lifter took whatever he was carrying. She has it now, and that was the holo
other."
"And you think that because you've destroyed that holo that I'll have to
keep you alive to identify her?" Glasc's laughter filled the kitchen. "The
warrants you brought here to Darkknell for her arrest will yield another holo
of her." She punctuated her comment with another shot that spattered hot metal
over Hal's jacket.
"Moranda Savich is a master of disguise, so you won't find her. More
important, though, your man Trabler probably killed her. I'd guess that part
of the task you sent him off on was to find out if the local police or
hospitals had reported her being recovered, right? They didn't, which means
she's out there and probably has help."
"And this will keep you alive why?"
"Because I know her. I've tracked her across a half dozen worlds. I know
how she operates; I know what she looks like in myriad disguises. Without me
you'll never find her-or, if you do, it won't be in time." He stressed the
last word to put pressure on the agent, since the desperate measures already
employed told him time was of the essence in the recovery of whatever Moranda
had stolen. "Give her a chance to catch her breath, and she'll have the prize
sold to the Rebels."
"I don't know that I can trust you to help me."
"Ah, excuse me, but I'm the one here who has trust problems, given that
your aide tried to tear my head off." Hal shook his head. "Pare-Imp-noiaff"
Just never seems to stop. "Believe it or not, I actually want to catch
Moranda. You're my best bet for doing that. The alternative is for me to shoot
you dead and hope I can evade an Imperial murder warrant. I help you, you say
Trabler's weapon discharged accidentally, and we're both in the clear."
"You're right, of course. You could never escape a warrant for my murder.
" A very confident note entered her voice and sent chills down Hal's spine. "I
am Ysanne Isard, the daughter of the director of Imperial Intelligence. You
would be hunted forever and your family would disappear."
"Pleased to make your acquaintance." Hal sighed as quietly as he could.
It couldn't get much worse, could it?
"And you are correct. I am here hunting a Rebel courier. He stole..."
"Don't tell me; I don't want to know. If you told me you'd have to kill
me." Hal closed his eyes for a moment. "I'm here to catch a thief, and that
thief has your property. I get her, you get it, I don't need to know what it
is."
"Very good, very smart of you." She hesitated for a moment and Hal wanted
to cringe for reasons he could not identify. "I am almost inclined to trust
you, but because I don't have a full security profile on you, I will demand
one condition to our alliance."
"That being?"
A thin, black, ribbonlike device rolled across the floor and unfolded as
it came to rest on its side. It looked like a tiny belt with a black clasp,
and Hal recognized it immediately as choke-collar. When snapped around his
neck it could be given a remote command to constrict, cutting off the
bloodflow to his brain, rendering him unconscious. They were often used to
restrain prisoners on work details. A constriction override command pulsed out
from a central control unit, so the collar constricted when prisoners moved
out of range and put a quick end to escapes.
Hal picked it up and let it dangle from one hand. "You'll have the
control unit and it will be a deadman device?"
"If I give a command or my pulse stops, the collar constricts. Without a
key, or without trusting someone to shoot it off your neck, you'll be dead
shortly after I am."
Hal didn't want to put the collar on, but shooting her and then living a
life on the run seemed to be his only alternative. "A lightsaber ought to be
able to cut through this."
"Perhaps, but the Jedi are all gone. The age of Imperial Justice is here,
Hal Horn."
"Of that I'm well aware." Hal slipped the collar on, snapped it closed,
then raised the collar on his shirt to hide it. He tossed out the Penetrator
and slowly stood. "Here I am, at your service."
Isard appeared and flashed him a quick glimpse of the control device,
then bolstered her blaster. "We resume our search at the place I first met
you."
"Don't bother. Arky will be long gone. He knew you were Imp Intel long
before I did." Hal smiled. "Back to the Continuum Void. It's the only place
that stocked Gralish liqueur and Moranda's a fiend for it. Having been shot
the way she was, she'll be wanting some fortification. That's the best place
to begin."
***
PART 4
by Timothy Zahn
What are you talking about?" Isard demanded, the already wintry tone of
her voice dropping into subzero territory as she leaned a few centimeters
further over the Continuum Void's bar. "He was here two hours ago. Where in
this vat of rimspit could he have gone?"
"I don't know. Agent Glasc," the nervous-looking De varonian standing on
the far side of the bar stammered, twitching his way backward the same few
centimeters Is ard had moved forward. "As the Emperor himself is my witness, I
truly do not know. All I can tell you is that he received a call half an hour
ago, told me to handle the bar for the rest of the day, and then took off like
Vader himself was after him. That's all I know. I swear."
"It probably is," Hal murmured from Isard's side, all his senses focused
on the Devaronian. The species was easy enough to read if you knew what to
look for. Hal did. "Offhand I'd say our quarry's been busy cleaning up a few
loose ends."
"He has no idea what a loose end really is," Isard said acidly, her
smoldering eyes still pinning the hapless bar - man to the wall. But there was
a subtle change in her tone, enough for Hal to recognize that the focus of her
anger had shifted from the Devaronian to Moranda. To Moranda, and her as-yet-
unidentified accomplice.
And that one was starting to worry Hal a little. Fine if it was some
fellow criminal, either an old friend or a new acquaintance-dangerous enough,
but at least fringe types were a relatively known psychological type. But
under the circumstances, her ally could instead be a member of the Rebellion.
And that was another vat of vinks alt. As the late and unlamented Trabler
had pointed out, Rebels came in all sizes and shapes, with profiles that
ranged from opportunistic to fanatical. Fringe criminals generally avoided
killing law enforcement officials unless absolutely necessary, if only because
it drew too much attention their direction. All too often, in contrast,
fanatics, reveled in both the violence and the notoriety.
Bad enough if some loose-laser Rebel shot him through the back for no
reason.
Worse if a Rebel shot Isard instead, and her dead body was the last thing
Hal wound up seeing as her choke-collar squeezed the life out of him.
"Fine," Isard said, interrupting Hal's increasingly unpleasant line of
thought as she straightened back up from her interrogator's lean. "If she spun
&n
bsp; him a story that he fell for that easily, it almost certainly had something to
do with a relative or friend. I want their names. All of them. Now."
The Devaronian gulped. "I-of course. Let me get his profile chart."
Sidling down the bar, he escaped into the manager's office. "Waste of
time," Hal murmured, turning around to lean his shoulder blades against the
bar as he glanced over the handful of patrons. A mixture of simple workers and
less simple fringe types, he decided, fairly typical of places like this.
"Even if we find him, and even if he got a good look at Moranda, she's had
more than enough time to change her appearance by now."
"The fact she and Arkos thought the manager important enough to chase out
of town implies they're reasonably concerned about it," Isard pointed out.
"Possibly," Hal said. "Except that I don't think it's Arkos who's running
around with her."
"Why not?" Isard argued. "He was right there at the scene. Probably even
saw Trabler shoot her."
"Which is exactly why it wasn't him," Hal said. "I know Arkos, and he's
emphatically not the type to get mixed up with a shooting. At least not
without some serious pushing from someone else."
Isard grunted. "Fine; so she's picked up someone else. The point is that
in setting up this wild skipper hunt they had to come at least part of the way
out of the sideboards. If we can chase down the manager and backtrack the
story they spun for him, we might be able to get another vector on them."
"I see," Hal murmured, throwing a sideways look at Is ard's profile. It
was a reasonable approach, all right, classic in its straightforwardness.
Unfortunately, it also required a data-sifting team that would stretch
halfway to Coruscant to pull it off. If she really had that much manpower here
to draw on...
"Don't worry, we're not going to do it all ourselves," Isard continued,
not bothering to look at him. Apparently, she was no slouch at reading
people's expressions, either. "There's an Intelligence quiet-drop tucked away
in one of the better parts of town where I can tap into Darkknell Security's
computers. A few properly placed orders, and the locals will have the
manager's complete list of acquaintances tracked down by nightfall."
"Um," Hal said, thinking back to his own earlier interactions with
Darkknell officialdom. "You'd better hope they don't tumble to what you're
doing," he warned her mildly. "Colonel Nyroska, for one, struck me as
something of a stickler for proper protocol. Forged orders don't exactly come
under that heading."
"Colonel Nyroska will do what he's told," Isard said coldly, dismissing
Nyroska with the flick of an eyelash. "That goes for the rest of this rabble,
too."
And for me, too, I suppose? Hal added silently, feeling with fresh
awareness and fresh resentment the soft pressure of the choke-collar against
his throat. A rhetorical question-of course it went for him, too. He was just
one more of her tools, after all, like Darkknell Security and Trabler and
probably dozens of others whose broken lives lay scattered about in the dust
of her wake. Maybe even hundreds, if the whispered stories about Armand Isard
and his ambitious daughter were to be believed.
He eyed her profile again. Yes, he was a tool. But then, so was a
lightsaber; and many was the overconfident would-be Jedi impersonator who had
carelessly sliced off one of his own major limbs. Sometimes mishandled tools
could be very dangerous.
Something to keep in mind.
The small man Moranda had pointed out heaved his travel bag into the
transport's cargo area and then climbed into the passenger compartment, a
vague sense of discomfort evident in the twitchiness of his movements.
"He's getting aboard," Bel Iblis announced, lowering his macrobinoculars
as a fresh twinge of guilt tugged at him. "Though what he's going to think
when he gets to Raykel-was
"Keep watching the transport," Moranda interrupted him, her voice
sounding distracted. "Make sure he's still aboard when it leaves. Anyway,
what's the problem? He ought to be relieved when he finds out his father
wasn't actually in any accident."
"I suppose so," Bel Iblis said, throwing a scowl at her. Seated at the
apartment's battered dining table, frowning at a datapad, she was
unfortunately oblivious to scowls at the moment. "On the other hand, this wild
skipper hunt isn't going to come cheap for him."
"Life never has been fair," she said. "If you're worried about it, have
your Rebel friends reimburse him."
Bel Iblis snorted. "The Rebellion is hardly a bottomless money pit-was
"The transport, Garm," she said, jabbing a finger toward the window
without looking up. "Watch the transport."
Swallowing back a curse, Bel Iblis turned to the window and raised the
macrobinoculars again. Over the past few days he'd managed to force back the
colored every waking minute but which at least left him able to function
reasonably well.
But "reasonably well" didn't mean there wasn't an edge of impatience and
bitterness to his attitude, an edge this casually arrogant little thief
forever seemed to be stepping on. It was a constant battle to keep from
blowing up in her face over what under normal circumstances he would have
shrugged off as minor personality conflicts.
But it was an effort he had to make. An effort he forced himself to make.
He needed her help to retrieve that datapack, to get this vital information
that could conceivably make or break the Rebellion. And besides, his black
mood wasn't her fault.
Three blocks away, the transport shuddered into motion and lumbered its
way down the street. "There it goes," he announced to Moranda, turning back to
her again. "And he didn't get off."
"Good," she said, setting aside her datapad with an air of satisfaction,
taking a draw on her cigarra, and pulling out her comlink. "He wouldn't have
been much use to your friend Isard anyway, but this should give her people
something to do while we stir the kettle a bit."
"Which means what?"
"Which means it's time to give the law a call," she said. "I've pulled a
likely name off your pal Arkos's private list of incorruptible enforcement
types. Let's hope he's also got the smarts to jump the direction we want him
to."
She keyed the comlink and held it up. There was a moment's pause-
"ationyroska," a crisp voice came from the instrument.
"Hello, Colonel," Moranda said. "You don't know me, but I have a small
problem here and I thought you might be able to help."
Nyroska's sigh was just barely audible. "If you'll call your local
Security office-was
"I have in my possession a very valuable and politically explosive item,"
Moranda interrupted him. "An item the Imperial Intelligence officer currently
nosing around town very badly wants."
There was the briefest pause. "You're misinformed," Nyroska said. "There
are no Imperial Intelligence agents on Darkknell."
"Let's not play g
ames. Colonel," Moranda said, putting some huffiness
into her voice. "You and I both know she's here. Frankly, she's pretty hard
not to spot, what with that blond muscle-type and his Luxan Penetrator running
interference for her. She's all over Xakrea, shaking the trees for a wayward
Imperial datapack."
"I see," Nyroska said. His tone was studiously neutral, but Bel Iblis
could hear the growing interest beneath it. "I take it the datapack is the
valuable item you spoke of?"
"It is, indeed," Moranda confirmed. "Under normal circumstances, I'd get
in touch with her directly to work out an exchange. Two problems: I don't have
her comlink frequency, and I don't like the idea of Blondie and his Luxan
lurking around the background. So I'd prefer to work the exchange through you.
"
"I don't know anything about Imperial agents on Darkknell," Nyroska said,
his voice hardening. "But if you're in possession of stolen or misappropriated
goods, the smartest thing you can do is bring everything to Defense Agency
headquarters and turn it in."
"Okay by me," Moranda said. "You'll have the million ready?"
"The what?"
"The million," Moranda repeated. "That's in Imperial currency, by the
way, not the local stuff."
"You must be joking," Nyroska said stiffly.
"Do you hear me laughing?" Moranda countered. "Trust me. Colonel, a
million doesn't even begin to mark what this is worth. The Imps will be