Crosscurrent

CHAPTER FIVE

Khedryn used a digital calibrator to fine-tune another power exchange relay in Junker's propulsion systems. He'd been optimizing his freighter's ion engines for hours. Like all good salvage jockeys, he was as much tinkerer as pilot, and he refused to let a maintenance droid touch his ship.

"Has to be it," he muttered, tweaking a manifold on the exchange.

He pulled a portascan from his belt, attached it, and checked the relay's theoretical efficiency. The readout showed 109 percent of manufacturer's spec, drawing a smile.

He intoned his personal motto as if it were a magic spell. "Push until it gives."

He pulled his communicator from his belt, smug even in his solitude, and flicked it open.

"Marr, efficiency on number three power exchange is one hundred nine percent. Let that settle in, my Cerean friend. Just bask in it."

His navigator and first mate's calm voice answered. "Basking, as ordered."

Khedryn grinned. "Didn't I say I would get it there?"

"You did. I believe that means I owe you a distilled spirit of your choice."

Khedryn nodded. "I believe it does, at that. Unfortunate that this rock doesn't have much of that in the way of quality. Pulkay it is, then."

"Are you still at the hangar?"

"Of course. Where are you?"

"I'm in The Hole. There is an empty chair at the private sabacc table."

Khedryn checked his wrist chrono. He was already late. "Stang!"

"Indeed," said Marr, calm to the point of annoyance. "I will simply continue to bask."

Khedryn slammed the relay cover closed and sprinted from the open-top hangar, shedding his tool belt as he ran.

"Pick that up," he called to a nearby maintenance droid.

"Yes, sir," said the droid.

"And don't touch my ship!"

"Yes, sir."

"I'm coming now," he said into his communicator. "Tell Himher to hold the first hand."

Marr's voice remained unperturbed.

"I will see what I can do to delay the start of the game. Reegas is here. And there appears to be some interest in our recent… discovery."

That halted Khedryn before his Searing swoop bike. He squinted in Fhost's sun. "The signal, you mean? How did that leak to anyone?"

"If memory serves, and I am certain it does, the leak originated in your consumption of several jiggers of spiced pulkay combined with a desire to impress a trio of Zeltron dancing girls. I believe it worked."

Khedryn ran a hand over his cheeks, rough with three days' growth of whiskers. "Three? Zeltrons? Really?" He thought of their smooth red skin and curves, his own average appearance. "Were they drunk, too?"

"That seems probable."

Khedryn saddled up on his swoop and started it. The engine growled like a feral rancor. He had forgotten his helmet. No matter. "You still basking?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, I should've had my mouth occupied with things other than our discovery, but I guess that's burned fuel I'll never get back. On the upside, it should make the sabacc game more interesting. Someone will offer on it, if it comes to that."

"Given your luck, I suspect it will come to that."

"Right." He revved the Searing. "You're really quite excellent for my ego. Are you aware of that?"

"I am."

"I'm en route."

"Please try not to collide with anything."

Khedryn pocketed the communicator and covered his mouth and nose in a scarf against the dust. He angled upward to fifty meters of altitude and loosened the reins on the engine. Below him, ships of questionable space-worthiness and even more questionable registration dotted the thirty square kilos of flat, dusty ground and the handful of decrepit hangars that served as Farpoint's official landing field.

A control tower built of cast-off parts and scrap metal stood sentry in the middle of the field. Landing beacons blinked here and there in the swirl. A sonic boom rolled over Khedryn's ears, indicating a ship entering atmosphere.

A few speeder bikes and another swoop darted through the sky over the field at lower altitudes than Khedryn. Treaded cargo droids unloaded goods from an old freighter, and crews in dungarees worked at their ships' engines and landing gear. Other than Junker, not a single vessel on the field was less than two decades old. Expensive technology trickled out to the fringe of the galaxy only after it had been replaced by something newer and became affordable on the secondary market.

Once clear of the field, Khedryn ducked low behind the swoop's windscreen and gave the Searing its head. He squinted into the spray of dust and wind and sped for Farpoint, glinting ten kilos in the distance, and looking not so much like a town as a junkyard.

The rusting, broken remains of a decades-old star cruiser formed the core of the town. The cruiser had crashed on Fhost sometime before the Yuuzhan Vong War, and no one knew what had happened to the crew. No one even knew the make of the ship, not anymore, though it must have been big. The wreckage had created a debris field eight kilometers long.

Khedryn thought it likely that it had been a wayward Chiss ship, but if so, the Chiss had never come back to recover it. Over time the rusting hulk had accreted a community of scoundrels around it, almost as though it had its own gravity that pulled only at criminals and rogues, or just those for whom the Galactic Core meant not luxury but overcrowded cities and too many laws.

Over the decades, Farpointers had torn apart, added to, and remade the ruins of the cruiser so many times over that only the more or less intact bridge section remained recognizable as something that had once flown-though now it was a warren of cantinas, brothels, and drug dens, not a command center for a starship. Of course, the vice dens of the one-time bridge were the command center of Farpoint, and that was about all that needed to be said.

Viewing the rickety, slipshod sprawl of Farpoint from altitude always reminded Khedryn of the first time he had seen it. He'd been a deckhand on a cargo freighter running medicines into the Unknown Regions, and Farpoint had reminded him so much of the ruins of Outbound Flight in the Redoubt that he had been unable to breathe. In that moment, he knew he'd found a home.

Only a few clear memories of his time in the Redoubt remained to him. He had drunk most of them away in the years after his rescue. But he did remember the way the planetoid had looked as he'd been shuttled away on the transport, the rusted, ruined remains of Outbound Flight as stark against the stone as exposed bone. He remembered the anger the survivors had harbored against the New Republic and the Jedi. He had not shared it, despite the stories of C'baoth's betrayal.

He'd soon grown up, put life on the Redoubt behind him, and ridden ships from the Empire of the Hand to the Galactic Core. He had resided for a time on Coruscant and Corellia, but he had called only the Redoubt and Farpoint home, the first out of necessity, the second out of grudging affection. Everywhere else he'd been, hundreds of planets in scores of systems, had been nothing but way stops.

Rats always find a hole, he figured. And Farpoint, it turned out, was his hole.

Above him, the setting sun turned the ambient mineral dust in Fhost's atmosphere into bands of orange, yellow, and red that bisected the sky, a rainbow that wrapped around the world. Khedryn wondered how long it would be before the planet's natural beauty-not only the sunsets, but also the gashed canyons and sheer cliffs that bordered the Great Desert-turned it from a backrocket launching point to the Unknown Regions and into a tourist destination. He tried to imagine tourists and respectable citizens of the Galactic Alliance mingling with the rogues and scoundrels who skulked in Farpoint's ruins. The thought made him laugh out loud.

He decreased altitude and speed-the roar of the swoop growing throatier-as he hit the outskirts of the town. Ramshackle buildings made from cast-off materials leaned like drunks against the more sturdy structures built from the crashed starship's bones. The large reptiles native to the planet's deserts-ankaraxes-pulled carts and wagons through the packed dirt streets, snarling in their harnesses, side by side with ancient landspeeders and even a few wheeled vehicles.

Khedryn weaved his way through the street traffic-leaving a trail of curses in various languages in his wake-until he reached The Black Hole, his cantina of choice.

Corrugated shipping containers, welded together like a child's building toy, made up the bulk of The Hole. Smoke, discordant Yerk music, laughter, and conversation leaked out of the rough-cut holes that served as windows. He spotted Marr's parked speeder bike, put the Searing beside it, powered it down, activated its antitheft security, and hopped off onto the packed-dirt road, avoiding the inevitable mines of ankarax dung.

A trio of Zabrak lingered on the street outside The Hole, the horns jutting from their heads as irregular in size and formation as Farpoint's buildings. They chatted in their rapid, coarse language, each with a tin cup of pulkay from The Hole's stills in their hand. Khedryn knew them by appearance but not name. He nodded and they returned the gesture.

A hulking Houk sat on a crate outside The Hole's door. A light blaster cannon that looked old enough to have served in the Yuuzhan Vong War-normally a crew-served weapon-hung across his scarred chest, suspended by a strap of ankarax leather.

"Khedryn Faal," the Houk said in Basic, his voice as deep as a canyon, and pulled open the metal slab that served as a door.

"Borgaz," Khedryn returned. He stopped before the door, noticing the new words painted over old ones in an uncertain hand: