Author's Note: Sorry this wasn't up last night (I didn't have any internet :( ).
Chapter 18: Solitude
.
A'den's commlink chirped, breaking the comfortable working silence in Vorpa's office. She was so engrossed in replacing the wrapping on her beskad she jumped violently and upset the whole process. She cussed colorfully while A'den retreated out onto the landing, raising the device to his lips as he walked and swinging the door shut behind him.
"A'den olar," he answered it.
"Vod'ika," a nearly identical voice answered before the door hit the edge of a haphazardly dropped toolbox with a loud bang. It remained wedged open ajar. Vorpa looked up when the door hit metal instead of the wooden doorjamb. With a sigh, she gave up on the wrappings. She'd have to start over anyway. She got up to close the door and give A'den his privacy.
"What is it, Jaing?" she heard A'den saying disappointedly when she reached the door, and she paused.
"I found Cornucopia." Jaing answered.
"Where?" A'den demanded. Vorpa held the door with one hand and tried to convince herself to close it. I shouldn't be eavesdropping on his call, she told herself.
Then Jaing said "Jutta Space." It piqued Vorpa's interest and drove any inhibitions away.
"I was back-tracing replacement part orders for a Corelian Monarch class freighter. One order led me back to an orbital repair station on the edge of Jutta Space. Cornucopia came limping in at sub-light 36 hours ago. The venting-regulators were burned out, probably from improper atmospheric entry or exit. It caused an ion buildup that burned out the hyperdrive mid-jump."
"She's too good of a pilot for that to happen," A'den said. Vorpa could imagine his grave, thoughtful expression. "Even if she did have to burn up the regulators in atmo, she knows her ship well enough not to then try reaching light-speed. Is the ship still there?"
"The station completed repairs ten hours ago and Cornucopia left. There was no log of its destination. I got into the station's monitoring system. There was only one crewman—an Ilothorian. I'm sorry, A'den. She wasn't there."
"You're sure it was Cornucopia?"
"A'den."
"Of course you're sure," A'den said and blew out a long exhale. "It's not your fault, Jaing. It was long shot you'd find anything at all in a data set that big, much less find it in time. At least we know her ship made it to Jutta Space. She may be there as well. Keep looking."
"I wouldn't get my hopes up, vod. If she's still alive, why hasn't she contacted us? Unless she is alive and just doesn't want to associate with us."
"I'll do it myself," A'den said benignly, taking Jaing's words as a refusal.
"No." Jaing said with a tone of weary resignation. "You won't find anything I haven't and I already promised Kal'buir I'd keep searching."
"You told him what you found," A'den didn't need to ask.
"I said I would keep him in the loop."
"How's he taking it?"
"He's spent the whole day with Et-ika," Jaing said meaningfully.
"He's torturing himself because he feels guilty for starting that argument," A'den translated glumly.
"He shouldn't. He was right. It was stupid to go there alone. Having rash people like that around is dangerous for everyone."
"You're ignoring everything she has done for us. We at least owe it to her to find out what happened."
"But we don't have to put ourselves at risk running all across the galaxy to do it."
"Just find her, Jaing." A'den said curtly and cut off the call with a sharp click. Vorpa heard him take a slow deep breath and blow it out loudly, venting his anger. Vorpa could only guess the woman they were referring to was the same one she had been ferrying A'den and his father around to find. Vorpa stepped out onto the causeway slowly on impulse.
A'den looked up at the sound of her boots on the grating and quickly smoothed over his expression, but not before she caught the look of pain he hastily concealed. It left his eyes shinning too bright.
"You heard." He said without a hint of anger. It hurt more than an outright accusation, maybe because he had expected her to listen in. Vorpa looked down at her boots.
"It doesn't sound like things are good at home," she said, picking at the chipped paint on her thigh plate.
A'den sighed again and leaned on the railing of the stairs. "Things are… stressed. One of our friends is missing and Et'ika, my sister, is sick…dying," he said at length, leaning against the stair railing and looking across the hanger at Gra'tua. "It's strange; I used to think a quick death was a few minutes, maybe an hour." He shook his head sorrowfully.
"That's true on a battlefield," Vorpa agreed, descending the stairs to stand just above him awkwardly. She felt she needed to be close to him, but wasn't exactly sure how to do that.
"With my sister… it could be weeks or months, even years. It's tearing my father apart to watch her die a little more every day. It terrifies him because he knows he'll have to watch the rest of us die the same way, slowly and far too young."
Vorpa balled her fists against the tightness in her chest when he mentioned his accelerated aging. She'd felt the same way the first time he offhandedly mentioned his shortened lifespan. In a culture of warriors there was no such thing as life expectancy, but A'den didn't even have the chance of cheating death to reach old age. Death would get him before long one way or another.
He had stated the facts of his life so frankly then. It made the frustration and anger in his voice now surprising.
"Kal'buir can't live like this. Her husband can't live like this. Her son…" A'den cut himself off, biting his lip. "It scares Ordo too. With Besany pregnant, he can't help but think of what his wife and child will go through in who knows how many years—what all of our aliit will go through."
She'll be alone with a child to care for, Vorpa thought stricken by her own pity for the woman she didn't even like Besany. Those sick bastards! It wasn't enough to make them barely human—the demagolkase had to steal their future too, their legacy! How many sons will Kal loose before he dies? Who will he have when they're gone?
A'den sighed heavily, drawing Vorpa out of her dark thoughts.
"There's nothing I can do there but get in the way." He said with nearly convincing assurance. He pushed off the railing and started up the stairs.
Vorpa put her hand on his chest-plate and held him back. He stopped and gave her a questioning look, but the woman was watching the dusty stairs under her feet.
"Go home, A'den," she said softly.
"I can't help—"
"Go home," she cut him off firmly, still unwilling to meet his eyes, "while you can." She pushed him down a step with the hand on his chest and A'den was too stunned to resist. She turned away, head bent low, and climbed the stairs alone.
"Vorpa?" He asked softly. She reached the door of her office and kicked the toolbox out of the way harshly. The sound of hollow metal and hard objects rolling across the durasteel floor echoed in the hanger. She slammed the door shut behind her, leaving A'den frozen on the stairs.
Inside her office Vorpa slid to the floor in a ball, wrapping her arms around her legs. Her office felt too large without another person at the small desk. It was cold and impersonal, just a room she slept in and nothing more. Vorpa listened to the sounds of A'den's footsteps receding across the hanger and the door closing behind him. She felt her solitude more than ever, felt it like a physical hole under the scarred plate of armor. She pressed her hand against the old wound, but all she felt was cold, rough metal.
.
Ny watched the large, dark-skinned man out of the corner of her eye while she waited for the caf to brew in the domed galley of the Jedi's ship. Sayne seemed to be frowning more intently every time she saw him, which was surprisingly little considering the four unlikely travelers had been sharing the limited space for going on four days. Sayne stayed in his cabin most of the time, Ny guessed sleeping. Though his frown deepened, the dark shadows under his eyes faded and his complexion got warmer. He still looked haggard and weather worn. It reminded her of Kal.
It was hard for Sayne not to remind her of Kal. He was gruff and coarse, but underneath it motivated by deep caring. Ny could see that much in the worry he wore more and more with the passing hours.
The caf pot beeped and Ny jumped. She poured herself a mug and, after a glance over her shoulder, poured a second.
"You look like you need it," Ny said, sliding the cup onto the table in front of Sayne. He sat up, startled and stared in confusion at the mug as if it was a foreign animal she'd passed him.
"Appreciated," he said stiffly and took the mug. Ny slid into the booth seat of the galley table across from him.
"That child, the one in carbonite, is a friend of yours?" Ny asked.
Sayne sipped his caf and set it down slowly before he answered, his eyes on the table the whole time.
"She's the closest thing to family I have left. She's everything to me."
"I'm sorry," Ny finally said the words she'd needed to tell him from their first meeting. "If I'd known what Djela was doing I would never have—"
"Why didn't you ask?" Sayne demanded, like a damn within him had broken, and his mug banged against the table as he brought it down. Hot drops of dark liquid splattered the tabletop. Ny jumped at his sudden anger and fumbled for how to answer while he glared at her disapprovingly.
"I just wanted the job to be over, honestly," she answered sheepishly. "Djela is part of a life I tried to leave behind."
"Why agree to it in the first place? You knew what kind of person he was."
"I knew him a long time ago," Ny defended herself, "and not very well."
"Then why trust him?"
"I didn't!" Ny insisted. "I owed him, and it would have been more trouble for…" for Kal, for A'den, for everyone at Kyrimorut, she thought. "…for the people I work with if he came looking for me."
"Are any of those people fifteen-year-old children?" Sayne hissed at her.
Ny opened her mouth to say something, but realized there was nothing she could say without giving away too much. How did she explain that the men she worked for were fourteen going on twenty-eight, experienced soldiers but fumbling family makers hiding from everyone and jumping at shadows?
"I know your type," Sayne went on in the face of her inarticulacy. "You aren't responsible for anyone else in this galaxy but yourself. You don't care about other people around you, so long as they don't affect you, so you never stop to think about the harm you might be doing—you just do what's best for you! Let the rest of the galaxy look out for themselves."
"I nearly died trying to stop Djela from—"
"Trying to get rid of him! If it stopped affecting you than you wouldn't have a problem with it. You're only here because you want your ship back."
"That ship is the only thing I—" It's the only thing I own in this galaxy, it's my home, it's everything I have, it's all I have left of Terin!
"Is it more important than her life because you don't know her?"
"No! I tried to do the decent thing," Ny insisted, cowering back in her seat.
"The 'decent thing' and nothing more!" Sayne drawled, his tone dark, "Maybe you don't hurt anyone yourself, maybe you even do something good and selfless now and then—when you can afford to—but that doesn't make you a decent person. That just placates your own guilt so you can sleep at night."
The little scrap of a padewan and the ancient Kaminoan Jedi sprung to Ny's mind. She couldn't forget thinking the danger of helping them wasn't worth it, their lives weren't worth it.
Ny said weakly, "You don't know a thing about me or—"
"I know enough," Sayne spoke over her, then sighed, a weary sound of hopeless cynicism. "You're the kind of person I hate the most. I realized being a cop for so many years that I put away the worst criminals—truly horrible people who had done the very worst things you could imagine—but the world didn't get any better. I realized that it's people like you—who don't care enough to raise a hand, who can't be prosecuted or blamed, who could have made a difference and did nothing—people like that are what's wrong with the galaxy."
Ny stared dumbly at him, her throat closed up and soundless. Sayne pushed his mug back across the table toward her and stood up. He shuffled out of the room, limping slightly, his shoulders hunched in defeat. But it was Ny who felt beaten.
She couldn't remember the last time someone had lectured her like that. Did my father ever do that? She wondered, scouring the dim memories of her childhood. My mother might have when she bothered to care… Ny gripped her cup and bit her lip, feeling far too childish for someone her age and all the more ashamed for knowing that.
The worst part was the ring of truth in Sayne's words.
Ny had been alone for a long time, and after Terin she'd stopped believing that good deeds would make much difference, for her or against her. Until the day a tanned young man with a wide innocent smile and calloused hands introduced himself as A'den and asked her for a ride, Ny had been fending for herself and only herself, struggling to find even the will to do that.
Ny had made a lot of shady deals in her life, before and after Terin. She told herself she didn't have the luxury of asking what she was transporting or why it had to go undetected.
Instead of taking responsibility for what I was doing I helped out the odd stowaway, she thought bitterly. Does that make up for any of it? How would I even know? I didn't care enough to ask whose life I was helping to destroy or who died to put creds in my pocket.
Her thoughts were sounding eerily similar to Kal's rantings about the Republic and the hypocrisy of the Jedi, who used his boys as living shields and flesh-droids. Am I no better than them? She wondered and pushed her cup away, no longer able to stomach it.
Is that the way Kal sees me? She wondered. If I hadn't been helping A'den when we met, what would he have thought of me? Would he hate me the way Sayne does? How long until he comes to that same conclusion? She couldn't stop the viciously painful thought from rising to the surface of her mind. Once there it refused to go away.
Pounding footsteps on the decking jerked Ny from her thoughts. The slicer, Jeu, ran into the galley as the Captain came around the corner in search of the commotion. Jeu's mouth, the only visible part of her face was tight with intense seriousness.
"What is it?" The Captain demanded.
"I have found Cornucopia."
.
After days of waiting the tension in Shard was nearly tangible. The Bounty Hunter was checking the charge on her blasters every few minutes and shifting restlessly around the back of the cockpit. Sayne was fingering the safety on his heavy hand-blaster and twisting his ankle experimentally, assuring himself it wouldn't fail. The Captain was completely rigid, standing beside the pilot's chair. Only her white knuckled grip on one of her custom blaster's in it's battered hip holster and her restlessly shifting eyes dancing from screen to screen in the cockpit gave away her anxiety. Ny felt jittery and ridiculously exposed in her flimsy flightsuit. She was starting to understand why Mandalorian's liked armor.
Only the slicer, Jeu, seemed calm. She was sitting the pilot's seat going over the controls, talking softly to herself hands lighting on each knob and gauge as she took stock.
"Will you be alright?" The Captain asked.
"I am assured I will be able to pilot this craft the necessary distance. I will meet you at the rendezvous point." Jue replied evenly.
"If we don't make it…"
"I know the appropriate people to contact."
The Captain nodded stiffly to Jeu and with one last look at the flashing hyperspace out the viewscreen she turned and left the cockpit. Sayne followed her like an exaggerated shadow. He shot a suspicious look over his shoulder at Ny before the doors closed.
"Jue?" Ny asked the Slicer hesitantly.
"Do you require something?"
"Could you pass on a message for me if… well if I can't?"
"So long as it does not incriminate me in your death and it is within my ability to deliver the message," Jue answered succinctly, her head turned just enough that she might be able to see Ny from the corner of her eyes hidden behind the shinny, black visor.
Ny thought the first request odd until she realized Kal was exactly the kind of man to shoot the messenger if he didn't like the news. Kal also knew that Ny had made her own stupid choices despite his efforts to stop her. He was only trying to look out for me and I cursed his name up and down the galaxy, she thought bitterly with regret. Can he forgive me for that? She wondered.
Ny tried to imagine what returning to Kyrimorut would be like. It was too much to hope that things could go back to the way they were before after the way she'd left. She shied away from the prospect of facing Kal again. It was undoubtedly going to be awkward and embarrassing. There was no way to defend her actions at this point. Ny would have to admit Kal was right and take the consequences. What can he really say that Sayne hasn't said already? She thought. Her already shattered self-opinion might not survive another beating, especially not from Kal, who had more right than anyone to criticize her. Her eyes stung at the thought.
"Miss Vollen?" Jue said with a hint of impatience. "What is your message?"
"N-never mind," Ny mumbled and looked down at the floor.
Would Kal even care what happened to me? She wondered, probably not. I wasn't really a part of Kyrimorut anyway. She thought back to her bare room. I never belonged there, she admitted to herself. Everyone there was united by a goal, to better the lives of the clones and restore their life-span. Everyone there was dedicated to that pursuit. And I'm not, Ny sighed. Maybe Sayne was right; I'm not like them.
Ny turned and followed the Captain to the airlock. The Cornucopia was the last thing she had in the galaxy and this was her chance to get it back. If she didn't, Ny wasn't sure where she'd go or what she'd do. She would be truly lost.
.
Author's Note: And that's where I'm leaving that. Muwahahahaha. No. Actually the chapter just got to long. This is another one that used to be one chapter and now… it is two. Because I can't write 10,000 words in a week. –Em.