Two sharply indrawn breaths were the only answer. Kirney fell silent, her eyes glassy and her gaze turned back in time. Selan was staring at his father as if he willed him to stop this agonizing tale and tell them everything was some sick kind of joke while Alina was darting wide-eyed glances between her parents as if her mind could not process what she'd just heard.

Myn took this as his cue to take over. "At that time your mother was undercover posing as mission controller on a New Republic Frigate and I had recently graduated from the New Republic Starfighter Academy. Because of my grades I was given command of a newly raised X-Wing squadron, Talon Squadron, and tasked with patrolling a sector of space along the border between New Republic space and the holdings of Warlord Zsinj." He stood and moved to the large window and stared out into the slowly darkening sky while the old dull pain reemerged from the depths of his memories. "It was our very first combat mission. Nothing but a routine patrol in an area which had seen a rise of sightings of Zsinj's ships in the preceeding week. We came across what looked like a damaged TIE Interceptor and followed it into an uninhabited system which the Fleet Almanach listed as secure. But it was a trap."

"That Almanach entry was wrong," Kirney continued the tale as she rejoined the conversation. "A few days before I had been given explicit orders by my Imperial superiors to manipulate the security classification of just that system so that a query would show it as secure."

Her husband nodded absently. "That TIE led my squadron into a real shooting gallery. We had no idea what was happening until we were totally swamped with TIEs and the squadron was blown to bits." He squeezed his eyes shut and finished huskily, "I was the sole survivor."

Alina got up and flung her arms around her father, sobbing quietly, while Myn placed a kiss on her head and held her close.

Kirney was still staring ahead, not seeing the here and now but a distant past. "I had no idea what the manipulation would cause, but then the news of Talon Squadron's demise spread through the Fleet and I knew I had to disappear. It would not take long to backtrack the data trail to me so my Imperial superiors extracted me and decided that I would not go undercover for a while, at least as long as the dust had not settled somewhat. Instead I was transferred to the Star Destroyer Implacable as data analyst and intel specialist."

Myn guided his still crying daughter back to the couch and sat down to take his wife's hand once again. "After that I was a mental wreck. My mind simply could or would not process what had happened and so it shut down. For weeks I was little more than a droid functioning on his basic programming but I felt absolutely no emotions." He shook his head. "I didn't care about anything anymore. Praise, rebuke, jokes, compliments … nothing touched me anymore. I was totally and utterly focused only on one thing: blinding hate. I was given access to the data NRI had gathered on the incident, among them the file of your mother. There was no holo, just her name, but I focused my hate on her and all the other Imperials who'd taken part in the ambush and really set up a list of people I'd have to kill before I died."
He sighed. "The military was my life, you see. I'd spent the years of my adolescence planning just what kind of brilliant career I'd have in the armed forces and now I thought I was a total failure when I could not even protect my squadmates on their first mission. I'd lost my self-esteem and any trace of the certainty I'd had before. My psych had cracked and was on the verge of falling apart … while I did everything to hide all of that from the people around me. Until I really had a total breakdown and my new squadmates managed to draw me out of my near-catatonic state. But still all these mental issues remained, my sanity remained cracked. I just ignored that and tried to go on as if nothing had happened."

"In the meantime your father had been drafted for a new X-Wing squadron, a somewhat unconventional combination of a special forces commando team and an ordinary starfighter squadron," Kirney picked up the tale again. "He'd been picked because he'd been a sniper in the Corellian Planetary Defense Forces before joining the New Republic and somehow this new squadron ended up doing a covert campaign against the forces assigned to the Star Destroyer Implacable." She let out a lang-drawn sigh and shook her head. "With hindsight I have to say my own time aboard Implacable was an eye-opening experience, even though I didn't see it this way at that time. But the realities of service aboard an Imperial warship, the way officers and crew held themselves and the kind of missions they did all served to sow the seeds of doubt in my mind about what I had been told about the Empire and the New Republic. I soon came to despise the commanding officer of the ship, Admiral Apwar Trigit, for his maliciousness, his arrogance and his violent eruptions, because he was so obviously the antipode of what I had considered the archetype of an Admiral in the Imperial Navy. And when, in the final engagement between your father's new squadron and the Implacable, Trigit wanted to abandon his crew of almost forty thousand people to death while he tried to drop out unseen …" Kirney let out a snort of derision. "Something within me snapped. For the first time in my life I went directly against orders from my Imperial superiors. First I gave the order to abandon ship, then I sent the New Republic a message and told them that Trigit was about to get away."

"But he didn't," Myn remarked with quiet menace, something dark etched on his features even all this time after the event. Then his face softened, taking on a weary expression and he rubbed his eyes. "When I shot down Trigit … That was the moment I had been waiting for. I'd imagined this for months, how I'd feel when strike one of the major figures from my death list. But it was nothing like I had imagined. I didn't feel the satisfaction I thought I'd feel, no elation, no victory. Instead there was a dull void, a nothing. The Talons were still dead. And the Wraiths had lost members as well, people I had begun to think of as friends. It was then when I began to question the purpose of all this vendetta thinking, although I was still a long long way from understanding that I'd waste my life for nothing if I spent it just on killing."

Selan leaned forward, riveted by the tale, and looked at his mother. "And what happened to you, mom?"

Kirney gave a sourish smile. "My own escape from the Implacable was somewhat more complicated. I couldn't just board an escape pod and surrender to the New Republic. Gara Petothel was still wanted for espionage and treason and I had no intention of ending in front of a firing squad. Or being shot into the sun …" She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. "I had an alternative identity ready, just in case I needed to disappear quickly, so I used it to disguise myself from the New Republic until I could escape and rejoin Imperial Forces. Or so I thought."

"What do you mean, Mom?" Alina leaned forward and looked at her curiously. For the first time the tale seemed to have riveted her more than it appalled her.

"My alternative identity was that of a young Aldivian woman Trigit had kidnapped, drugged and used as pleasure slave. That entailed injecting myself with a cocktail of very exotic drugs which, in the end, landed me in a New Republic medcenter." Kirney cast a quick glance at her husband but Myn simply stared ahead, his eyes glassy, lost in his own memories. "Which is where I met one of your father's squadmates who'd been wounded in the battle. Weeks later, I'd moved to Coruscant after being discharged, he and another of Myn's squadmates came to visit me and asked me to enter the New Republic Naval Academy to train as starfighter pilot."

Selan's eyebrows went up to his hairline. "Just like that?"

"No." Kirney gave a rueful smile. "Apparently they had run into an instructor who was running a nasty black market ring from within his training command and they wanted to use me as a bait to expose him and his cronies. Of course I could not refuse such an offer, especially when they agreed to try and get me into one of Wedge Antilles' squadrons. I was a spy, after all, and getting into one of Antilles' precious units would be a major victory for Imperial Intelligence." She shrugged again. "My time at the Academy was anything but the chore I'd thought it would be. I did bring down that black market ring, yes, but in hindsight it was the time and the trainees there which opened my eyes to the realities of the galaxy and let me see past the cocoon of lies the Empire had wrapped me up in.
"I'd been told that New Republic soldiers were barely restrained mad dogs, aggressive, vicious, not caring for peace and stability. I'd never noticed before that this was, to put it mildly, utter poodoo but there I could not longer ignore the truth. I began to like some of the trainees there and I was beginning to regret thoughts about killing them later in combat. In combination with my experiences aboard Implacable that utterly undermined my Imperial view of the galaxy and I worked myself into a solid state of confusion about what was right and what was wrong … and more importantly I was no longer able to discern which part of me was really mine and which were remnants of my Intelligence training."

"And how did you meet?" Alina's eyes darted from her father to her mother and back.

Kirney gave her a small smile. "After graduation I was accepted into your father's squadron. That's how we met."

"Not that I really noticed her at first," Myn remarked, his face serious. "At that time I was in a similar state of confusion, just for vastly different reasons. After the Wraiths had gotten me out of my near catatonic state, after my breakdown, I thought all these troubles past, that I was back to normal again. But I wasn't," he said quietly and shook his head. "For the people around me I played the role-model soldier, always in control, calm, dedicated. But inside there was a full-blown war raging, a war between the two parts of my mind which I just couldn't bring in line. The dark side of me, the one sith-bent on vengeance and bloodshed, was constantly at odds with the growing impression that such a life, dedicated to a vendetta on behalf of my dead friends, would be a total waste and a gesture of disrespect towards the ultimate sacrifice these people had made. I was constantly occupied keeping this under wraps, to demonstrate control and calm to everyone around me, but this conflict was there and I could not stop it."

"I was rather preoccupied myself at that time," his wife admitted quietly. "During that very first mission I flew with Wraith Squadron I realized that I could no longer work for the Empire. The trust and friendship the Wraiths offered to me was something I could not resist, that feeling of belonging which I had missed since the death of my parents. So I decided to bury my old life aboard Implacable and become the person I was pretending to be, Lara Notsil, Aldivian farmgirl turned New Republic fighter pilot. Only to realize within days that this would not work in the long run."

"Why that?" Selan inquired.

Kirney gave a self-deprecating shrug. "Lara Notsil was a far more complete character than Gara Petothel had ever been. In the Empire you learned early to present a party line face to the galaxy and refrain from saying or doing things the authorities wouldn't like. When my parents were killed I withdrew into myself, always scared of authorities, of making mistakes, of not producing results, even of thinking seditious thoughts and be killed as well. I was not a normal teenager, I was totally focused on pleasing the teachers, then the instructors and my superiors so that none of them would have a reason to punish me. I simply didn't develop any kind of basic personality, did not indulge in hobbies, had friends, went out or did what normal teenagers do. All of that influenced my basic thought patterns, my behavior in various situations, even the way I held myself. And these things were constantly at odds with the role I was playing. Lara Notsil had experienced all those things I only knew from the Holonet or intelligence manuals. So whenever I was not in total control of myself I slipped back into behavioral patterns of Gara … and being in control of oneself all the time is impossible. So, after some thinking, I decided to continue with the role I was playing until Zsinj was beaten … and then confess everything to my commanding officer."

Alina gave a nod of understanding. "And how did you get together?"

Myn exchanged a look with his wife, then gave a rueful grin. "In the meantime I had finally begun to notice your mother. Not just that she's a beautiful woman," - he winked at Kirney who rolled her eyes – "but more like she held herself. I mean, I was having some serious issues because I could not deal with the past. I'd lost friends, yes, but here was this young woman who had lost not only friends but her family and her home, who had been kidnapped, drugged and abused and yet she did not seem to suffer from the memories. She was moving forward with her life while I didn't. I felt like a total loser, and yet her presence rekindled that will to live within me, to learn how to overcome a traumatic past and move forward. So finally, after weeks of arguing with myself and working up the nerve, I asked her out."

"Pretty clumsily, too," his wife remarked with a smirk and the kids giggled.

Myn shot her a dirty look. "You just had to mention that, hadn't you?"

"Of course," Kirney said airily and smiled. "He wasn't skilled in that area, still isn't, so whatever you do don't ask your dad for dating advice."

Alina snickered and wasn't silenced even by a stern glare her father sent in her direction.

"I must admit he caught me off-guard when he asked me out," Kirney continued the tale. "I'd been watching him, surreptitiously, because I considered him the only real danger among the Wraiths. Imagine my surprise when I suddenly realized that he was interested in me. Romantically, I mean." She gave her husband a wry grin. "To say I was flabbergasted would be an understatement."

Myn smiled sheepishly. "And predictably you said no."

"Of course I did," Kirney shot back teasingly before looking at her kids again. "But your father was persistant so he finally wore me down. It wasn't an instant connection, though. At first we simply began to spend off-duty time together. We met for breakfast, wasted time on corny holodramas or hologames … "

"Oh, that brings back memories," her husband chipped in with a fond smile. "Remember that evening when we played a whole smashball season on that gaming console until we fell asleep in the lounge?"

"Don't remind me," Kirney groaned as she buried her face in her hands. "Face never let us hear the end of it after he found us in the morning."

The kids exchanged a look of utter incomprehension. "Face?" Alina asked.

"Garik 'The Face' Loran. By then commander of Wraith Squadron," Myn explained.

"So after a while your father somehow managed to worm his way into my thoughts," Kirney guided the explanation back to the main topic. "He even managed to intrude into my dreams and I caught myself looking forward to meeting him. That was a new one for me, I'd never had a real boyfriend before, any relationships I'd had had been fake and part of my various covers. I discovered that I liked those new feelings very much." Her smile faded. "Until the day my new life imploded."

"What happened?"

Myn's face showed his sorrow. "I tried to kill your mother," he said quietly.

And again the kids gasped in unison.