Star Wars: Shadow Games by Michael Reaves Read Free Book Online

the tour to a crawl by checking out every nuance of the ship’s drives and systems. This caused Spike to roll her eyes roughly every twenty seconds, but the captain, an imperturbable Zabrak named Serdor Marrak, seemed … well, imperturbable. Having the captain and Eaden Vrill standing on each side of him made Dash feel as if he were getting serenity in stereo—an eerie feeling. Spike’s prickly impatience was almost a relief.
    “Your shield generators are Chempat-6s, I see,” Dash observed as he crawled around the gleaming deflector system. “But that resonator coil up there doesn’t look stock to me.” He pointed upward to where a meter-long, half-meter-wide coil of flat optical-quality transparisteel wound its way around the power conduit to the deflector array.
    “It’s not,” said Marrak placidly. “It’s a modified Chem-6. I’d almost call it a 6.5.”
    “Why do you have to call it anything?” asked Spike, glancing at her chrono. “It’s a machine.”
    “Yeah?” said Dash, ignoring her. “May I ask about the nature of the modifications?”
    The captain said, “Javul Charn has sufficient reason to want to run silent and to be … difficult to track or trace. We modified the unit along those lines.”
    Dash looked over sharply from the resonator coil. “A
cloaking
device? You modified this to be a cloaking device?”
    The captain shrugged. “More of a smudging device. It kicks in once we’re in open space. We’ve installed maximal confounders; the coils have been torqued and the harmonics realigned so that they distort and blur our communications signature … among other things.”
    “What other things?” asked Eaden, betraying his own interest in the ship’s construction.
    “We beefed up the ablative capacity of the shields whilewe were at it. They’re virtually impenetrable to communications signals when we want them to be. They’ll also fling off pretty big space debris and, if we ever should find ourselves under attack for some reason, they’ll do a fine job of repelling energy weapons fire as well.”
    Dash frowned, puzzled. “They block communications. Why, exactly?”
    “Keeps people from eavesdropping on us,” said Spike. “We don’t want everybody to know Javul’s plans, do we? I can’t begin to tell you what a pain it is to get into a port of call and find a literal fleet of overeager fans waiting in orbit. Javul likes to keep a low profile. I think you can appreciate that.”
    Dash moved to peer out through a long, narrow viewport at the port engine nacelle. “Combined ion/hyperdrive, huh?”
    The captain nodded while, behind him, Leebo gave an ecstatic sigh. Dash stifled a grin. “Those modified, too?” he asked.
    “A bit. They were rated to just lightspeed. We managed to push them a bit farther than that. My engineer is quite an innovator.”
    Dash nodded. “I’d like to meet him.”
    “Her.”
    “Oh. Droid brain?”
    The captain blinked. “Excuse me?”
    Dash laughed. “Not your engineer—although I guess she might have a droid brain. Mine does.” He jerked a thumb back toward Leebo, who was gazing around like a lovesick Wookiee. “I meant the ship. I have a … an acquaintance who installed a full-faculty droid autopilot and system controller in his ship.”
    “Ah, I see. As it happens my engineer is a Twi’lek named Arruna Var. Our steward has a droid brain, though. So does the ship’s doctor.”
    “It’s too bad
you
don’t have a droid brain,” Spike toldDash, “we could download all this information right to your cortex. Save a lot of time.” She checked her chrono again.
    Dash grinned at her. “That is a fantastic idea. In fact, if you could take Leebo, here, and get those schematics downloaded into his neural net, that’d be stellar. Eaden and I can go over them with him later.”
    She stared at him a moment. “All right, but do you think you could hurry this tour up just a bit? We need to make sure we’re secure before we leave