Summary: Having recently recovered his health, Darth Sidious finds himself in need of that most valuable of assets: Information.
His first priority is one of the most powerful factions in the Starship Graveyard; a nasty Wasteland raider army that is still squatting in the wrecked Super Star Destroyer Ravager, despite a recent defeat at the hands of a rival raider Clan.
The best way to get the information? Break into their base of operations. Cue Sidious' Sithly Skills getting a workout.
...The fact that their leader keeps trying to kidnap Rey is just a coincidence. Really.
Note: This won't make much sense at all if you haven't read Counting Days. Really, it won't. xD
This is set a few months after Sidious moves in with Rey. At this point, she doesn't know that he's a Sith (and she definitely doesn't know what his job used to be), just that he's a quick study and isn't afraid to get his hands dirty.
For background on just what Rey did to piss off Cerebos (and get him completely obsessed with her), see Counting Days.
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Darth Sidious tugged his scarf tighter around his face, and reminded himself that it could have been worse.
So much worse.
His ship could have burned up in Jakku's atmosphere, destroying his last clone and and trapping him between life and death. It could have crashed further north, well out of range of anyone besides the raider clans. It could have gone down in the middle of the Graveyard, and been picked clean by scavengers and Rebels within the year.
Granted, in the latter instance the cloning cylinder would have likely remained undiscovered; he'd ordered the chamber hermetically sealed, and then - an afterthought, a contingency spun up on an especially hectic Coruscant day - had every being who'd worked on that section of the ship killed. Any scavengers that made it to the bilge would likely have walked right past him, their greed taking them straight to the supply rooms. The discrepancy in the layout and discolored bulge in the bulkhead would have flown right over their heads. They'd have passed on by, and let him sleep.
Not Rey.
The Sith Master allowed himself a small smile. He'd only Returned in the first place because of Rey, had woken for her harsh light.
And even in one such other world, she'd have found me, he mused. He knew. Eventually. She'd been drawn to him, even in his slumber. Sidious had been hard-pressed to act confused when she'd described her half-mad descent into the Gorgon's corpse. The compulsion to delve into the mysterious dark, to claim its secrets had been alive in her, even then.
She would have found him.
But only this world mattered, and hard as this life was, it was a completely viable starting position. They wouldn't starve. Nearly everyone who wound up in Niima Outpost either left as soon as possible or thought they were about to. Nobody asked too many questions, not even what passed for law enforcement. Constable Zuvio had barely given him a second glance once Rey had vouched for him. Sidious had barely needed to misdirect the Kyuzo lawman with the Force; Zuvio had far worse things to worry about than a weak, young (and therefore nonthreatening) Human rescued from a downed cargo ship of unspecified origin.
Sidious had to give Rey credit for that one. It both explained his presence and the sudden upswing in the quality and quantity of parts that Rey was selling to Plutt…most of which were clearly not from any of the known vessels in the Graveyard.
Freighter. Retrofitted with Old Imperial Tech, she'd said cheerfully, smirking as Plutt turned a truly spectacular shade of red. It's a credit mine. We're not sharing.
To his surprise, that description had given him a small pang of…not regret, exactly. Pride mingled with embarrassment. Pride, because the Empire was still remembered, and associated with strength. Embarrassment, because he'd lost it all in seconds.
Your overconfidence is your weakness.
The former Emperor gritted his teeth.
Curse that boy…
The worst part was that Vader's whelp had been right.
Sidious would never make that mistake again.
To add insult to injury, he was selling off a shining example of Imperial engineering in pieces to a junk shop to keep himself alive. Painful, yes, but the ship would never fly again, and they needed to eat.
A rare example of true irony.
It was almost poetic…And regrettably necessary, considering the situation outside the Outpost. Sidious and Rey could survive on Imperial military rations indefinitely (if uncomfortably), but Rey vanishing from Niima would draw more attention than he could readily deflect, even with the Force. His sudden appearance had caused too many problems already.
Such as…
Sidious adjusted his goggles, squinting in the too-bright sun, triple-checking his position. A little caution would go far, here. He scowled behind the layer of cloth covering his nose and mouth. The sweat seeping in the sides of his makeshift goggles – the eyepieces were from a scavenged Stormtrooper helmet, yet more irony – was stinging his eyes.
This blasted planet… It was boiling hot even in the shadow of the Ravager, shielded further by blackened stone and mountains of twisted metal debris, scoured smooth by decades – how many, he still wasn't sure – of wind and sand. The harsh environment necessitated heavier clothing than he was used to, despite the exhausting heat.
And so Darth Sidious was sweating in a battered shaak-leather jerkin, layered over a linen tunic. He'd patched together (with Rey's help) a set of greaves from more shaak leather, cut from seats in the Gorgon's observation deck. Leather could be a tad stifling, but it made decent protection from the burns and scrapes that were a scavenger's occupational hazard. And the sun; Sidious would rather carry extra water with him than spend days recovering from heat stroke, or repeatedly slather that healing salve over any skin he exposed to the elements.
Rey had quickly followed suit, when she saw how the tough shaak hide protected his knees and shins when they were crawling around the Graveyard. She'd found his boots herself, picking them out from a pile of stained clothing in the Niima market. A little reinforcement and patchwork, and they were perfectly suited to Jakku life. Sturdy and comfortable, if rather rough around the edges.
And fitting, for what he was doing. Sidious crouched low, ignoring the heat radiating from the warped metal underneath his feet, and trained his macrobinoculars on the three guards pacing back and forth along a rough metal catwalk welded to the side of the Ravager.
It had taken him nearly an hour to get this close. Once Cerebos' Army had recovered from their fight with the Clan, the warlord had both tripled the guard on the perimeter and moved his base of operations deeper inside the Super Star Destroyer. Sidious had spent a standard week scouting the area, taking note of the guard rotation schedule, pinpointing the blind spots in the surveillance net. The wide area patrols were easy to dodge. Sidious, after all, had the Force. It was child's play to divert their attention to a rough spot in the earth, or reinforce that the flicker of shadow in the corner of their vision was just their minds playing tricks on them. Even better, his salvage expeditions with Rey had given him a great deal of practice moving silently through hostile, unpredictable terrain. As his health recovered, he'd been forced to draw on senses and skills that he had rarely needed after the Republic fell. That he'd barely used since he had become a Senator, even.
It made him feel young again, far more than the unfamiliar strength in his fresh, pain-free body. Or the half-forgotten feeling of warm water and delicate (if rough) hands on his smooth, unscarred skin. Sidious pursed his lips. Either this body was a lot more sensitive than his last, or his scars had blunted his nerves far more than he'd realized.
Or I just…forgot. Decades without a body had that effect.
The fact that Rey would be rather angry at him – or at least extremely annoyed - if she discovered what he was up to was another reminder of younger days. Rey preferred caution, despite her aggressive tendencies, a point of view which Sidious entirely supported. He tended to defer to her judgement; she'd survived for over a decade in this place, after all.
But change was in the air. Sidious needed to know more about his situation than Rey could readily discover.
Such as what Cerebos might be planning, he thought, counting down the seconds to the next guard change. Rey had encountered Cerebos' raiders several times since the Road War, both inside and outside Niima. All of them had worried her, far more than she would admit. She'd glossed over what had happened in Cerebos' flagship, just mumbled something about getting onto the bridge and 'breaking some stuff' because she had to.
Sidious had not been born yesterday. No layer of grime or dirt could hide the delicate bones of her face, or her deceptively slender figure. He wasn't terribly surprised that she'd attracted such attention. The fact that she'd managed to live alone in the Badlands for years without being carried off by some pirate was another point in her favor.
Furthermore, he'd learned, through snatches of conversation between Zuvio and Plutt (overheard when he and Rey had been waiting in line at the commissary), that the raiders would be more than happy to devour Niima Outpost if the perimeter fence went down. And their numbers appeared to be increasing again…
So a reconnaissance trip was long overdue. The last thing he wanted was for the center of civilization on Jakku to be razed to the ground.
His chances of escape would be severely compromised.
There was a flicker of movement on deck 45.
Finally. Sidious clipped the macrobinoculars to his utility belt and edged carefully forward. The guards were headed for lunch in 5…4…3…
He leaped across the gap on 2, bolstered by the Force, and landed silently in a crouch on a jury-rigged balcony two decks below the patrol route. He ducked behind a storage crate next to the gaping hole in the hull, just out of sight of the beings inside; one of Cerebos' lieutenants and her three concubines…who weren't supposed to be there.
Kriff… Sidious cursed silently. The slaves' Force signatures were so weak, their minds so broken that they'd barely registered when he'd scanned the area. This time of day they were usually wandering one of the TIE hangers, blank eyed and listless, or waiting in line for the baths on deck 88.
Time for Plan B.
Sidious hefted his grappling hook and aimed to the right. He reached out with his senses, stirred the smoldering resentment between the three slaves. He released the hook when the Rodian smashed a vase on the Human's head, secured it with a sharp tug, and swung towards the broken porthole further down the hull. Two seconds later he was clinging to a wire net hanging down the side of the ship - an old, half-forgotten emergency exit, not as carefully guarded as the others thanks to its position - listening intently.
Fortunately, there were no beings on the other side. Sidious bent back the wire and squeezed through the broken porthole. A short drop, and he was inside the Ravager at last.
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It was midday, and Jakku's sun had, as always, driven most reasonable beings indoors. To nearly any other spy, so many sentients knocking around in a confined space might have doomed the mission from the start. It suited Sidious' plans perfectly.
A lone stranger in a dimly lit corridor would attract far more attention than one more cloaked body trailing on the edge of a returning scouting party, or slogging behind a cluster of tired maintenance workers.
Sidious smirked. The thing about secure locations was that once you got inside, most beings assumed that you were supposed to be there.
Besides, how could he find out what the scum were up to if the place was empty? From what he'd seen, Cerebos and his lieutenants weren't the most organized of command structures. The warlord tended to keep his tactical plans to himself, dole out information in pieces to his underlings, and delegate the mundane aspects of managing an army to lesser beings. Sidious doubted he would find a datacard loaded up with the next month's itinerary just lying around in an empty stateroom. Or even one of the paper scratchpads he'd seen Rey and Plutt use. Not in an easily accessible place, anyway.
No. Sidious was there to listen.
Soldiers of any variety could get very loose-lipped when they were in their cups. And given the bleary eyes on the group coming off the latest watch, the odds of most of them heading straight to the mess hall were extremely high.
So he kept to the shadows until he heard heavy boots clomping on durasteel, growing louder each second; the upper deck watch headed for their break. Sidious stood, drew down his scarf, and let his goggles hang freely around his neck. He made sure his violently red hair was pulled out of the way – a hood would be too conspicuous, and the raiders weren't likely to recognize him by sight. Yet. He waited for the middle of the group to pass his hiding place, gathered the Force about him, and then slipped next to a pair of Trandoshans.
They barely glanced his way. Sidious met their eyes, projecting boredom. He nodded jerkily at the low, grunted greeting, and mimicked their slumped, rolling gait. He moved deeper into the ship, pulled along by the exhausted throng.
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End Notes:
1. This chapter has a lot of background and musing, because Sidious doesn't have a POV narrative in Counting Days...I really wanted to show what he thinks of all of this, in a more down-to-earth way than in Edge of Night. More is coming!
2. There are a lot more notes in my Tumblr, onelightpoint. The tag is fic: hello neighbor!
3. Series tags for all of this crazy 'verse are in series: the rule of two
