Марта Уэллс - From a Certain Point of View

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“My programming does not allow for ‘kidding.’ You should know this by now.”

“Well.” Dengar’s grip dug into the JumpMaster’s yoke as he clearly grasped for any rationalization that would excuse the difference. “Solo knew that he was being hunted. Maybe he had the silhouette modified to keep a low profile.”

“Unlikely. There was insufficient time for such a procedure to take place between the ship’s known egress on Hoth and the present moment.” Fett was even more deceptive than IG-88’s first impression had suggested. Not only had he provided false information directly, he’d seeded his own ship’s data banks with decoy coordinates. The droid considered, for the briefest moment, not whether Fett had betrayed them—which was obvious—but whether he should share his deduction with Dengar. He decided that it would not be particularly fruitful.

“We’ve been deceived!” Dengar shouted, rendering IG-88’s internal calculus irrelevant. “That Mandalorian-impersonating son of a—”

“We still have an opportunity, Corellian.” IG-88 pressed a button, and the ship’s computer brought the freighter’s technical specifications on-screen. “A vessel outfitted as such is likely carrying contraband, intelligence, or valuable individuals. ”

The starship floated awkwardly in front of the Punishing One as it drew closer, engines still knocked out by the ionized particles running through its electronics system. But the comm must’ve been hardened to such an attack, as the woman’s voice from before returned.

“I’m telling ya, fella, you’ve got the wrong ship. My boss isn’t going to like it that you’re messing with me.”

Dengar cut the connection and gave IG-88 a sidelong look. “Boss?” He pulled up the ship’s registration on the console’s computer screen. The Deadnettle. Independent pleasure vessel. No home port listed.

“ ‘Independent pleasure vessel’? All right, maybe this’ll be worth our time anyway, eh, droid?” He batted a fist against his plate armor and raised the lower cloth of his turban up around his mouth and nose. Masks, IG-88 knew, kept things from getting too personal.

“I will begin docking procedures.”

Breaching an occupied vessel—even one disabled by ion cannons—was always a risk. Even for practiced soldiers, the element of surprise gave the defender a great deal of tactical advantage. There was only one way in, which made you an easy target. And without intimate knowledge of the vessel’s interior, it was nearly impossible to predict where your foes might be. In short, this meant that defenders had a lot of options, but the boarding party normally had only one: rush in and start shooting.

The duo of IG-88 and Dengar, however, was anything but normal.

From the moment the breach began, the unconventional pair was in complete control. As the air lock opened, smoke filled the entryway of the Deadnettle, settling over plush purple carpets and blocking the sight of half a dozen guards who had taken aim. It wouldn’t stop the blasterfire from coming in, but it would give them enough time to gain the upper hand.

It was over in an instant. Dengar strode through the smoke with his fire blade, a long, branched dirk of orange flame cutting through the fog, a vision of terror second only to a Dark Lord of the Sith. It was also top-tier misdirection. Because while the guards followed the blade with their eyes, they failed to see the assassin droid boarding their ship just behind.

IG-88 was not merely well armed, he was a walking arsenal. Only accounting for the devices built into his body, the droid had access to blaster cannons in each arm, deployable antipersonnel gas canisters, a localized stun pulser, and throwing flechettes as sharp as they were small. And of course, there was his most dangerous weapon: the mechanical mind that gave him what one of his creators called “wildfire sentience.” It was this that allowed him to utterly take apart six well trained security guards in a matter of seconds.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Dengar said. “I didn’t even get to—” His eyes went wide.

There was a lot to take in. The ship’s main lounge had been extended to cover the bulk of its interior. From wall to wall, the room had been converted into a gambling hall—and a high-end one given the fancy clothes the now cowering players were wearing. And there, hanging from between a pair of overturned sabacc tables, was a banner with the symbol of the Besadii, one of the most powerful families of the Hutt Cartel.

“I told you that you wouldn’t wanna mess with my boss.” The ship’s apparent captain—a Mirialan woman with a smart braid a few shades darker than her bright-green skin—was standing, arms crossed, above four of her dead guards. “Sunnari Khall. Captain of the Deadnettle. I’d appreciate it if you two got off my ship.”

This time, IG-88 turned his head to look at Dengar not as an affect, but as a signal to take her down and clear out the rest of the ship.

Before he could spring into action, though, Dengar reached across the droid’s body.

“Hey, hey, hey! Slow down, Iggy. The captain here is right.” He leaned in close to whisper to the droid, not that proximity was necessary, given IG-88’s high-range sensor suite. “The Besadii are not enemies you want to make.”

The assassin responded at full volume. He wanted the captain to hear him. He wanted to scare her. “They are not enemies you want to make, Corellian. I quite like enemies.”

IG-88 had not done much work for the Hutts, but he understood that they were wealthy, vicious, and vengeful. They might be useful enemies to have, IG-88 thought, as enemies so often led to new opportunities. He raised his arms and prepared to fire the built-in blasters.

“Try it and see what happens, canister.” Khall had raised her hand. In her palm, a thermal detonator began to beep. By the third consecutive chirp, one of the frightened passengers screamed. “Shut up back there, I’m negotiating !”

“Ah, see, now you’ve let on too much, Miss…Khall you said it was?”

The sweat in his palms, the furrowed brow…if she had said nothing else, IG-88 could tell that Dengar would have left then and there. But now that this Captain Khall had mentioned negotiating, he clearly smelled profit.

“Solo isn’t here. There’s nothing valuable aboard. I don’t have anything you want.”

“You do not know what we want.” IG-88’s voice, too-calm and metallic, would be the only leverage Dengar needed to get something out of this.

The Corellian added just a bit more pressure.

“Well, see, it looks to me like you’re running a very exclusive sabacc tournament. And no one plays sabacc…in a ship…in the middle of a debris field…for nothing.”

“You—you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

IG-88, whose programming drew on generations of research, counted the droplets of water on her brow, the doubling of beats in her heart, a micron-sized movement in her eyes.

“You are hiding something.”

“What could I hide from you? Rip my ship apart. You’re not going to find anything more than a few thousand credits. I’m telling you, we’re just an old gambling freighter in an even older debris field.”

Ah. There it was. The debris field.

“You’re playin’ for all those wrecks!”

Dengar’s instincts had been hardened by decades of bounty hunting. He’d spent tens of thousands of hours in the grime and the muck, and it had earned him an encyclopedic knowledge of criminal enterprise in the galaxy.

He didn’t know the specifics, but he could put the pieces together well enough. All these wrecked ships should have gone to some scrapyard somewhere. Bracca maybe. But someone—probably one of these Hutts—intervened, paid off some Imperial bureaucrat, and kept this battlefield out of the records. Now they were using it as a prize for the galaxy’s most secretive card game.