Disclaimer: For all the recognizable characters of the SW series, I do not suggest any hint of ownership; they are property of Our Sire George Lucas. However, Noga Nolshath and all others that you will not recognize are mine.
Setting: One year after the Battle of Endor
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Easing back in the hyperdrive lever, the blastboat Knight of the Round reverted back into real space and into the vicinity of the planet Kiilimaar. With black gloves darting over the control panels, the eighteen-year-old warrior began charging shields and arming guns. Yet, despite all of his seemingly frantic motions, Noga Nolshath did not tire. In fact, the blood in his mutated body was flowing at its normal pace. When the shields on the Knight were fully charged and the main turbolaser battery located under the nose of the blastboat armed, Noga prepared to do battle with the looming Star Destroyer Indefatigable and her escort ships -- two Carrack-class cruisers and one Nebulon-B frigate and several dozens of TIE craft. Before long, a voice crackled through the comm panel inside the Knight's cockpit. "Unidentified blastboat," it called, the Imperial comm officer sounding authoritative and dictatorial. "Identify yourself and prepare for boarding." I think not, thought Noga. He hit the reply switch and said, "Want to know who I am? Check your databases in dimension of my ship, and then you prepare to die!" There was a brief pause, then the a new voice aboard the Indefatigable replied with a brief, but noticeable, flash of urgency. "Blastboat Knight of the Round," the new voice riposted. "Lower shields and disarm weapons immediately! You are placed under Imperial arrest by Admiral Rivlante Cru. Surrender or die!" A small twist at the corner of Noga's mouth in the form of a smirk emerged -- something quite unusual for him. Idiot, he scoffed silently. In response to Admiral Cru's demand, Noga armed the proton torpedo launcher. Without so much as an, 'I-told-you-not-to' remark, a series of yellow-green splinters of annihilation lanced out towards his ship, with only a few scoring hits which splashed harmlessly over the Knight of the Round's dedicated shield matrix. Quickly, and with a mock yawn gesture, Noga touched the button that launched a pair of proton torpedoes towards the Star Destroyer. With the turbolasers on the Destroyer busy trying to destroy the incoming "smart" torpedoes, Noga turned his attention to the incoming fighters. As a flight of six TIE Defenders flashed by, Noga cocked an eyebrow. So, I guess Admiral Cru isn't as weak as I thought. But it didn't matter. This entire system patrol would soon be reduced to dust. The ship rocked and bounced mildly as concussion missiles from the Defenders scored hits on the shields, but Noga merely activated the blastboat's gunnery droid brain, an OT-6 model. The droid brain took control of the two dual-laser batteries on the dorsal and ventral sides of the ship, and began to pick off the Defenders and nearing TIE Interceptors. One by one the small defensive threat was eliminated, giving Noga enough time to give detonation coordinates for his payload of heavy bombs. A bright flash off of the Indefatigable's port side hull, blinding one of the TIE pilots so that he crashed his ship into the Knight's aft shield, told Noga that the torpedoes had hit their mark and it was time to launch his final attack. He punched the button that launched the bombs. With a jolt, the bomb ports behind the cockpit of the Knight of the Round opened and the bombs departed. Moving slowly compared to the torpedoes, Noga knew he had enough time to send his farewell's to Admiral Cru. "Admiral," said Noga sinisterly. "Tell your leader that Specimen R53-8K has returned, and the noose is ready." Through the crackling speaker, Noga could hear the desperation in Cru's voice. "But," he demanded. "Who are you?" "I," he declared with a menacing edge in his voice, "am the Empire's Nemesis." Without another breath, he closed the channel and departed. When the Knight entered the chaotic realm of hyperspace, Noga stopped the timer on the panel. Almost ten minutes, he thought. I'm getting a little sloppy! He chuckled.
********2
Ysanne Isard, Director of Imperial Intelligence and current leader of the Empire's remnants, paced back and forth in her spacious office, her blood-red clothing forming nicely around her body. With her mismatched eyes -- one icy blue, the other fiery red -- she gazed at the door of her office, waiting for her agent to enter. Never in her entire career had she been this angry. A single person infiltrates an Imperial military zone, and destroys four ships, including a Star Destroyer, and gets away without as much as a scratch. Somebody was going to pay for this! Isard ceased pacing when the door of her office slid open. Normally, anyone who wished to seek and audience with her would have knocked. But then, this agent wasn't a normal agent. At the doorway stood a tall man, slender but still powerful. He had jet black hair that extended down to his lower back, and eyes so green that when you looking into them, you felt as if venom was coursing through you. He was dressed in a gray and black uniform, with a black cape draped over his large shoulders. Along the belt of the agent were two very distinctive items that identified him as the best -- a high-powered blaster pistol, and a lightsaber. "Ah," Isard said when the agent stepped into the office, cape billowing behind him. "Captain Mironov. So good of you to make it." She smiled coldly, and offered Mironov a seat. As he sat, she began her questioning. "So, what can you tell me about the destruction of the Kiilimaar fleet?" "Well," said Mironov in a heavily accented voice. "There is nothing that you don't already know about what happened. Some kid entered the area, declared he was the Empire's Nemesis, and left before the ships blew up. But . . ." he trailed off, letting the anticipation in Isard's mismatched eyes grow. "I found something interesting. Just moments before the Indefatigable was destroyed, Admiral Cru sent an encrypted message to a communication satellite in the area, relaying the information he had downloaded about the data on the enemy ship." Mironov pulled a datacard from his breast pocket and used Isard's desktop datapad. After keying in a few commands, a holographic image projected itself from the desktop. "Recognize the ship?" asked Mironov, a sinister smirk on his face. "Vaguely," Isard replied, he eyes narrowing. "It's a prototype blastboat that was reported missing just about two years ago. The head of the project, Hiksu Arlaei, was killed by Vader, and all records of the ships very existence wiped away except for one. The one that Vader apparently missed gave enough information about it that we can identify it totally." Isard's eyes remained narrow, but the furrowing of her brow suggested that she didn't follow completely. "Madame Director," Mironov said. "This is the prototype Hawkbat blastboat, a warship even more deadly than the Skipray. Armed with a turbolaser turret, dorsal- and ventral-mounted dual laser cannons, two proton torpedo tubes, and twelve bomb chutes, this blastboat could rival the power of an entire sector command fleet, let alone a system patrol fleet." Mironov let that sink in. After a few long heartbeats, Isard stood, and began pacing again. She stopped at the window of her office in the Imperial Palace and watched the Coruscant traffic for a moment. "You will find this person, and recover the Hawkbat blastboat, and bring them to me. This mission is deemed classified, and all records of this meeting ever having taken place. As far as the rest of the galaxy is concerned, you are still in the Delphi system." She turned to glare coldly at him. "Understood?" Mironov stood and removed the datacard from its slot in the datapad. He crushed it between his fingers. He smiled sinisterly, and nodded at Isard. "Perfectly," he replied, and calmly, swiftly, left the office. A new type of blastboat that could incinerate an entire fleet. This could be trouble.
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Noga sat in his private quarters aboard the Knight of the Round, meditating. In his quiet contemplation, his life passed before him. He saw himself as a young boy, no older than five, being dragged from his home in the dead of night by angry Imperial supporters. His parents were murdered before his eyes, and their bodies desecrated because they had spoken out against the New Order. Yet they had spared his life. Although, Noga secretly wished they hadn't. He was taken to Coruscant and placed in the Imperial Medical Ward. It was there that his real horrors began. It started small, with minute amounts of bacteria injected into his body, and then more and more, and increasingly dangerous pathogens were administered. Eventually the Imperial surgeons grew tired of those experiments, as his body had grown immune to everything they could allot to him. So they began experiments on his physical body. They began attaching limbs of other species to see what would happen, including the tail of a vornskr. Then, they began to mutate his genes and deoxyribonucleic acids, giving him unlimited powers in the Force. After eleven years of their torturous experiments, Noga had managed to escape, stealing the Hawkbat blastboat he now called his own, and began his own personal war against the Empire. At eighteen, he was by far the most unpredictable threat to have ever come face to face with the Emperor's people. And the most wanted man on his list was his primary tormentor, Evir Derricote, the surgeon who had performed those hideous experiments.