Star Wars - Credit Denied - Unpublished (3 page)

The Nimbanel smiled at her obvious mistake, and took an extra moment to aim at her head.

Rendra fired, but the alien paid the shot no attention as he sighted her through the targeting guides. He squeezed the trigger—

And then a barrage of blaster fire lanced across the bay from the open doorway and knocked him halfway across the room toward her ship, where he crashed to the floor and lay motionless.

Rendra looked back to the bay entrance as Nopul and the mercenaries walked in with weapons still readied for any further trouble.

“So,” Nopul said, looking innocent. “You need any help in here?”

She smirked. “Exactly what was your plan? Wait ’til I come up with one and
then
get involved?”

“Well, if I knew that was going to be your attitude…”

Rendra noticed that Vakir had walked up to the Nimbanel’s body and was searching through his belongings. After grabbing a few small items, he put the muzzle of his blaster pistol against the Nimbanel’s temple.

“Hey!” Rendra shouted, startling everyone including herself. “What’re you doing?” She marched over to the Nikto and pulled his blaster away from the Nimbanel’s head. “If he’s still alive, let him be. He had a job to do—I don’t take it personally. Besides, we’ll be long gone by the time he wakes up.”

Vakir looked down at the Nimbanel, shrugged, and then walked away.

A thought suddenly crossed Rendra’s mind, and she scanned the bay for the espionage droid. “Anyone see a little annoying droid flying around?”

Her companions searched the bay, but came up empty.

“Well,” she said, heading for the ship, “I guess it doesn’t matter much now. All right, everyone, let’s go. We’ve got a lot of work to do and not much time to do it in.”

Rendra wandered back into the
Zoda’s
—now the
Runaround’s
—roughly circular recreation area to find the Nikto, the Dresselian, and Nopul engaged in a multiround sabacc hand, judging by the number of credits in the pot.

“Who’s winning?” she asked as she plopped herself down onto a nearby couch.

“Oro,” Nopul said without letting his eyes stray from his card-chips. “For now.”

The Dresselian laughed—a staccato shushing sound that made Rendra wonder for a moment whether the alien was actually having trouble breathing. But when Vakir threw him a hard look and Oro suddenly shut up, she knew she didn’t have to worry.

She watched as Vakir pulled a card-chip out of his hand and then looked to his two opponents, apparently searching for some hint of their reaction. Whether he had learned anything or not Rendra had no way of knowing, but he slipped the card back into his hand, selected another, and promptly shoved the new choice into the interference field in front of him.

For a moment, no one said a word, Oro and Nopul staring at Vakir as he regarded his pile of credits while clicking his sharp nails against the table.

“You bet or no bet?” Oro demanded.

Vakir slowly raised his gaze toward his fellow alien—and then suddenly reached across the table and grabbed the Dresselian by the throat.

“Okay, okay,” Oro managed to gag out, “take as much time as need.”

Satisfied, Vakir released his death grip. He watched his credits as he mulled something over in his mind, and then apparently came to a conclusion as he tossed the rest of his credits into the pot. “Twenty,” he said, although the word could have been just a grunt as far as Rendra was concerned.

The other two matched the bet, and then turned over the card-chips in the interference field in front of each of them.

“Looks like Oro wins again,” Nopul said, pushing himself back from the table. “Deal me out.”

As Oro gleefully pulled the pile of credits toward himself, Vakir slumped back in his chair with a definitively dejected look on his face. Oro continued to make various happy sounds until he noticed the Nikto sitting silently next to him.

Oro looked at the credits, at Vakir, and back to the credits. With his hand he cut the pile in half and pushed the credits that fell on one side over to Vakir, whose eyes lit up as the winnings came his way.

Nopul watched in utter confusion. “What in the stars are you doing?”

Oro looked at him as if it were obvious. “Vakir no credits, Oro no play. No fun for either of us.”

Nopul shook his head as if to clear his mind of the bizarre logic, while Rendra chuckled at the entire series of events.

“I get the impression you two have worked together before,” she said.

“Many times,” Oro said as he stuffed his half of the credits into a compartment in his belt. “And always.”

Vakir simply nodded as he collected the remainder of the pot and started stacking the credits in hand-high columns.

“Good,” she said, “because we can’t afford not to trust each other. What we’re about to do is dangerous. Any one of us slips up and we all go down.”

She pushed herself up from the couch and walked over to the wall of storage compartments. “And we only have one chance at this. If we fail the first time, we’re out of luck.”

“You haven’t mentioned what we are to accomplish,” Vakir said.

“Yes… I know. Well.” she started and then cleared her throat. As she leaned her back against the bulkhead, she risked a glance in Nopul’s direction and saw exactly what she expected: a look that begged her to reconsider one last time. She responded with an expression of her own: we don’t have a choice. When she thought she had given Nopul enough time to catch the gist, she turned back to the mercenaries. “We’re going to assassinate Uli Aaregil, the clan-leader of the Weequay.”

She let the statement hang in the air for a moment to allow for reactions, but Oro and Vakir only looked at her expectantly.

“So,” she continued, “we’ve got about nine hours until we reach the Sriluur system. Why don’t the two of you get some sleep while Nopul and I take care of some of the final preparations.”

The two aliens nodded, got up from the table, and headed back into the sleeping compartment without so much as a word. Rendra found their silence somehow discomforting.

“So,” she said after they had left. “They took that pretty well.”

“Yeah, I guess they did,” Nopul said as he brushed down the two strips of hair running across his scalp. “Too well. I would say.”

“We don’t need people who are going to question what we ask of them.”

He cast her a strange glance. “We don’t?”

Rendra found herself shaking her head. “Do we have to go over this again? I
thought
we’d straightened everything out.”

“Yes, you did spell out the entire reasoning in explicit and extremely logical terms.”

He was giving her that look again, the one that made her want to reach out and strangle him. She knew she had to take her eyes off him to stop herself from acting on her instinct, so she opened one of the storage units in the wall and pulled out a case filled with electronic devices.

“You can’t even face me,” Nopul said. “Doesn’t that tell you something?”

She spun on him before she could even think. “Yeah, it tells me I should start looking for a new partner.”

“Oh, I see, you call this a partnership. I was under the impression that partners had equal say—”

“All right, fine. This isn’t a partnership—it never was. I’m the one who always has to do the planning, who has to figure out how we’re going to make it to the next job without getting killed, running out of credits, or losing the ship.”

“And I sit around and do nothing, just follow you on these ‘jobs’ as you call them, sucking up your hard-earned money. I’m just another worthless alien feeding off the underbelly of humanity.” Contempt flashed across his face. “Maybe you should take a closer look at yourself before you decide the value of someone else.”

She threw the case of electronics onto the table, scattering the card-chips onto the floor. “I don’t need you to be my moral compass. Maybe I am devoid of ethics. I don’t know. But you’re no better than me, and your righteous attitude is starting to get on my nerves.”

“Fine then, excuse me for trying to stop you from making a mistake that could haunt you for the rest of your life. And you’re right, I’m not any better than you. You want to kill Aaregil for money sign me up. I’ll take my share and start up my own little
legitimate
business.”

Nopul’s last inflection almost sent Rendra completely into a rage, but she managed to control herself long enough to say, “Just get these jammers working.” And with that she headed aft to her personal quarters, her emotions seething just below the surface—much closer than she liked.

One of her father’s sayings about something or other started to coalesce in her mind, but she quashed it before it could fully form. Whatever it was wasn’t going to make her feel any better—that was one thing she never doubted about her father’s remarks.

Once alone inside her quarters with the door closed, she walked straight over to one of the valla-wood crates containing her personal gear, and punched it as hard as she could. The old wood splintered at the point of impact, revealing the ancient clothing stored inside. As her mind filled up with memories sparked by the sight of the old clothes, she began to sense something, as if she were being—

A buzzing whine from behind her brought her full around, blaster extended toward the source of the sound.

Hovering before her—and looking completely innocent—was the Nimbanel’s espionage droid, its ocular scanners whirring as they recorded.

Rendra holstered her blaster. “So, this is where you decided to hide out,” she said. “I guess we think alike.”

“This place is
busy
,” Nopul said as he surveyed the crowds overflowing the city streets. Looking down from their open-air docking platform, they could see a majority of the metroplex. Hundreds of thousands of beings congested the avenues and crossstreets, blocking up the surface-bound traffic for kilometers in every direction. Even the skyways were filled with planetary vehicles of every shape and function, from tiny swoop bikes to the most elaborate repulsorcraft.

“It is expected for such an event,” Vakir offered.

Everyone turned toward him with expressions of mild surprise.

“What?” he said in response. “You did not listen to the public channel’s METOSP?”

Oro and Nopul continued to look confused, so Rendra added what little she could to the unfolding information. “That’s ‘Message To Spacers,’ the frequency that informs incoming traffic about space lane vectors, local regulations and laws, and recent events that could affect interplanetary travel.”

“And?” Nopul prompted Vakir, pointedly ignoring Rendra.

“And,” the Nikto said, “Today marks the…” He stopped to think for a second, and then continued in the slow, dry speech pattern of a comm announcer. “The historic peace agreement between the Weequay and the Houk, who have long been arrayed against each other, especially here on Sriluur.”

“That’s a pretty good impression,” Nopul commented. “Can you do an Imperial stormtrooper?”

Rendra silenced Nopul with a look. “Well, this isn’t going to make things any easier. Security’s going to be tight. These sensor jammers had better work.”

“They work,” Nopul said simply and—at least from Rendra’s perspective—forcefully.