Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(3)
Eventually, Mercurial knows that someone will try to own him, too. But he has no intention of being a kept boy.
The bounty hunter stands and emerges from the bent, dented hull of an old freighter—one that must’ve crashed on the habitation roof eons ago and is now just a sculpture of rusted beams. Swift pulls his batons and moves fast: He runs and leaps off the lip of the building, giving his jetpack two quick pulses. The crackle of energy fills the air behind him, propelling him forward as the foundry roof comes up fast. Swift tucks and rolls, and when he returns to his feet, he spins his batons and runs straight to the ramshackle lean-to where Vazeen has been hiding.
She steps out. She sees him. He sees that she sees him, and yet his target stands there, unmoving. At first Swift thinks, The girl knows the game is over, but that doesn’t track. This is a girl on the run. This is her planet. She should spook. She should run. Everyone runs.
And yet she remains, staring right at him.
The realization sticks Mercurial like a knife:
She’s not running. Because she’s bait.
Damnit!
He drops down again into a roll just as the stun blast fills the air above his head in a warbling scream. Swift leaps to his feet and expects to see someone he knows coming for him: an old enemy, a betrayed friend, an ex-girlfriend with a broken heart and a blaster rifle. But instead, he sees some other woman coming for him. Older. Silver hair moved by the wind. Whoever she is, she looks familiar to him, but he doesn’t have time to sort through all the faces he’s met, because she’s got a pistol pointed right at him and another stun bolt comes—
But he’s fast: a coiled spring, suddenly unsprung. He deftly pivots on the ball of his right foot, and as he spins around he has one of his batons up and flung—it leaves his fingers and whistles through open air.
Clack! His baton clips the front of her blaster. She cries out as the gun tumbles away, clattering onto the rooftop. The woman shakes her hand—the vibration surely stung her mitt, and now she’s trying to soothe it—but still she keeps on coming, her face a grim rictus of determination.
Good for her. But she’s still not going to get him.
He flexes his hand, fingers pressing into the button in the center of his palm. The extensor pads at the tips of his fingers suddenly buzz, and his one flung baton jumps up off the ground—
And surfs the air currents back into his grip.
The older woman skids to a halt, throwing a punch as she does—it’s a good punch, solid, but the bounty hunter knows it’s coming because her body language telegraphs the attack. Mercurial sidesteps, her fist catching open air, and it gives him an opportunity to jab his baton up under her arm. Electricity courses through her. Her teeth clamp together and her eyes open wide as every centimeter of her seizes up. When she drops, he hears the scuff of a boot behind him, and he thinks: I’m too damn distracted. This job made him too comfortable, too complacent, and now someone’s hammering a fist into his kidneys, dropping him down to one knee.
He cries out and goes low with the next attack—his baton whips around, catching the second attacker behind the knee. His foe, a tall man with a hawk’s-beak nose and dark eyes, curses and drops hard on his tailbone. He recognizes this one, doesn’t he? Imperial. No. Ex-Imperial. Working for the New Republic now—now he wonders, Is this about the Perwin Gedde job? It’s coming back to him now. He stole their target right out from under them. What do they want? Credits? Revenge? Is he on their list?
Doesn’t matter. I have no time for whatever this is. The girl isn’t worth it. The payout is garbage. It’s time to go. The fallen vent stack tower is his escape route, so he leaps to his feet and bolts fast across the rooftop. Another stun blast warps the air around him (the older woman reclaimed her weapon), but he leaps and slides onto the crumpled tower now serving as a bridge. He rights himself and runs, feet banging on the metal. The vented durasteel provides texture that helps him keep his footing, and he charges down the bridge and toward a break in the factory wall next door. Nobody follows. His assailants are slow, too slow. Because, he reminds himself, nobody is as fast as me. Mercurial Swift, triumphant again.
He leaps across the gap—
And an arm extends across the open space and slams hard across his trachea. His heels skid out and Mercurial drops onto his back, the air blasting out of his chest as his lungs collapse like clapped hands.
“Hi,” says a voice. Another woman. This voice, he knows.
A fellow hunter, a bounty killer and skip-tracer like him: the Zabrak, Jas Emari. She steps over him, and as his eyes adjust he sees her juggling a toothpick on her tongue and between her teeth. She cocks her head, a flip of hair going from one side of her spike-laden scalp to the other.
“Emari,” he wheezes, air finally returning to his reinflating lungs.
He wastes no time. He brings one of his batons up fast—
But she is faster. A small blaster in her hand screams.
And all goes dark.
—
It has taken them months to capture Swift.
Months to set up a false sting—months to steal ID cards from the Gindar Gang, to pin it on a young woman (who blessedly was happy to do her part in seeing the Empire take its licks), to falsify a bounty on behalf of the Gindars (one they had no choice but to pretend they initiated when hunters came knocking at their door to accept the bounty). They had to make it look good, make it look tantalizing to a bounty hunter like Swift—but not too tantalizing, because Jas assured them that when a job looked too good, too easy, it set one’s teeth on edge. Nobody wanted to spook him, so it had to be done gently, slowly, with great caution and care. And all the while, Norra’s guts twisted in her belly like a breeding knot of Akivan vipers, the nasty thought haunting her head again and again: While we waste time, Rae Sloane drifts farther and farther away. And so did their chance at justice.