Star Wars_ I, Jedi - Michael A. Stackpole [165]
And no one knew why it had been carried out. For as long as anyone could remember, the Caamasi had been very pacifistic and the very soul of moderation and mediation. While a few Caamasi ventured forth as Jedi—obviously including my grandfather’s friend, Ylenic It’kla—most who left Caamas did so as traders or scholars, negotiators and diplomats. So beloved were they that various languages adapted the word Caamasi to mean “friend from afar” or “stranger to be trusted.”
Factions within the Empire certainly did what they could to help the surviving Caamasi after the immolation of their world. A number of colonies like Morymento had been created, and those who were inclined to see conspiracies everywhere even went so far as to suggest Alderaan had been destroyed because it was home to one of the larger Caamasi refugee communities. I didn’t know if that was true or not, but I could recall my mother collecting up old clothes for shipment to Caamasi camps elsewhere in the galaxy. With the defeat of the Empire, the charity continued and even swelled, which meant, with a semi-annual shipment of supplies just having arrived on Kerilt, the Caamasi colony became a ripe target for plunder.
As we reverted to real space, we discovered we were not the only ones who found the Caamasi supplies a prize worth winning.
We poured out of the Invidious and saw an old Kaloth-class battlecruiser in orbit around Kerilt. The IFF transponder indicated it was called Harmzuay, and I’d known of that ship from back in my CorSec days. It belonged to a group of Thalassian slavers who, even for slavers, had a pretty unsavory reputation—they culled the best and brightest of their victims and killed the rest, guaranteeing a diminished supply which hiked their prices.
“Bolts, on me. We have their skulls. Burn ’em, don’t shock. Rock, Slash, head down and ground attack Thalassian ships. Use ion cannons—I don’t want slave ships being blown up with slaves inside.” Timmser and Wallon acknowledged my orders and headed to atmosphere while the rest of us came around to port and drove straight at the two dozen Z-95 Headhunters the Thalassians used—fairly stock models with two triple-blasters and a concussion missile launcher.
The Thalassian pilots were not bad, but we were just better—a lot better. I nailed my first one in a head-to-head pass. I fired first, splashing his forward shield with laser light. He shied a bit and shot a concussion missile at me, but it jetted past harmlessly. My next two bolts punched through his shield. One drilled into the cockpit and the second melted part of the port engine. Bits and pieces of it broke loose, exploding out through the housing, then the S-foil itself tore off and whirled away into space. The skull proceeded into a flat spin, and the pilot, if he still lived, was unable to do anything about it.
The next pilot hit me once with red bursts from his triple blasters, but my shields held. I shot back, hitting him with a dual-fire pair of laser blasts. He rolled to starboard to get away from me, so I rolled to port to drop in on his tail. I triggered another burst of fire that nibbled away at his aft shield, then inverted and climbed into his continued loop. He tried to roll to port and climb away from me, but a quick push of the stick forward and a touch of rudder brought me back on him. My last shots pierced his shields and, were he flying an X-wing, would have decapitated his astromech. As it was, in a skull, I took off his cockpit canopy and the top ten centimeters of his helmet.
Red blaster bolts shot past me off the starboard side. I popped my throttle offline and went bow down for two seconds, then throttled up again and ruddered to starboard. The skull that had been trying to slip in on my tail overshot me, giving me her belly as a clean target. I pumped two sets of bolts into it, collapsing the forward shield and taking