The freight lift descended for so long that Darren began to suspect Nar Shaddaa’s relationship with the concept of ground was purely theoretical.
One wall of the cabin was transparent.
Outside, the city continued downward through kilometers of metal, neon, and traffic.
Towers vanished into an industrial haze lit by advertisements.
Bridges, docks, and corridors tangled between them in ways no terrestrial map could have represented honestly.
Sira noticed him staring.
“First time in the lower levels?”
“First time on any level.”
“That explains a lot.”
“Thanks for the support.”
She opened the case and handed him the rented blaster.
Darren checked the safety and kept the muzzle toward the deck.
Sira watched his hand, then passed him two spare power cells.
“Did you test it?”
“Three shots. All low.”
“How low?”
“The floor was in considerable danger.”
Her expression did not improve.
“I’m pulling it down before the shot,” he said.
“I can feel it. I can’t stop doing it yet.”
“Then don’t try a shot over my shoulder.”
“I won’t.”
She passed him a belt holster for the rental.
He fitted it opposite his pistol, where drawing one would not foul the other.
Sira waited until he had secured it before turning back to the cargo.
She had not reassured him.
He was grateful she had not tried.
Voran stood at the front with Vesk, the Nikto on the team.
Vesk had rough reddish skin, dark eyes, and two small curved horns near the jawline.
Marel, the younger human, checked the seals on six containers divided between two cargo speeders.
The sixth member was Garr, a broad-shouldered gray-haired man with a bracelet of old scars around his left hand.
Marel looked up from the seals as Darren pocketed the spare cells.
The young man gave him a quick nod and went back to work.
Garr checked a securing strap that Marel had already checked; Marel pretended not to notice.
Darren counted the people next and found Sira watching him do it.
The lift stopped.
Hot air blew through the opening.
Beyond the lift, children ran between stacked crates while two security men collected a toll from a driver.
One child brushed past Garr’s holster without looking at it.
Garr lifted his elbow to let her through.
Voran spread a route display across the hood of the first speeder.
Sira put a finger on one junction.
“We can use 176 if this is blocked.”
“That adds twenty minutes.”
“It stays open.”
“We’ll look when we get there.”
Voran folded the display before she took her finger away.
Darren watched her withdraw her hand.
In the cantina, the route had been a question for downstairs.
Now they were downstairs, and he still had not heard an answer she accepted.
Voran drove the first transport with Vesk and Garr.
Sira took the controls of the second; Darren rode behind her, with Marel beside him.
The cargo traveled in six dark containers, three per vehicle.
None bore markings that explained the contents.
Darren pointed.
“What’s in there?”
Marel answered before Sira could.
“Stuff that pays us.”
“Finally, an honest man.”
For most of the first hour they moved with delivery traffic.
Sira called the turns before Voran took them, and Darren repeated the level numbers to himself.
He borrowed Marel’s marker and wrote the last two junctions on a scrap of packing card.
When Marel reached for it, Darren returned the marker.
“The card’s mine now.”
“Expensive souvenir.”
“Everything here is.”
Marel had worked for Voran for eight months.
He offered this as a qualification, then spoiled the effect by checking whether Sira had heard.
She kept her eyes on the traffic.
A message flashed on Marel’s small comm.
He read it, held his thumb over the reply, and put it away.
“Family?” Darren asked.
“My sister. Wants to know when I finish.”
“Do you?”
“When he pays.” Marel nodded toward the lead vehicle.
“She thinks I do warehouse security. My mother thinks customs. My father stopped asking.”
“So what do you actually tell them?” Darren asked.
“That I move freight.”
Sira made a small sound from the controls.
“That’s technically true,” Marel defended.
“You get shot moving freight,” she said.
“Not usually.”
Vesk’s voice came over the intercom from the lead vehicle.
“He means not every week.” Marel swore at him.
Garr laughed once, a low crackle through the channel, and even Voran told them to shut up with less anger than Darren expected.
Marel took out the comm again.
This time he answered.
Darren looked away before he could read the words.
For a few minutes, watching the windows and listening to someone complain about work felt familiar enough that he forgot how far he was from home.
Marel pointed at the pistol under Darren’s jacket.
“That thing really fires metal?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Darren considered the history of gunpowder, industrialization and several centuries of human enthusiasm for improving the speed at which small pieces of metal could ruin a day.
“Cultural tradition.”
Marel laughed.
Sira looked at Darren as though uncertain whether he was joking.
“How many shots?” Marel asked.
Darren’s hand went unconsciously toward the spare magazine, then stopped.
“Not enough.”
“Then why carry it?”
His fingers stopped against the edge of his jacket.
He remembered the weapon sliding across wet stone, and the effort it had taken to put it back in its holster.
Here it was still the right weight, still something his hand understood.
“Because sometimes familiar is worth weight,” he said.
Sira glanced back at him.
She did not ask for an explanation.
That restraint registered.
Marel, incapable of restraint, nodded toward Sira.
“She carries the same blaster every job.”
“Mine has parts available in this galaxy,” Sira said.
“Romantic,” Darren murmured.
“Practical.”
“Same thing after enough bad relationships.”
Marel laughed too loudly.
Even Sira’s mouth twitched.
Darren found himself wondering whether the younger man’s family would recognize that laugh over a bad connection, and stopped the thought before it reached Rivera.
The conversation thinned as they left the busier levels.
Marel checked the cargo behind him, then the road.
He had stopped filling every silence.
The street narrowed into an industrial corridor.
Loading doors lined the right wall; to the left, a raised service walk ran beneath a glass-fronted gallery.
Ahead, a maintenance truck and a luminous barrier squeezed traffic into a single gap.
A side lane opened on the right just before the barrier, marked by a dim EAST ACCESS sign.
Three men waited beside the truck.
Their work uniforms were clean.
No tools lay on the ground.
Sira eased off the speed.
“I don’t like it.”
Voran answered over the intercom.
“We have a schedule.”
“176. We can still turn back.”
“Keep coming.”
The lead speeder slowed near the gap.
Darren looked above the workers.
A reflection moved across the gallery glass, too high to belong to anyone in the street.
“High. Left.”
Sira ducked.
The first bolt struck the canopy above Darren; the next blew out a light beside Marel, scattering fragments across his lap.
Sira braked and pulled toward the right wall.
A third hit tore through the rear of their speeder.
The deck dropped hard enough to throw Darren against the side rail.
“Lift’s gone!” Sira shouted.
Darren dropped from the open side, fired once toward the upper window and saw the bolt strike below it.
He had expected the dip.
His hands had done it anyway.
A projecting metal panel shielded him from the gallery while he looked for somewhere better.
A bolt burned through it beside his face.
“Column!” Sira called.
He was already moving.
The structural support stood three steps farther along the right wall.
He hit it shoulder first, then looked back at the hole in the panel.
He had mistaken concealment for protection.
There would be no time to make that mistake twice.
Voran’s speeder had stopped ahead of them, short of the barrier.
Vesk lurched against its cab.
Garr caught his jacket before he fell.
“Vesk hit!” Marel shouted.
One of the false workers advanced along the raised walk on the left, coming around Sira’s field of fire.
Darren fired twice from the column.
Both bolts struck low; the man hesitated, then brought his weapon toward her.
Darren holstered the blaster and drew his pistol.
The shot cracked across the corridor.
The flanker’s leg gave way beneath the thigh plate, and he fell onto the walk with his weapon out of reach.
Darren held the sight on him, saw him clutch the wound, and stopped pressing the trigger.
Nineteen rounds.
Sira drove the gallery shooter back from the window.
Behind their disabled speeder, another vehicle emerged from a loading bay on the right.
It turned across the corridor, cutting off the way they had come.
Men clung to its open sides.
“Behind us,” Darren called.
“I see it.”
Voran reversed alongside the nose of Sira’s vehicle, angling his cab toward East Access.
For a moment Darren thought he would take the turn without them.
Instead, he stopped with the two cargo decks almost touching and shouted for Garr to take the forward crates.
Sira crouched behind the front drive housing, firing across the street.
Garr hauled the nearest container across.
Vesk dragged it onto the lead deck with his good arm; Marel unfastened the next and shoved it toward Garr.
They left it where it landed.
The third container was trapped beneath the buckled rear frame.
Marel turned to climb after the second crate.
A bolt hit his shoulder.
He fell behind the edge of the disabled speeder, out of Darren’s sight.
“Marel?”
No answer.
Darren leaned past the column.
He saw a boot below the passenger opening, then fingers dragging against the deck.
The hostile vehicle accelerated from behind them.
Garr pulled himself aboard the lead speeder.
“Leave the second!” Voran ordered.
“East Access. Move!”
“Marel’s alive.”
“Leave him!”
Darren looked from Marel’s hand to the space between the vehicles.
Six steps, perhaps seven.
The rear attacker was closing.
He could reach Marel; getting him back was the part he could not promise.
Sira came out from behind the nose, moving toward the fallen man.
“Cover the window,” Darren said.
“I’ll carry him.”
She looked at him once, then braced against the housing and fired upward.
Darren ran.
An armored man dropped from the pursuing vehicle onto the service walk, crossed behind the disabled speeder and disappeared below its cargo bed.
Darren saw the movement.
He shifted toward the front, trying to keep the vehicle between them, but Marel lay beyond the cover of the cab.
He reached the opening as the attacker came around the opposite edge.
A hand struck Darren’s pistol arm against the frame before he could bring the weapon level.
He turned with the grip, trying to pull the man past him.
The attacker caught the rail with his free hand and drove him back instead.
The pistol fell into the footwell.
Darren struck at the man’s face, caught the rim of a helmet, and took a fist across his own.
A knee drove into his abdomen.
He could see the short blade coming up but could not draw breath enough to wrench away.
Blue light struck the attacker’s flank.
A second bolt hit his shoulder.
The blade scraped the frame beside Darren’s head as the man recoiled, turning his armor toward Sira and retreating behind the cargo bed.
“Move!” she shouted.
Darren caught himself on the rail.
His pistol lay in the footwell.
He picked it up and holstered it, leaving both hands free for Marel.
The younger man’s eyes were open, fixed on the lead speeder.
“Voran said go.”
“I heard him.”
A bolt struck above them.
Darren folded over Marel as hot fragments scattered through the opening.
Something cut the back of his neck.
He got an arm under Marel’s uninjured side and pulled him clear.
“Can you stand?”
Marel tried.
His legs held, then buckled.
Darren took most of his weight, and the pain in his own abdomen nearly brought them both down.
“One step,” he said.
“Help me with one.”
Marel’s boot scraped forward.
They reached the nose of the ruined vehicle as Sira shifted beside them, keeping it between herself and the men approaching from the rear.
Garr stood on the lead speeder’s deck with something small in his hand.
“Pulse! Keep moving!”
He threw it back along the corridor, past the wreck.
Darren turned Marel’s face into his shoulder.
An electrical crack cut through the firing.
The pursuing speeder lost lift and slammed into the road behind them, throwing one of its riders against the rail.
Lights above it died.
The maintenance barrier ahead still glowed, but they were no longer going that way.
Sira fired into the sudden dark.
Darren could not see her target.
He could see the lead deck, and Vesk leaning over its edge with one arm extended.
“Almost there.”
Marel’s good hand gripped Darren’s jacket hard enough to pull the collar against his throat.
Darren lifted him toward Vesk.
Pain changed the Nikto’s face as he pulled; Garr caught Marel under the other arm, and together they dragged him between the recovered containers.
Darren got one foot onto the running board.
His abdomen cramped when he raised the other knee.
For a second he hung there, unable to finish the movement.
Garr caught the back of his belt and hauled.
Sira was still beside the wreck.
A man leaned around a pillar behind her, raising his weapon.
Darren drew the blaster and steadied his forearms against a crate.
He had a clear line beyond her left side.
Two bolts struck close enough to make the man withdraw; Darren could not tell whether either hit him.
“Clear!”
Sira ran for the lead speeder.
Voran began moving as she caught the frame.
Her boot slipped on the running board; Darren caught her upper arm and held until she found her footing.
She kept her weapon pointed back into the corridor.
They turned into East Access.
Darren’s last glimpse was of the abandoned container and someone climbing toward it.
Then the wall cut off the view.
They entered a lane crowded with civilian traffic.
A vendor dragged a shutter down as they passed.
Farther on, two armed dockworkers stood beside an engine block, watching the smoke behind them.
Voran forced the speeder into a gap between haulers and kept moving.
No one followed out of the corridor.
Darren could not tell whether traffic, witnesses or the crate had stopped the pursuit.
He was grateful for all three possibilities.
Marel lay against one of the recovered containers, trying to sit up.
Darren pushed him gently back and used a dressing from his medical kit against the shoulder.
The wrapper skittered across the deck and disappeared under Garr’s boot.
“Leave it,” Garr said, seeing Darren reach.
Darren hadn’t known he was doing that.
He kept his hand on the dressing instead.
Across from him, Vesk breathed through his mouth while Garr examined the burn along his ribs.
Sira crouched on the running board.
The outer plate of her forearm armor was scorched.
“You hit?” Darren asked.
“Armor took it.” She flexed her hand, watching the fingers before she looked at him.
“Your neck.”
He touched the cut and found blood.
She gave him a cloth.
When he tried to unfold it one-handed, the tremor in his fingers made the task absurdly difficult.
Sira took it back, opened it and returned it without a word.
Darren held pressure on Marel’s shoulder until the young man’s grip on his jacket eased.
The last time he had checked a man behind him, there had been no answer.
This time Marel looked up and asked whether he could stop pressing so hard.
“Not yet.”
Marel swore at him.
Darren let him.
Twenty minutes later, they reached the delivery bay.
Voran shut down the speeder and sat with both hands on the controls until a loader asked him to move.
Then he got out and came straight toward Darren.
Soot covered his face.
A clinic droid knelt beside Marel while Garr helped Vesk onto an equipment crate.
Darren stepped away only when the droid took over the dressing.
He still had blood on both hands.
“I ordered you to abandon him.”
“Marel was alive.”
“I know.”
“Then which part is confusing?”
Voran stepped closer.
“The part where you think you get to make decisions for my team on your first job.”
Darren kept his voice low.
“I could reach him.”
“And who was going to come for you?”
Darren glanced at Sira’s burned forearm plate.
She was loosening its catches, her jaw set.
He had needed her before he even reached Marel.
“I needed cover. She gave it.”
Sira stepped between them before the conversation deteriorated further.
“Five crates delivered. One stayed with the second speeder.”
Voran closed his eyes, then looked toward the loader counting the delivery.
Five crates.
A missing vehicle.
A man asking for his signature.
“Wait,” he told the loader.
Darren folded the bloodstained cloth against his neck.
His hand was steadier now.
Marel swore as the droid moved an instrument inside his torn sleeve.
“You could have lost everyone on that deck,” Voran said.
“And you had time for two crates.”
“The space between us was clear then.”
It had been.
The hostile vehicle had blocked the street, but its men had not yet reached their wreck.
Darren could disagree with the order without pretending the seconds had cost nothing.
“You wanted us through that barrier,” Darren said.
“She gave you another route.”
Voran’s face hardened.
“You saw it before it happened?”
“No.”
“Neither did I.”
“Sira saw enough to ask.”
“Don’t argue for me,” she said.
Both men looked at her.
“I told you I wanted 176,” she said to Voran.
“You said no. Next time I say the road’s wrong, stop long enough to listen.”
The loader shifted beside them.
Voran looked at the waiting datapad, then back at her.
“Next time, call it before I’m at the turn.”
“I did.”
He had no answer ready.
She set the damaged armor plate on a crate.
Marel opened one eye.
“He saved me.”
Voran looked at him.
“I noticed.”
“So maybe yell quieter.”
“You’re drugged.”
“Best I’ve felt all day.”
Sira turned away, but Darren caught the smile.
Voran waited for Vesk to stop smiling.
The Nikto didn’t, though he winced when Garr tightened the dressing.
Darren kept his attention on the employer.
He had survived the job; he still needed to be paid for it.
Voran rubbed both hands over his face.
“If you’re going back, tell me what you need. Don’t just leave me counting people who aren’t aboard.”
“You told me to leave him.”
“And you didn’t.” Voran held his gaze.
“Now I know. Next time I need to know where you’re going.”
Darren could have kept arguing.
Marel was alive, but Sira had a burned plate and Garr had hauled him aboard like another damaged crate.
He could not claim the rescue had belonged to him alone.
“I’ll call it,” he said.
“Next time.”
Sira heard the word and looked at him.
Neither of them pointed out that Darren had known this group for one shift and had already started speaking as though there might be another.
Voran paid.
One hundred and fifty credits gross.
Forty for the blaster rental.
Darren kept one hundred and ten.
Added to the twenty he already had: one hundred and thirty.
He handed back the blaster, its borrowed holster and the two unused spare cells.
“Five shots in combat. Three in the test room.”
“You rented the weapon,” Voran said.
“Forty.”
Darren looked at the blaster lying in its case.
Forty credits to discover how much practice he needed.
He closed the case and took his money.
Marel called him over before he left.
The droid had sealed the dressing, and he was trying to work his comm with one hand.
“My sister’s asking again,” he said.
“What are you telling her?”
“That I’m late.” He looked at Darren.
“She’ll hear the rest when she sees me.”
Darren waited while he sent it.
Marel put the comm away and pulled a small electronic card from his jacket.
He held it out without trying to use the injured arm.
“Pell Varo.”
“Who?”
“Makes people exist.”
Darren looked at his own body, then at the card.
“That obvious?”
“You’re new here. Everybody needs her sooner or later.”
Darren took the card.
“Tell her I sent you. Maybe she’ll only rob you a little.”
“Comforting.”
Sira passed behind them.
“Deckard.”
Darren turned.
“Yeah?”
She pointed at the Earth pistol.
“Stop using that unless you have to.”
“Because of the noise?”
“Because of questions.”
Darren pulled his jacket over the holster.
The sentence stayed with him as he crossed the corridors of Nar Shaddaa.
The false barrier, the flanker and the second vehicle had been waiting.
Someone might have known the route.
He did not yet know who, or how.
He put Marel’s card in the pocket with his credits.
He had come down in the lift as a name borrowed from a film.
Now someone could describe his face, the man he had carried out, and the sound of his gun.
He needed Pell Varo before those details became more useful to someone else than they were to him.
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Thanks for reading — and for supporting Darren’s increasingly questionable life choices.