Free Star Wars: Shadow Games by Michael Reaves

have set this up
before
we jumped. Which means they’d have been shadowing us.
Closely
. We’d have detected them.”
    “Not if they were outfitted like this boat,” Dash observed. “Might’ve been pirates.”
    “Who got onto the ship and sabotaged it?” asked Finnick dubiously.
    “Or somehow got access to its passcodes.”
    Arruna was shaking her head. “If it had been pirates, they would have forced us out of hyperspace and tried to board us. More likely it was a timed event.”
    “Or an inside job,” Dash mused.
    Everyone turned to stare at him. He raised his hands as if to ward off the intensity and incredulity of their looks. “I’m just sayin’ … anyway, we won’t
know
until we’ve done some more detective work, will we? Meanwhile, I think we need to broaden our search for the missing women.”
    “Broaden our search?” repeated Finnick. “They were in this room. You heard them.”
    “Yeah, and now they’re
not
in this room. Meaning that somehow they got out.”
    Finnick snorted in disbelief. “How?”
    Dash gazed around the luxurious quarters in which they now stood, trying not to look as if he were mentally scratching his head. This was absurd. There was no place the women could have gone. There were no exterior hatches in the room; they’d searched the closet and peered under every article of furniture that had an under. The two women had vanished as thoroughly as if they’d been vaporized.
    Maybe they had …
    Dash slapped his hands together in a single brisk clap.“Oh
-kay
, we’ve checked all the furniture for hiding places; now let’s check it for possible exits.”
    “Exits?” Finnick repeated, and Dash bit back a sarcastic crack about echoes.
    “Tables that are on movable plates,” he explained. “Wardrobes with false bottoms. Wall shelves that slide or swing and—look, can we just have everybody check for that kind of stuff?”
    Finnick snorted again; Dash was getting extremely tired of that particular mode of disagreement. “Spy story nonsense,” the first officer muttered. Nevertheless, he started to search, as did Leebo. The droid stopped when Dash added, “Not you, Leebo. I want you to scan for hidden weaponry.”
    That stopped everything. Dash once again became the cynosure of everyone’s gaze. “What are you thinking?” asked the first officer.
    “Let’s get real,” said Dash. “The previous owner of this ship was most likely doing less-than-aboveboard business. The stealth shuttle is sort of a clue, right? That, and the amount of ablative shielding and other safety features that your boss
didn’t
have to install because they were already here. At a guess, I’d say
Nova’s Heart
belonged to a smuggler—who just might have installed a high-security system in this suite that included defensive weaponry to take out intruders. Maybe something tripped it before or during the emergency and—”
    All the color had leached out of Bran Finnick’s face. “And it thought Javul and Dara were intruders? No. There was no such system.” He looked at Arruna. “Right?”
    The Twi’lek looked paler as well. “There’s no record of it in the original schematics.”
    “Doesn’t mean it’s not there,” said Dash. “I don’t like the idea any more than you do, but it has to be either validated or invalidated.” He turned to the droid. “Leebo, call up the schematics and see if there are anylogical places to hide surveillance and defensive equipment.”
    Leebo uttered a chirp of assent and brought up the schematics’ holos without argument. Dash watched for a moment as Eaden, Arruna, and Finnick began pushing and pulling at the cabin’s furniture. Then he began a slow tour of the perimeter of the room. It struck him, as he turned from the interior bulkhead between the living room and the bedroom in the small but luxurious suite, that there was something odd about the room, but he could not, for the life of him, put a finger on what it was. As he was trying to