Symmetry and Imperfection

Part 5

~

In a corner of the impound lot, a human male watched station security conducting their investigation.

Humans of many subspecies existed throughout the galaxy, some of them quite striking, but this man was as plain as the gray plassteel of the deck and bulkheads around him. He was not tall, nor was he short enough to be remembered. His build was not excessively slender or bulky, his complexion too fair or too swarthy. In fact, he was such an average human that there was nothing outstanding that the casual passerby might remember about him.

Getting a little closer, one might notice that he seemed careworn, as if life had been hard to him but not hardened him. Deep lines were etched about eyes that were a warm gold-flecked brown, though the man looked to be only halfway through his fourth decade. His mouth seemed as if it had been made to smile widely and often, but that times had muted his grin into a slight upward tilt of the lips.

Now the man simply looked haunted, nearly as ashen as his dust-brown hair.

He turned away from the scene, jaw tight and slipped into a dim service corridor.

Knight Naum Kogahn felt sick. Someone had killed both men using high-level knowledge of physiology in conjunction with the Force. The thought that a Healer, usually the most gentle and peaceful of Force-users, could betray the calling was a thought that he found horrifying.

In the past twenty years, he had seen things that robbed him of sleep. In his nightmares, he relived the destruction of the Temple thousands of times, saw the bodies or empty robes of the people who had been his family. In the years since then, those Vader had not killed off split into bitterly divided factions. Some wanted to lie low until the ill winds passed, taking Vader and Palpatine with them. Others wanted to fight fire with fire and burned not only themselves but also everything and everyone they touched. Certain groups had withdrawn into themselves, eschewing all contact, sometimes violently. Naum was quite certain that the woman he was trailing was from one of the latter, and a particularly insular one at that.

Whoever they were, they were expending a great deal of effort to either bring her back or kill her. He had run into plenty of rogue Jedi, even some Dark Jedi who made Vader look like a blue-eyed innocent, but he had never heard of a Healer going rogue, much less becoming the Darkside rage-storm that her signature proclaimed.

The station was a labyrinth of corridors, most of them interconnected, and he cut back and forth on his way back to his ship. He had missed her, not by much, maybe just a matter of hours, but the Council would not be pleased. They had teams on the woman's backtrail, trying to see what or whom she was running from. The Council - what was left of it - had tasked him with finding her and if he could not bring her to be healed, he was to neutralize her.

Naum was so intent on finding her, so familiar with her signature, that he felt the shockwave of anguish as if she had been sitting in the same room with her. Even more stunning, he had felt Vader's response in a wave of ice and flame, calling out to her.

Hear me...

The Sith could be persuasive, though to the woman's credit, such contact had resulted in a surge of panic before she dropped out of Naum's Force-sense completely.

He came within sight of his lock and paused, rooting through his belt pouch as a cover for a quick survey of the corridor. There was still a bounty of fifty million credits a piece for the apprehension of the surviving Jedi, and plenty of skilled bounty hunters eager to boost both reputations and credit balances.

All clear.

The Illumine was an old corvette that had once been in Republic service but had lately been running spice and engaging in piracy around Nar Shaada. Well, at least it had been until it latched on to a ship full of fugitive Jedi. Naum's mouth quirked in that nearly-forgotten grin; he had been offered a lot of money to do some rather astounding - and in some cases, repulsive - things since acquiring this ship. A good many miscreants were now devoting their lives to good works as a result of what the uninitiated called "the Jedi mind-whammy."

Come to think of it, a good many Jedi called it that, too.

Once in the lock, he dogged it shut and cleared his account with the station. Aboard his ship, he disengaged completely from the station and headed into the cockpit.

"Free trader Illumine, come in, this is Departure. Free trader Illumine, come in."

Naum answered, "This is free trader Illumine, Departure. I require a launch window."

They would not ask his destination. It was expected that free traders went to the nearest jump point and reoriented anyway.

"Departure here, we are downloading the coordinates into your cache now. Clear skies to you, trader."

The navicomp accepted the coordinates as Naum brought the engines online.

Leaning back in the seat, Naum closed his eyes and relaxed into the Force.

She's alone, and in terrible pain, so full of rage and grief. With Vader on her trail, she must be scared witless. She was panicking and she's going to head for the first place that looks safe to her.

All Points station security had established that the ship belonging to the two dead men had made a precipitous departure. The old Kuat light-freighter could go far, but had a limited environmental system. This meant stops had to be made to take on fresh water and to blow the sludge. She'd be able to stay low for two weeks before the water started tasting funny, but she would probably put into port before that.

He needed to figure out which way his quarry was going to jump before Vader did. If those two highly unstable elements were to interact, the entire galaxy might well be blown to bits by the bang.

~

Sleep. For the first time in weeks... no, for the first time in months Abhaia slept without keeping a part of her consciousness tuned for intruders.

Her jump from All Points station had been hasty, and it had taken a series of hops to put her in the Meradni system. Ages ago, Meradni's sun had gone unstable, blooming into a red giant and blasting shells of superheated gas into space, ripping away whatever atmospheres existed from her coterie of planets. Abhaia had hidden her ship in a crater on the moon of the seventh planet and indulged herself in a full day of deep, dreamless sleep.

For now, she feared to allow herself any dreams. Afraid of what she would see in them, she allowed herself only the lightest dreamstate needed to process information. Even that small concession was almost too much.

In her dreams, Vader was just a darkness on the edge of her peripheral vision, watching her. She dreamed of her Arien, her beloved child. There were dreams of Arien in her grandfather's hands, or dead, or in terrible danger. In all of these, Abhaia could only move as if through air turned to thick syrup, unable to stop what was about to happen.

And then there was Vader. It was one thing to consider having his attention in the abstract, it was a totally different to be the focus of that attention.

Opening her eyes, she stared up at the ceiling of the compartment.

Vader had contacted her with a sure, cold touch that shocked her out of her fracturing emotional state.

::: Hear me. Hear me, lost one. Tell me where you are, and I will find you. :::

Abhaia had slammed up her mental shields and was launching even as Departure downloaded her coordinates.

Rolling out of bed, she went to the galley, mulling over the things that Vader had not said. Part of being a Healer was empathy, and some of the emotions she had sensed lurking below his communication scared her juiceless. She sensed passion, rage, ambition, ruthlessness, hatred, vengeance, and a deep, fierce loyalty. To cross this man, to betray him, was to invite oblivion.

She shook her head, as if to clear it.

Clarity. Calm. Get too wound up, Abi, and you are a dead woman.

The galley was well-stocked. She selected a hotpack of cereal with dried fruit and nuts and banged it on the counter to activate it, thawed out a sipper of fruit juice, then carried both forward to the cockpit. Settling into the pilot's chair, she set her meal to one side and pulled up a map of the local systems. This far out, stars were sparse, with a good bit of distance between them. Checking her fuelmass and environmental specs allowed her to estimate the outside of her range.

Out of an entire galaxy of some one-hundred billion stars, her choices were narrowed to a little less than ten thousand. She further eliminated those under Imperial control, some commander might decide to insure his early retirement by collecting a Jedi bounty; her options dwindled to one thousand. Next, she narrowed the parameters even further: No Hutt, syndicate, or corporate-controlled systems, and a large, transient, and variegated human population.

Four hundred left. Resorts, trade centers, gateway worlds, and some bounty-worlds. The bounty-worlds were the first to go; she was not going to go through months of adaption, innoculations, and surgery. Resorts had highly effective security measures meant to bring the tourists peace of mind, and she did not want the scrutiny. That left her with trade centers and gateway worlds.

Both Vader and Grandfather probably had an idea of the limitations she was operating under and were working the data much the same way. All Abhaia had to do was to bring one close while avoiding the other.

She snorted as she scrolled through her remaining choices; at this point she was dancing with asteroids, one mistake and either or both could smash her to paste.

Polstinar? Trading center for the Jewel Merchants' Guild with security that could count sandfleas on a Jawa.

Next.

Fremmer? Gateway world on the edge of Imperial space. Lots of Interdictor-class ships yanking transports out of hyperspace on a regular basis.

Next.

Quinrid? Major trading center for exotic goods coming in from wild space, heavy spynet activity from the Empire, Alliance and other entities.

Kal Madedo? Known as a smuggler's haven. Everybody minding their own business or looking to steal someone else's.

Possible.

Algeda? A major trade center with construction, refineries and a heavily transient, largely human population. Close neighbor of Kal Madedo.

Bringing the engines online, Abhaia began to plot her jumps with an eye to the capabilities of her scanning array. She had the feeling that she was in for a great many surprises, and wanted to avoid the most lethal of them.

~