Tales from the New Republic (6 page)

Hal sat alone in the back of the speeder as Glasc drove them to her operational center. Back at the Continuum Void she’d pulled Trabler aside and given him orders that sent him off on his own. She told Hal that Trabler was going to head to the spaceport to check on how things were running there, but he doubted she was telling the truth. Any information Trabler could learn in person could just as easily have been given to her over a comlink.

Hal paid little attention to the world passing in a blurred palette outside the speeder’s viewports. He found himself wondering what had prompted him to show the tapcafe’s day manager the holo of his wife instead of Moranda’s holo.
I recognized Moranda from the description the second he started in on it—the cigarra used to roast the blond was a giveaway—but why did I protect her? Now
I
know she’s involved, and that kills the assassin story dead. We have a simple lift from a thief here, but the presence of Imps suggests it’s not that simple at all
.

By not showing the man the correct holo, Hal had killed the only solid investigative lead Glasc had. He assumed, because she was an Imp, and because she questioned his loyalty right up front, the quarry she was after was connected to the Rebellion somehow. Hal Horn had no love for the Rebels—they put themselves on the wrong side of the law and that was enough to earn his opposition—but he wasn’t much crazier about the Imps. More than once he’d tried to rein in the excesses of overzealous Imperial operatives, which generally resulted in his having to clean up after them.

Trabler’s actions were a perfect example of the sort of excesses he wanted to avoid. He could have easily run after Moranda and grabbed her. Instead he gave no warning, he just drew his blaster and shot. Hal hoped his messing with Trabler’s aim prevented Moranda’s death, but he pretty much assumed she was either dead, dying, or severely incapacitated.

Trabler’s willingness to shoot to kill someone who, while not innocent, clearly was a bystander in the whole situation, told Hal that the Empire wasn’t looking to take any prisoners. Whatever Moranda had lifted had to be very important—covering state secrets, no doubt.
And if I know that much, I have to assume my life may be forfeit at some point—whenever I’ve exceeded my usefulness, or I become enough of an annoyance
.

That realization didn’t bring with it panic. Yes, Hal felt worried and hated the idea of never seeing his wife or son again, but a sense of calm overrode his emotions. He remembered back to when he was very young, not more than six, and had thrown a temper tantrum over a toy that had been broken. His father took him back out into the yard and told him that he couldn’t let his emotions run wild that way, that it disturbed the universe. His father began to teach him simple exercises to calm himself and drilled Hal until they became second nature.

Calm, he could think, and he did so as Glasc slid the speeder to a halt before the door of a small house. Shrubbery screened it from the other nearby houses. An alley ran up the left side and seemed to connect via a gate to an alley or street at the back of the property. The place immediately registered to Hal as a safe house, and while he could imagine someone with Darkknell Special Security using one for her headquarters, the isolated nature of the building—despite its being in the city—made him uneasy.

Glasc unlocked the door and entered first, then shut the door and headed down a narrow corridor through the kitchen toward an extension that jutted out from the rear of the house. “This way; my office is back here.”

Hal followed closely on her heels. She turned to say something to him as they moved into the kitchen, but her attempt to rivet his attention to her did not completely work. A half second before Trabler emerged from behind a door and dropped his hands on the back of Hal’s neck, Hal sensed his presence and acted.

Hal tell to his knees and curled his body forward, forcing Trabler to bend over to maintain his grip. As the Imperial op tightened his hands, Hal straightened up and came up on one knee. He drove the back of his head into Trabler’s face, producing all sorts of snapping sounds that he was pretty sure were not his skull. Trabler yelped and released him, raising his hands to cover his shattered face. Hal twisted to the right, scything his right leg back through Trabler’s ankles. The big man staggered, overturning a table, then crashed down.

Hal snaked a hand inside Trabler’s jacket and drew the guard’s Luxan Penetrator. He snapped the safety switch off with his thumb and triggered a quick shot at Glasc. She ducked back with blaster in hand, firing a shot that shattered a plate on a shelf just past Hal’s head. Hal dove to his right and came up in a crouch. Behind him Trabler, whose face was a mask of blood, had drawn a vibroblade from his boot and was scrambling to his feet. Hal drilled him dead center, burning out his heart, then ducked back where the food storage unit could give him cover.

Glasc triggered a shot that punched through the storage unit. “That won’t protect you.”

“Didn’t figure it would.” Hal fished the holo of Moranda from his pocket and tossed it into the middle of the floor. He let Glasc see it, then he fired a shot that melted it into a burning black bubble. “That will.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You Intel types always think you’re on top of the game, but I make my living sorting truth from lies, and I’ve sorted enough here to know that you’re here looking for something a Rebel op stole. He was the blond, and a lifter took whatever he was carrying. She has it now, and that was the holo of her.”

“And you think that because you’ve destroyed that holo that I’ll have to keep you alive to identify her?” Glasc’s laughter filled the kitchen. “The warrants you brought here to Darkknell for her arrest will yield another holo of her.” She punctuated her comment with another shot that spattered hot metal over Hal’s jacket.

“Moranda Savich is a master of disguise, so you won’t find her. More important, though, your man Trabler probably killed her. I’d guess that part of the task you sent him off on was to find out if the local police or hospitals had reported her being recovered, right? They didn’t, which means she’s out there and probably has help.”

“And this will keep you alive why?”

“Because I know her. I’ve tracked her across a half-dozen worlds. I know how she operates; I know what she looks like in myriad disguises. Without me you’ll never find her—or, if you do, it won’t be in
time.
” He stressed the last word to put pressure on the agent, since the desperate measures already employed told him time was of the essence in the recovery of whatever Moranda had stolen. “Give her a chance to catch her breath, and she’ll have the prize sold to the Rebels.”

“I don’t know that I can trust you to help me.”

“Ah, excuse me, but I’m the one here who has trust problems, given that your aide tried to tear my head off.” Hal shook his head.
Pare-Imp-noia! Just never seems to stop
. “Believe it or not, I actually
want
to catch Moranda. You’re my best bet for doing that. The alternative is for me to shoot you dead and hope I can evade an Imperial murder warrant. I help you, you say Trabler’s weapon discharged accidentally, and we’re both in the clear.”

“You’re right, of course. You could never escape a warrant for my murder.” A very confident note entered her voice and sent chills down Hal’s spine. “I am Ysanne Isard, the daughter of the director of Imperial Intelligence. You would be hunted forever and your family would disappear.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance.” Hal sighed as quietly as he could.
It couldn’t get much worse, could it
?

“And you are correct. I am here hunting a Rebel courier. He stole…”

“Don’t tell me; I don’t want to know. If you told me you’d have to kill me.” Hal closed his eyes for a moment. “I’m here to catch a thief, and that thief has your property. I get her, you get it, I don’t need to know what it is.”

“Very good, very smart of you.” She hesitated for a moment and Hal wanted to cringe for reasons he could not identify. “I am almost inclined to trust you, but because I don’t have a full security profile on you, I will demand one condition to our alliance.”

“That being?”

A thin, black, ribbonlike device rolled across the floor and unfolded as it came to rest on its side. It looked like a tiny belt with a black clasp, and Hal recognized it immediately as choke-collar. When snapped around his neck it could be given a remote command to constrict, cutting off the bloodflow to his brain, rendering him unconscious. They were often used to restrain prisoners on work details. A constriction override command pulsed out from a central control unit, so the collar constricted when prisoners moved out of range and put a quick end to escapes.

Hal picked it up and let it dangle from one hand. “You’ll have the control unit and it will be a dead-man device?”

“If I give a command or my pulse stops, the collar constricts. Without a key, or without trusting someone to shoot it off your neck, you’ll be dead shortly after I am.”

Hal didn’t want to put the collar on, but shooting her and then living a life on the run seemed to be his only alternative. “A lightsaber ought to be able to cut through this.”

“Perhaps, but the Jedi are all gone. The age of Imperial Justice is here, Hal Horn.”

“Of that I’m well aware.” Hal slipped the collar on, snapped it closed, then raised the collar on his shirt to hide it. He tossed out the Penetrator and slowly stood. “Here I am, at your service.”

Isard appeared and flashed him a quick glimpse of the control device, then holstered her blaster. “We resume our search at the place I first met you.”

“Don’t bother. Arky will be long gone. He knew you were Imp Intel long before I did.” Hal smiled. “Back to the Continuum Void. It’s the only place that stocked Gralish liqueur and Moranda’s a fiend for it. Having been shot the way she was, she’ll be wanting some fortification. That’s the best place to begin.”

“What are you talking about?” Isard demanded, the already wintry tone of her voice dropping into subzero territory as she leaned a few centimeters further over the Continuum Void’s bar. “He was here two hours ago. Where in this vat of rimspit could he have gone?”

“I don’t know, Agent Glasc,” the nervous-looking Devaronian standing on the far side of the bar stammered, twitching his way backward the same few centimeters Isard had moved forward. “As the Emperor himself is my witness, I truly do not know. All I can tell you is that he received a call half an hour ago, told me to handle the bar for the rest of the day, and then took off like Vader himself was after him. That’s all I know. I swear.”

“It probably is,” Hal murmured from Isard’s side, all his senses focused on the Devaronian. The species was easy enough to read if you knew what to look for. Hal did. “Offhand I’d say our quarry’s been busy cleaning up a few loose ends.”

“He has no idea what a loose end really is,” Isard said acidly, her smoldering eyes still pinning the hapless barman to the wall. But there was a subtle change in her tone, enough for Hal to recognize that the focus of her anger had shifted from the Devaronian to Moranda. To Moranda, and her as-yet-unidentified accomplice.

And that one was starting to worry Hal a little. Fine if it was some fellow criminal, either an old friend or a new acquaintance—dangerous enough, but at least fringe types were a relatively known psychological type. But under the circumstances, her ally could instead be a member of the Rebellion.

And
that
was another vat of vinks altogether. As the late and unlamented Trabler had pointed out, Rebels came in all sizes and shapes, with profiles that ranged from opportunistic to fanatical. Fringe criminals generally avoided killing law enforcement officials unless absolutely necessary, if only because it drew too much attention their direction. All too often, in contrast, fanatics reveled in both the violence and the notoriety.

Bad enough if some loose-laser Rebel shot him through the back for no reason.

Worse if a Rebel shot Isard instead, and her dead body was the last thing Hal wound up seeing as her choke-collar squeezed the life out of him.

“Fine,” Isard said, interrupting Hal’s increasingly unpleasant line of thought as she straightened back up from her interrogator’s lean. “If she spun him a story that he fell for that easily, it almost certainly had something to do with a relative or friend. I want their names. All of them. Now.”

The Devaronian gulped. “I—of course. Let me get his profile chart.”

Sidling down the bar, he escaped into the manager’s office. “Waste of time,” Hal murmured, turning around to lean his shoulder blades against the bar as he glanced over the handful of patrons. A mixture of simple workers and less simple fringe types, he decided, fairly typical of places like this. “Even if we find him, and even if he got a good look at Moranda, she’s had more than enough time to change her appearance by now.”

“The fact she and Arkos thought the manager important enough to chase out of town implies
they’re
reasonably concerned about it,” Isard pointed out.

“Possibly,” Hal said. “Except that I don’t think it’s Arkos who’s running around with her.”

“Why not?” Isard argued. “He was right there at the scene. Probably even saw Trabler shoot her.”

“Which is exactly why it wasn’t him,” Hal said. “I know Arkos, and he’s emphatically not the type to get mixed up with a shooting. At least not without some serious pushing from someone else.”

Isard grunted. “Fine; so she’s picked up someone else. The point is that in setting up this wild skipper hunt they had to come at least part of the way out of the sideboards. If we can chase down the manager and backtrack the story they spun for him, we might be able to get another vector on them.”

“I see,” Hal murmured, throwing a sideways look at Isard’s profile. It was a reasonable approach, all right, classic in its straightforwardness.

Unfortunately, it also required a data-sifting team that would stretch halfway to Coruscant to pull it off. If she really had that much manpower here to draw on…

“Don’t worry, we’re not going to do it all ourselves,” Isard continued, not bothering to look at him. Apparently, she was no slouch at reading people’s expressions, either. “There’s an Intelligence quiet-drop tucked away in one of the better parts of town where I can tap into Darkknell Security’s computers. A few properly placed orders, and the locals will have the manager’s complete list of acquaintances tracked down by nightfall.”

“Um,” Hal said, thinking back to his own earlier interactions with Darkknell officialdom. “You’d better hope they don’t tumble to what you’re doing,” he warned her mildly. “Colonel Nyroska, for one, struck me as something of a stickler for proper protocol. Forged orders don’t exactly come under that heading.”

“Colonel Nyroska will do what he’s told,” Isard said coldly, dismissing Nyroska with the flick of an eyelash. “That goes for the rest of this rabble, too.”

And for me, too, I suppose
? Hal added silently, feeling with fresh awareness and fresh resentment the soft pressure of the choke-collar against his throat. A rhetorical question—of course it went for him, too. He was just one more of her tools, after all, like Darkknell Security and Trabler and probably dozens of others whose broken lives lay scattered about in the dust of her wake. Maybe even hundreds, if the whispered stories about Armand Isard and his ambitious daughter were to be believed.

He eyed her profile again. Yes, he was a tool. But then, so was a lightsaber; and many was the overconfident would-be Jedi impersonator who had carelessly sliced off one of his own major limbs. Sometimes mishandled tools could be very dangerous.

Something to keep in mind.