A recording droid keeping pace with him, Bammy took stock of YT-1300 492727ZED, which at some point during her forty-odd years had acquired the name Stellar Envoy. His booted feet sloshing through lubricant puddled on the floor, he was practically yelling to be heard over the racket of servowelders and cutting torches, power hydrospanners, grinding wheels, and power washers. The more closely he inspected the wrecked ship, the more his distress mounted. The job that was supposed to be his first real break was instead in danger of becoming a catastrophe. How was he ever going to stick to the price he had quoted Rej Taunt? Where did he even begin?

Conveyed downside to his small garage in the Duros Sector, what remained of the Corellian-made ship hung in a cradle in the center of the bay. Bammy hoped that one day he'd be able to afford a repulsorlift, but until then he had to make do with cranes and gantries to support the vessels he repaired. He had hired a crew of salvagers to remove the twin mandibles, outrigger c.o.c.kpit, and whatever else was loose or ruined. That left him with a crumpled saucer. The seven legs that formed the landing gear had fused to the carapace when the YT had skidded along the hull of the Jendirian Valley III before slamming into the underside of the bulk freighter's armored deck.

The ship was in much worse shape than he had been led to believe by the EVA team that performed the initial zero-g a.s.sessment. Bammy had already filled a dozen oversized trash containers with hazmat debris, and he was just getting started. A YT 1300p that had collided with an asteroid near Nal Hutta would supply replacement mandibles, along with a more s.p.a.cious main hold, deflector shield generator, and a pair of six-being escape pods. But while the Stellar Envoy's hyper-drive, Quadex power core, and still-state-of-the-art Rubicon astrogation computer were sound, the pair of Giordyne sublight engines would have to be rebuilt from top to bottom.

Worst of all, the ship needed a new droid brain.

"Boss, where do you want this?"

Bammy cupped a hand to his ear and whirled to one of his subordinates. "Shut that kriffing torch off!" Swinging back to the Iktotchi who had called to him, he asked: "What have you got?"

"Fuel drive pressure stabilizer."

"Serviceable?"

The horned alien rocked his head. "More or less."

"Which is it: more or less?"

"More."

Bammy indicated a pile of numbered and categorized parts near the stern of the suspended ship. "Stow it over there. And be sure to brand it."

The pile was one of many, the garage resembling an ongoing archaeological restoration project more than a ship rebuild.

While the Iktotchi was hauling the stabilizer across the bay, the voice of one of Bammy's pair of human employees rang out. "This flux compensator is shot. Same with the alluvial dampers."

"You can't fix them?"

"Not me."

Bammy shoulders slumped. "Add them to the list."

He hoped one day he could afford to hire a Givin or a Verpine.

The situation was going from bad to beyond belief. But at least his full complement of mechanics was back on the job after a month of joining the rest of Nar Shaddaa in celebrating the end of the war. Nar Shaddaa had no special fondness for now-Emperor Palpatine, but many felt that Palpatine would be so consumed with consolidating power in the Core that worlds in the Mid and Outer Rims would once more become lucrative markets for spice and other proscribed goods.

More important, smugglers would be able to travel without fear of interception or attack by Separatist droid ships or Republic cruisers.

There'd been no club or cantina partying for Bammy. Rej Taunt was expecting a ship, and it was best to avoid disappointing a crime boss by failing to deliver on time or superseding an estimate.

Bammy looked up at the saucer's singed stern. The blackened areas were carbon scoring-the result of a turbolaser hit from a big Republic ship. He couldn't be sure, but he'd stake credits that the hit had been indirectly responsible for the collision. The bolt could have overwhelmed the shields and left the guidance systems stunned. Once he tore apart the power core, he'd know for certain-but it was clear the freighter had gotten herself mixed up in trouble. It was clear, too, that Bammy wouldn't be the first mechanic to rebuild her. In all his years of tinkering with ships and landspeeders, he had never come across a vehicle hosting as many aftermarket parts. It was as if every owner of the YT had patched, upgraded, or retrofit the ship one way or another. And aftermarket parts weren't going to fly with someone like Rej Taunt-at least not those parts that would be plainly visible. Bammy was confident he could get away with using parts fabricated in Nar Shaddaa's shops for the comm and illumination systems, but he couldn't chance Taunt running independent checks on the life-support and computer systems. That's why the droid brain was problematic. Repairing the existing one was out of the question, and buying a new one would eat up what little profit he still hoped to make on the job.

He had tasked his newest employee-a young kid named Shug Ninx-with searching out someone with a line on a replacement brain, and it was the human-Theelin who entered the garage just then and hurried over to him.

"I might have found us a brain," Ninx said, flushed with excitement.

"Where?" Bammy started to say, but he stopped when he spotted a familiar figure saunter into the bay. Swinging back to Ninx, he shook his head in disappointment. "Kid, going to him was a bad idea."

The blue in Ninx's mottled complexion intensified. "I didn't know..."

Bammy put a hand on Ninx's shoulder. "Don't worry about it. Maybe it'll work out in our favor."

A Koorivar with a p.r.o.nounced cranial horn, Masel was known on the Smugglers' Moon as a fence, an arms dealer, an opportunist who had worked for both sides during the war. A naturally sibilant tone Complemented his deviousness.

"Your young half-breed tells me you're in need of a ship's brain."

Bammy steered the Koorivar to a cluttered table in a corner of the bay and motioned him to a chair. "Since when are you in the business of ship parts? I thought you only dealt in weaponry?"

Masel's shoulders shrugged under his rich cloak. "Nothing's changed. Except in this instance, I may have something you can use."

Bammy compressed his lips. "I'll listen, anyway."

"I've contacts among the crews dismantling the Separatist fleet. I can get you a targeting and fire-control brain off a tri-fighter command ship."

Bammy scoffed at the idea. "Converting that to serve a YT freighter would take an expert slicer and way more credits than I can afford."

"I know that," Masel said. "But I have someone who will do the conversion for you. All you need to do is supply schematics of the ship."

Bammy thought about it. "I already have the schematics, direct from Corellian Engineering. But how much is this going to set me back?"

"Less than half of what a factory-warranteed Hanx-Wargel Superflow would run you-even at wholesale."

"You guarantee it?"

Masel smiled. "Of course I will. A full refund if there's any problem."

"A refund?" Bammy laughed. "You're gonna have to resurrect me if my client has any problems with it."

"Resurrection is the provenance of others. I'm only a simple profiteer."

Bammy thought some more. "How soon could I have it-a.s.suming 1 decide to trust you?"

"A week after you hand over the schematics and a down payment of half the cost."

Bammy was still grappling with it when he returned to the YT. The Iktotchi was waiting for him under the starboard-side docking ring, a small module resting on his thick, grease-stained forearms.

Bammy's expression went from pensive to quizzical.

"I extracted it from the droid brain," the Iktotchi said. "It's the freighter's flight recorder."

Instead of returning to his apartment in Nar Shaddaa's Corellian Sector, Bammy remained at the shop, downloading data from the Hanx-Wargel Superflow IV computer. Registry information, ownership, flight and service records. His interest piqued by what he discovered, he spent most of the night cross-referencing the data with HoloNet entries, and by morning had compiled what amounted to a brief history of the ship, which had been known by many names over the decades.

YT 492727ZED had come off Corellian Engineering's production lines at Orbital Facility 7, and for the first twelve years of her life had been one in a fleet of more than eight thousand ships owned by Corell Industries. CI Limited ferried goods to the so-called Five Brothers of the Corellian system, as well as to the enormous and enigmatic repulsor known as Centerpoint Station.

In numerous accounts by pilots who had flown the YT-1300, the freighter was alternately praised for her speed and maneuverability and condemned for her quirkiness and unreliability. Often the pilots employed terms more suited to describing the personality of a sentient being than to evaluating a ship's performance. As her several names suggested, the YT was obedient or willful, a joy to pilot or a demanding demon, a savior or a troublemaker. Where Corell's Pride had "heart," Fickle Flyer had "issues." Meetyl's Misery was a constant source of despair. Entry after entry detailed accounts of dazzling maneuvers, close calls, or unexpected and often baffling breakdowns.

"Made the run to Tralus in record time . . .," one pilot recorded. Another said: "Marooned five hundred K from Selonia with a load of defrosting plar fish..."

"Beat the Fusion Flame hands down in a race around Drall..."

"Unable to launch from Centerpoint..."

So went the litany of testimonials and denunciations, with each in-stance of malfunction ending in makeshift repairs and retrofits, almost as if everyone had agreed to make the ship the subject of an ongoing experiment in improvised engineering.

To satisfy his curiosity, Bammy searched out the shoddy pulse generator a pilot had been forced to install; the place where a navigator had taken out his frustration on the Fabritech transceiver relay with a hydrospanner. He found dozens of areas where the ship had been similarly bruised and battered. A few pilots had gone so far as to scratch or torch epithets on the bulkheads or in the maintenance access crawl s.p.a.ces.

The ship's history was equally eccentric.

For most of the dozen years that CI Limited had owned the YT, the company enjoyed continued growth and placed high on the list of the top investment opportunities in the Corellian system. Then business began to take a dive, thanks in part to actions by the monopolistic Trade Federation, which at the time had been devouring one small shipping concern after the next. Inaction by the complacent Republic Senate hadn't helped. In the years before Chancellor Valorum's first term of office, CI Limited's profits took a woeful slide. Eventually forced to sell its fleet of swift ships at rock-bottom prices, the company fell into bankruptcy and finally went belly-up.

YT 492727ZED was one of the last ships to go, sold to an enterprising pair of freelance traders named Kal and Dova Brigger. Siblings, the Briggers renamed the ship Hardwired and for a brief period took over where CI had left off, moving whatever freight they could find between Corellia and other worlds. By Bammy's calculation, all their profits must have gone into upgrading the ship's hyperdrive, which had made for easier travel to Corellia's neighboring systems and, eventually, to the Core. The freight they carried began to change as well, from consumer goods to light arms, munitions, and similar contraband.

According to HoloNet entries, the Briggers' illicit dealings brought them to the attention of the Smugglers' Confederacy of the Cularin system, and ultimately to the attention of the organization's leader, Nirama, who loaned the siblings enough credits to have the YT further upgraded in exchange for their pledge to refrain from doing business with slavers. When after only a standard year the siblings reneged on the deal, Nirama put a price on their heads. Half" the reward was collected by a celebrated bounty hunter who captured Dova and returned her to Nirama, who in turn had her executed.

Dova's surviving brother, Kal, renamed the YT Wayward Son, changed the registry to Fondor, and lit out for Thyferra, hoping to find work for Iaco Stark's Commercial Combine. A former smuggler himself, Stark headed up a group of pirates, bounty hunters, and a.s.sa.s.sins working the Rimma Trade Route, but he'd allowed his ambitions to get the better of him and found himself in the midst of an armed conflict with the Republic over stolen shipments of bacta. Kal suffered an even worse fate for involving himself with Stark, having been eaten alive in an abandoned spice mine on Troiken by carnivorous insects loosed after an attack by Republic forces.

Fifteen or so years after the crisis on Troiken, the YT had become the property of the Republic Group, about which the HoloNet had very little to say, though the organization was linked in byzantine ways to holding companies on a host of important worlds, including Coruscant, Alderaan, and Corellia. Once more the registry had been changed-to Ralltiir-and the ship had been renamed Stellar Envoy. The flight recorder detailed frequent trips to far-flung worlds like Ansion and Yinchorr, and the Superflow IV recorded upgrades to the freighter's communications suite and hyperdrive.

For a short time, the ship may even have been piloted by a Jedi Master named Plo Koon. Pure speculation on Bammy's part, based on a holoimage he had uncovered completely by chance. Taken shortly after the debacle on Troiken, the holoimage showed Jedi Knights Plo Koon, Qui-Gon Jinn, and Adi Gallia standing in front of a YT-1300 that might have been the one Kal Brigger had flown.

The pilot who had flown the Stellar Envoy for the Republic Group's was a human named Tobb Jadak.

It was close to sunrise when Bammy had come across the entry, but the discovery had given him a second wind. He knew the name, and a HoloNet search confirmed his hazy recollection of the fact that half of Nar Shaddaa's gamblers had lost money on Tobb Jadak, as a result of his losing a swoop race he'd been favored twenty-to-one to win. Rumors abounded that the Hutts had forced him to throw the race, but also that Jadak, through intermediaries, had bet heavily on himself to lose. Whatever the truth, Jadak's ignominy hadn't prevented the Republic Group from hiring him to pilot their ship.

The flight recorder indicated that Jadak and his copilot had jumped the YT from Coruscant, where she had almost certainly been damaged during the battle there, only to collide with the Jendirian Valley III as the mammoth ship was departing Nar Shaddaa.

Only a kid at the time, Bammy wasn't one of those who had lost credits by wagering on Jadak. Still, death by collision seemed a cruel fate for a guy who had once been a prizewinning swoop racer and pilot. Then again, the universe rarely played fair with winners or losers.

Chapter six.

"Reverting to reals.p.a.ce," the pilot said over the YT's intercom while Rej Taunt and the Gossam were sipping drinks in the main hold. "Entering the Tion Cl.u.s.ter."

"No need for undue concern," the long-necked alien said, taking note of Taunt's worried expression.

"I'm not comfortable with bugs-any of them. Not even Neimoidians, and they're almost humanoid."

"The Colicoids will be easily appeased by our cargo," the Gossam said in his most a.s.suring voice.

Taunt said nothing in a definite way.

The Gossam's name was Lu San. A longtime Nar Shaddaa resident, he had spent two years in an internment camp on the Smugglers' Moon at the start of the war, but, like several other members of his species, he used the time to establish contacts among the criminal underworld and was already reaping the benefits of that education.

"Your ship is a marvel," Lu San added after a moment, clearly hoping to put Taunt at ease.

Glancing around him, Taunt nodded. "A thing of beauty."

During the walk through of the rebuilt freighter, Bammy Decree's enthusiasm was so contagious that Taunt hadn't even bothered to have the mechanic's work double-checked. Instead he'd relied on the word of his pilots, who had taken the ship on test flights to Nal Hutta and Ylesia, and p.r.o.nounced her a wonder.

And she was.

Renamed Second Chance and bearing a Nar Shaddaa registry, the YT concealed enhanced sublight and hyperdrive engines and sophisticated sensor and communications suites. Refitted with new mandibles and c.o.c.kpit, the saucer had been twisted back into shape and cleaned up but left to look its age, with fresh paint and duralloy only where needed, while the interior now sported a s.p.a.cious main hold, a small galley, a refresher, and a private cabin for Taunt, with a bunk sized to his bulk and smaller versions for guests. It would take an expert eye to detect that the ship was now a composite of a 1300f and a 1300p. For a relative beginner, Decree had done a superb job and more important, had known better than to delay completing the work or add to the price he had quoted.

Taunt was so eager to try out the ship that he had accepted a job from a Black Sun Vigo he might otherwise have turned down. If only it hadn't involved dealing with bugs . . . But Taunt had long had Ins eye on furthering his reputation as an earner with the Black Sun leadership, and the chance to do that had offset some of his initial revulsion.

And fear.

Black Sun was finally recovering from an attack thirteen years earlier by an a.s.sa.s.sin who had executed the cartel's head honchos, including the flamboyant Alexi Garyn. During the war, several Vigos had attempted to a.s.sume leadership, but plans to align with the Hutts in controlling the flow of the specious healing agent bota had backfired and left Black Sun in shambles. Lately, though, there were signs of reorganization under the guidance of Dal Perhi and a Falleen crime lord named Xizor.

It was one of Perhi's lieutenants who had approached Taunt with the job and put him in contact with a Koorivar named Masel, who had recommended using Lu San as an intermediary with the Colicoids.

Masel was one of a new breed of information brokers born out of the ashes of the war and the birth of the Empire. One day soon Palpatine's navy of Star Destroyers commanded by flesh-and-blood officers disgorged from the Imperial Academies would rule all s.p.a.ce. But until then there were credits to be made by taking advantage of what the war had left in its wake. Many would miss the Jedi Order, but no one Taunt knew. The Empire was already better armed than Black Sun and other enterprises, but at the very least, Palpatine's proxies could be dealt with turbolaser for turbolaser rather than turbolaser against the force.

The Second Chance carried no major weapons, but the cargo holds were packed with what Taunt hoped would prove even more effective in dealing with the insectoid Colicoids: fifty metric tons of flash-frozen eopie meat.

The chitinous, carnivorous hive-minded designer-manufacturers of the tri-fighter, destroyer, and sabotage droids that the Separatist conspirators had purchased in ma.s.s quant.i.ties to hurl against the Republic had decamped from their native Colla IV at the end of the war and immigrated to worlds in the Tion Cl.u.s.ter, among other places. Most of their deadly inventions had been deactivated, but many of their self-modeled droidekas had been acquired by security companies operating in the Corporate Sector, and some of their other innovations had found their way onto the burgeoning black market. Among them were containerfuls of the melon-sized Pistoeka disa.s.semblers known as buzz droids, which Black Sun had decided were perfectly suited for work in Nar Shaddaa's vehicle and vessel chop shops.

Taunt hadn't had personal dealings with the Colicoids, but he knew fellow criminals who had, back when the insectoids had attempted to a.s.sume control of Kessel's spice trade and had sought to take over a spice factory on Nar Shaddaa, only to learn the hard way that a former slaver would prove to be more deadly than they were.

"It's something about their posture," Taunt said, his anxiety triumphing over his pride in the Second Chance. "I can stomach Ruurians, Kamarians, even a Geonosian or two, but there's just something about their . . . concavity that makes them seem more aggressive". " A shudder pa.s.sed through him. "I'd feel safer sleeping with an Anzati."

"They are more aggressive," the Gossam said. "And your . . . how should I put it? Your healthy corpulence is bound to excite them to hunger."

Taunt's eyes widened. "Don't tell me that."

Lu San smiled pleasantly. "That's why the quadruped meat must be off-loaded before we make an appearance. Beyond its purpose as barter, the eopie will distract and placate them long enough for us to conduct and conclude our business. The tactic worked well for the Trade Federation when it placed its initial order for droidekas."

"But Neimoidians begin life as grubs. There's common ground."

Lu San waved his small hand in a dismissive gesture. "The Colicoids are well known to feast on even their own kind."

Taunt's ample mouth twitched. "Ever see one of them ball up - like the droidekas?"

"Once only," Lu San said. "In the presence of a hueche - their onetime predator on Colla Four."

"Couldn't we have gotten one of those, just in case?"

"The Colicoids are thought to have eradicated them. Perhaps from a cloner if there had been time."

Taunt stood up and paced across the main hold. "What else do I need to know?"