Tales from the New Republic (11 page)

It took her three hours of nauseating, backbreaking sifting before her search pattern finally paid off. “Your name Sansia?” she asked quietly as she came up beside the woman whose holo Bardrin had showed her earlier.

The other woman looked up at her, eyes narrowing suspiciously. “Yes,” she acknowledged warily. “What about it?”

Mara glanced casually around. None of the Drach’nam were in earshot at the moment. “A close relative of yours asked me to get you out of here.”

She’d expected elation, or barely contained joy, or at least a certain amount of surprise. But Sansia’s reaction wasn’t any of those. “Did he really?” she said, her voice dark and scornful. “How very kind of him.”

Mara frowned. “You don’t seem very pleased.”

“Oh, I’m overjoyed,” Sansia said sarcastically. “The joy is merely tempered by a somewhat cynical disbelief. You’re what, some kind of mercenary?”

“Not exactly,” Mara said. “Disbelief in what?”

“In Daddy dear’s motivations,” Sansia said, digging down into the slime. “Let me guess. He told you about my terrible plight, and how important I am to him and the business, and that he would do anything and give anything to get me back. Once you were properly teary-eyed, he turned up the heat and either talked, maneuvered, or bribed you into charging here to my rescue. Right so far?”

“Close enough,” Mara said cautiously.

Sansia’s hand came out of the slime holding one of the krizar pupae. She glanced at both the long ends, then tossed it back in behind her. “But though he desperately wanted his darling daughter back, he also made it clear—subtly, of course—that he wanted the ship back even more. In fact, he probably gave you all the access and command codes you’d need to get it flying whether I was with you or not. Am I still right?”

Mara felt her throat tighten. “He said I needed to be able to fly the ship if you were incapacitated during the escape.”

Sansia snorted. “That sounds like him. Plausible straight to the top, but phony as Imperial confidence. The fact is, merc, that he doesn’t care about me one single bit. If he did, he wouldn’t have sent me to Makksre on that half-daft run in the first place. He wants the
Winning Gamble
back, pure and simple.”

Mara glanced around again. One of the guards across the way was eyeing her, and she dug her arms again into the slime. “What’s so special about the ship?”

“Oh, it’s just about three levels past state-of-the-art, that’s all,” Sansia said bitterly. “It’s got an incredible flight system, an unbelievable weapons targeting array, and a crazy, one-of-a-kind defensive shoot-back system I think Daddy must have stolen from somewhere.”

Mara studied her face, stretching out with the Force to try to get a feel for her mind. The same bitterness she could hear in Sansia’s voice was indeed roiling through her emotions. “So what are you saying?” she asked. “That you don’t want me to try to get you out of here?”

Sansia’s eyes slunk away from Mara’s gaze. “I’m just telling you how it is,” she muttered. “Maybe warning you that somewhere along the line he’s probably going to try to force your hand. Try to get you to run without me. I guess I thought you should be ready for that.”

And was hoping against hope that, unlike her father, her rescuer had a conscience? “Thanks for the warning,” Mara said. Her fingers touched something hard in the slime: one of the elusive krizar pupae. “It just means we’ll need to move up the timetable a little,” she added, pulling the pupa to just above the surface where she could examine it. The entire shell was solid; clearly, this one wouldn’t be poking its jaws out any time soon. Perfect. “Where will they take us after we’re finished here?”

“Across the hall to a really disgusting barracks-style sleeping room,” Sansia said. For the first time since their conversation began Mara could sense the faint whisperings of cautious hope in the other woman’s voice and emotions. “They’ll let us wash up, then feed us.”

“Showers or tubs?”

“More like animal watering troughs than real tubs,” Sansia said contemptuously. “Once they bring you down here, you’re never clean again.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that,” Mara said. “All the more reason not to hang around any longer than we have to. Are there surveillance cams in the room?”

“There are a couple of obvious ones near the door. Probably a whole bunch of non-obvious ones hidden around, too.”

“Okay,” Mara said. “One more question: how long to the shift change?”

Sansia peered across the room at a set of glowing emblems embedded in the wall. “Not long. Maybe ten minutes.”

“Good,” Mara said. “I have a couple of things to pick up first, so I’ll catch up with you in the sleeping room. Get washed up fast, and be ready to move as soon as I get back.”

Sansia was eyeing her suspiciously, but she nodded. “I’ll be ready,” she said. “Good luck.”

Mara nodded and moved on, holding the krizar shell she’d found beneath the surface as she slogged along, wanting to put a little distance between her and Sansia before she made her move. Out of the corner of her eye she saw one of the Drach’nam walking purposefully down the walkway toward her, flicking his whip into the air as he came, no doubt preparing a comment and object lesson about idle chat while on duty. Mara let him get almost within whip range…

And with the most spine-curling scream she could muster, she swung her left arm up, clutching the forearm with her right hand. “It’s got me!” she yelped, flailing around and sending bits of slime flying through the air all around her. “Get it off—get it off!”

The Drach’nam reached the edge of her trench in a single bound. “Get your hand out of the way,” he snapped, leaning precariously over her as he caught her left wrist and hauled her bodily up out of the pit. The movement brought her up against his belted knife, and she winced as the needle-sharp spikes of the handguard dug briefly into her ribs. “I said move it,” he repeated, dropping her onto her feet on the walkway and prying her right hand away from its grip.

To reveal the krizar shell hanging from the underside of her left arm.

Or at least, that was what Mara hoped it looked like. Her Force-manipulating skills might not be as good as Luke Skywalker’s, but it was no big trick to use the Force to hold the shell pressed firmly against her arm as if the creature inside were hanging on. The only danger was that the guard might brush off the glob of slime strategically placed at the intersection point and notice that there were no krizar palps linking the shell to the arm.

But after all the times this had undoubtedly happened, the guard was clearly uninterested in the details. “Got one there, all right,” he growled, shifting his grip to her right hand and pulling her along the walkway toward the door. “Hey! Your Seventh Greatness?”

“Yeah, go ahead,” the slavekeeper told him, gesturing the guards flanking the door to open it. “Tell Blath to be careful this time—His First Greatness isn’t going to like it if he loses another one.”

The door opened. A second Drach’nam stepped to Mara’s left side as they headed out, taking her left arm and holding it in an iron grip at the level of her waist—probably, Mara decided, making sure she didn’t knock the krizar off against her side. The door slammed shut, and the three of them headed at a fast walk down the corridor.

Mara didn’t know where the med facility was, but odds were it wasn’t very far away, which meant she had to move fast. She continued to moan and cry like a helpless and broken slave as the Drach’nam half dragged her along, struggling ineffectually in her supposed pain against the casually unbreakable grips of her two escorts. Under cover of her attempted flailings, she glanced down to her left. The second guard’s knife was bouncing along only a few centimeters from where he was holding her left arm pinioned.

And here was going to be the riskiest part of her plan. With both of her arms under their control, the two Drach’nam wouldn’t be expecting any trouble from her and should therefore be less watchful than they might be otherwise. But if that assumption proved false, there was going to be some serious and immediate trouble.

But there was nothing for it but to try. Stretching out to the Force, she slid the knife partially out of its sheath, monitoring the alien’s mind closely to see if he would notice the sudden change in weight at his belt. Carefully, trying not to jar the weapon, she eased the spiked handguard up against her left forearm near the spot where she was still holding the krizar pupa in place. Two quick jabs—two stabs of genuine pain against the backdrop of her agony act—and she eased the knife down into its sheath again.

Just in time. The knife was barely back in place when the guard on her right brought her to a halt at a side door, shoving the panel open with his free hand. Shifting her attention to the krizar pupa riding her arm, Mara sent it spinning away down the dingy corridor ahead of them.

After the darkness everywhere else inside the fortress, the medical facility was something of a surprise: bright, clean, and reasonably well equipped, with a tiled floor and even some sections of wood paneling. And the reason for the altered decor was immediately apparent: the medic wasn’t a Drach’nam.

“Sit down,” a tired-looking Bith in a slightly shabby medic’s tunic said, coming around a desk and gesturing them to the room’s lone treatment table. His tone was brisk, but his face and hands betrayed the edge of nervousness that Mara suspected was probably a common condition among non-Drach’nam in Praysh’s employ. “Where is the pupa?”

The guard on Mara’s left lifted her arm. “It’s right—oh,
pustina
. It’s gone!”

“It must have fallen off,” the Bith said, the tension in his voice suddenly jumping sharply. His eyes flicked guiltily toward the wall to the left—“You
two
had better go see if you can find it.”

The two guards didn’t argue, but charged immediately back out into the corridor. “Did you notice it fall off?” the Bith asked, turning Mara’s arm over and starting to clean the residual slime away.

“No, I didn’t,” Mara said, putting some whining fear into her voice as she looked past the medic’s large head. Through an open doorway in the back of the treatment room she could see a large supply cabinet. Stretching out to the Force, she eased the transparisteel cabinet doors open a few millimeters. The labels on the vials were too far away to read, but if the colors and bottle shapes followed conventional New Republic pharmaceutical standards, the three she was looking for were there. Lifting one of the vials off its shelf, she slid it quickly down along the wall to the floor. There was no way to know where the surveillance cam back there was located, but there was nothing she could do about it from out here anyway. She could only hope the bottle’s sudden movement wouldn’t be noticed by whoever His First Greatness had monitoring the spy displays. Getting a grip on the second bottle, she lowered it to the floor beside the first…

“Odd,” the Bith said. He had that section of her arm clean now and was peering at the two puncture marks she’d made with the guard’s knife. “These don’t look like krizar palpal indentations at all. Are you certain that was what grabbed you?”

“I don’t know,” Mara moaned, moving the last of the three vials to the floor and then snagging a couple of small squeeze bottles and adding them to her collection. “All I know is that it hurt. It hurt a lot.”

She could sense the sympathy and frustration in the Bith. “Yes, I know,” he murmured. “It is not an easy life for you down here.”

“No,” she said, half sobbing as she moved her prizes across the floor to the examination room doorway. Whoever was on surveillance duty might reasonably be expected to ignore an empty supply room, but a room occupied by a human slave and Bith medic was another matter entirely. She had to take out the surveillance cam in here before she could bring the bottles the rest of the way to her.

“Ow!” she gasped suddenly, half pulling her left arm out of the Bith’s grip as she quickly studied the wall he’d glanced at earlier. The cam, clearly designed to be hidden, was fairly obvious to someone of Mara’s training and experience: a small lens masquerading as a knot hole in the wooden paneling.

“I am sorry,” the Bith said, and she caught his mixture of concern and puzzlement as he immediately eased his grip on her arm. “There should not be anything where I was touching that should hurt.”

“Well, it did,” Mara said petulantly. With the fingers of her right hand, she surreptitiously dug a wad of slime from the hardening mass caking her legs. “They were whipping me earlier up in that big open place—
ow
!” She snatched her left arm away from him again, flailing this time with her right as well. The motion sent a half-dozen small globs of slime spinning across the room—

And with a little help from her Force abilities, the largest of the globs splattered into the wall squarely over the hidden surveillance cam.

“Again, I am sorry,” the Bith said, glancing over at the wall. He took a second look, his whole body stiffening suddenly as he realized what had happened. “Excuse me,” he said, grabbing up a towel and hurrying over to the wall.

And with the cam still covered, and the medic’s attention elsewhere, Mara brought her vials and squeeze bottles flying across from the doorway and dropped them smoothly down the front of her jumpsuit. By the time the Bith finished his cleanup job, they were safely nestled in the folds of material at her waist.

“My apologies,” he said as he put the towel in the disposal and returned to her. “The nutrient can damage the wall material, you see, which His First Greatness was kind enough to allow me.”

And he would be in serious trouble if he allowed the cam to stay covered too long? Probably. “It’s okay,” Mara muttered.

Once again, she was just in time. The Bith had just taken her arm again when the two Drach’nam guards clumped back into the room. “Nothing,” one of them snarled, glaring suspiciously at Mara. “What did you do with it? Well?”

Mara shrank away from him. “Nothing,” she said, her voice frightened and pleading. “Please—I didn’t do anything.”

“Then where is it?” the Drach’nam demanded, taking a threatening step toward her, neuronic whip in hand.