Chapter One
Nine Years Later
The sound of metal against metal cried out from within a messy workshop that was large enough to fit a medium sized hover-bus. Mechanical detritus filled the shop, along with two speeders parked against opposite walls. Both of them cannibalized for parts, bits of wire hanging out of them as if they had been attacked by predators and left for dead. Several starship engines hung from chains suspended from the ceiling, and a workbench along one wall was filled with tools and scrap metal.
At the center of the workshop, propped up by the steady stream of four antigravity repulsors, was the ugliest starfighter ever put together. Two massive cylindrical engines were mounted atop a Clone War vintage cockpit, pulled from an Arc-170 bomber. A vertical stabilizer rose between the engines, with a stalk-like sensor pod mounted atop. To the untrained eye it had the look of a skinny blaster cannon.
A heavily modified astromech droid, originally an R2 unit, whistled towards the underside of the custom ship, signalling an incoming message. It was designated BR2-DE and pronounced "BR" for short. Underneath the chimera-esque vessel, covered in grease and oil, was a seventeen year old human. "Hold on BR," he said.
The teenager pushed his dolly out from underneath the fighter. His brown hair was wet with sweat, his long bangs stuck to his forehead. A datapad, connected by a cable to the underside of the fighter, flashed with a bright green light. He tapped the message window beeping at him.
"Kel?" came the inquiring caller. It was his younger, more responsible sister. Her hair, if she hadn't dyed it bright pink, would have been darker than his, closer to black. Her eyes, dark brown in color, were identical to his however.
"Yes!" Kel answered. "I'm here!" Kel was not there. He had placed the datapad on the floor and was back underneath the fighter.
"I don't see you," she sighed. "It's important..."
"I can hear you Kasyndra," Kel reassured her. He began double-checking the connections between the engines and the power supply. Kel was too careful to create a mechanical error, but most of his parts were pulled from junk heaps. He always tested the parts before he used them, and double-checked everything before the first power up.
"Dad just messaged me. Apparently traffic control has grounded the fleet," Kasyndra announced. Their father ran a successful shipping company, operating medium-sized freighters and handling specialty freight. Kel had become as mechanically inclined as he was after spending years in his father's maintenance hangars. He had been tinkering with engines before most children could read galactic basic.
"Why?" Kel asked. He pushed his dolly out from underneath his ship. Everything had checked out.
"He didn't say. The government has put out alerts and cleared the airspace over the whole continent." Suddenly Kel's interest peaked, something sister apparently could sense. "You know what that means?" she asked.
Kel had been working on his current project for months. Despite being an ugly collection of scrap, Kel was using the vessel to test some custom built parts he had designed for his father's ships. Kel was soon scheduled to go off planet in order to attend a prestigious engineering university. If he didn't test fly his ship this afternoon he would have to wait for months until he returned home at the end of his first term.
"Yeah, I got it," Kel sighed. He wiped his forehead with the back of his head. His brown hair was extra dirty at the moment, covered in sweat, dust, and rust.
"You're not going to fly your ship," his sister told him, as if she could decide for him. She knew, however, that Kel rarely listened. "Kel...?"
oOoOo
The bright afternoon sunlight of Jappa's star made his fighter look even uglier than it did from inside the shop. Kel sat inside the cockpit, flipping switches. The twin engines, pulled from automated droid ships, roared to life. The engines were meant for a craft the size of a light freighter, but the modular design made them easy to mount to the half of an Arc-170 fighter-bomber he had found buried in a junk heap months ago.
Jets of pure blue plasma ignited out the back, sending waves of hot air back into the open doors of the shop. If he hadn't been inside the cockpit, Kel would have heard the crashing cacophony of tools and scrap metal bouncing around the shop. Instead, his focus was on the computer screen inside the cockpit. BR2-DE had been installed in the astromech socket behind the cockpit. It was busy analyzing the ship's systems, making sure everything was running properly and inside safe parameters.
Although he had at first been annoyed by his sister's news, the ban that cleared Jappa's airspace actually encouraged him. Kel's brilliant engineering prowess had not translated into piloting brilliance. He could fly, yes, and was a fully licensed pilot. Like every other teenager his age he had dreamed of blasting Separatist fighters out of the sky alongside the top fighter aces in the galaxy. When he was twelve years old one of the most popular game centers in the capital had installed military surplus flight simulators. Local leagues had sprung up, with teams of virtual fighter pilots competing with each other.
Kel had been horrible in the simulators, and it hadn't been long at all before his friends stopped inviting him to be their wing mate. He was easily distracted by the sounds of his ship, something that the simulators often didn't get quite right. He had no situational awareness, which is what kept you alive in a dog fight.
An air space ban meant there weren't any other ships in the sky for him to run into, or strict flight plans for him to follow. Of course, the planetary air traffic controllers would be able to track him, but his fighter wasn't registered, and he had some hidden landing spots out in the uninhabited forests if he needed to ditch his ship. BR2-DE had the coordinates pre-installed. With his checklist complete, Kel placed his hands on the repulsor controls.
"Ready BR?" When his faithful astromech whistled in the affirmative he flipped the switch and his ship shot into the air like a bolt from a blaster.
He quickly brought his ship upwards and over the low lying buildings of his suburban hometown. His shop was located on a small plot of land not far from his father's house. After gaining enough altitude he decided it was time to run the main engines.
"BR, prepare to open up the engines, run them at 10 percent initially. Run constant analysis."
After his astromech complied he triggered the ignition. The acceleration drove him into the back of his seat, which meant his inertial compensators weren't quite dialed in correctly. BR2-DE began feeding data through his cockpit's main screen. The engines, and more importantly his custom designed power plant, were performing flawlessly. He listened to the noise behind him, which rumbled with a satisfyingly deep thrum. Not the high-pitched whine that Kel found so annoying. He also noted that he felt very little vibration, which meant there was no wasted energy.
A warning screech from BR-2DE brought his attention back to his flying.
"Oh, gods and stars!" Kel exclaimed, jamming his flight stick backwards. His ship shot upwards, and away from an incoming mountain top. "Warn me sooner BR," Kel sighed.
He pulled up into a higher altitude, eliminating the chance of any further close calls. He leaned over and tilted his ship to the side, getting a good look at the terrain below. He had flown halfway across his home continent.
He began to turn back on a lazy curve, steering his test flight back in the direction of home, when BR2-DE once again gave him a warning signal. His ship had no long range sensors installed yet, so he was relying on his BR's short range scanners to detect incoming vessels. Because of the travel ban he hadn't expected any. The signal warned of an incoming speeder approaching on an intercept course.
"Uh, any identification?" Kel asked. No information, his droid replied, it was too distant. Kel thought it likely the incoming vessel was one of the planetary security force's patrol speeders. They must have detected him on scanners and were sending the speeder to ground him. Unfortunately he had no communication equipment installed and wouldn't be able to respond to the patroller's requests, even if he wanted to.
"Right, let's see what these engines can do," Kel said. Based on the telemetry data BR2-DE was feeding him, the speeder was coming in at a high angle. The patroller would try to get behind him and then turn sharply, putting the speeder on his tail. Kel knew he could avoid that entirely.
He put his ship into a turn in the opposite direction of the speeder and accelerated to twenty-five percent. His airspeed was now more than twice the speed of sound. He manually dialed up the inertial dampeners, lessening the effects of the G-forces.
Soon enough BR2-DE gave him a relieved whistle. He had sped away from the patroller and put it out of BR's scanner range. He dropped his ship lower to the ground, just above the trees. He figured if he kept up his speed for a few more minutes he would be well out of visual range of the speeder's sensors, and this close to the ground he would be invisible to the security forces planetary scanners as well. Kel twisted his neck and tried to relieve some of the tension he hadn't realized was building up. It was time to head to one of his hidden landing spots and go home.
oOoOo
The Imperial Star Destroyer Inferno Stardropped out of hyperspace above Jappa. The destroyer accelerated at cruising speed towards the blue-green orb as if it were a bone-white dagger pointed towards the heart of the planet. The ship settled into a wide orbit around Jappa, the second planet in the system. Underneath the destroyer an imperial shuttle dropped out of the rectangular hangar bay, its wings folding down from the triangular landing formation into flight mode. Behind it four Imperial TIE fighters, as much a symbol of Imperial power as the destroyer from which they emerged, sped into flanking formation.
Imperial Intelligence Agent Dekai sat in the back row of the passenger section inside the shuttle, his hand stroking the small beard he wore on his chin, against standard military protocol. He was a tall and thin man, a permanent serious set to his brow. He was not yet forty standard cycles old, but the stresses of spywork had already began to grey his black, close cropped hair.
He wore a uniform similar to that of a lieutenant in the Imperial Army, although he did not wear the standard rank badges. Instead he wore only a patch on one sleeve, marking him as a high level operative in the Empire's secretive spynet. Unlike their rivals in the Imperial Security Bureau, who wore stark white uniforms with proper military rank badges, agents working for Imperial Intelligence preferred to blend into their surroundings, like a watchful shade.
In the front row of seats in the passenger section sat a handful of attendants along with Moff Sawn, the ultimate overseer of the sector. Sawn was travelling to Jappa to meet with the system governor, a man by the name of Sant. The trip was officially an inspection of the new military base that was under construction in the capital. But Dekai had his own unofficial objectives.
Dekai's overt mission, the one that Moff Sawn knew about, was to inspect the system's holonet relay station. The holonet was the communication system that tied the galaxy together. Communication packets were projected through hyperspace between systems, resulting in near real time communication no matter where the origin and destination of the data. The new holonet relay was more important and noteworthy than the military base, and most average citizens were barely aware of its existence.
The size of a small asteroid, the holonet relay was practically a starship in its own right. Equipped with a hyperdrive, albeit a very slow one, it could be moved and relocated if need be. It had automated defenses, in order to defend itself from salvagers or those hoping to illegally slice into the holonet. Besides the standard communication equipment this relay also had hidden systems designed by Imperial Intelligence itself. Monitoring equipment, controlled by droid brains, noted all communications that passed through the relay. Data packets would be periodically piggybacked on top of standard data flows and sent to Coruscant. Imperial Intelligence had massive data centers at its disposal that could splice the information. Suspicious activity could be noted and monitored, and those who were on an Imperial watchlist could have their conversations replayed.
Dekai really didn't know too much about the technology of it all, but the Moff and the other officials didn't know of his ignorance. Because that mission, as authentic as it might be, was just a cover. His true purpose, kept secret from even Moff Sawn, was an investigation of Jappa's governor. Dekai's most trusted and skilled analyst back on Coruscant had noticed peculiarities with the construction of the base. Funds had been siphoned away from the project, and there were no top-secret reasons the credits would have been missing from the account. Dekai strongly suspected the governor was pocketing the missing funds, but there was the remote possibility he was doing something even less untowards.
Determining what sort of corruption was going on, and if it was the variety of corruption the Empire could tolerate, was Dekai's true purpose. At the very least, the money laundering would be noted by Intelligence, to be used for blackmail purposes if the need ever arose.
Dekai attempted to reflect on his mission at hand and ignore the incessant prattling of the officials in the row in front of him. He attempted to let it all fade into a sort of white noise as he eagerly awaited the end of their trip and arrival planetside. Raised voices from the cockpit section interrupted his meditation. He focused his attention, trying to pick out their voices amidst the conversation in front him.
"...unknown fighter inside of airspace. Approach vector is not clear." The voice was coming over the comm, and seemed to belong to a traffic control operator on the ground. The pilots inside of the shuttle glanced at each other and then opened their comm channel to the TIE fighter escort.
Dekai unbuckled his restraint and moved out of his seat. He passed the Moff and the others, who were yet oblivious to the situation, and approached the sensor station. A young flight officer sat staring intently at a heads up display, reading the telemetry data.
"What's going on?" Dekai asked.
The officer jumped a bit as he was snapped from his focus. "Uh, there is an unknown ship inside our approach vector," he answered.
"Is it hostile?" Dekai asked.
"Unknown," the officer shook his head. Without having to be asked, he pulled up a long distance visual scan. The ship was hard to recognize, for the distance involved distorted the view. But it was definitely not any standard ship Dekai recognized. And his intelligence training required him to recognize quite a bit.
By this time the Moff had finally became aware of the disturbance and inquired as well. Sawn was a middle-aged military veteran, and the hostile ship didn't seem to phase him too much.
"Just shoot it down," Sawn said with a shrug. While the Moff continued his previous conversation Dekai stared intently at the sensor station, eagerly awaiting the impending confrontation as half their escort sped away to deal with the potential threat.
oOoOo
Kel was only a few kilometers away from his landing spot, which was hidden amongst the vast expanse of forest, when BR2-DE whistled in another terrified alert. There were two ships incoming at high speed. Kel read from the heads-up-display that translated his droid's language, ascertaining the speed of the incoming ships. They were way too fast to be more patrol speeders, and they would be on top of him in moments. He banked his ship sharply and once again hit his accelerator. As the two ships were coming in from above he would be unable to hide from their scanners near the tops of the trees.
"BR, do everything you can to boost your scanners, draw power from the ship if you need to and override your safety parameters. I need to know what is about to vape us," Kel commanded, trying to keep the panic from his voice. He wasn't succeeding.
He had accelerated back up to twenty five percent power. His ships engines were humming along without complaint. Yet the two ships were still catching up to him. After only a few moments BR returned results from his boosted scanning. Whatever nerve Kel had steeled away evaporated. Indeed, the two ships were not patrol speeders. They weren't even the old Z-95 HeadHunters that the local defense force flew. They were Imperial TIE fighters.
As the cold grip of fear froze his heart Kel fumbled his flight stick, and for a short moment his ship flew too close to the tree tops. The top of an enormous biffur tree, whose fruit was a local export, exploded against his cockpit, showers of wood, bark, and innocent woodland critters thrown about in a terrific shock wave about him.
"Frack!" Kel exclaimed, regaining control and gaining some altitude. The TIEs had pulled even with him, matching his speed as they flew above him. Kel guessed they were getting a good look at his unusual ship before they blew him out of the sky.
The bone-shaking screech of the TIE's namesake twin ion engines sent shockwaves into his cockpit, making his teeth rattle. The Imperial fighters cut their speed slightly and dropped behind him. Kel knew he was moments from death.
Thoughts of his family and friends, and all that he was leaving behind, flashed briefly through his mind. He did not want to die. Spurred on by pure survival instincts, Kel jammed his accelerator all the way. His ship shot forward, more than doubling his speed in less than a second. The inertial dampeners lagged behind the sudden increase, shoving him hard into his seat.
A sudden flash of light was followed by a shockwave of superheated air, shaking his fighter. Two blasts from the TIE's cannons narrowly missed him, intersecting in the space his ship would have been without his sudden dash forward. Kel banked again, back towards his original direction before the TIE pilots could get another shot on him. The most advanced fighters in the galaxy increased their speed, quickly catching up to him. His ship had handled twenty five percent power flawlessly, but now, at over fifty percent, a vibration between the engines had begun. But Kel knew he had to push on.
"BR, override the flight computer's subroutines, maximize power from the reactor," he ordered. His astromech gave him a dutiful warning, but obeyed. He couldn't push his accelerator any further manually, since the control stick was already pushed all the way forward. Boosting the ship's reactor risked blowing the power couplings, but the engines should be able cope with the energy since they had been manufactured for a ship three times bigger than what Kel had strapped them to.
The vibration got worse, and was now followed by warning alerts lighting up all over his console. His electrical system was in the process of blowing out, taking out his repulsor flight controls. He was at seventy-five percent power from the reactor.
Warped by static, Kel had to squint to make out the two fighters on his sensor screen. He was beginning to pull away from them. Whatever excitement he felt was blown away by a flurry of blaster fire erupting around him. Kel had no shields. It would only take one hit to blow him apart.
Kel knew it was only a matter of time before his ship erupted into a ball of fire, even if the TIE pilots failed to land a shot on him. His speed was actually begin to drop slightly, as the vibration damage was beginning to sap the power reaching the engines. He briefly attempted to think of crazy flight tricks that would get him on an escape vector. Spins and flips were out of the question, as he was liable to run himself into the ground under normal circumstances. He could make for space, but he had not installed a hyperdrive, so he had nowhere to go even if he got away. In addition, with his repulsors blown out he would be unable to land even if he managed to evade pursuit. There was only one way he could get out of this alive.
"BR, prepare to..."
Suddenly there was an explosion behind his cockpit. A shower of sparks penetrated his cockpit, burning through his flight suit. He cried out in pain as superheated bits of metal burned against his skin. For a moment he thought he had been hit by the TIE fighters. And then, with a mix of dread and sorrow, he realized the truth. The electrical system had shorted out BR2-DE, who had plugged himself directly into the power system in order to boost his scanners. His poor astromech had exploded. To some people droids were mere tools, just property. But to Kel, BR2-DE, who he had put together himself out of scrap and spare parts, he had been a friend. And he was responsible for his death.
But he didn't have time to mourn. Kel struggled to keep his ship on a level flight path. Without his astromech, who had reinforced the partially completed flight computer, he could barely control the ship. With only a spare glance at his surrounding terrain Kel reached under his flight chair and pulled a lever, activating his ejection seat.