Chapter 8
Fracture
He was playing with her now, Mission knew.
Kreedan had been circling for a while now, cat-calling up and down the corridor. She didn't know why no one had come to investigate the noise, and she wondered if she wanted someone to come along or not. Another Vulkar might cause Kreedan to stop toying with her, or he might try to shove off the other Vulkar to keep her to himself. She didn't think he was the type to let someone interrupt his fun, but she hoped that was the case anyway. Her stomach clenched into a tight cold ball and her throat constricted. Like lightning, a thought flicked quickly through her panicked mind. Had her message gotten out? Did Big Z know she was in trouble?
"Come out little blue-tails," Kreedan growled. "I'm not going to hurt you." A throaty growling chuckle froze the blood in Mission's body and sent little thrills of phantom pain up her spine. Even if the message had gotten through to Big Z, she was afraid it might already be too late.
Danika ran after Zaalbar, her vibroblade balanced easily in one hand. The young Wookie was so enraged, he wasn't even growling anymore. She'd never seen a Wookie in battle before, and by what she saw of Zaalbar at that moment, she sincerely hoped she'd never be on the wrong end of one.
Carth followed behind Danika, realizing for the first time how is hero status had affected his physique. They had not been running for very long, but he was already falling behind the dark-haired smuggler. He silently vowed that if he made it off Taris alive, he'd start exorcising again.
Zaalbar rounded the next corner in the hallway, and to Danika following behind it sounded as if there was a sudden explosion of noise. Every hair on her body straightened and her adrenalin glands jumped into double-time. She fervently hoped that none of the other Vulkars in the base had heard that.
For all his cruelty, Kreedan had never felt nor confronted that level of rage in his entire life. So the moment he heard Zaalbar's roar, his body reacted for him, jumping into a startled run down the opposite end of the corridor from the horrible sound.
He didn't run fast enough.
I was running, stretching my legs to the limit of their range, feeling the muscles work as they propelled me through a field of tall, pale grass. The air was fresh and clean, still crisp with winter cold. I could hear the grass rustle in the wind, the call of distant birds. The sky was bright and clear, soft clouds meandering over its expanse.
It wasn't real, I knew that. My reality was a place of blood and dirt, blaster shots and the stinging swings of vibroblades. It was not this empty, peaceful place, no matter how much I wanted it to be.
I felt a thrill of primal terror, muffled as if it had come to me from a long distance. It wasn't mine, but I knew it was real.
"I'm coming," I whispered over the distance.
The world around me broke apart into millions of glittering lights as I fought my way back to conscious thought.
"I'm coming."
Through the fog of the neural inhibitor and the drugs, it resounded clearly in the Force. It was a beacon of utter calm and confidence. Whether it was intended for her or not, Bastila neither knew nor cared. As she sat slumped and barely aware in her cage, she smiled.
She was coming.
"I'm coming."
A wave of utter calm washed over Danika, even as she watched Zaalbar tear into Kreedan with his vibroblade. She didn't know how she knew, or how it was even possible, but she the voice belonged to Sabine. The blond woman wouldn't be completely out of the fight after all.
Kreedan died quickly, if not painlessly, under Zaalbar's blade. Danika left him to it. "Mission?" she called gently. "Mission, you can come out now, it's all right."
A narrow door opened after a few moments, revealing a wide-eyed and pale Mission, her head tails curled protectively around her neck. "Is he gone?" she asked. For that one moment, she looked every inch of her fourteen years.
At the sound of the young Twi'lek's voice, Zaalbar came running, sweeping her up in a tight hug. Warbling, high pitched calls of concern came out muffled into Mission's shoulder.
"Big Z, I can't breathe!" Mission wheezed. Her Wookie friend quickly put her down and checked her all over, sniffing at her loudly between whines. She protested half-heartedly until he was satisfied. Carth and Danika stood back and kept quiet, letting the friends have their moment.
"Hey, uh, thanks for rescuing me and everything," Mission said to Danika and Carth. Her cheeks flushed light purple, and for the first time since Danika had met her the young Twi'lek looked embarrassed.
Danika smiled warmly, "Anytime, Mish."
"We should get moving," Carth said. "Did you find the accelerator?"
"It's not on this floor," Mission said. "I would have checked the other floor, but the elevator is guarded by gun turrets."
"How many grenades do you have?" Danika asked Carth.
He blinked in shock. "I don't carry grenades," he answered.
"Damn," Danika said.
"I have some," Zaalbar said.
"Great!" Danika said. "I'll need three." She accepted them gratefully and pulled out one of her spare plasma cartridges.
"What are you doing?" Carth asked.
"Borrowing a trick from Sabine," she answered.
Danika knew that Carth was recalling the damage done to the rancor's neck from the way his face paled and his eyes widened. "Uh, are you...?"
"Wiring three grenades to a plasma cartridge? Yup."
"Hey, I don't want to spoil the mood here or anything, but won't that blow up the elevator?" Mission asked.
Danika stopped fiddling with the grenades and blinked several times at the teenager. Suddenly her ebony brows came down in a sharp V. "Shavit!" She growled. "You're right."
Carth let out a quiet sigh, his whole body relaxing. "So we're back to square one, then," he said.
The four companions gave each other a significant look. "I got nothing," Mission said finally, just to break the silence.
The dream faded as I struggled into consciousness. It slipped from my memory like water off a jacket, but before it fully disappeared I knew that it wasn't gone for good.
"Oww," I moaned. The back of my head throbbed in pain, strobing through my waking thoughts like a light in the darkness.
"Ya took a g'd knock," Hestra said. "Ya migh' wan' t' stay down fer a bit."
"Where'd the others go?" I asked. I remembered telling the others about the rancor, remembered the trek down the tunnels, but things got hazy after that. I tried to get a look around, but I couldn't see much. The light in the room was low, but it hurt. What I could see told me that the room Hestra and I were in was more clean than the sewers had been. From that I reasoned that we must have made it passed the rancor somehow and gotten into the Vulkar base. So why did my head feel like I'd just been run over by a ronto?
Hestra cocked her head at me, a strange look on her face. She got up from the crate she was sitting on and walked over the few feet that separated us. She slung her rifle over her shoulder before crouching in front of me and taking my face gently in her hands. She tilted my head up towards the weak light source, causing me to flinch and clench my eyes shut. I felt fingers probing my eyelid and made an argumentative noise with my throat. "Shh, I am not trying to hurt you. I just want to see what's wrong with your eyes," Hestra said, her perfect speech startling me into letting her open one of my eyes. Even so, I kept the other one tightly shut.
Hestra said nothing for longer than I was comfortable with, so I struggled to focus my single open eye on the veteran's face. Whatever I did worked and it seemed to me that the light level adjusted itself to a more comfortable level. Hestra's face came into clear view, here grass green eyes wide. "What's wrong?" I asked. I opened my other eye cautiously to get a better look.
"You're not human," she whispered.
A cold thrill ran up and down my spine. My mind flashed back to the night I'd gone to the cantina alone and the morning after. An image jolted across my inner eye, a smell, a brief stint of sound. The light level in the room rose again and everything became sharper. Hestra let go of my head and leaned back, a look of utter shock on her face. "What are you?" she asked.
"Changeling," I answered. The word came from my mouth as it had the morning after the cantina; without thought or reason. I'd had a boring, almost normal childhood after all, and a fairly normal adulthood to boot. There should not be any reason for me to be spouting words that had nothing to do with me.
Well, except for the fact that I seemed to have a split personality disorder.
My head continued to throb, and though I wanted to chase myriad thoughts I stilled my mind for the moment. I was sitting in the middle of enemy territory with a swoop accelerator to find, a race to win, and a Jedi Princess in distress to rescue. Thinking circles around myself could wait until I'd gotten off Taris alive and intact. Almost as an afterthought, part of my mind focused on my eyes and the room went back to normal.
Hestra sighed and shook her head. "Your eyes were slitted a moment ago," she said. "Like a cat's."
I'd almost gotten my head back in the game, but that comment threw me off again. "Wait, what?" I asked. The moment I finished speaking I had the answer. Before I'd been knocked unconscious I must have been in a room with very little light, and sometime between then and waking up I must have changed my eyes to accommodate to the situation. The reason most feline eyes had slit pupils was that the configuration allowed the eye itself to catch more light. That realization brought on a string of others.
"I can shape-shift," I said, my voice ringing stunned in my ears.
"That explains the Trandoshan and the Sith patrol," Hestra said. She sighed again. She studied me then, her eyes roaming over my face as if memorizing it. "I'd have sworn you were human."
"I would too," I said. "My parents were human, I remember that."
"Don' w'rry. I won' tell th' others." Hestra's voice was different now. Her clear, Corusanti speech was gone and the thick, almost unidentifiable accent was back.
"Why do you do that?" I asked.
"D' wha'?" Hestra knew perfectly well what, but she was keeping a straight face. Just from that I knew that she'd played more than her fair share of pazzak.
"Why do you change your accent like that?" I asked again.
Moss green eyes darkened and facial muscles relaxed. Hestra smiled at me, her whole expression sad. "Old habits die hard," she said clearly.
I looked down at my hands and focused slightly, the skin turned dark, almost black. "Yeah, I know what you mean," I said quietly. I flexed my hands and the skin lightened again. Furling one finger at a time, I was acutely aware of the muscles that pulled them into place. I knew I could change them into almost anything I wanted.
Silver gray brows drew down as Hestra stood up and swung her rifle off her shoulder. "Cut that out," she said. "Now git yerself t'gether an' le's go find th' others."
"Right." I stood up carefully, taking stock of the bruises I knew were brewing under my armor. If I really concentrated, I knew I could calculate the exact damage done to my soft tissue and how long it would take me to heal. I set that information aside for the moment and did a quick check of my equipment. I swung my blaster rifle off my shoulder and hefted it in my arms, giving brief thought to how it must have been awkward to carry me with the thing digging into someone's chest or shoulder.
Hestra said nothing as she walked out the door, T3 quickly rolling out of her way. Respecting the lack of chatter, I followed. "Come on T3," I said as I passed. "Let's go fish Danika out of her latest predicament."
Hestra pulled out her comlink as we walked and activated it. "Th' pup's aw'ke," she said. "Where're y'all?"
"Three corridors down and to the left," Danika answered.
I was about to ask for the comlink when Hestra handed it to me. I cocked an eyebrow at her, but instead of answering she gave me a half-smile. Instead of perusing it further, I spoke into the comlink. "I don't know if anyone noticed, but isn't this place pretty empty for the base of the second largest swoop gang in the Lower City?" I asked.
"I don't know," Danika replied. Despite the seriousness of the situation I could hear the smile in her voice. "I keep expecting to find a group of them around every corner."
"Do me a favor and find a wall terminal," I said. "The security feeds should tell us where everybody is."
"Hurry up, then. I don't like staying in one place for long."
There were no functional cameras in the Vulkar's spice den. This lack wasn't due to poor maintenance or simple systems failure, Canderous knew. After all, he'd been the one to take them out.
Canderous had never been particularly skilled with machinery, but he did know his way around them. As a warrior on the front lines of battle, he'd learned quickly that it was to his benefit to know how to sabotage the enemy. He smiled as he remembered the glory of those days. The rich scent of blood and hot metal, the faces of his enemies as they fell before him; all of it played briefly over his mind's eye as he lounged in his chair. Vulkars of all sizes and species lay sprawled around him, deeply under the influence of spiked stims and altered spice. It had taken him some time to cook all of it and then to replace the 'clean' supplies in the Vulkar's spice den.
It had been worth the effort.
Canderous leaned back the chair and swung his legs onto the counter of the table before him, pulling a cigarra from the pouch and putting it to his mouth. As he lit it, his eyes turned to the terminal by the wall. He couldn't see the details of the picture on the screen from his seat, but he could see a dirtied spot of gold, and that was enough for him.
She was here. The woman he'd seen down in the Undercity and reluctantly left to its depths was here, inside the Vulkar base. He assumed she was looking for the swoop accelerator that the Vulkars had stolen from the Beks, since their little Twi'lek and her Wookie were there as well. That was of no concern to him, however. The blond woman was all he cared about.
The big Mandalorian scratched his beard and sighed. She couldn't possibly be his Sandra. She'd died on the surface of a distant world many years ago right in front of his eyes. He couldn't deny the resemblance; the two women were like sisters. And they used fighting styles so similar they could have learned them from the same teacher.
No, they were identical, right down to the faint scar over her left eye. But his Sandra had always looked at him with her eyes in such a way that made him think of the soft quiet in his basilisk droid just before it plunged down into the atmosphere of a planet. It was that same sense of perfect calm; that feeling that he was right where he was supposed to be. This stranger held no hint of recognition in her eyes for him, though there had been an attraction. He'd heard of warriors taking sufficient wounds to lose their memories, and after all Sandra's body had never been found. It had given him hope in the beginning, but after years of neither hearing nor seeing her, he'd given her up for dead. Mandalorians mourned the death of their loved ones on the battlefield, not in the bottom of a bottle.
So even though Canderous didn't know what to do with this strange woman who looked and acted so like his Sandra and yet so different, he knew he couldn't leave her to the tender mercies of the Vulkars. He'd do everything he could to smooth her way. Time would reveal her true identity, and if he lacked anything, it certainly wasn't time. He'd wanted to get off Taris before the shavit hit the fan anyway.
After checking the security feeds, I came to the conclusion that the Vulkars were either hiding in the bathrooms, which had no cameras, or they were all locked up tight in the one room in which the cameras weren't working. I didn't like not knowing for certain, but we were running low on time. The big race was coming up soon and I wanted to become familiar with the track before I had to race my heats. I'd raced swoops before. Usually only when Danika and I had been desperate, but I had enough experience to know that familiarity with the track gave an undeniable edge. Considering the fact that whole gangs were based around the event on this particular world, I was willing to bet that the opponents had an intimate knowledge of the track. I knew that I'd need all the help I could get.
I was looking through the rest of the system the terminal was hooked up to carefully when I noticed something odd. The turrets guarding the garage floor elevator that Mission had noticed earlier had been disabled. It was a something you wouldn't have noticed on a quick sweep through the system, and I guessed that was why Mission hadn't noticed.
"Is something wrong?" Danika asked. Positioned to my right, rifle at the ready for anyone or anything coming down the corridor, she had a good angle to see my face. I'd been keeping my expression neutral, but Danika had spent enough time with me to know better.
"The turrets have been disabled," I answered. "It looks like a power malfunction from here, so somebody probably took a servodriver to the hardware, instead of hacking their programming."
"They'd have to be recognized as friendly by the turrets in order to get that close," Danika filled in. She had a distinctly disapproving tone in her voice. I knew how she felt. Somebody had taken the trouble to physically disable the turrets, thereby insuring that a normal systems check wouldn't detect the problem for some time. The question that bothered me was who had taken the time and effort to do it.
"Which means it was an inside job," I said. "I've got a disturbing twist in my stomach that says whoever did the turrets cleared out the Vulkars, too."
"C'ld be a tr'p," Hestra said.
Danika shook her head. "If it is, we have to walk into it. We don't have time to find another way."
Grimly, Carth agreed.
"So why's this friend of yours so important, anyway?" Mission asked. "Is she an officer or something?" She'd heard the gist of our agreement with Gaddon earlier and knew that we wanted to 'win' the prize the Vulkars had put up for the swoop race this year. She also knew that we were Republic soldiers, courtesy of my ID docs, but none of us had ever told either her or Gaddon about Bastila's Jedi status.
I wrinkled my nose at the thought of the prissy brunette Jedi. I'd never actually met her before but I'd seen her around the Endar Spire enough to know a little bit about what she was like. "Something like that," I said to Mission.
A strong emotion twisted Carth's face for a moment as if he was struggling with something. In another moment his face cleared and he opened his mouth to speak. "She's a Jedi," he said.
I felt my eyebrows lift as Mission's eyes widened. Carth was paranoid, he'd barely trusted Danika, Hestra, and I. Mission was a stranger, met only a few hours before. That Carth was trusting her with something as big as the fact that Bastila was a Jedi was nothing short of a miracle.
Mission whistled at Carth's words. "I've heard about her," she said. "She's the big shot that killed Revan right?"
I shrugged. "That's what the holonet said."
"So if she's such a big shot, why'd she get captured by the Vulkars? They aren't that hard to right, they're just a bit trigger happy."
Carth looked surprised for a brief moment and then scowled. Both Hestra and Danika grinned broadly, as did I. "You know I never thought about that before," I said.
"Shut up," Carth said.
"Oh don't be so butt-hurt," Danika said. "I'm sure she just got caught off guard or something." The corner of her mouth twitched as she spoke and her tone was that of barely contained mirth.
"The explanation for this is going to be priceless," I said. Danika burst into a fit of wild laughter. Hestra held her composure well, just standing there and smiling. Carth just stood there with a face like stone, a look that made me join Danika in the laughter. Mission was not far behind.
Hestra looked unimpressed with the entire situation despite her smile. She shifted her rifle in her arms and cleared her throat. "So, we 'bout r'dy t' go?" she asked.
Struggling for composure, I shrugged again. I raised an eyebrow and aimed the silent question at the rest of the group. Carth didn't get it, though I thought Hestra did. She did nothing except give me a level stare. Danika picked up immediately after she'd sobered up and responded in kind. "Sabine and I are ready to go," she said. "That is, unless anyone wants to ask any more questions."
"Like the meaning of life," I cracked.
Completely straight faced, Hestra added her own two bits to the banter. "Forty-nine," she said.
Carth's mouth twitched and his whole face warped in a strange look somewhere between confusion and bewilderment as he looked between Hestra, Danika, and me. Danika glanced at him out of the corner of her eye and grinned. "I'll take that as a no," she said.
I straightened my expression and flourished my rifle, implicating Danika in the process. "Ladies first," I said.
She took the invitation instantly, striding down the corridor as she snorted. "So, what? You're not a lady now?" she said as she walked.
"No I aint," I replied as I followed, stretching out my vowels and twisting the pronunciation my words with a twang. "I'm an over-grown monkey-lizard, don'tcha know."
I heard Hestra's soft chuckle as the others followed behind me. My sharp ears picked up Carth's voice, trying to be quiet. "Did I miss something?" he asked.
"Nope," Hestra replied. "Ya didn' miss a thin'."
To Be Continued...
