Star Wars: The Old Republic: Fatal Alliance (10 page)

"When
do you want me to leave, sir?"

"Immediately.
Your security detail is waiting."

"Thank
you, sir. "

Ula
swallowed his nervousness, made his farewells, and exited the room.

*
* *

He
didn't get very far. In the hallway outside the Supreme Commanders
suite of offices, a squad of six soldiers awaited him. They wore
smart service dress uniforms and saluted on sight of him.

"Sergeant
Robann Potannin, " the lead soldier introduced himself. "We
are your escort, Envoy Vii. "

Potannin
was swarthy and muscular, and though he was as tall as Ula, he loomed
as though from a great height.

"Thank
you. Sergeant Potannin. I'll be grateful for your protection on
Hutta. What's the arrangement? Shall we rendezvous at the appropriate
spaceport when the shuttle is ready?"

"Shuttle
departs in one hour, sir. "

"Then
I'd better get moving, hadn't I?"

He
moved off along the corridor, and the squad fell into formation
around him. He stopped, and they stopped, too.

"Where
are you going?" he asked Potannin.

"Escorting
you to Diplomatic Supplies, sir. "

"That's
not where I'm going. I need to swing by my apartment to pack my bag,
and I'm sure I can manage that on my own. "

"Negative,
sir. All offworld necessities are provided by Diplomatic Supplies. "

"But
my clothes..."

"Not
required, sir. Ceremonial attire is being tailored to your
measurements as we speak. "

Ula
had never seen this side of the Republic administration at work. It
was surprisingly, and irritatingly, efficient.

"I
have a pet voorpak, " he said, improvising wildly. "If I
leave it alone, it'll die. "

"Not
to worry, sir. Provide us with your key and I'll have it cared for. "

"No,
no. That's not necessary. " Ula ran a hand through his hair.

Both
packing a bag and his imaginary pet were covers for his real
intention. He wanted to send a message from his apartment to his
Imperial masters, informing them of this sudden development.
Otherwise they might worry at his silence.

Luckily,
he had prepared for every contingency.

Pulling
his comlink out of his pocket, he said, "I'll call a neighbor.
She'll look after it. Give me a moment. "

He
walked a short distance from Potannin and placed a quick call. The
neighbor was imaginary, too, but the number was real. It led to an
automated message service that was regularly checked by Watcher
Three's network of agents on Coruscant. After the tone, he recorded
his name and ordered two innocuous dishes from a nonexistent menu.
The name of the first dish contained nine syllables, the second
thirteen, and those numbers allowed Ula's real message to be decoded
from stock phrases every Imperial operative knew by heart: he had
experienced an unplanned interruption and would reestablish contact
as soon as possible.

At
least via the voice-drop his abbreviated message would get through.
Who knew when he would find an opportunity to send another?

That
thought triggered a whole new wave of trepidation. Bad enough to be
in the spotlight, but to be completely cut off from his chain of
command was even worse. He could feel his hands beginning to tremble,
and to hide that he stuffed them with his comlink into his pockets.

"All
right, " he said, turning back to the attentive Sergeant
Potannin and beaming the brightest smile he could manage. "I'm
all yours. "

Smoothly
falling into formation around him, they marched him off to be
outfitted for his new role.

PART
TWO

HUTTA

CHAPTER
7

The
glorious jewel of the Y'Toub system rose like a bloated corpse from
the bottomless sea of space. Shigar squinted out at it, glad for the
first time that they hadn't found more opulent transport. The
passenger lounge of the Red Silk Chances was filthy, and its
viewports barely counted as translucent, but the squalor matched the
view. Hutta looked every bit as foul as its reputation suggested,
moldy green and brown like a fruit left to ripen too long, bursting
with rot from within.

Larin
sat next to him, and their shoulders jostled together every time the
freighter rattled beneath them. Her face was hidden by the helmet of
her increasingly nonregulation armor, but he could tell from the
straightness of her spine that she was paying close attention to
everyone around them. The droids and lowlifes taking the trip with
them warranted it. Thus far there had been two knife fights, several
games of rigged dejarik, numerous arguments over the outcome of the
latest Great Hunt, and a vigorous sing-along-in a dialect Shigar had
never heard before-that had felt as though it might last forever.

Seeking
to calm his nerves, he closed his eyes and concentrated on an oddly
shaped shard of plastoid in his right hand that he had picked up in
the streets of Coruscant as they had waited to board their shuttle.
Nothing about it was familiar, so there was no way his conscious mind
could guess its origins or purpose. Determining either or both of
those was where his psychometric ability was supposed to come in.

About
one in a hundred Kiffar were born with this particular Force talent,
deciphering the origin and history of objects by touch alone.
Shigar's came and went despite his every effort, and it was this lack
of control that had at least partly put off the Jedi Council when it
came to allowing his trials. Plenty of Jedi Knights had no
psychometric ability whatsoever, but all were supposed to intimately
know their own strengths and weaknesses. A wild talent of any kind
was not acceptable.

Shigar
focused on his breathing and let the Force flow strongly through him.
The shaking of the freighter and the chattering of its passengers
receded. He felt only the complex shape of the object in his palm,
and examined the way it sat in the universe without recourse to his
usual senses. Was it old or new? Did it come from nearby or far away?
Was it precious or disposable? Had it been dropped deliberately or
without care? Was it manufactured or handmade? Were there thousands
of such things in the galaxy, or was this the only one that had ever
existed?

Half-felt
impressions came and went. He saw a woman's face-a human woman, with
wide-set brown eyes and a distinctive scar across her chin. He
pursued that mental scent as far as it went, but nothing more came to
him. He let it go, and realized then that he had seen this woman in
the old districts, while walking off his anger at the Council's
decision. She had been selling roasted spider-roaches to an Abyssin
with one eye. His mind had thrown up her face in desperation. She had
nothing at all to do with the scrap of plastoid.

A
Jedi Knight is a Jedi Knight in all respects, Master Nobil had said.
Until he controlled this talent, he could hardly be said to have
control over himself. On that point he had no defense.

Frustrated,
he opened his eyes and put the scrap back into his pocket. He had a
few pockets now, mainly down his chest and the front of his thighs.
They added several kilograms to his body mass and jingled when he
walked. The unfamiliar textures and cut of his disguise came courtesy
of a market on Klatooine, where he and Larin had boarded the Red Silk
Chances for Hutta. He was still getting used to it.

Through
the grimy viewport, the foul world's fifth moon, Nar Shaddaa, was
slinking by.

Almost
there, Shigar told himself.

"You're
a little small for a bounty hunter, aren't you?" a six-fingered
smuggler asked Larin.

She
turned her head the tiniest fraction. "So what? You're a little
too ugly to be human. " Her voice was artificially harshened by
the vocoder added to enhance her disguise.

The
smuggler only laughed. "You don't intimidate me, girl. I lost my
ship playing pazaak in a den owned by Fa'athra. I'm going to ask him
for it back, out of the goodness of his heart. What do you think of
that?"

The
Hutt called Fa'athra was widely known as the cruelest, most sadistic
of all.

"I
think that makes you stupid as well as ugly. "

The
smuggler laughed again, his face opening like a wound to expose a
bewildering variety of snaggled teeth. Shigar was ready to intervene
if the exchange became violent, but the smuggler seemed satisfied by
Larin's response.

"Tell
your friend here, " the smuggler said, leaning close, "that
if he really wants to pass himself off as a rancor racer, he'll have
to roughen his hide up some. Those guys have a life expectancy of
less than five minutes. You don't last longer than that without some
kind of damage. "

He
turned away to butt heads with someone else, leaving Shigar and Larin
to exchange a quick glance.

"I'll
put on the mask when we land, " Shigar whispered to her. He
hadn't wanted to on Klatooine, disliking the grotesque appearance it
lent him and the stench of poorly cured leather. "You can say I
told you so then. "

She
just nodded. He was glad he couldn't see her expression.

*
* *

Bilbousa
spaceport was crowded with every kind of sentient species and droid
model that Larin had ever heard of. The air was thick with spices and
a dense melange of language. As the Red Silk

Chances
disgorged its passengers with nary a pretense of courtesy, they
blended into the muddy stream of life as character befit: pushing,
shoving, appealing for passage, or simply standing still and waiting
for an opening.

Shigar,
now clad in the snarling visage of a rancor racer, blended in
perfectly.

They
negotiated the press as gracefully as possible and chartered a hopper
to take them to Gebroila, the city closest to Tassaa Bareesh's
palace. There was no need to pass through security or to change
currencies. All forms of credits were accepted on Hutta. After
checking that Shigar's chip wasn't counterfeit, the Evocii driver
swept them recklessly into the never-ending stream of traffic,
provoking a dozen potentially fatal near-misses. Larin kept her eyes
and attention on the interior of the cab. Their mission was dangerous
enough without worrying about everyday threats.

The
journey to Gebroila was a long one, and it felt even longer. Hutta's
damp biosphere was poisoned by millennia of industrial abuse, making
it hazardous even to breathe there. Those few species to survive the
Hutts' takeover of the world had mutated beyond recognition. Some,
like the hardy chemilizard, had evolved the ability to take
sustenance from compounds that might kill an ordinary animal. Others
perfected elaborate and expensive chemical defenses, or occupied
those few niches that weren't sodden with pollutants. Such niches
were vigorously contested, making their inhabitants some of the most
vicious in the galaxy.

The
Hutts themselves were a prime example of evolution in action.
Corpulent and slug-like, their ancestors must have made easy prey on
their original homeworld. But environmental catastrophe had forced
them to become hardier in several ways at once, developing
surprisingly powerful muscles beneath all their flab, and minds to
match. They were the original niche dwellers and now formed the
summit of the food chain.

Larin
rode in silence, very familiar from her time in special forces with
long periods during which nothing happened. She would have liked to
make plans for their arrival in Gebroila, but Shigar was silent,
caught up in his own thoughts. She let him be and pondered the matter
herself. Security around the palace was bound to be tight, and they
had been unable to purchase the right IDs to get in. In a culture of
fakes and lies, demonstrating appropriate authenticity was going to
be difficult-unless they found a back entrance that wasn't watched
from a dozen angles at once. Somehow, she didn't think it was going
to be that easy.

*
* *

The
palace was as large as the neighboring city. Shigar was both
intimidated and reassured by its sprawling vastness. It would be
easier to hide behind those ornate walls, among the thousands of
servants, penitents, and other enemies that converged wherever money
concentrated. At the same time, there would be eyes everywhere. They
couldn't afford to slip up once.