Star Wars_ Death Star - Michael Reaves [43]
It wasn’t just her imagination.
Teela held her gaze as steady as she could, and kept her mental wall in place.
A moment passed. It seemed like a long time, but it couldn’t have been more than a few heartbeats. Vader seemed to nod slightly, then turned back to look at whatever it was that Tarkin was prattling on about.
The removal of his attention was like a glass shell shattering about her. Teela nearly collapsed. She gasped, loud enough to cause several of her colleagues to glance at her. She felt shaken to her core.
What had just happened?
SLASHTOWN PRISON COLONY, DESPAYRE
Ratua considered his options, or at least what he thought they might be, and found them less satisfactory every time he recounted them. Only one held any appeal at all, and that one not so much.
As he saw things, he could either spend the rest of his life on this tropical pesthole of a world, until one day somebody or something killed him …
Or he could leave.
That is, he could try. The stats were as simple as they were depressing: nobody lived to a ripe old age on the prison planet and shuffled off peacefully in their sleep. Nobody. Either some horrible local disease took them, or somebody wanted their boots, or something with fangs and poison-tipped claws looking for a meal got too close, and that was just how it was. Despayre was a hard place, and sooner or later you were grub food, even if you were as fast as Ratua was.
He was in his shack, alone and brooding. The pitiful interior was illuminated by a glow stick, which gave barely enough light to show the backless chair, the large cable spool that served as his table, with his cracked plate and two mismatched and chipped mugs, and the crab spider as big as his hand nestled in one of the upper corners near the roof. Night had fallen, and the predators that liked the dark were out hunting. Some were prisoners, some animals, and none of them was apt to wish you well. And yet for the path Ratua needed to be upon, he would have to venture out in the night. Moreover, he was going to have to do it real soon, because the only chance he had of getting off this rock was the tiniest of loopholes that could close at any moment. The effort would cost him everything he owned—which wasn’t much, and that was part of the problem—and if he failed, yet still somehow survived, he would be starting over again from point zero, with nothing save the clothes he was wearing.
Ratua sighed, staring at the makeshift wall of his hut. Was the life here worse than the risk of trying to leave it? Nothing ventured, nothing gained, but also nothing lost …
A tap on the door interrupted his meditation. He grabbed his capacitor, walked two steps to the entrance, and peered out through the peephole. The capacitor, salvaged from a broken gel-cam’s battery pack, wasn’t much of a weapon. It required contact with an attacker, which was closer than Ratua wanted to be against somebody with a knife, say, but it was better than nothing. The device, once triggered, built up an electrical charge within a couple of seconds. The amperage was low, but there was still enough voltage to knock a full-sized human onto his backside—assuming you could touch bare skin with the contact points. His quickness made it a somewhat better weapon than it might be in the hands of someone with normal reactions, but it was good for only a single zap before it had to be recharged, which would be far too slow in a fight if you couldn’t stall the attack long enough to let the juice build back up.
As good a scrounger as he was, he had never been able to score a blaster. Not that he’d tried all that much. Carrying a firearm wasn’t the best way to keep under the radar. Still, there were times, like now, when he regretted not having scrounged harder.
He glanced through the tiny fish-eye lens in the door, salvaged from the same cam as the capacitor, and relaxed. It was Brun, the cargo crew boss on the night shift. The one he’d been expecting.
Ratua opened the door,