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

Here we go. Haven't been able to post updates for a bit because of RL stuff, but the next chapter's ready right below with probably the biggest single-chapter fight scene since the end of Hanna's Story. Nothing too bad or intense, just some old-fashioned brawling.
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Chapter Twelve

Everything went perfectly. The first Jahzer Qe-cora knew of the intrusion was when his window shattered. The sound of splintering glass filled the room as the two black boots plunged through it like stones hitting water. Minuscule shards sprayed inward, hundreds of them, each a deadly projectile in and of itself, rainbows of reflected light playing across the walls and ceiling. But there was no respite or chance to react. Before all of the fragments of glass had even settled to the ground, Hanna's arm was thrust through the gap and her flamethrower blossomed to life.

The living room was around eight meters by ten, a decently sized room, with the entry door in the far wall and décor similar to that of the hallway outside: old-fashioned light fixtures, burgundy carpeting fringed with gold, and wood paneling on the walls. There was furniture as well, a leather sectional seating couch in the center of the room, with a small table made of black wood and topped with slate stone against one wall and two accompanying wooden chairs.

And all of it went up in flames.

The ignited fuel-air mixture that sprayed from Hanna's wrist filled the room, lit all of the furniture and most of the walls on fire, and flowed along the carpeting in a wave. Nothing survived. As her boots connected with the floor with a solid and heavy thud, the flames were working on gutting the entire apartment, meter by meter.

Hanna had her pistol drawn and swept her helmet scanners over the room. Her helmet had told her that Qe-cora was in the room before she had made her dynamic entry, and she wanted to make sure that he was dead. The flames should have taken care of him, they had taken care of everything else, but there was no harm in being certain. Even if he was a smoldering corpse on the floor, she wanted to put a blaster bolt in him to make sure he stayed down. This was not the sort of being she wanted to take chances with.

It took her about ten seconds to realize that there was no body, and half a second more to realize that there was no sign of Qe-cora anywhere. Her helmet scanners played over the room, but the fire was interfering with the thermal readings, and nothing else would be able to sweep the room and alert her to any life signals. The sonar was almost useless in such a large room, and the infrared was even more useless than the thermal. She growled to herself, switched her visor off and went back to the basic visual scanning. She would have to find Qe-cora with her own eyes.

Hanna cased the whole room, from corner to corner, overturning the furniture and even throwing a few good looks at the ceiling. There was no sign of him. Qe-cora had disappeared into thin air. Hanna swore, grabbing one of the wooden chairs and throwing it into the wall, smashing it to cinders and flaming slivers. How could she have missed him? He had been in the apartment, he had been in the room just seconds before she had smashed in through the window. There was no way he could have gotten out fast enough to escape without being forewarned, and there was no way he knew that she was coming. Yet, there was no body, not so much as a singed nose hair.

“Where the hell are you?!” She shouted, loud enough to override her helmet's sound dampeners.

Her answer came soon enough. Something struck her from behind; it was the other chair, she could see the splinters and sparks fly when the fire-weakened wood broke against the beskar. But it still caused her to stagger forward in surprise and with the force of the blow. Another blow caught her in the lower back, knocking her to the floor and scattering more embers into the air. That blow felt more like a kick. But to kick someone wearing Mandalorian armor took serious strength, or serious stupidity.

She rolled to her right just as she hit the ground, her blaster blazing back in the direction she had come from. A dark shape, framed by the red light of the fire, ducked and dodged out of the way, taking cover behind the remnants of one of the pieces of the sectional. She filled the air with blaster bolts, trying to take the sectional apart piece by piece, until her blaster, already warm from the fire around her, overheated in her hand and shut down.

Hanna tossed her blaster aside and aimed her wrist-mounted sonic blaster. A single word from her, and it unleashed. The ripple through the air not only caused the ruined sectional to disintegrate into ash, but it also put out the fire over a decent area on that side of the room, sucking the oxygen away and scattering the fuel particles needed for sustained ignition. Once again, though, Qe-cora had evaded her, and there was no sign of him on that side of the room.

She climbed up to her feet and turned around, wrist out and pointed, eyes flickering from one fire-framed silhouette to the next. She watched for aggression, for movement, for anything that told her where this guy was. But he was a ghost, he left no trace, no sign. He was almost a third of a meter taller than she was, how could he move so quickly without being seen?

A moment's pause, a sixth sense ticked the back of her mind. She spun again and fired, blowing a hole in the wall that led to the kitchen. The black shape seemed for a moment to be staggered at the edge of the blast, but still avoided the worst of it, and moved to duck behind another piece of the sectional.

“No you don't.” Hanna leveled her left gauntlet at the sectional and let loose a flechette blast, shredding it and piercing the wall behind with twenty-odd metal spikes that flew faster than the speed of sound. But Qe-cora had pulled up at the last second, avoiding most of the flechettes. And rather than dodge away this time, he dodged closer, moving right up into Hanna's face with terrifying speed.

For a moment, all Hanna saw was limbs, fists, boots. She fought back, letting the blows ring off of her armor. Nothing he had could hurt her, no matter how hard he swung. As he hit her, she was throwing some blows of her own into the shadowy form in front of her. Punches, quick, sharp, aiming not to overextend and leave a limb open to be grabbed. Qe-cora ducked and dodged like a blade of grass in the wind, all but impossible to hit, seeming to wrap himself around her blows as they rained in while still driving forward with his own.

A punch from Hanna's left hand connected with something, arm or ribs she guessed, and she surged forward to follow up, unleashing the blade in her right gauntlet and stabbing for the center of the ghostly mass. But Qe-cora was like smoke, fading out from in front of her blade and seizing her arm as it came at him. Then he was behind her, trapping her arm up against her back and a nanosecond away from snapping it in half, even though the armor.

She threw an elbow back into the form behind her, felt contact that drew a grunt of pain from Qe-cora, but he did not loosen the grip on her arm. Disregarding the pain, she twisted back around and dropped, sweeping her leg back through Qe-cora's ankles. She had used this reverse before, a lot of beings knew it and taught it, and she fully expected Qe-cora to avoid it. Which he did, but not how she expected. Rather than releasing her arm and jumping back, he somehow got the necessary spring from somewhere to jump up over her, still holding her arm, and come down on the other side, dragging Hanna to the floor on her face.

Hanna barely had time to orient herself, and far from enough to climb back up to her feet, before a hand had wormed its way in underneath the back of her helmet, released the seal, and flung it off of her head.

The warm air flooded in, the smoke filling her nose and mouth. She could feel the fire, the heat crinkle on her skin. Anger forced her jaw to clench, and she surged upward, shoving up off the ground and springing into an uppercut.

The blow missed Qe-cora's chin as he dodged backward, but Hanna was able to follow it up with a left jab right into his lower-right ribcage. There was solid impact, at last. And she knew that there was no way the blow had not at least cracked bone. But Qe-cora did not seem to even notice the pain. He swung a high cross from her left, one she ducked under, but followed up with an uppercut of his own that clocked her right in the jaw.

It hurt. His fist felt like being hit with a brick and her jaw snapped closed, teeth clacking together. But she stayed on her feet, she let the pain feed into the absolute blinding rage she was working up.

Everything had gone right, everything had worked perfectly. No one knew she was here, the apartment was in ruins, and she had thrown everything she had at him. Fire, blasters, sonic attacks, flechettes, her own body. There was nothing else she could have done.

So why in the holy stars and all of the hells that existed was Jahzer Qe-cora still alive?

She roared and charged him. He tried to kick her, to meet her chest with her boot, but she saw it coming and dodged it, slid to one side and let the blow glance off of her breastplate. Her left hand reached out and grabbed Qe-cora, getting a handful of his clothes, and then she started to hit him. She hit him as hard as she could, in the body, in the face, anywhere. She hardly even saw where she was hitting him, she just kept hitting where she felt contact.

Qe-cora finally started to make noise; he was grunting with each punch she drove into his body.

She aimed up higher and hit him in the head, around where his mouth should have been, and a stream of blood flew out and splattered out on the floor, the fire burning it away and raising a whole new odor in the room.

Hanna swung at him again, aiming for his nose this time, a bellowing echo of feral triumph shouting from deep within her chest. But this time, he caught her fist in his hand, stopping her offensive in its tracks. His other hand, his right, came out of nowhere, thudding into her left temple with the force of a starfreighter.

Hanna saw stars, her ears rang. Her arms went slack, all of her muscles relaxed at once and she had no conscious will, for that one second, to do anything to make them move again. Qe-cora pulled free, let go of her hand, and then hit her again, this time in the right temple. This was not a punch though, his fingers were stiff. The pointed blow struck through the skin and nerve endings and sent a shockwave through her skull into her brain.

The wave of blackness knocked Hanna out before she had even hit the ground. Her last thoughts, before she lost consciousness, were a few choice Mandalorian curse words at her own stupidity for not blowing the whole apartment up with a proton torpedo when she had the chance.

 

This is part 1 of a longer chapter, I split it up for ease of reading. A bit of the fallout of the fight, and some important revelations...
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Chapter Thirteen

A column of white agony carried Hanna upward out of the blackness she had fallen into. She gasped, eyes snapping open, and panted through the pain, both the sharp, keen-edged pain that made her eyes water, and the dull and throbbing pain that made her stomach knot up inside of her. She tried to assess what it was that hurt, but the hurting seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, her face, her hands, her arms, her chest, her guts, her legs. Everything hurt.

She tried to look around. It was dark. She was in a small room, alone, with very little furniture or pieces of decoration around her. All she could see was a simple bed against one wall and a small clothes dresser against another. A door was ahead and to her right, across from the bed. The wall she was leaning against had nothing. There was no visible lighting, and no windows, only the door. She guessed, from the wood walls and burgundy carpeting, that she was still in the apartment building she had traced Jahzer Qe-cora to.

It took her an extra second for the memory of what had happened before she had blacked out to come back to her. Rappelling down from one of the floors above, setting the apartment on fire, searching for Qe-cora, and finding him. The fight, was that why she was in so much pain? What had happened to Qe-cora? And why was she not dead?

The door opened. In stepped the same tall, dark man that she had danced with the night before. He stood just shy of two meters tall, with closely cropped black hair, no facial hair, brown eyes and a dark tan complexion, fit and muscular but not bulky. He was dressed in a rather casual black and gray two-piece set of fatigues without decoration or adornment, except for two pins that sat on either side of his collar, both of them identical: the Imperial crest made of silver metal, inlaid in black. In his hands were, of all things, a bottle of wine and a pair of wine glasses. He did not look entirely well, his hands were cut and his nails chipped, and he sported fresh bruises and lacerations on his face that made him look rather less suave than he had at the gala. But the grace and smoothness of step that he had was precisely the same.

It took a very long, very pregnant second for all of the pieces and wheel and gears to click together in Hanna’s mind as she watched him walk into the room.

It was him. The man from the gala. Chase Resdove. Jahzer Qe-cora. They were all the same person. It was all the same man.

“Good,” He said in his deep and richly accented voice, “You are awake. I was beginning to think that the stimulant I gave you was having the opposite effect.”

Hanna tried to get up, to move forward, to get up and hit him until she stopped being so confused, and discovered a rather unpleasant surprise: her hands were bound together behind her, and her legs had been bound together as well, at the knee and at the ankle. “Why aren't I dead?” She growled at him. Not entirely on purpose, either, her throat hurt along with everything else.

He raised an eyebrow at her and set the bottle and glasses on the dresser. “That was not the question I expected you to ask, I will admit. It is a good question, but, not one that I will answer right now.”

“You're Chase Resdove.” She stated. She was not really asking, she was just telling him what she knew so they were both on the same page. Because she still had no idea why he had not killed her. She barely had an idea of who he actually was. “I saw you at the gala.”

“The blows you took to the head did not affect your memory I see, good.”

“But you’re also Jahzer Qe-cora.”

Qe-cora came over toward her, kneeling in front of her and lowering his voice. It did not sound any less velvety, but it certainly sounded more menacing. “Correct. Perhaps you will be able to answer my question, in exchange for the one I just answered for you.”

He had kept her alive to interrogate her, then. Probably to reveal the identity of whoever had broken his cover to her and marked him for death. Hanna gave him a tight smile. “Sorry, I don't talk to dead men.”

Qe-cora looked at her for a moment, as if trying to work through the layers of exactly what she had said. “If I were dead, then you would not have binders on your wrists and be covered in a number of bruises. So there is no reason for you not to talk to me. My question is a simple one, you should be able to answer it rather easily: Who sent you to kill me?”

“I’m a professional.” She said with all of the pride she could muster. “I don’t reveal my clients.”

“Not willingly, no, I suppose not.” Qe-cora climbed to his feet and turned away from her, going back toward the dresser and the bottle of wine. “I believe that I already know the ones who contracted you for this job, in any case. You are very well trained and equipped for a mercenary or bounty hunter or whatever you are; that armor is not just for show, you have the skill to go with it. The only ones who can afford to have true Mandalorians do their dirty work are the Empire.”

Hanna leaned back a bit. It hurt her shoulders and arms, but she managed to lean back all the way to the wall. She also tried to act as casual as she could, despite the throbbing pain all across her body and the fact that her heart was trying to pound its way out of her chest. “Not necessarily. There are plenty of beings out there who can afford my services if they really want them.”

“I suppose that may be possible, if you sell yourself short.” With a soft popping noise, he uncorked the bottle and started pouring himself a glass of wine. “But the conclusion remains the most logical one. Considering that only select parts of the Empire are aware of my existence and what I am capable of, and only someone with that knowledge would take the step of terminating me. The rest of the galaxy has no reason to seek my death.” He slid the other of the glasses closer to the end of the dresser and started filling it as well. “What I want to know is: who does, and who did?”

“I already told you, I don’t reveal my-”

“Enough, I know.” He re-corked the bottle and set it back on the dresser behind him, then picked up the second glass that he had just filled. “It was rhetorical the second time, I was stating my goals rather than asking a direct question. Just as you did when you said my name and the fact that you were sent to kill me before.” He held the glass out to her, full of a rich, red wine that swirled as it moved. “Would you care for a drink? Alderaanian sweet-fruit wine, as good a vintage as you will find out here on the Rim.”

“Blow it out your exhaust port.” She snarled.

He shrugged. “Suit yourself.” Then he lifted the glass to his mouth and took a sip. She noticed that he gripped the glass by the stem, not touching the bulb that held the wine itself. “Mm.” He nodded in appreciation. “It is quite good. It has a rather bracing effect on one’s nerves. Apologies for hosting this discussion in my bedroom, but you did damage the room I do most of my entertaining in quite badly. It is not every day that a girl I met drops into my apartment, sets my sitting room and all of my furniture on fire and then tries to kill me with her bare hands. On such occasions, it may call for a bit of… alcohol-induced fortitude.”

“You talk an awful lot for a dead man.”

His brow furrowed and he sounded genuinely confused. “You keep saying that even though I am clearly not. How did you get the impression that I was dead?”

Hanna hesitated for a moment. This was an interrogation, and the last thing she wanted to do was give him any of the information he was looking for. It was the only thing keeping her alive, the only reason he had not kicked her out the window she had previously kicked in.

But then she decided to go for it. He had guessed most of it already, anyway. And if he was going to kill her, he would do so whether or not she told him anything. “Your Imperial personnel profile had a lot of redacted information on it. I was able to pick some of it out. You were declared dead, and then suddenly you’re not; you pop up here and I get sent to correct the mistake.”

There was no recognition dawning over his face, no look of understanding or even triumph. Just a quick nod, then he set the wine glass back on the bed. “Ah, the report, that makes sense. A false death is one of those things that can be a hard charade to keep up. I am surprised that it took them this long to come after me, it has been more than a year since I arrived here.”

That gave her pause. And it matched with the other information they had previously gathered. But she still did not know exactly what he was saying. “Care to try and explain that to me? Why wouldn’t anyone have tried to track you down before?”

“Oh, I am sure they have.” He sounded so cool, so collected about everything. So smug in his assertions. “They just never found me until now. Or if they did they were dealt with in a variety of manners. Tracking and catching me is a very difficult goal to set for oneself.”

“But you did get tracked and caught. Someone tracked you. I caught you. I should have killed you.”

“It was a valiant effort.”

Hanna was past confused now. She was getting angry. He sounded very much like she presented no threat to him at all. “Effort? I think setting your apartment on fire should count for more than that on its own.”

Qe-cora offered her an open hand, as if begging her for credits. “Why do you think I reemerged after everyone assumed that I was dead? With a high enough profile that someone somewhere put a notice on me, enough that a flag went up on a list in someone’s database and the contract went out to you? Why would I decide to regain a public identity after living in hiding for years? Why did I present myself to you at the gala? I was not impatient, bored or incompetent, before your suggest any such thing. You have read the records, I hope that you give me more credit than that.”

She shrugged. “It takes all sorts.”

He scoffed in absolute arrogance. “If I were that short-sighted and suicidal, I would have died years ago. No, I had a different purpose in mind when I came out of hiding.”

“So,” Her mind raced, “You came out of hiding on purpose, and you had to know that eventually someone would recognize you. But you didn't hide, didn't run, didn't even put up any defenses. You went out in public. You walked right up to me and offered to dance. So you wanted me to find you? You knew all along that I’d be coming for you?”

He nodded again. “You or another bounty hunter like you; one who specializes in cleaning up the Empire’s dirty laundry.”

Her head rocked back, slightly offended. “What makes you think I-?”

He waved a dismissing hand at her. “Do not flatter yourself; there are hundreds of others like you out there, hunters who would never make it in the guilds. Rather than put yourself in the free market, you huddle in the Emperor's shadow and pick the scraps off the floor around his table. Because even if it is not as profitable, it is safe so long as there are people someone with power wants dead.”

“You’ve got it all wrong, dead wrong.”

“Do I?” He started walking toward her again, slowly, his hands behind his back. “Maybe you frame it differently in your head. Maybe you are killing for a cause, being a good citizen, making the galaxy a bit safer by killing the bad people. Or maybe…” He knelt down in front of her again, so close that she could see the pattern in his face where her glove had scarred the flesh, see where the bacta sealant had been applied to aid in healing, see the edge of a cold front moving across his brown eyes. “Maybe you believe you are an elite hunter, believe that you are valuable to them because you specialize in hunting high risk targets: Former Imperial agents, former Separatist soldiers, perhaps even… former Jedi.”

She could not wholly suppress a slight hitch in her breathing as he said it, and that was all he needed.

“Ah, you do.”

“No, I don’t,” She insisted, “I’m just a bounty hunter.”

He shook his head, and his hand reached out to point at her face. “Your eyes lie for you. That is why you were sent after me, they considered me a high risk target; something above the ken of normal bounty hunters. You might even have been sent here by Lord Vader, or His Majesty the Emperor himself.”

“Keep dreaming, you aren’t that important.”

“Obviously not, or else Vader would have come here himself. No, I may be high risk, but I know I am low on the pecking order. The Empire has greater concerns than sending its favorite son to hunt me down. But,” He paused, laying particular emphasis and making this his thesis statement, “They would send you.”

 

Hanna could think of nothing to say. No wonder this man was a class-1 threat. He was dissecting her, verbally, taking her entire story apart piece by piece without ever asking her more than one actual question. It was so much less than an interrogation, yet it was more effective than any interrogation she had ever been witness to. She did not see any reason to continue talking to him, considering that he seemed to know everything already.

No wonder he had connected so well with her at the dance. He probably knew exactly what she was from the moment he had seen her. Singled her out, danced with her, engaged in a seemingly casual conversation where she had probably given her true identity away to him a dozen times. But she would not give him the opportunity to draw more out. She would not favor him with any more words about who she was working for.

He misinterpreted her silence as her simply being offended at what he had said, which was not far from the truth. “Come now, I did say I knew you would never tell me who your employer was. I had to find that particular information out myself. And now that I have proceeded to the correct conclusion via verifiable logic, we can proceed.” He looked back over at the bed, then pointed to it. “Are you sure you do not want a drink?”

She could not continue to stay silent. Her anger made her want to turn the tables, to make him start giving up useful information. “Just who are you? You obviously know how to trick people into thinking you’re someone you really aren’t. I know you worked for the Empire pretty much your whole life, I saw the service record. But your actual role was redacted along with pretty much everything else important.”

Of course, he dodged the question the same way he had dodged her punches during their fight. “Except, apparently, for the fact that everyone assumed I was dead at some point.”

“Well, it didn’t say that exactly, but reading between the lines made it pretty obvious.”

“Did it? Well, I wonder.” He stood up and turned toward the door. “I wonder just how much you know about me. I will not ask you to recite it; I have appropriated your armor’s datalink to your ship’s computer, that should be sufficient.”

“You-!” Hanna tried to stand up again, but was only able to push herself a bit further out from the wall and roll her legs around underneath her body so she could get on her knees. “How did you manage that?”

“It was not difficult.” He left the room, but left the door open so she could still hear him talking from the other room. “Mandalorian armor is unique enough that I would assume any sort of computer datalink system would not be built in; most armor sets I have encountered are old and very few beings would be able to manage the sort of operation it would take to put one inside, say, the chest piece. And since it was not attached to either of your wrist gauntlets, I knew…” He walked back in, carrying the the one piece of armor she was not still wearing, aside from her gauntlets and gloves. “...It had to be in your helmet.”

She looked at her helmet in his hands, at all of the exposed wires and circuits poking out from inside it. “And you took it apart and pulled everything out?”

“It appeared to have been recently maintained, so the circuitry I needed was not hard to find.” He took the helmet to the dresser, set it down, and started to mess with the wires he had exposed. “All that remained was to connected them to a portable holoprojector to display the data that usually runs across the visor.”

Her head spun. How had he had time to disarm her, tie her up, and not only take her helmet apart but to break into the datastream between that and the Arbiter? “How long was I unconscious?”

“An hour or so. I stunned you while I worked on taking the weapons off of your armor and patching up a few of the holes you made in me. I took the opportunity to put out the fire you started in my sitting room as well.”

“You did all that in an hour?”

“I can work quickly when needed.” The helmet began to project a small blue hologram with information on it. Information that looked rather familiar to her: the Arbiter's main computer home screen. T'ocs had put a lot of work into making the computer's database more friendly to use than the simple text-based coding it had been before. As she watched, though, the view changed, to one that looked a lot more like it had previously, just line after line of code. Several of them said error and access denied on them.

“Your ship’s security systems are good;” Qe-cora commented, playing with wires a bit more, as well as other controls inside of the helmet. The code shifted and moved as he worked with it. “The encryption must have been done through a private firm.”

“How could you possibly…?”

“Because I have all of the computer system backdoors and overrides in standard Imperial security software memorized. Believe it or not, most of them have at least two of each. These are different systems than what I normally see, done to Imperial standard but with the backdoors removed and the overrides changed to a more secure configuration. Not your work, I presume?”

“You’re making a lot of assumptions, why stop now?”

“I never assume, I deduce. I considered your response to my previous statements and gathered that you have no idea how this system was encrypted, or by whom. Am I wrong?”

She opened her mouth to reply, realized that he was right, and closed it again. Her cheeks were burning with embarrassment and shame, but he did not seem concerned with her. Rather, he was watching the code turn more friendly before returning him to the computer's main screen, now with a number of files there with names Hanna immediately recognized. He had cracked into the Arbiter's computer system's most secure files: the ones related to Hanna and her mission. All in less than an hour.

“Ah, here we are.” He said. So smug, so confident. “You have quite the database here, mostly the standard navigational information, a few bounty registries, and a long list of names with copies of the official Imperial records attached to each one.”

He was into the most secure and private file on their ship, one only a handful of people in the entire galaxy had ever seen. She could not hold back at him anymore. “That file was triple encrypted! How-” Then the idea hit her. “Wait, you said you knew all of the Imperial security system overrides. I’ll bet you know some file encryption overrides as well. Maybe even all of them.”

He turned and nodded in her direction. “Good deduction.” He turned back to the screen he had brought up, the full list she had been given of men and women to kill. “Quite a storied list, I have to say, I am flattered to be in such company.”

“You shouldn’t be. They’re all threats, people I've been contracted to kill.”

“Hmm. Threats. According to what definition, I wonder? These are all very dangerous people, people with power and influence, and there I am, in the middle of it all, sitting alone in a three-room apartment, minding no one’s business but my own.”

Hanna felt a weight of concentrated resentment settle in her chest. Every time he said something, she wanted to hit him even harder than she had before he had tied her up. “Nerfcrap. If that’s all you were doing you would never have let yourself be caught, you would never have let me track you down, you said so yourself. Unless you really aren’t as awesome at staying under the scanners as you say you are.”

“That was all I was doing before I decided that the time to be passive had ended.”

Another gear shift, and another change in his plans and his motives. It was starting to make her head spin. “Be… passive? What?”

“Allow me to explain my role in this galaxy.” Qe-cora scooped up his wine glass again, looking at her as he leaned against the dresser with the projection of the list, her list, over his shoulder. “I am a troubleshooter. I am informed of the existence or presence of problems, and I make them right.”

“Like a bounty hunter.”

“No.” He said with uncharacteristic insistence. “I do not do it for money. I do it because it is what I was born to do.”

Hanna's head twitched to the side, and her eyes squinted. This was one gear shift too many. “…what?”

“Stop interrupting.”

She gave him a peeved look and clenched her jaw shut.

He did not seem to notice, taking a sip from his wine glass before speaking again. “The Empire raised me to my role; from the moment I could walk, I had a blaster in one hand and a computer spike in the other. I learned how to go anywhere, do anything, be anyone, and no one ever knew or remembered. I was a shadow, a phantom, removing problems from the Empire to make it a safer and more secure society. I served my Emperor well.” He paused for a moment, swirling the wine in his glass and looking into it instead of at her. “Then, I was betrayed. Discarded, thrown away. They thought I was dead. But I was not. I hid myself away. I had been extensively trained in how to hide, to make myself disappear. I was little more than a breath of wind, not even lingering in memory of the places I passed through.”

Hanna butted in, despite his comment to her previously. She just had too many questions to let him keep talking. “And now you’ve just… decided that you want to make your mark? That all of a sudden, you want to make yourself known to the galaxy at large?”

“I never said that.” He said with a shake of his head, “I said I want to stop being passive. I want to stop letting this galaxy spin itself to pieces, to stop the Empire from pulling itself apart with corruption and rebellion. I wandered across the Rim for a year, and everywhere I went, I saw Imperial power being misused, misconstrued, mishandled, and I am going to end that. I am going to do the job I was born to do: make sure the Empire lives and thrives.”

“So that’s what you are.” She felt she was beginning to understand at last. She had heard this sort of rhetoric before, when she was a girl watching or listening to official functions. “An Imperial Security Bureau agent.”

The look Qe-cora gave her told her that he thought she could not have possibly been more wrong. “Oh please. The ISB is a publicly known organization; they are respected or feared throughout the Empire. They do good enough work. But that is not what I am.”

Her mind worked through the remaining possibilities. “So you’re someone even more fanatical than an ISB agent, and more secretive. Imperial Intelligence, then?”

“Imperial Intelligence is a better guess.” He gave her a single nod. “They have a hierarchy, however; they are answerable to someone as they go about their business. I answer to no one but the ideals I was raised to uphold.”

Hanna paused, looking at him, at the sincerity of his gaze that complemented so the utter conviction of what he was saying, no matter how incredibly out of the universe's worth of possibility it was. “I don’t know if you’re still nercrapping me or you’re just insane.”

“Believe what you like.” He sounded distinctly like he did not care what she thought of him. “But the Empire’s sight is long, long enough that I had to fake my own death to escape it even for a moment. And its reach stretches almost as far. Nothing in this galaxy is beyond their agents. I included myself among that number for a long time.”

That threw her a bit. For a moment, she thought she was starting to understand him. He was some sort of super-patriot, maybe the result of one of the Imperial Youth programs she had heard about on the Core worlds. But then he goes and says something like that. “So you’re a traitor.”

“Are you even listening?” He set his wineglass down. There was a flicker of something in his face, not quite anger, maybe annoyance? “I seek to uphold and maintain the Imperial ideal. That goes beyond the wishes and whims of the petty bureaucrats, no matter how powerful they are. That is what I saw, that is why I faked my death, and that is why I am coming back now.” He stepped toward her, but did not kneel this time, looking down at her with the sort of aristocratic arrogance she expected from someone with such Imperial ideals. “That is why I need you.”

She blinked. “I don’t understand.”

Now he did kneel down. He spoke more persuasively, as if he were presenting her with something, without arrogance or the snooty self-assurance he had before. “No one knows who I am, except you and a few others like you perhaps, and those who put my name on this list. What I want to do, the reason I have come out of hiding to this degree, is to strike more names from this list of yours, along with others who are not mentioned here, and that is not something I can do merely by making myself known. Whatever skills and abilities and talents I may have, I am no one. I am a shade seen out of the corner of an eye, the darting specter across the moons at night.”

He turned and pointed back at the still-displaying hologram. “Those beings, those on your list, they need a very public, very visible comeuppance, something that will make those under their sway know what line it was that they crossed. They have to know that it was the Empire that they turned away from, and that it was the Empire who brought them down to less than nothing. I need someone who can make that sort of statement, the one I cannot make myself.”

“And you think that’s me?” Hanna crinkled her face in confusion. It was no act, she had no idea how to follow the thought process he was trying to lay out in front of her. “I’m just a bounty hunter, a contracted killer; nothing I do is for the Empire except the fact that they gave me the list and they pay my bills, you said so yourself. You might as well grab a Stormtrooper off the street on Coruscant or a pilot trainee from Anaxes and give them your speech, because I’m not going to be of any help to you.”

He let out a sigh, a very faint and brief one, then got up and went back to the dresser for his wine. “That might be what your role is now, but you have not had me available to help you, either.”

“Can you see me rolling my eyes at you from across the room? Or are you too drunk at this point?”

He turned to point at her with the lip of his glass. “You are a Mandalorian warrior. You should know the value of a reputation. Building a reputation for being a ruthless enforcer of Imperial justice is not a particularly difficult thing to do, so long as you do not die along the way. And you already make a terrifyingly destructive first impression. All that would remain for you to do is make your activities more overt, and make it more evident that the people you kill are enemies of the Empire, not merely bounties.”

“And what would you be doing?” Sarcasm flowed out of her like exhaust from an ion engine. “Sitting alone in your three-room apartment minding no one’s business but your own?”

“On the contrary, Miss Shirid,” He turned back to the list and started scrolling through it. “I am going to go with you.”

He knew her name. Of course, it stood to reason that he did, she had introduced herself to him at the gala, it made sense. It was just terrifying to think of that man and this one as being the same person. Then her mind caught up to the section thing that he had said. “You're what?”

“You may have experience hunting dangerous targets in a sense, but you have no idea what some of the people on this list are capable of, the ones who wield power instead of blasters. You do not know how they think, how they will react or protect themselves against hunters like you. I do. You will need my help if you are to succeed, which is in my best interests as well. I want to see these sorry excuses for carbon based life exterminated from the Empire forever. If we work together, this list will be only the beginning of what we can accomplish.”

She shook her head at him. Neither of them understood the other. Neither of them were thinking in any way like the other. “You don't get it, do you? You're my target. I'm not here to team up with you, I'm here to kill you. And if you take off these binders, that's what I'm going to do, even if I have to use my bare hands.”

He shook his head right back at her. “No, you would not. You might think that you would, but I am of more use to you alive than dead.”

“You're worth a lot of money to me dead, so...”

“I am talking about the future, Miss Shirid.” He turned to look at her again, his hands now going behind his back. “Not just how large your next credit cheque will be. A life lived by the gun may end at any time, and to be as professionally effective as the Empire requires of you has to be enormously expensive. I would guess that, to date, you have barely broken even on your venture with them, no matter how many numbers are put in your bank account after each mission. How will you guarantee your future, when you have no savings, and when you cannot even trust that you will finish the next mission?”

Hanna swallowed. “Maybe I don't care about the future. Maybe I just care about today.”

He looked at her. And he tilted his head to one side, a soft, pitying movement. “Maybe you do. But where has that gotten you? Biting off more than you could chew, facing an opponent you could not kill. There may be no better time than to change your life's outlook than when you are a hair's breadth from losing it.”

She looked at him, and blinked. A burst of clarity exploded in the back of her brain. “So if I don't do what you want, then you're going to kill me.”

His frank look gave her the answer before he spoke. “I am not in the habit of running a charity for those who seek my life. I kept you alive for a purpose. But I am not attached to you as a being. If you refuse, there will be others in the future.”

“Then I really do not have a choice, do I?”

He sounded far less arrogant now, more blunt, honest and straightforward. Which made what he said all the more chilling. “I did try using the honey before the acid. It is in your best interests to join with me, at least more so than if you had simply killed me and gone on your way. But no, you really do not have a choice. I will kill you, then turn your body over to the authorities as the one who committed arson and murder within these very apartments. No one will come to save you, no one will miss you, no one will mourn you. You will be reduced to a statistic, and your armor will either wind up in a private collection or be sold to a museum here on Dasnai. No legacy. No remembrance. No future.”

The cold sensation that settled in Hanna's stomach washed over the rest of her body. She was out of options. And the thought of just... disappearing, being forgotten, it terrified her. She did not have anyone to remember her, no one to write her name down or take up her armor. Even T'ocs, he would not come to help her. He could not come to help her, he could barely stand without using a cane. Her whole life, everything she had done, everything she had fought for, over, ended, just like that. It would all be for nothing.

There must have been something in her eyes or in her face that gave her thoughts away, because Qe-cora approached her once again, coming to kneel down beside her this time instead of in front of her. His eyes were warm and his voice sounded surprisingly genuine. He pointed toward the hologram of the list. “Those names, those faces, they are not all worth your time and efforts. Do not let someone else decide your path for you. Let me help you, and you will be doing more than just helping yourself. You need not live a life that is worth nothing. You can make a difference. We can make a difference. We can make this galaxy a better place, safe, peaceful, a place where justice reigns, not credits or blasters. Bringing an end to those who deserve it, Miss Shirid. Isn't that what you want?”

Hanna closed her eyes for a moment. All of her instincts were screaming at her, telling her to refuse, to never trust him. He was a class-1, a man dangerous in far more ways than just how well he could aim a blaster. He was trying to manipulate her, to lie to her in order to save his own skin somehow, to get her to join him so he could use her as a pawn in whatever larger game he was playing.

But she had no alternative. No recourse. If she refused, she would die. He would make sure of that. And he would and could do it, too, he was not bluffing. Each of his arms was long enough to wind all the way around her head, he could reach over from where he was and snap her neck the moment after she opened her mouth.

And even if she did somehow get free and somehow manage to kill him, what then? Go to the next name on the list, move on and pretend that nothing had happened, that nothing had changed? Fool herself into thinking that the course she had set was the best one she could have plotted? Her future was a black hole, there was no light, and every name she struck from the list gave her the distinct impression that she was edging ever closer to the event-horizon. Sooner or later, there would be no going back, only tumbling down into a pit that would swallow her and leave no trace that she had ever existed.

Such was the life of a hired blaster, the life of someone who came and went at the bidding of Darth Vader, of someone who did not exist anywhere, drifting from planet to planet like a shadow crossing their suns. The life of a blaster, pointed at what the wielder wanted dead, then tossed aside when it was no longer of use. That was all she was anymore, a living blaster. And even the living part of it was up for debate.

It would change. It had to change. She did not know how, but if this man, this Imperial attack hound who still spouted propaganda with every other sentence, could find it within himself to strike out on his own, to seek a way to make his life worthwhile, to make his own choices, then she could, too.

Hanna opened her eyes. “I think,” She said, “I'll try some of that wine now.”

Qe-cora leaned back on his haunches, looking at her to continue without changing his expression.

She turned her head to look at him. “We can toast our new partnership.”

He smiled at her. A real, genuine smile, something he had not given her since the night they had first seen each other, when they had been just two anonymous faces meeting for the first time from across a lonely ballroom, when the only things that had mattered were a pair of hands, a strong, firm step and sense of rhythm. She thought that those moments were long gone behind a curtain of uncertainty, anger and terror. But the smile he gave her brought it all rushing back.

“I will bring you a glass.” He said, as he reached over to unfasten her binders. “Together we will drink, a toast to the future.”

“To the future.” She nodded. “Whatever it may bring.”

 

Chapter Fourteen


“And you’re sure about this? This is the guy we want to go after?”

Qe-cora nodded. “For a trial run, yes. Going after the most dangerous beings on this list right away, while neither of us trust each other or know each other, would be suicide.”

Hanna nodded in return. “And, it has the bonus of not being far from here, so it won’t take long to pull off.”

They stood together by the dresser, apparently the only flat surface left in the apartment that had not been burned to cinders, each with a glass of the very sweet but also strong Alderaanian wine in their hand. She was looking at the footage they had pulled from the records in her ship's computer, still being projected from the mangled insides of her helmet. They alternated between speaking and watching the hologram of a wiry, beak-nosed man in a gray uniform go through the same few seconds of blurry security footage on a loop. He was either handing something to someone in a long robe, or taking it from them, it was hard to tell.

“Stot Breakwater,” She said, “The Moff who oversees this very sector, ranked as a class-3. Headquartered on Ws'cee, a planet a bit sunward of this one.”

“An individual with hands in cookie jars across the sector.” Qe-cora folded his arms over his chest. “Treason, graft, corruption.”

“Not the most impressive guy, is he? He looks like a stick with a uniform on it.”

“He is a rather smug fellow; I made his acquaintance some years ago, when he was an up-and-coming Army officer and I was just a trainee.” The maybe-formal Imperial leaned his head back, maybe trying to get a different angle on the footage they had both seen about fifty times apiece. “His temper is rather even, and he is not a stupid man by a long stretch, but he lacks a certain… inventiveness that most others of his station possess.”

It took Hanna a moment to try and decipher what he was saying. “So, he’s intelligent, but not inventive?”

“More or less, yes.”

“I'm not sure that helps us.”

“Of course it does.” Qe-cora sipped at his drink before continuing. “Intelligence is the simple storage of knowledge, facts, data, none of which is relevant to you, but you store it for the hope of possibly making it relevant at some point. Or from your own hubris, either way.”

“So, that's you?”

The look he gave her was the sort of withering glare that only the most blank of expressions could deliver. Little in his face changed, the height of his lids, the tilt of his head. But it was exactly the sort of emotional reaction that Hanna had been trying to wrangle out of him the entire time they had been talking. She tilted her head back and raised her free hand in a mock shrug.

“Being inventive,” He said, slowly and deliberately, “Is another matter. When someone is inventive, it means they are able to think outside of the box, beyond what other beings expect. Moff Breakwater thinks that because he went to good universities and collects information like others may collect rare credit chits, he is smarter than just about everyone else.”

Hanna scoffed. “And look where that's got him. Imperial Moff overseeing an armpit of a sector like this. You’d think someone didn’t like him.” She took a drink. It was pretty good wine.

“I doubt many do like him. He often spoke his mind a bit too readily in my recollection, it would not surprise me if he crossed someone like Grand Moff Tarkin one time too many and found himself reassigned far away from any sort of decent posting.”

“And rather than try to earn his way back to a decent post, he’s turned to running the black market and funneling surplus weapons and military equipment to unlicensed merchants, crime syndicates, maybe even rebel cells.”

“By being the local Moff, he can tax the items as they come in as if they were legitimate shipments, and then take a cut of the profits when they are sold. Making credits hand over fist, right under the Empire’s nose.”
“Well,” She motioned to the hologram. “It’s not like no one noticed.”

“True, very true. “ Qe-cora moved his free hand, his right hand, up to tap a couple of fingers against his chin. “The Moff is rather inept at covering his own tracks, it seems.”

They both watched another loop of the footage, of Breakwater interacting with a shady, robed character in some meaningful yet indiscreet way. Hanna shook her head. “And he does this in full view of a security holocam. It almost makes me wonder if he wanted to be caught.”

“Do not give him too much credit. He is a well-trained officer, but he cannot think of everything.”

She saw another opportunity to jab him. “Not like you?”

One again, there was a reaction. This time, a short, vehement shake of his head. “Nothing like me. His focus is only on himself and his own profits, willing to do whatever it takes to move himself ahead, even betraying the Empire he swore to uphold.”

Hanna smiled, but backed off. “Well, he can’t outrun justice forever, right? Especially if justice means a getting a laser rifle round to the back of the head from half a klick away.”

“It will not be that easy, unfortunately.” Qe-cora reached into the helmet and detached his holoprojector, causing Breakwater to freeze mid-handoff and the image to disappear. “Even if he does not want to be caught, the Moff has to know that his activities would be uncovered eventually. Perhaps he is not expecting it this soon, perhaps he is. Either way, he will have made preparations for it.”

“Another deduction?”

“I know how he thinks.” He rolled the small black projector around in his hand as he spoke. “Redundancies, backup plans, careful and thought-out approaches. He thinks like a shrewd business-being. We will need to gather more detailed intelligence on his living space, his work patterns, and his day to day routine. Once we find out his patterns, how he works and where he goes, we can find a way to end him.”

Hanna nodded. There was nothing wrong with that plan. It was the exact one she had tried to use against Qe-cora himself, after all. She scooped up her helmet, looking at all of the wires that were exposed and tangled up inside of it with a silent sigh. “You know, of all of the targets that I've killed, a Moff will definitely be the highest profile. I mean, he's a public figure, people are going to notice that he's gone pretty much right away no matter how quiet we make it.”

“It must be so.” Qe-cora walked out of the room, taking his glass of wine with him along with the projector. “Moff Breakwater has dealt in the shadows for too long, we must drag him out. His fall needs to be evidenced by his traitorous nature. It needs to come to light for all to see.”

Hanna took another drink from her glass as she surveyed the damage she had done to the apartment. It looked like a rather large bomb had gone off. The furniture was all completely destroyed, the walls were blackened and scorched, the carpeting had been reduced to short, hard crust. The window was also almost completely smashed, through all of the glass that had to have scattered across the room had been cleaned up. A cool breeze was blowing in through it now.

“We could turn his underworld contacts against him.” She suggested. “Make it seem like he’s sold them out somehow, get them to take care of it for us.”

“Then it would look like he was an innocent victim between criminals and their profits.” Qe-cora shook his head. He had walked closer to the window and now stood in front of it, looking out into the city. “These things can be spun no matter how bad they may look, believe me.”

“I’m well aware of the power of Imperial propaganda.” Hanna thought back to her formative years, and how glamorous the life she had wanted to lead appeared on all of the holo-documentaries she had watched. How much she had learned since then. “So there isn’t anything we can do to make this happen, make him look bad?”

“I did not say that. Keep in mind, someone within the Imperial power structure put Stot on this list. If something happens to him so that he is publicly disgraced, perhaps even accused of treason, his support among his peers would likely dry up. It is the followers he has within his own sector that worry me more. A Moff has a good deal of power at his disposal, there is a reason this job was left to you and he was not simply arrested.”

She kicked one of the hollowed-out pieces of the furniture, all but unidentifiable as such. It collapsed in a small cloud of ashes. “Does power include any sort of counter-infiltration units, you think, or is it just the usual Stormtroopers?”

“They are not standard to the post, no, counter-infiltration forces are held at the discretion of the Admiralty and Army officials. But there is little keeping him from financing his own private paramilitary group with the funds he had gained from his illegal activities.”

“And we wouldn’t know about it until we actually did some digging, would we?”

“No. I highly doubt records of anything like that would exist except somewhere Stot believes only he can get to them. Likely a personal data filing system or even a hard copy kept under lock and key.”

Hanna decided she would stay away from the window. Just in case. She remained standing toward the middle of the room, in the midst of the destruction she had wrought. “Should we make that our priority, then? Find whatever records he has of his activities and retrieve them?”

“That depends on what is on them and what they pertain to. The report you have may only be scratching the surface of his activities, any evidence we can find may be either enormously helpful or entirely unnecessary and not worth the effort.” He shrugged. “They may not even exist at all.”

“So regardless, we need to go and gather more general intel around the city he lives in and his work habits.”

Qe-cora nodded. “Yes. We have to plan this out as much as possible, or else one or both of us will likely wind up dead and Stot will remain in power.”

Hanna decided to come over to the window now, just to try and see what he was looking at. All she could see was the cityscape in early evening, towers of stars surrounded by lines of flickering lights as speeders moved to and fro. The sky was afire with crimson and purple, as the planet's solitary sun made its final call of the day before drawing the curtain. Sounds and smells were small and distant from this height, all she could really hear was the wind cruising lazily past her, and pretty much all of the smells were blotted by the stench of burned leather, melted plastic and scorched wood.

Somewhere out there was T'ocs. He was probably fearing the worst, it had been far too long since her last check in via comms. “Which is more important,” She asked, “Him getting taken down or us surviving?”

Qe-cora took a deep breath, then turned to look at her. “If it comes down to it, both of us should strive to survive above all else. Even if we do not remove Stot, there are others on the list that we may fare better against. This is not a once-for-all mission. Stot is nothing, he is a peon content to have his way in one little corner of the galaxy. In the long run, his fall will mean little.” He turned back to the window, his free hand clutched tight against his back. “For us, he is a trial run. If we succeed in bringing him down and both live to tell the tale, then the others on this list begin to look more vulnerable. From there, the possibilities begin to open wider.”

Hanna nodded. She took a sip from her glass of wine before speaking. “We'll need a ship, and a little more organization. But before we discuss that,” She slammed her helmet into his chest, “Put my helmet back together.”

 

Thank you for the kindness as always, Finds!

I can neither confirm nor deny.

 

Hey, it's an update! Wow, I haven't been back at this one in a while. I took some time off for NaNoWriMo, and then December has been all fun and family. Now we're getting closer to the holidays and I've come back from seeing Rogue One a couple days ago (love love loved it) and thought, hey, here's something I haven't posted a part of in a while. So, let's remedy that.

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Chapter Fifteen

They were walking together. The night had fallen now, darkness had fully embraced the city of Soriana, and the both of them could walk about without worrying about prying eyes. Of course, Hanna had to keep her helmet on her belt and had draped a loose poncho over her armor, just in case. It was, according to Qe-cora, a necessary precaution.

“I told the men who came to investigate the fire about you.” He said to her, “I told them that someone in black Mandalorian armor had attempted to assassinate me and fled out of the window via jetpack when they failed. And I would assume that they draw a line between that and the dead security guard. Soon enough, every security team on the planet will be looking for you.”

“Yeah, thanks for that.” Hanna was enjoying the fact that the night was quiet, but what he said made perfect sense and still kept her on edge, watching the shadows, keeping an eye on passing speeders. “I guess the best option for me would just be to leave, then?”

“At this point, yes.” Qe-cora did not just walk when out and about. He strode, with his hands behind his back and head held high, as if he had nothing to worry about and not a care in the galaxy. “Moff Breakwater's headquarters is still here in the Paseti system, but you should be able to go there and do some scouting. I would advise doing so without your armor on, just in case.”

“Noted.” Hanna shifted her hand along her belt, toward her holster, where her blaster was sitting again. He had given it back to her, so nonchalant about it that it made her burn up inside. He was so sure, so confident in himself that he was willing to give her back every single weapon she had, without even carrying one himself. It burned her up inside. But there was nothing she could do about it. “And what will you be doing in the meantime?”

“Making my farewells to Governor Price and the other members of his circle here. That will take me some time. Then I will go to Ws'cee myself.”

“In an official capacity? As Chase Resdove?”

“We will have to see. The being who lands on Ws'cee may well be someone new.”

“You do that often? Change who you are?”

“Whenever it becomes necessary. Which is both less and more than you might expect.”

He was a master of answering questions without actually responding to what she had asked him. She decided to get back to business. “So, when we meet up on Ws'cee, will we have a signal, or...?”

“Do not worry about it.” He said dismissively. He also stopped walking and stood still on the corner of the street. They were a short distance from the hangar district, where the Arbiter was docked, where she would most likely find T'ocs. “I will find you, you do not need to look for me.”

“Wait, so, you're not giving me a signal or anything? What's to stop you from leaving me high and dry out there?”

“Nothing. So I would advise you to keep away from high places.” He turned and walked away, presenting his back to her with his hand clutched at belt level, without a trace of fear. “And be sure to stay moist.”

Hanna started shouting at him, at his turned back. “I can't trust you, I don’t know anything about you, except that you should have killed me! I don't think I even know your real name!”

His voice drifted lazily back over his shoulder. “Of course you cannot trust me, all that matters is the mission. But you can call me Jahzer Qe-cora, if you want.”

“Son of a-” Hanna wanted to swear at him with all of the frustration he had built up inside of her over the past few hours. But he was out of earshot now. Her words would be wasted. “Nerf herder.” She finished under her breath. It was hardly an appropriate curse for everything he had done to her, and everything he might wind up making her do in the future. But, still. It was odd to think that he walked away like that, and she walked away as well, both of them alive, despite all of the reasons they both had to kill each other.

What a strange, confusing sort of mission this had wound up being. Of all of the outcomes for her first attempt at killing a class-1 foe, this was certainly not one she had expected. And she was not sure yet whether she preferred it this way or not.

She started walking back toward the hangar. At the same time, she pulled her helmet off of her belt and put it on. One thing she had to say for Qe-cora, he knew what he was doing with electronic circuits and the like. He had fixed her helmet in less than five minutes, and from what she had seen, it was as good as new. She was still going to have T’ocs look it over once she got back, though, just to make sure that there were not any extra little surprises slipped inside of it.

The commlink crackled to life as she spoke into it. “T’ocs, you read me?”

For a long moment, one that made her heart skip a beat, there was nothing in her ears but white static. All sorts of horrible scenarios played out in her mind, T'ocs dead, T'ocs captured, their entire operation rumbled by the local authorities, herself dragged in front of Darth Vader, Jaxin Qe-cora laughing at her as he goes on his merry way on the other side of the galaxy…

Then the commlink crackled with a familiar, and very welcome, voice. T'ocs sounded out of breath, as if he had run to the commlink in as close to a sprint as he could manage. “Yeah. Yeah, I do. Thank the stars you’re still there, Hanna, I thought you were dead for sure.”

Hanna could not hold back a laugh that was part nerves, part relieved tension. “So did I.”

“What happened? You went dark for almost five hours.”

“Five hours, it's been that long?” It boggled her mind a moment, but it was fully dark now, so it made more sense than less. Still, though. Now that everything was over, her knees felt weak, her heart was pounding, not fast, but rather hard. All of the adrenaline that had been built up over the past few hours, apparently, was draining out of her. “Osik, I need a smoke. Long story short?”

“Sure.”

“It's him.” She said.

“Who?”

Hanna paused, letting her eyes close for a moment. She saw the man, the strong hands, the warm eyes, leading her through a dance to music she had never heard before. “It's the man from the gala, the one I danced with. He’s Chase Resdove. He's Jahzer Qe-cora.”

“The man... you danced with.”

“The same. No mistaking it.” Hanna opened her eyes. An ugly, possibly unfair thought crossed through her mind. It took flight from her mouth before she could think it all the way through. “T'ocs, did you know?”

“What?”

“Did you know?”

“Did I know what, ad'ika?”

“Did you know that the man I danced with was Jahzer Qe-cora?”

The moment of hesitation before T'ocs replied was more indicative of an answer than what he actually said. “No.”

Hanna closed her eyes. She heard her own voice shrink in her ears. “Would you have told me if you did?”

“Hanna, Jahzer Qe-cora is the man we are here to kill, regardless of who knew what when. It doesn't matter what happened at the gala. What matters is what happened today.”

“That's what I thought.” Hanna got to her feet, taking her helmet off and let it hang on the magnetic clip on her belt. She was done talking for the moment. He had known, or at least suspected, and the whole discussion they had had, the shouting match, all of those things she had said… he had just been trying to protect her.

The same man. Her mind kept going back to that same point. All of the fates and ironies in the galaxy crossed at once. How could the most charming and polite man she had ever met in her life be the same one she had been tasked and commanded to kill? How could someone so warm and friendly be a ruthless, emotionless killer? It had been one of the best nights she had ever had, and certainly one of the most pleasant and peaceful when it came to social events. Now, that memory was jumbled, confused, just like her mind itself. It could not settle, it would not settle, on an emotion. She was angry at what she had learned, upset at what the consequences might be, fearful of what might happen, disgusted with herself for getting attached to a man after one night, and, somewhere in the very back of her mind, she was happy that she had gotten to see him again.

She shut it down. She shut it all down. She needed to think, and in order to operate properly her mind needed to be able to function without a maelstrom of emotion constantly blowing and spinning through it.

Qe-cora was an enemy. More than that, he was a class-1, a greater danger than anyone she had ever faced before, than anyone she had ever met except for Darth Vader himself. No matter what had happened during the gala, she needed to keep all of that in mind.

She needed a new plan. A plan that he would not have thought of. She needed to do something so unorthodox, so unusual, that a former Imperial agent who had been trained by the ISB, officer's academy and basically every other worthwhile Imperial service would never see it coming. She needed to brainstorm a plan so out there, so off the wall, that he would not be able to predict it.

And when she looked him in the eye and killed him, she would not regret it. There would be other nights, other dances. Qe-cora was not the only man in the galaxy. Just a very charming, and very dangerous one. One she could not hesitate with. He needed to die, and she would be the one to escort him to the gates of hell.

***

T’ocs was pacing. It was never good when he paced. Walking was too hard for him at this point for him to walk any more than necessary. But nervous habits were hard to break. “So… how are you still alive?”

“That’s the strange part.” Hanna was perched on the edge of a seat on the couch in the Arbiter’s lounge, her armor off and helmet sitting on the table in front of her, her hands laced together in front of her shoulders slumped forward. She felt exhausted and drained, but she needed to talk to her buir. She needed to talk to someone. “Or, one of the strange parts. He doesn’t want to kill me, he never did. He wants to help me. So he left me alive and helped me pick out a new name from the list to take on. Together.”

He stopped pacing with his back to her. She heard T'ocs breathe for a moment. She figured he would curse, she knows that she would in his place, but he does not. Instead, he stated, “That is strange.”

“Yeah. He’s super concerned with making the Empire secure and safe and all that other propaganda osik, you know. Like, that’s pretty much his whole goal in life, to make the Empire a better place, listening to him talk is like listening to the Imperial Holonet.”

“And he believes all of it?”

“It sounded to me like he does. Either he's some sort of super-patriot, or he’s just playing me. And either way, I don’t like it. But he didn’t kill me when he had the chance, and made it pretty clear that he would if I tried to double-cross him, so I’m not sure if I have a choice but to at least follow his lead for a bit.”

“That’s about the worst possible situation for you to be in. Be careful, ad’ika; he’s a time bomb you have yourself strapped to, now.”

“He said he wasn’t ISB or Imperial Intelligence, but I’m not sure if he’d admit to it either way if he was. He fights like a madman, too, strong as a gundark and twice as nasty. But when he talks, it’s all urbane and civilized. It’s like he’s two different people.”

“He’s a professional, then.” T’ocs’s voice dropped to a low enough register that Hanna had hard time hearing him. “Fierfek, I was afraid of this. He might not be ISB or Imp Intel, but he’s definitely been trained like he was one of them. And you said he was able to deduce some of who you are?”

Hanna did not recognize the word fierfek, but it did not sound Mandalorian. She filed it away into her internal swear word bank regardless. “Right down to the fact that I specialize in high-risk targets, including Jedi. I tell you, he’s good. Some of it might be guesses, but he plays it off like his knows everything about you just from a few words and expressions. It’s why I’m thinking he’s at least partially telling the truth about why he’s out here.”

“And he said that he would kill you if you refused?”

“Not in so many words, but the implication was there.”. She crossed one leg over the other, trying to disguise the trembling that seemed to come and go at random. “He had me completely helpless. There was no reason for him to keep me alive. Except for the fact that he had a reason.”

“He’s a professional.” T’ocs said. He had repeated that fact before, and seemed stuck on it for some reason. “He has to have a reason, and a good one. Just the whole idea that he did this on purpose, to draw you out…”

“He was probably lying. He couldn’t have had any idea that I was coming, could he?”

“He could. He really could.” T’ocs shook his head, still pacing back and forth across the length of the ship’s hold. “There are a lot of ways that he could have known, not the least of which is indicated that he somehow picked on you as a possible assassin at the gala. I’m not going to assume anything except for the worst.”

“It’s going to be hard to plan any sort of successful takeout of this guy if we just assume he can, I don’t know, read our minds.” Hanna unlaced her hands and held them up in front of her. “We might as well just do what he says.”

“He cannot read our minds, the only ones I would suspect that from would be Darth Vader and others like him. Qe-cora, I would more suspect that he is highly intelligent, observant and experienced.” T’ocs gestured at her without stopping his pacing. “When he saw you during the gala he knew right away, just like everyone else did, that you didn’t belong there. But unlike everyone else, he may have seen it as more than just an awkward situation. He may have seen you as a potential threat.”

“Which is why he singled me out, danced with me, tried to get all of the information he could out of me without raising my suspicions.” Hanna chuckled to herself. As high-strung as T’ocs was acting, she hardly felt the same. More than anything, she felt a mixture of relief and frustration. Relief at not dying and frustration for that being a possibility in the first place. “Can you imagine how else that night might have gone if you hadn’t grabbed me and brought me back here once it started getting late?”

T’ocs turned on her with a look on his face that said he had already imagined quite a bit. “He’s a professional. He wouldn’t have done anything that he didn’t see as being necessary to whatever plan he has in place.”

Hanna shrugged and reached out to slide her helmet across the table toward herself again. “Look, I don’t know what he knows, or what he doesn’t know, or anything like that. I just know that he’s incredibly charming, incredibly dangerous in a fight, and that he is expecting to meet me on Ws’cee. So if we don’t do what he says, he’ll probably hunt us down and kill us. Besides, the guy he wants us to take out is on the list.”

T’ocs rounded on her with a finger extended into her face. “Do not use that as an excuse. Do not let yourself be drawn into this. That man is still on the list himself. He is a class-1, the most dangerous target we have ever been given. We cannot lose sight of that goal. Do not doubt for a moment that he will kill you if you give him the chance and it serves his purposes.”

Hanna looked at T’ocs, one of her eyebrows raised. “You really think that I don’t realize that?”

He backed off from her a bit, face calm. “I just want to make sure your head is in the right place. You walked out of your cabin the morning after you met him like you were walking on clouds, and if I want to try to keep you alive, I need to bring you down.”

“Thank you.” She replied, “Really. I know what you’re trying to do, what you tried to do that night after the gala. But don’t worry about it.” Hanna stood up and picked up her helmet. “I’m not going to lose sight of what I came here for. That man manipulated me, tricked me, and then almost killed me. No one else has ever done that. Not since Ome. So this isn’t just a job for me anymore, this is personal.”

“Good.”

“But I’m still going to Ws’cee. We have a good opportunity here to strike a very high-profile target alongside an experienced and very, very dangerous former Imperial agent. Stot is a class-3 threat with bullet points all over his profile about what he can throw at us. This isn’t something I can pass up.”

T’ocs took a deep breath, then nodded. “Agreed. But be. Careful. Keep your guard up at all times. I don’t trust him, his intentions or anything he said. And neither should you.”

“I don’t.” Hanna tossed her helmet to him, which he caught out of reflex. “That’s why you gave me the armor, isn’t it? That way he can’t shoot me in the back.”

He tossed her helmet back to her. “Or the head.”

“Or the head.”

“I’ll set us a course for Ws’cee. You pull together some sort of plan for how to go forward once we get there. Stot’s a class-3, and he basically owns the entire sector, he’ll have thought of a lot in terms of surveillance and security. We can’t just walk around down there like we own the place.”

“I have a plan.” Hanna rolled her eyes at herself before continuing. “And unlike my last one, I think it’s a good one this time.”

 

Apologies for failing to reply to so many chapters in a row, I was mostly away from the boards for a pretty long time and I finally caught up on this story just a few days ago...

... and wow, I missed so much! Hanna went from getting the full-fledged Vader dressing-down (minus Force-choke, I guess) to teaming up -- not quite of her own free will -- with the most important target on Vader's list? That's what we call being caught between "a cliff ahead and a mountain torrent behind you" where I come from, and it's not a comfortable situation at all! Well, at least she had fun at the ball, I guess that must count for something.

Although I can imagine the possibilities here. Hanna is beyond ****ed off at Vader by now, so teaming up with Qe-cora (if that is indeed his name) also comes across as an option for rebelling against her boss. On the other hand, this Qe-cora fellow isn't exactly what you'd call reassuring, so it might not end well. But then again, I'm going to count on you not to finish off such a brilliant OC after just three stories, so I'll stay in the corner over there and wait for the next instalment

PS: You need to update your title bar