Star Wars_ I, Jedi - Michael A. Stackpole [141]
It didn’t take that long for several of the Survivors to storm the ship with blasters drawn. I gave them a smile, raised my ale toward them, then drained my glass. They didn’t seem to find this as amusing as I did, so they hauled me out of the shuttle and through the streets to a building that, despite the collapse of the east wing, looked impressive enough to have once been very important. They took me up some stairs and around to a grand office, where I was unceremoniously plunked down in a chair and my identification card was tossed onto a big desk.
All but two of my escorts retreated to the door, leaving me alone with two men and a woman. The first man I recognized from files as Jacob Nive. Tall and well built, with long blond hair gathered into a thick braid, he looked very much the sort of dashing, handsome holograph of a pirate presented in entertainment media. As close as I was I could see the dirt under his fingernails and the light scars on his face from battles past, but I still found the bright eyed man somehow engaging. I’d seen his type before and knew he could be quite charming.
Next to him stood a woman about as tall as Lando Calrissian and much darker complected. She wore her black hair very closely cropped and had sharp dark eyes. I didn’t find her hard at all to look at save that her right hand appeared to be a mechanical construct over which she wore no synthetic flesh. Its clicks as she worked a triangular credit coin back and forth between her fingers underscored her impatience.
The third person seemed to a reservoir for any impatience she could not burn off with her nervous habit. Taller than even Nive—making him a good head taller than me and probably thirty percent heavier—this guy was handsome and, worse, had no doubt about it at all. His black hair had been cut to a middling length and was so dark that it almost appeared blue—though a shade of blue much darker than the icy hue of his eyes. He wore a moustache and goatee, and had grown his moustaches out like wings that swept back along his cheeks.
Nive looked at me, shooting the cuffs of his jacket. All three of them wore what had once been the uniform of the Khuiumin Survivors—grey jackets with red cuffs, collars and breasts, gold trim around the cuffs and down the seams of the grey pants—but their clothes had seen much better days. Repairs had been made with big, obvious stitching in gold, as if to mark the scars on the body beneath the clothes. Given the amount of it on Nive’s jacket I was surprised he was still standing, and the stitchery circle around the woman’s right elbow suggested how high her prosthesis went.
The pirate leader slipped my ID datacard into the datapad on his desk, read for a moment, then looked up. “You are foolish or suicidal, Jenos Idanian, coming here in that shuttle.”
“No, just incredibly bold.” I settled an easy smile on my face and crossed my legs, as if the pirates were in my office and not the other way around. “Your people went to certain lengths to get the shuttle, and I decided to deliver it.”
The dark man laughed. “And you think we will thank you for this?”
After a split second read of the other twos’ reactions to his speaking, I spitted him with a cold stare. “First, I don’t believe that you, in particular, think at all.” I deliberately looked back at Nive. “I would apologize for the inconvenience I caused you, but the fact is that you caused me a greater inconvenience first. I needed to be well away from certain people, and your operation would have prevented my getting away. I could not let that happen, so I took the shuttle and escaped you.”
Nive’s expression tightened. “What happened to the two men who were supposed to be on board the shuttle?”
“The smaller one is dead.