Chapter Four: What Doesn't Kill You
Like Coruscant, all of Nar Shaddaa was blanketed in layers upon layers of metropolitan sprawl. But Coruscant's upper levels boasted gleaming spires, fresh air, and bright skies: home to the rich and powerful of the galaxy, they glittered with the decadent, artificial beauty of gentrified wealth. Only in its deepest undercity did the mirage fail. The lowest layers of the city languished in decay, befouled with pollution and rife with crime, a canker in the heart of the rose.
And where Coruscant ended, Nar Shaddaa began.
The Razor Crest's trajectory had brought it plunging through the smog-choked atmosphere and down into the city itself, only the Mandalorian's expert piloting—and perhaps Arashu's guiding hand—keeping the ship from plowing directly into the crumbling buildings. The landing pad was riddled with cracks and gouges, only some of them from their near-disaster, and stained with only the Gods knew what. The warm, sticky air pressed in around them, and Thane coughed as the reek of organic and mechanical rot forced its way down his throat. He envied the Mandalorian his helmet, no doubt equipped with filters and rebreathers to keep the unwholesome atmosphere at bay.
There appeared to be no power to this section of the city. Before it gets dark, the Mandalorian had said, but that statement seemed to be relative. Little artificial light, and even less sunlight, filtered through the layers of buildings above, and the way ahead lay in deep shadow. The occasional pair of eyes gleamed in the darkness, watching with varying degrees of menace, but always skittered away as the two men approached.
Thane was glad the baby slept. The squalling of a frightened child would surely draw unwanted attention, and might embolden whatever watched them from the dark.
Though he had never visited this moon before—and indeed had actively avoided it for the past eight years—he had heard of this place. The Dark Lands, people called it: an apt description, if lacking in imagination. Known to be dangerous and crime-ridden by even Nar Shaddaa's notoriously low standards, the Hutts had all but sealed it off from the Red Light Sector above so the activities here would not interfere with the… business… up there. The sapient population was sparse, skittish, and brutally cutthroat. Acquiring parts in this area would as likely involve a fight as a negotiation.
Thane eyed the Mandalorian with no small measure of apprehension. All that beskar he wore caught what little light made its way down here and threw it back in a dark silver gleam, all clean lines and smooth curves. It stood out even in the dimness, a beacon of unbelonging. Flaunting such wealth was dangerous even in the most civilized of places. Down here, it simply asked for trouble.
And indeed, as they made their way deeper into the city, the glimmer of eyes in the dark grew more and more numerous. Staring. Glaring. Animal growls rumbled out of open doorways. Whispers floated on the fetid air. And the scrape of shuffling feet began to follow them as they continued on.
Thane shifted his grip on the child to hold him with one arm. His other hand hovered near his blaster.
He sensed a presence behind them an instant before a voice hissed out of the darkness in sibilant, heavily accented Huttese.
"Well, ain't this sweet. A little family."
Both Thane and the Mandalorian drew their blasters as they spun around to face the voice. The Mandalorian switched on a light on his helmet to reveal a scarred Zabrak, leering at them with an avaricious grin. Broken teeth, broken horns, and broken nose spoke to a life spent glorying in violence. Ragged and filthy clothes stuck out from under ill-fitting, cobbled-together armor that looked like it would shatter under a well-thrown punch. His breath as he brought himself nearly nose to nose with Thane reeked of stale booze and sour disease.
"This what you Mandos look like under them buckets?" the Zabrak sneered. "What happened? You trade away one set of armor already?" He turned his grin at the Mandalorian. "Gimme yours, and maybe I'll let you keep yer little bundle there."
"Over my dead body," said the Mandalorian calmly. And before the Zabrak could react, he fired his blaster. The Zabrak was dead before he hit the ground. "Or yours."
The noise woke the child, who began to wriggle and fuss.
Holstering his own blaster, Thane eyed the body with a frown. "Was that necessary, Mandalorian?" he asked sharply. "He was unnamed, and no real threat to us."
"Down here, you gotta speak the language." The Mandalorian nodded toward the eyes that had watched the incident, and Thane glanced up to see many of them slinking away.
Kneeling beside the body, the Mandalorian began to search it. "Didn't expect you to have a problem with that, assassin," he added pointedly.
The child's fussing turned to wails, and Thane patted his little back gently. "Hush, ashi," he whispered. To the Mandalorian, he bit out, "Then it may surprise you to learn I am more than my profession."
The Mandalorian sat back on his heels and stared up at Thane for a moment, his face inscrutable behind his helmet. Then he pushed himself to his feet with a grunt. "This guy's got nothing of value on him," he said. "Let's keep moving."
The Mandalorian hung back a little as they walked silently on, watching Krios with the child. The sight of him in the assassin's arms had at first sent a surge of adrenaline through his veins and nearly had him reaching for his blaster. But when he'd seen how Krios had gently soothed the baby to sleep, how he cradled him so tenderly even in the midst of a confrontation… well, the Mandalorian still didn't trust him. But that was becoming more and more of a conscious decision.
The child certainly seemed to like him just fine. But then, the child seemed to like just about everybody—except, maybe, for Cara Dune. So he probably wasn't a great judge of character. He was just a baby, after all.
The way Krios handled him, though, was nothing if not… parental. A twinge of jealousy caught the Mandalorian off guard. Haar'chak, Krios even had a pet name for the kid.
"So, what does that mean, anyway?" the Mandalorian asked.
"Pardon?"
"That name you keep calling the kid. Ashi, or whatever."
"Ah." Krios glanced down at the child, once again calm and snuggled contentedly on his shoulder. "It is a term of endearment among my people. I suppose the nearest translation in Basic would be 'my shadow'—a holdover from when the Drell inhabited the deserts of Rakhana." He hesitated. "It… it's what I used to call my son."
"You have a son?" the Mandalorian demanded. I didn't need to know that.
"Yes." Krios coughed into his fist, then looked back at the Mandalorian. "You're surprised by this." It was not a question, but an observation.
But before the Mandalorian could reply, Krios's eyes widened and a strangled noise escaped him. He swiftly and wordlessly handed over the child, then spun on his heel and began to walk away.
He made it no more than a few steps before a fit of coughing doubled him over. Deep and rattling and obviously painful, it seemed to be tearing him apart from the inside out. Bracing himself with one hand on a grimy, graffiti-covered wall, he seemed barely able to stand, or even breathe.
And not for nothing, but he was making an awful lot of noise. Some of the eyes that the Zabrak's death had frightened away were returning, slinking toward them through the shadows with predatory growls.
It seemed an eternity before the fit passed, and when it was over, Krios continued to lean against the wall, catching his breath. The child squirmed in the Mandalorian's arms, reaching his little hands out and cooing worriedly.
The Mandalorian took a few steps closer, but maintained a careful distance. If Krios was sick, he didn't want to risk catching it. Or worse, the kid.
"You okay, Krios?" he asked curtly. "We gotta keep moving. We're sitting mynocks out here."
Krios didn't answer the question directly, but only tipped his head noncommittally before straightening. "Time for me is short," he rasped, "but it will run out on my own terms. Let's go."
"Right," the Mandalorian muttered to himself. "'Cause that's not cryptic at all."
Sounds of violence and illness were not uncommon in the Dark Lands, Shyna Ilii had noted. This place was barely even habitable, sunk as it was in darkness and depravity. Nobody even tried to make a life here. They only hid here. Or became trapped here.
So the wails of an infant were all but unheard of in this place—which made tracking her quarry that much easier.
Shryna had been more than a little surprised that the Mandalorian would bring his stolen prize to Nar Shaddaa, of all places. She would have thought a fugitive from the Guild would have avoided it at all costs, but his suggestion that he had more than one bounty aboard his beat-up old rustbucket had begun to explain this little stopover. And that little stroke of luck had put him right smack in her crosshairs.
Of course, his blowing her ship out of the sky had been an extremely frustrating setback. But it had been a relatively simple matter to guide her cockpit-turned-escape-pod down to the moon's surface in the Razor Crest's screaming, smoking wake. And upon catching up to him, she'd heard a name spoken that sent an avaricious thrill down her spine.
Krios. The Mandalorian had Thane Krios with him. The assassin had somehow managed to piss off every Hutt cartel in the Outer Rim, and the price on his head was huge. If Shryna could take down the Mandalorian, and get hold of both the Empire's asset and Thane Krios, she would be a rich woman indeed. She could retire back home on Shili in style and never have to crawl through skuggholes like this again.
Of course, that was a very big if. This would not be easy, even by the most tortured stretch of the imagination. Both the Mandalorian and Krios had fearsome reputations on their own; if they fought together, it would take nothing short of a miracle to defeat them. She had to get them separated, somehow.
Hanging back far enough to be out of earshot but close enough she could still sense their movement, she pulled out her commlink. "Grix? It's Shryna Ilii. I need to speak to Madura."
"The Lady Madura is not at your beck and call, bounty hunter," Grix replied haughtily. "Tell me your message. She will respond—or not—at her pleasure."
Shryna rolled her eyes. "Whatever. Just tell her I need some troops in the Dark Lands to capture a valuable bounty. Expendable troops. I'm transmitting coordinates now."
"Oh? And why should the exalted Madura care about your bounty?"
"Tell her the mark is Target 421. She'll know what that means."
From Grix's sharp inhale, she could tell that he knew, too.