A/N: My muse escaped while I was fighting off the mole people. I lured it back with cheese puffs. All is well.

Jaina Retrospective Two: Adumar

We had planned to get off Adumar as soon as we'd bought our goods, but the planet, with its strange dialect and strange clothes, convinced us to stay for a week. Two days later the Adumari nation of Cartann began its Imperial interdiction backed push to rule the planet. A week later they started hunting down untrustworthy offworlders. The three of us tried to make it out of Cartann territiory. I made it. Kev and Millia didn't.

-

I don't like being angry. When I'm angry, I feel powerful, invincible, like I can move faster, think faster, hit harder. I feel like there's something inside me trying to cut its way out. When it's over, I feel drained, empty. When it's going on I do stupid things. Things like joining the air force of the anti-Cartann coalition on Adumar.

It was in a Blade fighter that I really learned to fly. The plane I flew during the war provided the bridge I desperately needed between swoop and ship. I'd been able to pilot – barely – based on what I'd read and my instincts. On Adumar I really learned to fly.

I graduated the crash course training program the coalition had hastily assembled at the top of my class, and made ace two weeks and three skirmishes later.

-

By the time I'd been on Adumar a year, Cartann was starting to falter, for the simple reason that they'd taken to outsourcing in recent years. Without labor from other countries their food supply was limited. They had to build new factories in order to supply their Blade plants with several key parts, so they were slow to produce new planes, and, for entirely different reasons, slower to produce new pilots. It had become a war of attrition, and it was one nation against an entire world.

-

As our forces began moving into formerly Cartann territory, we began to find the prison camps. They were like the Empire at its depraved worst: half starved prisoners, political dissenters and violent rebels and simple criminals, from petty thieves to murderers, all together in one complex, all used as slave labor in the factories.

The prisoners had to be fed and given medical attention and the camp records had to be sorted through so the truly dangerous could be separated from the rest. I'd been forced to eject in a recent mission, and was still recovering from a broken leg. Adumar might hero worship her pilots, but outside of Cartann they're not beyond putting them to work. I was sent to one of the newly discovered camps as a makeshift med-tech along with several other out-of-action pilots. That's where I found Millia and Kev.

-

We trooped into the camp, the prisoners staring at us from their barrackses. I stared back, trying to smile. I stopped. Had I seen him? And then he was running towards me: Kev, dark skinned and dark haired as the day I first met him and threw eggs at him, but stick thin and with dark circles under his eyes. He couldn't run very fast. The guards trained their weapons on him but I broke through their perimeter and ran towards him, embraced him. He was all skin and bones and gristle and we were both crying our eyes out, holding each other and rocking back and forth. I kissed him for the first time then, hungrily, desperately, so glad he was alive I could have held him forever. I brought him back inside the gaurds' perimeter with me. A glare was enough to get him through. I was a pilot, after all, and on Adumar that meant a lot.

-

Kev told me, in hurried tones, that he and Millia had joined a resistance movement after a couple months of evading government forces who were after untrustworthy offworlders. Kev had convinced Millia to stay away from the more militant groups. They'd been caught graffiting statues with anti-war messages, and that had been enough to get them sent to the camps without trial.

Millia was in the camp infirmiry, he said. An officer had taken an interest in her and she refused him. He got her anyway, and she would have died either for her refusal or from her defensive wounds if we hadn't taken the camp. The infirmiry was for gaurds, not prisoners.

-

The first time I saw Millia in over a year, she was grinned at me, her best manic, sharp toothed, classic Millia smile, and tried to get out of bed. She couldn't, so I came to her and gave her a hug as fierce as the one I'd given Kev, but without the kiss. Her grip was frighteningly weak.

-

Medical supplies were scarce, and low tech. The coalition was cut off from offworld contact and shipments. Millia died of an infection that would have cost one race's winnings to cure on Nar Shaada. Her second to lsat last words were a plea to her long dead mother to come to her. Then her eyes cleared for a moment, and she turned to me. What she said will be with me forever:

"Thanks for the stars, Jaina."

And then she was gone.

-

We buried Millia in a local graveyard. Kev and I wouldn't stand for her final resting place to be anywhere near the camp. Most of the prisoners who died, even after the coalition took the camp, weren't so lucky.

-

I got Kev a job as a mechanic on an airbase safely inside coalition lines. He protested – said if I got myself killed he wanted to be there, damnit! – but I was a pilot and he was just an offworld mechanic.

The war ended a month later when Cartann declared their intent to surrender. Kev and I got the Kestrel back, mostly intact. We spent a week getting our ship into working shape. We went back to Millia's grave, to say goodbye. Neither of us intended to return to Adumar. Ever.

-

The official surrender ceremony was, as is typical on Adumar, overblown and extravagant. A good fraction of the two forces met on a field in the sweltering sun, all of us in full dress uniform, the victors wearing ceremonial blastswords, specially made for the occasion with detailing in our squadron colors. The coalition contingent was made up of our most distinguished pilots, and by some miracle I was one of them. I stood in third row from the back in the leftmost formation for four sweltering hours. The pilot next to me fainted from the heat and had to be taken to the nearby medical tent on a stretcher. I listened to the drone of the declaration of surrender, broadcast over what was probably an Imperial-made sound system, without really hearing anything.

-

I said goodbye to my squadron with by getting drunk beyond belief, which was of course completely illegal at the age of seventeen. I was the youngest member of the squadron by almost an even standard year, and they weren't sure whether to look at me as a little sister or a role model, given that I could out fly them all. The point is, we got thoroughly drunk. I somehow got it into my head to invite them all back to the Kestrel, which I did. I woke up the next morning (meaning four hours later) with the worst headache I've had to this day, eleven other hung-over pilots on my ship, and a feeling that if I didn't get off the planet immediately I wouldn't be able to stand leaving. I woke up the other pilots, kicked them out, practically crying the whole time, and took off as soon as I got clearance and before I'd really finished the warm up sequence.

-

I haven't contacted anyone I met on Adumar since I left, two years ago. It's to dangerous.

Adumar isn't part of the Empire, not formally. Officially it's an allied territory. In actuality Issard rules Adumar just as much as she rules Imperial Center. It was inevitable, I suppose. It took about a year, but the people of Adumar elected a government that favored being part of the galactic community, which means the Empire. It didn't take long before the newly established Adumari Planetary Council was just a puppet government.

I'd like to know what my old squadron thinks of that. Jax, the second in command, might just approve. Tillin, the guy who was just a year older than me – he had a crush on me that started in flight school, did you know that? – is probably still to naïve to see that his planet is being controlled by Imperial Center. I'm willing to bet Rahley has either gotten off planet or joined some sort of anti-government militia by now. Rahley always reminded me of Millia, and I loved her for it.

I can't contact them, of course. I'm wanted. The human female with the weird sword. They're as good as gone. Millia's been gone for just as long. Now Kev's gone, and the only person I've got, if you can call it that, is a Basic-speaking warrior woman from a backwater planet who I'm probably going to have trouble convincing that energy weapons are worth while. Oh, and she sleeps with her spear.

-----


Interlude 2

Imperial Center

There were buildings here whose lower floors were completely inacessable. Zekk knew. He'd checked. The turbolift shafts themselves ended far above where they should have.

The buildings above an area nearly twenty klicks long merged over a hundred floors from rock bottom and Zekk could find no way to get in.

And, Zekk somehow knew, there were people in there. And they wanted out.