The Rebel Queen - Poe Dameron

Chapter XXI: Par For the Cors

Gareth

Cantonica, Lower City...

In all the galaxies, Gareth Cors had never seen so much security in one place. And Cantonica was chockful of those rich types. The kind with a private army for security and a permanent foothold in paranoid delusions to always shriek at shadows.

If he'd never left his homeworld, he'd never have believed so much wealth could be amassed under a single roof, let alone by countless strangers hailing from across the galaxy.

Pressure welled in his stomach, and it took every ounce of self-restraint not to groan.

Gareth was a creature of small habits. He was used to his nerves feeling ablaze before a job. He was content with his crew—as much as they were strangers, they were comrades in the ways that mattered: they kept each other alive and in the black. And, most of all, he enjoyed the downtime after a high-stakes job. The feeling that all loose threads had been neatly tied down and dealt with. 

Certainty. 

That was what he valued. Above the credits and the notoriety and the rush of adrenaline, it was the gut feeling that everything had been squared away. That everything would reset to zero, and he'd be riled up and ready to do it all over again in a couple of weeks.

Except, his heart hadn't evened out since the handoff. Simple as it was, one prince with barely any security or credits and their kidnap job financier with too much of it, something about it all seemed... unfinished. Personal. And emotions were a steep price to pay as a third-party crew. They could get messy. Worse, they could get incendiary; all violence and revenge, if they weren't careful.

"Never had a kidnap job pay so much," Yora Toombs leered at the pile of credit chits on the dejarik board. "Royals should get into more petty squabbles with other royals."

With her boots off the ground and her posture slumped comfortably in the chair, she looked like someone without a care in the world. A rare look for her, Yora was the numbers runner. Brains with too many probabilities to calculate. Always considering fractals and planning exit strategies in advance. The crew was practically alive because of her busied mind. 

At that moment, eyes shining and large as she counted their haul, she'd have fooled anyone who didn't know her into believing she was the farthest removed from anxiety in that room.

"Aren't you curious, though?" the muscle of their group, Ace Biggs, asked. His large arms were spread out over the couch, so he'd take up the entire corner of the room.

Ace—whose real name was a mystery to the entire crew from long before Gareth had joined up—tended to shrink up the space for everybody else when he wanted to make a point. And it wasn't hard to do, since he was over six foot and twice Gareth's size.

Gareth assumed it was a scare tactic, a way to always have the advantage in any room. A way of saying I'm bigger than you, don't you forget that.

Yora had once insinuated that Biggs was like that because he'd lived carefully his whole life, his need to take up room was just a form of delayed rebellion. From the specific phosphorus burns on Ace's arms and neck, and the fact they'd heard him speak Korunnal to a dancer in a cantina on Nar Shaddaa once, Gareth assumed Yora meant he'd grown up on Haruun Kal. But it was just a guess, educated as it was.

"You're just disappointed you didn't get to see any action this mission. A prince with no protection detail... who would've thought? His backgrounds were clean, too. No relatives or business partners to steer clear of on Cantonica. We lucked out, he's just a nobody." Yora snorted, tossing a credit chit at the massive fighter when he didn't stop tensing. "Here, go to one of the slot machines. Blow off some steam the way the rich do it."