DoctorOblivious

During those two weeks, Sophia was rarely to be seen. She frankly preferred not to be seen by the fireteam of the Scout squadron–she particularly tended to greet Corporal Kran with a hard stare on the few occasions that she crossed paths with the Kuati. Her scarceness was mutually beneficial. A vague sense of surreptitiousness–possibly even criminality–tended to lurk around her activities while the Trills were arranging for the evacuation of the settlement. In truth, however, her activities were almost entirely legal. The historian was doing her job: poking around the settlement, the ad hoc sentry posts that protected the thousands of sapients who called it their home, and even going on a few patrols with some of their looting parties. At all times, unless she was being specifically instructed to shut up lest her jabbering attract the attention of some foul beastie in the depths of Nar Shaddaa’s underground–or possibly a punch to the jaw–Sophia was talking. Sometimes they were formal interviews with a veteran who wished to unburden themselves. Flattery sometimes worked. Mutual griping about vague orders or the apparent apathy of the higher-ups sometimes got an empathetic smile–whatever stellar-state they served, soldiers always loved to complain. A few outright lies helped grease the wheels. Sophia bribed a couple–some with credits, but mostly with processed sweets and insta-caf. One had even read her controversial article about Admiral Slaughter. Fortunately, that person was an Imperial. Her historical investigation of the final few days of the Coalition War–that what the historian was calling it in her draft, anyway–was absolutely, one-hundred-percent legal. It wasn’t even illegal to properly compensate a primary source for their first-hand testimony. Military bureaucracies tended to frown upon their personnel divulging the finer points of ongoing operations to nosy scholars, however. A few major questions needed to be clarified: Was the underground redeployment an improvisational decision made during the surface bombardment–or orders that had been dispatched prior to the Battle of Nar Shaddaa? Who dispatched those orders–Republican or Imperial elements of the Rebel Alliance, the late Empress, or had the Jedi Grandmaster done a run around the chain of command and issued the orders directly? Was this the only underground settlement that had been established after the surface bombardment? How many soldiers and civilians were surviving in these underground settlements? From what units did the soldiers deploy? Medical needs? Where were the others? The answers she eventually managed to wheedle out were staggering. “I’m honestly surprised that so many of you guys made it down here. The spacelanes were totally saturated–there was no way the entire garrison at the Red and Black would have been evacuated in time.” “Yeah, thank frack we got the order before the bombardment. We sent a salvage party to headquarters about a week after–couldn’t make it. Radioactive desert. Every surface entrance smashed, all the way down to bedrock. No water, no power, no nothing, just a lot of glass and rubble. Can’t imagine anyone made it out of there alive.” “Who gave that order?” “Dunno.” Other interviews revealed that units had been dispatched all over Nar Shaddaa. Individual soldiers named the Corellian Sector, Mezenti, Eastport, Lenstrum, Go-Toe, Nova Venture, Deucalon, New Vertica, and a dozen others that Sophia wrote down and knew nothing about. A glance at a map weeks later revealed that those sectors were separated by many thousands of kilometers “Honestly, I’m not surprised to see so many survivors down here. People are… resourceful. Trained people even more so, ‘specially if they need to be. This one settlement is–maybe sixty thousand–” “Try twice that–I don’t know the most recent count, but I keep seeing new faces.” “That many?–oh, on multiple levels–” “Yeah, I still forget about the verticality of this place. Caves under tunnels under maglev shafts under turbolifts under–you get the idea.” Where the orders to evacuate the Red and Black came from remained a mystery. That was answered by sheer luck in two separate interviews. The first was with an Imperial scout sergeant who had fought side-by-side with the Jedi Grandmaster just days before the battle. “Things got a bit exciting for us. Apparently there had been a bit of a survey of the maglev tunnels when the Reps were setting up headquarters, but it was outdated by that point and it didn’t go past a few hundred klicks. Vertica is… about twenty-five thousand, just to give you an idea of the scale of how bad that is. Anyway, we got orders from Grandmaster Draygo to complete that survey, fill in the details, locate potential threats. We lost a couple guys who were supposed to map the route to Vertica. So my squad and the Gee-Em: complete that leg of the survey and locate the two missing scouts. We found one of them alive, the other…” “He didn’t make it, did he? I’m sorry.” “It was a bad way to go. There was some insect-spider-bug-thing I don’t even know what they were, but a whole hive of them. Dozens. We burned them out, completed the survey. We never found the body, or his armor.” “So, it was the Jedi Grandmaster who started the subsurface evac?” “I didn’t say that. I just said that she helped open up the evacuation routes. You’ll have to excuse me–I need to prep for patrol.” Unofficial inquiries–that is, unwelcome snooping about–found that so many of those sentry posts were equipped with emplacement weapons and floodlights that transformed the inky blackness of the tunnels into eye-stinging daylight. Towards the end of the two weeks, Sophia had enjoyed the opportunity to join a patrol to the Corellian Sector and Go-Toe settlements–a routine status report, essentially to make sure that everyone was still alive. The Go-Toe settlement was comparatively small, but the Corellian settlement resembled one of the refugee camps that the Survivor’s Foundation was running on Ylesia, albeit more heavily armed. The Foundation tended to not deploy armored personnel carriers as its field command centers. It was a few days later that Sophia finally returned, sleep-deprived and a little bug-eyed from overreliance on caffeine. Her datapad was stuffed almost to capacity with interview files and images–maps, recordings, census data, other data that was of potential use. Her pouch was almost empty, having expended most of her private stash of processed treats and credits. One night, when she volunteered to help keep watch at one of the external sentry posts, Sophia idly turned over a challenge coin in her fingers and mused over the data she had collected. Slouching on the battery pack of the E-Web emplacement for warmth, the historian suddenly sat up bolt-straight, eyes wide inside her helmet. She ran the math in her head over and over again, realizing with growing excitement that one of the largest armies that the Rebel Alliance still possessed had never been deployed. It was still on Nar Shaddaa, fresh and with unspent equipment. It just needed to get off-world. “Hey, you okay? You see something out there?” Her partner racked the E-Web in preparation. “No, no, I mean, I’m fine. I think we’ve won the war.”

During that tense hour of negotiation, Sophia sat uncomfortably in conversation with one of the rebel sentries: a young Twi’lek woman named Giz’aptel. The two were a study in contrasts, with Sophia’s bright orange Mandalorian-trimmed armor, seemingly intended to catch attention–Giza, on the other hand, wore only a darkly-patterned breastplate and a helmet. She supposed that the Twi’lek probably had blue skin–it appeared almost black in the darkness of the cave. The woman’s lekku periodically twitched in some unknown gesture of emotion as they spoke. It might have been disbelief, exhaustion, maybe revulsion, but Sophia had never known any Twi’lek closely enough to dare ask what the expressions might mean. Even over a several minutes in the darkness, it was impossible to disguise the Core Worlds in her voice–every single person in the tunnel probably would have heard the Coruscant echoing against the walls. “Is that Coruscant that I hear in your accent?” Giza asked of Sophia. The Twi’lek leaned forward, lekku slightly curled upwards. “...yes.” Sophia’s fingers clenched around the curvature of her helmet, gripping it so tightly that the the edges of the visor scratched against her gauntlets. “I lived there for a few years. Uh, seven, actually? Seven. After the war–” Giza chuckled sardonically. “--which one?” “It certainly has been a decade. Anyway, I finished my doctorate at Usk-Core.” That was the University of Coruscant, one of the largest universities in the Core Worlds, with hundreds of thousands of students on Corrie alone, to say nothing of its affiliates. There was some possibility that the two shared some remote connection through that world–there was more than a trace of Coruscant in the Twi’lek’s voice–but it was exceedingly unlikely that they could have crossed paths. “Goooo Sand-Panthers!” The Twi’lek muttered out a quiet shock-ball cheer. “Rawr.” Sophia hooked her fingers into claws and slashed feebly at the air. There was definitely some remote connection. “I was in the history program, you?” “Nanotechnology, studying under Lavorre… but all for a single year, before you people showed up.” Sophia fidgeted uncomfortably with the helmet in her lap, turning it end over end several times. She had found her false identity as a Mandalorian to be extremely useful on a number of occasions. Some had found the armor intimidating in close quarters. It had made for useful camouflage during an expedition to Coruscant when the wrecked planet was still under the control of the Mandalorian Crusaders. Adopting that identity held very different consequences when coming face to face with someone who had been driven into exile by their campaign. The historian chewed on the inside of her lip for a few seconds. “I… was actually on Carida when the Lemon fell. I was on a research visit to the Imperial archives.” “You’re… not much of a Mandalorian, are you?” “Probably not.”

The muscles in the sides of Sophia’s jaw worked in irritation when she was manhandled away from the water line. “The point is that this area still has working water. Even if it tastes like…” The annoyance faded from Sophia’s expression when she reflected on the fact that drinking industrial water was probably a very bad idea–the kind of bad idea that required a future medical screening. “Like it could use purification, that’s not difficult to jury-rig. Water, nutrients, and heat–where you have those, you have life, and I’m pretty sure the POGs weren’t putting much of a priority on evacuating rations.” As the Imperial Scouts advanced further into the maintenance offices, Sophia unconsciously checked the charge on her blaster pistol. The indicator lights were barely visible in the gloom, but she could make out that it was fully charged. The weapon had not been fired–not that shattering a plastic window with repeated percussive persuasion was much quieter. Her datapad let off an electronic chime as they began to climb further down, but at that point her arms had already started to burn with exertion. Sophia glanced down to check once her feet touched rock. To her bemusement, the datapad had managed to connect to some civilian network in the maglev tunnels… and downloaded the technical holoprints of several hundred kilometers of the tunnel complex. All of that information was now useless. Although, perhaps not entirely useless. As the scouting party advanced through the caves, they came across a massive concrete support pillar that was buried deep into the bedrock. Sophia held up her spot-luma towards the pillar and spied an identification marker inlaid in oxidized durasteel. And then the scout troopers stopped as one and dispersed into a combat formation. A grim frown unseen in the gloom, Sophia glanced towards the positions that the scouts had taken… and then towards the rocky formations and jagged pieces of metal that the ambushers had taken. There was a strange tingling somewhere just next to her left ear, as though something or someone was trying to get her attention... The historian considered her options. In this situation, her helmet was effectively useless–more of a hindrance than anything. Unlike the typical soldiers–and far from the walking arsenal that Mandalorians tended to carry–her helmet had few sensors, no light amplification or infrared scanners. All it really accomplished in this situation was to slightly hinder her peripheral vision. On the other hand, it certainly made a dramatic impression on strangers. It certainly accomplished that on the Trills. The scouts would have heard a few sharp intakes of breath and a clatter of plastoid on plastoid as Sophia beat the center of her breastplate with a fist. And then they saw her striding forward as casually as she would have if she had been walking through a Coruscanti plaza, one hand pressing her removed helmet against her hip and the other holding a spot-luma aloft. It would have been impossible to miss that orange, Mando-patterned armor as it walked forward. “Listen up, strangers! My friends in the Imperial scouts back there know exactly where you’re hiding. Pretty sure you have a good idea where they are as well. You might be thinking ‘sure, but we have a prepared position, we can take ‘em,’ but I’d really rather not end this day with strangers murdering strangers… and I’m pretty sure that I’ll be the first to go down ‘cause I’m walking towards you guys right now and I’m in the crossfire.” Sophia took a deep breath and continued onward. “So, pretty please with no murder on top, can we all start standing up and say hello before one of us gets twitchy?”

“Oof, mind the rebar–I’m snagging… there.” With some difficulty, Sophia managed to haul herself up the climbing cord and into the tunnel. Her eyes darting from within the helmet, she squinted determinedly and saw precisely… nothing but inky blackness. Inky blackness, and a few tiny amber lights that were built into the walls of the maglev tunnel. Her armor’s rangefinder warned her that this tunnel stretched some hundreds of meters into the distance, but that was an infrared laser-based system that provided nothing in the way of visible data to her. She had brought a spot-luma in anticipation of this possibility, but this darkness was so opaque that it might as well have been a physical barrier. The sound of velcro ripping filled the silence as the historian padded through multiple pouches, eventually thumbing the device to life to bathe the five in a sphere of white light so intense that it almost appeared blue. The white of the scout armor appeared almost incandescent, and the orange of Sophia’s turned an inky brown under that light. She waved the spot-luma over her shoulders as the scouts and their pilots trudged through the darkness, her eyes searching for reflections and movement. Gratefully, there was no sign of movement besides the shadows of the five armored figures. Drips of some kind of solvent–maybe coolant, maybe ordinary water–rapped down on their helmets as beads of light. Sophia glanced at her shoulder as the beads dripped down–absolutely no absorption into the oily cloth, so it was probably water-based. Sophia paused and studied a glimmer on the left wall. It was a sheet of light that kept reflecting back on her… windows, she decided. An office? Maintenance station? Some kind of place where sapient beings would have had access to, which meant a possible source of power, or maybe even computers or a SCOMP link that her datapad could interface with. “Sergeant,” she indicated the windows with a wrist-flick of the spot-luma. She approached and fumbled blindly, her fingers finding the seam of a closed doorway. No door-knob, no handle–impossible to open this door without explosives or a cutting torch or some hydraulic override… but no matter. Sophia just unholstered her blaster pistol in a reverse grip, and smashed the metal butt against the window. As it happened, the window was not transparisteel–it was just cheap, glassy plastic, and came apart in twenty sharp shards and a cacophony of crashing. Climbing over the wreckage, Sophia searched the room just beyond. It was as generic and depressing as an underground maintenance office could be expected to be–it was a small room with a few desks, a number of computers that were just as dark as the tunnel just outside, and a SCOMP link that was equally dead to all attempts to interface with it. Papers were scattered over one of the desks: probably technical blueprints or even segments of a map. A mug containing a cold, bitter liquid lay abandoned next to one of those desks, holding sentry next to a bobblehead of a Mon Calamari with a cartoonishly large head. A metal cabinet with helpful warning labels lay open on another one of the walls–probably circuit breakers or something to do with electrical currents. Sophia ventured further into one of the unfinished corridors just to the side of that office, where the floor changed from dull, scuffed linoleum to matte concrete. Pipes and conduits lined both walls of this corridor. She studied the warning labels, then removed her helmet to place an ear against one of the pipes. “I hear a current.” Her hand found the handle of a spigot and twisted–her greaves were soaked in a cold and clear liquid in an instant until Sophia cupped an armored hand under the current. No doubt to the horror of the scout troopers, she took a test sip and immediately spat it out in a spasm of coughing. “I’m okay, I’m okay. It’s water, definitely water. Just metallic as frack, that’s all. Tastes like I’m drinking a pencil.” She grimaced and wiped a tear from her right eye. “It might actually be potable, though. Just who were you expecting to find down here, anyway?”

Sophia swallowed her pill with some labor. The pill was, in fact, a standard-issue radiological chelator, suitable for consumption by anyone from relief workers equipped with heavy machinery to newborn sapients. If any of the Rebel soldiers suffered any side-effects, it would be excessive thirst… and the Chiss might complain about his urine having a slightly greenish color. His build was somewhat slight. But regardless, it was a fairly large pill with an unpleasant, chalky taste. The historianbegan to tap madly on her datapad when Steve returned. It was possible that some of the ancient and long-disorganized archives of Nar Shaddaa had survived the battle–and the centuries-old original blueprints for the maglev lines would be of significant value in the underground… She tapped insistently at its screen when it remained frozen for several seconds. As she probably should have expected, the Holonet was in a state of shambles in the Y’Toub system. The interstellar relays in hyperspace might have been intact, but the groundside transceivers were probably all rubble or overwhelmed by local transmissions. The datapad would continually ping the local servers in hopes of making contact with those local servers. “Oh. Right. Where do I… I see the handles, gotcha.” She had become somewhat hyperfocused on her attempt at searching the civil archives and had ignored the Sergeant’s call to mount their vehicles. A quick glance at the command console showed that there were handholds for a passenger and her armored calves fitted neatly against a groove in the speeder bike’s engine block. It left her indirectly hugging the waist of the squad’s leader, but personal space was far from her mind at that moment. Survival came first, survivors second, surviving intelligence third… and her own dignity somewhere near the end of a rather long list. The datapad gave a mild vibration on her wrist. It would be impossible to check the device until Sophia was dismounted. She gave the soldier in front of her a mild dig in the side with her pointed elbow and nodded. “Ready. I think.”

“Thanks, but no.” Some of the color had returned to Sophia’s face, but there was a lingering sensation of foulness that made the historian feel the need for a shower. The onboard sonic shower wouldn’t be sufficient. Neither would lukewarm water and soap. Perhaps a few liters of isopropyl alcohol and a nylon brush would banish the stench. “I’m getting a feeling that something dirtside is going to need it a lot more than my stupid bout of self-harm. Leggo, please, I’ll be just a moment.” Moriarty, however, was clearly still affected by the reversion from hyperspace into the wreckage field around Nar Shaddaa. The two soldiers would have felt the cold sweat on her arms, and her vision faded faintly at the first steps from the cockpit, as though she had risen from a long nap. Those first unsettled steps turned into a quick trot, then turned into a trail of discarded clothing that led to the cargo hold. The light jacket and casual top were replaced by a black, rubbery bodyglove that clung tightly to Sophia’s figure and covered her from neck to ankle. Even if the garment–and that was describing it generously–offered virtually nothing in terms of protection to assault and just slightly more than that to the elements, there were a number of clips applied to stable locations that assisted in donning her armor. Boots, greaves, breastplate, pauldrons, vambraces and gloves… and then finally a ragged, oversized, oil-soaked cloth that fitted around Sophia’s shoulders like a greasy, improvised poncho. The historian gave each plate a tug to test the lock of the plastoid against the clips in the bodyglove. The entire process of donning the armor took only a pair of minutes, and it transformed the scholar into an armored figure that could almost–almost–pass for a Mandalorian mercenary who was a bit down on her luck. Even if the orange plate was cut to the exact dimensions of modern-era Mandalorian armor–even if the rim of the helmet was lovingly lined with hand-painted sigils–anyone who got close to her would have been able to recognize the make of the armor as standard plastoid, a material that was almost unheard of amongst the Crusaders, the Deathwatch, or any other major faction of Mandalorians. It wasn’t beskar, or even the durasteel alloys were more common in the modern era, and no amount of paint would protect the fraud from an inspection by a knowledgeable party. The fact that Sophia’s only visible weapon was a light blaster pistol would be further evidence to the lie. Even if the fact that Sophia owned a significant amount of armor-grade plastoid was likely to raise uncomfortable questions with the Rebellion’s scouts, it might cause any distant onlookers to dismiss Sophia as an auxiliary or guide, rather than a vulnerable civilian. It might only buy her a moment of hesitation, but even that second would be valuable. Now properly clothed, Sophia dug into an internal pocket within her discarded jacket and retrieved a little plastic cylinder stuffed with a number of white, chalky pills. Trotting back to the scout troopers, she found them waiting, their speeder bikes prepared, and no doubt wondering why their civilian pilot was now dressed in orange plastoid patterned after Mandalorian armor. The historian didn’t give them the opportunity to ask questions–she shook out five pills from that cylinder, swallowed one, and held her hand out to the scouts. The cylinder was even clearly labeled with a pharmacist’s summary notes. Sophia explained. “It’s a radiological chelator. I… kept some of that cargo for my personal use. Just in case. I insist. It’s better to start with a prophylactic dose.”

Sophia, at that moment, was a bit beyond conscious response. She was pressing down on the sides of the helmet so fiercely that the plastoid interior was scraping painfully against her scalp. Her eyes were screwed shut. She couldn’t even hear the tap of the fingernail against the visor of the helmet. It was like the historian was being bombarded by every terrible sound that she had ever heard, standing point-blank to the speakers in one of the larger arenas on Coruscant. It was the sound of an infant crying, the screams that followed the stampede of a panicked crowd, the snap-hiss of a lightsaber’s ignition, the whoop of a police siren only meters behind her. It was the shriek of the frozen winds slicing through the caves of Ilum, the security klaxons that screamed unwaveringly when the war began. It was the unholy wail that Sophia had made through unpracticed lungs when she had been created. “Yeah, that’s mortality for you. It’s cold and painful a lot of the time. You’ll get used to it.” It was the cold voice of her creator when she was brought into a frozen homeworld. “Stop it, Sophia.” A guttural voice with the warmth and softness of sandpaper growled from somewhere under her larynx. Her fingernails scraped down the sides of the helmet, not really accomplishing anything but removing a layer of caked dirt where they traveled down to the lower ring of the helmet. “Stop it, get them out, out! Damn! Them!” That last outburst was matched by three hollow thunks when Sophia tore the orange helm from her head and slammed it against the deckplate, as though assaulting an opponent. Despite the violence in her enraged expression, the blows didn’t cause any damage to either the metal floor or the helmet, aside from scuffing the paint on the front plate. It might not have been Mandalorian iron, but the helmet was still armor-rated plastoid and the historian wasn’t particularly strong. But something about the outburst–and the pain in her wrists that came from assaulting an inanimate object–was satisfying. It was certainly distracting from the voices of suffering in her head. Her vision cleared and the lights that were previously accompanying the screams with the blade of a migraine faded to merely irritating brightness. “We’re still alive. And on the ground. I’m sorry.” Her voice came at a lower register and if the scouts turned to glance at the historian as she collected herself, they would have seen a mess–Sophia was sweating profusely and her expression was that of cold rage. Her hands were shaking as though she had just arm-wrestled a Wookie. “I’d like a minute before we disembark.”

The alarm that warned of hyperspace reversion steadily grew more urgent in the cockpit of the Machine, rising from a polite buzz and a little warning light, to an urgent screech and crimson lights pulsing throughout the cockpit. Those final seconds were enough to jolt Sophia out of her daze–the possibility of wrecking a hyperdrive and having to limp on a backup or effect repairs loomed into her conscious mind. The historian reached over to pull the freighter out of hyperspace… …and revealed an abattoir of a star system. Wreckage from capital ships, starfighters, and civilian freighters littered the starways and filled the sensor boards with thousands of false returns. Leaking reactors and competing comms traffic were bombarding the civilian transmitters aboard the Machine and rendered them useless. In a maneuver that sent their stomachs into the bowels and then back into their throats, Sophia hauled back on the steering yoke and then pushed it forward to evade a hulk of a Nebulon frigate that had been ripped from its engines–and a cloud of vacuum-preserved bodies that it had left in its wake. Past that butchery was Nar Shaddaa. The lights of the night side cityscape were eclipsed by a daggerlike shadow. The reverberations of that shadow’s impact discombobulated Sophia as thoroughly as a slap across the face. The pain of tens of millions of people dying–of being incinerated, of being torn to pieces, of being crushed, of being blown from rooftops and windows and falling to their deaths–shrieked through the music of The Force like a record player being tortured with a blowtorch. All around the historian, her walls were closing in and breaking apart; the air was burning her skin, the vacuum was pouring in–and the screams and curses would–not–stop. Sophia let go of the steering yoke and placed her hands over her ears, as though the barrier could somehow mute the shriek of pain that was bombarding her from all around. Her fingernails left red marks against her brown skin as she scratched down her neck–pain, perhaps, to try and distract herself from that which was throbbing in The Force. Finally, she reached for her helmet and shoved the T-visor over her face, keeping the helmet in place with both hands. Muffled moans could be heard from within: “Please, no, stop them stop them stop them those fracking bastards!”

The idle, quiet hours were always the worst. Sophia had spent much of her adult life on Coruscant, a planet that never seemed to get some proper sleep. It had banished the stars from its night sky with light pollution and replaced them with skyhook satellites. There was a never-ending stream of speeder traffic, night-shift workers, and obnoxious music only meters away from her apartment. And not once, not ever, had Sophia spent any of those non-existent quiet hours trying to distract herself from the fact that she was likely to be dead at the end of the day. Sophia cast a thoughtful glance at the dome of her helmet. Blue lights flickered in the T-visor as the glow of hyperspace swirled past them. Reaching past her console, she retrieved a coarse cleaning rag and a bottle of solvent. She idly wiped at the dust smudges on the visor; first the inside of the helmet, where her dried sweat and the dust of Coruscant had conspired to create a smelly, thin layer of cement that tended to flake and sting the eyes. “No. I’m afraid I’m a little new to this. I’m a historian, not a spy. If the galaxy made any sense, I’d be sitting in a library right about now… or maybe writing up dossiers for your fleet intelligence if things got really interesting. But, then, as it happened, fracking Faust threw a moon at my home and destroyed nearly everything and everyone that I cared about, and all of my collections were scattered like dust or turned into dust. And then the fracking Mandalorians decided that the fracking ruins of my home made an abso-fracking-lutely lovely tourist spot.” Sophia took a deep breath. During her tirade, she had been wiping ever more vigorously at the interior of her helmet, causing an annoying squeaking sound that followed the cadence of her curses. “Yes, I’m a just a little bit bothered about all of that. I couldn’t not get involved after all of that, and watching…” It was obvious what Sophia was about to say about Nar Shaddaa, but Sophia never completed her sob story. At that moment, she sat upright like a kath hound hearing an ultrasonic whistle and the color drained from her face. ((@Trill Scout Squadron))

It was all a bit overwhelming. Whenever Moriarty was sufficiently provoked to voice a protest to one of the soldiers, another was there to provide back-up in the form of yet another accusation. By the point that the soldiers were beginning to walk their speeder bikes, she was about to demand to know exactly how stupid they believed her to be. Did they really believe her to be so staggeringly brainless that she would have raided the stocks of the Rebel Alliance and filled her hold with pilfered medical supplies? Well…. She had. A little. Most the medicines and rations were legally obtained–even the ryll and bacta were legally traded–but the anti-radiation chelators were… less-than-legally obtained. But those were relatively inexpensive. They were just very difficult to locate on civilian markets. Before she voice that protestation, another of the soldiers had approached her from behind, tapped her on the shoulder, and shook her hand as gently as the plastoid gauntlets would allow. “Charmed, under these circumstances,” she hurriedly replied as she glanced towards the heavy clang of a speeder bike settling into Machine’s cargo hold. “And it’s Doctor Moriarty, please.” Being reminded of the military hardware reminded Sophia of yet another potential complication that had arisen–and it wasn’t the ambiguous nature of Machine’s registration. Expecting but never quite getting around to cleaning off the dust and buffing the scuff marks from Coruscant, she had left out a counterfeit Mandalorian armor in the hangar. By counterfeit, it was ordinary plastoid that had been molded in a decent facsimile of the infamous warriors’ armor. It couldn’t possibly be missed. It was bright orange, marked with black runes, and it looked like a suit of Mandalorian armor. It was almost certainly too late to do anything about that now. Her thin face tightened in a cringe at the sight of the loading droids departing her ship with mostly-legally-obtained cargo. Those, she imagined, were almost certainly going to be seized by the Rebel Alliance on forfeiture charges. “You know what? Fine, finish unloading–do your kriffing jobs. Bet you’ll all have a kriffing restraint bolt on you by the end of the week.” Sophia snarled as she boarded the ship and shoved past a hulking humanoid loading droid. It just glanced downwards towards the gangly biological and issued an electronic moan best described as disappointed. Once Sophia reached the cockpit and sat down heavily in her seat, she ran her hands over her face and through her dark hair in dismay. When her vision refocused from her palm and onto the control surfaces, she found the helmet of that armor resting on a stack of papers, staring her directly in the eye. By its side were her blaster, her stun baton, and most dangerous of all, a pen. She sighed and keyed the internal comms system. “I’m ready when you guys are. Whoever you guys are.” Her weary voice paused for a second. “And… uh, when one of you guys get to the cockpit, you’re going to find my blaster. Right side of the control boards, the co-pilot’s station. Please don’t panic when you see it.” ((Go ahead and post our departure, @Trill Scout Squadron))

((For @Trill Scout Squadron)) If any of the scout troopers had been on safari or had any experience hunting big game, they would have recognized the expression on Doctor Moriarty’s face as it snapped towards the four soldiers. Her face drained of color and her right hand froze in the middle of guiding a hovering loading droid towards one of the boxy habitation units that was affixed on the keel of her freighter. Her jaw had dropped open and her eyes snapped open and darted between all of the blaster barrels that were pointing in her direction. The number of weapons trained on her was wholly discouraging and far greater than her usual experience–to be more precise, exactly zero. The expression was that of a Naboo ikopi staring into the headlights of a low-flying airspeeder, trying to determine whether the approaching vehicle was a predator and which way to run. Coincidentally, the sound that escaped from her lips–a pathetic sort of strangled whimper–was almost exactly the kind of cry that an ikopi made when it finally decided to flee, only much more quiet. “Eh? Ehhhh?” Her hands instinctively went clear of her hips, never mind the fact that she had left her blaster on board Machine. The most lethal item on her person was her datapad, and that was clearly visible on a wrist mount. She swallowed heavily. “I… I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Acutely aware of the firepower trained on her person, Sophia quickly followed up with more self-preserving babbling. “I mean, this, uh, this task you’re alluding to. I’m just trying to get back to Nar Shaddaa to try and… help.”

((For @Trill Scout Squadron)) Ten minutes and a mug of caf later, Sophia had returned to the cockpit and was busy harassing the Ylesian air traffic controllers. Most unhelpfully in this time of war, the Rebel Alliance had replaced the civilian staff with their own military controllers. Aside from clearly having a poor opinion of civilian freight, the military structure seemed to operate on an alien set of navigational rules that prioritized keeping shipping lanes as empty as possible above… all else. Pacing from the cockpit to the common room and back again, Sophia stabbed the air with the tip of a half-eaten slice of flatbread. A drop of grease oozed from the indentation that her teeth had made in the crust and fell to the deck. “What in the…” Sophia swallowed hard and thought better of cursing out a military officer who could easily terminate the conversation without any threat of accountability. “Ma’am, this is not according to regulation. Codes of Navigation section nine-point-three and subsequent clearly state that independently-operating freight may employ themselves in contracts with traveling refugee populations by their own means, and that their movements–” “--Are similarly subject to the same requirements of conflicting military operations, Captain Moriarty. The Y’Toub system and all spacelanes between it, the Cha Raaba system, and any nearby systems are currently within a military exclusion zone. Civilian traffic is forbidden for the foreseeable future. This is for your own safety. Good day.” In hindsight, Sophia supposed that she should have considered herself fortunate for even being extended that minor courtesy, but that that moment and in that silence, the historian just glared at the controls and proceeded to devour the slice of flatbread. And then she obliterated a biscuit that had been leftover from yesterday and a lukewarm cup of caf. It was rage-eating, the kind of wrathful consumption that scattered crumbs in terror and sent drops of caf fleeing for the hills–that is to say, about half of it wound up on the collar of her jacket, the floor, and everywhere except its intended target. Had Sophia been of sound mind, she would have taken her medicine and gone to do something potentially lucrative. Hauling bacta or proton torpedoes or even rations would have been a perfectly sound alternative to risking her own neck for nothing but wounded pride. However… Give her regulations, that schutta. There were lives to be saved, post-trauma fever-dreams to be defied. The historian plopped herself into the pilot’s seat and curled around her datapad. She began to type furiously, with the kind of productivity that was born out of late-night deadlines and anger. Anger, despite anything that the Jedi might espouse, was quite a productive emotion–possibly the most productive emotion that could be conjured by the human mind. It allowed a human mind to endure pain, exhaustion, indignity–it could inspire sapients to throw themselves on the weapons of their oppressors and fell empires… or at least individual ministers. It certainly inspired Sophia to break through the layers of encryption surrounding the Rebel Alliance’s air traffic control systems with all the frantic activity and subtlety of the many-tentacled vaapad of Mon Calamari. While that grim determination resulted in the Machine being redesignated as a military contractor, authorized to transport munitions and even more colorful cargos into conflict zones, it also tripped a few security tripwires with the enthusiasm of that mythical beast dragging a ship into the depths Much like that great beast, Sophia barely took notice of the electronic havoc that she had wrought, and happily set off to the real work of her profession. Within a few hours, a short conga line of trauma medicines and anti-radiologics were being loaded into the VCX-100 light freighter, with its proprietor happily guiding the loading droids through the cargo hold. Happily, and obliviously, for the vaapad that had plowed through several layers of military encryption had forgotten that the passengers left bobbing amidst the flotsam probably had harpoons at their disposal…

Womp. Womp. Womp. The floor crunched under Sophia’s back as though a beast of prodigious size was stomping towards her. The historian stirred in her sleep; she was exhausted. Forty-plus hours of constant activity had crept up on her, and she had reached a degree of fatigue that no amount of caf, no primordial giants jumping up and down on her ceiling could awake her from. Womp. Womp. Womp. The crumping sound of explosions was growing closer. A shiver coursed down Sophia’s spine. That last one had been very close. Her eyes shot awake and stared at a ceiling made of books. Womp. And then little Dinsa, the Duros child that had sat next to Sophia during the flight from Nar Shaddaa, screamed in her ear. It wasn’t a happy scream of delight mixed with giggles, or even an incoherent gasp of startlement: it was the blood-curdling scream of pure terror, of someone confronted with danger so gargantuan that all they could do was stand, stare, and scream at their encroaching doom. That sent the historian straight past the grogginess of being awoken from her nap and into an adrenaline-fueled rush that launched her from the bed and onto the floor in a single spin and full-body leap. It was almost graceful. And then she hit the floor. Sophia stumbled and fell into a floor that seemed comprised almost entirely of saucers and half-empty mugs of caf. She pushed off the floor, smooshing her hand into the creamy stickiness of a cinnamon bun, and turned to collect the Duros girl into her arms. Dinsa was shaking like a malfunctioning repulsorlift array–seemed ready to shove off and take her chances on her own. Wading through the ankle-high tide of cold caf and soggy pastries, the historian made her way towards her bedroom door, yanked it open hard enough to leave a dent in the wall… revealing… Another wall. This one, being made of books. And datapads. And a couple of holocrons. And a few of the more esoteric forms of media storage that a small number of species had invented. Sophia recognized a few of them as texts that she had been forced to memorize during her doctorate–a couple of encyclopedias… there was even a copy of her infamous biography of Admiral Bruce Slaughter in that wall. “Hold on, love, arms around my neck. Good, like that.” Sophia adjusted the child onto her hip and tucked her shoulder in preparation of a charge. “Sophia… smash!” Charging forwards, she plowed through that puny wall and burst through, scattering manuscripts and books and leaving a path of literary devastation in her wake. Sophia almost slipped on one of the fallen books–she glanced down and saw the sultry cover of a volume of bodacious girl-smut–but she managed to regain her balance and avoid falling flat on top of the illustrated form of a sensuously-reclining Twi’lek. “Alright, I’ve got you. Hold… oh.” In the living room of her apartment, gazing out the window towards the view of Coruscant’s lower-Upper Levels, was a woman dressed in oversized Jedi robes. She was not an attractive woman, not in conventional terms. Handsome might have been the word best used to describe the woman. She was tall, with raven-black hair that was so streaked with gray that it gave the impression of a cascade of pepper. Her eyes were of a piercing, almost metallic light-green that made Sophia hesitant to exchange eye contact. The lines of her face–the hardness of her cheeks and bloom of scars that spread across her face like the veins of a delicate plant–the set of her shoulders–the power in her legs and back and the way she stared down the approaching shockwaves as though they were an opponent that could be fought and beaten… all of those gave Sophia a reminiscence of an enormous bird-of-prey. “It helps to try and block it out. The screaming, I mean.” Armiena Draygo turned towards Sophia and smiled–or twisted her lips in a movement that approximated a smile. “You have to try and block it out, keep focused on the big picture. You can’t stop… all of this, but you might be able to help in the oncoming disaster. You’ll need to let go of that girl first. Her fate is out of your hands.” Sophia took a half-step away, placing her shoulder and torso between the Duros child and the Jedi Grandmaster. Something hit the window and bounced off. The historian startled and watched as an old Imperial TIE Fighter shrieked away into the city-scape, one-winged and on fire. Beyond that was the sight of a dying city. The sky blazed red-orange in a violent sunset that roiled with nuclear blasts. Far into the distance, the curves of a modern, post-GA tower crumbled and sank into a cloud of dust and debris that was quickly approaching the two women. “I understand that it’s horrible. But you need to stop being… selfish. You’ve been lying to everyone about what you are, what you can do–lying to everyone, especially yourself. You need to let go of that–f–” What Armiena was about to say, Sophia never found out. Another nuclear blast landed closer to the apartment, almost directly in the middle of that wave of debris cast by the death of the nearby tower. Cast upwards by the blast, spikes of molten glass and steel pierced through the window–Sophia turned and fell over Dinsa, as though her frail body could somehow protect the child from the doom of a nuclear holocaust– ________ “Frack!” Sophia startled awake and threw away the helmet of her Mandalorian-style armor. The plastoid bounced as it hit the ceiling, wall, and rolled about on the floor, hollow and light against the durasteel plate. For a few seconds, the historian just breathed. She was soaked in cold sweat. Oddly, she didn’t feel nauseous. Sophia crossed the short distance from her stateroom to the refresher, stripping sweat-soaked clothing along the way. When she finally emerged from the sonic shower and splashed cold water into her face, she stared herself in the mirror for a few seconds and nodded. “Yep. Back to Nar Shaddaa it is. This is going to suck.”

The next several hours faded in and out of Sophia’s conscious memory. She remembered setting a timer to alert her to the Machine’s reversion to realspace–and then her memory blanked until she was being grabbed by one of her passengers–one of Dinsa’s parents, a Duros, who was driven almost to incoherence by the complex mixture of emotions unique to a parent who was terrified for their child’s safety and enraged by a perceived slight in customer service. The historian had no recollection, but a red mist had descended on her vision and she shoved the alien’s hands off of her shoulders, and proceeded to step uncomfortably close to the mother. “I don’t think you understand, but I just took you and your family through hell. They’re shelling Nar Shaddaa. No targets, just people, millions of people. So I’m sorry,” she began to step forward, driving the Duros into the wall of the common room. “If the ride got a bit bumpy, but those psychopaths are just killing people there so you are very fracking welcome okay?” Sophia finished breathlessly. She remembered the tears in her eyes and that she mumbled an apology before retreating to her quarters. The next event that Sophia remembered was sitting on the floor in her quarters, her hands holding a fake Mandalorian-style helmet down onto her head as though shoving the plastoid shell down would protect her head from the migraine-like pounding. It didn’t help. A muted buzzing resonated within the little room–that was the realspace reversion alert. She must have fallen asleep. Amazing, that she could have fallen asleep while millions of people were dying to planetary bombardment and everyone that she cared about was fighting for their lives. A wave of nausea began to bubble up from her stomach. That provided the necessary motivation for Sophia to push away the helmet and leave her room, even if that was just to rush for the refresher. She next regained conscious memory during the descent through Ylesia. It was a familiar planet to her; humid climate, turbulent and unpredictable weather, a day-night cycle that left that body’s internal clock frustrated and melancholy within a week. Emphasis on the turbulent, unpredictable weather, with an unexpected surprise of gravity that was just a little bit higher than what most spacers were prepared for. In some dim, conscious part of her mind, she reflected that seeing the blinking lights of hazard spot-lumas and the spaceports must have awoken her mind from its trauma-induced daze. Yes, it was probably trauma, she told herself, along with a healthy lack of sleep, caffeination, and fresh food. It would be a landing by instrumentation only. Sophia reached towards her right side and found a stubby mug of tea that she had abandoned before the jump from Nar Shaddaa. The historian blinked and glanced down upon feeling steam. It was fresh–and she was almost certain that it wasn’t her that had brewed it. There were even a couple of biscuits beside it. “Thank you!” She called out towards the passenger compartments. The landing was routine by Ylesian standards–that was to say, a spontaneously-developing storm cell required a diversion and another fifteen minutes circling a landing pad, all the while nervously watching the anemometer and the fuel gauge. But Machine eventually settled, without even suffering any damage from a final insulting Ylesian cross-wind and Sophia’s exhaustion-induced hesitation. She didn’t remember wishing her passengers farewell. She was… fairly certain that most of them were grateful to have reached safety, even if Sophia had some recollection of the stench of alien effluent. She might have even been hugged by a couple of them–a dull ache at her lower back suggested that little Dinsa had probably jumped right into her arms for an overly-enthusiastic tackling hug. None of them had attempted to stiff her or even negotiate down their fare, which was… a pleasant surprise, considering the acrobatics. And then Sophia sat on the boarding ramp, looking slightly dazed and staring into the middle distance, periodically pushing her hair out of her face. She wasn’t entirely sure what to do next. Her head was still pounding.

“Almost there…” Not entirely unlike a monk entering a meditative trance, Sophia repeated those words to herself as This Machine Kills Fascists wound its way through the horror of a modern space battlefield. In this case, however, rather than entering a state of serenity in which even the body’s defensive mechanisms took a deep breath, Moriarty was closer to succumbing to something of a nervous break: that meditative chant was accompanied by shaking hands that were leaving sweat slicks on the controls, and eyes that were constantly darting from sensor readouts to the navigational computer to the crowded starfield. The poor Duros child beside her had decided to remain silent… until a nearby barge took a hit from a distant cruiser. Sophia flinched when the midsection of that enormous vessel belched forth a gout of flames and shrapnel. Clearly, the barge was hauling something explosive, even if that hazardous cargo was only fertilizer. Then its engines desynchronized and caused that amalgamation of linked cargo containers to collide with itself. Sophia never saw the explosion. The canopy turned opaque to block out the blinding glare. But a collision with–something–stripped away the freighter’s shields and something gave a metallic crunch somewhere in the aft of the freighter. That was when poor Dinsa finally gave out a little scream. The Duros child still managed to push her hands over her lips, rather than distract Sophia as she piloted and hoped her way through the expanding cloud of debris that was the wreck of the barge. And then the early-warning sensors began to buzz threateningly, indicating the unfamiliar tone of a targeting lock on Sophia’s vessel. Then came the artificial growl-scream of ion engine propulsion that arced from left to right, and the historian realized that it wasn’t a distant turbolaser barrage that had killed the barge–it was a squadron of starfighters. “Rebel freighter,” intoned a static-stricken voice that barely managed to make itself audible over the interference of the barge that was continuing to tear itself apart. “Shut down your shields and set your engines to idle. Comply with all instructions from our boarding parties.” Sophia glanced at the Duros child, then back at the readouts from the navigational computer. Machine was nearly outside the influence of the gravity well projectors–and the early-warning sensors were continuing to buzz their warning that the Sith starfighters had the freighter in a targeting lock. Her ship was carrying more than twenty people… who almost certainly would not be treated kindly by the Sith. And as for herself… no, Sophia could not afford to allow herself to be captured by the Sith Empire. At best, they would kill her on sight. Being taken alive, however, offered the possibility of a future of ceaseless misery and exploitation. Fleeing was her only option. “Sith starfighter,” Sophia began in reply. Her left hand was shaking as she reached for the hyperdrive activation lever. “Go frack yourself. I’m carrying refugees. People, you di’kut. You can’t just leave be, can you? Can’t build anything of value in your own home, so you go and tear down what others built. Government’s a piece of poodoo, gotta destroy what others made for themselves. Entire ideology’s a–” “Doctor Sophia?” Cried out Dinsa, pointing at an alert light that had just appeared above the lever that Sophia was gripping. The historian yanked back that lever, her hand slipping on the rubberized grip. The starfield lengthed–the entire ship gave a characteristic electronic whine as the hyperdrive spooled up… And they were away.