Rating: T
Genre: Star Wars
Type: Adventure/Romance/Angst
Disclaimer: With apologies to Charlene Newcomb and fervent assertions that I don't own Star Wars or KOTOR
Summary: I wondered what would happen to Celia Durasha once she left the Kuari Princess in "A Certain Point of View" in Tales From the Empire. Also, I felt that Star Wars needed a dashing pirate character. Furthermore, HK-47 needed a sequel, I thought. Only trouble is, he doesn't remember anything…
The Man Who Made Darth Vader Laugh
The Maelstrom Nebula wafted around the stolen robo barge, caressing it with tendrils of red gas. Yet, like the fingers of a spirit, it could not change its path or reach out to comfort the lone pilot inside.
Brushing her red locks out her emerald green eyes and sniffing slightly, Celia Durasha watched tiredly, the events of the last fifteen hours weighing too heavily upon her to sleep. She remembered the coldness of Adion's eyes as he shot down Kaileel, the security chief of the Kuari Princess and her best friend. She recalled the way she had earlier stabbed one of Adion's stormtrooper escorts with the knife Raine gave her so long ago. Her hands trembled, remembering the blood that had flowed from the shrieking soldier's neck onto her small hands. Still, she had no regrets – Raine had been killed by rebels, but Kaileel was her friend. No matter that he had stolen blasters from the 'Princess to give to the rebels on Mantooine. In her mind, his gentle dark eyes and smiling face appeared, his thickly accented voice calling her "dear crimson" as he always did. She could not hate him.
Celia struggled to remember him that way and not as she had left him in the docking bay, his eyes empty, a blaster hole still smoking in his barrel-like chest. The Kabieroun had always been a gentle giant and to see him shot down was almost too much for her to bear. Blinking away sudden tears, she angrily slammed her hand on the seat next to her and checked the sensors, knowing that they would tell her nothing. The Maelstrom Nebula blocked all sensor scans and made communication difficult. She started to wonder if the trajectory she had taken away from the Princess would cause her to become lost. There was really no way to tell, now. At the time of her escape, her sole thought was to get away as fast as possible in case of Adion drumming up a pursuit. Now, she was alone. Throwing aside her panic and calling upon her navigational skills, Celia began to punch coordinates into the computer, manually computing the route based on the Princess's travel path when she saw it last. Thankfully, the tedious task took her mind off her recent experiences. With time, she knew, she would be out of this place. What she would do then, she didn't know.
A voice, deep and rich, raised itself in song and echoed throughout the small ship. HK-47, or Hakky as his master called him, turned his audio receptors down to their minimum levels, wondering why organics had vocal cords that suited them well in their life but purposely misused them by imitating an injured wookiee pup, or singing as Imril insisted on calling it. The assassin droid ran the sonic cleaner slowly over the floor of the cargo hold/living quarters of the ship he and his master called home. The Dustman was a heavily modified starcraft, a small freighter but with the nimbleness and speed of a snub fighter. It had four Mon Calamari engines networked together with smaller Kuat Mark III maneuvering jets around the perimeter of the ship, two linked quad lasers with 360 rotation on the tail, four hidden laser cannons on the main body and two proton missile launchers. Not one to court chance for too long, the master had also installed redundant shield systems and a landing claw, along with a small tractor beam. Any left over room was converted into cargo hold space. The master made his bed wherever there was an open space to lay his bedroll or up in the cockpit.
Though he took as long as possible cleaning the hold, Imril was still not done singing when Hakky finished and the droid was forced to climb the ladder to the cockpit, bringing him closer to the sounds of an old Twi'lek drinking ballad. Imril D'Var was sprawled in his leather pilot chair, propping one dewback leather boot carelessly on the pilot console. A bottle of fine Coruscant brandy was in his hand and he took periodic gulps from it. Mentally, Hakky calculated that his master was 2.13 above his normal inebriation levels. He wondered, not for the first time, at the advisability of being on a ship with a drunk pilot. Still, his frequent worrying always proved wrong. Imril time and time again proved to be the definition of 'dumb luck,' and not just in the matters of drinking and piloting. Some of their most successful escapades had started because of Imril being at the wrong place at the right time or vice versa. Hakky often felt that, given a chance at freedom, he would continue to follow Imril just out of curiosity.
Imril leaned back in the chair and stared back at Hakky from an upside down position, his brow furrowing. "Hakky? Why're you standin' on the ceiling?" he asked. "Guess I've been drinkin' too much." The Corellian took another gulp from his bottle absently. "Anyway, how's the hold? What've we still got down there? Anything that can be saved for spare cash in case this doesn't come off as planned?"
"Reassurance: Do not worry, Master. The cases and crates we scavenged from the last shipwreck can be magnetically attached to the deck and will not be pulled out by the decompression. Hypothesis: By my calculations, I believe we can hold up to four tons of the Maelstrom gas."
"Excellent. Compressed, that would equal about forty kilograms in solid form."
One of the things that baffled Hakky was the way a rational thought could surface in his master's mind even when he had been consuming large quantities of alcohol. "Affirmation: Yes, master." He was about to say something further when suddenly, out of the mists of the Maelstrom in front of the viewport, a large mass appeared.
In one motion, Imril swore, straightened up and engaged the full stop. Despite his quick action, the forward momentum still caused the Dustman to bump violently into the object which Hakky was now able to identify as a blocky robo barge, the kind used to transport passengers to orbiting cruise ships.
The impact came unexpectedly. Celia had finally figured out where she was going and fed the information into the autopilot. She stood up to stretch, feeling the cramp in her back from bending over the controls, when the barge jerked without warning. The sudden movement upset her balance and she fell, slamming her head against the controls and knocking herself unconscious.
Swearing colorfully in languages that Hakky did not know, Imril brought up the damage report. He cheered up a bit when he realized that the lower shields had taken the brunt of the damage, knocking them down to thirty percent. Looks like his luck was still holding out. "Blasted cruise ships," he growled, the incident driving the drink from his brain. "Always dropping junk around while passing through." On the side of the barge, he recognized the colors of the Kuari Cruise Line. At this close proximity, the sensors detected that it was still functional and moving in a course perpendicular to the Dustman's. Imril flipped on the communications and hailed the vessel. The answer was static. "Either they're giving us the silent treatment, which is unlikely, or there's no one on board."
"It is a robo barge, after all, sir," agreed Hakky. "Still, I wonder why the Kuari Cruise Line abandoned it here after setting in a course. Why not wait until they reached port and sold it?"
"Unless…" Imril pulled out a blaster and checked the charge. "They didn't. Maybe someone on the cruise vessel stole it? If that's true, then the moment the cruise ship's out of the Maelstrom, the captain's going to send out a report to the company and within an hour or two, the company will have posted a bounty." The Corellian maneuvered his ship closer to the barge, preparing to dock. "Which, my dear Hakky, we shall be only to happy to claim, having snatched the ship thief and found the barge." Deftly, he positioned the ship over the other and engaged the docking clamps. He exited the cockpit, sliding down the ladder with practiced ease to the hold. Striding over to a wall, he banged on a certain part and pulled open the jarred panel. From the secret compartment, he took a small device about the size of a flash-heater, one of his most prized possessions: an adaptable slave circuit. The only one of its kind, he had stolen it from a hidden robotics lab during a run in with Hapan pirates. With this attached to the ships computer of any vessel, he could controller it from the cockpit of the Dustman quite easily.
Tucking it into his belt, the Corellian drew one of his blasters and opened the docking hatch. Raising his blaster to eye level, he slowly moved into the barge, eyes alert for any sign of life. The passenger area of the barge was empty, the lights dimmed and the windows tinted. He made his way up to the cockpit area, palming the door switch and stepping back as the door slid open. What he saw made his heart skip a beat and his lips move in a foul oath. Holstering his weapon, Imril took out his comlink. "Hakky? We've got a problem. And it's got red hair."
A/N: R&R, constructive criticism please.
