Star Wars_ X-Wing 04_ The Bacta War - Michael A. Stackpole [84]
“Pleased to meet you both.”
Karrde waited until Tapper slid a chair from over by the wall beside his own and Melina seated herself before he continued. “Melina, you’ll coordinate shipments of material to Booster. He’ll give you the details. The cargo and the delivery points will be hazardous, but we’ll not charge him our normal rates for such things. He’s part of our family—albeit a rather distantly related one.”
She nodded. “I understand.”
Mirax smiled. Great, this means what we don’t pay for transport we will pay for the cost of the items. And Karrde said it was a buyer’s market.
Karrde looked up from his datapad. “Is there anything else you need, Booster?”
Tapper laughed. “Perhaps he wants Another Chance or the Death Star’s womb. I mean, as long as your aim is to break the Bacta Cartel, you might as well go in for other things you can’t get.”
The brow over Booster’s artificial left eye rose. “It’s important in this business for you to be able to tell fable from fact and wishing from thinking. From what I’ve heard, about six months before I got out of Kessel, just after the Imps hurt the Rebels at Derra IV but before they ran them off Hoth, some treasure hunters searching the Alderaan graveyard found Another Chance and turned the ship and its arms over to the Rebels. That’s fact. The location of the shipyard that built the Death Star is likely a fact as well, but it’s one I don’t know and it’s my wish that it’s a fact that went to the grave with the Emperor. I don’t think that’s likely.
“Now it’s Iceheart’s wish we won’t break the cartel and destroy her power.” Booster smiled coldly. “I think—no, I know—she’s not going to get her wish. Her fall will not be fast, and it won’t be bloodless, but it’s coming. Count it as fact.”
Tapper raised his hands. “Sorry, I meant no offense.”
“And none was taken.” Mirax patted her father on the arm and felt the tension begin to flow out of him. “My father just wanted to make sure that you knew betting against Wedge was a mistake.”
Karrde pressed his hands flat against his desktop. “A lesson we have all learned, I am certain. Now let us attend to the details that make sure we all profit from it.”
23
Corran Horn felt tired enough from the recent raid and run home that he knew he should just turn in, but the idea of hitting the small suite of rooms he shared with Mirax didn’t appeal. On his approach back to the Yag’Dhul station he’d gotten a message she’d recorded saying she was taking her father out on another trip to finalize arrangements for supply shipments. She expected to be gone for three days.
Which means I’m alone when I could use a good hug and some sympathy. Corran knew what was happening to him, and he wanted to fight against it, but even by trying some of the breathing exercises Luke Skywalker had recommended to him, he had a hard time putting a dent in his downward emotional spiral. It’s like flying into a fireball. You have to hang on and hope you come out in one piece on the other side.
The fourth anniversary of his father’s death had snuck up on Corran and ambushed him. A lot of hydrogen had been melted into helium in a lot of stars since his father’s death, but the memory of holding his father’s dead body in his arms had the immediacy of an event that had occurred moments before. Corran could still feel his father’s weight pressing against him. The man’s stillness, the stink of blood and blaster-burned flesh, the screams of those in the cantina, including his own, all pounded in on him.
The previous year, things had not seemed to be so bad to him, but he’d just started with Rogue Squadron at that time, so he had a legion of distractions to dull the pain. He also realized that his