• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

It made perfect sense. She had figured the old man would speak to her. Jos had, too, but somehow that knowledge had slipped from his mind—he had been so tired and overworked. In hindsight, it seemed unbelievable that he could have put that possibility out of his thoughts, but he had. Tolk had talked about the explosion, the deaths, the horror of it all, and Jos had fastened upon that and thought about her reasons no further.

Uncle Erel.

Rage rose in him like a hot tide. He stood, went back to the ’fresher, and flipped the sonic shower on. He stepped into the stall, feeling the grime and sleep and sour smell of alcohol that still seeped from his pores begin to sluice away, rolling down his body in dirty waves to the drain. He looked at his chrono—the next transport was scheduled to lift midmorning. Time enough to shower and dress, and then, by everything that was righteous, he would pull rank, call in favors…grow wings and fly if that’s what it took to pay a visit to his loving uncle and have the truth from him—one way or another.

32

Kaird, or Mont Shomu, as he was known in his fat human disguise, smiled as the human pilot and the Twi’lek food service tech sipped from the bottle of local wine he had brought along. It wasn’t bad wine, made from a round, reddish purple fruit about the size of a human’s closed fist that grew on the funguslike trees of the Jasserak Highlands. Called avedame, the pulp was crispy when ripe, and had a tart, yet sweet taste; the wine reflected this.

That the wine was drugged with myocaine didn’t affect the flavor at all, given that in the liquid oral form, the muscle relaxant was tasteless, odorless, and colorless. To allay any suspicion, Kaird also drank the wine. The difference was that a pinch of neutralizer had gone into his glass, along with the straw-colored wine, ensuring that he would feel no effect from the chemical.

“Let’s get started, shall we?” the Twi’lek female said. The excitement was high in her voice. Kaird smiled, and the fat face smiled with him. How sweet and naive…

Bogan, the human pilot, was just as ramped. He swallowed half his glass of fruit wine and impatiently waved the holoprojector to life. Not as conscientious as the other pilot, to drink wine, even though it wasn’t much.

The image of a large hall filled with tables, at each of which two players sat, blossomed in the air above them. The holoproj was sharp, and they would get to enjoy the first twenty or thirty minutes of it. After that, once the pharmaceutical took hold, they would be awake and alert, but simply unable to move.

After fifteen minutes, the pair of them began to slump, and, while they no doubt wondered and worried at this, they simply did not have the energy to do anything about it, save to frown. At twenty minutes, they couldn’t even flex their facial muscles enough for that. Were he to give each of them a blaster, neither could summon the strength to raise it and shoot him.

Kaird moved to the human. “Can you speak?”

“Y-y-y… yesssss,” Bogan managed, his voice a dragged-out slur. “Wh-wh-whaaat …?”

“I’ll keep it short and simple. I’ve drugged you. I want the codes to the admiral’s personal ship—access, security, operational, everything. The drug I gave you is not fatal; however, if you don’t give me the codes, or if you give me false ones, I will kill you and your friend. Do you understand?”

“Y-y-yesss…”

“Good.” Kaird produced a recorder from his pocket. He knew that the man’s slurs wouldn’t matter—the security codes were not vox-specific, so anybody could make them work. “Give me the codes. Take your time, identify each one clearly. If they work, you and your girlfriend will have a pleasant evening watching the Strag match, and by noon tomorrow, you’ll be able to move well enough to call for help.

“If any of the codes fails, however…” Kaird removed a small thermal detonator from his pocket. Used to trigger a larger bomb, a unit this size, if it went off in this room, would shred everything