Star Wars - Side Trip - Part 1 by Timothy Zahn

Author:Timothy Zahn [Zahn, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 1997-02-28T06:45:05+00:00

The elder Horn shook his head. “ ‘Risky’ still doesn’t begin to cover it. For starters, we don’t even know what game Brown Jacket and his Mandalorian friend are playing.”

“Then it’s time we found out,” Corran said. “Let’s stay close and see if we can find an opportunity to introduce ourselves.”

They had gone perhaps two blocks—though where Kast was leading them Trell hadn’t the faintest idea—when they heard the shout.

“What was that?” Riij demanded, looking around.

“There,” Palror rumbled, pointing his thick central finger to the left. “Argument starting.”

Trell craned his neck. There was an open-air tapcafe that direction, with a long serving bar at the rear and perhaps twenty small tables spread out in the open space in front of it beneath a wide, Karvrish-style woven-leaf canopy. A slightly built man wearing a proprietor’s apron was standing in the middle of the dining area, a half dozen large and rough-looking men wearing mercenary shoulder patches looming in a threatening circle around him. The chairs from a nearby table were scattered back or lying on the ground, indicating a quick and unruly departure from them. “I think the argument’s over,” he said. “It’s gone straight to trouble now.”

“Come on,” Riij said, angling that direction. “Let’s check it out.”

“Leave it alone,” Kast ordered. “It’s none of our business.”

But Riij and Palror were already heading off through the crowd. “Blast,” Trell growled. Stupid idealistic gornt-brained Rebels—“Come on, Maranne.”

A line of onlookers had started to form at the edge of the tapcafe by the time he and Maranne broke through the stream of pedestrians. Riij and Palror were already to the mercenaries, who had opened their circle around the tapcafe proprietor in order to face this new distraction.

And now Trell could see something he hadn’t been able to before. Standing beside the proprietor, clinging tightly to his waist in terror, was a young girl. Probably his daughter; certainly no more than seven years old.

Trell hissed a curse between his teeth. It took a particularly vile form of low-life to threaten a child. But that didn’t mean he was going to follow Riij’s lead and charge in blindly like a mad Jedi Knight on Cracian thumper-back. “Backup left,” he murmured to Maranne. “I’ll take right.”

“Right,” she murmured back. Dropping his hand casually onto the grip of his blaster, Trell started drifting behind the ring of onlookers to the right—

And with a suddenness that startled him, the fight started.

Not with blasters, which had been his main fear, but with hands and feet as the two closest mercenaries lashed out at Riij and Palror. With three-to-one odds on their side, the mercs must have felt weapons to be unnecessary.

They got a shock. Riij had clearly had some good training in unarmed combat, and Palror was a lot faster than Trell would have guessed from the alien’s bulk. Riij’s counterattack sent his opponent reeling back; Palror’s threw his merc slamming back with a horrendous crash into one of the other tables, sending it spinning and scattering its chairs across the floor.

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