Fighting with Monsters
Star Wars: The Bergeron Chronicles, Part 2
a fanfic by Sisiutil
Chapter 2
"So if I put off the maintenance of the ion drive for a month, and land that spice shipment in the meantime..."
Axel Bergeron muttered to himself as sat in the captain's chair aboard his ship, the YT-1300fp space freighter his father had named the Nomad. Axel had kept the name of the ship, just like he'd kept the name of the business, Bergeron and Son Shipping Ltd., even though his father had died nearly one standard year ago and even though Axel himself had no son, or any other family, for that matter. But he liked both names, so he'd kept them both. He would be the first to acknowledge that they gave a comforting illusion of stability in a galaxy where that was a precious commodity.
The ship was resting in a hangar in Carnaxa, the primary spaceport city on Axel's home planet of Sessram Prime. The freighter pilot busied himself with a task most beings in his profession and many others loathed: balancing his accounts. Axel looked upon it as a puzzle, like the hinged block he'd played with as a child, trying to get all the colors to match on each of the cube's six sides. The only problem with financial puzzles, though, was that the sides kept moving and the colors kept changing of their own accord. Axel kept telling himself he enjoyed the challenge, certain that if he persisted he'd one day believe it. Besides, it kept his mind off other things. Like a certain woman he as doing his damndest to forget.
A soft chime from the panel beside him indicated that he had an incoming sub-space comm call. He turned in his chair immediately; he'd been expecting a response from a potential client. He shifted himself over to the co-pilot's chair and activated the comm panel. He tapped in his acceptance of the call, looked at the display screen... and his entire body froze. It felt like someone had just kicked him in the gut.
"Kilu..." he whispered in response to the hazy but all-too-recognizable face on his comm panel's viewscreen, a face he'd memorized and had been seeing in his dreams for months now, in spite of those very earnest efforts to forget about her.
"Hello, Axel," Kilu Branon said, her brown eyes gazing directly into his across the many light-years that separated them.
He swallowed. "Long time, no see," he muttered.
"I know," she said, though if she felt at all abashed about calling him out of the blue like this, it didn't show. Didn't she know what effect seeing her again would have on him? Apparently not... or maybe she just didn't care. "Axel, I need your help."
Of course you do, he thought, why else would you be calling? He almost said it, but stopped himself. Not because he knew full well how bitter and petulant it would sound, but because a more salient fact had suddenly registered in his mind: Kilu was in trouble.
"What is it?" he asked, the pain he'd felt at seeing her again momentarily forgotten as his concern for her came to the fore. "What's the matter?"
"I'd rather not say over an open channel," she told him, her voice heavy with meaning.
It took him a moment, but he understood. The static and interference affecting both the audio and video quality told him that she was calling from one of those cheap public commboxes--another indication as to the level of her desperation.
"Right," Axel said. "So, are you going to come to me, or..."
"Why do you think I called you, flyboy?" she responded impatiently, one slender brow raised.
"Of course," he said. She didn't really need him--she needed his ship. Well, it was something.
He glanced at the other information on the viewscreen, which told him what her exact location was: Mos Eisley, the main spaceport city on Tatooine, in the closest binary star system to his own home base in the Sessram system. It was only a few relatively short light-years away. He forced himself to think quickly. How could he tell her where to meet over an open channel? He searched his mind; fortunately, he'd been to Mos Eisley several times on cargo hauls and was well-acquainted with the spaceport district.
"Okay," he said. "There's a place there, named after that recipe of my dad's you liked so much." He looked at her expectantly.
It only took her a very short moment to think that through, then she blinked and nodded in understanding. "Right," she said, "I'll find it. When will you be there?"
He thought for a moment again, realizing he had to find a way to answer that question cryptically as well. "In about... one eighth of your former fellow passenger's sleep cycle?"
"Got it," Kilu said. On the trip back from B'Tel Four, they'd taken the planet's Foreign Minister to Coruscant, the capital of the New Republic; his species had a sixteen-hour sleep cycle, so an eighth of that was two hours. "See you then." With that, she ended the transmission.
Axel sat staring at the blank viewscreen for several moments. Not a "thank you", not a "nice to see you again", not even a lousy smile to show she was looking forward to their reunion. Typical. She was Jedi and, as he'd learned the hard way, was all about the mission, whatever that mission might be. He shook his head to clear it; none of that mattered right now. Kilu was in trouble and needed his help. The question was, what kind of trouble, and how much help was she going to need?
Not that any of that mattered. Not when it came to Kilu, in spite of what had happened between them. His decision made, he returned to the pilot's seat and brought the control console to life. He started tapping in the pre-launch sequence.
"Arf!" he called out over one shoulder.
A moment later, his white-and-black striped, conical-headed agromech droid, R4-E6, appeared at the far end of the cockpit corridor.
"Get us ready for take-off," he said. Arf responded with a series of beeps and whistles; Axel listened to them and winced. "Aw hell," he cursed in reaction to Arf reminding him of the customer he was abandoning. "Send Wills a text message with my apologies and regrets--tell him my ship's been commandeered by the NR government for an emergency," he said. "That's not far from the truth..." he muttered after the droid warbled a reluctant acknowledgement.
A few minutes later he was blasting out of the planet's atmosphere, heading for Tatooine and the woman who'd broken his heart.