Star Wars_ Millennium Falcon - James Luceno [13]
“She's back online!”
Jadak's eyes were wide. “Now you wake up? Now?”
A whoosh issued from the sublight engine and the YT veered abruptly, as if to avoid a collision, sending Jadak and Reeze slamming into the pod's curved wall.
An instant later they were spiraling through space.
NAR SHADDAA
18 YEARS BEFORE THE BATTLE OF YAVIN
VISS AND HEET CAME THROUGH THE DOOR TO THE WAITING ROOM and walked directly over to where Bammy was sitting.
“All right, mechanic. He'll see you now.”
Bammy Decree knew Viss from school, before Viss had been expelled and taken a job as one of Rej Taunt's bodyguards. Bammy knew Heet, too. After his short stint at tech school, he'd worked on some of Heet's skimmers and sloops.
Bammy started for the door the two bodyguards had come through, but Viss stuck an arm out to hold him back and Heet threw him a bathrobe.
“He's taking a massage and a steam,” Viss explained while Bammy was staring blankly at the robe. He motioned with his chin to a small refresher off to one side of the waiting room. “You can change in there.”
Bammy was a head shorter than Viss and Heet and fifty kilos lighter, and because most of the beings who came to visit Rej Taunt were closer to the size of the bodyguards, the robe fell off Bammy's narrow shoulders and trailed on the floor when he emerged from the ‘fresher. He cinched it around his frame the best he could while two Klatooinians seated in the waiting room tried to keep from laughing.
Viss pointed to Bammy's balled-up clothing. “Leave those in the 'fresher and follow us.”
Beyond the door, Rej Taunt's villa was even tackier than the waiting room, crammed with bric-a-brac of the sort that filled Nar Shaddaa's junk emporiums. But while only ten years older than Bammy, Taunt was an up-and-coming crime boss with a taste for the finer things. Bammy didn't doubt that Taunt would one day be living as lavishly as a Hutt.
Bammy followed his bulky former school acquaintances through several enormous though empty rooms, across a courtyard adorned with foliage imported from Ithor and columns from Coruscant, and down several broad stone stairways to a gaming room piled high with decades-old ovide wheels, sabacc tables, and dance cages. Half a dozen humans and aliens were busy at cleaning tasks. Bammy hadn't seen a droid since he showed himself to the front gate scanner two hours earlier.
Viss rapped his huge hand against the jamb of an old wooden door and someone opened it from the far side, clouds of steam wafting from the room beyond. The supersaturated heat struck Bammy like a ton of permablocks. The steam was so thick he couldn't see his pointed nose in front of him, and in seconds sweat was streaming into his eyes and dripping from his small chin. He was moving his hand in front of his face as if to part the steam when a deep voice boomed from somewhere in the mist.
“Over here, mechanic.”
Bammy followed the sound to where Rej Taunt was lying supine on a table, rolls of water-storing fat avalanching off his naked torso, his thick arms being massaged by three comely human females. An Askajian, Taunt was the eldest son of a family of tomuon cloth traders. He had come to Nar Shaddaa as a child and never left.
Taunt gestured to the adjacent massage table. “You want a rub?”
Bammy started to decline but the crime boss cut him off. “Of course you do. Doff the robe and set your skinny human body on the table. I've already instructed my fems not to make fun of you.”
Bammy did as instructed. At twenty standard years old, he was already in poor shape, but he was certain the trio of masseuses had seen worse in their line of work. If nothing else, his body was absent the blaster scar tissue and elaborate tattoos common to most of Taunt's employees. Flat on his stomach, Bammy discreetly lowered the robe to the floor. The fem's slick hands felt good on his tense shoulders, he had to admit.
“The only reason I agreed to see you,” Taunt said, “is because Viss and