Chapter 2

5BBY

The Ultimate Argument came to a halt over the landing platform and hovered over the pockmarked ferrocrete for a few seconds before setting down. As seemed par the course for every time someone arrived in a place where government authority had broken down or was in the process of doing so, it was the middle of a local heatwave, and Lel could see the heat haze over the vast, flat expanse of the spaceport.

He looked at Ceron. "Now we wait," he said.

His employer nodded, "Indeed, now we wait."

Local traffic-control during their approach had been of the 'don't bother us until you're over the port and want a spot to land' variety, which both made it easier to slip through without questions being asked and more challenging because there would likely be something of a security problem. But, by habit, he had his binocs hanging from his neck when he arrived somewhere new, so after he finished checking the engine status, he reached for them and studied the one part of the port infrastructure he could see.

As far as terminals went, the building was about average size but clearly had been neglected. Not to the point where it wasn't usable anymore, but it was clear that whatever budget existed for maintenance went elsewhere. The dire need for a paint job and the generally just extremely grimy appearance made that obvious. A few more speeders were parked in a small open-sided hangar of the type that backwater worlds like this usually used to house whatever aerial militia they had. Technicians seemed to be doing their best to keep them going, and since more than a few of them seemed like they were armed with some sort of heavy weapon, they likely belonged to what passed for the local enforcement arm.

Twenty minutes later, he found himself glancing over at his boss. "So how much do you think they're going to want as a bribe for letting us in?"

"I don't know," Ceron replied, "but I think we're about to find out."

Sure enough, from the sole terminal, a lone speeder came their way. With the port mostly empty, there wasn't really anywhere else they could be going, after all.

"Just stay next to the ramp and look menacing," Ceron ordered, and Lel nodded in acknowledgement.

"Will do."

The speeder parked next to where the loading ramp lowered itself, and with the way the cockpit of the YT-1300 class was placed, Lel could only see the back-end of the vehicle. The faded markings showed that it belonged to the Itar's Landing Port Authority, but how much that extended to the city's current reality and the planet was anyone's guess.

"So who are you?" asked one of the… men from the speeder after it stopped and all three humans had disembarked.

Local militias equipped with technicals didn't exactly inspire confidence. So he double-checked the deflectors, and the remote weapon controls just in case. After that, he watched as the sole other occupant of the port, a small ship in the colours of one of the sector's smaller shipping companies, took off and rose through the atmosphere with little urgency. By that time, the negotiations going on outside seemed to conclude, as the speeder moved back to the terminal building. Not entirely to Ceron's satisfaction, though, going by his posture and gestures. Lel knew better than to ask, he didn't know the man well enough for that yet, but it was apparent.

For the next few minutes, negotiations went back and forth, and it didn't take Lel long to see that much of the intransigence by the locals was all for show. Whatever local strongman controlled the principal city and the only significant spaceport, it was clear that he wanted that anyone coming from out-system to be let in with the least amount of hassle. Even so, the man on the scene still wanted his cut, and this was what most of the back and forth was about. Eventually, Ceron handed the man a handful of what Lel knew to be some credit chips of mid-level value.

The locals seemed to be satisfied, as they nodded and drove off in their rickety speeder. Ceron on the other hand was less than pleased, I could tell.

"I take it they either wanted too much or you know that they'll try and break into the ship before we've even left the perimeter?" Lel asked, "or maybe both?"

Ceron barked a laugh at that and walked back up the ramp and said, "You certainly don't lack common sense."

Lel grinned. "Thank you, Ceron. There are people who consider common sense a special power, though."

"Unfortunately, they're probably right," his boss replied and headed towards the cockpit. When we were both settled into our seats, he activated the small, non-standard holodisplay on the centre console. A blue holographic representation of the planet appeared.

"Right, so we are here," Ceron said without preamble, "on the largest of four continents, and pretty much smack-dab in the middle of the settled area. Used to be that here," he pointed to another area, "on the smallest of the landmasses large enough to be rated as continents, there was a logistics base that supported the war effort, which ultimately led to the fighting and that continent being heavily bombarded from orbit during the wars. Part of the Outer Rim Sieges. There's no infrastructure or settlement at all there now, so we'll be taking the Argument to get there. That out there, was just for show, to keep them from guessing until it's too late."

Lel studied the hologram before looking up at the other man. "I take it during the fighting they missed something?"

"You are correct, my friend," came the reply, "Though I have to point out, the reason you're here is that yes, the entire thing sort of sounds too good to be true. In any event, my contact will be meeting us here. I know where the site is, but he'll have the latest intelligence for us, in case that becomes relevant."

With another sigh, Lel suppressed the urge to say something, but made a mental note to keep his blaster where he could easily get at it. Just in case of the inevitable betrayal.

Then they waited some more. In fact, they waited so long that Lel was about to suggest that they just go to the place on their own.

Ceron seemed not to notice, but in the end, there was no need to speak up, as another speeder approached the Ultimate Argument, this time it was only occupied by a single person.

If there was one way he could describe the man that was introduced to him as Arcet Kiren, it would be 'Shanghai street market knock-off Han Solo'. Same ESB-era leather jacket, albeit in black instead of blue, same Imperial-issue boots and dark pants, albeit the latter without the Corellian blood stripes, and an absolutely awful "I'm totally not sleazy" grin that, on the face of the actual Han Solowas both accurate and endearing. Here, it was anything but. Moron probably thought he was god's gift to women too. Maybe it was his imagination, but Lel couldn't help feeling that way, even in the absence of solid proof. Unlike Ceron. Him, Lel actually liked, because the man was at least trying to appear legitimate, in spite of the additional sets of ID papers on the computer for himself and the ship, that Lel wasn't supposed to be aware of. On the Rim, that was just being prepared for the worst.

Lel followed Arcet to the holochess table, but he fingered the grip of his blaster while he did so.

"Gentlemen, we are here," he said and called up a map of the planet that hovered in the air above the table. The map zoomed in on their current location. " and you know that where we want to go is here."

The map zoomed out and rotated to the smallest of three continent-sized islands about halfway around the planet, it centred on a small dot. Next to a mountain range roughly two to three-thousand metres high on average, going by the markings on the map. In the middle of what had once been a sprawling base complex in and under the western edges of the mountain range, not too far away from what had once been a medium-sized city, but what was now marked as 'ruins'.

"My hyperdrive died on the way here as soon as I dropped out of lightspeed, but during my approach, I took care to fly across that continent within forty kilometres of our objective. This map is old, taken by an Old Republic survey ship just before the Jedi Rebellion," he said, and Lel had to suppress the urge to twitch at his choice of words, "but as far as I could tell from that high up, it's accurate."

Ceron nodded. "And we are going to find what we discussed?"

"Ayup. Dozens vintage Astromech and other assorted droid models, and a few assorted odds and ends," said Arcet.

"Okay, question," Lel interrupted before anyone else could say something, raising his right hand while he did so, "how come the locals haven't looted this place down to bedrock yet?"

"First the CIS and then the Republic glassed the ever loving nerf dung out of that continent before they both abandoned the system," Arcet said with a smirk, "From what I'm told, the last bombardment lasted over four local days, so they figure that there's just nothing left worth taking. Which is actually right. The base was in the process of being abandoned already, so almost everything worthwhile had already been moved."

Lel nodded. That he could see, even if it did feel all a bit too convenient. But then, he was there to look menacing and to ensure that they got back out in one piece.

"So what we will find there," Arcet said, "is, as discussed, a cache of still packed droids that were meant for the Grand Army. I found them there when I scouted out the base last month."

Lel sighed internally. This meant that Ceron and him were there because it was either too much to carry away on his own or because it was behind some sort of Uncharted-like trap with Star Wars technology. Yup, there was no getting around it any more. He knew he had to say it now.

Luckily, Arcet excused himself to go to the refresher.

With an outward sigh, he looked at Ceron and said: "I have a bad feeling about this."

"Don't," Ceron said, "I've known this man for nearly ten years and he has yet to stab me in the back. And we might need you. You're the only one who speaks binary."

Lel wished that he could be that confident, but there was a good chance that Ceron was right, and that they really were about to earn a decent bit of money. It wasn't like he had much of a choice, because he'd rather do this than be stuck here instead of Bespin. And he still needed to eat.

However, that feeling didn't go away.


The landscape of the continent was best described as apocalyptic. Overlapping impact craters everywhere, places where there once had been settlements, roads, infrastructure in general, but what little remained was a few lonely ruined walls. The planet's dark-green and violet plant life had taken over, but the devastation was still evident even after all this time. The sheer devastation laid out before his eyes quieted him, for all that he had seen in both his lives so far, and what he knew this crazy galaxy could offer. To think this blasted hellscape had happened in less than a day. Lel shuddered at the thought of a mini Base-Delta-Zero. According to Arcet, even at this scale the climatic disruptions caused by the heat and dust of the bombardment had caused crop failures and abnormal weather phenomena all over the planet.

Looking at it all from three hundred metres up had been bad enough, but now down at ground level it looked like every piece of post-apocalyptic imagery he'd seen. Greener perhaps than many, but destructive and haunting all the same.

It was obvious that the base had been hit the hardest by the bombardment. What had, according to Arcet, been a base near the size of the Senate District on Imperial Center, was just a mess of overlapping craters caused by capital-grade weapons to the point that they'd had to land inside one of the craters, that was large enough to take a YT-1300 and that had only a gentle slope. Thankfully, Arcet had brought some more equipment, and what radiation there had been had long since dissipated, doing away with the need for hazmat suits or something of that description which was a relief.

Where the Argument was parked had once been part of a large-ish open space next to the actual entrance to the base.

Lel and the others looked at where the pieces of debriswere which were mostly blocking off a tunnel that went off into the mountain.

Arcet grinned. "When I got here, all that marked the entrance was that pile of rubble. Took me most of a day to free it up enough to get in. Turns out, the first hundred metres of the tunnel are partially collapsed, but we'll get through."

"I'm impressed." Lel replied, and he was. The entrance was large enough to take the largest walkers and armoured vehicles that the Republic had sported during the mid-clone wars, meaning just about anything short of an AT-AT, so that it was this intact after everything certainly was impressive.

"So was I when I first got here," Arcet replied, "and I bet so is he." Ceron, the person so described, laughed and nodded.

"Say what you want about the Republic, they knew how to build things," he said. Lel agreed, albeit probably for not quite the same reasons.

"Good thing then that the Empire wrote this place off," Ceron added, glancing at Lel while Arcet wasn't watching. Lel didn't know him very long, but it was clear that he was to be the lookout. "Right, once we are in there, be, for the love of the gods, be careful and mind the commlinks."

For emphasis, he raised his right arm where he wore a wrist mounted unit, not unlike Lel, though Ceron's had a few more buttons than was usual.

"Yes, dad," Lel replied with a smirk, and Arcet nodded.

The various chunks of rubble were, on average, the size of himself, and were partially covered by plant-life and the local equivalent of moss. It was fairly easy to see where Arcet had cleared some of it away and very poorly hidden those efforts with some foliage. The pieces formed a sort of ramp there, it was fairly steep, but easily traversable on foot. At least he'd been smart enough not to use explosives.

Even so, Lel still drew his blaster, just in case. He brought up the rear as the other men clambered inside. Arcet was taking the lead, using a small handheld scanner to check for radiation, and by the time Lel reached the top and began to climb down, they were already shining their torches at the various pieces of wall. Power was obviously down, and so all they had was what they could carry on them. The air inside still smelled of dusty, with the faint stink of decay but seemed clean here at the very least.

"We'll need to run a power cable or something from the ship to the power hookup in there, to see if any of the lights are still working," Arcet said and motioned at a small building that was nestled against the ferrocrete walls.

In a way, the combination of everything reminded Lel of the descriptions of the SLDF depot on Helm. But if they were the GDL here, then Lel didn't want to think about who or what the Free Worlds League attack force was likely to be, since he didn't fancy himself to be Grayson Carlyle come to life. Though he supposed that given his own situation, the man was likely out there in the multiverse somewhere. But unlike the Helm Cache, this base wasn't meant to be a doomsday vault. If Arcet was to be believed, this was going to be little more than a fancy warehouse, to the point that it had required an external power supply during normal operations.

"Let's do that right now then, before anything else," Ceron suggested, "because even if the lights are completely destroyed, I'd rather trigger whatever defensive systems when we can still get out."

"Will do," Lel was halfway outside before Arcet could say a word. A faint yell of "Container Aurek-3!" came after him.

Ten minutes and considerable swearing and sweating later, he had the cable run from the external hookups in the well of one of the landing it ran up the small incline of rubble, down the other side and towards the building. It was then that the other two decided to help, or at least Ceron did, taking the connector from him.

"Go check the building with Arcet," he said.

As it turned out, the building was both boring and empty on the inside. Lel could see that this had once been a security checkpoint, meaning the usual accoutrements of computers, monitoring stations and an empty weapon's rack. The floor was covered with glass shards from the windows, presumably blown in when the entrance had collapsed.

"Seems that my theory was right," a voice said behind him.

Lel turned away from examining the rack towards Arcet. The human was leaning over one of the security stations and motioned around.

"What theory?" Lel asked.

"Look at it," Arcet replied and motioned around them. "There isn't any trace of fighting, or bodies in here. So they either left before the bombardment, or…."

"Or," Lel continued, "left afterwards once the emergency supplies ran out, but took care to conceal that someone had survived. They can't have gotten far though, because outside must have been hot, in all the worst senses of the word."

"Yeah, but this was pretty much a fancy warehouse, so the choice was either starve or die out there somewhere, where there was at least a slim chance of being rescued. I bet," Arcet said and he knocked his knuckles on the dead station, "that some made it, and that's what started the rumours that parts of this place of magnificence still exist."

Grinning despite himself, Lel nodded. "Almost had to be. I once read an old story where they had something similar. Your usual 'collapsing star nation' tropes. They moved the actual depot into a hidden base like this one, so when the other faction rolled up and found nothing, they slagged the city where it supposedly was in response and because the entire thing made him look like a fool. People only had rumours from then on, so it took centuries to find again."

Arcet looked at him blankly.

"Point being," Lel continued, "that in that story, the base was blown up by a failsafe in the end because someone handled the systems there like a ham-fisted nerf-herder. So in short, be the fuck careful."

"That… that's actually a really good point. Who knows what the Old Republic hid here," Arcet replied with a respectful nod. He stepped to the door and waved at Ceron who was standing outside, whistling as he did so. "Get in here!"

Universal power connectors were a technology that hadn't changed much since the Ruusan reformation, so finding one that was within range of the cable didn't take very long. When Ceron flipped a few switches, Lel was holding both thumbs behind his back as tightly as he could. Nothing happened at first, but less than two seconds later, the lights in the checkpoint came back on, followed by the outside lighting up considerably.

"YES!" Arcet exclaimed and stormed outside. With Lel and Ceron following behind at a more sedate pace. Indeed, some of the lighting were on. Near the entrance, it was still dark on the ceiling, but near the back where, from what Lel could now see, a tunnel was stretching off deeper into the mountain, with rows of standard GAR-issue lights making everything just barely visible. A number of the light sources were the red emergency kind, but they could see well enough.

"Come on!" Arcet exclaimed, quickly following up with exclamations of success. Lel stepped closer, and he could see that he had called up a floor plan of the facility on a normal information computer panel. Noting that he and Ceron had come to look over his shoulder, Arcet began to explain without any preamble.

"Okay, so the storage part we want is here," Arcet said, pointing to an area of the base, "at the very end of the facility. We go there, you convince yourselves that I'm not screwing you, then we maybe take a sample, and we come back with something big enough to take the entire stash. Good?"

Not really, as Lel felt it, but they were up to their necks in it now, so they had to see it through. He would still wait for the other boot to drop on them the entire way. They were in for and Lel, to his eternal shame, began to quietly hum to himself. A bad habit he would never admit to anyone and that he had inherited from his human half. It wasn't until they were at their destination that he realized he'd been whistling the Raider's March. Thank the gods that no one but him knew what the tune was.

The said destination turned out to be behind a set of doors. They were not as massive and strong as he had detected, just your random ship bulkhead doors from the early in the Clone Wars. With the Ultimate Argument powering the emergency systems here, getting them open proved to be not much of a challenge. They hissed slowly open, and revealed… exactly what Arcet had said there would be. In a room similar in size to one of the smaller hangars on the Death Star, rows upon rows of industrial shelves with factory-packed Droids were stacked all the way up to the ceiling. Lel ignored the other two and stepped over to the nearest shelf.

As everything else, the crate was covered with a thick layer of dust, but he wiped some of it away with his hand.

"That's an R-series droid," he said after reading the contents list, "and still in it's base factory configuration and primer colour."

Meaning that the little guy inside, would be devoid of personality and any colour beyond a dull gunmetal grey. But then, it had taken the true main character of this crazy universe twenty-odd years to develop into the feisty little bastard everyone knew and loved.

The others looked back at him. "We could take one of them back to the ship as a sort of sample. Make sure the merchandise is as described, you know," Arcet suggested.

Ceron looked back and forth between them before sighing in resignation. "Yeah, that's a good point. Come on, Lel," he said, "and you, Arcet, keep your Comlink handy and don't fall over yourself."

"Just get on with it, will you?" was the only answer. Lel looked after him for a moment as Arcet stomped off to somewhere in the depths of the room. He shrugged, and looked at Ceron.

"Which one?" Ceron asked.

Lel grinned, stepped in front of the shelf and closed his eyes. "Eeny meeny miny moe…. This one." His index finger was pointed at a random crate, five down from the one that he had cleaned off. Ceron stepped closer after giving Lel an odd look and cleaned off some of the dust.

"Oh, nice choice, R3 series, a Aurek variant, even. even," Ceron said, and Lel looked back at what he'd been told about the most common droids types in Republic use back in the day.

"Meant for use on larger ships, transparent dome, RAM is smaller than the R2 series," Lel said, "but faster at the same time and coupled with a faster astrogation processor."

"Indeed, my young apprentice," Ceron replied grinning. He was still studying the inscription on the crate and didn't notice the shudder that ran down Lel's body at that choice of words. "The Aurek variant, like the R2 series, still has that small cargo space, too. Come on. Let's get this one to the ship."

As someone who had worked retail in his other life, Lel thanked every deity he knew for the invention of mass-cancelling repulsorlift carts, because the droid in it's crate turned out to be a lot heavier than he had expected. Thanks to that, it took them only a few minutes to move the packaged droid back to the entrance. Lifting it across the small hill of rubble would have been impossible with a wheeled cart, and even with the one that they had it took them almost twice as long, but at least Lel could get a breath of fresh air.

"It wouldn't have killed Arcet to come help us," Ceron opined, and Lel, trying to keep from losing control of the cart, only grunted. Eventually, they had it on level-ish ground. After that, manhandling it up the loading ramp was child's play. Lel tied down the crate while Ceron walked back outside with a ration pack, having declared that he was hungry.

The first sign of any trouble was four TIE fighters roaring over the landing site out of nowhere. Even through the hull of the Ultimate Argument the infamous howl of their engines was clearly audible.

Without bothering to yell 'I told you so' at himself, he drew his blaster, and ran towards the hatch. The roar of the Imp fighters remained, and once he got to the ramp he could see… what looked like the worst-case scenario from his nightmares.

The crater's edge was lined by stormtroopers, all their blasters pointing at the Argument. Lel wasn't willing to bet on the memetic version of their marksmanship skills, so when an officer in an Imperial Navy uniform stepped up, he knew what he was going to do.

"Surrender, Pirate!" came the yell, and Lel threw away his blaster as far as the terrain allowed before raising his hands in surrender. Being secured by stormtroopers, and then roughly marched out of the crater didn't keep him from cursing in every language he knew. The two troopers who had come to secure him cuffed him in the back for that, but it was worth it.

Once out of the crater, he could see two Lambdas parked a respectful distance away, with more stormtroopers climbing over the rubble, and down into the facility. Unless Arcet had found another exit somewhere, they would find him quickly. Lel was taken to the side, where Ceron was being searched and stripped of all of his equipment except for his wrist-mounted commlink, which he managed to semi-hide in the sleeve of his shirt and under his crossed hands. Lel was unsure what was the point of risking it was though. Unlike him, Lel let the Imps take everything in his pockets, including his datapad. The troopers doing the searching were supervised by an officer, who wore the rank cylinders of a Commander in the Stormtrooper corps. He had the aristocratic bearing of a core worlder, so there was little chance of talking him around. At least neither the shuttles nor the troopers themselves didn't wear any unit insignia that Lel recognized, chiefly that of the 501st, so he thanked the gods for small mercies. Before he could approach them though, he was called away, leaving Lel and Ceron alone with four troopers.

"I wonder when he betrayed us," Ceron whispered under his breath. Lel furtively glanced at the stormtroopers that guarded them before considering his words.

"Probably the moment he found out that whatever it is he's really after caught Imperial interest," Lel whispered back.

Ceron chuckled. "Birds of a feather, eh?"

"Shut up!" came a yell from the first stormtrooper,

As they lapsed into silence Lel decided that speculating was best done when you didn't have what felt like twenty dozen blasters pointed at you. Ceron was right though. While the Imps started searching the Argument, with more pouring into the facility, Lel decided that there were two more possibilities. One, Ceron was having him on still, two, Arcet had sold them out the moment he had noticed the Imps were pouring into the facility. Because if he had been working for them for the start, approaching Ceron in the first place made no sense unless he was nuts enough to have planned to screw over the Imps too. Which would definitely rate him as 'stupid evil' if it were fictional, but given that the E-11 that was pointed at his head when the officer returned certainly felt real he wasn't going to bank on that either.

The officer returned, accompanied by a stormtrooper Sergeant and two normal troopers.

"Where is he?" the officer demanded.

His voice and accent indeed marked him out as a coreworlder, with a trace of a Coruscant accent. Lel and Ceron exchanged a quick glance and a shrug without removing their hands from behind their heads.

"Last we saw," Ceron replied, "he was in the storage room with all the droids."

Lel nodded, equally unwilling to risk getting shot any more than he was already. "He shooed us out with a single sample droid, then you turned up."

The Commander glanced at the sergeant who nodded. "We found a single droid aboard the freighter, food supplies and salvaging equipment, Sir."

"It seems that you are intelligent enough to see when being truthful benefits you," the Commander replied, "However briefly. You have chosen very poor associates, Rebel scum."

'I wish,' Lel thought, but refrained from saying so.

"Take them away, Sergeant," the officer ordered, "We have what we want this day."

"Yes, Sir," came the response with a bland acceptance that made it patently obvious what was going to happen next.

But there was little they could do, so for the first time that day, he had to come to terms with the fact that he was most likely going to die. The one good thing was that he knew the Sergeant carried his Datapad. Not that it would help, there simply was nothing he could do. And now he knew why the Imps had done but the most cursory of searches when they had disarmed him.

Ceron on the other and seemed to be a lot less resigned. He fiddled with the comlink the imps still hadn't found behind the back of his head, before looking at Lel, and then towards where they had parked the Adventure.

He said nothing, only mouthing 'be ready' before pressing a button.

The link sent some sort of signal, but before he could do much of anything, a cloud of steam emanated from the landing gear bays of the Adventure, and the dorsal turret started to fire red laser bolts at just about anything in range, more or less at random.

It had the desired effect, as everyone but Ceron was momentarily distracted. He took that opportunity and rammed his right elbow into the neck of the trooper that was escorting him, between the helmet and the upper body armour panels, one of the weakest points of the entire armour setup. Lel followed suit before the first trooper had gone down, and by the time the Sergeant heard that the two other troopers had gone down, Lel had seized one of the E-11s.

Even so, the Sergeant managed to raise his own rifle first and fired first. The bolt zipped past Lel's braintails close enough that he could feel the energy backwash, and would later find proximity burns. Ceron returned fire quickly, and the stormtrooper was caught right in one of his eye lenses.

He was dead before he fell down.

Ceron looked back and forth between him and his rifle. "Well, I've never seen that happen before."

Lel only shook his head and dashed over to the fallen. His pad was still in one piece, and as he stuffed it back into his pockets, the word 'BACKUP' thrummed in his mind for a moment. He quickly pilfered the man's belt for a few extra energy packs, but refrained from doing more. Which was good, because Ceron's distraction had run its course and the first of the Imps seemed to remember why they were here.

The two traders were less than a hundred metres from their ship, but it was obvious to both of them that they would be in for a fight.

Sure enough, they were spotted immediately.

"There they are! Blast them!" yelled a random Trooper.

Lel took off without needing prompting, firing un-aimed shots in the general direction of the Imps, dodging their fire and every obstacle in his way at the same time. He could hear a cacophony of noise, as the turret on the ship firing wildly into whatever direction, Ceron coming up behind him, and blaster fire going every which way adding to the chaos. A number of bolts came very close to hitting him, but he'd managed to avoid getting hit. He crested the edge of the crater and… fell over his own two feet. Lel tumbled down and came to rest against one of the Argument's landing struts, disconnecting the power line in the process. He shook his head and opened his eyes, just in time to see Ceron jumping down into the crater. Unlike Lel, he did not manage to avoid getting hit, and he was caught by a blaster bolt in mid-air sending him tumbling down the crater. He came to rest close enough to Lel that he could reach him without getting up. Lel scrambled to his feet and over to his friend.

Ceron groaned, so for a moment he was still alive at least. The bolt had caught him in his right upper body, thankfully away from his heart. But they had to get moving, so instead of examining the wound, Lel grabbed him by his shoulders and dragged him up the ramp into the ship. With the somewhat superior upper body strength that evolution had granted the denizens of Ryloth. Lel managed to manhandle him into the co-pilot's seat and strapped him down. There was no time to search the ship for any unwanted guests, so he sat down in the pilot's seat and put down his stolen E-11.

Thankfully, he was at least passingly familiar with the layout of a YT-1300.

He glanced over at Ceron and at the edge of the crater where stormies were getting into position now that the turret had ceased fire. The odd bit of blaster fire was starting to harmlessly pepper the hull.

The former groaned in pain and exhibited all the signs of going into shock. Still he groaned and then spoke, for the first time since getting hit and through pain and gritted teeth.

"Password is Argument-Trill-Herf-Xesh-1138 Aurek," Ceron ground out his voice thick with pain.

Systems unlocked after Lel hacked that into the main computer, and the cockpit lit up like Bastion on Empire day. The ship began to vibrate and Lel fired the repulsor lifts at maximum power and engaged the shields. The Argument jumped into the air and the main drive fired with a roar that sounded almost exactly like the YT-1300 drive he was more familiar with. Seconds later the ship was darting for orbit at full power, dashing here and there, back and forth, spiralling and weaving to avoid the incoming fire from the ground. She handled beautifully for a ship her size, and even though Lel couldn't yet make the Argument dance like Chewie or Han Solo could the Falcon, he could understand why the Corellian and his Wookie sidekick had fallen in love with that particular example of the class.

By the time the TIEs managed to intercept them, they had broken out of the atmosphere. Lel instructed the navicomputer to calculate a random vector for a hyperspace jump, and while the calculations were running, he did his best to avoid the circling fighters and the ships they had launched from. Those were an old Acclamator and two CR90s that bore out what he had seen so far, and suggested that Arcet had stepped on the toes of someone who was more or less local, but he still wanted to get out of the system as fast as possible.

For the next five-odd minutes he manoeuvred wildly trying to keep the TIEs from landing any good hits; it also overtaxed the tracking software in the turret, so that all the computer-guided shots failed to hit home. Even so, more and more TIEs were launched, and slowly wearing down his shields. Eventually, the much-anticipated beep from the computer came like a note from heaven, and Lel reached towards the lever for the hyperdrive motivator, mentally begging the ship not to pull a Falcon at Hoth now.

This YT-1300 functioned perfectly, and Lel let out a sigh of relief. Wherever he would end up, it would be a while before the imps could follow, as the course would include a few more vectors before they dared putting in somewhere. He leaned back in the seat, until a small voice made him shoot up and nearly hit the roof.

"You take good care of her, ya hear?"came Ceron's quiet voice.

Lel turned around in his seat and saw that Ceron looked as if at death's door. He felt guilty for having mostly forgotten about his employer and sort-of friend in the ensuing dogfight, who had started to cough up blood at some point.

"What the hell's are you-" Lel began, but Ceron interrupted him with a cough.

"Don't be stupid, for all that's holy," he said harshly. "I'm about as screwed as I can be." Ceron coughed, and Lel could see that he was bleeding there too. With a bloodied hand, he reached to the main computer terminal and typed as furiously as his fading strength allowed.

"There, I signed her over to you, but if I was you, I'd implement one of the other IDs before hitting the next port," Ceron laughed tiredly, then coughed and grimaced, and Lel could see that he was fading fast.

"But…" Lel tried to say.

Ceron laughed again, in spite of the pain it was clearly causing him and said, "I've seen how you handled her. Even with this short hop, you've been treating her like you know what you're doing, and that you would take care of her as if she were yours. You were really obvious about it too."

Lel doubted that it was that easy to deduce. "Ceron, I'd never presume-"

"Bantha-shit, Lel," Ceron interrupted again, summoning what remained of his strength, but fading away fast and with a voice that made that clear. "You treat her like a lady… and she'll always bring you home."

No one in this galaxy would ever know what exactly that line meant to Lel's human half, but it was enough that he stopped complaining. Instead he held his… his friend's shoulders and comforted him as much as he could.

"I will, Ceron, I promise," Lel said.

And with those Ceron closed his eyes, they would never open again.

tbc