Jeck Hashis idly toyed with the Republic-era commlink before his workbench/counter; he had one eye closed and the other one focused intently through the magnifying glass that was affixed to a rather comfortable contraption on his head. At the moment, he was so concentrated on his work in getting the inner mechanisms of the commlink to work that he almost didn't hear the old-fashioned bell to his mechanics shop ring, signifying that someone had entered his store.
"I'll be with you in a moment," Jeck said just before he stuck his tongue out and placed it to the side of his mouth in concentration; just another alignment in the comm's modulator, and he thought that maybe he could...
The device was suddenly pulled out from his sight, and Jeck looked up in incredulity. "What the...?" He trailed off as he saw a light-skinned woman with pronounced cheekbones, red hair, and distinct blue eyes look back at him with impatience through the magnifying glass. "I said I'd be with you in a mo..."
Jeck trailed off as the woman removed the synthflesh that made her cheekbones so pronounced; and after a few quick blinks, the blue irises fell into her palms to reveal her natural brown eyes.
"Mirax?" Jeck asked.
"I'm glad you recognized me even with this dye job, Jeck," Mirax Terrik Horn remarked; her tone, however, retained none of the humor or life that she had in the past when Jeck had known her. "Anyway, I got something here that might be more interesting than a Republic-era comm." She held up a tiny tracking device in the thumb and forefinger of the hand that wasn't carrying said comm.
"What's this supposed to be?" Jeck asked as Mirax placed the device upon his workbench/counter.
"Tracking beacon of alien design, probably Unknown Regions," Mirax answered curtly. "I was hoping you could tap into it and find out where it leads back to." She then pulled out a datapad from her purse and placed it next to the beacon. "Once you've succeeded, tune this 'pad to the frequency so that I can see where the beacon leads back to."
"You mean you want me to reverse the beacon's function... so that it can lead you back to the person who's tracking you with this?" Jeck asked.
"Yes," Mirax answered simply.
"But, Mirax, you're... you're a wanted woman on this station. And those Rogue Squadron aliens, too, aren't they-"
He was cut off from going further when she grabbed him by the collar and pulled him in to end up inches from his face.
"Never mind those aliens, they're not a concern. Just do what I tell you, Jeck," she growled. "You owe me. And if you don't want your wife and kids to get a personal visit from me..."
Jeck's eyes widened as Mirax deliberately trailed off in her speech. "You wouldn't do that!" he exclaimed incredulously. It was only then that he looked past her shoulder and saw that the curtains to his mechanics shop were closed and that the door was locked; and to tie it all up, the sign that was supposed to say that the shop was open read that it was closed.
"Yes, I could," Mirax intoned.
"Wh-what happened to you?" Jeck stammered. "You weren't like this be-"
"You didn't hear, Jeck? My father and husband just died; there's not much I wouldn't do."
"Uh... okay, okay, I'll-I'll go ahead and do what you want, just, just leave my family outta this," Jeck begged.
Mirax released his collar and headed to the back of the shop.
"Where are you going?" Jeck asked despite himself.
"You said it yourself, Jeck," Mirax replied after stopping in her tracks. "I'm a wanted woman on this station; I'll be outta sight while you continue with your business. By the way, you can open right back up, but if you try calling for help..." She then pointed to a portrait of Jeck's family on his workbench/counter.
"Right," Jeck said contemptuously.
Once Mirax sequestered herself in the shop's backroom, Jeck reluctantly opened his shop up, pulled back the curtains, and, for a moment, considered calling for help to anyone willing to listen outside.
But after that moment, he thought better of it and returned to his workbench/counter to work on reversing the tiny tracking beacon's function.
. . .
Considering the fact that Acheron could sense when people would approach her dorm, Sal-Solo wasn't at all surprised, after using his override code to unlock her door, to find her standing in the center of her room with her arms crossed over her chest and an uninviting sneer on her face.
"Come with me," he said without preamble.
"Why?" she asked rudely.
"'Cause I wanna show you somethin'," he replied. "Somethin' I think would interest you... Tahiri Veila."
Her expression didn't change. "That supposed to shock me? I'm not surprised you'd find out that kinda info, Thrackan."
"No, I don't suppose it should," Sal-Solo agreed amicably. "Still, I don't think I need to remind you of what I can do to you if you don't cooperate." He pointed to her ankle bracelet.
Acheron breathed out through her nostrils before she wordlessly stepped forward and left the dorm with Sal-Solo.
"You can both take the rest of the day off," he said to the guards who were waiting just outside. "And don't worry, you'll still get paid in full."
Neither guard said anything, they just turned and left obediently.
"So Jacen's not here, huh?" Acheron asked, noticing that she and Sal-Solo were the only two out in the corridor at the moment. "You're really that confident I won't attack you even with this bracelet?"
"Of course I am. Now, if you'll follow me."
Reluctantly, Acheron obeyed as he led her down the corridor in the opposite direction of where the guards went.
Three minutes later, they approached a turbolift, which opened immediately after Sal-Solo pressed the UP button. From there, a waiting period of five minutes passed as he and Acheron rode the 'lift up before they stepped out into an identical-looking corridor; he then led her to another room after a minute's walk.
When he opened the door, he led her into a centralized chamber with a bunch of databanks and computers all around them. And in the middle of the room was a giant droid sitting cross-legged, hunched over, and inert.
Sal-Solo looked at Acheron and asked, "What do you think?"
The Sith shrugged nonchalantly. "Looks like this thing needs some work done on it if you want it to run, it seems," she remarked lazily.
Sal-Solo chuckled mirthlessly. "That it does, I agree. But I'll tell you this, Tahiri, or Acheron, or Leary, or whatever you wanna call yourself: my scientists managed to get the consciousness of this droid back up sooner than we thought. Oh, it'll take some months before it can function the way we want it to, you know, in terms of organizing and controlling everything here and whatnot. However... I think you'll find the consciousness of this thing to be quite... oh, what's the word I'm looking for... illuminating."
He then walked over to one of the databanks and pressed a button.
"Oh, Anakin?" he said into the transceiver.
Acheron's eyes widened even before the reply came through the speakers hidden somewhere in the chamber.
"Yes, Thrackan?" the voice of an all-too familiar teenage boy asked.
"It's time for you to wake up," Sal-Solo answered. "I got a special guest for you."
"Special guest?" the boy's voice asked. "Who, Thrackan? Who is it?"
"Wake up, and you'll see," Sal-Solo said before he cut the comm and looked back at Acheron.
"What is this?" she asked with anger in her tone.
Sal-Solo didn't answer before he looked over to the inert droid. It came alive and straightened up; its photoreceptors blazed a bright green, and they looked directly at Acheron.
"Tahiri?" Anakin Solo's voice came through the droid's vocoder.
Now Acheron's expression dropped in shock. "A-Anakin?" she stammered.
"It is you," he said in response. "But... why do you look so much older? You look like you're in your twenties or something. And what's up with the dark clothing; you look like a Sith. It doesn't look good on you, I gotta say."
Acheron grimaced before she looked directly at Sal-Solo. "Turn this off," she demanded sharply.
"What?" the Anakin droid asked.
"Why?" Sal-Solo asked. "We're just gettin' started. C'mon, go on. Talk to your ol' boyfriend; it'll be sweet."
"Boyfriend?" Anakin asked. "No, we're just friends, Thrackan. Tahiri and I never... I mean, I, uh... I thought of it, but..."
"Stop this!" Acheron yelled at Sal-Solo.
"Tahiri," the Anakin droid said hesitantly, "why are you mad? Did I say something wrong, did I do something? What, what is it?"
"Shut up!" Acheron yelled at the droid. "You're not Anakin!"
"B-but I am Anakin," the droid replied concernedly. "Who else would I be?"
"Anakin died years ago!" Acheron exclaimed. "I don't know what you are, but you're not him!"
"Tahiri, it's me," the droid said innocently. "It's Anakin. C'mon, tell me, what's wrong? Why're you like this? This isn't you. If anything, you don't seem to be the Tahiri I know. The Tahiri I know was much more talkative, much more pleasant, much more-"
Acheron released a feral roar before she lifted a hand up toward the droid and unleashed a torrent of Force-lightning at it.
Mere seconds after enveloping the droid into a spasming convulsion, however, Acheron's own body was overcome by a brief but powerful bout of electricity that knocked her flat on her back.
In the corner of the chamber where he stood, Sal-Solo held a small cylinder with a red button on top and a regretful look on his face. He regarded Acheron's unconscious body for a moment before he looked over at the smoking carcass of the Anakin Solo droid that was hunched over and inert again.
"Well, that was a bad idea," he remarked aloud. He then brought up his personal commlink to his lips. "I need a repair team for Priority Sigma at once. And get a security and paramedic team up here, too."
. . .
It had taken Jeck less than two hours to trace the tracking beacon's signal back to its source, and Mirax was almost disappointed to find that it was coming from a hotel two levels down from the one where she and the Rogues had resided. Then again, she supposed it was a good thing that the person/people who was/were tracking her had nothing to do with any of the Centerpoint authorities; that might make it easier to find out what they wanted from her to place a tracking beacon on her in the first place.
Once again in the disguise that she had partially discarded when she showed up at Jeck's shop, Mirax walked up to the room where the signal traced back to, which had the shades closed to keep anyone from looking inside. She gave a brief look behind her to see if anyone was watching her; there was a small throng of people passing by, none of them looking her way, but there was a CorSec patrol car stationed there.
Fortunately, she was prepared for this; the device she lifted from her purse was something from Jeck's shop that he called an anti-locker, which, in short, used magnetic polarization to reverse the effects of an electronic lock to open a mechanized door.
And the best part of it was that it looked like any other keycard, even ones that looked like they could open up a hotel room with proper authorization. For that, Mirax was kind enough to actually pay Jeck with untraceable credits instead of another threat to his family.
Mirax took a moment to herself before she swiped the anti-locker over the room's keycard reader, which promptly unlocked the door.
Less than a second later, she hurried into the room and quickly replaced the anti-locker with what she colloquially called her "nausea blaster" that she intended to use on Tahiri Veila. She levelled the blaster up in a two-handed grip—with the gun simultaneously releasing the wraparound material over her right hand to make sure that the weapon couldn't be ripped from her grip—even as she backed herself up against the wall beside the door. In an instant, she swept the room with her blaster.
Mirax found it empty; even the refresher door was open to reveal that there was no one inside. She released a breath of relief before she closed the hotel room's door, fully preventing anyone from looking inside.
And that was when she heard a female voice say from behind her, "Hi, Mirax."
But before she could swing the blaster around, Mirax felt her right shoulder pop from its socket by a powerful grip that didn't quite feel physical. She gave a brief yip of agony as she lost all feeling in that arm, and thus all control of her nausea blaster, before she was spun around so that her back was up against the wall again; this time, however, it wasn't by her own volition.
The woman who now pinned Mirax to the wall via an obvious Force-grip—obvious given that she was holding up one arm toward her—had blonde hair; but everything else about her, without any facial prostheses or eye-coloring contact lenses like Mirax's, showed that she was Jaina Solo.
"Nice gun ya got there, Mirax," Solo said mockingly. "Too bad it didn't alert you to me. Just outta curiosity, though, how'd you find me?"
"Go to hell, Solo," Mirax intoned even as she struggled vainly against the other woman's Force-grip.
"Which one? There are nine of 'em according to the people who live in this system."
"Whichever punishes you for turning your back on the Jedi Order and cutting off my husband's hand, you bitch."
Solo grinned maliciously. "You know, I could pull the answers I want from your mind and leave you as a vegetative husk right here, right now. Or you could just tell me and spare us both the trouble. How 'bout it?"
"Go ahead," Mirax dared. "Do your worst."
Solo's eyebrows arched up. "You'd really do that to your children, especially after they lost their father? Oh, and their grandfather, too. I'm not sorry about that, by the way."
Mirax abruptly stopped struggling. "Wait, what?"
"Oh, that hasn't been figured out yet? Heh. I woulda thought someone woulda learned I was behind that massacre on the Venture." Solo shrugged nonchalantly. "Oh, well. You know now; I guess I'll leave you with that resolution before I plunge you into an irrecoverable coma."
"You killed my father?!" Mirax shrieked. "You killed all those people! Mara! How could you?!"
"Quite a coincidence, don't you think, that both the Sith who killed your father and husband are on this station," Solo said flippantly. "Funny, too, that you came here to avenge your husband, but end up coming into contact with the Sith who killed your father... without even knowing it beforehand."
"You will pay for what you did!" Mirax exclaimed.
"Is that the best you can come up with?" Solo retorted. "I guess grief does muddle the mind and makes it come up with cliches instead of something more original." She then made a popping sound with her mouth.
"I'll give you something original as soon as I get outta here!" Mirax countered.
Solo chuckled as she approached the trapped woman. "I'll give Lord Acheron your regards; that's Tahiri Veila's Sith name, just so you know. Just as mine is Darth Judicar, by the way"
But just before Solo—or Judicar, as she just revealed herself so casually to be—could place a hand on Mirax's head, the door to the room slid open and two CorSec officers rushed in with their blasters drawn and pointed at the Sith.
"Freeze!" the officer to the left ordered.
But with a single gesture from the hand that Judicar was going to place upon Mirax's head, both cops flew back to crash against the wall behind them. The Sith let them collapse to the floor before she Force-grabbed the left one's neck and broke it; she did the same to the other one before he could train his blaster upon Judicar.
However, with that momentary distraction loosening the Sith's body-wide grip on Mirax, the latter kicked Judicar in the stomach less than a second after she killed the last cop. The Sith doubled over in pain, completely losing her hold on Mirax before the widow turned and hurried out the door; with her broken arm, she wasn't confident that she would be able to take Judicar on before she recovered and promptly killed her.
Once Mirax was gone, though, Judicar recovered from the kick and gritted her teeth in frustration. She spared one look at the two dead CorSec officers before hurrying out; however, she went the opposite direction where Mirax was heading.
The widow's time would come, Judicar thought; but right now, she had to lay low.
