Star Wars_ I, Jedi - Michael A. Stackpole [181]
In direct contrast, Shala the Hutt and his gang of glitbiters were malevolent to the core. They’d taken over a warehouse out near the spaceport and had remodeled it in a fashion best described as Old Republic because it looked as if the place had been destroyed before the Empire arose and left virtually untouched since. Debris tangled the place, with rusty orange being the dominant color and laser-burn black being a second choice. Duraplast crates that looked worn enough to be Death Star debris were scattered all over, and the whole place stank of rotting vegetation.
The duracrete slab in the center had been lased down into an amphitheatre with a flattened dais at the north end where Shala spread himself out. I’ve heard it said that young Hutts can be quite muscular and powerful, which must mean that Shala is older than dirt. If a rock could be described as obese and it drooled, that would be Shala. Shala tended to mumble a lot, then laugh, which made his cronies laugh, too. The 3PO droid he had translating for him did a fairly good job, but Shala hit him so often to correct him that the droid’s right arm looked like it had been dragged behind a speeder bike going at high speed through Vlarnya’s narrow streets.
I smiled at the droid. “Tell your master I find his hospitality most generous, but an allergy to most insects means I’ll have to decline snacking on those crunchbugs.” I nodded to Shala and passed the bowl of chirping bugs back to him, licking my lips enviously. I turned my attention back to watching two little mammals with tusks trying to tear each other to pieces. They fought hard, apparently not knowing Shala would eat the victor.
The most interesting thing about Shala’s warehouse was that the building was actually smaller on the inside than it was on the outside. The absolute glut of junk in the place made it difficult to tell that fact from the inside, and I would have missed it save for spreading my senses out to see if he had hidden guards located in various spots where they could snipe at interlopers. I didn’t find any at that time, but I did discover people working behind false walls and in other sunken pits buried beneath piles of scrap metal and plasteel.
I smiled and gently flicked away a droplet of tuskette blood that hit my right cheek. The victorious tuskette screamed as Shala snapped its spine and bit its head off. He offered me a raw haunch, but I declined, so he tossed it to another of the warehouse’s denizens, and a fight ensued for it. I sincerely hoped for the sake of the Rodian who won the prize that Shala would be sated by tuskette, lest another victor end up on the evening’s menu.
By far the most secretive of the groups in Vlarnya was the Blackstar Pirates. While they made a cantina called the Mynock Hole their home, most of them passed through it on their way to another location. Way off in the back of the common room, in a corner where visitors never got seated, members would punch a code into a keypad and be admitted beyond a sliding door fitted into the wall. I had no idea what went on back there, though the relief of pirates allowed to leave their public station and retreat to the back radiated off them like heat off a fusion reactor.
While collecting data, I did my best to limit my uses of the Force. I wanted to avoid detection, of course, but I also wanted to avoid having things that seemed anomalous happening before I started taking overt action. The fact was that the easiest solution to dealing with the Invids was to put together a lightsaber and harvest a bunch of heads. Decapping the pirates would certainly cause a quickening of the Invids’ downfall, but then I’d be the only one left on Courkrus, which would provide Tavira with a big clue as to which one of us was the source of her problems.
Even more of a problem than that, of course, was the fact that I’d be