Chapter 10: Serren
With a loud clatter, Kai dropped the heavy wire bin full of scavenged items on the girls' cabin table and heaved a dramatic sigh. A smattering of screws and bolts bounced out of the gaps in the container and went skipping along the bunkroom decking, rolling in every direction and adding to the general tumult of her arrival.
From her cross-legged position on the floor of the converted hold, Serren opened her eyes and glared.
"Will you keep it down!" she hissed. "I said stealth mode. You're as loud as a herd of nerfs."
"Hey, I was quiet enough when it counted," Kai shrugged. She blew a stray lock of hair out of her eyes as she wiped grimy palms down the seams of her trousers, and then beamed a smug smile. "I was in and out without so much as a squeak from the deckplates, and Chewie doesn't have a clue. So much for super-sensitive Wookiee ears, huh?"
Lithe and strong, Kai was also agile enough to squeeze into tight spaces, but it was her ability to do so without making a sound that made her disturbingly good at clandestine operations. When she and her sisters were small, she had always been the one nominated to slip stealthily into the kitchen after bedtime and come creeping back up to their shared bedroom with the pockets of her robe bulging with contraband. They'd learned the hard way that such furtive activities were much more difficult to hide from their mother than from their father. It wasn't that Han didn't notice, but he seemed to take some delight in his daughters' cunning instincts, and he'd been known to turn a blind eye to minor acts of disobedience. Leia was far more likely to oppose blatant misbehaviour, and her sensitivity to the Force made her a formidable obstacle when it came to sneaking around. Always keenly attuned to the activities of her daughters, she seemed able to sense their mischievous intentions often before they even had time to act on them. Chewbacca, too, seemed to have a preternatural ability to detect impending shenanigans, but he relied wholly on his physical senses and, luckily for them, he was too distracted at the moment to pay close attention to their movements.
Kai looked happy with the results of her mission. Brin had given her a list, marked in her choppy scrawl on a scrap of flimsi, which detailed the items they would need to enact their rescue plan, and the possible shipboard locations for each. Kai had subsequently hunted down every trigger switch, blast module, fusion cap and power pack on the list, along with anythingthat could remotely be utilized as a component. That was the first stage of their operation: to gather the necessary articles and deliver them to their bunkroom so that Brin could assemble the parts into something useful, all without attracting Chewbacca's attention.
Kai scanned the room and then looked back at Serren. "Where is she?"
"Working with Chewie on the electromag' locks for the landing gear," Serren replied in a quiet voice that she hoped would temper her sister's boisterous enthusiasm. Distracting him, she clarified through the Force. Despite Kai's earlier remarks, Serren was acutely aware that the Wookiee did indeed possess a keen sense of hearing and, after their failed eavesdropping on his comm-call with their mother, it was obvious that they would need to take precautions to stay off his scopes.
"Ah," Kai nodded and then motioned to the bin and dropped her voice to a whisper. "I got everything on her list, except the magnetic anchors and..." She unfolded a heavily stained and creased flimsi and pointed to an item on the list. "That thing."
Serren noted the volatile item with some concern. "I'm not sure we need anything of that caliber. I thought this was going to be a minimal impact operation? Sneaky-sneaky, in-and-out, right? All we need is a distraction or two. Didn't we agree on that?"
"Yeah, but when have you ever known Brin to stick to the rules?" Kai replied.
"Nobody in this blasted family seems to stick to the rules!" Serren exclaimed in frustration. Then, realizing the volume of her outburst, she clamped a hand over her mouth.
Kai snorted a laugh. "Geez, Serren. Stealth mode, remember? 'No unnecessary chatter'," she chortled, happily echoing Serren's own words back to her.
Firing her twin a hot glare, Serren rubbed at her temples and dismissed the parallel tweak of irritation that Kai sent her way through the Force. Just as she would at home whenever they squabbled, Serren closed her mind to her sister and redirected her attentions to the pair of Force-blind presences working away beneath the Falcon on the temperamental ship's landing gear. She was concentrating hard, honing in on the personalities, when she felt a shock of alarm followed by a flow of frustrated annoyance emanating from Chewbacca's noble presence, and a swell of triumph underscored with roguish amusement from Brin. She opened her eyes.
"Something tells me she'll be back here soon," she sighed at Kai, who was now carefully arranging a handful of detonator caps in a line atop the table. "Then it's your turn to stick with Chewie."
A few moments later the hatch slid aside and Brin sauntered in, rubbing at her short russet locks with a threadbare towel and looking enormously pleased with herself.
"Hydraulic assembly on the landing gear ruptured somehow," she announced with a sly smile. "But, uh, some of it got me, too." Her expression brightened into one of glee when she caught sight of the heap of items that Kai had recovered. "You got the detonators!" she crowed, hastily blotting her hair dry and then carelessly discarding the towel to one side. "Great. This stuff will be aces for a distraction!"
"Shhhhh!" Serren hissed.
Brin pulled a sour face. "You should be thanking me, not shushing me, boss. I took one for the team. Chewie got the worst of it, though," she said smugly. "Oh man, he has the best swears in the galaxy. He's in the fresher right now and I think he'll be a while."
Serren unfolded her long limbs and rose to her feet as the youngest Solo turned to her work bench and began the task of sorting through Kai's collection of found objects. Brin removed each item from the bin and placed it on the bench, and then emptied her bulging pockets of a few misappropriated treasures of her own and added them to the pile.
"Now be quiet," Brin instructed her sisters sternly, before turning her attention to her work. "I need to concentrate." Soon absorbed by the task at hand, her lips began to move, murmuring to herself as she matched each item from the bin with its counterpart from her mental list and stacked them into a semblance of order, grouping them by category and purpose.
A few minutes later, with the items organized into piles, Brin set to work dismantling some of the larger articles into component parts. Serren watched, intrigued by the way her sister's deft fingers separated the weaves of wires and micro circuit-boards and, in the short time that a skilled soldier could have disassembled a blast rifle, Brin had all of the objects gutted and the needed elements laid out neatly on her bench.
"Analog switch with remote input circuit," she recited aloud as she took inventory of the parts she had gleaned. "Embedded micro-antenna with receiver, internal and external temperature sensors, comm-frequency data connection, five-stage heat-inducing wire with emergency interrupt, holonet-enabled transmitter, 16-terabit encryption module board, rechargeable power pack...perfect."
She glanced up and flicked eager eyes from one sister to the other with a satisfied grin. "We have everything we need. Let's get started."
While Serren and Kai looked on in amazement, Brin spent the next hour working her magic. Her dexterous hands flew through the pile of scavenged parts, seeming to possess intrinsic knowledge of how to combine what appeared to be little more than a motley heap of scraps into a tidy assortment of "distractions". From the collection of mismatched parts, Brin fashioned flash grenades, thermal charges, pulsed energy projectiles and a few other devices that Serren didn't immediately recognize, all designed to draw the guards' attention in order for the girls to slip into the castle—and out again, hopefully with their father—without anyone becoming aware of their presence.
That was the plan, at least.
By the time evening arrived and darkness began to fall, all of their ragtag equipment had been prepared and carefully packed away into satchels, ready for use in their covert operation. Serren, as the most pragmatic and believable of the trio, was tasked with informing Chewie that they had been invited by some of the local teenagers who'd visited the Falcon earlier to attend a musical recital in the village hall. The girls had concocted the story as a credible reason for them to be absent from the ship for the requisite number of hours they would require to sneak in, find their father, and spring him free of his prison. To persuade Chewie to let them go, Serren was to emphasise the fact that the concert would be both an opportunity for a worthwhile cultural exchange and a way to keep them out of the Wookiee's hair for a little while.
Serren quailed inside at the prospect of executing that step of the plan. Over and above any of the other tasks, what she hated most was the necessity of lying to Chewie. She feared losing the Wookiee's respect—or worse, his trust—when he discovered their ruse. On the other hand, she didn't disagree with Kai's impatience over their father's absurd predicament and, if she was being perfectly honest with herself, she secretly relished the idea of playing the hero, too. It was perfectly in keeping with her family's legacy, she reasoned, and exactly the sort of thing both of her parents and her two uncles had done for one another a million times before, if all the stories were true. Sure, Serren could have blown the whistle on her sisters as soon as she learned of their plans, but where would be the fun in that? And the months of grief she'd get from Kai and Brin for ratting them out would hardly be worth the trouble it would save. She finally justified her decision by reasoning that, by going along to bridle the other two and keep them quiet, the mission was far more likely to be successful. Still, deep down she knew that, when all was said and done, she would owe Chewie an apology.
Luckily, the wise old Wookiee had many years of first-hand experience with all of the Solo girls and he fully understood the stubborn natures of both Kai and Brin—certainly enough to know that they were not ones to be easily dissuaded from a course of action once they'd set their minds to it. With that insight, Serren hoped that Chewie would see her participation in the escapade for what it was: an act of wisdom, rather than an act of rebellion. Knowing her sisters as they both did, chances were good that somebody was going to have to save their skins.