Children of the Jedi: Star Wars Legends (Star Wars - Legends) by Barbara Hambly

Author:Barbara Hambly [Hambly, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780307796332
Publisher: Random House Worlds
Published: 2011-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

In the throbbing indigo darkness, Framjem Spathen rolled back his head so that the long electric ropes of his glowing hair brushed the floor, raised arms glistening with cutaneous diamonds to flash in the bloody light, and screamed. The scream seemed to lift him onto his toes, rippling through that hard-muscled body in wave after wave of sound and pain and ecstasy as he rolled his head, heaved his hips, stretched his fingers to the utmost …

“Were those muscles all really his?” wondered Bran Kemple, drawing on a hookah that smelled like old laundry steeped in alcohol and regarding the holo—an extremely old one, Han had seen it in dozens of cheap clubs from here to Stars’ End—with half-shut eyes.

“Sure they were,” said Han. “He paid about two hundred credits per ounce for ’em, plus installation, but after that they were his, all right.”

The dancers on either side of Framjen’s holo were real; a boneless Twi’lek boy and a massively breasted Gamorrean female, undulating under the red glare of lights for the edification of half a dozen seedy customers. It would have been hard to picture anything less conducive to lust, Jungle or otherwise. The day-shift hustlers of various races and sexes were working the floor hard, chatting up the patrons and drinking glass after glass of watered liquor at prices that should have brought 100 percent Breath of Heaven. Even they looked tired.

Han supposed that having to listen to a fifteen-year-old Framjen Spathen holo for eight hours would tire anyone.

Bran Kemple sighed heavily. “Nubblyk the Slyte. Now there was a hustler who could run things. Things was all different in his day.”

Han sipped his drink. Even the beer was watered. “Pretty lively, hunh?”

“Lively? Pheew!” Kemple made a kiss-your-hand motion toward the ceiling, presumably a signal to the Slyte’s departed spirit. “Wasn’t even the word. Half a dozen flights in a week that never made it on the port manifests, people appearin’ and disappearin’ through the tunnels out under the ice … Decent drinks and decent girls. Hey, Sadie!” he yelled, gesturing to the one-eyed Abyssin barkeep. “Get my friend here a decent drink, fer pity’s sakes! Festerin’ barkeep can’t tell the festerin’ difference between a mark and somebody in the trade, fester it.”

He shook his head again, and mopped at his broad, pale-green brow with a square of soiled linen he’d dragged from the depths of his yellow polyfibe suit. His curly brown hair was surrendering to its destiny, and he’d picked up a couple of extra chins in the years since Han had last seen him as a two-bit gunrunner in the Juvex Systems.

“So what happened?”

“What happened?” Kemple blinked at him through the gloom. “Place got cleaned out. He’d been strippin’ old machinery, droids and computers and lab stuff, down under the ruins. Some kind of old laboratories, they musta been, and there were rooms full of ’em, Nubblyk said. I will say for Nubblyk …”

The Abyssin brought Han a drink that would have flattened a rancor,

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