31
“Well,” Luke said, “this is a better neighborhood than where we were before, but where exactly are we going?”
Lando pointed. “There.”
“A plant shop?”
“Don’t let it fool you. It’s run by an old Ho’Din name of Spero. He’s got a lot of connections, some Imperial, some Alliance, some criminal.”
“Let me guess: He owes you a favor.”
“Not exactly. But we’ve done some business in the past and he doesn’t mind making a few credits passing along information.”
They headed for the shop.
“We’re getting a lot of dirty looks,” Luke said.
“It’s the uniforms. The Empire doesn’t have many friends down here. Most of the locals are probably on the run, one step ahead of being arrested. They won’t bother us as long as we don’t stick our noses in the wrong place. Don’t want to bring Imperial heat and light into their hideout.”
Inside the shop there was no sign of the Ho’Din owner. Except for Luke and Lando, the place was empty.
“Nobody home,” Luke said. “That’s odd, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, odd. I—”
Somebody said something behind them. Luke didn’t understand what it was, but he recognized the language: Wookiee.
“Easy, friend,” Lando said. “Nobody is going to make any sudden moves.” He lifted his hands away from his body, told Luke to do the same.
The Wookiee speaker said something else.
Something about the voice …
“Turn around, nice and slow,” Lando told Luke.
They turned.
Sure enough, there was a Wookiee standing there. One with a bad haircut—
“Chewie!” Lando said.
Despite the helmets, Chewbacca recognized them at the same instant and lowered the blaster pistol he held.
Lando smiled as he and Luke moved forward to embrace Chewie.
“What happened? Why is your hair chopped off?”
Chewie tried to answer at the same time Lando fired more questions, and Luke didn’t get much of it. But he was glad to see the Wookiee.
Finally Lando began to translate for Luke.
“The shop owner is tied up in back; in case anybody spotted Chewie coming in, they wouldn’t think the Ho’Din was helping, right, right, and—slow down, pal!”
Chewie kept talking a keening, harning noise.
“Okay, okay, Leia thinks it’s Black Sun that wants you dead, Luke, they’re behind the assassination attempts, not the Empire. Huh? Well, I don’t know how, there’s just the three of us, how can we get inside the place, that won’t help her if we get caught, will it—?”
The dialogue ended abruptly as a blaster bolt lanced through the shop’s open door and shattered a flowerpot hanging from the ceiling. Shards of the ceramic pattered against Luke’s back, and clumps of moist dirt and humus fell around him. The junglelike smell inside the shop increased.
“Hey!”
Outside the shop, four men with blasters loosed more shots. They weren’t wearing uniforms, whoever they were.
The three inside the plant store dropped to the floor. Chewie raised his blaster and blindly fired several rounds back at the shooters.
“Who are those guys? Why are they shooting at us?”
Lando said, “Who knows?” He pulled his borrowed blaster and added to Chewie’s return fire. It didn’t look as if they hit anybody, from the torrent of light that came back at them.
“Is there another way out of here?” Luke asked.
Chewie growled a reply. Luke thought it meant “Yes.”
“In the back!” Lando yelled.
He and Chewie cooked off several more shots, and the three of them crawled toward the back of the shop.
They passed an old Ho’Din bound and gagged in a corner.
“Sorry about this,” Lando said to the Ho’Din. “Send the Alliance a bill, they’ll pay for it!”
Chewie reached the back exit and shoved the sliding door open.
Another high-energy bolt zipped through the door at chest height and burned a hole in an inner wall. Fortunately, they were all still stretched out on the floor, and the hole was well above their heads.
Lando cursed. “They’ve got us boxed!”
Before they could think about what they were going to do, somebody outside the back exit screamed. There came the sound of several blaster discharges—but no fresh beams poked into the shop.
“What the—?” Lando began.
Luke looked up from where he lay prone on the floor, plant dirt ground into the chest and belly of his stolen uniform, and saw a figure walking across an alley. Well, not walking so much as … swaggering.
Luke recognized the man.
Dash Rendar! Oh, man. Here he was saving Luke again. Luke hated this.
“Howdy, boys. Having a little trouble?” He spun his blaster on his forefinger and blew across the end of the barrel. It made a slight hooting noise.
Luke came up, saw Lando and Chewie do the same. He started to speak, but Lando beat him to it. “Rendar! What are you doing here?”
“Saving your butts, looks like. Seems to be my specialty. Better come on, we can talk as we move. Follow me.”
Luke shook his head. He really didn’t like this, but there wasn’t much he could say about it. Rendar was, unfortunately, right.
In a conference room in his castle, Darth Vader stared at the small man who stood in front of him. “You are certain of this?”
“Yes, my lord, I am certain.”
Vader felt a flash of triumph. It was not enough, not by itself, but it went a long way toward the proof he needed. “And you have the tape and documentation.”
“Already in your files, Lord Vader.” The little man smiled.
“You have served me well. I will not forget this. Continue your search.”
The little man bowed and left.
So. There existed a recording of a freelance agent speaking to an Alliance crew chief, telling her she would be made rich if she could but kill Luke Skywalker.
Of course, no direct connection to Xizor had been discovered, but Vader’s agents would find it, did it exist. The briber had talked to the crew chief, someone had talked to him. Vader’s agents would backwalk every moment of the briber’s life until they found out who had sent him. And who had sent the being who had sent him. And so on.
It was one more addition to the growing collection of circumstantial evidence his agents had gathered and were continuing to gather.
By itself a grain of sand was nothing, but with enough grains, one could cover a city. It would not do to tip his hand too early. As of now, he had enough sand to begin. A bit more and he’d be able to bury Xizor …
He must be removed, once and for all, and the day was coming when it would happen.
Soon.
It would be soon.
Dash showed the way. Chewie took the point and led them into a warren of twisted corridors and tunnels that should lose any pursuers, given how fast Luke lost his own bearings.
“So how did you get here again?” Lando asked Dash.
“The usual way. Sneaked in under the belly of a freighter in the sensor shadow. A trick I learned as a boy at the Academy. A good pilot can do it in his sleep. How about you?”
Lando’s smile seemed a little sickly to Luke. He shrugged. “Yeah, we did that, too. Piece of cake. Could have done it on autopilot, it was so easy.”
“Yeah, but how did you manage to get here?” Luke asked. He pointed at the ground.
“The Ho’Din’s? Oh, everybody knows about Spero, don’t they, Lando?”
“I guess they do,” Lando said. “Okay, that’s how, but—why?”
Dash sighed. “Something to prove, I guess. I felt pretty bad after that disaster Luke and I went through. Not something I’m used to, making mistakes. But I figure, you crash your ship, you better climb into the next one you see and get it back in the air. Too much time goes by and you don’t, you get afraid to fly. I screwed up, and I’m still not over that, but you can only sit and bubble in your own juices for so long. I work for money, but I figure I owe the Empire a little something. When Chewie called, I decided it was time to pay the Empire back.”
Luke nodded. “I understand how you feel.”
“I have a few contacts here,” Dash said.
“You must breakfast with me,” Xizor said.
Leia looked at him. He had come to her room early, but she had already dressed, and her costume was once again that of the bounty hunter she’d affected earlier, sans the helmet. She didn’t want to wear the clothes this scum provided.
“I’m not hungry,” she said.
“I insist.”
Even now that she knew he had tried to kill Luke, she could feel the ghost of that attraction to him. Fortunately, she was able to resist it. Anger made a good antidote.
She decided to see if Xizor would reveal anything to her. Said, “Will Chewbacca be joining us?”
“Alas, no. Your Wookiee friend has … taken his leave of us.”
“Got away and you can’t find him, huh?”
Xizor gave her a thin smile totally without humor. “You think he escaped on his own? Really, Leia. I allowed him to break free.”
“Come on.”
“I want Skywalker. Skywalker wants you. I have you. Surely I don’t need to draw you a diagram?”
She felt her belly twist and go cold. He was toying with them. The whole reason to have her come here was as bait for Luke. Oh, no.
She’d been hungry, but breakfast no longer held any appeal. This creature was evil. Twisted, brilliant, and evil.
“Where are we going?” Luke asked.
Dash said, “I know a place we can hide. We can figure out what to do from there.”
Luke felt a sudden rush of something in him. A kind of powerful knowledge that filled him, made him grin. Of a second, he had become one with the Force—and he hadn’t even tried to do it. It just happened.
“What?” Lando said, noticing.
“We’ll go to this place and make plans to rescue Leia,” Luke said.
He wasn’t sure what he expected, maybe that Lando or Dash or even Chewie would stare and shake his head, ask who had abdicated and left Luke in charge, something. But the other three exchanged glances, looked back at Luke, and when they did, it was apparent that something had changed.
“Right,” Lando said. “Of course.”
Chewie moaned his assent.
“What else?” Dash said.
It was simply the right thing to do, and it felt as natural as breathing. That’s what the Force was, he realized. A natural phenomenon. He had struggled so hard to attain it, and all that it required was that he relax and allow it, instead of trying to create it. Simple.
Too bad “simple” and “easy” didn’t mean the same things.
Never mind. Because a thing was difficult did not mean it could not be done. With the Force, many things were possible. He still had much to learn, more than he’d ever thought before. He smiled. What was it Master Yoda had said? Recognizing your ignorance is the first step to wisdom?
Yes.
Guri stood in front of Xizor as he stripped from his breakfast outfit and began to dress for his appointments. She took no notice of his lack of clothing.
“Our agents say that a Corellian freighter answering the description of the Millennium Falcon is hidden somewhere in the Hasamadhi warehouse district near the South Pole.”
Xizor selected a tunic and matching pants from the closet and examined them under the artificial sunlight. “So? There are hundreds of Corellian freighters that look like that, are there not?”
“Not hidden in the Hasamadhi warehouse district.”
“Are you saying you think Skywalker and the gambler have come here? Have eluded the Imperial picket line and landed on the planet as bold as you please?”
“Any halfwit pilot who knows the freighter trick can manage it. Our own smugglers do it all the time.”
Xizor rejected the outfit. Tossed it onto the floor and picked another suit of a darker hue and more conservative cut.
“All right. Check it out. If it is Skywalker’s ship, have it watched. When he shows up, have our people kill him. Circumspectly, of course.”
She nodded. Turned and left.
Xizor considered his image in the mirror after he dressed. Very impressive. He also considered what Guri had just told him. He didn’t really expect Skywalker to arrive here so soon, but it was possible. If it was him, so much the better.
Vader would be made to look a fool by having Skywalker killed under his very nose.
And there was Leia, a problem he would eventually unknot to his satisfaction. He had plenty of time to play with her.
Things could hardly be moving along any smoother, could they?
Business had to go on, however, and Xizor could delegate only so much of it. Certain matters required his attention. He finished his inspection and headed for his receiving sanctum.
Once there, Xizor said, “All right. Who is my first appointment?”
“General Sendo, Prince Xizor.”
Well. The device had been repaired enough to get his name right.
“Send him in.”
General Sendo entered, bowed low.
“Do sit down, General,” Xizor said.
“Your highness.” The man obeyed.
There was the obligatory chitchat. Then Xizor gave him a plastex envelope containing ten thousand in worn, used credit notes, his monthly stipend for keeping Black Sun abreast of things Black Sun might wish to know about. Sendo was a do-nothing officer in the Imperial Intelligence’s Destab Branch who had never seen battle but who could access all kinds of information from where he worked keeping a chair warm.
Xizor put the envelope into the man’s hand and waved him away. There was no chance of any betrayal here—every supplicant who arrived was scanned and body-searched for recorders or holocams, and any who happened to have such things upon his or her person was summarily executed once he stepped inside. The rules were simple, and everybody who entered Xizor’s castle had those rules made known to them each visit. And if the courier decided to try to tell what he saw without proof, he would be wasting his time. Not to mention that the high-ranking officers of the local police, the local Army garrison, and Imperial Navy Intelligence were also on retainer to Black Sun, and any such reports concerning Xizor would find their way to his desk within moments of being given. Such reporters would simply … disappear, courtesy of Black Sun’s secret employees in the appropriate agency.
Mayli Weng arrived with a petition from the Exotic Entertainers’ Union asking for general pay increases and better working conditions for the twenty thousand workers who were members. Xizor was disposed to grant her request: Happy entertainers made for happier customers. Black Sun’s percentage of the profits—donated by the owners of the businesses in which the entertainers were employed—would thus increase. Weng always asked and never demanded. He’d never even had to use his pheromones on her, she was so polite. Of course, he could not actually make the change himself; that would still be up to the Owners’ League; but they had yet to refuse a recommendation from Black Sun, and he thought it unlikely they would do so now.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Xizor said.
Weng nodded, bowed, thanked him profusely for his generosity, and left.
Bentu Pall Tarlen, the head of the Imperial Center Construction Contracts Division, arrived to hand-deliver the latest bids on major building projects on-planet. With these numbers, Xizor could have his favored companies bid at lower prices and win the jobs. Once construction was started there would, of course, be cost overruns and delays to bring the monies involved up to profitable levels. Black Sun’s percentage of such deals was not inconsiderable.
Through a dummy consortium that hired “consultants,” Xizor arranged a transfer into Tarlen’s account.
The man left, pleased.
Wendell Wright-Sims dropped by to deliver ten kilos of the highest-grade spice. Xizor didn’t indulge in such things himself, but sometimes he had guests who might wish to do so, and he wished to be hospitable as a host. He thanked Wright-Sims and sent him on his way. There was no question of payment; the man did it to maintain favor. It was cheap insurance for him, even though that much spice was probably worth a couple of million credits on the streets.
The head of Black Sun could have had these transactions handled by others, but he preferred to see his most valuable tools face-to-face now and then. It was part of the job, necessary to remind those in the know just who ran the system—and who would come looking for them if they ran afoul of Black Sun.
The work might have been called tedious by some, but Xizor had not been bored in years. There were too many things to think about, too many angles to consider in even the most humdrum situation. Boredom was for those who lacked imagination. Xizor could sit alone in a room for days staring at a wall and be as busy mentally as most men working a complex and demanding job.
The representative from the Jewelers’ Guild arrived …
The place Dash led them to was a pit, dirty, smelly, and more of a cave than anything, bounded by raw sewage and rat-eaten power cables. At least that was what it looked like on the outside.
Once they moved past a guard and a gate as thick as Chewie, the inside was a considerable improvement. It might have been a second-rate hotel in any one of a dozen ports Luke had visited. Except that the prices for staying here would have bought them new houses on Tatooine. Each.
“Now, if we can come up with an idea of how to proceed, I can reach out to my contacts,” Dash said. “Do we have any ideas?”
“Yes,” Luke said. “I have one.”