[Legacy Of The Force] - 04(90)

“You always know the time. You’re just making excuses to talk to her.”

“Boys, you’re making me angry…”

Jag began beeping. Rather, some electronic device on his person did, and the beeps were a complicated swirl of musical tones, like an astromech trying to recite poetry, a more elaborate signal than any of the ones either Jedi had heard from any piece of jag’s equipment.

Looking startled, jag pulled his datapad from a pocket. “High-priority flash traffic.” He opened the device, read a few lines … and then began reading aloud. “From the central computer of the Errant Venture. Jedi Temple holocam recognition and analysis code assigns ninety-four percent probability of match to target Alema Rar for attached sequence.’ “

The argument forgotten, Zekk sat beside Jaina. “Put it on the big display.”

Zekk oriented the datapad toward the display that dominated the wall opposite the hall’s entryway. He pressed a button, and a moment later the screen glowed into life, playing a holocam recording.

It appeared to be from a ceiling-mounted security holocam. It showed a crowd of people, most of them uniformed Alliance military personnel, rushing toward a door. In the midst of them was a well-bundled humanoid female-definitely blue-skinned, possibly Twi’lek, but her face was not large enough on the image for Jaina to recognize.

Then jag’s code went active. A wire-frame representation of a female Twi’lek body was superimposed over the target. As it conformed to her posture, smaller lines stretched from body parts-foot, shoulder, head-and words and percentile numbers flashed by too fast to read. The wire frame adapted itself further, shortening one foot by half its length, causing the left shoulder to droop in a fashion suggesting permanent physiological damage.

That sequence ended and another began. It seemed to follow shortly after the first. The holocam view showed a ship’s broad passageway. Uniformed personnel poured into it from a larger chamber; their movement was restricted by their numbers. The blue female was toward the center of the mass of them, jumping up and down. This holocam view zoomed in and held a still frame.

The woman’s features were very much like Alema’s, the Alema of the Dark Nest.

Jag brought up a third file, but it was not a holocam sequence. It was a log of instances of holocam recording glitches recorded aboard Errant Venture-in the areas where the deck plans were not classified, at any rate. The log cited thousands of instances, and a schematic plotted them on those deck plans, showing definite patterns of progression along corridors, through air ducts, through casinos and shopping centers.

Clearly, Alema Rar was on Errant Venture, or at least had been when the raw data from this report was compiled, no more than a few days earlier.

And Errant Venture was now in the Coruscant system, having been granted the right to ply its trade here after having fled Corellia.

Jag stood so fast he could have been yanked to his feet by invisible springs. “Hunt’s on.” Expressionless, he ran toward the Training Hall’s exit.

CORUSCANT SPACE

ERRANT VENTURE

Walking-half staggering, because the great gambling ship’s artificial gravity generators seemed to be phasing on and off, right and left, and had been doing so since she’d downed her sixth whiskey of the evening-Captain Uran Lavint turned a corner into the narrow passageway where her cabin was located.

The thought of returning to her cabin drew a sigh from her. There was an even-odds chance that Alema would be there, skulking, ready to discuss her day’s worth of spying failures, ready to offer another set of threats. Upset by the ritual, Lavint would take hours to fall to sleep. Nor could she have any company over while the mangled blue Twi’lek was present.

Still, it was Alema’s Jedi powers that gave Lavint the edge at the betting tables. Whenever Alema watched from it Shadowy place, and communicated with Lavint with little telekinetic prods, giving Lavint a much-improved sense 44 how good the other players’ hands were, Lavint won big. She won enough to maintain a cabin aboard this pricy flying hotel, enough to buy cargo that would make her next smuggling run a very profitable one, enough to surround herself with the trappings of a life well misspent.

She just wished that Alema weren’t one of those trappings.

But now, as she weaved her way to her door, a shadow seemed to flow off the opposite wall of the passageway and stand over her.

Lavint reached for her hold-out blaster and was bringing it in line to fire, or at least threaten, when the stranger snatched it from her hand. He didn’t aim it back at her; he just held it, barrel down.

Lavint peered at him, alarmed and suspicious, for the seconds it took to bring his face into focus. Then she recognised him and laughed. “Colonel Solo,” she said. “Here to kill me?”