Kregg thought HK-47 would never let him leave the cockpit. The rickety machine stood under the arched doorway leading out, its motors and gears whirring. It stood there still as death, waiting like the reaper itself.
"Come on, HK," Kregg pleaded. "You droids don't get it, but men get cramps in their arses when they sit for too long."
HK-47's vocabulator crackled. "Retort: They also have an utterly useless flesh-sac known as a 'bladder', which seems to serve more as a nuisance than a repository." The droid eyed Kregg up and down. "Commentary: Judging by your jittery movements, it seems yours must be full. The master will never forgive me if I allow a meatbag to loose its secretions on her floors." HK stepped aside and waved Kregg through as Bestia giggled in the background.
Kregg looked over his shoulder as he stumbled into the hallway. The droid went back to looming in the doorway as if it'd never even moved. Death wields a fekkin' carbine, not a glaive.
The bones in his legs creaked as Kregg went down the corridor. He damned himself for getting old. Still, he preferred the pain over sitting still for an eternity. The droid was right enough about one thing, though. He swept in and out of the lavatory like it was an asteroid field before proceeding to the engine room.
The heat smashed Kregg square in the face when the door slid open. It was sobering and soothing, sweeping the last dregs of sleep and malaise from him at once. It was a pleasant change of pace from the damning cold that had taken residence in the ship since their landing. Kregg stood still, let the heat wash him over, and took a deep breath.
That same breath was knocked right back out when a blur of white pounced at him. It knocked him to the ground and sent his eyes spinning. When he finally found the wherewithal to focus, he felt a weight on his chest, both light as a feather and heavy as a duracrete slab all at once.
"I'm glad to see you, too," Kregg said in between fits of trying to catch his breath. Xira loomed over top of him, her knees digging into his chest like daggers. "Looking great, darling."
"Still a ways to go." Xira backed off of him and stood, dragging Kregg up to his feet by the wrist. She was still naked as could be, her pale white skin weeping fat beads of sweat. She was still gaunt, yet looked more hale all the same. She threw back her head and let her shock of black hair tumble down. "The heat here's just like home. Really brings out the best in a lady, don't you think?"
Kregg scratched at his stubble. This was the Xira he met all those years ago, lithe and spry and fearsome. She was built lean like a twig and on the surface seemed just as like to break, but she was sturdier than even the oldest of the wroshyr trees of Kashyyyk.
"Nexu got your tongue?" The barest hint of color flashed across her cheeks as she whipped around him. She clapped her hands down on his shoulders and began to rub, boring her fingers so hard into his jacket that it felt just like they were right on his flesh. "You know as well as I do that heat burns away all bad things."
Kregg chuckled. "Too bad it can't make this hellhole warm."
She leaned up into his ear. "I have ways." She inched a hand in between his legs, but Kregg swatted it away.
"Still ain't the time." When Kregg turned to face her, Xira wore her displeasure plain upon her face. "We're landed. It's just us, the droid, and the cripple."
"I don't think I've met the droid." She squatted gingerly and rested a knuckle against the floor, flexing her fingers. "Or the 'cripple', for that matter. What's the rub?"
"I think I like it better when you're standing over me," Kregg said. He felt his own sweat welling up against his shirt. He shrugged out of his jacket and let its slump to the floor.
"Nuh-uh-uh," Xira said, wagging a finger. "You already missed your chance." She stood upright again, then thrust herself forward against him. "Always so desperate to get to the chuba you miss the forest for the trees."
Kregg wrapped his arms around her. "Droid's an old fekkin' thing. Built like the spittin' image of death itself, if death wore hisself a coat of rust. I figure it's a hell of a lot faster than it lets on, but-"
"I'm faster." Xira shrugged out of Kregg's embrace.
"Well, we'll see, won't we?" He leaned over on one of the engine rods. The metal was still hot to the touch, but Kregg had burnt himself on worse. "Our cripple's a girl, name of Bestia-"
"Where do they come up with these names?"
They laughed together.
"I'm sure I can outmatch a girl on broken legs," Xira said. "Sith or no."
"You make it sound a lot more simple than it's gonna be."
"Of course it'll be simple," she said with a snort. "What's the big bad smuggler afraid of?"
Kregg felt a flush snake its way across the back of his neck. "Consequences."
Xira rolled her eyes. "Consequences?" She spat and waved her hand before walking to the other side of the room. She hopped up and began to swing from one of the smaller beams running across the wall. "Since when do you give a kath hound's piss about consequences?"
Kregg watched Xira sway back and forth, pulling her knees up against her chest. He slid his hand down his face and dragged a film of sweat with it. Fek, it's hot. "I'm an old man. I'm supposed to worry about these things."
She laughed at him. Xira turned herself around and curled up around the back of the pipe, snaking underneath it until she was all but pressed against the wall. Then, she eased herself down on her back and let her head and shoulders hang down from the rod. Her hair fell down in black streams until the tips grazed the floor. "You talk like a sixty-year old man." She smiled. "An incredibly virile sixty-year old man." She tumbled down, spinning just in time to land on her feet before she hit the floor. It was like watching a cat at play.
"Say we do succeed," Kregg said. "What next? We still gotta get out of this place, and it wasn't no easy feat getting in here."
"It was one, you just said it yourself."
"You know what I meant. I only got through it plastered out of my fekkin' gourd."
She crossed her arms. "Marcus, when are you not plastered out of your fekkin' gourd?"
Kregg chuckled. "Less and less these days." He felt his tension melt away when she draped an arm around his shoulder. "How do you want to play this?"
"Simple: By not playing." She brought her arm away and headed for the door. "I want to meet my new friends first."
Kregg laughed. "Xira, honey. You ain't gonna meet 'em like that, are you?"
She placed one hand on her hip. She gave one of her breasts a firm squeeze with the other. When she let go, Kregg watched as it wobbled slightly. "Why the hell not?" She let out a laugh of her own. "I'll take one of your Sith whore's robes. Not like she'll be needing it after she's gone and died of exposure."
Kregg chewed on the inside of his cheek. "Watch it."
Xira's eyes went wide.
"She's no whore," Kregg said as he stepped up to her. "That's all that needs to be said on it."
"And I guess you've seen her maidenhead yourself to prove it?" Xira stuck her hands on her hips and gave him a playful pout.
"I said that's all that needs to be said." He gave her a slap on the rear. "Now go and get some clothes on, robes or otherwise."
He never saw the slap but it stung all the same when her nails drew blood. Kregg watched her stomp out.
More things change, the more they stay the same. Kregg stepped out into the hallway. The cold air felt good when it ran through him. He leaned up against a wall and closed his eyes, letting it wash him over.
He had been in the Viridian Slug, at the same table he was at when he met Lysara and Fell. Back then, the little laser wire actually worked, and it worked well. Kregg learned quick never to pull too far on it. The shock that went coursing through his body if he strayed brought him to his knees every time. But the laughter hurt worse than any pain. Kregg would groan, stumble, and spasm about on the floor like a fish out of water, and half the bar would throw a raucous celebration at his expense.
A white shadow dragged him to his feet. Kregg only got a look at her when he was back on his stool and she sat across from him. What little of her skin could be seen was solid white, other than the black markings that ran jagged across her face. She was clothed in a vest of dark black leather, with a shift of dark black roughspun underneath. An adornment of black bands and silver buckles wrapped around her hips like snakes of metal and rawhide. Creased leather pants in dark grey drab led down to black boots, the kind they would have called "shit-kickers" back on Fondor.
"Care to tell me why a man in a pub isn't allowed to walk ten feet to the bar?" she asked. Her lilt was singsong and unfamiliar. Kregg had been all over the galaxy, edge of known space in the east and the lip of the Outer Rim in the west and everywhere in between, and this accent was none he had ever heard. She raised a hand clad in a fingerless black glove to her mouth and used two of her slender fingers to whistle for a serving girl.
"Well, when a man's in debt," Kregg said with a shrug. He leaned back in his stool enough to make it teeter. "Call me crass, but I've been all over this galaxy and seen a lot of shite, but I've never seen anyone like you. What brings you here?"
"You first," she said with a crooked smile. She had pearly white teeth, and each ended in a point just as barbed as her black fingernails.
"I'm on the wrong side of the ruling Hutt." A serving girl approached and they each got a drink: light, bubbly hypocras for her and dark rum for him. "Hence the ties that bind." Kregg raised his arm and the red laser wire sprung to life, setting the corner they were in aglow.
"What a coincidence," she said, "I am too." She took a sip from her cup and swished it around in her mouth. In another heartbeat, she downed the whole glass. "Urga the Hutt wants me to send his regards to his brother."
"The only 'regards' you're gonna get from The Fat Minister is a friendly introduction to his petting zoo. And it ain't a nice one like that place on Corulag."
"I'll make it a point to visit when I'm done here." She reached for his drink as well. Kregg tried to swat her away, but she moved with such inhuman speed and precision it was like chasing blaster fire. Before he knew it, she had the glass in her hand and was downing his rum.
"Hey, that was mine. What fekkin' gives?"
"Conversation works up a mighty thirst," she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. "Wouldn't you agree?"
"Aye, and I'm mighty parched now." Kregg rolled his eyes. "That was my drink."
"Relax, you'll get another." She stretched out an arm and clasped Kregg's hand, bringing it down into the center of the table underneath her own. "Xira of Clan Morr, dispatched by the Nagai Golden Council to explore your galaxy. And who might you be?"
Kregg laughed and feigned a gag. "Politics make me retch. Marcus Kregg, as lowborn a creature as there ever was. No titles, here." He met Xira's eyes; they were vivid green pits of balefire that burned bright within the sea of black around them. "What brings a politico to the bantha's arse of the galaxy anyway?" He wriggled his fingers underneath her hand but she did not let go.
"'No titles,' he says." Xira giggled. "I was in what you call the Core a month past. Every Holonet screamsheet had a story to tell about the so-called 'Phantom of Byss'. That's a title if I ever heard one."
"And a lengthy story I have no desire to get into with a stranger," Kregg said flatly. "Not even a pretty stranger."
She tsked. "Your tongue needs work." She held up her cup as the serving girl returned to refill it. After the wench moved away, Xira downed it in another single shot. "'Pretty', he says." Her cheeks ran the same foamy pink color of the hypocras as she hopped off her stool. "I'll see you around then, Phantom."
When she was leaving, Kregg tried to grab her wrist. For a moment, he thought he had. It took him another few to realize he was holding nothing, and that the side of his face was stinging like wildfire. He raised the back of his hand to it and saw blood on his knuckles.
Kregg felt a hand pushing into his sternum and snapped back to reality. He was leaned up against the wall outside the engine room, the coolness of the metal radiating through his back and into his bones. Xira stood right in front of him, swathed in another of Cinder's flowing black robes.
"Surely you got on something underneath there?" Kregg raised an eyebrow.
Xira grimaced. She splayed the robe open, revealing all black linen underneath. "I can be modest when I need to be."
"You didn't have trouble at all before the whole concubine business."
"We never need bring that up again," she said, pressing a finger against Kregg's lips. "The less said about my dishonor, the better."
"Your secrets are safe with me." Kregg smiled and ruffled her hair. "I'll follow your lead. I'm just the pilot anyhow."
"Fine by me." Xira shrugged. She closed the rope tight and then rounded the corner towards the cockpit.
As Kregg followed her, he remembered the Ugnaught that approached him after the slap. Morag was a stunted little fellow clad in maroon fatigues and a black smock riddled with vivid chemical stains. I wonder where the little bastard ever ran off to, him and his brother.
"That's funny," Morag had said as he tugged at his grey whiskers. He took a swig from a brown glassware cup in his hand.
It took Kregg a moment to find the source of the voice. "How do you mean?" he said, finally looking down.
"The three of us was outside when she was walking in, Lorack, Curlig, and me." He took another swig. The apple in his throat bobbed up and down as he swallowed. "Now it's just me and Lorack. Poor Curlig reached for that arse of hers with that stupid laugh o' his and he was dead 'fore we could even blink."
Kregg rolled his eyes. "Maybe your pal got what he deserved."
"Eh, he learned his lesson, so now I drink in his name." Morag snorted. "She sure didn't gut you, though. Never even saw her pull the knives."
"I reached for her wrist," Kregg said as he raised an eyebrow. I was reaching for her wrist.
Morag chortled so hard drink spurted out his porcine nostrils. "Oh no, my friend. You smacked her right on the arse, right in view of the whole bar. That's why you wear them three gouges on your face." He wiped his nose with a dirty sleeve and waddled off, his boots thumping against the glass floor. "See you later, smuggler," Morag called back from across the bar.
Kregg looked down at the floor to see his reflection. Three gouges ran deep across his cheek where she'd smacked him.
Returning to the present, Kregg raised a hand to his cheek. A set of barbed pockmarks served as a permanent reminder of his blunder. Blood welled up there now where Xira had hit him again.
"Are you coming or what?" Xira called from down the hall. "The droid's staring at me from down the way."
Kregg wasted no time going after her. How's a ghost supposed to protect you from Death, anyways?