501st: An Imperial Commando Novel Read Free

off. Ny watched, hoping she just looked anxious to complete her deliveries and get paid. Searches took less than ten standard minutes, from what she’d seen, and the akk had been nosing around in
Cornucopia
for about that long.
    It’s nearly over. Nearly out of here. Nearly … home
.
    Where was home now, anyway?
    Then it started. The hacking bark of the akk hound, that distinctive
ack-ack-ack
noise that gave the animal its name, echoed from the open hatch. Ny knew she wasn’t going home now, ever, and she struggled not to panic. Three stormtroopers rushed to the ramp, blaster rifles ready. The fourth held his sidearm on her.
    “Wait here, ma’am,” he said. He craned his neck to see what was happening. “Officer, what’s going on in there?”
    The akk stopped barking. Ny heard one set of scuffed footsteps accompanied by scrabbling claws, and she simply couldn’t draw another breath. This was it. The animal must have sniffed out her stowaways.
    “Sorry, boys.” The guard’s voice emerged from the hatch. “He’s still a pup, despite his size. Needs a bit more discipline.”
    The akk came trotting down the ramp dragging a bantha’s thigh bone, the huge pelvis end clamped between his jaws. It was Mird’s treat; bantha meat wasn’t easy to get hold of on Mandalore. Ny’s knees nearly buckled. The guard tried to take the bone from his animal, but the novice akk wasn’t having any of it. His lip curled and he growled deep in his throat, teeth still locked hard on the femur.
    “Look, I can get another bone,” Ny said, feigning exasperation rather than flinging her arms around the akk and telling it what a good boy it was for sabotaging the search. “Keep it. I need to get moving.”
    One of the stormtroopers tilted his head at her. “What do you need a bantha bone for, ma’am?”
    Ny’s answer was out of her mouth before she even thought about it. The ease and speed with which she conjured up a complete fabric of lies shocked her.
    “One of the miners has a pet nek,” she said. “You don’t find many banthas on your average asteroid.”
    It really
was
getting that easy to lie. She was disappointed in herself, her old self before widowhood had made her into a more marginal creature, but she also felt a thrill of excitement—and shame—at her newly discovered capacity for defiance.
Yes, I’m wrong, I’m breaking the law, but I did it—I pulled it off
. The guard was still trying to get the akk’s mind back on search duties as she closed the hatch.
    Stang, she hoped those two could still breathe in that tank. She couldn’t check until
Cornucopia
jumped to hyperspace and she’d set the autopilot on course. Getting out of Mezeg orbit seemed to take hours rather than minutes, and the moment the stars in the viewport stretched from points of light to frozen streaks of infinity, she checked the course and handed the controls over to
Cornucopia
’s nav computer.
    The aft cargo section was silent except for the throb of the drives and the rattle of loose fittings. Ny took a deep breath and began unbolting the water tank inspection plate on the deck, wondering if she’d find bodies rather than live Jedi.
    “That was too close.” Ny lifted the metal panel and reached down. It was a tight fit in the space between those tanks even for a short, skinny kid like Scout, so the Kaminoan must have been very uncomfortable indeed. “How did you get away with that?”
    Scout scrambled out of the hole in the deck, her ginger hair disheveled. She looked like she hadn’t eaten in a week. It took a little longer to extract Kina Ha, not only because the Kaminoan was much taller, but also because she was a lot older—exactly how old, Ny wasn’t sure, but the Kaminoan was a venerable lady by anyone’s standards. Ny usually couldn’t tell the age of a nonhuman, but Kina Ha would have looked obviously oldto anyone, with deeply lined gray skin and drooping eyes. She moved slowly. It made Ny feel positively