Star Wars_ I, Jedi - Michael A. Stackpole [114]
I snatched the truncheon from the air before it could hit the floor, and looked past the Weequay’s twitching form. I reversed the baton and offered the handle to another of the guards. “Clearly, it’s defective. Now if you will take me to Booster …”
I turned back to head toward his office, when I discovered my quarry had come to me. This wouldn’t have been a bad thing, but the flesh of Booster’s face was as red as his artificial left eye. He grabbed big handfuls of my green flightsuit, hoisted me up off the deck and slammed me into a bulkhead.
“Where’s my daughter?” His short, bristly white hair and the goatee he’d taken to wearing made him look more like me than I even wanted to think about. “What have you done with Mirax?”
I groaned, less from the impact than the sheer fury in his words. “Let me explain.”
He jammed me into the wall again. “You think you’re that persuasive, CorSec?”
Booster released me and I fell to the floor. He looked at his guards and shook his head. “Fyg and Kruqr, escort him to my office. Now.”
Another Weequay and a fairly scrawny human grabbed my arms, jerked me to my feet and Rybet-marched me off to the wardroom that Booster used as his docking bay office. It felt odd for me to be conducted to his office in the same manner I’d hauled so many prisoners along in my day. I knew that even without using any Jedi techniques I could break their grips and get rid of them. Because of the unseemliness of being hustled along that way I almost did make a break.
I didn’t because I realized there was no purpose to my doing so. Yes, I might feel embarrassed at being manhandled so, but what difference did it make? Was my pride worth injuring someone? No. They were conducting me to where I wanted to go anyway. What they or anyone else thought of me was really immaterial.
I smiled. Some of that Jedi training got through.
Reverting to type, I studied my surroundings. The docking bay had plenty of room for ships and approached capacity. The old TIE fighter launch racks still had a few TIEs in them, but many of them were missing parts. Other smaller ships had been fitted with unusual suspension collars that allowed them to hang from the racks as well. In that way Booster was able to fit a lot more ships into his hold.
The vast majority of ships in the docking bay were freighters, though few were as big as Mirax’s Pulsar Skate or the Millennium Falcon. Most ships of that size couldn’t afford docking space on the Errant Venture anyway. The ships present were those of smugglers who dealt in rare, exotic and high priced items, or the idle rich who found slumming on the Errant Venture something of a thrill. Most of the ships bringing goods for trade and transshipment on the Errant Venture just offloaded their items into one of the supply holds and left a crewman or agent on board the EV to handle the transactions.
Booster’s people brought me to his office, tossed me inside, then shut the hatch. I had to hit a glowpanel switch, and when I did, I shuddered. Clutter filled the room—cracked duraplast boxes leaking streaky red, viscous fluids, piles of datacards leaning precariously one against another, chairs filled with cast-off clothing and in the corner stood a deactivated 3PO droid festooned with a dozen gunbelts complete with blasters. Booster’s desk dominated the room and appeared neat in comparison to the rest of it. The single layer of datacards, datapads, wires and odds and ends had been cleared back from a small cube projecting various holographs of Mirax.
I shifted stuff from the chair in front of the desk to the floor and sat, watching the ever-changing display. Though Booster would deny having a single sentimental bone in his body, his projector cube had arranged the images by chronology and subject. They flashed up every ten seconds or so. The display might follow a theme, like images of Mirax working on