm, her father tossed the stained cleaning cloth onto the bar. “Good work.”
There was no time to savor the compliment. Heart thumping, she made a sweep of the room, looking for trouble. “How long till the next shuttle, d’you know?”
Her father made a show of ordering her an apology drink.
“Three hours,” he said, handing her the glass of fizzy. “So we lay low, and stay close.”
She quirked an eyebrow. “But not too close. I mean, you and I haven’t been formally introduced!”
“Again, so sorry,” he said loudly, eyes glinting, with both hands raised as he bobbed his bald head. “Good fortune, lady. Farewell.” Good fortune, yes. They were going to need it.
Myri let out a deep breath. Three hours wasn’t that long. Besides, even if Oobolo’s people did come looking, what could they find? With the crystals deactivated, she was as good as invisible. And it didn’t matter that they were watching everyone on the secure-cam net, either. Provided she didn’t do anything stupid, like win a jackpot, they wouldn’t look at her twice.
We’ll be fine. Just fine.
And they were … for two hours and twenty-six minutes. Then Oobolo’s security droids crashed the party.
“Hey!” someone shouted. “Don’t shove that thing in my face,
I ain’t done nothin’ wrong!”
Startled, Myri fumbled the credit chit she was about to feed into her lugjack. When she straightened up after retrieving it, her mauve-colored father was standing in front of her.
“Droids with scanners,” he said, his familiar eyes intently serious. “Five of them, which is five too many. Time to go.”
She stared into the crowd, where a tall, physically imposing droid, uncomfortably reminiscent of a battle droid, waved a hi-tech sensor wand over one of Oobolo’s gamblers.
“Yes,” she agreed. “But go where?”
Before her father could answer, the public address sys
tem crackled to life.
“Ladies, gentlemen, and gentle-folk all,” Oobolo’s voice greeted them. “This is the captain. Apologies for the inconvenience, but our routine public safety sweep has revealed that someone on board is unwell. Now there’s no need to panic, it’s just a nasty rash, but I’m sure that whoever our afflicted friend is, he or she doesn’t want to suffer needlessly or spread it around. So please remain calm and co-operative while my health team finishes up. And to take the sting out, have another drink on the house.”
Agitated chatter, even some laughter, as the crowd reacted to Oobolo’s announcement.
“Dad? Go where?” Myri asked again, leaning close. “And how? Don’t tell me you’ve got a ship stashed in your suit pocket.”
Her father grinned. “Nearly. There’s a cloaked Alliance cruiser standing by. We eject in a lifepod and send up a flare, they’ll come get us.”
“Ha,” she said, grinning back. “If you weren’t mauve and bald, I’d kiss you.”
“We’ve studied this ship’s schematics,” her father said. “Each ‘fresher has an access duct leading to a maintenance bay. We’ll meet down there and head for the lifepods. The duct panel in the females’ ‘fresher is on the back wall, third up, second from the left. See you soon.”
Myri walked away from him without a backwards glance, neatly avoiding the droids. Inside the females’ ‘fresher she found a lone Twi’lek, her pale blue head-tails turned greenish from too many drinks.
“They want you outside,” she told the muzzy-eyed gambler. Queasily compliant, the Twi’lek staggered out. Unhooking the slender, dangly earring from her left ear, Myri gave it a quick twist, activating its miniaturized laser scalpel core, sealed the ‘fresher door then hurried to locate the access duct panel. Finding it, she used the scalpel again, swiftly severing the plate’s bolts. Then, after lowering the plate to the floor, she tucked the scalpel in her jumpsuit’s front pocket and wriggled feet-first into the access duct.
Just as she let go, a hard metal fist hammered on the ‘fresher door … and the last thing she heard as she plunged into darkness was a droid’s voice demanding to be let in, right now.