Zoraida Cordova - A Crash of Fate

“I’m glad you’ve seen who Izal truly is,” Ana Tolla said, pulling him out of his memory. “She’s abandoned you. Can’t bring you anything but pain. It’s best that she’s gone. But me? I can give you an opportunity.”

He didn’t believe that Izzy was gone. He had to believe in her. He had to hope. “There is no opportunity you could give me. If I cross Kat, I cross Oga, and crossing Oga means being as good as dead. The only good thing is you’ll be right alongside me.”

Ana Tolla glanced over her shoulder. “I’m not offering you a job, farm boy. I’m offering you the opportunity to be a hero and save lives.”

She held out her hand to the lounge area. When Belen saw him, her eyes went round as orbs. She had been tightly gagged, and her wrists and ankles were bound by magnetic cuffs.

Jules was breathing hard, his hands balled at his sides. He could try to overpower Ana Tolla. And then what? Face four others with blasters? Even with the Twi’lek injured, Jules was still severely outnumbered and outgunned. He’d never get Belen to safety.

“Now, what do you say, farm boy? Are you ready to do exactly what I tell you?”

He thought of Izzy. Her bright eyes. Her lips. The lies that spilled from her mouth. He focused on Belen. Ana Tolla was not going to get away with this. He could only hope to stall whatever it was. Izzy had told him about some of Ana Tolla’s jobs, and he expected the worst.

Hurry , he thought at Izzy.

“I’m ready,” he said. “What do I have to do?”

“We’re going to burn this farm to the ground.”

“Excuse me!” shouted the green-and-white protocol droid G1-MD. “Excuse me. What are you doing here? There are no shipments authorized at this time. Delta! What is the meaning of this?”

Delta walked around the shipping container and waved her arms. “Calm down, Gee-One.”

“We aren’t stealing anything,” Izzy said, but she made her way to the red-striped Avent100 light freighter that had been stationed there all day. “Except this ship.”

“This vessel is not authorized for transport!” G1-MD shouted. Her already round eyes appeared even more startled as her head moved side to side.

“You can come along,” Izzy told her slyly. “You are supervisor of this operation, aren’t you? The ship will be in safe hands.”

The droid registered her words, then considered. “When you put it that way, the probabilities of success will increase if I’m there.”

Volt and Delta ran up with their weapons. G1-MD marched forward, spouting off regulation infractions and rules of Ohnaka Transport Solutions. They froze when they heard the zooming sound of a swoop bike.

The bike appeared too big for the boy who rode it. Tap cruised to a stop in front of them.

“What are you doing here, boy?” Volt shouted.

Tap shook his head. “I saw Izzy and Delta without Jules and knew something was wrong, so I followed you here.”

Volt let out a heavy sigh. “It’s too dangerous, kid.”

“I’m useful! Aren’t I, Izzy?”

“I’m sorry, Tap,” she said. “But Jules has been taken. We can’t risk you, too.”

“I can pick any lock. Can any of you say that?”

Izzy looked to Volt and Delta for help, but they offered none.

There was a fierce look in the boy’s eyes. Izzy was about his age when her mother began teaching her everything she would need to know. How to fly. How to shoot. But Tap wasn’t hers to make that decision for.

“If I say no what are you going to do?” Izzy asked.

Tap smiled. “Follow you anyway.”

“Fine. Everyone get on the ship now . I don’t know how much time we have.” Izzy led her crew aboard. “Who has a channel to the cantina?”

Everyone turned to Volt. He shrugged. “My girl’s a bartender there. But she doesn’t know about the game—”

“Do it now,” Izzy told him, “or I will feed you your own gut rot.”

Volt stalked off to the ship’s cargo bay, muttering a string of curses.

Izzy settled into the cockpit and strapped in. Delta took the copilot seat. Everything felt so new to Izzy. She couldn’t read a single word of the unfamiliar alphabet on the control labels. She was about to press a button that on her ship would shut the access ramp.

“No!” Delta shouted. “That’s the forward cannon. This is Teklada, a mathematical language.”

“You can read it?”

“No, but I remember it from one of the labels in Hondo’s storage. Gee-One, get over here and translate this, will you?”

Izzy took a deep breath. She was so nervous she’d forgotten about G1-MD. The droid strapped in behind them, craning her head over Izzy’s shoulder and rattling off her interpretation of the symbols.

“This ought to be fun,” Izzy muttered. “Hang on tight, everybody, we’re going to Kat Saka’s farm. Buckle in, it’s going to be a short ride!”

The ship took off. It was the smoothest ship she’d ever piloted, though she’d only flown the Meridian and a single-pilot flier at academy before that.

“Okay, Delta, now’s the time to tell me what you do know about Ana’s plan.”

G1-MD recited as if she was reading off all the information on their destination: “The grain from Kat Saka is the finest on the planet, some might say in the Outer Rim. The unique minerals in the soil of Batuu—”

“We get it, droid,” Delta said, then turned to Izzy. “What Ana did tell me was that she needed someone who would know the silo override access codes. That would be Jules.”

Volt was back in the cockpit. “Sent a warning to Oga’s. I heard last season Kat refused to sell to StarFlora Corp even though they offered enough credits to buy a yacht. Or fill a yacht.”

Izzy thought about the jobs they’d done together. Ana Tolla didn’t just steal things. She destroyed them.

Izzy felt hope bleeding out of her with every passing moment. She struggled to breathe. Jules, she thought. She wouldn’t be fast enough to get to Jules.

“Whose ship is this anyway?” Delta asked.

Izzy remembered the stylish spice trader Jules had made friends with. “Trix Sternus’s, I think.”

“According to the Ohnaka Transport Solutions sale logs, the ship now belongs to—”

A series of beeps went off. Izzy grabbed the yoke and said, “Be ready to fight on landing.”

The first time Jules had worked on Kat’s farm, he’d been shorter than the wild grass. Sometimes he still felt like the scrawny little kid who’d run through those fields—frail but free. It didn’t matter how tall he’d gotten, how big he was; he still felt helpless. He loathed that he was going to help Ana Tolla and her pirates destroy a part of his homeworld. He thought of Belen in Ana Tolla’s ship, who was waiting for him to rescue her. He thought of Izzy.

Just Izzy.

So he stood at the main building and punched in the code to the stores where Kat kept the seeds she and her family had been cultivating for four generations. After everything he’d said about protecting his world, his home, he had to save the person he couldn’t lose. He wondered if that was why Izzy was so guarded. Love was a vulnerability.

He felt the butt of a blaster pistol jab into his back.

“Hurry it up,” Damar said.

“I said I’d help you get in here. I didn’t say I’d help you carry anything. I’m not crew.”

The blaster moved to his forehead. He could feel the cold metal of the barrel on his skin. Helpless. He gritted his teeth. He wasn’t faster than a blaster, but he could take this bantha’s ass by surprise. He could—not do anything. Belen. He thought her name like a prayer to the spires, to the Force, like a promise that this was not going to be the end.