32
PHAEDA
SAILING ACROSS THE FARGONER SEA
Gray water crashed over the bows, throwing spray droplets high in the air where they were caught by the screaming wind and whipped down the ship’s length.
The Yngranault plunged through the trough of the wave, seemingly suspended for a moment in glass, and then began to climb up the next wave. That one broke across the deck with a crash that would have sent several crewmen overboard, had they not been tied to the starboard railing. It was another rogue wave, and it came in the middle of the night, during a mild storm—a squall, the veteran crewmen called it. The winds slashed, but they did not disturb the sea overmuch.
The crews were divvied up between the chum and everybody else. Everybody else worked the sails, climbing masts and pulling on ropes to adjust the yardarms. Since the Yngranault was three-ships-as-one, each one of the straights had its own helmsmen, who communicated via commlink and then commanded their large, powerful Ven droids to turn the wheels. It turned out, there were lots of VV-909s aboard, and they all took turns doing hard work and shouting at the others to work the capstan or the fishing nets or the bilge pump.
Ageless and Drozo were put to work on most days on the nets, casting them over the side and working the crank, listening for the linemen to call out the depths (sonar could not be used to measure the depths, since it might upset the ocean life). The linemen shouted out, “Eight fathoms!” At eight fathoms, Ageless and Drozo were safe to toss their nets. Whenever their ropes began to pull taut, they knew they had a full net, and twenty men worked the cranks to haul the bloated fishing nets out of the water.
As chums, both Ageless and Drozo were often elected by the Vens to do the daring work of reaching over the side and grabbing the nets and hauling them in, having to avoid the snapping claws of chuugiir crabs and the vicious jaws of ikkuchian snapper-welts. All of these would soon be delicacies on some restaurant somewhere on Phaeda, but right now they were dangerous enough to take a limb. Already two chums had lost fingers and been given artificial ones by the medical droids.
When the pile of fish plopped down on the deck, the chums had the duty of opening the nets and, along with a few droids (Yngranault had to use mostly organics, because, if droids got washed overboard, their machine lubricants could pollute the Fargoner Sea), they hacked and cut the fish up using something called a grongi hookblade. It was like a meat hook, only about half the size and with razor-sharp edges, and with a special handle fitted for fingers, like vibro-knucklers, for superior grip.
There were special ship’s officers simply called butchers, who came forward to do the main cutting, and soon the decks ran with blood of every color one could imagine.
Once, Ageless slipped when one of the snappers launched itself at him, and Drozo caught him just as he was about to go overboard. “Woah there, friend,” said the Twi’lek. “We’ll have to throw in the nets and go fishing for you next! Hah!”
“Thanks,” said Ageless, peering over the rail into the waves, at the school of poisonous and glowing ellarzhezes, which gathered in tentacled throngs around the Yngranault at all times. They liked to eat the parts of the fish the butchers discarded over the side, but they would gladly devour a living man in one of their feeding frenzies.
“So, where are you from?” Drozo asked, taking his hookblade to one of the snapper’s fins.
“Oh, here and there,” Ageless sighed.
“Same here,” Drozo snorted. “That’s what everybody here says. It’s a wonder we’ve all never met before, seeing as how we’re all from Here And There.” He laughed, and Ageless laughed with him. It was easy to like him, and even the work. Yes, even the constant threat of maiming and death did not taint this experience for the former Imperial agent.
Looking around at the men and women, all counting on one another in this moment, even though they were often paranoid of one another…It’s a strange kind of family. But everyone’s family is strange to outsiders. He wondered where they were all coming from, what they were running from, and how long they would stay.
The sea churned around them.
Another rogue wave came and they held on for dear life, some of them laughing madly as the water tried to pull them down.
This lasted eight days, and all the while Ageless watched his Human quarry from afar. He watched him all the way to a Onishgald Port, an island five hundred kilometers south of Phaedron. He watched his quarry from a safe distance, following him through the port town’s streets as he visited gambling dens and lost a lot of credits in sabacc. Ageless tried to find a moment when the Human was alone, but his quarry always made sure to be around others.
The next day, they all boarded the Yngranault again and set sail.
* * *
The chums also had to work other filthy jobs that neither the officers nor the officer-droids wanted any part of. Ageless, Drozo, and a dozen other men got volunteered to work the bilge pumps. Bilgewater built up in the lowermost decks of each of the Yngranault’s straights, weighing them down unless it was constantly pumped out. Because of the Phaedonites’ fear of polluting their last pure sea, the Yngranault could not use electric pumps, for fear its frequency would disturb the sea life, so all the bilgewater had to be pumped manually.
Ageless stood in knee- and sometimes waist-deep water that smelled of every kind of filth one could imagine. Much of the ships’ waste leaked into here, and instead of being pumped out into the sea, it got pumped out into a water purification machine (one of the few machines allowed on the vessel) and was evaporated into the air.
“Imagine doing this all our lives,” said Drozo, wiping his brow. He and Ageless were on a half-hour break, and stood to one side while another team stepped in for them, maneuvering the pump’s levers up and down, up and down.
“I don’t believe I can imagine that, friend,” Ageless said, taking a sip of water offered by another chum. He nodded his thanks, and eyed his quarry, who just now came down the ladder to help work the pumps. Ageless monitored the Human at all times, though tried to appear uninterested.
“Yes, well, get used to it. Not many folk who make it into this life ever make it out.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t you know why they call us chum?” the Twi’lek laughed. “You’ll find out tomorrow.”
And he did. For on the next day, they went chasing after leviathans.
* * *
The crew called them leviathans, though their real name was exonodatrix, and they were five-hundred-meter-long creatures, whose bodies were black and scaly. Their heads were shaped almost like a krayt dragon’s and their tail ends were a tangle of gargantuan tentacles. Some believed the creature was some aquatic relative to the krayt dragon, an offshoot from some common ancestor that somehow wound up on Phaeda.
The Yngranault could not go anywhere near it, for the mammoth waves they created were too much. Even from a distance, those waves crashed over gunwales and pushed men about the deck. All three of Yngranault’s bows had a massive harpoon cannon, which everyone called the “dicers.” Each dice fired off a single harpoon, attached to a rope, which was meant to glance off the scaly hide and slice off a chunk of a leviathan’s flesh and muscle. It had to be precisely done, because a head-on direct shot would only bounce off the armor-like scales.
Once a chunk was sliced off, longboats were launched with chum crewmembers rowing out to pick up the floating piece of meat and reel it in. They could usually get five or six five-meter-long chunks before the leviathans dove back under.
Ageless stood in awe each time one of the leviathans emerged. He was one of the men expected to go out on longboats to retrieve the meat—if they didn’t, the Fargoner Sea’s many predators would devour it in minutes. When they reached the meat, the slavering jaws of numerous predators snapped at him, and the tentacles of other, stranger predators reached up to wrap greedily around the leviathan meat, and tried to pull it down with them.
Ageless saw three men get pulled into the water by those tentacles, only one of them made it back out, and he was missing a hand. The bodies of the other two dead chums created a feeding frenzy, which distracted the other predators enough that he and the other chums were able to pull the leviathan meat back to the Yngranault.
On Ageless’s boat was Drozo, a Wookiee named Arochachabba, three Jawas he did not know the names of, and his Human quarry. Once, the boat was thumped by some creature below them, and the boat tilted and Drozo fell in, but both Ageless and the Human grabbed him by his collar and hauled him back into the boat, just as a circular maw of teeth rose up from the depths to try and swallow him.
“Thank you,” Drozo said quaveringly to both of them. Even his lips were trembling. “Thank you, boys. Thank you.”
Ageless and the Human exchanged a single look, and got back to rowing. And they rowed hard to get away with their prize, leaving behind red waters filled with the sea’s worst predators.
* * *
The Fargoner Sea was gray for long stretches, then turned a sparkling blue. Ageless spent many hours during his downtime reading from his datapad, while massaging his callused hands with oils and surreptitiously watching his Human quarry move around and eat and talk to no one at all. Ageless was growing a beard, because there wasn’t much time to shave it off. Indeed, many of the chums were letting their personal hygiene go, and the lower decks grew smellier by the day.
Ageless got to know Drozo better, especially once they went to port. Drozo opened up about his family, which included a son back on Ryloth that was still waiting for him. “But I can never see him again. Not ever,” he said while they drank Whyren’s Reserve at a cantina late one night. Ageless had only agreed to go with Drozo because his quarry had gone to the cantina, too. And the Human sat alone, as always.
“Why can’t you go back?” Ageless asked, somewhat interested.
“Because if I do, I’ll be arrested.”
“Something you did?”
Drozo shook his head and took drink. “Not really. I covered for a cousin, who was a dreg, and who I definitely should not have covered for. He went to jail, and now, since I aided and abetted him for a short while, and his crimes were so serious, I’m on the hook, too. It’s an old law on Ryloth, has to do with the honor of the family and all. If you abet a criminal there, and they’re related to you, you have to serve time, usually ten years. But I didn’t know his crimes were that serious when I took him in,” he lamented.
Ageless could see it in Drozo’s eyes, the same look he had seen in the eyes of desperate folk, back when he turned them into informants for the Imperial Intelligence Service. It was the look of a person looking backward through time, wishing they could change everything.
Out of the corner of his eye, Ageless saw the Human stand up, lay a few creds down on the table, and leave. If he was ever going to get his target alone, this was it, while they were at port and not in some confined space on the deck with crewmen all around.
Ageless took out enough creds to pay for his and Drozo’s drink, and pushed himself away from the bar. “You can’t turn back the clock, my friend,” he said, clapping him on the back. “Trust me, I know. But you can make a new start.”
“How do you do that?”
“You just decide. Nobody can tell you when. Only you can do that.”
“Is that what you’re doing? Making a new start?”
“You could say that,” Ageless said, and headed out.
“Where are you going?” Drozo called.
“To get some air.”
Ageless stepped out of the cantina and into the seaport streets. His Human quarry was fifteen meters away and slightly staggering. He followed the guy across the small island, through old cobblestone streets that contrasted with glimmering buildings of transparisteel and duracrete. Almost anywhere you went on the island you could see the ocean in all directions. The sun was setting, becoming a molten ingot on the distant horizon. The seas looked like they were on fire.
Ageless followed the target through small streets, down shadowy alleyways, and finally got him alone on a small stretch of beach, far away from the harbor town proper. At some point, Ageless realized they were playing a game. The target was pulling an SDR, a surveillance-detection run, and he was waiting for Ageless to reveal himself.
Which meant the Human either suspected Ageless, or was just checking to see if someone had followed him this far.
Ageless followed him across the beach, keeping about twenty meters distance, and the Human came to an abrupt stop just as the sun finally dipped below the horizon.
“Well,” he sighed, his back still to Ageless. “Here we are.”
Ageless came to a stop five steps away. His hands were in his pockets, and one of them held a small grongi hookblade. “Your name Gaffrey, codename Kavolid,” he said. “Former IIS handler for agents seeking high-value targets.”
“You’re him?” said Gaffrey. “You’re the one that’s hunting all of us down? You’re Ageless Void?”
It had been almost a year since he heard anyone say that name aloud, and Ageless had to admit, it felt strange. It made him almost miss those first days with IIS. With the Kingdom.
With Hej Zumter.
“I just want to talk.”
“Like you ‘talked’ with all the others?”
“I tried to talk to all of them, but they all resisted. Will you be more reasonable?”
The Human slowly turned around to look at him. His hands were in his pockets, same as Ageless’s. And Ageless knew the man had not led him here without bringing a weapon with him.
The soughing tide was the only sound. From Ageless’s right, there came a strange glow. When he looked, he saw the foaming waves reaching up around his ankles, as though trying to pull him in, and the bioluminescent algae was glittering in colors of red, blue, green and pink. It looked like an aurora underwater, and soon it stretched far out into the deep waters and became a dream. For a moment, for just one instant, Ageless thought he felt himself pulled towards it. He felt a swelling power, an energy that breathed through his pores and whispered to him.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Uh oh. No, not now. No, no, no…
There came a vertiginous lurch that almost overcame him, a slight dizziness that had been chasing him for almost a year now. And the whisper he heard…it was a Dark Voice, calling out his name, as though from down a dark, dark well, along with inarticulate words that nevertheless wormed their way into his mind and made him feel small. He was carried about on those whispers, which were made even more powerful by the life teeming in those waters at his ankles—
The trance only lasted a single breath, maybe two, but it was enough for his target to have picked up on a momentary weakness.
When the Human leapt at him, Ageless had just enough time to leap back and dodge the vibroblade that went for his throat.
Ageless push-stepped backwards, through the ankle-deep tide and thick, clumpy sand. He caught the enemy’s wrist and deflected it, then brough his hookblade out and slashed across his arm. The Human cried out as blood spilled into the surf. The enemy shuffle-stepped forward twice, swinging wildly until Ageless once again caught his wrist, twisted it, and disarmed him. All Kingdom agents were given the same operational training, including self-defense lessons in isk maega, a martial art that was a combination of the deadliest moves in Teras Käsi, Udas’mon, and a variety of other combat arts. So this former Kingdom operative would have at least cursory knowledge.
But Ageless had more than just cursory knowledge, he had years upon years of both training and experience. He was not at all bothered by the Human’s attacks, his timing was too badly off, his balance too unstable, and his lack of experience showed all too well.
Disarmed, the Human tried a series of strikes at Ageless’s face, all of which missed, except for those Ageless head-butted. As a Zabrak, his horned head was a natural asset, and he had put it to good use in his years as an Imperial operative. He smashed the Human’s fists twice, and he heard the snap of the bones breaking. When finally he saw his opening, Ageless slipped the next punch and married his head to his enemy’s shoulder, while snaking one arm around Gaffrey’s head and sweeping his feet out from under him.
The Human landed in the tide with a splash, the glowing algae sticking to his face momentarily before running off. Ageless knelt on the man’s chest and pressed his hookblade to his throat and said, “You have one chance to live. I’m going to ask you three questions, and you have to answer each one correctly on your first try. Understand? Nod if you understand.”
The Human, panting, clutched his bleeding arm. He nodded begrudgingly.
“Are you willing to go back to the Imperial Intelligence Service if I told you to?”
The Human winced. His eyes showed a cocktail of confusion, astonishment, and fear. “I…I thought you were here to bring me in. I didn’t know I had an option—”
“Answer the question. If I told you to, and if I could assure you IIS would take you back, would you do it?”
“I…suppose so. Yes. But—”
“Are you willing to betray them?”
“Betray?”
“Spy on them. Bring me intel on what they’re doing.”
“I…I…I don’t understand. I thought you were working for them again. They took you back in. You didn’t have anything to do with Zumter’s corruption. They did a psych eval on you and the eval droids said you weren’t in on it. They brought you back, and you’ve been sweeping all the former Kingdom personnel—”
Ageless pressed the hookblade harder against his throat. “Answer.”
“Yes!” the man gasped.
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, I’ll spy on them for you! I’ll be your double agent, just…don’t kill me!”
“Last question,” Ageless said, looking around the beach to make sure they were still alone. “If I told you you would be sharing all your intel with the Rebel Alliance, would you still be willing to betray the Empire?”
Now the Human’s eyes went wide as saucers. “Wh-what?”
Ageless slid his knee off the man’s chest. Slowly. As the tide sighed and hissed all around them, and the sky grew darker and the algae grew brighter, he looked down at the pitiable soul. “I was sent to sweep all Zumter’s associates, yes, on the orders of the Kingdom. And I’ve found them all. You are the last one. But when I found them, each of them had a choice: be a double agent for the Rebellion, or die then and there. Only two of them chose death, and I gave it to them. I can give it to you, Loriss Gaffrey,” he said, saying the operative’s true name, which the Human probably had not heard spoken aloud in over a decade.
“If you want it, I can do it. If you want death, I can grant it. But I can also take you back to the Service and tell them that when I found you, I conducted an investigation, and found that you were not involved with Zumter, after all. That he framed you. With me vouching for you, it could be all you need. In a few months, you could be reinstated. But I’ll be watching you, Loriss. I’ll be watching you closely. And you will be expected to hand over intel to the Rebellion.”
Gaffrey swallowed hard.
“And I also need some intel from you right now, before I leave this beach. Intel that is traceable only to you.”
“Intel? But…why?”
“You know why,” said Ageless, easing the hookblade away from his neck. “Think on it a minute, and you’ll figure it out.”
Loriss Gaffrey’s eyes narrowed, then he nodded. “You need me to be compromised before I go back in.”
“There you go.”
It was imperative that an informant or double agent be compromised before letting him go. If Ageless were to vouch for Gaffrey and let him rejoin the Service, Gaffrey could then tell them all that Ageless was working for the Rebels, and that he, Gaffrey, was innocent of any wrongdoing. But if the Rebels had compromising material on Gaffrey, then no matter how hard he tried to make himself look spotless, and no matter how hard he tried to double-cross Ageless, the Rebellion could simply leak the intel onto the HoloNet. Intel that could only have come from Gaffrey. The Service would then know he had leaked classified information.
His choices were die now, or give the Rebel Alliance compromising material on himself as an offering to become their double agent. There was no third option.
“Well, what’ll it be, Gaffrey?”
The Human appeared to be in misery. “How did you find me?”
“The Service sent me here. You know how it goes. They have all the heavy resources, they just point me in the right direction sometimes. Don’t ask me how they tracked you to Phaeda. Not my department. I just had to gather what resources I could to pin you down.”
“You’re using the Empire’s resources…to track down agents…and turn them into double agents for the Rebels?” He shook his head in bewilderment. “Why, Ageless? Why turn on the people that raised you up? Zumter’s gone, the Rebels have him, or haven’t you heard?”
He had heard. In fact, he had been the one to deliver Zumter to the Rebels, as well as another agent, Horizon Lost.
“The Service accepted you back? Why are you betraying them to the Rebellion now?”
“Maybe the same reason you allied with Zumter, and helped him with his scheme to funnel credits away from the Service and into shadow accounts, and knowingly used Rebel assets to shuffle that money around the galaxy. Because you know the Empire is going to fail and you want to make it out alive.” He shrugged. “Or maybe I just got tired of their sithspit. Maybe I’m sick of war, and just want to put an end to it. Or maybe,” he said, standing up, “I don’t want to serve those who won’t even have someone of my species over for dinner.”
Gaffrey sat up slowly, still clutching his injured arm.
“So, what’s it going to be, Gaffrey? Death, or compromise?”
The Human stood up slowly, and looked out across a darkling sky, at stars reflected in vast black waters. “What do you want to know?”
Ageless stepped closer to him. “You were Sark’s handler.”
“Who?”
“The agent known as Horizon Lost. You were his handler when he was assigned to help Darth Vader go in search of someone. An old Jedi Master, apparently hiding out in the Outer Rim. The Emperor had a vision of such a person hiding out on a swamp world. Vader and Sark went to some backwater world. You chronicled all the intel from that time, didn’t you? Every line of data.”
Gaffrey shook his head. “No. There were no reports, nothing written down about it. Lord Vader and the Emperor wanted nothing traceable, no files on the investigation, no hard data. Why? That’s all ancient history, what could I possibly have that you or the Rebellion wishes to know?”
Ageless leaned in. “I want to know all about Dagobah.”
* * *
“I cannot tell you much more than what you probably already know, I’m afraid,” said Loriss Gaffrey. The former Imperial intelligence officer’s hands were shaking as he walked over to an outcropping of large rocks on the sand dunes overlooking the sea, and took a seat on one of them. He had torn off a part of his shirt and used it to stop the bleeding on his arm. “Lord Vader kept that whole operation close to the chest. He only needed one of our operatives to help sniff out leads in the Outer Rim.”
The man’s nerves were on edge. He couldn’t stop trembling.
Ageless handed the guy a death stick from his pocket. Ageless did not smoke the things himself, but he had been handed a few by many of the Yngranault’s crewmen late after a shift. Everyone else smoked, and he kept up the pretense that he did, too, if only to fit in. Gaffrey, it turned out, liked to smoke death sticks very much. “How long ago was this?”
Gaffrey took a long toke, and exhaled a plume of smoke with his eyes closed, savoring the taste. “Let’s see now. It would have been just before the Battle of Yavin. Emperor Palpatine was confident there was at least one or two more Jedi roaming the galaxy, and he wanted them sniffed out.” He spoke as if in a dream. Probably he could not believe he was sitting here confessing classified information, that he was on the run and now suddenly beholden to the Rebel Alliance. It must feel surreal, Ageless thought. I can almost relate.
“You mentioned before that Palpatine believed this because he had a ‘vision’? Sark said the same thing. Was Palpatine into mysticism himself? Some sort of religion?”
Gaffrey gave Ageless a look. “Don’t tell me you never heard the rumors.”
“What rumors?”
The Human rolled his eyes. “Boy, you really were kept in the dark, and kept from thinking too much outside of your op-sec. The rumors that Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine were not so…shall we say, pure themselves? That Vader himself was some sort of mystic, possibly with Jedi training. I mean, hells, he’s been known to kill with a lightsaber, and more than once.”
Ageless had indeed thought it curious, but like most in the Empire, he had always been discouraged from thinking too much on those types of issues. If there was any mention of it on the HoloNet, it was always scrubbed by the Propaganda Bureau. Those things happened, and certainly the citizens on any Imperial-controlled worlds would keep hush about their own conspiracy theories, lest a surveillance droid happen by their window and overheard them, and then a grab team of stormtroopers disappeared them in the night.
But you couldn’t help yourself from asking the question in your own mind, could you? That it was possible that Vader, rumored to have killed his own officers from across a room, was not in fact using some kind sonic death beam known only to IIS’s top weapon designers, but that it was caused by something else. Some unnatural force.
And once you started down that path of questioning, your next thoughts would turn inevitably toward the man holding Vader’s leash. And what did that mean for Vader’s own loyalties? What did it say about his background?
I’ll never join you! Skywalker had cried while hanging from the end of a platform inside Cloud City’s huge cylindrical chasm, in the Main Processing Vane. Ageless had witnessed the exchange between him and Vader from afar, while battling Sark and nearly dying from his injuries.
If you only knew the power of the Dark Side! had been Vader’s reply.
So then, was Vader being serious, or merely poetical?
“You’re saying you have proof that Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine are, what, Jedi?”
“I don’t have any proof, only suspicion. When I went up the chain and asked my IIS superiors just where the Dagobah intel was coming from, the reply came up from the upper echelons that the Emperor seemed ‘to have had a vision.’ At first, I didn’t take it literally. But later on…” He shrugged, and took another toke of his death stick.
“What happened later on?”
“Vader. He and Sark began their investigations in and around Dagobah and surrounding worlds, like Utapau and Elrood. But Sark…he spent some time on Vader’s ship. Just the two of them, and one assassin droid Vader kept with him at all times. Sark said he saw Vader meditate a few times, alone in a room at the back of the ship, almost like a sanctum. After each of these meditation sessions, Vader would suddenly speak as though he had some new intel, and they would return to the Dagobah system and scan every planet there, every moon. They even went down to the planet Dagobah itself once or twice, and Sark said they stayed there for weeks, and that Vader was obsessed. The Dark Lord would disappear for a day or two at a time, and Sark would start to think he had gotten himself eaten by one of the predators there—Dagobah has a lot of those, he said—but every time Vader returned and said only that he had ‘sensed something’ watching them, but could not find it.” Gaffrey took another quivering toke of his death stick, and the smoke leaked out of his nostrils as he ruminated.
Phaeda’s two moons were high in the sky, full to bursting, and set the entire world aglow. The aurora-colored tides became more erratic, more violent, and reached higher and higher up the beach, almost to the sand dunes where Ageless and Gaffrey sat.
“And I thought that was the end of it, till the Bespin Incident.”
Ageless’s ears perked up. “What about the Bespin Incident?”
Gaffrey sighed and put out his death stick. “About a week after Vader left Cloud City empty-handed, he returned to Mustafar furious. He sent out messages to IIS and other agencies that he wanted a workup of Luke Skywalker’s trajectory before he entered the Bespin system. He wanted to know where the Farm Boy had been coming from that day, and where he might’ve gone after he escaped Cloud City.”
At the mention of Mustafar, Ageless made a mental note: The last time I spoke to Director Zumter, just before the Rebels took him away, he mentioned that IIS had ripped the memory of some medical droid that supposedly was there when Palpatine rescued some Human from the lava-covered planet, and encased him in a suit of black armor. That droid’s memory seemed to indicate that was the beginning of Darth Vader. More, the droid said that Vader had asked for someone, a person named Padmé.
Eager to be this close to more information, Ageless asked, “Did Vader renew his interest in Dagobah after the Bespin Incident?”
“Yes, he did,” the Human lamented.
“Why? Why was Luke Skywalker’s trajectory when he entered the Bespin system so important?”
“Because when Skywalker first entered the Bespin system, his trajectory indicated he could only have come from a handful of planets. None of them were habitable, except one.”
Ageless nodded. “Dagobah?”
“Yes. And according to our agents that were on Bespin, the Dark Lord seemed to feel that Skywalker was—how did they put it?—gifted when he met Vader there. There were rumors of security footage being erased, footage that only a few stormtroopers got to see, and they claimed the footage showed Vader locking lightsabers with Skywalker. Apparently, Skywalker was injured, but he gave the Dark Lord a pretty good fight.”
Ageless’s mind raced to catch up. He spoke even as he put the pieces together. “So, Vader saw Skywalker’s approach vector to Bespin from Dagobah as too much of a coincidence. Vader had been told to look for a Jedi Master hiding somewhere in that sector of space, he had concentrated his search on Dagobah—and came close to someone ‘watching them’—and then Skywalker happens to have a lightsaber, and not only that, but he’s good at using it. And he had likely just come from Dagobah.”
“Yes. The distance between Dagobah and Bespin is only about eighteen thousand lightyears, a small distance galactically speaking, so it seemed an obvious conclusion. But we did another sweep of the Dagobah system and found nothing of importance there. An old smuggler base abandoned fifty years ago or more, a starship that had crashed there about twenty years before that, and a strange signal beacon we could never identify the source of.”
“Signal beacon?”
“Yes, it came and went, filled with static. Probably a long-lost flight recorder of some ship that got destroyed somewhere in the system. The flight recorder is probably tumbling through space forever.” He looked at Ageless. “Is that enough for you and your Rebel friends to compromise me with?”
For a long moment, Ageless just considered him. He mulled over everything the Human had just told him, and wondered if there was anything else he could use there, anything besides handing it over to the Rebellion as collateral to keep Gaffrey in line.
Finally, he said, “I’m going to give you a HoloNet site access number, and you’re going to talk to someone there. It will be a Rebel, your new handler. They will tell you your next steps. I’m going to sail back to Phaedron on the Yngranault. You should wait a couple of weeks before returning, so that I can smooth things over with the Service, then charter a boat back to civilization. Got it?”
Gaffrey nodded. “How do you know I even have the money to charter a boat?” Then he laughed. “Oh, right, of course, the Service has already frozen all of my public accounts, but you’ve got access to the shadow accounts I keep on Phaeda. You probably sliced them all before I ever came onto the planet.”
It was true, but Ageless made no remark. “I’m glad you chose life, Gaffrey. I hope we can meet under better terms someday. I would offer to shake your head, but something tells me you won’t take it.”
“You’re right.” The Human glared at him a moment, then turned his gaze to the tide coming in.
Ageless turned and left. The last time he looked back, he saw the Human still sitting on the sand dune, gazing out to the horizon, out at a future of unknowable conflict and fear. If Gaffrey played his cards right, he might live a long life. But it was not likely. Double agents rarely got to live happily ever after.
That meant that Ageless himself was not likely to survive the Galactic Civil War, no matter who won.
Ageless moved quickly back to the seaport. He was on-mission, and had to get back to a place with HoloNet access. His next task for the Rebellion: contact the Imperial Intelligence Service and tell them that Loriss Gaffrey was no traitor, that they had it all wrong and he was never in on Zumter’s conspiracy to undermine the Service, and that they should consider bringing him back in from the cold. If they believed him, it would be one more Rebel mole inside the IIS.
And one more step towards the destruction of the Empire.
* * *
There was a nip in the air. Winter came twice in a single year on Phaeda, and it could not always be predicted when the two Winter Phases would begin. Cold wind whipped his jacket as he was boarding the Yngranault, and preparing to go back to a chum’s life. Near the plankway, Ageless met Drozo, looking exhausted from his all-nighter and lugging his duffel with him. “What did you get up to, friend?”
Ageless shrugged. “Just some sightseeing.” He looked at the Twi’lek. “Hey, Drozo, I just want to say…thanks. Thanks for working with me and looking out for me while we’ve been out here.”
Drozo smiled big and clapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, what’re friends for, right?”
Ageless smiled. “Right.” He pretended to let it go. But as Drozo walked ahead of him on the plankway, Ageless surreptitiously slipped his hand into his friend’s pocket, and dropped a credit chit. The chit had thirty thousand credits on it, taken from one of Loriss Gaffrey’s shadow accounts. It wasn’t a fortune, but it might be enough to give the Twi’lek a good head start on a new life. And he deserved it.
After all, Ageless knew what it was to be a man looking to start all over.