Star Wars_ Death Star - Michael Reaves [94]
Without missing a step Ratua turned into the next doorway, a shop featuring femwear, resisting the urge to kick in the afterburner. He pretended to peruse the racks of selections and gaze at the holomannequins. As he did, he could feel fear roiling in his belly like one of the dianoga rumored to infest downlevels. Stihl was a decent man, but there was no doubt where his loyalties lay, and it wasn’t with escaped prisoners.
A droid rolled up, gyroscopically balanced on a single wheel. “How may I assist you, sir?”
Calm down! “I need, uh, something, ah, festive for a female friend.”
“Species?”
“Twi’lek.”
“Skin tone?”
“Um, teal.”
“How festive, sir?”
“Oh, you know. Very.”
“Right this way. We have a selection of Twi’lek wear in the correct color coordinates. Something in hisp-silk, perhaps? Sleep gowns? Microgarments?”
Ratua followed the droid to the back of the shop. There were no other customers or staff about that he could see. There was a window at the shop’s front, and all he wanted was to be sure his back was to it. He paid scant attention to the droid as it held something filmy and nearly transparent up for his inspection. “Yes, yes, that’s nice. What else do you have?”
His mind whirled. He hadn’t expected to see anybody he knew here. None of his fellow prisoners were likely to be wandering the station on their own, and what were the chances one of the few guards he had known personally on the prison world would be transferred here?
Apparently much greater than he had expected.
When you thought about it, it made sense. They’d need guards on the station, because a place as big as this was becoming would definitely have crime popping up, even if it was no more than deckhands getting drunk and disorderly. And that wouldn’t be the only problem. Put a million people into an enclosed space, even one as huge as the Death Star, and there were going to be a fair number of bad eggs. Military discipline wasn’t the easiest thing to live under, plus there were all those civilian contractors. Yeah, they’d definitely need detention centers and guards, and who better than guys who had hands-on experience on a planet full of real criminals?
Okay, so it was reasonable. But that wasn’t the problem, was it? If Stihl saw him, he was cooked, no two ways about it. And that was definitely going to put a bend in his ability to court Memah. He couldn’t risk going into the cantina if, as he suspected, Rodo and Stihl had become pals. It certainly wasn’t surprising—given their joint love of hand-to-hand violence, it was inevitable that they’d either be bosom buddies or mortal enemies. Regardless, his potential romance was over before—
Hold on, hold on, wait a second. He had told Memah who he was. For maybe the second time in his life, he had offered the truth. She knew he was an escapee, and—so far, at least—had done nothing. He could just tell her about this. They could work out something …
“How about this item?”
He looked at the droid. It held up a piece of crimson silk that he could easily hide in his hand, with two fingers left over. The mental image of Memah wearing nothing but this filled his thoughts, momentarily banishing that of Sergeant Stihl. Oh, my.
“I’ll take that. And that other thing, too.”
“Very good, sir. Debit code?”
“How about hard currency?”
“That will be fine, sir. Shall I gift-wrap these for you?”
“Uh, yes. That would be good.”
Ratua walked out of the store carrying the packages, in a considerably more sober mood than he’d been in a few minutes before. He had a few nice gifts for Memah, though they might be a bit premature, given the nature of their relationship. He would hold on to them for a while and hope to see her in one, someday soon.
And when he thought about it, maybe Stihl wasn’t so much a threat after all. The man was in the military, so his work schedule had to be somewhere in the ship’s computer. Those files could be accessed by somebody with sufficient expertise—and with