Star Wars - Darth Plagueis

heed as he flew over and past them, their dull, black eyes blinking against the snow and ice.
    He pulled back on the ion engines and slowed still further. A yawn forced itself past his teeth. He sat up straight and tried to blink away the fatigue, but it was as stubborn as an angry bantha. He’d given the ship to the autopilot and dozed during the hyperspace run from Vulta, but that was all the rack he’d had in the last two standard days. It was catching up to him.
    He scratched at the stubble of his beard, rubbed the back of his neck, and plugged the drop coordinates into the navicomp. The comp linked with one of Ord Mantell’s unsecured geosyncsats and fed back the location and course to Fatman . Zeerid’s HUD displayed it on the cockpit canopy. He eyed the location and put his finger on the destination.
    “Some island no one has ever heard of, up here where no one ever goes. Sounds about right.”
    Zeerid turned the ship over to the autopilot, and it banked him toward the island.
    His mind wandered as Fatman cut through the sky. The steady patter of ice and snow on the canopy sang him a lullaby. His thoughts drifted back through the clouds to the past, to the days before the accident, before he’d left the marines. Back then, he’d worn the uniform proudly and had still been able to look himself in the mirror—
    He caught himself, caught the burgeoning self-pity, and stopped the thoughts cold. He knew where it would lead.
    “Stow that, soldier,” he said to himself.
    He was what he was, and things were what they were.
    “Focus on the work, Z-man.”
    He checked his location against the coordinates in the navicomp. Almost there.
    “Gear up and get frosty,” he said, echoing the words he used to say to his commandos. “Ninety seconds to the LZ.”
    He continued his ritual, checking the charge on his blasters, tightening the straps on his composite armor vest, getting his mind right.
    Ahead, he saw the island where he would make the drop: ten square klicks of volcanic rock fringed with a bad haircut of waist-high scrub whipping in the wind. The place would probably be underwater and gone next year.
    He angled lower, flew a wide circle, unable to see much detail due to the snow. He ran a scanner sweep, as always, and the chirp of his instrumentation surprised him. A ship was already on the island. He checked his wrist chrono and saw that he was a full twenty standard minutes early. He’d made this run three times and Arigo—he was sure the man’s real name was not Arigo—had never before arrived early.
    He descended to a few hundred meters to get a better look.
    Arigo’s freighter, the Doghouse , shaped not unlike the body of a legless beetle, sat in a clearing on the east side of the island. Its landing ramp was down and stuck out of its belly like a tongue. Halogens glared into the fading twilight and reflected off the falling snow, turning the flakes into glittering jewels. He saw three men lingering around the ramp, though he was too far away to notice any details other than their white winter parkas.
    They spotted Fatman , and one waved a gloved hand.
    Zeerid licked his lips and frowned.
    Something felt off.
    Flares went up from the freighter and burst in the air—green, red, red, green.
    That was the correct sequence.
    He circled one more time, staring down through the swirl of snow, but saw nothing to cause alarm, no other ships on the island or in the surrounding sea. He pushed aside his concern and chalked his feelings up to the usual tension caused by dealing with miscreants and criminals.
    In any event, he could not afford to mess up a drop of several hundred million credits of hardware because he felt skittish. The ultimate buyer—whoever that was—would be unhappy, and The Exchange would take the lost profits from Zeerid in blood and broken bones, then tack it on to the debt he already owed them. He’d lost track of exactly how much that was, but knew it was at least two million credits on the note for Fatman plus almost half that again on advances for Arra’s medical treatment, though he’d kept Arra’s existence a secret and his handler thought the latter were for gambling losses.
    “LZ is secure.” He hoped saying it would make it so. “Going in.”
    The hum of the reverse thrusters and a swirl of blown snow presaged the thump of Fatman ’s touching down on the rock. He landed less than fifty meters from Arigo’s ship.
    For a moment he sat in the cockpit, perfectly