Saga - PT Meeting Your Destiny (New Chapter 12-17-16)

Hello! It's been a while since I posted any new fics here. I've been busy and I've been working on some other books (which I hope to get published, when they're finished ) in the meantime. But the main thing was, I wanted to put a layer of polish on this one so thick that it shines like chrome. Posting it now with the awards going on might not be the best thing, but whatever, screw it, I've been sitting on this story long enough.

Title: Meeting Your Destiny (part 2 of my melodramatically-titled Blood and Shadows series)
Author: Cynical_Ben
Timeframe: Pre-A New Hope
Characters: Hanna Shirid, T'ocs Le'tim, Jahzer Qe-cora, other bit players that will come and go.
Genre: I dunno. Epic? Does that count?

This is part 2 of a series, though there's technically two other stories that are a part of this series that are already available on the boards to read. I have links to the two of them below, and I'd love it if new readers started there. It won't be necessary, but you'll certainly get more out of this fic if you read the others first.

A forewarning, my fics tend to be rather dark and dramatic. This one is no exception. There's a scene in here that actually had me misting up as I wrote it. So if you're looking for something cheerful, you probably won't find it here. It's one of the reasons I've given the series such an angsty title, it helps remove all presuppositions.

I will be posting a section a week until I run out and have to write more, or until the story is over, whichever comes first. Another forewarning, my chapters tend to be novel-length, which makes them rather large and long to read on a forum page. I'll break them up and format them as best I can.

Here are the previous two parts of the Blood and Shadows series:

Hanna's Story (Part 1 of the series - get to know the characters!)​

Interlude - Mandalore (Short story that takes place between part 1 and part 2.)​

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Oh, and there were a few people I promised to notify if I ever got around to posting this story. Findswoman, Ewok Poet, Chyntuck​

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And now, on to the show!​

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Prologue

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Hanna stepped off the Arbiter's ramp, doffing her helmet and running a hand across her head to clear off the sweat. A dozen steps on a new planet and she was already hot. Her hair stuck a bit to her forehead, but a quick wave of the hand took care of that. She liked having her hair short, it had always been a chore to manage long hair. Having long black hair had made her a target when she was in training, it made her look more feminine. In the field, on the job, long hair was impractical; it got dirty, it could get caught or tangled or grabbed, and it was a pain to have under a helmet all the time. Her current hairdo was much better, simple and easy to keep up, easy to fit under a helmet, it just made so much more sense.

She inhaled a breath of the hot, stale air and looked around. The hangar was not a large or fancy one. In fact, it was rather crappy all things considered. The floor was dirty, there was rust on the piping and grime just about everywhere. Lighting was all but nonexistent, only a few scattered, yellow lumina panels above portals and doors and a single pair of spotlights to guide ships in. The air was thick with exhaust and stank of a million other stenches, body odor, feces, stale urine, other things that she could not or did not want to identify.

She slipped a cigarra out of her belt pocket and clutched it in her teeth, flipping her electric lighter out in her other hand. A click of a button later, and the familiar, rustic scent filled her lungs and nose. Once, it had made her gag and cough to smell it. Now, it was a comfort, a haven amidst the chaos she was wrapped in so often. Her life as it was afforded few opportunities for luxury, comfort, even rest and relaxation. She needed to take what she could get, every chance she got it.

Taking another puff, she removed the cigarra from her mouth and put her helmet back on, pressing her hand up around the seal under her chin, attaching it back to her armor. She dropped the cigarra to the ground and stepped on it, smashing it flat. Then she pressed her hand to the side of her helmet, turning on its internal commlink.

“I'm on the ground,” She said, “Time to get it started.”

“Be careful.” A voice, masculine and rather level, spoke in her ear. “You are going up against a class-4. This one might kill you just for looking at him.”

“I'm not going to give him the chance. Don't wait up for me.”

“I will leave a light on in the window.”

Hanna stepped out, crossing the hangar floor and heading out through the doorway nearest to her. It led through a passage that followed along the building's edge and opened out onto the streets. The streets on Rete were rather dirty ones apparently. The city around the docking bay was just as ill-kept as the hangar was, just as grimy, just as filled with smoke and odors.

Only here, there were people, beings of all shapes and sizes, humans, Twi'leks, Aqualish, Weequay, Nikto, Toydarians, Rodians, Trandoshans, Jenets, Gand, Chandra-Fans and more, many more. Some were walking, others were driving speeders or swoop bikes along the ground or over the surrounding rooftops, one or two she saw were flying through the air under their own power. It was a cosmopolitan mix of life that only a lawless city on the edge of a civilized galaxy could hold up for anyone to see the moment they stepped off of their starship.

And Hanna was here to end one of those lives.

Werther Lanceen, a former Imperial officer who had gone AWOL, taken up a job as protection for a Hutt crime lord who operated in the sector around Rete. With his knowledge of Imperial arms and tactics, he was able to stay one step ahead of the local authorities, and ensure that the Hutt's men were able to do so as well. The organization was expanding and Lanceen was gathering power. And the Empire wanted him taken out before he managed to get any more.

Lanceen was a man, a strongly built one, with dark skin, a shaved head, and a pair of piercing blue eyes. Hanna had seen holos of him in the file. Every name on the list came with a file straight from an Imperial database somewhere, with all of the information she or someone like her needed to track that particular being down and kill them. Lanceen would not be hard to find, his presence as a part of the Hutt's local contingent was well publicized, but the issue was going to be killing him without drawing the wrath of the Hutt clan down along with it.

It meant she had to be subtle. Something that was not her strongest suit. A woman dressed in matte black Mandalorian armor from head to toe with weapons strapped to her every limb tended to attract attention no matter what sort of planet she landed on. But she had a plan. That was the best part about Lanceen being so public with his activities and actions, it made him predictable. It made it easy to come up with a plan to kill him.

He always went through a similar series of bars and pubs during the week, alternating between a few favorites and choosing others at random. But there was one he always went to at the end of a long week of cracking skulls. A little dive off of the main roads, away from the big crowds, just a place where he and his boys and girls could go for a few hours, carouse, laugh, and drink until they passed out. It was a place where he could relax, let his guard down, and have fun.

He would be there in around two hours. Hanna had to find the place, survey it, come up with a battle plan, gather the necessary resources, and then execute both the plan and him when those two hours came up. This initial excursion was just the intelligence-gathering part of it, just surveying the lay of the land, finding the potential escape route and back ways to and from the cantina, mapping out the surrounding neighborhood to account for potential response time from possible backup Lanceen might have. A man like him planned for a lot of eventualities. Hanna just had to plan for more.

There was a stage in her life where she would not have planned this out to this degree. Where she would have gone in guns blazing and let the rest sort itself out. But she had learned. The year or so she had spent working for the Empire, working for Darth Vader, had taught her than not all battles could be won with fists and blasters. Not every action was as simple as a military one, where a soldier received orders and carried them out, their own role the only focus and not a thought given about the rest. Sometimes, the planning had to go deeper. Sometimes, knowing more about your enemy than they did about you could make the difference between who came out on top in the end.

Hanna could not claim to be a master of that. But she was learning. She learned quickly, that was what T'ocs said.

As she walked up and down the streets of the city, other beings gave her a wide berth. A few stared. Most turned and went another way. Some of the tougher-looking brutes, mostly the Weequay or Trandoshans or other such morons, fingered their weapons and bared their teeth at her. She did not turn and look, she did not favor them with the glare of her helmet's T visor. She was not here for them. So long as they kept their distance, they got to live.

Mandalorians had a reputation. She had learned a lot about that in the last year. She walked on the streets, and beings reacted. They feared her. Just a glance, a shadow, an outline was enough to put those who might be in her crosshairs on edge. Those with something to hide wanted to hide it deeper. Those on the run wanted to run farther. Those in fear of their lives prepared to fight to preserve them. The word Mandalorian had become synonymous with bounty hunters, assassins, mercenaries at the top of their game, some of the best the galaxy had to offer.

That was why, no matter where she went or what sort of mission when went on, she always wore her armor. In this sort of life, you were only as good as the weapons you wielded or the armor you wore, and hers were some of the best that money or blood could buy. She had debated having it repainted, black was an inauspicious color in her opinion, but every alternative made her even more conspicuous. For now, it remained matte black, from the soles of her boots to the top of her helmet's rangefinder and every plate in-between. T'ocs had told her that the color represented a soul out to bring justice. Whether that was true or not, Hanna had no idea anymore.

What was she doing this for? It was a question that bobbed up to the surface of her mind from time to time, when she was between cigarras and not four glasses deep in a bottle of Corellian whiskey. Was it the money? The thrill of the hunt? The honor of working for the Empire to bring traitors and scum to justice? Or was it just because she did not have anything else to do or anywhere else to go?

Hanna turned down a side street, watching the few beings there scrabbling to the side to get out of her way. She was a few blocks from the cantina, or at least the lot her information told her the cantina stood in. Her helmet's display was warning her about weapons, vibroblades and blasters hidden in the back of belts and under the flaps of loose jackets. Nothing that would penetrate her armor. She was a star cruiser on two legs, they were little more than swoop jockeys threatening to shower her hull with stones. Nothing they had would threaten her, not even if dozens of them came at her at once.

The first mission she had run as an independent, when she had left the Ultimatum and struck out on her own to start working on the list, was to kill a man. Just one man. He was not a big man, a smart man, or a man with a particular set of skills. He was just a man with a ship to fly and the moxie to try to smuggle guns out of Imperial surplus holdings and into the hands of rebel cells. Hanna had tracked him down, waited until he had contraband in his possession and loaded into his ship, and then shot him.

It was not until after he was dead that she found out what he had been smuggling were foodstuffs. She was not sure what to make of that at all.

It confused her. Smuggling food made no sense. She had no idea why someone would risk their life to bring food from planet to planet, or why that sort of thing would put him on a list of dangerous criminals, traitors and people who could turn entire sectors of space into war zones. There was nothing dangerous or illegal about food. The planets on his itinerary were planets with rebel cells, with mayhem and scattered terrorism across their hemispheres. But they also had mass amounts of people who could have used that food, beings without the money or will to go anywhere else beyond what ranat hole they were trapped in.

Why had she been told to kill a man shipping food to planets in turmoil? Yes, he was technically breaking Imperial regulation, several of them in fact, but that sort of matter was usually dealt with by the local authorities, not by an outsider, by the private military contractor who had already been running wet works with Imperial forces in the months prior to that. That was not what she had signed on for. That was not why she had wanted to fight for the Empire in the first place.

When she got to the second name on the list, a thuggish former stormtrooper cadet who had jumped ship fresh out of the Anaxes academy and decided to sign on with a pirate crew, Hanna realized that the first one was a test. Her first mission had just been to make sure that she would kill, without question, whoever Darth Vader and the list told her to kill. Everyone else who she killed deserved it and was more than dangerous enough to put on the list. Class-8, class-7, class-6, the rank slowly climbed up from foot soldiers to officers to people with skills that made them very dangerous in one area or another. Soon, every mission she went on would be a threat beyond anything the Empire could throw at them short of a Star Destroyer or legion of Stormtroopers.

Lanceen, for instance, was smart, very smart, with the full backing of a Hutt's armed forces behind him. He was also extremely skilled in combat, enough so that his file had graduated from a class-5 to a class-4 purely on that alone. A tough nut to crack, just like the rest. Class-4s were rough, they took special care to bring down. Like the one she had faced one down a few weeks prior. A woman working as a magistrate's bodyguard, she wore red a lot. She also fought like a gundark with its skin on fire and had a thing for electric stun batons. Which was why Hanna had ended her from two kilometers away with her trusty sniper rifle. The magistrate thought it was a failed attempt against his life. He never knew that it was the pretty blond bodyguard he had who was the real target all along.

She had a plan, an idea, of what she could do about Lanceen. But she wanted to see the cantina first, see the layout, the structure and the space around it. She had to know if her plan would work, or if she would need to come up with a new one.

Side streets and alleys gave way to a few clusters of run-down apartment buildings with a small, squad building crouched between them. A crude fluorescent sign on the side, between the graffiti and street tags, said that it was, in fact, open for business. There was no name, no indication of what it was beyond tags that called it names that could not be repeated in polite company. But it was right where her information said it would be. So private, so off the beaten path, that someone who was a public face could go there for a few hours to themselves without fear of being bothered.

She debating doing a helmet scan, working through the building's structure to find who was where and how the layout worked. But that would not get her everything she needed, only the most basic of wireframe glimpses at its structure and foundation.

“Kark it.” Hanna started walking again as she muttered to herself within her helmet's private shell. “About time to get a drink anyway.”

The inside of the cantina was seedier than the outside. The lights were purple and green, constantly moving, swirling and dancing across the tables, along with several of the patrons. The bar sat along one wall, all sorts of concoctions and taps bubbling behind it, a bulky woman tending it, two large blasters under it at different places to help her keep the crowd under control. The other beings in the room were either passed out, in the process of passing out, or so drunk they could hardly walk. The music, if one could call it that, was provided by a trio of humans in a corner working various instruments in ways they were likely not designed to be played. At least there was no signs of spice, none that Hanna could pick out in any case.

She walked to the bar, having to shove past a couple of Nikto making out on a table and kick a chair away to get there. The bartender barely glanced at her at first, a tribute to the woman's length of service. Hanna doubted it was every day a Mandalorian walked into her bar, but the woman barely batted an eye.

“What'll you have?” She asked as Hanna picked out a stool that seemed to be the cleanest and sat down.

“Corellian whiskey.” Hanna took her helmet off and set it on the bartop beside her, running a hand through her bangs to remove them from where sweat had stuck them to the center of her forehead. She needed to get those trimmed. “If you've got it.”

The bartender scoffed. “Haven't had that around here since before the Hutts took over.”

“Then the best you've got.” Hanna took a small stack of credit chits out of her belt and lay them on the counter. “Whatever's closest.”

“To whiskey or to you?”

“Both.”

The bartender nodded, still looking quite sour, and moved off to another part of the bar, where she worked the levers and knobs on one of the variety of pumps and taps she had. Hanna took the moment to look around. Without her helmet, the array of smells and sound hit her full force. This was not the worst bar she had been in, not by a long shot. The clientele seemed harmless, it was small and familiar, and there was plenty of privacy if you wanted it. It was plain to see why a Hutt's enforcer would come here on his down time.

The bartender came back with a smoky brown liquid in a tall glass for her, scooping the credits off the bar. “Here. Best we've got.”

“It'd better be.” Hanna took the glass, sniffing the contents. It smelled strong enough. She ventured a swallow, a moderately sized one. It was not whiskey, but it was not half bad, either, a mix of smoky and sweet flavors that spoke of being mixed, rather than bottled. And, best, it was cold. She nodded. “Not bad.”

The bartender scoffed at her again before moving off to tend to other patrons. Hanna picked up the glass from her counter and turned on her stool, looking out across the cantina as she took another drink. The cantina floor only had tables and chairs, no support pillars or walls, meaning that there was nowhere to run or to hide except places where the lights did not want to go.

She glanced around for back rooms or passages to the outside other than the one she had walked through. She saw a door alongside the bar that had an “employees only” sign on it, and an open side door that seemed to lead downward. No other entrances that led directly to the streets. Where the others led, she could not be sure without going to look, but going through the one with the sign on it would arouse suspicion.

She called back to the bartender. “Hey, what've you got downstairs?”

The bartender looked down the bar at her, scowling. “A big pile of none of your business.”

Hanna rolled her eyes and pulled another credchit out of her belt. “Look, if it’s sabacc or a dice game, I want in.”

“It's not.” The bartender moved down toward her, planting both trunk-like arms on the bartop and scowling even deeper than she had before. “That area's reserved. Private parties only.”

Hanna looked at her a moment, then put the credit back into her belt and drained what was left in her glass, head thrown back toward the ceiling. She slid the glass toward the bartender and got up. “Fine. Plenty of sabacc games out there.”

She grabbed her helmet, put it on, and walked out. The drink had given her a bit of a buzz, it was more sweet than strong. Her eyes could still focus on things, that was usually the point she stopped drinking when she was between missions. Unless she was safe aboard the Arbiter, in which case all bets were off.

The cantina was exactly what she had expected, and the presence of the basement for private parties told her exactly what she needed to know. Lanceen and her crew likely went down there. Which meant killing him could very well be kept discreet and kept quiet, something she was not used to being able to do.

She would still need to survey the neighborhood for her extraction route, and to plan out exactly how she was going to kill the man, but she was glad to know that her original plan would, in fact, work. All she had to figure out was how to get around ten kilograms worth of explosives into the basement without drawing attention to herself, especially since she had just left there in a huff and returning would draw the bartender's suspicions.

Of course, the other option was to just walk in after Lanceen and his people were good and drunk, walk past whatever the bartender said or threw at her, toss the bomb down the stair, and walk back out. But, with the potential of Hutt reprisal, she needed to make it subtle. If it was done subtly, with no obvious calling cards or evidence, then the Hutts would assume it was one of their obvious enemies, another clan, other crime lords, perhaps the Empire.

She wondered, as she walked back along some of the side streets, just how much damage the explosives she had would cause. But she figured that it would not matter. Collateral damage was immaterial. So long as she killed the target, the mission would be accomplished.

Hanna grimaced. She felt a subtle twinge of nausea eat at her guts. It was probably the drink. Something in it had upset her stomach. She would have to have another smoke when she got back to the ship to get it to calm down.

***​

T'ocs stumped from the Arbiter's cockpit into the main crew lounge, what had once been the old Loronar freighter's main cargo hold. The fastest way on or off the ship was over the boarding ramp that led up to the main hatch, which led directly into the lounge. He had to stump rather than walk, because his hips and legs had been replaced by prosthetics and he was still re-learning to walk, even a year after it had happened.

It was hard to get used to. If it had just been one leg, or even both below the knee, it would not have been so hard. But when everything from your belly down was mechanical now, hips, knees and feet included, it was difficult to even move, let alone return to normalcy. The prosthetics he had gotten were not top of the line, but they were hardly a pair of peg-legs either. His body just would not adjust to the change in weight and balance enough to make walking easy again.

He found his way to the acceleration couch in the lounge and dropped down into it. He exhaled, looking down at his legs. They looked somewhat natural, covered with synth-skin and hidden under his clothes, but it felt like walking with both knees locked up after having the circulation cut off. Awkward, stiff, without much feeling or flexibility. He could move them, they just did not move very quickly or exactly how he wanted them to.

He sighed, sitting back on the couch and looking up toward the ceiling, the bulkhead of the ship. This used to be his ship. In a way, it still was. He flew it, sometimes, and he still lived on it the way he always had. But it was not truly his. He had passed it on, just as he had passed on his armor, his weapons and his legacy in general. He was not the warrior he had once been. He was not even a mercenary, none of the payment for the jobs Hanna took went to him. She bought the food, the fuel and ammunition and other amenities. All of the business went through her. She just chose to keep him around.

It was odd, his new role. All his life, he had been the man of action, the leader, the one who went in first and came out last. Now, he found himself tagging along to a woman he had unwittingly turned from a bright young Imperial cadet to an angry, bitter sociopath who drank whiskey until she passed out and smoked cigarras to dull the emotional pain her life caused her. Sometimes he pondered what he had unwittingly unleashed on the galaxy. Sometimes, he regretted what he had done.

Now was certainly one of those times.

He could feel the explosion before he heard it. The whole ship rumbled, loose plates rattling and something fell out of a locker or off of a shelf deeper within the ship. He waited until the shaking had stopped, then got up and went to the ship's hatch. He pressed the button to unlock it, then flipped the switch to open it and drop the ramp. As it opened, he went to the hatch, leaned on the edge, and looked out and up, above the rim of the hangar's open roof. He could see a massive cloud of black smoke rising from a few kilometers away, swirling eastward on the wind.

She had gone ahead and done it. He told her that she could manage this sort of mission without doing so much damage, but she had not seemed to care at all. Instead of taking Lanceen out on his way to the cantina, or on his way out, poisoning his drinks, or even just walking in and putting a blaster bolt through the back of his head, her plan was to somehow plant explosives, ten kilograms worth, in or around the building and blow the whole thing to Coruscant.

In doing so, he made it clear that she would kill not only Lanceen and whoever was with him, but also everyone in the bar and possibly some of those in the apartments around the cantina as well, especially if the explosive set off proprietary explosions via gas lines or even alcohol storage.

And Hanna had not cared in the slightest. To her, those other lives were incidental.

T'ocs had always prided himself on being professional. On killing clean without collateral damage. He had built a reputation on being a strategic and discrete operator, building his team in such a way to ensure flexibility to any mission the client required. And the one he had basically taken upon himself to mentor, the only one of his team who was left and the girl he had adopted as his own daughter, was blowing up entire buildings to kill one man.

Pragmatic. But also ruthless, unethical and entirely without honor. It made him sick inside to see. And even sicker to know that Hanna would never respond if he told her how much it disappointed him. She just did not respect him that much.

Adopted daughter or not, it was hard to control a seventeen going on eighteen year old who could down an entire bottle of Corellian whiskey in a sitting and snap necks with her bare hands. Half of the reason he had even adopted her was for the mutual emotional support they needed to survive a mission that had gone severely pear-shaped. The moment the mission was over, though, he had gone into a coma, and she was left with no one. Thus in the intervening time she turned to more typical soldiers' comforts, and he had not been able to win her back in the time since. That emotional connection was gone.

Maybe the spiral would end one day before she killed herself. Or maybe she would go on a mission like this one day and never come back. All he could do was stand back and watch.

The whooshing, whining noise high in the air announced to him that she was on her way back. T'ocs stepped back out of the hatch and waited by the controls. When exfiltrating from a Hutt-controlled planet, it often paid to be quick. The longer they stuck around, the greater chance there was that one of their enforcers or bounty hunters would track them down and try to cause trouble. Hutts did not often move quickly, but when they did, they crushed most of what was in their path. The better for he and Hanna to get out of the way as soon as they could and leave Rete to sort itself out.

Hanna landed below the ramp, dropping into a crouch as her legs hit the ground and her jetpack shut down. She climbed the ramp and moved into the ship, slapping T'ocs' shoulder as she went past him. He worked the controls and closed the hatch, retracting the ramp at the same time.

“You are late.” He said as he turned around. “I was about to leave you behind.”

“I had to make sure that I got him.” Hanna said. She had taken her helmet off and set it down on the couch, and already had a cigarra in her mouth. “Turns out, ten kilos of that explosive pretty much levels a three-story building. Lanceen and his group never got out of the basement.”[/SIZE][/FONT]

T'ocs nodded. “You could have killed him about hundred other ways that would have been more subtle and eliminated only the person specified in the contract.”

“But then I wouldn't have gotten to blow up a ratty little cantina. Or put a bartender under a ton and a half of rubble.” Hanna lit her cigarra, took a breath, and exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Whatever. Lanceen's dead, and I've got proof.” She put her lighter away and pulled a small white tag out of her belt, tossing it to T'ocs.

T'ocs caught it and looked over it. It was an initial, last name, and serial number carved into a piece of blast and fire resistant durraplast. An Imperial soldier's ID tag. “He still wore his breastplate?”

“Yep, guess he couldn't give the Empire up completely. He at least painted it a different color than Imperial gray.” Hanna took another pull of the cigarra, then motioned toward the cockpit with her head. “Let's go, we're done here.”

 

Just a quick note to say that I was here, I watched the thread and I'll be back to read and review as soon as DRL allows

 

Chapter One

Target name: Olee Starstone.​

Age: approximately 37 standard years.​

Height: 1.6 meters. Hair: black. Eyes: blue.​

Last known to be at apprentice level of Jedi training.​

Former masters: Bol Chatack.​

Known associations: Roan Shryne.​

Class-4 threat.​

Last known position at the time of this report: Alaris Prime, Kashyyyk System.​

“A class four?” Hanna asked aloud the question both of them were thinking, “Didn't we just do this dance?”

“She is a Jedi, which regardless of class is still a highly dangerous thing.” T'ocs said. “She’s also still at large over a decade after the Jedi Order was forcibly disbanded. Either she’s good at hiding, or she’s lucky, or she’s more dangerous than we know.”

“If she’s that good at hiding, how did we find out about her?” Hanna folded her arms up across her chest. “Did she just forget to be sneaky one day?”

“Or does she want to be found? Does she want someone to come after her?”

“Would a Jedi set that kind of trap?”

“You and I have both read the records. They have tried it before, against both the Emperor and Lord Vader. They might try to do it again to put an end to whoever else may be trying to track them down. Wound the Empire a bit, remind them that the Jedi are still a threat. Check over the rest of the profile.”

Hanna flipped to the other part of the file they had been sent, bringing up a three dimensional hologram of a woman in nondescript clothing, matching the description given in the text part of the file. She otherwise looked somewhat fit and athletic, but not remarkable. She certainly did not look like a Jedi. But, then, none of them did. “This looks like an old shot, she’s probably changed her appearance at some point. Run her name through the record file, see if you can come up with any criminal records or outstanding warrants.”

“Doing.” T'ocs leaned forward again and started tapping commands into the control interface.

It was Hanna’s turn to lean back now, reaching into her belt. Out came her latest pack of cigarras, still three-quarters full. Normally, she only smoked when she needed to calm herself down, clear her head for thinking. Right now, she was already thinking. Smoking was just a way of giving her something to do while she thought. “A class four.” She pondered aloud, “Why would she be rated the same as Lanceen? Jedi are more dangerous than that.”

“Jedi filled a number of roles, way back when. Some of them were warriors, yes, but there were also the philosophers, the scholars, the administrators, and so on. Perhaps this Starstone was merely a clerk of some description.”

“Not believing that for a second.” Hanna flipped her lighter out of her pocket with one hand as she bit down on her cigarra. “This is the first time we’ve had a confirmed full-fledged Jedi on our plates, T'ocs. I am not about to make any assumptions or take anything for granted. It might be only a class four, but it’s still a Jedi.”

“Yes, it is.” T'ocs turned away from the computer screen. “The check is running, but I doubt it will return anything except for the standard outstanding Jedi warrant.”

“Me too. But it doesn’t hurt to be thorough.” Hanna clicked the little flame into existence and filled her lungs with the rustic, sour smoke of her cigarra as she took a breath. Almost instantly, she felt calmer, her mind clear and thinking about their potential moves forward without worry or wondering at the prospect of going up against their first Jedi. “Make sure to run common aliases and ciphers off of that name as well. Cover the bases.”

“Of course.” T'ocs typed at his monitor for a moment. “Still no results. She may not still be in the Kashyyyk system, even if she was spotted there. Where else might she go?”

“Any number of sparsely populated systems, I’m sure. She would probably want to get as far away from the Core as possible, away from the Empire's strongest holdings. Any place on the Rim or Outer Rim, maybe even the Unknown Regions if she were desperate enough. And if that’s the case, she’s probably got some mean survival skills.”

“In which case we pack for all possibilities, correct?”

“Absolutely. This is a Jedi we’re talking about, we load for gundark.” Hanna looked back up at the ceiling. “If I were a Jedi who wanted to hide, where would I go?”

“We should start where the file says, on Alaris Prime.” T'ocs said, bringing up a hologram of the small moon above the chair he sat in. “She may or may not be in the system, but we have to do our due diligence. It's a small colony, mostly Wookiees with a few humans, it would not be too hard to search it, come up with some clues, possibly even the lady herself.”

“Wookiees, huh. Wonder why she'd show up there of all places.”

“They used to be friendly with the Jedi back when the Republic was still around. Maybe they are hiding a few somewhere.”

“Maybe that's why so many of them are slaves now.”

“That or them being two meters tall and strong and making excellent manual workers. Wookiees are smart, technical beings, not at all the brutes that the Empire makes them out to be.”

“Then they should have known better than to oppose the Empire and get themselves all chained up.” Hanna leaned forward into the hologram, taking in the contours and lines of the planetoid they would shortly be visiting. “One decent spaceport, two towns, a few other scattered villages. Won't be a long search either way.”

“There's an Imperial contingent there, but it's small, just the troop garrison and officials they need to keep things in order. That's where most of the report on Starstone came from, aside from archive texts.”

Hanna looked where T'ocs had indicated, the largest of the moon's clusters of dots that marked the sparse excuse for cities and villages. “Then we'll start at the smaller towns, they won't be as well searched or patrolled. If she was spotted in a more populated area after over a decade of hiding, she won't stay there.”

“Good thinking. And if she has moved off-planet?”

Hanna pondered for a moment, taking another long draw from her cigarra. “She might not. She knows Alaris Prime well enough to stay hidden for ten years, she doesn't just pack up and leave on a couple weeks' notice. Especially not if she has friends there to help her hide.”

“And if we cannot find her?”

“We hunt down her associates and whatever trace of her we can find, then track her to whatever ranat hole she crawls down into. She'll find out soon enough that she's got nowhere she can hide.”

T'ocs gave her a bit of a smile. “We'll make a bounty hunter out of you yet, Hanna.”

“Jedi hunter, boss.” Hanna dropped her head and looked at him, taking the cigarra out of her mouth. “Everything else has just been warm-ups.”

 

Alaris Prime, much like the planet Kashyyyk itself, was best characterized by its jungle, though both terrain and the trees lacked the size or wildness of their counterparts on the Wookiee homeworld. Unlike Kashyyyk, Alaris Prime still had much of its forests' floors accessible from the air, with some areas made up of vast plains rather than Kashyyyk's oceans. Alaris Prime did have seas of its own, but they were small and shallow, long emptied of fish by the colonists. The local wildlife, gnasps, vynocks, even gundarks, had been shut out and kept away from the towns and villages with electro-shock fences, and the Wookiees had turned vast parts of the formerly wild land into farms and homes for families.

Until the Empire arrived. Then the Wookiees were made into outcasts from their own colony, the natural beauty of the forests were razed and seas dredged to make room for agricultural facilities, all-environment farms, animal nurseries and hatcheries. The villages were turned into work camps and slave distribution stations. The best of the housing was given to the Imperial soldiers and businessmen, spacers given the areas nearest the ports, offworld traders set up shops nearby, and what little hovels were left on the outlying towns were given to the Wookiees, either those assigned to work on the farms, or those about to be shipped out to work camps on other worlds.

Once a prosperous and flourishing agricultural colony, which supplied the homeworld and surrounding planets with food and boasted a pristine natural topography, now became just another cog in the Imperial machine. The Wookiees, once a proud and enthusiastic supporter of the Republic, were reduced to a sub-human source of labor, little more than pack beasts. Not just on Alaris, either, all over the system, even the galaxy. Alaris just happened to be such a small sample size that it made the oppression that much more obvious, the disparity that much more severe.

It was no wonder that Hanna got rather glowering looks from Wookiees as she walked across the small town she had deigned to start her search in. They associated most humans, especially those in all-encompassing armor, with the Empire. She did not mind, so long as none of them got in her way.

She was here for a human. More than that, she was here for a human she had a rough physical description of and who could probably kill her with a gesture. Hanna had fought Jedi before. She had killed Jedi before. But she had not hunted one before, not like this, not when they had a whole planetoid, even a whole system to hide in.

She needed to remember everything. Everything she had learned and experienced in the year or so she had been a hunter. If she was going to find Starstone, track her to whatever hole she had hidden herself away in, drag her out and stab her to death in the street, she needed to use everything she had learned. How to troll through data on a computer system, looking for the patterns and digital imprint of someone trying to cover their tracks. How a person trying to life a life off the grid walked, talked, acted and dressed. How to determine the best places to patrol and search based on the temperament of the target when they tried to disappear, whether blending into a crowd or losing themselves in the wilderness.

Crowds were not an option on Alaris; the few humans around stood out like sore thumbs, either ugly and brutal slavers stomping about looking for a fresh pair of paws to chain, or Imperial officials who hardly spared a glance for the Wookiees, preferring instead to preen and prance about like aristocracy. Either one made Hanna curl her lip in anger. They represented the worst of what the Empire was, leeches clinging to the underbelly and growing fat on the blood of others. Everything she had, she had earned through her own efforts or the deaths of those who had taught her. These disgusting parasites had been handed gold on a plate, gobbled it down, and spat in the face of the server.

Alaris was a primitive place, even for an outlying colony settled by a naturalistic species. The towns were small, the buildings were crude and almost entirely prefabricated, the roads were paved with dirt or crushed stones, and even the spaceport lacked basic amenities like an automated transponder ID system and tractor beam relay. The planet did not even have public transports. Everyone who flew a speeder owned that speeder. About the highest pieces of technology were the vast systems of fences separating Imperial-occupied towns from the wilderness of the moon. And with the threat of a potential Wookiee uprising always present, everything was monitored. There were holocams on every street corner she saw, every building, every alleyway and every park bench. If Starstone were still on the colony, she would have to be laying very low, as far away from the Imperial presence as she could.

That was why she was trying one of the outlying towns first, the ones further away from the main spaceport facilities. Starstone had been imaged some time ago, but it had been via one of those same surveillance cams, within one of the towns in the Imperial occupation zone. The cams in these towns were not exactly few and far between, but with patience and practice, one could probably learn their locations and pick out routes to avoid ever showing up on them. However, it had been years since Starstone had been seen, without even a glimpse of her. Even for a Jedi, that was terrifyingly stealthy.

Hanna glanced to one side as an adult male Wookiee shoved past her on the street. She knew better than to antagonize him, even if the shove was humiliating. The being was almost twice her mass and was surrounded by potential allies, while she was alone and had no idea if local Imperial authorities would aid her. As she glanced back at him, her eye caught something. A holocam, a model at least ten years old, that had been broken from its mount along a storefront and left to dangle by a cluster of wires. According to her helmet, it was still getting power, but she doubted the view of it showed much more than the texture of the wall it was pointed at.

Her mind hit on something. It came to her as she walked on, and she put a hand to her helmet while still moving. “Arbiter, you read?”

“I am here, Hanna.” T'ocs' voice came back immediately. “Have you found Starstone?”

“Not yet. I need your help with something. Cross reference the Imperial surveillance network with our map of the known settlements and towns. See if there are any discrepancies.”

“Any places where one might go off the scanners, you mean?”

“Exactly. I figure that Starstone couldn't have gone this long without being imaged just by avoiding the cams, sooner or later she would have slipped up. There's no public transport and owning a speeder is too conspicuous, so if she moves at all it would have to be on the ground. Either she's found a place without cams or she's destroyed them. There are a lot of cams out here, but a bunch are broken or powerless and there's been no attempts to fix them that I can see.”


“Then there may not be a noticeable gap. If she wanted to cover her tracks or stay out of the way, she may knock out certain cams along her most common ways to go about her day. Not enough to be obvious, just enough to make her invisible.”

“That's true. Look for patterns of inactive cams or areas that aren't being monitored, especially around living areas where humans are welcome.”

“I still do not think it will be that obvious, but I will see what I can find out. Keep moving and searching. I may need you to access one of the holocams so I can get into their network, I will let you know.”

“Sure.” Hanna turned her commlink off again. “Sure, you do that.”

She kept walking. Even with T'ocs helping, there was still a lot of ground to cover. Alaris Prime was not a big planetoid, on the galactic scale or even on scale within its own solar system, but it was still a planetoid. Searching every last crack and crevice with nothing but her feet, eyes and helmet scanners would take months, maybe even years if she ventured into the wilds. The search needed to be narrowed. Hopefully, T'ocs would provide some means of doing that. But in the meantime, she still needed to search, if only to better pick out more information on the local culture not contained in the official Imperial reports.

Alaris was not a tourist spot by any means. Few outsiders came here unless they were here on business, either as slavers or administrators, perhaps business-beings to help run the agriculture or merchants to deal equipment and machinery. But the towns were still built in a human style, all flat on the ground instead of following the more Wookiee convention of building in the trees. The Wookiees did not know, or care, about taking proper care of these sorts of towns. Thus, everything was that extra bit of dirty, slimy and scummy that denoted it being an Outer Rim world with little value to the Empire beyond basic utility. Hundreds of temperate worlds capable of supporting agricultural efforts already existed in the Empire, Alaris Prime's output was a drop in the ocean in the grand scheme of things. Thus, the importance of things like proper street sanitation and aesthetic pleasantries were all but nil.

No one cared about this colony anymore. The Empire did not care, they were only here to control the Wookiees and keep them from causing trouble. The Wookiees did not care, they were only here because they were forced to be, and even the most patriotic and foolish among them knew better than to throw away their lives by rebelling for the fate of a few farms and scattered towns.

Hanna kicked an empty ration container out of her way, looking around to where the nearest trash receptacle was. As far as she could see, none existed, at least not on this particular street. Refuse was dropped where it was generated, leaving heaps of litter and waste piling up on curbs and in back alleys. One thing to be said about the Empire: it was sure to be slacking on its promises of order, security and peace if it could not even keep the streets clean.

Her commlink chirruped in her ear. “Hanna.”

“What've you got for me, T'ocs?”

“I am sending you two sets of coordinates. One of them is an apartment complex near you, it houses humans almost exclusively and is almost completely off the grid. The other is a small building on the edge of the protected zone, about four klicks away, also almost invisible to the security system. There is also a blind path between the two of them large enough to drive a speeder truck through.”

“Good work, T'ocs.” Hanna brought the coordinates up on her helmet, cross-referencing them with the grid of sectors the Empire had organized. “I'm on my way to the first location.”

“Have you found anything else down there?”

“Yes. Lots of trash and an entire population of beings who do not want to be here. I'd bet that the only being on Alaris Prime who might want to stay here is Olee Starstone.”

***​

The apartment was about what Hanna had expected on this sort of world: functional, but nowhere near clean or hospitable. A small cluster of ragged humanoids, mostly children but there was a stringy-looking adult Gotal in there as well, stood out front, banging on a variety of homemade instruments and begging for coins from the passers-by. The building’s facade was a mixture of stone, wood and plaster, all of it decades old and either saging or outright falling down with windows that were sometimes intact, but never clean.

Hanna walked past the revelers, ignoring their outstretched hands. They were obviously too young to know better than to beg for credits from a Mandalorian. The front hall of the apartment was just as dirty as the exterior, with scum-fringed burgundy carpet that was supposed to run down the center of the floor but was so worn it zig-zagged instead. The walls were painted a garish golden and feathered with a textured pattern that had no particular pattern. Then there was the reception desk, sitting up against the right-hand wall, dark wood scuffed and warped by time, with a bored-looking Duros sitting behind it.

Hanna stood in front of the desk for almost ten seconds before the Duros looks up from the holozine he was reading. “Can I help you?” He said.

“I’m looking for a woman.” Hanna said, “Human, about one and a half meters tall, dark hair. Might go by the name Starstone.”

“Hmm.” The Duros sat back for a moment, then leaned forward again and pulled a book out from underneath the counter. He set the book on the desk and leafed through to a page toward the end, running a green-blue finger down a long and rather sloppily written list of names. “Don’t see anyone by that name here.”

“Well, do you remember anyone who looks like that checking in at some point? Have you ever seen her before?”

The Duros tossed a hand into the air. “All these humans look alike to me, you know? Besides, I only started here three days ago.”

Hanna sighed, letting her eyes roll to the back of her head. “Fine. Just… just don’t get in my way.” She walked away, down the hall toward the nearest door she saw.

“Okay, fine.” The Duros called after her, “Just don’t shoot anyone, okay? Imperial cops will be all over the place and then I’ll have to find a new job…”

Hanna drew her blaster, it was a special one made by an old friend of her. He called it the RKB. She pointed it back at the Duros without looking at him. Even it it wasn’t directly pointed at him, the blast spread would at least get close enough to shut him up.

She didn’t have to, though. The Duros took one look at the blaster, let out a frightened bleating noise and took off running, out the door and into the street without looking back.

The door Hanna came to led into a hall that was lined with a number of other doors, each of the apartments inside the building lined up in a row. There was one door, the one nearest to her, that led to a staircase where a likely identical hallway sat attached to another floor’s worth of apartments. She would have to start searching them one by one, either by knocking or by kicking them in.

The first two rooms were empty, primitive wooden doors swinging in just by her twisting the handle. The third room, the second door on the left not counting the stairs, was locked. Hanna backed up a step, pulling up her helmet’s infrared scanner. According to the red and indigo blobs she saw, there was someone in the room along with a droid. She put her blaster away and knocked.

“Is someone-oof! Is someone at the door?” Someone inside called out, a feminine voice. “Revver, can you get that?”

There was a loud beeping noise, then the sound of something ramming into the door from the other side, causing Hanna to take another inadvertent step back.

“Revver!” The voice shouted, “Just because we’re checking out doesn’t mean you can just run into the door!”

A droid voice, the sort of binary beeps that an astromech droid usually “talked” in, spoke from the other side of the door, then the latch opened from the other side and it pulled open. Behind the door was a rather ugly astromech droid with a clear dome, a bronze-colored torso, a red leg strut on its left side and a blue strut on its right. Its grabber appendage retreated back into its torso as it examined Hanna through a black photoreceptor, then swiveled its dome around to “face” the room and beep something at whoever else was in there.

“It’s a what?” A Rodian woman, no, a girl, she could barely have been sixteen standard years old, walked to the door from somewhere deeper in the apartment. She was dressed like a mechanic, wearing coveralls that were stained with grease, oil and sweat, dirty orange hair pulled back in a ponytail, her green skin looking more sickly than most Rodians that Hanna had encountered.

“Oh.” The girl said. “A Mandalorian. You weren’t lying.”
The droid chirped at her.

“I’m not here for you.” Hanna said, “I’m looking for a woman named Olee Starstone, human, a bit older with black hair.”

The Rodian played in her ear with a finger for a moment. “Uh, well, that doesn’t ring any bells. There are a few humans who live here, but I think they all room on the upper floor, I don’t see them around much.”

“Hmm.” Hanna looked back up the hall in the direction she had yet to go. There were a lot of rooms to search still. “Fine.”

“Hey,” The girl put out a hand to keep her from leaving. “Are you… are you here for a bounty or something?”

“None of your business.”

“I’m not- look.” The Rodian stepped forward, opening the door a bit winder. “I’m a mechanic, and there’s not a lot of work here for mechanics. At least ones who aren’t human.”

“And what about that is my problem?”

The girl wilted. “I dunno, I just thought, if you maybe needed a mechanic for some reason… Revver and I were going to check out and leave and try to go somewhere else. It was… I just figured that I’d ask.”

Hanna looked at her for a moment, then said, “Listen, kid. You wouldn’t like to roll in the company that I keep. If you want my advice? Find a place as far from the Empire as you can and settle down there. Any time you get tangled into Imperial business is almost as bad as being in business with the Hutts. Trust me.”

The Rodian nodded. “I… thanks.”

Hanna walked on. She heard the door to the Rodian’s apartment close behind her. She really did not care if the girl took her advice or not. She didn’t even know if her advice was good. She just knew that, if someone had given her advice when she was the girl’s age and if she were in her position, that was the advice that she should have received. Maybe if she had, things would have been different.

The next door, to her right, was also an empty room. As were the next two on both the left and right side of the hall. She was down to two more rooms, apparently the apartment building did not have a lot of people home at the moment.

That was fine. If Starstone was not at home, then she would try to confirm if she did live here, and then wait for her to return. After investigating the other location that T’ocs had found, of course. They were flying blind here, and every lead they had would need to be chased down.

The last door on the left was locked when Hanna tried the door. And as she moved up to knock, her helmet warned her that there were trace amounts of several different kinds of rather dangerous chemicals on the other side. She knocked anyway.

“Coming!” A raspy voice said. It was only a moment or so before the door opened, and Hanna was looking at a middle-aged Trandoshan woman dressed in a spotless white hazmat suit. She looked at Hanna for a moment without saying anything, then asked, “You buying or selling?”

“Neither.” Hanna said, “I need information.”

“Ah.” The Trandoshan nodded, then looked back over her shoulder at something. “Might as well come in, then. I’m in the middle of something that can’t wait, but we can talk while I work.”

She left the door ajar as she retreated into her apartment, and Hanna followed her in. What she saw surprised her. The main room, the sitting room, had been turned into a laboratory of some sort, every horizontal surface covered either with sterile white dropcloths or with the sort of vials, piping and heating equipment that you might expect from some sort of mad scientist in a holofilm.

All of the chemicals that her helmet had picked up were scattered around the room, some of them in vials, others in the air. Nothing seemed too dangerous, or at least not uncontained. But it was pretty clear, right from the moment that Hanna stepped into the room, that the Trandoshan’s asking about buying and selling was not something she wanted to involve herself in. Too much trouble came out of laboratories like this.

The Trandoshan went over to one of the tables, pulled up a chair and sat down, tending to a pair of small chemical burners that were heating a series of vials filled with blue and pink liquid. “So,” She said in perfect but rather sneery Basic, “What sort of information are you looking for?”

“I’m looking for a woman, I think she lives in this apartment. She’s a human, about one and a half meters, middle-aged, dark hair.”

“Yeah, I might have seen her around.” The Trandoshan gave one of the burners a gentle and smooth poke with her claw, moving it just a bit to let its tiny flame lick a different corner of the vial. “Of course, with the boys upstairs, they have a lot of ladies in and out of here.”

“This one will have been here for a while, calm, collected, doesn’t get mad or get in people’s way.”

“I don’t really know about that.” The Trandoshan turned and gave her a glare out of one eye. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m pretty busy day in and out here.”

“I just need to know if she lives here. If not, I’ll leave and you can get back to… whatever you’re cooking.”

“I’m not cooking. I’m testing. I’m a chemist. Alaris Prime has an extremely varied and complicated ecosystem, and there are plenty of elements here that don’t occur naturally together in many other places. I’m trying to figure out whether those combined elements can work for other alternative purposes.”

“I don’t care.” Hanna walked over to the woman and put her hand on the table, causing the Trandoshan to glare up at her. “If you don’t know, then just say you don’t know. And if you say that all humans look alike to you, I’m flipping this table.”

The Trandoshan grumbled in the back of her throat, then leaned back in her chair and folded her arms across her chest. “There’s a human who lives on the upper floor who sounds link the one you’re looking for. She works all day and spends most of her time out in the work camps, so you’re probably not going to catch her.”

“I’ll worry about that.” Hanna turned and walked away, but stopped before she reached the door. She fished a couple of credits out of her belt and tossed them back into the room at the Trandoshan. “For your trouble. Call it a finder’s fee.”

The Trandoshan let the credits fall to the floor, then turned back to her work and ignored Hanna as she left the apartment and closed the door behind her.

“Upper floor it is.” Hanna checked the other door before turning around. It was unlocked and the apartment beyond looked recently vacated, empty and bare of life. She started walking back up the hall to the stairway. “I’m coming for you, Starstone.”

The upper floor of the building was in even worse shape than the lower floor. A couple of the apartments were boarded over and closed off, she could see through the half-closed doors that the rooms beyond had actually collapsed. Ceiling beams were lying on the ground, a few had floors that were torn up, and one, the room at the corner of the building, looked like just a floor and a single wall, the ceiling and other four walls absent and exposing everything inside to the elements.

Hanna focused in on the four apartments that seemed relatively intact. She knocked at the door of one, the second door down on the left of the stairway, and was immediately greeted by a man’s shout of “Go ‘way!” She debated with herself for a moment whether it would be worth the trouble to continue or to just move on to the next room.

“Kark it.” She rammed the door with her fist again, making sure to pull her punch a bit and avoid damaging the wood.

“I said go away,” The voice said from inside, rather slurred and sounding a bit muffled.“We don’t need any more!”

“Yeah, you’re not going to get anywhere with that one.” A new voice said from behind Hanna.

She turned, facing a man dressed in what had probably at some point been military fatigues, but had long since faded and worn down to almost rags. He had a rather heavy, muscular look about him, and his unshaven face squinted at her as if he were having trouble seeing her for some reason. He also had tattoos on his hands, wrists, arms, all the way up to his shoulders, some faded, some very recent. And all of them were related to gang activity, the sort billions of third-rate thugs across the Rim boasted about.

“Why not?” She asked.

“Because when Torque’s on a bender, he’s bent for a good long while.” The man sniffed, rubbing a meaty hand across his face and under his nose. “What you want here, Mandie? Chasing down a bounty?”

“Something like that. A woman, about a meter and a half, slim, dark hair, doesn’t make a lot of noise. She live here?”

“Yeah, sure. Her room’s down at the end of the hall. She ain’t never in it, though, always out and about doing something.” He sniffed again. “Say, what’s the payout on her?”

“None of your business. It’s not a public bounty.”

“Oh. Private beef, eh?” The man shrugged. “Go ahead and take a look if you want, no skin off my back.”

Hanna nodded and started walking toward the end of the hall. She made sure to have one of her scanners sweep behind her to make sure that the man was not going to try anything stupid. But he crossed back over to another room, opened the door and went inside, closing it behind him and never looking over at her.

The door to Starstone’s apartment was locked. Hanna drew her blaster and then kicked it in, splintering the wood with barely any trouble. The apartment was dark, and as she moved into the main room it was clear that not many people came here. It was neat enough, without any dust or much more visible dirt than what was in every apartment, but nothing was set out or powered on. The whole apartment looked so sparse and bare that it might as well have been a droid living there.

She moved from room to room, checking in every cabinet, drawer, box and other place that could potentially hide useful items. Very little turned up. She was able to find the basic amenities of living, some packed rations and other cheap preserved foods, a few outfits of rugged, nondescript clothes, toiletries that could have been purchased just about anywhere, and that was pretty much all. No datapads or dataslates, no holozines or books, no toys or games or anything else that seemed like someone lived there. And, most baffling of all for her, no weapons. Not even so much as a rusty kitchen knife.

Hanna turned the apartment upside-down, and came away with nothing. She stood, for a moment, in the middle of the main room, looking from door to door, toward the small, solitary bedroom, to the grotty bathroom, then back to the door that lead to the hall. She tried desperately not to be very angry.

Starstone was a ghost. She left nothing behind to trace her by, nothing to indicate where she went everyday, and none of the neighbors could or would remember her because they were all too busy with their own pursuits. This whole excursion had been nothing but a long, winding dead end.

But she had to keep looking. Starstone was here, she lived in this apartment, and that meant she was not only on Alaris Prime as they suspected, but that she was close. All Hanna needed to do was keep hunting, chase down her other leads, keep her eyes and ears open.

She keyed her commlink. “T’ocs, you read?”

“I’m here, Hanna.” His voice came back almost immediately. “What have you found?”

“Pretty much nothing. Starstone does live in this apartment, I’m standing in her sitting room right now, she’s not home, and from what everyone has been telling me she isn’t here very often. There’s nothing in the apartment to help us, no papers, documents, weapons, nothing but the absolute basics.”

“Then we need to keep looking. This isn’t a defeat, Hanna, this is all a part of the hunt.”

“I know. It just… it’s frustrating. I don’t like not knowing where she is or what she’s up to. She’s a Jedi. She might have seen us coming and made preparations.”

“That’s a possibility, of course. But we have to keep moving forward, if we sit around and wait for her to come to us she will see us coming and do something about it. The more focused you are on a certain location and person, the easier it is for a Jedi to read it.”

Hanna took a moment, looking around the room again, one last sweep of the eyes to make sure that she had not missed anything. “What’s the next step, then?”

“The other location I’ve found that’s not on the cams. It’s a bit of a walk from where you are, but it’s the only other location I’ve seen in this city that isn’t on the grid in one way or the other. That’s where you need to go.”

“On my way.” Hanna walked out through the apartment, and swung the half-shattered door back into place on her way out.

 

Okay, I'm finally here! Sorry it took me so long to come over and read, but now I'm all caught up.

It's a bit sad to see what Hanna has become one year on. In a way she became more Mandalorian than the Mandalorians (including those she killed) and more Vaderish than Vader as she went through her killing list. I love how you highlight her addictions to smoking and alcohol as a way to escape her own situation -- and how she calls the Rodian, who is the same age as her, "kid".

It's also sad to see what T'ocs has become -- the fact that he can't get used to his prosthetic legs, the fact that he blames himself for turning Hanna into a "sociopath" and the fact that he thinks that she's merely "keeping him around". You have a great narrative device there, by having him in the background providing logistical and intelligence support to her throughout her missions. It's interesting to see how you're showing their relationship even when this story is so clearly centered on her.

And the hunt for the invisible Jedi, Olee Starstone, is a great way to show that Hanna still has things to learn from T'ocs. In the end, she's still the rash young woman we met in the previous stories, and she still needs his advice to temper her -- she's just more hardened and brutal than what she used to be, and it's hurting her.

The line that really stood out to me was the moment when T'ocs says "bounty hunter" and she corrects him to "Jedi hunter". Her experience in the Deep Core has marked her deeply, and she's in for a surprise when she meets the different brand of Jedi that we can expect Starstone to be. At the same time, she doesn't like what she's seeing on Alaris Prime, which leads me to wonder how she'll consider collateral damage this time.

I'll be over here waiting for the next instalment!

 

EDIT: - Content warning for the below chapter. *Character death*




Chapter Two

It was a long trek to the other building, across some of the worst parts of the colony: the work camps. That was where the Wookiees who did not have homes of their own, which was most of them, had to live, huddled together on the ground under prefab tents and in crude houses built out of scrap metals. The only running water was from ground pumps with filters that all needed to be changed last year, and the only food were prepackaged rations handed out on a weekly basis. They were not even able to eat the food they helped to grow.

Hanna walked on. Terrified Wookiee children and starving mothers stared out at her as she walked past them, huddling close together and watching to see what she was there for. While Hanna did not care for what they thought of her, they were not her mission after all, she did wonder if they had seen Mandalorian armor before. They seemed to see her as a very specific object of fear, rather than simply resenting her presence because of her race as others had.

She was not aware of any Mandalorians who had been on Alaris before, but she was one of the most outlier Mandalorians of the culture's diaspora, adopted into the culture only a year ago and only having been to Mandalore itself once, when she had gone to get her armor fixed and adjusted. For all she knew, there could be an army of Mandalorians here enforcing the Imperial rule at the end of a blaster.

The building she was looking for was at the very edge of the work camps, sandwiched between them and the towering energy fence pylons that kept the beasts out and civilization in. It was small, squat, had a row of dirty windows in the front wall and a roof that had been red at one point in the past, but faded to a dull rust color. Even the door was just two wooden slabs hung side-by-side on hinges, with knobs to pull them open and a crude lock that looked like it needed an actually, physical key of some sort. A sign on the front said that it was a day-care, of sorts, likely a school for the young Wookiee children whose parents were working, and they were accepting enrollments.

“I've reached the building.” She reported, switching her helmet over to its thermal scanner mode. “I'm getting four life forms inside, three of them are small, probably pets or children. The fourth one might be her.”

“Be careful.” T'ocs warned her. “If there are children, she may be training them as Jedi. You could have a hard fight on your hands.”

“Don't worry about me.” Hanna checked a couple of her weapons to make sure they were ready. “Just warm up the engines and get ready to pick me up in a hurry once I'm done here.”

“Affirmative. Good luck, ad'ika.”

The commlink went silent, and Hanna was alone. She took a deep breath, braced herself, and kicked the door in.

Her helmet swept the interior of the room she walked into. It was a loose reception and entryway area, dim and faded, though it at least seemed clean. There was a desk with files and a rather aged computer terminal, pastel colors and stencils of trees on the walls, the carpeting was a dull forest-y green and a smell of unwashed Wookiee youths hung in the air. While it was somewhat well kept, it was also clear that not many beings came through this way on a daily basis. The sound of her entry had alerted those within the school, and they were huddling together in a room just beyond her, their heat signatures all blurring together into one blob of red and yellow on her visor's display.

Hanna went forward, drawing her blaster. Her other blaster, not the RKB. It was a heavy blaster pistol, a custom model that packed the punch of a much larger weapon. One shot would put a hole through any unarmored sentient, Wookiee or human, and she had killed over three dozen beings already with it in the last year. It was messy, and loud, and overheated as fast as she could pull the trigger, but it got the job done in as few shots as possible, which was what she needed the most from her weapons.

The door at the back of the entry room was an old-fashioned one just like the first had been, a wooden slab on a hinge. There was no lock on this one, so Hanna took her time and opened it the way it was supposed to be opened: turning the latch and pushing it so it swung out of her way and allowed her into the room beyond.

She found herself in a central courtyard of sorts, a massive open room that took up most of the school's interior. It was very much like the outer room had been in terms of aesthetic, all simple pastel colors and soft tree-like décor, in addition to being filled with rough toys meant for children, dolls, blocks, little vehicles on wheels, all of them made out of wood and in various states of disrepair and fatigue. A climbing structure was along one side of the room, and the other had a few boards nailed to it that were covered with crude but colorful drawings on sheets of flimsiplast. There were a few smaller rooms attached to this one, a bathroom and a couple of more formal classrooms, but they were all empty and dark.

In the center of the room, huddled together, were three Wookiee children and a woman. The woman was a bit taller than Hanna, with shoulder-length dark hair that was graying all along its length, and dressed in a simple smock that was streaked with various colors of paint. She seemed... tired. Old. Hanna's intrusion caused her to move to protect the children, them huddling around her with her arms drawing them close, but there was nothing in what she did that was any sort of act of aggression. She did not raise her hand to throw Hanna back out of the room. She did not even go for her weapon.

“Olee Starstone.” Hanna said, voice projected out across the room. She was not asking a question, but she still wanted to be sure she had the right target.

The woman's eyes went wide with surprise, and her face went white. Hanna understood now. Starstone had not expected that Hanna was there for her. She thought she had come for the children.

Starstone knelt to the young Wookiees around her. She did not have to kneel far, even at their young age they were already up to her torso. “Go now.” She said to them, giving them a bit of a shove toward one of the side rooms.

Two of them looked at her, eyes wide in fright, then scampered off to the classroom without a sound. The third, this one a bit older than the others, did not move, taking her sleeve in his paws and tugging on it, grumbling something in the Wookiee language.

“No, Trino.” Starstone told him, “Not this time. Go on, protect the young ones, keep them safe.”

The young Wookiee howled at her, turning a frightened yet baleful eye to Hanna as he did.

“Do not worry about me.” Starstone assured him. She even gave him a tired smile. “Remember: the Force is with me, no matter what happens.”

The Wookiee pup seemed satiated, but did not run away. Instead he turned and walked to the classroom, eyes darting between Hanna and Starstone the whole way.

Starstone stood up to her full height as he left. She looked thin, haggard, bags under her eyes and no definition to her arms or neck, veins and tendons standing out under skin that looked pale and paper-thin. She was hardly in shape for a fight.

Then, she did something Hanna did not expect. She put her hands out in front of her, close together, and said, “All right. Let's go.”

Hanna paused for a moment to allow her brain time to digest the gesture and come up with a plausible explanation. But the first word out of her mouth was still “What?”

“You are here to take me away, aren't you? Because the Empire finally tracked me down, found out who I used to be? There is no point in pretenses. I am willing to go with you.”

Hanna looked into Starstone's eyes, looking for duplicity, that flicker of insincerity that signaled a trick, some sort of ploy where Hanna would get close to put binders on her, then have a lightsaber stabbed through her midriff. But all she saw was honesty, openness, and the relief of a life spent hiding and on the run being over.

It unnerved her. It made her feel funny inside. No one was willing to be taken, not one of the other targets she had tracked down, they had all fought to the bitter end or begged on their knees like worms. This was the first time someone had offered themselves up to her willingly. What was more, this was a Jedi. The Jedi she had experienced before had fought like rabid nexus, only stopping when they were blown to pieces. She had never expected one to just... give up.

It had to be a trick. That was the only way it made sense.

“I'm not here to take you in. I'm here to kill you and take your body back to Lord Vader, in pieces if necessary.”

Starstone's head dropped for a moment, then she nodded and looked back up. “I feared as much.” She put her hands back at her sides and took a deep breath. “Do it, then.”

Again, Hanna was taken off of her guard. No one just willingly submitted themselves to death, especially not a Jedi. No one just gave up, surrendered without any sort of fight, not when they had lived for so long on the run. Who was this woman, so completely without a survival instinct?

More tricks, it had to be more tricks. She was a good actor, Hanna had to give her that, but the masquerade was not going to work.

“Just promise me one thing.” Starstone said, “Just promise me that you will not hurt the children.”

“So that's your game.” Hanna felt she understood now. “The children. You're raising Wookiee Jedi. You figure that while I'm focused on you, they'll be escaping to fight another day. That makes them my targets, too.”

Starstone's eyes bulged in horror. “No! No, they're only children, I take care of them during the day because their mothers work in the fields and their fathers were shipped off-world. They aren't Jedi, how could you think about killing them?”

“A Jedi teaching them all day every day and is willing to die so long as they live? It's spelled out right in front of me.”

“They are children, they are here because they have nowhere else to go and be safe from the slavers and beings like you.” Starstone took another deep breath. “I will not fight you. But I cannot let you kill the children.”

“Then you won't be able to stop me.” Hanna raised her blaster and pointed it at the Jedi's head. “If you want to save them, then fight for them.”

Starstone looked over toward the classroom, where the three Wookiee children were huddled in terror, looking out at the goings-on. She looked at them for a good long moment. Then she smiled. “No. I won't fight you.” She turned back to Hanna, still smiling. “I won't fight you because that's what you want to happen. You want to kill me in battle, not in an execution.”

Hanna bit her lip. There was that Jedi insight, that unnatural ability to know exactly what someone was thinking at the most inopportune moment. “Then you're letting them die.”

But Starstone shook her head. “No, you won't kill them. Because that's not what you're here to do, is it? You're only here for me, you were not hired to kill children. So, you won't kill me, and you will not kill them. Then what will you do?”

Hanna bit down harder on her lip. She let the pistol down a bit. Her head was spinning with too many thoughts, and her stomach felt funny. She needed to smoke. She needed to get this over with and done before the Jedi wormed her way deeper into her head.

She pulled the trigger. Her blaster roared. The three Wookiee children all howled in horror.

The blast hit Starstone in the middle of her chest and sent her flopping backwards, scattering toys as she hit the floor. She was dead before coming fully to rest, the single bolt reducing her heart to ash and hardly even leaving blood.

Hanna went to her and checked her over, making sure she was dead first of all, but also looking for a weapon, a lightsaber, anything to indicate that she was a fugitive from Imperial justice. But there was nothing. She had nothing on her body or in her pockets that was more than a few crude paintbrushes, some scattered credit chits and a handful of tissues.

She leaned back, sitting on her heels and looking down at the body. Starstone looked... odd. Her eyes were closed and her face seemed calm, collected. She looked like she was at peace with the violent death she had just suffered, which made entirely no sense. In fact, aside from the crater in her chest where her heart had once been, she looked more like she was sleeping than dead.

It made no sense. None of it made sense. She had never intended to fight. She had not even been trying to play a trick. She really had been willing to die.

Hanna's helmet scanners warned her of someone approaching. The Wookiee pup, the one who had tried to persuade Starstone to run away previously, was approaching with a crude club, probably a table leg, in his paws. She let him come. She let him come all the way until he was close enough to wind up to take a swing at her head, before she turned and grabbed the club, really just a stick, in her hand.

She looked at him, the little Wookiee staring up at her with rage, even hatred in his eyes, teeth bared in a growl that would have been far more fearsome on an adult. She took the club from him and tossed it away, but did nothing else to him.

Starstone was right. She was not here to kill children. Even if she were, she was not sure she could bring herself to do it.

“I know you can understand me.” Hanna told him, “Even if I don't understand you. So I want you to listen. I killed your teacher because it was my job. The galaxy works that way most of the time. Someone has a job to do, and someone else gets hurt because of it. If you hate me when you grow up, fair enough. I... probably deserve it. But don't think that this makes you special, either. People die. It's just how life works.”

The young Wookiee looked at her, eyes spewing venom, and did not say anything. It disturbed her more than if he had bellowed and roared at her.

“Go on, get out of here.” She ordered him, “You and the others can go. You aren't my targets, I won't stop you.”

He turned and walked away, watching over his shoulder to see if she made a move. Hanna did not even stand up straight, watching him walk away, seeing an adult where a pup had been just moments before.

She blinked, and then she was seeing herself, walking away from the body of her friend Atto, of her friend Ice, from Blade, from Trev, losing more of her innocence each time until she was reduced to... what? A burned out shell of a human being, with no feelings, no remorse, and no heart, floating from job to job, target to target, bottle to bottle without aim, goals or direction.

Hanna watched the older Wookiee herd the two younger ones out of the room. Both of the younger ones were softly crying, their squeaky howls of sorrow enough to move even Hanna to tears. If she had had tears left inside of her to shed.

She turned her commlink back on. “Arbiter, this is Hanna. I have the target, ready for extraction.” She looked down at Starstone's still body again. “We're done here.”

 

Chapter Three

Hanna tossed her helmet to the couch and dropped down beside it, undoing the few straps and buckles on her equipment belts. She had to get out of it. It felt heavy and constricting, like it was squeezing her all over her body. She had taken off everything on her way across the room, finally stripping down to her bodysuit, leaving all of her equipment, armor, weapons, belts and tools all scattered across the lounge. She had also left Starstone, now wrapped up in a body bag that would keep her from decomposing or flopping about too much during transport, on the floor, nestled up against one of the walls. She just pretended that it was not there.

“We are in the air and on an automatic course out of the atmosphere and into orbit.” T'ocs walked back into the lounge from the cockpit, stiff prosthetic legs stumping across the deckplate, taking care not to step on anything Hanna had left about. “I do not think we have much of a choice except to leave quickly this time.”

“Yeah.” She pulled her packet of cigarras out of her belt, where it had ridden untouched through the entire ordeal, then let the belt itself drop and fall to the floor. “I don't think the local authorities were happy with us just blasting out, but I don't feel like explaining it to them right now.”

T'ocs looked at her for a moment, watching her take out a cigarra and her lighter and light up, tossing the rest of the pack to the floor along with everything else. “You’re shaking.”

She looked up at him from under her brows as she took her first breath of smoke. “So?”

“Why?”

“Why do you think?”

“The mission was not that rough, was it? It did not seem nearly as dangerous as we suspected initially.”

She put her lighter away, sighing a cloud of smoke into the air, eyes staring up at the ceiling. The air above her looked haunted and cloudy with the smoke hanging in it, constantly swirling and moving, until it caught a current, swirled into the air filtration system and disappeared. “She didn't fight back. She didn't even try. She just stood there and let me shoot her.”

T'ocs came over and sat down on the other part of the couch, looking at her but not close enough to touch her. “I knew that she did not put up much, but I did not know the details. She did not fight back at all?”

“No.” Hanna sat forward again. Her cigarra tasted funny, and she took it out of her mouth. “I don't think she even had a lightsaber. I couldn't find it if she did.”

“Maybe it was a ruse. Playing helpless so you wouldn't kill her.”

“That's what I thought. But I did kill her. She didn't even try to stop me. And I… the way she died, I’ve never killed someone like that before. She just stood there. She stood there and looked me in the eye and didn’t move until I shot her in the chest. All she did was tell me that she wasn't going to fight back, and tried to... I had to finish her quick, I had to end it. I just... I couldn’t let her talk to me anymore.”

She tossed her cigarra onto the floor and stomped on it, way more than was necessary to put it out. Then she dropped her head into her hands. “What's going on, T'ocs? Why do I feel so bad about killing a Jedi? What wrong with me?”

“Hanna,” T'ocs came around and sat down beside her, putting his hand on her shoulder, “Take a deep breath. It sounds like this was a stressful encounter, and you just need a moment to calm down.”

She kept her head down, moaning, “And do what, T'ocs? Calm down and do what? Get another mission to go kill some more people?”

“We're hunting people that deserve everything we give them. You cannot get upset at…”

“Cannot? What, you won’t let me get upset?” Hanna looked up at him, emotion cracking her voice. “There were three little children in there, T'ocs, children. I killed her right in front of them. I could see the fear an-and hate in their eyes when they looked at me.”

T'ocs paused. He seemed shaken, choosing his words carefully. “You did your job and you walked away. You should be more thankful that it did not come to a fight. There are very few people who have beaten Jedi in one on one combat, especially ones without Jedi powers of their own. If you had to fight her, she may have killed you.”

“Or maybe I could have brought her in alive, talked her into giving herself up. She didn’t want to fight me, T'ocs, not even after I threatened the children.”

“A Jedi backed into a corner is one of the most dangerous beings in the galaxy, Hanna, you know that, we both know that. You could not afford to take any chances.”

“She was not even carrying a weapon. Maybe she didn't want to be a Jedi anymore. Maybe she was just looking to live in peace instead.”

“Maybe not. But does it matter? What you did has been done, and there is nothing else to say or do that will change it. We have to walk the path we choose, Hanna, there is no going back from decisions we make. And even if we can make them again, we will not be the same as we were the first time. Look at me.” T'ocs gestured toward himself, indicting his lower half, the prosthetics barely disguised by synthskin and loose clothing. “I was a mercenary leader, someone the Empire valued and respected, my name was on a list. Now, I am a dead man, only alive because of all of the machines shoved inside me. I'm adjutant to another hunter, barely able to walk under my own power. All because of one decision I made almost a year ago. The decision to take you aboard my ship.”

Hanna shook her head. “Worst mistake you ever made.”

“You think so?”

“T'ocs, I am a girl who has lived on her own in this galaxy for less than a year. I killed my first target eleven months ago, a smuggler. I put three rounds into him at long range and another two into him at point-blank range to make sure he was dead. His ship was loaded with packed rations, not the illegal weapons they told me it was. And ever since then I’ve been moving up, killing other smugglers, bounty hunters, Hutt enforcers, resistance leaders, and now a Jedi, I have killed a lot of beings in my long and illustrious career. She was old enough to be my mother and didn't even try to fight back. What if everyone I've killed were that way? What if I'm killing the wrong people?”

“Hanna-”

Hanna picked up her helmet and looked at it, staring into the cold featureless void of the black visor. “When those children looked at me, they didn't see me, they saw a monster who killed their caretaker and carted the body away. And for what? Why did I do it? Because it was my job. Because someone else told me that she deserved to die. That's all. My job just cost someone their life and robbed three children of their surrogate mother.”

“Hanna-”

“I'm not human anymore.” Hanna leaned her head forward and rested it against the helmet, against the cool metal. “I can't be. I'm an empty shell of a person. I can go through the motions but I can't actually feel anything, no emotions, no longings, no hope. I have nothing left to live for except the job. I can strangle out killing beings for money, but that's all. I-I’m a living droid, a tin soldier, a-”

“Hanna, stop this.” T'ocs grabbed her shoulders and turned her around to face him, making her drop the helmet on the floor. There was a flash of emotion in his eyes that she had never seen before. “You are a smart, capable and resourceful young woman with both great physical and emotional strength. You ought to be proud of what you have done, not sorry for it. There are only a handful of beings in the entire galaxy that could have lived through what you have lived through.”

“I'm not so sure I did.” Hanna said. Her stomach was full of something that was twisting and turning and flipping around and her head was full of horrible thoughts. But for once, she did not want a cigarra or a drink or something else to blot them out. She wanted to feel them, because they were the only thing left for her to feel.

T'ocs' face fell. In fact, he looked crushed. “Your future is completely open to you.” He tried to assure her, “You have the skill and power to make it whatever you want.”

She shook her head. “Not in this life. Not anymore.”

“I don't understand.”

“No, I guess not.” She shifted out of his grasp and scooped her helmet up off the floor. “I'm just wondering what my father would think of me after what I just did.”

T'ocs' back straightened out a bit. Technically speaking, he had adopted Hanna, but their relationship was less paternal and more distant comradeship, even after a year. Hanna never talked about her biological father, not after he had been killed almost a year ago, she even refused to talk about her home planet. To hear her bring it up meant she was in a mind the likes of which had not been seen since they had known each other.

And the inference that she was not looking at T'ocs as any sort of father figure, that was painful.

“He'd be proud of you.” T'ocs said. “I know he would.”

Hanna nodded. “I'll bet you do.” She put her helmet on and shut out the world, back to the familiar dance of lights and muffled sounds. “I'm going to go plot our next course. Go check the engines and make sure we're ready for hyperspace.”

“Wait, you already know where we are going next?”

“Yes.” And that was all she said before turning and walking away, into the cockpit, and closing the blast door behind her.

 

Oh wow. You said this story would be dark, but that scene with Olee Starstone and the Wookiee pups was heartbreaking. And the dialogue with T'ocs... they're just talking past each other, aren't they? It's not like Hanna has someone to give her the support she needs in him, and she's not able to give him appropriate support either.

I wonder where they're going next. In a way Hanna has to choose between ploughing on with what she has become, or trying to become something else -- I'm not sure she's already reached the point where she's going to make that choice.

 

I did my best to try to make a scene that's in just about every bounty hunter-centric story (a Jedi hunt) and make it as heartbreaking as possible while still keeping sympathy on both sides. It was a fine, fine line to walk, and I view that moment as a sort of moral bottoming-out for Hanna. That's the point where she takes that one step further than she's ever gone before, and the next chapter is about her emotionally and psychologically breaking down. And as much as T'ocs may try to support her, he simply isn't up to mentoring her.

 

Chapter Four

Hanna still had her helmet on. She had hardly taken it off since successful killing Starstone. Isolated in her own little world where what she was feeling, what she was thinking was known only to herself. T'ocs had tried, unsuccessfully, to get her to open back up after her meltdown at the mission's conclusion. All he had done was cause her to retreat into even stonier silence. He was not even sure she had slept that night, her bunk was vacated both before and after he had gone to bed himself. All he knew for sure was that, by the time he had climbed out of the shower and slipped into his fatigues, she was already in full armor in front of the holographic projector, hunting through a list of names for the identity of their next target.

T'ocs briefly considered trying to talk to her again, but decided against it. He hobbled to the couch and dropped down into it with a groan, his leg motivators creaking and hissing as they relaxed. He sat and watched his young friend, his adopted daughter, in silence for a moment or two, trying to discern anything he could from her body language. Then he put his hands out on the table and sighed.

“What's next, then?”

“We hand in the evidence of Starstone's death.” Hanna said, not turning from her study of the list. “Then, we pick out a new name, hunt them down, and do the same to them.”

T'ocs blinked at this sudden change of gears. “Didn't you just say last night that you were not sure we were killing the right people?”

“That was before. I've been doing my research.” Hanna dismissed the hologram with the press of a button on the projector controls. She still did not turn or regard T'ocs at all. “Everyone else on the list I've been able to find information on are enemies of the Empire. That's the only common thread uniting them. Smugglers, mercenaries, former Imperial officers and soldiers, even politicians. Either they're already openly hostile toward the Empire, or they're going to be soon.”

“So, Starstone was an aberration.”

“She was a Jedi. It seems that was enough for whoever put the list together.” Hanna folded her arms over her breastplate. “I've already contacted Vader and let him know the job's finished. He's going to meet us at a dead-space rendezvous point as per the usual and update the list with any new targets.”

“You contacted Vader yourself?” T'ocs sat back, startled. “I thought he said never to contact him for meetings, that he would let us know when we needed to meet.”

“He did. But you know what I learned yesterday, T'ocs? I learned that he's playing me for a fool. He thinks I'll just kill what he tells me to kill without thinking about it. He tells me where to go, what to shoot, what to kill, and I do it like a good little wind-up-toy. He thinks he controls me, but he doesn't. It's not going to work anymore. He's trying to manipulate me, to turn me into a mindless servant who doesn't think for themselves. He's just like a Jedi, only he wears a mask.”

T'ocs leaned forward again. He had wondered whether she would ever catch on to Vader's agenda, to just how one-sided the relationship was. But the leap over suspicion of his plans and motives and into hostility caught him off-guard. “That's the attitude a lot of our people had about the Sith in the past. It didn't end well.”

“Sith.” She scoffed. “Just a name, he's got dozens of those already.”

“No, it's not.” T'ocs stood up and leaned onto the table across from her. “I fought in the Clone Wars, Hanna. I saw what the Sith could do, back when no one knew they existed. I watched as they made the galaxy burn from one end to the other and step through untouched. A grudge match between two of them spawned a battle that leveled most of Mandalore's capital city. Sith are clever, dangerous creatures, they're subtle and sly, their plots have plots and wheels move within wheels. But they are also completely ruthless and powerful enough to do what they will. If you underestimate Vader or lump him in with the Jedi, he'll string you along just long enough to amuse him to some end, then he'll slap you back down with an ease that will terrify you.”

“You underestimate me, T'ocs.”

“No, Hanna, I don't. You're a skilled, dangerous young woman and I would never want to cross you. But Vader is on an entirely different level from Starstone, Virgal or any other Jedi, living or dead. The Jedi who spent the last decade or more turning a single planet into a grotesque puppet to their will, or huddling on a Wookiee colony terrified of drawing attention, or any manner of running, fighting and dying. Vader rules this galaxy. His word is law, and what he wants, he gets.”

Hanna turned to him at last, T'ocs's own T-visor looking back at him with the coldness he had once radiated to his own crewmates and marks. “Precisely why we're going to meet him. I'm going to ask him about this. I want to know what he wants from me, and I'm going to get an answer, no matter what it takes.”

T'ocs sighed and hung his head. “Or, he'll kill you. After you are through eliminating a third, maybe more of the names from his list of targets. Maybe all he wants from you is a pawn.”

“Maybe it is. And if that's the case, then I'm done. I'm through letting him control me.” Hanna turned and stalked toward the cockpit, her walk stiff-legged and with her shoulders hunched forward. “I'm going to check on our course.”

“Hanna.”

She stopped on the edge of the portal into the cockpit. “What, T'ocs?”

“Do you want to die? Is that what this is about, now? Going along the list until you go up against someone strong enough to kill you? Or antagonizing Vader until he kills you? Do you really not have anything else to look forward to?”

“What else would I have to look forward to, T'ocs?” She turned back to look at him, expressionless visor hiding her face but the growling anger in her voice making up for it. “Everyone I know and love is dead but you, and you're a walking corpse propped up by machines. My past is buried beneath two meters of dirt.”

T'ocs knew he had to snap her out of it. She was on a dangerous path, her mind in a very dangerous place. He had seen young warriors try to answer these sorts of questions before. It never ended well. He tried a different tact, one he had tried to bring up before. “What about the future? Nothing about the future's been decided yet.”

“I've been contracted to kill a list of people scattered across this galaxy by a being who will kill me if at any point I displease him. You said yourself that he has plots inside of plots, there's no telling what he has planned for me if I reach the end of the list. I have no future. Nothing but death.”

“You've never seen anything outside of the Empire, there's a whole universe of possibilities out there that you haven't seen.”

“Maybe I don't want to see them. Maybe I'd rather just do what I was raised to do, what you wanted me to do from the very first time we met. I'm a soldier now, T'ocs, a killer who does what she's told. I've killed a lot of beings, and I will kill again. And again. Until something stops me. You can either give me support, or get out of my way.”

T'ocs looked at her, at the armored shell around the girl he had trained, taught and mentored as best he knew how, the harsh, unforgiving tones of her voice ringing in his ears. He saw now. He saw that she was right about one thing: he had been wrong, when he made that decision what seemed like so long ago. He should never have brought her aboard.

“I have been with you since you started this, Hanna, I'm not going to retreat now. You're my responsibility and you're the only being I have left in this galaxy I feel I can care about. It would take more than Darth Vader to frighten me away.”

“Good.” Hanna nodded. “Someone's going to have to fly the ship.”

***

The rendezvous point Darth Vader and Hanna had arranged, or Hanna had requested and Vader in turn provided, turned out to be an empty section of space framed by a nebula, light years from any planets or stars. The nebula, its crimson vaporous form stretching for thousands of stellar kilometers in every direction, blotted out the Arbiter's sensors and communications devices, giving the meeting an air of mystery and suspense before the other party had even arrived.

“Of all the places to give us for a rendezvous, why an empty nebula?” Hanna asked, sitting back in the pilot's seat and crossing her arms. The Arbiter was drifting in space with its engines warm but inactive, patient but vigilant, and her pilot and co-pilot had little to do at the moment but wait. “It's not like we have anything to hide.”

“Maybe we don't. Maybe Vader just doesn't want eavesdroppers.” T'ocs gave up listening to the garbled static that permeated the commlink channels and set the headset down. “The nebula makes sure no random hyperspace traffic goes through, and it keeps prying eyes and ears from catching anything but shadows and static.”

“But what about this meeting needs to be kept secret? We're contracted mercenaries working for the Galactic Empire, nothing that I'm sure isn't already being done in a thousand places across the Rim and the Core.”

“Not to Jedi, I would wager. Perhaps Vader wants to keep his outsourcing that particular group's destruction a secret for some reason. He used to do it himself and they trumpeted it from the rooftops. Perhaps times change.”

Hanna grunted, leaning forward to check the scopes again, before giving up trying to make sense of the jumbled mess of signals and focusing on looking out through the viewport instead. The nebula sparkled and waved outside, close enough for its textures and contours to be visible, but far enough that the Arbiter was not about to be enveloped by the obscuring cloud. From time to time, a plasma discharge lit up the cloud, energy dancing through it like lightning through a thunderhead cloud, each bolt strong enough to severely damage unshielded trespassers. Nebula, especially those born of stellar destruction as this one was, tended to be dangerous places, energy spread through an ever-advancing haze, unstable and unpredictable. A perfect place to hold a rendezvous you did not want anyone else to hear about.

“I wonder how much longer he'll make us wait.” She pondered aloud, “He told me where to meet, you'd have thought he'd be here first.”

“Who's to say he is not here already?” T'ocs pointed out, “He could very well be out there in the nebula right now and we would never know it.”

“But he'd know that we're here.” Hanna noted with a dark growl. “He'd sense us, wouldn't he?”

“Indeed.”

“I hate Jedi powers.”

The sensor board beeped, and Hanna was the first to glance at it. “Picking up two contacts coming out of hyperspace. Star Destroyers, Imperial-class. Transponder data says they're the Ruthless and the Exactor.”

“Vader's flagship.” T'ocs leaned forward as Hanna turned the Arbiter around to face the new arrivals and both of the massive, wedge-shaped vessels appeared in the forward viewport, distant, but still clearly visible against the stars beyond. “Interesting.”

“He mentions a rendezvous point, we all think it's going to be a secret, and then brings two Star Destroyers to the party.” Hanna aimed the Arbiter at the two white shapes and engaged the thrusters. “Better contact them before they decide we're hostile and blow us out of space. They might do it anyway.”

“Let's hope not.” T'ocs reached for the commlink headset, but before he could dial up so much as a standard hailing frequency the receiver squealed with an incoming signal.

“Small craft designated Arbiter, this is the Exactor.” A rather officious voice told them, “Lord Vader requires your immediate presence. You will land in the forward hangar bay and await further instructions upon your arrival. Acknowledge.”

“Arbiter acknowledges, Exactor.” T'ocs replied, picking up the headset but only speaking into the microphone without putting it on. “We're continuing our approach, advise us further if you have any other instructions.”

“Affirmative, Arbiter, you'll be the first to know. Exactor over and out.”

The commlink went silent again. T'ocs and Hanna exchanged a look.

“Forward bay,” Hanna noted, “The officers' hangar. Think it's a trap?”

“If it was a trap, they would have dropped in on top of us and those long-range turbolasers of theirs would have blown this little ship of ours into scattered carbon and gases.” T'ocs replied, “More likely, they want the meeting to be private. No use disrupting the crew for the sake of one mercenary.”

Hanna grunted again. “Whatever. Let's just get this over with.” She eased the throttle forward another notch or two. “I'm tired of sitting here waiting to find out what's going to happen. Time to make something happen.”

T'ocs looked at her and sighed to himself, not offering a comment. The Arbiter surged forward beneath them and took a smooth, easy course toward the lead Star Destroyer's forward hangar bay. Both of the Imperial-class's hangars were located underneath the ship's hull, the main one roughly amidships and the smaller one forward of that. While the main hangar could launch numerous TIE fighters at a time and house entire corvette-sized starships, the forward one was only large enough to house a shuttle or two, reserved almost entirely for visiting dignitaries or the private use of the ship's command crew.

Each of the capital ships was big enough to fill a horizon and had enough guns to raze whole cities from orbit. From a distance, they looked like little more than white triangles, but as the Arbiter drew closer those triangles took a three-dimensional diamond shape, with a towering command and communications tower above the aft, overlooking the ship's massive length.

The white bulk of the Exactor's hull soon filled the Arbiter's viewport and left both Hanna and T'ocs in silence. They were both experienced enough with Imperial capital ships that the Exactor's size and shape did not unduly intimidate them, but knowing that Darth Vader was waiting for them lent an air of menace and dread to the familiar hull and lines. They were going to board the Lord of the Sith's flagship, and there was no telling what would happen when they arrived.

Hanna guided the Arbiter into the hangar with light touches on all the controls, until a jolt and jump told her that the ship had them in a tractor beam, her controls turning useless in her hands.

“Arbiter, this is docking bay control.” A new voice said in the commlink, “We're guiding you in. Please power down all engines and weapons.”

Hanna looked at T'ocs, who nodded. The two of them worked over the controls for a moment, shutting down the weapons systems and shunting the main thrusters to an idle standby, leaving the ship to drift in the invisible grip of the massive vessel. Both of them then sat back and watched as the ship filled the space above and around them and they were pulled into its gullet.

“No turning back now.” Hanna said aloud. T'ocs nodded, but did not reply.

The hangar was almost empty of ships as they cruised inside it. A single Lambda-class shuttle rested on its landing skids in the opposite corner from where the crew had apparently been instructed to guide the old Loronar freighter. It was odd and unnatural to watch things move around them without having to do a thing to the controls. Both Hanna and T'ocs twitched from time to time as their muscle-memory embedded reactions kicked in when they got too close to a bulkhead or a fighter deployment rack.

The Arbiter settled at long last to the hangar floor with a loud banging and a bump, causing both of its crew to buck in their seats.

“Admittedly,” T'ocs said with a grunt, “That was one of our better landings.”

Hanna undid her crash webbing and stood up. “No kidding. At least no one was shooting at us this time.”

A cluster of beings were waiting for them at the bottom of the ramp when it descended, two gray-clad officers, a few hangar technicians and a quartet of stormtroopers. The officer with the longer rank bar approached them first.

“Special agent Hanna Shirid?” He asked, voice reeking of the galactic Core.

Hanna nodded. She had her helmet under her right arm instead of on her head for the time being, brushing hair off her forehead with her free hand. “That's me.”

“Lord Vader has instructed me to escort you and your pilot to him. Our men will tend to your ship.”

“Thank you.” Hanna looked over his shoulder at one of the technicians and cocked her thumb back at the Arbiter. “There's a body in a bag against the wall of the lounge. Lord Vader will probably want to see it, so don't go bumping it much when you move it.”

The technician's face was ashen as he nodded.

“The ship needs fuel, but that's about all.” T'ocs said to the other officer, “It's been a quiet week.”

The other officer nodded, then motioned to the techs and moved away. The stormtroopers remained where they were, either guarding the ship, or perhaps making sure that no one try to leave just yet.

“Follow me.” The first officer said, turning and walking off. Hanna followed, putting her helmet on, and T'ocs trailed them as best he could manage.

***

Vader was waiting for them in a private conference room. He was standing at the head of a long table that was most often used for meetings between ranking officers across the ship, perhaps even multiple ships within a fleet. His deep, regulated mechanical breathing was the only sound he made as the officer, Hanna and T'ocs entered the room, the former coming to attention, the latter-most panting for breath. Aside from the four of them and the table, the room was empty.

“Lord Vader, special agent Shirid has arrived.” The officer announced.

Vader looked at them for a moment, then said, “Dismissed, Lieutenant.”

The officer nodded, saluted, and fled, the door closing behind him. Hanna and T'ocs were left alone with Vader. He did not speak, only breathing, waiting for someone else to open the conversation. Hanna got right down to business, stepping up toward the table.

“I've taken a Jedi off your list this time, Vader.” She held out her hand in the direction of the distant Arbiter. “Olee Starstone is dead. I have her body if you want to see it.”

Vader regarded her for a moment in silence, his harsh respiration the only ambient sound aside from the distant rumble of the Star Destroyer's air filtration and computer systems. Neither of the others moved or spoke, waiting to see what the response would be.

“Are you proud of yourself, hunter?” He asked, voice a dark basso rumble. “Did it thrill you, killing someone who did not try to fight back?”

Hanna made a strangled noise, halfway between a word and a bark of anger. How Vader knew that, she had no idea, outside of the ever-ready explanation of his Jedi powers. Unless, of course, he knew far more about the names he had put on the list than he had let on to her, or included in the files. “You knew. You knew where she was, you've probably known for years. You just didn't care. Because she wasn't a threat. She never was.”

Vader looked at her for a moment, before spitting out a single word: “Pathetic.”

T'ocs flinched. Hanna took a stance as if she would jump forward, but remained where she was. “What is?”

“You believe you are doing something worthwhile, a noble crusade against the Empire's enemies. You think you are something elite, something special.”

“That's why you hired me, isn't it?”

“Is it? I hired you to fulfill a contract. You were given a list of beings whom I require eliminated. I do not disclose the reasons for that rationale to my contracted killers.”

“Care to make an exception? Because if I'm going to keep on doing your dirty work, I'd like to know exactly what I'm fighting for if not the destruction of the enemies of the Empire.”

Vader pointed at her with a single gloved finger, causing Hanna to take a step back and swallow. “Do not presume that you have any right to know anything about why I chose to spare you.” He said, “You are not in any sort of position to make demands of me.”

Hanna took an extra moment, and a deep breath, before talking again again, even though T'ocs put a hand on her arm to try and keep her quiet. She shook him off and spoke. “If I know what links all of the people I'm killing, I'll know more about the angles I need to take, the plans I can put in place. I don't care about what they did to deserve death. I just need to know what I'm up against.”

Vader took two stalking steps forward, toward Hanna. “You have been contracted to eliminate beings whose deaths serve my interests. That is all you are required to know, that is all you will know, is that understood?”

“I hunted and killed a former Jedi who was hiding away on a colony moon among a forest full of two-meter tall furry bipeds, where she was working in a day-care for Wookiee children. Starstone wasn't a threat to anyone, so how could her death serve your interests?”

“Your considerations and opinions are no concern of mine.” Vader turned away from her, returning to his place at the far end of the table. “You have been given a list and you will continue to strike names from that list.”

“And if I don't?”

Vader turned his mask to face her over his shoulder. “I do not appreciate having to tie up loose ends. But I also will not hesitate in doing so. This is a galaxy full of bounty hunters, mercenaries and other sorts, replacing one with another is not an insurmountable task.”

The silence between the two lingered for a moment as Hanna racked her brain for something to come back with. He stood with his back half-turned to her, arms at his sides, thumbs hooked into his belt, casual, at ease.

Vader held all the cards. He always held all the cards. She wanted so badly to somehow rock that composure, that confident and dismissive air he wore around himself like a cloak. That expressionless mask, those solid black orbs of darkness that hid his eyes, she wanted to gouge them out, smash them, rock him back on his heels.

She could do nothing to hurt him. Not here, not now. Maybe not ever.

“Fine.” Hanna huffed. “Do you have any updates to the existing datafile, or can I just be on my merry way?”

Vader turned away, pacing along the other side of the table toward them. Both Hanna and T'ocs faded away toward the corner in the opposite direction. “Two of your previously assigned targets have been given to other operatives more suited to the task. In turn, you have one new name on the list. The updated file will be sent to your ship's computer.”

“Any particular reason I only get one target in exchange for two?”

Vader stopped his pacing and turned to face her again. “Your new target is a former Imperial agent, and is listed in the target database as a class-one.”

“A class-one?” Hanna asked, half in disbelief, half laughing. “What is he, another Sith?”

“He was an agent for the Empire long before you, trained from birth. He will likely kill you.”

“Then why send me after him if I'm just going to get killed?”

“If your skills are as vaunted as you seem to believe, why not test them? It costs the Empire next to nothing to commission you, compared to the cost of training and sending an assassin who would likely suffer the same fate.”

“So no matter what the outcome, you win. Or, at least, don't lose.”

“The Empire always wins, hunter.” Vader stalked in their direction again, went past them and out the door, arms now clutched together at the small of his back over his cape. “You have your orders.” He said over his shoulder, “Now go.”

Hanna did not try to get the last word. She turned and walked out, step brisk and sharp in the opposite direction from the one Vader had gone, T'ocs struggling to keep up with her as she went. Neither of them spoke until two doors and a bulkhead were between them and the last place they had seen him.

“A class-one?” T'ocs said, watching the heavy blast door close behind them as they re-entered the Exactor's forward hangar. “Not two weeks ago it took us two days and a lot of hard-packed explosives to eliminate a class-four.”

“I know, I know.” Hanna jerked her head back and forth, either surveying the hangar or violently shaking it in disbelief. “Pull that updated list from their computer, and figure out who we're up against. Then get all of the info on him you can scrape up. And I mean everything.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I'm going to warm up the Arbiter. Then we're going to fly out of here as fast as we can and get a look at everything we have on our new target. The class-1 can wait a few more days, we're going to need to do our homework this time.”

“Vader made it sound so simple.” T'ocs commented.

“He always does.”

 

Chapter Five

“His name, or at least his most common alias, is Jahzer Qe-cora.” T'ocs was reading information off of a datapad while Hanna guided the Arbiter out of the Star Destroyer's hangar and took them out of the nebula. “There's no holos or pictures on file, but there is a physical description. Around twenty-five years of age, two meters tall, tanned-to-dark complexion, brown eyes, dark brown hair, weighs around a hundred kilograms, fit and muscular.”

“Big boy.” Hanna commented, “Sounds like a typical Imperial soldier to me.”

“He is a certified sharpshooter, a certified combat ace and he graduated from the Carida academy with top marks. He also has training records with the ISB and Imperial Intelligence, so he is not simply a soldier. No known affiliates, aliases or contacts on record.” T'ocs frowned and looked at the screen a bit closer. “There's another note here. Some sort of redacted information, it's scrubbed from both the official personnel file and the listing Vader gave us.”

“That doesn't make any sense. What sort of information would they redact from an official personnel profile?”

“Maybe there's another file we can't access. Maybe there's something else to this one that makes him even more dangerous. Class-1 dangerous, I mean.”

Hanna grunted, thinking. Then she gasped. “What if he's a Jedi? Or, not a Jedi, some-something else? Maybe he's able to use the Force, like Vader?”

T'ocs nodded slowly. “Maybe. It makes sense, may be the sort of information you would not want to put on an official report. But why put it down and then redact it? Why not just omit it entirely?”

“Because it was pertinent as some point, but isn't now?”

“Why would it not be important now? Both his personal profile and the target listing are classified data, I would bet that there are only a hundred people in the entire Empire who have access to them, either, people who make high-level decisions about who is a danger to the Empire and who is not, or beings like us. You do not redact information on those reports, you leave everything that makes them a threat on there. Otherwise, beings like us just run in half-blind and get ourselves killed.” T'ocs shook his head, sifting through more data for some sort of hint or clue. “No, there's something else here. Something that needed to be classified for some reason.”

“Like what?”

Both of them paused and thought for a moment. Behind them, the fabric of space rippled as the two Star Destroyers departed, off to another part of the Empire where they could ply their intimidation and firepower for something more than just courier duty. The Arbiter was alone, floating through the nebula in a forgotten corner of space, the only two beings aboard her both too deep in thought to even vocalize the checklist needed in the run toward hyperspace.

“He's been killed before.” Hanna said at last. “Maybe that's why we're only getting this added to the list now. That redacted part is his date and cause of death.”

“And they assumed he was dead for some time, before he turned up alive somewhere and they had to redact it.” T'ocs looked at her. “Maybe we are not the first ones to go after him, or the first ones to kill him.”

“Is there any information in there about where or when he popped up? Or about where he might have been stationed at the time?”

“Only that his last known location is on a planet called Dasnai. Everything else is probably redacted or not even mentioned.”

“Alright. Then we have a choice. Go to Dasnai and hunt for this class-1, Qe-cora or whatever his name is, or just go on down the list like we were doing before.”

T'ocs paused for a moment before commenting. “We're going to Dasnai, aren't we?”

“Of course. Why not get it over with while we still have an idea of where he is? Set me a course for whatever system Dasnai is in, and we'll read up on it on the way over. Once we're there, we'll do some recon, figure out where he's hiding, then we'll who the better judge of skill is: me or Vader.”

***

Dasnai was not as dirty as Rete or even Alaris Prime. In fact, it was rather urban and clean, much more along the lines of what one might expect from a planet ruled by the Empire. It was a rather verdant planet, known for producing scientifically and medically useful plants and microbes, not as strong or prevalent as bacta but still important to various fields of medicine and biological study. It was also on a nearer partition of the Outer Rim to most Core worlds than Thyferra and Ithor, making it a popular off-campus study destination for third and fourth year science students, particularly botanists, from universities across the Core. The planet was peaceful, it was laid-back, and there were no native species capable of dragging humans to horrible deaths.

Hanna shook her head as she read through the Imperial datafile a third time. “Seems like exactly the opposite of the sort of place where most of these clowns hide out.”

“Perhaps that is the point.” T'ocs was working through other data on the projected hologram above the table, the planet's population and urban density census, giving them a long, detailed list of names, occupations and some loose age and physical descriptions. “Perhaps he intends to hide on a planet away from bounty hunters and unscrupulous locals. Dasnai is quiet enough that he could conceivably live without having to take many precautions from day to day.”

“Dasnai is also home to more Imperial soldiers than Rete, Ord Mantell and Lothal combined.” Hanna sniffed, running a hand across her face and scratching her nose. It had been almost two days since she had last had a cigarra, the mission to Alaris Prime and subsequent meeting with Vader had knocked her out of her habits. But the lack of it was beginning to fray on her nerves. But something about her current situation, about their mission, was keeping her too occupied to think about it too much. “There’s also a lot more surveillance. And more eyeballs in general. You'd think someone would see him sooner or later.”

“A lot of people probably see him. The thing is, few would know that he is anything special.” T'ocs brought up a new list of names and waved at them. “This is a list with a filter system run on it to all humans in Dasnai who meet the physical description we were given. As you can see...”

“That's a lot of names.”

“Around three hundred, to be precise. And this is just those registered in the last census, which only covered planet-born Imperial citizens, not counting those present on business or as a part of a planned university excursion, or even those who moved here from elsewhere. There might be thousands of men who match the information we have on him, what little of it exists. The description is vague enough that he could be almost anyone, even without getting into the possibilities of him having cosmetic surgery.”

Hanna sighed and looked down, then started hunting through the pouches on her belt. “I need a smoke.”

“This will be a harder mission than the one to Alaris Prime.” T'ocs said, looking at her as if he wanted to say something about the cigarras, but had decided not to. “Alaris had a smaller population and there was a very obvious tell in Starstone's pattern. This Qe-cora is a fully trained and capable Imperial agent, he knows how to make himself invisible.”

“Then how do we know where he is?” Hanna asked, taking a break from looking for her cigarras and going back over the report. “Where did the report on him come from?”

“Good question.”

“Here it is.” Hanna pointed at the datapad screen. “Someone matching his description was spotted at the Empire Day celebration in the company of... the governor?”

“Really?” T'ocs typed into his control panel and pulled up the profile of the local planetary governor. “Governor Roan Price, a staunch loyalist whose family has been involved with local politics for generations. He's a member of COMPNOR and has a son in the Anaxes academy. He looks clean.”

“So clean he probably squeaks when he walks.” Hanna folded her arms across her chest. “Do we have any pictures of him at the celebration?”

“I can check the HoloNet and a few network databases, but a more thorough check is going to have to wait until we reach Dasnai.”

“Do what you can. Maybe we'll get a glimpse of our Jahzer Qe-cora in a crowd shot or among the party-goers.” Hanna leaned back over her datapad. “Why would Qe-cora make friends with the governor, of all people?”

“He is probably under an alias, perhaps even as an Imperial functionary.” T'ocs said as he worked. “The man has been trained by the best of the Empire, both in combat and in espionage. He may have decided that the best way to hide is to do so in plain sight of everyone, assuming a new, public identity while burying the old one.”

“If he did, it was a mistake. We got this report and he was added to the list, so someone must have recognized him.”

“Or recognized someone they thought was him.”

“But who even knows this guy? Who out there would be able to see a guy and say, hey, I think that's a wanted man, when his file is so super top secret? Who submitted that report?”

“Check it and see.”

Hanna scrolled through the information then tossed the datapad to the table in frustration. “Nothing. Either that's not recorded, or it was an anonymous tip, and either way it's no help.”

“So, he might not even be on Dasnai.”

“That's about the size of it, yeah.” Hanna shook her head, running her hands through her hair. “Vader didn't say anything about where he was, only that he was a target. But, have these reports ever been wrong? I mean, with regards to the location of the target.”

“Not as far as I can recall.” T'ocs waved through the hologram of Roan Price's biography. “We have done quite of few of these, and my memory is not the best any more...”

“He's never been wrong before. Whoever makes up these reports, they always know exactly where these people are. It has to be Vader.” Hanna picked the datapad up again and flipped back to the report they had received about the man she was being charged to kill. “Assuming that Vader did write this, or had someone do it for him, then it's accurate, it has to be. And the redacted information is something he put on there, and then decided he didn't want his hired hunters to know. What wouldn't he want me to know about this guy?”

“Didn't we decide that it was a previous supposed death of his?” T'ocs gestured toward the datapad in her hands. “That it was redacted because they thought he was dead at some point in the past?”

“Yeah. We decided that was the most logical explanation. But what if that's not all it is? What if Vader is hiding something?”

“It was redacted from what he sent us, and from the official Imperial profile we pulled. Unless Vader was foresighted enough to redact it from both sources, it was redacted because it was no longer valid, not because Vader does not like you.”

Hanna frowned, looking back at the datapad, then put it back on the table and leaned back in her seat. “Maybe.”

“Assuming that the target is, or was, on Dasnai, our next step has to be to go there and find out whatever we can about him before planning the actual elimination. We should go and look through the local news holos for information about the governor's usual entourage. Maybe Qe-cora will be one of them.”

“Okay, sure. That sounds good.” Hanna folded her arms across her chest. “I still think Vader is hiding something, though.”

“Of course he is. Everyone has something to hide, Hanna, and someone like Vader must have secrets that could shatter stars. They just do not pertain to us in any way.”

Hanna shook her head. “It just isn't fair. He's got everything. He's the most powerful man in the Empire, everyone's afraid of him, he has Jedi powers and basically every military operative, monetary reserve and information source in the civilized galaxy at his disposal. He can just waltz in, pick us up out of the mud, dust us off, and all of a sudden it's work for him or die. And no one can stop him from doing it.”

“Vader is a ruthless pragmatist, Hanna, he does whatever he feels is necessary to further his vision for the Empire. That sort of single-minded determination, when backed up by the sort of power he wields, is incredibly, hilariously dangerous.” T'ocs sat back, shutting the hologram projector down. He folded his hands together in his lap. “There was debate for some time when the Empire first came to power as to whether he was a real person or just something cooked up by propaganda ministers. For those of us in the mercenary sector, we found out rather quickly that he was very real.”

“How so?”

“Vader only values those who obey him, or those he respects. A number of mercenaries who had been employed by the Republic in its twilight years did not have either. So, when they tried to arrange for better pay by staging a coup on some small Outer Rim planet and holding the local governance hostage, Vader was called in. He ordered the Star Destroyers in his task force to bombard the planet's cities until the mercenaries gave up, or until the local population overthrew them, whichever came first. By the time the mercenaries surrendered, half of the capital city had been leveled. And he had all of the mercenaries who were left executed anyway, because he did not consider them trustworthy.”

Hanna shook her head again. “Just not fair.”

T'ocs smiled. “The HoloNet called it a grand demonstration of Imperial peace-keeping operations.”

Hanna kicked her feet against her couch, looking down at the table and the deactivated datapad. Her voice dropped almost to a whisper. “Sometimes.”

“Sometimes what, ad'ika?”

She looked up at him again. “Sometimes I wonder if we're actually on the right side.”

T'ocs took a deep breath and sat back again, hands cupped together on his lap with index fingers steepled. “I wondered that once too, ad'ika. Back when the Empire was still young. It stopped when I realized that the Empire was the only side I could be on. Those mercenaries tried to change sides, and it did not end well for them. There are no sides anymore. Only with the Empire, or against it.”

“And if you go against it, nothing in this galaxy will help save you. Might as well put the blaster to your head right there.” Hanna's melancholia was interrupted by a loud beeping coming from the direction of the cockpit. She straightened up and turned that way. “Sounds like we're coming up on Dasnai.”

As she got up to head forward, T'ocs got to his own feet and stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Hanna, a moment.”

She turned and looked at him, a bit surprised. “What, T'ocs?”

He paused for just a moment before speaking, looking far older and more tired than she ever remembered him looking before. “These sorts of thoughts are normal, especially with all of the things you have seen and done recently. But you cannot let your emotions rule your judgment. This life we lead, it is not a pleasant one, or a quiet one, and sometimes we have to do things that we never thought we would have to do. Insulating yourself from that with narcotics and alcohol is only a temporary solution. You have to face the fact that things we do are not the sort of ones people watched in holofilms or hear about in stories from old warriors around a table.”

Hanna looked at him for a moment, bit her lips, and nodded. They were hard words to hear, and hard words for him to say, but she knew that did not necessarily make them untrue. “I... think I understand that now.”

“I hope so. You do not have to enjoy this sort of life, but you do have to live with it. At least for the time being. Things will change, the future is never set in stone or steel, you just have to endure long enough for the galaxy to spin itself a bit, and let you off in a better place.”

Hanna nodded again. A slight smile perked the corners of her lips. “Thanks, buir.”

T'ocs smiled in return, a very soft and sad smile. “You've never called me that before.”

“Well, this is the first time you've acted like a father to me and not someone who's just tagging along for the ride.”

“I can never replace Georg, Hanna, and I do not want to try. But I walked the path you are on myself some years ago. If you need someone to talk to about something, anything that happens out there, I am here.” He held his arm out wide of his body, glancing around at the walls of the ship around them. “I do not have much else to do at this point.”

Hanna grabbed his forearm and gave it a squeeze. She had learned the gesture on her trip to Mandalore, but did not understand the significance. It was just a handshake at the wrist. But to Mandalorians, it seemed like more than that. “I'll keep it in mind. Now, let's go down to that planet, find this guy and put a blaster bolt in him.”

“That sounds like a plan to me.” T'ocs and Hanna stumped their way to the cockpit side by side. “Preferably we put several into him, but I am open to the ideas of explosives this time as well.”

Hanna scoffed and smiled. “Well, whether that's a possibility remains to be seen, he may be hiding out in the middle of an orphanage or something.”

They could see Dasnai through the cockpit viewport now. It was a verdant world, mostly rainforest and jungle with a rather temperate climate that had belts of humidity and belts of rather frigid air. The ecosystem was diverse and plentiful, and the local wildlife was almost entirely peaceful herbivores, making not only an ideal research station for botanists, but also a rather decent vacation spot for those without the credits to spend going to Alderaan or another of the scenic Core worlds. From space as the Arbiter arrived in-system, the globe was shades of greens swirled with white and gray clouds, the planet's solitary blue-tinted moon hovering in the far distance and its yellow sun framing them to the port side.

“Pretty.” Hanna commented. “How's local aerospace?”

T'ocs cycled the scanners. “It seems rather clean, not much traffic. A few patrol ships, local bulk cruisers for the most part, nothing very big or fast. A few luxury yachts are ferrying people to and from the moon, but aside from that, nothing.”

“Quiet and out of the way, even though it's a strongly pro-Imperial, no heavy patrols, no spotlights, no one looking out. If he is here, it's looking more and more like a pretty brilliant hiding place.”

“Only until someone noticed him. I doubt many Imperials of status enough to know who he is, or was, have ever been here on more than a stop-over, it just is not important enough. But the sheer volume of eyes, he had to know that it would happen at some point, he would be a fool not to.”

“So is he a fool,” Hanna asked, head tilted to one side in though. “Or is he expecting someone to come after him at some point? Is he waiting for us?”

T'ocs pondered for a moment. To Hanna's distress, he did not immediately say the word no. Instead, he shook his head. “I do not know. He is a class-1.”

Both of them sat in silence, pondering the sphere spinning before them, with millions of lives going about their business, working, playing, laughing, loving, none of them with any idea that, somewhere, in amongst the crowds, a certain man was standing, or walking, or running. A man who was so dangerous that the Empire could not even have him arrested, not openly; they had to bring in a professional, a hired killer who had wrangled every sort of dangerous criminal there was, including Jedi, to make sure whatever he was up to, whatever threat he presented to the Empire, was permanently ended.

“Contact aerospace control.” Hanna said, “Let them know that we're here and looking for a place to relax for a few days. See if they can recommend a few higher class institutions, perhaps some that are favorites of the governor. We'll go from there.”

“And what will you be doing in the meantime?”

“Trying desperately to think of ways to kill a man on a planet this peaceful without igniting a tremendous misunderstanding.”

 

Not getting a lot of traffic on this story. Chyntuck I know you're reading when you get the chance and I appreciate it. Findswoman, Ewok Poet, have you had a chance to read this one yet?

EDIT 7-26 - Sorry, this came off as a bit more view-hungry than I had intended. I appreciate comments with feedback, it's really helpful for a writer like me who mostly exists in an echo chamber of my own neuroses. But I'm not trying to be view-hungry and I apologize if it came off that way.

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Chapter Six

Dasnai was about as beautiful down on the surface as it appeared from high orbit. Imperial design here was not the stereotypical gray blocks and prefab cubes most Outer Rim planets were stuck with. The planet was peaceful enough, and had been so long enough, that architects had been able to make the cities more than just a series of squares. The cities were rather rounded and graceful, with flowing arches and aqueducts carrying water in the same manner water mains did in more urban cities. The buildings did not have right angle corners, even, the angles were rounded off and rather aesthetically pleasing. There was not even a regular arc or angle for them, each building was different depending on what the size of the plot of land they sat on was, and whether the building was a single round shape, or a rather more complex collection of round clusters.

“This place must be a furniture maker's nightmare.” T'ocs muttered to himself. “Or paradise.”

“Why so?” Hanna's voice asked in his ear.

“Nothing made with right angled corners will fit properly in any of the houses or buildings built here. Everything has to be built for the buildings they are put in, I wager.”

T'ocs was standing on one of the elevated walkways, allowing pedestrians to traverse the city above the dedicated freight and speeder lanes on the streets below them. The city, the travel guide he had downloaded called it Soriana, was a beautiful mess of spires, arches and towers, buildings of all shapes and sizes assembles in clusters that would have made anyone with an organization disorder convulse and foam at the mouth. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the placement of things, and the roads wound through the chaos without bothering to bring it any sort of order. It was very much not a typical Imperial city.

The air was cool, with a soft breeze brushing against his face as he walked. Others on the walkway, mostly humans, some in business clothes, others in more casual attire, gave him quick smiles or nods as he walked by. He wondered why. No one looked away, no one turned aside, no one put their head down and moved on quickly to avoid making eye contact. Why was everyone on this planet so friendly? With the slowness of his pace and the awkward, stumbling gait he had been forcibly adopting ever since his injuries, he was used to having people shun him. But not here. The people of Dasnai seemed to have different values than most of those on the Rim.

“It's nice.” He said.

“What is?”

“Being able to get out, to walk around and not have to explain my status or my injuries. To not be stared at, or have beings running from me, or make a commotion. To just be able to walk and enjoy the pleasantness of the day. It is not something I have been able to do in a very, very long time.”

Hanna laughed with the sound of a bell that had not rung out in a long time. “You sound like such an old man.”

“I am old, Hanna. Old, worn down and more than willing to take a rest from time to time.”

“Well, don't rest too much, we've still got a mission to run, remember?”

“I remember. I am heading to the main public tourism station here, that should be a good place to start gathering intel. Completely above the board and above suspicion, as well. How are things going on your end?”

“I've finished patching the ship into the local HoloNet broadcasts, just like you showed me. I'll keep my eye out for anyone matching Qe-cora’s description and let you know if I see or hear anything else useful.”

“Good girl.” T'ocs had to shake his head a bit. He knew Hanna was not the most mechanically-minded being, but patching the Arbiter's HoloNet receiver into the local broadcasts was child's play. Her having to be walked through it was akin to a fighter pilot having to be told how to strap on their helmet. It was a weakness they had to get to work patching up; he would not be around to tell her how to attach the coolant lines back to the engine housing forever.

The walkway was leading him, as he had mentioned to Hanna, to a public tourism station. That was the great thing about the more settled planets of Rim territories, especially those with booming tourism industries: they welcomed those with a hunger for information. It meant he was free to ask questions without raising people's ire or suspicions. Not any questions, of course, but questions within reason for the average tourist. T'ocs had a cover story in mind in case anyone tried to pry a bit. One he had yet to run by Hanna, because nothing would ever be easy between them. But he figured that it would be fairly solid. And it was easier to ask forgiveness than to seek permission.

The tourism station was sitting along the side of the walkway in a more open part of the cityscape. It was built into a larger building that had speeder parking on the lowest floors and hangar space up above, allowing beings to make it one of their first few stops when they arrived on the planet. The front edifice was rather pleasant, with signage arrayed in bright red colors that contrasted well with the green of the planet around it, all of it welcoming to anyone who happened along the way. The building had banks of windows on just about every wall and glass doors leading inside, the interior looked neat, clean and inviting, and it seemed a rather pleasant place overall. It certainly made T'ocs feel welcome.

He walked in, pushing the door open and stumbling over the stoop. It was odd to have manual doors on a place like this. It was also hard to push something open with his center of gravity all thrown out of balance. He needed to get a cane at some point, or something else to lean on as he walked.

A young woman, dressed up in a crisp blouse and with her platinum blond hair done up in a neat and tidy bun, got up from behind the welcome desk where she had been sitting. “Oh my!” She said, voice high-pitched but not grating, “Sir, do you need help?”

“No, thank you.” T'ocs assured her as he stumbled into the entry room and looked around. The room was spacious and tastefully decorated, with a simple rug on the floor that bore the Imperial crest on a light blue background, two-toned brown and cream walls, and subtle lighting that mimicked the natural light streaming through the windows and door. “I will not fall, I just have a hard time walking sometimes.”

The woman came over to him anyway, offering him an arm to take for support. “Come over this way, sir, I have a chair you can sit down on, then I can find you something to help you walk.”

“Not necessary, young lady, thank you, I do not want to trouble you.”

“Oh, it's no trouble at all, sir, that's why we're here.” She gave him a rather pleasant and surprisingly genuine smile. “Since you're here, I'm guessing you haven't been on Dasnai for long?”

“About an hour, roughly. My daughter and I just flew in from Empress Teta, we're on a bit of a tour of some of the more scenic parts of the Empire before she goes off to the Academy.”

“Well, we appreciate you stopping by. Here at the official Soriana welcome center, we have all sort of information on where to go and what to do if you want the best Dasnai has to offer.”

“I would appreciate that, actually. My daughter is doing some work on our ship and I told her I would try to find someplace for us to eat. But the travel guide we downloaded must have been broken because I couldn't get it to work on my datapad.”

“I can help you with that sir, in fact I can download the latest guide we have and link your datapad into our local new HoloNet feed. You'll be sure to stay up to date on everything that's going on, which is especially important because this is a very special month.”

T'ocs looked at her as they rounded the corner of the entry room and headed to a small lounge area with padded chairs and low tables, a potted plant sitting and looking rather vibrant in the corner. “Why is that, exactly?”

“Oh, it's Veterans Appreciation month on Dasnai. We take a month out of the year to recognize all of the Imperial Armed Service veterans who live here, whether they're Dasnai citizens or not. Did you... serve, sir?”

“I did. I served under the Republic and the Empire both, in fact.”

She gave him another smile. “In that case, I'll have to make sure to keep you comfortable. Have a seat in here sir, and I'll go to gather the materials I promised. Do you have your datapad with you?”

“Yes, in fact. One moment.” T'ocs dug his datapad out of the pouch on his belt, actually one of Hanna's belts, and handed it to her. He had been sure to wipe it of all but the most benign information and files before setting out on this little expedition, just in case.

She took it in her hand before helping him ease down into the nearest chair. “All right, you just sit there sir, make yourself comfortable. Are there any refreshments you would like? A drink?”

T'ocs settled down into the chair with a groan that was not acting at all. “Just some water, and thank you.”

The woman smiled at him one more time and left. T'ocs leaned back in the chair, listening for creaking or groaning, and hearing none. Everything here in the welcome center was crisp and clean and friendly and inviting. Exactly what someone who was visiting the planet wanted to see when they arrived. It almost made him feel a bit dirty to think that he was going to use the information the nice young woman was going to give him to track someone down and kill them.

Veterans Appreciation Month. That explained all of the friendly looks and appreciative nods he had been getting. Everyone saw him, saw how he walked and carried himself, how he wore old military fatigues, and rightly assumed that he was a combat veteran. Now, he had not served in the Imperial military in the strictest sense, but he had fought on the side of no other power. And in his persona as Hanna's father, who could tell?

He only had to wait for a few moments before the woman was back, bearing a small disposable bottle full of water and his datapad, along with a couple of laminated flimsiplast sheets.

“Here you are, sir,” She handed him the water and set the datapad down on the table in front of him, “I have your datapad loaded with all of the travel and tourism information in and around Soriana. And these,” She handed him the sheets of flimsi, “Are the menus of several restaurants nearby, all of which I highly recommend.”

“Thank you, very much.” He answered. “This should set my daughter and I up for the whole trip.”

“I do have one last thing for you here, sir.” The woman took something out from where she had tucked it under her arm. “This is a folding officer's cane that was left here some time ago and placed in our lost-and-found. It was going to be disposed of, but I thought you might need it more.”

T'ocs took the cane. It was styled like an old-fashioned military officer's baton, the sort used by only the most posh and proper of drill sergeants in the days of the Old Republic. In fact, it looked very much like one he had seen hanging on a wall in Hanna's father's trophy room on Empress Teta. It made him wonder who, exactly, had left it behind. Some crafts-being in the past had given it a locking hinge in the middle of its length to make it more portable, and it was well-worn but still strong.

“Thank you, again, for everything.” He said, giving the woman the most genuine smile he could manage. “May I rest here for a while and look over everything you've given me?”

“Absolutely, sir, take as long as you need. The center here is open until eighteen hundred Galactic Standard time, and I am here until then as well. Let me know if you need anything else or have any more questions.”

“I will.”

The woman smiled, gave him a rather proper and polite half-curtsy, and departed to return to her desk. He smiled until well after she had gone. If the galaxy had more women like her, they would not need nearly so many people like him.

The menus were the first thing he looked over. Most of them were mid-range establishments, not upper-class, but not the sort of greasy undercity diners he was used to eating in. These were places that balanced the need for quick service and expediently-delivered food with the fact that food was supposed to taste good and not make you feel sick after consuming it. There was a rather eclectic mix of choices, as well, from Ithorian cuisine and fruit to Mon Calamarian seafood, and all of them were moderately priced and within easy walking distance of the welcome center.

He filed all of the information away for the moment. He was hungry, and knew that Hanna would appreciate food that was not grabbed on the run or vacuum-packed rations. But he wanted to review everything else he had now before making that sort of decision.

He laid the flimsi on the table and scooped up his datapad. There were a few new files waiting for him on it, one that said event schedules, one that said popular destinations, and a third that said helpful travel tips. He pulled up the last one first. It was full of speeder rental locations, public transportation routes and schedules, and even a map of the city. There were also a few notes about general city navigation, how it was easiest to get from point Alpha to Beta, which mentioned that the city did have a layout plan, one based around the root pattern of large trees that had once lived on the land Soriana now occupied.

Tree roots. Of course, why would it be anything else?

He switched over to the other file, the popular destinations around the city. It was about what he expected, a list of tourists traps and scenic locations, things like public parks, an outdoor art gallery, three different tour-taking stations that led beings into different parts of the surrounding jungles, and a stellar observatory. What interested him the most, though, were the museums. There were no less than four museums noted, with a variety of focuses across topics and subjects. And of course, there was a veteran's museum; the file even noted that it was open for free through the entire month.

As T'ocs was about to switch to the last file, his commlink beeped. He checked to make sure the woman was not nearby as he switched it on and spoke. “What is it, Hanna?”

“Just checking in. Local HoloNet's pretty boring, they're either playing local low-budget holodramadies or rebroadcasting news programs from the Core worlds. And I haven’t seen anyone matching Qe-cora’s description. How are things going on your end?”

“Quite well, actually. Apparently, it is Veterans Appreciation Month here on Dasnai, and the young lady here at the welcome center was more than happy to give me all of the information I wanted.”

Hanna seemed to be in a good mood. Or at least bored. “Charmed her off her feet, then? When's the wedding?”

“Stop it. I have a full map of the city as well as transport and destination suggestions. And I also have a list of upcoming important events that I was about to look over when you called.”

“What is it, a meeting of the local single's club?”

“Enough.” T'ocs brought up the list and starting reading off the more interesting entries. “There appear to be a few sporting events, a grav-ball championship match is coming up soon. A vintage speeder collector's get-together to show off their pride and joys. Two different singing clubs are both having concerts a week apart. And- hello, this is interesting.”

“What?”

“There is a gala ball being held in two days, with live music and catering by several of the city's finest eateries, hosted by the governor of the planet himself. And, it is open and free to all veterans of the Imperial Armed Forces and their families.”

“And, why exactly is that interesting?”

T'ocs smiled, shutting down his datapad and returning it to his belt. “Because, it gives me an idea.”

***

“No. No way, absolutely not, never.”

“It's the best chance we have, Hanna.”

Hanna shook her head and pounded her fist against the table to emphasize her words. The empty Ithorian food containers on it rattled around and one fell to the floor. “I. Won't. Do it. It's stupid and ridiculous.”

T'ocs tried to remain calm, but it was hard when it came when butting heads with someone as obstinate as Hanna. “It is a good plan, and you know it.”

“No it isn't. It involves me putting on a dress and you pretending to be my father, my real father, so it is not a good plan.”

He held his hand out toward her in exasperation. “Did I not say that you should not let your emotions get in the way of the mission? Did I not say that?”

“You were talking about missions where I had to kill people, not about ones where I had to pretend like you were my father.”

“The point still stands.” As did T'ocs, getting to his feet with the aid of his new cane. “This is a good plan, and it is the best chance we have of getting close to Governor Price and his entourage, especially since we do not have any official standing with the Imperial government or the Imperial military. We cannot openly approach any of the officials for this investigation, but we can attend this gala, mingle with the guests, and try to figure out which one of them might be our Jahzer Qe-cora. It is not only a good plan, Hanna, it is the only plan, the only chance we have to get this much information in one place. Otherwise, it may take us weeks, even months to track down every scrap of information. And by that time, he may have gotten wind of our snooping around and decided to take matters into his own hands.”

Hanna took a deep breath, held on to it, and exhaled in an angry sigh. “Why do you always have to be right about how to run these missions? Why can't I ever be right about how to do it?”

“I'll let you be right next time.” T'ocs sat back down. He had gotten through and could relax again. “I know this will be hard for you, but the cover story we have is too good to pass up.”

“You could have at least told me first before you started going around telling people you were my father.”

“I know, and I apologize. I should have run my idea by you before I left the Arbiter. But what is done is done, right?”

She took another deep breath, rolled her eyes to the ceiling, and nodded. “Right.”

“Thank you. Now, down to the plan specifics.” T'ocs started marking off things on an imaginary list on the tabletop. “You and I will attend the gala as Georg and Hanna Shirid, visiting the planet on our tour of the Empire's more scenic corners. We will both mingle with the guests as best we can and try to gather information on all of the party-goers. And both of us will keep our eyes open for anyone matching Jahzer Qe-cora's description.”

“Okay.”

“In order to do this, both of us will need to dress up.”

“Yes, we went over this already.”

“Which means I will have to put together some sort of dress uniform, and you will have-”

“To buy and wear a dress, yes, I know.”

“Which you do not want to do.”

“No.”

T'ocs looked at her for a moment, leaned back in his seat and propping his cane up against the edge of the table. “Answer me this, Hanna. Have you ever had to buy a dress for yourself before?”

Hanna's answer was so quiet that he would have missed it if there was any ambient noise. “No.”

He took another moment to think, and to let her think, before asking his next question. “Have you ever worn a dress before?”

Hanna's voice got even smaller, to the point where he was not sure he heard it at all. “No.”

T'ocs might have laughed. But he saw the look on her face, how lost and alone she seemed all of a sudden. He slid to one side on the couch, taking his cane with him, and patted the seat he had just vacated with his hand. “Come over and sit, ad'ika.”

She came over and sat down, her arms folded around her as if she were trying to stave off shivers brought on by the cold. She did not look him in the eye.

“You would want your father to be here for this sort of thing, wouldn't you?” He said, voice as gentle as he could make it. “Your real father, I mean.”

“He always told me that a uniform and a smartly-pressed shirt were the prettiest things I could wear.” She said, “I never wore girl's clothes. It was always pants and shirts. Dresses weren't allowed at the schools I went to.”

“It sounds to me as if you were robbed of one of the joys a young woman can experience in her life.”

“Maybe I don't want it, T'ocs. Maybe I never wanted it. Maybe I'm okay with dressing like a man, like a soldier.”

“Maybe you are. Or maybe, it is because you never had the chance.” T'ocs leaned back, picking his cane up and resting it against his shoulder. “I chaperoned a young woman to a gala much like this one years ago, before the Empire fell. She was radiant that night, preparing, making herself over, selecting the exact right dress and gloves and shoes to wear. I almost forgot that I was there to protect her in case some of her father's enemies moved to kidnap her during the gala.”

“Did they?”

“No. I watched the entire night. The gala passed without incident, she danced and sang and laughed with her friends, then returned home and slept until well after daybreak. I watched a whole room full of people do nothing but enjoy each others' company for hours on end without being in any danger or there being any action or commotion that required my presence.” He set the cane down on the floor again and put his hand on her arm. “You are not the only one who was robbed of a chance to do something like this, to attend an event like this, Hanna. Beings such as us, mercenaries, soldiers, those who live by the blaster and knife, we are on the outside looking in. We have missions, targets, tasks and plans to carry out, orders to follow. We never have the chance to enjoy ourselves and live life without caring about whether we will get a blaster bolt to the ribs the next day. This gala might be as close as we ever get.”

Hanna sighed. She still did not look at T'ocs. “I don't even know what kind of dress to wear. And...” She ran a hand over her face, tracing the line of the scar on her cheek where a Jedi's lightsaber had burned her. “Who'd want to dance with me, anyway? I'm...”

“Nobody's ever as pretty as they look in the holograms, Hanna.” T'ocs assured her. “I guarantee you that every woman there will have enough cosmetic product on their face to prime and paint a wall.”

“So?”

“So, you can choose to either beat them, or join them.”

She scoffed. “I might as well just wear a mask, then.”

“If it were a masquerade ball, perhaps. But none of these people know you, and none of them will ever see you again. At least not without your buy'ce. For one night, you have to pretend to be someone else. Not looking like yourself may help you remember that.”

Hanna did not seem happy. But she also seemed like she knew she had no choice. She turned to look at him at last. “Where can we go here to get a high-class dress on short notice?”

 

Yay! Glad to have you caught up!

I'm not overly fond of timeskips in most works, but I think in Hanna's case I wanted to gloss over some of the time she's spent with the Empire because, while a lot of the experience has changed her, it wasn't necessarily interesting from a narrative standpoint. A lot of missions that involved killing the people the Empire pointed her at. Some of that does get alluded to in things later on but I didn't think it was important for use to see it necessarily.

Alaris Prime was a great location that I really should have used more. It comes from the old Galactic Battlegrounds game and seemed to me an ideal place to give Hanna a bit more idea of the Imperial "model of efficiency". Starstone is actually an existing character, from the James Luceno work Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader, she's just a Padawan at that point but escapes Vader's wrath after an elder Jedi sacrifices himself. The line about her possibly being a librarian is actually a bit meta, since she was noting as being trained by Jocasta Nu, the Jedi librarian from the films.

As regarding the people in the apartment, one of those characters may wind up showing up again, but not for a while I don't think. The others are based on characters from an RPG session I participated in a few months back.

This was the chapter that legitimately made me tear up to write it the first time. Starstone's death scene went pretty much unchanged from the first drafts to my posting it, as did Hanna's little speech to the Wookiee cub after. I pointed it out above, but this is basically the moral nadir of Hanna's "arc" as it were. This is where she hits rock bottom. It's also where I realized that the story was getting way too dark and I needed to shift gears a bit. I think I had in my mind that "dark=serious=good", but writing for a character like Hanna and watching her moral compass erode made me almost feel like I was abusing her. I didn't want her to be trapped in that dark place. So after this, the story is going to start changing gears a bit, get back to the more typical Star Wars tone. It's slow, though, I wanted it to happen as a natural result of the story progressing.

I get the impression that Hanna's still suffering from PTSD from what she experienced on Ome, and never came to terms with it or the death of her father. Both of those things start to subconsciously come back on her. She's racked with feelings and emotions that she can't quite explain or even quantify, and she doesn't really have an outlet. T'ocs is too callused and stuck in his way to reach out to her when she needs help.

Duly noted, thank you. I've added something to the beginning of chapter 2 to that effect.

It took me a bit to decide what Hanna's guilt and PTSD would crystallize as, and I decided that she would, even if for a moment, become almost suicidally paranoid and suspicious, especially of those who use the Force. She doesn't understand it, she can't experience it for herself, and the most traumatic experiences of her life all have that same common denominator. Vader does indeed have plans, but Hanna is little more than a pawn in them at this point. Her unstable emotions make her lash out at whatever targets she can find, but she overestimates her own abilities since she's succeeded in pretty much everything that's been asked of her to this point.

Jahzer Qe-cora is one of my most favorite characters I've ever written. I love him to death. We'll be seeing a lot of him moving forward and seeing just what sort of man he is.

Dasnai was a rather offbeat creation. I don't even remember what gave me the inspiration for the actual planet itself, but I liked the idea of an Imperial planet that's more than the usual sort of cold, mechanical Imperial architectural style. We don't spend a lot of time there initially but we'll circle back to it later on in the story as well. I want to flesh it out more, but we'll definitely see later on that it's not nearly as perfect as it seems on the outside.

The gala was an idea that visualized in my mind as I was writing other things later on. I do enjoy a good bit of Imperial pageantry. And getting Hanna out of her comfort zone gave rise to some delightfully entertaining circumstances that we'll see in the next chapter.

Absolutely, can do! I appreciate all of the comments and kind words!

 

Not getting to the gala this installment, but this is still a fun chapter. Chyntuck Findswoman

Chapter Seven

Hanna thought she looked hideous. Her skin was the wrong colors in the wrong places, the blush on her cheeks was too bright, and her brows and lashes did nothing to match her eyes. And the worst of it was, she had not even started putting the makeup on yet.

“What am I doing?” She asked herself. She was staring at her own reflection in the mirror of the Arbiter's solitary refresher. Arrayed on the counter were all of the makeups, powders, liners and various other things that T'ocs and the lady at the cosmetics store they had blundered into assured her she would wear well. Some would smooth out the lines brought on by stress, others would cover up the scars and even out her complexion, she even had something to take out the stains left on her teeth by cigarra smoke.

But she did not know how to apply any of it. She had no idea how thick to make it, or how thin, or whether to stroke or to dab. She hardly even knew what went where.

She stared at herself, at the rugged forgetfulness of the features she had now. Once, she might have been cute. But that was years ago, long before she had ever set upon her current path. She never had any sort of use for it, for being the sort of girl who felt naked without their make up. For her, being naked meant walking down the street without her heavy armor on and having at least three high-powered weapons at immediate hand. Being considered pretty, or even just cute, was not a goal on her list of accomplishments in life.

Now, here she was. Having to play-act at being that sort of girl and without any idea of how to do it.

She ran a hand through her hair and let it fall back to where it had been, her bangs loose on her forehead, the rest a sloppy mop around her ears and the back of her neck. She should have trimmed it long ago, but ever since leaving direct Imperial employ, a crew-cut seemed excessive. Yet, having long hair under a helmet was a foolish idea; the bangs and longer back were a compromise. But for something like this, for such a high-class event, she fancied she would look rather out of place among the high-class women with their low-backed dresses and long, flowing locks.

No, she had no chance of fitting in at the gala. She also had no chance of standing out, at least as anything other than a laughingstock. About the best she could hope for was that she avoided attracting much attention, attended the gala and gathered was information she could. So long as no one dragged her out of the crowd and tried to make her dance for whatever insane reason people danced at these things.

“What in the osik am I doing?” Hanna put a hand to her forehead. “I don't even know how to dance.”

She looked at her face, at the tired bags under her eyes, at the wrinkles of stress around her forehead and mouth, at the crook to her nose where a break had never properly healed, at the slight sneer to her lip where a cut had scarred the flesh. There was nothing she could do to make herself look beautiful with these sorts of things, not even for a single night. The best she could hope for was to dab something here and something there to hide this or that, but no amount of powder would change the skin underneath it.

With a heavy sigh, Hanna picked up the light cloth that had come with the largest of the makeup kits. She had to at least try. She was already in the refresher; if she did not like the results, she could wash it all off and try again. Though she reckoned, as she dabbed a streak of skin-colored powder across her cheek, that she would need just about as long as she had until the gala started, about twenty-one standard hours at the most. And in that time, she still needed to sleep, and eat, and try on her dress after the tailor was done with it.

The dress. The dress had been a nightmare to find. No dress shops in Soriana would meet the two-day deadline; most of them seemed appalled that such a thing would even be asked. The dresses she found at these places were always showy, bright, and utterly ridiculous, covered with laces and spangles and ruffs and frills to the point where Hanna thought for sure she had seen bright avians doing mating dances on distant alien worlds that looked less silly. And the colors, the colors were the worst. Nothing could be subtle, nothing could be straightforward. If there were only two colors, it was considered a plain dress, perhaps even rather ugly. Most had three, four, even five, but not many different ones across the spectrum. Rather, it was complimentary colors, different shades of the same color, sometimes in a gradient, sometimes in stripes or even spots or blotches.

All she wanted was a plain dress, something simple, something she could keep clean and would not have to worry about having to care for. Something she would not grow fond of and could throw away the moment she was back aboard the Arbiter after the gala. It took them hours of walking, driving, riding in public transportation, more walking, arguing with snooty tailors and sales-beings, more walking, and finally flying back to the Arbiter without speaking to one another.

It was by complete chance that Hanna and T'ocs had found the tailor who had finally had the sort of dress Hanna wanted. Which, of course, did not fit. The tailor at least understood their position; he was the son of a military family, and one of his helpers had a relative who was going to the gala as well. The two of them were willing to get the dress ready for her as quickly as they could, which would still be cutting it close. They had even given them a discount.

It was a bit disturbing to see T'ocs sign the name Georg Shirid to the receipt, though.

She put the cloth down and looked at what she had done to her face. It was like looking at a doll. Her complexion was one uniform color from ear to ear, without shading or gradient or blemish, and all of the distinguishing wrinkles, scars and everything else were missing. Her eyes looked tiny against the glowing singular color of her cheeks, chin, forehead and nose.

She snarled at what she saw, grabbed a washcloth off the counter and ran water from the sink. As she wiped her face down and felt the makeup peeling bits of her skin off as it came away, she recited her Mandalorian curses into the cloth. T'ocs had not taught her many words of his native language, but he could not help himself from swearing at times, and she had picked up a few distinct words here and there. She peeled the cloth away from her face for a moment and looked down at the layer of pink on it.

She laughed. T'ocs was right. She almost had enough to prime and paint a wall. She had her face in her hands, and she was no closer to making herself up properly. This was an exercise in futility.

Hanna slammed the washcloth into the basin of the sink, then grabbed a handful of the cosmetics on the counter and scattered them across the room. Bits and pieces clattered across the walls and the floor, leaving streaks of various flesh and shaded colors across every surface. She dropped both hands onto the edge of the basin and hung her head, letting her shoulders slump and heaving out a tremendous sigh. She seemed to be sighing a lot since they had started thinking up this stupid plan.

She let her head hang for a moment, then looked up, into the mirror. Her face was still streaked with makeup but enough was gone to let the blemishes through again, like peeling a too-perfect paintjob off of a dirty, damaged wall. She wiped her hand across her face, smearing it even more, rubbing it, scrubbing it, scraping it and finally flinging it off of her face and across the mirror.

It took her a few moments, taking deep breaths, to calm herself down. It took her several more moments to wash out the cloth and use it to clean the mirror. When she had cleared it enough to be able to see herself in it again, she surprised herself. What little makeup she had left, just a bit here and a bit there, was actually effective at fulfilling its purpose. It hid her scars and minimized the other blemishes. She looked at herself for a moment, then used the washcloth to clean it up a bit more, removing the remaining excess, smoothing out edges, making it blend in.

It was not perfect. She doubted that the galaxy's best makeup artists could make her look like a holodrama star even with gallons of the stuff and full days with which to do it. But it somehow was accomplishing what she had wanted it to do in the first place. A little certainly went a long way.

She turned away from the mirror and started cleaning up the other scattered items from across the floor. She had plenty of time to practice it, and a lot of ways she could get it wrong before she got it right. But at least she knew now that it was not a completely hopeless endeavor. She would never wear makeup again after the gala was over, however. It was far too much effort for something that no one would notice or care about so long as she was wearing a helmet.

But until then, she had to pretend to like it. She thought, as she picked the rest of the scattered implements from the floor and put them back on the counter, that she would try the eyeliner next.

After poking herself in the eye, she decided to skip the eyeliner and put some blush on instead.

***

The Twi'lek tailor swept into the room again, his gold lace shirt barely covering any of his blue skin. The dazzling grin he flashed T'ocs as he came in helped allay the quiver he had in his stomach.

“Thank you so much for bringing her to us.” He said for the hundredth time. “I always relish a customer who appreciates minimalism and lets the boldness of color speak for itself.”

“And who hasn't the least idea of what to do to make herself look good, but doesn't like playing dress-up?”

“Exactly. It's a challenge. And I relish challenges.” The Twi'lek, An'tini by name, glanced back at the dressing room, both of his head-tails writhing with emotion. “Especially ones with a time limit.”

“Yes, thank you for having the dress ready on such short notice.” T'ocs paced toward a nearby chair, cane clicking against the polished stone flooring beneath. “I know having it sized to fit must take much longer than two days in a normal case.”

“Ah, but this is not a normal case, my friend. This dress may be my greatest work of art yet.”

“Greatest?” T'ocs looked around them, at the various dresses and dress-suits arrayed across the showroom floor, each of them more ostentatious than the last. Bright colors, lace ruffs, towering frills, shimmering ribbons, skirts that rode too high and backs and fronts that went too low. All of them far more fashionable, at least in the high-fashion sense, than the one Hanna had picked out.

“Greatest.” The Twi'lek pointed a finger toward the ceiling and held his other hand to his chest whist making his declaration. “Art comes about as a response to limitations, my friend. And I have never been more limited than now, with this dress, with this girl. Imagination balanced by practicality. Think of it!”

“I am thinking.” T'ocs glanced around for a chronometer, and could not find one. He tapped his cane on the floor as he sat down in the chair and cleared his throat. “I am thinking that we only have an hour until the gala.”

“Patience, my friend. You cannot rush perfection. The final fittings must be made while she is wearing the dress, they cannot be done on any mere model. It must be made to fit her and no other.”

T'ocs sighed through his nose. He tapped his cane against the floor a few times, before laying it across his knees and sitting back in the chair. He already had a dress uniform, without badges or emblems to denote when and where it was from, clothing a foam dummy a few short paces away. He knew that his fit, he had worn it a dozen or more times in the past, the only reason he head brought it here was to update the cut and take in the waist where the past year's worth of stress and bisection had removed several inches.

All they were waiting for was Hanna.

He honestly did not know what to make of this side of her. She had been so adamant about not wanting to dress up, not wanting to be made up or be primped and preened. It was all he could do to find a place that even made a monochrome dress, let alone one without any sort of adornment or additions. Dasnai was an Imperial planet on the Rim, which meant that everything bought here was either emulating or imitating something from the Core worlds. High fashion was not a product solely of the Empire, but it was the Imperial court that dictated it. And the dictation was: the more flamboyant and pretentious, the better.

It made finding a plain, ordinary, elegant dress impossible. Which made Hanna a very unhappy girl. At least until they had found this place, a small, crowded tailor shop on the very edge of Soriana, with an eccentric proprietor who was willing to accept the unusual request of turning the simple woman's sleeping gown, little more than a sleeve of fabric with holes in it, shaped in all the right places to keep it from falling off, into something that could be worn to a dance.

Whether it would work, or not, the fact that Hanna was willing to put up with it fascinated T'ocs. Also fascinating him was that, though she had spent hours working on her makeup over the past two days, she had yet to show T'ocs her face with it on. She had even come to the tailor's shop while wearing her helmet, and as far as he knew, she still had it on. If it were anyone else, he would have suspected that she was ashamed of her work. But since it was Hanna, he had no idea what she was thinking, or what she might have planned. She certainly was not going to attend the gala with her helmet still on.

Or maybe she was. He did not know anymore.

“Here she comes!” An'tini crowed, clapping his hands together with excitement. “Oh, it's so exciting!”

T'ocs stood up, leaning on his cane. He took a deep breath, completely uncertain of what, or who, would come out of the dressing room. Would it be Hanna? Or someone else dressed up to look like her? It made something in his stomach do a backflip with uncertainty, a feeling he had not experienced in a very long time.

The tailor's assistant, an older woman with a bob haircut, was the first to exit, the smile on her face wide enough to stretch from ear to ear. After her came Hanna.

She had taken her helmet off and had it under her arm, complementing the long black gloves she now wore, each one riding up past her elbow. Her dark hair was combed, cleaned and swept back, held in place by some sort of product that left it moist and shimmering, a pair of bangs trailing down her forehead on either side to frame her face. And she was indeed wearing makeup, not a lot, just a touch here and there, enough to minimize her scars and imperfections and bring out the color in her cheeks and eyes. It was easy to see that she had been working at getting the balance and touches needed, especially since her skin was so fair and pale from spending most of its time out of the light. But what drew T'ocs' gaze was the dress.

A brilliant shower of scarlet shimmered from narrow loops over her shoulders down her front to show her collar, but no cleavage. The soft synth-silk hugged her body, but did not constrict it, with no ornamentation aside from its own natural shine. It rode snug to her torso and down her hips, then spread itself around her legs, leaving her free to move about, with narrow slits cut into both sides to add to the flair, but not enough to show much within it. It was a rather conservative, modest dress all things considered. But against her pale skin and void-black hair, the color burst out like a supernova.

Hanna looked at T'ocs. She seemed almost embarrassed as she handed her helmet to the assistant and spun in place. “What do you think?” She asked.

The dress rode high on her back, almost above her shoulder blades, and the skirt did not flare or fly as she made her turn. It maintained a rather elegant, refined posture, a dress of culture, of class, elegance without showing off. The black gloves and her hair together created a very moody and dark contrast between them, her skin and the dress, the dark colors contrasted against her fair complexion, and the dress rode the line between. And Hanna's eyes above it all, their pale gray positively shining with delight. She thought she looked beautiful, and it showed in every move she made, every breath she took; it made her all the more radiant.

She looked at him, and he smiled at her. His heart was swelling with something he had not felt in a long time: pride. “You look wonderful, Hanna.”

She blushed, a bit of red creeping in under the color on her cheeks. “Thank you, buir.”

T'ocs looked at the Twi'lek tailor, who was positively bouncing with barely contained glee. “It's perfect.”

An'tini clapped his hands with a wide, bright grin. “I know! And the most brilliant part of all is the woman who wears it!” He rushed forward and took Hanna's hands in his own and kissing them, making her blush even more deeply. “You look lovely, my dear. You will be the toast of the gala, or my name is not An'tini of Ryloth!”

 

Some interesting stuff here, honestly. This scene is a bit out of my comfort zone, writing-wise, but I hope it turned out alright. Findswoman Chyntuck
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Chapter Eight

“That little weasel had no idea what he was talking about.” Hanna said to herself. “I'll bet he was lying about his name, too.”

Of course, she had made an impression on the gala. It was not necessarily a good one, at least not entirely, but it was certainly a large one. The ballroom was not a large place in itself, an open room of the governor's mansion where the floors were polished wood instead of metal or stone, and where the walls were decorated with paintings and flat-panel holos of ages and times long gone. The sides of the room had a few tables for refreshments and a small stage where the band was playing, but the center of the room was an open floor. This meant that whenever anyone entered the room, everyone saw them, and because there were only thirty to forty people in the room at most, there was little chance of hiding in a crowd.

It was not exactly pleasing on Hanna's part to find out that the gala she had spent so much time and effort preparing for had exactly three other people under the age of fifty in attendance, and one of them had walked into the room along with her. Or that the dress she wore, as simple and plain as it was, stood out amidst the grays, whites and blacks of the stoic formality everyone else dressed to like a red sun in the midst of an empty starfield. The ripple that had gone through the crowd of geriatric veterans and their rickety companions when she had entered the room had been rather obvious and not at all flattering.

Now she was staked out by the drink table, a glass of rather weak, bubbly liquor in one hand and two more in her stomach, watching old couples creak about on the dance floor or huddle in groups to talk, shout and laugh together. No one came near her, no one spoke to her, no one even glanced in her direction except when they thought she was not looking. Even T'ocs, who had valiantly played the role of her caring father for the first half-hour or so, had been steered away by the lure of old war stories being told in a circle by men old enough to have fought in the same wars he had and more besides.

At least the music was good. Very formal and Imperial, yes, with mostly strings and a couple of soft horns, played in the company of a single man tapping away at a drum. But it had a stately grace and formality about it, and was played as a decent enough tempo that it could indeed be danced to. Provided that you were not old enough to require assistance just to stand up, let alone walk.

Hanna sipped at her drink. The liquor was warm, and it was starting to go flat as it sat in her hand. It was not even very strong; she was used to whiskey, and this drink was little more than child's soda by comparison. She would have thrown it away, but she was pretty sure that what little entertainment she was wrangling out of watching a sixty year old man with two bad hips try to do a stately court dance would have been minimal without alcohol in her system.

That was all she had at this point. People watching. All of the old men and women here had stories to tell even if they would not talk to her. Some of them had old wounds that had been cured but would never heal, scars, cybernetic replacements, prosthetics. One man she saw was missing his right eye and, rather than have it replaced, he wore a black eye-patch over it. There was a woman who did not have a right arm below the shoulder, but that did not seem to keep her from laughing with her friends and old comrades. Another man had been horrifically burned at some point in the past, his face completely hairless and his ears reduced to mangled flaps of skin, but the ring in his voice when he spoke about his days in the Navy was still strong.

She wondered how many of these people had fought only for the Empire, and how many of them had fought for the Republic back in the day, like T'ocs and her father both had. Most of them probably had, which left her little wonder as to why T'ocs had hit it off so well with them. They fought in the same war, some of them may have even fought in the same battles he had. It may not have been on the same side necessarily, but T'ocs was a proficient liar, he played the part of Georg Shirid with an ease that made Hanna ill, right down to the slightly stooped shoulders and using his cane to support his right leg over his left.

T'ocs fit right in. She, of course, did not. The soldier's daughter, too young to have fought in any great wars, too pretty to get her hands dirty, standing by herself and wishing for the time to pass just a little bit faster. She regretted having made herself up at all. If she had walked in while wearing full armor, helmet in arm, she probably would have gotten a lot more respect, and at least garnered some conversation. But no, she had left all of that behind on the Arbiter. T'ocs had insisted that she bring no weapons, either, not even a vibroblade. It made her feel naked.

She turned as she heard a noise, another ripple going through the people around her. A stir was being created at the rear of the ballroom. The governor, Roan Price, was making his appearance, fashionably late, of course. He was a rather dry looking man, with a thin, long nose and closely-trimmed gray hair, wearing a dapper gray and white suit. With him was his wife, a rather stately looking woman with graying blond hair and wearing a patterned white dress, and behind her came another man.

Hanna stared at the last for some few moments. The man was around two meters tall with dark skin, his head shaved aside from a pair of bushy black eyebrows and a similarly-colored goatee, and he looked like he had been carved out of stone. Though he was wearing a formal uniform as everyone else was, she could see muscles ripple underneath, especially around his arms and neck.

He matched the description she had for Jahzer Qe-cora almost exactly.

She watched him cross the room, behind the governor and to one side, scanning every face he passed, eyes darting from being to being with practiced precision. Was he a bodyguard? A shadow? A plant of some sort? Hanna took a sip of her drink as he glanced in her direction to keep him from getting a good look at her face. He certainly was not here to enjoy the company of others. She recognized the look in his eye, he was a predator on the prowl, watching and waiting for someone to step out of line. She had seen that look on a hundred Hutt enforcers and a dozen or more Imperial agents and officers both of current and former employ.

That had not stopped her from killing any of their number, of course. But this man, he was a class-1, which put him several tiers above the sort of scum she was used to going up against. So what was he doing here, acting as the bodyguard for a local Imperial governor and attending a gala ball where only a handful of beings could have presented a threat even if they were handed a blaster rifle and a clean shot?

The governor was smiling and shaking hands as he came along the ballroom floor. Most of the men and women here he seemed to know, he greeted them with warm smiles of familiarity. Others, like T'ocs, he met with more formal nods and smiles as introductions were made. It was not until he came to Hanna where that smile and cheer seemed to waver, just for a moment.

“And who might you be, my dear?” He asked.

“Hanna Shirid.” She said, offering him her hand, just as T'ocs had told her. “Georg is my father.”

“Ah, I see.” The governor took her hand and gave it a rather cold and stiff shake. “I am glad you could join us.”

He swept on, his wife barely sparing Hanna a glance and his massive bodyguard not even looking in her direction. She drained what was left in her glass and turned to let it down on the table. “So glad I could be here.” She muttered. “I'd rather be watching paint dry.”

When she turned back to try and watch where the bodyguard was going next, she jumped in surprise. A man was standing in front of her as if he had appeared out of nowhere. She had not seen him at the gala previously, she would have remembered. He must have come into the room as a part of the governor’s retinue.

He was young, in his mid-twenties if she had to guess, and had meticulously styled jet-black hair and a complexion the shade of a good tan, his face clean-shaven down to the micron. He wore a rather dour black uniform with no decoration or styling, with black boots and a black belt with a gray buckle; the only other color on anything he wore was a decorative pin, a silver Imperial crest inlaid with black, on each side of his collar. He was well-toned, but not bulky, tall, but not towering, though certainly both bigger and broader than she was. And, as he turned to look at her, she saw that he had enchantingly warm brown eyes.

His sudden appearance was enough to catch her off-guard, but what he did next was rather more startling. He bowed to her, a formal, at-the-waist bow, one hand at his stomach, the other behind his back. As she straightened out, he looked her in the eye and spoke.

“Might I have this dance, miss?”

His voice was smooth, deep, with a thick Core accent that made the word dance sound like dahnss. He offered her his hand, and she, without really thinking about it, gave him her own.

“Sure.” She said in reply. She did not know what she was doing, but it was certainly the most exciting thing that had happened that evening and she was not about to let that slip away.

He was a full head taller than she was and had much longer legs, but despite his size, he moved with grace and ease as he led her out onto the dance floor. He did not drag her or force her to run to match his pace, and every step he took was measured, smooth and easy to follow. He paused as they reached the edge of the dance floor to let one of the older couples go by in the other direction, then motioned for her other hand with a raised eyebrow.

Hanna gave it to him. “Sorry.”

“Apologies are unnecessary.” He said in his velvety smooth voice as he moved them out further into the center of the ballroom. His right hand was around her left and vice versa, neither of them squeezing but both snug enough to not move about. “It's obvious you have not attended these sorts of functions often in the past.”

She huffed a laugh. “Try ever. And I apologize in advance for not being able to dance.”

“All you need do is follow my lead.” He spoke with such utter certainty, it sounded like he knew exactly who she was and what she was capable of. When, in reality, he did not have the least idea. “Do what I do, but do it backwards.”

“That sounds easy enough.”

“It should be.” He brought them to a halt and moved her hands up to a more formal dancing position, her right out away from her body and her left held up toward her shoulder. He had not stopped looking her in the eye since offering to dance with her. “Are you ready?”

She took a deep breath, swallowed, and said “Yes.”

Then, he swept her away. He was just as graceful while guiding her through the dance as he was when walking. And she somehow managed to be right there with him. Each step he took, she took, each move he made, she made. They moved to the music as it played on above them, around them, through them. They walked, they turned, they spun, sweeping across the dance floor in a steady, rhythmic pattern. In synchronicity, though far from flawless, a slip here, a stumble there. But neither broke the rhythm or gave up the dance.

The sounds of conversation and laughter around them faded away, until there was only the music, their partner, and the dance. There was only the rise and fall of the strings, the soft call of the horns, the steady tapping of the drum. There was only the man who guided her, his eyes urging her on, his nodding keeping her in time. There was only the woman following his lead, hardly knowing what she was doing, but light enough on her feet to follow. There was only the next step, the one after that, and another one beyond. The music and the dance flowed together, slow, graceful and easy.

A picture appeared in Hanna’s head, a picture of a leaf, released from the plant that had birthed it and falling toward the ground, tilting, spinning, floating upward and downward, this way and that, but never quite dropping. It kept its balance, it glided from each current of air to the next almost effortlessly, catching each breeze and gust and twirling within it, then going free before it could be carried away. It was the song that carried it, the music playing told it which way to go, how to stay in the air and keep from falling. Each note, each rise and fall, gave the little leaf all it needed to stay in the dance.

Then, the song ended. The dance stopped. The little leaf fell from its place in the wind and rested on the ground below. Hanna was left with the man who had guided her through the dance. Both of them stood still in the center of the dance floor. She was surprised to find herself short on breath for a moment.

Around them, the other couples were all clapping, their soft applause not turned toward the band who had been playing, but toward the two dancers in their midst. Hanna and the man both glanced around at the sounds of praise, at the smiles and grins. People were talking amongst themselves, not about the glory days, but about what they had just seen. One of the other attendees, the one with the eye patch, told those he was with that he had not seen a dance the likes of that since the days of the Old Republic. The one-armed woman looked pensive, perhaps even nostalgic. Even the governor looked rather impressed. Beyond them all, Hanna could see T'ocs, his expression warm and happy, his hands clapping along with his peers, but more out of pride than appreciation.

“I think they like us.” She said to her partner.

He did not smile, but one corner of his mouth did twist upward a bit in response. “Indeed. Are you willing to go once more?”

“There's no music.”

“Not yet.” He turned to look in the direction of the band, who were all looking at them as well. “If you please, something a bit more... enthusiastic this time.”

The band leader, a woman on a stringed piece she propped in the crook of her arm, nodded to her band-mates, they waited for the drummer to tap out the timing, and then all started to play together. The song was not the soft grace that the previous one had been, this one had drive to it, a strength and rhythm that reminded Hanna of the marches played over the loudspeakers during Empire Day festivities back on Empress Teta.

The man turned back to Hanna and raised his hands to hers again. “This time will be faster.”

“Bring it on.”

It was faster. The music had increased its tempo and the dance kept pace, the steps shorter and quicker. It was also more complicated, with half-step turns off of one foot, spins that went halfway around then back the other direction, and pivots that she had to lead instead of him.

And then he let her go with one hand and swept her out under his arm. She spun under his limb and stepped out, posed for a second with both of their arms outstretched, hands gripped together at the fingers. Then he brought his arm back, spun her back around the other way, and caught her before she slammed into him.

“Whoa.” She said.

“You are doing well.” He said, with utter sincerity. “Especially since this is your first time.”

“Guess I made the right call, then.”

“Which call was that?”

“Not letting them put me in high heels.”

“Ah.” The man led her into a turn, spinning them back toward the band's stand. “A wise decision.”

“I probably would have fallen over a dozen times by now if I had.”

“Probably.” He glanced to one side as they went into another spin. “Though, I am glad.”

“Glad for what?”

“That I noticed you standing by yourself at the refreshment table.”

“Well, the dressmaker did say that I would be the toast of the gala, I just wanted to be sure he was not lying.”

“I would say he was telling the truth.”

She turned her head sideways with a quizzical smile. “Is that flirting? Are you flirting with me?”

He looked at her. A smile flitted across his lips for just a fraction of a second before disappearing. “Merely stating facts.” He said instead, “I would no sooner toast any of the others present here.”

“Not a fan of older women?”

“Older people in general. They tend to smell of clothing freshener and stale beer.”

They turned again. Hanna spotted the governor talking with his maybe bodyguard nearby out of the corner of her eye. She ignored it. “Were you as bored as as I was?”

“When?”

“Before we started dancing.”

“I was slightly entertained listening to some of the stories being told, actually. The experience of veterans like these is important to remember, else we be doomed to repeat history.”

“Are you a soldier?”

“Of course. I would not be here if I were not.”

“What service?”

“Imperial Army, logistics branch. I was stationed on Saleucami until a few months ago when my unit was moved here. We ship out again in a few weeks.”

“Oh. I'd ask where, but, I'm sure you couldn't tell me even if you knew.”

“Indeed. What about you?”

“Oh, I'm not enlisted yet. My father and I are taking one last grand tour of the Empire together, then I'm enlisting in the Academy when we get back to Empress Teta.”

“Which service are you aiming for?”

“I don't know yet. Maybe the Army, the stormtrooper corps. Probably don't have the build for it, though.”

“Probably not. But, you never know.” He turned her around again, then stopped. The music had stopped, as well. The dance was over. Neither of them even really noticed that no one else had been dancing for most of the latter half of the song, because they would rather stand around the edge of the dance floor and watch instead.

“Well.” Hanna said. She took a deep breath, prepared for him to say his farewells. “Thank you for the dance.”

“Thank you.” He said, not yet relinquishing his hold on her hands. Instead, he drew both up and decorated them with a delicate kiss. His voice as he spoke was a lovely, deep purr. “Before coming to this dance tonight, I thought I had seen the best and most beautiful the Empire had to offer. I was wrong.”

Hanna blushed. She felt her whole face heat up from her cheeks spreading up to her eyeballs. “Well, that's... um. Very flattering.”

“It is also the truth.” He released one of her hands and motioned with the hand he now had free. “There is a veranda we can retreat to, if you wish, out of the way of this crowd.”

“I...” Hanna felt her head spin. It was probably the dancing combined with the drinks. It made it hard to think beyond what she was doing right then and there. But the friendliness in his eyes and gentleness of his manners gave her no reason to doubt his intentions. “Sure. A bit of fresh air couldn't hurt.”

“Agreed.” He released her hand, then tucked his arm around hers and led her across the ballroom, the crowd parting for them as they went. As they were crossing the threshold to exit the room, he leaned down to whisper in her ear. “Truth be told, my head was already spinning before that second dance.”

She laughed, and the door closed behind them.

 

An interesting theory! We shall see what happens, shan't we?

 

So this update is a day late (I try to put these up on Saturdays if I can) because I actually lost my desktop PC and my internet router to a power surge. Funny story, actually. Tree next to my house gets hit, cracks in half, the lightning travels down the trunk, into the ground, then jumps the five or ten feet to an outdoor outlet and into my house, proceeding to knock the power out. When I got the circuits flipped back on, my PC wouldn't boot and my internet was down. Had them surge protected and everything.

Lucky, I have a laptop to write on, bought a new router, and all of my writing projects, both fics and not, are backed up on Google Drive or OneDrive. So. Long story short, it's not been a fun weekend, but it could have been a lot worse. Here's the next chapter.

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Chapter Nine

Hanna woke up in her bunk aboard the Arbiter, her head filled with soft and happy thoughts, smiling up at the ceiling. The night was over. But the warm and fuzzy feelings she had fallen asleep with had not left her. She had done something the night before she had not done in a long time: enjoyed herself.

For a few hours, she had forgotten all about Darth Vader, all about the list, all about trying to hunt and kill someone. She had danced, she had laughed, she had talked for hours with a man she had just met. She did not care about anything else that might happen, all that mattered was that she had found a way to forget about how terribly unhappy her life had become, and found a person who made her smile and laugh in a way no one had since her father had died. He seemed to know her inside and out from the moment their eyes met.

And she had never even learned his name.

She swept a hand over her face, whisking the hair out of it and wiping the sleep-sand from her eyes. The topper to the whole wonderful night she had was that all of the liquor she had ingested had not given her a hangover. A little early-morning fuzziness, but no headache or sensitivity to the lights in her cabin. Hanna was not used to spending a night drinking without side effects, it made her question just how strong the whiskey she usually drank was, or perhaps how desensitized she had become to the effects.

She got up slow. She did not see a reason to hurry. There was no pressure, no time constraint, no need to return to normalcy quite yet. But her stomach was growling and she was thirsty, so she got up, dropping her blanket down onto the floor. She noticed that her dress was lying on the floor already, she had slipped out of it and gone straight to bed upon returning from the gala. She looked at it for a moment, then slid it to the side and opened up her cabin's narrow clothing closet. She picked out a rather loose pair of pants and a simple shirt she could slip into without too much effort, then ran her hands through her hair to put it back behind her head and left her cabin.

T'ocs was sitting at the table, looking into a projection that looked like a public advertising post of some sort. He had his fingers interlaced and his hands leaning up against his chin, deep in thought. Hanna did not even notice, dropping into the seat across from him and laying down across it, one leg crossed over the other.

T'ocs glanced up at her under his brows. “You look like you had a good night's sleep.” He commented.

“I did. What time is it?”

“Almost noon. Do you need painkillers or stimcaff?”

“I'm not hungover, just... I don't know. I feel relaxed, light, peaceful...”

“Happy?”

“Whatever it is, I like it.”

T'ocs did not comment. He returned to his study of whatever information he had up in holo in front of him.

“What are you so involved in?” Hanna asked him.

T'ocs scrolled through the information, still reading. “Investigating a lead I happened upon last night at the gala while you were dancing.”

Hanna looked at him for a moment, and when he did not elaborate she turned around so she could put her feet on the floor. “What did you say?”

“I said that while you were otherwise occupied, I managed to gain some ground on accomplishing our mission here.”

Hanna's good mood had evaporated by the time he finished speaking. “Well, I am sorry that I took your advice literally about trying to enjoy myself and behave like a normal person for one night. I supposed my teenage hormonal swings are to blame for it, or perhaps severe emotional repression brought on by the trauma in my past.”

T'ocs remained engrossed in his study, face expressionless. “I am not blaming you or pointing fingers, Hanna. I rather enjoyed the night myself. But tell me, how much useful information did that rather dapper man you were dancing with give you?”

“He was sweet and he said I looked beautiful so I'm sorry if I forgot to ask him questions about who might or might not be Jahzer Qe-cora. He probably wouldn't know anyway, he's an Imperial Army officer whose unit is here to help the governor with supply and logistics projects, and he hasn’t been able to socialize because he’s been buried with work. He probably doesn't even know the names of the other people in his apartment complex.”

“Does he know your name?”

“T'ocs, what is this?” Hanna was rather angry. She did not like his insinuations, or the fact that he seemed determined to ruin the best morning he had had in a very long time. “Since when are you interrogating me about the man I danced with? Did you just decide to start acting like you think a father should act?”

“Hanna...”

“I'm honestly surprised that you pick now, of all times, to start going after me for this. I mean, are you jealous of him, that I was giving someone else attention aside from you?”

T'ocs straightened up and shouted at her. “Hanna!”

“What?” She shouted back.

His voice fell back to its usual tone, but he did not lean back toward the hologram. “I am not jealous, and I am not trying to act like your father. I am trying to keep you on point, and focused. We have a job to do, and I have something that I think will help us with that.” He tapped a key and brought up a mirrored image of what he was looking at on her side of the table, allowing her to read it. “I was speaking with some of the governor's inner circle of friends at the gala. Most of them have been friends with the governor for years, politicians, service veterans, business owners, a very closely-knit group, including his bodyguard Rondo who I am sure you noticed.”

“I saw him, yeah. So what?”

“So, none of them could be Qe-cora, because they all have known and lengthy records here on Dasnai, far too long to match Qe-cora's service description. Except one.” He pointed at the hologram. “This is the apartment of one Chase Resdove, the only member of that inner circle I was not able to observe or speak with at the gala. According to the others, he is young, rather tall, and has only been here on Dasnai for a short time, working as an adviser of some sort to the governor outside of the usual channels. If Qe-cora is anyone close to the governor, it has to be him.”

“Interesting.” Hanna was curious now. She scrolled through the information, only to find that there was not a lot there. “So, why did you pull up this guy's apartment? Why didn't you just look into his records somewhere in the governor's files? There has to be a personnel profile for him somewhere, right?”

“That is the issue, and the core to my suspicions. The man is a ghost. He has no public records anywhere I could find, at least not under that name. No hospital or medical records, nothing in the public transport or tourism logs, not even a public comm number or address. Mister Resdove leaves very light footprints as he walks. The only way I found this apartment was through a backdoor access into a privately-screened apartment building's tenant list, which I only got into because I noticed that there was an apartment building that showed up on the holocomm listings without any tenants in it. Basically, it's a complex for those who want to live off of the grid, away from the pressures of life.”

“And you found out he was there anyway.”

“His name is on the lease, anyway. They had to keep a file of that somewhere. It took me most of the morning to get in through their encryption and firewalls, and this is all I came away with.”

“A name, a layout of the apartment, and a square footage estimate. No maintenance reports, no holocomm records, no billing information, no indication of the floor he lives on, not even a picture of him. He really is a ghost.”

“We need to scout out this apartment. Whether he is there or not, we need to know where this apartment is, how we can access it, and whether we can pull off a covert elimination there.”

“We also need to figure out if this guy actually is Jahzer Qe-cora.”

“How do you suggest we do that?”

Hanna opened her mouth to reply, but realized that she had no idea. “Um... trace him somehow? Find out his routines, what he does, who he is?”

“The more we stay around him, the greater chance there is of him noticing us. And if he notices us, he will kill us. Remember what Vader said, he is a ruthless killer who was trained from birth to never hesitate, only execute.”

“But if we're wrong, I might be killing an innocent man.”

T'ocs nodded. “That is a reality we both must face. We cannot afford to take a risk in this matter, even if it means the death of someone who was not our target.”

“But killing one of the governor's advisers? Won't someone notice? Won't that turn the entire planet against us? He's attached to an Imperial official, somebody's going to notice if he were to be killed.”

“Only if we do it wrong. No bombs this time, no flash, nothing that will be noticeable or obvious. We need to be quick, decisive and subtle, which have not been our strong suits in the past.”

“No, not really. I hope you have a plan.”

“This is your call, Hanna. Remember? This mission is yours to plan and run.” He waved at the hologram. “You have the same information I do, now. So you tell me: what is the plan?”

Hanna licked her lips. The morning had started so well, too. But her head was still clear, and the ideas were coming quick and easy. “First of all, I'm going to get some food.”

T'ocs smiled at her. It was a tired smile, but it was still a smile. “Good plan. There should be some freeze-dried nerf sausages in the cooling unit if you want more than army rations. And the leftover crepes from the restaurant we went to two nights ago as well.”

Hanna smiled back. The air was clear again between them, they were back to being a team. She got up and headed for the Arbiter's galley. “While I'm doing that, get me a topographical map of the buildings around that apartment and find me a location I can stake out from. I want a look at this place up close and in person before we go any further.”

***​

Up close and in person was a matter of perspective, of course. Surveying from a distance was something she was used to at this point. One of the first weapons that T’ocs had trained her with was his beloved sniper rifle, how to mount it, to brace, to sit and wait for hours, even days for something to happen. She was not very good at that part, was the thing, patience was not a strong suit of hers. But the other mechanics, those were easy.

Everything up to two kilometers away could look close through the scope of her laser rifle. When combined with the optics in her helmet, Hanna could zero in on a credit chit sitting on a table at a distance that made it invisible to the naked eye. And the beam focus and flash suppressor attachment she had on the rifle's muzzle meant each shot could shave the engraving off of that chit while leaving the table and the rest of the room intact. It lost a good deal of its raw power, of course, but the added precision and stealth had served her well in the past.

But this was not an assassination mission, not yet. So her rifle was aboard the Arbiter still, and she was armed only with a pair of macrobinoculars.

Laying on the top of a nearby industrial data crunching center, a simple gray blanket draped over her to camouflage her form, Hanna was making sure to take her time. On a mission like this, a thorough survey meant everything, and she needed to discover every possible bit of data she could before any sort of action was taken. The apartment was closed to outsiders unless specifically invited by one of the residents, and nearly all of its records were kept off of any data storage system accessible from the government and public sides. It was a true private residence.

It was odd. The building she was looking in on did not seem all that remarkable from the outside. A simple cloudcutter with banks of windows on each side and the same rounded corners typical of all of the buildings she had seen on Dasnai. But the windows were, by and large, tinted so as to make them completely opaque from the outside, looking rather like mirrors. It made surveying the interior all but impossible from her vantage point. She had switched over to a combination of thermal scans and a sonar mapping view, looking for heat sources and counting of the separate rooms and floors until she found the apartment T'ocs had indicated.

Also of note was how solitary the building felt. There were no walkways attached to or leading from it, no landing pads attached to it at any height that she could see, and no speeder traffic anywhere around it. Isolated, alone, part of the city yet separate from it.

“Found it.” She said. “Eighty-ninth floor, the west-most flat. The sonar map matches the layout of the apartment from the file, and I'm picking up one thermal signal inside.”

“Can you see inside at all?” T'ocs asked in her ear, his voice emerging through the tiny commlink speaker she had wired there.

“No. The windows are tinted. I'd have to get into the building to see it.” She ran her binocular view over the outside of the building again. “Building exterior is smooth, can't climb it without the proper gear. No external vents or emergency exits I can see on this side.”

T'ocs sighed. “So the only way into that flat is to go in through the door. That complicates things.”

“Not necessarily.” Hanna shifted her weight a bit, letting her free left arm slip back under her right and widening her view of the apartment by adjusting the dial on top of the binocs. “The building's structurally sound enough that I think we could utilize a more dramatic solution.”

“Not more explosives, Hanna. The collateral damage...”

“It would be worth it if we took care of a class-1 without actually getting close enough to him for him to fight back.”

“It would also kill dozens, maybe hundreds of innocent people if even part of that building collapses.”

Hanna swallowed hard. “Acceptable losses.”

T'ocs paused in his reply, just long enough for her own words to echo back on her in sickening reverb through her own ears. “These are good people, Hanna. I’ve been out there, I’ve walked these streets. This is not an untamed planet full of deadbeats and killers, this is a civilized world. That apartment might be filled with people just trying to live their lives out of the public eye. You'd end all that for them, just to kill one man.”

“It doesn't have to be that way, T'ocs.” Hanna insisted. “We can pack a charge that would only take out that corner of the building. It's got a rounded framework, it should be able to sustain that sort of stress without collapsing.”

“Are you willing to take that chance?”

Hanna took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She saw lights dance in front of her, beams of energy flashing, bodies lying on the ground. Men, women, children, all races, creeds, ideologies and statuses. And she saw Darth Vader, his expressionless mask towering over her, stentorian breathing pulsing through her ears. In front of him, he held a holographic projector, and hovering between them was a shaky blue three dimensional representation of a list.

“Whatever it takes.” She said. Her eyes opened. “I'm willing to do whatever it takes to strike names off of that list. For all we know, if we let Qe-cora walk away, he could kill thousands of people a month from now, or even a week. We have a chance, we go for it. No hesitation. We follow our orders.”

T'ocs was silent for a good, long while. It gave Hanna a chance to catch her breath, to let the tension drain from her shoulders. She felt a trickle of sweat roll down her cheek past her eye, and she adjusted the view on her binocs to an infrared view. The figure inside of the apartment was moving, they were coming toward the big window at the corner of the building. She refocused her view and zoomed in closer, taking in the contours of the hazy yellow, red and white figure that was the man she was going to kill.

“I have an idea.” She said aloud. “There have to be some ways to get into the building, don’t there? I mean, there has to be an actual door somewhere to let people in and out?”

“Typically, yes, unless they have invented teleportation technology specifically for the clientele of this one building.”

“I’m gonna move over to another building and look for the entrance.” Hanna slid backward away from the edge of the roof and got up, swinging the blanket around her body like a makeshift poncho. She was wearing her old armored bodysuit underneath it, not her beskar’gam, mostly because it could at least partially pass as normal clothing. Mandalorian armor very much could not.

“Don’t make too much of a spectacle of yourself. Even if the building security doesn’t notice you, if Qe-cora is there, then he might.”

“I’ll be careful.” She clipped the binocs back to her belt and made her way across the roof to the emergency stairs. Unlike most Imperial construction, Dasnai buildings were built with plenty of safety protocols and regulations, including emergency stairs built onto the exteriors in case of fire or other events. Which meant that the apartment she had been trying to look in on was either in violation of those regulations, or there was a stairway that she had not seen. And she had searched pretty thoroughly.

“So, if this place doesn’t have an external access ladder for emergencies, there has to be something else for them to comply with regulations, right? Can you look that up somewhere on the files you have?”

“That thought did occur to me. I looked into it, and apparently the building has what amount to escape pods in most of the suites.”

“Escape pods?” Hanna mounted the ladder and started her descent. “Really? They’re that rich?”

“Well, crude amalgamations of escape pods, in any case. Certain parts of certain rooms can be ejected from the building proper and then float down to the ground on repulsorlifts. I won’t deny them being rich, though.”

“So instead of climbing down a ladder to leave the building in case there’s something like, I don’t know, a fire, they think it’s safe to eject themselves out of the building on a tiny platform and let it fall all the way down to the ground instead. No, that makes perfect sense.”

“I would guess that they did it for reasons of building security. They do not have the ladders there to prevent the sorts of intrusions we are going to have to attempt.”

Hanna looked at how much further she had to descend, then kicked her feet out of the metal rungs and slid down the rest of the way, boots and hands guiding her down. She hit the ground with a grunt. “I mean, even if it works, the repulsorlifts would probably blast craters into whatever buildings they landed on. Or just smash right through one of the walkways and send some other people falling to their doom.”

“I doubt the people in that building would be concerned more about the welfare of others if their flat were on fire. They’d be more concerned with staying alive.”

Hanna grunted. She started walking. “I’m going to case the bottom of the building, look for any service entrances or other ways that the staff and patrons get in and out.”

“Good call.” T’ocs’s voice paused for a moment, but she could hear him muttering to himself on the other end.

“What was that? I didn’t copy.”

“I said that I can’t believe there isn’t more information out there about this bloody apartment. There is nothing. No advertisements, no listings in any of the real estate holozines or HoloNet circulars. Nothing made available to the public at all if they wanted to live there. It only exists in the most official of records. Even the blueprints that I found are from the initial building permits, and they’re years old.”

“Well, there’s only so much you can do from there. No need to swear about it.”

“Since when are you hung up on swearing? I hear you practice your Mandalorian curses into the refresher mirror at night before you shower.”

“I’m not. I just figure it’s worth saving the right bloody words for the right bloody time.” Hanna turned a corner and started moving down a busier street, working her way toward the apartment building but making sure not to stand out against the flow of foot traffic. A lot of smart-looking business people were out and about around her, it was either lunch or supper time and the shut-in office workers were out looking for food. She gave one of them, a rather rotund man with a salt and pepper beard, a nod as she passed him. He glanced at her and nodded back.

“Point taken. I’m going to keep looking though things on my end, keep me updated on what you find. And be thorough, there’s no need to rush ahead and make a mistake that would have been avoided if you took your time.”

“Yeah, I know.” Hanna put her finger to her ear. “I’m in public, so I’m going to go dark for a bit. If something happens, I’ll give you a shout.”

“Affirmative. Oya, ad’ika.”

 

Bit of a shorter chapter today. I actually heavily revised this section of the story from my initial draft after I realized, upon re-reading it, that things moved too quickly without enough being explained. So I shuffled some stuff around and, end result, this story is drafted at 21 chapters as of right now. I'll be posting these every Saturday (hopefully) until I've exhausted my reserve, and hopefully by then I'll have more written so we can keep going uninterrupted.

anyway

Let's dive back in.
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Chapter Ten

A day’s worth of surveillance certainly paid off. Hanna adjusted the collar on her work uniform. She was pushing a hover-cart full of nondescript work uniforms that the laundry service's records told her belonged to the apartment's staff and headed for the service entrance she had discovered on the previous day. Seeing the laundry service come and go had been a bit of luck, they were the only service she had seen that seemed to be handled by an outside contractor and not by people within the apartment itself. Her loose plan was to get inside of the apartment, do exactly what the laundry service was supposed to do, and then to leave. This was a mission to gather more intelligence about the apartment's interior, nothing more. She doubted that laundry service for the maintenance staff even went to the floor the maybe-Qe-cora's room was on.

The laundry service had been easy as pie to infiltrate, ambushing the speeder after its last service stop and stunning the sole employee inside; she had left the work woman stunned and cuffed in the back of the service speeder and acquired her credentials and uniform, which should be enough to get her inside. The issue would be if they had a list of the employees somewhere, or worse, hologram images of them, and she would obviously not be on there. She looked something like the woman she had replaced, they were both short, had dark hair and pale skin, but anything more than a cursory glance would destroy the masquerade.

But the weakest part of any security system was the people designated to keep an eye on it. Holocams could be baffled or wiped in a number of ways, but the tech needed to do that varied wildly and was often very expensive. Motion detectors, infrared sensors, electronic and mechanical locks, she could run into any of it or none of it, and more than that besides. The only reliable method that worked across any system, and the only one available to Hanna at the moment, was to somehow trick or fool the guard or guards on duty.

Hanna had left the majority of her arms and equipment on the laundry speeder, she had a single long knife, not even a vibroblade, stuffed into her boot and that was all. She figured a weapon scanner would not pick it up against the similar material in the cart. If it did, then she had an alternate plan. It involved a lot of blood and dead security guards. She would rather it not come to that, however, since that could mess up her opportunities for later actions against Qe-cora.

The service entrance was a double-door in the side of the building that was actually below ground-level, a level below the apartment's main entrances. It was accessible via ramps that were formed from narrow alleys just beside the apartment building itself. It helped, actually, because that meant whatever happened would be out of the way of any potential passers-by.

Hanna eased down the ramp and went to the door, surveying the surroundings as she went. The apartment itself was just as clean and nondescript here as it was above, with sheer, featureless walls and no right angle corners, no graffiti or street tags anywhere to be seen, and not so much as a discarded ration container littering about. She did not see any obvious security devices, no black bulbs that indicated the presence of holocams, no sensors in the walls or floors, but that only told her what she already knew: that whoever had built this apartment cared a lot about security. The most secure places were usually the ones that did not look secure from the outside.

She went up to the featureless door, turned the cart to the side, and knocked. There was no lock, no latch or knob or anything to open it from this side. Just plain, smooth metal doors. Her knuckles rang against it and let the sound reverberate. She had no idea if this was the actual procedure, or if there was a procedure, but she figured that her cover accounted for any mistakes she made.

The door did not open. Instead, the panel to the side of it, one that had been recessed into the wall and hidden by a sliding wall section, opened, revealing a small scanner and a speaker. The former made her bit her lip, but it was the latter that proved to be the more immediate problem.

“State your business.” An official-sounding voice squawked.

Hanna hesitated for a moment to gather her words. “Um, I'm Fina Nasr, I'm with the Soriana Quick Cleaning service. I've come to pick up the work laundry.”

The speaker was quiet for a moment. “You must be new.”

“Um, yeah, first day, actually.” She paused for a long and what she hoped was an awkward moment before injecting a bit of teenaged angst into her voice. “Oh no, did I do something wrong?”

“You aren't following the proper procedures. All contractors have to scan their retinas into our system to confirm their identity. Also, you need to be registered in the system ahead of time, you can't just show up to the door and expect to be let in.”

“Well... I didn't know no one told me and they said that the regular person on this route was sick so they threw me in a speeder and told me to start driving and now I'm in trouble and I'm gonna get fired because I couldn't complete my route and I'll have a load a clean uniforms when I get back and they're all going to wonder what happened and it'll be my fault because I'm the new girl and...” She let her voice trail off. Then she made it so small and quiet that it hurt her throat a bit to even speak. “I'm sorry. I'll go back, they'll send someone else out who knows the procedures.”

She had half-turned and was worried that she had misplayed her hand. Then the voice arrested her as it re-emerged through the speaker. “Wait, don't leave. This goes against all of the procedures, but we do not want to wait to have the delivery done either, the entire schedule will be thrown off for the day.”

She came back to the door, clutched her hands together, and squealed so loudly her own knees almost buckled. “Oh thank you! Thank you, sir!”

“This is only temporary.” The man on the other end of the speaker did not seem to notice or mind, or in any case did not shake his professionalism. “The minute you return to the Quick Cleaner's, you must be registered if you are to work this route in the future.”

Hanna took a moment, cleared her throat and composed herself. “I understand, sir.”

“Put your right eye up to the scanner.”

She obeyed. A blue light pulsed for a moment, held steady for another moment, then disappeared, leaving stars and sparkles in its place. She blinked hard to try and clear it.

“I am setting up a temporary security clearance for you, it will only be valid for the next two hours, after which it will be removed from the system entirely. So please do not take long.”

“No, sir.” The door creaked as the security seal released, then hissed and retracted into the side of the building. She was staring down a long corridor with only a single door, on the right side, and a small window on the left. She grabbed the cart and started walking. She saw, as she drew level to the window, that there was a rather officious and severe-looking security guard in there, and he locked eyes with her.

“The maintenance closets are down the hall, fifth door on the right.” He said, voice echoing through the PA system embedded in the wall above the window. “There will be a laundry pile for you to pick up of all of the dirty uniforms, but there may be others scattered around the room. Not all of the maintenance workers here believe in organization.”

“Right. Thank you again, I'll be sure to grab them all and leave you all of the clean ones you need.”

He nodded. “Be quick. My shift ends in twenty minutes, and I do not want to have to explain this to the next guard who comes on duty after me.”

Hanna shook her head, already starting to move down the hallway. “No, sir, thank you sir! I won't be long!”

She turned and headed down the hallway, pushing the cart out in front of her. She could not bother suppressing a smile. She had never counted deception and infiltration among her strengths, but, it turned out that she could be a competent liar.

And, she realized, she had an in. She had a way to get back into the apartment, at least for the next two hours. She did not even need to break in. And after those two hours, her information would be wiped, removing any trace that she was ever here. At least until someone searched Qe-cora's apartment. That presented her with a very, very big opportunity that she may not have again. She filed the information away for the moment and focused on her job.

The hallway was long, and there were not a lot of doors. The other rooms she passed were not marked, either, so she was not sure if the upstairs access was at the end of the passage or if she had already passed it at some point. That was something she would have to figure out, but not right now, the guard was already paying too much attention to her. Opening random doors would make her too suspicious. It took her some time to find the fifth door on the right, marked Maintenance in black paint stenciled on the front.

The door did not open up with her approach. She waved at it, stepped closer, moved further away, jumped up and down, and searched the whole edge of it for another scanner. Then, she tried pushing it. The door opened. Hanna rolled her eyes and pushed the cart inside.

The maintenance room was about what she expected. A small, cramped closet about as big as her cabin back aboard the Arbiter, with a variety of tools and cleaning supplies on shelves, a large bucket on a repulsorlift base with a mop sticking out of it, and a rack of nondescript one-piece jumpsuits. Most of the latter looked rumpled and recently worn, and a few had stains, dirt and dust on them. Not a terribly dirty place, then, just dirty enough to require sanitary jumpsuits every day or so.

Hanna got to work. The jumpsuits were actually rather hefty, made of some sort of synth-weave material that was probably waterproof and designed to repel stains. She had to take all of them off of the metal hooks where they hung and lay them on the floor, then unpack the stack of them she had in her cart and hang each one up individually. It took her a bit longer than she was expecting, and the uniform she was wearing did not ventilate well in the cramped closet. By the time she had slid the last of the uniforms into her cart and hung the last one up, she had trickles of sweat running down her face and dirt all over her hands. She gave the door a shove, thanked the designers who thought to put the door on a double-sided hinge, and headed back down the hallway the way she had come.

As she passed the guard, who gave her a nod, she said, “I'll be sure to know the procedures next time.”

“I hope so. Thank you for being expedient.” He bent over and pressed a button somewhere. A short, sharp buzzer sounded and the door opened up. “Have a good day.”

“You, too!” Hanna gave the cart a shove, let it drift out through the door, then departed behind it while giving the guard a jaunty wave. Once again, she could not suppress her smile.

 

I'll throw up a bit of a content warning here before we get things rolling. This chapter opens with a rather violent death. Not much beyond that, but I figured that an excess warning was better than no warning at all.

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Chapter Eleven

An hour later, Hanna had stashed the speeder and the unconscious employee of the cleaning company out behind the largest pub she could find and walked back to the apartment. She was wearing her armor now, though she had a blanket draped over it and was not wearing her helmet, disguising it from casual or far-away view. She was also holding a small utility crate under her arm that held some of her more visible weaponry, though not her sniper rifle. That would have been too visible and too obvious regardless. No, she had her high-powered blaster pistol and her wrist gauntlets in there, the former of which might or might not be strong enough to punch through reinforced glass.

The glass between her and the security guard, for instance.

The conversation with T’ocs about this had been short and to the point. She had an in, and it was something that she would not be able to get again. They both agreed that she needed to go for it. If she could get all the way to the apartment without raising any alarms, she could kill the man inside just as quietly and then escape. Whether or not he was Jahzer Qe-cora was almost immaterial at this point. Neither one of them wanted to take the chance that he wasn’t, and might detect her infiltration if she just went out looking for information. This needed to be swift, clean and quiet.

She walked up to the door without speaking, without looking up or around. After touching the panel just to the side of the door, she held her right eye to the light that appeared. For a moment, she worried that her identification would not be valid anymore. Then, she heard a chirp, and the door beside her opened up, sliding away without hesitation. She hitched up her shoulders and walked inside.

The security guard looked up at her as she walked in. It was a different security guard now, a woman with a round face and a squat body. Her face twisted in confusion and anger. “Who are you?” Came her angry voice over the PA system, “How did you get in here?”

“Walked in through the door.” Hanna said. She dug into the box she was carrying with her left hand. “I have something here for someone who lives in this building.”

The guard was reaching for something, Hanna guessed that it was probably an alarm. “I'll need to see some credentials.”

“Right here.” Hanna pulled her heavy blaster out of the box, swung it over and pulled the trigger twice, rapid. The initial bolt blew a large hole through the glass, then the second shot caught the guard in the chest, carried her back up out of her chair and into the far wall. The reports were rather loud in the long hallway, as was the sound of the guard collapsing to the ground. But Hanna paused, waiting, and listening, and there was no immediate alarm, no shouts or bright lights.

She was inside.

Hanna swept the blanket off of her body and let it drop to the floor, then holstered her pistol and pulled the gauntlets out to slide them onto her hands. She smashed her fist against the glass between her and the security room. Her gloves were made of forged beskar and lined with impact compensators, designed to let her punch whatever she wanted without breaking her hands. The reinforced glass, struck right where she had already blown a hole through it, stood no chance.

She climbed through the window and into the room and looked over what the guard had been able to see. She had a grainy holofeed to the outside of the door, an override switch that would let her seal the door from inside, a monitor and abbreviated keypad to operate the eye scanner, a commlink system that could reach both the outside PA and the one in the hallway, and that was about all. Everything else was a desk full of papers, manuals and regulatory pamphlets, the sort private businesses circulated to make sure their employees were following procedures.

After flipping the override switch and sealing the door, Hanna smashed the commlink and went looking through the pamphlets for anything useful. Most of it was business fluff, about how to follow the schedules and regulations and ensure the building was safe and quiet. But one older, more faded document caught her eye. It was a layout plan for the apartment's maintenance areas, including the emergency stairwells, from the basement all the way up to the penthouses.

Hanna smiled to herself, grabbing the paper and tucking it into a belt pouch. She knew that it was only a matter of time before someone noticed the guard's death. She had to move.

It took her only a minute or so to take her wrist gauntlets out of the box and put them on. They were some of the only parts of her armor that were actually detachable now, everything else was built, forged and sewn together. And they had some of her best weapons built into them, so leaving them behind wasn’t a smart decision. She made sure all of the connections were good and that they would not move around, then she put her helmet on. She would leave the box behind, there was nothing about it to trace it back to her, and she did not need to carry her weapons out of sight anymore.

Climbing back out through the window, Hanna pulled the layout map out again. Her helmet scanned it in as she looked it over, inserting it into the basic floorplan that she had T'ocs had been able to liberate from the city’s dataservers. It filled in a couple of important holes in her intel, including that she was about six doors down from a maintenance stairwell that would take her right up to the floor she needed.

She tossed the map back into the security room and started walking. By using the maintenance stairs, she would minimize the potential beings she might possibly encounter between where she stood and Qe-cora's apartment. Thus, minimizing potential impact on the building's routine and potential casualties. The less she had to do in order to complete her mission, the better.

As she started walking forward, Hanna also checked to make sure her commlink was off. Operational procedure was for her to go silent, helping to ensure the element of surprise. Even burst transmissions that were heavily encrypted, such as the ones Hanna and T'ocs used to talk to each other, could still be detected, and their presence alone might be enough to alert someone to the fact that something was going on. Thus, comm silence. That meant she did not have T'ocs’ advice, and had to do this on her own.

The stairs were past the maintenance closet she had been in before, but the hallway looked much the same beyond it as it had before: gray and white tile floors, nondescript off-white walls and bright lumina panels in the ceiling that frightened away any errant shadows. Hanna felt distinctly like she was sullying the subtle inference toward uniformity and perfection that the apartment complex was trying to convey. And she was enjoying every moment of it.

She reached the door marked Stairs and gave it a gentle push inward. The door's frictionless hinges swung without a sound, opening to a rather industrial-looking stairwell, with metal stairs and no color on the walls aside from the raw taupe construction paneling that had been used to build them. Aesthetics apparently did not matter when the only beings seeing them would be the hired help.

Hanna checked her map. She had previously estimated Qe-cora's apartment being on the eighty-ninth floor. That meant she had a lot of walking ahead of her. That also meant she had time to try and formulate a plan.

Walking up to the door of his flat and knocking was too simple. There was every possibility of surveillance around the flats themselves; she had been in places before where each room had their own holocam feed directly outside of their door, allowing them to see visitors before admitting them. She highly doubted that a place this uptight about security would have anything less. And the moment he spotted a stranger, much less someone in Mandalorian armor, outside of his door, he would either button down and call security, or activate the escape pod and eject himself from the building entirely, leaving her empty-handed and having alerted him to her presence.

No, approaching the apartment directly was not a good idea. She brought up the floorplan she had as she climbed another flight of stairs, letting the hologram rest in her view in place of the boring walls and floor around her. There was so little information, all she knew was that there were three rooms in the flat itself: a central living room that sat at the very corner of the building, a connected bedroom off to the right, and a small kitchen and refresher off to the left. The only entrance was the front door. There was no conveniently-sized vent system for her to crawl through, and the maintenance stairway would land her almost a half of the floor away from it with no attached rooms or places to hide.

Hanna studied the plan for a good, long while, looking and thinking through every possible option she had of entry. There were not many. But she knew that the door was not an option. And there was no other entrance into the flat from that level. She did not have the equipment to blow through one of the walls and make her own door, or to go to one of the other apartments and either come up through the floor or down through the ceiling. She would either need a lot of explosives, a laser welder with a lot of fuel, or a lightsaber. She only had a few explosives, no laser welder, and there was no way she would ever carry a damn lightsaber around unless she was taking it to Darth Vader after killing its previous owner. Or after killing Darth Vader.

She frowned at the floorplan. This was a secure building, inside and out, and it was looking like the only option for her to gain entry into her target's apartment was the worst one possible. And she doubted that her strategy of walking up and knocking on the door would work twice. To top all of it off, she was on a strict timeline. If she was going to leave without raising any alarms, she needed to leave while her security access was still good.

What other possible entrance could there be? No fire exits, no emergency entrances, no way to get in or out except the door. It had to be an extraordinarily oppressive sort of place to live, with only one door and no real windows that someone could slide open, no balconies to go out and stand on while the wind curled around you...

The windows. The apartment did have windows, rather large ones, in fact, that ran from ceiling to floor along an entire section of the living room's wall. They were not on the floor plan and could only be seen from the outside when the person within the apartment wanted them to be seen. They also could not be opened or moved in any way unless the escape pod were launched. But they were there.

What were they made out of? T'ocs had posited that they were made of transparisteel, but Hanna doubted it. Transparisteel was heavy, usually reserved for starship construction where tempered glass was simply not strong enough to use. For the outside of a building with as odd an architectural style as this one had, with all of the curved edges and lack of corners, it had to be glass. And if it was glass, even tempered or reinforced glass, she could break through it.

A plan started to formulate in her mind. She could go to the floor above the apartment, open the window either by design or by force if necessary, then use the rappel line in her equipment that she had never before had an opportunity to use to swing down onto or through the glass of the apartment below. Depending on the glass, she might have to plant explosives to get through, but with the proper momentum, her beskar boots would likely be enough.

She switched the floor plan from viewing the eighty-ninth floor to the ninetieth. The floor layouts were identical, so the doors and the windows were in the exact same place. She went up two, three floors further. All of them were the same, with the same rooms and the same windows facing the outside world. That was good. Making her entry multiple floors above was probably better, just to eliminate the possibility of her entry into a given apartment alerting Qe-cora to her presence.

A little thrill ran up her spine. She shut the hologram down and glanced at the nearest floor indication to where she was, a number crudely stenciled on the wall above a door she was passing. The thirty-third floor. She had a long way to go. But at least, now, she had a halfway decent plan.

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***​

Hanna arrived at the ninety-third floor hot, tired and out of breath. The climb had been brutal, her armor getting heavier with each flight of stairs she took. Her legs felt like jelly now, and her knees were not working properly. She had forgotten just how much all of her equipment weighed. She leaned against the wall, panting and trying to force extra oxygen into her lungs through sheer willpower.

“Come on, girl.” She said to herself, helmet speakers muted to ensure that no one else would hear her. “Not much further now. Pick 'em up, and move 'em out.”

Staggering with each step, she started to move again, pushing the maintenance door open and exiting into the hallway. This floor was far nicer than the basement had been, with plush burgundy carpeting trimmed with gold lace on the floors and walls that were made of stained wood paneling, decorated with actual drawings and paintings of landscapes. Old-fashioned, yes, but rather luxurious. Even the lumina panels in the ceiling hung suspended a few centimeters down toward her via fixtures made of a gold-colored metal.

Hanna tried to slow her breathing down and listen for any sounds or signs of attracting attention. But all she could hear was the roaring of her own ragged breathing in her ears. She switched her helmet over to its thermal scan mode and started moving down the hall. Her boots made dull thudding noises in the thick carpeting, and she felt rather exposed with the complete lack of cover. At least the hall was not perfectly straight; it moved in a gentler curve to follow the frame of the building, meaning that as she walked to the building's west end, the hall was curving to her left. She could see maybe five meters ahead before the walls blocked the way.

Her thermal scans went right through the walls here; apparently the building’s designers had not thought, among all of their security precautions, that someone might try scanning for heat signatures. At least not from inside of the building. She saw that she was not alone on the floor, there were beings of some sort in at least two of the apartments she had to pass by before she reached the one she wanted in the west-most corner. So she needed to keep being as quiet and unobtrusive as possible, because she did not want to have to kill anyone else. It would just raise too many questions.

Even more than before, Hanna felt that she was intruding in a place that was, while not sacred, at least somewhat venerated by some. These were homes she was walking around, the homes of the secretive and vain, sure, but still homes. The beings who lived here had no idea that, if one of them so much as opened the door and walked into the hall, they would get a blaster bolt between the eyes.

It was a rough reality. But she could not leave any witnesses, not since she her target was a government official. Never mind that he was on her list, he still had an influential official capacity and that meant the inquest and investigation into his death would rattle the whole planet, possibly the entire sector. If she added another few beings to that, not counting the security guard, there would be few stones left unturned, and there was every possibility that her mission, and even her very existence, was not recorded anywhere within the Imperial records. The only one who knew what she was doing was Darth Vader, and he stood to gain nothing by supporting or shielding her from whatever heat she brought down on herself.

Whatever consequences she incurred were her own responsibility. The messes she made were ones she had to clean up. Which was why she was hoping against hope that everyone in these apartments was otherwise occupied and would not venture out into the hallway while she was creeping around. The last thing she wanted to do was kill a mother in front of her children. Because this time, she would have to kill the children, as well.

Hanna shook her head at herself. Killing children. Was that what she was reduced to now? Was that what was necessary to complete the missions she was being sent on?

Once, she had aspired to being a soldier, a noble sort, the ones who lived and died on the battlefield, where the enemies were right in front of you. But the galaxy she had been released into was far different from the one of year's past. Back when the Clone Wars had been raging, it was easy to tell who was on your side and who was not. The lines were etched into durrasteel.

Things were different now. Soldiers had become keepers of the peace, there was no enemy aside from those who broke the law. She had aspired to join in battle, not to be inducted into a police force. That was why she had become a mercenary. That, and she did not have anywhere else to go.

The decisions that had led her to this place, to creeping through an apartment hallway while avoiding any sort of contact for fear of having to complicate her mission by incurring unnecessary casualties, in order to kill a man she was not even sure was the right one to complete her mission, boggled her in hindsight. But she did not dwell on them for long. Nostalgia was a paralytic agent, and living life full of regrets over the past did nothing but prevent her from moving forward. T'ocs had taught her that. He always moved forward, no matter what.

Hanna kept moving forward. And in a time that seemed both surprisingly quick and agonizingly long, she had reached the door to the ninety-third floor's west-most apartment. Her helmet's scanners told her that the whole three rooms of it were empty. Perfect.

The door was locked, of course, she had expected that. Which meant that she was prepared for it. The door was an automatic one, just as most were, with a similar eye scanner to the one that had led to the service entrance at the building's foot. This one was likely coded to only open the locks on the door when it detected the retinal patterns of whoever was renting the flat. Or, when a maintenance person needed entrance.

Hanna checked her chronometer. The retinal patterns for her own eye would only be active for another few minutes, she had made it just in time. She pulled her helmet off of her head and put her eye up to the scanner. Of course, if this did not work, she had an alternate plan, but that, like most of her alternate plans, involved explosives, and she would prefer if that was not necessary.

The scanner chirped, and the door slid open. Hanna grinned, put her helmet back on, and entered the apartment.