Star Wars_ Tales From the Mos Eisley Cantina - Kevin J. Anderson [3]
Three stories above one of Mos Eisley’s nameless streets, twin beacons blinked like ship lamps, and brilliant yellow beams glowed out of a wide-open entry hatch. The droid maneuvered us closer. A long curving ramp and straight stairs swooped up from street level to the elevated main entry. Beneath the stairway, I spotted the hotel’s most notable feature: three large portholes.
A group of investors crazy enough to sink their credits on Tatooine had towed a beat-up cargo hauler here and sunk a quarter of it under the sand. Debris blown in by a recent dust storm lay clumped along its near side, which had been starboard. Antenna-cluster wreckage drooped over what must’ve been the cockpit. I mentally saluted the Lucky Despot with the spacer’s traditional appraisal of somebody else’s ship: What a piece of junk.
Our speeder settled at the foot of the long ramp. “Disembark here, gentles,” droned the droid.
We unloaded our gear from the airbus’s cargo compartment onto a repulsor cart. We’d only brought one change of clothes and our performing outfits, and left the rest of our belongings at Jabba’s palace. Mos Eisley’s odors—ship fuels, rancid food, low-tech industrial haze, and the sheer desensitizing smell of hot sand—hung in sullen air.
Once inside the lobby, we blinked while our eyes adjusted. An orange-suited human security guard slouched at one corner. No sign of Lady Val. Mentally I recategorized her. She might trust droids, but she equated musicians with kitchen help.
“This way.” Our droid led us past an extremely attractive front-desk person, species unknown to me, whose multifaceted eyes glistened prettily. A long, vast room filled a third of the ex-ship’s top deck. Reflective black bulkheads and a shiny black floor enveloped several dozen sparsely populated tables, but more than one table tottered over damaged legs, and here and there white strips showed through the peeling black bulkhead. In here—the famous Star Chamber Cafe—we set up and started a number to get the room’s acoustics. Early diners clapped, clicked their claws, or snapped their mandibles. Satisfied, we repacked our gear and grabbed an empty dinner table. Within minutes, the show began. A comet whizzed past Figrin’s head. Constellations appeared beneath the ceiling and reflected in my soup.
Holographic sabacc spreads flickered into existence over several tables. Now I remembered the rest of what I’d heard: Jabba had made sure the Despot never got her gambling license from local Imperial bribemeisters, so Valarian had to hide her gaming equipment until dark. Reportedly Jabba warned Lady Val of planned police raids … for a price.
Figrin ate rapidly, pulled out his deck, and wandered away. Tonight he would lose. On purpose. My other comrades joined a low-stakes Schickele match.
I found a bored-looking Kubaz security guard and struck up a conversation. Kubaz make excellent security staff. Their long prehensile noses discern scents the way Bith distinguish pitch and timbre, and a Kubaz’s greenish-black skin blends into every shadow. In exchange for my personal stats, which he probably knew anyway, and a mug of mildly intoxicating lum, I found out that the green-caped Kubaz’s name was Thwim, that he was born on Kubindi, and that Mistress Valarian’s prospective bridegroom, D’Wopp, was an expert hunter—common enough profession on their homeworld.
I also spotted a familiar triangular face. Not friendly, but familiar. Kodu Terrafin pilots Jabba’s courier run between palace and town house. He’s Arcona: Dressed in a spacer’s coverall, he looks like a dirt-brown snake with clawed legs and arms and a large, anvil-shaped head.