Chapter 12
"Faughn sold you the ysalamiri?" Mara repeated, hissing quietly between her teeth. If there had been any lingering doubts about Faughn's loyalty, that certainly extinguished them.
"She said you were okay with it," Mirax said innocently, her eyes shining a little too sweetly. They were standing in a large meeting room on the Pulsar Skate, where Mara had told Faughn to meet her with the ysalamiri. Faughn was nowhere to be found, though the ysalamiri were arrayed behind Mirax, just close enough that Mara was cut off from the Force as she spoke to her business rival. Mara studied the other woman, trying to decide if she was really that dense or if she was purposely trying to undermine her. Mara was leaning towards the latter. Not that it mattered, the harm was done just the same either way. "Where is she now?"
"I have no—"
"Faughn's ship never left. She's still in docking bay 786." Mara turned toward the new speaker, a young man who been standing in the corner, quietly looking over the ysalamiri.
"Thank you," Mara said to him, tossing a smirk at Mirax and turning to leave.
Mirax threw a warning look at her assistant before smiling back at Mara and adding, "Oh, good. Maybe you can still catch her."
"You better hope I do," Mara replied darkly.
This could not be happening. Faughn took a deep breath, trying to come up with a new plan, but knowing it was futile. She was so close! She'd been in the clear, until the Corellian port authorities told her she couldn't take off, she was grounded until they inspected her ship. All because her ship was too light. Not too heavy, like she'd picked up contraband. Too light. What kind of police state was this? No wonder the locals were rebelling.
Her crew had scattered the moment things had started to go south. But Faughn wasn't leaving. She had nothing without her ship. She would not give it up without a fight.
She hadn't wanted it to end this way. She respected, even liked, Mara. But it was a matter of survival— the company was a sinking water vessel and Faughn wasn't about to go down with it. When Aves had offered to fix her ship up in exchange for covering a few of his routes, Faughn had thought it was too good to be true. But she knew better than to ask questions and she'd cautiously gone along with it.
Everything was going according to plan. Skimming a little money with each run while Mara was too distracted to notice, Faughn was in good shape. Then when Mara set up the meeting with Mirax, it had almost all slipped away. But Faughn ran a few calculations and decided to take a gamble. If she could get to Mirax first, she knew the smuggling mogul had been itching to get her hands on the ysalamiri for a long time. Selling the ysalamiri wasn't how Faughn would have preferred to do it—Sith, she'd given them all names, she considered the ysalamiri her pets—but she'd run out of options.
Faughn glanced at her chrono. The Starry Ice's computer had alerted her when the Incident Alley landed twenty minutes ago. She'd pled with the authorities to let her leave, offered every credit she'd saved as a bribe, but they wouldn't hear it.
Now there was nothing to do but wait for Mara to find her.
Dankin was still thinking about his confrontation with Corran when he returned to the ship to begin unloading the cargo. He knew it would have been foolish to challenge Corran, but he still felt like he should at least be able to keep his ship secure. Replaying the scene in his head, trying to decide what he could have done differently, Dankin was so focused on the earlier events that he didn't hear the scampering feet as he made his way between the stacks of crates.