I
Nar Shaddaa Mar'set
Mar'set woke up feeling like crap. She rolled over and groaned, willing her head to stop hurting. When that failed she stumbled to the fresher and drank cold water out of a sink. Now slightly more awake she tried to remember what had happened the night before. She gently patted herself down, checking for injuries. Not finding any she mentally crossed that off her list, along with catching a cold. It was the wrong season and she didn't have a cough, which left drinking too much. She groaned again and stumbled back to her bed, noticing for the first time a Twi'lek on the next bunk over. Memories of last night slowly came back to her. She remembered being on the promenade and bumping into a woman, Loni, Lonly, or something. And competing with that woman for a man' s attention. Taric, she thought. She remembered drinking. A lot. Then the Twi'lek Kalina taking them all back to Mar'set's place. And more.
She groaned again as the rest of the night came back to her. Quietly she dressed and left the room, trying not to disturb the Twi'lek woman still sleeping. Mar'set came downstairs to look for the other two people she remembered coming home with and stopped by a security console on the wall. Sure enough, the logs showed that two people had left in the early hours of the morning after one of them had received a call. Mar'set frowns at the names in the security log. Lon-lee. Thanic. Keelena. Thanic and Lon-lee left on a taxi. Their destination was unknown and the call's encryption too difficult to break. She exits out of the security panel and walks over to an intelligence database in the temporary command center. Going back three months she tracked any record of Thanic, Keelena, or Lon-lee. Keelena was a resident of Nar Shaddaa. Lon-lee arrived a month ago on a passenger ship. And Thanic had a ship registered to him in the spaceport. That left this morning. Imperial military business, no stated destination. Mar'set sighs and logs out of the console, then heads out for some food. She leaves instructions for the Keelena to be taken home when she wakes up.
Mar'set grabs breakfast at the same cantina that they were drinking in the night before and mulls over her options. The call must have been important to wake Thanic up, and both of them had been acting shifty that evening. Despite not being her problem, Mar'set couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong. She spent the morning getting food to restock her ship, then headed to an Imperial Intelligence outpost in a bad part of town. Mar'set had done some work for them a few weeks before and was owed a favor. Her hunch paid off when she found a partial military roster that showed Thanic assigned to Balmorra. She called her crew and told them to meet her at the spaceport. Her father had always told her to trust her instincts, so Mar'set also put a unit of House troops on standby before she left.