"When did a nice girl like you learn to do things like that?"

-Han Solo (40 ABY)

Star Wars: The Most Dangerous Game

Chapter Six – Departure

Shae spent most of her walk through the Mezenti Spaceport on Nar Shaddaa trying to ignore her brother and the remarkably constant string of expletives he was managing to weave together. She had heard backwater dock workers in the heat of an argument show more restraint, which impressed her more than anything else. All she could really do, as she looked around the facility for her contact, was pretend like she was listening and make the standard response when she heard a break in Cander's rambling.

"I understand that, Cander," she lied, "but this is from the BBA."

"To hell with the BBA!" Cander shouted through the comlink, drawing stares from other travelers in the starport. Shae grinned nervously and mouthed apologies before moving on. "I don't get you sometimes, Shae. You're the only person I know who isn't satisfied with having an account full of credits, more than you even know what to do with, more than you can even spend!"

"More than you can gamble away?"

"Yea—no! You know what I meant!"

Shae shrugged. "What's wrong with having more than enough?"

A few more curses hissed through the channel. "Money is never a problem. It's what money attracts that's the problem. You're going through the BBA now, through official channels. You're gonna be tracking some hard targets that aren't just petty criminals who robbed the wrong crime boss. These are going to be upper tier baddies who are tied into groups that won't like a bounty hunter mucking up their game."

"So, basically what I'm getting out of this is: you're worried about me."

"No, I'm perfectly a-okay with the possibility looming that my sister will rub the Exchange the wrong way. Or the Hutts. Or even Czerka, in all their false benevolence."

Shae smiled. "I'll be fine, Cander. In any case, this seems like a trial run for my new employer. They're personally flying me out to Tatooine and covering all my expenses, so all I have to do is step off the transport and track their mark down. On Tatooine, Cander."

He replied with a sigh.

"You know how easy it is to track someone there. Like—"

"Like finding stink on a Hutt, I know."

"Okay, so we're in agreement."

"A tentative agreement, Shae. Get to Tatooine, find your mark, and get home. The less time you're formally employed by these people, the better."

"Thanks for understanding," Shae said.

"Right." She could hear him biting his fingernails in the background. "Well, are you at least gonna send me the information so I can help you track this guy?"

"It's already sent."

Cander typed something at his terminal. "You couldn't have known beforehand that I'd agree to this."

"You always end up agreeing, Cander."

"This could've been the exception. There will come a day when I'm gonna have anything better to do when you call."

"Goodbye, Cander."

"Anything better, Shae!"

She closed the channel and slipped the comlink onto her utility belt. At the far end of the terminal, a Human male wearing a very nice suit was standing next to Dock 322, holding up a sign that had one word printed across it: Vizla. She rolled her trunk of equipment over to the man and shook his hand.

"You're Miss Shae Vizla?" he asked.

"That I am. You're my contact?"

"Rennat, pleased to meet you. I'll be acting on behalf of my employer during this job. Any expenses or queries will all go through me."

Shae nodded understandingly. "You're my go-to guy."

"Exactly," Rennat replied. "In fact, do you have any questions before we proceed?"

She shook her head. "Are we ready to get offworld?"

Rennat chuckled. "We most certainly are." He pointed at her trunk. "If you don't mind, I'll secure your belongings down in the cargo hold before we get to the briefing."

"You can take my trunk down there," she said, rolling it around so he could take the handle. "But I'll be keeping my pistols with me."

He cleared his throat. "I must insist that we keep everything that might accidentally discharge out of the passenger cabin. I assure you, they will be quite safe with us."

Shae had to laugh. "It's not about my blasters being safe, it's about me being safe. If you think you're gonna disarm a bounty hunter before she steps onto a ship with persons unknown, this is going to be a very brief and fruitless working relationship." She jabbed a finger at him. "Your employer hired me for a reason. This is part of it."

The man looked uncomfortable, shifting around where he stood and looking around as if someone would be there to back him up. "I, ah... I suppose exceptions could be made in this case." He straightened his coat jacket. "My employer spoke very highly of you, so I wouldn't like to be the one to tell him our deal fell through because of a formality."

"I'd appreciate that."

"Very well." He motioned to the hatch. "We'll be leaving shortly. Just past the airlock is the passenger cabin. Minus the crew and myself, you're the only other person aboard, so feel free to choose whichever seat you'd like."

"Thank you." Shae stepped through the airlock and made a hard right into the passenger cabin, while Rennat took a left down a ramp into the transport's hold. The ship wasn't all that big, maybe no larger than a NR2 gully jumper. From the seat she decided on, she could see the door into the cockpit, the refresher, a small kitchen area, and the ramp to the cargo hold just by turning her head. She wondered if her own ship, the Taylir IV, might have rivaled her new employer's vessel in terms of size.

A brown-haired woman wearing a gaudy blue dress emerged from the cockpit and walked over to secure the airlock. "Welcome aboard," she said sweetly as she passed Shae. Almost immediately after the hatch was sealed and the cabin pressurized, the floor began to vibrate as the engines primed.

Outside her window, their gate retracted into the starport, and she could hear voices from the cockpit confirming their ascent vector. The woman nodded as she passed Shae again on her return trip to the cockpit, and by then, the transport was slowly pulling away from Mezenti.

Shae could hear the captain on the comm before the door was shut. "Roger that, Tower, we are clear for ascent. Increasing thrust to—"

With that, their transport accelerated up and away from the surface of Nar Shaddaa, passing through the perpetual aura of ethereal light that loomed heavy over the moon, the color of holo static. Her first mistake, Shae would later realize, was being so taken by the view as they ascended through the atmosphere. She was always the pilot when she came to Nar Shaddaa, never the passenger. Being able to watch the lights of the city as they pulled away without having to keep an eye on her control board elated her to no end.

Her second mistake was not realizing that Rennat hadn't returned from his trip to the cargo hold, even though stowing her trunk of equipment couldn't have taken so long on a transport so small. At that point, she was still overwhelmed by the view and the knowledge that she had finally made it in the bounty game. She was working through the BBA now, and things were about to change for her and Cander in ways that she could only just comprehend.

She never could've known how right she was.

–

Shae never dreamed of her parents. Not for years. Why they came to her during her trip on her new employer's transport, she would never quite understand.

She could hear their voices, see their hardened faces emerging from the ether of her mind—

She could smell the burning corpses.

Being so young when they died, the images eddied and blurred into each other until they resolved into two bodies lying on the floor, their torsos rent by a burning weapon. Her parents had died fighting, but they had died right in front of her. Cander's hand tried to close over her eyes, but she could still see that beam of blue light, and the hiss/click of a lightsaber deactivating.

Her third mistake was not tasting the null gas as it was being pumped into the passenger cabin.

"Is she out, Kelsai?" Rennat asked though a gas mask.

"Yeah, she's out," a woman, Kelsai, replied. The one from the cockpit, judging by the voice. "There's a chance she might just be lucid right now, but give it another minute and she won't wake up until our friends get her back to Coruscant."

"It's that effective, huh?"

"Surgeons use lighter stuff when they're putting patients down before surgery. You could ride through the Maw and she'd never know it."

"I suppose I'll take your word on that." He pushed the hair out of Shae's eyes. "Have we made contact with our mystery employer yet?"

"No, but he's not late. We just began our first orbit around Taris and the captain said we're not expecting anyone for another few minutes or so."

Rennat groaned. "I just want to get this woman off the ship as soon as possible. I poked around in her equipment trunk before I spaced it. She was armed to the teeth. Mando armor and everything."

A beat of silence. "Employer didn't say anything about capturing a Mando, did he?" asked Kelsai.

"He conveniently neglected to mention that little point. Come on, let's get some binders on her."

"Got them right here." She pointed at Shae's hips. "You're going to take those, right?"

"Damn," he said. "Nearly forgot. She wouldn't let me take them to the hold. It was either let her bring them aboard or watch her walk away."

"Whatever, just hand them to me."

Rennat went to unhook Shae's utility belt. "I know better than to ask the captain, but that mystery employer better be paying us real kriffing good for this."

The belt was unhooked, but it wouldn't come off. He looked up to see a blaster pistol pressed up against his gas mask.

"He better," said Shae, and put a bolt through the man's forehead.

–

Outside the viewport, a Tracer-class light corvette pulled up along side and matched the transport's orbit around Taris. When they didn't get a response through the comm, the corvette used a signal lamp on its hull to flash blink code into the cabin that said HELP REQUIRED?

Kelsai didn't know where the controls were for their own lamp, and if the captain had told her at some point, her mind was in too much of a haze to remember, but she did have the bounty hunter's data-gauntlet. Pointing it out a starboard viewport, she clumsily toggled the light control and replied YEZ. HELP. She had forgotten the code for "S."

The corvette flashed a confirmation and a few controlled thruster bursts brought the two ships' airlocks alongside each other. A dull thud signaled the connection and pressurization of an umbilical. Kelsai waited at the hatch, her face nearly pressed up against the transparisteel, her panicked breaths fogging up the view. She looked over to the bounty hunter every now and then, trying to assure herself that the woman wouldn't be getting up again. The null gas should've done the trick the first time, but, then again, they hadn't counted on capturing a Mandalorian, had they?

Rennat's body was still sprawled across the main aisle of the passenger cabin, blood spattered across the inside of his gas mask. She worked up some tears for the man.

Someone knocked against the transport's hatch. It made Kelsai jump; she screamed and her hands flew to her mouth. There was a man on the other side of the transparisteel window, motioning for her to open up the hatch. She briefly stumbled on the hem of her dress and yanked the release lever home. A group of five mercenaries spilled into the transport, weapons ready, their eyes taking in the scene in front of them.

The man she had seen at the window grabbed her by the shoulder. "Is there anyone else in here?" he asked.

Kelsai fought through the panic to say, "N-no."

"Malkis, take Oppal down into the cargo hold. The rest of you sweep the rest of the ship. 'Thorough' is the word. Understand?" He returned his attention to Kelsai. "Who did this?" He tilted his head towards Rennat's body, the blaster marks on the ceiling, the woman sitting still near one of the viewports. "Is that who we're here for?"

This time, Kelsai couldn't find the words so quickly. She nodded and took a moment to collect herself.

"Come on, girl. I need you here."

"It was her." Kelsai pointed at the bounty hunter. "Sh-she woke u-up while we were drugging her, and she killed..." She wiped away the tears that had made it all the way to her chin. "She... She killed everyone."

"The pilots?" he asked.

"Dead," she replied. "They shorted out the controls so she couldn't take over the ship. That's why I wasn't able to..." She pointed towards the corvette, left the rest unsaid.

"All right." He walked over to the bounty hunter and looked her over. She was slumped over, her head pressed up against the seat in front of her. The man lifted her head up and a steady stream of foam dripped out of her mouth, which seemed to satisfy him. "Definitely null gas. She'll be out for a good long time."

Kelsai nodded, but didn't say anything.

"Where were you when all this was happening?" he asked. A few of his friends had returned from their sweep of the ship and made an OK gesture.

"I was standing right next to him." She pointed at Rennat. "We were just about to slip some... some binders on her when she... Like she had been breathing oxygen the whole time!" She pushed her hair back. "She killed Rennat, and I think she would've killed me, but she needed the cockpit open. I didn't know what else to do! I-I just didn't want to die!"

Her hysterics seemed to be wearing on the man. "Look, calm down. There's not much you could've done."

"By the time she had made it into the cockpit, she was talking funny, off balance. The captain and copilot shorted out the controls and she shot them for that." Kelsai took in a calming breath. "Before she could do anything to me, she collapsed."

One of the mercs, Malkis, whispered something into the man's ear.

The man nodded. "Okay." He lowered his weapon. "Well, miss, this could've gone a lot better, but we have our woman. I can only assume you'll be taking your crew's cut of the profits for yourself, so you have that to look forward to, if nothing else."

Kelsai's eyes bore into a section of paneling, distant, unblinking.

The man sighed. He was losing patience with her. "Kraul, what's the situation in the cockpit?"

Kraul poked his head out of the cockpit, his expression grim. "Not looking good, sir. They shorted this thing all to hell. I might be able to get everything back online, but that would take a few hours."

The man shook his head. "No good. Our employer wants the Mandalorian on Coruscant ASAP. Start locking everything down while we get our two guests on board."

Kraul saluted. "As ordered, sir."

"What's you name?" the man asked her.

She broke out of her stress-induced trance. "Kelsai."

"Okay. My name is Zarl. Since things aren't looking too good as far as your ship goes, you're gonna come back with us. We're on our way to Coruscant, but if you want to be dropped off anywhere along the way, I'm sure we can accommodate you."

"Okay."

"Anywhere else, and you'll have to pick up a connecting flight. Understand?"

"Yeah," she said and sniffed. "Thank you, Zarl."

"Malkis, you help me bring the Mandalorian to the medical bay. Kelsai, you follow behind us."

Zarl unceremoniously dragged the bounty hunter out of her seat by her arms while Malkis grabbed her ankles. Kelsai followed them through the docking umbilical and into the corvette, where they quickly wound their way through a corridor and down some stairs into a very utilitarian medical bay. It was a small room with one bed, some medical equipment, and a few chairs scattered about; perfect for treating things a mercenary might encounter on a typical day, but not much else.

They dropped the bounty hunter on the bed and Zarl pulled out some retractable restraints. "Strap her down," Zarl told Malkis, and together they pulled the restraints taut across her legs, arms, chest, and shoulders. "From here on out, I want two people with eyes on this room at all times, hear?"

"I hear you, sir," said Malkis.

"No more mistakes. Our employer wants her alive, and I know he's not going to be all that pleased to hear most of Rennat's team got vaped."

"She'll make it to Coruscant, sir."

Zarl allowed a feral grin. "You say that like there's a chance she won't."

"I left chance back in the starport, sir. As ordered."

"That's what I like to hear." Zarl punched the intercom. "Jes, get me a secure channel to our employer. Want to let him know we got his Mandalorian."

"I've already got him on hold, sir." Jes replied. "He seemed pretty eager to know how everything went."

"Smooth sailing. Go ahead and put him through down here."

"He's still insisting on voice only."

He muted the intercom and turned to Malkis. "I have never dealt with anyone with such a fetish for secrecy."

Malkis shrugged. "As long as he pays well."

"Heh. You guys have been hanging around me too much. I'm starting to hear too much of myself in you." Malkis laughed to himself and Zarl unmuted the intercom. "All right, Jes, transfer the call to me. And calculate the jump to hyperspace so we can get out of here as soon as the others are done closing up shop."

"Already have, as ordered, sir."

"What did I tell you?" he said to Malkis. He pulled out his personal holoprojector and connected his employer's call. Zarl wouldn't be able to see his mystery employer, but the employer would be able to see them. "Can you hear me, sir?"

"Loud and clear, Zarl," said the employer. "I hope you bear good news."

"Good and bad," Zarl admitted. "The bad first: Rennat's team ran into a bit of a snag. The null gas they were using to knock out the Mandalorian didn't have the desired effect. Rennat's dead, as is the captain and copilot of their ship."

The employer sighed heavily. "This was supposed to be accomplished without loss of life."

"I understand that, sir, but Rennat had his operation and we had ours. In the future, I might suggest letting us get the job done rather than going through different parties."

"Timing necessitated the hiring of multiple crews in this instance, but your suggestion has been noted. You had good news for me."

"Ah, yes. The good news is that one of Rennat's crew, Miss Kelsai, survived long enough to make sure the Mandalorian was properly subdued. We have your mark restrained, unconscious, and ready for transport to Coruscant as we speak."

"That is wonderful news, Zarl. Can you hold the projector over the body?"

"Can do." Zarl aimed the camera in the direction of the unconscious bounty hunter, grinning confidently to Malkis all the while.

"Mister Zarl, you have a serious problem," said the employer.

"Excuse me?"

"This is not the Mandalorian I hired your team to retrieve. Something has gone wrong."

"Wrong!" Zarl spun the projector around and looked directly into the camera. "Nothing went wrong, sir.

"I assure you, something has. I have her profile sitting right here in front of me, as well as visual confirmation from Rennat's last data packet. That woman you have is not the Mandalorian, Zarl."

"Look, buddy, you hired us to take the unconscious Mandalorian from Rennat's team and transport her safely to Coruscant. We did that. There was no one else—"

It finally clicked.

Kelsai quietly unholstered one of the blaster pistols at the bounty hunter's hip, taking aim as the sobering possibility overtook Zarl. She fired twice into Malkis's skull, his body crumpling like a house of cards; he was in her blind spot, and she didn't have time to make sure everyone played nice.

Zarl saw his friend die and an expression of pure shock washed over his face. "What have you—!" He reached for his blaster rifle.

"Don't do that," Kelsai said evenly. "I don't mind killing you if you inconvenience me here."

The man reluctantly stepped away from the weapon, rage back-building in his eyes. "You're the Mandalorian."

Kelsai dropped all pretense. She relaxed in her dress, held the pistol confidently at Zarl's forehead. Shae stood in her place. Like Jaq Rand always said concerning infiltration, The only real difference between the truth and a lie is whether or not you, as the liar, believe it yourself. Her Kelsai had been one hell of a good lie. "You don't miss much, do you?" she said, then angled her head at the unconscious woman on the bed. "Except when it matters." She held out her hand. "Give me the projector."

Zarl hesitated, then tossed it at her. It went wider than was necessary; he was probably trying to distract her. She snatched it out of the air without breaking eye contact, then addressed the mystery employer. "May I ask who's speaking?" she singsonged.

"Surrender to these men, Shae."

"That's not what I asked," she replied. "And also, no. They don't exactly have me at a disadvantage right now."

"I've tried to make this as painless as possible on you. If you had allowed it, you would have been on Coruscant and in my custody without conflict or bloodshed. You can end this now, Shae. If you do not, I cannot promise that more amicable outcomes will be made available."

The voice coming at her was heavy with a kind of hatred she hadn't heard before. The man was trying to hide it, trying and failing. "Who are you?" she asked the employer. "What did I do to you to justify all of this?"

"It's not a matter of punishment, Shae," he said. "It's a matter of justice. Your time has come and gone. In light of the death you have wrought on these people: Do you understand why?"

Shae tossed the projector at the wall, breaking it. "All right, enough of that." She nodded to address Zarl again. "I'm gonna need you to accompany me to the cockpit. Your ship can make it to Nar Shaddaa, yeah?"

"Yes," he said through his teeth.

"Good!" she said. "That is good. So, why don't you lead the way and we'll get me somewhere a little friendlier—" She noticed Zarl's hand make some kind of familiar movement. "What did you just do?"

"I don't know what you mean."

She looked a little closer. The glove the man was wearing was similar to the one from her Mando armor set. She used hers to control her jetpack; she could only guess what Zarl's was used for. "I'm going to repeat myself, even though I'm not a fan of it." She let Zarl hear the power pack in her blaster ring to life. "What. Did. You. Do?"

Zarl shrugged. "Recalled my men," he said with sickening confidence. "They'll be here in a few seconds." He held up a hand. "And the whole hostage thing won't work. They'll have locked out the controls to the ship by now, just like the transport captain and copilot did. You'll be stuck. Again.

"The difference being: this time your opponent is armed." Zarl laughed. "You can kill me, but you won't be escaping. You're done, Mandalorian."

Shae groaned, rolled her eyes. She was really hoping it wouldn't come to this. Really hoping. She didn't want to do everything Plan B entailed while wearing a gaudy dress that barely fit. "Let me ask you something, Mister Confidence," she said. "Did your merc buddies do an explosives sweep on that transport before coming aboard?"

The mirth drained out of Zarl's face. It was almost instant.

"That's what I thought." Shae stuck her arm through one of the medical bed's restraints. "You really should have." She winked at the man, reached over to her data-gauntlet.

And pressed the detonator—