Several days, arguments, games of dejarik and barbed comments later, Inej sat in the pilot's seat again as they reverted back into realspace.
"You know," her companion said thoughtfully as he gazed out at the now-stationary stars, "I never get tired of seeing that. Not since I was a little kid."
Inej smiled to herself as she flicked a few switches on the console. "Me neither."
Then the strangely intimate moment was gone, as seemingly everyone else on the ship filed into the cockpit. There were only two chairs beyond the ones Inej and Jesper were in; Nina quickly - not to mention imperiously - occupied one, while Matthias had a glare-off with Kaz while Wylan snagged the second. Freshly irritated and impatient, Kaz leaned between Inej and Jesper to peer at the world below, his weight on his good leg, despite the blaster wound having fully healed several days before.
Though half of the planet was in shadow, the part visible was a white-flecked blue. Inej felt Kaz stiffen next to her as he realised what those white flecks were.
"Are those lightning storms?" he asked incredulously. He looked at Inej for confirmation; she nodded. "Are you crazy? Where are we?"
Inej opened her mouth to reply, but Jesper beat her to it before she could. "You know, Kaz, if you trust my and Inej's flying so little, why don't you fly the ship yourself? I've heard you're a stellar pilot when you want to be."
Kaz glared at Inej. She thought she heard Nina cough something that sounded suspiciously like "flyboys" but she couldn't be sure.
"Eadu," she supplied in response to his earlier question. "We're in the Eadu system, sector Bheriz, Outer Rim Territories. And yes: it's a mountainous planet famous for its nerf-herders, massive amounts of rainfall, and lightning storms."
Kaz's face drained of colour. "Inej. . ."
"What're we doing here, though?" Nina chimed in, leaning forwards to offer her opinion. "What's our objective - what made us come here?"
Inej kept her eyes on the cerulean planet as they circled closer, but she turned her head to the side to answer, "The datachip with the information that led to us finding out about this so-called planet-killer credited and referenced Eadu several times. We traced the signal to here, and based on other data stored in the chip. . . Well, we thought this place was our best bet to find more info about the project - and how to stop it. That's all this trip is," she reiterated, actually glancing back to give Nina a pointed look. "Reconnaissance."
Nina seemed to get the message, though she sat back with her arms crossed, and argued, "They wouldn't have sent the Wraith on a reconnaissance mission."
Jesper jolted into a rigidly upright position next to her, but Inej paid it no mind.
"I'm a spy, Nina. Reconnaissance missions are my job."
Her friend couldn't argue with that. "Fine. But we get in there, and once we've got what information we want, we can-"
"Leave without ever letting them realise we've been here," Inej finished calmly. "Without ever letting them know that we know about this project." She gave her a wry glance out of the corner of her eye. "You just want to blow something up."
Nina rolled her eyes. "Well, I didn't lug all those thermal detonators from one ship to the other for no reason."
Inej wasn't inclined to think that Matthias's sudden onset of coughing was coincidental.
"I like blowing stuff up," Wylan voiced, almost hesitantly, but it got everyone's attention.
Every gaze in the cockpit snapped to him. His eyes widened as a blush consumed his cheeks.
"I- I'm good with chemicals," he hastened to explain. "Reactions. Explosions."
Inej noted with some dismay that both Nina and Jesper were nodding grimly. "Could come in handy," the latter said with a slight grin on his face.
She struggled not to beat her head against the console. She might end up hitting the eject button or something and kill them all.
"We're approaching the planet now," she said instead, pointedly interrupting their discourse on pyrotechnics. "Get into the meeting area and strap yourself in, unless you want to get thrown across the room thanks to a stray lightning bolt." She didn't glance back as she said, "Sorry, Matthias, but this is going to be bumpy," so she didn't see the glare he shot her, but she entertained herself briefly by imagining it.
The she focused on the task at hand.
The planet's atmosphere was coming up fast; Inej could make out the rough-hewn texture of storm clouds that obscured the world beneath like a protective coat of paint. She flinched, her hands skittering on the controls, when the first arc of blue-white lightning lanced beyond the viewport.
"I guess you were faking bravado for Kaz's benefit back there?"
Inej pressed her lips into a tight smile. "Of course."
Jesper glanced at her. "I'd have thought the Wraith would be more used to nerve-wracking sights."
"The Wraith," she grumbled back, "is used to the cover of darkness and tough computer security. Not high-voltage lightning storms which could electrocute us all if we don't do this carefully."
"Are there any other types of lightning storm?" Jesper teased lightly, then he glanced over at her again. "Loosen your grips on the controls; it's just going to make it harder for you to move quickly and tire you out prematurely."
Letting a long, slow breath out between her teeth, Inej did so.
"So you're really the Wraith, are you?" Inej clenched her jaw. She did not want to have this conversation now. "The being with the third highest 'dead or alive' bounty in the world?"
"Yup." Her teeth were still grinding together. She should probably stop that; it hurt.
In her peripheral vision, she saw Jesper open his mouth again and she tensed, expecting more questions she really didn't want to answer.
But what came out was: "You're younger than I am."
"I'm twenty."
"And I'm twenty-one, but I still don't know how the hell to navigate this galaxy. I don't understand what's going on, politically, socially or economically. I'm not mature enough to decide whether or not I think it's worth joining a cause in which the average lifespan of a pilot is just over two weeks."
She hissed out another breath between her teeth - half at the inquiry, half at the lightning that flashed less than two metres to her left. She eased the ship a shade to the right as she said, "I had. . . unfortunate circumstance. . . as a child. They led to me having somewhat rigid ideals of what right and wrong are."
Jesper was silent. Patient.
Inej took another deep breath. "I was a dancing slave in Pekka the Hutt's palace."
There was a jolt in the ship, startled cries from behind them, and Jesper cursing under his breath.
"That was me, not lightning," he explained hurriedly upon seeing her face. "Sorry."
She steadied her breathing again. A good few minutes passed before she spoke.
"From my point of view, any regime that not only allows, but actively encourages slavery, is evil. And I know that I was enslaved by a Hutt, over whom the Empire has no jurisdiction, but. . . It could have just as easily been the Empire. It just wasn't. And so I'm going to risk my life time and time again, in the vague hope that for every new mission I complete, the chance that someone else will have to go through that diminishes ever so slightly. A Republic can do better. The Republic will do better."
There was an awkward silence in the cockpit. And the only attempt Jesper made to break it was with a quiet, "I believe you."
Studying him out of the corner of her eye, Inej wondered if Jesper wasn't as emotionally immature as he claimed himself to be.
And then suddenly they could see more than a few feet beyond the viewport, and the craggy terrain of the planet was coming up fast. Inej sucked in a breath, reflexively throwing herself back against the chair even as Jesper yanked them up so they just skimmed the ground, and she could let the breath out of her lungs again.
"Starting the landing cycle now," Jesper said, then grinned over at her. "See? It wasn't so bad. We made it through the storm."
Inej glared at him, even as she huffed a laugh of her own. "This is why I spy for the Rebellion, rather than fly."
That was when their ship's comlink lit up. A message played over it, fuzzy with interference - presumable from the storms.
". . .fied vessel. . . transmit. . . repeat. . . codes. . ."
"Halt the landing cycle," Inej ordered instinctively, standing up to get closer to the comlink. "They're hailing us."
"They're hailing us?" Jesper asked, panic in his voice. He glanced at her, and Inej was sure her brow was furrowed in equal worry. "I thought you said this mission was supposed to be clandestine?"
"It was," she replied. "And there's usually not much activity around Eadu. Why they would be actively searching for ships and asking for the correct codes? Is there an Imperial garrison nearby? I was under the impression Eadu didn't have one. . ."
They exited the last storm cloud and suddenly the terrain of the planet was spread out beneath them, like an unfurled map. There were still too many peaks and mountains for Inej to see far in any direction - to try and spot an Imperial facility in any direction - but the signal did clear up significantly.
The transmission repeated. "Unidentified vessel, we have you on our scopes. Please transmit correct clearance codes to allow for landing."
"Clearance codes?" Jesper seemed to be starting to panic now. The was a squeaking sound behind them, and Inej turned in her seat to see Wylan standing there, face ashen. "We don't have any-"
"Unidentified vessel, we have you on our scopes. If you do not transmit the correct clearance codes, we will be forced to open fire. I repeat: unidentified vessel, we have you-"
There was a clatter of footsteps behind them; Inej started minutely. Wylan, ignoring the shock written on both their faces, strode forward to take the comlink from Jesper. "Transmitting clearance codes now," he said into it, then tapped at the device for a while until he set it down again.
Inej kept her silence, but Jesper looked from Wylan to the comlink and back again. "I knew we brought you along for a reason, lordling."
Wylan scowled. "Don't call me that."
"Your dad's a rich merchant, right? Would you prefer 'merchling'?"
"Codes verified. You will be provided with a flight path to follow. Do not deviate from this approved flight path, or you will be destroyed. Welcome to Eadu, Jan Van Eck." The comlink clicked off.
Wylan slumped into one of the free chairs with a sigh.
Jesper, on the other hand, seemed full of nervous energy. "So, what do we do now? Land when they tell us, wait for them to board us, realise we're not Wylan's dad, capture and interrogate us as Rebels and Rebel sympathisers? Eventual execution?"
"No," Inej said. "Stay calm, Jesper. I've got a plan."
"Stay calm?" He seemed quite. . . jittery. "Easy for you to say, I guess; you're the blasted Wraith. You've probably been on several thousand missions that've gone awry and still pulled off the objective with relative ease. Me? This is my first time, and I've got to say that I'm not really liking it so far."
Jesper seemed to have a real chip on his shoulder about her identity as the Rebellion's most infamous spy.
Inej ignored it. "Wylan goes in with Matthias, pretends his father sent him as a representative to whatever function this is. He finds out what's going on and why, while I do some poking around in the facility itself. That is," she added, looking back at Wylan for the first time. He seemed a little pale, "if your father hasn't made your defection public knowledge."
Wylan snorted. "And ruin his precious image? Not a snowflake's chance in Mos Eisley."
Inej turned back to Jesper. "The rest of you, hide. Use Kaz's smuggling compartments if you have to. Just stay out of sight. If anyone questions why a lord's son has such a garbage heap of a ship, Wylan can just claim he has unusual tastes or something."
Jesper still looked green. "We're all gonna die."
"Possibly," Inej admitted. She didn't like sugar-coating things - not when it was life or death. "But we're less likely to die if we follow my plan than if we all just wait in the ship."
Jesper blew out a breath through his nose. "Alright. What do we do next?"
The comlink chimed, and Inej pulled up the message to see it only contained a string of coordinates - landing coordinates.
"We do as advised. We follow the approved flight path." Inej sat down again. "Starting the landing cycle now."
The surface of Eadu was rough and rocky, and Jesper entertained himself briefly as they landed by imagining how many octaves Kaz's voice would rise by if he found out they'd accidentally mutilated the underside of his ship by flying too low. Alas, they didn't, and he and Inej touched down lightly on a stretch of flat land shortly in front of what had looked some sort of facility from the air.
"An Imperial one, for sure, if it was ever in any doubt," Inej had said, squinting down at the grey cube dazzled with floodlights. "See? There's a bunch of lambda shuttles over in that quadrant, not to mention how high tech the place is. There aren't that many places that have the credits to throw around on high quality buildings like that."
Jesper supposed the Wraith would know these things - he still couldn't believe he was sitting next to the Wraith - but he'd asked anyway. "How do you know it's not some company that's decided to use Eadu as the beginning of their galactic dominance or something? It would make sense, Wylan's dad being a merchant and all."
Inej had smiled and tapped the console. "I did some research into Eadu the moment I learned the name of the place. It has a population of around two and a half million, most of whom are nerf-herders in small villages. Other than that, this place has no useful resources. The storms make comm transmissions difficult to send. There's no reason anyone would want to build a facility here," she'd paused, then added, "unless you wanted to hide something."
Jesper had sighed as they soared over the facility, high enough to be out of reach of ground-based scanners and human (or near-human) eyesight. "So finding out what's going on here is our best shot."
Inej was already fiddling with the controls as she looked at the place they were due to land, but she'd nodded. "Absolutely."
Then she'd sent Wylan back into the main meeting room to debrief the others.
Now, she rose from the pilot's seat, glancing out of the viewport at the crags and rocks around them. "Not the typical place for a social function," she noted. Jesper followed her into the main meeting area, where she clipped on the pouch she wore round her waist and shrugged on a brown jacket. She pulled a hair-tie out of one of the pockets to begin to pull her long hair back from her face as she stared, hard-eyed, at Wylan. "Don't mess this up, or we're dead, merchling." She drew on a cap and goggles, keeping them up on her forehead rather than over her eyes.
Jesper snickered. He genuinely didn't think he'd ever seen the shade of red Wylan turned before.
Nina was gazing at her friend somewhat sadly, with a small smile on her smile. She hugged her, and said, "May the Force be with you."
Inej hugged her back. "You too."
Nina glanced up, then, as if suddenly realising that everyone else was staring at her intimate moment with her friend. "And with the rest of you too, I guess."
Surprisingly enough, it was Matthias who chuckled at that.
"May the Force be with us all," Kaz echoed. Jesper gave him a startled look, but his dark eyes were fixed on Inej. She looked everywhere but at him.
And true to form, Kaz was still the only one Inej hadn't make eye contact with by the time she gave them all a collective nod, then slipped down the ramp and out into the torrential rain.
Matthias clapped his hands, oddly chipper. Jesper watched him with suspicion as he began to herd Wylan away from the door. "Well then, let's the rest of us start getting into those smuggling compartments you mentioned."
Wylan pulled himself out of his bodyguard's grasp. "We're not staying here. You and I are infiltrating the facility."
Matthias went very, very still. "What."
Wylan stepped back, until he was in line with Jesper. "That's the plan. I used my father's clearance codes to get us in, and if he doesn't turn up soon people will start to get suspicious. I can go in, claim he sent me as a replacement or a stand in, and hopefully find out what's going on - what this function's about." Matthias's mouth was moving, but no sound came out. Wylan said firmly, "You and I are going in."
Matthias glanced around at the rest of them, as if hoping that would correct or embellish the plan in a way he found less horrifying - or as if he was wishing they weren't here at all. "No, my lord," he said, grabbing Wylan's arm. "We're not."
Wylan's patience seemed to have run out: he pinched the bridge of his nose and took in a sharp breath, tugging gently on his entrapped arm. "Matthias, why don't you want to go in there? What are you so afraid of?"
The bodyguard's mouth opened and closed for a moment, flapping like a fish. He looked around the crew, and when he looked back at Wylan, his grip on his arm tightened. "We're on Eadu," he said. "You don't know much about it, but I overheard your father mention it to your underlings, once. The security here is through the roof. Mapping the mountains, mapping the hallways, security holocams everywhere, tripwires, lasers - you name it." He took a deep breath. "My lord - Wylan," he began earnestly. Almost desperately. "If you set foot in there, you're not coming back out."
Wylan had stopped moving. But it didn't matter, because the hush that followed Matthias's admission was short-lived anyway.
"What?" There as a sort of seismic anger in Nina Zenik's voice - righteous fury, protective worry, fierceness that would shame a nexu. She marched up to Matthias, a snarl on her face, and jabbed a finger in his face.
"You're telling me," her voice was a low hiss, "that you allowed my dearest friend to go out into that sort of minefield without warning her?" Matthias stared, stony-eyed, and Nina's face contorted. Jesper half expected her to tear the Imperial's face off there and then.
But she didn't She turned around and marched away - to where her assigned sleeping bunk was. When she came back, she'd thrown on a jacket similar to Inej's - they must be standard issue in the Rebellion, Jesper thought numbly - and clipped a blaster and her lightsaber at her hip.
It was Wylan who finally had the nerve to ask, "Where are you going?"
"To find Inej," Nina threw back over her shoulder. "And make sure she understands the danger of this blasted planet."
"What?" Jesper wasn't the only one who gave out the horrified cry; he and Wylan exchanged terrified glances. "You can't-"
She was already gone.
"Matthias, go after her," Wylan said immediately, staring down the lowered ramp. Jesper could see his pulse pounding in his throat.
Matthias immediately objected, "My lord-"
"That's an order." Jesper didn't know if that was anger or fear in his voice, but it was hard. Brittle.
And the way Matthias was looking at his employer. . . His face was affronted, aghast, offended sensibilities evident in the frown.
No, Jesper realised. Not offended sensibilities.
Offended honour.
"Go!"
Matthias went. He didn't even bother to put on a jacket before he charged out into the dark, pouring rain.
Wylan's posture sagged; he looked to Jesper for support. Jesper looked to Kaz, who'd taken a seat at some point amongst all the drama, but the smuggler just gave him a droll look.
Jesper swallowed. "We need to move on with the plan." He looked down at Wylan. "You need to get in there."
Wylan was still staring at the lowered ramp. "I need someone to come with me."
"I'll come," Jesper offered instantly. He didn't care why Wylan needed a bodyguard - two was better than one, anyway. And he did not want to stay on the ship on his own with Kaz. Not with everything that'd been floating around in the air for the past few days.
Wylan looked surprised, then grateful. Jesper didn't bother examining the flash of warmth that gave him.
"Let's go then," Wylan said, returning his gaze to the exit. "We don't have much time."
