Star Wars: Coldiron Squadron
by Dash Nolan
Part 1
At six hundred kilometers an hour, trees are not trees. At that speed, they become a furious river of browns and greens, two looming, winding walls on either side, frozen at their peak and ready to crash inwards. The trees of Naboo were a shining example of their kind, thick and lush everywhere you looked. It was what happened when most of your planet was made of water. A T-16 Skyhopper, a small knife's blade of a craft with a single seat, a single gun, and little else, was cutting a very narrow path through the jungle. At some points, the little Skyhopper's wingtips passed trunks by no more than a couple meters.
The airspeeder banked right and into a clearing. For a brief moment, Mar Devlek could see beyond the trees. He was a few minutes outside Kaadara, a beautiful seaside town and his current home. A few clicks west, Mar spotted the mountains reflecting the dipping sun. It would be dark in a couple hours. He reached the edge of the clearing and returned his attention to path finding. The way ahead had looked good ten seconds ago, but now he could see the low-hanging branch and Mar pulled back just in time to rise above the tree's arm and break through the treetops.
He peeled right in a wide arc toward the sea. The sun was setting on his right, and the waters reflected the light in small, chaotic peaks, making staggered shapes in momentary flashes. One of the flickers caught his eye, burning itself into his sight as a transparent blue silhouette. Mar knew that shape, those predatory spikes. His heartrate shot up, pounding against his burgundy flightsuit. Sweat practically leapt from his scalp, and his short blonde hair was soaking under his helmet. Mar dove back down through the wide foliage and levelled out low enough to blast dirt in all directions. He knew it wasn't them, it was a flash of nothing off of whatever, just like the last twenty times, and the twenty before that. He had to get home.
Mar liked the building style that was used through most of the major cities on Naboo, incorporating lots of colors from the nature around it, tan walls and green roofs and almost no right angles. He throttled back as the T-16 entered the airspace apove Kaadara. Mar took care to stay well outside the city spaceport's radar range, using a broad turn to kill his speed as he came low towards a small peninsula. The small private hangar came to life, lights framing the entrance as the large door shifted aside, sending a flock of birds skyward. The airspeeder's wings folded up and Mar touched down, the hangar door shutting loudly.
It was a beautiful house, far better than anything before, such as a microscopic bunk aboard a Mon Calimari cruiser. Mar stepped out of the flight suit on his way to the kitchen and tossed the dusty one-piece carelessly onto a wood-framed sofa. When he woke up that morning, Mar had swore he was finally going to cook himself a dinner. Now he swore as he reached into a cupboard and pulled out a bag of jerked bantha and a fourth of Corellian Ale. The drum in his chest continued to race. Mar remembered the chems behind the mirror in the refresher, then remembered the two months he had managed to stay off them. The ale would have to do.
Dropping onto the sofa and the legs of the flight suit, Mar found a feed of a pod race from Nar Shadaa. The Hutts had managed to cut a track through the dense buildings covering the moon. When he was a child, Mar's father would sneak him holorecordings of pod races from the Outer Rim. He used to dream of being in that seat, dangling behind fire, moving quicker than a blaster bolt, centimeters from the ground. Now it was just a welcome distraction. He sat back, pulled from the bottle of ale, and started to pick apart the drivers' mistakes. The races were short, but they were only heats. The event went on for several hours, and eventually the empty bottle rolled to a stop on the flightsuit next to Mar, his head rolled back and snoring. It was an erratic, restless sleep.
Sunlight skipping across the green waters burned at Mar's half-closed eyes. His head was full of fluids and he coughed and snorted and knocked the bottle to the stone tile floor. The drop was heavy and loud, but the bottle remained intact. He loved living on a peninsula for the gorgeous sunsets, and hated it for the harsh sunrises. His comm unit was beeping away underneath him. Mar rolled awkardly and groped around, his eyes still recalibrating. The device was buried in his flight suit. He dug it out and played the waiting message. Nothing. An error, the file was corrupted. Very few people knew how to contact him, and he decided that this was no accident.
Mar threw the file to the personal terminal in his bedroom. The door caught on a small pile of clothing, which he kicked vaguely toward the bed. He had been right. The recording wasn't corrupted, it was encoded. Only twice in his military career had he been given encryption keys. Per regulations, since he had discharged with codeword clearance, Mar had kept the keys, just in case. He tried the first one, but the file remained gibberish. He ran it through the second key. It was a code he had been issued during his time with Wraith Squadron. They had found themselves well behind enemy lines or deep undercover more than once, and the key was invaluable. The terminal let off an upbeat ding, and the file was sorted out. It was simply a few lines of text.
"I am a friend, not a specter. You should watch your shadow, there are ghosts around every corner. I will be at the Cafe Tides this afternoon, alone."
"Specter," he mumbled. "Shadow. Ghosts." Mar ran his hand up his face and tired to shake away the lingering sleep. That was a mistake, as it brought his hangover to the forefront. The message had been phrased very carefully. He was going to have to meet this person. The struggle to get from sofa to refresher was immense, but the warm water helped move the last of the drink out of his head. Mar lingered under the stream, clawing at the cool tiles with toes, trying not to think too hard about any one thing. Of course, this meant that his mind filled with images of her. High cheekbones, blue eyes, auburn curls, and enough kills to make her ace at least three times. They had both been there, they both knew, so Mar wondered why he hadn't contacted her either. Apparently she had decided to be the one to reach out.
The hours between sunrise and afternoon felt like days, and Mar was forced to pour himself something to prevent the anticipation from driving him crazy. When the time finally did come, he choked down two rolls to dry up and guided the Skyhopper out of the hangar. Mar flew past the peninsula's end, out over the water, then turning to fly parallel to the coast. Normally he liked to keep the airspeeer low and kick up some mist around the ship, but the ocean traffic wouldn't die down until evening, so he kept high.
The capital city of Theed stabbed up through the horizon, beige peaks and wide emerald domes. Mar brought it down just outside the city, landing in a little slip he kept under a fake name he couldn't remember. He rented a speeder and coasted into town. Even though Cafe Tides was on another edge of the city, the traffic was dense. Mar couldn't stand being stuck. He blasted down a side street, wove between several more before reaching the small shopping area. Tides was one was many in the immediate area. Mar's thoughts raced at the prosepct of seeing her again, but that smell always forced him to slow. Fresh bread, almost ready, hints of local flowers in the dough. The more affluent came from far to get loaves from Naboo's capital. It wasn't why he had decided to settle here, but it was a major perk.
White and sage cloth shifted in the light breeze. Mar stepped into the open air cafe. There was a beautiful woman sitting alone in the far corner, enjoying a glass of something red with a chunk of fruit floating atop. She was much older than himself, mid-sixties, he figured. She stared at him at smiled a polite, practiced smile. Then he spotted the red bangs. It was certainly his contact, but not who he was expecting. He took a seat.
"Hello, Mar," she said, her tone kind.
Mar laughed dryly, shaking his head. "Hello, Chief Mothma."
"Not anymore. I have embraced my time away from bureacuracy."
"I bet. I was happy when I heard you recovered, though the news never said anything more specific than a "toxin". If you don't mind, what happened?"
"You would not believe me if I told you."
"Know what?" Mar stretched his neck as he spoke. "I'm pretty sure I would."
She laughed again. He didn't like it, it was too well versed, too consistent.
"You are right. Of course you're right. Which brings us to the subject of why I'm here."
Mar said, "That message was a little ham-fisted, don't you think? You hit every buzzword but the big one."
Her hands appeared on the table, open, palms upward. Another well-timed gesture of friendliness.
"It probably was, but I had to get your attention, and if the message had my name on it, I wasn't sure that you would come."
"That was a good guess."
"Yet here you are. Would you like a drink?"
"I thought you were going to be someone else."
"Commander Murleen?" Mothma offered before taking another sip.
He stared at her for some time, watching the breeze play at her black and gold headscarf and deep red bangs. Mar watched her eyes, and they seemed to say nothing but "hello, I understand, tell me your story." He wondered if that was learnable or genetic.
Mar asked, "So why are you here then?"
"I heard that your friend Tycho was married not too long ago. How was it?"
Dodging the question, he thought, always the politician.
"I didn't go."
"I know."
"You do?"
She avoided the temptation to be condescending, saying, "You were at the center of one of the Alliance's best-kept secrets, do you think we would let you simply fall off the radar?"
"So I was never discharged, just on very extended leave."
This time, Mar noticed the slight rasp in her laugh. Time was catching up, if slowly.
She said, "Rookie One, if the Alliance was calling you in, they would have sent something a bit more official than an old woman in a scarf. I am an old friend asking a favor. If you say no, I am off-world within the hour, and you can go back to trying to put your speeder into one of those lovely trees."