Delusions of Grandeur

6

Zekk brought the Lightning Rod down through the atmosphere, confident that no one would disturb him … at least not here. This planet was the farthest place from anywhere he could possibly find.

The charts called the bleak world Ziost. Glaciers covered much of what had once been a towering outpost of the fallen Sith Empire, so that only a few broken turrets still protruded from the landscape of ice. Frozen tundra crackled blue under the shimmering auroras dancing above in the sky.

Ziost was too inhospitable to harbor any sort of colony and the Sith ruins too decayed to shelter pirates or other refugees who might seek to hide from the scrutiny of authorities.

It was, however, a good place for Zekk to do his work, undisturbed and alone. Without risk of detection.

The disguised man on Borgo Prime—whom Zekk was certain must be Bornan Thul himself— had commissioned him to transmit a coded message to the Bornaryn merchant fleet. In the wake of Thul’s disappearance and the kidnapping of his brother Tyko, the fleet had gone into hiding and now hopped at random through hyperspace to keep from being found.

Zekk had to communicate with them somehow. His bounty depended on it. “Master Wary” had offered suggestions, places from which he might attempt to send his message—and Zekk intended to try them all. He would not give up easily.

The Lightning Rod headed toward a broad shelf of ice under a twilit sky. Fissures ran across the frozen plain, and slushy water burst through the cracks, propelled by tidal pressure. Trusting his instincts, Zekk found a safe place to land and shut down all systems: he would leave no bright sensor traces for spying eyes, however unlikely their presence might be.

Working in silence, he rigged up his transmitter, fed in power from the engines to give his signal a spectacular boost—and began sending Bornan Thul’s message.

Zekk wasn’t sure what the coded burst said, but now he could hazard a guess: Thul would most likely explain his disappearance, announce that he was still alive, or perhaps estimate when he expected to come home.

He first sent the signal to the Bornaryn headquarters on Coruscant, on the chance that Aryn Dro Thul might check in for urgent news. It only made sense that she would have made arrangements to learn if her missing husband reappeared.

Zekk didn’t know why the man was so desperately hiding, but Thul was obviously frightened. He did understand why Thul might go to Shanko’s Hive in disguise to hire a bounty hunter—a little known bounty hunter like Zekk. Since Thul had such a high price on his own head, he would be foolish to send the message himself. Any glory-seeking bounty hunter might spot the signal and race to its source fast enough to capture him.

Being a bounty hunter himself, Zekk was paid to assume such risks. Even so, he did not intend to be easy prey for his competitors.

Everyone in the galaxy seemed to be looking for Bornan Thul—including Zekk … until he had unwittingly been hired by the very quarry he sought. On the other hand, Thul had already set up another meeting with him, so perhaps when the time came, Zekk could capture the wanted man after all and take the whole bounty. Then he would prove himself a bounty hunter to be reckoned with.

The ethical question was a hindrance, of course.

Next he sent a duplicate message to other places where “Master Wary” thought the merchant fleet might pick up transmissions. Zekk couldn’t be certain exactly how Thul’s scheme worked, but the merchant might well have made plans for such a contingency. Their business had boomed, and successful traders always lived with the threat of being held for ransom.

Leaning back in his creaking cockpit seat, Zekk transmitted the message to a fourth and final set of coordinates. He had fulfilled his obligation, everything “Master Wary” had asked him to do. Time to go-As he reached forward to power up the Lightning Rod, he felt suddenly uneasy in the cockpit. Were his rarely used Jedi senses sending him a warning? Or was his imagination just running away with him?

He decided to leave Ziost as quickly as the battered old ship could carry him. Repulsorlifts blasted, melting a crater into the plain of ice. Zekk let the ship hover as he contemplated his course. Next, he would begin his search for the abducted brother, Tyko Thul.

The ship’s rear sensors sounded an alarm. Zekk’s hand flew over the control panels and spotted another ship fast approaching—a souped-up hunting craft made from new and old components pieced together.

The intruder soared out of hyperspace without slowing, barreling directly toward the Lightning Rod. A warning tingle along Zekk’s spine supplemented the flashing red lights on the control panels. The newcomer had already powered up his weapons systems—and Zekk was in his sights.

A gruff, phlegmy voice came over the comm system. “I have my targeting computer locked in on you, Bornan Thul. Surrender—or I’ll simply destroy your ship and take your remains for the bounty.”

The Lightning Rod protested as Zekk flew a rapid evasive maneuver. He shouted into the voice transmitter. “Wait, who is this? I’m not Thul, I’m a bounty hunter, just like you are! My name is Zekk!”

After a pause, the bounty hunter’s voice came over the speakers again. “Never heard of you, Zekk … but you’ve no doubt heard of me. I am Dengar. Now surrender your ship. I must interrogate you regarding Bornan Thul.”

Zekk streaked across the glacial plain, pushing the Lightning Rod’s engines to greater speed. He certainly knew of Dengar, one of the most fearsome hunters in the galaxy.

Shadowy circles surrounded deep-set eyes on Dengar’s pasty face, giving him a skull-like visage. His head was wrapped in bandages to cover the scars and perpetually seeping wounds from a hideous injury long ago. Once a crack flier in a swoop gang, he had suffered a severe accident caused by a young Han Solo, and later his brain had been cybernetically enhanced by the Empire. Dengar was also one of the elite hunters Darth Vader had hired to track down the Millennium Falcon after the battle of Hoth.

This was indeed a man Zekk did not want to cross—but neither did he want to surrender for a long and intense conversation with the bounty hunter.

“I can’t tell you anything about Bornan Thul,” Zekk said, still flying at breakneck speed. “By the Creed you can’t fire on another bounty hunter unless I am obstructing your own target.”

Dengar replied, “I interpret your resistance as such an obstruction. You transmitted a coded communication for the Bornaryn fleet through relays to known rendezvous points. I planted numerous drone buoys to intercept any suspicious signals, then waited. You triggered my alarms; therefore, I intend to seize your data banks and study them for myself.”

Any other person might have laughed, but Dengar simply let the pregnant silence extend for several seconds. At last he said, “I will have that information, whether you give it willingly—or force me to rip it from you.”

Without waiting for a reply, the veteran bounty hunter fired a pulsed ion cannon, a disrupter that was as high-powered as it was illegal to own. Zekk had not imagined the device could be made with such devastating output.

The ion blast brought down all of Zekk’s shields. Luckily, the Lightning Rod’s life-support and engine systems ran off of a separate protected power array and survived. The Lightning Rod was now defenseless, however. One more shot would cripple it completely.

Zekk swerved upward from the base of a sheer cliff of ice that bristled with rock outcroppings. Dengar’s ship howled close behind, demonstrating the bounty hunter’s cybernetic reflexes. Zekk leveled off at the top of another frozen plateau and streaked along, low to the ground.

Dengar launched a small concussion grenade, and Zekk braced himself for impact, knowing his disabled shields could offer no protection against the explosive. The detonation would destroy his rear engines and send him to crash and burn on this abandoned ice-age world.

The grenade struck his starboard hull … but no explosion followed. He heard only a dull metallic thud, as if a hammer had smacked his cruiser. He breathed a huge sigh of relief at this incredible stroke of luck—Dengar had fired a dud!

Master Skywalker at the Jedi academy had said there was no such thing as luck or coincidence. There was only the Force, which moved in mysterious ways … and Zekk wondered if he could subconsciously have used a trace of Jedi powers to deactivate the explosive.

Before the bandaged bounty hunter could launch another attack, though, Zekk gritted his teeth and threw every possible ounce of his piloting skills into getting away. Right then.

Dengar fired laser cannons, but Zekk intuitively knew what to do, knew how to react. He jinked the Lightning Rod to the left, then curved up in a loop, elbowing back to the right, zooming in a serpentine maneuver that neatly avoided the bounty hunter’s pattern of strikes.

Zekk felt the fluid instincts move through him, like a Jedi Knight using his lightsaber to deflect blaster bolts. The entire ship seemed a part of Zekk. He dodged and hopped, ducked and swerved, perfectly avoiding the rapid-fire attack. Like a Jedi. It simultaneously frightened and exhilarated him.

“You may not have heard of me, Dengar,” Zekk said, “but you will. One of these days, I’ll rival even Boba Fett.”

In an uncharacteristic display of emotion, Dengar roared at him over the comm systems.

The ice-bound plain swept beneath him, reflecting the booms from his high-powered engines. Zekk got an inspiration—a desperate idea that just might allow him to escape….

He powered up his forward laser cannons and deployed them in a wide arc, firing low and directly ahead. Using all of his weapons without slowing for an instant, Zekk strafed the frozen glacier field.

His superhot lasers bombarded the snow and ice, slicing open a molten wound as he flew onward. The meltwater flashed into steam that billowed up in huge evaporating clouds and froze again into icy mist crystals. Fog swelled to fill the air behind him like an ever-expanding smoke screen. The cloud slammed into Dengar’s ship, blinding him.

Zekk pulled the Lightning Rod up, rocketing straight toward the edge of the atmosphere. Below, he left the befuddled bounty hunter’s ship enveloped in condensing steam.

Knowing he had only a few seconds, he let the Force flow through him and punched numbers at random into the navicomputer. He’d have to trust in his inordinate “luck” to select a course by chance that wouldn’t take him through the core of a star or down the gullet of a black hole.

As soon as he escaped the gravitational pull of the planet, the starlines of night elongated to welcome the Lightning Rod as it shot forward. The entire planet of Ziost shrank to a tiny pinprick behind him as the nothingness of hyperspace swallowed him up.

Dengar would never know what had hit him or where Zekk had gone.