7
SOMEWHERE IN THE MID RIM TERRITORIES
ADRIFT OUTSIDE OF ANY ESTABLISHED HYPERLANES
The name of the ship they had stolen, they learned, was the Questionable Success. Either someone had thought it was a joke, or else they had had a premonition that Kevv and Namyr would steal it and make a getaway that had technically worked but hadn’t put them in much better circumstances.
Kevv stood in the engine room, coughing through the last of the smoke that the fans hadn't yet vented out. Namyr was up in the cockpit, running diagnostics on all systems while also using the comms board to search for any incoming signals. So far, it seemed like they were truly alone out here. She wasn’t sending any signals out, of course, since the last thing they wanted right now was to have their signals show up on Imperial scopes.
“All right,” Kevv said, tightening the clamps on the jerry-rigged coolant system he had attached to the hyperdrive. “Try it now.” After a few seconds, Namyr cued up the hyperdrive’s standby mode and the temperature in the engine room immediately shot up by twenty degrees. That was more than just stifling, but not nearly as hot as it had been just an hour ago when they first tried this. “All right, that’s good, shut it off, shut it off.” The hyperdrive went offline again and Kevv slid out from underneath it, wiping the sweat out of his eyes.
Standing up, he let out a heavy sigh and looked at all the parts he had cannibalized from the 74-Z speeder Namyr had brought aboard. He had taken the speeder’s own coolant system and some of its circuitry to modify the backup coolant system that someone (thank the Force) had left onboard the Questionable Success. It took some time to install it all—Kevv was a competent enough mechanic, but hyperdrives were something for true engineers to mess with, especially when they were this badly damaged.
“Well d-d-d-d-done, sirrrrr!” said the droid sitting in the corner.
Another minor stroke of luck was, for a small fee, Pixelito Spaceport would allow one of their maintenance droids to stay aboard a person’s ship while he or she was away, to fix minor leaks and cracks and short circuits and the like. This one had been aboard the Questionable Success when Kevv arrived at the spaceport, only to find his shuttle had been delayed. He'd had conned his way aboard the ship and took off. The maintenance droid was a TT-4-G model, brand-spanking-new, torn apart when Namyr crashed into it with her speeder, but its primary systems still worked, even if its lower torso and legs were utterly destroyed. Its chest, head and one of its arms were all that was salvageable, and that was all Kevv had needed for it to talk him through the more difficult aspects of hyperdrive repair.
“Thanks,” Kevv said, wiping his hands on his shirt and heading fore. “Keep an eye on it, will you?” He handed the droid a commlink. “Call me if anything changes.”
“Will d-d-d-d-do, sirrrrrrr!”
The corridors were still mostly dark. The eerie, blood-red glow of the emergency lights lit the way to the cockpit, where he found Namyr slumped in the copilot’s seat, head in her hands, looking defeated.
“It’s not that bad, is it?”
“We can’t send up a distress beacon, obviously,” she said in a low, worried voice. “The Empire would surely pick it up before anyone else. We can’t be too far away from Malastare, relatively speaking.”
Yes, relatively speaking, he thought. Malastare was likely a hundred lightyears or more behind them, and yet while that was a vast distance in terms of actual vacuum between them and the planet itself, it meant nothing to an Imperial Star Destroyer with a Class-I hyperdrive. “How long do you think before they can calculate our course from our last known trajectory, and track us here?”
Namyr sighed and shrugged. “A matter of hours? Maybe a bit more? Then they’ll fan out across this patch of space and start dropping search buoys and probe droids, they'll sweep for us. It won’t take them long. I looked in the cargo hold, this is some kind of foodstuff supply ship, so its hull isn’t likely to have heat-masking or anything to keep us from being spotted.”
Kevv sat in the pilot’s seat and looked at the reports from Namyr's diagnostics tests. The two most important things were in working order: life-support and hull integrity. There were no leaks and no damage done to air-recycling or pressure-keeping systems. So they were solid on that front.
Kevv looked out the viewport at all that vastness. The stars were laid out for them like grains of salt on black cloth. A strange feeling came over him, for this was an all too familiar situation for him. “Did I ever tell you about how I came to be in the Rebellion?”
“Kevv, we really can’t talk about this right now. We’ve got more important things to discuss.”
He nodded. “I was stranded. Aboard a ship called the Moroboa Khel el-Tel. We called it the Moroboa for short. We were stranded for months, and the entire crew went insane, one by one, killing each other and accusing each other of stealing food." He paused, looking back on memories he'd long fought to suppress. "I was the last survivor. I had to kill two people who tried to break into my quarters.”
Namyr looked over at him in utter shock. “Stars, Kevv!"
“Yeah. A Rebel ship came across our distress call. They happened to be in the area, running from Imperial ships. Crazy luck that they were there at all. One in a million chance, really.” He sighed. “So, it’s only random luck that I’m here with you right now.” He offered a smile, since Humans seemed to like those.
“I’m…sorry. Sorry to hear all that. Stars above, Kevv, that’s…”
“It’s no big deal. That’s what it is. Like I told you back on Malastare, we pilots don’t like to dwell on the things that almost killed us. Nor do we like to think about the things that are going to kill us. We just like to focus on not dying, right up until the moment that we do. It’s also kind of a Duros thing, so that helps,” he chuckled.
Namyr nodded. “I haven’t given up if that’s what you’re worried about. I just…I can’t see a way through.”
“Well, the coolant system is working, at least for now. And I think with a few hours of cooldown time for the hyperdrive, I ought to be able to cue the engines up and get us moving on sublight. There are some circuits that melted in the circuitry bay, those need to be replaced. But those also need to cool down before we can even touch them. The droid can help us with it, I’m sure. He doesn’t have any legs but I can strap him onto my back like a backpack, and that should do the trick.”
“Sounds like a plan.” She gazed back out at the universe.
He hesitated a moment. “I hope you’re not angry with me.”
She looked back at him. “Angry? For what?”
“For the trick I pulled that got us into this mess.”
“Kevv, if you hadn’t done it, we would be in an Imperial dungeon right now being tortured until our bodies and minds gave out.”
“I know, but—”
“No, don’t. Don’t think about the thing that almost got us killed. Remember what you just said.”
Kevv laughed. “All right, then. What’s say we get to work?”
Using passive sensors only, Namyr did one last comms check to see if any radio signals were coming from anywhere else around them. Nothing.
As they walked to the circuitry bay together, Kevv said, “So, I have to ask, how did you know that we were in trouble back there on Malastare? Did you pick up on the agents following you into your apartment or something?”
“No, I only picked up on them after I left my apartment building. And I only left because I received a warning.”
“A warning?”
“Yes. A clerk droid delivered a message from an unknown party, it only said that ‘they’ knew where I was, and that 'they' were coming for me.”
Kevv stared at her in surprise. “Sithspit. Somebody tipped you off? Who do you think it was?”
“Who do you think?” She raised an eyebrow.
For a moment he just stared at her. Then it clicked. “No. Him?”
“Who else could’ve known?”
They gathered up the maintenance droid and put it to work, then pulled out the toolboxes and put on work gloves so they could handle the overheated and melted fuses. As Kevv pulled them out and used a solvent spray to remove the leftover gunk, he reviewed what they knew so far. “So, Ageless Void survives Hoth, thanks in part to you and me, and then Commander Fera brings him into an operation to bring in members of the Imperial Intelligence Service. He escapes after the Cloud City thing, goes dark for a while, but then resurfaces to start sending us former IIS officers and agents that he’s coerced into being double agents for the Rebel Alliance.” Once he was done wiping the gunk away, he and Namyr went about inserting new fuses. “And now he sends us a warning that we’re about to be swept up by Imperial agents. Why do you think he’s doing it? He has to know that even when this is all over, he can’t just be forgiven. He assassinated too many Rebel leaders to count during his time with the Kingdom. That can’t just be swept under the rug.”
“It won’t be,” Namyr said. She had a power reader in her hand now, and was touching its prongs to the various nodes of the circuitry boards, gauging energy outputs. “Ageless knows it can’t all be forgiven, I told him as much just before I left him on Cloud City.”
“So, what’s his endgame, then? Where can he go from here? And why help us at all if the Alliance is never going to let it go? He has to know that one day…” Kevv shrugged. He didn’t want to say it. One day Ageless will have to go on trial for crimes against sentient beings, or else he will run for the rest of his life, always looking over his shoulder for the assassin the Alliance sends after him. “Why is he helping us?” he asked again.
Namyr looked satisfied with the power levels, and so threw the switch to test for a surge. When it didn’t happen, she directed him back to the cockpit. “Let’s cue up the sublight engines, see if we can get this wagon pushed up the hill.” They packed up their tools and stepped into the companionway. "As for Ageless, who knows why he does what he does. But I'm sure he has a reason. He struck me as someone who never does anything without a purpose."
Once they were in the cockpit, they worked together revving up the engines, moving first through one-quarter impulse, then increasing the output until they were sure no blowout was going to occur again. When the sublight engines kicked in, they looked at each other and smiled, and slapped each other’s hand.
"Good job, partner!" Namyr exclaimed, pumping her fists.
“What course should we set?” Kevv asked.
“Doesn’t matter. There’s nowhere to go until we’re sure the hyperdrive’s going to work. So for now just get us moving away from here, so that when a Star Destroyer inevitably drops out of hyperspace in this region, we’re not where they expect us to be.”
“Copy that.”
The view in front of them changed, the stars swirling as though being sucked down a drain, just as Kevv turned the Questionable Success towards a distant cluster of stars.
“Sensors are picking up a series of large moving objects at these coordinates here,” he said, directing her attention to the deep-field sensor arrays. “Could be a comet, or an asteroid cluster. We could use it to hide?” he suggested with a shrug.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“Set a course, then. Hopefully our luck keeps holding out.”
“You know, you never did answer my question. Why Ageless Void helping us?”
"I said it's anybody's guess."
"But why do you think?"
Namyr scratched her chin. “There are only four reasons a person betrays his government: money, ideology, ego, or protection. He’s good on money, and the man certainly doesn’t need protection.” Indeed, Kevv recalled the lethal power and dexterity the Zabrak had demonstrated even while injured and freezing half to death on Hoth. Ageless Void was as deadly as an ash-hound during mating season. “And he doesn’t strike me as overly egotistical.”
“So, ideology, then.”
Namyr shrugged. “Sure. But what that ideology is…” She shook her head. “If I had to guess, I would say it is evolving. Likely, he doesn’t even know why he’s doing it. Not yet. He’s acting on instinct, but being propelled toward the answer by following those instincts.”
Kevv finalized their course and left the ship in the hands of the autopilot, then sat back. “Where do you think that will lead him?”
“I keep asking different versions of the same question.”
“Which question?”
“Do I think he will be on our side,” she said, doing another check of the system. “I think you’re hoping there will be some simple yes or no answer. The truth is, we can’t know, and that the only answer for him may be to stay on his own side. But I’ve turned many criminals into informants, and I’ve managed to flip quite a few Imperial agents, and I can tell you that right now, the most important thing for him to do is stay on the search. And then he needs to make a decision. He needs to decide what matters to him most.”
Kevv shrugged. “Makes sense. But what happens once he decides?”
Namyr scratched her chin again pensively. “He’s a driven person. A goal-seeking being. More than likely, he was like that even before the IIS took him in. It’s probably what drew them to recruit him. Commander Fera and I have spoken with the evaluation droids that did the psychological workup on Ageless, and after collating all the data, we all determined that Ageless was likely a tumultuous youth, adventurous but also somewhat frightened. Probably confused about something, and also stubborn. Insanely stubborn. As in, he would’ve been the kind of person who, if captured, would look his enemy captors in the face as he smiled and killed himself, to prevent them getting anything out of him. Ageless sets his will against those he defies, and will kill himself if it means it will slightly inconvenience them. Totally committed to his goals, but, even more so, make sure his enemies do not achieve theirs."
She checked the tibanna intake valves, made sure they were modulated. Kevv watched how she did all this smoothly, mechanically, while reciting Ageless Void’s psychological profile.
“But then the IIS came along and only reinforced his goal-seeking tendencies. Now his mind is directed towards missions. He seeks objectives.”
“But who’s giving him his objectives now?”
“He is.”
“Are we sure?" Kevv asked. "Are we certain we’re not being played? Perhaps all these double agents he sent us aren’t double agents at all, and maybe they will feed us false information. Even giving you the heads-up back on Malastare could just be a ploy to earn more of your trust.”
Namyr shook her head. She seemed so certain. “No. Directed by his instincts, he will seek new objectives, and through those objectives he will find the answers to who he is. And then he will choose a side.” She finished her sensor scan, and reclined in her seat. “And then,” she added, “we just pray that that side aligns with ours.”
“And if not?”
Namyr stared coldly at the ceiling. “Then I’ll have to kill him myself.”
* * *
A little over an hour later, a Star Destroyer appeared distantly in that sector of space. When it did, it found nothing of import. It scanned the entire region, and found only a few anomalies. Then it picked up a single small blip, a whiff of energy like that coming from a freighter’s sublight engines. It followed this signature over to a blue comet blazing through space, leaving a trail of ice fifteen million kilometers long. There was faint radiation here, possibly indicative of exhaust from a ship’s hyperdrive.
The Star Destroyer searched for several more hours, but the Questionable Success was already long gone.
* * *
ASTEROID XXK-1-CORELLIA-3304491 (CODENAME ARISEN)
SECRET LISTENING OUTPOST OF THE REBEL ALLIANCE
SAILING THROUGH THE OUTER EDGES OF THE CORELLIAN SYSTEM
In a dark room lit only by candles, Fera knelt on a plush ceremonial pillow with her eyes closed. Ish’lib incense burned in the corner, filling the room with a rich and invigorating smell, like old leaves burning. With each inhalation she prepared herself for the inking from the cosmetic droid, and each time she felt pain from its tattooing needle, she exhaled and said the sacred words of Ñoltosh-arur, a goddess still worshipped among some of her people.
The sacred words were merely for the ceremony, merely for feeling some connection to tradition, for no one else was there to hear them. No one but the droid, who finally stood and said, in a soft female voice, “There, my lady.” She held up the mirror so that Fera could see the new, dark-black tattoo across her smooth green flesh.
The looping design was selected from a myriad of ancient symbols her people used to create the tattoo stories written on their faces. This glyph represented coming to terms with one’s past mistakes, and beginning a path towards true redemption. The swirling lines went from her cheek to her chin, connecting all the tattoos of her past mistakes in an interpretive, all-encompassing master design, with room to spare. Plenty of room for more mistakes, she thought, smiling.
“Are you pleased?” the droid said.
“Very pleased, thank you. You may go now.”
“Of course.”
The door behind Fera swished open and the droid stepped out. Once alone, she prayed. Fera was no longer sure she believed in any of the old gods, but her family had. Mirialans had many old deities, some of them renamed and repurposed to fit a more modern galaxy, but some of them, like Ñoltosh-arur, refused to be modernized. Ñoltosh-arur was one of the Ancient Ones, and one of the few whose name was still known. He/she had no gender, and demanded nothing less than total perfection among all mortals who belonged to his/her Court. Ñoltosh-arur was represented only by symbols—no letters of any alphabet could do him/her justice, and no simple drawing could contain this, the mightiest of the Ancients.
Fera had inherited Ñoltosh-arur’s rituals from her father, who swore he dreamt of him/her nightly, and that he/she had promised to look over Fera all her days.
For several moments more, she remained kneeling, breathing, and repeating the sacred words. When she had recited them exactly two hundred times, she stood up and walked over to her bed, and began to systematically remove the many complex pieces of the ceremonial gown, handed down from her grandmother. She stood naked before the mirror and took in her new countenance, forever altered by the redemption-path tattoo.
It has begun, she thought, drinking the last of the nam’bat’tat tea, and thus concluding the ceremony.
Then, slowly, meticulously, Fera began to pull on her slacks, shirt and jacket, all casual gear for working within the offices of Arisen. She bounded slowly over to the door, her almost floating, mind still in a quasi-meditative state. The asteroid base had only been online for a month, and they were still waiting on the shipment of artificial gravity generators. So, for the moment, they had only spin gravity. Thrusters on the asteroid’s surface had spun the asteroid up just enough to give a semblance of light gravity, but if it spun any faster, it might look suspicious to deep-space probes.
Fera opened the door and glide-bounded down the hall, past other buoyant AIN officers and droids on their way to man a listening station or deliver a message. The corridors were ostensibly made of rock, pocked full of irregular holes, with natural tunnels that wound through the asteroid like an insect colony. But the “rock” was actually a strange, anomalous compound of zersium ore (which was necessary in the production of durasteel) and three other alloys unique to the outer cloud of the Corellian solar system. Besides a few key rooms that were made off-limits, such as Fera’s quarters, there were no doors here, only plastic curtains. The tunnels were lit dimly by halogens, candles and torches, and every corridor smelled of the dust that the vents had yet to suck out of the air.
Fera bounded into Arisen’s nerve center, where thirty computer techs and signals-intelligence specialists were hard at work at their desks, looking over holoscreens and working around the clock on Imperial messages that had been picked up by their agents on Corellia and sent to Arisen for decryption.
“Commander Fera,” said Onaley, a green-skinned female Twi’lek who was her new operations assistant. Onaley had just floated over to her and handed her a datapad. “These are the latest decrypts. Looks like the Imps are using random-phasic signaling to try and slip messages through the HoloNet without anyone noticing. Mostly here in the Corellian system. Our guys on the UnderNet gave us the heads up.”
Fera scrolled through the datapad with her finger, scanning the output. She was surprised by the uptick. “Comms traffic seems to have increased.”
“Yes, ma’am, I noticed that, too.”
“Do we have any idea why?” She walked slowly around the main station, up at the holoscreen on the wall, which showed the latest reports of every single operation they were currently working on. The Alliance Intelligence Network (AIN) was more scattered than ever, but they were intent on picking up momentum in the Corellian system. In the wake of their victory at Yavin, and their near total destruction of their leadership at Hoth, the Rebel Alliance could not allow themselves complacency. We need to keep our edge, Fera thought, watching the glowing dots on the operations screen moving up priority as new messages came in. Can't let up now, not with our foot finally on the pedal, and not after losing someone as integral as Captain Han Solo. That had been a blow, and with Princess Leia and the others on a secret mission to get him back, the Rebellion was missing some of its key heroes, which not only hurt morale but left them shorthanded.
“Our decryption specialists have picked up several key words from every message,” Onaley said, answering the commander’s question. “And the analysts have been combing over it, looking for a pattern. They believe they’ve found the reason for the increase in encrypted comms traffic, and it has to do with the destination of each of these messages.”
“Which is where?”
“The Endor system. Ever heard of it?”
Fera scrunched her face. “Vaguely. Somewhere in the Moddell sector. In the Outer Rim, right?”
“That’s it.”
Fera shook her head. “Probably a false lead. Nothing out there except…well, nothing. No major spaceports or space stations, no shipyard to speak of, and no special resources for them to acquire.”
“That’s not entirely true,” said Onaley, waving to a computer. It picked up her gesture and threw a hologlobe of a green-and-blue world up in front them, rotating slowly. “This moon is designated IX3244-A, also known as the Sanctuary Moon, or the Forest Moon of Endor. It’s small, remote, with harsh indigenous life. Our analysts say it would be the perfect place for the Empire to cue up a large-scale operation of some kind. The moon would supply any workers with water, food, recreation—”
“But what kind of large-scale operation could they be conducting there?”
“Take a look at this, Commander,” said Onaley, pulling up a file on her datapad and sending it over to Fera’s datapad. “It’s three messages received by a group of Bothans that went missing somewhere in the Moddell sector. It was their last transmission. The Bothan Spynet was kind enough to share this with us…for a price. They thought it might be relevant and our analysts agree, and the Bothans say they’re appointing a small task force to look into the veracity of the message.”
Fera traced the line of her new tattoo with one hand while she read over the three messages. The thing that caught her attention was that the Bothans, before they went missing, had decrypted an Imperial signal meant for the Super Star Destroyer Executor, which had been patrolling that region of space. Fera had been close to the Executor at Bespin, and had very nearly been taken in by its tractor beam.
The missing Bothans’ last three transmissions indicated there was something in the message they decrypted about “a large crystal” inbound to the Moddell sector, and that there were “trillions of plates of durasteel” on order, and, lastly, that a massive antenna was being built on the Sanctuary Moon, of a design usually only used to project enormous energy shields. But Fera was looking at the specs and the overall size of that antenna and its primary transmitter, and she could not imagine anything that would require shields so large.
What are they guarding that they need that much protection? It would have to be huge. The size of—?
“No,” she mumbled.
“Ma’am?”
A large crystal. How large? she wondered. The rumor for years was that the Death Star’s superlaser had been powered by a giant gem of some kind, something called a kyber crystal, somewhat rare these days since Jedi weren't around and they had been the primary harvester of them.
“No,” she said again, rereading the Bothans’ report. “No, no, no…”
“Ma’am, what is it?”
“Onaley, how many agents do we have at our disposal right now?”
“For what type of job?”
“I need them to be able to slip in and out of the Endor system, and soon. Just a sneak-and-peek is all I need.”
Onaley checked her own datapad. “There’s Jagged,” she said, using the codename of a Human operative that usually worked Cademimu sector. “But he’s just waiting on a call from his handler to reassign him, so maybe not so good. Um…let’s see…can’t use Alinoxx since she’s in deep cover right now. There’s nobody right now that I can—wait, Mordenta,” she said.
Fera looked at her. “Mordenta?”
“Yes, ma’am. Mordenta and Swift got off Malastare in time,” Onaley said. Mordenta and Swift were the codenames for Namyr Abjura and Edreezel Kevv, respectively. Fera had not seen either of them in the flesh in almost a year, not since escaping Cloud City with the skin of their teeth. “They got the confirmation only moments ago. It was a close thing, but they managed to steal a ship out of Pixelito. They suffered some damage but made repairs and are now limping our way.”
“They get the intel about Ossus?”
Onaley smiled. “It’s in your updates.”
“Ah.” Fera sifted through the reports on her datapad until she landed on it. As she read it, her heart quickened. As important as this new intel on Endor could be, Fera felt something even more terrifying could be unfolding on the so-called “lost world” of Ossus. That planet had been unreachable for four thousand years, but now it might be that the Emperor had discovered a way to it, and that his rumored lust for ancient Sith relics might bear him some fruit. It was not likely that there was anything left there he could use, but Fera had not gotten this far by underestimating Palpatine’s resourcefulness. All things are a weapon in his hands.
“Send Mordenta and Swift a brief message instructing them to head to Endor after they’ve finished their repairs and ensured no Imperials are tailing them. Then I want every untasked analyst working on this data, and confirming whether or not this new route the Hutts found to Ossus is viable.”
“At once, Commander.” Onaley spun on her heels and walked briskly out of the main station.
Fera stroked her new tattoo, and puzzled over her datapad.
She stared at the data, at the complex route through hyperspace the Desilijic kajidic had purportedly stumbled upon. If this proved true, Ossus could become a reachable planet again, and if that happened—Well, who knows what it means? Who knows what’s left there?
Or who?