Author's notes:
Zayne and company go looking for Mission and Dustil, and his very special kind of luck strikes. Carth shows us that he's learned some tricks from meangirl!Canderous (haha could you imagine Carth admitting that even to himself - NEVER).
Sorry for the delay in updates. Real life hits hard. Divorce, work, raising a kid. Writing is a wonderful escape from it all.
Zayne looked up from his delivery manifest to scan the street. Nearby, his cargo speeder idled with crates stacked two meters high on its flat, open back. Nobody paid attention to an ordinary laborer looking bored with his job.
The bustling streets of Adascoplis were warm despite the planet's freezing global temperatures. Arkania's capital city was fully enclosed underneath clear giant domes that were large enough to encompass its skyscrapers, parks, swoop tracks, and a population of roughly three million. It was an incredibly pleasant environment, one that Zayne didn't begrudge the pureblood inhabitants of this harsh world.
He did begrudge the tight layer of security that kept offshoots living on the ice plains from entering without express governmental permission. That permission was usually secured by their employers and gained them the privilege of working the most brutal, dangerous, and demeaning jobs that the planet had to offer.
Across the street, Zayne watched Jarael entering a market that was owned and frequented by purebloods sympathetic to the resistance. She appeared to be a perfectly normal pureblood herself, her skin color covered over by makeup, contact lenses to hide her pupils, and prosthetics to cover her pointed ears and give her pointed fingers. Zayne hated that his wife had to cover over her stunning beauty for these undercover missions.
He too was camouflaged to look like an ordinary Arkanian pureblood, and the camouflage itched now just as it always did. He didn't think anyone would notice if he scratched.
"I haven't got all day!" a shopkeeper shouted from his doorway. Zayne rolled his eyes and grabbed the nearest crate, knowing full well it wasn't intended for this address. The shopkeeper impatiently tapped his foot while Zayne carried it to him, then grumbled under his breath while he read the information tagged on its lid.
"This isn't what I ordered!"
"Sorry sir, my mistake, I grabbed the wrong one." Zayne took the crate and returned to the speeder at the slowest speed that wouldn't utterly enrage the man. This delivery service was the perfect cover for surveillance because it was a real and legitimate operation run by one of their pureblood sympathizers. It would lose its usefulness, however, if Zayne drove all their customers away.
He grabbed the correct crate this time and returned it to the curb for inspection. Once the shopkeeper was satisfied and had signed for the package, Zayne returned to the speeder to note the delivery. Finally, he saw Jarael emerge from the market. She wandered along the street while pulling out a comlink with a particular flourish that told Zayne she had learned nothing from her meeting.
Zayne continued on his delivery route, keeping his eyes peeled for anyone he knew to be friendly to their cause. He also kept close tabs on Jarael, whose route mirrored his own; she was at the greater risk, for she was the one having direct conversations with those that they thought – hoped – could be trusted.
This was how their entire day continued, and by the end, they had covered an enormous portion of the city, almost an entire sector. They made their way through upscale and middle-income neighborhoods (there was no poverty permitted in Adascopolis, gods forbid, that was an offshoot problem), parts of the business district, and even the port. Eventually, they returned to the safe house where Juhani waited for them.
It took Jarael and Zayne little time to brief each other on the meager information they'd gathered. As they did so, they removed the itchy makeup. There had been eyewitnesses to ArMSec's apprehension of a blue Twi'lek and a human male. Some said the human wielded a lightsaber. Others said that was ludicrous. As usual, the populace was tight-lipped about the activities of Adascorp. Many still held the company and the family in high esteem; the others weren't foolish enough to bring unwanted attention upon themselves.
They had also circled through the usual information drops, where Resistance spies within Adascorp and the puppet government left encrypted data chips. The reports on them yielded nothing of value today.
"I think Tarcen might have been killed," Jarael announced grimly.
Zayne felt sorrow creep heavily onto his shoulders. Had he sent the young man to his death?
"He hasn't contacted any of our agents in the city," his wife continued, "and I spoke with one man who thought he'd seen three people together right before ArMSec showed up. And he said that while ArMSec was packing up after the fight, a government medspeeder showed up. He couldn't see what they did, but the speeder left shortly after ArMSec."
"We already checked the hospital logs. None of our people have been admitted." Zayne paused and sighed. "Well, none of them are being treated right now. We didn't check the city morgue."
"If he survived, ArMSec would've taken him in. Not in a medspeeder."
"Could the medspeeder have been for Mission or Dustil?" Juhani asked.
Jarael shook her head. "ArMSec would have grabbed them, no matter what. They'd qualify as 'unusual suspects,' and would be taken directly to their facilities."
They remained in silence for a while as Zayne and Jarael continued to read reports from the drop sites. Jarael eventually confirmed that Tarcen was indeed lying in the city morgue. She gave Zayne a soft kiss on the cheek to help banish the guilt that she knew he carried. She felt it too, but cold logic was a much more effective balm for her conscience than it was his.
At some point Zayne became aware that Juhani was looking distinctly frustrated, sitting across from him at the lone table in the safe house. At least, he thought it was frustration that made her neck fur seem to stand on end. Could be static.
Zayne felt bad that they had forced her exclusion from the day's espionage, but it couldn't be helped. Though her species wasn't unheard of on Arkania, they were rare enough that she would have left an impression upon the memory of anyone she interacted with. That, and she was terrible at subterfuge. He had to admire the Cathar's earnest honesty. There was not a single pretense that Juhani was skilled at maintaining, save the one where she wasn't deeply worried for Mission's safety.
"Did you contact the Jedi Order?" he asked the Jedi Master.
"I did," Juhani replied. "The nearest help is possibly a week away. I told them to wait for further word from me before sending it."
Jarael nodded. "If we can't find them within a few days it's probably going to take more than a couple of extra Jedi to get them back." She waved an arm about. "Adascorp's power up here is overwhelming."
Juhani cleared her throat gently. "Forgive me for suggesting this, Zayne, but could Tarcen have turned them in and then been caught in the crossfire?"
Zayne suppressed the reaction to hastily defend the now-dead young man and tried to remove himself from the situation and view things objectively. "The only people who knew what he was doing and where he was going were those in the room with us. I guess it would be easier to believe Tarcen is a spy than Lakani."
"He could have mentioned it to someone else on the way out," Jarael added.
"Maybe." Zayne frowned, now considering all the possibilities. "Whoever tipped off Adascorp would have needed to leave the base to send in a report, unless they cracked the signal jamming." Which wasn't likely. Their counter-intel equipment had come from technology developed for Rogue Moon and was one of the most advanced systems in the galaxy. "Maybe it could have been him. We can check the logs when we get back, see who's come and gone since Juhani showed up."
In the corner of the room where a small computer terminal stood, a crimson light began to blink brightly.
"What is that?" Juhani asked.
"Intrusion sensor!" Jarael answered, then cursed. "Tarcen could have compromised this location."
Juhani closed her eyes for a moment. "There are dozens of people outside."
"They know we're in here," Zayne stated grimly. "We've got to bail." He rushed to the computer terminal and typed in a quick series of commands. "We've got sixty seconds."
"They've already breached the building?" Juhani asked, surprised.
"No, self-destruct. I want it to go off before they get too close."
"You have an escape route?"
"Something like that." Zayne ignited his lightsaber and went to the center of the room. He plunged the blade deep into the floor and drew a meter-wide circle. The chunk of floor fell away to reveal yawning darkness underneath.
Jarael grabbed her sack of supplies and dropped through the hole without a word. A splash could be heard below.
"The sewer," Juhani observed flatly.
"Only the best for our guests." Zayne grinned. "After you."
"The smell is going to be very difficult to remove from my fur," the Cathar growled before disappearing through the hole. Zayne took one last look around the room to make sure nothing was left behind, then followed his wife and the Jedi Master.
His boots splashed down in the disgusting water, then he had to sprint through the shallow channel of waste fluids to catch up. After a hundred meters a loud explosion reverberated through the tunnel. The walls shook as the building they had just been in collapsed, crushing the sewer underneath it in the process.
"Zayne, that building was not occupied, was it?" Juhani asked as they watched debris fly halfway to their position.
"No, it's just an unused section of a shipping center. We rigged it with polymer explosives on the supports so the place gets leveled without starting a big fire." Zayne hoped no ArMSec personnel had been caught in the destruction either.
The trio traveled through the stinking underground for over an hour until they reached a location where Jarael believed it would be safe to emerge. That location proved to be right outside the manufacturing facility of a chemical company. It was drier than the sewers, but it smelled no better.
They found a dark alley and did their best to shake off the accumulated filth on their clothing. Fortunately, it was late in the night by now and there were very few people to avoid in this industrial section of Adascopolis.
"What shall we do now?" Juhani asked, no doubt frustrated that they'd gotten no closer to finding Mission or Dustil.
"One of us needs to get back to HQ and warn Lakani that we've been compromised," Zayne explained. "And check the security logs to see if anyone else could have sold us out. But we also need to keep searching the city."
Jarael pursed her lips and frowned. "If Tarcen was a spy, then the tunnels leading back to HQ are possibly compromised as well. And they probably know Juhani is here and who she is. You'll have to go overland."
Juhani arched an eyebrow.
"You stick out like a Wookiee around here," Jarael explained bluntly. "Zayne might slip through the security cordon unnoticed – you won't. There are ways to sneak out of the city directly onto the glacier without passing any of the checkpoints."
The Cathar nodded. Usually, it didn't bother her that subterfuge wasn't her specialty or even a mild talent, but right now she desperately wanted to be more useful. "I am not certain I would be able to find the way back to your base," she said, her voice heavy with apology.
"Zayne will have to take you."
"Me?" Zayne asked. "Who's going to watch your backside?"
Jarael flashed him a wicked and beguiling grin. "Aw honey, you know I love having you watch my backside almost as much as you love watching my backside."
Juhani snorted a laugh. Zayne blushed ever so slightly.
"I'll be fine," Jarael continued. "But one of us has to stay. We've got contacts who need to be warned. You know I'm better at this stuff anyway." It was true, he acknowledged internally.
"That doesn't mean I have to like it."
Jarael reached out to grab a fistful of his tunic, pulling him to her for a deep kiss. The fingers of her free hand laced into his hair while he wrapped his arms tightly around her. They separated and touched noses. He was satisfied to be staring now into those electric blue eyes that had been masked by opaque contacts all day. "I love you."
She smiled brilliantly and his heart sped up a little bit. "I love you too." With a quick last kiss, she was gone.
Zayne turned back to Juhani, who looked a little embarrassed but not as uncomfortable as he would have expected. "Shall we, um…?"
Juhani nodded and threw up the hood of her robe. "Lead the way."
Despite the proximity of the manufacturing sector to the outer edge of the city's giant enclosure, it still took them over an hour to navigate a discrete course to their exit.
"The sewer again?"
"Don't worry, we'll stay dry this time. Probably."
They stood outside one of the city's refuse and waste processing facilities. The operation was entirely automated, with droids fulfilling any roles that couldn't be performed by robotics. It was no surprise that no sentient would want to work near these kinds of smells.
Security was lax, as Zayne had discovered several years ago; the only real monitoring occurred near the entrance and exit where automated sludge haulers returned with the city's garbage. If you could somehow jump the electrified eight-meter fence, then the entire complex was fairly accessible.
Zayne and Juhani did just that.
On the other side, he led them on a circuitous route through machinery and between large pipes until they reached the true outer wall of the city. Permacrete rose forty meters into the air before transitioning to the transparisteel dome that covered the city. Several pipes, each nearly a dozen meters in diameter, penetrated the wall, and next to each was a small access door.
The doors had no controls, but Zayne easily forced it open with a wave of his hand. "Maintenance droids come through here," he explained to Juhani as they stooped to enter. "They use these ledges to run down the pipes and fix whatever needs fixing."
Zayne looked over his shoulder as they walked carefully along the narrow flat surface running the length of the massive pipe. Juhani appeared ready to faint, though she said nothing. The smells were incredibly abusive to his human nose, far worse than what they had already encountered in the sewers. He couldn't imagine what her sensitive Catharian nose was experiencing.
The tunnel was fairly lit because they were already close to its terminus, which opened to the chilly Arkanian surface. The sewage fell away in a disgusting waterfall, plummeting into glacial crevasses and forming some sort of river that flowed off to the south, angling slowly away from the city. It passed near several offshoot villages before disappearing into the glaciers' icy substructures.
"Now where do we go?" Juhani asked as they stood at the tunnel's end, opening her mouth and drawing in large breaths of clean air. It was a very lothcat-like behavior.
"This ledge continues around the outside until we reach the end of the waste facility. There's a safe point to jump across the crevasse near that."
Less than ten minutes later they had leaped across onto an open glacier. It was cold and the wind was biting, but at least the air was clean.
They had walked in comfortable (though frigid) silence for a kilometer when Zayne felt the first tremor. Juhani stopped immediately.
"Did you feel that?"
Zayne nodded. "Could just be the glacier shifting." It wasn't so harmless, though. He knew it in the way the back of his neck prickled like it always did when something bad was about to happen.
They continued another few meters before he felt the rumble in his feet again.
He knew instantly what it meant: the ground was about to collapse beneath them.
"The glacier?" Juhani asked. There was no time to respond; Zayne acted on Force-guided instinct, flinging himself into the Cathar Jedi and bringing them both to the icy ground a couple of meters from where they had stood.
This location was no safer, however. A resounding crack was followed moments later by a deafening roar. Everything around them turned white and gray and blue as they plummeted in an icy avalanche.
There were a few moments of the weightless sensation that accompanied a long fall before Zayne felt some ribs crack against the jagged block of ice that ended his terrible descent. He strained against the pain to sit up, clawing through the mound of frozen debris that covered his legs. As the powdered air began to clear, he expected to see the eerie, barely glowing walls of an ice cavern.
He saw instead durasteel walls covered in pipes, wide metal walkways crisscrossing this enormous room in which they'd landed, sealed vats half-sunken into the floor, and bright light streaming through the new hole above them.
And, because it was his famous 'luck,' heavily armed Arkanians running towards them while unarmed individuals in lab coats ran away.
They had crashed onto one of the large walkways near the center of the facility, and they were rapidly being surrounded, guards swarming towards them from this level and the levels below. A couple of meters away Juhani stirred, shrugging chunks of snow and ice off as she stood to her feet looking largely unscathed.
Zayne moved to his feet with considerably less ease.
Juhani had just arrived at his side when the encirclement was complete. The guards adopted cover positions with heavy weapons raised and precisely aimed. They carried themselves like elite soldiers and wore the blue and white armor of ArMSec. Zayne reached for his lightsaber and thumbed it on.
Nothing happened. He glanced down and saw the hilt was partly crumpled, right over the power cell. He would have to settle for his blaster. Beside him, Juhani calmly drew her weapon and with a snap-hiss activated the blue blade.
The soldiers were visibly surprised by the distinctive weapon, but only for a moment. Then one spoke with authority.
"Kill them both."
Carth had never been precisely certain where the line of micromanagement began. The revelation of Revan's true identity and the subsequent lack of any betrayal had been the first successful push towards repairing his general trust in others. After that, he had started to delegate a little. Still, as a captain and an admiral, he had always been over-involved in the operations of his ship, his fleet, his office. He had become better at delegation each year, proficient even.
He knew, though, that he was micromanaging way too much on this deployment. It was evident in the stiffness of shoulders as he hovered near the senior officers' bridge stations. It was evident in Captain Hyteru's manner of regarding him coldly and a little bit defensively.
So when the task force located an escape pod adrift in the black, and it had been tractored into the Dream's hangar bay, Carth had agreed to stay to the rear, behind an armed escort, while the security team opened it. He was pretty sure this was a moral victory over himself, at least.
Not that Hyteru would credit it to him.
It took the security detail a few minutes to open the hatch at the top of the pod, which appeared to be at least partly fused. As it was finally swung open, two soldiers standing atop the capsule trained their weapons and lights inward. Hands emerged through the opening and one of the soldiers helped pull the single occupant through.
The man was grizzled and filthy, with a gray short beard and tattoos covering his bald head. He registered the clean, well-lit hangar, the red and black uniforms, the fighters parked nearby, and cursed.
"The hell are 'publicos doin' out here!?"
While the soldiers helped the obviously weak man down from the pod, Carth watched him carefully. The man eyed the med team with distrust as they scanned him for injuries and disease, and reacted gruffly when his blaster and vibroshiv were confiscated, though it was clear he had forgotten until that moment that he even had them.
After the med team had determined his injuries were minor and he suffered merely from undernourishment, he was escorted to a holding cell for questioning. Carth watched through a falsely opaque wall with Commander Ospen as the interrogator entered and took a seat across the table from him.
"Name?" she began directly.
"Gandon Harth," he replied brusquely. "When am I gonna get some food?"
"Our medical team has cleared you," the interrogator responded simply, without looking up from the pair of datapads she held. "Don't worry, we won't let you starve."
"Why'm I being kept in the detent' block?"
"Because, Mr. Harth," the interrogator responded, now making direct and forceful eye contact, "most innocent escape pod rescuees don't wear the tattoos of the Raff Syndicate."
"Pfft," the man responded, leaning back in his chair. "Republic ain't got jurisdiction out here."
The interrogator smiled grimly. "Mr. Harth, who do you think is going to fight us for you? We are out beyond charted space, and unfortunately forgot to bring along any civil defenders." She leaned forward slightly. "That could work to your advantage, however. Tell us how you ended up in that escape pod and we'll drop you off at the next habited system, forgetting all about who you work for. After all, you're right – we have no jurisdiction to keep you."
Harth kicked his filthy boots up on the table. "Not much to tell. We was tradin' out this way, got ambushed by some freaky lookin' ships."
"By trading, you mean selling slaves."
He shrugged.
"And these ships that attacked you, can you describe them for me?"
"Ain't like nuthin' I ever saw. Looked like they was built outta rock, shootin' weapons that overloaded our shields and burned through the hull."
The interrogator tapped a command into a datapad and then tilted it for Harth to see. Carth knew exactly what she was showing him – he'd stared at it too many times himself in the last weeks.
"Did they look anything like this?"
"Yep," he drawled. "That's a dead ringer."
So this slaver's ship had been destroyed by a group of vessels matching the last data sent from the lost recon force. Carth couldn't help it – his heart rate ticked up by just a hair.
"And where were you attacked?"
The man laughed. "You think I know co'rdinates or sumthin? We was attacked and I scrammed to a 'scape pod. End o story."
"Did you know that we identified molecules on your escape pod that traces it back to a nebula less than half a lightyear from here?" the interrogator asked casually.
"I know I weren't in the pod long enough to drif' that far."
"No, but the ship your pod launched from was certainly in that nebula recently. And it is entirely reasonable to expect that you know the coordinates since you were that ship's captain." She gestured to the pattern of tattoos over his right eye. "That is what those four black triangles mean, isn't it?"
The man kicked back in his chair and slung his hands behind his head unconcernedly. "I think yer confused. These tattoos ain't mean nuthin, they just look badass."
"So you're refusing to cooperate?" the interrogator asked, sounding completely unconcerned with whatever his response might prove to be.
"Damn right."
"Okay then. We'll return you to your escape pod, and we'll forget this meeting ever happened."
"Scuse me? You ain't going to throw me back in'ta space. I know you 'publico types. Just empty threats. Does the cap'n know yer talkin' ta me this way?" he sneered.
The interrogator merely arched an eyebrow.
"No, but the Admiral does."
That was his cue. Commander Ospen hit the button to make the wall transparent, and Carth stood there with arms crossed and a deadly glare on his face, giving his best I'm-the-goddamn-Admiral-and-you're-going-to-lick-the-shit-off-my-boots look.
The pirate wasn't impressed.
Ten minutes later, under Carth's direct orders and over Hyteru's stringent objections, the pirate was being shoved back into his escape pod.
Two minutes after that it was back in space and the task force made a micro-jump to bring themselves just out of range of the pod's minimal sensors.
Carth ordered the ships to hold position and returned to his cabin. He could feel the captain's glare on his back as he left the bridge. He let two hours pass before returning to the bridge and giving the order to return.
The Tarisian Dream again tractored the escape pod and hauled out a very cooperative Mr. Harth.
The slaver captain confirmed their suspicions, providing them with coordinates for an asteroid station that was hidden less than a lightyear into the nebula. He also warned them that the space around the station was a particularly dense section of the gas cloud where sensors would be useless past a couple of hundred kilometers; visibility would be a few kilometers or less.
He even offered to guide them in himself. Carth said he'd consider it and had him thrown in the brig.
Now he stood around the planning table on the bridge, speaking with Hyteru and her senior officers as well as Lieutenant Pol'tan. At her recommendation, they launched several probes into the nebula while they approached at high sublight speed. It took them nearly an hour to come up with a penetration strategy that Carth liked. As the meeting broke up, Hyteru stuck around, clearly waiting for an opportunity to speak her mind. Carth was pretty sure he knew what she wanted to say, and he decided to jump right into it.
"You're not happy about the way I handled that slaver."
"Would you have really abandoned him, Sir? Left him to die out here?" Her tone was frosty, even disappointed sounding.
Carth replied after a brief pause. He didn't need to gather his thoughts – he'd pondered this through many times.
"At the end of the Mando Wars, I was assigned to Revan's battle group. We pushed deep into Mandalorian space and liberated dozens of slave colonies along the way. But when we got to a Cathar labor camp... I don't know what it was about them, but the Mandalorians seemed to hate them more any other species. The way they brutalized them was ten times worse than what they did to the others."
He grimaced as the memories returned, smells and sights and sounds that he would never forget no matter how badly he wanted to. Burning flesh, stinking, fetid wounds, screams – the incredibly anguished cries as adults and children were beaten and tortured.
He turned and looked Hyteru straight in the eye.
"If I'd had Force powers, I would've become a Sith just to get better at killing Mandalorians and the slavers they were working with."
The Captain was taken aback by that; perhaps she knew he was from Telos, bombed into near desolation by the Sith; perhaps she was thinking of what other horrors he must have seen the Sith commit in that war.
Perhaps she was thinking of how admirals had a reputation for being too disconnected from the front lines, willing to order things that they wouldn't do themselves. But Carth had stared Harth in the face and still condemned him to death.
"Yes, Captain. I would've left him to die out there."
He left the bridge.
Carth knew the Captain's opinion of him had been damaged. But she hadn't been involved in the Mandalorian Wars, or even the Jedi Civil War. She hadn't seen the atrocities, hadn't been at Serroco or Duro or Vanquo. She would never understand that for some, mercy shouldn't – couldn't – be an option.
On the other hand, Commander Ospen's respect for him had definitely gone up.
And they were getting closer to answers. Carth instincts were humming with anticipation of what they would find in that nebula.
Tonight he would sleep better than usual with the feeling that they were finally getting somewhere.