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“Oh, yeah. I remember him. Nice ride. State-of-the-art shuttle. Custom interior. Top of the line. Even nicer than yours.”

“How would you know what the interior of my shuttle is like?” Zannah asked suspiciously.

There was a brief pause, then both Quano and Pommat burst out laughing.

“Him smuggler,” the Rodian explained when he caught his breath.

“Not exactly,” Pommat clarified. “It’s just a little side racket I’ve set up. Something to help pay the bills, you know?”

“No,” Zannah said darkly. “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me.”

“Whoa, you got a little fire in you, doll,” Pommat said appreciatively. “Let me break it down for you. At night, I’m the only one working here. I can pretty much do anything I want. Including breaking into somebody’s shuttle.”

“You’re not worried about security systems?”

“Never ran across one I couldn’t slice,” he said, puffing out his chest. “It’s one of my many talents. Maybe if you’re lucky, I’ll show some of the others later on.”

“So you break into people’s shuttles and steal from them?” Zannah clarified, ignoring his clumsy come-on.

“Nah. That’d be stupid. People would notice if stuff was missing. They’d report it to my boss. Wouldn’t take long to figure out who was behind it.”

“So what do you do, exactly?”

“You’re going to love this,” Pommat said with a sly wink. “Once I’m inside, I slice into their nav computer and download all the info onto a datapad. It gives me everything: the owner, any planets the ship is registered with, commonly plotted hyperspace routes. I know who owns it, where they’ve been, and which world they use as a home port.”

“Clever,” Zannah admitted. “But what use is that?”

“This is where it gets good,” he promised, obviously pleased with himself. “I’ve got an arrangement with a guy on Kessel. Every month he sends me a shipment of glitterstim.”

Glitterstim, or spice, was a powerfully addictive drug banned on most worlds. Doan, however, had no laws against importing it. And nobody at the spaceports to enforce the laws, even if they did exist, Zannah silently noted.

“I don’t sell the spice here,” Pommat continued. “Nobody has any money except the nobles. And they won’t deal with the lower classes. But I’ve got contacts at the spaceports on a bunch of other worlds here on the Outer Rim.

“So let’s say I slice into a ship’s nav computer and I find out it’s from Aralia. I reach out to my contact on that world, and I see if he wants me to send him a shipment. After we work out a price, I sneak onto the vessel while the owner’s not around and I hide a stash of spice somewhere on board.

“I tell my contact where I hid it, give him the ship’s registration, and he tells one of his buddies at the spaceport to let him know when it returns to Aralia. Then he waits until the coast is clear, sneaks on board, takes the stash, and transfers the credits into my account back here on Doan. The owner never has a clue!”

“Spice smuggling is a capital offense on Aralia,” Zannah remarked.

“That’s the best part. If the customs officials ever decide to search one of these ships, the owner goes down for the crime, not us. It’s foolproof!”

The whole operation seemed rather petty and ill thought out to Zannah. She wasn’t bothered by the fact that Pommat was willing to have innocent people suffer horrible fates just so he could make a handful of credits from time to time. What bothered her were the technical details. The operation had obviously been thrown together out of simple opportunity, but it struck her as inefficient and unreliable. But she wasn’t about to ruin the rapport she had established by saying so out loud.

“I didn’t realize I was dealing with a criminal mastermind,” she teased, bringing a cocky grin to Pommat’s face. “So when the white-haired man left, you snuck onto his ship and copied everything from his nav computer?”

“Got it all right here on my datapad,” Pommat replied, patting his hip pocket.

“So you know his name? You know where he’s from?