AN: Hello friends. Here we are at the 10th chapter, a milestone in its own right, but magnified by the fact that we have reached the tipping point in our story. Now for answers to at least some of your questions so far, as we continue our march inwards. Hope you enjoy!
Chapter 10: Racing Against Time
Gunmetal eyes cast to the sky, Wren pulled on his cigarra and clutched his coat tighter. These sub-polar industrial regions were certainly frigid, but Wren's Stormtrooper bodysuit was all the protection he needed from the elements. No, the coat hid the bodysuit from the locals. How long it'd been since Byss had gone silent, Wren couldn't tell. He seemed to be adrift for eternity; three jumps at a time in his commandeered Gamma-class assault shuttle. Three blasted jumps, just him, the thirty-nine empty armor bays in the passenger compartment, and an electronic voice that damned his ears with every syllable.
Wren saw a grizzled old face in the smog coming off the factory blocks; Sargeant Tyarl, scarred and worn and fierce in the way of old soldiers still soldiering. "Why does the asset have to talk?" Wren lamented. "Why do I have to interact with it? Hold conversation with what we died for?"
"I died. You still live. Maybe it talks because you're supposed to listen? Because you can still hear it?"
Wren shook his head violently. "No time. Can't stop."
"You saw the holonet reports. The Byss Run is gone. Our legacy will grow no brighter from you smashing yourself into a star."
"Maybe that's what we deserve," Wren replied. The cold Coruscanti wind howled between the city spires and monolithic factory blocks. Out the corner of his eye, Wren saw a group of workers eyeing him warily, and with an exasperated sigh Wren turned his collar to the wind. He ground out the remains of his cigarra and set to walking, winding his way back to the nearest spaceport.
"Your body mass is still decreasing," came the voice from the comm panel. Wren growled in frustration as he settled into the pilot seat. "You didn't eat anything. You haven't eaten for four days."
"I'm fine," he grunted, even as his stomach grumbled at him. Wren keyed in the ignition sequence, and pulled his brick of a vehicle away from the spaceport and into the Coruscanti sky-traffic, ascending level by level until safe trans-atmospheric flight paths materialized through the bustle.
"I know that you're not." Wren cast a sullen glance at the softly glowing cylinder of crystal.
"Then know it in silence," he hissed. The starfield stretched out before him; working methodically, Wren configured his next three jumps. But finalizing the last translation was an impossible task that the computer would not let him complete. His scowl deepened as he dug into the system preferences, disabling mechanisms placed to save his life. His task complete, Wren pulled back on the hyperdrive control and drifted off to sleep despite the yammering in his ear.
Then the alarms exploded inside his head, and Wren bolted awake, heart pounding, bare chest heaving, hands balled into tight fists. Eyes cast left and right, tracing the lines of the bulkhead and the furnishings of his bedroom, struggling to ground himself until he caught sight of the lump lying on the other half of the bed. Two glints of jade met his gaze in the low light, watching with careful silence. Wren shifted closer, and the jade glance turned away, allowing him to slip his arm under her pillow and drape his other over her waist.
"None of your clan would approve," Shana thought slowly and sleepily. It was true; the strangeness of the situation was undeniable. And there was no impetus beyond her; he'd made every honorable gesture, and Shana had been the one to overturn his gentlemanly notions. And yet he took no liberties with her all the while. Well, almost none, but such a violation was minor and not entirely unwelcome. A small and timid part of Shana insisted on the propriety of traditional Mandalorian courtship, the mar'eyce riduur. But all the while, the rest of her knew the inescapable chill of empty space, saw how regret and pain formed the partitions of Wren's life, and felt the snug security of his arms encircling her body. These animal feelings were stronger here than the social sway of culture, swaddled in void, alone amid a desolate, hostile universe so far from her kin and their ways. A trifling transgression in the face of lonely oblivion, a warm fire in the long night. "And oh, how warm a fire it is. There's definitely something about a nice man that has nothing to do with raising warriors."
That even such an uninvolved pleasure as a sleepy embrace was a new delight to Shana was something Wren didn't need to know. But there was an element that sat apart from base comfort, as well. Shana had seen the Mandokar in Wren, the Mandalorian spirit; indomitable and tenacious, loyal to the end and hungry for life well lived. Sure, it was marred by haastal, emotional injuries like dried blood rusting on a forged blade. But it was there regardless, hiding underneath, showing its brilliance when Wren could manage to keep himself clean of his echoing past. At that moment there was a part of Shana that wanted nothing more than to see Wren spotless and free.
Wren let his fear-weary frame uncoil and relax, touching his nose to Shana's scalp and drifting off for a half hour at a time. The touch of a woman was nothing new to him, but real restfulness was a feeling he'd forgotten. He'd long ago found the favor of easy females to be a sorry substitute for peace of mind, but this was different. The scent about Shana's hair and skin, the quiet rhythms of her breath and heart, and the warmth carried on her touch were things alone that together amounted to the off switch to Wren's mental engine of war, at long last. The stand-down order echoed through Wren's brain as he drifted away again, until Shana made a languid sound and stirred between his arms.
"Mmmh... You talk a big game, all fierce and witty and brooding," she mumbled, turning to fix him with lidded eyes. "But secretly you're all fluff. Gar beskar'gam kadilir ti taylir, nu besbe'trayce. Your armor is better pierced by an embrace than by weapons."
"I could say the same to you," Wren said with a quiet laugh that grew deeper as Shana smiled, elated to fins Wren appreciating the humor of her people. "Miss Mando, professional warfighter, jetpack assault and CQB specialist, purrs and cuddles like a Sanus cat."
This jab earned Wren a solid thump in the ribs. "Treading on dangerous ground," Shana warned in a calm, even voice that spoke of how ill-advised it would be to continue to test that calm. Wren came to the conclusion that infantile or winsome comparisons might be unwise to place upon a woman of Shana's upbringing. Cute was evidently not a quality sought by a typically Mandalorian dala.
"Hakyo told me what happened," Wren said. Might as well change the subject into something important, use the vibe in the air to address something potentially volatile.
"Did he? I thought he had taken that in confidence."
That made Wren hesitate a moment. "Hak told me what happened," the spacer specified. "Just that you ran off on your own into the thick of them. He didn't mention any conversation you'd had."
This in turn left Shana reigning herself in. "It's no matter, I want you to know this of me before we part ways." Wren nodded once in silence, and Shana continued. "I've history with that species. I was born into some form of debt slavery, separated from my birth parents earlier than I can honestly remember. It was a mining colony, and life there was hard, but there was still not to be found among those few who knew love in such a place. But the operation was situated in disputed territory on the border of Hutt space. Bartokk deathsquads hunted us like cowering vermin until the Hutts found a suitable mercenary force and brought them to heel. And that was when I became Shana Tor'kad. Daughter to one of the most successful Mandalorian warlords of this era, successor to his school of sportsmanship, and still deathly afraid of and completely set off by Bartokk."
"We've all got the soft spots," Wren consoled. "And now we're on an even playing field, so who says we should part?" Shana eyed Wren through the dim light with renewed scrutiny, sitting up to regard him with a careful expression, and he spoke on. "This ship and her crew have business to finish, all together. Could be a speed bump, but it could be an extended engagement; these guys have shown to be decently resourceful with plenty of muscle, might be a challenge. Point is this crew fits together well, and you fit well as a part of it. So when you finish whatever it is you've got going, maybe consider a more casual line of work, with friends who make money together instead of a boss who has you flying across the galaxy alone? We could sure as hell use your skills, and I... I for one would certainly appreciate your company."
Once Shana had figured what Wren was generally proposing, each word plucked hard on her heartstrings, leaving her speech halting and careful. "In truth, I would like that very much. But I'm afraid I don't know exactly when I would be able to leave my current employment. Despite his demanding nature, I'm quite fond of my boss, and I wouldn't want to leave him high and dry with things that need doing."
Wren tried to show a good Sabacc face, but the disappointment he felt was undeniable, despite the fact that Shana had not even refused his offer. Something from deep down told the star-captain that there were quite a few things that would need doing. And seeing this upon Wren's face only deepened the ache in Shana's center.
"Rise and shine children," SENA interjected, shattering the air of tender honesty. "Triple zero awaits."
The four of them, starship captain, warrior woman, genius prodigy, and hulking ruffian, assembled on the bridge to the sight of the radiant corridor of hyperspace. Shana entered last, taking her time in dressing. She slid into the empty copilot's chair, something of a formality since the actual copilot was in the droid bay. But it had been left empty regardless, something that struck Shana as conspicuous. It was Fink's ship, but he was at the port auxiliary console, attending to the Lady's engineering functions. The view up front had been saved for her. There was little doubt in Shana's mind what that meant; whether or not she and Wren held any spoken, defined bond, the way they seem to have become had not gone unnoticed. No, it seemed that this patchwork band of eccentrics and misfits had set her a place at their table. Four and change was now five.
"If only you didn't have to go and ruin it," a small and obnoxious voice in the back of her head bleated. "Wren will understand," Shana fired back. "He'll know that it was still real. He'll see that in the end. Or not. This is the bed you made when you made the fate of this man's soul a part of the objective."
The Lady translated back to existence, the stars straining back to themselves out of the endless curtains of hyperspace energy, and immediately the HUD was awash in a tapestry of sensor contacts; yellow and blue civilian vessels, armed and unarmed respectively, interspersed with orange indicating warships broadcasting the authentic transponder codes of a major military authority. So thick was the volume of contacts that they began to occlude the canopy completely.
Wren growled in frustration. "Damn it SENA, dashboard sensor map please. Switch the HUD to collision avoidance." The info display system responded, wiping the heads up display of sensor IDs so it could visually represent the paths of surrounding traffic. The total sensor picture was cast in miniature from the console between Wren and Shana. Wren eyed it for a moment, and caught sight of Shana as he did. "Well that's different."
Shana's armor was nowhere to be seen. Instead, the mercenary wore sensible street fashion; a pair of fitted black pants, boots quite like her uniform pair but for a more luxurious, fashionable construction, and a black bantha leather jacket. Her hair was tied in a single long braid, bangs loose framing her face, and at the end of that fiery tail was fastened a ring cut from some sort of lustrous rainbow-speckled stone. "What? You can't wear armor all the time. It's conspicuous, you know? We're supposed to be on the run."
"Not sure if this is any less attention grabbing," Fink jested. "But at least now they can eye you up all they want and never find the merc they're looking for. Sounds fun."
"Didn't anyone teach you any manners, besom'ika?" Shana shot back.
"Verp manners. All wavelength control and transmission ettiquet. So no, not really." The mechanic wore the obnoxious grin of someone who knew exactly how cheeky he was being. The levity raised Shana's spirits and set her on edge all at once.
"If the bond is true, than it'll hold fast," Shana thought. "Duraanir jate'kara. Damn fate for this twisted meeting. But for this foul circumstance there would be nothing but us, vode an. Brothers and sisters all."
Shana found herself fixed upon the sensor projection, and sure enough one of the orange contacts flipped red. "We're painted," SENA reported immediately. There was no alarm in her tone, and Shana remembered that the galactic capital was a highly complex traffic control environment. SENA whistled low. "Damn that's a big one! Nebula-class, and boy is she zippy, closing eleven o'clock high."
Wren seemed troubled, and Shana grew more nervous every second. "What the fosh is a top of the line Star Destroyer doing on traffic control?" He wondered aloud.
"Damn his instincts. But you knew the con was almost up." Shana took one second to steel herself, until her expression was grim, but unashamed. "They're rolling out the welcome mat."
All eyes turned to the copilot's chair, and Shana forced her chin just a touch higher. "Oh," Wren blurted. He turned his eyes back to the transparisteel, youthful face locked up by inscrutable tension, as the New Republic warship began looming larger. But Shana felt the gazes of the others boring into her.
"Light freighter Hasty Lady, receiving?" The comm panel squawked. "This is Captain Ekmeno of the Star Destroyer Conciliator. Are you receiving, Captain Eschlan?"
"Ooh, so I'm a star captain now," Wren muttered, before thumbing the control on his headset. "Receiving, Conciliator. Fine day for a reentry, isn't it?"
"Quite. Follow us down to atmosphere if you don't mind, we'll keep the riff raff clear and ensure you make your landing platform unbothered." There was a touch of ember in those last words, the barely restrained gusto of a confident shipmaster who, in all honesty, dearly wished someone would actually attempt to interfere with the Lady's arrival on Coruscant.
Wren guided the Lady into formation with her massive new guardian, and together they powered towards the planet. The crew of the Hasty Lady could see the Conciliator's combat patrol tightening their screen as the space traffic thickened, until finally the capital ship could follow no further. Four craft launched from the Star Destroyer's bays as the Conciliator and her fighter wing pulled away; the E-wings followed the Lady down into the Coruscanti air. Together the five ships picked a path into the cityscape, winding between reaching towers and crossing over sprawling plazas built atop the mountainous city blocks, themselves towers that reached deep down to the surface hidden below. Deeper and deeper they traveled, deeper than any aboard the Hasty Lady thought prudent, until the light from above grew dim.
"Kinda shady digs for the big shiny heroes," Wren quipped out if the corner of his mouth. "You sure these guys are taking us to the right spot?"
"This can't go down around prying eyes and ears," Shana explained.
Wren didn't care to ask what exactly this all was. And then the urban canyons parted to reveal a landing complex built on a shelf in the side of one wide tower with eight 75 meter pads; the northern-most one lit up then, and the four E-wings peeled off and began making their way back to the surface. As the Hasty Lady came in for touchdown, her running lights revealed ambling figures leaving the cover of the interior of the block. These shapes grew into humanoids, darkly clothed and heavily armed.
Wren's face was all steel. "Welp, here's your stop," he said, swiveling in his chair to face Shana. His right hand lay at the grip of his S-5, his other hand pressed palm down on the control console, quite close to the weapons controls. "All ashore going ashore."
That bit deep into Shana's heart. "How quickly he changes face. And you thought they'd forgive you, silly girl." Shana heard Fink and Hakyo stirring behind her as she stood, fixing her jade eyes on Wren. "I'm here to tell you that it's your stop too," she responded. "There's someone here who is paying you a whole lot for the chance to talk to Wren Eschlan."
Shana could see in their eyes that none of them intended call her friend anymore. So driving the point home was less painful than Shana had expected. "SENA will want to come too."
Their walk was long, tense, and silent; Shana, swimming in Wren, Hakyo, Fink, and SENA's mistrust, with two platoons of balaclavaed New Republic soldiers. Eventually they reached an audience chamber of sorts, with angled rows of inward facing desks forming a pit around a small stage. More New Republic personnel, their armor devoid of markings and their faces covered, waited and watched from every corner of the lecture hall. As the crew and their duplicitous passenger were lead down the stairs, an elderly fellow whose face graced textslates in schools the galaxy over. Shana strode ahead to greet him, stepping up onto the low stage and hugging the elder.
"Ahh, welcome back Agent Tor'kad," he said with a tired voice, as Shana helped him down to the floor with his walking stick. He hobbled closer to Wren and his crew. "And these must be the ones we've been looking for, all this while. You gave us quite the run around, Captain Eschlan."
"Wren, this is General Jan Dodonna," Shana introduced. "He's the one who contracted me to find you and bring you here for a chat."
"Heh, well I'm retired now, at least almost," the elder general insisted, fixing his eyes upon Wren. "I've but a few last loose ends to clean up before I can give this war a rest, at long last. Loose ends like Velabri."
Wren felt his body tense up, his hand straying on its own to his hip, where SENA hung suspended in gemstone, crystallized thought. "What about it?" He demanded. "You can't have what you're looking for. Nobody owns her and nobody ever will again."
That made Jan laugh harder than was comfortable for him. "Ooh, you're a sharp one to be sure!" He croaked. "But you still think like a buckethead. We've no interest in SENA, as you say we consider her to be as sentient as you or I, and deserving of the appropriate dignity. Like Agent Tor'kad said, we only want a few questions. For now."
"Then ask them," SENA ordered, her voice spilling from the comm headset that hung about Wren's neck.
"Where is he, SENA?" General Dodonna's kindly old voice was hard as iron now. "Where is your other half?"
"Okay, I am officially sick of this pudu. If you don't intend to make sense, I'm fixing to leave. You can keep the credits."
The spacer turned on his heel and made for the exit, Fink and Hakyo following behind, but a cry rang out that stopped them all cold. "Wait!" SENA cried out. Her voice held the tremble and crack of desperation that no protocol chip could emulate. "Wait, Wren. I can't run from this again."
Wren's anxiety was flaring higher by the second. "Damn it SENA, stop playing with me or I'm gonna fekking lose it. Run from what?"
"My other half," SENA affirmed. "Who I was before... This."
General Dodonna took just a moment to let SENA finish. "We never got a chance to fully break down the Velabri station after it's capture," he began. "There was far too much we didn't understand but sorely needed to. We'd barely begun when Operation Shadowhand broke out, and after that it was an undertaking we could hardly afford to support. But we'd understood by then it's purpose; the production of a purely electronic intelligence, one with unlimited capacity for natural learning, same as a biological commander but more knowledgable and efficient than any being could hope to be. The emperor knew even before his first death that the weakest links in his chain of power were the Imperial officers who struggled piecemeal to enact his will upon the galaxy whilst squabbling among themselves all the while. Thus he sought a new method of controlling his fleets, one which answered to him alone and carried out his orders without question or ulterior motive."
"A Self Enhancing Neural Architecture," Wren said, slapping his face in frustration. Sergeant Tyarl hard warned him of those who would remember Velabri and search for its remnants, but he'd never stopped to consider the actual circumstances of SENA's creation. Not that SENA herself had been forthcoming.
"Close," Jan continued. "But not quite. The emperor needed an electronic mind like SENA's to control his fleets, but still could not suffer the possibility that such a mind could have desires running counter to his own. The template had to be altered, harnessed in such a way that the mind would be compelled to follow Emperor Palpatine's directives without any resistance or deviation of any kind. An Integrated Space Combat Architecture. ISCA."
"We were sick," SENA interjected, giving everyone pause as they tried to link the non-sequitor to the previous revelations. "Him and I; some mega-bug, caught while galivanting across... Some jungle world. The name is lost to me. His name is lost to me, and mine as well. But it was bad and it was late, we saw dozens of doctors on every center of medicine but none could offer anything but a delay of the inevitable. The parasitic seed would consume us both, and infect any present for our ends. Nothing could stop it... Except one Imperial facility that claimed an experimental treatment could save us both. And in our desperation to stretch our love just another cycle further, we let the wrong one in."
"SENA..." Wren's teeth ground hard, and his voice strained and cracked.
"Seeing back before... Before the change is impossible. Only the faintest notions remain, so faint at first I didn't realize they were there, or what they were, or how to find them within me. So I ignored the quiet echoes, until we tried the deep core."
Something fractured within Wren, an immediately recognizable feeling that began to spiral out of control. "Oh no..." the spacer groaned, and in a blink he was elsewhere, the voices of his friends muffled by deep water.
"Warning, mass shadow detected! Warning, mass shadow detected! Warning, mass shadow detected!"
Wren stirred slowly, confused. He pressed his hand to his face, feeling the rough stubble there. His eyes opened, and the starfield hung before him, a sight he'd not expected to see again. The sensor readout showed their position in empty space, light years from the neutron star that would've turned the assault shuttle into component molecules. "I'm alive..." He mumbled, faint and delirious with hunger.
"Look," came the voice, strange and female. "I get that something is clearly messing you up right now. Really, I do. But I'm on the same boat, I have no idea where I am, who I am, what happneed to me, all I know is that I'm scared, lost, and I don't want to die. I'm really not in a position to stop you if you really want to end it but for fek's sake, please leave me somewhere I can begin to make sense of this first."
Maybe it was the hunger that had finally broken Wren down into who he was, his Stormtrooper conditioning no more. Maybe it was the final realization that his home was truly no more, that he was truly alone. But now this woman was a person when before she had been the voice of his guilt, maybe real, maybe imagined. For the first time since Velabri he had some degree of clarity. "We died for you," he sobbed. "Nothing else we fought for meant anything in the end, so it came down to you. That's not your fault, I'm sorry I took it out on you, but I couldn't accept that everything else I've ever known is either destroyed or debased."
"It's fine," came the response. "I'm grateful, really. You 're the first person to talk to me like this, since...-"
The voice crackled and fussed out for a moment, and then went silent. "Hello?" Wren asked, suddenly feeling idiotic as though he were taking a call. "Are you still there?"
"Yes," came the reply. There was tension in the voice that Wren couldn't place. "I'm sorry Wren."
That earned a tired chuckle. "So you already know my name? What am I supposed to call you?"
"SENA. I'm called SENA."
Wren felt the deep water receeding from his brain, finding himself hunched over, heart pounding. He felt a pair of hands rest on his shoulders, and turned to see Shana with a concerned expression of her face. He couldn't meet her emerald eyes, instead looking around the room at those who now witnessed his shame. "No deal," he heaved to General Dodonna. "No fekking deal."
"Like hell," SENA immediately contradicted. "We're finding ISCA together or I'm taking the Lady and you guys can wait till I get back."
"If SENA is in, I'm in," Fink interjected. Hakyo nodded once, grumbling his affirmation.
"I follow my kin," the cyclops said.
Wren was all venom as he cast his eyes down to his hip, and then to his crew. He looked back to Jan, to Shana, to SENA, and the back to Shana and her boss. Then he slid SENA from the case, striding up to the elderly officer and thrusting the Corusca cylinder into his chest. "Fine," he spat. "Don't call me when you're done."
With that he turned sharply and beelined for the door, mind set to the nearest upward-bound turbolift and the nearest watering hole from there.
General Dodonna was all steel and grimace. "We haven't time for this," he lamented, focusing now on his agent and the three crew who had cast their lots with this endeavour. "Records taken from the Velabri station show that the Emperor sequestered ISCA at an unknown location, alongside the first operational fleet fitted for an ISCA-type Control Unit. And from our studies of the project records and sensor survey of the deep core, we have detected signs of fleet activity around the remnants of Byss, and have determined that this is likely the surviving fleet of Admiral Uyoroi Kemin, who initially conceived of the ISCA concept and helped oversee its development. She is known to have abandoned her reassignment in the final hours of Operation Shadowhand, with enough time to reach Byss before the Byss Run fully destabilized. If she can construct a working S-thread system to stabilize a hyperspace lane out and determine ISCA's location, she would be in position to conquer and unite the Imperial Remnants, reignite the war with the New Republic, or simply murder untold trillions. The galactic balance of power will never be the same."
"Let me see the records," SENA demanded, now through Fink as a mouthpiece. "I can find him. Let me find ISCA."
"Yes, this is as planned," Jan concurred. "But the enemy has agents abroad, like the one who tracked you across the galaxy and arranged the various attacks you've suffered on the way here. We have been doing our best to figure out who it is and how they've managed to follow Admiral Kemin's orders from outside the deep core, but to no avail; there is no telling how well they have us, they could be working through the records on their end and doing their astronomy as we speak. We must retrieve Wren, we cannot afford to wait an extra second."
"I'll get him," Shana offered, and none gave protest.
"Find him swiftly and do not fail," General Dodonna ordered, thrusting SENA into her arms. Shana took the crystal-energy matrix and clipped it to her belt.
"Don't bump me too bad," SENA demanded.
Shana nodded once, and then disappeared into the dark, racing against time.