Approximately six years earlier, aboard the cruiser Black Knight, Outer Rim Territories
"I just need to know how it got into the system and how far it's spread," Garin said, leaning over the tech's shoulder and staring at the computer screen.
"Does it really matter sir? I mean it's ju—" the tech's comment was cut short by the expression shot him. "Sorry sir, it's limited to the ship, every personal datapad and terminal has been sent the footage."
"There's nothing more dangerous than the images I assume?"
"Its just some two-dimensional motion shots of Lieutenant Sajuuk sir, nothing more."
"Alright, I want it purged from the entire network."
The tech looked miserable, "sir that could take hou—"
"Do it; right now, get help if you need it, but I want those files erased."
Garin stood up and left the tech to his task, stalking around the perimeter of the Cave considering this bit of trouble. Personally he didn't care that someone had snuck an old camera into Vic'que's shower, that wasn't the part that bothered him. What made him worry was the potential loss of unit cohesion that could be caused by a lack of respect. He knew that despite the tech's complaints, it would be taken care of, even if it did take hours. Now he just had to find out who had taken the video and deal with them, he still wasn't sure what he'd do with the culprit or culprits once he found them, but work detail and transfer out of the unit came to mind. They were in the midst of preparing for Hades' biggest operation and he didn't need clowns pulling practical jokes now; especially with all the new personnel coming aboard and finding their niche within the unit. The video stood to severely undercut Vic'que's authority and she was already considered a bit of a loose cannon by most of the unit.
He made his way to the hangar deck, the smell of weapons gas, ozone, and charged ions greeted his nostrils as he stepped out into the bustling chamber. The new craft were already berthed and others had been rolled out for routine maintenance. He began walking amongst the strike craft, being careful not to interrupt any of the mechanics, technicians, weapons crews, or supply crews as they did their work. After a year of serving with him, they'd grown used to his visits and they were no longer reason for concern, everyone understood that he simply came here when he needed to get away from the duties of command and simply wanted to pretend he was just a pilot again. He paused in front of a Defender, it wasn't his but he ran his hand over the nearest solar paneled wing, tracing the lines of the surface thoughtfully.
"Credit for your thoughts…sir?"
He turned to see Daru standing behind him eying him curiously.
"Just thinking Chief," He said off-handedly.
"I can see that," she said, her lekku twitching back and forth. He knew that their movement could signify all kinds of things, from emotions, to internal thoughts, and even serve as a form of communication. That didn't mean he understood any of it.
She moved past him, picking up the toolset that sat by the fighter and clambering up onto a wing and straddling the support pylon. She set the repulsor on the toolset and began her work on the pylon.
"Some of the Defenders have been having issues with the power couplings from the panels to the cockpit, happens from time to time with any design that relies on solar power sources situated away from the desired systems."
Garin nodded, ducking around the wing and leaning against the bulbous cockpit, "have the Avengers been operating properly?"
"No problems that I've heard about, I'm just having my crews check over all the Defenders in case the problem is universal since we did get them all in the same batch with the exception of those replacements we just received."
"Speaking of replacements, have you been able to deal with the influx?"
Daru snorted as she pulled herself up the starboard pylon, the toolset following her lazily as she began checking the central pylon.
"I've got one of the best deck crews in the Fleet sir, if we can't handle a few extra hulls then no one can." She paused and looked down at him with a smile, "it is nice to be working on the Star Wing again though; those beauties don't have half the issues that the TIE models do even if they are outmatched by the Defender."
"What about the Skiprays, any issues with those?"
"Aside from not enough of my people being qualified to work on them, no, and that won't be a problem for long. I'm doing everything I can to make sure we have a universal qualification for everyone."
"Meaning," Garin asked, looking up at her over the rim of the cockpit.
"That I have my people cycling through ship-types so that we can work on anything we have in the hangar."
She finished checking the central pylon and shimmied around to the port pylon, Garin walked around the cockpit following her.
"How on earth did you get away from your last commander Chief? I can't imagine anyone wanting to lose your skills."
She paused in her work, her body tensing as her lekku twitched and swayed, "my last 'commander' was an Imperial bureaucrat that thought I'd look nice dressed in underwear two sizes too small and hanging on his arm whenever he went out to social events. I was lucky the Hutt slime let me wear a gown over it when we went out, even if it was see-through, it let me have some dignity."
Garin winced; he'd walked right into that one. Though the image of Daru's slender and trimmed form walking around barely clad wasn't unpleasant, that she'd been forced to do it bothered him. Before meeting Thrawn, and the handful of non-humans, and half-humans that served aboard the Knight he might have found such behavior normal. After all he'd grown up on Coruscant, such things were fairly commonplace and he'd always bought the Imperial viewpoint of humans being better. After serving alongside individuals like Daru and some of his pilots and other crewmembers he no longer believed in that superiority.
"How did you end up a chief mechanic on a cruiser then?"
"Thrawn," she said simply, continuing her work.
That made sense, it seemed that everyone in this unit owed something to Thrawn, Garin had to wonder about that, and if it said anything about Thrawn's intentions or motivations.
Daru's voice brought him back out of his thoughts, "it was a dinner at the Imperial Palace, my master had stepped away, to be seen with some important official, Thrawn was there and he started speaking with me." She finished checking the pylon and swung her legs over the pylon, looking down at Garin as she put her tools back in the toolset. "Catch," she said as she dropped off the pylon, Garin was pleased to say that he was able to catch her as she fell; he was surprised to find how supple her body felt beneath his fingers, they stayed like that for a moment before she smiled at him.
"You can put me down sir."
He did so, and followed her behind the first Defender and to another behind it; a repulsor crane came around and plucked the first fighter off the deck to take it back to the launching racks.
"So what did you talk about?"
She shrugged, climbing up onto the port pylon, "at first nothing much. I thought he just wanted company and since I was one of the only non-humans there and we both had blue skin I thought that I must have reminded him of home. That and the white uniform with captains pips made sure I couldn't refuse even if I'd wanted to, but don't get me wrong, that another non-human was talking to me was the highlight of the evening."
The toolset floated up besides her and she opened the maintenance hatch to begin her work. "We spoke for so long that I thought he was trying to get me alone with him, he wouldn't have been the first Imperial at those parties to want some privacy with me." She paused, frowning at the panel she had opened, taking another tool out and going back to work. "This power coupling is hardly even connected, I don't even see how it got off the assembly line; no wonder it's been having power issues. Less than half the power from this wing is even getting to the cockpit."
She fussed over the offending coupling for a moment before she returned to her story. "After about half an hour the conversation turned from social to technical, I mentioned that when I wasn't entertaining my master I liked to spend time in his private garage and get impromptu lessons from the mechanic in charge of maintaining his air cars, speeders, and what have you."
"That caught his attention?"
She shrugged, closing the hatch and moving up the central pylon. "It must have, my master came back then and took me away, but three days later some Fleet troopers showed up with orders for my release into their custody. My master was outraged and of course protested but there was something in the order must have scared him because after they showed him the document he was only too happy to let me go."
"Must have been surprising," Garin said, leaning against the front of the cockpit module.
"It was terrifying; they stuck me in a Navy air car and didn't say one word the entire time. When we finally stopped they took me out and escorted me through Fleet Command dressed in the last thing my master had me put on, I was so ashamed."
Garin tried to imagine being an alien and walking through Fleet Command in undersized underwear, he couldn't do it, but he believed that she must have been miserable.
"They took me to a small office, sat me down, and left. I was completely terrified and had no idea what to expect. Finally though, I heard voices, the door opened again and a commander strode into the room followed by Thrawn. I didn't know what was happening but when the commander said: 'I understand your sentimentality Captain, if she's as good as she looks then she's being wasted on some fat politician, even if she is a tail-head.' I didn't know what to think, but Thrawn put his hand on my shoulder and that gave me much more confidence. I thought that he'd taken a liking to me and I was going to be his consort from then on, I didn't think that Thrawn could possibly be worse than my master considering how friendly he'd been at the party."
Garin turned and looked up at her as she opened up the cockpit and dropped inside, he watched her through the viewscreen as she continued to work.
"How old were you when this happened?"
She didn't miss a beat, nor did she look up from her job. "Sixteen, my first master bought me from my parents when I was thirteen and I was resold to that Imperial when I was fifteen."
Despite living in lower-income regions on Coruscant he still registered surprise and disgust at how a little girl could have been treated like cattle.
She continued as she ran diagnostics in the cockpit, "after Thrawn took me with him, we went up to his ship in orbit around the planet. The first thing he did once we were aboard was give me my own cabin and some decent clothes." She smiled at the memory, "I wasn't sure what to expect by that point, but the next day he introduced me to the Avenger's chief, a hold over from the Clone Wars who didn't have any of the preconceptions about non-humans. Thrawn told me that I would be studying under him from that point onwards; I learned quickly and soon even surpassed my tutor. I spent the next few years with Thrawn aboard the Avenger before he ordered my transfer to this unit."
"Do you miss it?"
"Miss what?"
"Being aboard the Avenger," Garin wondered just how deeply her feelings for Thrawn ran as he asked the question.
She looked up from her job then, eying him with a smile that made her face shine despite the grime from her duties.
"I'm CDO aboard a heavy cruiser that operates outside of the normal chain of command and get to work on the best fighters in the galaxy while I'm at it. Sir, this is a dream."
Garin snorted; yes he supposed that would be a dream for woman raised as a slave for half her adolescence. Daru climbed out of the cockpit and moved to the final pylon, Garin followed her.
"How do you feel about serving a force that discriminates against non-humans? Even oppresses them?"
Now she paused, both in her speech, and in her work. The silence seemed to drag on for minutes when it only lasted a matter of seconds. Finally, she looked down at him, her expression calm; even as her voice dropped to a near whisper, he had to strain to hear her.
"Garin, what I said before, when we thought that we might be attacking legitimate Imperial forces, I meant it. If the Emperor ever betrays what little faith I have in this system, I won't feel any remorse about changing sides."
She leaned down towards him, "you, Thrawn, this unit, you're all my family and all that matters to me. The Empire can hang itself for all I care. So long as I have a place to call home with people I can respect and I know respect me, the politics of why we're fighting don't mean anything to me."
He thought about warning her again, like he had before but decided against it, he could see in her eyes that she meant every word of what she said so he simply nodded his understanding. He reached up, offering his hand to her; she took it and squeezed it tightly.
"You'll always be welcome in my crew Daru, you've proven repeatedly that you're worthy of the respect everyone aboard the ship gives you."
Still holding his hand, she nodded with a smile. "I know Garin, that's why I'm still here."
The moment might have lasted forever if his comlink hadn't buzzed, and even then they didn't release their hold on each other until she nodded at his waist.
"You're beeping."
He scowled and reached for the link, Daru released his hand and got back to work.
"Durives."
"Sir, its Harth. I'll be in your cabin."
Garin frowned, looking up at Daru again before walking away from the Defender and heading towards the hangar exit.
"What is it?"
"I've found our pranksters."
Garin blinked, "plural?"
"Yes sir, two of them, a very specific two as a matter of fact."
Garin groaned and shook his head, hoping that it wasn't who he thought it was.
Present, interrogation room aboard the Mon Cal cruiser Home One, Bilbringi Shipyards
"I can't believe you had that conversation," Deanna murmured, shaking her head.
I shrugged, "it wasn't the most comfortable one I ever had, especially with an Admiral only a few kilometers distant."
"One thing I don't understand," she said, looking over her notes. "You've said multiple times that you wouldn't support the Emperor if you knew that he was targeting civilians indiscriminately; how could you not have known that he was ordering just that; especially with the destruction of Alderaan?"
"No one in the fleet knew anything about Alderaan or the Death Star, rumors abounded about what exactly had happened and even those rumors were kept fairly quiet. Originally the story was that Rebel's had stolen a mining station designed to crack planet sized asteroids and fired it on Alderaan when the Empire would not give in to their demands, and that it was destroyed, not by Rebels but by an Imperial counter-attack when the Rebellion had tried to hide in the Yavin system. After that rumor proved false it was stated that saboteurs had fired the Death Star's laser and destroyed Alderaan rather than Tarkin. It wasn't until the Battle of Endor and its aftermath that I learned what had happened and really began to question things."
"Yet you were ready to join the Rebellion despite being unsure if they were responsible for Alderaan or not."
Again I shrugged; being able to move my hands around freely was such a relief. "There were so many rumors about what had happened I just pushed it to the back of my mind; I didn't know who had fired the weapon. Only that if I ever found out, I would do everything I could to make sure they never did again. Of course I learned later that everyone who has ever been responsible for firing the superlaser had died aboard either the first or second Death Star. As for joining the Rebellion, yes, if it meant keeping my people alive I'd go along with anything, it was a better alternative than going mercenary or working for a crime syndicate."
She considered me thoughtfully for a moment before tapping her datapad, "let's continue with the Zaarin campaign, when operations start?"
"They didn't, we hadn't realized it, but Zaarin had already found out that we knew about him and moved first…."