Totals are twenty-one-ten, play the minus-four card, totals are seventeen-ten. Next turn, totals are twenty to twenty, tie. Next...
Atton slouched comfortably in his booth, looking like nothing much as he watched the crowd. As usual, he kept his thoughts buffered behind a wall of pazaak, though it was probably unnecessary in this place. Not that any part of Telthek Nest was particularly safe; his intuition as well as the Force made him acutely aware that trouble was peeking out from behind every corner.
Dono's Cantina was a busy place; so was the galaxy, and the latter had gotten a lot busier since Atton and his not-quite-friends had imploded a planet full of Dark Jedi. The Republic's war fleets were beginning to carve their way into the Remnant's outer worlds, while Intelligence chucked agents over the border like there was no tomorrow. One cell, led by a certain Lannik Mai, had been sent ahead of the Ebon Hawk; they were to locate what Atton and his crew were after and point them in the right direction.
Related: it was a disquieting omission on the part of the enemy that, even in the face of a Republic incursion, not one Sith had yet shown himself on any battlefield.
Much as Atton wished otherwise, he knew that the Mass Shadow Generator hadn't gotten them all. Trayus Academy had hosted at least a quarter of Meetra's Sith, but definitely less than half, the rest being spread out across Remnant space. Which meant that those survivors must have slunk off to an ominous ancient citadel on some other inhospitable hellhole of a planet to regroup, and to decide who would lead them in the interim before Darth Revan's glorious return.
So while Admiral Opelle and his colleagues attended to the immediate task of invading and wrecking the Remnant's fleets, armies, and strategic assets, that was what he left to his personal SIS unit: finding out where the Remnant Sith Order had gone, who was in charge, what they were up to, and finally where they were now expecting to welcome Revan and the forces of the true Sith—if anyone knew that at all.
The dingy cantina briefly lightened a fraction as its door opened long enough to admit a pair of Humans, who ambled this way and that before getting to Atton's booth. The first of them tugged on the corner of a wiry black mustache and said, "We're with Burmere Munitions, looking for a buyer. We set the mine..."
He let the prompt hang in the air. Atton said, "And we go and step on it. You must be Lannik Mai."
"Yeah, and this is Rittu. Nice to meet you, Fenn," said Lannik as they squeezed into the booth across from him.
Atton—Fenn Moru, as he was supposed to be—recognized the utter lack of enthusiasm behind the words. After Malachor's destruction, his crew had spent a standard month preparing for this assignment in a Republic base on Ord Vaxal. They'd been given access to training facilities, supplied with new equipment, and briefed on everything the Republic knew about the Gordian Reach and other Remnant territories.
In those early days, being properly brought into the Strategic Information Service, there had been a decidedly professional veneer of respectability about the whole thing. The crew as a whole had been given a code name, Salvage Team Four. They all had ranks now, as well; Atton was styled an SIS unit captain, while the others—including, ridiculously, the two droids—were now special agents.
The day they had struck this deal with Admiral Opelle, he'd said, For all practical purposes you'll report directly to me. So Atton's first impression had been that the SIS was some kind of sister organization to Republic Intelligence. Perhaps a smaller, more specialized counterpart, one that worked more closely with military higher-ups and cut through some of the obfuscating levels of bureaucratic control that other agencies had to put up with. That was just begging for interdepartmental friction.
But there was more to it than just that. Atton had a hunch that the exact choice of code phrase they had just used—with Intel setting a mine and him stepping on it—had been chosen on purpose.
"Yeah," he said, "you too. So what's our target? Where are we going?"
"You're going to the sector capital—Torque Highport station. The prefect there is the only Sith of any rank that we've been able to locate. All likelihood, what you're looking for will be among his personal files. We've acquired a schematic of the station, and some other things that will help you get aboard. But since this is ultimately an SIS assignment, how you reach your objective will be up for you to determine." Lannik Mai was about as expressive as a dead man, but his last sentence drew a thin smirk out of his partner.
"We're good at improvising," Atton said after taking a gulp of his blue tonic.
Rittu scratched at the back of his neck. "That's what the JOPs always say."
"Shut your mouth," Lannik snapped.
JOP, Atton had learned, was short for "Just Out of Prison"—one of several epithets used to refer to SIS agents. Despite the fact that it was close enough to the truth in Atton's case, he might have found it annoying, except that a very familiar and otherworldly sense of unease stole over him at that moment. A subtle current charged his bones. His eyes flicked about the room—first to the bar, then to another booth close to the entrance.
"Recommend you go to Krylon before the Torque system," Lannik was saying. "We've made contact with a black market merchant there who's sympathetic to the Republic. Credits are no issue; he'll supply you with any special equipment you might need. Full mission details are on this."
Atton took the datacard Lannik had slid across the table. There was no use asking them if they'd been found out or were being followed; if they thought so, this meeting wouldn't have taken place. "Thanks. We're done here, then. You guys better burn sky. I've got a bad feeling about this place."
"Yeah, so do I." Rittu grinned again, but this time without rancor, as though they were sharing an inside joke. Disliking him more every second, Atton bit back a remark as his eyes were drawn again to the booth near the exit—Steady, kid, he thought—then to the door itself.
"I'm not kidding. There's gonna be trouble," said Atton—and not a few seconds later, there was.
