Alliances (Star Wars: Thrawn, #2)(25)

She took a deep breath. Okay. Duja wasn’t answering, but that didn’t necessarily mean something terrible had happened. Odds were she was simply away from her ship, with her comm turned off for a perfectly good reason. The outpost Duja had specified—Black Spire—wasn’t all that big. It shouldn’t take more than an hour or two for Padmé to have a look around.

The landing field was small, not all that surprising given the size of the outpost itself. But there were only a pair of midsized freighters parked near the middle, leaving plenty of room for her to put down. She did so, picking a spot as far from the other ships as she reasonably could, and shut everything down to standby. Putting on a light-green jacket with a subtle brown brocade running from left shoulder to right waist—the outside sensors said it was a bit nippy out there—and tucking her blaster out of sight beneath it, she cycled the hatch and stepped out.

She had finished getting her BARC speeder bike out of the aft hull storage locker when she heard a voice call to her in an unknown language.

She turned. A lumpy nonhuman of a species she didn’t recognize was crouching at the bottom of the nearest freighter’s landing ramp. “Excuse me?” she called back.

“He was complimenting you on your magnificent ship,” a human called from the top of the ramp. “Excuse us, but your Basic is nor my language.”

“That’s all right,” Padmé called back, suppressing a knowing smile. Liar. He was trying hard—a little too hard, actually—to pretend he was struggling with a second language. But the Basic words and syntax were coming just a little too easily and smoothly.

“What are?” the man asked. “I mean, what species?”

“Species?” Padmé asked. “Oh—you mean the model. It’s an H-type Nubian yacht. Tell me, do you know someone named Kuseph Jovi?”

“I know nothing of that name,” the man said. “Are you here to meet her?”

A quiet warning bell went off in the back of Padmé’s mind. Why would he assume that the name she’d rattled off was that of a woman?

Unless there was already an unknown woman in Black Spire who’d caught their attention.

“To meet him,” she corrected. “I’m here to deliver his new ship.”

“Really,” the man said, eyeing the ship as he walked down the ramp. There was a lump at his side that probably indicated a hidden blaster. “Nice. What did he pay for it?”

“No idea,” Padmé said. “I’m just a courier. Any idea who might know where I can find him? The ship that’s picking me up could be here anytime, and I want to finish the transaction so I can go home.”

“There’s a cantina in the middle of town,” the man said, pointing down a ragged-edged corridor that had been cut through the trees and undergrowth toward the outpost itself. “If he’s here, someone there will know him.”

“Thank you,” Padmé said. Climbing onto her speeder bike, she turned toward the corridor and headed in.

She could feel the man’s eyes on her as she left the field.

She’d expected Black Spire to be like all the rest of the tiny frontier outposts she’d seen in her travels: carved out of the wilderness, with houses and shops laid out in a more or less orderly fashion along the major streets—though the term major was usually granting them more status than they deserved—and other buildings arranged haphazardly wherever their builders had felt like putting them.

But this town had a twist. There were ruins here, ancient ruins of some long-gone civilization, bordering the colonists’ town. A few of the buildings were completely or partially within shells of the older structures, while one or two others nestled against them as if for warmth or protection.

Even more intriguing, the black towers she’d seen on her way in, obviously the source of the outpost’s name, weren’t structures or towers, but the petrified remains of trees, scattered like sentinels throughout the town and the region around it. The whole place struck her as beautiful, mysterious, and a little bit sad.

But the populace, at least, conformed completely to Padmé’s expectations. Pedestrians and a few vehicles moved between the buildings, everyone pausing to give Padmé a quick or furtive once-over as she passed. Genuine strangers were apparently rare here.

Either that, or Duja had stirred up more attention than she’d probably wanted.

At the intersection of the two main streets was the cantina the man had mentioned. There was a strange wooden platform off to one side: waist-high, about two meters long, with some kind of yellowish strawlike decoration poking up around all the edges. Probably where the locals gathered for speeches, lectures, or just the general haranguing of their fellow citizens, she decided. There were two other vehicles parked at the other side of the entrance, and she guided her BARC to a spot beside them.

And as she walked toward the cantina door she got her first real look at the platform.

It wasn’t a platform at all, but a box about fifty centimeters deep. The strawlike decoration was in fact actual straw, forming a mat at the box’s bottom and lining the sides.

Lying on the straw was a body.

It wasn’t a political dais like Padmé had thought. It was, instead, an open-topped coffin, possibly being prepared for a funeral pyre.

Duja’s funeral pyre.