Unknown Regions
Fercondell System
On Approach to Fercondell 3
16 BBY
Meredith Valior grimaced a little as she felt the transition back into realspace occur. This was reputedly the final jump, so, barring any of the usual mishaps, they were now in the Fercondell system. The source of her grimace was her inability to actually know this by looking at a star chart or at least out a window. Normally she could do that. In fact, she recalled ruefully, most of the time she was up in the cockpit next to the captain when approaching a new destination. Most captains found her presence comforting in the dangerous vulnerable moments after exiting hyperspace.
Not here, there were security measures in place apparently. No one not a part of the new regime based here or having been granted a clearance was allowed to get a visual fix inside the system. So everyone without a clearance and on a trampy merchantman like the Desoy Gloss that meant everyone but the captain, was forbidden the bridge until they were dirtside. Meredith found it peculiar, and rather paranoid, but oddly sensible. It had an even greater logic to it if, as rumor suggested, there really had been three major space battles here in the eighteen months since the new arrivals had set up shop. Major space battles didn't happen at random, heck, not even the Bloodspawn usually put together attacks with that kind of frequency.
Sitting in her worthless excuse for a bunk inside a half-converted freight compartment that probably hadn't been properly repaired since before she was born and smelled of the last twelve species to use it, Meredith rather hoped the rumors were true. They'd been flying thick for the last two years, all on the heels of news that something big had happened out there, out in the rest of the galaxy. Maybe so and maybe it did coincide with this new presence. Then again, and Meredith had long ago acquired the cynicism of a seasoned spacer, new governments, new species, new regimes, these popped up all the time. It was nothing special. She'd seen a planet change hands three times inside a month once, anyone could manage a brief novaburst of infamy with enough energy, and the galaxy was full of people with more energy than was good for them.
Nevertheless, those rumors had been enticing, and Meredith had found there was at least some concrete material to back them up. The Desoy Gloss was such a piece of evidence. The captain had gotten his hand on a cargo hold full of a mixture of high grade ores. How he'd done it he was in no hurry to explain and Meredith knew better than to ask. That was modestly unusual, but it happened from time to time, prospectors did occasionally get lucky and suddenly tap a great find after all. It was the money-grubbing man's desire to bring them to Fercondell 3 that had convinced the Preceptor.
Good ore was worth a small fortune at Dovarand, Nmonmnong, or any other shipyard world you could fight, sneak, bribe, or otherwise manage to reach. Fercondell 3 was nothing, Meredith had never heard of it, and while there was any number of places she'd never heard of, though a lot fewer than for most people, you didn't usually drop loads of quality ore there. The Captain had said though, for this lot of ore he'd be able to fill the hold to stuffing with Vensol YY-7 Perimeter Beacons. She hadn't believed him then and she still didn't believe it. Those things were top of the line and made just about every colonist, settler, and prospector drool, but there were tricks to the software alignments and no one, no one, could mass-produce them. The captain could cruise around, unload that one score and live like a kingpin for the rest of his life.
This has got to be some kind of scam, Meredith shook her head for about the thousandth time. Then again, she thought. Sometimes advanced tech shows up, and most of the rumors mention it, along with regular exchange instead of the usual extortion. Can these Imperials really be what they claim? She'd been sufficiently intrigued to jump aboard and find out.
"We're beginning atmospheric entry, hold tight," the Captain's voice came over the scratchy comm. system, another piece of the ship that probably hadn't ever been replaced in Desoy Gloss' good two centuries of service. Meredith breathed a bit heavily. She was no rookie when it came to space travel. Thirty-three years old and she had been to fifty-two different worlds, even over fifteen in one year once, which was almost double what most traders seemed to manage. Despite this, she wasn't a pilot and never felt comfortable putting beat up old scows to the test.
Exhaling slowly the Preceptor calmed herself, reciting a long and complex series of formulas: protein strings, a good chunk of the periodic table, neural pathway sequences, and other tidbits, letting her awareness expand as she reached out to the Force. Placing her right hand palm down on the decking she let her mind seek into the structure of the ship, gauging stresses, faults, and component strain. Ultimately, letting this awareness of pilot skill, machinery, and the uncompromising laws of physics merge together she formed a coherent picture.
We aren't going to crash…probably, Meredith amended with a silly little smile. Never trust the Force too far. She recalled the old Preceptor axiom. It feeds on your emotions, and tells you what you want to hear or what you don't want to hear, not what is.
The descent was actually remarkably smooth, the captain probably having one of his better days. Still linked to the ship the Preceptor was able to learn a few things about Fercondell 3 through its interaction with the atmosphere. It was a more or less standard gaseous mix, with nothing corrosive and nothing especially thick in the batch, and the temperature range was in the normal temperate-habitable zone. She tsked slightly when they slowed to land. The Force was a fine tool, but she could have learned a lot more by simply having thirty seconds at a sensor station.
"This security had better be worth it," Meredith muttered to herself as she gathered her small satchel of possessions and joined the handful of other passengers hurrying to exit.
As they lined up she noticed several other passengers were carrying a lot more than her limited belongings. Trade goods, she guessed, or perhaps they intend to immigrate. For her part she carried everything she owned, as any wandering Preceptor would. It wasn't a lot: one change of clothes; a handful of cosmetic and emergency supplies; her medical and surgery gear; the pouchful of small gems representing her rather limited wealth; a very, very nice datapad containing her research materials; one vibroblade as long as her finger; and one vibroblade as long as her arm.
She had gotten very good at packing it all over the years, everything fit into a small satchel, aside from the blades anyway. The little one was inside her coat at her waist. The long one hung at the left hip. No one in line remarked on the weapons in the slightest. Everyone carried some kind of armament, whether human or alien, open or concealed. Only the desperate or the insane traveled the spacelanes unarmed.
The starboard hatchway opened, letting bright natural light into the poorly-lit confines of the freighter. A fairly bright sun, Meredith noted, and tasted the air briefly, with her ordinary senses and the aid of the Force. Arid, I think, she decided. Probably mostly grassland, limited forests. There was also salt tang, an indication they were near a coast. Desalinization for water, she guessed.
"Come out one by one," a voice, one obviously synthesized, ordered. "We'll match each name against the manifest and then you'll be sent on to inspection."
A machine? Meredith wondered, unable to see around the people in front of her. Or men with vocoder systems? Both were about equally likely, and with so many people present her Force sense was not sufficient to make a determination.
One by one the passengers exited, each stating his or her name as it was called by those deadpan, artificial voices. There were no demands to remove weapons, but this was hardly surprising.
Meredith was standing in the middle of the pack, the location of least suspicion, and as the group in front of her thinned she got a look at the beings receiving them.
There were four, and they positively blazed in the sun, glare streaming off bright white armor, polished and waxed to shine. Quelling a reflex to shield her eyes the Preceptor advanced unhurriedly. She could tell from the very first that these were dangerous men. White seemed a strange color for armor, no camouflage at all, but it was certainly fearsome and intimidating with its black trim and sharp blaster rifles. Those stubby, compact devices had a menace all their own. They were clean and polished, not dilapidated like the weapons you saw in the hands of the average warlord's troops. The troops stood steady at attention, not for a second appearing uncomfortable, bored, or twitchy. They were obviously disciplined.
Maybe not quite Bloodspawn, Meredith considered, suppressing a shudder at those memories, but the next thing to it for sure.
"Meredith Valior," the closest of these troopers spoke.
"Yes," she replied with a small nod of the head. Those helmets made the men largely unreadable, even with her talents in the Force, but she strongly believed they had not reacted to her at all. So, she noted mildly. They don't recognize a Preceptor of Flow. It was hardly surprising, many people did not, most worlds even, but the deep blue lab coat/suit combinations all Preceptors wore, really the only thing members of the order had in common in the slightest, was easily recognized. So Meredith knew they had no orders regarding such as her. She wasn't sure if that was good or bad.
The trooper motioned with his left hand, indicating a long table where baggage was being inspected by men in smart gray uniforms with serious expressions under the eye of a slightly older man in a black uniform with a little bar on the left breast. A rank badge of some kind, Meredith guessed, walking idly over, giving her time to take in everything in the docking bay.
Efficiency was her overall impression. This was a professional operation, standardized, dedicated, and designed to overawe. It was a far cry from the scummy operations of the warlords and crime syndicates who ran most port entries. Nor was it the commerce driven proceedings of a lucky industrial or otherwise independent world. Bribing the inspection team, even if she had been inclined to try, almost certainly wouldn't work here.
Glancing beyond the docking bay the Preceptor saw a massive building rising in the background. It seemed pentagonal in design, centered about a high-rising tower in the middle and three impressive turbolaser turrets. It looks like it was…dropped here, Meredith thought in shock. A building like that and it was pre-made? She stilled a whistle.
"Miss, I need to see your bags and your weapons, on the table," one of the gray-uniformed men indicated. He was not armed, but there was a holstered blaster pistol on the officer behind him, and a number of the white-armored troopers were stationed around the docking bay with plenty of opening firing angles. It was a secure setup, the Preceptor realized; anyone who tried something during inspection would only be a position to harm the least threatening opponent, while being instantly surrounded.
It took Meredith a moment to puzzle out the words though. It was obvious what the inspector wanted, and she complied readily, but his speech was oddly accented. In humans that could mean many things, but she suspected, given the rest of her information on these 'Imperials,' that he had learned Minnisiat only recently in some hurried training program. Indeed, down the line one of the arrivals was waving his arms angrily as it became apparent he shared no language in common with his inspector. Hardly surprising, she herself spoke a half-dozen trade languages and still regularly had communication difficulties even on well settled worlds.
"If Minnisiat is not your principle tongue," Meredith asked carefully, making sure to sound idly curious as she placed the vibroblades on the table and began slowly unpacking her satchel. "Would Iritar, Sy Bisti, or something else be better?"
The man gave her a strange look and said something in a choppy, quick-phrased tongue to the officer behind him. After a brief moment of surprise the officer favored Meredith with a modest smile. "The official language of the Galactic Empire is Basic, you wouldn't be familiar with it I'm afraid, but you are encouraged to put some effort into picking it up while here." His Minnisiat was significantly more polished than the inspector's.
"I see," Meredith's reply was noncommittal. Basic, a decidedly simple, and if anything arrogant, name for a language. It told her quite a few things about these Imperials, but the signal was rather mixed.
The inspector went through everything carefully, asking a small number of questions, such as the purpose of her gemstones, and making careful notations on a datapad. It was all very well organized. The stumbling block came not with the vibroblades, as she anticipated, but with her own datapad.
The inspector looked at the device in puzzlement, and then annoyance when, after scanning it with a sensor and managing to turn it on he could read nothing within, even when he was using some kind of translation program from his own datapad.
"What's this language?" he asked.
"Eshaliti," Meredith answered mildly. Taking a small gamble she decided now was a good time, with the officer turning his attention back to her, to reveal a little bit about what she truly was. "It's a technical language used for official scientific data by Preceptors and a number of other scholars in many of these sectors."
"We'll see," the inspector shook his head and motioned for her to wait.
What happened next was shocking. The inspector input a datapad command and from a small storage area out of the sun a silver facsimile of a humanoid, it stomach open to expose wires, transistors and other electronic components, waddled up.
Meredith barely noted the small crowd of arrivals had gone totally silent. It was just too shocking. The movements and components were clearly artificial, this proxy of a person was some kind of machine, and even if the visual evidence had not been obvious the Force absolutely confirmed it to be without life. A fully autonomous machine? A proxy of a person? What kind of device is this?
In over ten years of journeying across fifty-two worlds the Preceptor had seen more than a few astounding things. She had believed she possessed a fairly good grasp of what the most advanced technologies could do, had seen the fastest ships, best weapons, and even the highly advanced Krindesh robots, but never a machine like this. Not even the Bloodspawn had such things, so far as she knew.
The silver person-machine took her datapad in its metal hands and began to chatter rather excitedly in that choppy language of theirs. A translation unit? Meredith guessed. I wonder how good it is. "What kind of machine are you?" she dared to ask during a pause, but not in any trade language. She chopped together the words from a few phrases of Hjont, a culture extinct for a good thousand years she'd once done archeological research on.
"Machine?" the unit snapped back in perfectly fluent Eshaliti. "I am W-3PO human-cyborg relations and it is poor manners to refer to a droid as a mere machine." Eshaliti was a flat, dead language ideal for transmitting and storing technical information and terrible for conversing, but Meredith believed the translator machine sounded positively indignant.
"Dra-oid?" she managed, isolating that foreign, untranslatable word from the brief speech.
"A mobile, and to a degree self-aware, essentially autonomous robot," the officer answered, turning back to her. "You don't have them around here, or so we've learned. However, its presence is obviously a problem right now." He said something to the silver machine, the droid, in his own language and it slowly returned to its storage compartment. Many of the other passengers eyed it rather enviously.
Turning back to Meredith with a somewhat severe smile the officer went on. "You're not our run of the mill visitor Miss Valior, clearly. You're carrying medical equipment far above the standard for this region and technical data as well. Also you called yourself a…" he paused, and the inspector showed him the datapad for a moment. "A Preceptor," he only stumbled a little over the unfamiliar word. "We have some interesting scout reports related to that title. I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to wait here and then go to a secondary inspection with another officer."
"And if I refuse?" Meredith asked, not precisely intending to do so, but she wanted more information. Trying to escape from this crowded docking bay would be an extreme response, but it might be something to start putting into the contingency.
"You would be barred from entering Fercondell 3 and deported at your own expense," his smile had vanished instantly, but his face was not entirely unkind. "Also, a watch order would be placed on your likeness in our database."
"I see," Meredith drew upright with her full Preceptor professional authority. It wasn't all that much of an advantage here, her blue suit was old, wrinkled, and a poor match for the spotless uniforms on these Imperials, but it was a statement to make all the same. "I will consent, assuming I can keep my property with me at all times."
"At this point you can retain everything but the weapons," the officer returned. "Those will be retained by security for now, but be assured you will get them back, the Empire is not in the business of petty thievery."
What exactly they were in the business of was an open question, and finding out was much of Meredith's purpose here, yet she felt that statement was true. Her weapons weren't objects of art to be mounted on someone's wall, and the professionalism of the troops and continual presence of cameras told her procedure wasn't likely to be stretched very far. "Very well then," the Preceptor accepted.
"Excellent," the officer replied, and then snapped out commands into a wrist-mounted comlink. One of the white-armored troopers detached from standing at attention by a nearby wall and marched over. "VB-8946 here will escort you to an interview room."
The armored soldier said nothing, and Meredith got the impression she was supposed to be intimidated. She was, at least a little. The numerical categorization struck her as something of a stunt for the onlookers, they couldn't possibly use that in battle, but it also meant that, whatever these white troopers were used for, there were an awful lot of them.
"Oh," the officer added after a moment as Meredith placed her gear back in the satchel. "One final question before moving on; purpose of your visit?"
"Professional development," Meredith replied with a wry smile. Chew on that one for a while why don't you? It even happens to be true, she mused.
The white-armored soldier escorted Meredith out of the docking bay in silence. She carried her bag easily over one shoulder, but felt somewhat vulnerable without her blades. Giving them up was annoying. It wasn't that she absolutely needed the weapons, for a Preceptor the Force could turn the human body into a living destruction device with more firepower than the average hovertank, but she always felt more comfortable with them. Carrying a vibroblade and moving with the walk of someone who knew how to wield it was a great way to avoid fights. Besides, Meredith had spent too many long hours practicing her fencing skills.
At least I should get them back, she figured. Unless they dump me in a cell, and maybe even if they do. There were precision locator chips implanted in all her permanent belongings, and a program on her datapad could track them. The Imperials had surely detected those, but no one would bother to remove them.
They went around a few corners and then the trooper motioned to a secure doorway. The door slid open smoothly to no prompting the Preceptor could see or feel, which meant some helmet-based signal no doubt. "Wait here," he ordered.
"Of course," Meredith stepped inside without hesitating. She was as paranoid as any seasoned traveler, probably a lot more so, given how many enemies the Preceptors of Flow possessed, but she also knew when the appearance of serenity was essential. These Imperials, whatever they really represent, are not people to be tweaked around.
The interview room was obviously used more for interrogations than casual conversations. It had two spare folding chairs on opposite sides of some bare, cold metal table. There were obvious cameras in all the corners, and probably hidden ones as well. One of the walls was clearly a one-way mirror, a millennia old trick but still useful for the psychological effects mirrors had on the average humanoid species. Meredith knew all about those, and probably a whole lot more about the mental aspects of interrogation than her erstwhile hosts expected. Interrogation is something the Force is very good at. We Preceptors even get hired for contract work that way. She didn't like it much from a personal perspective, but there were about a trillion worse jobs to have when you found yourself stuck in a combat zone.
The Imperials made her wait of course, no surprise there, and the chair was suitably lacking in comfort. A little Force tweak on her muscles got rid of that instantly, and she felt as if the chair was perfectly padded for her body. That done, Meredith thumbed on her datapad and brought up a handful of articles she'd pulled out of the hospital on Knevm, her last stop. Waiting was no big deal; there was never enough time to handle all the reading.
Eventually the door opened again.
Chapter Notes
First, for anyone who hasn't guessed yet, this story is set in the Unknown Regions, therefore there's a lot of unusual and unexpected things presented here. Some of it has been drawn or extrapolated from canon sources (particularly the novels Outbound Flight, Survivor's Quest and the novella Fool's Bargain). The rest is drawn from my own creative juices. The story assumes a small, but consistent and steadily expanding Imperial presence in the Unknown Regions beginning almost immediately with the end of the Clone Wars. Though canon does not explicitly state this occurred, many sources strongly imply it.
Meredith Valior: Meredith is rather too standard a name for an ordinary Star Wars character. The choice is deliberate, Preceptors chose classical, formalized names and abhor nicknames (she would get very mad if called Merry).
'Miss Valior:' characters in the Star Wars universe are regularly referred to formally as Title+Family Name (ex. Jedi Solo, or Princess Leia). However, the Imperials in this case do not have something to work with and fall back to the traditional standbys. These have been used in cannon occasionally.
Fercondell 3 is on the border of the Unknown Regions; geographically it is near Nirauan, which is not yet an Imperial base (Thrawn being not yet on the scene). It is my own invention and represents the first world used by the Empire as a permanent base in the Unknown Regions.
The several references to the 'Bloodspawn' refer to a powerful and dangerous alien race in the Unknown Regions, this will be expanded on later.
Minnisiat was introduced in Outbound Flight as a trade language common to the regions near the Chiss Ascendancy (which is relatively close to Fercondell 3).
Eshaliti is intended to be a 'scholar's language,' rather like Latin is used now. It is my invention.
Outbound Flight establishes the absence of Droids in any region at all near Chiss space, which is why even a protocol droid is so surprising.
The Preceptors of Flow are a force order of my own invention from the Unknown Regions. As the story progresses this will be thoroughly detailed.