Kandosa had been waiting for less than five minutes when his contact appeared. He hadn't seen her at first, small enough she'd nearly been hidden in the shadow of a passing Jilruan.
He might have nearly missed her, but she wouldn't have gone unnoticed for very long. Kandosa had learned a long time ago how much could be read out of how a person walked, how they held themselves. He'd gotten into the habit of observing people, he'd long since started doing it automatically. This human woman — had to be his contact, her face fit the holo he'd been sent perfectly — her walk didn't match the rest of her.
He meant, she looked perfectly normal. Scuffed boots, simple, cheap synthetic clothing, a blaster at her hip accompanied with far more power cells than most would think reasonable just for a walk down the concourse. Perhaps a bit cleaner than one would expect, but everyone had their quirks. She looked ordinary, but she walked like someone important. The unconscious grace of those born into wealth or power, but the sharp confidence of a warrior. Put the two together and he would say, no matter that she looked like nothing but a spacer down on her luck, she moved like a general.
Well. Perhaps this was going to be interesting.
It took but a second for the woman to spot him. She sauntered through the cantina over to his table, carving through the shifting crowd with casual ease, stood across from him. "Kandosa of Ordo, so you're alive."
Kandosa blinked at the fluent Mandoa, only mildly surprised. First contact had been in Mandoa, of course, but it'd been written — there were translators on the net that could handle that with little issue. Perhaps she'd picked it up somewhere, his people were scattered all over the galaxy these days. "Was there a clan name with that, Cina?"
If Cina was surprised by his guess that she was the one making an offer, and not an employee of the same, she didn't react. "No, I haven't the honor, I'm afraid."
"Well, sit down, then," he said, pointing with his chin. She did, smooth and easy, not breaking eye contact on the way down. "So, you have a job for me. What's the target?"
"It's not that kind of job. I don't think it particularly likely, but it's possible there won't be any fighting at all."
That... No, she hadn't just learned Mandoa recently — that was fluent, native speech. Her accent was slightly off, Vorpayya, unless he was mistaken. If she was from Vorpaya, but wasn't a child of a proper clan, she had probably been angling for an adoption before everything had gone to shit. The child of immigrants or exiles, something like that. Though, if she hadn't been raised in a proper clan, and on a largely agricultural planet of all places, she likely wouldn't have been raised Mandoade from childhood, which just made the way she held herself even more strange. He hid his suspicion with a smile — it would be rather rude to draw attention to her circumstances, after all. "But you don't think that likely, so you want backup."
With a wry little smile, the little woman shrugged. "I have a few comrades, and we will be in the fight, but there aren't enough of us. I was hoping we could pick up some extra firep—" Cina cut off, glancing up as the server approached their table. The Rodian woman dropped the platter of fried genishak onto the middle of the table, quickly followed by a couple tall glasses of ale. Once she was gone, Cina turned back to Kandosa, one questioning eyebrow raised.
He nodded. "Fill your boots." Going to such lengths to be hospitable wasn't something he would normally do for a prospective client, but he'd admit the initial message had intrigued him. Everybody knew he was Mandoade, of course, but nobody attempted to treat with him in his own tongue, and certainly didn't think to observe the proper niceties.
It did make rather more sense now, with this Cina being some kind of Mandoade refugee, but that didn't make him any less curious.
With the appropriate half-hearted grunt of thanks, Cina took a strip of the genishak and a sizeable gulp of ale. He waited until the glass came thudding back to the table before speaking. "All right. You just need a little extra firepower. A handful of my boys and myself might be willing to provide that. What is it you have going down, exactly?"
Cina shook her head. "You might not like it."
"Oh, we'll just have to see, won't we?"
She glanced around the room for a second — had to be reflex, nobody on Taris spoke Mandoa — then leaned forward a little over the table. "I'm sure you know of the swoop race coming up."
Shrugging to himself, he said, "I might have heard of it. Another pissing contest between the local trash. They're always scrabbling over which should get to be on top of the heap, I don't always pay attention."
A smirk pulled at her lips, teeth glinting in the colorful light of the cantina. "Something like that, yes. You might have heard the prize offered by the Vulkars is a person, a human woman. I've been contracted by a third party to rescue her. We decided our best shot at a successful extraction is at the race, when she's out in the open. Now, I will have my pilot in the race, and she's good, so she should do well. She will place high, but I'm not sure if she'll win. If she doesn't, we'll have to take her by force."
Kandosa nodded, slowly, something half-remembered niggling at the back of his head. "I see why you want backup — that could get real ugly real fast. What's your team look like?"
"There's me, of course. My second, who's more than decent with a blaster. My best fighter is a Wookiee — I don't know if you're familiar with the species, they're very big and very tough. Not a bad head on that one either, though he can get a little carried away."
He felt his lips twitch. "I know the type."
Returning his smile, amusement in her eyes, Cina shrugged. "The pilot can also fight; she's not quite as good a shot as the rest of us but she's clever as hell, very good in a pinch. My slicer will be hidden up a few levels, she'll be our eyes. I have her practicing with a sniper rifle at the moment, but I wouldn't depend on that, violence isn't her style. That's all of us. When we move to secure the target, the Vulkars and the others will attack, and the Beks are certain to retaliate. But we can't count on that — they'll be hitting the Vulkars, not covering us."
That almost had him grinning — this tiny little thing was casually talking about sparking off a gang war that could easily drag on for months or even years just so she could get at her mark. It was sort of adorable, honestly. "You said you were hired by a third party. If I do agree to help you out, I'll be wanting a cut. Say, thirty-five."
Cina frowned at him for a moment. Then she leaned a little further forward, her voice actually dropping to a mutter this time, barely audible over the music filling the cantina. "There's a reason I came to you, Kandosa of Ordo. You kill for Davik, yes, and most everyone I talked to is right terrified of you. But you have another reputation. People say you're honorable, fair, and reasonable. I could have found some mir'osiksii mercs, they might get the job done, but I'd rather fight with someone I can depend on to have their head straight.
"My point is, Kandosa, I want you to name your price. I'll pay you in Republic credits, whatever you feel is fair. I don't want to swindle you, and I trust you not to swindle me."
It took a short moment, staring flatly back into Cina's eyes, for it to sink in that she was being completely serious.
Somehow, Kandosa managed to hold in his shocked, delighted laughter.
Mission had never felt so completely awesome in her entire life.
The lower city gangs threw a big swoop race every year or so, though no two were on exactly the same course. Go deep enough under the surface and everything was pretty much abandoned, a forest of monolithic towers and dilapidated concourses and rusting walkbridges and debris. In the weeks before every race, a neutral team would go down to scout out a new course, zigzagging between the obstacles, up and down levels, sometimes even carving tunnels through towers. Cameras were set up here and there throughout the course, giving the spectators and gamblers something to watch — only a very small bit of the course could be seen from the finish line, after all.
It had taken Mission less than half an hour to slice into the system. The day before the race, Zee and Cina had tracked down a spot in an abandoned tower overlooking the staging area, where she was set up now. An array of displays were hooked up to a terminal she'd cannibalized from one of their nests — most waited idle for the race to start, one showed the gathering crowd below her from two angles, the last a few columns of scanning code and one waiting command line.
A constant hissing and chattering in one ear was her line into planetary dispatch, which had been much harder to slice into, though it had actually taken far less time to set it up for today. (She'd cracked the official com channels ages ago, after all.) Her other ear was linked to everyone else's coms, on a channel with a mutating encryption she was actually rather proud of. Not that anyone else on the team was really good enough with cryptography to appreciate it — Zee was ace with hardware, but he didn't have the head for software.
It was just...so...damn...cool. She felt like a spy or something in some terribly cheesy holodrama, it was great. Especially when she got to say things like, "Skies still clear, Red. Swarm looks clean." It didn't look like anyone was trying to sabotage the other racers, anyway. The cameras also scanned for disruptive signals, but she didn't see anything.
A gruff voice responded with, "Copy, Scope. Note any changes."
Mission winced, glanced to her left. One of the window panels had been carefully removed, a long, nasty-looking sniper rifle propped against the frame and waiting. The code names had been her idea — she didn't think it was likely anyone would crack her encryption, it just sounded fun — so of course they had to go pick one for her she kind of hated. It turned out she was a far better shot with that thing than a normal blaster, but she still wasn't comfortable with the idea.
Though, she wasn't entirely sure why Asyr was called Red — it wasn't like her fur was red or anything...
"Scope, Twin. Is Heavy in position?"
Before Mission could even glance at her screens to confirm quick, Canderous was answering Carth already. "This isn't my first op, Chakaar. Just try not to hit me when it lights up."
Of course, to make things even more awesome, they were working with a legit Mandalorian mercenary. Mandalorians were scary, she wouldn't deny that — she couldn't remember the invasion very well, it'd been too long ago, but the people who did remember didn't have nice things to say. And, well, they were a bit big and hard and intimidating. (At least Canderous was, anyway.) But they were just so...badass, yeah? As though this didn't feel enough like some ridiculous holodrama already, they just had to pick up a grizzled jaded soldier type. Just kept getting better and better.
"Kandosa, ken copaani sa-talganr. Ache naar ven parji, juan ni sa tagar lise aat-kiramur. Jat?" That was completely meaningless to Mission, but she recognized the voice easily enough, even with how her encryption distorted the sound a little. Apparently, Cina spoke Mandalorian. Which wasn't as much of a surprise as it should have been, Mission wasn't convinced there were languages Cina didn't speak.
"Orijate, ni burcha. Ven pakodshia sa ham'halai."
"Jehaachii."
"Gar jorhai sa ni jehaatii?"
"Iji anaat ru. Chon gar buche—"
His exasperation clear even over the com, Carth said, "Would you two stop that? Seriously, listening to Pads and Red go on in Bothan was bad enough, I don't need Mando gibberish too."
"Very subtle, aruetii. I'm sure nobody listening in will find a Bothan on Taris at all suspicious."
Mission couldn't resist. "Nobody's listening in, Heavy. It'd take days to slice this channel, we won't be using it that long."
"I don't doubt it, ad'ika. That doesn't mean Twin isn't an idiot."
She shrugged — she wasn't about to disagree there. It'd been a week now, and Carth still hadn't done or said anything to change her immediate first impression of him. She really did hate it when people she was way smarter than treated her like a helpless little kid who needed to be hidden away and taken care of. Shit, she'd been living on the streets practically alone since she was seven, nobody had been taking care of her for a very long time, she knew how to get by around here far better than Carth did. If anything, she was the one who needed to take care of him.
Or, she would say so if Cina weren't already handling him. She clearly hadn't spent all her time on a nice shiny core world, she knew how to take care of herself. Which was a little weird. Hadn't she said she'd spent all her time on Alderaan and...some planet Mission had forgotten the name of that was mostly farms? How exactly did she seem so comfortable on a city planet anyway?
Eh. Must be that weird brain stuff Mission couldn't quite wrap her head around. Not important.
The racers were all moving into position now, the array of overpowered repulsors setting her teeth to vibrating even all the way up here. There was a sudden increase of activity from the system, but a quick skim of the code determined it as just a last diagnostic, nothing really important. The count had already started, a holoprojector above the finish counting down from a minute. Cina and Asyr were hissing in Bothan over the line, no idea what that was, probably not anything important. (She could sample it and copy it into a translator, but she decided not to — there was something going on between them, she had the feeling whatever it was would be private.) The count hit zero and, in a blink, the swoops all zipped into motion, shooting out of the staging area quicker than the eye could follow.
But computers were faster. She saw all of it.
The races the lower city gangs on Taris threw together were rather different than professional ones. For one thing, there were usually rather more participants relative to the width of the course — the official leaderboard had seventy-three spots, which was less than in a professional race, but the course narrowed to only a few meters wide in a couple places, and never spread to more than twenty or so. And there were far more obstacles in the way. Underground races, on the average, were far more deadly than professional ones, and most of those accidents were in the opening moments, as the racers tried to force themselves somewhere in the pack without running into anything. Which also turned the opening stretch into a minefield for the next two laps, it never went well.
There were reasons she only watched races, and never actually tried to convince the Beks to let her enter. She wasn't an idiot.
This race was no different. Only a handful of seconds had passed when sparks were already flying across one of her displays, staccato bursts of fire as racers were pushed off the narrow course against walls or bits of debris sticking up into the course. Mission kept a careful eye on one monitor, the one she'd set to track Asyr as closely as possible. (There were a few spots the cameras didn't reach, but she'd be able to eye her most of the course.) The sleek red-silver swoop had ended up in the middle of the pack somehow, which was a rather unsafe place to be — they were squished into tight formation, there wasn't a lot of room to maneuver. A crash at the left of the pack had the whole group shuffling right as they went, a few places bumping into each other, one just in front of Asyr swung around, the back was going to come right down on the tip of—
Asyr drifted right, rolling a bit left as she went. Just as she was about to hit the swoop next to her, she suddenly popped a few meters higher into the air and shot forward, clear over the one in front of her that had nearly pitched her into the ground. Mission grinned to herself — Asyr had used the repulsors to jump off another swoop, giving her both more height and more speed, since the other one was moving too. It was enough to have her sailing over the next few ranks, zipping by in the narrow space between the pack and the bottom of a concourse overhead, sinking back to optimum height hard enough she scraped the ground for a second, a trail of sparks dancing in her wake, but she recovered smooth enough, now a couple lengths ahead of the main pack, already closing in on the leaders.
The swoop she'd used for a boost was less lucky, shoved into the ground, sent spinning and flipping. At least until another rammed into him, disappearing in a fireball shot with crackling electricity, growing as another smashed into it, then another. But that's how these things went sometimes. Asyr wasn't the only one to screw over another racer, they were down to fifty-four already.
But it looked like Asyr wasn't bad at this. Good choice — if she understood right, their other option had been Carth, and Mission really doubted he'd be ruthless enough to pull that kind of stunt. It was still early, but if she kept flying like that Asyr had a decent shot.
Mission straightened in her chair, hand coming up to one earbud. "Guys, I got Sith chatter about the race."
"Copy, Scope. Are they moving in?"
She took a long moment to listen, eyes tracking over the code scrolling by, only idly noting Asyr tick up a couple more spots. Finally, her chest loosened, tension she hadn't even consciously noticed melting away. "Negative, Pads. Sounds like they're watching, have bets riding on it. Skies still clear."
"How's Red doing? I can't even pick her out on this damn feed."
"Twin, Red. Just sit tight a few minutes." There was only the slightest whistle of wind under Asyr's rumbling voice, most of the air rushing by cut out by her helmet.
Mission glanced at the screen, Asyr and a few racers around her banking into a narrow tunnel. Asyr cut sharp into the turn, slipping in front of the one ahead of her, but coming into the tunnel at way too hard of an angle. She rolled, repulsors coming against the side wall of the tunnel just in time, riding sideways for a short bit before the tunnel swung back the other way, she slipped across the ceiling, passing another racer over his head, to the opposite wall before letting herself drift back right side up, locking onto the floor again. Damn. Yeah, Asyr was pretty good.
"I can out-fly a few untrained civs in a straight race. Trust me." And she didn't even sound nervous. Shooting around at a hundred meters a second, a single, tiny mistake all it would take to have her smash herself to death, and she didn't seem any more strained than she did sitting in their apartment eating breakfast, like this were no big deal. Rather less strained than she sounded just going up stairs, with her injuries from her crash down planetside still bothering her.
Mission thought that was kind of funny. She'd never met one before, but apparently the stereotypes about Bothans were completely accurate.
By the time Asyr was coming around the first few curves of the second lap, Mission thought she mostly had the picture of it by now. She'd watched enough races to get a feel for how people flew pretty quickly. "Okay, Red, pass two more and you'll be in the top five." They needed to be in at least the top five to get into the winners' circle, close enough for Cina and Asyr to make a grab for Bastila. "You should be able to hold that no problem, the way you're flying. If you want to try to go for lead, watch the guy in the black and gold swoop. He's tricky. You could tail him and skip just before the finish, but be careful."
"Copy, Scope." Asyr smoothly ducked under a racer as he popped over a dip in the course, cutting into the next curve and putting her in sixth. "I'm covered, if you want to get set up."
Glancing toward the rifle waiting next to the window, Mission couldn't quite keep a pout from her face.
The bars of her tiny prison swung away, and arms were reaching for her, thick and hard and muscular. Bastila tried to twist away, but it was more reflex than anything. There was nowhere to run.
Hands took her above both elbows, hard and strong as steel, squeezing tight enough to bruise, dragged her forward. Her head spun, the dirty, asymmetrical arena carved out of the metal and plastic and ceramic of the lower city swirling around her. She fought to focus, fought to do something, but the neural disruptor interfered far too much, it was a struggle just to remain standing. If she weren't bracketed by two large beings with very firm grips she'd probably be on the floor.
After long moments, blinking, squinting, she made out the figure making for her. The name of the species was eluding her at the moment — native to Hutt space, she knew that much — this particular one sharp and wicked-looking, scarred and cruel, spiking armored scales ringing eyes alight with black humor. This would be the winner of their bloody swoop race, she knew. The one who'd won her.
On any other day, this would be nothing. He would be nothing. She could prevent him even taking notice of her, she could make him say or do anything she wanted, she could send him flying across the room, she could crush him like a bug under her heel. But this wasn't any other day. She could barely manage to stay on her feet, standing here in the humiliating little getup they'd forced her into, she could only glare back at him, trying to keep anything else from showing on her face.
There was absolutely nothing she could do. She was finished.
That was the very last thought she had before, in the blink of an eye, everything went completely insane.
It started with the harsh scream of a blaster, a single shot burning into the side of the winner's head, only a couple steps in front of her, close enough her stomach turned at the smell. There was a great clattering and hollering, people in all directions going for their weapons. Before anyone could respond, the two holding her were hit, toppling limp to the ground in eerie silence, taking her down with them. And then the sound of blasterfire was overwhelming, unbroken noise turning the air thick and sharp, her head rang with it.
She heard someone stepping up to her, she tried to pull away, but her head went swimming again, she was helpless to resist the yanking at her wrists, someone pulling her along by the cuffs binding her. She stumbled after whoever it was, more falling than walking, skinning her knees more than once. After some distance she couldn't count, she was pulled down to the ground, her shoulder coming to lean against something hard and cold.
She jumped at the sound of a blaster shot coming from far too close, almost deafening. There was a wave of heat against her hands, her arms, but it didn't hurt, she hadn't been hit. Bastila forced her eyes to focus again, looking down at her hands.
The blaster was right there, she spotted it just as it fired again — the shot hit the cord linking the cuffs, burned most of the rest of the way through. Another arm came under her forearms, a human arm, the blaster turned around in their hand, and it came smashing downward. Weakened from the shots, her arms braced against another, the cord snapped. Blinking in astonishment, Bastila glanced up to face her rescuer.
She went cold, in a tingling wave starting in her head and quickly working its way downward. For an instant, she was in one of her nightmares again, staring into eyes filled with an infinite, overwhelming emptiness, reaching out to drag her down with them. She knew that face, she knew it almost as well as she did her own these days.
Revan.
Raised over the chaos surrounding them, blasters and repulsors and echoing explosions, her voice was hard and flat, and it was wrong, it wasn't Cianen Hayal, it was her— "Do you remember me, Shan?"
Before Bastila could even think to stop it, a shocked laugh bubbled up out of her chest. Oh, she remembered. She hadn't forgotten a thing, not a single thing.
Revan shot her a curious, suspicious sort of look, but they were interrupted again, another being sliding into a crouch against the wall on Bastila's opposite side. She noticed with no small surprise that the woman was a Bothan, the silver framing her cheeks faintly familiar. "Captain Lar'sym. Good to see you alive, Commander."
"Here, can you shoot?" The blaster was pressed into Bastila's hands before she could protest.
It occurred to her, slowly, that Revan had just given her a weapon. She'd even turned her back to Bastila, taking potshots around their cover with a rifle she hadn't noticed until just now. She didn't...
Bastila could kill her. Right now. At this range, she wasn't looking, she could shoot her in the back of the head, it'd be over in a blink, she couldn't—
She could use a blaster, theoretically — she'd been taught the basic idea ages ago, though she'd never really had occasion to put it to use. But with the neural disruptor, "That might not be wise." She doubted she'd be able to shoot straight at the moment. "Could you get this thing off?" she asked tapping at the band of metal tight against the side of her temple.
Revan shook her head. "Afraid not. We'll get Scope to take a look when we get back." Then her voice shifted slightly, turning smoother, almost a drawl. Though Bastila couldn't understand a word of it, it wasn't Basic. She paused a moment, likely listening to a response, then turned back to Bastila and Lar'sym. "Red, back to your bike. Get up, Shan, we're getting out of here."
Looking back on Revan's chaotic little rescue mission, Bastila wouldn't be able to remember much of the next minutes. Not that she'd been entirely sure what was happening at the time. She couldn't see very well, the neural disruptor reducing her to a dizzy, stumbling mess, if Revan weren't dragging her along she'd have ended up bumping into walls.
Or just walking into blasterfire — it was a constant noise, a grating screeching of superheated air and boiling metal, sounding from above and around them, but fortunately little of it aimed their way. By the sound of it, a sizeable firefight had broken out through the staging area and among the racegoers, but the bulk of it away from the platform at the core, reserved for the staff managing the race, where Bastila had been kept the whole time. There had been a few people around, but they'd already fled or been downed, she tripped over a body more than once.
Swoop bikes and airspeeders roared by overhead, her skull vibrating from repulsors at full blast, a few hovering overhead, heavier shots slicing out into the blurry distance. They'd been stumbling along a short while, just a few meters from the lift down, when Revan suddenly dove forward, dragging Bastila tumbling roughly to the floor. They'd rolled into a wall, blocking off that direction, but there was someone standing right there, she was already turning her blaster down toward Bastila, and—
A shot struck the woman in the head, she went limp and lifeless instantly. By the shape of the burned wreck carved into her skull, that shot had come from the towers above. Snipers? The scale of the fight going on out there, and now snipers, just how many people had Revan brought with her? Not that Bastila was particularly surprised, she didn't think Revan believed in overkill.
The next instant, a blackened, glowing trench was carved into the floor of the platform, an airspeeder swooping by overhead. Bastila noticed the strafing fire had cut right into where they would have been if Revan hadn't dragged them down.
That chill stole over her again, ice dripping down her spine. That speeder had come from behind them, coming too fast. Revan couldn't possibly have seen it.
No, she shouldn't be able to— It should have lasted longer than—
Revan yanked her to her feet again, dragged her into the lift. The ride downward only lasted a couple seconds, Revan replacing her rifle's power cell as they went with all the smooth efficiency of a veteran soldier. The door swung open with a ping, and she started forward—
Only to duck back in, dragging Bastila around the edge, plasma flooding through the doors to hit the back wall of the lift, dozens of blaster shots incinerating the metal, she lifted an arm to shield her face from the rain of sparks. Over the cacophony, Bastila could barely hear Revan at all, despite standing right at her shoulder, barking an order.
A few seconds later, there was a quick series of low noises somewhere between a pop and a thud, and the rain of blasterfire cut off. Revan grabbed Bastila's free hand, moved her fingers to her belt at her back. "Quickly, hold on."
Revan charged out of the lift, the edge of the course under the platform, Bastila holding on and struggling just to not fall over. There had been a crowd of armed beings down here, looked to be dozens, but someone had thrown down a rain of concussion grenades, they were all knocked from their feet, dazed, drunkenly grasping for their weapons. Revan picked through the field of bodies, occasionally firing a shot into one moving too quickly.
Before long she was turning, leading Bastila down into a garage of some kind, judging by the sharp smell of plastic and hydraulics. The noise of blasterfire was even thicker in the enclosed space, heavy on the air — the battle reached down here too. Instead of trying to force their way through, Revan pulled her into a dingy little side room. Might have been a guard station a few hundred years ago, but now it was filled with discarded speeder parts in a puddle of noxious fluids, the fumes were eye-watering. Bastila ducked as close to the door as possible, covering her nose and trying to hold her breath.
Revan was talking into her wrist again, giving orders to her unseen companions. "This is Pads, package secured at launch, green. Twin Hunt, break now, pick up Scope. Heavy, your call. Red, you up?"
"I do hope you have some plan to get us out of—"
Most of her attention on a datapad strapped to her forearm, Revan only cut her the shortest, most disdainful glance before talking into her com again. "Launch in fifteen. See you at home." Revan dropped her hand, turned a look on her. A familiar look, the same one Hayal had given her half the time on the Spire, an offended, condescending sort of glare. "I'd think someone getting rescued should be a little more grateful. I have no obligation to be here, you know."
Bastila had absolutely no idea what to say to that. Instead she just glared back.
She'd been struggling to find something to say in her own defense for a few seconds when Revan grabbed at her again, yanking Bastila in her wake out of the little room. They stepped out into the gaping entrance of the garage even as an empty speeder pulled up, coasting to a stop right in front of them. Revan practically threw Bastila into the back seat — her elbow hit the edge of a seat rather hard, her hand going numb and tingling — then jumped in behind the controls. A high electric whine ringing in Bastila's ears as the repulsors cycled up, Revan disentangled herself from the strap of her rifle, tossed it carelessly back in Bastila's direction. "Fire at anyone following us. Try not to hit Asyr, she'll be on a red and black swoop."
"You can't expect me to shoot with any real accuracy with this thing still—" The airspeeder jumped forward, driving Bastila back into her seat, forcing the air from her lungs. They shot through the arena in the space of a second or two, the firefight nothing but a colorful blur below them. With a twitch that pitched Bastila onto her side, they dove into the maze of the lower city, craggy forms of permacrete and durasteel whipping past to either side faster than she could really make out.
Revan risked a quick glance back at her, lips curled in a little smirk. "Oh, and you might want to hold onto something."
The airspeeder rolled nearly ninety degrees, for a heart-stopping moment Bastila was sure she was about to topple out into the open air — which was ridiculous, all but the simplest speeders had safety features to prevent that sort of thing — but the force of the turn, arcing around a corner into another valley, pressed her into her seat hard enough there was no real danger of that. Over the next minutes Revan carved a meandering path through the maze of monolithic obstacles, blasting around towers and through gaps in concourses and catwalks at absolutely terrifying speed.
They'd gone some distance, slowly climbing their way toward the surface, when Bastila heard a heavier whine of higher-power repulsors coming from behind. Her fingers tight on the foreign rifle, she turned in her seat, tracking the swoop bike coming up on their right. She'd been an instant away from firing when Revan's earlier warning finally registered. "Is that Lar'sym?"
Slowing their dangerous flight somewhat, Revan fiddled with the console for a moment. "Asyr. We get away clean?"
The Bothan's voice hissed from the speakers built into the speeder, crackling only slightly with distortion. "A couple speeders tried to follow you, but they weren't a problem."
Bastila was sure they weren't. Between an experienced Republic starfighter pilot originally trained by the Bothan military and a few random gangsters, she didn't think there was any doubt which would come out alive.
"Ah, well, good then." Revan sounded rather surprised by the lack of pursuit — given the chaos it'd sounded like they were leaving behind them, Bastila would have been shocked if they'd managed to muster much at all. "I have Shan, we're on our way home. Everyone report."
The first voice to respond was high and thin, a girl, hardly more than a child. "We're good. Zee took a couple grazes, but they aren't nothing, he'll be fine."
"We managed to get away clean, I'm told we'll be at our speeder in five."
Bastila recognized the voice instantly. A sense of relief stole over her, a smile pulling at her lips. "Onasi? Was that Carth Onasi?"
Her voice dripping sarcasm, Revan said, "Sounds like you have a fan, Flyboy. The Jedi's wetting herself over here."
The glare she sent the back of Revan's head might have a little less heat to it than she would have liked, but she couldn't really help it. A pessimistic voice at the back of her head had been certain this "rescue" was merely taking her out of one hopeless situation and putting her into another. Because, Revan wasn't wrong: she had no particular obligation to be here. Bastila couldn't trust her to help her get back to the Republic. She wasn't certain she could trust her not to shoot her in the back.
(She could kill her. Right now. At this range, she wasn't looking, she could shoot her in the back of the head, it'd be over in a blink, she couldn't—)
Ordinarily, any captain from Starfighter Command might have been some reassurance, but she'd still had doubt. Lar'sym was a good officer, of course, but she was Bothan. The Bothans were allied with the Republic, but they weren't truly part of it — as far as they were concerned, their first and last duty was to their own people, and Bastila didn't know Lar'sym enough to know if she had any personal loyalty. If Lar'sym thought siding with Revan, even if she decided to hand Bastila over to the Sith, was better for the Bothans in the long run, Bastila couldn't predict which way she would go. Especially since Lar'sym seemed to be following Revan's lead, no, she couldn't count on her.
It was a well-kept secret in the Republic that the Bothans had nearly signed a formal treaty with the Sith very early in the war. So far, they'd managed to keep it limited to certain intelligence officers, command staff, and Jedi. There was no telling what the political fallout would be if the media got wind of that.
But Onasi? Onasi she trusted. They didn't get along very well — honestly, Bastila had trouble talking to most everyone outside the Order she'd ever met — but they mostly saw eye-to-eye on principle. If Onasi were the one running the show, she might just get off Taris alive.
Bastila checked back into the conversation in time to catch an unfamiliar voice, low and gruff. "—hell of a fight, back there. Almost feel bad for checking out early."
A grin on her voice, Revan said, "I promise I'll call you next time I plan on starting something."
"Actually, I might have a proposition of my own for you. Keep the second half of my payment, and we'll call it trading favors. I'll find you after I'm done washing the blood out."
"Right, then. Ret'urche vi, ni burcha."
"Koyachi."
Silence fell over the line, but only for the moment. Onasi said, sounding more amused than uneasy, "Am I the only one who finds Cina and the Mando's flirting a little creepy?"
Bastila jumped — Mandalorian? They had a Mandalorian working with them? Had they gone completely insane?
Lar'sym opened the channel early, a few seconds filled only with the low chuffing of alien laughter. "If you think that's bad, never watch one of our romantic comedies. I suspect they aren't quite fit for human consumption."
"Ah, I've only seen Hjisthe aan shorak and Cakhine rrokul, but I thought they were pretty good." Somehow, Bastila wasn't at all surprised to learn that Revan spoke Bothan, and had apparently watched Bothan holos in her spare time.
"You don't count as human, hjanethe."
"Aw, hjAsythe, I'm touched."
"Yeah, I'm with the Bothan on this one. You two flirting is somehow even creepier."
"Green is a bad color on you, Flyboy."
"I thought you said orange was my bad color."
"No no, see, you have no good colors."
Bastila sat back listening to the three banter on, and on. Luckily, no one was paying any particular attention to her, because she doubted she could very effectively keep the scowl from her face.
Somehow she just knew this was a bad sign.
Cina was pretty sure there was something somewhere in the Jedi Code against taking inordinately long showers. Granted, Cianen had only perused the thing out of academic curiosity, but she had the feeling this sort of indulgence was something the Jedi would have a problem with. Though, Jedi "asceticism" was a huge fucking joke, that wasn't really the point.
She was really just hoping Shan would get out here so she could get out of this awkward conversation.
"I understand, Zaalbar, I really do." The approximation of the young Wookiee's name still sounded offensively wrong to her ears — she'd taken her cue on how to pronounce it from Mission, but it was radically different from the proper Shyriiwook. She felt uncomfortable every time she said it. "And I'm not saying I don't appreciate all you, and Mission, have done for us. It's just a little...complicated."
Zaalbar shot her what she (somehow) recognized as a flat, unamused look, fingers absently clicking against the surface of the table. "I'm afraid I can't see what should be so complicated. Our debt is not yet paid."
"You were a good deal of help down there, Zaalbar." At least, she assumed he had been. Distracted getting Shan to the garage alive, she hadn't really been paying that much attention to the rest of the battle. It must have gone according to plan. What with them not being dead.
"My contribution was relatively small, all things considered. In any case, even were I uniquely responsible for your surviving that encounter, it would not cancel our debt. The hunt was entirely your idea. If you willingly put the two of us in potential danger, it does not count."
Cina winced — she'd known that, of course. Perhaps she'd simply been hoping Zaalbar wouldn't. Which was rather silly, when she thought about it, since he was the actual Wookiee here. Seriously, why did she know so much about their traditions? That got stranger and stranger the more she thought about it.
"I don't see what the big deal is either." Mission was sitting in a spot next to Zaalbar, tinkering with the neural disruptor half-disassembled across the table in front of her. It'd only taken a few short minutes for Mission to figure out how to get it off Shan. Of course, Mission being Mission, she'd been playing with it ever since. "I mean, do you want to get rid of us that much? We'll just keep hanging around, the debt'll get paid eventually."
"It's really not that simple."
"Yeah, why not, though?"
Carth chose that moment to jump in. Smiling over his cup of caf, looking a little too pleased with himself, he said, "We're not staying on Taris, kid."
"Don't call me—"
"Now that we have Bastila, we're getting off this rock as soon as we possibly can. We're simply not going to be here for Zaalbar to pay off this debt of his."
For a couple seconds, the two of them just stared at Carth, eye wide and slowly blinking. Then they turned to each other, hands flicking in turn in what Cina instantly recognized as RSL. Cina understood sign, of course, but this was obviously meant to be a private conversation. She leaned in toward Carth, turning away from the silent discussion across the table. "Could you cut it out with the 'kid' stuff?" she whispered. "She really hates it."
His brow lowered in a light frown. "She's what, fourteen? I don't know how they do things on Shelkonwa, but..." He sounded almost disappointed, as though he'd expected better moral judgement from her.
Which was just so bloody hypocritical she couldn't help glaring at him a bit. "Carth, she's literally killed people for us." He winced at that, one hand rising to rub at his cheek. "She may be young, but she's not a kid. Taris never allowed her to be. So cut it out. Okay?"
He didn't say anything, eyes unfocused and expression stricken, his thoughts clearly on something else. But he did nod, so she considered that an issue settled.
Mission and Zaalbar were still signing at each other, Cina quite consciously looking anywhere but in their direction, when the bathroom door finally opened. A glance over her shoulder and there Shan was, looking far more like herself. The clothes were wrong, of course, simple trousers and tunic in muted colors Cina had picked up for her in head of time. She'd guessed Shan's size from memory, and she'd gotten pretty close — the trousers were a bit tight around her hips, but she'd clearly been able to get them on, so close enough.
It was more in how she held herself than anything. That quintessentially Jedi sort of bearing, self-assurance so overwhelming it edged more than a little into arrogance, a subtle sense of superiority in her eyes, as though looking down her nose at they silly, Force-blind children. There were reasons ordinary people didn't like Jedi so much, just being in a room with one could be annoying sometimes.
Cina frowned — wait, she'd decided just yesterday she must have been a Jedi before the mind-wipe. She... She hadn't been anything like Shan, or most of the other Jedi she'd met. Had she? She somehow couldn't imagine herself being so... She didn't know what word she was looking for. It just felt wrong somehow, Shan-ifying herself in her head.
Shan was naturally irritating, but Cina should try to be nice anyway. She had just gone through what had to have been a fairly traumatic experience. "There's food in the oven, and there should still be some caf left."
"I don't drink caf." Amazing, how much smug superiority one person could cram into a statement so short and mundane.
Cina did try to keep the annoyance off her face. She didn't think she did very well, but she did try. "Fine, then, drink the bottled water — I wouldn't touch the tap, if I were you."
There was a short moment, barely a flinch, something else breaking through Shan's detached Jedi mask. Something fragile, something vulnerable, something...frightened. But then it was gone, so quickly it might not have been there at all.
But it had been, Cina had seen it. She knew, quite suddenly, that whatever the Jedi had done to her Shan was in the know. Shan knew who Cina used to be.
She knew, and she was afraid of her.
Shite, now she had to try even harder to be nice...
"Right, we're going with you then."
Cina blinked, tore her eyes away from Bastila back to Mission. The girl was grinning again, that way she had where she was practically glowing, wide enough Cina caught the tips of pointed teeth. (She must have picked that up from humans, Twi'leks didn't natively show their teeth in non-threatening expressions.) "I'm sorry, what?"
"We're going with you, when you leave the planet. Me and Zee."
"You've got to be kidding me," Carth groaned, one hand coming up to rub at his forehead. For her part, Asyr looked equally exasperated, though she'd apparently decided it wasn't her business, focusing the bulk of her attention on her datapad.
For a long moment, Cina sat back, mostly ignoring the increasing volume of the argument growing between Mission and Carth. (It mostly seemed to consist of childish insults, she wasn't missing anything.) That proposition was...complicated. In an ordinary situation, she might have gone along with it, if for no other reason because she'd be able to get the both of them — who were, as much as they would argue the point, essentially children — out of what were very unstable, exploitative living conditions. Maybe fly back to Alderaan and sponsor them for refugee status, that sounded like a brilliant idea.
But...well, Cianen Hayal wasn't real. She had no idea what would happen if she tried to go back to the University. Cianen did exist legally, of course — she probably could sponsor them anyway, or just outright adopt them, that would skip all the hoops in the process and give them instant Alderaanian citizenship — but there wasn't really a life waiting for her back in Aldera.
The problem was, she had no idea what was going to happen after Taris. She definitely had to talk to Shan about what was going on, but she had a feeling the Jedi would demand...something from her, she couldn't guess what at the moment. Getting off Taris wouldn't be the end of it, was the point.
She had absolutely no idea what she might be dragging them into. It was complicated.
"You will not be coming with us."
Cina focused back on her surroundings to find Mission glaring at Shan, the expression almost impressively toxic, considering how sweet and cheerful the girl usually was. "Hey, do I go sticking my nose in your business?"
Her voice forced flat and casual, as though defining fundamental terminology in an introductory syntax course full of hungover first-year undergrads, Cina said, "Sticking their noses into other people's business is roughly ninety-five percent of everything Jedi do with their time."
Most of the rest of the table looked less than impressed with her little joke, but Mission broke into scandalised giggles, so she'd define that one a success.
Shan seemed to be trying to pretend she hadn't heard Cina at all. But she didn't miss the slight scrunching of her nose, the narrowing of her eyes, as though she could smell something awful but was trying to not draw attention to it. "I don't know how you've handled this operation in my absence," she said, directed more to Carth than anyone, "but the Republic does not condone pressing into service civilians and children or the hiring of Mandalorian mercenaries."
Astoundingly, Mission didn't say anything to that, her jaw working in silence, face caught somewhere between offense and confusion — if Cina had to guess, she couldn't decide which part she wanted to yell at Shan about first.
Cina was equally flabbergasted, Asyr ended up getting to it first. Not even deigning to lift her eyes from whatever she was reading, she grumbled, "I hope you realize, Master Jedi, that without the assistance of civilian children and Mandalorian mercenaries we would have been hard-pressed to get anywhere near you. Perhaps you would rather not have been rescued, our mistake."
In a transparent attempt to hide her irritation, Shan forced out a haughty scoff. "You call that a rescue?"
"Given the resources available to us, I can't imagine anyone could have done much better." Cina shot Carth a quick look. Was he actually defending her? That was weird, he'd spent the whole bloody time they've been on this planet complaining, saying she was— "Granted, I can't help but feel she's completely insane half the time, but it's always worked out in the end." Ah, there it was.
"If that chaos is the best you can envis..." Shan's voice slowly trailed off. Eyes flicking to Cina, slow and dead, "She... Hayal was in command."
Cina shrugged. "I don't know if I'd call it that, but I've been the one coming up with all the ideas, yeah. Turns out the Republic military doesn't teach its people basic problem solving."
Chuckling under his breath, Carth said, "Cina, there is nothing 'basic' about your problem solving."
"It worked, didn't it?"
"I'm just saying, starting a gang war to give you cover for a rescue mission isn't what I would call 'basic'. You keep things interesting, I'll give you that, but there is nothing linear about however you thought up of that."
She shrugged — that was just basic logic. They hadn't the numbers to fight them all outright, and the lower city had essentially already been in the middle of a low-key turf war for years. The gangs hadn't mixed at their makeshift arena, they'd all kept to their own. The obvious solution was to place her people here and there in the middle of as many of the gangs as she could, and have each of them fire all at once into one of their neighbors; in the heat of the moment, they would all think they were being attacked by a rival gang, and respond accordingly. Once they'd had the fight started, they'd just had to defend themselves and stay out of the fucking way.
After all, the rank and file members of these gangs cared far more about their own feuds than they did holding on to a prize of dubious value only one of them would get to keep. The math was quite simple, really.
But defending her methods wasn't really her priority at the moment. Shan had reacted to the news that she was in charge very...well, strangely. She was staring at Cina, her eyes wide, lips slightly parted, looking almost... It was very subtle, Cina couldn't be entirely sure she was seeing what she thought she was seeing. But, if she had to put a word to it, something about the idea left Shan quietly horrified.
After a few moments, choking back a gulp of water and shifting in her seat, the Jedi managed to collect herself. "Regardless, I am the commanding officer of this mission, and—"
"You ain't the commanding nothing of this Mission."
Cina didn't quite manage to suffocate a laugh. Clearly, her punning had been a terrible influence.
"You're a prissy, ungrateful little, sleemo, you know that? And I thought Jedi were supposed to be nice."
"You don't know what you're talking about, child. I—
"Really, you should be thanking Cina, you owe her your stupid life. She's not Republic, she didn't have to be down there saving your selfish ass—"
She was trying to hide it, but by the tension in her jaw and her shoulders Shan was starting to get seriously annoyed. "Your presence here is no longer necessary. I don't know how Hayal managed to coerce you into—"
"Coerce!" Mission, on the other hand, was doing absolutely nothing to hide her own anger. She'd even jumped up to her feet, her chair clattering down to the floor behind her, fists clenched at her side and lekku starting to darken with a flush. Even Zaalbar looked like he was getting fed up with the Jedi, fur along his shoulders rising and dark eyes twinkling with silent rage. "Listen, you spice-mad black-blooded scum-sucking slag," she snarled in Huttese, then, switching back to Basic, "we weren't coerced into nothing! We volunteered to help Cina, and without me she never would have even found you, me and Cina are the only reason you're not stuck with Qraknee being raped to death right now, so shut your fucking—!"
"Mission." Miraculously, the girl cut off at the sound of her name, eyes flicking over to Cina, looking almost sheepish. "I need to talk to you two about something, but first we need to finish up here. Why don't you both go wait in my room. Second door on the right," she said, pointing over to the hall leading further into the apartment.
After another short moment of glaring at the Jedi, the pair shuffled off, muttering to each other low enough Cina couldn't pick it out. Fingers folded behind his head, Carth let out a low whistle. "That kid's a pain the ass sometimes, but I gotta admit she's got spunk."
Asyr snorted. "Well, you're not wrong."
And they didn't even speak Huttese. "Anyway, we were saying..." Cina turned to Shan; she was staring after Mission, her face blank, though an emptier sort of blankness than she usually went for. Less self-righteous, more shaken. "You want to be in charge? Go right ahead, Master Jedi, be my guest. So, how do you intend to get us off-planet?"
Shan just stared at her for a moment, blinking. "Ah, we will need a ship, of course."
"That shouldn't be a problem," Asyr said, her tone deceptively light. (Cina would bet Asyr had spotted the same dilemma she had.) "I'm certain we could steal a suitable one without too much difficulty."
Astoundingly, Shan looked uncomfortable with the thought of jacking themselves proper transportation, shifting awkwardly in her seat. Bloody Jedi, honestly, did she want to be captured and tortured? "I suppose. Once we're up—"
"The Sith blockade will reduce us to plasma before we even get out of atmo."
Shan snapped back to her — the shocked offense on her face, Cina had to bite her lip to keep herself from bursting into laughter. "I assumed we would simply run the blockade..."
"In a ship large enough to carry all of us?" Asyr shook her head, the fur on her face softly shivering with amusement. "I could maybe make a break for hyperspace in a one-person snubfighter, but in a larger craft we'll be dust before we get anywhere close."
Wincing, Carth said, "Yeah, I'm afraid I have to agree with Lar'sym. There's no way we're flying out of here. Best chance I see, we just have to lie low until the blockade's over."
Cina shook her head. "No good. If Mission could identify Shan through the net, you can be sure the Sith know she's here somewhere. She's probably the only reason they haven't lifted the blockade already. They'll keep the planet on lockdown until they have her."
"The planet isn't completely quarantined. They would still have their own people moving up and down." Shan glanced between the three of them, pretending as though she weren't looking for confirmation. "Perhaps if we stole one of their transports—"
"They'd report it quicker than we can kill the whole crew."
"Besides, their landing craft won't be hyperdrive-equipped. It won't get us out of the system."
Shan's lip curled for a moment with annoyance before once again vanishing behind a curtain of Jedi placidity. "Could we remove their transponder and plant it in a ship of our choosing?"
Asyr actually considered that one for a second, her datapad drooping a bit and her eyes narrowing. "Well, just the transponder wouldn't be enough. They would query the navcomputer, so you'd need to take that too. Whatever ship you transplanted it to would have to have systems compatible with that particular model, and since their landing craft aren't intended for hyperspace travel..." She shrugged. "That's possible, I suppose. But you'd need to rewire the ship to support two parallel computer systems, one linked into the coms and the other the primaries. That'd take a week at least — longer, since we don't have a professional tech on hand."
"Which is far too long, of course," Cina said. "Assuming the crew don't report it immediately, you have a window of maybe a couple hours before they flag the I.D. Even just taking the transponder, you might not have long enough to wire it in."
"Not to mention Imperial military systems are all encrypted. The rest of the ship's systems will crash immediately when you try to use it."
Shan was going oddly pale, her fingers tapping at the table. "Maybe if we just copy the recognition codes onto a different ship..."
Rolling her eyes, Cina said, "Yeah, nice try, but no. We could strip them from an Imperial ship but, again, that'll be reported long before we're done. Your best bet would be to register a new I.D., but the only place on-planet you could possibly do that is their planetary command centre, right above our heads. Even assuming we had the numbers to break in and hold the place long enough to get what we need — which we really, really don't — they would definitely notice that. We'd end up pinned under enough firepower to incinerate the whole tower by the time we're finished."
What she didn't mention was that they did have a slicer on hand who might be able to pull off what they needed without even stepping foot in the building. Mission had said she had experience playing with Imperial code, after all. But Shan didn't even want Mission involved, Cina wasn't going to bring her up. At least not until after Shan admitted she had no bloody clue what she was doing.
Seriously, Cina had a better understanding of the problem and she couldn't even remember learning all this shite.
"Any other brilliant ideas, Commander?" There might have been more than a hint of sarcasm on Cina's voice saying the title.
Shan did seem to be giving up already. She'd leaned forward, a hand against her forehead propping her up. She let out a long, exhausted sigh, her voice peculiarly unsteady. If Cina didn't know better, she would almost suspect Shan was having feelings, but this was a Jedi she was talking about, so she must be mistaken.
Though, being the only nice person in the room, Carth didn't let her wallow very long. "This is why you had advisors with you on the task force, Bastila. There's no shame admitting you don't know something. Nobody expects any Jedi to know these things."
Cina smirked. "I don't know, I can think of a few exceptions. Off the top of my head, oh, Revan, maybe?" Onasi and Shan both shot her absolutely venomous glares, she shrugged back. "I'm right and you know it. It's not my fault you have the arrogance to think you can command a fleet without educating yourself on basic military practices first."
"Hjanethe, you are not helping."
"Right, sorry. I'll be nice." She wasn't sorry at all, of course, but Shan had clearly gotten the message by now. She knew to stop kicking someone when they're down.
"Finally, what was taking you so—" Mission cut off, her eyes bulging almost comically wide. "Ah, hi, Canderous. What's up?"
Waving Kandosa in behind her, Cina said, "Canderous has a plan to get us all off-planet. I was wondering if you could help us work out the kinks."
Kandosa gave Mission, sitting cross-legged on Cina's borrowed bed, a long, evaluating stare. The girl shifted under the Mandoade's gaze, which she couldn't really blame her for — Kandosa had quite a stare, and he was a bloody intimidating man to begin with. Tall and broad-shouldered, muscular but compact, bare arms littered with scars from blades and blasters and blotches that looked curiously like the results of a caustic chemical spill, he certainly looked like the kind of bloke who would tear your throat out as soon as blink.
But his face, no matter how rigid his expression and merciless his eyes, was missing even the slightest hint of malice. "You're Scope? The slicer?" Kandosa's voice was low and gruff, though without the note of doubt someone else might have had.
"Oh, yeah." Mission was frowning to herself, probably realised just that second she and Kandosa had never actually met face-to-face before. "Um, what kinks?"
Turning to Cina and switching to Mandoa, Kandosa muttered, "She sounded young, but I didn't think she was this young."
Cina shrugged. "I trust her."
His only response to that was a slow, solemn nod. "Alright, ad'ika. I've taken a liking to Davik's ship. Wanna help me steal it?"
Mission's eyes went wide again, her mouth dropping open. Even Zaalbar had dropped the bit of machinery he was tinkering with — he did always seem to be doing that — staring at Kandosa with an equally blank expression. After some long silent seconds, her eyes slowly drifted over to Cina. "Is this for real? We're gonna steal Davik Kang's ship? Seriously?"
"That's the plan." Cina's lips tilted into a smirk. "You in?"
"Fuck yes, I'm in!" Mission jumped, her hand snapping up to cover her mouth. "Stang," she muttered, the word coming out rather muffled. She reached into a pocket, pulled out a credit chit, flicked it over toward Zaalbar. He smoothly caught it, slipped it into a pouch on his belt without a word.
Cina had to bite the inside of her lip to keep the smile off her face.
"I can get us to the ship no problem," Kandosa was saying, seemingly unaffected by the moment of adorableness. (But, Mandoade.) "What I can't do is get the recognition codes to get us through the blockade. I was hoping you could help with that."
Her face sinking into a frown, Mission leaned back a bit to stare up at the ceiling, fingers of one hand tapping idly at her lip. "I mean...maybe? I'd need to register new codes, right?"
Cina nodded. "That would be safest, yes."
"Sure, I should be able to do that. I've already cracked most of the Imp encrypts, it shouldn't take more than a half hour or so. Getting at 'em in the first place will be the problem. I'd need into the central system, there's no access from the outside."
"Their computers are on a wireless network." Kandosa seemed strangely certain of that...
"Yeah, but it's not on the net. I mean, their internal network is isolated from the holonet, physically, you can't slice in. And the building is shielded and everything. Maybe we can cut in somewhere near the bottom, but they'd have to be pretty stupid to not notice that."
"Wait." The two of them turned to look at her, Kandosa with a single dark eyebrow expectantly raised. (The one with the claw marks cut through it, actually, hard not to notice.) "Kandosa, can you get inside the building?"
His head tilted a little. "Davik has an arrangement with the locals. I sometimes act as an intermediary with certain contacts. Yes, I can get in the building, but I think bringing Scope in with me might raise a few eyebrows."
"Do you carry a com?"
"Oh!" An ecstatic grin spreading across her face, Mission was bouncing a little in excitement, the old bed creaking a little with each dip. "You got one? Lemme see it." With a quick look at Cina, a tolerant smile twitching at his lips, he unclipped a plain, innocuous-looking com from his belt, handed it over. Mission fiddled with the thing for a little bit, occasionally tapping at the pad strapped to her wrist. "Ah ha, perfect. You mind if I keep this for, ah, an hour and a half, maybe? Not enough memory to download all the files we'll need. It'll still work when I'm done."
"Hold up a sec." Mission blinked up at Kandosa, her fingers defensively tightening around the com. "I thought you said the building was shielded. You can't skip across my com to do your slicing if the signal's blocked."
"No, see, the net signal is blocked, coms get through just fine. They have to, so they can talk to all their little Sith all over the planet."
"Then why do you need to download the files to the com? Couldn't you just send them out to you?"
"Well," Mission muttered, shuffling a little, "ah, I don't need to. But they should be monitoring the com traffic coming in and out. Not actively listening, but tracking the bandwidth and stuff. Slicing in probably won't be noticed, but broadcasting that much data? If I were the one designing their system, I would have that trip an alarm automatically. Now, I don't know if it will, but, I thought, just in case."
"Just in case," Kandosa agreed, with another slow nod. "Do what you need, but you'll owe me a new one if you break it."
"Not gonna break it. But sure."
Kandosa gave the girl another serious nod. Then, so smoothly one would think he wasn't changing the subject at all, he turned to Cina. "Javyar's?"
She felt her eyebrows wander up her forehead. Was he really suggesting they go to the cantina just for the hell of it? That seemed oddly...un-Mandoa. They generally didn't do things just for the hell of it. But she shrugged her confusion off. "Sure. I just need a minute with these two quick, and I'll be down."
With a last nod, Kandosa turned on his heel and walked out of the room. Man of few words, this one. (But, Mandoade.)
Apparently, Mission had checked out of the conversation as soon as she had permission to tinker with Kandosa's com. She already had a bundle of tiny little electronics tools spread out across the bed — must have had them hidden away somewhere, Cina hadn't seen her reach for them — half of the com's casing already removed to reveal the tangled innards. Honestly, she couldn't even pretend to be surprised. Mission was an excitable kid, couldn't expect her to hold it in when she had a new toy to play with.
At least Zaalbar was paying attention. But then, he was always paying attention.
"We need to talk, about you two coming with us."
Mission twitched, wide eyes jumping up to hers. "Oh! Yeah, right." She placed the partially-disassembled com on the surface of the bed, every movement slow and gentle. "But, there's really not anything to talk about. We're coming with." It was said with confident assertion, yet with a hint of confrontation, as though at once stating a fundamental fact of the universe and a low you got a problem with that?
Cina had to bite the inside of her lip to keep herself from smiling again. This girl was just so adorable sometimes. (Twi'lek, yes, she was blaming it on that, Twi'leks were unfairly adorable in general.) "Not particularly, no." Mission and Zaalbar were far better company than Carth and Shan, at least. "I simply want to make sure what you're getting into. I have no idea if or when I'll ever be getting back to Taris. If you stick with me, it could months, years before you ever have the chance to come back."
"That's fine." Shrugging to herself a little Mission said, "It's not like either of us really have anything here worth sticking around for, you know? Zaalbar, he just got here a few years ago, and he really hardly even talks to anyone besides me. And, well, I used to have a brother here, but he ran off, I don't even know which planet he's on these days. Or if he's even still alive. I got a few friends with the Beks, yeah, but no one I'll be too sorry to miss even if I never come back.
"Um, honestly," she said, eyes sheepishly darting away, "me and Zee have been looking for a good opportunity to get off-world for a while now. That's what I wanted the credits from the sabaac game for in the first place, we've been saving up to buy a place on some nice backwater world, or our own ship maybe. Even without Zee's lifedebt going on, we might have tried to weasel our way along."
Shooting the back of Mission's head a surly look, Zaalbar grumbled, "I do not weasel."
Mission rolled her eyes. "Alright, fine, I would try to weasel our way along. Just, don't get all guilty about dragging us along, yeah? Timing could be better, but we want to come. Give me a couple days to clone our accounts and my library where I can get at it off-world, and we're good."
Thinking ahead to this conversation, Cina had expected...she didn't know, for there to be at least some reluctance on Mission's part to leave everything and everyone (except Zaalbar) she knew behind. It was just a normal person reaction to this sort of situation, one would think.
She remembered, when Cianen had left Shelkonwa for the University, it'd been in a very conflicted state of mind. There hadn't been a whole lot for her on Shelkonwa — she hadn't belonged there, she'd always been too...too bookish, too contrary, her hometown had just been too small for her. The whole damn planet had just been too small for her. And it wasn't a whole lot of people who landed a scholarship at the home campus in Aldera, as they were one of the premier educational institutions in the entire sodding galaxy and could afford to be extremely selective. But on the other hand, she had lived there her whole life, it was everything she'd ever known, she'd only seen Aldera in holos before, read about it in books. And, as much as they might fight, she did love her family...
...was what she remembered thinking, but now that she thought back on it the feeling wasn't really there. She remembered Cianen's parents, her siblings and cousins, of course she remembered them, it hadn't even been that long since she'd seen them. (She did at least try to get back for the holidays.) But, she remembered their faces, she remembered everything, and she...
She felt nothing.
Because the memories were empty, they weren't real. Cianen didn't exist, her family didn't exist. The person she'd once been did have family of some kind out there somewhere, she knew that — a few things she'd thought or said here or there certainly hinted at that. But she hardly remembered anything about them. She'd come up with the name of a single cousin, she was pretty sure she had at least one brother, she vaguely remembered a rough outline of what her father might have looked like. That was all she had.
She might not remember what her parents looked like, or anything about them at all, no more than a few brief flashes of her entire childhood, but feelings came through a little better. It was quite clear to her that she had not been on good terms with her family. She couldn't remember what that had been about, but...
Actually, come to think of it, she might have a theory. She'd guessed by now that she'd almost certainly been a Jedi. From the very few foggy memories she had, she suspected her parents had had absolutely no idea what to do about her and her magic powers. Perhaps she'd been sent to the Jedi against her will, and she'd never forgiven them for it.
Which did seem a little silly to her. She meant, with how old she was that had to have been, what, twenty years ago? more? To still be worked up over it seemed a bit...petty.
Anyway, before she'd gotten distracted, the point had been that she would have expected Mission's willingness to leave Taris behind to come as a surprise to her, to feel...she didn't know, pity, maybe. But, in the moment, it was just... Well, it was just what it was.
She understood perfectly, such a perspective felt natural to her, and that realisation was rather confusing. Just what she been like, before the Jedi fucked with her head?
With a sense of sinking dread, Cina abruptly remembered there was someone on hand who might actually be able to tell her. About who she had been, about everything. But that meant she had to have a personal conversation with Bastila bloody Shan.
Son of a bitch. That was just perfect.
Kandosa — Canderous's name in Mandoa. Will be used in sections narrated by Cina or Canderous himself.
Mir'osiksii — This is pieced together from canon Mandoa. Mir'osik translates to "shit for brains"; sii, from what I can tell, seems to be some sort of adjective/attributive suffix. Just using mir'osik to describe a noun instead of as a noun.
Chakaar — Insult, similar meaning to "scumbag"
[Kandosa, ken copaani sa-talganr. Ache naar ven parji, juaan ni sa tagar lise ast-kiramur. Jat?] — Constructed from canon Mandoa, though with a couple invented grammar things and slight changes to reflect Cina's rural accent. Means something like: "Canderous, please don't go starting a fight. At least until after the job is done, then as far as I'm concerned you two can kill each other. Okay?"
(The rest of the conversation) — Cand: "Of course, friend (what he calls Cina). I'll be as soft as sponge cake." Cina: "Liar." Cand: "Are you calling me a liar?" Cina: "That's exactly what I said. Is your helmet—"
Aruetii — outsider or enemy (i.e. non-Mandalorian)
Ad'ika — boy, girl, kid (affectionately)
Ret'urche vi — Standard farewell, slight spelling alteration to reflect Cina's accent.
Koyachi — Another set phrase, used by Canderous here as a more casual sort of farewell. Canon spelling changed for reasons.
Nerds want explanation on Mandoa spelling changes? I can so do that. First of all, the use of "y" in canon Mandoa is very European, with the baggage inherited from the complex linguistic history of the continent. The whole vowel-or-a-consonant thing. I've reanalyzed the "y" as either a vowel (in these contexts changed to "i"), a consonant, or a modifier on an adjacent consonant (i.e. "cy" becomes "ch").
Also, apostrophes. Canon Mandoa puts apostrophes at the intersection of any two morphemes (excluding plurals and certain inflections). I only write them when they're phonologically meaningful. As an example, Mandoa doesn't need one because the language doesn't allow diphthongs, so the vowels would be pronounced distinctly anyway. But in mir'osik, the apostrophe is necessary to mark the syllable break (mir-o-sik, not mi-ro-sik). In cases like koyachi, I disagree with the convention set by the original creator. Commands are formed be sticking "ke-" at the beginning of a verb, the "e" dropping if the vowel starts with a vowel. I thought it made more sense to interpret the "e" as epenthetic, in which case I think it's just kinda silly to have that apostrophe there.
Yes, much nerd, I know.
Cina and Bastila are both going to absolutely hate that conversation.
Might be a little while until the next chapter comes out. I've been feeling completely horrible lately, which means little ability to do pretty much anything. Seems to be brain-related specifically, so writing in particular is fucked.
Whenever I get to it, though, last Taris chapter. Woo.
(Because fuck Taris.)