Alliances (Star Wars: Thrawn, #2)(26)

Padmé had trained long and hard to keep reactions and emotions out of her face and body when she needed to. But even all that practice nearly proved inadequate. She was barely able to maintain an expression of idle curiosity as she stepped over and peered into the coffin.

Duja had been through the crusher, all right. Her face was battered and bruised in several places, and there were small stains on her clothing where blood had seeped through. The amateurishly handmade brooch she always wore seemed undamaged, and her chrono and data card pack were undisturbed. Not a robbery, then, but a cold-blooded attack.

One thing was sure: If she’d fallen to violence, she hadn’t gone down without a fight.

That one quick glance was all she dared for the moment. But she would be back. Turning away, she pushed open the cantina door and went inside.

Given that it wasn’t yet local noon she wasn’t expecting much of a crowd. She was right. Apart from her and the bartender, there were only three others in the room: two humans and another of the lumpy aliens like the one at the landing field. “You here for a drink?” the bartender called. “Or to pick up your friend?”

“My friend?” Padmé echoed, putting puzzlement into her face and voice.

The bartender pointed through the wall toward the coffin. “The lady out there.”

“The—? Oh. No, not at all,” Padmé assured him. “I’m looking for a man named Kuseph Jovi. Do you know him?”

It was the bartender’s turn to look puzzled. “No one here by that name,” he said. “You sure you got the right place?”

“This is the spot where he said to bring his new ship,” Padmé said, walking over to the bar. “I suppose he could be coming from offplanet, though why he’d pick a spot like this for the transfer I couldn’t guess. No offense,” she added.

“None taken,” the bartender assured her sourly. “Not exactly New Codia, is it?”

“Not really,” Padmé agreed, wondering distantly whether New Codia was a system, a planet, or even just a city. There were so many small and forgotten places across the galaxy. “What do you have here?”

“What do you want?” the bartender countered. “We’ve got Batuu Brew, Black Spire Brew, Blurrgfire, Toniray White, Andoan White, Moogan Tea—with or without alco—” He rattled off another half a dozen drinks, none of which Padmé had ever heard of. Local favorites, probably. She picked the Andoan White and watched as he selected a bottle and poured a few centimeters into a small obsidian mug. “So what’s her story?” she asked as the bartender set the mug down on the bar and accepted a five-credit coin in exchange. “The lady in the box, I mean? What happened to her?”

The bartender shrugged. “Don’t really know. Some men from one of the trading ships brought her in a few days ago—said they saw her try to take a corner too fast out in the forest and flipped her speeder bike on top of her. She was already dead when they got to her, so they brought her here hoping someone in town knew who she was.” He shrugged again. “No one did, so we decided to give it a few days to see if anyone came looking for her. Not good to lose someone and never find out what happened.”

“No, it’s not,” Padmé said, taking a sip of her drink. The story was ridiculous—Duja was one of the best speeder riders she’d ever seen. More likely she’d been poking around a suspicious ship, had been caught and tried to escape, and had either been hunted to ground or else forced into the accident they claimed had killed her.

Which would have left them with a huge problem.

Duja was smart enough not to carry any kind of genuine identification with her. As a result, her killers had no idea who she was, where she’d come from, or whether she had backup waiting for her. And they desperately needed answers to those questions.

So after pawing through her data cards without finding anything useful they’d cleaned her up as best they could, brought her to Black Spire, and talked the residents into setting her outside the cantina in the hope of drawing out her contacts.

The big question for Padmé was whether they’d tracked down Duja’s ship and sifted it for its own set of data and secrets. If they had, her investigation was effectively over.

If they hadn’t found it—if Duja had hidden it somewhere out of their reach—there was still a chance of taking them down.

And the more Padmé thought about it, the more the latter scenario seemed the most likely. If the killers had already gotten everything they wanted they probably wouldn’t have bothered to dangle Duja as bait.

“How’s the Andoan?” the bartender asked, the mystery of the dead woman outside apparently already forgotten.

“Good,” Padmé told him. It actually wasn’t bad, certainly not for a local brand. “Do you think anyone would mind if I wrote a song for her?”

“Wrote a—what?” he asked, frowning.

“If I wrote a farewell song,” Padmé said. “It’s the custom of my people to sing the departed on their journey with songs of encouragement and hope.”

“I thought you said you didn’t know her.”

“I don’t,” Padmé said. “But it sounds like no one else here does, either. And truly, it’s the lost strangers who lack encouragement and hope the most.”