Star Wars - Credit Denied - Unpublished (2 page)

Rendra felt her defense mechanism kicking in. “That wasn’t Dania’s fault—”

He shook his head, and his eyes squinted in that annoying Kerestian expression of shocked disbelief. “You’d better cut down on that whiskey, it’s starting to affect your memory.”

“Okay, okay, we’ve had our problems with Dania in the past, but right now we don’t have time to establish a new contact in this sector or travel out into the Rim to hook up with Keleni. If we don’t take care of this job immediately, we’re out of luck and out of credits. And then we’re out of a ship.”

Nopul’s expression slowly shifted from incredulity to understanding and then finally to reluctant acceptance. “Fine, point taken. But I’m still not happy about it—about any of it, for that matter.” His eyes shifted to survey the crowd again. “I can’t wait to get this over with.”

“You and me both,” she said as she gestured to the waitress at the bar for another whiskey. “Just keep an eye out for anyone wearing a red sash or scarf or something. That’s the sign.”

“Well, so far I don’t—”

The sound of shattering glass interrupted his statement, and their attention was immediately drawn to the dejarik table in the back corner. Two aliens were standing on either side of the game board shouting at each other in languages that the other didn’t seem to understand.

“You catch any of that?” Rendra asked.

Nopul continued to listen for another second. “Apparently the one on the left, the Nikto, thought they were playing the Bespin Variant, and the one on the right, the Dresselian, thought they were playing the Smuggler’s Option.” He paused to absorb more of the argument. “And it sounds like they both take the game pretty seriously.”

As they continued to watch, the Nikto suddenly yanked a handsized spherical object from a compartment in his belt. At the same time, the Dresselian brought a hold-out blaster to bear on the Nikto.

“Great,” Rendra said, doing her usual best to infuse sarcasm into the word. “This is
exactly
what we need.”

“I say we make a quick exit.”

She turned to Nopul. “Uh, did I mention we’re supposed to meet the mercenaries here—in this bar?”

“Yeah, but in a few minutes there might not be a bar to meet
in
.”

Rendra glanced back to the confrontation. The Nikto had set the thermal detonator’s timer, and the Dresselian still had the blaster pointed at the Nikto’s forehead.

“Wait here,” Rendra said as she got up from the table.

“I’ll think I’d rather wait over there, by the door, if you don’t mind.”

Rendra would have laughed at Nopul’s comment if she weren’t about to walk into the middle of a conflict between two apparently humorless aliens holding deadly weapons.

By the time she reached the dejarik table, she still hadn’t come up with a specific plan—but then again, that had never stopped her before. “So, is there a problem with the food?”

The two aliens glanced at her without turning their heads. “Go away,” the Nikto said in mispronounced Basic.

“Look… friends… we can work this out. There’s no reason to blow yourselves and everyone else here into the next system. Why don’t we just sit down and talk about—”

The Nikto looked straight at her and clicked the detonator’s timer into the “on” position. From her angle she could see the chrono display: less than thirty seconds and counting.

The Dresselian started screaming at her in an uninterrupted barrage of gutturals and sibilants, none of which sounded even remotely familiar. Apparently, a calm discussion was out of the question, leaving her with a single choice.

Before the aliens could even comprehend her movements, she had drawn her blaster, shot the detonator out of the Nikto’s hand and the hold-out blaster out of the Dresselian’s, caught the detonator as it sailed through the air, and was just now clicking off the timer.

Both aliens twitched as if to come after her, but a wave of her blaster halted them. “Oh, what, you don’t want to play now that you’ve lost your toys?”

The Nikto seemed more ashamed than angry, while the Dresselian completely ignored the remark.

“Well, I’ll assume you two have learned your lesson. Now play nice. I don’t want to hear from you for the rest of the…”

Something had caught her eye. She looked from the Dresselian to the Nikto and then back again…

Both were wearing red straps around their necks. She’d been too preoccupied with their weapons to notice before.

“You’re not Vakir’sa’jaina and Oro Memis?” she asked. “Please say you’re not.”

They looked to one another, then back to her, and nodded. Rendra dropped her head. “Okay, Dania, that was your last chance, and you blew it,” she muttered.

She regarded her mercenaries. “All right, you two. We’re already late. Let’s get moving.”

“So, what you’re saying is that you’ve finally lost it,” Nopul said as they passed through the wide archway leading away from the station’s commercial district and into the docking bay complex.

Rendra glanced at the Dresselian and the Nikto to make sure they hadn’t heard Nopul’s remark. The two were in the midst of some sort of heated discussion, oblivious to anything going on around them. Satisfied, she turned back to her companion. “What am I supposed to do? We don’t have time to find someone else, and even if we did, how do we know they wouldn’t be worse?”

Nopul looked back to the mercenaries, and then regarded Rendra. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

She wasn’t sure whether he was just giving her a hard time or was genuinely concerned. Either way, she had no choice. GalactiCore wanted its money—it didn’t care if she was having staff difficulties. She decided to steer the conversation in a different direction. “Did you slice out those Ships and Services codes?”

If Nopul noticed her tactic, he didn’t show it. “You doubt my abilities? Well, perhaps I should link up with someone who—” “Did you?”

“Of course I did. Stars, you’re testy. I’m just trying to lighten the mood.”

Rendra started a rebuke, and then realized that she was the one who was in ill humor. Sometimes Nopul displayed more wisdom than she thought he possessed. Being constantly on edge wasn’t going to help her complete this mission, especially given her current stack of problems. Another of her father’s axiom’s began to play in her mind, but she silenced it as soon as she realized its source.
Thanks, Dad, but I’ll handle this on my own
.

“Uh,” she began, trying to recall where the conversation had left off. “So, what’s our status?”

They turned down a narrower corridor toward the outer edge of the complex, farthest from the rest of the station. Starving for credits definitely had its disadvantages.

“Well, I swapped our BoSS registry numbers with a trading vessel called the
Runaround
. The
Zoda
still has the same transponder code—I just changed the information in BoSS’s computer banks to reflect the new ship information. It’s a lot harder to detect a forged file than a forged transponder.”

“The
Runaround
. Sounds appropriate.” She looked at Nopul, and they both broke into laughter, finally relieving several hours’ worth of pent-up tension.

As they took the next corner into an even narrower hallway, Rendra suddenly came to a halt. Nopul stopped a couple of steps ahead, and the aliens just managed to avoid slamming into both of them.

The Nikto muttered something behind her. Rendra had picked up enough of his language to know he was wondering what was going on. She turned and put a finger to her lips to silence him and the Dresselian, and then motioned for the three of them to stay put while she checked things out.

Halfway down the corridor she stopped at the hatch to bay 919-A, where she had docked her ship. She checked the control panel on the wall and found there had been one access since she’d left.

She turned to issue Nopul and the aliens instructions when the bay door suddenly slid upward, revealing the wicked muzzle of a blaster carbine pointed at her chest.

“Maex. What a coincidence. I was just looking for you.” The Nimbanel spoke in his native tongue, but she understood every word—she’d had more than enough experience with Hutts and their Nimbanese underlings than she cared to recall.

She tried to hide the fact that she had been in the midst of signing to someone outside of the Nimbanel’s view, but in doing so she had sacrificed her chance to quick-draw her blaster.

“Please, come in,” the Nimbanel said with his mouth and insisted with his weapon. “You know, GalactiCore isn’t very happy with you at the moment. You seem to have missed…” he glanced at the datapad in his other hand, “three payments.”

As soon as she stepped inside, the bay door slid shut behind her, locking with a hollow thud.

“Uh,” she said, cycling through every con and outright lie she could think of. Unfortunately, nothing useful came immediately to her mind, leaving her with the weak, honest approach. “Look, I don’t have the money right now. But I just took on a job that will make me enough to pay back all of those payments, plus two more.”

A hollow whine sounded from somewhere behind her ship, and she glanced over the Nimbanel’s shoulder to see an espionage droid hover into view, its ocular scanners whirring as they took in every square inch of the vessel. That task now complete, it turned toward Rendra and its owner to capture data on their verbal transaction. She’d had to use such precautions on several of her own jobs before, sometimes for legal reasons, sometimes because her benefactor wanted to watch his target squirm.

“Oh yes,” the Nimbanel said, stealing her attention away from the droid. “My informants placed you on Eryso in the Hedya system thirty-two hours ago. Let’s see, you met with several beings from a ship called
Chasa Riv
, BoSS registry 52462474-245. You left twenty-three standard minutes later carrying a datapad you didn’t have when you arrived, and then, according to vector calculations based on your ship’s maximum hyperdrive speed, you immediately jumped here.”

She had to admit: the Nimbanel was thorough. But as he was wasting time reading off the log of her recent activities, a plan had begun to take shape in her mind. She just needed a few more pieces of information to make sure it would have at least a chance of working.

“You’ve been keeping track of me,” she said, maneuvering slowly into a conversation. “I’m surprised you didn’t pick me up twenty minutes ago while security was doing that background check.” She did her best to hide that fact the her statement was an outright fabrication.

He regarded her with a forced smile. “Yes, well. It doesn’t seem to matter now, does it?”

Perfect,
she decided.
He must not have any informants here on the station or he would have known she was lying—which means he doesn’t know about my newly acquired mercenaries.

“So,” he continued as he pocketed the datapad, “I’ll take the scandocs and the pass-keys to your ship. Now.” He punctuated the request with an almost imperceptible heft of his blaster carbine.

Her eyes tracked down to her own blaster—

“Do I have to take the keys from your
dead
body? That’s not in my contract—although I don’t really have anything against it, other than having to fill out those tedious security reports.”

“Look, uh…” she said, fishing for his name. When he didn’t offer, she continued. “Let’s work out a deal. You and me. I’m going to earn a lot more than I need right now. I’ll cut you in if you’ll just give me three days to—”

She saw him flick a switch on the carbine—she didn’t know exactly what it did, but it couldn’t be good—and she knew she’d run out of time.

She turned and leaped for the door controls as a blaster bolt zinged over her head, blowing a fist-sized chunk of duracrete out of the wall. From her prone position she reached up and clicked the release mechanism.

And nothing happened.

Another blaster bolt exploded from his carbine, this time striking the floor and spewing a cascade of debris across her back. She rolled several turns to her right as the Nimbanel continued to take shots at her.

Finally, she pushed herself to her feet and snapped the blaster from her holster. Before he could fire another shot, she had loosed a pair of laser bolts straight for his chest.

The first slammed into an invisible barrier that showed itself by flaring a pattern of visible-light static, as if the molecules in the air in front of him had momentarily erupted into a chaotic frenzy and then returned to normal. The second bolt met the same fate, leaving the Nimbanel completely unharmed. Rendra had always wanted her own personal shield, but she’d found the prices exorbitant. Apparently this bounty hunter was good at what he did if he could afford such a device.

Her mind raced as the Nimbanel smiled and took aim at her once more, moving slowly as if to signal his confidence of his inevitable success. Why hadn’t Nopul and the others charged in once they’d heard the exchange of blaster fire? She glanced to the door… and then down to the control pad.
Oh yeah,
she realized,
it’s coded. Let’s see what we can do about that…

She raised her weapon to fire again, but rather than targeting her opponent, she tracked across the room to the door release.