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Chapter 17: Careful What You Wish For
"So, what is our mission?" Winter questioned after somewhat righting herself in one of the Dromedary's fresher units and pulling on some of her sister's, as was usually the case, more practical clothing choices. She was still painfully thin, though, and her face looked… haunted, somehow, and Leia had to remind herself that she had, since their early childhood days, not forgotten a single thing. Unless, maybe, if there was alcohol involved, and she had never known her childhood companion to indulge to the degree of actually losing part of the night. Perfectly remembering every single bit of their lost home had to be taxing, especially without anyone around to distract you.
"This guy is," Iabaes replied and handed over her pad, the file on Maximilian Seerdon they had stolen on Bimmisaari already open. "We need to make him vanish so we can credibly pretend like we've killed the man. Otherwise, Tyber Zann blows Captain Potter's cover with the Empire, to begin with; if he knows that Harry Potter and Vincent Dash are the same person, who knows what else he could put out there that we don't want known. We have the ability to make a perfect facsimile of Seerdon's body, but the bluff would quickly be up if the real one kept running around, doing his thing."
Like she had been doing for as long as Leia could remember, Winter was just stoically watching, listening, remembering everything for later, for whenever she might need it. Not even that she was splitting her attention between listening and scrolling through the file would prevent that from happening, though it sometimes tended to rankle the uninitiated, who would think they were being ignored in favour of a datapad.
"He works in the ISB main offices…" Winter analysed, more thinking out loud than actually talking to anyone. She was likely to be all the way through the information by now. Maybe it was a good thing to have her there, Leia decided, and not just for personal reasons; her sister had been coordinating missions for multiple years now, and she seemed to be doing a good job of it, all things told. "No way to get him there… private address on Loijin Plaza, that's the Ambassadorial District. Everything there has entire armies of security… No, somewhere between home and work. Maybe exploiting some vice, every privileged kid has one."
"I like her," the Mandalorian declared, watching first the white-haired, then the dark-haired sister in turn. "Her mind is very analytical; if we can stop her from thinking too much, she would make for a great warrior."
"I'm better used as a spy, believe me," Winter replied eventually. "Not an easy target you have there but should be doable. Who wants first watch duty?"
"I told you it would work out," Leia, instead of answering, directed at Iabaes. "Obviously, she's now our boss for this mission."
And with that, even the normally stoic warrior could not hold herself back, and simply started laughing, loud and free. "That's usually how it happens with my people; someone is always more suited, and it will show."
OOOOOOOO
"This one has to be the most boring Imperial officer out there," Leia observed, putting away her electrobinoculars after yet another fruitless hour of watching their target do… nothing; nothing but watch sappy holo-dramas and eat unconscionable amounts of snacks with questionable health effects. How this man stayed in shape, considering his diet, was anyone's guess. "And I've had quite a few try to impress me over the years, so I should know."
Iabaes, who had drawn the night shift together with her, snorted loudly, taking up the observation where her younger comrade had left off, as had been their pattern for the last few hours. Simply staring through the damn spying equipment for hours on end, despite its various comfort features, just wore on your eyes the same way working with a console the entire day would, only with the added 'benefit' of having to hold the damn thing up the entire time, too.
"Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep," the Mandalorian quoted a line from some obscure play she could vaguely remember hearing about in school when she was younger. "I think there's more to this guy than we're aware of. No one is this… plain, this normal. Especially not if what I read about his father is at all true."
"Oh?" Leia questioned, looking over at the older woman; not that she could see it, still looking through the electrobinoculars as she was.
"A few years ago…" the warrior began but cut herself off suddenly. "Something's happening, he's moving."
Immediately, Leia too picked up her binoculars once again and trained them on the windows of Seerdon's Coruscant apartment, an apartment he should never have been able to fund with his income as an ISB commander. Obviously, daddy was doing more than just grease the wheels when it came to promotions.
"Wait a minute," Iabaes thought out loud. "Leia, switch to thermal, tell me what you see."
Somewhat confused, the Princess nevertheless plopped the small switch on the side of her equipment from low-light amplification (although the necessity for that on Coruscant of all worlds was highly debatable) to a thermal overlay and finally saw, how exactly Maximilian Seerdon could seem so incredibly dull: he was a droid. A good one, to be sure, but a droid, nonetheless.
"Haar'chak," the Mandalorian exclaimed next to her, and going by the tone of her voice, Leia assumed it was not a nice word. "Look at that… two Seerdons. Be careful what you wish for, you might get it. This one just got a lot more interesting."
It was on Leia to snort this time. "You don't say."
The two of them continued their watch for several more hours with nothing in particular going on, over there on the other side of the deep chasm across which they were watching their quarry. It was getting into the coldest hours of the early morning, shortly before that part of Coruscant would get its first bump in temperatures from the approaching sunrise, when once again the human replica droid was brought out and lay down in the commander's bed. As for the man himself, he surreptitiously made his way toward the door of his own apartment, only to vanish within the bowels of the skyscraper.
"Split up?" Leia posited, looking at the older woman questioningly, receiving only a nod in return. "You take the upper parking deck, I take the lower one," she added, already sprinting toward one of the airspeeder bikes they had bought specifically for this mission from a rather questionable trader in the lower levels of Coruscant.
"Yes, ma'am," Iabaes called after her, half-joking, half-serious, but she was already on her way. While the upper parking structure in Seerdon's apartment building was rather close to their observation point in elevation, and therefore much closer to the man's flat than the lower one, she had a feeling that, if he wanted to remain unobserved, he would accept the longer way. It was simply the fact that he had gone to surprising lengths to avoid having people know he was going out, why spoil that with using your own speeder, parked on the cushy, luxurious upper parking deck?
"Damn," she cursed, though there was really no one around to hear. "He's gonna be using a different speeder, too."
Placing herself across the 'street' from the exit of the parking structure, Leia pulled out her electrobinoculars once more. It took barely a few minutes for the increasingly suspect Imperial to shoot out of the exit ramp and into the slightly diminished night-time traffic. Maybe he was not that smart, after all, she pondered, watching the blazing red air speeder dash away. At least she had an easy target to follow through the throngs of vehicles always populating the capital's skies.
She followed the commander to yet another one of Galactic City's slum districts, where the glitter and glamour of the Senatorial District and the Great Rotunda might as well not exist. Once there, the bright red dot she had been following dove down between two blocks of buildings, quite out of sight.
"Haar'chak," Leia found herself cursing once more, this time using whatever it had been Iabaes had said earlier; she had pondered following him more closely but decided against it so as not to spook their target. Maybe that would now backfire on her. Her Mandalorian sister-in-crime was quite a good distance behind her, too, and even together they would have a hard time combing through the entire underworld of even one block, let alone the six blocks that were immediately adjacent to this particular canyon in the cityscape. No, her only hope now was to dive after their quarry as quickly as she could and hope for the best.
So, she dove.
The moment she passed from the open skies to between the buildings, things immediately got confusing; where the air above the 'surface' of Coruscant was reasonably clean, as much as could be expected of an entire planet that lacked greenery but excelled in exuding pollution, the slums districts were very much different. A myriad of smells, some good, some bad immediately accosted her senses; from baked meats of questionable origins seasoned with enough strong spices to mask even the weirdest tastes, to the delectable fragrance of a small patch of flowers someone somehow made grow on a tiny balcony, to the overwhelming stench of piss, sweat and cheap booze.
That was without even mentioning the sounds: somewhere, someone was either bathing a cat, or running it over with a lawnmower. Somewhere a bit further away, someone was rhythmically banging together two metal-pieces, maybe considering themselves a traditional blacksmith; or maybe it was children, sparring with metal rods, probably to the endless frustration of their understandably worried parents. Leia herself still had a small scar from doing something like that with a boy from her class when she was young, maybe seven or eight.
And the slums district was not much easier on the eyes, too, though much less of a cacophony: drab greys dominated, occasionally interspersed by more colourful marquees or neon signs. Even the people looked grey, many of them visibly listless, bereft of hope. It was heart-breaking. Yet the overwhelming greyness of the place had its upsides, too, as any bright red airspeeder would have stuck out like a sore thumb, and the vehicle belonging to Maximilian Seerdon was no exception. Barely a moment had passed before she spotted him, a way's off to the right, speeding along between the buildings. She was on his tail once again just as quickly, though it did not seem like she had been spotted.
Their unfair game of tag continued for a bit longer, with Leia now doing her very best to stay somewhat closer without being found out, and she thought she had done rather well when, in the end, on the edge of another dilapidated industrial sector, the commander set down his speeder in front of a small group of people. She had barely managed to look through her electrobinoculars and startled at the symbol on the group's armours when the leader turned to look directly at her, raise a hand and point.
OOOOOOOO
Leia was weaving her way through the narrow chasms of the slums district she had followed Seerdon to, with blaster fire whistling past all around her from the pursuing group of Black Suns on air speeders. Of all the people for the seemingly boring Imperial to be involved with, why did it have to be the best-informed, best-equipped and most-entrenched criminal organisation around? The Zann Consortium was ruthless, and worrying, and all these other things, not to mention dangerously knowledgeable about things only known to the upper echelons of the Alliance, but they were a speck of dust compared to Xizor and his cronies.
Around a tight corner she whizzed, hoping the larger, more cumbersome airspeeders her pursuers were using would either be unable to cut the corner as quickly, or would simply not fit into the even more narrow chasm she was now speeding through. Half of that was right; yes, the narrow gap between two skyscraper foundations was indeed not wide enough to allow the mercenaries, gangsters, whatever they were, to follow her, but no, she had not been able to throw them off. Half had simply stopped and were now all firing at her with everything they had, while the other was now rapidly ascending to where the buildings were further apart, likely to try and head her off. With no other solution readily available, Leia did something she had not done in quite a while, possibly not since Obi-Wan had died: she reached deep inside of her, trying to grasp that illusive state of calm that would allow her to touch the living Force around her so that it may guide her in eluding the enemy.
But what she found within herself was just that: only herself. There was power there, of course, but it was not coloured by intent the way it had been when the old Jedi had been training her… or maybe she was doing it wrong, following Harry's teachings instead of 'Old Ben's'? Yet opening herself to the world around her was no different; she had never been the most sensitive, though she'd only ever had Luke to compare herself with, but she could remember there being something… more. Could it be that learning magic was beginning to close her off…
Her ill-timed musings were rudely interrupted when one of the surprisingly lousy shots behind her finally landed on target. Luckily, it was not Leia herself that was hit, only the airspeeder bike she was on, but at hundreds of metres above the next floor level, the effect was bound to be somewhat similar. The quick, agile vehicle swerved violently first left, then right, then turned on its head, throwing off its rider before it impacted on the duracrete wall to the left and went out in a blaze. Suddenly bereft of her connection to the Force, something she now realised she had been for months now, most likely, there was only one thing to turn to in her moment of need: it was up to her to do the saving now, not some nebulous outside force, or the Force, for that matter.
Falling, more and more quickly, she did her best to turn inward once again, using the exercises both Harry and Obi-Wan had shown her. With no other option to turn to, the young woman simply let instinct guide her, reached out to the energy she could always feel bubbling under the surface these days, and did. What she did, she was not sure, but she did something, as she was soon no longer falling, but being squeezed through an unreasonably narrow tube and spit out at the other end.
Then, she landed in some of the most rank, foul-smelling water she had ever encountered. Sputtering out things she would rather not think about, Leia came to the surface of the mystery liquid that had arrested her fall. It took a few moments to register, what exactly had happened: first she had been completely unable to feel the guiding influence of the Force around her, and even though Luke had always been better at surrendering to its gentle nudgings, she knew that was not how it was supposed to be, knew, she should have been able to at least feel it a little. Then, she had apparated into… uhhh, a sewage dump. A few moments more passed, until the actual impact of her own thoughts became clear: she had apparated, even though it was a skill she had yet to learn, as Harry wanted her to have some more practice with less dangerous forms of magic first, forms that were not prone to leave parts behind if done wrong that he himself had said he would be hard pressed to reattach. With thoughts of the interesting stories her boyfriend had told of splinching came awareness of the pain in her left hip. So, either she had indeed, upon her first, instinctive try at apparating, splinched herself, or one of those miscreants thinking themselves able to aim a blaster had actually hit. Either way, there was nothing to be done about it until she got out of this wretched pool.
Swimming through the soup made up of… well she chose not to think about that overly much, proved difficult with the wound she had sustained and the sudden onset of bone-deep tiredness the instinctive apparition must have exacted on her, so it took longer than Leia would have liked for her to reach a narrow ladder, let into the pit's rusty outer wall. Weak, slimy fingers gripping for purchase on old metal was not a recipe for success, and two times she almost fell back down into the sludge-whose-contents-shall-not-be-named until she finally reached the top and let herself fall down onto the narrow ledge. Without a wand to use, her cleaning charm was lacklustre at best, though it got rid of the worst of the worst and made her clothes at least somewhat dry. A drying charm, another one of those nifty little tricks wizards and witches had come up with over the years, continued that mission, until both her hair and garments were as dry as they were reeking.
She gave herself a few minutes just to come down from her adrenaline high and examine her hip; there, just above the ridge of her left hipbone a small piece of skin was missing, likely deep enough to scar, but just shallow enough to not bleed like crazy. Applying her limited skills with healing magic, she stemmed what bleeding there was, hoping the cantrip would hold until she got back to the safehouse, somehow. How exactly remained to be determined. A groan of pain passing her lips, she pulled herself up on the wall to take in the room more comprehensively, though there was little to see. A number of ingress pipes, a large egress pipe that had been either closed off intentionally, or was blocked somewhere downstream, the small ledge she was sitting on and the ladder. Only two exits were visible: a large, non-functional ventilator inside a shaft that let in the little bit of light she had been using to orient herself, as well as a closed door. Determinedly setting her jaw against the pain, she hobbled to the door and forced it open against the rusty hinges.
With a reproachful shriek, the door eventually gave way to a part of the slums district Leia thought she had seen earlier, maybe flown across in her pursuit of Commander Seerdon. Now though, with the questionable benefit of perspective, the whole place seemed considerably worse than from above. Both aliens and humans looked rough down here, many of them bearing scars, everyone armed with at least something. Worried, she checked her own blaster pistol, but the little light that normally indicated it had charge and gas left remained stubbornly inactive, as did her communicator when she tried to reach Winter, Iabaes and Jane. Why apparition seemed to be the only completely destructive piece of magic continued to elude her. At least, she consoled herself, the Mandalorian knew what she had sped off to do. Only the smell she had noticed earlier, the smell she now understood to be not only the district itself, but the sewage pit she had landed in, seemed a bit less severe now. The princess (though she had never left less like one than in this moment) was under no illusions about the reasons for her seeming indifference to the stench, though; it was because she, herself, was reeking.
From the moment she stepped out from under the shadow of the old, unused doorway, she knew this was not the place for an obviously wounded, reasonably pretty young woman to be running around alone, without a blaster. While most of the time, there was a certain benefit to the glamour Harry had made for her hiding her as something of a knockout, as she was aware some of the younger men under his command called both her and her alter-ego, she now found herself wishing he would have added some ugly scars, a few disfiguring boils; it would not stop everyone from taking an interest, but some of the less determined might have been dissuaded. Now, though, with beautiful face and clothes only partially hiding she had a… pleasing shape, she was drawing looks, few of them of the gracious, non-leering kind.
"How much, sweetheart?" Someone was calling after her as she made her way along the narrow walkway on one side of a chasm, doing her best to appear as if she was not hobbling and hurting and vulnerable. She just had to find a turbolift bank that would take her to the upper levels, from there she'd just take one the many air taxis that were always looking for a fare and, for a bit of an extra fee, would ignore her seemingly dismal bodily hygiene. "I was talking to you. Hey!"
With a grumbled 'Bitch!' Leia was only just able to make out, the older human continued along his own path, deterred by her disinterest. Many other, she knew, would not give up quite as easily, and being molested was probably the best she could hope for if she was caught down here. Out of a group of beings from various sentient species, more lurid remarks were thrown at her, and the princess could feel their lingering stares on her breasts and butt. Intellectually, she knew that appearing scared now was the worst thing she could do; someone capable of defending themselves would not appear scared, the overly simplified reasoning went in places like these, at least for some. And, while normally she was quite able of beating anyone who got uppity, at least any one of the people down here who were likely to take the wrong kind of interest, she was hurt and tired and exhausted.
With as much speed as she could muster without stumbling, Leia rounded a corner into a side alley, to escape from view and hopefully be able to apply some more healing magic, maybe that nifty numbing charm Harry had taught her. Luck, or the Force, or whatever else was not on her side, though, as a number of men from the group she had just passed seemed to take her foray into a less public space as an invitation. Just as the young woman was beginning to raise her vest and blouse to expose the wound beneath, she noticed the group. Painful as it was, she laid a hand on the raw flesh to stop the mob from seeing what she was doing and cast the pain-stopping magic she had been aching to since her first steps out of the sewage pool. As she let the clothes fall back into place, the leader, a tall, scarred alien of some species she did not know, began whistling.
"Doncha stop for our sakes," he called to her, and Leia could once again feel his lingering gaze on her breasts. "We liked what we was seein', didn' we lads?"
Affirmative grumbling went through the group of five… well, she would assume they were men, given their actions right now, though just four of them she could easily distinguish as such; granted, she had heard of and seen enough women involved in stuff like this over the years, but they tended to be the tiny minority.
"In fact, why doncha take off more," the leader leered at her, licking his thin, black lips "You'll 'ave fun like never before with us. My lads and I, we know how a lady like you wants to be treated, righ' lads? She wants to be treated like a slut! Why else come down here, baby? Show us some skin, tease us with your ass, just to leave us hanging?"
"There's nuffin hangin' over here!" One of the human men called out, earning raucous laughter from his buddies. If it had not been clear before to her, then it was now, at the latest: she was not going to let these men do to her what they obviously wanted to, would not do this to herself, nor to the one she had given her heart to (as Harry would most definitely find a way to blame himself, ridiculous as that was), nor were they going to let her go peacefully. Hoping the numbing charm did as promised, she entered a defensive stance that had been drilled into her quite diligently. Magic was out of the question here, there were simply too many witnesses around; she would have to beat them into submission the old-fashioned way.
"Careful," she warned the assembled group, trying to sound surer of herself than she actually felt. "I bite."
"Oh, we likes 'em feisty, don't we lads?" the leader grinned at her, looking her up and down once more, assessing her both as an opponent and as a possible prise, if his greedy gaze was any indication. "Have at 'er!"
The first to try, a Zabrak-human hybrid by her estimation, was clumsy to the point of being comical; obviously undeterred by her stance that, to anyone who took the time to look, would have betrayed she was trained, the man charged at her, arms stretched out in a grabbing motion. A slight twirl, a grip to the wrist, a knee first into his special-no-no place then into his face had him taken care of. The second attacker seemed a little less blinded by either stupidity, lust or a combination thereof, though his attack was still little more subtle than his buddy's: he swung his clenched fist at her, putting all his weight into the punch, only to find his momentum turned around on him when she simply went with the flow and steered him headfirst into the wall. Assholes Three and Four seemed to be somewhat on the smarter side, having coordinated at least the timing of their attacks. To their misfortune, they had not made up their minds as to how they wanted to come at her, leaving themselves open to a dodge that let one stumble into the other. Without remorse, the disoriented aliens were then bashed in the back of the head with the butt of her mostly useless pistol; at least it was still functional as a club.
Leia was just turning her attention to the last one, the leader of the group, when the man started to speak. "So pretty, so feisty… you'll fetch a hefty price after I've had my…"
Whatever he wanted to have, she never found out, thanks to the metal rod someone had bashed over his head.
"Everything alright, there, Missy?"