In the hold, the remains of the machine had already cooled, and Rick, without a pang of conscience, pulling on gloves, began to cut it into parts, carefully pushing them aside. Working on disassembling speeders and swoops was almost the first job he had ever been allowed to do...
Memories made the cutter's tongue extinguish, and the guy stopped. All emotions, all nostalgia had to be driven away. Driven away to protect those who remained there, in another life. After all, even a simple acquaintance with a gifted person could have a bad effect on them.
He is Rick Monroe, and now he must do what he has to do, disassemble the speeder and extract the undamaged navigator. This is what he did, gradually turning a pile of scrap metal into pieces of armor plating and a heap of useless junk.
Soon, he had the navigation module in his hands, which the counter carefully set aside, re-examined the scene, and began to clean up. Everything that could be used and was worth money was moved to the elevator to be sent to the workshop, where it would be studied and used.
The guy's gaze fell on the corpse. He remembered Troy with a bug under his skin. Rick walked quickly to the body to examine it thoroughly.
A detailed examination in the Force and a rather unpleasant manual search brought relief, no bugs were found on the body. Only a set of drugs, similar to those found with Troy.
"Hutt agents," the guy said calmly, putting the set in his pocket and looking indifferently at the closed eyes of the unknown. However, he would soon find out everything about the dead man. The trash was sent into space through the airlock without unnecessary emotions. A couple of hundred pounds more or less, few people on Nar Shaddaa cared about orbital cleanliness.
After half an hour of loader work, Rick settled in the workshop, opposite the computer, which had been placed in a safe environment beforehand, and began to study the data from the nav module. For starters, he opened a pre-downloaded map of Smuggler's Moon with coordinates. No one ever guaranteed accuracy, but if you overlay the movement tracks on the map, you could get a general picture. And then logic and logistics came into play. Main places of stay, study of the most frequently used routes, parking. After that, with great confidence, it would be possible to determine the location of the group's base.
The requested operation required time, and for now, Rick decided to do what Muha hadn't done for him. Contact the Black Sun. And he decided to do it somewhat crudely, but at the same time veiled and polite. Having sketched the occult symbol of the "Black Sun," used in some expansion regions, in a graphic editor, he carefully cropped the image so that the pixel size, when combined, represented the comlink number. After that, through several manipulations, he inserted an audio track into the image, which could be found and read by opening it in a text editor. "I have something that might interest you, the number is left." Then he added another inscription in Aurebesh on the drawing: "Not all is as it seems."
After checking that everything was working, Rick carefully hacked into the planet's relay network and finally got to the one closest to the skirmish site. There he left his message.
If the Black Sun is as good as they say, then he will be called soon. And for now... For now, he can study the data from the navigator.
There weren't many recordings on the navigator - someone had clearly cleaned the memory, and did it regularly. Only six routes remained, almost all of them, except for the last one, did not go beyond one sector. Only the final one led to the wasteland where the speeder met its end.
It was possible to try to extract the deleted records as well. If the recording was not cyclical and was not overwritten, people often forget about it. But it was possible to work with the information that was available. He brought up the starting point of movement and all parking points longer than five minutes on the screen.
Judging by the data obtained, the speeder started from a paid guarded parking lot near a service center. It did not linger anywhere for such a long time, and immediately after the fifth stop, it flew to the wasteland.
There was little information. Little to solve the problem without revealing his location with requests and without the possibility of maneuver. Turning on a couple of recovery programs, Rick began to wait for the request for deleted information recovery. But Troy's people, apparently, were disciplined and did not suffer from sloppiness, which complicated the task.
Going online, through several masking programs, Rick began to gather information about the service center near the parking lot.
The parking lot belonged to the center. The center belonged to a medium-sized local businessman who serviced speeders. His name was Raus Telshi, and he belonged to a glorious Zabrak clan - not a very common phenomenon among representatives of this race, who considered mercenary work the highest virtue, but not business intrigues.
Out of curiosity, Rick brought this Telshi to the screen. At the same time, he took the ID of the deceased from his pocket, who was now floating in orbit not far from the ship, curiously divided the screen into two parts and simultaneously began to search for information about him.
Raus looked quite Zabrak-like - fierce, tattooed, and horned. Only there was some disorder with the clan tattoos. It gave the impression that either the tattoo artist was drunk, or something went wrong with the drawing... The deceased was a half-human, a Zeltron half-breed, if his card was to be believed. And deceased, if it was to be believed. However, he was already deceased. True, the card claimed that the untimely death occurred a couple of months earlier...
"What a pity," this referred to the fact that the courier boy was not nearby to identify the Zabrak. But... The probability that it was the same healthy tattooed Goh was high. In general, there was a probability that Troy's group was torn apart by infighting, and now he was dealing with its fragments. However, this is an unconfirmed hypothesis. He chuckled at the second piece of news, considering what he could do with the information, and sent a request for the reason for the premature death of the half-breed.
Meanwhile, he looked for the website of this very service center. He needed to try to bypass their system's firewall and study what was what, but for that, he needed to find the website itself.
The search didn't take long: Raus clearly believed that advertising was the engine of trade. At least, there were a dozen links in the local network. The list of services was impressive, although a good third of them could not be found in the price list of any corresponding establishment on any more law-abiding planet. Contacts were available there as well.
He had to struggle with the half-breed for longer, the result was not the most standard - if the information in the holonet was to be believed, he was the pilot of the barge that destroyed an entire sector.
It seemed that Troy had managed to infiltrate all levels of the planet's life. Or... Or he had a good anchor in the local system that allowed him to obtain most of the deceased's IDs.
But Rick took on Raus seriously. Having found a couple of unused but registered email addresses, he wrote him a letter with a commercial proposal. The commercial proposal was the kind that is immediately thrown into the trash after reading. A rather impudent and relatively safe virus for most users was attached to it, which the protective programs could easily handle. But behind it was another small worm, which was launched only after restarting the system and, politely digging into the registry, sent all the information from the computer to the owner. The owner was the email address, with which Rick had no direct connection, and it was impossible to calculate it. Unless someone had dug into his own communication node.
But there were only their own on the ship.
Rick returned to the cockpit in pants, boots, and a shirt, over which a towel was draped. Even the blaster remained in the room. His not completely dry hair looked disheveled, and he constantly had to fix it. Slumping into the chair, he looked curiously through the blister at the hull of the ship to which "The Chance" was attached. Meanwhile, he slowly rubbed his hair with a towel.
"How much here..." he didn't specify what, continuing to look beyond the cockpit.
There was something to look at. Directly in front of the ship, in the alignment of the former hangar, Nar Shaddaa's atmosphere, shrouded in a misty haze, slowly turned. Against the background of the disk, weakly illuminated by reflected light, debris floated - there were plenty of them here. Space debris was not a problem for shields, but the hull to which "Happy Chance" was docked had no shields for a long time. The support structures, too massive to be transported for recycling, bore traces of barbaric dismantling of the hull and equipment. Everything valuable that could have been here had long been removed and taken away. Only a bare skeleton remained, slowly drifting in orbit.
"A whole graveyard of ships," it was impossible to estimate the number of pilots and crew who had become one with space. Over several millennia, it approached the number of stars in the sector, - "How's your leg?"
"If you hadn't reminded me, I would have forgotten," the Duros chuckled, looking around. "Thanks to our doctors, who help us so well... I don't see any overly agile debris yet, so no one is on our tail. We've escaped. Does your skinny always steer so skillfully?"
"Too often," Rick grimaced, "he often uses a lot of energy for aerobatics. That's the skinny one."
Rick transferred all power to the corpuscular shield, curiously studying the information from the passive sensors.
"We had a great rest on this planet," Rick grinned, sprawling in his chair, "no resorts needed."
"Explosions, fires, corpses, air shows with onboard weapons, survival races," Jethro nodded. "Did I forget anything? Good vacation. We should repeat it next year."
"You forgot torture, beatings, and one little private party," Rick nodded, "although you didn't participate in the torture. And repeating it, yes, it's a must."
"And I have absolutely no intention of participating," the Duros assured him. "From any side. And beatings - you're exaggerating. What kind of beatings, just comparing who has the thicker gut. If you grab him seriously, you might break him by accident... "
"Well, it's not just about beer..." the guy smiled, "some big lug jumped me, so I had to calm him down. Nearly killed the poor fellow. So the brawl counts towards the total score. The main thing is that one more thing goes into the total score. A lot of credits. And then I can fly on, and send you to the boss."
"And for credits, I need to sell the cargo," the Duros remarked calmly. "Which is still in the hangar."
"I hope no one has reached the hangar yet. Otherwise, I'll have to fight them off..." the guy shook his head. "No amount of ammunition will be enough."
The conversation was interrupted by an incoming message signal. The captain's datapad received an invitation to meet for a discussion of matters of interest. The meeting place was a private club - entry was by invitation only. The message was signed only with a name - or perhaps a nickname. Jar.
"Well, they're offering me a look inside a sarlacc," the guy said with a feigned smile, "looks like the luminaries finally decided to see what I'm made of..."
"Luminaries?" Jethro asked, glancing at Rick.
"Yeah, those da-a-a-ark luminaries," Rick scratched his beard, looked through the blister, "of the galactic criminal underworld. Though I'm not sure it's them."
He handed the datapad with the message to Jethro.
The Duros read it carefully and grunted.
"They're remarkably brief. And they don't respect you much. They didn't say anything about 'alone and unarmed.' Who are you taking with you?"
"What's the point of taking anyone with me?" Rick pondered. "Except maybe Bus, he shouldn't cause any trouble."
"If you go alone, you'll show that you're short on people, that you can't pull any of them off duty," the pirate explained. "Escort means quite a lot in such cases. And it can say a lot... I'd suggest taking me. First, I don't look like a cute little animal, and second, I represent Quint. And we can solve two problems at once: you've taken a business partner as an escort, which means you're not just good for shooting at mynocks, well, and we'll find a place for the cargo. Maybe."
"Yes, it makes sense to take you," the guy nodded, still considering options, "but just in case, it's better to examine the wound first, so it doesn't open up if something happens."
"I'll show myself to the doc," Jethro nodded compliantly, returning the datapad to Rick and getting out of the chair. "Should I send Nika to take over? Or let Larrius be on duty?"
"Let's have Nika," the navigator was more useful in this situation than Larrius.
The Duros nodded and headed for the exit. The limp was barely noticeable - the forses had done their job well, making the doctor's task considerably easier.
Jethro found the doctor - along with the navigator - by smell. Literally. When at the exit of the cockpit, the nose unmistakably hints that there is Hapan cuisine nearby, it can only mean one thing: the doc is in the galley. And where the doc is, there's the skinny pilot who can wring a speeder dry for the Imperial Ballet.
The Duros knocked delicately on the door, but didn't wait for an answer - he entered immediately.
"Jethro..." Shergi moved away from the navigator somewhat embarrassed, but not far. "Did you come for some caf? I can make you some..." she looked at the Duros with eyes that were still shining, but definitely not from caf.
"Uhh..." the pilot drawled. "Actually, I came to you, ma'am. I need to take our navigator from you so he can be on duty in the cockpit while the cap and I go out to have some fun at a club. The cap wants you to check my leg - whether I can dance, or if I'll have to be bored in a corner while the cap is having a blast?"
"Can't the dancing wait?" Sher looked suspiciously at the Duros's red eyes. A fun outing seemed more than strange after saving Mr. Carvo, the shooting, and... everything else. Sher cast a quick glance at Nick. To feel, to see his reaction.
"Or is this the kind of dance you can't refuse an invitation to?" she guessed, and her heart clenched.
"You see, ma'am," Jethro informed her confidentially, "I'll be leaving soon, and I haven't really seen anything of Nar Shaddaa yet. When I come back, what will I brag about, besides your beautiful eyes?"
Nick watched him with slightly narrowed eyes, then nodded and stood up, holding Sher's hand in his fingers.
"When you're free, come to the cockpit," his fingers tightened slightly. "I'll be bored there alone."
A soft smile flickered across her lips in response, she watched the tall and thin figure of the navigator with her eyes and nodded to the smuggler.
"Let's go, Jethro," she paused for a moment. Not in the galley to examine. Not at Shai's. Not where Mr. Carvo was... "Well, let's go to my cabin, shall we... We don't have a medbay yet. And a doctor's cabin is almost always a workspace," she waved her hand and stood up.
"Can I see the cap before... Before you go out to have a blast?" she asked, letting Jethro into the cabin.
"Why does no one like simple pirates?" the Duros sighed. "He didn't say anything to me about it, ma'am... The leg doesn't hurt, and I'm just not used to everything healing so quickly."
"Sit down, Jethro, please, and free your leg. Okay, now stretch it out on the chair... Good..." Sher bent over the wound, examining it carefully. In fact, there was little left of the wound. Only traces of what she saw that day when Mr. Tardi sent her to his friend.
"I'm also not used to it, Jethro," she shook her head, straightening up, "that it's so fast. But it seems we'll have to get used to it..." the doc added thoughtfully. And sighed, looking at the Duros. "It's too early for you to be wandering around seedy places, Jethro, I'd keep you longer... But if it's not a dance marathon..." her smile was sad. "The leg will hold. Take care of your heads, please."
And as the Duros was about to leave, she added softly.
"Jethro, what does 'simple pirate' have to do with it? Or 'simple doctor'? There's no rank in love. You just have to meet it."
"I'll try to do that down there. Thank you, doc," the pilot winked at her and disappeared behind the door.
"Good luck, Jethro," Sher said in a trembling voice, although the Duros could no longer hear her. Something was there. Both in Nick's gaze and in her feelings, something that made it clear that they would need luck, she and the cap.