31
[ ONE YEAR AFTER THE EVENTS IN CLOUD CITY ]
PHAEDA (THIRD PLANET OF THE PHAEDA SYSTEM)
IN THE CAPITAL CITY OF PHAEDRON
THE OUTER RIM TERRITORIES
The waterways of Phaedron wove labyrinthine through the smog-filled city. Two rocky moons sat fat in the sky, one yellow and one white, and often made it so that nighttime was not very dark at all. Like tonight. The smog hung low over waters so polluted they were almost black, and the canals passed through the city and underneath duracrete bridges, from which Phaedron’s citizens tossed their trash, which clumped together in roving islands of garbage that droid-controlled kektas picked up. The kektas were square-shaped boats that moved lugubriously slow. The locals sometimes used them for free transport about the expansive city, just hopping onto them as they drifted by, even though it was illegal to do so. The alternative was to use the repulsor-trains, which were always overcrowded, sometimes broken, and usually late.
The kektas were reliable, though. They had their patrols preprogrammed and every Phaedronite knew he or she could set their chrono to the schedule. Oftentimes, if you were smart, you could time it so that the kektas all happened to converge on the same spot in one of the narrow canals, and you could just go jogging across, hopping from boat to kekta, and reach the other side of the canal. This was preferable on parts of the canal where there were no bridges, or the bridges were closed for maintenance, which was a regular occurrence.
Phaedron was always undergoing maintenance. The city had once been a glimmering jewel, where reputable traders from all parts of Cademimu sector came to set up trade outposts and warehouses, creating jobs in a sector that was teeming with potential. Phaeda was a planet of millions of islands, some large, some small, spread out over a sprawling ocean. Thousands of years ago, the city of Phaedron, located on the planet’s largest continent, began to bustle. Unable to build outward too much, due to the limitations of the shorelines, the people began building upward. The city grew tall, with apartments stacked high, almost reaching the clouds.
But then the Mandalorian Wars happened, and a single orbital bombardment had shattered the tallest buildings and destroyed a massive power generator on the surface, leaking radiation upon people made recently homeless.
The city, and its planet, had never truly recovered. People died of radiation sickness, drinking the poisoned water and eating the poisoned foods. A blockade by the Mandalorians had kept medical and resupply ships from entering the system. The Mandalorians had argued they had no choice, that their ships’ systems had been sliced and sabotage, made to fire on innocent civilians, but it no longer mattered whose fault it was. The damage was done, and the city never again reached such heights.
The people that remained in Phaedron today were mostly the descendants of those doomed people, and they continued a tradition of building a relatively low and flat city, most buildings were lower than five stories, and where they ran out of land, they built crannogs across the waters, creating a network of connected artificial islands.
After the Mandalorian War, Phaeda itself attracted people on the run, rogues and killers with warrants for their arrest, thieves and conmen desperate for a fallback spot. Phaeda became one of those hives of wretched scum your parents warned you to never visit, the “pirate jewel” of the Cademimu sector, where thieves found buyers for stolen goods, chemical factories chuffed smog out over the waters at all hours, and desperate beings died in the street and their bodies lay there for days before an overburdened streetsweeper droid finally found the time to clean them up.
Ageless Void figured that if his life did not change, he would either end up dead or having to retire to a place like this.
Ageless had the kekta schedule down pat, and had his alternate routes planned out. He was ready to run a surveillance-detection run. Using the streets and bridges, he blended with crowds until he split away to move down an alleyway, then into a tapcaf or clothing shop, where he would look out of a bay window facing the street, looking at its reflection to see if he could spot any repeats (faces he had already clocked in the crowd earlier). If he felt he was in the black (all clear) he would then use the kektas to save a bit of time.
On his way back to his apartment, he passed through the Kerenjall Marketplace just outside of the Phaedron Spaceport, and watched which shuttles came and went. R-3PO said he had chatted up a service droid working the spaceport’s terminal, and knew of an incoming HWK-290 vessel. Ageless had a feeling it was the ship he had been waiting for. The 290s ceased being built during the Clone Wars, but some were still in use. Seeing one in the wild was rare.
Has to be him.
Ageless browsed the fruit stalls of the marketplace, glancing at his chrono from time to time. The ship was late, but when it finally arrived, he watched the HWK-290, called the Verena, descend slowly on repulsors that were loud and obviously in need of repair. The Verena disappeared behind the wall of Phaedron Spaceport, but Ageless only had to wait five minutes before the pilot—his target—stepped out of the front terminal, luggage in hand, and hustled down the street, looking for an air-taxi.
He won’t get one, Ageless thought, pulling his hood over his head to hide his horns. Not this time of day. Not only was it one of the city’s busiest hours, but Ageless had had R4 slice into the local net-box and forge a series of driver requests for the far side of the city—all of the droid-driven air-taxis would see a rather unprecedented amount of passengers requesting transportation, and would not be anywhere close to Phaedron Spaceport.
And that left Ageless’s target on foot. No airspeeders, no landspeeders, he had to hoof it.
Ageless also thought it was the perfect night for tailing. The two moons were bright, which provided many deep shadows, but the moons also made it so that there was just enough light to easily follow his quarry. The crowds of night-shift workers heading for the nearby water treatment plant also provided plenty of cover.
Ageless reached up to scratch his cheek. “I’m mobile,” he said into the commlink clipped inside his sleeve. “Target is in a gray slashcoat and green pants, thirty meters ahead of me.”
“I copy, sir,” came R-3PO’s prim reply. “I have my speeder’s belly cam on him. Proceeding to follow.”
Ageless glanced up to see the gray Twin-228 airspeeder coasting slowly above. “Keep the box close as you can, but not so close you skim the rooftops. Don’t need an alert from air-traffic control outing you.”
“Of course, sir.”
Their target was a seemingly innocuous middle-aged Human, plainly dressed, average height with blond hair. The man was an IIS officer and so would know something of tradecraft; Ageless had to be careful not to make too much of an impression in the crowd. His jacket was reversible—black on the outside, green on the inside—so whenever he found a chance, he took it off, turned it inside-out, and put it back on. He also had two different colored wigs in his pocket, which he easily could throw on to hide his horns.
His target had trouble managing the bustling crowds. Ageless followed from a parallel bridge for a while, and used the kektas whenever he could, knowing his quarry would not even know the local custom of using them to hop across the canals. He followed the Human until he stepped into a glimmering hotel called simply the Open Door. It was a three-story building that Ageless had scouted before, knowing it would be a likely stop for his target.
“He went inside the Open Door, looks like,” he said, again pretending to scratch his face and speaking into the commlink. “But circle around, see if it’s only a ruse.” Ageless would be surprised if it wasn’t. If it was him on the run, he would walk into a couple of hotels, reserve a room, and then change clothes and hairstyles if possible, and exit out the back somehow. He would do this at a couple of different hotels, under different names, leaving a confusing trail for any ghosts haunting his footsteps.
“He is exiting out the back,” R-3PO reported. “I cannot see him, but Arfour has sliced into the districts security camera system, and he reports a humanoid figure stepping out into the back alley and crossing Isantress Canal Bridge.”
Ageless smirked. Smart.
“Feed me his trail.” While he listened to the protocol droid relay the astromech’s directions, Ageless jogged around the building and leapt over a floating kekta he knew would be cleaning the canals at this time of night, scrambled up an embankment and over a bridge, then found his quarry twenty meters ahead, stepping into a hotel called Beriill’s Place. Beriill was an Ugnaught, and the owner of the hotel. Ageless had chatted with him once when he first arrived in Phaedron, and so he knew there was a cellar on the bottom floor that a person could take to exit out into an old culvert, where they could walk along the riverbank to another canal bridge.
Our boy may have done his research before coming here, after all.
“Both I and Arfour have lost visual, sir,” reported R-3PO.
“Don’t worry, I know where he’s going.”
Ageless leapt down from one bridge to the riverbank, trudged into stinking knee-deep waters to reach a passing kekta, and grunted as he caught it, nearly slipped off, but held on as its rickety repulsors carried it over the sludgy canal. Two Rodians had also hitched a ride on the hovering boat, and they were both clearly drunk and arguing loudly with one another. Ageless hoped their racket did not alert his target as they approached.
He found the Human climbing up a filthy embankment thirty meters ahead of him, and he conferred his position to R-3PO, who said he was moving his airspeeder into position to intercept the target. It was a good thing he had brought the droids along, else he would have lost his target, for the Human was fast and nimble and broke line-of-sight with Ageless multiple times.
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His Human quarry maneuvered down seedy alleys, and once, he cut through a bakery and then into another alley and jumped over a fence, then took a turbolift up to a roof, ran across it, and slid down a fire escape and jogged across a small park. Ageless let him get far, far ahead, even lost sight of him a few times and trusted R-3PO to keep tabs on him. Once, when he came to the brick wall of an abandoned building, Ageless glanced around to make sure no one was watching, then slipped his hand into a jacket pocket where he kept the lightsaber. With a snap-hiss! the blue blade ignited, and after just a few seconds, Ageless had cut a hole in the wall and stepped through, then switched the lightsaber off and concealed it again. Over the last year, and on more than one occasion, the lightsaber of Luke Skywalker, which he had picked up in Cloud City by providence, had proven a great tool for infiltration.
Ageless caught up to his target on a glidewalk. The Human had changed clothes and wigs again, and so Ageless did the same, turning his jacket inside-out and pulling on a blond wig.
They maneuvered like this, watching the Human double-back multiple times and, once, climbing a fire escape to the rooftops, leaping from one to the next. Ageless followed from afar, letting R-3PO keep track of the target in his Twin-228. From the rooftops, one received a commanding view of a city that went on forever, stretching from the shore out into the blackened seas. These were the Crannoglands, buildings supported on struts made from both wood and durasteel, rising as much as twenty feet above the water. If Ageless fell into the water here, it would be difficult getting back up to city-level.
The Human walked across the ocean using extensive bridges. He hitched a ride with a family of Jawas riding atop a ronto, but then slipped away once more and would have vanished if not for R-3PO maneuvering through the sky traffic above.
“He’s just entered the Loigran Docks, sir. I believe he’s…yes, I see him now, he is stepping aboard a fishing yacht.”
“Is it a watercraft or a hover vehicle.”
“Watercraft, sir.”
“Does it belong to Nz’onoc Fishing?”
“It does. I can see the logo on clearly on the escutcheon.”
“Then I know where he’s going.”
Nz’onoc Fishing Industries was one of the major sources of jobs in Phaedron, the company was responsible for sending ships far out into the parts of the seas yet untouched by pollution, and fishing deep to bring back kigqua fish, doshi squid, and the colorful utarranya seaweed for eating. Half of Phaedron’s food supply came from this kind of deep-sea fishing. Often, out-of-towners could find quick work simply by agreeing to be one of the “chum” on a vessel—that is, a low-level grunt doing all the hard and dangerous work.
The ship would not be a hover vehicle of any kind because Phaedron’s city officials had put Nz’onoc Fishing Industries under notice that they were to use no transports that “exhaled powerful pollutants.” So then, an old-fashioned sailing vessel, likely done in the wide, quadri-sail style of Rodians, since the company was owned and operated entirely by a billionaire Rodian family.
Ageless had to race to get to the docks, knowing that Nz’onoc would ask no questions and simply take the Human aboard. The Human had probably planned it so that the ship would set sail as soon as he arrived. He would be under the guise of a desperate out-of-work visitor looking for quick credits. Nz’onoc Fishing Industries would love him.
Through R-3PO’s guidance, he arrived just as the sails were being unreefed, and a tall, round, black droid (of a design Ageless had never seen before) stood on the platform shouting at crowds of passersby. Its round head and blazing-red lines glared at everyone, and its vocabulator boomed: “The Yngranault is now departing for the Fargoner Sea! Last chance to be chum! We can always use more chum!”
“I can be chum,” Ageless said, walking up and presenting his ID slate. It was a fake ID, and it would pass almost any scrutiny, but the droid did not even look at it. He simply waved the Zabrak in distractedly and said, “Get aboard now. You will find your own quarters. Do not forget to submit yourself for inspection.” It then began hastily untying the ropes that moored the vessel.
Ageless nodded his thanks, and, just as he was approaching the plankway to the ship’s main deck, he spoke into his commlink. “Is our target on the ship?”
“Yes, sir. He’s heading aft, along with what looks like the rest of the chum.”
“All right. Follow us for as long as you can, but you’ll eventually be turned back by air-traffic control. Phaedron does not like any ships flying over the Fargoner Sea, they don’t want to risk any spilled pollutants.”
“Understood, sir. I will let you know when they turn me back.”
“Copy. Also, the droid said there’s going to be an inspection. I can’t take the lightsaber on board, I’m going to hide it behind a recycler at the end of the dock. Send Arfour to pick it up, would you?”
“Of course, sir.”
The recycler was a giant, ten-meter-wide machine for ships to dump their waste when they returned to port. Ageless slid the lightsaber behind the machine’s primary compactor when no one was looking, then crossed the plankway onto the Yngranault’s main deck.
The same huge droid as before stepped up to him, and said, “Have you not yet found your quarters, chum?”
“Eh…”
“Get below! We’ll sort it out together! But first, inspections!”
Ageless looked around at a bunch of other humanoids, all dirty-faced and desperate, many of them with rickety artificial limbs, without synthflesh, the gears of their cybernetic replacements exposed. They all looked despondent as they crowded around the ladder to go belowdecks. They were each patted down and scanned for weapons or other illicit gear. In the crowd, Ageless saw his quarry, who was now bald and wearing a black jacket. His target’s eyes were darting around still, looking for coverage.
As far as Ageless could tell, the man had not seen him.
* * *
The Yngranault was a single ship made from three huge galleons, called straights, all lashed together by durasteel planks and bridges. Wider than it was long, it was essentially three sailing vessels in one, each one with massive square-rigged sails billowing from four twenty-meter-high masts. The length of each straight was forty-eight meters, and the width of each was thirty-two meters; the decks were wide and expansive, but kept clear of all clutter. With the durasteel bridges added between each straight, the overall ship’s length was one hundred twenty meters. The reason for the Yngranault’s massiveness was the amount and size of fish they brought in from the Fargoner Sea.
The work aboard the Yngranault, Ageless soon learned, was not for the weary. Immediately he was thrown into a lower deck with seventy other filthy, stinking men, most of whom appeared as confused as he was. The big round droid, who he learned was called VV-909, or “Ven,” towered over the new chum and shouted at them, directing them to the small nooks where they could make a place of their own.
Ageless and a pale-skinned Twi’lek took up a spot where a pair of hammocks swung empty. Ageless had nothing to store, but that did not make him stand out, for almost no one else had many personal effects, either. The ship heeled to port heavily, and everyone slid or fell over. Ageless barely reached up in time to grab hold of a rafter to keep himself upright. He grabbed the Twi’lek, as well, propped him back up when the ship heeled back to starboard, then set itself aright.
“Thanks,” the Twi’lek said.
“No problem.”
The Twi’lek looked at him warily at first, then gave a small smile. “Rogue waves. I suppose we should get used to them.”
“Why’s that?”
The Twi’lek’s lekku (head-tails) twitched curiously. “You didn’t do your research before coming out, I suppose?”
“I was…kind of in a hurry.”
“Aren’t we all? The seas on Phaeda are quite even-keeled, compared to those of other worlds. Not too many storms—though, when they do come, they are fierce. But the number-one thing to look out for out here are rogue waves.”
“Tectonic activity?”
The Twi’lek shook his head, and adjusted the blankets and pillow in his hammock. “No, not really that many earthquakes or tsunamis in this hemisphere—if there were, no one would dare build those crannogs out on the sea, now, would they? No, the rogue waves come from a combination of things. Something deep beneath Phaeda’s oceans generates a tremendous amount of heat, but it’s not volcanoes. No one knows exactly what it is. When the heat suddenly rises, all of the ocean life in the water goes into a feeding frenzy, including the tu’ruginox.”
Ageless had read about those. “The giant squids, right?”
“They’re not squids and they’re not fish. Nobody knows what they are. There’s only three of them on the whole planet, but they are massive, and believed to be from off-world. Maybe they’ve been here thousands of years, maybe millions. Only deep-sea vessels have ever picked up portions of their bodies on cameras.” The Twi’lek shrugged. “Anyways, when the water suddenly gets warm, those suckers swim in a frenzy, and you best hang on to something. I’m Drozo, by the way.” He held out his hand.
Ageless shook it. “Krommen.”
“Nice to meet you, Krommen. Looks like we’ll be fast messmates.”
“Sounds good.”
“Trust me, you want to have a messmate when you go out to sea.” He glanced around at the other faces, particularly a huge black-furred Wookiee with a missing eye that went thumping past their hammocks. “You’re a desperate man, Krommen, we both are, else we wouldn’t be chum on the Yngranault. But remember, all these other beings are desperate, too. Watch your back, and I’ll watch yours.”
Ageless had spent many years in the spy game, judging other people’s mien, gauging their demeanor and their intentions by body language. He gauged Drozo to be true, and decided he would take his advice.
But as he prepared his hammock, Ageless’s eyes ranged across the darkly-lit deck, and found his Human target, getting all cozy in his hammock at the opposite end.
Clever grig. He came to a backwater world, but one with a complex city and teeming with people, used false names to rent rooms in a bunch of hotels he’ll never stay in, then shaved his head and put on dingy clothes and hopped on a boat filled with desperate men, a boat headed out to a sea that is verboten to any and all airspeeders, landspeeders, or hover yachts. If you wanted to disappear, but not be in the middle of a wasteland desert-world, you couldn’t have picked a better spot.
It’s going to be hard getting him alone.
As if to underscore this, his commlink twittered, and when he found a fresher to lock himself in for privacy, R-3PO reported, “Sir, I am being turned back by air-traffic control. If I keep going, I will be in the no-fly zone.”
“Understood,” he whispered. “Just turn around and go back to Phaedron. Pick up Arfour and both of you go check the spaceport.”
“The spaceport, sir?”
“Yes. There’s no way he came here without credits or weapons or false IDs. He wouldn’t have hidden them in the hotels he visited—his intention is to never return to those again, I’m sure, going to each of them just created a confused trail—which means whatever credits or resources he brought with him, he put them in a locker at Phaedron Spaceport. See if Arfour can slice the spaceport’s systems and find which one, then take a look. But be careful. He may have local assets in play. They could be watching that locker.”
“Yes, sir. And, sir? May the Force be with you.”
“Thanks.”
A moment after Ageless signed off, the Yngranault heeled to starboard heavily, knocking him sideways, and then settled. As soon as he flushed and stepped out of the fresher, Ven was standing outside, waiting on him. “I was looking for you, chum!” the droid boomed. “Captain Agz’Ver’alk wants all the new chum gathered in the galley for muster and orders! Move there at once!”
Ageless nodded and followed the signs to the galley. Along the way, a bald Human stepped out of another fresher and almost bumped into him. “Oh, sorry.”
Ageless stared at his target, smiled, and said, “Please, after you.”
“Thank you.”
The two of them moved on wordlessly.