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By Root 609 0

with candles and I created a selection of music that could be pumped through the ship's intercom. I stocked the galley with food and wines and asked Molpol's cook to prepare a special meal I could reheat and serve. Performers and crew alike were entertained by the lengths to which I was willing to go to win Sari over, and most were more than happy to enroll in the conspiracy. I even managed to persuade Dax Doogun to finance the installation of a dejarik hologame table in the Falcon's main hold. I knew that Doogun was a fan of the game, but more important I knew that Sari was, and I devoted every spare moment to brushing up on moves and the rules of play. I knew, too, that she had a strong distaste for violence, so I made certain that the accessway to the turbolaser battery was sealed.

While I toiled, I imagined the entire scenario: the meals and wines we would share, the mood music we would listen to, the competitive but flirtatious dejarik contests in which we would engage—my Kintan strider besting her Mantellian savrip …

The day finally arrived when Sari sprang the surprise inspection tour. We had just given the second of three performances on Delphon, where the planet's more primitive cultures had a legend of an ancient asteroid bombardment and a starship that had left carrying genome samples of all the native flora and fauna. The primitives weren't fooled by our attempts to make use of the legend—nor were they meant to be—but they played along just the same. As a result we performed one of our most successful shows, in which Sari was a standout, as ever.

Her tour of the Falcon began with the boarding ramp, which she went down on one knee to inspect. Once inside the ship she went directly into the cockpit, where she ran a white-gloved hand along the instrument panel, the steering yoke, and several of the control levers and toggle switches. She sat in the copilot's chair and swiveled through a full circle. Then she returned to the main body of the ship and made two circuits through the ring corridor before entering any of the secondary cabin spaces and holds, peeking into dark recesses, on the lookout for dust or cobwebs, smiling when she was impressed, or at least satisfied by the efforts I'd made. Once she had returned to the main hold, I swept aside the tarpaulin under which the dejarik hologame table was concealed, and knew by her bright-eyed gaze that I had passed the test.

In the end, all she said was, “Yes.”

We struck camp on Delphon, collapsing the tents and cleaning up after ourselves. The handlers and beastmasters herded the animals into the Haor Chall lander; the crew went to their ship, the performers to theirs, and Sari and I boarded the Millennium Falcon. I had the freighter's navicomputer plot the most straightforward course to Delphon 7, because I planned to task the autopilot with most of the flying. In those days, in the years before the Rebel Alliance began building hidden bases on worlds in the Greater Javin, the only risk posed by sublight travel was pirates. But from everything I had heard, Imperial forces had the pirates on the run. What's more, pirates were not known to attack circuses.

While Sari showered and rid herself of makeup and glitter, I set the table in the main hold, opened the wine to let it breathe, got the meal warming, lighted the candles I'd strewn about, and started the music running through the intercom. When she emerged from the ring corridor into the main hold she had changed into something more comfortable, and the sight of her changed me forever.

We sat across from each other at the table, and I filled our glasses with wine.

“To an eventful journey,” I said, raising my glass.

Smiling, she raised hers.

The glasses were millimeters from clinking when the voice of the lander captain howled from the enunciators in the engineering station.

“Pirates!”

I leapt up, flinging wine in every direction, and rushed to don the comm headset.

“Are you certain?” I asked.

“They're flying the Blazing Claw,” the captain told me.

“Do they know we're a circus?” I said.

“They do, and