One way Bardan Jusik survived the war.
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Baroli is a bad place to hide. Everybody knows that – only the Baroli can hide among each other, because normal humans don't have blue hair or facial tattoos, and normal humans stick out like a sore thumb, in ways aliens don't. Yeah, no one with sense ever hides on Baroli…
Then again, no one ever said Bardan Jusik had sense.
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He owns a little mechanic shop midway between the seedy area around the spaceport and the shining towers of the communications centers Baroli is famous for, and he's happy there. The streets are clean, he only has to carry one blaster around, and he makes a good living repairing lawnmowers and kitchen implements and occasionally, very occasionally, hacking into military communication systems. For fun, of course.
He never finds what he's looking for, although he finds a whole lot else.
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Of course, he doesn't go by the name Bardan Jusik now. When people ask his name, it's Tul Myver, and when people ask how he came to Baroli, he tells them it was as far as he could go from Thayiv IV on the money he had, and that's all he really needs to say. People don't like to talk about the time two Republic and three CIS fleets got into a slugging match in the space over a planet with no shield and far too few ships, and Bardan – Tul – has the look of a man who has lost everything.
It's almost the truth. Bardan really is from Thayiv IV, and he really has lost everything. He just didn't lose it there. Kal always did say the best lies were the ones closest to the truth.
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Ekria and Drake take the codes off his hands. He doesn't know where they go from there, although he can guess. It doesn't really matter to him – Ekria is a good woman, but she's a better customer. She takes good care of her ship and her guns, and her face is like those of all Barolians, with numbers and codes scrolling over her face in black ink. Drake is another matter. Jusik didn't know him from before, but he thinks that Purge has been bad for the man.
It's only a matter of time until Drake gets stupid.
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He's an aching thirty-five years old, and his night vision is worse than awful after fifteen years on a world without true night. Still, he's still more capable than the native Baroli – when he goes out walking at night, the only people he has to fear are off-worlders like himself.
It's very boring, out there.
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Ekria drags herself into his shop a year after she last left, short her left pinkie finger and her man. She doesn't want to talk about it, she says, and Bardan doesn't pry – well, not much. He's no fool, and he has no wish to wake up one morning with the Emperor's lackeys at his throat. He's worked too long and hard for a pair of smugglers with a grudge against the Empire to bring him down.
Ekria looks right at him and tells him it wasn't Imperials. Bardan doesn't trust her. He's right not to.
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Bardan has never been prone to prescience, but now and again he dreams of things that eventually happen. Coruscant, at the end – yeah, he knew about that, although he wrote it off as a really weird fever dream at the time – and that mess on Ord Mantell, with the clones and the Mandalorians and the kid. He'd paid a little more attention that time, and – well, he wasn't shot, at least.
This time, he dreams of Ordo. He looks older, and his armor is battered. He's snoozing on a bench in a dingy spaceport that could be any backwater world, and the only thing Bardan knows is that somewhere, sometime, they will meet.
He's learned to really hate dreams like these.
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One morning, six weeks after Ekria came back missing significant parts of herself, several billion people die in an instant. Bardan spills hot coffee over his hands, and watches the holonews along with every other person in the galaxy.
Alderaan is gone.
A few days later, a smaller cataclysm takes place, and Ekria tells him solemnly that General Kenobi is finally dead, and a boy named Skywalker is going to save the galaxy. The look at each other for one long instant, and then they laugh and laugh and laugh some more. The galaxy really is that cruel.
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Bardan finds Ordo in a spaceport three sectors away from Baroli, and by then, he's so exhausted that all he does is drop his bag and kick the bench leg hard. Typically, Ordo has a knife to his throat in less than a second – Bardan would have been disappointed if he hadn't.
"Long time no see," he says wryly, and it takes an uncommonly long time for Ordo to recognize him.
Later, after all the questions have been asked and all the food has been eaten, Ordo will say, "You hid yourself too well. We couldn't find you."
Bardan can't stop a bitter smile spreading across his face
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A year later, Ekria is dead, and a boy named Zakarisz Ghent has just sliced a code the Imperial Chief of Cryptology swears is unbreakable, using computers stolen from an abandoned mechanic's shop up the street.