Cold Secrets Deep Inside
"My Lord, there has been a development."
"My time is valuable, Inquisitor. Report."
"It's Twelve. She has taken an interest in the Legacy Databanks. She claims they contain essential information for her hunt for Cal Kestis. I denied her request for access."
"I have sensed a disturbance. The girl who fights with Cal Kestis is more than she appears to be. Operation Dark Sea was not as thorough as I initially thought."
"My Lord… is it possible Twelve has uncovered the truth?"
"Not yet. That is how it must remain. A team will be dispatched immediately to purge the records."
"What of Cal Kestis and his remaining allies?"
"Twelve dealt with Cere Junda. She will finish the mission."
"And if she doesn't, my Lord?"
"Leave that to me."
Her fingers curl around the unfamiliar handles of the shuttle's control column as she gives the dashboard a final cursory glance. Fuel and oxygen gauges, controls for adjusting the angle of the wings, a lever to operate the egress ramp, and an array of buttons and dials for calibrating the hyperdrive—all standard instrumentation, but it's been a while since she's flown one of these.
Her gaze drifts toward the man in the copilot's seat.
"This is such awfully long procedure for a simple launch," Hans drawls. "It's a wonder how the Empire manages to get anything done at this rate."
He's strapped into the copilot's seat with his hands in his lap, his wrists still bound together by heavy stun cuffs. A signal damping device not unlike a restraining bolt meant for droids protrudes from the back of his neck, blinking every once in a while in sync with his subtle twitches of pain. Despite all this, his posture looks almost comfortable.
"Twelfth Sister, you are clear for departure," the Captain's voice rasps over the intercom.
"Finally!" Hans huffs dramatically.
She eases up on the throttle, keeping her eyes focused on the rectangular opening to the yawning emptiness of space. The shuttle feels large and cumbersome in her hands, sluggish to respond to her guidance. A hum vibrates through the hull as she presses the button to lock the wings in flight mode. Corsun fills the window, a sea of burning plasma dimmed through the cockpit glass.
"The coordinates, please."
Her unwilling companion sighs. "It would be quicker if you let me handle-"
"The coordinates," she repeats curtly. The air in the cabin chills. "Now."
Hans grudgingly begins to list a stream of letters and numbers. Her fingers flit delicately over the hyperdrive controls, the flight computer whirring to life as it begins calculating a route.
"We were five parsecs away from it the whole time," she mutters. The coincidence doesn't surprise her as much as it should. Hans says nothing.
Pushing forward on the throttle, she flips another switch and throws the shuttle into the brilliant abyss of hyperspace.
She doesn't know if the signal damper is enough to stop Hans from committing suicide with his implants. Hans knows this. He gave three demands in exchange for his cooperation.
First, nobody else was to accompany them on this trip. Second, the location tracker on the shuttle was to be disabled. Third, he was to be given five minutes to speak with Nightsister Merrin, alone.
Two of those requests aligned well with her own intentions. The last did not.
"Why do you want to speak with the Nightsister?" she questioned.
"Call it an… unfortunate sense of responsibility. I provided incriminating intel on her, and I would like to apologize, for my conscience's sake."
Not the answer she expected, to say the least. Coming from this man, she would have immediately taken the statement as a joke had he not delivered it with such conviction. As it was, she still didn't believe it for a second, but Hans was adamant, and the urgency of the situation got the better of her in the end.
A small price to pay in exchange for answers.
Now, as the vortex of hyperspace swirls in her vision, she tries to tamp down the same hot urgency still burning in her chest.
"What did you say to the Nightsister?" she asks, keeping her gaze directed straight ahead.
"I confessed that I was the one who gave you the information that led to her being used as bait against the crew of the Stinger Mantis. She was understandably upset." She sees him give a small shrug out the corner of her eye—though it might be just another wince of pain.
Perhaps the man does have some twisted sense of conscience after all. She thinks back to her own conversation with Merrin, and the memory of the Nightsister's hateful gaze has her wondering what form of revenge the witch would exact upon Hans Westergaard if she ever escaped. Likely a spectacular one.
Then again, probably not as spectacular as whatever Merrin wanted to do to her.
The vortex splits open before the shuttle's nose, revealing a desolate vista beyond. A brown gas giant bisected by thick, banded rings fills the right half of the windshield. In the distance, a tiny star casts a pale, sterile glow over the scene, making the rest of space seem a deeper shade of black in contrast. Pushing forward on the control column, she pitches the shuttle down toward the planet's rings, eyeing the pulsing signal on the terminal next to hand.
"How can I be sure these coordinates don't lead to some ambush?" The question is halfhearted even in her own ears.
"An ambush?" Hans laughs incredulously. "If this shuttle blows up in the middle of space, I know who I'd bet on out of the two of us to make it out alive, and it's certainly not me."
"You seem keen on self-sacrifice. Who's to say you're planning on making it out at all?"
To her surprise, the amusement suddenly drops from Hans's features. "I have no quarrel with you, Inquisitor. We are both victims of circumstance, in our own ways."
She raises an eyebrow beneath the mask. What does he know that he's not telling her? Even with all her misgivings about the man, she took it for granted that Hans had the knowledge she needed.
When did she start relying on him?
The rings of the gas giant draw closer through the window, gradually resolving into their constituents—a sea of frozen sand drifting below them in the void. A dark blot rises in the distance, poking above the edge of the planet's shadow and glimmering dully in the starlight.
The Legacy Database. The place where her answers lie, imprisoned in a digital cage. Hans brought her to the right place, after all.
A message scrolls across the comms terminal to her left in bold red text.
Unauthorized approach. Transmit identification codes.
A quick glance at the metadata confirms the message is in an official Imperial cypher. Her mouth draws to a line as she flips the switch to broadcast the shuttle's identification. The Grand Inquisitor denied her request. The station's defenses may well tear the ship to pieces the moment they move within range. Hans says nothing as she guns the throttle, and she hates how that bolsters her own confidence.
This is to help her find Cal Kestis. This is to help her finish the mission. That is all.
"Lieutenant, status report, damn it!"
"Forward containment wing's lost power, Captain! Surge in the generators."
"What about the backups?"
"That's the problem. They all surged at the same time. Even the backups."
"What? How is that possible!"
Silence.
"Answer me Lieutenant! Was it sabotage?"
Heavy breathing, distorted through the comm.
"I think one of the prisoners escaped, Captain."
The shriek of blaster fire. Screams. Static.
The station does not open fire.
For the first few moments after the shuttle lands, she simply sits there, staring at the walls of the hangar bay through the windshield. The matte-grey durasteel is identical to every other hangar in the Imperial navy, the same hard edges and perfect proportions that silently proclaim a sense of order and inevitability. Most of the time she finds comfort in it, in its promise of the Empire's implacable might over the traitorous Jedi.
Today, it makes her feel caged. Blind.
"Stay here," she commands, unclasping the belts fastening her to the seat and pulling the lever to open the egress ramp.
"And what do you plan to do when you reach the database? Hack into it with an icicle?" Hans scoffs.
She scowls at him through her mask, frustrated that she didn't think that far, frustrated that he's right. With a low sigh, she opens Han's seatbelts with a twitch of her fingers. At least he doesn't indulge himself with a smirk this time. She turns away without a backward glance.
The silence engulfs her as she strides down the ramp. She can hear the soft beep of the signal damper on Hans's neck as he follows slightly behind her.
"A fully automated facility," he says appraisingly. "Almost feels like home."
All she can hear in the space left by the empty silence is the roar of the Stinger Mantis's engines as it slipped from her grasp in an identical hangar in an identical facility, half a galaxy away. She was so close. She's always so close with Cal Kestis. Reaching, but never quite holding.
That's when she sees the faint scuff marks on the polished floor. The mask's heads-up-display automatically frames the imprints in raised orange lines. A chill runs down her spine. The marks are from landing gear. Another shuttle was here, and recently.
She makes for the door at the back of the hangar as fast as she can without breaking into a full-on sprint. Fishing the code cylinder clipped to her breast pocket, she jams it into the port in the doorframe. A light flashes red on the door control. The door itself doesn't budge.
"Given that whoever's in charge wouldn't even let you know how to get to this place, I doubt you'd get clearance within the facility," Hans says mildly.
She's already ignited the blade of her lightsaber by the time he catches up with her.
"Come now, Inquisitor. Are you really so keen to cost the Empire a perfectly good door?" Hans raises his arms with some difficulty, presenting the stun cuffs like a gift. When she only stares back at him motionlessly, he purses his lips in exasperation. "Inquisitor, please. Between your paranatural powers and that blade, I pose about as much of a threat to you as a gonk droid. Let me help you."
For the briefest of moments, she considers jamming the lightsaber through the door control and being done with it. Instead, she swings the blade in an upward arc, severing Hans's bindings with a sharp screech of melting steel. The man rubs his wrists with a sour expression as the cuffs clatter to the floor.
"Couldn't be bothered with the key?"
"Open the door," she orders flatly.
Stepping forward with a huff, Hans jams his index finger into the scomp port beneath the code cylinder receptacle. There's something perverse about the way his hand twitches in the port, the metallic traces along his fingers like the symptoms of some grotesque mechanical infection. The rings of the scomp port rotate this way and that. The door slides open with a whisper.
"After you," Hans says, removing his hand from the port with a light bow.
"How kind," she replies icily.
Walled off from the low hum of the shuttle's engine, the corridor is even more silent than the hangar. Their footfalls peal like thunder, and she finds herself scarcely daring to breathe in the still air. There's a gravity here beyond just the absence of sound, like walking on a layer of thin ice above a dark and sinister sea. She remembers keying in the command for emergency shutdown back on the other station, right before she first confronted Cal Kestis in the flesh. She hadn't known about his intentions with her people then.
It's time she got her answers.
Rounding the corner, she finds the main access terminal taunting her from the end of the hallway. When she reaches it, she can't help but insert her code cylinder on an empty hope. Text flashes in the air above the holoprojector in mocking red.
Access Denied: Invalid Credentials
"You know they keep logs of access attempts, right?" Hans says in a tired voice. "Although, I suppose there isn't much the navy can do to discipline an Imperial Inquisitor. Come to think of it, that would explain your blind confidence that things always go your way."
Without waiting for a reply, he walks forward and inserts his finger into the scomp port on the dashboard. The indicators along his implant blink rapidly beneath his mussed hair, and he winces every once in a while when the signal damper on his neck flashes red. After a few moments, he lets out an irritated sigh.
"I can't concentrate with this handicap distracting me," he hisses, turning back to face her. "If you want access to the database, I need it removed."
"You opened the hangar door just fine."
"That door was child's play. Bypassing the security and the encryption on the vault of the Empire's deepest, darkest secrets certainly is not."
The heads-up display on her visor traces the contours of his face, spitting out a dossier of Hans Westergaard's known dealings and associates in a meaningless feed of information in her peripheral vision. She's seen it all before, memorized it before her trip to Cantonica. None of it gives her any insight on his motivations now.
One thing's for sure: he's definitely more dangerous than a gonk droid.
"The signal damper is hard-wired to your cybernetic implants. The machinery required to remove it is back on the dungeon ship." A lie of omission, to test the waters.
"Well then, you really didn't think this through, did you?" Hans leans back and folds his arms over his chest. "You brought me here to hack this terminal, and I can't hack this terminal with this contraption attached to my neck. If you can't remove it, then we might as well go back."
His eyes are hard. He knows he holds the cards.
"Fine." Her tone is cold. "Hold still."
Her thumb slides up the trigger on the lightsaber hilt as she swings it behind Hans's head. The searing blade cuts the device jutting from the man's neck cleanly in half, rendering a tuft of hair to ash in the process. Hans flinches—whether from some final defense mechanism built into the damper or simply from fear, she doesn't know—but by the time he reacts, the blade is already extinguished.
"Better?" she asks with cold politeness.
Shock is slowly replaced by a guarded disdain as Hans straightens back up, carefully flexing his digits as if he doesn't quite believe they all still work.
"When all you have is a hammer…" he mutters under his breath, inserting his finger back into the scomp port and leaning over the terminal. The holoscreen flickers with static before dissolving into a wall of incomprehensible glyphs. "Now, what exactly am I looking for?" he asks with a sigh.
"Whatever Cal Kestis found. Whatever there is about the Arendellian people."
Hans doesn't give any sign of acknowledgement, but the text on the screen starts streaming faster. She watches the column of gibberish with a rising sense of trepidation that she can't quite pin down.
Why the Crocus? Why does Cal Kestis care?
"And… all yours, Inquisitor."
Hans steps back, beckoning to the holoscreen with a grin that belies a little too much satisfaction. The symbols on screen are now arranged into blocks of text, like entries in the galaxy's longest news broadcast.
As she steps forward and places her hands on the keypad, she resolves to figure out slicing for herself so she never has to rely on someone like Hans Westergaard ever again.
The documents seem to be sorted by timestamp. The first entries are political accounts of the official crests and symbols used by the rulers of Arendelle, followed by dated descriptions of the planet itself. Sparse, century-old descriptions of the customs and history of the Arendellian people flit across her gaze, clearly written from the coarse and callous perspective of an outsider. The Arendellians are described as almost indistinguishable from humans as a species, without a single mention of elemental abilities or Force sensitivity.
She frowns to herself, sifting through vague half-remembered instances of when she asked her father about the people beyond the sky. Evidently, the Galactic Republic reciprocated in their knack of knowledge about the little resource-poor planet named Arendelle, too remote and too primitive to be of interest or concern. The timestamps trickle forward, making a path toward the present in leaps and bounds without any increase in detail. Her eyes narrow as she clicks through the pages, faster and faster, a dull sense of foreboding pitting heavier in her stomach with every new document.
The tone of the next document is different. It's an entry from the Jedi Archives from fourteen years ago.
Master Idias returns from the Unknown Regions bearing news most exciting. By her account, the Arendellian people are a culture intimately entwined with the living Force, so much so that every member of their society is able to harness the Force. They must have centuries of study and knowledge, insights into aspects of the Force that even the Grand Master has yet to touch upon! This could be the discovery of an era.
The Council has determined Master Ino Cordova will lead an embassy to meet the Arendellian royal family on behalf of the Jedi Order. The embassy will depart immediately after Master Cordova returns from his present research expedition.
The next entries pepper the timeline in a dense cloud: a map of prospective hyperlanes to reach Arendelle from Coruscant; lexicons and translation scripts for the Arendellian language; records of Ino Cordova's reports on some other civilization called the "Zeffo", which he was apparently preoccupied with from a previous assignment. Her eyes flit over the screen with rapt attention, watching history play out before her, waiting for the façade to fall, for the Jedi to show their true colours.
Waiting for Arendelle to burn.
Except it doesn't come. She flicks past one final page and abruptly, there is no more. For a moment, she continues to click forward, thinking it's some glitch in the display.
She hears Hans's voice through the commlink in her mask before it carries to her from outside the mask, much farther away than it should be.
"Don't bother. There isn't any more. Someone purged the database of all documents dated after Order 66."
Whirling, she sees Hans looking to her with an almost apologetic expression from halfway down the corridor, his face framed by the closing diamond of sealing blast doors. She dashes forward, but it's much too late. The durasteel plates slide shut with a dull crash before she even makes two steps.
"I'm sorry, Inquisitor," his voice continues through her comm link. "You're not the only one on a tight schedule. I wish we could have parted on better terms."
Her gaze sweeps over the walls. There is no control terminal on this side of the doors. Hot rage flares like a beacon in her chest, sending spears of ice smashing into the thick metal. The wall holds firm, shattering the ice into crystal shards.
"Hans," she spits, fists clenched. "I will find you, and I will end you." Each word is a bullet.
"Please be reasonable," Hans replies, a hint of amusement creeping into his tone. "I helped you, just like I said I would. It's only fair I get something out of this in return. Don't worry about me, Twelfth Sister. You won't be seeing me again." The comm clicks, severed.
It takes her three minutes to cut through the door with her lightsaber. It takes her thirty seconds to sprint back to the hangar. By then, the shuttle is long gone.
"Slicing" is the Star Wars universe term for hacking. It feels a little tacky if I'm honest, but gotta stay faithful to the source material...