Ashkhen caught her reflection again, this time on the tall glass in her hand. She reaffirmed her original assessment that being a forensic paint analyst, however professional, did not translate to makeup artistry at all.
She had argued that neither olive drab nor ranger green were colours that her species were capable of producing naturally, but camo face paint was the only solution—or rather, suspension—Captain Obrim could conjure up on such short notice. Much to her chagrin, the police technician-slash-cosmetician the Captain brought along pulled up the only green Nautolan's portrait he knew of for reference—that of Mij Malgar, seven-time Galactic Republic Performing Arts Association Award winning singer, actress and comedienne. Ashkhen had no desire to even remotely resemble someone who, after rising to fame and success in such an extraordinary short time, blatantly denied branchioplasty and headtail augmentation claims.
Lieutenant Doushan, still very firmly against the whole concept, had offered 'all tookas are grey in the dark' as parting words of wisdom and encouragement.
The CSF database had no records on Tal Tezzir—no age, no gender, no affiliation, not even a species. That could have only meant one thing: an underworld mogul so influential that many Bothan intelligence agents would have had to die to bring back the information.
Ashkhen's task was to do a preliminary casing of the swoop platform, then report back. She had found Casik's viewing venue no problem and blended in with the rest of the race fans. Nothing noteworthy happened in the first couple of hours, aside from the occasional racer crossing themselves off the list of competitors and the living. Unwilling to return without anything to show for it, she stalked closer to the stairs that led to the upper level restricted viewing gallery.
"VIP lounge is for VIP only."
The bouncer looked down at her with the long-suffering resignation of someone who had thwarted many an attempt to slink up those stairs. Ashkhen glanced over her shoulder, then flashed a reassuring smile.
"You can let me pass."
"No, I can't," he said. The slight squaring of his shoulders and the way he angled his head, however unexpected, signalled that backing off would be wiser.
Ashkhen headed back towards the scoreboards, contemplating the chances of running into muscle with latent shielding abilities, then moved on to the different options to get upstairs.
Scouting the back rooms, maintenance corridors and ventilation shafts to find a way would have taken too long. Taking out the guard would have drawn too much attention, plus it felt wrong. She glanced up at the tinted plexiglass viewport—crashing through it with a Force-propelled jump seemed doable, but not too subtle either.
As a last resort, she shook the desperation and defeat from her slumped shoulders, and took a seat at the customer side of the bar for a change.
Ashkhen had seen the same scenario play out at Irigo's over and over again. Any and all unaccompanied females between the ages of feet touching the ground while seated and death had a targeting beacon going off the minute they entered the three-meter vicinity of the bar. Ashkhen soon gave up on mimicking Tilla; her strained back muscles protested the twisted posture of simultaneously leaning on the bartop and throwing challenging glances over her shoulder.
Her stakeout had been compromised by some enthusiastic young man trying to buy her a drink three times, when finally someone from the second floor lounge appeared at the bottom of the stairs and made a beeline for her. Ashkhen caught him checking his breath from the corner of her eye and braced herself for the worst. He walked right up with admirable confidence and stood close enough for her to gauge the number of drinks he'd had when he started speaking.
"I hope this doesn't come across too corny, but you totally look like uh, you know"—he continued in a singsong voice, snapping his fingers in rhythm—"Can't wait till the Cap'n comes down with his ship?"
Ashkhen considered aborting mission right then and there, but her sense of duty prevailed. She forced a smile and hoped it didn't look too pained. "Yeah, I… get that a lot."
After a brief introduction, the guy had launched into an extensive monologue about his favourite topics—swoop racing, himself, some motivational holobook he had read, himself, the book he was planning to write, some more swoop racing, and himself.
Ashkhen, face arranged in a screen saver expression, now slowly twirled the tall glass of hooch in her hand, throwing scornful looks at her mirrored-self.
"So, do you want to see it?"
Ashkhen snapped out of creasing her forehead and watching the green lines slowly smooth out.
"Excuse me?"
"The best spot for viewing!" He jerked his head towards the stairs. "They've even got a 3D holomap that shows where the most casualties happen."
One what-would-Tilla-do moment later, Ashkhen slipped her arm into his and shepherded him towards the stairs. It took all her discipline not to stick her tongue out at the bouncer as they ascended.
Once upstairs, Ashkhen granted him a generous ten seconds to continue his presentation on the swoop racers, then excused herself. As soon as she got out of his sight, she circled around the room and put a credit chit on the bar.
"I'm looking for Tal Tezzir."
The bartender glanced up, pocketed the money, then went back to wiping glasses. "Think that's a good idea?"
"I'm in the market."
He chuckled to himself. "Sure you are."
"I know what I'm doing."
"Sure you do." He shook his head, then pointed at the hallway to his left.
Ashkhen strutted down the corridor, making every effort to project the image of a toughened war dog. Two guards stood by the door to Tezzir's private lounge—they looked her up and down, then let her through without a word. In hindsight, that was missing a red flag big enough to have Chancellor Palpatine's entire office reupholstered with. Nexus with full stomachs wore smiles like that.
Ashkhen walked in. In that moment, the Force quivered with foreboding—that had been the last door she would ever walk through in her life.
The occupants' genuine surprise lent her brain one last second to file away the details before panic set in. The mean age in the room was around two hundred years; the four people sitting around the table were all men, very obviously members of Black Sun, and Falleen. That last bit opened the way for profound dread—the consciously controlled pheromone transudation of the Falleen made her the single worst possible candidate for casing the place.
Most species, to various degrees, were susceptible to falling under their sway, but those with a hightened sense of smell were in most danger. Even with the thick layer of propylene glycol covering her exposed skin, Ashkhen had little hope of retaining more agency than a string puppet in their presence.
Tal Tezzir stood up, and kept standing up until he reached his full two-and-a-quarter meters height. Ashkhen instinctively dropped her gaze, but his charmwork wasn't the in the eyes. The Falleen's allure crept closer like the slow warmth of the morning sun.
Shit! Shit! Shit! Bonadan, Salient, Cadomai, Ruuria, Listehol, Jelucan, Telos…
"Aren't you a little too fresh faced for a place like this?"
Ashkhen made the mistake of looking straight into his mesmerising, liquid gold eyes. So beautiful!
"B-b-blaster rifle," she managed, trying to blink away the daze. "Do you have one? For, uh, s-sale, I mean?"
That wasn't even close to what she had planned to say, but she hardly cared. Watching his lips as he spoke put interesting images into her mind.
"And what's a little girl like you gonna do with a big gun like that?"
Bandomeer, Cursin…? No, kriff, it's Corsin, uh… Mikkia, B-Bogden…
"I just… thought I'd ask."
The last vestiges of critical thinking had one foot shift towards the door; too little too late. The rest was already in thrall to Tezzir. His hold took over—like a blade of sea grass that a wave tossed, Ashkhen swayed on her feet, and stayed where she stood.
"Now you're making me curious being so curious."
Whatever chemical cocktail he exuded bypassed her brain and went straight to her limbic system. Curling up at his feet suddenly seemed like a terrific idea. Or sitting in his lap.
Hevurion… Champala…
"Come, join us."
Tezzir sat back down and patted the seat cushion next to him with a smile that melted Ashkhen's hearts. She closed the distance in three steps and took a seat, making sure her leg accidentally touched his.
Tezzir's friends enjoyed the show—they exchanged a few words in their native tongue, then burst into laughter. Ashkhen wondered if Tezzir would have objected to her putting a hand on his knee. He did not. The merriment increased.
Tezzir leaned back with his hands held up. "I'm not even exerting myself!"
Ashkhen didn't notice them switching between Falleen and Basic; prismatic ripples of colour ran across Tezzir's scales, turning his gray-green skin brighter and brighter. Ashkhen would have gladly renounced the Force so long as she could keep staring into his eyes.
One of Tezzir's companions mumbled something about headcounts and schedules, but the others shot him down. Ashkhen didn't care about them, or rather, wished they would have left—one clawed finger ran along her cheek, and the world, with her in the middle, unfurled into passion. Tezzir's chuckle shut down any remaining conscious thought.
"There's always room for more," he said.
Ashkhen wanted to join in the laughter, but the little blue pill she so obediently let him place under her tongue had other plans.
••• ••• •••
Clomp. Pitter-patter-pitter-patter. Clomp. Pitter-patter-pitter-patter. Clomp.
Ashkhen glances back above her shoulder, then hurries to keep up with Master Balian's ground-eating strides. The weather alternates between damp chill and light drizzle, a thick fog obscures visibility beyond a few meters in every direction.
Under their feet, a rope bridge gently sways in the gusts of wind. Cato Neimoidia's climate doesn't rank among the top five in terms of favourite climates, and she has only been to six planets so far. Ashkhen doesn't dare looking over the edge; she knows it's quite the drop, but the fog shrouds the bottom, too.
"…Master?"
"Yes?"
Ashkhen can't see Master Balian's face from this angle—she's trailing him one step behind, to his left. Also, the top of her head only reaches up to his elbow.
"How deep does it go?"
Master Balian chuckles. There are patches of frost on his horns. "Seems bottomless, doesn't it?"
Jedi-like or not, Ashkhen hugs herself tightly against the wind. It's not because of some misplaced martyrdom that she doesn't ask for Master Balian's robe—he's without one, too. He seems less bothered by the cold, however, most likely because he still has his boots on.
"Master, what went so wrong?"
Master Balian's head is momentarily enclouded by the water vapour of his sigh.
"Undercover missions, young one, tend to come to an abrupt end when the operatives involved are compromised."
"You're saying that like it's my fault," Ashkhen mumbles.
"I'm not the one who couldn't keep their nose out of Trade Federation businesses."
She shrugs. "I just thought that more information would mean more leverage in negotiations."
"You went snooping around against my explicit direction."
Ashkhen scutters after him in silence. All she can think of is soaking her frozen feet in a bucket of hot water.
"What's on the other side?"
Master Balian, one never to miss an opportunity to teach, looks back at his Padawan. "What do your senses tell you?"
Ashkhen closes her eyes for a moment and extends her awareness beyond the fog. "It's cold."
"That's hardly specific to the situation, Ashkhen. You're always cold."
She tries harder. "I think I can hear people talking."
Master Balian nods. "Think we might expect trouble once we get across? Do they sound angry?"
"No." Ashkhen listens for a while. "It's mostly one person talking, the others are laughing at what he says."
"Better be prepared regardless," Master Balian says. Humour tinges his voice. "Anything else?"
Ashkhen hesitates. "There's… there's something about the air that I just can't place."
Master Balian tilts his head to the side. "What would that be?"
"Master, I think it smells like shit."
Master Balian's melodious laughter comes out an uncharacteristic and boisterous chortle.
••• ••• •••
Ashkhen stirred. Another guffaw. Dim blue light from a holoscreen illuminated the ceiling. She recognised the interval signal of The Late Night Show with Orcon Soders. Not one midday rerun had ever been missed at Drosili's Diner.
She turned her head towards the source of the ugly laugh, and the smell of body waste intensified. The mattress she lay on reeked of it.
She sprang up, or at least intended to, but managed nothing more than an ungainly flop to hands and knees. The room around her did another double barrel roll. By the grace of the Force, the show's obnoxious laugh track masked the sound of her upchucking.
Ashkhen drew a ragged breath.
Not good!
She wiped a hand across her mouth and sat back down. Shoes and jacket were gone, that explained the cold. Her comlink had been in the pocket of the latter—the assessment of the situation had yet to be completed in order to choose a curse appropriate for her level of distress, so Ashkhen settled for an interim kriff.
Her tingling scalp and the grime patterns on her shirt suggested that she had been dragged on the floor by the headtails.
How rude!
A rush of distress zapped through her. Ashkhen clutched at her trusty duty belt, then breathed a shaky sigh of relief. She turned her attention to her surroundings.
Bodies upon bodies lay on dirty mattresses strewn across the floor, arms and legs akimbo; thirty-odd barely flickering lights in the Force. Faint groans escaped the collective stupor here and there, but not a finger twitched, not an eyelid fluttered.
This particular Black Sun cell wasn't smuggling weapons in—they were smuggling people out.
Ashkhen shook the shoulder closest to her. The girl's head lolled to the side, eyes closed. Drugged out of her mind. Ashkhen tugged on a hand nearby—cold, clammy, and unresponsive.
"You're watching the Late Night Show with Orcon Soders! We'll be right back after this short commercial break."
Ashkhen quickly lay back between the two unfortunate souls. A figure rose from the couch scratching his ass, then shuffled towards the door. The species was hard to guess from the back, but he had a full head of hair and no backbone ridges. Instant relief—not Falleen. A keycard beeped against the control panel by the door. It shut behind him with a short whir and beep, indicating an automatic locking mechanism. Ashkhen followed the process through half-lidded eyes.
Two minutes of commercials before the show would start again, twenty precious seconds of it were already gone. Ashkhen scampered to her feet and edged towards his recently vacated station, careful not to tread on anyone in the dark.
Crink.
Whatever afterglow of the downer Tezzir had given her still lingered, the broken glass piercing into her foot expelled it at once. So intense and unexpected, the pain lacing up her leg made both her knees buckle. Ashkhen stumbled forward, caught the back of the couch and struggled to keep the weight off the injured leg.
"Aaaand we're back! I'm Orcon Soders, and you're watching the Late Night Show! The next challenge I have for—"
Beep. Whir. Hiss.
The guard's silhouette appeared in the doorway, scratching his crotch, in the midst of a huge yawn. Four steps into the storage, he noticed Ashkhen clinging to his seat, frowned, drew and aimed.
"You're not supposed to wake up yet."
His blaster flew into Ashkhen's outstretched hand. She pulled the trigger twice.
The first blue ring hit the middle of his forehead, the second fizzled out on the wall behind him. The cold, the drug, the pain, the fright were too much to sort through at once. Ashkhen pulled herself over the back of the couch, dropped onto the seat and set herself to remove the shard from her sole by the dim light of the holoscreen.
Not good! Not good! Not good!
She tore a strip of fabric torn from her shirt, folded and pressed it against the cut to stop the bleeding; pulled off a headtail band and snapped it snug around her foot, to keep it in place. To steal another few moments before she had to walk on it, Ashkhen held up the blaster to get a better look. BlasTech DL series, heavily modified, but nothing distinctively CIS-related. Her mouth pulled into a snarl. All this for kriffing nothing!
Pain throbbed in her foot, anger thrummed against her temples. She let out a long breath and let them go. Not nothing. Not yet anyways. A storehouse's worth of cargo needed to be checked.
Ashkhen tucked the blaster into her belt and hobbled over to the guard lying on the floor. She turned him over—human or near-human, his complexion and features seemed off, but that could also have been the effect of getting stun blasted in the face. Ashkhen searched his pockets, took his card, his comlink and his knife. She momentarily considered taking his boots too, but the difference in size would have made them more cumbersome than helpful.
She faced the door, keycard in hand, and a clear sequence of objectives in her mind—evasion and escape, calling for reinforcements, then tearing the place apart.
Maybe a tetanus shot, too.
The corridor right outside the storage room was serviced by three freight elevators, one of which had a card access panel right next to it. Ashkhen swiped the stolen card, and waited for the car to descend. The doors parted—holding out one hand to keep them from closing, she swiped the card on the inside terminal again to see which floors he had access to.
She immediately ruled out the landing bay, the south entrance level, storage levels fourteen through twenty-nine and the lounge. She withdrew from the elevator and headed for the stairs. The prospect of climbing eighteen floors with a lacerated foot seemed about as breezy as hiking up to the snow-capped summits of the Alderaanian mountains, on the other hand, running into Black Sun members on the fire escape was just as likely as on those popular hiking trails.
What felt like a hundred and eighteen flights of stairs later, Ashkhen leaned on the wall to catch her breath, then swiped the card on the wall terminal. The door slid to the side, she peeked around the corner, then settled in for the long wait.
High power cables hummed along the walls, industrial fans droned on and mouse droids whirred as they scurried up and down the maintenance corridor. Ashkhen's body temperature fell to a level where dozing off was a real concern, just one tiny waver of self-control away.
The long awaited clink-clank of a protocol droid's approach jostled Ashkhen fully awake. After a slow ten-count, both her arms shot out towards the door, and an RA-7 unit stumbled onto the stairs. Another Forceful heave, and its head popped off—Ashkhen cringed over how uncivilized her recon methods had become, but there was precious little time to waste. With the droid's head under one arm, she scuttled closer to the maintenance hall's door.
Across the corridor, at knee-height, Ashkhen spotted a utility hatch. For the next ten seconds, while the nearest security camera panned in the other direction, she outstretched her hand towards the grate and pulled it away from the wall. She murmured a ten-second prayer that no one was watching the visual feed too closely to notice the gap. When the camera panned away yet again, she limped across the hall, slam-dunked the droid head into the vent, then squeezed through the opening after it.
Teeth gritted against the chilly airflow blasting along the shaft, Ashkhen commando-crawled from indoors cooling unit to indoors cooling unit, pushing the droid head in front of her. The RA-7 unit shot disapproving glances at her at every roll. Garbled speech echoed through the pipes every once in a while, making Ashkhen stop to listen, and lose a little bit of momentum each time. At one point, she passed the charred remains of some electrocuted murine creature. Despite her efforts to watch the proximity, the tooka-sized rodent's body crumbled in half as she crawled by. Ashkhen—not her proudest moment—swore, dry-coughed, then heaved all over the mummy. A layer of dust smudged her face as she wiped away the slip-up.
The air quality gradually improved, so far as the ratio of smog from outside and circulated air from inside shifting towards more chemical fumes could be considered good. The sound of traffic grew louder, too—at the next corner, Ashkhen didn't curve along the building, but found a hatch cover on the opposite side of the shaft and tore it off with a powerful Force Push.
The cold draft swelled into boreal winds in the vent that branched off—giant, spinning fans sucked in the Coruscant air and propelled towards the inside of the building. Ashkhen's headtails fluttered in the gust, the low pressure made it difficult to breathe, still she pressed on. At long last, when the spinning blades were within arm's reach, she extended her right. The fan gradually slowed its spinning until it finally stopped.
It took all her focus to maintain the control over the industrial fan. Had she slipped, she would have gotten decapitated, bisected, or double amputated and bled out—either of which images were incentivising enough to minimize the time spent squishing through the small aperture between the blades.
Once outside, glaring red light blinded her for a few moments, then it went off, leaving sparks and streaks of colour in her vision field. Ashkhen squinted towards the source, and saw a short pole sticking out from the building to her left. Her eyes had less than a second to recover before a second blast of fulgor dazzled her: red-and-green afterimages iridesced in front of her eyes again, making it even more difficult to see which way she should move on.
Ashkhen squeezed her eyes shut against the obstruction light going off every few seconds, and stood on the narrow ledge running along the wall of the building. Force Sight told her that a landing platform jutted out from the side of the skyscraper across, twenty meters or so below her floor. Under regular circumstances, she wouldn't have thought twice about the jump, but leaping into the abyss, eyes closed and delirious with fatigue, made her hesitant. She tightened her grip on the droid head and climbed onto the beam to close a little bit of the distance.
Get away. Get help. Get away. Get help.
Thirst, exhaustion, blood loss and core temperature dropping to a dangerous level—Ashkhen powered through the mental lapses until she couldn't. She gauged the distance and jumped.
And missed by a parsec.
Crash.
"Passenger detected."
The four-second panic of free fall had cut a dangerous amount of adrenaline into her bloodstream—Ashkhen, deafened by the drumroll of her own heartbeats, feared the crash when she would come down from that high. She clambered out of the legspace, swept the remains of the plexiglass sunroof off the seat and pulled herself into a sitting position. The numbness in her left leg slowly dissipated as the blaster she had tucked into her belt unwedged itself from her spinal cord.
"Good evening, Miss. Where are you going?"
"The uh"—she adjusted the blaster so it didn't press against the bruise on her back—"CSF headquarters, please."
"Right away, Miss."
"How long will it take?"
"The estimated travel time is three hours and forty-one minutes."
"Can't you go any faster? Use the express tunnel on Level 4114."
"It's not in my programming to enter areas restricted to civilian use."
Ashkhen bit her lip, thinking about the people she had left in the Black Sun compound. Surely, saving them took priority.
"Initiate override. Adegan Protocol, four nine nine seven senth besh one seven."
Surely, he'd understand.
The driver droid processed the ID in about two milliseconds.
"Authentication confirmed. The Coruscant Babida District Pick'n'Drop Transport Services welcomes you aboard, Jedi Master Sarkis Balian. Thank you for your service to the Republic, and may the Force be with you. Bypassing traffic control. Recalibrating route."
The air taxi shot upwards, did a one-eighty mid-ascension, and went straight against oncoming traffic. Ashkhen couldn't suppress a faint smile—this was more in line with her driving style.
"Estimated length of journey is one hour and thirty-three minutes."
Only then did Ashkhen allow herself to slump back. She passed out before her head hit the headrest.
••• ••• •••
"You're late. And look like shit." Lieutenant Doushan, in person, stood on the landing pad. He frowned into the air taxi through the vaguely Nautolan-shaped hole in the plexiglass sunroof.
Ashkhen gave her eyes a moment to adjust to the bright lights of the CSF station, then tossed the droid head in the Lieutenant's direction. "Catch."
"What the f—"Doushan turned over the head in his hands—"what is this?"
"That's rhetorical, right?"
"I swear to—" The Lieutenant slowly exhaled, teeth clenched tight. A host of emotions played out across his face, then he spun on his heels and marched towards the entrance. "Let's not keep the Captain waiting."
Ashkhen lurched after him, but her steps faltered, then stopped right before the open gate as though she bumped into an invisible wall.
"What now?" Doushan's impatience grew with every second.
Ashkhen dropped her voice. "I'm… I'm carrying."
"Good for you."
"It's a heavily modified DL-21, it'll set the alarms off!"
Doushan held his hand out. "I'll take it into evidence."
Ashkhen's eyes swept over the dozen or so police officers milling around. The majority were already throwing suspicious glances at her, dirty as though she had climbed through a junk hauler's exhaust port, swaying on unsteady, shoeless feet.
"It's tucked into my belt, under my shirt," she whispered. "I'm not reaching for it!"
"Oh, for kriff's sake, turn around."
Doushan yanked the blaster free. An unsettling thought ran through Ashkhen's mind—the sudden alignment of the back of her head, the Lieutenant and the serious firepower he now packed. Fortunately, Doushan was not yet riled up enough to impulsively splatter-paint the landing platform, he simply resumed his stomping towards the entrance.
The station's flooring wasn't any warmer than that of the landing pad had been. In the wake of her steps, a small cleaning droid beeped and tweeted its indignance, cleaning up the trail of bloody footprints that marked her way through the maze of corridors. Ashkhen didn't recognize this part of the building, but took a little comfort in the fact that they weren't heading towards the detention area for a change.
"Clinic." Doushan swiped his card on a wall panel. A door opened—waves of pain carried out the smell of bacta, disinfectant and blaster burns to the corridor. "Come to my office once the MD unit's done with your foot. It's through there"—he nodded at the double doors further down the hall—"to the right, second elevator, up to floor seven, right again, left, past the drinking fountain, fourth door on the right."
••• ••• •••
Ashkhen sat on Doushan's couch, wearing a dark grey uniform shirt with the CSF logo on its back and right sleeve. It took all her discipline not to curl up with her back to the Detective and sleep through the next sixteen hours or so. The stimpak that the MD unit had administered was slowly working its magic, getting a boost from her first round of antibiotics.
Captain Obrim entered with the facial expression of someone simultaneously gauging how much shit had hit the fan and not really wanting to know the answer.
"Everything all right?" He handed Ashkhen a bottle of water. She drank the entire bottle extra slowly to avoid answering his question. Instead, she launched into a ten-minute report describing everything from the location and layout of Casik's track through the untoward encounter with the Black Sun to her brief experience with sentient trafficking and her escape.
Obrim followed her account attentively. His jaws slackened into a ghost of a smile.
"Was calling a getaway cab part of your plan?"
"It turned out to be," Ashkhen mumbled, obsessively reading and re-reading the mineral contents on the label.
"What the kriff were you thinking?" Doushan used his most grating voice, as he always did, when dishing it out. "Which part of recon didn't you understand?"
Ashkhen glared at him.
Doushan threw his datapad on his desk. "Forensic data analysis: fat lot of kriffing help your unit was!"
"It wasn't an inventory droid?" Ashkhen's face fell.
"Oh, the inventory is there, all right!" Doushan said. "It's a legitimate cargo handling operation! Unloading, sorting and warehousing everything under the sun but illegal weapons!"
"Legiti—?" Ashkhen's temper rose to match his. "By all means, you're the expert, but if I was gonna take a wild kriffing guess here, I'd say that's a front, Detective!"
Her tone on the last word really hit a nerve in Doushan.
"It may be so that your kind takes hallucinations as gospel," he sneered, "but we need hard evidence. Since you didn't bring back any Falleen DNA wedged in—"
Ashkhen was on her feet the next instant, showering Doushan with curses so vile that it surprised her that she knew how to use them in context.
"Lieutenant!"
Captain Obrim's thunderous voice drowned out the rest of Ashkhen's expletives. He half-rotated to face Doushan in the very same manner a gun turret housing an anti-tank missile launcher would. The Lieutenant immediately switched to a different tone.
"I meant under the fingernails. Her species has no fingernails."
Captain Obrim's aura thrummed with a bodeful note. "Highly unprofessional and inappropriate."
Doushan offered a reluctant half-shrug as means of apology. Ashkhen briefly considered choking him out with the Force.
"I don't think the operation was a waste of time," Captain Obrim continued in a much milder tone. "We've gained valuable intelligence on the Black Sun Coruscant branch, even if it's, to our current understanding, unrelated to the weapons trafficking ring. We'll look for Reyden's Weequay guy, to see whom he's connected to."
"Those people there still need our help," Ashkhen said quietly.
"Priorities, Dakiis," Doushan said. "I'll give you a list of twelve potential Weequay gun runners, see if any of them could be our guy."
"As soon as we get the kidnapped young women to safety,"Ashkhen ground the words out, eyes narrowing.
"Not my circus, not my Kowakians."
Ashkhen stood again, noticed with relief that the dizziness had lessened, and side-stepped the Lieutenant. The confiscated blaster leapt into her hand from his desk.
Doushan's reflexes easily matched those of a drugged up ex-Jedi. THUNK—Ashkhen's forehead slammed into the tabletop, fire exploded in her shoulder as Lieutenant twisted her hand between her shoulder blades. The blaster dropped to the floor.
After such a long and traumatic night, the unexpected pain compliance hold was the final neutron that caused the nuclear meltdown. It bypassed all training, logical reasoning, the conscious mind, and struck something primal. Doushan flew backwards and hit the wall with such force that the plaster spiderwebbed upon impact. His instincts took over—by the time Ashkhen spun around she was already looking down the business end of his sidearm.
"Let's all calm down, okay?" Captain Obrim said in a soft voice.
Finger inside the trigger guard, the Lieutenant's knuckles stood out white. "Don't you ever throw me like that again!"
"Don't you ever kriffing hold me down!" Everything but her voice shook uncontrollably.
"Then don't pull a kriffing gun on me!"
Ashkhen slowly exhaled. He was sort of right—from his point of view, her intentions were far from clear. The whole rushing to save others act wasn't thought through very well. She sat back down on the couch, rubbing her wrist. "Sorry about the wall."
Doushan looked back at the hairline cracks, but didn't comment. He pressed he cold barrel of his blaster against the back of his head—a lump was already forming.
"Someone at the Involuntary Servitude Task Force owes me a favour," Captain Obrim said. "I'll see if I can pull some strings."
Ashkhen nodded a silent thank you. The Lieutenant settled back into his chair and pointedly pulled up an array of Weequay mugshots on his terminal.
"Let's call it a night." Obrim turned to Ashkhen. "Come."
Ashkhen's forehead creased into a question mark.
"I'll drop you home."
Doushan opened his mouth to protest the absurdity of the Captain of the Anti-Terrorism Unit personally chauffeuring some dispensable dogsbody, but one look from Obrim made him turn his attention back to his holoscreen. Ashkhen, surprisingly, agreed with the Lieutenant.
"I appreciate it, Captain, but I'm good." She thrust both hands in her pockets so they wouldn't see them shaking.
"It wasn't a suggestion," Obrim said. "And sadly, it's terribly dangerous to use public transport wearing a CSF shirt without a personal shield generator."
••• ••• •••
"What's this place?" Ashkhen looked out the viewport of Obrim's airspeeder, surprised to see that it was already making its descent onto a private parking terrace.
"Rampart Town. It's where I live," Obrim said. Upon seeing Ashkhen's expression, he added, "I said I'd drop you home. Never said whose home, and I live much closer."
Ashkhen's reaction was an odd mixture of gratitude and fluster, which manifested itself as a throaty mm-hmm.
Obrim set the speeder down and killed the engine. The shift in his posture signalled that a talk was coming. Ashkhen braced herself, and the gentle tone the Captain hit completely took her off guard.
"I know you were brought up to ignore fear and take the risks no one else would. I'm not telling you to change your beliefs, I'm only asking you to do so with a little more concern towards your own safety."
The glove compartment cover slid open, Obrim reached inside and handed Ashkhen a simple, standard comlink.
"I don't ever put my men into harm's way without means to call for backup. Given the peculiarities of the Capital's surface architecture, it doesn't have an infinite range, but it can use civilian signal services to bounce data between other comlinks and have them relay your coordinates directly to our Unit in case of an emergency."
Ashkhen stared at the small device in her hands. Words wouldn't come, but the Captain nodded in understanding anyways. He got out of his speeder and headed towards his home with Ashkhen following one pace behind, on his left.
To her ultimate surprise, none other than Mrs. Obrim herself stood in the entrance, despite the late hour.
"My wife, Telti." Obrim made a half-turn. "This is Ashkhen. She's working with us."
Ashkhen leaned forward into a deep bow of respect. 'With' felt nice for a change.
Recognition flashed in Telti's eyes, her aura bespoke genuine hospitality. "Well met. Do come in!"
Ashkhen hesitated—from what she glimpsed through the entrance door, the Obrims' home looked way to neat and clean to host such an amphibimorphized pile of filth. She took off the spare pair of running shoes the CSF drill instructor had lent her, and left them politely outside the threshold.
"Guest bathroom is the second door to the left upstairs," Telti answered her unasked question. "You can come down to the kitchen anytime you're ready for dinner."
"Thank you for the invitation, but I don't think I can keep anything down just yet," Ashkhen said, eyes wandering over to the upstairs bathroom door.
Please there be a tub, please there be a tub, please there be a tub!
Telti's kindheartedness shone through her eyes as she offered a nod of acknowledgment, then went into the lounge after her husband. Ashkhen had a feeling that Captain Obrim turning up at the middle of the night followed by some work-related rando in various stages of distress and disshevellement must have been a repeat occurrence at the Obrim residence. She walked up the floating stairs, pulling her already compact frame tighter in, mortified by the idea of accidentally smudging the pristine white walls.
••• ••• •••
Telti planted a kiss on the top of her husband's head. The ice sphere clinked against the side of the glass as she set it down.
"Do I want to ask?" She sat on the sofa next to Obrim and put her head on his shoulder.
Captain Obrim sighed. "We shook the tree and Black Sun fell on our heads."
For the next hour or so, Obrim first unloaded his worries on his wife's welcoming ear, then they moved on to a less—or more, from a certain point of view—turbulent topic, and talked about what the boys were up to. When the pauses grew longer and the yawns more frequent, Obrim pushed himself off the sofa with the intention to head for the master bedroom and turn in.
"Should I go check on her?" Telti asked, looking towards the dark and empty foyer. Ashkhen hadn't emerged from the bathroom yet.
Obrim shuffled his weary feet along the velvet pile carpet. "She must have dozed off."
"Isn't that unsafe? What if she—"
"Drowns?" Obrim raised an amused eyebrow. "In the unlikely event, I'll call in some favours and have Forensic Limnology get rid of the evidence."
"Jaller!"
••• ••• •••
Next morning, Ashkhen found three of the four Obrims sitting around the breakfast table. The Captain's two sons looked like his miniature clones with their mother's lighter complexion.
Telti's eyes widened with surprise, then narrowed with confusion. For a moment, Ashkhen believed that the lady of the house had forgotten about last night. Realization hit as she caught her own reflection in the floor-to-ceiling mirror by the dining room entrance.
"Rrright. That was camo paint yesterday, and this is what I look like when I wake up. And, uh, I owe you an extra fluffy white towel."
The air around the boys exploded with suppressed hilarity. The younger snickered into his breakfast bowl.
"Uh-oh—"
"—she used the decorative one," whispered his brother.
Ashkhen's hearts missed a triplet beat. Never once, during the ten years of training in diplomacy had she ever encountered such a cultural phenomenon—a towel on a towel rack that wasn't meant to be towelled with.
Decorative towels!? Is this a Human thing? An Obrim thing? Have I kriffed up and started a beef before the morning caf?
To her surprise, Telti's face lit up with relief. "Don't worry about it. Most useless gift from my mother-in-law."
She indicated the seat to her right. Ashkhen politely accepted, focusing through the queasiness slowly setting in. The breakfast table was laden with every type of dairy product known to mankind—yogurt, kefir, quark, soft curd spread, blue cheese with darker blue veining, and tall glasses of smoothies in front of the boys. Telti poured a dash of cream into her caf. Ashkhen swallowed hard, and picked out a piece of unbuttered toast.
Her other hand shot out by reflex—the inoxium salt shaker stopped mid-flight, before it crashed into its own mirrored image.
"Cooool!" the boys cried in unison. Obrim's younger son forgot his pitching arm in the follow-through phase.
"Esmit Kalvar Obrim!" Telti's voice easily outshadowed the Captain's timbre of the previous day. "Whatever in the Deep Core possessed you!?"
"It was Ravic's idea!"
"He's lying!"
"But I heard Dad say—"
"Enough of the both of you!" Telti's eyes turned heavenward. She massaged her temples with both hands.
The four of them returned to their breakfasts. Utensils softly clinked, a maid droid picked up empty plates, and gentle lounge music trickled from the invisible speakers. By all outward appearances, the Obrim boys were silently contemplating their school-related agendas for the day. Ashkhen's headtails pricked and burned—anurans about to be dissected in biology class must have experienced the same kind of attention.
"If there's something you'd like to ask, I'm sitting right here," Ashkhen said.
The boys looked at each other, then at their mother, then at Ashkhen, then back at their mother. Telti's nod obliterated the floodgates.
"How d'you get your powers?"
"Can I be a Jedi?"
"Skywalker's the coolest General ever, isn't he?"
"Can you fly?"
"Can you make me fly?"
"Can you see the future?"
"What number am I thinking of?"
"Do you ever miss your mom?"
"Esmit!" Telti cried out in horror.
"Whew, okay," Ashkhen said. "Let's see… I came into this world a Force-sensitive, the Jedi found me and taught me how to use my abilities. Anyone can follow the principles of the Jedi, but to be accepted into the Order, you need to fit a lot of criteria, and excel at things like discipline, respect, uhh"—her eyes shifted to Telti—"doing your homework on time, cleaning your room, putting away your clothes…"
Time and time again, Ashkhen wondered if 'internal focus' was just a handy excuse for Jedi to employ an infinite number of service droids in the Temple. Come and think of it, the only kind of laundry Ashkhen ever did before living on her own was flinging her socks towards the laundry chute with a flick of her fingers.
"Yeah, Skywalker's… really cool." She sighed, shoving down all her earliest memories of the decorated war hero. "Some say he's the greatest Jedi who ever lived, but I'd reserve that judgment for future Jedi.
"The term we use is levitation," Ashkhen continued. "And it's mostly objects other than our own selves. To zigzag through the air, or make someone fly like that—the most powerful Jedi say size matters not, but the majority of us still have to account for physics. Inertia, aerodynamics… the stuff you learn in school, right?
"Always in motion, the future is." Ashkhen nodded solemnly. "That particular insight is from Master Yoda himself. Force-users sometimes have visions about one possible course or another, but the future depends on so many variables, decisions and circumstances that it's impossible to predict. Being gifted with premonitions is a double edged sword—Jedi had gone mad trying to decipher their visions, and thinking that every dream after a heavy dinner was heralding the end of the Galaxy."
She looked at Ravic, raising an amused eyebrow. "You were thinking of twenty-seven million four hundred and ninety-three thousand eight hundred and twenty-seven."
His reaction had even Telti stifle a chuckle.
"This might be a little too heavy a topic for a lighthearted breakfast conversation, but you can't really miss what you've never known," Ashkhen said, addressing the last point on the boys' list. "I was brought to the Jedi Temple before I turned four—it's more like imprints that I have of my mom than actual memories.
"What I have for her, on the other hand, is infinite gratitude and respect for making the hard choice—the right choice—and giving me over to the Jedi."
Her glance shifted to Telti, then back to the boys.
"Mothers truly know best, trust me on that one. You'll understand when you're older just how blessed you are to have such a mentor figure by your side."