The Way of a Siluan, Part II
Chapter 27: Blood and Water
14 BBY 0 months 10 days
Ry Kyver could not, Vader decided, have possibly acquired the power prophesied by the Emperor. If she had, why abandon her starship on a mere outpost like Takodana? And besides, he had never believed that any such acquisition of power was possible in the first place. Strength of Force ability was something one was born with, like him, or not. One could train what one had, but that was gradual. There was no magic route to new power.
There were in his mind, therefore, two possibilities. One was that his original plan had worked. The veiled threats he made to her back on Ukio had sufficiently frightened her that, being convinced of her inability to do what the Emperor expected of her, she had run away. Or, she had – or believed she had – accomplished the death of "that One" and yet failed to acquire any new power. Again, in her shame she would refuse to face the Emperor. He would be better able to guess which when he examined the computer on board her starship, which an informant reported was abandoned in the dock near the old cantina on Takodana.
Vader did not expect to find Ry Kyver herself on board. One informant had found her signature black denim jacket stuffed behind a toilet in the women's washroom and another had seen someone who might match her description, but with hacked-off hair, leaving the cantina with a Mandalorian smuggler by the name of Wakeh Gunma. Vader's agents would be on the watch for the Mandalorian, but in the meantime, it was one more reason to expect to find Ry's ship empty.
He did, however, find another sentient inside: an albino Zabrak, sitting there in a red tank top and gray gym shorts at the computer terminal behind the cockpit, with one hand holding a fat juicy sandwich in one hand and the other hand on the computer control board, staring at the small green text on the black output screen.
At the sharp clip of Vader's boots on the metallic floor, the Zabrak looked up, screamed and dropped her sandwich. Behind his mask, Vader gave a twisted smile. He was used to people being afraid of him. He liked it. But this Zabrak in the red tank top and gray gym shorts was taking it to an extreme. With one hand over her mouth and her little pink eyes all wide she was standing up and backing away from him, but there was nowhere to back up to. Her back hit a wall.
Vader reached out and pressed the button to lock the door behind him, then stood calm, grounded in the cycle of each breath, watching this useless Zabrak hyperventilate against the wall, arm raised to shield her face from blows he hadn't even lifted a hand to inflict.
"You are trespassing on Imperial property," he said.
"No, please no," she pleaded. "I'm a bounty hunter...I mean, not me, Tr...my boss is, I'm just helping her...it's an Imperial bounty."
Vader took a step towards her and drew his lightsabre. It zinged to life. The Zabrak shrieked.
"I can help you! I'll do it for free! Please, please...you want to find her, right? You want to find this Ry Kyver. I can help you. I know where she's headed. Look..." she pointed a pale and trembling finger at the computer monitor.
Vader strode up to the monitor, stepping over the wreck of her sandwich on the floor. There on the computer screen was a flight plan. Evidently, the Emperor's precious Ms. Kyver was planning to head to Marfa. Behind his mask, Vader raised an eyebrow. Marfa was just another stupid agricultural planet, almost as useless as his homeworld, Tatooine. But Vader questioned whether Ry Kyver was actually headed to Marfa now. His second hypothesis began to make more sense: she'd had some kind of plan for escape but abandoned it and her ship when she caught wind of the bounty hunters. He would have to find some way to spin this so that the Emperor would be persuaded to settle on bringing her back dead instead of alive, or to give up the useless project altogether so that Vader could focus on more important things. He hadn't told Palpatine, but there was a report of a Togruta that matched the description of his former Padawan, Ahsoka Tano, visiting a large space station known as the Wheel some months earlier. He would far rather be hunting her than this useless Ry Kyver. But to keep his master happy, and off his back, he had to show the Emperor that he had made an effort to find Ry Kyver first.
And so Vader gritted his teeth and leaned over the computer control board. The keys quickly yielded to his gloved hands. A few keystrokes would tell him what he'd actually come for: which planets she'd been to prior to Takodana, and at what time. That would give him some idea of what she was up to. As he did so, he noticed something unusual about the computer: all the hardware was there to require biometric log-in, preventing unauthorized access to the machine, yet somehow this random Zabrak had accessed Ry Kyver's personal files.
He toggled back to the flight plan, then looked at the Zabrak, who was standing with her back to him by the door now, alternately wringing her hands and pounding on the door and trying the controls, which obeyed his will but refused to yield to hers.
"You accessed this?" he asked, gesturing to the computer screen.
She turned around. "I'm sorry," she blabbered, "I thought it would help me find her, I didn't mean to do anything wrong..."
"How," he stressed sternly, "did you access this? The computer is clearly set up to require the owner's retina scan and fingerprint to access the contents of the hard-drive."
The Zabrak swallowed hard. "The files, the files with the information on her bounty, the electronic record of her biometrics was in there. I just rewired the sensor to accept electronic input from the disc instead of a direct read from the bioscanners. The rest was just regular hacking. I thought..."
Vader raised a hand to silence her. He let a few cycles of breath pass as he considered this. He might have a reputation for leaving a high body count, but whatever people might think he never killed for the sake of kill. He killed to wipe insubordination, unintelligence and incompetence out of the Empire, his Empire. This pink-eyed sandwich eater of a Zabrak might be an unusually spineless specimen of her species, but she was evidently neither unintelligent nor incompetent. The type of files he'd provided for the bounty hunters were often used to make droids capable of recognizing specific biological individuals. That was mere routine. But to re-route the same information to bypass a bioscanner, that took some creativity.
She may be of some use to me yet, he thought. It was occurring to him that if Ry Kyver really had left in a hurry, she might have files in the Imperial system that she'd forgotten to take with her. Not only information on the Imperial Agriculture Program, which would have some monetary value on otherwise useless agricultural planets such as Marfa, but also the midi-chlorian project. He made a mental note to look more carefully into what she had been doing with that.
The Zabrak was still uselessly trying to open the door. "There is no need for escape," Vader said archly. "You will be coming with me." With computer skills like that, she could indeed be quite useful at very little cost. He smiled. Such a good idea. And he wouldn't even have to do the work himself. He would assign this Zabrak to set up an alert: if Ry Kyver used any of her login credentials to access the Imperial network, he would be directly notified. So would the nearest Imperial military or police station.
"You ready?" Wakeh's sister Jubi called from the cockpit.
"Yeah," Wakeh said as she wrestled her muscled arms into the sleeves of her wetsuit.
Jubi looked out the cockpit door to where Ry and Wakeh were getting ready in the hold behind. "You don't look ready," she said.
Wakeh scowled at her, zipped up and pulled the hood of the wetsuit up over her head, struggling to adjust it around her face. "I'll be ready, just bring the ship down," she said. Jubi raised an eyebrow at her, but went back to the pilot's seat. Soon Ry could feel the slow descent of the starship, the soft impact as it touched down on the surface of the water, and then the sound of the waves against the hull, echoing in the empty hold below them.
Wakeh stuffed the last of her Mandalorian armour into the waterproof bag she was bringing and then sealed it shut. "What are you looking at?" She glared at Ry
"Nothing." Ry, who was already suited up and just sitting and waiting until it was time to put on her oxygen mask, looked down at the underwater flashlight clipped to her waist and twiddled with it.
Having grown up with no biological family whatsoever in the Jedi temple, Ry wasn't used to spending time with biological siblings and found it hard to believe at times that Wakeh and Jubi were really sisters. True, there were some superficial similarities between them: both were human and both wore blue and ivory Mandalorian armour. Both were middle-aged, but obviously very fit. Both had smooth, dark faces, not light brown like Ry but true blue-black, with flat wide noses and wide dark brown eyes and black hair tightly braided with interwoven threads of blue and gold. But the similarity ended there. Wakeh was a much taller woman, taller than Ry, with a big-boned, muscular frame, whereas Jubi was round and curvy, shorter than her sister and shorter than Ry too. And when it came to personality, the two were as different as battle droids and astromechs.
Ry wished like crazy that Jubi, not Wakeh was coming with her to break into the IMAg station. Wakeh was too eager, for Ry's taste, to take control. Jubi a softer type, more easily pushed around. Ry knew might need someone who was OK just doing as she was told if things went sideways and Ry needed to take control, her kind of control, of the situation later.
Not that things had gone so badly so far. When they approached the planet Arum and were questioned by the Planetary Guard at the atmospheric border, the borrowed fishing vessel and a bona fide fishing permit were enough to persuade the tired-sounding official that all they wanted was to catch a few mega-crabs, something no small number of fishers sought to do as the metre-wide creatures fetched a hefty price on the galaxy's more urban planets.
More importantly for Ry, Wakeh had (so far) swallowed hook, line and sinker Ry's half-true story about how the security system at the IMAg station was structured and why she personally had to be there to monitor it while Wakeh went about rescuing her precious brother.
But sitting there in the starship-turned-boat, feeling the waves rock up and down and hearing the wind howl around the hull, a sinking feeling in Ry dragged down her usual confidence. Somehow she wasn't wholly sure that this would go well. As much as she needed to take the risk of breaking into the IMAg station if she was to have any hope to downloading her data and using it to help her rebuild a life, there were one too many things that could go wrong.
First, there was Wakeh. Wakeh had never gone diving before in her life. This was not a good dive for a first-timer. Too many chances to get scared by the sight of a two-metre scuttle-squid or a giant sea slug, not to mention the mega-crabs. And swimming up the long discharge shaft that would grant them unconventional access to the building was a recipe for disaster if Wakeh proved claustrophobic. But Wakeh had said that she was fine with the plan and insisted that she was going.
Ry checked the waterproof pocket on her wetsuit. There she had stashed her red kyber crystal and her ID card, but most importantly, her keycard was still there. She would need that to get the security down, otherwise they might as well just march up to the stormtrooper training camp on the hill above the IMAg station and turn themselves in. She figured the card would still work. After all, it was not unique to her. Several other higher up people carried the same card to access IMAg facilities. Yet if some Imperial official – she could guess who, still breathing down her neck even at this distance – if some Imperial official saw fit to put out a one million credit bounty for her, might they not also have made sure to lock her out of all Imperial facilities? She wouldn't know until she tried.
"You'll be fine," Jubi was saying to Wakeh. Having left the cockpit, she was helping Wakeh on with her oxygen tank.
"Yeah, I know," Wakeh said gruffly. Ry stole a glance at Wakeh's face. Her expression and the slightly rapid, shallow way she was breathing told Ry that Wakeh, tough as she was, was scared. "We should go," Wakeh said, and looked sharply at Ry as if she was the one taking her time. "You ready?"
Ry tried not to roll her eyes. She had been ready for quite some time. But she got up and made her way over to the door, awkward in the big black flippers she was wearing.
Wakeh punched the controls to open the exterior door and the hatch swung open. The three women looked out on the ocean, rough and glistening. A couple hundred metres away was the matt dark of the shore. There were no stars in the dull dark sky, but lights from a large facility a bit higher up on the land reflected orange on the water.
"Is that the IMAg station?" Wakeh asked Ry.
"No, the IMAg station is on lower ground. That's the stormtrooper training facility. But I told you, it won't be an issue."
In the semi-dark Jubi waved a hand in front of her nose. "Whew! And what's that smell?" she asked.
Ry rolled her eyes. "It's an animal processing facility. They need animals to process." She decided Wakeh and Jubi probably didn't want a detailed description of the several hectares worth of feedlots where various species of swine and cattle stood knee-deep in their own excrement. Ry wanted more than anything to just be off, to get one with this and get out of here and away from the Gunma sisters and all of this. As long as she could get her data first.
"Well, let's go," Wakeh said, and after pulling on her oxygen mask, she jumped down into the water with an awkward splash. Ry flipped backwards over the edge of the boat, using a smoother and more practiced technique.
As the dark water wrapped itself around Ry, she felt her annoyance at Wakeh's bravado wash away. Ry had always liked being in the water. She liked the way it pressed against her, she liked its silk touch against her skin. Even in a wetsuit, she could still feel it there, cool and constant.
And she was no stranger to the planet Arum. Business at the IMAg station had sometimes brought her there, but even when it didn't, she often came just to go diving. There was a darkside nexus a bit further offshore, deep beneath the dark water. She used to go there sometimes, seeking insight for the midi-chlorian project or for hunting the Siluans or even simply for her work at IMAg. She couldn't feel the presence of that place as strongly as she did before she killed that damned girl on Iwaki, but it was still there, a dim awareness of something far behind and below her as she propelled herself smoothly through the water. But the thought of that deep, lightless place somehow made her feel vaguely ill now and she didn't quite know why. She stuffed it from her mind, angling downward through the dark water.
Ry checked the navi-gage she wore on her wrist. The place they were making for was about a hundred meters ahead of them and fifty meters below. Wakeh, a few metres ahead of her, had turned on her underwater lamp. The streamers of its light poked down into murky nothingness. Ry scowled into her mask. Using a lamp was normal enough for fishers and so not likely to draw attention, but she would just as soon have made the descent in quiet darkness. The sea-creatures would see or hear or feel them coming well enough and stay away. Ry didn't need Wakeh freaking out at the sight of a scuttle-squid or anything like that.
But they saw nothing until the soft ooze on the ocean bottom showed grey in the lamplight. They were swimming along a few metres above the surface towards a dark shape in the near distance when a mega-crab with metre-long pincers scuttled across their view. Wakeh flinched back, sending the lamplight scattering in another direction, but when she got the light trained on the crab again it just scuttled away on some private business of its own, not caring why two puny humans had descended to its depth.
They were then left in the emptiness of the ocean, in front of a dark hummock on the ocean floor. A hole gaped in it, with a metal grate covering an even deeper darkness within. This was the entrance Ry had chosen to the IMAg station: a metre-wide shaft that carried the waste and offal of the animal processing facility out for disposal in the ocean depths. The metal grate across the end of it was designed only to keep sea-creatures out and was easily removed with the underwater laser knife Wakeh carried.
Into the shaft they went. Wakeh pushed forward but behind her, Ry found herself a little more reluctant than she thought she would be. It was a good hundred meters or so of round pipe, only a metre or so wide and lined with a formless biofilm. It reached out filmy streamers that stroked their wetsuits as they swam along, but Ry gritted her teeth and tried not to think about it. The important thing here was to get her data. Then she would have a way to start over, a way beyond the nothingness of what her life had become without her Force skills. She might need to lay low for a while first until the hubbub about that bounty died away, but then she could go and sell the secrets of her yet unshared work for the next phase of the Imperial Agriculture Program. Plenty of planets wanted out of the IAP, or into it. One of them, probably Marfa, would do. She could earn something, at least, advising them how to gracefully exit the Imperial program and make the most of it once they were out. Then gradually, gradually she could retrain. Her latent Force sensitivity was still there – she was sure of this because she could still feel a dull throb from that darkside nexus far behind her – and so maybe, just maybe, if she stole back her data, she could get back to work on the midi-chlorian project and maybe, just maybe, make something of it.
With that thought, Ry nearly bumped into Wakeh, who was standing up now at a place where a vertical shaft met the gently upward-sloping one. In the lamplight Ry saw Wakeh reach out a hand to her and she took it. Wakeh was herself grabbing a metal projection from the slimed wall of the shaft, and there was nothing else for Ry to grab onto to stabilize herself in the ooze and filth of that place as she pulled off her flippers and left them there.
Oxygen mask still on, Wakeh nodded to Ry and motioned upwards. Ry got up on Wakeh's shoulders, managing not to slip on the shoulders of her slimy wetsuit, and Wakeh passed her the knife. Reaching up, Ry could just touch it: the manhole cover. She quickly cut around the edge of it, pushed it aside and then pulled herself up.
She unclipped her underwater lamp from her belt. She hadn't used it back there in the water, but here she flashed it around to find her way. She took in a large warehouse of a room, with conveyor belts and clean steel tables all around. This was where workers cut and packed the meat from the abattoir, which Ry remembered being on the other side of the control room.
The control room. She flashed the light onto the closed door and padded softly over to it. This was the moment of truth. She pulled out her key card and passed it over the scanner. The door opened.
The feeling of exultation was enough to make Ry want to laugh out loud, but she just unclipped the yellow safety ladder from the wall by the door and crept back with it to the open manhole and let it down. Out climbed Wakeh, who pulled off her oxygen mask and stood there huffing and puffing in the dark.
"It stinks in here," Wakeh said, in between a cough and a hack.
Ry pulled off her oxygen mask too now. She'd been here often enough that the smell of blood and feces and disinfectant didn't phase her. "The control room is that way," she said and flashed her light onto the door.
"You do your thing," Wakeh said. "I'll get changed." She skinned out of her wetsuit and opened the waterproof bag she'd lugged up with her. Out came the gleaming Mandalorian armour.
Ry rolled her eyes. Mandalorians and their armour! But she had work to do now. In the control room, the dim light on the smoke detector on the ceiling was enough for her to make out the computer that stood against the wall to her left. She touched a key on the control panel, and a multi-coloured screen lit up. With a few keystrokes, she called up the security menu. She was not surprised when the computer demanded a password when she clicked the command to disable the security system. The computer ate the password she fed it and spat out a message: Security temporarily disabled. Automatic re-enabling will occur in 30 minutes.
"Security is down," Ry called out to Wakeh just as the Mandalorian came to the door, fully clad in armour and anonymous in that smooth helmet. Ry turned back to the computer with a scowl and typed in another command. The computer emitted a little chip, which passed it to Wakeh, who pushed it into the slot on her datapad.
"See?" Ry said, pointing to the site schematic on the datapad screen, "You go here, through the abattoir, then out this back door. Up beside the feedlot and then the prisoner barracks are here. Then you come back via this overpass to the landing bay here and send the signal to Jubi to meet us there, at the upper docking bay. You'll need this," she said and passed Wakeh her key card. "There's probably a guard at the barracks but you'll know how to deal with them."
Wakeh nodded, confident in her own element now. "Got it," she said, "Meet us at the place as soon as I call you, K?"
"Sure, but first I'll stay and monitor things from here," Ry said.
Wakeh gave her a thumbs up, then turned and left.
Ry watched the door close behind her and then smiled a triumphant little smile. It would take Wakeh at least twenty minutes to go extricate her brother, so Ry figured she had more than enough time to get her data and no one to disturb her while she was doing it. Exiting the security portal, she breathed a sigh of relief when the computer offered no barrier to the Imperial network. She quickly navigated to her own directory, entered her personal password to gain access to her files and then set to work.
In the distance, a siren sounded. A drill at the stormtrooper training facility, Ry thought, and let it go.
Between the midi-chlorian project and her IMAg work, she had some hundred or so files in her directory, but she tapped the command to Select All and then Copy to Disc. Insert Disc, the computer prompted. Ry scowled at the delay but rummaged in the drawers and shelves of the control room until she found a box of slim grey rectangles. She pushed one into the disc drive, waited for it to show up in the computer's list of directories, selected it and then repeated the Copy command.
File transfer is 1% complete, the screen said. Ry turned her back on the computer and switched on the light so that she could see properly around the room. She didn't think anyone would realize she was here but just in case she locked the doors, but then remembered that anyone with a key card could still get in.
The computer beeped its completion of her task and ejected the disc. Ry grabbed it and stuffed it into the pocket she unzipped on the thigh of her slimy wetsuit. She hadn't bothered to take her wetsuit off, just in case things went sideways she needed to go back the way she came.
On the computer screen, there remained a long list of files in her directory. Select All, she tapped out the command again. Then, Delete. This was crucial. By now she'd had time to think, and to feel angry. Whether the Emperor had personally issued that bounty or not, he had still been wrong. No new power had come to her from destroying that One he'd prophesied. Instead, she was here in a stinking wetsuit trying to steal back her own data. She wasn't going to let him have it even if he wanted it.
It took a minute for the computer to process her request, but when it was done she navigated to the computer's Deleted Files directory and selected the command to Delete Files Permanently.
File permissions do not allow permanent deletion, the computer screen read, and Ry cursed out loud. She remembered now: she'd nearly lost her data one time and since then had set her files so that the system would require her password for each file individually before any of them could be permanently removed from the Imperial database. But it was just too easy for someone to retrieve her files from the trash if she didn't do this, so she clicked the first file worth of midi-chlorian project data and set to work: input password, change file permissions, delete file permanently, select the next file...
On her wrist, the comm device Wakeh lent her beeped. Ry quickly deleted one more file before activating the comm. "We got him!" Wakeh's voice said, scratchy over the bad connection but still sounding really pumped. "Meet us there."
"You got him?" Ry repeated, failing to keep the tone of unwelcome surprise out of her voice. She still had nearly a third of her files to go.
"Yeah, piece of cake, once I took out the guard. Anyways, he's already with Jubi in the ship, so we need you at the landing pad ASAP."
"Right, I'll be there," Ry said and clicked the button on the comm to close the connection. She looked nervously at the chronometer. It was a good eighteen minutes since Wakeh had left to go get her brother. At this rate, it would take Ry at least five more minutes to finish deleting everything. She decided that Wakeh could wait and started on the next file.
Four minutes and thirteen files later, the comm beeped again.
"Where the heck are you? Are you OK?" Wakeh asked, sounding impatient.
"I'm fine," Ry said and deleted another file. "I'll be there soon."
"What are you doing?"
"Security," Ry said. "I'll be there soon."
Wakeh closed the comm connection without saying anything.
Ry shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Still damp from the wet stink of that mucky discharge shaft, her bare feet felt cold on the rough non-slip floor. Only seventeen more files to go, all IMAg material now. Eighteen, if she only wanted to delete data, but the folder of research articles she'd been reading was in there too, at the end of the list. She might as well cover her trail, she figured. She'd never told the Emperor her theory about how altering the human microbiome could enhance Force sensitivity, and she didn't want anyone putting two and two together when they saw the sort of articles she'd been reading.
Three minutes later, the comm beeped again.
"Where in all of space are you?" Wakeh demanded over the staticky connection.
"I'll be there soon," Ry said absent-mindedly.
"I need you here now," Wakeh said. "Something's moving over at that stormtrooper hive of yours up the hill. I've got a bad feeling about this."
Ry thought fast. If stormtroopers did show up, all this would be for nothing. But she remembered her oxygen tank still strapped to her back and the pair of flippers she'd left at the top of the discharge shaft. If stormtroopers did show up, they would go for Wakeh's starship first, she figured, and she could escape back the way she came.
"Right, I'll be there pronto," she told Wakeh, then ended the call and kept on working. She was getting faster: select the file, pull up the file permissions dialogue box, input password, change file permissions, delete. Repeat.
She was almost finished when a quick swish nearly made her jump out of her skin. She turned. Wakeh was there in full armour, face shielded in that gleaming helmet, with two different blasters slung from her hips, standing in the open doorway to the abattoir facility on the far side of the room. With one finger, she touched something on the side of her helmet.
"What the heck are you doing? We need to go," Wakeh hissed through her closed visor.
"I just need a second," Ry said and turned back to the computer. Four files to go.
Silence, then, "You aren't doing security anymore, are you?"
Three left. "Yes, I am," Ry said. Personal security, yes.
"We need to get out of here now," Wakeh said. "The Imps are on their way."
"It will be fine," Ry said calmly, without looking away from the computer screen. "I'm almost done."
"Look, either you come now, or I make you come."
"Just give me a sec."
"You are not allowed to screw this up," Wakeh said.
"I'm not going to." Ry clicked the second to last file, input her password to change the file permissions, then sent it into digital oblivion.
"You got that right."
Something in Wakeh's tone of voice made Ry look up from her work in time to see Wakeh take a step towards her. Everything in Wakeh's body language told Ry that Wakeh would try to tackle her. She raised a hand, palm outwards towards the tall Mandalorian. A simple Force-push would keep her away.
But nothing happened.
With the folder of research articles still untouched, Ry turned her back to the computer. Both hands palm-out, she concentrated all her energy to thrust the oncoming Wakeh back...and then realized she had no power in the Force to push with. But she figured that the AgriCorps Jedi weren't trained in open-hand combat for nothing. With Wakeh two steps away, Ry crouched, poised and ready for her assailant.
Sleek in her blue-and-ivory armour, Wakeh lunged forward. One step, two steps, then Ry swung her right leg up and around, aiming to knock Wakeh off balance with a sharp kick to the head, but Wakeh ducked and let Ry's momentum spin her around so that she landed with her back half-turned. That's when Wakeh grabbed Ry around the waist and held her in iron-grip. Ry screamed and kicked and tried to elbow Wakeh in the gut but the Mandalorian armour and Wakeh's sheer muscle gave no ground. Before Ry could twist free, Wakeh had her blaster out, muzzle to the back of Ry's head.
"No!" Ry screamed, but Wakeh pulled the trigger, and Ry went limp.
Wakeh slung Ry Kyver over her shoulder, firefighter style. There was no way on the face of this planet she was leaving a living Ry Kyver behind to tell the Imperials what she now knew about the Gunma family. Nor was she about to have her blood on her hands. And so she had the blaster set for stun. She turned to head back out the door into the main processing chamber.
Behind her, the door nearer to the computer terminal sizzled and dissolved into a thousand green sparks and the white heads of three stormtroopers pushed through. A blaster shot can only take one at a time, but Wakeh deftly flicked to the highest stun setting and took all three out in one shot, then ran.
She ran, as fast as she could with fifty-two kilograms worth of Ry Kyver in a damp and stinking wetsuit slung over one shoulder. Past long stainless steel tables gleaming in the light of the emergency exit sign, past rows of massive hooks hanging from long chains. She ran, with the sour tang of blood and antiseptic an unwelcome guest in her nostrils. She glanced down at the locator that wore on the forearm of her free hand. A few more metres to go. She came to a heavy insulated door and flung it open. A blast of cold froze her breath in the air.
"Freeze!" a man's voice shouted at her, and she almost laughed. Inside, a row of five gleaming white stormtroopers greeted her with blasters. But if there was one thing Wakeh Gunma didn't leave behind when she walked away from her life on Mandalore, it was her armour. In fact, she had enhanced it over the years.
Behind her visor, her eyes flashed. "No problem," she said, then pressed a button on her right shoulder. The thin green bubble of a blast shield popped up around her and five shots of blaster fire bounced harmlessly away. One of the stormtroopers lunged at her, but she whipped her blaster out first. All five stormtroopers fell stunned with two quick shots.
Wakeh's heart pounded. Now she wasn't sure what to expect when she got to the vehicle port where Jubi was waiting, but she walked as quickly as she could over the frosty floor of the freezer room towards the open portal she could see as a dim glimmer against the matt black of the twenty-metre high ceiling. She adjusted Ry's limp form so it wouldn't slip to the floor, then activated the comm on her wrist with her teeth.
"Hey Jubi," she said.
"Where the heck are you?" Over the comm, her sister sounded stressed.
"Just below. You got company up there?"
"Do we ever." As Jubi spoke, Wakeh heard the rush of incoming aircraft overhead.
"Cover me, K?"
Wakeh didn't wait for an answer. She reached behind her and activated her jet-pack. Even though flight with a jet pack didn't require physical exertion, it did require concentration, and Wakeh lurched up between the ceiling-high stacks of freezers, unused to the uneven weight of another human body to deal with, but by the time she reached the open portal and smelled fresh oxygen, she was going strong. She shot up through the portal and into the waning starlight.
Boom! A blast greeted her, and Wakeh found herself shoved three metres to one side, almost beyond the starship's iridescent shield bubble that rippled with each impact of the blast torpedos from the oncoming Imperial transport. Shields like that kept out the hot energy of blaster fire, not cold hard matter, and shrapnel from an innocent exhaust vent had caught her squarely across her left side. The lopsided weight of having Ry Kyver thrown over one shoulder meant that the hit sent her spinning, but she righted herself just in time to avoid careening out into the line of fire and whizzed towards the open door of the starship.
It occurred to Wakeh just as she got to the door that she'd better turn her jet pack off before she got inside. She just managed to hit the button on her shoulder with her free hand when she slammed into the wall just inside the starship. She lay on the floor groaning, with an unconscious and rather heavy Ry Kyver lying half on top of her. She almost envied Ry being out like that; her whole body hurt.
The ship lurched as it took off. Wakeh could still hear the sound of enemy fire pinging off the shield but in a moment, a jolt sent shock-waves through her stomach and the roar of atmospheric friction around the ship was abruptly silenced. This, she knew, meant that the ship had made the jump safely to hyperspace.
Wakeh screwed her eyes shut and tried to will her aching body to get up. Now! she told herself and took a deep breath and opened her eyes to the blue-white artificial lights above her, then pushing Ry aside, peeled herself off the floor and stood up. Her head throbbed and through the visor of her helmet, everything seemed a little blurry. She took a moment to straightened Ry's body out but her hands shook slightly with the anger she couldn't help feeling. What was Ry doing at the computer back there, taking so long and risking their lives like that? Wakeh slipped her hand under the edge of her helmet and rubbed the back of her neck, hoping nothing was damaged.
"Hey sis!" her brother called from the cockpit. Wakeh turned and saw him sitting there. She pulled her helmet off and grinned. All at once, her head cleared and her anger fading away. Seeing her brother there grinning back at her, her heart swelled with pride. No matter what Ry had done, the Gunma sisters had won. They'd played their cards right and now the brother they loved was here, safe and sound.
Wakeh always got a kick out of introducing her brother Jared. The looks people gave her were priceless. Not only was he a different shape, size and colour, he wasn't even human at all. From time to time she met people who had the gall to point out to her that they didn't think cross-species adoption was such a good idea, but Wakeh couldn't dream of not having Jared for a brother. He grinned at her out of his grey Yemerian lizard face and blinked his round little olive green eyes at her. He reached out his short little lizard-arms to give her a hug, but then pulled back, looking worried.
"You bleeding?" he said.
Jubi, who was sitting in the pilot's seat beside Jared, looked up in alarm. "Yikes, that doesn't look good," she said, getting up and reaching for the first aid kit in a compartment behind her seat.
Wakeh looked down at her blue armour. There was, in fact, a dark splotch of blood down her left side. Consciously, deliberately she made a point to stay calm, then touched the place.
Yet she could find no cut. She was bruised, yes, but her armour was unbroken, and the blood wiped off on her glove without any sign of a source.
Jubi was standing beside her now, first aid kit in hand, but she was looking past her sister not at her. "Oh no…" she said, "we're going to have to act fast."
Wakeh turned around to look behind her. Ry Kyver, glazed eyes open now, was lying there on the floor in a widening pool of blood. Plain to see was an ugly gash along her right leg, with little bits of something metallic grey sticking out.
Wakeh cursed under her breath and then cursed again. The shrapnel that had hit her...it must have bounced off the beskar of her armour but cut straight through the dirty neoprene of the wetsuit that Ry was wearing.
"We're going to have to change course," she said to Jared. "Set the landing coordinates for the hospital."
Author's note: an earlier version of this chapter included another scene, which I later took out.