Carida

[DoctorOblivious]

Even if the voyage to Carida had passed quickly, making it through customs was proving to be a nightmare. This wasn't Sophia’s first passage through Imperial space--her passport would attest to that--but when the crew of the aged Star Queen cut their passengers loose and sicced Imperial security on them, she found herself facing extensive delays.

 

Something had happened for the Imperials to see fit to increase security at the border. A pair of stormtroopers, clad in their immaculate gray armor, stood like statues beyond the border between interstellar space and Imperial soil.

 

Even if the voyage to Carida had passed quickly, making it through customs quickly proved to be a nightmare. This wasn’t Sophia’s first passage through Imperial space--her passport bore a number of holostamps which would attest to that--but when the crew of the aged Star Queen cut their passengers loose and sicced Imperial security on them, she found herself facing the type of soul-crushing delays that she had only seen on that occasion she had joined a former coursemate on an excursion to Dxun.

 

The memory of that expedition made her lips twitch despite the oppressively sterile conditions of the spaceport: white floors of faux-marble, blue-gray walls with viewports overlooking the nonstop caravans of space traffic flowing in and out of the spaceport, and the occasional banner bearing the Imperial ensign. A faint smell of disinfectant lingered in the frigid air and stung at Sophia’s brown-green eyes. A periodic automated address, pronounced crisply in the Imperial Academy-imparted accent, implored passengers of the usual warnings describing how to proceed through customs with minimal incident.

 

Sophia shivered and buttoned her jacket, tucking her hands into her sleeves. Despite the grime, foul smells, malfunctioning equipment, and the buzz of a hundred alien dialects, she had always preferred traveling between worlds in the Galactic Alliance. Poor hygiene or not, the overused and underfunded facilities always felt more real; certainly, the hundreds of species never hesitated to voice their misgivings, rather than keeping a stiff upper lip and keeping calm while the world was literally crashing down around their heads.

 

The line of travellers trudging forward with their bags between their knees to get past this final indignity of interstellar travel. After what must have been hours of delays due to heightened security, Sophia was able to glance around a crimson-skinned Twi’lek’s shoulder to spot a line of gray steel-plasticine cubicles manned by a crew of harangued officers… and just beyond, a pair of Imperial stormtroopers standing like statues in their gray plastoid armor, putting on a show of unceasing watchfulness with their carbines at the ready. More than a few of the customs agents seemed to be taking their time with the interviews.

 

The historian felt a bead of sweat trickle down her back despite the frigid atmosphere. Another advantage of traveling through Alliance space was that it was easy to lose oneself in the crowds. Here, Sophia felt as though she was being watched from six different angles.

 

Finally, Sophia was called forward and she found herself being interrogated by a scruffy, grumpy middle-aged man with a ruddy complexion, who seemed intent on finding suspicion with her planet of origin, her sex, her profession, her homeworld, her age, and the fact that someone had taken the last drop of stimcaf without starting a new pot. Or perhaps, carrying a number of Jedi relics in a sealed container through customs, she was feeling paranoid.

 

“Purpose of your visit?” Questioned the customs officer, putting on a show of reading through Moriarty’s papers, despite the fact that she knew perfectly well that the elder was carefully watching her reactions.

 

“Academic r-research.I’m a historian.” A snort from the customs officer. Evidently he didn’t think too highly of eggheads in their ivory towers.

 

“You're a long way from your libraries, Doctor Moriarty.”

 

“...true, but--”

 

“Anything to declare?”

 

“Yes, I have an isobaric case containing items of historical interest. The transfer authorization is right...” Sophia helpfully leaned forward to indicate the proper forms, indicating that the historian was in fact authorized to transfer these sensitive and likely unique Jedi artifacts out of Galactic Alliance space for academic inquiry. The customs officer frowned and glared at her brown hand, which stalled mid-air until Sophia withdrew it back to the edge of the middle-aged bureaucrat’s desk.

 

“A historian. What brings you out of Galactic Alliance space to Carida?”

 

“Serious scholarly inquiry requires primary sources. That is, interviews with people who were present at historical events, sensor data, recordings, transcriptions… opinions from experts in technical fields.” To her dismay, the hands probing through her passport paused and the man tilted his head ever so slightly, as though something had just caught his ear. Brought on by the stress of the moment, Sophia’s careful diction had slipped for a few seconds and revealed an accent that was rarely heard these days: an Alderaanian accent. Even more uncommon were sapient beings who had heard this nearly-extinct accent in person, though the customs officer wasn’t quite certain that he hadn’t imagined it.

 

“Hmm.” His gray moustache twitched. The customs officer had seen plenty of her type in his many years; biased historians who wrote political hack jobs under the cover of scholarly credentials. The majority of their work wasn’t fit for the refresher, let alone the study. A slew of highly-prejudiced histories had been released shortly after the end of the war, most of which cast the Imperials as cartoonish, goose-stepping fascists who went out of their way to inflict atrocities on Republic populations. “Then perhaps you would be interested in hearing the Imperial point-of-view for a change, rather than focusing your attention on biased Rebel sources.”

 

“I… well, in fact, I’m putting the finishing touches on a manuscript that is highly critical of the Jedi Order during the leadership of Grandmaster Kaipi.” Sophia felt her hands becoming clammy and tried not to cringe. Her accent had slipped again. “In it, I synthesized a number of viewpoints from both sides of the war--Jedi support staff and Imperial soldiers on the ground--and frankly, it casts a great deal of doubt over whether her tenureship was actually pro--”

 

“Your accent is very unusual, Doctor Moriarty. Where did you say you were from?”

 

“Borleias, suburb outside of Kadarr.” The historian felt something drop in her gut as she saw a muscle twitch in the officer’s gray-clad shoulder and heard a set of plastoid boots stamp forward.

 

“You’ll have to forgive us, Doctor, but we really must keep the queue moving. If you’ll follow this officer, we’d like to ask you a few more questions before we release you to your business. I’m sure that you understand that these times are rather historic. Have a lovely day, Doctor.”

 

And with that, Sophia found herself escorted by a stormtrooper away to an interrogation room, a tiny, oppressive booth in which she was left to literally sweat it out in the poorly-circulated space while the Imperials decided what to do with her. The historian forced herself to slow her breath; despite having been separated from her luggage and the Jedi archival devices, her credentials were immaculate and the Empire couldn’t threaten her with anything worse than deportation back to Coruscant along with her personal effects. Anything worse would risk a minor diplomatic incident; the movements of scholars were supposed to be protected.

 

But if there was a Jedi or a Force-User of some other sect monitoring the line, then this had the potential to be a uniquely terrible day… but it was best to not dwell on that possibility.

[DoctorOblivious]

Sophia found herself escorted deeper into the spaceport--a much more utilitarian section of the facility--by a stormtrooper with a force pike. The assault trooper was silent, save for the periodic, mechanically-deadened “left” or “right” from his helmet-mounted speakers.

 

Security theatre, the historian reflected; a display of force intended to reassure the populace that the present crisis was well under control, when in reality all authorities were concerned that their security was rather porous. What was a stormtrooper with a polearm going to accomplish if a Sith or some type of maniac bent on martyrdom decided to attack Carida? The Imperial were by no means secure in their current position, and they knew it. Which, of course, made things all the worse for the sweating Sophia, having been singled out for further inspection by an old codger who was either prejudiced or paranoid.

 

“Through that door and take a seat,” intoned the anonymous voice. A blast door flanked by the walls of an obviously reinforced room hissed open, revealing a holding cell with a permacrete floor, steel walls, and at least one holocam mounted in a corner to observe the proceedings. The only furnishings inside were a cheap, government-issue metal desk and two identically-styled chairs, one of which was occupied by a young Lieutenant in the olive-grey of Imperial service. Two more stormtroopers stood on either side of the door, armed with force pikes.

 

Another bead of cold sweat trickled down Sophia’s sides. Was this standard? Who in the blazes did the Empire think that they were dealing with?

 

The young officer looked up from his captive’s documents and smiled politely, though Sophia detected a minute crinkle at the corners of his eyes that suggested that the smile wasn’t entirely professional. Just what she needed… Sophia sat and then was silent, with her olive fingers perched on the lip of the table between her and the young Imperial officer. The scholar just looked at him with a neutral expression on her face, obviously nervous but putting forward a good effort to not break down or be rude to a man who had it in his power to make her life miserable.

 

But she wasn't about to say the first words.

[DoctorOblivious]

Sophia’s hands remained on the lip of the metal table. The pit in her stomach had not yet been filled; the historian suspected that the interest in Kervitz’s expression was more than merely professional. The thought of an Imperial officer having an intimate curiosity in her as a woman, while having immediately power over her freedom...

 

“I’m here to interview an expert regarding those artifacts in my manifest. I suspect that they might be heirlooms, actually. One of the artifacts is a holocron that I have tentatively dated for roughly 4,000 BBY.” Sophia’s face blanched when the acronym slipped out; referring to the Battle of Yavin was likely a bit of a faux pas in the Imperial capital. “I mean, some time around the Jedi Civil War. I need an expert to confirm my suspicions, to determine whether they’re genuine and whether any of the information from either of the artifacts can be trusted. I’m not about to begin writing a history on the war unless I know that my source material can be trusted.

 

“And, once that’s finished, I’d like to get in contact with some of the veterans’ groups on Carida. A perspective that’s not often covered in some of the recent publications..." Despite herself, Sophia's jaw tensed and that last word came out almost as an obscenity. It was clear how low an opinion she had of most of those works. "...Is that of the people who were wearing white.”

[DoctorOblivious]

Despite her nervousness, Sophia’s eyes widened slightly and she lifted her fingers from the table to steeple them in front of her face, leaving an imprint of clammy sweat on the cold metal. “That would be… very interesting, in fact.” The thrusters in her head immediately began warming up; first-hand accounts from Imperial veterans were rarely considered in the histories of the Galactic Civil War, especially when it concerned engagements against the Jedi. Although, considering the pain that continued to resonate from the recent war, some bias was perhaps expected. “So few historians even consider the Imperial perspective in the war. I will definitely have to give you my comm information so you... can put me in touch.”

 

Sophia paused. The clever bastard had just convinced her to give him her comlink frequency. But for access to the Imperial military archives...

 

“Anyway, the expert that I came to interview is Aidan Darkfire.” Her lips quirked in a slight smile. She did not stutter; Sophia had come to meet with the son of the former Jedi Grandmaster. “I know, he’s barely more than a child, but there are very few people in the entire galaxy who I think have had any experience with the artifacts that I’m studying.”

[DoctorOblivious]

“An Imperial Knight?” Sophia stared at the Imperial officer, lips slightly open until she realized that the man was actually serious. “An Imperial Knight. Unbelievable. If that boy’s mother knew about this, you would probably have a diplomatic incident on your hands. The reason why I’m trying to find him is that I’m writing a book about, well, said mother. And unlike most of the tosh that’s been written on the matter, I’d really prefer to make a proper effort. This would include people who knew her--friends and family, other members of the Order… and yes, this would include the opposition’s perspective. Although, it looks like I would be moving at the speed of the chain of command.”

 

Even if Draygo's son absolutely refused to give her the time of day, however, at least this journey would not be wasted. If the Empire actually allowed her access to its archives on the Civil War, then that was a privilege afforded to a select few. That alone would allow her to produce a work of nearly unprecedented depth--almost certainly a controversial and probably a highly-unpopular perspective in the Galactic Alliance, but controversy was not in itself undesirable.

[DoctorOblivious]

At last, Sophia was released from Imperial custody. It was everything that the historian could manage to not breathe a sigh of relief when she was hurried from the holding cell and presented with her belongings. Not that the Lieutenant wasn’t fairly good looking--the uniform suited him rather well--but the thought of any individual who had it in their power to make her life difficult or short developing a personal interest in her was something out of any sensible woman’s nightmares.

 

Finally free to continue with her visit to Carida, Sophia summoned an airspeeder from the spaceport and left with directions to her home away from home…

 

 

 

…Approximately an hour later, Sophia found herself entering a neutrally-colored closet, a rather sad suite with a pretentious name that was only large enough to accommodate a small bed, a miserable little plastwood desk, refresher unit. “‘Ideal for the frugal traveller’, indeed,” the historian muttered as frowned at her meager lodgings and placed her backpack on the bed for inspection. It didn’t appear that the Imperials had tampered with the artifacts that had brought to Carida; their protective container was tightly sealed and pumped full of a protective gas to prevent damage caused exposure to the atmosphere. Not that Draygo’s archives required the protection, but the seal around the reinforced canister was intact and showed no signs of tampering.

 

She then closely inspected her clothing any traces of homing beacons or recording devices. Sophia knew some basic fieldcraft, but she had to admit to herself that if the Ubiqtorate or Imperial Intelligence had taken a close interest in her affairs, it was likely that she would miss any devices that they might have placed in her effects. The historian would just have to hope that her entrance hadn’t attracted too much attention and that she hadn’t just made life difficult for Draygo’s son. Dissatisfied with her search but understanding that she wasn’t likely to find anything, Sophia pulled out her datapad to check her messages and groaned inwardly.

 

An alert had just been issued from the Galactic Alliance that travel to and from Triple Zero had just been severely restricted after the development of a deadly epidemic that had been imported from a world that Sophia had never even heard of. Unless the Alliance embassy on Carida managed to come through for her, there was a very good chance that the historian’s stay at the Imperial capital would be significantly lengthened. Such was standard for Sophia’s luck the last few days, but there wasn’t anything she could do about this development other than continue on and hope that her visit wasn’t completely unproductive.

 

Judging from Aidan’s knee-jerk reaction to her comms, the young Imperial Knight--Sophia still couldn't quite grasp what had inspired that allegiance--was in no way inclined to speak to anyone claiming a relationship with his mother. An understandable reaction, though having an Imperial officer deny any connection to a stranger who was already under polite suspicion had the potential to be disastrous in the capital. Fortunately, the historian had an emotional trump card in the form of a few objects recovered from her ship, including a holographic picture frame that would likely be of great sentimental value to him.

 

Sophia reached into her bag and retrieved a set of miniature screwdrivers and mechanic’s loupes. The holographic frame was an inexpensive commercial model, but once the historian pried away its plasteel case to reveal a surprisingly tidy rewiring of its innards, it was obvious that Draygo had spliced in a few aftermarket components. The frame and battery might have been commercial-grade, but everything else had been gutted and replaced, including a few components that Sophia couldn’t even recognize. Peering closely at these chipsets, it appeared the device hadn’t even suffered any damage from years of neglect in the Gravedigger.

 

Sophia frowned. Either the battery of this little momento was too weak to attract the attention of the mynocks in her ship, or it too heavily reinforced to be easily breached by their feeding frenzy. The battery was still intact; it was only drained, as though the holoprojector had been left running until it ran out of juice. This was an easy repair to make; biting her lower lip as she worked, Sophia carefully plucked out the battery with a set of antistatic tweezers and replaced it with a compatible model from her pack.

 

The holoprojector flickered to life almost immediately once the battery was replaced. Willing her hands to not shake from excitement, Sophia closed up the device’s plasteel case and flipped it over to watch as holographs cycled according to a timer in the frame’s software. A starfield currently occupied its space, to be replaced by a projection of a forested foothills, stars barely visible with the arrival of dawn or twilight. Without comprehending how she knew, Sophia realized that that she was looking at a scene from Alderaan.

 

Another starfield. Then a holograph of an infant boy sleeping peacefully, his tiny body covered by a thin blue blanket. That must have been Aidan as a toddler, most likely when his grandmother was raising him while Draygo was conducting the Republic’s efforts in the Civil War.

 

Then came a view of a darkened subterranean passage on an unknown planet, a beam of light faintly visible through a craggy ceiling and glinting softly against a water-slickened wall. Sophia could only barely make out the outline of a trail of climbing ropes and a set of clips that had been hammered into the roughly-hewn wall. Sophia frowned; from what the historian understood, Draygo had something of a passion for spelunking, but why would the Jedi Grandmaster have brought a holocam on an expedition for lightsaber crystals?

 

Another field. This subject, Sophia recognized immediately. Aryian Darkfire was kneeling on the jagged wing of his StarViper starfighter, his eyes obscured by a set of shielded welding goggles but his face otherwise exposed. His hands were buried wrist-deep in the guts of his starfighter, tinkering with the workings of one of the hull-mounted laser cannons. Sophia smirked when she realized that the focus of the holograph was the Jedi Master’s grease-stained hands and wrists, but Darkfire showed no sign that she was aware that he was being oggled at by his wife.

 

Another transition followed; another starfield, then a holographic from an arched, reinforced hangar. An massive, eight-limbed war droid knelt just before Draygo’s point-of-view, an array of sensors decorating its body cast slightly downward in a display of almost fanatical adoration. A pale hand rested on its armored leg, fingers tracing an identification rune that had been laser-etched into its plating.

 

Moriarty finally realized that these holographs must have been captured from an implant in Draygo’s eyes; that explained the focus and perspective of the images. The scenes continued, interspersed by unfamiliar starfields from planets that Moriarty could only guess at. Perhaps she would have time to delve into the metadata of the holos to see if she could find any information regarding where the images were captured, but for the moment, Sophia just watched, mesmerized by these scenes from another life.

[DoctorOblivious]

The photo gallery continued on, holograms of Armiena’s family and friends interspersed with images of alien starfields. At one point, an image of Draygo’s face, completely covered with some gray-green-blue goop, appeared in the queue. Sophia couldn’t help but smile at the image; she had no idea when or where this holo had been captured, but there was something delirious about Armiena’s expression. She wore a ridiculous, shit-eating grin; the collar of her white robe was frayed and blackened; patches of her pitch-dark hair were missing and some of what remained was shrivelled. It appeared that the Jedi Grandmaster had barely survived a close encounter with a flamethrower. Nevertheless, Armiena appeared delighted, giddy with relief and triumph, astonished that she and her friends were all still alive.

 

Sophia was stunned out of her reverie by a vibration coming from her armored satchel; someone had just sent a message to the comlink-archive that the historian had recovered from the Gravedigger.

 

Sophia cast a glance upwards at the ceiling of the tiny room and considered the wisdom of unsealing her barostatic satchel in an enclosed space with only a pair of small air vents for circulation. The protectant gas, odorless, colorless, tasteless, and mildly toxic, was not exactly intended to be vented outside a dedicated scavenging device. Although, it was only at one atmosphere of pressure and was slightly denser than air…

 

The historian shrugged and peered closely at the edge of the canister, taking another look to ensure that the airtight seal was intact. Sophia withdrew her pocketknife and worked the blade into the seal, prying the edges of the breached container apart to reveal a padded insert containing Draygo’s holocron and archival disc, both in the same position when she had left the two troves in the padded enclosure. The light glinted softly at the edges of the artifacts; there wasn’t even a hint of fingerprints on the sides of the devices, aside from those that Sophia had left the last time she handled them.

 

She knelt down to inspect them more closely, her nose almost touching the face of Draygo’s archival disc. A loose hair trailed from her forehead onto the device. There wasn’t even a trace of fibers left on the face of the disc. Perhaps the Empire’s customs’ inspectors hadn’t pried into her belongings, she decided. Sophia involuntarily gave a sniff and almost immediately felt lightheaded. The historian snatched the Grandmaster’s effects from the canister and slammed it shut, hoping to forestall the release of the toxic gas into her room. It was no use; Sophia had already gotten a good whiff of the protective gas and the lightheadedness was getting worse. Shoving everything valuable into her bag, she retreated from her room and resolved to allow the vapor to dissipate over the course of several hours.

 

Sophia took the archival disc into her palm and, much to her astonishment, the device immediately lit up at her touch and displayed the contents of Darkfire’s message. The young Imperial Knight was certainly irritated, but he wasn’t resolved to ignore her arrival to the Imperial capital. She bit back a little giggle and hoped that a temporary sense of euphoria wasn’t one of the symptoms of a dangerous exposure to the gas. Her shoulders still heaving with the occasional hiccup, she withdrew her datapad from her bag and took a quick, unsteady holo of the two artifacts.

 

She sent a brief message to Aidan Darkfire.

 

 

“I just want to talk.” Attached was a holo of Armiena Draygo’s archival disc and the holocron that was in her possession. Both the objects were almost unique. There were perhaps six copies of the archival disc manufactured over the entire course of its production, for use only by members of Draygo’s Council; the holocron was of an extremely unusual four-sided configuration, a tetrahedron. Hopefully, this would convince him that Sophia had known the young man's mother,

or that she had at least come across some of her belongings.

 

 

Sophia swung her backpack and its contents onto her shoulder and walked away from her room, staggering into walls only twice on the way to summon an airtaxi. Its driver, a male (she thought) of a species that the historian couldn’t even identify, made a double-take when she passed him the address supplied by the young Darkfire. Sophia passed a credit chit under the transparisteel barrier separating the passenger compartment to his seat; his face, a mucosal mess of eyes and horns, gave her a concerned many-glance but he seemed convinced of the wisdom of ferrying her to the military base.

 

The floor of the airspeeder lifted under her feet and they set off to an undoubtedly past the military base. Hopefully, the identification badge supplied by immigration would get her security gates; hopefully, Aidan’s good grace would allow her to leave.

[DoctorOblivious]

Moriarty spent the airspeeder ride to the Imperial base housing the Empress’ Knights in silence, only responding to her driver’s pleasantries with the barest minimum to avoid rudeness. Yes, it was quite pleasant weather this day; what had happened to the planet was awful and good riddance to the Sith, the freaks and murders that they were; she was a historian specializing in contemporary military history on her way to interview a veteran of the Civil War; this was a particularly challenging field, due to incomplete records and heavy classification on tactical data, et cetera. Once those topics of conversation had been exhausted and the young historian fell into brooding silence, her driver issued a gurgling rumble that Sophia assumed was his-hers-whatevers species’ equivalent of a sigh and tapped a button on the airspeeder’s control surfaces to fill its cabin with something vaguely resembling music. The melody was almost completely atonal and the woman’s lyrics were indecipherable to one unfamiliar with her language. At least, she guessed that the vocalist was a female, judging from the higher pitch of the artist’s voice.

 

Her dark eyebrows furrowed into a frown. Sophia almost immediately began to develop a mild headache and there was a ghost of a high-pitched humming in her ears; apparently, the music made abundant use of frequencies that were just slightly beyond the range of human hearing. Despite the headache, the music was oddly compelling.

 

In Moriarty’s possession were two Jedi artifacts of almost unique rarity, one of which appeared to contain a complete record of the Jedi Grandmaster’s holdouts during the Civil War. The information that the archive contained was of incalculable strategic significance, and despite the fact that she was willfully carrying the devices into an Imperial base, Sophia merely felt… thoughtful. Even with the installation looming just on the horizon, a typically Imperial abomination of geometric shapes making heavy use of duracrete and steel, the historian wasn’t even afraid, only nervous at the prospect of potentially botching her reunion with Draygo’s son. It was rather peculiar.

 

There was a harsh rap on the airspeeder window at the civilian entrance to the military base. Sophia glanced to her left; an MP, clad in grey plasteel armor of a cut similar to that of a stormtrooper’s carapace but wearing an open-faced helmet, jerked his thumb back and she vaguely made out the command to disembark. Her hands fished through her bag to pay for the transit. In her hurry, Sophia neglected to count out the coins before she dismounted but it must have been sufficient for a respectable tip, judging from the driver’s double-take.

 

For the next several minutes, Sophia waited with some degree of impatience in the MP’s shack as the next cycle of security checks commenced, quietly chewing on the inside of her lip as her documentation was challenged. From there, her credentials and visa were further examined, confirmed with immigration at the spaceport; Sophia’s person and bags were checked for weapons and fieldcraft devices by both scanners and physical examination; in general, another cycle of feeling thoroughly probed and more than a little violated by a regime that was rightly paranoid for its security. Upon verifying the historian’s identity and her approval to visit a military installation, however, Sophia was allowed to enter on foot, albeit guided to her destination by another MP to prevent the clueless civvie from wandering off...

 

Approximately a quarter of an hour later, Sophia was guided into the common room of Darkfire’s barracks by the unit’s staff sergeant. The historian immediately picked the young Darkfire out, even without the assistance of the identification patch on his uniform. Even slouched in a cushy sofa and half-watching a mind-numbing Holonet broadcast, he even looked like his parents’ son: dark hair, brilliant green eyes, though his broad build was more reminiscent of his father. Sophia turned to murmur a quiet thanks to her guide and entered the room to introduce herself, but the desk sergeant remained just inside the doorway in case his intervention was needed.

 

Sophia strode towards the couch and shrugged the backpack from her shoulders. Standing before Aidan, she held out a brown-skinned hand for him to shake. She had long, slender fingers and a thin wrist; it was obvious that this was a woman who had very little training and wasn’t accustomed to physical exertion beyond basic civilian exercises and tapping away at a datapad. More interesting, however, was the historian’s Force-presence, if Aidan had gone through Jedi training. Even if her touch and biometric readings indicated that Sophia was made of the same flesh and blood as any other human being, one trained in the Force would be rather perturbed by her presence. The brown-skinned woman clearly wasn’t a droid--she was even gifted with a mild Sensitivity to the Force--but there was something indescribably off to Sophia’s aura.

 

“Aidan Darkfire? Sophia Moriarty. I served with your mother during the war.”

[DoctorOblivious]

Sophia couldn’t say that she blamed Aidan for preferring to avoid his parents. The young man had been dealt a terrible hand during his upbringing. True, he’d at least been raised by his grandmother on the frequent occasions that Draygo and her husband were on the frontlines or in the relatively exposed temples on Gala or Borleias, but it couldn’t have been much of a substitute. Misal, Sophia knew from personal experience, was not a particularly emotionally available woman, and her associates were even more secretive. The historian’s typical interaction with them involved getting black-bagged and dragged on board a shuttle to an unknown location.

 

“Understandable. You had a raw deal growing up.” Sophia was tempted to say something further, to reassure the young man that the separation had hurt Armiena almost as badly, but thought better of it. “I had a chance to complete my education when the war ended--history, emphasis on contemporary history. I don’t know if you’ve seen some of the material that has been published about your mother, but they’re all political hatchet jobs by hacks who are trying to sell a political opinion, not information. I knew your mother--I mean, towards the end of the war, I was practically her left hand... erm… woman and I’d like to set the record straight before these idiots twist her life even further.”

 

At the words left hand woman, Sophia’s amber eyes gave Aidan a searching glance, carefully observing whether he showed any reaction to that phrase whatsoever. Perhaps the Imperial Knight had simply been too young to remember. In any case, speaking those words on the Imperial capitol, where it was entirely likely that her every move would be shadowed by the Ubiqtorate and her every utterance recorded and transcribed by listening devices, was taking an insane risk that wasn’t likely to pay dividends. After all, in the last years of the civil war, Aidan was more or less being raised by his grandmother and what little time he did spend with Armiena was likely to be lost in the hazy memory of early childhood.

 

Sophia turned to rummage in her satchel for the artifacts she’d recovered from the Grandmaster’s ship. Feeling the cold metal and rigid crystal of the archive and holocron under her fingers, she placed the two artifacts on the table beside them. Both glinted in the light, bearing a light sheen from nervous-sweat left behind by Moriarty’s hands. The archival device was a palm-sized disc, seemingly wrought of ordinary steel aside from a concentric ring around the core of the device and a few miniscule divots that indicated the presence of holoprojectors and sensors. The latter was an ebon holocron of an unusual configuration, a four-sided triangular prism. A faint light glimmered from within its lattice, but it lay otherwise inert.

 

Despite all of Sophia’s efforts, she’d never been able to activate that holocron.

 

“I found these on your mother’s ship, near Kashyyyk. That disc contains a substantial portion of your mother’s archives.” Sophia couldn’t believe that she was revealing these artifacts in the middle of an Imperial military installation. Her heart was pounding in her neck. “I don’t want to cause any trouble, but I’d like to get to know you.”

[DoctorOblivious]

“I wouldn’t ask you to disrupt your training. I don’t know why….” Sophia cut that sentence short, realizing that asking Aidan his motivations to join the Empire’s military after his mother’s ruinous struggle against that same government was perhaps impolitic for the moment. “I mean, I don’t see why it should be necessary for you to take leave so soon. What I’m hoping for is to find out what happened to the people that your mother cared about--friends, family, you get the idea--and to understand their perspective of the war. I’d be perfectly happy with exchanging messages--I just… felt that after our first exchange, I would need to speak to you in person.”

 

Sophia eyed the young man’s investigations of the holocron with some wariness. “I still haven’t been able to get that thing to work. I know that some of the Jedi holocrons have security precautions in place to ensure that only a trained Force-Sensitive can access their contents, and even then, I understand that they can be somewhat finicky.” That was putting it mildly; some of them had security precautions so sensitive that they could even sense the experience of their peruser and prevent them from accessing information on dangerous subjects. “I once managed to get that metal… disk… thing operational. From what I’ve been able to determine, your mother built it as a type of archival device and comlink. It’s filled with records from her time in the Jedi Order--and it’s how I was able to contact you.”

 

Sophia glanced warily at the ebon holocron. The historian thought she perceived a flicker in the glow radiating from within its crystalline lattice. After many hours of poring over the device with her naked with her naked eyes, the assistance of a set of low-power loupes, and even an archaeologist’s scanner, Sophia hadn’t been able to detect anything aside from featureless black crystal. If it hadn’t been for the continual electrical activity that the scanner picked up, the historian might have considered the possibility that it had suffered irreparable damage from exposure to low-atmo in the Gravedigger. Now, after countless hours of being pored over and examined, it seemed as though something from the seemingly-innocuous, palm-sized prism had woken up, was staring back at its examiners, and trying to decide what it thought of them.

 

“You’re not feeling as though it’s watching us, are you?”

[DoctorOblivious]

Sophia gave Draygo’s son a sideways glance when he closed his eyes and forcibly slowed his breathing. She recognized Aidan’s intention immediately; the upright posture, the conscious effort to control his breathing in a steady, deliberate rhythm… this was an attempt at Jedi meditation. It was the same thing that Sophia had done in her final and only successful attempt to access the stores of knowledge within the former Grandmaster’s archives, although, most likely, Aidan was actually making accessing his latent connection to the Force rather than simply calming his wrought nerves.

 

The historian silenced a pang of jealousy. Despite being Force-Sensitive, at least in purely biological terms, Sophia was unlikely to ever share that connection to the Force.

 

The holocron flickered to life, a blue-white mist emanating from the tip of the prismatic archive. A smile sprouted on Sophia’s lips in anticipation of the wealth of information that they might be about to access. The form of a thin, middle-aged woman clad in the robes of a Jedi Librarian soon came into focus, standing at roughly knee height. The gatekeeper gave her surroundings a glance, first making eye contact with Sophia, whose smile at their triumph immediately evaporated. Then the figure turned and stared into Aidan’s brilliant green eyes, folding her long, thin hands into her sleeves.

 

”Greetings, cousin.” The holographic figure gave a minute bow and looked into Aidan’s eyes, a small smile on her lips. Her thin, wispy hair was neatly tied into a small bun and secured with a plain wooden stick in the middle of its knot. ”My name is Lachelle Draygo. I am the gatekeeper of this holocron. I imagine that you have many questions you would like to ask.”

 

Sophia, for all her previous composure, had gone pale and was staring at the miniature woman, wide-eyed with horror.

[DoctorOblivious]

The historian never felt the wave of distress that coursed through the Force, her sensitivity being only slightly more developed than utter blindness. However, Aidan had clearly felt it, having recoiled from the plush armchair and slammed his face into the window. Sophia rose from her chair, accidentally knocking the holocron from the table as she moved over to grab Draygo’s son by the shoulders. Even though she hadn’t experienced the disturbance, Sophia knew that something terrible must have just happened: the death of an extraordinarily powerful Jedi, a destructive event on a planet-killing scale, or awakening of an eldritch abomination...

 

“Look at me. Blink a couple times.” Sophia looked into Aidan’s eyes for a moment, checking the size of his pupils. He’d hit his head against the window pretty hard; she could already see a bump swelling on his forehead, and there was a possibility of concussion. At the very least, he’d probably have a dreadful headache in the morning.

 

Sophia thought back to years ago, when she and Armiena had been all but inseparable, working together shoulder to shoulder in an attempt to guide the galaxy out of the hell of the final months of the Civil War. In those dark days, when the Empire was on a resurgence and even the most aggressive offensives launched by the Republic were failing to find purchase, the Jedi Grandmaster would sometimes repeat a mantra to herself when she was alone.

 

I am proud of where I am. I am proud of who I am working with. I am proud of what I’m working for. She would say. At first, the words were spoken defiantly, Armiena staring into her reflection with a set jaw and with conviction. However, as the months of monitoring the final days of the war in the isolation of a Jedi Praxeum continued, and the casualties mounted, and the losses of entire fleets and generations of Jedi and soldiers continued, the words were whispered desperately. Months of sleep loss and being cooped up in the Jedi enclave had stolen the color from her face and left heavy bags under her eyes. Still, the mantra continued, all the way until the last, desperate days of the war.

 

“Are you proud of where you are? Who you’re working with? What you’re working for?”

[DoctorOblivious]

Sophia bit the inside of her lip and frowned. The historian had no love for the Empire, and the history of its prejudice against other non-Human species suggested that she would always be in some small amount of danger while in its territory--although the same could be said of the Galactic Alliance’s inability to regulate a number of galactic-spanning corporations that ran roughshod over worlds where the Alliance had little presence. But truth be told, had no specific reason to fear the resurgent Empire, especially if it had made itself an enemy of the Sith Order in such a dramatic fashion.

 

“Well, assuming that some idiot doesn’t decide to start something that forces the Empire to begin deporting Alliance citizens, I might be here for quite a while. They were so generous as to put me in touch with some folks who can get me access to the Imperial military archives.” Granted, access to the archive buildings didn’t necessarily entail access to the archives, and even the documents that the historian was allowed to peruse were likely to be heavily redacted, but one learned to read between the black bars.

 

Her left hand scratched at her dark eyebrows. Her work didn’t actually require her to be physically present to meet with her publishers very often. It also wasn’t very often that one was privileged to be present to witness history in the making. Surviving history, of course, was a completely different matter.

 

“I know that Misal and her friends are searching for your mother, but until I hear anything…” Or if she heard anything, was probably a better. “It looks like I’ll be staying here indefinitely. The work is wherever I find anything interesting. I’ll just need to find a way to make my presence to the Empire useful in the meantime. Or at least tolerable.”

[DoctorOblivious]

With only one disdainful glance from the Imperial Commander, Sophia suspected that she and this child soldier were not going to get along. Clearly, Eleison had an overelevated reverence for the value of operational security, whereas Moriarty… while she wasn’t a journalist by training, it was her trade to stick her aquiline nose where it didn’t belong, to irritate overly secretive sorts in the name of the pursuit of truth and the next month’s paystub. That understanding of historical context probably made her even more dangerous than a gumshoe reporter. She returned Eleison’s grasp, feeling surprisingly strong muscles under the calloused skin of her fingers; the Imperial commander would have felt long, thin fingers belonging to a woman whose idea of physical activity was climbing several flights of stairs and whose concept of a battlefield injury was a repetitive stress injury from too much time spent datapadding.

 

“Doctor Sophia Moriarty, historian… of the University of Coruscant…”

 

Nope, they were not going to get along whatsoever. Nor was she going to agree with the soldier's apparently spartan tastes. Her stomach wasn't going to object to a free meal after several hours of neglecting her ravenous metabolism, but even her pragmatic tastes tended to prefer a meal that wasn't scientifically designed and industrially manufactured to produce a meal that delivered sufficient nutrition in efficient packaging as cheaply as possible.

 

Sophia grabbed a pair of the processed ration cubes and took a taste nibble after taking a seat. The flavor was… vaguely tolerable, if not identifiable and only marginally tolerable, tasting not completely unlike chicken. It wasn't completely objectionable; in fact, she suspected that she could grow to develop a taste for the rations with enough practice, as horrifying that prospect of subsisting on these products might seem. She took a test sip of the tea; again, heavily processed but not unpalatable.

 

“Your parents were fighters, Aidan. They might have been with the Jedi, but your mother joined as an adult. There's only so much that Jedi training can do to supplant a previously-formed identity. As for their contributions to the galaxy…. well,” Sophia buried her nose in the cup of tea, letting the herbal steam waft over her face. Only her eyes and forehead visible behind the inexpensive ceramic mug, she continued on. “Wait twenty years. There are going to be some amazing disagreements amongst the historians.”

[DoctorOblivious]

Despite herself, Sophia stiffened upon listening to Commander Eleison’s speech regarding the perceived uselessness of the Jedi Order and the more proactive stance that she wanted to take with the Imperial Knights. She’d heard this speech before, almost word for word. Indeed, anyone with any knowledge of history would have heard this speech before, and probably had read it many other times, all delivered by young Jedi and other well-meaning iconoclasts. How effective their efforts were… those results tended to be mixed. Sometimes, they would leave behind a legacy of a period of long-overdue reform; more likely, they flared out dramatically or ended up causing for more damage than they fixed. The Jedi Order was certainly in need of reform, but considering the resurgence of the Sith…

 

The historian just nodded and followed to the Corellian freighter, hefting her bag with its priceless curios onto one shoulder. She gave the canvas bag a test shake, hearing the quiet clinking of the archival devices and electronics inside; nothing was unaccounted for.

 

Sophia wasn’t in any position to voice her concerns, or even to probe exactly how Eleison intended to maintain the “purity” of any political organization, especially one with as tattered a history as the Empire. In the meantime, however, the scholar would be in a unique position of a lay witness to a historic meeting of the Jedi Order. Her role would be to document as much as she was able: record as much as possible, take holos when it wasn’t intrusive, and to take note of anything that transpired that could be of consequence.

 

Hopefully she wouldn’t manage to make enemies in either fragment of the Jedi Order in the meantime.

[DoctorOblivious]

((I am making some assumptions with my character’s standing here. If there are objections, I’m happy to edit the post. No espionage is planned; this is just an in-character narration of a very deep dive into the JNet archives.))

 

When Sophia first came to Carida, she was an itinerant scholar, not certain whether she would be welcomed with open arms or escorted from the away from the planet's military installations under armed guard. On her second visit, she would be a guest of the Imperial Remnant and the Knights of the Head of State, a known quantity to the Imperial Navy, and with security clearance for some of the Empire’s more sensitive records. Previously, she had simply been begging for the graces of the Knight-Commander; she had returned with authorization to access the Imperial archives. A long week awaited the traveling scholar, one filled with sleepless nights, navigating her way through the shoals of redacted paragraphs and combing through an ocean of data.

 

It would be a grueling campaign, but with enough coffee and donuts, she would be victorious.

 

Sophia had hitched a ride on a troop transport and had spent a cramped and sweaty voyage in the steerage of the vessel, keeping to herself and ignoring the fact that she had been using the same change of clothing for the last two days by immersing herself in the findings of her peers. A contact in the Engineering Department of Usk of Cresh had finally reported his findings of a set of crystalline wafers that the historian had recovered from the ruins of Draygo’s vessel. Through a series of nondestructive assays, the Verpine had concluded that the wafers were components of a highly-advanced data storage device. The polymorphic organo-crystalline lattice allowed for extraordinarily dense, almost incalculable storage of data, increasing exponentially with the complexity of the assembly that the cross-section was assembled into. As for interaction with the device, the Verpine could only offer conjecture; his scans detected elements of a type of proximity sensor that was often installed into room-scale holocomms, but the materials scientist hadn’t an inkling of how the end user would interact with the device.

 

Sophia understood immediately. These wafers were attempts at assembling a holocron--forty-one attempts, each a failure.

 

Her passage through customs went much more smoothly, as this time she was sandwiched between a score of Imperial soldiers, some of whom had attempted to smuggle minor pieces of contraband from Coruscant. Her room (closet was a more accurate description) was still rented--and still draining her meager reserves of credits--but much to her surprise, the crate full of electronics that Misal had supplied was still present. This time, Sophia was able to take more time to examine the various pieces of equipment in the package. A miniature holocomm no larger than the palm of her hand was present, but Sophia was surprised to find that the disk was completely devoid of any contact information--it probably had been wiped by the miserable crone. A smaller satchel contained a curious set of contact lenses floating in an odorless saline solution of some description--the historian spent at least fifteen minutes poking herself in her amber eyes, trying to become accustomed to the lenses and blinking rapidly to the irritating, foreign objects sitting in her eyes.

 

She stared at herself in the solitary mirror in the unit’s refresher and wiped at a trail of makeup that had been smeared by the saline. “Um, record?” Sophia recited lamely in the refresher. “Link? Begin recording?” She sighed. What was it that those blackguards and assassins always said to each other before beginning an operation? It was obvious. “Sync.”

 

A miniaturized heads-up display in light brown outlines bloomed around her irises; Sophia recoiled in surprise and nearly blinked the lenses free from her eyes. A tiny pixel of crimson blinked repeatedly in her lower left eye--likely an indication that something in the lenses was recording either image or sound. Sophia glanced at her datapad, having brought it with her to the refresher; something was uploading both holo and sound to the device. She was going to have to play around with these curious little creations and test their capabilities, she resolved, and discover whether they offered any other features.

 

Sophia returned to the satchel that Misal’s associates had left. A small stash of credits in varying denominations was also included--not an insignificant sum, enough for a few interstellar journeys in modest furnishings, but not so much to draw suspicion of counterfeit or seditious purposes. A few metallic pieces of jewelry of classic, geometric design were present; the historian couldn’t even guess at their operation, but a trace of an earring’s pins with a fingertip hinted at a trace of serration: a data output, perhaps?

 

She spent a few more hours in her room playing with the various knick-knacks that had been abandoned by the spurned Miraluka, trying to discover any hidden features in the electronic wonders that she had overlooked--but also trying to find out how to turn off the blasted gizmos. Wandering into Imperial archives outfitted for a clandestine operation would have been a fantastic method to earn berthing for life in an Imperial prison. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem that Misal had left any documentation for any of the devices in the satchel, either trusting Sophia to figure out operation of the widgets through trial-and-error.

 

Sophia munched on one of the flavorless ration cubes that she’d managed to save from the Misericordia, puzzling over why the bitter old crone had entrusted these clandestine marvels without leaving any instruction. No additional files, save for the recording being streamed from the contact lenses, had been uploaded to her datapad. No documents were included in the satchel. The historian pondered over the question, slowly accumulating crumbs on the rooms cot, until an idea so patently obvious that she cried out in frustration sprung to her mind. Sophia had in her possession a device that was nearly unique in the galaxy, whose encryption seemed nearly unbeatable to any but the galaxy’s cleverest hackers: Draygo’s archival disc.

 

Sophia placed the metallic cylinder before her crossed legs, in the middle of the cot, and closed her eyes. Steadying her breath, she began to meditate...

[DoctorOblivious]

After some hours of meditation, Sophia’s trance was interrupted by a knock on the door of her rented room. The historian sat upright from her slouched position with a jolt and peeked outside her door, noting the delivered carton of pizza with raised eyebrows. She furtively glanced down the hallway after she peered into the carton’s lid; she wasn’t aware that she even knew anyone on Carida, least of all someone who might think to handwrite a private note… She read rapidly as she ducked back into the oversized closet, surprised that she had made enough of an impression on Andromina for the TIE pilot to have tracked her down. She folded up a slice of the pizza and devoured it with abandon, peering at the attached identification badge with her free hand.

 

Her eyes widened when she realized exactly what she was looking at. This little strip of plastisheet was an research identicard that bestowed complete, unescorted access to the Imperial archives. Sophia’s mouth dropped open and the greasy slice fell out of her mouth--even if Beth had managed to procure this identicard through legal means, it was a tremendous security risk for an outsider like Moriarty to come into possession of a badge with this level of security clearance. It couldn’t possibly be legal for her to even possess this kind of clearance without enduring months of background checks and security interviews…

 

However, if the Ubiqtorate ever bothered to read some of her previous works, they would understand that even if her earlier writings took something of a pro-Republic slant, she was not a raving, pro-Jedi fanatic. She peered closely at the plastisheet identicard, instinctively angling it to watch the security holos shift under the light. There would be other security features built into the card that weren’t immediately visible, but it at least seemed genuine. If she did have this kind of clearance, it would practically be criminal for her to not make use of it.

 

Sophia reached into her bag, retrieved the archival disc, and placed it in front of her crossed legs on the mattress of the bed. Before the historian had even had a chance to place the device on her bed, the inlaid holoprojector shone to life and displayed the convoluted holographic user interface. A set of icons pulsed occasionally; her eyes traced over them to investigate. Sophia read over the holographic display while biting the inside of her lip; the first of the updated documents were manuals for the various gadgets that had been left in her room. Sophia transitioned to the remainder of the alerts: these were updates on the locations of the Wolf Spiders. Half of them had deployed to Iridonia, half of them to Sullust; reports of ammunition expenditures, damage reports, a compilation of sensor recordings… a report that the Journeyman had been shot down over Iridonia. There was no mention of the fate of its crew.

 

Sophia suddenly lost her appetite. At least two other vessels had been present at this skirmish, but there was no report concerning the fate of Misal Draygo or the others on that shuttle. There wasn’t anything that she could do for Misal, and if something had happened to the Miraluka hag and her secretive operatives, Sophia likely would have joined their fate. She reached out and pushed the holoprojector disc away, the image winking out of existence as she lifted away her hands. There wasn’t anything that Sophia could have done for Misal in a battle, the historian told herself; she was untrained, barely more competent than the average Coruscanti civilian; her place was in intelligence analysis.

 

Sophia ran her hands through her hair and stared at the mattress of the bed. She needed to get to work, needed to document the war that these people had fought.

 

A quick shower later, the historian summoned an airtaxi and made her way to the Panopticon, the reinforced-looking building in the Imperial Citadel where the Remnant’s archives were housed. A squat, eight-sided building in the midst of one of Carida’s largest installation, the Imperial archives were actually mostly excavated into the bedrock--the majority of the structure was buried deep into the planet’s crust, where even orbital bombardment or EMP burst might not damage the records. Certainly, the multiple checkpoints manned by helmeted stormtroopers hinted at how sensitive some of the documents under its aegis might be, as did the fact that the majority of the functions of Sophia’s datapad were disabled upon entering the facility. Nodding along with the rhythm of a thunderous Sullustan rap that had rendered Sophia partially deaf during the airtaxi ride, the historian displayed her identification--both her scholar's credentials and the misappropriated pass from Andromina--to a final checkpoint before entering an armored turbolift that sent her into the planet’s crust.

 

When the doors to the turbolift opened, revealing a facility with polished duracrete floors and steel fixtures, Sophia sniffed at the dehydrated, recycled air when she entered the historical stacks of the Imperial Remnant. She detected more than a hint of dust, and the delectable scent of acid-free, conservation-grade paper--real paper, not micron-thin flimsi or plastisheet. Most of these records would rarely be visited. Indeed, Sophia could only make out the clicking of one individual’s shoes against the waxened floors. However, when the doors to the turbolift opened with a chime to the silence of the stacks of the Empire’s archives, Sophia thought she heard the accompaniment of a chorus of angels.

 

This was Sophia’s mileu. Here was the home of unimaginable depths of data, reports needed to be written into stories. All that was needed was a historian who was willing to sift through the mounds of data and navigate through the redactions. Naturally, the task was typically aided by a dedicated research librarian who understood these waters and could guide visitors to their destination. Although she was hardly dressed for such a strategy, Sophia walked over to the librarian’s desk in the middle of the floor and offered the attending officer a big grin…

[DoctorOblivious]

Sophia’s shoes clicked on the polished concrete of the floor of the Imperial Archives, a vaguely circular room surrounded by innumerable reams of dataslates, terminals, and paper books, affectionately known to military officers and academics alike as the Panopticon. Now that the historian had finally had the pleasure of visiting the repository of information and the workstations that were surrounded by centuries of sensitive data, Sophia could see the resemblance to the building concept, but the moniker was chosen more for the institution's’ reputation for collecting virtually all available information in the galaxy.

 

Striding to the center of the multilayered library, she gave the attending archivist a big grin. “Hello. My first time in the Panopticon. I don’t suppose you could help find some rather… specific reports?

 

“Be happy to. Your identification, please.” Something in the officer’s accent stuck out to her--there was clearly a bit of Coruscant in his voice that military training couldn’t completely obliterate, but not the strained accent of the posh Upper Levels...

 

She held out the badge for the librarian’s inspection. “Sophia Moriarty, embed with the Imperial Knights. Coruscant?”

 

“Eastport.” That was it--there lingered a very slight twang of the lower classes of that thoroughly working-class precinct. “I was reassigned just a little bit before the armistice. You’re… not that Sophia Moriarty, are you?”

 

Sophia was taken aback. She hadn’t expected her presence on the planet to have been noted. Shoving a loose strand of hair away from her face, she responded carefully. “Well, I was with the Knights at Y’Toub...”

 

“Not what I was thinking of. The Last Full Measure: An Accounting of the Final Days of the Galactic Civil War? Or Hydia to Aequita: The Founding of the Galactic Republic?”

 

Sophia found herself blushing. The former was the first successful history that Moriarty had published--the first actually successful text, that had finally allowed her to cease subsiding on a diet of ration bars and instant noodles. That second text was her graduate thesis, an accounting of the organic growth of a loose confederation of star systems situated vaguely along the route of the Hydian Way into the Galactic Republic. Despite the tremendous effort in compiling the sources used to tell the story of the founding of the government that would co-opt the Rebellion and fight the Empire to a stand-still, she had imagined that the text was mouldering in the proverbial shelves of academia. “I didn’t think anyone ever actually read those.”

 

 

“Are you kidding me? Where were you able to able get a primary source for the Jedi perspective of the Battle of Coruscant?”

 

 

“I was working in their archives at the time.”

 

“Spast--to have a few hours in those halls… I… anyway, what can I help you with?”

 

“Kamino. ‘Round the same time of the Jedi attack. Anything that you can give me--Aurek-Aurek-Resh, casualty reports, sensor data, briefings, civilian facility reports...”

 

“Working on something new?” Now was the officer’s turn to grin. Clearly, most of his workday consisted of retrieving reports and documents for the analysis of general staff and intelligence. Tracking down the recollections of a controversial battle for the purposes of finally bringing the misfortunes of that terrible day to public attention was far out of the realm of the ordinary for him.

 

“I'm about ninety percent there. Unfortunately, that last ten has been a real… the Jedi have not exactly been forthcoming about their perspective of the battle.”

 

“A moment, Doctor Moriarity.” Ignoring the historian’s correction of “Sophia”, the archivist took a few minutes to hammer away at his workstation, locating some of the archives that would provide the her with a starting point. He pointed with a three-fingered hand towards a nearby workstation. “I’ve set up a temporary log-in for the archives at that desk there, though I highly recommend that you leave the retrieval to me. Our archival system is somewhat… idiosyncratic. Obviously, you won’t be able leave the Archives with any of the originals, so you’ll need to take notes, and… oh dear.” His eyes widened slightly at a report that appeared on his datapad.

 

“Oh dear what?”

 

“...Are you certain that you wouldn’t like to narrow down your search query? I’m pulling up quite a bit of information. You’ll be here for weeks if you don’t know what you’re looking for.”

 

“I’ll manage. I don’t sleep very much.”

 

Sophia took her post at the workstation and began to scroll through the first of the documents that had been transferred to the screen of the secured datapad: an After Action Report from the General who had been in command while the Imperials attempted to repulse the Jedi assault. Sophia took notes occasionally, then moved on to the next document. So began a long, long day of research--the historian appeared to have been welded to the workstation and scarcely left, and the archivist occasionally located additional documents from the Imperial and civilian facilities on Kamino. Hours passed. More and more documents were transferred to the workstation that Sophia had claimed as her territory, and a small fort of paper books began to fortify the perimeter of her realm. A slight, somewhat unassuming woman, the historian quickly disappeared behind the walls of data surrounded her. She took no notice, lifting her head only occasionally to thank the archivist for locating yet another paper book or dataslate and further reinforcing the fortress of texts that surrounded her. She reappeared from her realm only occasionally for refresher breaks and to retrieve more caf--at the moment, she was subsiding mostly on nutrient pills and caffeine.

 

The duty shift eventually ended. Sophia was jolted out of her trance when the archivist was relieved of his post, overhearing the conversation of the archivists in the background.

 

“She’s been there all day--barely even moved. She’s a machine.” Sophia heard in the background as Rishard left his port.

 

Sophia rubbed at her bleary eyes and dug in her pockets for a pair of reading glasses. This was going to be a late night...

[DoctorOblivious]

Lost in an overabundance of data, Sophia continued to pore through a mountain of reports from Kamino regarding the Jedi attack several years ago. From what the historian could gather from the Imperial perspective, the attack had been a disaster from almost the beginning for the Jedi; coordination with the Rebellion’s fleet appeared to be spotty at best, and at least one Jedi had been downed by turbolaser fire--turbolaser fire, of all things--early into the engagement. What exactly the Jedi had been attempting to accomplish with their attack on Kamino was a mystery, but it soon became clear that the assault simply caused widespread, indiscriminate devastation, resulting in a loss of civilian lives estimated in the millions.

 

From a glance through casualty reports from the civilian authorities, most of these lives were terminated with an entry in their file stating that they were merely missing, but Sophia understood perfectly what that meant: that it had been impossible to recover their bodies, and that they had drowned in the turbulent depths of Kamino, trapped in their sinking cities. It was a terrible way to go. In the chaos of the dogfight, it was nearly impossible to keep track of individual fighters, but a rescue and recovery operation that had taken place after the Jedi withdrawal confirmed that the sinking of one of the floating cities had been accomplished through the destruction of a critical power juncture that fed the city’s repulsorlift arrays. The torpedos that had sunk that city had been delivered from beneath its platform. Requiring unimaginably precise piloting to avoid diving into the waves or colliding with the floating platform, only a Jedi would have managed that maneuver.

 

Only Grandmaster Trevelian was confirmed to still be in the air when that city was destroyed. There was something to be said about the confusion of battle, but there was no possibility that Trevelian couldn't have known about the potential collateral damage of his attack.

 

At nearly the same time as the attack on Kamino, the Rebellion had led a similar attack on the Empire’s shipyards at Kuat. Similare results seen in that attack; although at least Kuat Drive Yards was a valuable strategic asset that had constructed a disproportionate fraction of the Empire’s military orders, including a significant portion of their fleet of Star Destroyers. Whether Kuat Drive Yards was still a valid target for a military campaign was a topic of vociferous debate amongst the community of contemporary historians, however; there was an ongoing argument concerning whether orders for military equipment and ships were still being processed at the legendary shipyards, whether Kuat Drive Yards ever intended to reopen the Star Destroyer production lines, and whether the planet’s history marked it as a valid target, even just to deny a potential resource to the Empire. However, what couldn’t be denied was that the Rebellion hadn’t given enough time for the orbital shipyards to evacuate their dockworkers, and that countless civilians had been killed when Starlisk had ordered his bombardment and destroyed them. When Sophia finished reading those reports and took a moment to think over a cup of caf that had long gone cold, she let out a whisper of “holy shit!” when she realized that Draygo had saved the Rebellion’s sensor data in her personal archives.

 

In a palm-sized device on Sophia’s belt, known only to her, there was incontrovertible evidence (from the perspective of the Rebellion, no less!) that the Rebellion and the Jedi had both engaged in hideous war crimes.

 

Starlisk and Trevelian, both war criminals. The former was an essential component of the Republic's struggle against the Empire until the very end of the war. The latter, though not a member of Draygo’s Jedi Council, was a close personal friend of the Jedi Grandmaster’s and was undoubtedly trusted with critical assignments. Draygo knew. She even kept personal files that could have been used to prosecute the Admiral of the Rebellion’s fleet.

 

This supposed icon of virtuous warfare, sometimes the very symbol of principled resistance against domination by the Sith, had done nothing. It would have been politically inconvenient to do so.

 

Sophia fished through a mountain of reports, trying to locate a file that she had skimmed over nearly twenty hours ago and had since been buried under a stack of books. It was a status report on an Imperial operation that had been called Project Genesis, a Sith-Imperial collaboration that had expanded to Kamino only a few months prior to the raid but had been in operation for years. It clearly involved something involving genetic engineering, but the biology was far beyond the comprehension of the historian and she suspected that the few redacted sections within concerned secrets regarding Sith mysticism. The commanding officer on the part of the Empire was someone or something named KALI.

 

Sophia frowned and wiped at her bloodshot eyes when she read that name. She had hoped to interview a person. It was obviously a pseudonym or an acronym or a division within the Empire at the time. No rank or service number was attached to that name, but the acronym didn't follow any conventional military system of nomenclature that she was familiar with. It was most likely that it was a decommissioned division within the Empire or a pseudonym, Sophia decided.

 

“Yeah, she's still at it. I'm a little bit worried about her, actually. You don't think that maybe she's taken spice or something?”

 

Sophia’s head jolted upright and overstrained neck muscles complained at the day spent hunched over a desk. Yet another duty shift change had taken place; the librarians had exchanged their station; the acrid low-level lights for the night shift had been exchanged for bright overhead lighting.

 

She swallowed another nutrient pill and downed it with another cup of cold caf. She needed to find out what this Project Genesis was, find out who or what KALI was… and she suspected that she wasn’t going to find out with the Empire’s assistance.

[DoctorOblivious]

On the exposed page of Sophia’s notes, underlined and written in a shaky and frustrated hand, was the name of KALI. Scrawled in the margins were a number of attempts at parsing the alias, the author clearly believing that the name might have been an acronym or a reference to a mythological or literary figure.

 

The historian glanced up--her eyes had been rendered bloodshot by over twenty hours of almost-nonstop work at the terminals and the paper archives, and the excessive amount of caffeine that she’d been ingesting during that time had turned her hands somewhat twitchy. Sophia had heard this tone often enough to recognize it on hearing: the forced-cheer of a bored professional who had been rendered dead on the inside by the doldrums of their shift.

 

“Can’t. Too much work to get done, don’t know when or if I’ll ever be here again. Gotta make the most of this. Deadlines.” She set aside her notes and found that her hands were shaking even at the effort of pushing the piles of flimsiplast and pens. That probably wasn’t a good sign. “...and probably going to be a lot longer, considering how this is going." She sighed. "You’re not giving me a choice, are you?”

[DoctorOblivious]

Sophia had glanced away from the technician for a moment, her brown eyes focusing on a document that had somehow been stuffed into the mounds of paperwork that she was sifting into. There was little time to glance over the document, a fragment of a journal entry that had somehow found its way into the Imperial archives on Project Genesis. She had only a second to skim the text, but her hurried glance at least made out the name of Admiral Druger—one of the poor, neglected sods who had been abandoned by the Imperial Navy in the Unknown Regions, the Emperor (which one? Sophia had wondered), and the commencement of the bombardment pattern Base Delta Zero.

 

A cold name that belied the brutality of the maneuver, Base Delta Zero was the most severe atrocity that the Empire could visit upon its subject worlds in the days of the Sith Emperors. Base Delta Zero called for the sterilization of an entire world: cities obliterated from orbit, rural areas sterilized by repeated waves of turbolaser bombardment, even survivors exterminated and droids melted down to slag. Most of the Sith Emperors had actually preferred less thorough atrocities, the psychopaths desiring their victims to suffer from the ruination of their worlds’ ecosystems by toxic contamination and biological attacks. Supposedly, a full record of the Base Delta Zero maneuvers committed by the Empire was held within the bowels of the Panopticon and lay under heavy guard. There was no chance that Sophia was supposed to have come across this journal entry.

 

Her left eye twitched. Her first thought had been to turn over the memo and pretend that she had never come across this particular record, but that involuntary gesture had just immortalized the document in her personal archives.

 

Sophia rose from her seat and made a concerted effort to not appear as though she was attempting to escape from her seat as she allowed herself to be escorted away by the technician. “Look, I don’t know what you expect, but I’m not taking stims. I haven’t tried that sort of thing since uni, and that was a bad idea. I was sick for a week, nearly had a mental breakdown in quals.” An evasion, but what Sophia was concealing would be difficult to uncover.

 

A little bit wobbly from lack of sleep, she nonetheless managed to notice the weariness in Parvati’s face. When the two departed the archives and were well on their way to the medical ward, Sophia took advantage of a gap between surveillance holocams and continued on with her whining. “I’m just tired. Can we just get this done so I can get back to—“ Her voice dropped down. “She’s a person? I fracking knew it!”

[DoctorOblivious]

Sophia flushed pale, her skin became cold and clammy, and her limbs trembled as though she a spice-addict jonesing for her next fix. She grimaced and glanced from side to side. Odd--she wasn’t normally prone to panic attacks, but now it seemed as though these reinforced underground corridors were about to embrace her in a tender wampa-hug and choke the life out of her. The historian had no comprehension of what was about to happen, but buried under hundreds of meters of rock and durasteel-reinforced concrete where no Holonet signal could reach her devices, Sophia had managed to work through the events that hailed a catastrophe that was about to doom Coruscant to years of irrelevance.

“I… uhm… I’m very sorry, but I need a refresher--thiscan’twaitIswearI’mnotspiced--oh Force... make a hole!” Sophia found herself sprinting away from the archivist and she searched desperately for signage indicating a refresher station. She plowed through a one of her fellow scholars, inadvertently shoulder-checking the grey-furred Shistavenan to the ground--but there was no time to glance to check that her older colleague wasn’t hurt.

Fortunately, only seconds before the death of hundreds of billions struck and the Force reflexively kicked her in the bowels, SOphia, half-blind from a thrumming migraine, managed to follow the scent of ammonia to a refresher station, skidded over a film of drying cleaning supplies, shoulder-checked her way into an unoccupied stall, and thrust her head into the porcelain throne. At that moment, the Force decided to sucker punch her in the gut, and the historian retched miserably. She felt as though this entire underground complex was in danger of collapsing around her, burying her alive--she was simultaneously burning up, and yet so frigid that Sophia didn’t dare remove her jacket. Her ears rang with… something, but Sophia couldn’t make any sense of the keening racket.

And something kept punching her right under the solar plexus and in the bowels at the same time.

Groaning miserably, Sophia felt the unmistakable trickle of bile struggling to rise from her gut. She shut her eyes and just held herself above the refresher.

“It’s okay, Lachelle. You’ve got this. It’s okay. It’s okay. Just breathe and let it pass.”

It was not okay. Sophia did not “have” this. And as for breathing, it was impossible to breathe and let a wave of nausea pass at the same time. The unmistakable sounds of a woman in misery could be heard from her refresher station as she expelled a tide of sickness from her bowels into Carida’s plumbing.

It was nearly an hour before the historian trusted herself to lift her face from the faux-porcelain. When she managed to push herself away, she just sat on the cold tile, shivering and drawing her jacket closer towards her. Tears streamed down her face and she occasionally wiped at her eyes, but she knew that her face was a swollen, makeup-streaked, snotty, and generally unhygienic and unsightly mess and mess.

“Frack me…” she whispered. “The actual frack was that?”

[DoctorOblivious]

The frantic events of the next week were a blur, and a time that Sophia would later find painful to recall.: Coruscant; Kuat; the Galactic Alliance; the Imperial Remnant. What Sophia had expected to be stable, or at least sufficiently well-founded to stand its ground, evaporated in a matter of days. She watched G-Span as system after system seceded from the Galactic Alliance. She endured the dread of standing before a reunion kiosk and inquiring after some twenty people she gave a damn about on Coruscant--no information was available about the fates of any of them. That didn’t mean anything. If her Coruscanti friends and colleagues had escaped, it was likely that they were still in hyperspace or had yet to be processed into the exploded refugee system. If not… the civilian Holonet transceiver networks were overloaded to the point of uselessness, and the better odds were that no remains would ever be found if they were lost.

No information was available regarding the fate of the Darkfire boy. That was classified information, Moriarty understood, not to be divulged to someone who wasn’t immediate kin.

There had been a frantic Holonet transmission from Andromina, the pilot that she had briefly met--and made a libidinous fool out of herself in front of--on Coruscant. That felt like it had been years ago. Recalling the incident in her closet of a hotel room, Sophia found herself staring at the blank screen of her datapad once the transmission ended. The average crew of an Impstar Deuce, she reminded herself, was something along the line of forty-six thousands. Beth’s time on the terminal had to have been extremely limited, and the pilot might have had to wait hours for her limited session. And Beth chose to contact her, of all people. Didn’t she have family? Close friends? Why her?

Sophia wiped her hand clean of the greasy slice of flatbread onto her bed and closed down her datapad. The historian swept her fingertips through her hair and just stared at her knees for a few minutes 

Moriarty rose and paced the perimeter of her room, an exercise that only took a few seconds. The exercise repeated itself and Moriarty stammered to herself, hammering on the dull beige walls of her room with a small fist. “Too much left on Coruscant. Everything I have, everything I was counting on. And Draygo’s stuff. Too much to leave. Too much to just leave. Gotta go there. Somehow. Somehow. Think think think think.” The anxious stammering continued for several minutes, accompanied occasionally by the frustrated pounding against the walls of her room.

Someone in the next room started to yell angrily.

“Maybe. Just maybe. Urban environment, chaos, lots of verticality, the bastards probably aren’t consolidating their territory. Can they really keep unit cohesion in an environment like Coruscant?”

Some things were worth dying for, Sophia had told herself just before setting on this adventure. She fell upon her datapad and set to work.

Two hours later, an advertisement was blasted out across Carida’s civilian networks: “Require time on a tri-dorn molprinter capable of molding armor-grade plastoid composite. Est 18 h. Will supply mats, paints, prints, just need the gear. Highest priority, will buy out current contracts if needed. Available?”

_______

Six hours later, Sophia found herself in a garage frequented by a local chapter of historical reenactors. She breathed deeply of the scents of oil and welding torches and paint and immediately felt her shoulders loosening, the anxiety in her mind fading away. The historian had never met any of this motley menagerie of humans and aliens, but immediately upon stepping into their territory and inhaling the comforting scents of their craft and having to shout over the din of pounding, she knew that she had met her own people--hobbyists, tech enthusiasts... nerds.

Sophia brushed hair out of her face and went over the holoprints of her armor with a well-built human. Only now did she notice that the dark-skinned human had the words “Rebel Scum” tattooed on his knucklebones and she resisted the urge to arch an eyebrow.

After seeing the distinctive T-Visor in the armor’s helmet, “Really? You’re gonna recreate a son of Mandalore right after what they did to Coruscant? Too soon?”

“Can he do it?”

“The plastoid shell…. sure. But this wiring and metalwork for the jetpack… I think you’re gonna need forty-eight for this job.”

“That’s fine, I’ll buy out the next two days.” That would drain her life savings to almost nothing, but chances were that she wouldn’t need them much longer.

“Shiny. I’ll queue up the parts. Lamarr’s all yours for the next forty-eight hours.”

Sophia took a moment to regard the centerpiece of the garage’s equipment, a tri-dorn molprinter that was larger than her hotel room and boasted enough chrome-plated arms to be confused for an ancient torture device. Each of those fiendish appendages terminated in an equally-dangerous device: welding torches, electromagnetic torques, nanoscale forges--everything that a mechanically-inclined and overimaginative individual needed for a great night.  Evidently, this clan of historical reenactors had given the machine of “Lamarr”, but Sophia decided that a more masculine name better suited it.

“Hello, Mister Zirtech 9001.” She approached the apparatus and stroked one of those arms with an appreciative finger. This one ended in a durasteel vibrosaw and she withdrew well before the blade. “Sing me the song of your people…”

Her hand hauled up the canister of plastoid slurry and shoved it into a cylindrical intake. Next followed a spool of heat-treated durasteel wire. Those  arms went to work,, traversing around an empty space within the center of the molprinter and applying individual drops of plastoid and steel. Gradually, a grey shell began to take shape around a repulsorframe.

After watching the beginnings of a cuirass take shape, Sophia knelt down on the concrete floor and dusted off a square meter of space with her hand. As magnificent as that eight-armed beast of an apparatus was as it performed its craft, there were pieces of work that required a more delicate hand to complete. Producing a mass of thermalweave cloth and a simple needle from her satchel, her fingers deftly raced through the fabric to stitch together a simple garment: a traditional Mandalorian kama.

Weaving at least took her mind off the subject of her mortality.

[DoctorOblivious]

((Weaponized cosplay!))

 

Fifty hours later, it was completed. Those two days were a blur of weaving, durathrash music, programming on her datapad, flatbread, sleep deprivation, and the occasional lomin-ale with her fellow nerds. Once the cuirass came off the molprinter, Sophia immediately laid it out over a tarpand sprayed it over with an aerosol of a vivid shade of orange. The durathrash pounding and a Twi’lek growling incomprehensible lyrics in the background, the historian leaned over the pauldron and carefully stenciled a traditional mythosaur icon in black, making sure to allow her fingers to slip a few times to lend to it a roughly-drawn appearance. Seconds later, one of her comrades in books blasted the cuirass with an ultraviolet lamp to rapidly dry the paint.

Slightly addled by paint fumes, Sophia dragged put a blast-shielded helmet and tibanna-fueled welding torch. Humming along to the spine-tingling lyrics being blasted in the workshop, Sophia attacked a few non-vital segments of the plate with the torch: few grazing slashes to imitate near-misses with blaster fire, and a pair of lingering scars on the abdomen and greaves in facsimile of direct hits. The charring did not quite have the same appearance as blaster hits, but it after examining the abused plate from further away, Sophia decided that it would at least pass for battle-damage from a distance. 

Then came pre-aging the armor. Attempting to pass as a Mandalorian mercenary would never succeed while wearing armor that reeked of fresh paint. Fortunately, two of the reenactors were happy to take turns trodding upon the plates and assaulting the plastoid with their carving knives to lend it a weathered, beaten appearance. That part was simple--merely a matter of waiting and reimbursing her fellow nerds with flatbread and beer to take turns venting their loathing of the Mandalorians out on her imitation. 

The attachments were somewhat more complicated. Though the helmet boasted an imitation of a sensor antenna, no hobbyist store on Carida was going to sell quality-spec sensors to a civilian and Sophia only had hours to spare to write and steal coding--not nearly enough time to write even a crude sensor interpretation algorithm. The jetpack, fortunately was more simple--the physics of a small object in flight were not terribly complicated, and with generous cribbing from various Holonet sources, Sophia was able to piece together a guidance algorithm that she almost trusted with her life.

Eyes heavy from fifty hours of continuous work, Sophia took a few moments to survey her work. Painted orange with black trimming, her suit of imitation Mandalorian beskar’gam certainly wouldn’t blend in with any environment, but the world she was about to attempt to infiltrate didn’t offer any camouflage. Pounding the breastplate with a fist, she also recognized the distinctive clatter of stormtrooper plastoid--subtly different from the denser, more metal-rich beskar. It would have to suffice. But she knew that it would never pass inspection by a Mando’ad, especially with the webbing around her shoulders and legs. Not that she would stand a chance against the nomadic warriors in a close-range firefight.

“Let’s put it on. Boots, shinplates…” Sophia’s thin frame gradually grew heavier as she began to mount pieces of plastoid plating on her black bodyglove. When the helmet went over her face, her breath immediately grew warm and she fought to control the pace of her breathing. Finally came the woven kama, a handspun cloth of armorweave that rested just above her hips. It fell around her legs, the weight strangely reassuring around her thighs and knees.

“How does it feel?”

“All in all, pretty good. actually. I feel… big, though, rawr.” Sophia smiled under her helmet. She stretched out her shoulders and felt her motions only slightly restricted by the joints of the pauldrons “The peripheral vision in the helmet is actually quite a bit better than I would have expected. Really warm, though. Shoulda thought to put in a climate control unit.”

“Room to upgrade, then. We… will see you again, I hope? You’re not going to do anything too stupid with that armor?”

There was a pregnant pause before the historian answered. “My account is settled, correct? Peth-Osk got cleared and everything?”

______

Two hours later, Sophia had returned to her meagre lodgings on Carida. The room barely more than a closet, there was hardly even space to walk on the floor without stepping on pieces of discarded armor. A holograph of Coruscant’s lower levels--at least, what had been the lower levels before Faust had sent a moon into her atmosphere--lay nested in her lap and the historian charted out several routes to her apartment and the University of Coruscant. Utterly exhausted by the day, she felt her eyes grow heavy and she began to nod off.

Three hours later, she woke up, her lips still smeared with some red-orange hot sauce from her dinner. The holograph still shimmered below her, albeit with some incomprehensible gibberish scrawled over Coruscant’s skyscrapers when she had been attempting to work in her half-awake, half-asleep state.

Sophia closed down the map and pushed her hair out of her face. There were perhaps five people in the entire galaxy who knew that she was still alive and cared for the fact. Her voice strained from nervousness and exhaustion, the historian began to record a message from her acquaintance in the Imperial fleet. Maybe it would reach the TIE pilot..

“Beth,

I’m still alive. Hopefully you can say the same. The Sith haven’t gone after Carida yet…. but… I have a personal errand that requires me to go to Coruscant. No, I haven’t completely lost my marbles… well, maybe. I left some information there that might be critically important, like ‘might get a few million people killed if it falls into the wrong hands’ sort of important. I’ll be able to sleep a lot better if I know that it’s destroyed or off Corrie. If you hear from me again, I’ve probably succeeded and I’m on my way to safety. If not… well… at least I tried.

I know that I can’t ask you to be safe. That’s the life. So shoot straight--and shoot first.”

Her message completed, Sophia laid down on her cot and instantly fell asleep.
 

[DoctorOblivious]

Sophia did not sleep well after she had completed her “I may be dead in a few days” message. Perhaps it was the diet of cheap beer, greasy flatbread, and instant-caf with which she had been sustaining herself had twisted her digestion;perhaps it was her week-long streak of self-insomnia and dwelling in a concrete closet reeking of motor oil for nearly two days; it perhaps it was a somber reflection on her imminent mortality and what afterlife a being such as her could anticipate; sleep did not come naturally. When faced with these bouts of insomnia, the historian tended to rely on a proven regimen of pharmaceuticals to lull her to sleep (largely in the form of orally-administered ethanol), but she supposed that recovering from a skull-shattering hangover wouldn’t be conducive to her continued survival… so it was a long night of tossing and turning for her.

 

The next day, Sophia began her search for a pilot. As Carida was the capitol world of the Imperial Remnant, there was a nonstop stream of refugees fleeing from Coruscant and other planets in the core--but not much outgoing traffic. 

 

Just like everything else on this planet, the pilot’s cantina she was guided to was obsessively clean and obnoxiously-lit. The stench of stale ale that tended to linger in these establishments was absent; the clientele was predominantly human, and a mediocre band of jizz-wailers piped from one of the bar’s well-lit corners, occasionally pausing to advertise one of their uncreative covers. Two or three people, probably close friends or a producer, made a valiant show of applauding after every song.

 

Sophia hated this place more than her narrator could possibly describe. An appropriate fate, she decided, would have been to seal every exit and flood the entire establishment with tihaar. The foundations would then be razed by orbital bombardment and paved over to make room for an appropriately rundown dive.

 

But she had a job to do; coasting through the bar while nursing an mass-produced ale best described as a bad date on the Great Western Sea, the historian plied the lingering crowd of resting pilots in the hopes of hiring transport to Coruscant. However, after even mentioning her destination, the typical reaction was to outright laugh in her face or leave while muttering an expletive along the lines of “frack that spit.” Sophia met with a lot of species and was rejected by a lot of accents.

 

Until Sophia met with Giza'valla (“My friends call me Giza,” the red-skinned Twi’lek explained). The pilot seemed to be putting on an impression of a younger Han Solo; she wore tight-fitting pants lined on either side by a series of yellow stripes and a beaten jacket of cheap, fake nerf leather. But she didn’t run when Sophia named her destination.

"I need passage to Coruscant."

 

Her prospective pilot let out a bark of laughter. Seeing that Moriarty's expression was fixed, her voice lowered and a tremor of disbelief regulated down her lekku. She muttered a low phrase under her breath--probably some phrase in her native tongue that couldn't easily be translated to Basic. "You must be pfasking kidding me. After what the Mandos did? They'll kill you the first opportunity they get."

 

"'Magine so."

 

Another spasm of the headtails followed. "Do you... actually want to die? I don't take suicidals or--"

 

"I'd rather not. Honest. Look, I just need you to get me to Coruscant, I don't care which starport, no one is expecting me--that's all I need. I can pay ten thou in ash."

"Fifteen." That reply came in an instant.

 

Sophia coughed and set down her mug of warm ale. A paroxysm of reflexive coughing followed as her lungs attempted to expel an inhaled gulp. "Beg… beg your pardon? For a one-way?"

 

"This won't be like a hop and skip to Corellia. Triple Zero is a warzone, I have to expect that the planet is blockaded and that the Mandos are running caparound the system. If I'm going to risk my neck, it's going to be extra. Fifteen, all in advance."

 

Sophia ran some calculations in her head--fifteen thousand was nearly enough to purchase a beat up freighter or a shuttle and to take the risk of running the blockade on her own. That ship wasn't likely to survive for a return trip, but she was already expecting the journey to be a one-way trip. Credits were not exactly a concern of hers in that light. However, she would have preferred being smuggled onto the planet surface, rather than alerting every Mando within a light-hour to her presence and living on the run. She took a sip of lomin-ale, the drinking souring in her mouth.

 

"Very well. Fifteen it is."

 

"Pleasure. I’ll start pre-flight checks right away, sooner we can take off the better. I’m on landing pad seven-two-five cresh, ask for the Twilight Dancer.”

____

Sophia shook Giza’valla’s surprisingly warm hand. Taking a glance at her half-full glass of lomin-ale, she promptly decided better of finishing off the disgusting beverage and simply departed the vile den of mass-produced beer, terrible music, and scarcely-tolerable fried food. The cost of the ferry would drain the majority of the funds that had been donated by Misal’s organization, but she supposed that a return flight from a planet conquered by the Mandalorians was an unlikely eventuality.

 

The historian inwardly groaned when she saw the vessel piloted by her ferry. It was an old YT-2400 light freighter, and the unpainted saucer hull of the vessel was speckled with random patches of hull. The outline of a co-pilot droid was visible through the tinted canopy of the cockpit. As it happened, her perception of her ferry’s appearance was incorrect. Giza’valla, she noted as the Twi’lek came strutting down the boarding ramp of the freighter with a stubby blaster pistol slung inconveniently-low on her hip, wasn’t attempting to imitate Han Solo--she was attempting to put on a display of a Dash Rendar.

 

The Twi’lek was an imitation of an imitation. And Sophia was betting her survival on a poor imitation of a Mandalorian.

 

The historian put on a stolid mask of a stiff upper lip and marched up the boarding ramp, pausing only to deposit a password-protected credit chit into her pilot’s hand. She could guess at the layout of the freighter well enough. While the floor of the ship lifted and turned under her fleet over the course of their lift-off and approach to their hyperspace vector, Sophia, with some difficulty and minor bumps, went through the routine of donning her ersatz beskar’gam in the tiny refresher of the vessel.

 

Fifteen minutes later, exactly according to schedule, they retreated into hyperspace.