Saga - Legends Of Small Propagules [Dark Times, OCs]

Title: Of Small Propagules
Author: Mechalich
Timeframe: 19-18 BBY
Characters: Brend Litnor (OC), Merjul Sayeris (OC), Aes Rimi (OC), Dusk (OC)
Genre: Drama, Science Fiction
Keywords: AgriCorps, Agriculture, Refugee, Sarkhai, Zabrak
Summary: An agronomist sent to Ord Varee finds himself tossed into a dangerous refugee crisis.
Notes: this story was inspired by a desire to write something in set Star Wars about societal progress, rather than things never being allowed to get better. I blame s3e3 of the Mandalorian.
A map of the continent of Acenou can be found here.

Of Small Propagules
Chapter One – Ord Varee, 19 BBY

Brend considered the official credentials once again, giving them a serious look for only the second time since they'd been delivered by courier. Throughout the short journey he'd left them buried in his luggage, not wanting to think about it much. Now, though, with arrival immanent, there was no avoiding the little identity card with its stenciled codes and symbols. He had a new position to take up, one in which he was obliged to wear the label, not bury it where it could be safely ignored.

He'd only had the thing for just over a week, it had arrived along with the new assignment he'd been expecting for considerably longer. In many ways, especially the visually obvious ones, it differed little from the card he'd used to possess. The central symbol of a bundle of grain stalks remained unchanged, only the circular image surrounding it had been altered and that in a manner that would take some attention to notice. The various legal authorities enumerated on the rear text were identical in language, though in some places numbers had been changed due to the laws they referenced undergoing subtle reorganization. Even the font and color scheme were no different.

Despite this, there was a single, simple, reason why the credentials felt foreign in his hands. Instead of Department of Agriculture, they now read Ministry of Agriculture1. The very top line, the most fundamental declaration, had been changed to suit the New Order.

He took some solace that his position remained a civilian one, not reclassified to serve under a military umbrella as many had been. He could pin the insignia onto the lapel of an armored vest worn over reinforced coveralls of his own choice rather than being squeezed into one of the miserable uniforms that were already beginning to be forced upon any number of researchers facing that treatment. How long that privilege would remain, Brend had no idea. With a mere three months passed since the founding of this brand-new empire, everything remained in a state of constant and unknowable flux.

Changed, and duly pinned, he packed up the remainder of his single case worth of luggage and cleaned out the little passenger cabin. “Okay Jan, time to go,” he ordered the JN-66 droid that sat in the charging station against the wall2.

“Understood,” the little droid detached, engaged his repulsors, and floated up to take his customary position behind Brend at eye level.

The walk was a short one, this bulk freighter was not intended to carry passengers and had carved out space for a mere handful by sacrificing crew quarters. Less than fifty steps carried him up to the bridge. There, looking out through the old ship's only external viewports, he got his first look at their destination and his new home: Ord Varee.

It was an unassuming planet, a blue, green, and brown ball lacking icecaps. Scattered continents, mostly small or midsize rather than the massive conglomerate landmasses common on many worlds, lay within the embrace of broad oceans. Curiously, by some quirk of plate tectonics no strip of land crossed the equatorial zone. The world possessed a band of pure unbroken blue expanse across its whole waist.

Signs of development, the gray-brown pigmentation shift indicative of dense settlement and synchronized industrial agriculture, were strangely confined entirely to the largest continent, the ship's current descent target. The rest of the planet, as best could be seen from low orbit, appeared to be entirely wilderness.

Such a development pattern was notably anomalous. Normally sentient life spread out to fill up every corner of new lands rather than huddle together on one patch.

One glimpse was all Brend received. The freighter's captain had an old school approach to handling passengers during major maneuvers. He ordered him to take shelter in the galley, which doubled as the emergency mustering station.

In some mild way this was an annoyance. Brend would have liked to watch the ship land. However, standing on the bridge and being studiously ignored while the crew talked over him would surely have not been pleasant. Had there been other passengers, the period of confinement would have been frustrating, as it would have essentially guaranteed an exchange of awkward small talk, but he was traveling alone.

The recent shift in governance had a depressive impact of discretionary travel, left space abandoned save for those who needed to trade to live or those on official business. Ord Varee was only a minor trading stopover at the best of times, which these were, galaxy-spanning proclamations of renewed prosperity aside, not. So, he had the galley all to himself.

Sitting down, Brend decided landing was a good time for a final refresher course. “Jan, run the planetary summary again.”

The floating analysis droid did not hesitate. “Ord Varee: a terrestrial planet with all attributes within point-nine of standard located in the Belshar sector of the Mid Rim. It lies on the Namadii Corridor hyperlane, but services limited trade volume. Initially settled as a Galactic Republic Ordinance/Regional Depot eleven thousand nine hundred and fifteen years before present. The initial population was less than ten million, but a combination of native growth and low but steady immigration has raised the population significantly. The most recent census recorded three billion one hundred and four million and two hundred thousand inhabitants. The planet has a largely self-sufficient internalized economy. Primary imports are advanced technologies. Primary exports are high-purity clays and specialty porcelains derived from deposits of reef animals in the equatorial ocean band.3”

“The planet's history is largely uneventful, and it has not featured significantly in any major conflict of the post-Ruusan period,” Jan was aware that the Republic no longer existed, but the historians were still deciding how to demarcate the change, so the droid still used the old term. Brend found this strangely sad. “But there is one notable recent event. Four years ago, the planetary government entered into an agreement with the Refugee Relief Movement to open the planet to mass immigration in return for substantial financial compensation.4 The small continent of Acenou was opened to off-world refugee settlement. In the brief window before the outbreak of the Clone Wars drastically restricted movement across the galaxy, one hundred million immigrants arrived on planet.”

One hundred million sentient beings, from who knew how many different species, dumped into a virgin wilderness with nothing but prefabricated housing and gear available to them and no oversight beyond the limited watch of the Refugee Relief Coalition. There was no way to assess the situation as anything other than a horrible morass. Of course, that was where his new assignment took him. “And the Acenou summary?” He questioned the droid.

“The continent of Acenou was leased by the government of Ord Varee to the Refugee Relief Coalition for nine hundred and ninety-nine years,” Jan repeated the exact same summary he'd given before. “The RRC put in place a local oversight administration to govern refugee settlement and to meant basic Republic legal requirements for refugee housing and protection. The government of Ord Varee, beyond restricting admissible refugees to species within certain benchmarks of Human physiology, was not involved whatsoever.”

That policy was startlingly speciesist, but at the same time Brend was not blind to its practicality. It meant, he knew, that all refugees would be able to live in the same standardized housing units, handle the same equipment, and even mostly consume the same foods and medicines. From an agriculturalist's perspective it made matters considerably more manageable.

“The RRM Administration, colloquially referenced as 'Rima,' established their headquarters on the eastern coast of the continent,” Jan continued to rattle off facts as if that was the most wonderful task in the world, which given the droid's internal programming, it probably believed. “This site is now known as Acenou City. It possesses a population estimated at twenty million. The continent has no other single settlement with a population above one hundred thousand. As of the Declaration of the New Order, the Refugee Relief Movement has been discontinued. All operations not terminated by judicial order have been transferred to the authority of the Commission for the Preservation of the New Order. The exact circumstances of this transition as it applies to the local situation on Ord Varee and the continent of Acenou are not available in public databases.”

Decidedly not encouraging. Someone, Brend knew, had to be in charge down there, at least far enough to approve his assignment as Acenou's research agronomist. Presumably someone somewhere within the labyrinthine hierarchy of COMPNOR – a single glance at the organizational chart had made his eyes hurt – had the authority to make requests of the Ministry of Agriculture regarding consulting scientists, but the mechanism behind it all was remarkably opaque5. Such confusion was demoralizing. For the five years previous since leaving school he'd understood that ultimately, however much the madness of war obscured it, he was ultimately serving the benefit of the Republic. Now he not only had no idea who he properly reported to, but no real sense of the purpose either.

Hopefully it wouldn't matter in the end. Work was work. It would serve so long as he could find his path to it.

The BFF-1 freighter made a shuddering, lumbering, but overall uneventful descent to the surface of Ord Varee. Brend thanked the captain upon leaving, grateful that his transit fee had been paid in advance by the ministry. The middle-aged spacer gave the new insignia a confused look, one that seemed likely to be common in the coming days. Perhaps the highly connected residents of the Core understood the true scope of this changeover, but out here on the Rim everyone found their questions overwhelming the available answers.

The main spaceport of Valree, Ord Varee's sprawling capital city, was a long way from bustling. Freight traffic ran steadily enough, but when he crossed over into the compact passenger terminal Brend found the facility all but deserted. It only then occurred to him that on a planet where everyone lived on one continent there was minimal demand for sub-orbital flights. This transformed from a curiosity to a difficulty the moment he discovered there were no scheduled flights to Acenou City at all. The spaceport information droid kindly noted that there were several private charter ships available and suggested he might take advantage of one, a piece of data that would have been helpful only if it had somehow been included in his travel budget.

Massive transitions in forms of government produced economic disruption. Though Brend was still getting paid, as reflected in the balance of his personal account, that sum was reported in Imperial Credits, which were presently completely unavailable in the hard currency form a charter captain was likely to demand. Besides, his government salary was nowhere near generous enough for him to waste money that way. “Jan, can you do me a favor and trawl the network to try and find a way to get over to Acenou that doesn't cost me more than you did?”

It was the kind of task the little machine was quite good at, and it took the droid under a minute to discover that Rima maintained a vessel on standby for charter flights to Acenou by its executives and visiting VIPs. This ship was presently in port and had a flight plan filed for Acenou City scheduled for the next morning, twelve hours away. Records indicated it had just arrived a few hours earlier. The vessel itself was lodged in the spaceport's upper class private terminal.

Brend's official credentials served to acquire access to that section, which they probably shouldn't have, but no one was quite certain yet which sort of Imperial official was the kind who had to pay attention to local customs versus the kind that did not. Making his way to the crew dining hall in the back, he found the pilot eating in a cramped booth. She was a woman of what he guessed was about forty years, rapidly going gray, and who hadn't bothered to change out of her flight suit. Like most pilots, she was attentive to movement patterns, and discerned his intentions early in the approach.

“That's no Rima badge you're wearing young man,” she noted with an arced eyebrow. She did not pull her fork out from the pile of steaming noodles in front of her. “Which means I don't have to give you anything. If you want a favor, spill it.”

“I need to get to Acenou to report to my new job assignment,” honesty felt like the appropriate approach in this case. “But, somehow, my travel schedule stops here. I think my superiors thought I could take a tram across thousands of klicks of ocean or something. So, is there any way to ride along in the morning? I'll take any spare space at all.” He'd been transported alongside, and on one memorable occasion within, the cargo before. He could survive it again.

“What?” she looked over him, and then beyond to take in Jan's somewhat dinged and severely scratched carapace. “The big shiny empire doesn't pay enough, is that it? That sure was fast.”

Brend had several extremely lengthy rants regarding how agriculture, the galaxy's most essential industry, was chronically neglected and perpetually underpaid on the tip of his tongue. For the moment, he managed to swallow all of them. “As far as I can tell, the Empire pays exactly the same as the Republic did, but it only pays in Imperial Credits, which don't spend out here yet.”

“Ha,” the pilot drained a long pull of something vaguely milk-like from a tall glass. “That's for sure. Haven't so much as seen one of the new chits yet, and no one around here'll take a transfer. The governor issued an order to maintain Republic Credits as legal until we get some newly printed cash.” She shook her head briefly. “Why don't you just got to the spaceport authority and make a big stink? They'll ship you across the ocean just to get rid of you.”

Brend was aware that this strategy had the potential to work. He was also aware that while his credentials said Galactic Empire on them, they also said agronomist, not something suitably intimidating like inspector. It was a very risky move. “I'd rather not burn all my bridges before I even get started,” he replied to the pilot.

“Smart,” she slurped down a double forkful of noodles, noisily. “Well, maybe I could make room. We're supposed to fly with a co-pilot, but the upper brass quit paying for that years ago and just bolted a piloting droid into the secondary control panel. Means the co-pilot's seat is empty, if you're not too tall.” She looked him up and down. “You'll fit, barely. But why's the Empire sending you to Acenou anyway? Scuttlebutt around here is that they're going to pull everything out as soon as they can.”

That estimate certainly fit Brend's imagined understanding of COMPNOR's priorities. “No idea,” he admitted. “All I know is this is the assignment the department,” he caught the error too late. “No, the Ministry of Agriculture sent me on. The way things are now, it seemed like a bad idea to try and refuse the transfer. Besides,” he shrugged. “I was getting bored of soil remediation on Ord Hallitron6.”

“Agriculture?” the pilot blinked in momentary confusion, then her expression darkened angrily. Not directed at him, Brend realized from her next words, but at the Empire. “So, you're the one they sent to replace Sanava.”

Confusion doubled over in the conversion, as he had no idea who this referenced. “Replace? I checked the records. The, ah, ministry, did not have anyone previously assigned to this project.”

“Not the department,” the pilot's use of the old title was surely deliberate, linked to the grim-faced glare storming across her face. “The AgriCorps7.”

“Oh,” Brend went very still. He swallowed slowly and struggled to secure a semblance of stability in the face of this revelation. “Oh,” he mumbled helplessly. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“The day after the Chancellor decided he wanted to be called Emperor instead, Rima sent security down to her office and arrested her in the hydroponics lab. I know because I had to fly her back, under guard, afterwards. The guards told me they took her to the planetary defense force barracks on the other side of the city. No word since, she's just disappeared.” Her eyes narrowed. “I hope you're not going to claim she was part of a plot to kill the Chancellor from all the way out here. I doubt she'd spoken to another Jedi in months, on Acenou you can't even get a live holocall.”

As far as Brend was concerned, the capabilities of Jedi were best not contemplated too deeply. He had enough trouble keeping multiple interacting scientific fields sorted, no need to layer mysticism atop that. Despite this, it stood to reason that any conspiracy ought to be kept as small as possible. Did a handful of Jedi try to kill Palpatine? Maybe. Subsequent events certainly suggested both sides were contesting the highest levels of power. The surprising part wasn't that they fought, it was that Palpatine won.

Well, for the moment anyway. It had only been three months. There were still Jedi out there. Brend doubted the Emperor slept well at night.

“I have no idea what really happened between the Jedi and Palpatine,” he admitted. “But I've no quarrel with the AgriCorps. Feeding the galaxy is foundational work. We could have used more of them, and I would rather have worked with Sanava than replace her.” He'd never met one, but some of his teachers back at university had. They'd spoken of them as miracle workers, capable of turning barren desert into fertile fields with a wave of the hand.

This declaration seemed to go over well. The pilot raised her milky beverage in mock toast. “What's your name young man?”

“Brend Litnor.” He decided not to mention his academic title. Strangely, while most farmers had considerable respect for agronomy, they found the idea of earning a doctorate in the field somewhat ridiculous.

“Merjul Sayeris,” she offered him her left hand. “Private docking bay number six. Get there by oh-six-hundred local so I can smuggle you aboard.”

“Thanks, I owe you,” he gripped carefully.

“Buy me a drink sometime and we'll call it even,” Merjul shrugged. “I don't carry big debts.”

The early morning departure left him few options but trying to sleep before morning came racing at him. Unfortunately, his timing was hours off. His body was used to galactic standard time, a full six hours behind. In the hopes of calibrating rapidly he rented a room at a cheap spaceport-adjacent lodge and used a mild sleep aid to knock off early.

His last thought was of how he hated adapting to new planets. He had no idea how the clone troopers had been so good at it.

Notes
1. This is a canon agency, and the distinction also seems to be canon. The Republic had Departments, the Empire had Ministries.
2. JN-66 analysis droids are canonical. These are the ones found floating in the Jedi Archives in the PT.
3. Ord Varee’s location, ORD status, and population are canonical. The remaining factoids are things I’ve made up.
4. This is a canonical event and is central to this story. It sources to one of the old HoloNet News Reports.
5. COMPNOR is canonical, and very important, but its interaction with the rest of the Imperial government is poorly understood within canon.
6. This is a canon planet.
7. AgriCorps is the Jedi Agricultural Corps, quite possibly the largest Jedi organization when Order 66 was executed.

 

Chapter Two – Ord Varee, 19 BBY

Rima's executive class traveled between the continents of Valon and Acenou aboard a brightly painted HWK-290.1 It represented a significantly better class of ship than such a simple task required, but one that covered the distance at a comfortably high altitude and impressive supersonic speeds. Though they had to cross nearly five thousand kilometers of ocean, the trip took little over an hour.

Brend spent that interval crammed into the narrow co-pilot's chair trying not to smash his knees into the piloting droid in front of him and carefully listening as Merjul aired her exhaustive and highly informed grievances without pause. Both of them tried to pretend they were unaware of the planet-level director of Rima engaging in overwrought intercourse with his mistress in the luxurious passenger compartment.

Thankfully, the cockpit had excellent sound dampening.

“It's a ridiculous fetish,” the pilot remarked sardonically. “As if high altitude changes anything. Inertial dampers means you can't feel any of the motion. Sometimes I think I should turn them off, see how long it takes them to cover the walls in vomit.” Her grin broadened, then faded almost immediately. “Then I remember I need another twenty years before I can retire. Not sure what I'll do if they pull this run along with the rest. Back and forth day after day might be boring, but it's an easy flight with zero risk of space pirates.”

“You, ah,” Brend tried to probe courteously. “You think you're going to lose your job?” It seemed a poor prospect for his future, with employment just begun.

“Refugee Relief was run by rich nobles,” grousing came naturally to Merjul. Like most pilots, she viewed life as trying to chart a path through an endless series of obstacles that some clueless fool had dumped in front of her. “That man behind us who thinks his wife doesn't know he has three different kept women, including a Twi'lek, is from the upper crust of Alsakan.2 You think he cared one whit about refugee welfare when he took the job? Please, he did this because he thought it would pad his resume for a run for office when he made it back home. Also because it's a lot easier to keep the string of mistresses and scandalous hook-ups out of the news when you're on a Rim world most of your planet's never heard of. Now though?” She raised an eyebrow. “Everything's changed. Looking good for bleeding-heart Senators no long matters. This is a COMPNOR project now, and stars only know what those people want. All the signs, and I can read the signs pretty good from up here, say they're just going to mothball this and pretend it never happened. Last three months I've carried plenty of managers, consultants, and techs out; you're the first one I've had coming in.”

An extremely ominous statement indeed. It triggered the thought that he'd only been assigned at all because the Agriculture Ministry felt some sort of instinctual obligation to prove it could replace a member of the AgriCorps. He wondered if anyone had examined what he was intended to accomplish on Acenou. The assignment's language had been full of legalese and distinctly short of details. “One hundred million people sounds like a lot to abandon,” That was the population of an average planet.3 “There must be some kind of plan.”

“Haven't heard one myself,” Merjul forcibly kept her focus out through the viewports. “It wouldn't surprise be if they just up and left. Rima's only got about a thousand personnel here. Locals and droids already do most of the work. They could probably do the rest.” Gloved fingers clenched the controls. “Between you and me, I wouldn't worry about the people, but the money. This place bleeds credits like a sieve, freighter after freighter of 'donations' come in, hardly anything comes out. Some of that's inefficiency and corruption, obviously, I mean this was a big Republic project, what's new? But a lot of it's real essentials. What happens if COMPNOR just closes the spigot? Things could get nasty fast.”

Using his datapad, Brend made a note to have Jan conduct a full analysis of the project financial setup as soon as they landed. His pay didn't come out of Refugee Relief accounts, but that represented little solace in the possible event of being marooned on an isolated continent amid economic catastrophe. “Wouldn't the planetary government step in during a crisis?” He questioned. Ord Varee wasn't the most prosperous planet in the galaxy, but it was a long ways from broke. It could provide at least a floor of minimal support.

This drew a nervous laugh and stiff head shake from Merjul. “The whole project was a cash grab by the previous administration,” she explained. “They got voted out as soon as the war started. The new governor turned everything over to Rima. I guess that means COMPNOR's proud owner of their very own continent, for a thousand years anyway. As far as the locals are concerned Acenou might as well be on another planet. You're riding with me aren't you? There's no regular traffic, no trade links, nothing. Rima's supply ships land directly in Acenou City.”

That represented a staggeringly inefficient arrangement, and one Brend had never encountered before. He supposed, from the governor's perspective, it simplified matters, but it left one hundred million people in an incredibly precarious position at the mercy of off-world patrons. That wasn't unknown, plenty of mining colonies operated that way. He'd spent the past three years trying to restore self-sufficiency to the kind of mess they could leave behind. The scale of it though, that threatened to overwhelm his composure.

“It's a sad bit,” the pilot's gray-haired scalp shook wildly. “But it's wrapped up in the nature of the refugees who showed up. Ord Varee's natives are ninety-five percent Human. Those on Acenou are ninety-nine percent not.”

“Oh, of course,” Brend chewed on those words, their bitterness lay heavy upon his tongue. It made ample sense. The old, evolution-based, primal impulses of speciesism. Defend your own, purge the other. It was not even something he could call a surprise, not after three years of war divided upon those lines. “Then who holds the local plurality?” Demographic data on the refugee population had been stubbornly difficult to locate. “Zabraks?”

“That's right.”

It was not exactly his most brilliant guess. Iridonia was, galaxy-speaking, close by4, and that species had a tendency to spread out and colonize almost as strong as that of Humans. They also possessed significant internal cultural divides. That was uncommon, as non-Humans tended to unify in the face of the Human majority, at least outwardly. Zabraks had divided sharply over the secession issue. Considering Ord Varee's admission requirements, they were the logical choice for greatest numbers.

Admittedly, it was a rather ironic setup, on an Ord. He suspected that history also contributed to the abandonment of the refugees. An unbearably ancient source of prejudice, but the past had a long reach on the scale of planetary cultures.5

Little more was spoken, after, as Merjul focused on the rapid descent and Brend stretched his neck to stare out the windows and get his first look at his new home.

They came down over a wide bay, one tinted a distinctive greenish shade. There were boats out, and a scattered archipelago of floating harvester platforms. Though the ship moved too rapidly to allow a detailed examination, by their number Brend suspected that whatever industry this bay fostered was important to the continent overall.

The final leg saw them turn north and fly in to a city on the edge of the bay. It was gray and shining, a sprawling assemblage of durasteel and duracrete bonded together through prefabricated assembly. Fields, sown with rapidly rising grain, surrounded it on a vast alluvial plain. In the distance the green forests from which that farmland had been reclaimed could just be glimpsed.

It was quite a large city, spread across many square kilometers and featuring densely aggregated buildings and a number of large towers over one hundred meters high. Constructed by droids linking together whole floor units in series and then skinned with spray-on reinforcement polymer, they were ugly and aesthetically unvaried. Everything was the same style, the same color, and same layout. Identification of districts, patterns, and any local flavor was impossible given the lack of landmarks.

“Acenou City, population twenty million,” Merjul intoned as she lowered them into a spaceport docking bay on the city's eastern edge. “The only city on the continent, and the most boring city you'll see this side of Geonosis.”

“Character takes time.” It was a saying Brend's father was fond of using. He mostly applied it to people, but it served settlements just as well.

After they landed, he had to wait in the cockpit until the director and his mistress cleared out. During that time he booted Jan up and connected the droid to the local network. The analysis unit was at last able to figure out where they were supposed to go and who exactly they were to report too. These gaps in his instructions did not inspire confidence in the Rima administration.

Thankfully the analysis droid was capable of rapidly sorting through a great deal of directory data. Brend subsequently learned he'd been assigned to the Acenou Development Office and his superior was the Chair of Development, Tyso Cateath. The ADO operated out of the towering Rima Rampart Building, near the geographic center of the city and the only building on the continent topping two hundred meters. Even from the spaceport, kilometers away, it was hard to miss, since someone had placed a giant RRM logo on all four sides.

Brend could have done without that particular display of corporate pride. After three years of war all he could think of was how it made the building look like a prime target.

After thanking Merjul he took the public tram from the spaceport to the downtown. The city's tram network was rudimentary at best, but despite this the cars were mostly empty. Spaceport traffic was light, and the limited number of stops on the way provided little utility to anyone not heading to the city center. The locals had responded by absolutely coating the tram cars in graffiti, mostly bizarre angular symbolism in red, black, and brown recognizable as Zabrak in origin, though the meaning was otherwise incomprehensible.

Downtown featured considerably more activity. Speeders clogged the roads and filled the air with the whine of repulsorlift engines. Foot traffic was also considerable, with pedestrians transiting from various offices to shops and eateries at a regular pace. Available services were, at a glance, severely limited. Mostly food and stores selling basic necessities. There were few specialty services and no luxury offerings of any kind. Employment, based off clothing choices, appeared to indicate a heavy preponderance of bureaucracy and medicine, common urban enterprises anywhere. Industry, if it inhabited the city at all, was found further out, lost in the sprawl.

The downtown population was Zabrak heavy, with the horn-headed near-Humans making up close to a majority. Humans, Twi'lek, and Togruta were also abundant, as might be expected in any large city. Less in conformity with stereotype were the large number of Nautolans, easily ten percent of the visible populace. It took a reminder from Jan for Brend to recognize this as a logical outcome of Ord Varee's proximity to their homeworld of Glee Anselm, just one hop down the Namadii Corridor6. Outside of these major groups, numerous exotic species, most wildly unfamiliar to his eyes, shuffled about amid the dense construction. They were rarely idle. Not their home, simply a place to conduct the official business that drew anyone to administrative centers.

Traffic in front of Rima's headquarters was considerable. A line for public entrants stretched out the doors and a good fifty meters down the street despite it still being quite early according to local time. Brend made his way around this queue and discovered an employee's only entrance on the opposite side. A pair of security guards wearing uniforms that were clearly knock-offs of the Republic Judicial design scheme bearing the Rima badge stood sentry. Both were Human, and appeared largely bored. Despite never having seen the new agronomist before, they waved him through with no more than a quick glance at his credentials.

Avoiding the busy lobby, crowded with people being processed through security and directed to various departmental offices, he took the employee turbolift to the twenty-second floor where the ADO operated. A protocol droid greeted him as he emerged onto the office floor. “Welcome sir, how may I direct you?”

“I'm Doctor Brend Litnor, the new agronomist,” he told the machine. “I need to meet with Chairman Cateath.”

“Of course sir, we have been expecting your arrival,” the droid answered. “Take the first right, and then follow the corridor. It is the last office on the end.”

These directions led to a corner office with an excellent view of the bay, which Brend supposed he ought to have anticipated. He was not above admitting that, if he stood in the chairman's place, he'd have taken that office too. Some perk structures simply remained universal.

The office's door was locked, but opened immediately after he stepped in front of a recognition panel. “Come in, come in,” Chairman Cateath spoke with the soft warm baritone that seemed to come standard on small-time political climbers. “Glad you were able to find your way to us.”

Tyso Cateath was a gray-haired, aging, man who'd achieved the state of genteel roundness commonly referred to upon those of his class as portly. His office's decorations made it clear that his taste for sumptuousness went well beyond food. The space was walled with cherry-shaded hardwood paneling and filled with solid wood furnishings. Every surface save the terminal-equipped central desk was covered in display articles ranging from holographic viewer cases to wineglasses to wooden animal figurines to many more curios Brend struggled to identify. Even the lighting felt this personalization, the industrial ceiling panels replaced by hanging fixtures that seemed to be assembled out of some kind of animal horn conglomeration.

The visitor's survey of this display did not go unnoticed. “It's all local products, the achievements of artisans who have settled here that this office is proud to support.”

Assuming this was true, and it struck Brend as the sort of claim it would be utterly pointless to falsify, it seemed a decent gesture. A testament that at least the office's heart was in the right place.

“Well then,” the chairman rose from his desk, briefly shook the agronomist's hand, and then swiftly sat back down. “Welcome to our little enterprise. How much did they tell you before arrival?”

“Almost nothing,” Brend did his best to be open without revealing his anger at having to borrow a ride from the courier. “I did not even realize I had a predecessor.”

This drew a frown across the man's pudgy face. The resulting expression invoked the irritation of a surprised fish. “Yes, a sad business. She was something of a loner, Sanava Antder, no one knew her well, but her work was excellent all around.” He swept arm around to indicate the bay beyond the city. “Algae farms,” he pointed at one of the distant harvester platforms. “The whole thing was her idea, genius really.”

Under the proper conditions, that kind of operation could be extremely productive with minimal labor requirements following initial setup. Assuming the bay met the criteria, it was a strikingly forward-thinking plan to locate such a key resource next to the densely populated capital. Brend felt a steadily growing regret that he'd never had the chance to meet the AgriCorps worker.

“Very impressive,” he admitted freely. “But I'm still unclear on my purpose here. Am I to take over consultation for the algae operation or...” he trailed off, uncertain how to ask for the explanation he should have received along with the job assignment.

This line of reasoning caused the director to deflate, as if he were a balloon slowly letting out air. “The purpose of this office was to propose development initiatives, conduct feasibility studies, and provide grants and pilot programs with the hope of generating either operational scale backing from the Refugee Relief Movement or outside investors. We never had much luck with the latter,” he sighed weekly, almost a wheeze. “During the war everyone put their money into, well, war, but we did better with the former. Rima utilized central funding to turn several projects that came out of this office into industry scale realities. Now though, I doubt there's any credits for new projects.”

He looked up, face bitterly forlorn. “Your position is funded by the Ministry of Agriculture, like many of the people on this floor you'll be able to keep working even as this office becomes functionally defunct. Intense management seems pointless, under the circumstances. The overall mission is to find ways to increase agricultural output, with the overall goal of making Acenou self-sufficient and sustainable. For now, take a week, familiarize yourself with the local situation, and send me a report with five ideas to start. After that, you can start drafting serious proposals. If nothing else, we'll keep them on file in case a policy changes provide us with a new funding source in the future.”

“I believe I understand sir, thank you,” Brend nodded his head. In part, he did. The development office was a consulting think tank, that much was clear. It was obviously understaffed in the extreme, the agricultural development of an entire continent was a task for one hundred researchers at least, not one, but he grasped the principle of the idea. He'd done somewhat similar work on Vacad as a post-doc, putting together reports and maps regarding which toxified substrates were suitable for re-vegetation by which edible cultivars all the while knowing the planetary government only had the funding to try and restore a fraction of the study area. He could churn out as many reports as necessary, though it would be nice to get at least a few things funded.

“Well then, I won't keep you,” Cateath offered a weak wave of dismissal. “Our protocol droid, everyone calls him Seep for some reason, can have your credentials keyed into the office network. If there's anything you need, don't hesitate to ask.”

Brend had met older people on the edge of retirement before. Chairman Cateath was young for that mode of existence yet, but it seemed that he felt the strange doom that seemed to hover over Acenou acutely. Coupled to his chat with Merjul, it was beginning to present a distinctive pattern. Jan's pending financial analysis rose considerably higher up his reading list.

The protocol droid, in the punctilious officialism that seemed embedded in all models of their type, insisted on walking him to his new office, chattering along all the while regarding the occupants of the intervening spaces. The names failed to register, but the listing of occupations matched fairly closely with a list of Republic government departments, now relabeled Imperial ministries. He did confirm that he was the only new arrival. Most of the office's employees had been present for the entirety of the Clone Wars. The only previous departure had been medical, the elderly education advisor had fallen from a speeder, shattered her hip, and retired early one year before. Her replacement had been local, from Valree.

He did not enjoy learning he was the odd one out of the bunch.

The office itself offered a different sort of discomfort.

It was not large, a narrow space featuring a work desk with a terminal, a pair of equipment cabinets, and a ceiling mounted projector aimed at the opposite wall. That much was fairly normal, though Brend immediately inquired regarding laboratory space and was informed that he had access to a shared lab with the environmental monitoring office down in the basement. The abnormal part was that the office had never been properly emptied. Sanava Antder's presence remained attached to everything within.

On the doors of each cabinet were printed drape posters featuring ocean scenes. Four different worlds, of which only Mon Calamari was obvious to the eye. The desk featured a self-contained aquarium holding several forms of vine-growth-pattern seaweed wrapped around a complex nutrient lattice. Thankfully the unit had its own light source and cleaning system, so it had not become a tomb due to neglect. Even the ceiling had been printed over to appear as if the office lay beneath the waves, and the lighting settings adjusted accordingly.

“I'm an idiot,” Brend realized upon taking all of this in. Naively, he'd assumed the AgriCorps Jedi was a Human, like so many of the famous faces splashed across the news during the war, but of course there was no reason why that should be true. Seep, thankfully, represented an ideal source to identify his predecessor's species without any embarrassment at the oversight.

Chagrian. He ought to have guessed, based simply on the interest in seaweed-based agricultural systems. The species absolutely dominated that sphere across the whole galaxy.7

Closer examination of the cabinets revealed that the first contained various pieces of sampling and modeling gear, all easily recognized and sourced to major firms. The second was filled with algae, plankton, and sediment samples in vials of a variety of sizes alongside a series of carefully labeled field notebooks documenting Sanava's three years working in Acenou. Opening one at random, Brend found them marked down in clear detail, documenting her deployment of phosphorous monitoring probes along the northern edge of the Eastern Bay. Beyond technical data, the bottom of the page included a paragraph of short musings on the poetic nature of waves and the concept of an eroding beach as a metaphor for the influence of the dark side of Force.

He quickly closed the layered flimsi and put it back in place. Calling on Seep, he asked for delivery of a secure storage crate. His first hour of work in the new post was spent boxing up Sanava's journals, samples, and decorative flourishes and then figuring out how to deposit them in archival storage. A sad thing, but the recollection s of any Jedi, agriculturalist or otherwise, were far too dangerous to either keep or destroy. The equipment remained, it was perfectly usable and he had no idea if he'd be able to order replacements.

The algal aquarium, after some reflection, was allowed to retain its place on the desk. Sending it down to archives meant dooming the microcosm when the battery eventually failed, and Brend hadn't the heart to dispose of the beautiful assemblage of rainbow-colored strands in such an ignominious fashion. It wasn't as if such a simple ornamental organism could possibly represent a threat to the Galactic Empire.

The desk terminal, far more than any physical artifact, represented a great worry, but after booting it up and proceeding through the first time log-in procedure and new user certification he discovered the memory of all previous users had been thoroughly wiped. Only the default ADO settings remained. It seemed that while those who conducted the arrest had neglected the physical materials, they'd been sufficiently aware to take that step. Brend could only be relieved that he was spared making the decision himself.

Settling in he discovered that, thankfully, Chagrians and Humans used compatible chairs. This spared him the brutal inter-office battle that would surely result from any attempt to requisition a quality office version. Brend had never in his life encountered a working environment where everyone was happy with the available options.

Comfortable as he might have dared to expect, he called Jan up and dove into a review of the circumstances governing one hundred million refugees and the continent assigned to be their new home.

Notes
1. This is a canon freighter class best known as the one used by Kyle Katarn in Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight.
2. A canon ecumenopolis and arguably the second most powerful planet in the galaxy.
3. The population of the galaxy is stated at 100 quadrillion people, with 1 billion inhabited planets. Division provides an average planetary population of 100 million.
4. Both star systems are in grid square J-7, only around 5,000 light years apart, practically neighbors in Star Wars terms.
5. Legends canon establishes the Ordinance/Regional Deports (Ord X planets) were established by the Human-supremacist Pius Dea regime to support their anti-alien crusades. Iridonia was among the known targets.
6. Glee Anselm is also in square J-7. Making this one little chunk of the galaxy host to two of its more notable alien species.
7. So this isn't canon, but the Chagrian lack of any real sense of taste is. It seems logical that they'd corner the market of the galaxy's production of the equivalent of Soylent.

 

Chapter Three – Ord Varee, 19 BBY

It did not take very long at all for Brend to unearth the true nature of the situation Acenou faced. It was neither complicated nor concealed, not really. Instead it represented the sort of looming catastrophe of choice that Humans were excellent at ignoring based of the sheer unreasonable aspect attached to them. The kind that, by the time action was finally taken, were too late to prevent.

The financial records, agricultural reports, and contractual statements regarding Rima's arrangements with its suppliers were all a matter of public record, easy to parse once referenced. Many of the executives and their aides had to be aware of the circumstances, yet at the same time they clearly did not care enough to do anything proactive whatsoever. Those indicators were equally obvious. Upper management was engaged in mass flight, leaving as rapidly as they could navigate the galaxy's rapidly changing transportation circumstances on journeys back to the Core. By the time disaster struck they would be long gone and far enough away to claim it was a responsibility for someone else.

They were not even, Brend suspected, malicious in their motives, not really. The project, the continent, these things belonged to COMPNOR now, and no doubt the various remnants of the Refugee Relief Movement considered any ongoing problems – problems that could be traced directly to the administrative changeover afflicting the galaxy – a matter for the new masters to address.

A perfectly reasonable sentiment. COMPNOR ought to be throwing itself at this problem. It was, in practically every way, an excellent scenario to flex its administrative muscle and allow its countless new recruits to gain much-needed experience. He assumed that everyone from Rima believed this too and was simply waiting for a new COMPNOR management team to arrive and take over with new directives.

Brend would have assumed this too, save for one simple fact. He was the only new arrival. The number of people transferred to all of Rima's departments, projects, and teams since the Declaration of the New Order amounted to exactly one individual. No one else, not one expert, security consultant, or executive had been dispatched. Nor could this be blamed on transport insecurity. The list of pending transfers was completely empty.

The implications did not require an in-depth understanding of government policy to discern. Especially not when the Galactic Empire was already making its demographic priorities clear1. Less than one million of Acenou's residents were Human, and almost all lived in the city and worked in administration. That number was also falling, by over one hundred per day and rising. Ord Varee's governor had created an exemption that allowed any refugee able to verify a close relative living in Valon to move there for family reunification. Records of that kind were easily falsified, by Humans, but almost impossible for members of any other species given the absence of their kin from the native population.

COMPNOR had clearly acted on the new priorities and made a decision accordingly. The simplest possible decision. They would do nothing at all.

Acenou had been quietly thrown to the wolves.

Though the data were clear, Brend struggled to accept this reality. Seeking confirmation, he traveled back to the spaceport the next day, bought Merjul lunch, and explained his conclusions to the pilot, the only person on the continent he thought would listen to him all the way through.

The resulting explosion of profanity involved at least four languages, went on for two full minutes, and got Brend thrown out of a restaurant for the first time in his life.

After she calmed down somewhat, Merjul launched a brutally simple question at him with the force of a concussion missile. “Think you can replace Sanava now? She could have worked some kind of miracle and gotten us out of this. Can you do the same? Or are you just going to run away like everyone else?”

“I'm not going to run,” Brend felt the decision, the commitment, settle over him with these words. Knowing what he did, recognizing the disaster to come, he knew he could not turn his back to it. He did not have the Force, but he was as well-trained and well-tooled as anyone to solve this specific problem. Perhaps the task was beyond the grasp of an ordinary man, certainly it seemed the Jedi Order has thought so, but there were no more Jedi. The galaxy would have to fight its way forward without them. “There should be a solution that doesn't require any miracles. If there is, I won't rest until I find it. At the very least, it should be possible to mitigate the worst case. There's some time, still, enough to do something. Even a minor change could save so many.”

“Stars blind me, but I believe you,” Merjul shook her head, gray hair whipped about in every direction. “And maybe I can help you. I hear things carting the bosses back and forth, plenty of things I'm not supposed to know. Let's say you're right, and COMPNOR never shows. If that's true, Rima's still going to leave and the local leaders will have to face this.” She leaned in and whispered. “You didn't hear this from me, but if you do come up with some incredible solution, take it to Aes Rimi. She might just be able to make it happen.”

Three days later Brend stood outside the office of Aes Rimi, Rima Vice-President of Project Allocation. He had not come up with an incredible idea, but he had stolen one from Sanava Antder and repurposed it to a purpose beyond what he suspected the Jedi considered reasonable. Bent in that way, he suspected it had the power to save them. He just had to convince the woman on the other side of the door, a personage more powerful than any other refugee on Acenou by an absurd margin.

He didn't have an appointment, but had made his way in via the expedient of having Jan whirl through the lobby as if the droid was having a repulsor malfunction and then sneaking down the hallway during the confusion. The door code was a complete mystery, so he resorted to trying to attract the attention of the office's occupant by the ancient means of pounding on the portal with his datapad.

When it unexpectedly slid open ten seconds later, Brend found himself staring down the barrel of a blaster pistol. Black, sleek, polished metal seemed to suck in the light. It drew attention inexorably, stole breath from his lungs and words from his mouth. Everything vanished from his mind but the sudden thought that he might have made a fatal mistake.

“You, you're the new agronomist,” a hard, tooth-crunching growl enunciated this phrase. “What in the Sith are you doing banging on my door?”

Aes Rimi was a Zabrak woman of average height with a ring of short horns across the front of her scalp, a waist length ponytail of stark black hair gathered between them, and three thin dark tattoo lines descending from each eye to the corners of her lips. She wore a simple shirt, skirt, and vest combination in blue and brown patterns, though finely tailored. Brend doubted she had more than a handful of years on him. Her eyes were orange-tinted and bore an expression that suggested they'd just emerged from the caldera of a raging volcano.

“I, uh, I had a proposal to offer,” he managed to stammer out this in the face of the still terrifying blaster. Brend wasn't unfamiliar with weapons. He'd worked in rural regions, hunted dangerous wildlife, and even on one memorable occasion exchanged fire with bandits, but nothing prepared him for a barrel less than an arm's length from his face. “Regarding our impending food crisis.”

Aes blinked. “You've been here four days,” she scowled. “You shouldn't even realize there is a food crisis, much less have a plan to solve it.” The blaster barrel dropped away, slowly.

As black metal shifted from central to peripheral vision, Brend felt as if he could think again. “Sometimes, a fresh set of eyes on a problem goes a long way.”

“Cliche,” the hard Zabrak jaw snapped once. “But true enough. Come in, I'll hear your little proposal, but if you waste my time you're still taking a stun blast to the face.”

Knowing the blaster was set for stun did a great deal to calm Brend's nerves.

The office assigned to a Vice-President was easily ten times the size of the one granted an agricultural researcher in addition to being placed twenty floors higher in the building. Its decor was, despite this, remarkably bland. The furniture and amenities were sleek, modern, and soulless. Any possibility of personal touch had been ruthlessly stripped away, leaving behind only a corporate minimalist ideal closer to something out of advertising holos than real life. The singular exception as a commemorative holo on the edge of the central desk featuring Aes alongside three other Zabraks.

Her husband and two children, all deceased. It had been almost impossible not to uncover that fact upon looking into this woman. They'd been killed in a high profile Separatist bombing a year before the war began. The explosion had missed taking her life by mere meters. She'd fled her planet while still strapped to a hospital gurney.

That incident had only sparked her fire. Aes practically radiated ferocity. “Why don't you tell me of this impending crisis you've identified, newcomer.” She demanded once the door closed. “And try to impress me.” She sat back in the fine office chair, covered in genuine nerf leather, in a faux casual pose. The blaster rested across her knees.

Most business executives, academics, and bureaucrats hungered for flattery. They wanted to be told how important they were, often over gourmet meals or expensive cocktails. Even a few days of exposure made it clear the overwhelming majority of Rima operated this way. Aes Rimi offered a very clear contrast in the opposite direction, one that favored the straightforward approach.

“Six months ago,” Brend began. “The Refugee Relief Movement concluded contract negotiations securing supplies and funding for Acenou.” He rushed through the summary, moving ahead as fast as he dared. “That agreement is fully funded for a three year term. At the end of the agreement, two and a half years from now, COMPNOR is not going to renew it, any of it. All financial assistance, including material and food imports, will totally and permanently cease. Right now, this continent hosts just over one hundred million stomachs. Officially, it produces enough food locally to fill twenty million. When imports end, that shortfall guarantees mass famine, tens of millions of deaths.”

It was a grim calculation, but also a simple one. Acenou had not been designed as a self-sustaining colony. The initial plan had assumed that the Separatist crisis would, eventually, reach a diplomatic resolution and the people here would return to their homeworlds. That would never happen now. Not only did the new Imperial regime make such a mass movement effectively impossible, in many cases the places these people had once lived were nothing but radioactive slag. The residents of Acenou would live, or die, on this continent.

Aes leaned backwards. She projected a facade of unconcern. “You are making the assumption that not only COMPNOR, but also the governor of Ord Varee and any major charity within reach are willing to let one hundred million people starve. Many would consider that a dangerous accusation, bordering on seditious anti-imperial sentiment.”

“Maybe,” Brend agreed it was a serious thing to charge, but the data spoke with perfect clarity. “But it is the only outcome consistent with the events of the past three months. Even if that's wrong, or there's a last-minute reversal,” he continued, finding his rhythm. “External support is not going to last forever. Maybe COMPNOR will continue to supply food, but without financial and material support Acenou will be stuck begging again and again. This is the last, only, opportunity to break free and put everything on a path to sustainability.”

“Let us say, hypothetically,” Aes raised an eyebrow and crossed her legs. “That I agree with that assessment.” Her eyes smoldered like hot coals in the center of her face. “How, exactly, do you propose to increase our agricultural output five-fold in two and a half years?” She reached forward and tapped her fingers on the edge of her desk, long nails drummed against the polyplast. “Right now we have two sources: the cultivation zone surrounding Acenou City and the algae farm in the Eastern Bay, five million and fifteen million respectively. I've had droids run the projections. The best case for squeezing the most we can out of those gets us to ten and twenty-five before time runs out. That leaves us sixty-five short. I'm very curious to hear how you expect to overcome that.”

“It's not sixty-five,” a measure of confidence returned as Brend found the first point at which his training revealed a data point the burning-eyed manager had not yet grasped. “Officially there's no agricultural production in the interior, but they're clearing land out there and growing crops. It's detectable if you run the right satellite analysis.” Most of the interior cropland was being concealed from visual overflights, but the remote sensing data, shifts in carbon flux, spectral reflection data, photo-chemical pigmentation levels, these sorts of outputs were clear to the trained eye of a modern agronomist. “My guess is that it's being kept off-book to be sold to smugglers, but when need comes calling they'll eat those calories. Based on the land use conversion rates projected against the previous three years, that should account for around fifteen million two and half years from now. That means the target is only fifty million.”

Those words drew in the Zabrak's attention. “It seems you do have something useful to impart. That buffer is important, huge even, if it comes down to begging for scraps from COMPNOR. The greater of a reduction in support we can survive, the more likely they are to agree to make up the gap. But, I remain curious as to how you propose to produce an agricultural system capable of feeding fifty million people in two and half years, especially given the resources available. Tell me, what is your grand plan?”

Brend offered one word only. “Algae.” Seeing as this declaration grabbed the Zabrak's attention, he plowed ahead. “The system Sanava Antder designed is highly productive, adaptable, and scalable. It is really only limited by the available shallow water space. The output of the Eastern Bay does cap around the twenty-five million you projected, but the Western Bay is over ten times its size. While nutrients conditions there as less optimal, so per unit production will be lower without supplementation, but there's more than enough space to make up for it. Additionally, Acenou's west coast hosts a sufficiently large population of aquatic and amphibious species to conduct the installation and maintenance without the need for specialized sub-surface equipment or the need to train up a new workforce.” He'd checked those numbers. Blubreens, Chagrians, Nautolans, and Salengas2 all contributed enough trained expertise to handle it.

“That's an interesting idea,” Aes admitted. Her fingers ceased moving. “But there's a problem. All our algae farming equipment is tasked to the Eastern Bay project. We don't have any resources left to build more than what s already planned. There's no way to turn this proposal into reality.”

“There is,” Brend spun his datapad around, displayed the infographic he'd created before the smoldering eyes. “If you re-purpose all industrial aid for the next two and a half years to the production of algal farming units and supportive infrastructure we can build all the necessary equipment here, on Acenou, in time. It'll be tight, but it can be done.” He'd run the figures hundreds of times to make sure.

Aes stood up with startling speed. Her horned head leaned in close, examined the screen in great detail. “Madness, absolute madness, but it could work, possibly, and even if we ended up short, there would be more production coming online, enough that a few months of emergency rationing might just stretch it. But, there's still a problem,” slowly, legs shaking, she returned to her chair. “You're talking about completely restructuring Acenou's industrial economy, binding one hundred percent of our output to a single commodity. Yes, maybe that's necessary to feed everyone, but what happens next? The population projections for the next century allow for some growth, but the kind of output we'll be able to produce when this is done will fill the whole hundred years' worth of needs in one. What do we do with all these algae farms after that?”

“Does it matter?” Brend found he didn't quite understand the question. “Can't we retool after preventing a famine? Or just slowly develop other industries through recycling?” It sounded ridiculous to him to worry about what came after starvation. The chaos of a famine tended to leave little functional industry behind when scavengers sold whole durasteel plates for handfuls of rice.

“It matters,” the tapping resumed, and Aes' voice curdled with deep-seated bitterness. “Because this plan of yours has no time to spare. It requires a full commitment now, not six months from now. You came to me because you figured out that after Rima finishes running home I'll be in charge, which is smart, but they haven't finished scrambling yet. By the time I get my hand on sole decision-making power it'll be too late. There won't be enough time, or enough money, left.”

“Stang,” it was the only word capable of filling the gap. She was, of course, entirely correct. Every day mattered. Tooling up an industry in this way was logarithmic, not linear. Six months delay would lead to an overwhelming shortfall.

“To make this mad idea of yours work I have to take it to the board and sell it.” The expression on the hard face grew grimmer by turns. “Convince them that the future of Acenou is a glorious economic miracle of making huge quantities of algae farming units. So, the question is simple: who buys the surplus three years from now?”

These words froze Brend in place. All his life, he heard claims that the Jedi had the power to foresee the future. He'd never believed it. Their other feats might be real enough, but that one had always sounded ridiculous. Not anymore. This day, this second, he believed in it absolutely. Sanava Antder, somehow, had foreseen what was to come. The system she'd invented, it's adaptive and scaling capabilities, was too perfectly suited to the moment to be simple luck.

Tragically ironic, that ability to foresee the future but while being unable to secure a place within it for herself. Unless, he suddenly faced down a flood of pure sorrow, she'd known she was doomed and pressed ahead anyway. Brend shook his head in the face of that thought, unprepared to grapple with a sacrifice of such magnitude.

Turning back to Aes, he gave the executive the answer. “Everyone. The whole stang-ing galaxy is going to buy as many units as we can produce, a thousand times as many.”

Burning eyes narrowed to flaming slits. “A bold claim. Explain.”

“Right, uh, well, we both get the HoloNet News dispatches, I'm sure,” he rambled ahead, ideas swirling through his mind to burst across his tongue. “The war's officially over, but the Empire's leading huge fleets all across the Outer Rim, taking thousands of systems back, and not just from the Separatists. Pirates, slavers, Hutts, anyone unwilling to bow down and obey Coruscant is getting a visit from a Star Destroyer3. Palpatine's not going to let those worlds go once he's got them, and that means he'll open them to colonization. The people in the Core, trapped on overpopulated worlds and unable to expand for decades because of the Trade Federation, they're hungry for it. Billions, trillions even, of colonist are going to launch, whole sectors will open up, and not in ten years, but the moment the turbolasers go silent.”

“Algae farming is highly adaptable,” Brend had gone down to the assembly line and taken one of the farming units apart piece by piece to see. “Change the light intake panels to adjust for stellar spectra variance and adjust the filters to handle the trace nutrient balance and they can work on any world with water. That's pretty much any planet anyone will bother with. Once we get past famine, the next thing that happens is that Acenou gets rich.”

“There has been talk of developing the Deep Core,” Aes breathed out slowly as she picked up the thread. “Of securing Coruscant against any repeat of Grevious' surprise attack. If the Emperor is willing to go that far then you're right, an era of expansion is inevitable.” She spun her chair around to face her terminal, tapped out rapid-fire commands. “Algae is no one's idea of a luxury food, but as a source of calories it has admirable efficiency, even big starships use tank systems to produce backup rations. Acenou will never meet the security requirements for a military contract, but civilian shipping and colonization firms, plenty of Refugee Relief Movement executives have contacts in those fields. This is the kind of insider deal that nobles love. Convincing them to make this bet won't be easy, exactly, but greed is a better motivator than any other.”

She stood again, a rapid, uncompromising motion. “I want a pilot project proposal in my feed by tomorrow morning. We have a week to set up a demonstration display before the next quarterly executive committee meeting, and it needs to impress those stodgy nobles enough to make them forget everything except mounds of credits. In this new age of empire charity is dead, but avarice remains.”

Running the scenario in his head, Brend believed he just might manage it, assuming he went without sleep. It would be worth it. “You'll have it.” Cursed as the circumstances might be, it was otherwise a grand project, exactly the sort of critical undertaking he dreamed of solving when he'd joined government service.

“Get to work then, and let's hope that the Force is with us.”

Notes
1. Exactly how rapidly Human High Culture became de facto Imperial policy is not clear, but the writing was clearly on the wall even before the start of the Clone Wars, something sources such as Darth Plagueis make clear.
2. These species are all canon.
3. This canonical campaign, the Reconquest of the Rim, is a hugely significant if poorly explored portion of the Saga timeline.

 

Chapter Four – Ord Varee, 18 BBY

“Sir, the most recent engineering report has outlined a problem with the southern shore production zone.” Jan floated through the confines of the speeder truck Brend had converted into a mobile office. “If accurate, it represents a severe impairment jeopardizing a significant proportion of that area.”

The southern shore zone represented ten percent of the total in the Western Bay. That was a lot, enough output to fill five million mouths. “What’s the issue?” Brend didn’t like the sound of this. He’d faced down plenty of problems in the past year, but none that had risen to such a significant scale.

“Seasonal flow rate analysis indicates that during the monsoon period the current and counter-current patterns along the southern border of the bay will jeopardize the structural integrity of the farming unit supports,” the droid explained using his perpetually calm tone.

Vaguely, Brend recalling reading a prior report regarding that issue. “I thought that one had been addressed, something about adding shielding to absorb wave impact.”

“That is correct sir,” Jan agreed, but amended. “But the shielding available lacks the precision modulation capability to avoid blocking out critical nutrient flows at the same time as conducting wave buffering. This would result in total production loss during the monsoon period if implemented. An alternative solution using dynamic bracing materials to strengthen the structural anchoring was proposed and accepted instead. However, that option has been, as of twelve hours ago, rendered non-viable due to new imperial mandates regarding the use of strategic military technologies.”

“Stang,” Brend swore. He tried not to pace back and forth in frustration. Fifteen months living under imperial rule and none of the improvements promised by Palpatine had arrived, but they’d acquired numerous problems instead. COMPNOR, as expected, had left Acenou to starve. Now, despite claiming to support an unprecedented galaxy-wide expansion, the Empire was strangling the commerce necessary to support that move. It was, he imagined, probably just corruption at work, as usual. Some rich company had bribed a Senator. The obvious countermove was to simply pay off the sector’s Moff in return for an exemption. Unfortunately, until the algae project delivered on the grand promises Brend and Aes had spun to the board, the continent was basically broke.

Instead of despairing, he struck Jan with the usual question whenever the droid reported a new problem. “And does your analytical matrix suggest any viable solutions?” Aes had, as part of her ‘all options on the table’ creed, had a slicer pare away the droid’s protective protocols regarding such matters as ethics and legality. The result was a master of the unorthodox developmental idea.

“The shielding option remains viable,” Jan answered quietly. “From a budget standpoint. Surplus units are available. The essential requirement is enhanced modulation software to upgrade above stock capacity. A proprietary shielding unit developed by Sarkhai Defense Industries demonstrated the necessary capability during trade shows. The Empire subsequently prohibited sale of such units without a military license.”

“Of course they did,” Brend groused, though he privately admitted that shields were a more reasonable product to restrict than support bracing. “How does that help us?”

“Acenou hosts a population of two hundred and twenty-five thousand Sarkhai,1” the droid’s level and pedagogical voice made for a poor relay of conspiratorial discourse. “Including a number of former defense industry employees. The likelihood that they possess either a working copy of the software or the ability to reconstitute its capabilities is estimated at seventy-five percent.”

“Go visit the Sarkhai and ask them to share their secret technology so we don’t all starve,” Brend summarized the plan the droid had just proposed. He didn’t like it, it offended his sense of proper scientific and governmental procedure to rely upon outside elements, but it was at worst worth trying. “I suppose I should at least ask them. Where do the Sarkhai live?”

“Acenou’s Sarkhai community is found deep in the monsoon forest zone, roughly equidistant from the east and west coasts.” The droid projected a map against the wall. A red dot highlighted an otherwise indistinct stretch of forest in the middle of the continent’s southern zone.

“Bit of a trek,” he estimated it as roughly five hundred kilometers inland and another two hundred from their current work site. “This trip will take at least a full day, maybe two. I’ll have to leave you here to serve as a relay,” he told Jan. Truthfully, the droid was in many ways a far better administrator than any Human could be, and could make hundreds of decisions in the time he processed one, but the machine lacked the authority to approve anything above the most minor level alone. Brend spent a lot of time stamping off on such choices rather than using his agronomist knowledge. Sanava’s robust system offered little need for it.

The work could spare him, for a little while at least.

“Acknowledged,” Jan was no stranger to the role. Brend got called away, most often back to the city, far more often than he would like. “Please be careful sir, reports of violence in the interior are growing increasingly frequent.”

“Got it,” regrettably, that was all too true. That problem only increased the paramount importance of the algae project. If matters could get as bad as they had with food still being regularly delivered, famine would turn the continent into a literal hellscape. “I’ll take one of the airspeeders, that should be safe enough.” The project had several T-47s, used for moving farming units, tanks, and support strut mix around in bulk. They retained the Rima paint job they’d been given years earlier, and though the administration was now defunct, the logo continued to invoke respect while shipments continued.

Brend was an indifferent pilot, but he’d learned enough as a teenager to handle a mid-altitude pathway to a fixed destination.

He left in the morning, after reviewing the specific requirements and doing his best to familiarize himself with the Sarkhai, a species that, twenty-four hours earlier, he’d never heard of. That was hardly surprising, but it made things somewhat more difficult. Thankfully they were a species that charted very close to Human, physiologically and psychologically.

The aerial flight was, for the most part, uneventful. The monsoon season had just come to an end and the dry forests and monsoon forests covering this latitudinal band of Acenou presented a vision of endless green vegetation as a result. The canopy was all but unbroken in every direction for hundreds of klicks. Though several million people lived beneath those leafy boughs, their populations were widely scattered and the compact settlements and cultivated plots they’d carved free of the expanse were only visible up close.2

The Sarkhai were no exception to this trend. Their population clustered in across a series of nearly two hundred villages scattered over almost eight hundred square kilometers in a layout that, viewed from space, formed an oddly leaf-shaped pattern. It centered on the Rima supply drop site, an arbitrarily designated point on the map. The settlements themselves, built of densely packed prefabricated housing units, were notable only in their layout. Sarkhai villages were laid out in a star pattern, surrounded by exterior log palisades and a cleared zone of bare earth with overlapping defensive firing lines even Brend’s distinctly non-military mind could recognize. Inside the star the handful of municipal buildings were themselves formed into a ring as a final defensive line. Even their croplands had been arranged in narrow strips connecting adjacent settlements, surrounded by low log walls.

Clearly these were a people who did not regard the surrounding forest as a friend, but instead a threat. A carryover habit, of course. Their homeworld possessed a phenomenally diverse and deadly array of wildlife predisposed to view Sarkhai as prey.3 Acenou, by contrast, had relatively few large predators and with a history of humanoid settlement measured in single digit years, none of those had any inclination to view the new arrivals as a food source and were in fact much more inclined to run away from aggressive bipeds inclined to shoot them at the least provocation.

The settlement offered only one legitimate landing location, the large duracrete pad used by the Rima supply drops. It dwarfed Brend’s speeder, obviously, but this had the advantage of making the touch down an easy one. The only true Sarkhai town on planet, hosting perhaps ten thousand residents and all the industrial and commercial production they’d manage to cobble together using limited allotments and, Brend assumed, trade with smugglers, surrounded the platform.

Such construction told a story, a representation of which commodities the species prioritized as essential. In the case of the Sarkhai the answers appeared to be electronics, lighting, and paint. The latter presented the most obvious display. Every building was painted pure white across the outer surface and marked by large, brightly colored, indicator symbols. The day was sunny, and the resulting architecture became physically painful to look upon.

Brend had let the Sarkhai know he was coming, of course, and he was greeted as soon as he landed.

The welcome consisted of a pair of Sarkhai of late middle age, who gave off the distinctive vibe of a long-married couple. They appeared very Human, at first glance, especially as their pale gray hair and skin shades would not have stood out on Humans of that age. Differentiation came from their faces, painted chalk white and highlighted with dark blue geometric motifs. The pattern of those marks, unique to each individual, matched a picture Brend had studied earlier and revealed the man on the left as Mayor Ethun Rall. If the woman was in fact his wife, it seemed Sarkhai were not a people for heavy ceremony.

Something to be grateful for.

“Welcome, doctor, to our little Starleaf County,” the mayor offered as Brend put away his flight helmet. “We are pleased to host you. May I show you around? We have a lunch planned, but it is a little early yet.”

“Certainly,” Brend forced himself to offer his best smile. He was here as a petitioner, he needed to do his best to play nice.

The brief tour revealed relatively little of Sarkhai life. The local people were mostly presently indoors, whether at work or, regrettably more common, idle. The fields were also largely inactive. The harvest had concluded several days earlier, coinciding with the end of the wet season, and planting would not resume until several weeks had passed. Brend did not have the numbers available, but he suspected that relatively few of the people living here had consistent work. The limited supplies available to the refugee settlements were not capable of providing all with the opportunity for useful labor, nor did they have access to markets to pursue entrepreneurial endeavors. He glimpsed a fair number of people, mostly young men, seemingly conducting maintenance of the palisades or the perimeter sensors in an act of performative effort.

“We hope to replace wooden barriers with stone, in time,” Mayor Rall explained. “But we’ve yet to secure a path a quality quarry, or any excavation gear, so it is impossible at present.”

Silently, Brend typed out a message to Jan ordering the droid to consult the geological maps and determine is there was a viable stone source nearby. Assuming one existed, a modest quantity of the proper extraction tools could probably be appropriated from somewhere. Aes had her own contacts with smugglers after all.

Sarkhai, he discovered as the tour progressed, possessed superior fast-twitch muscle response and anaerobic metabolism compared to Humans, but reduced endurance. An adaptation, he deduced, to the need for rapid escapes from stalk-and-ambush forest predators as opposed to the pursuit hunters of the open savannah. The resulting stop-and-go approach to the circuit taken by the mayor left the agronomist slightly befuddled.

Lunch was somewhat more enlightening. It was a modest affair, just the three of them consuming dishes the mayor’s wife had personally cooked. The dishes were prepared using locally grown crops, not the non-perishable staples supplied by Rima or the powdered nutritional mix harvested from the algae farms. The overall mixture included starchy wraps, boiled tubers, sliced vegetables, and some kind of sweet jelly.

Brend’s agronomist mind inevitably sought to classify the sources of each dish. He came up with analogues of millet, yam, and taro as the various starch and vegetable sources. The jelly appeared to be made from something very much like a fig. None of these plants were part of Acenou’s native vegetation and had presumably been imported from Sarkhai. The fig-analogue interested him the most. Such plants were usually dependent upon complex pollinator interactions and difficult to cultivate in new environments. This variety, which he suspected must instead be clonal, might be useful for widespread cultivation in the monsoon and dry forest regions.

Upon a mention of this fact to the mayor, Rall agreed to share all the knowledge he possessed freely, a very generous offer that suggested the man was acutely aware of the impending food crisis. “We are increasing our territory under cultivation as rapidly as we can,” his ensuing comments made this explicit. “But there are limits as to how much land we can clear, and the resulting fields require at least a year, usually two, of nutrient treatment and tilling before anything will grow. Even after that, yield has been very low.”

“Off-world crops usually require many years to fully integrate their native ecosystem into native soils and to develop the proper bacterial, fungal, moisture, and nutrient microclimates necessary for natural growth level,” Brend explained, sadly. It was the core of the overall problem. “Though modern comprehensive engineering and rapid evolutionary modification techniques accelerate the process significantly,” he recalled, thinking back to Sanava Antder, that it was originally a group of Jedi, working on the barren world of Ossus, who had unlocked the modern comprehensive adaptation approach.4 “It still takes several seasons to develop land that can produce at industrial scales.”

“Is that why you’ve chosen to pursue algae farming instead?” the mayor’s wife asked insightfully. “Is that faster?”

“That’s one reason,” Brend agreed with a quick nod. “There are also fewer variables overall. Fundamentally, the organisms in question are simply less complex, down to the cellular level, and the aquatic environment is considerably more consistent across factors such as temperature and acidity. Clearly, the current plan is a stopgap, but even when we move past the need for algae as a food source, the farms can easily be converted to produce fertilizer, simple organic polymers, and other useful outputs.”

“That does sound helpful,” Mayor Rall acknowledged, then, slyly, added a caveat. “But it is clearly not that simple, or you would not have come here seeking our shielding technology.”

It was not an especially promising opening, but Brend appreciated the directness. He was no good at the song and dance of political theater. “The monsoon currents presented an unforeseen complication,” he shrugged. “There’s always some, in any big project. We’re lucky to have a solution close at hand.”

“You are making some assumptions,” the mayor noted. His blue face paint took on intriguingly fantastical shapes as he arched his eyebrows. “That we both possess that technology and are willing to share it.”

“That’s true enough,” the agronomist had no problem admitting this. “And if I’m wrong, I’ve wasted a day, but I don’t think you would have extended the invitation to me if you couldn’t make good, and I don’t think you’re cruel enough to hold this tech secret when it could save millions of lives. Besides,” he elaborated. “I’m not asking for a gift. There’s always a price that can be agreed upon.”

Mayor Rall shifted in his chair slightly. The wooden runners crackled against the hard plastoid panels of the prefabricated house. “Since the very moment outsiders discovered our people, we have been pressured to sell our defensive technologies,” he answered after taking a deep breath. “Always, we have resisted this, and I will not break the faith of thousands of years. My counteroffer is a simple one; Sarkhai engineers contracted to install the modified software and conduct maintenance as necessary. Your project gets the adjustments it needs, but our shielding system remains private.”

“Done, that’s fine,” Brend agreed immediately. It was a kludgy, inefficient solution that implemented an unnecessary additional layer of oversight that would ultimately be rendered pointless the moment a slicer cracked open one of the algal farms and extracted the shielding software to sell on the black market, but in the end none of that mattered so long as the units got built. When it came to feeding millions, a lot of things could be justifiably done the wrong way. He had no reason to hesitate, not given the constant time pressure. Truthfully, he was surprised the mayor hadn’t held out for more.

“We have a number of experienced engineers among us,” it turned out that the Sarkhai, had in fact done exactly that. “I hope the provisional administration will compensate them appropriately.”

“I’m sure we can accommodate their expertise,” Brend swallowed. They could, probably, but it was another ratchet pull straining against the budget. The funding margin had never been large. Still, if the mayor was telling the truth and these Sarkhai really were skilled, there would be plenty of work beyond shielding software to push into their hands. Big projects could always use more engineers.

After lunch, in the interest of both courtesy and the satisfaction of his curiosity, Brend asked to take a look at the fields. The mayor seemed to find this welcome and passed him over to the care of a farming supervisor.

The walled in strips of land were filled with rows of simple stakes used to support the growth of the vines that served as the floral component of the yam crop, clearly the most important of the cultivated plants here. The shaded borders close to the log walls aggregated moisture and were host to broadly leafy taro growth. The walls themselves, in a creative use of space Brend much admired and remarked upon, were used to support the lengthening braided liana structure of the fig-analogues. Millet was only found in the most recently cleared sections, as its productivity was presently extremely low. “We’ve mostly been plowing it under to store up nutrients in support of the yam crop,” the farmer explained. “It’s performed better than the others so far, though the protein content is troublingly low. Even if we manage to get enough output to meet our caloric needs, I think we’ll need supplements for decades.”

“That’s normal,” it was an almost universal result. Species not specifically adapted to a planet never produced the same patterns as they did in their original evolutionary context. Many colonies remained on vitamin and mineral supplements for generations. “Hopefully, once we get past this initial bottleneck, we can reconfigure the algae farms to provide for various nutrient shortfalls.” Simple and well-established genetic engineering practices handled that conversion.

“That would be a blessing,” the farmer was an older Sarkhai and walked slowly. He tended to stare carefully at each plot as they passed. “But it is my hope that, before I am done, I can leave this place able to support our people without outside aid. These are turbulent times. It seems unwise to depend upon the fickleness of transport.”

It was a reasonable goal, one that aroused native sympathy in Brend. It would also save money. The transport of supplies to hundreds of locations across the continent using cargo skiffs and airspeeders represented a major expense in both pilot salaries and vehicle maintenance in addition to the cost of the food. It was also a point of vulnerability to banditry. “If protein is an issue,” Brend mused. “You might consider blending the compost side of things to a fungal or insect crop source.”

“Or bodies reject chitin-based foods,” the farmer shook his head slowly. “Sarkhai had no native arthropoids.”

“Really?” That seemed unexpectedly rare. Segmented exoskeletal lifeforms were the most common thing in the galaxy. “Well, perhaps as an alternative, what about mollusks? There’s a new passive mucosal filtration system that was developed on Quesh a few years ago that drastically reduces the processing labor needed for land snail harvesting, and Acenou hosts a number of useful candidate snails with strong domestication potential. If you have a student with a strong background in tech, I’ll send along the relevant research and see about getting in enough gear and samples to setup a pilot program.” The chance that the Sarkhai engineers could afford to license the system on their own was negligible, but if they managed to reverse-engineer a knock-off in violation of the patent he wasn’t going to ask any questions.

The farmer grasped this implication rather swiftly. “I will ask for volunteers. There will surely be someone who-” He stopped suddenly and froze completely. Ears perked up, and his expression hardened. “Repulsorlifts?” the word emerged as a hiss. “Bikes?” Conclusion dawned rapidly, stretched across the pattern-marked face. “Raiders! Run! Back to the town, hurry!”

With shocking acceleration, the Sarkhai farmer dashed toward the potential shelter of the town. All through the fields, others mirrored this action, dropped everything in a mad scramble for safety. Dust churned beneath their feet.

For a long second, far too long, Brend froze. Raiders? His mind tried to reject the notion entirely. The intellectual, logical, part of him knew bandits were common in the Acenou hinterlands, a realm of minimal law, but he’d not believed any so brazen as to attack a large settlement. Such an aggressive move lay outside his imagination.

Until he recalled that, in observing the Sarkhai throughout the day he’d seen many armed with spears or simple slugthrowers, but never one who carried a blaster. They had protection aplenty against the wilds, but against soldiers with modern gear were practically defenseless.

And it was soldiers they faced, for the repulsorlift whine resolved into the distinctive frequency radiated by BARC speeders, the wartime mounts known throughout the galaxy from their service during the Clone Wars.5 Soon after, another sound broke through the afternoon air, the sharp rapports and stinging impact detonations of blaster fire. Though the enemy was as yet unseen, the assault had begun.

The initial onslaught was directionless, wild. Speeder bikes swirled in all directions, firing rapidly at anything in their path. They were not targeting any objective, but rather simply seeking to sow chaos, to disperse the Sarkhai and occupy them with firefighting and rescue operations. A cowardly approach, one that inflicted vast quantities of damage and destruction to no purpose beyond distraction.

Despite this, the Sarkhai fought back. Warned by sharp hearing and perimeter sensors, white-painted faces poured into the streets in number. The ear-battering crack of slugthrower discharges split the air. Metal bullets shattered branches in the distance with each miss, triggered a steady rain of splinters.

A speeder bike caromed over the log wall and across the fields, giving Brend his first glimpse of the attackers. The BARC was intimately familiar, seen in a thousand news updates, though this unit was battered surplus left behind by the GAR as below standard after one-too-many repairs. Unexpectedly, the bandit’s outfit also triggered a memory spike. The raiders wore blue with red trim and pot-form metal helmets. A design modeled on the officers of the Republic Judicial Department by the Refugee Relief Movement.

Horror clenched and clawed through his gut as he realized these thugs were former security officers. Rima’s departure had put almost their entire contingent out of work. Some had returned home to Valon in search of new employment, but all too many had chosen to abscond with their gear and turn predator. They were not widely abundant across the continent, but few could stand up to their military-grade equipment and veteran tactics.

As the raider passed, Brend discovered his blaster pistol, the one Jan had insisted he strap on this morning, was in his hand. He had no recollection of drawing the weapon. He stumbled and fell upon seeing the black metal object.

The Sarkhai, already ahead due to their superior burst, left him completely behind. Alone and suddenly desolate, he scrambled forward on his knees, hoping desperately that his brown coveralls concealed him against the surrounding vines and earth. It felt pointless to run, for the swirling horde of bikes in the town center held no promise of safety there.

Ten steps further, Brend dropped flat as the drone of a bike whipped past, too close. A speeder shot by no more than a meter from his right shoulder. The bandit raced down the corridor provided by the fields in an assault run, firing as he moved. Fires blossomed in the log palisade with each impact.

Fight! Something ferocious and primal rose up from the reptilian depths of the agronomist’s brain to scream across the surface of his mind. It’s a perfect shot. Strike!

Logic could not challenge this intuition, only reinforce it. The angle was ideal. The cowardly raiders deserved no mercy.

Feeling as if he stood outside his own body, Brend took the pistol in both hands, disengaged the safety, lined the sights up with the bandit’s center of mass, and then pulled the trigger.

The ruby bolt speared the man in between the shoulder blades, scorched through the armor easily at such close range, and burned deep inside. A ringing shock of impact split the air. Then the bandit slumped down. The speeder deflected downward, scraped the earth, and crashed with a sickening crunch.

Brend watched the vehicle compress inward; then doubled over and vomited all over the yam stalks.

He’d just killed a man. The shock reached from the hair on his head all the way down to his toenails.

The loss of the speeder did not go unnoticed by its fellows. A pair of bikes swerved out from the edge of town and shot down the farm rows in search of this unexpected resistance. Searchlights blared from the front of each vehicle, speared the ground with white brightness.

Reflex and adrenalin took over. Arms snapped up. Vision tracked down to the source of the right hand light. Brend depressed the trigger as fast as his finger could move.

The first three shots splashed off the BARC. The next three, rising with the shooter’s arms, struck the man atop it. The bike jerked, veered left, and exploded against the log wall in a blinding fireball.

“Karking blighter!” the remaining bandit screamed. “You’re no white-face! You’ll pay for that, and slowly.”

The bandit’s blaster rose. A conical burst of blue sparks split the air.

Brend felt every nerve fire at once, then darkness.

Notes

1. Sarkhai are a canonical near-Human species introduced in SWTOR. They are best known as the species to which Nadia Grell belongs.
2. With 100 million people spread across roughly 5 million square kilometers, Acenou has a population density similar to that of modern New Zealand. The continent therefore appears mostly empty.
3. According to SWTOR, the Sarkhai developed advanced defensive technologies due to predators on their homeworld.
4. This is, I swear, a real part of the Ossus plotline in SWTOR.
5. In one of those fun OT before PT publication quirks, the Empire apparently rejected the BARC as a suitable design for the new regime. That means the galaxy must be flooded with the things.
   

​

 

Chapter Five – Ord Varee, 18 BBY

Waking up brought with it a nasty post-stun headache, biting light sensitivity, and a distinct sense of surprise at being alive. The latter diminished only slightly when Brend felt the binders bite into his wrists and ankles at the slightest twitch. “Stang,” he grumbled. “This is unexpected.”

“Really? I believe I’m the one with grounds for surprise,” an unexpectedly ordinary voice, only slightly distorted by slow-smoldering anger, remarked. The words came from a tall but otherwise bland looking Human in a repurposed security uniform with a blaster rifle casually suspended from a neck strap across his chest. He sat in an artificially relaxed posture on a roughly cut tree stump amid a small clearing in the forest. A small heating unit glowed a low ruby red behind him. Its pale light obscured the trees beyond.

“Two men, years as security officers, months raiding these refugees, and they get taken out by a Sith-spawned agronomist?” He shook his head. The dented helmet he wore rattled along with the motion. “I guess all this time without blasters pointed at us made everyone go soft. Still,” he leaned back slightly and clasped his hands together above his knees. “I suppose that does reduce the split on the loot, and as much as I want to break all your bones as a gift to the fallen, you’re a choice piece of booty if I ever saw any.”

Hostage. The fog began to clear from Brend’s mind. His eyesight resolved in the dark, slowly, and took in a dozen men wearing grubby uniforms clustered around heating units amid a circle of idle speeder bikes. Reasoning slowly supplied awareness of the new status he’d unexpectedly acquired. These raiders thought to trade him in for some large payoff.

Recognition of this carried with it a profound sense of doom. Aes Rimi would never spend one cold credit to save him. She’d simply hire a new agronomist to manage the project. Logically, he knew this to be the correct call. Brend lacked delusions of irreplaceability, and he had no expectation that the Zabrak would bow to such blatant extortion.

Not that he mentioned anything of that nature. The inevitability of execution does not make a man feel smug. Instead, lacking anything else, he indulged his curiosity. “I don’t understand. Even if you make a fortune, how will you spend it? There’s no way off the continent.”

“That what you think?” the bandit leader leaned back even further, till his helmet rested against the skin of a speeder. “And here I’d heard you were a smart one. Sure, the local smugglers charge too much to take anyone off planet, but over on Valon they don’t care at all about what happens here. And,” he reached back and tapped a knuckle against his bike. “These bits of GAR surplus have plenty of range. Sure, it takes a few hours of hopping the waves, but that’s nothing a decent biker can’t manage.”

Brend’s spirits managed to, somehow, descend even lower. That method was, he realized, perfectly possible. Risky, given the watery grave that awaited anyone who faced even a minor equipment failure, but he supposed bandits had loose safety standards.

This thought did provide a moment’s desperate inspiration. “I am a member of the Imperial Ministry of Agriculture. If you carry me to Valon the governor’s office will pay out twice as much as anyone here can.”

A cruel smile spread across the bandit’s face. “I guess you are smart, in a stupid sort of way. They probably would pay more, true,” the man mused grimly. “But they’d also record the move as a crime against the Empire, and well, that’s a little too much heat for any self-respecting bandit to carry around.” A single shake of the head reinstated abject inevitability.

Despair must have shown on Brend’s face. “Why so glum soil-sampler?” the bandit shifted, leaned forward, and bent close. “Are you afraid the horn-head won’t pay for your hide?” Fingers unclenched briefly, only to entwine again after a heartbeat. Deep thought played across the dirt-stained face. “I suppose she might not, at that. Ah, sithspit, that’s frustrating. Especially considering that if we kill you to make the point then we’ve killed an imperial official. The Empire probably won’t like that, which would really impede my retirement plans. Hmm…” Hands opened and closed repeatedly.

The clink of the helmet and crackle of the leather gloves made Brend flinch with each motion. He had no desire to experience the depths of this man’s savage creativity.

“Hmm…” the bandit mused. “Yes, I think that could work.” A smile brightened his face, horribly lurid. “The Empire’s been going hard against the Thalassians and Zygerrians both, but the Hutts are still in business. I’ve read your bio, soil-sampler, you know how to fix toxic spills. They pay good money for that skill; the slugs have lots of goo that needs cleaning up.1 Ransom would be better, but seeing as it’s too risky, the payout for a slave with a doctorate’s good enough. And…” the smile became a vision of malevolent glee. “The Hutts won’t mind a few bruises, not so long as there’s no permanent damage.”

Brend’s heart sank. It was worse, far worse, than he’d feared. He was not a religious man and considered few things to be a fate worse than death, but enslavement to the Hutts made the list. Right at the top even.

“Kerrelis,” the bandit called out to one of his men. “Send a coded message to that slaver transporter, tell him we have a package to hand over. After that, everyone eat up, pack in, and get some rest. We’ll have a long ride come morning.”

The bandits spent the next several hours consuming stolen rations, drinking copious quantities of fig wine they’d taken from the Sarkhai, and counting up the rest of their plunder. It was mostly lighting and sensor systems stacked in heaps on towable repulsorlift pallets. They taunted their victory to Brend in every possible way. Numerous toasts were raised in memory of their fallen and coupled in insult to every possible aspect of the Sarkhai.

The bandit crew comprised fourteen men exactly. Brend learned this with brutal efficiency, as their leader allotted each man two punches in vengeance, one for each of the fallen. The only rule was the strikes had to be in places that ‘wouldn’t cripple.’

By the time the raiders retired for the night to sleep in blankets wrapped up atop their speeders, Brend could not feel his arms and legs. He’d passed out in agony twice, only to be forcibly awoken and forced to swallow a half-dose of painkillers to ‘feel it longer.’

Three bandits stayed up through the night. Two perimeter sentries and one man assigned to watch the prisoner. Brend found the last assignment darkly comical. Even if he somehow came free of the binders, he could not so much as crawl about.

Sleep was absolutely impossible. He could do nothing more than roll back and forth, teeth clenched against the pain, desperately trying to find any posture that would reduce his agony.

It was a dark night. The moons set early, and a smattering of irregular clouds covered many stars. The tree canopy did for the rest. Beyond the immediate circle of the clearing there was naught but twisting black shadows. The buzzing of insects filled the dark with a steady mix of variable noise. A predatory bird called out in low tones at irregular intervals. Brend tried to find something other than pain to focus on by counting the elongate calls.

He’d just hit fifty-three when the bandit standing over him disintegrated.

A flash of pure yellow, a bright shower of sparks, and then nothing. No body, no weapons, just a slow flutter as uniform fragments descended slowly to the earth.

The sound of the discharge did not reach Brend’s ears until after those garments touched down, and it did not strike once, but three times.

Shock pulled him beyond pain, to a place where cold logic asserted itself. For the particle beam to race ahead of the sound so noticeably meant the attacker was a considerable distance away.

Sniper.

Three blasts. Three disintegrations. All the bandits awake and ready eliminated in one preemptive assault.

Raiders rolled free of their speeders in response to the devastating squeal of the disruptor rifle. Blankets flew into the air. Blasters were drawn. Heads swiveled as eyes struggled to find purchase in the darkness and identity their attacker.

More men died before the remainder could take cover behind their speeders and fire wildly eastward into the thick woods.

“Ride!” the cry of their leader pierced the black. “We have to charge this karking scum! Covering fire and ride!”

A quintet of speeders launched forward, darting toward the forest. Two bandits, one the leader, remained behind, crouched next to Brend beside their vehicles and pouring bolts downrange.

No further blasts came from the distance.

“Come out and fight you coward!” One rider shouted.

Another voice rose to join the taunt. Then there was a distant thump and the shout twisted into a scream. Fire blossomed in the forest as a speeder exploded against a tree trunk.

“Pick up your thermal scanning you idiot!” Another cry split the night. “They must be in the trees.”

“There’s too many birds! Kark it! Where is-“ a shocking, ear-splitting crackle shook the leaves. Birds took flight, a crowd of shadows against the starfield. A second speeder met its end via collision.

Not a blaster. The still reasoning part of Brend’s mind recognized the variant sound. A slugthrower, a weapon invisible in darkness and whose sound, echoing in the forest, would seem to come from everywhere.

“Coward, I’ll take this whole forest down!” A bandit opened up with his BARC’s blaster cannon on full auto, sprayed bolts in every direction.

“Fool,” Brend heard their leader whisper beside his ear.

The rain of ruby bolts ripped a wave of carnage through the forest, but this served only to reveal the position of the shooter and his closest ally. Two more shots followed. Thereafter, only a single rider remained.

This one had had enough. He turned his bike about and broke for the south, throttling up to maximum speed as he sought to leave it all behind.

It might have worked, in daylight, but in the darkness, he failed to navigate the densely packed vines of the forest. Tossed from his seat by sudden impact, he was swiftly found by the slugthrower’s final discharge.

The second-to-last bandit broke from his leader’s side, vaulted onto his bike, and fled.

This time the former security officer simply sighed.

The BARC made it to the edge of the trees before it exploded in a cloud of orange sparks.

“Enough!” Brend turned at this shout to discover a blaster barrel pointed at his face. “I have the agronomist!” The bandit bellowed toward the trees. “I’ll kill him. Come out, let’s make a trade.”

No answer came, but no bolts emerged from the darkness beyond.

Several very long minutes, a period Brend would forever remember as the longest interval in his entire life, passed. He tracked every crackle and shift of the bandit’s dark glove, felt the terrible weight of mortality pressing upon him.

Eventually the undergrowth parted and a Sarkhai walked into the clearing.

She was short, slender, and overall compact of being, with close-cropped gray hair pulled back into a bun behind her neck. Two short bars of blue, bent slightly downward, marked her face beneath each eye upon an expression burdened by some tragedy no one could name. She wore a gray-green camouflage uniform, much stained, and ragged skirt and cloak wraps tied at waist and neck. Somehow, though this forest was warm enough to never freeze, she looked as if she’d just emerged from a howling blizzard. The long disruptor rifle she carried was a clear contrast to her haunted and harried appearance, sleek, sharp-edged, and in perfect condition. The loving care of a master craftsman radiated off its every shining surface.

The left hand wrapped around the weapon’s trigger shone in tandem, porcelain white and glazed, covered in some kind of protective composite. The slugthrower pistol so recently used to take several lives rested quietly in a holster on her left hip, below a band of cracked and stained leather pouches ringing her waist.

“Don’t come any closer!” the bandit demanded as she reached the ring of speeders. “I can put a bolt through his head faster than you can raise that monster gun. You hear me?”

A single nod, very slight, the motion almost entirely absorbed by the scarf around her neck, indicated awareness.

“Good,” fingers clenched down dangerously around the blaster’s grip. “Now, here’s the deal white-face witch. I’m going to take the binders off this wretch and put him on the back of my speeder. He’s a bit battered, but he’ll be able to push himself off so you can pick him up, but not before I’m out of range. Sound fair?”

The same slight nod repeated.

“Good, glad we have a deal.” The bandit, using his left hand, pulled a small cylinder from his pocket and pushed a button.

Brend felt the binders detach.

“Get up,” the order came harsh, furious.

Brend tried. Truly, he did. He managed, despite searing spikes of agony, to get his hands in front of him and under him far enough to hold his torso upright and rise to his knees. When he tried to go further, his legs, victim of the brunt of the blows hours past, simply refused to obey any command. He tried to rise, over and over, but they would not move. Three times he tried to shift his weight and stand. Three times he collapsed into the mud below.

“Get up curse you!” the bandit howled. Using his left hand he reached out, grabbed Brend’s shoulder, and pulled hard. “Witch,” he glanced over to the Sarkhai. “Help me, or I’ll kill him and we’ll see who aims fastest.”

A third nod.

The Sarkhai shifted the disruptor as she approached. The rifle, radiating a high-pitched whine from the massive charge it held in readiness, was now cradled under her right shoulder; held against her body for support with her right hand on the trigger. Slowly, one step at a time, she moved forward until she reached out with her left arm to grasp Brend’s right shoulder.

The agronomist bit down as she did this, not in pain, but to stifle a gasp. Her touch was cool, the same temperature as the night’s chill air. What he’d thought an armored glove was in fact solid composite.

A prosthesis.

“We lift him up on three,” the bandit barked nervously. “One, two, three.”

The Human pulled. Brend felt the metallic digits did not grasp, but instead, let go. Recognizing the deadly gamble, he allowed his battered arms to surrender. His full weight driven by gravity back to the earth. As he fell, he turned his neck, desperate to see.

Silver and white, the prosthetic arm snapped to full extension, fingers joined together as a metal axe and smashed through the bandit’s lower jaw.

Blood sprayed everywhere. The man fell backward with an incoherent gurgle of shock and pain. The Sarkhai twisted in space, whipped the disruptor around until the end of the barrel contacted the edge of the blue uniform. The soft whump of impact was followed by a crackling discharge.

A final shower of sparks blossomed in the night.

Moments later, Brend felt a grasp gently against his side. He groaned slightly as he was rolled over and propped against the stump. He managed, just barely, to raise his arms and shift his back to a posture that hurt slightly less. Standing up remained an unattainable goal.

He bent his neck to stare at his rescuer instead.

The pale Sarkhai woman had shifted her disruptor to a back carry and was calmly wiping blood from her prosthesis using scattered fragments of the dead men’s clothing. She appeared almost perfectly calm, as if recent events were merely ordinary to her.

“Thank you,” Brend slowly managed to find his voice, croak out the woefully insufficient words. “You saved me from…” He tried, and failed utterly, to find a means to properly articulate the circumstances. Instead, he simply repeated the weak phrase over again. “You saved me.”

This drew another simple nod, but no words.

“Ah, I’m Brend,” he continued. The freedom to speak was helpful. Talking offered a distraction, something to do other than wallow in pain.

The Sarkhai woman opened one of the pouches about her waist and tossed a small glow rod on the ground between them. Soft green light spread out amid the shattered ring of speeder bikes. Using her metallic composite fingers, she quickly carved out a series of tight characters in the loose dirt.

“Dusk?” Brend blinked at the simple appellation. “That’s you?”

Again, a nod, sturdier this time. Carefully, but also swiftly so the image was visible for but a moment, she pulled down the scarf around her neck. This movement revealed a tracery of narrow scars across the front of her throat. A single glimpse allowed, before concealment returned.

Enough to grasp the meaning behind the injury. Vocal cord damage, something beyond easy repair, had left this warrior unable to speak.

“Thanks for coming after me,” Brend offered weakly. He had no idea what else to say.

Dusk responded with a blank look. Considering everything that had happened, she remained remarkably relaxed. Nothing in her expression suggested any substantial commitment to his welfare. Saving him was simply a component of her mission, the same as killing the bandits. Despite this, he felt the kindness conveyed through her actions. She need not have risked herself in the offered exchange but had done so rather than leave him to die.

He had no words to express such honorable devotion.

“What’s next?” he asked instead.

Dusk tapped the BARC speeder that formerly belonged to the dead bandit.

“I don’t think I can walk,” Brend admitted miserably. The pain was getting better, one tiny marginal improvement at a time, but he was still in the throes of misery. He did not know if the Sarkhai woman, small as she was, could lift him onto the speeder. She was clearly fit, but some things were a matter of forces.

The only response from Dusk was a shrug. She moved around behind him, grabbed beneath both shoulders, and began to slowly leverage him up onto the back of the speeder.

It was a slow, frustrating, embarrassing, and absolutely excruciating process. Brend filled the night with a series of grunts, moans, and coughs. Dusk’s silent contrast only redoubled the acute shame that kept him from meeting the Sarkhai’s eyes. When they were done, she strapped him down like a cargo bundle, slid into the pilot’s seat, and activated the bike.

They did not ride fast. Dusk kept the speeder just above canopy height, lights off, with the engine low enough that their passage failed to spook the nesting birds. The resulting journey, a distance of no more than fifty klicks, took several hours. By the time the walls of the Sarkhai settlements came into view dawn had begun to break through the lingering gloom.

Dusk drove them to the very edge of the palisade, then stopped. Without ceremony, she stepped off the speeder, pulled a comlink from one of her pouches, and tapped out a coded message. Turning about, she undid the straps holding Brend down.

“Thank you,” he winced as he managed to sit up under his own power at last. Every part of his body still ached and stabbed with each movement, but the sharpness of injury had faded to something tolerable.

A nod from Dusk. She made a motion with her hands, compressed them together and then tapped the speeder. A clear instruction to stay with the bike. Then, without anything further, she shouldered her rifle and walked off toward the forest.

“Wait? Where are you going?” Brend called out. The sudden departure, the absence of ceremony, left him absolutely flummoxed.

The white prosthetic arm waved once, caught the first streams of morning light breaking through the trees, and then fell away beneath the cape once more. Brend could only state as she walked past the cleared line and disappeared into the trees.

Moments later, a band of Sarkhai militia scrambled over the wall to bring him inside.

Notes
1. They so do. Hutta is a mess, and plenty of other Hutt worlds aren't far behind.

 

Chapter Six – Ord Varee, 18 BBY

“Who is she?” Brend sat across from Mayor Rall, supported in a medical cot. They were in a private space within the local clinic. He’d just been proclaimed clear of permanent damage by a nurse and given a fresh dose of highly effective painkillers. Enough to feel almost normal.

There was no need to specify who the question addressed. “Dusk is a Culler Warden,” the mayor explained. He sighed slowly. “An ancient order from our homeworld. Rather than relying on defensive protections as others do to dissuade predators, they work to secure territory by actively eliminating threats. There are not many of them now, and she is the only one who came to Ord Varee from Sarkhai.”

“She was the only one who volunteered?” That seemed unlikely. Dusk did not give off the impression of any kind of politic feeling. She appeared far too focused for such things.

“No,” the mayor shook his head sadly. “They drew lots, and hers was the name called. The King and Queen directed those of us unwilling to forsake the Republic to leave Sarkhai, but they did not wish us to make the voyage unprotected.”

“Why did you break away?” Some combination of painkiller-induced mania and post-traumatic reduction in inhibitions led Brend to ask this question.

“We are mostly those who lived in the ancient lands of the Grell family,” Rall explained. He was calm, but there was a steadfast pride, unbowed, behind these words. “When our planet was first discovered by outsiders, thirty-five hundred years ago, it was one of that family, Nadia Grell, who became the first Sarkhai Jedi. She was a hero of the Republic who served alongside the Barsen’thor and master scholar Gnost-Dural and endured the sojourn on Ossus during the reign of Zakuul.”

Brend knew that episode had revolutionized agriculture throughout the galaxy when the discoveries of the Jedi were recovered by the Republic, but he had not known a Sarkhai had been involved.

“A statue of Nadia stood in my hometown.” The tale expanded. “How could we, who lived under the protection of her legacy, betray the Republic that she gave everything to protect?”

As motives went, it was no less reasonable than any other.

“The Refugee Relief Movement helped us leave, but only provisioned enough ships to move twenty-thousand people at a time.” Pride faded, replaced by old sadness. “Many trips, all on the same route; a mistake. On the final trip pirates attacked. Dusk led the defense against boarders. Our fighters prevailed, barely, but she was injured through the neck by shrapnel. In truth, she was lucky to survive, the shards tore through vocal cords not veins, but among our people the loss of the voice is a terrible thing indeed.”

“This is why she’s left outside, isn’t it?” It was not especially difficult to deduce.

“The ancient rules are simple,” Mayor Rall bowed his gaze. “Those who cannot speak are not Sarkhai, but beasts, and beasts are not allowed within the walls. Exile is the only option for one rendered mute.”

“Even if the condition could be repaired?” Brend’s eyes widened, shock and sorrow mingled within.

“How can a beast be treated?” The mayor’s gaze deflected to the floor. He shuddered with misery. “We offered to allow Dusk to remain among us, to retain her proper name. Why not? This is not Sarkhai. The forests here are calm and hold only timid felines and modest canines. She refused. Her order holds hard to the old ways. It is not within our power to persuade her.”

Brend was an agronomist, not a medical doctor, but while at university he had conducted research alongside Anomid engineers. That species, he remembered suddenly, had no vocal cords at all. To speak with others, they fashioned artificial voice boxes that generated a perfect facsimile.1 Even if the injury could not be repaired through surgery, a solution should exist. “I see,” he murmured. “Well, I’m no Sarkhai. Humans perform treatments on beasts all the time, it’s called veterinary medicine. Maybe you could pass on a message for me?”

“That should pose no problem,” Mayor Rall looked up again, misty eyed.

It was Aes Rimi who offered the second, and thoroughly perfect, half of the lure. She awarded Dusk the Acenou Medal of Valor, part of a series of awards she made up whole cloth, and invited the Culler Warden to the first annual award ceremony. Brend, also invited to accept recognition for Excellence in Civilian Innovation – which he received on behalf of Sanava Antder, in abstentia – was able to track her down during the afterparty. It was a subdued affair, given that all the food and beverages on offer were made from algae.

The Sarkhai had dressed in an old security uniform that barely fit her petite form. Brend suspected she’d scavenged it from dead bandits. Not that anyone noticed. Onlookers fixated on her painted face and artificial arm instead. Brend waited until late to approach her, not wanting to pressure the woman. In the end, he contrived to refill his punch at the same time she did.

“I’m glad to see you are well,” he began, and meant it. Living along in the forest, hunting predators with any number of legs, could impair even the most fearsome of personages.

A sharp nod in response, but she did not turn away.

With no other signals on offer, Brend forced himself to meet the painted face head on. “I hope you got my message. Have you thought about the offer?”

Dusk pulled a scrap of fabric from a hidden pocket and passed it to him using her artificial hand. A response was written upon it in the same bright blue shade as her facial markings. ‘I will never live among the Sarkhai. The penance must be served, but yes, I wish to speak again.’

“Okay, that’s,” he had to quickly fold up the scrap to avoid drenching it in tears. “That’s great. Let’s, ah, let’s go see Aes Rimi and see about a scheduling a medtech appointment.” The continent possessed only a handful of top line surgical droids, and they were very busy, but for this time could be made.

Dusk nodded once more.

Brend would not see the Sarkhai again for two years, not until after the algal project was complete and they found themselves sharing another award ceremony. He had not known she was coming and fell to his knees when she greeted him with a smile and a soft, electronically reproduced. “Hello.”

The Western Bay algal project had averted disaster. Brend was duly proud of it, but that one word was something more. An expression not of necessity, but victory.

Notes
1. Anomids, and their odd vocal setup, or lack thereof, are actually quite well represented across a number of canon sources.

This piece ends here. The story of Acenou through the dark times will hopefully continue, elsewhere.

 

I liked this story. Revealing more about the agri-corps and what they did for the republic. And love to see more of Brend and his friends

 

So I finally caught up with this story (a more accurate description would be that I binge-read it) last night and it placed what I had already read of this 'verse in context. This is a very interesting and well-written tale, and very unique in your approach to focus on societal development, especially in this context of transition from one regime to another where the refugees are most at risk of being left behind.

I found myself growing very fond of all your characters here, but the real tour de force is that the one I wish I could hug is the one that never appears in the flesh: Sanava. I would really like to know more about her, but I know that what makes this character work so well is that we only see her legacy, and that we, together with Brend, come to realise that she was aware of what was coming for the galaxy and for herself, and yet she continued her work to secure the future of the refugees.

And lastly, I want to say that your worldbuilding is outstanding, but I knew that from the Acenou Collection I already. I took good note of the I in that title, so here's hoping that II is on the way!

 

The practicalities of the transition from Republic to Empire are something we don't see a lot in Star Wars, probably because on the most important worlds changes were gradual and, at least initially, minimal. Life probably didn't change very much on Alderaan or Coruscant very much at all, especially considering the pre-existing wartime security apparatus, but it must have changed a lot on Mid and Outer Rim worlds, especially on those planets were major ongoing government projects were happening. While the Acenou situation is probably unusually large, I imagine there were millions of situations were a few thousand workers suddenly found their jobs vanishing with them a long way from home.

The funny thing is that I initially created Sanava entirely as an excuse to ship Brend to Acenou, but she ended up having a greater off-screen impact than I thought. The Service Corps, in general, fascinates me, just the idea of all these other uses for the Force that don't involve hitting things with lightsabers that are massively underdeveloped.

Thanks, it is, in many ways, the world-building that caused this story to happen. The exploration of many difference species living together is one of the things I find Star Wars most effective to do as a setting, and using the Refugee Relief Movement to set up a scenario has been an idea I was toying with for some time, since it's a very different environment compared to a cosmopolitan and urbanized world like Coruscant.