Honor Among Thieves

Chewbacca was striding toward Baasen, fury in his eyes, spitting threats of grievous bodily harm at the old smuggler. Baasen reached his weapon first and sprang up to his knees, pointing the blaster at Chewbacca’s head. “Sorry about this,” he said as he pulled the trigger.

His weapon hand disappeared from the wrist down, his sleeve catching fire from the heat of the blast. Han didn’t remember picking Simm’s blaster up, but it was in his hand, the barrel smoking with the discharge. He climbed to his feet, keeping the weapon aimed at Baasen.

Chewbacca growled out his thanks and crossed the room to remove Han’s cuffs.

“Anytime, pal,” Han said, lifting his hands to let the Wookiee work on them, but keeping the blaster pointed at Baasen. The Mirialan’s eyes were wide. “You just sit still, old friend, and maybe I’ll forget how angry I am right now.”

“You shot my hand off,” Baasen said. He sounded more surprised than hurt.

“I was aiming at your head. It was kind of a rushed shot.”

The cuffs hissed and popped when Chewbacca shorted them out, and a few seconds later they fell to Han’s feet with a clank.

“Time to go,” Han said to Chewbacca. Every Imperial alert system in the city would be blaring alarms at the unauthorized blasterfire.

The weapons Baasen had taken from them were laid out on a nearby crate, and Chewbacca stopped long enough to grab his bowcaster and Han’s blaster. Han pushed Baasen over onto his back with one foot. “You don’t want to try and follow us,” he said. “The Imperials will throw you in prison, but if I see you again, I’ll let Chewie pull you apart.”

Baasen stared up at him with amusement and open hatred. “Oh, we’ll meet again, boyo.”

“You’d better hope not.”

“Where do they get all those guys?” Han muttered. Chewie huffed a sarcastic reply.

They were hiding in the shadow of a loading crane, about twenty meters off the ground. What looked like a thousand stormtroopers milled around the warehouses and docking bays below. Garet and Simm were both cuffed and kneeling on the ground outside their docking bay while a black-clad Imperial officer questioned them. Han couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he could read the sullen expressions on their faces.

So far Baasen hadn’t made an appearance. Han kept waiting for the old Mirialan to show up, led out in cuffs by Imperial troops, but it kept not happening. And the more time that passed without Baasen in custody, the more worried Han got. Maybe they were trying to modify the cuffs for a missing hand. That was probably too much to hope for.

“Think he slipped out before the troops arrived?” he asked Chewbacca.

The Wookiee growled.

“He always was a slippery old ghodstag,” Han said. “You don’t think he’d come after us, do you?”

Chewbacca looked at him out of the side of his eye and grunted.

“Well, looks like the boys in white aren’t going to be leaving anytime soon, so we need to slip quietly away now.”

Chewbacca chuffed a question.

“No, not the Falcon. Not yet. We still need to find our rebel spy, or this was all just a waste of time.”

The Wookiee growled out a long response, and Han raised his hands in mock surrender. “Okay, okay, ease down, pal. Yes, I fired the blaster, and so it might seem like our current predicament is my fault. But Baasen was about to shoot you. Should I have let him do that? So, in a way, this is your fault.”

Chewbacca’s low howl was brief and philosophical.

“I mean, you could argue that.”

Before Chewbacca could warm up to his rebuttal, Han slid down the crane’s ladder to the ground and slipped into the alley between two warehouses. Old, worn-out packing crates littered the space, but there was no sign of any other garbage. For some reason, the utter lack of loose trash in the city was as chilling a sign of Imperial dominance as anything else. Han wondered what happened to people who littered. Whatever it was, clearly it was bad enough that no one did.

At the end of the alley, they hid behind an empty crate while a squad of four stormtroopers walked by on patrol. Chewbacca fingered his bowcaster and looked a question at Han.

“No,” Han whispered. “No more shooting.”

Chewbacca quietly huffed back at him.

“No, I did not ‘start it.’ ”

The troopers went around a corner, and Han headed off down the street in the opposite direction. They needed a place to hole up for a while, wait for the manhunt to die down before they picked up their search for Scarlet Hark. Holing up and hiding from the law were two of Han’s specialties, but that was out on the Rim, where the Imperial presence was light and the populace cooperative. Cioran was the kind of place where hundreds of stormtroopers responded to a single blaster shot, and Han was willing to bet a lot of credits that there were hundreds more in reserve just waiting for the go signal. And the locals were used to being ground under the Imperial boot heel. They wouldn’t dare risk their own safety by hiding fugitives from the law. There wouldn’t be seedy bars where a man could slip into the shadows and a few credits in the right hands would keep anyone from asking questions.

Overhead, the traffic of speeders and personal fliers cast fast-moving shadows across gray and glass buildings that reached up so high, they appeared to lean in over the walkways below. Massive structures in a flat institutional style designed to be both functional and oppressive. And everywhere, at every intersection and building corner, the omnipresent eyes of the Empire. Sensor arrays and guard posts dotted the walls of every building. Sleek Imperial speeders cruised overhead, while squads of stormtroopers in urban pacification armor roamed the walkways.

“We may be in a lot of trouble here, Chewie,” Han said. He took off his weapons belt and put it and his blaster into Chewbacca’s satchel. He pointed at the Wookiee’s bowcaster. “Might have to leave that behind, pal.”

The Wookiee growled menacingly and clutched the weapon tighter.

“All right, here.” Han took off his long coat and handed it to him. Chewbacca wrapped the bowcaster in it until it was just a long cloth parcel that only looked a little bit like a hidden weapon. “Guess that’ll have to do.”

Chewbacca hefted the wrapped weapon over one shoulder and growled out a question.

“Japet. We’ll start with him,” Han replied. “He’s the one who rolled on her, so maybe he knows where she’s hiding. Besides which, we haven’t got anything else to go on.”