"Mole? Hey Mole, are you in here?!"
Kyle's call reverberated through the most loathsome docking bay he'd ever seen in the Alliance fleet. The old reek of melted durasteel and spilled industrial fluids was so intense that he could have been standing inside the rotting husk of some metallic megafauna. Though the glowbanks were too bright, a persistent gloominess bled from the groaning bulkheads from and a floor ravaged by carbon scoring. Three of the room's repair alcoves looked like they had been hit with concussion grenades. The tangled piles of hull segments, starfoils, and disemboweled engine blocks within were barely recognizable as ships. The fourth alcove held the Moldy Crow, and it alone was in one piece (more or less).
Kyle's first reaction upon being "gifted" this raptor-headed light freighter had been to hope that someone was playing a prank on him. He'd only taken the Crow on his first mission for the Rebels after some extensive last-minute repairs, and by now it had earned some grudging respect.
Emphasis on grudging. Jan was somehow able to fly this thing like she'd been born in the cockpit, but to Kyle the drive and maneuvering controls were sluggish and testy. Atmospheric flight in particular was like riding a nauseous dewback. Unless he earned enough credits to get those systems overhauled, he knew it was only a matter of time before he plowed the Moldy Crow straight into a mountain.
Benches and carts surrounded the Crow like defensive walls, piled with machinery. Kyle picked his way through them, occasionally kicking some dropped item aside with his shock boot. On one of the benches he spotted Mole's comlink, glistening with grease beside clumps of cables and insulation. That figured. He was always misplacing things.
Kyle came close enough to lay his hand on the streak of red that ran along the Crow's fuselage like a wound freshly opened by a vibroblade. Spiraled scorches and streaks of char formed a chiaroscuro across a hull which, long before he had ever laid eyes on it, may have once been a respectable russet. Naked machinery gaped and dangled where armor panels had been blasted beyond recover. Extraction from Talus had been rough, rougher than usual, and as Kyle scoured the signs of damage and unfinished repair with his sharp eyes, he lost himself in remembering.
Or almost did. There was a funny feeling in his hand, a ghost of a twitch, an almost magnetic attraction between it and one of the insulated pockets of his bulky blast jacket. Not literally magnetic. Not real.
It was only close enough to real to almost slightly, circumspectly begin to distract him.
Just then a little storeroom behind the Crow's engines banged open, and out came the man, or rather the Mon Calamari, who was supposed to be salvaging this junk heap. Molindi's perpetually moist skin was a dirty silver, spotted with inky blue. A full head shorter than Kyle, he was as lithe as a huurton, and his movements always had a scurrying quality to them. He came out of the storeroom half-concealed by an armload of tools and gizmos. Lengths of wire tangled about his legs and trailed the floor behind him.
Seeing Kyle, he lurched and nearly fell over, the junk in his arms clanking and jangling dangerously. "Augh! Commander Katarn, wasn't expecting you! Is everything all right?!" His voice had a deep, gurgling intonation.
Kyle glanced at the Mon Cal's misplaced comlink, toyed with the idea of tossing it to him, and let it slide. "Easy, Mole. Just here to check up on things. You been taking care of my bird?"
"The best as I can, same as always." Stumbling past the human, Molindi deposited his load onto the nearest bench with a crash. His greasy, webbed hands rifled through the load. "The power converter assembly is worse than I suspected... I still need to find all the required parts. Looking through inventory's like wrestling with an octowhale."
"How about the sublights? And the hyperdrive?" Kyle stepped closer, tracked by one of the Mon Cal's bulbous copper eyes.
"Well. Ah..." Molindi held up a misshapen chunk of circuitry, stared at it as though its function and presence in his hand were utter mysteries. Drops of glistening black lubricant ran down the webs of his fingers, pattered to the bench's surface. "This... is a buffer for a hyperdrive motivator. Many parts for Hawk-series freighters went out of manufacture a standard decade ago, but if my hunch is right..."
He went on like that for some time, detailing his plan for getting the Moldy Crow ready to fly again. Kyle knew that Molindi was the best technician aboard the flagship (or at least the best one available), but as the explanation wore on, he had to fend off a suspicion that fixing the ship might be equally as hazardous as getting it shot up had been...
And again, there was the matter of Kyle's jacket pocket. The one where he kept his datapad. It pressed against his ribs, bulged, tingled with the power of its tiny power cell and microcircuits.
But that was his imagination. The datapad was off. He always kept it off, purely out of professional habit. When he was out on a job, it paid to save a power cell's charge, and he wasn't such a complete mopak that he couldn't go an hour without checking FleetNet or his e-mails. Most of the time he wasn't even thinking about his datapad. At all.
This wasn't most of the time.
"The trick, you see, is to stick with CEC products, but not to use anything from their Y series, any of them," Molindi gargled.
"But you need to use the grav motor from a YT-1210," Kyle said, managing to remember what they were talking about. "It's the only kind that's small enough."
Molindi flinched as if he'd been given a small jolt from a stun baton. "Agh! Well, yes, your original grav motor was, but it caused all sorts of problems! I'm not surprised those flaming flargs aboard the New Hope didn't notice. You see, on YT-series freighters they..."
The Mon Cal traipsed over to the Moldy Crow, gesticulating with nervous energy as he narrated the catastrophic flaws of a YT-1210's grav motor design. Kyle, though, nodded off as soon as Molindi's back was turned. His hand itched toward the datapad—no figment of his imagination this time. The long night spent reading FleetNet nodes, digging for the truth buried in gigabytes of commiseration, speculation, and catharsis, had taken its toll. It had burned an afterimage on his brain, like a rogue protocol implanted into a droid's programming—that need to go back and read more, to see if there was anything new to read.
"Like I said, it's all about the shunt circuits," Molindi concluded, slapping the Moldy Crow's fuselage. Then as though impelled by the energy of his argumentation, he went straight back to working on the ship without waiting to be challenged or confirmed. A fusioncutter shrieked, casting a flicker as strong and stark as lightning across the hangar.
Kyle winced and shielded his eyes with a hand. "Hey Molindi," he called. "Have you heard about this whole business with Crix Madine?"
"Oh!" Molindi backed away from his work, the fusioncutter blazing like a miniature sun in his hands until it powered down. He stared at Kyle like he'd forgotten he was there. His already sickly appearance was worsened by the enormous, opaque black goggles that now shielded his eyes. "Heard about it? Well, who hasn't? Really horrible story, couldn't believe it at first. Hopefully they keep Madine locked up for a very long time. He's a disgrace and a dangerous lunatic."
"That's what you think? He's crazy?" Kyle asked.
Molindi shrugged. "Would any sane being do what he did?"
After a moment he leaned back into the Moldy Crow and the fusioncutter flared again. This time Kyle turned away from the light. He barely heard the clang made by his datapad as he set it down hard on a nearby bench.
Lots of people shared the Mon Calamari's opinion. He'd read it in hundreds of subcomments, seen it said a hundred different ways. He's sick. He's a cracked coolant tank. He flipped his programming. Jan apparently agreed. The man has got to be insane. Her incisiveness was one of her lovelier traits. Kyle respected a being who could cut through the bolcrap and get right to the heart of a matter. But Jan was going with the crowd this time, and the longer Kyle thought, the more he was convinced that the crowd was wrong.
Because he had seen crazy. Lots of it. Very soon before his mission to Talus, he'd been on Nar Shaddaa (for pleasure, not business), and in one local rotation he'd witnessed enough mental instability to sate anyone's curiosity.
One good example would be the obese Aqualish who had burst through the doors of the Rimmer's Rest cantina right as Kyle and a shapely Zeltron woman were getting settled in. The alien had been buck naked, enormous folds of greasy, hairy flesh undulating as he staggered about, upending and trampling anything in his way—tables, intoxicant dispensers, bystanders. All the while he'd been ranting, pleading for help, explaining in an unforgettably hellish series of screams that his genitals were on fire (they weren't). What few parts of the cantina escaped his rampage had been wrecked anyway just by patrons trying to stay clear of the lunatic creature—until Timmy got his E-11 out from behind the bar and mercifully put an end to the spectacle.
That had killed Kyle's mood and his appetite, as well as those of his Zeltron companion. While four men were hauling the half-fried remains of the nude Aqualish out the front door, the woman had excused herself. Said she had a headache. Two hours later, on his way back to the Moldy Crow, an extremely intoxicated and disgruntled Kyle had been briefly accosted by yet another fine sample from the galaxy's spectrum of derangement: some rag-clothed street-dweller, a Caamasi with one ear missing, a snout that drooled like a broken faucet, and arms that spasmed uncontrollably. He accompanied Kyle for six blocks and two speeder rides, babbling that he had been a Jedi Master in a previous life, and that there was a mynock frozen beneath the surface of Helska IV that controlled his thoughts. Getting rid of him had been a nightmare. Kyle would rather have fought a squadron of stormtroopers, or been sealed in a shipping crate full of mailocs, or—
The point was, Kyle knew crazy when he saw it. Crazy people were like that.
Crix Madine had graduated at the top of his class at Raithal Academy, built a distinguished career in the Imperial Army, then after his defection soared like a signal flare to the top echelons of Alliance Special Forces. As for his predations, all the details—the lies and obfuscations, hiding in plain sight, the psychological warfare, hacking code cylinders and security systems—these weren't the actions of a man detached from reality. They signaled the same meticulous intelligence that had made Crix the military genius everyone knew he was. Dismissing him as a madman, a lunatic, wasn't merely too easy. It didn't fit the facts of the case.
Kyle mulled this over while he waited for the datapad to finish powering on and the main FleetNet page to load. There was nothing new from High Command about the Madine scandal, but the discussion nodes had tripled in size. He glanced through a few—it all seemed to be more of the same, until he spotted one node that looked fresh. Less than a hundred subcomments.
The main transmission read:
I have a friend in AI who's part of the Madine case, he was willing to pass a data packet along to me. This is probably going to end my career (and his), but I don't give a kriff. It's about time people in the know started talking, not just about Kolaador but the investigation itself. High Command is NOT just being careful—they're keeping us in the dark. They're letting us all spin ourselves out in this ragefleet circlejerk so that we'll forget that CRIX MADINE IS NOT THE ONLY ONE.
It was a long screed—six or seven paragraphs—and the mention of data leaked from Alliance Intelligence was instantly tantalizing (not to mention extremely concerning). Kyle scanned the text, caught the words THIS was on his datapad, and scrolled to the end where a bundle of six static images showed—
Showed...
Kyle froze, his jaw locked, staring. For an immeasurable and undefinable moment he did not react, was not capable of reacting, because he was not capable of believing that these images existed and they were on his datapad's screen and he was seeing them. If there was no reaction, if nothing happened inside him, maybe that would mean it wasn't actually happening—that it was a hallucination, a nightmare, something other than real.
Seconds passed, and all hope of denial turned to vapor. Kyle Katarn's mind went blank: wordless, thoughtless, void of feeling. Nothing existed in him except a raw, bottomless scream.
This was not something he was supposed to see.
This was not something he would have chosen to see.
This was not something that anyone should see.
Grimacing, snarling, he pounded the datapad's controls. The offending images slid out of sight, but not out of his mind. They would be there. Forever.
They would be in the same place as the men and women he had killed, or seen killed, on both sides of this war. Rebel soldiers in the asteroid base in the AX system. Stormtroopers and mercenaries on dozens of worlds. The corpses in the streets and gutted houses of Talay, charred husks that had been families with little children—children like the ones he had just seen, the children on Kolaador, who'd never dreamed they were anything but safe there. The images from Sulon after the attack that had claimed the life of Kyle's father, Morgan Katarn, and the unspeakable sight of his severed head dripping atop a spike made of bones.
There would be no forgetting.
Never.
Kyle leaned over as he ground his fists into the rough metal tabletop. What the kriff was this asshole doing, putting... that on FleetNet? What was he trying to prove? What the hell was wrong with him? Who would make another person look at that?
He pressed on the table harder, harder, wanting to feel it give beneath him. He couldn't do anything else, not then—but when he regained control, he was going to report that node to the monitors.
Or find the guy who'd written it and punch his teeth down the back of his throat.
Kyle glared down at the datapad, and the effort required to not pummel it until his knuckles split left him gasping. When it subsided, he looked again and realized the display had changed.
The node was gone, with all the subcomments, except one by monitor R3-E6. All it said was, This transmission violated the FleetNet Terms of Use and the Code of Conduct.
Footsteps approaching from behind spun Kyle like an antipersonnel laser turret. Molindi backed off a step, dropping his hydrospanner to the floor with a clatter. The Mon Calamari studied him, fish-mouth gulping with dismay. Whatever was on Kyle's face, it wasn't pretty.
"Augh! Kyle— Commander Katarn— Sir, are you all right? You look like you just witnessed a war crime."
Still getting his breath back, Kyle gestured defeatedly at his datapad.
"Sir, would you tell me what's the matter?"
Kyle leaned back against the bench and told him.
When he was done, Molindi's jowls were trembling. "How disgusting," he warbled. "Not to mention the security breach. I don't know what's wrong with people."
Jan said the same thing, thought Kyle, trying to understand. Trying to feel something.
"Commander, I'm sorry that happened. Why don't you go get some rest, or something to eat? Or maybe some exercise?"
"Oh, I'm gonna—I've got just the thing in mind," Kyle said. He pushed off from the bench and started threading his way back through the junk, back toward the door. "Good luck with the Crow, Molindi."