And now Trell could see something he hadn’t been able to before.
Standing beside the proprietor, clinging tightly to his waist in terror, was a young girl. Probably his daughter; certainly no more than seven years old.
Trell hissed a curse between his teeth. It took a particularly vile form of low-life to threaten a child. But that didn’t mean he was going to follow Riij’s lead and charge in blindly like a mad Jedi Knight on Cracian thumper-back.
“Backup left,” he murmured to Maranne. “I’ll take right.”
“Right,” she murmured back. Dropping his hand casually onto the grip of his blaster, Trell started drifting behind the ring of onlookers to the right. And with a suddenness that startled him, the fight started.
Not with blasters, which had been his main fear, but ‘with hands and feet as the two closest mercenaries lashed out at Riij and Pairor.
With three-to-one odds on their side, the mercs must have felt weapons to be unnecessary.
They got a shock. Riij had clearly had some good training in unarmed combat, and Pairor was a lot faster than Trell would have guessed from the alien’s bulk. Riij’s counterattack sent his opponent reeling back; Palror’s threw his merc slamming back with a horrendous crash into one of the other tables, sending it spinning and scattering its chairs across the floor.
Someone swore viciously. The downed merc scrambled to his feet and rejoined his comrades, their former casual semicircle now reformed into a deadly, no-nonsense combat line facing their attackers. The proprietor had taken advantage of the distraction to hustle his daughter back across to the bar; heaving her up and over to the relative safety behind it, he turned back to watch.
For a long moment the combatants stood motionless facing each other.
Trell kept drifting toward his chosen backup position, his eyes on the mercs, his hand tightening on his blaster. Would they draw now, in which case Riij and Pairor were probably dead? Or would sheer pride dictate they beat such insolent opponents bloody with their bare hands?
The watching crowd was obviously wondering the same thing. Trell could feel their tension, their excitement, their bloodlust…
And then, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted movement to his left. The mercs caught it, too, anger-filled eyes shifting that direction-Their expressions changed, just slightly. Frowning, Trell risked a look of his own.
Jodo Kast had stepped forward out of the ring of onlookers.
For a moment the bounty hunter just stood there, gazing silently at the scene. Then, stepping to one of the tables at the edge of the tapcafe, he pulled out a chair and sat down. Crossing his legs casually beneath the table, he folded his arms across his chest and cocked his head slightly to one side. “Well?” he asked mildly.
And with that one word the decision was made. No mercenary with a speck’s worth of professional pride was going to use weapons against outnumbered opponents who hadn’t themselves drawn. Not with a bounty hunter like Jodo Kast watching.
Roaring obscure and probably obscene battle cries, the mercs waded in.
At that first exchange Riij and Palror had had the element of surprise.
This time they didn’t. They did their best, certainly-and still better than Trell would have expected given the odds-but in the end they really had no chance. Less than ninety seconds after that battle roar, both Riij and Pairor were on the floor, along with two of the mercs. The remaining four, not all of them looking all that steady on their feet, were grouped around them.
One of them looked around, jabbed a finger toward the proprietor cowering at the bar. “Them first,” he snarled, breathing heavily.
“You next.”
“No,” Kast said.
The merc spun around to face him, almost losing his balance in the process as a damaged knee tried to buckle under him. “No what?” he demanded.
“I said no,” Kast told him. His hands were in his lap now, concealed under the table, but his legs were still casually crossed.
“You’ve had your fun; but I need them alive.”
“Yeah?” the mere snarled. “What, you got a bounty to collect on them?”
“You’ve had your fun,” Kast repeated, but this time there was frosty metal glittering in his voice. “Leave it and go. Now.”
“You think so, huh?” the mere spat. “And who do you think’s gonna stop-?”
And abruptly, right in the middle of his sentence, he dropped his hand to his blaster and yanked it from its holster.
It was an old trick, and one that had probably given the mere the desired edge in many a facedown. Unfortunately for him, it was a trick Trell had seen used countless times before; and even before the other’s hand had reached his