Star Wars_ The Jedi Academy Trilogy 01_ Jedi Search - Kevin J. Anderson [23]
Moruth Doole stepped backward, fluttering his long-fingered hands. “Work it out? What are you going to do, buy me a droid replacement for my eye? I hate droids! Because of you, Jabba tried to have me killed. I had to beg them to take only my eye. I had to beg them to take my eye!” He jabbed at his boiled-egg blind side.
Skynxnex shambled closer to Doole, lowering his voice. “I think you’re confusing him, rather than frightening him, Moruth. Maybe he really doesn’t know what happened.”
Doole sat down at his desk and straightened his lizard-skin waistcoat, regaining his composure. “When you dumped your load of spice, Jabba blamed it on me! He put out a contract on my life. All because of your cowardice.”
Chewbacca roared in outrage. Han barely kept his anger in check. “Jabba put out a contract on me too, Doole. Greedo tried to assassinate me on Tatooine. Boba Fett captured me on Bespin and I was trapped in carbonite, just like your friend there”—he gestured to the gruesome trophy on the wall—“and I got sent to Jabba anyway.”
Doole waved a hand in dismissal. “Jabba’s men had already infiltrated the spice-mining operations, and he wanted to expose me, so his own people could procure the glitterstim directly. One of his hit men fried my eye and half blinded the other. He was about to do more, but Skynxnex killed him.”
At the doorway the scarecrow smiled with pride.
“Jabba forced my hand, and I had to act. We staged the prison revolt. The warden himself was Jabba’s man, but half of the guards were on my side. I paid them well, you see. Luckily, the Empire was thrown into chaos right about the same time. We took Kessel for ourselves. There were a few other upstart slave lords on the other side of the planet, but they didn’t last long. I’ve been stockpiling spice supplies and building up a massive defense fleet with everything I can scrape together. Nobody—and I mean nobody!—is going to come here and take things away from me.”
Doole grabbed his head with his long fingers in a gesture of weariness. “Everything was going just fine before you had to get Jabba angry at me! Everything was safe. I knew just how to play the game. Now I’m jumping at shadows, afraid every moment.”
Doole stared at Han with his mechanical eye. “But ruining my life once isn’t good enough for you, is it? You come back here broadcasting a message from the New Republic. Somehow I thought remnants of the Empire would try to grab the spice mines back first, but big governments are all the same. You are a spy, a particularly inept one. Did you think you could just fly into our space, look around, and go back to your Republic with all the information they need to come take us over?” He slapped his palm on the desktop with a damp splat. “We’ll strike the first blow by killing their spy, and we will be ready to blast them out of the sky the moment your attack ships come out of hyperspace!”
“You haven’t got a chance!” Skynxnex sneered.
Han allowed himself to smile, then actually chuckled. “You boys have it all wrong. Absolutely wrong.” Chewbacca grunted his agreement.
Skynxnex scowled. Doole stared at Han in silence for a moment. “We’ll see about that.”
Doole reached into the pocket of his waistcoat and withdrew a small ancient-looking key, which he inserted into one of the drawers of the former warden’s desk. He fumbled with the lock, then opened the drawer. Reaching in, he pulled out an armored strongbox. He hefted the strongbox to the table, then dug in another pocket of his waistcoat to extract a second key.
Han watched, his curiosity piqued, as Doole opened the strongbox and withdrew a smaller sealed container. Doole meticulously slipped both his keys back into his pockets before looking at Han.
“I’d like to spend time interrogating you thoroughly, but I want to know exactly when the New Republic plans to come in and take over, how many ships they are sending, what type of forces they will use. I’ll get the