Zeerid crouched, one hand on Aryn, as he fired three shots with the E-9, trying to target one of the grav-thrusters on the speeder but hitting only the surrounding fuselage. The shots did no damage so he targeted the cockpit. Trying to avoid Zeerid’s fire, the pilot overcompensated and the speeder turned hard right. While the pilot scrambled to regain control, Zeerid grabbed Aryn with his good arm and pulled her to her feet.

“I’m all right,” she said. “Go, go.”

Sirens screamed in the distance, presaging the arrival of the port authorities.

Supporting each other arm in arm, they limped to the entry door and Zeerid punched in the code. Behind them, the doors to the landing pad slid open. Shots rang off the hull of Fatman. Zeerid fired a few blind bolts behind him. Aryn deflected another two shots into the bulkhead.

The ship’s door slid open too karking slow. Zeerid grabbed Aryn and climbed in before the door was all the way open. He hit the button to close it and the door stopped and reversed itself.

“I’ve got to get us out of here. You’re all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said.

The wound on her calf was ugly but looked like a graze. The pink, raw meat of her flesh was bordered by black lines of charred skin.

He pelted through Fatman’s corridors until he reached the cockpit, slammed himself into the pilot’s seat, and fired up the engines. His numb arm made it difficult, but he managed. He looked out of the cockpit for the speeder, saw it above him.

He’d ram it if it didn’t get out of the way.

The thrusters engaged and Fatman rose off the pad. The speeder wheeled to the side. The pilot fired wildly at the cockpit, but Fatman’s transparisteel canopy turned the shots without so much as a mark.

Zeerid considered blowing the speeder from the air with Fatman’s plasma cannons, but the falling debris might hurt an innocent.

“Consider yourself fortunate, fella.”

When he had ten meters of altitude, he engaged the ion engines and Fatman blazed skyward. He monitored the scanners to ensure no one was following them.

When he saw nothing, he let himself uncoil. He tested his arm, found it unbroken, just badly bruised. The feeling was already beginning to return to his hand.

Once the ship broached the atmosphere, he gave her to the autopilot and hurried back to the hold to check on Aryn.

VRATH HOLSTERED his still-warm weapon while he watched Zeerid’s ship lift into Vulta’s night sky. The ship’s ion engines flared blue and the freighter sped into the darkness and mingled with the rest of the night traffic.

He cursed as he surveyed the ruins of their ambush: two of his men dead, one wounded, the authorities en route, and he’d neither seized nor destroyed the engspice.

The Hutts would be unhappy.