Allegiance (19 page)

Ozzel felt the blood draining from his face. “You can’t be serious.”

“Come now,” Somoril asked sardonically. “Squeamishness hardly befits a senior Imperial officer.”

“I won’t be a party to this,” Ozzel insisted. “You’re talking about deliberate murder—”

“This is war, Captain,” Somoril cut him off harshly. “Men die all the time in war. It’s a minuscule price to pay for keeping two experienced senior officers in the service.” He raised his eyebrows. “Or would you rather be stripped of your rank and sent home in disgrace?”

Ozzel grimaced, those admiral’s bars shimmering in his mind’s eye. “No, of course not,” he muttered. “Do whatever you want.”

“
Thank
you,” Somoril grunted, getting to his feet. “Have the tech and medic report to me, then get your ship ready to fly.” He smiled grimly. “Our glorious Emperor’s Hand is waiting.”

“H
ERE’S THE TRANSMISSION LOG YOU ASKED FOR
, Inspector,” the woman at the Conso City HoloNet center said, pulling a data card from her computer. “But I’m afraid I’ll need a tri-authorized judicial request to give you access to the sender name files.”

“I’ll have it for you by tomorrow,” LaRone promised, taking the data card from her. “In the meantime I can start with this. Thank you.”

A minute later he was back out in Drunost’s late-afternoon sunlight, the data card snugged securely away in an inside pocket. He hadn’t really expected Consolidated’s privacy policy to let him dig into more detail without first jumping through a set of nested legal hoops, but it had been worth a try.

Still, he had the transmission log. Maybe that would be enough.

There was a lot of traffic on the streets around the HoloNet center, he noted as he walked along. A block down the street was the likely reason: a large white building with Consolidated Shipping’s logo and the words
REPOSITORY AND CURRENCY EXCHANGE
above the door. As the day’s business activities wound down, the various merchants and service area managers would be bringing in their take, mostly Imperial credits, but also a smattering of local and regional currencies that some of the people
of this backworld region still weren’t quite ready to give up. Idly wondering how much the repository took in every day, LaRone looked around for Grave.

The other was nowhere to be seen. Frowning, LaRone keyed his comlink. “Grave?”

“Here,” the other’s voice came back promptly, with none of the code words that would mean there was trouble. “I’m in the tapcafe down the block on your right, across the street from the repository. I think you’ll want to join me.”

“On my way,” LaRone said, picking up his pace. “Anything from the others?”

“Quiller called,” Grave said. “Consolidated has what’s left of the Barloz locked away and isn’t inclined to let strangers look at it. He didn’t want to press the point until we could compare notes and see what else we had to work with. Marcross and Brightwater are in the same situation vis-à-vis the autopsy reports.”

And meanwhile, Grave had taken up residence in a tapcafe.

“So are we celebrating or drowning our sorrows?” LaRone asked.

“Neither,” Grave said. “Come in quietly—I’m at a back table to the right of the door.”

The tapcafe was like hundreds LaRone had seen across the Empire: low lighting, large serving bar against the back wall, four- and six-person tables filling most of the rest of the space, a wild mix of humans and various types of aliens. Grave was at one of the smaller tables along the right-hand wall. “So what’s the big secret?” LaRone asked as he sat down to the other’s left.

“Table over there,” Grave said nodding ahead and to his right. “Three humans and a Wookiee. Any of the humans look familiar?”

LaRone reached up to scratch his cheek, looking casually over at the table as he did so. One of the humans
was a kid, late teens at the oldest, with that indefinable but distinctive air of someone seeing the big city for the first time. The second was a somewhat older man with the equally distinctive worlds-weary look of someone who’d already seen it all. The broken red line of a Corellian Bloodstripe caught LaRone’s eye; apparently the man was some kind of hero. The third man—

He frowned. “Is that one of the farmers we shot the swoop gang off of?”

“Sure looks like him,” Grave agreed. “He seems to have upgraded his wardrobe a bit.”

LaRone nodded. Instead of the grubby robe the man had been wearing the day of the swooper attack, he was now dressed in the same style of edge-embroidered tunic and trousers the rest of the tapcafe’s customers sported. “Interesting,” he murmured.

“I spotted him as he was coming down the street,” Grave said. “He seemed okay until he turned to come in. Then he suddenly got this furtive look as he did a quick scan of the area. I thought it might be worth checking out.”

“Any idea who the other three are?”

“No, but they were already here when he arrived.”

A prearranged meeting, then. “I’ll send Quiller back to the ship and have him run any known human–human–Wookiee teams,” he said, reaching for his comlink.

“Not so fast,” Grave said, putting a hand on his arm. “First tell me what you think of the two humans and the Rodian by the door.”

The kid and Corellian at the first table had carried the stamp of known types. The two humans and Rodian were just as recognizable. Violent criminals, all three of them. “Uh-oh,” LaRone murmured.

“They were also here when our gentleman farmer showed up,” Grave said. “They have that settled look,
like they’ve been here awhile, but they’re way too alert to have been drinking very much.”

“Casing the place?” LaRone suggested. But even as he spoke he realized that wasn’t precisely it. The three had the look of criminals; but more than that, they had the look of criminals already in the middle of a scheme.

And they weren’t watching the bar or the bartender or the cash box. Their attention was focused instead on the far side of the tapcafe. Tracking their eyes, LaRone found himself looking at a group of seven men seated around a pair of tables.

Men with broad shoulders and short hair and alert eyes. Men very much like LaRone and Grave themselves, in fact. “Security?” he hazarded.

“Or mercs or off-duty military,” Grave said. “Could be some business feud.”

“No,” LaRone said as it suddenly clicked into place. “Someone’s about to hit the repository.”

“Oh,
shunfa
,” Grave murmured. “With the three dirt-singers at the door here to watch for off-duty wild cards?”

“That’s my guess,” LaRone said, surreptitiously lifting his comlink and keying it on. “Quiller, where are you?”

“On my way back to the Suwantek,” Quiller’s voice came back. “I wasn’t able to—”

“I know—Grave told me,” LaRone cut in. “Get back fast—we’re going to need some airpower.”

“Wait a second,” Grave said, frowning suddenly. “LaRone—”

“On my way,” Quiller said, his voice suddenly tight and professional. “Where and how much?”

“The Consolidated repository on Newmark at the northern edge of the city,” LaRone told him. “Looks like someone’s planning a hit.”

There was a short pause. “And we’re getting involved why?”

“Because helping Consolidated nail the raiders may help lube the wheels to get us the HoloNet and autopsy data they’re still sitting on,” LaRone said. “Better comm Marcross and Brightwater and have them get back to the ship, too—we may want an official stormtrooper appearance before this is over. Grave and I will stay here on the scene where we can feed you intel and targeting data.”

“Got it,” Quiller said. “Ship’ll be fired up in ten minutes. Let me know where you want me.”

LaRone clicked off the comlink. “How soon?” Grave asked.

“He said ten minutes,” LaRone told him.

Grave grunted. “Let’s hope that’s soon enough.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it just occurred to me that those Consolidated Security guys look a lot like us,” Grave said. “Or to put it another way,
we
look a lot like
them
.”

LaRone glanced casually over at the door. The two humans, he saw, were still watching the security men in the back.

The Rodian, on the other hand, was now watching him and Grave. “Terrific,” he muttered.

“So what now?” Grave asked.

“We sit tight,” LaRone told him. “For the moment.”

“And you think they were with the BloodScar pirates?” Han asked when Porter had finished his description of the swoop attack.

“That’s my read from their shoulder patch design,” Porter said. “In fact, the shoulder patches themselves are a pointer that direction—the BloodScars fancy themselves a military sort of group.”

“Have you had run-ins with them before?” Luke
asked, sniffing carefully at the drink Porter had ordered for him. It smelled a lot like engine cleaning fluid, and he wasn’t at all sure he wanted to let it anywhere near his stomach.

“Not really,” Porter said. “Most of our trouble’s been from smaller pirate groups, especially off Purnham and Chekria. The only time we ran into actual BloodScar ships was a couple of months back when Casement was with a convoy that was attacked off Ashkas-kov.”

“So what makes you think they’re that big a group?” Han asked.

“Because they had ten ships on that Ashkas-kov attack,” Porter retorted. “If they can afford that much juice to hit a single trade route, they must have one blazing number of ships.”

Chewbacca warbled softly.

“Good question,” Han agreed. “How many ships of that convoy did the pirates actually hit?”

“I think just four of them,” Porter said, crinkling his nose in concentration. “But Casement said they fired on everyone—blew ’em pretty much to shreds. Only reason he survived was he had an armored inner hull and could play dead until they left. They blew the other four away after they’d stripped ’em, too.”

“So maybe they already knew which ones had stuff they wanted?” Han suggested.

“I suppose, maybe,” Porter conceded reluctantly. “But they’d have to have a blazing good intel service for that. A thousand guys in a thousand different dispatch offices.”

“Or just two or three in the right ones,” Han said.

“That’d be just as hard as building a really big fleet,” Porter argued. “Maybe even harder. Why are you arguing so hard on this?”

“Hey, pal, don’t jump on
me
,” Han protested. “I just want to figure out what’s going on. You’ve either got a
big fleet hitting everything, or you’ve got a small one with good intel. You want to fix the right problem, or the one you happen to like?”

Porter took a deep breath, exhaled it between clenched teeth. “The right one,” he growled. “But if the BloodScars are eating up a lot of other gangs, then we’ve got ourselves an entirely different problem.” He scowled at Chewbacca. “
Especially
if what they’ve done up to now is because of good intel.”

“Let’s get back to the swoopers,” Han said. “Any idea where they came from?”

“Somewhere off Drunost, anyway—they came in on a Barloz freighter.” Porter lifted a finger. “But there were at least a few survivors. I saw a couple of landspeeders take off after the stormtroopers wrecked the ship.”

Stormtroopers
. Luke shivered. He’d grown up tangling with Sand People and had some idea how to deal with them. But Imperial stormtroopers were something else entirely. He and the others had survived a couple of brief encounters with them aboard the Death Star, but even at the time he’d had the feeling the Imperials had been taken by surprise and weren’t operating at full efficiency.

Now, of course, he knew that Tarkin and Vader had deliberately allowed the
Falcon
and its crew to escape so they could track it to Yavin 4. Their next encounter with the Empire’s elite, Luke suspected, would be very different.

“Survivors are a good thing,” Han said approvingly. “Means there’s someone you can talk to. Where did they go?”

“Last anyone saw, they were burning dust for here,” Porter said, gesturing around them. “No surprise—this is the only population center anywhere around where you could go to ground.”

“You sure they haven’t left?”

Porter shrugged. “They sure didn’t leave in what was left of their ship,” he said. “Or anything else that they might have left inside. Consolidated would have gotten all of that when they impounded their ship.”

“
Consolidated
has it?” Luke asked.

“Who else?” Porter said, looking puzzled.

“I thought the port authority would have it,” Luke said. “Or the local patrollers.”

Porter shook his head. “Don’t have either here.”

“I told you Drunost was all company towns,” Han reminded Luke. “That means the whole planet’s been carved into corporate territories.”

“Like the Corporate Sector, only on a smaller scale,” Porter added. “Also not nearly as bad.”

“Debatable,” Han muttered.

“No, really, they’re okay,” Porter insisted. “They keep law and order pretty good. Beats dealing with the Empire, anyway.”

Luke
.

Luke started, his eyes flicking around before he recognized the voice. It was Ben Kenobi, speaking in his mind as he had during the attack on the Death Star.
There is danger, Luke. Stretch out to the Force
.

“What kind of danger?” Luke muttered under his breath.

The voice didn’t answer. Luke hunched over his drink, his eyes darting around the tapcafe. Everything looked all right to him.

But Ben hadn’t said to
look
. He’d said to use the Force. Setting his jaw, Luke stretched out with his mind.

The images and voices around him seemed to fade into a distant background hum. He looked around again, trying to see through the faces to the emotions and basic overall impressions of the tapcafe’s patrons.

But he didn’t sense anything. For that matter, he wasn’t even sure what exactly he was seeking.

And then, abruptly, an image flashed into his mind: a picture of a hungry, shaggy-furred predator, coiled to spring onto its prey.

He caught his breath as the image faded. What in the worlds—?

He smiled tightly. Of course—it was a hint. He let his eyes and mind drift around the tapcafe again, this time holding the image of the predator in his mind and trying to match the sensation that image had evoked with the emotions of the people in the room.