IN THE SHADOW OF THE MANDALORE
A "Star Wars" story set sometime long, long ago...
Okay, this is PART 2 of Chapter 6. It’s long — about 3,000 words long, which some might think is too long of a post. But I don’t care what they say. The people that like it, read it, and that’s all that matters. It’s a long chapter, what can I say?
It’s here for SCI-FI FRIDAY, or whatever they call it. There’s not a lot of this story left. I believe I already told you I have to put it aside until I finish my other serial THE SHIELD OF LOCKSLEY. I call this one: “My Unintentional Serial.” But it seems everything I have is a serial. My novellas are all serials. I remember I wrote NO SIMPLE REMEDY and took it with me when we went to stay with a friend at her place for ten days. We went with another friend. I read my story out in its entirety. I’d love to be able to do that, but nobody wants to listen to that.
Maybe I’ll ask my PAID people if they would like that? After it’s all done, just read it out in one go? Anyway, I digress.
In our last part we met a new character, a detective Yb’rik Dosange…
“We’ve been looking for you,” Dosange said into his ComLink.
“Is that him?” Rebuh asked, and Dosange nodded.
He was leaning against a durocrete block, looking down the path of destruction Archangel had carved into the city’s surface. Several of the surrounding buildings had fallen, or else imploded, in on themselves. He supposed that it was because the bottom five stories had been sliced out from underneath them. There were still some fires burning, and there was always a threat that with fires, the flames would ignite the gas clouds around the planet—but that had yet to happen.
A tale meant to frighten people, he thought, looking up at the poisonous clouds being mined for minerals.
“You do know that we already have his location, right?” Rebuh said, and Dosange nodded again.
“Who is this?” Fitt asked, not recognizing the signature.
“I’m someone who can make your life a lot more comfortable, if you co-operate.”
“I don’t see how you think you can do that,” Fitt said, with what could only be a forced laugh.
“No? Well, the Jedi say you’ve been gone for an hour. Maybe we can start right there? They’re going to want to know why you’ve been gone for an hour, and frankly, so do I. But more specifically, I want to know where you went?” He looked at Rebuh and smiled, shaking his head at the man’s simplicity. He held his hand over the comLink.
“Are we done here?” he asked, and Rebuh nodded.
“Where?” Fitt said. “I don’t know where I went. I took a walk. I’ve got a lot on my mind,” he added.
“I’m sure you do; I’m sure you do,” Dosange said, looking at all the destruction. “I’ll tell you what, I’m on my way over to the crash site right now—it’s really quite a sight from up here—so I’ll meet you there as soon as we land.”
“Land? Where are you? Who are you?” Fitt asked.
“It seems the Jedi have asked SecuroCom to help them with their investigation—not that we wouldn’t have been looking into it ourselves, anyway—but more specifically, they asked for me by name.”
“Exactly. And who are you?” Fitt asked.
“We’ve already talked to the members of your crew who survived the crash. There was a group of your Security Personnel who appear to have been killed. Were you aware of that? And some droids that someone turned into scrap metal. Do you have anything to say about any of that? And oh yes, before I forget, we’ve also taken whatever feeds we can from the onboard Navs; they’re sending them to me, even as we speak. In fact, oh, I’ve already got them,” he added, tapping a button on the comLink and opening the files. He could see the Mandalorian Basilisk leaving the ramp and disappearing from view. “I’m looking at the intel right now, and I must tell you, it’s very interesting. I’ll tell you what. I’ll be there in about a half a shake. We’re coming into port right now. I’ll be wanting to speak with you, after I talk to your Captain.”
“I’m sorry, but I didn’t get your name?”
“Didn’t I introduce myself? Oh…sorry. I’m Detective-Major Yb’rik Dosange. Like I said, the Jedi have asked me if I could take a look at your case. I didn’t want to. I’ve got enough on my own, without taking on theirs. But they said something I found rather interesting. Something about drones on the other side of the planet coming on line. Aren’t those drones under control of the NavCon system?”
“How do you expect me to know that?”
“I thought you might. Or maybe, that you should. You do own a freight company, do you not? And now you want to tell me that you don’t know how the NavCon works? My gut tells me this might be tied in with something I’m looking at right now. If it does tie in, you’re going to want me as your friend.”
“You mean, you aren’t with the Jedi?”
There was a moment of silence, and Dosange imagined the man trying to sort things out in his mind. Well, let him, he thought, reading through the man’s file. He wasn’t going to run, he knew that; besides, there wasn’t anywhere for a man like Fitt to hide on a planet like Taris.
He just needs time to think.
He continued reading the file, wondering what the man was hiding, sorting through pages as they appeared in holo. He scrolled through pictures of the family; family homes in various locations, on various planets, and showed them to Rebuh. Both of them shook their heads with the ostentatious exhibition of wealth; there were articles in the holo-news with tours of various houses.
And then he found the missing piece of the puzzle.
Sith artefacts.
No wonder the Jedi are so interested in what happened here.
“You still there?” Fitt asked.
“You know I am,” he said absently, still reading.
“I also know you’re probably triangulating my signal and know exactly where I am. So why don’t you cut the bantha shit and send a transport over to pick me up?”
“I don’t want to do that right now,” Dosange said, pushing himself off the durocrete block and cancelling the file. He looked around, following the path of destruction where he could see Archangel perched on the edge of a precipice where massive robo-cranes were securing the ship. He pulled a monoscope out of his pockets and centred it on the wreckage. He zoomed in for a closer look.
“What? You don’t? Why?”
“We’ve had you under constant surveillance this entire time. Do you really think a man in your position is going to walk away from something like this? Or that no one’s going to notice? I thought you might want a little more time to yourself; I thought you might want to sort things out in your head first, before we talk—and I get that. You’ve just been involved in one of the most horrific crashes in Tarisian history. That’s the disadvantage of living on an ecumenopolis. If anything from up here falls to the ground, it’s going to take out civilians.” He was looking up at the transports criss-crossing the pale yellow sky above him.
“I’m sorry, what did you say your name was again?”
“Dosange. Major-Detective Yb’rik Dosange.”
“Well, Major-Detective, all I care about right now is finding my daughter.”
“What about your daughter?”
“She’s missing.”
“Did you report it?” he smiled.
“Report it? Of course I reported it! You didn’t think to say anything about it?”
“I was waiting for you to mention it. And believe me, if you hadn’t, the questions I have for you would’ve been a little different.”
“All I want is for you to get her back,” he said.
“We’re working on it.”
“Working on it! The man flew off on an old Mandalorian Basilisk!”
He paused. Dosange minimized the file he was reading and looked at Fitt’s image on the comLink. The faint blue figure flickered in and out of focus, and he hit the comLink until the image darkened and came back into focus. He looked at Rebuh and shook his head.
“Yes?” he asked, looking at the man’s figure.
“It was Mandalorian! Where did he get that! I don’t even have one of those!”
“Why would you?”
“Are you with the Jedi?” Fitt asked after a moment.
“I’ve already told you I’m not. Would it make a difference if I were?” Dosange asked.
“My son’s a Padawan, or maybe a Knight by now, I don’t know—but he’s a Jedi. He was at the crash site. I don’t see the point in telling them everything, and then telling you the same thing, an hour later.”
“Them?”
“He was with a Twi’lek. A female. Master P’oh. Do you know her?”
“I’m not a Jedi,” Dosange said, ignoring the question, “but sometimes I work with them. They have a different way of doing things when it comes to asking questions and determining the truth. They use the Force, which comes in handy for figuring that sort of thing out, I imagine. But I don’t have the Force on my side, so I have to rely on facts. Of course, they can always bend the truth to suit their needs as well, which comes in handy if they want to hide things, but for the most part, they don’t do that a lot.”
“So you don’t trust them?”
“What would I?”
“Good.”
“I’m with State Security. We like to do things the old-fashioned way.”
“And what way is that?”
“We’re the guys they call out whenever there’s an issue involving a murder they can’t solve.”
“Murder? Who said anything about murder? I didn’t say my daughter was—”
“I figure things out, Lord Fitt. It’s what I do best. I answer to my boss, not the Jedi.”
“I see.”
“You’d think that we don’t get a lot of calls about these things, but we do. It seems the Sith are everywhere. Apparently, they have agents all across the galaxy—thousands, we’re told, on Taris alone—just like we have ours on their worlds. At least, that’s what people tell us is happening.”
“Spies?”
“Who knew? So, let me ask you, outright. Did what happen today, have anything to do with that deal you made in Sith Space last year?”
There was a moment of silence that was more than a pause.
“Last year?” Fitt asked.
“It’s been in our sights for a while now, and, well, to be honest, there’s no easy way of asking, is there? My boss has been asking me all kinds of questions about it, and I just don’t know what to say anymore. I don’t have the answers.”
“No, it has nothing to do with that. True, I deal with Darth Vectivus on an on-going basis, but I had dealings with him long before he discovered his Sith roots. Look, I’m close to the Jedi Temple, right now. Send out a transport and we’ll talk.”
“Unfortunately, my department has a limited budget and we only have the one transport for all of us. I happen to be using it at the moment; I’m on my way back—coming back in from Concordia. Do you know where that is?”
“Should I?”
“No.” He thought for a moment, looking at the marks on the ground where Archangel’s landing gear scraped against the durocrete and transparisteel, leaving a the deep rut. He followed the track with his eyes. He could see exactly where the buildings once stood.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” he said, bending down to look at the transparisteel closer. “I’ll need another hour or more, once we get in—I have to make my report—the boss is a stickler for that. I’ll meet you wherever you want. I’m pretty sure a man like you has a place to stay on every planet in the Galaxy. Just send the intel to my office, and I’ll find you. Dosange out.”
He disconnected the ComLink and looked up at the transports riding the sky-lanes. He’d have to call in a runner to take him out to one of the Guild’s apartments, but first he needed to clear his mind.
He needed to take a walk.
“Well?” Aunjaali asked; there was a note of petulance in her voice Rev couldn’t help but notice.
He was standing with his back to her, trying to listen through an earful of static using an archaic booster hooked up to the Mid and Inter-Space Transfer Relay—MISTER—and at the same time, looking up at the link coming in from Taris on the view screen.
“I can’t hear a thing,” he said, throwing the headphones across the room in frustration. As much as he liked new tech, he knew sometimes direct communications were better served with outdated tech; in this case, however, it wasn’t working.
The room’s West wall was a compilation of one thousand individual monitors, each one about the size of a large fist, and each one capable of taking in feed from all the major systems of the Galaxy. Right now, the monitors were streaming a live feed coming in directly from Taris—with a delay of only seventeen hours—and the entire wall was taken up with the smouldering remains of what had once been his father’s ship, Archangel. To the left of Archangel was what was left of the Mandalorian craft, another crumpled heap of twisted metal.
To the left of the view screen was a holo-pad, and to the right, a bank of high quality speakers. It was all part of the MISTER system. With it, Rev could contact any of a dozen different Guild managers, using the backdoor code his splicer stole. As important as he thought it was for him to have access to his father’s office, it also enabled Rev to bypass the nanobots his father had injected him with at birth; it was the reason he liked old tech.
The East wall of the room was a floor-to-ceiling window looking out over the Trakalt Valley where Aunjaali sat in her lounger looking at far-away, snow-capped mountains scraping against a distant sky. The mountain peaks appeared to be lost in the clouds. The tumbling Neoncer River scratched its way through the middle of the valley where neighbouring homes were built into the sides of the cliffs, visible in the soft afternoon light.
She turned to look at the screen and saw the melted debris of the still smouldering Archangel lost somewhere in the middle of it, hissing steam. SecuroCom had called for rescue droids, pneumatic drills, and stonecutter droids, which worked steadily in the background—massive machines dwarfing everything around them—as well as a dozen Jedi utilizing the Force to push aside huge chunks of durocrete and transparisteel girders three meters wide and forty meters long. Reports estimated the death toll at 17,000; the injured, three times that amount.
Aunjaali walked to the centre of the large room, her arms folded beneath her breasts, looking at the carnage on the screens. She stood half a head shorter than Rev, but the montrals projecting from the top of her head gave the illusion of added height.
She was Togruta, with the rusty skin tones of her race, white pigmentation and markings, as well as grey lips. Her three head-tails—lekkus—hung down to her slender waist, two of them under her folded arms and the third running down the length of her back. White stripes enhanced her beauty; her face, head-tails, and montrals were a garland of thick striations, while on her chest, legs, back, and arms, were delicate lines as thin as veins.
Rev found himself forcing a mollifying smile when he saw the look on her face. He wondered what she might be thinking.
She’s still as beautiful as the first time I met her, he thought, reminding himself she could be difficult—impetuous, as his grandsire liked to say.
Impetuous is being polite, he told himself.
Her cheekbones were high, giving her face a look of determination and a strength of character he’d not seen on other Togruta females. He watched her small nose twitch as she concentrated on the view screen. She shook her head slowly, stroking one of the lekku resting on her breasts, and he wondered if it was a simple distraction because of the destruction she was watching, or she if was thinking it was the end of all their plans.
“We have to go.”
“I’ve already made arrangements.”
“Does he think he’s not going to be held accountable?” she asked. “The Board will have his head for this. This might just play right into our hands.”
“I don’t see how. It’s not as if he was piloting the ship himself.”
“Why? What have you heard?” She turned to look at him, her eyes deep and piercing, almost malevolent in their intensity, and he marvelled at her strength.
Rev nodded. “There was a Sith attack.”
“Sith? But we deal with the Sith all the time.”
“We deal with the Dark Council through Darth Vectivus. That’s different. He’s a Sith, but he’s not the one behind this. It’s someone else.”
“You mean, personal?”
He shook his head.
“Don’t know yet. I doubt it. He hasn’t been off-world in twenty years. Hard to make enemies when you don’t get out much.”
“Business?”
“Probably. I just don’t know what, though. We’ll have to wait and see.”
“Wait? For what? He’s not going to just tell you.”
“We’ll have to wait and see. He may have to in the end.”
He knew she was voicing her father’s concerns, and as much as he’d grown to love her over the years he wondered when she was going to let go of her family so they could start out on their own. He looked forward to the day they left Anaxes, combined the two families, and set out to control the Galaxy the way his father should have done thirty years ago.
“How many were there?”
“What?”
“Sith. How many did Jer’glo say there were?” She looked at the two ships on the ground—the Mandalorian a twisted hulk of metal lying off to one side—and Archangel, a behemoth in comparison.
“One.”
“One Sith did that?”
“The Sith brought Archangel down; one of the Jedi destroyed his ship.”
“How many Jedi were there?”
“Jer’glo says three, but he stressed that two of them showed up after it was all over. One of them was my brother.”
“And now your brother’s involved? The Board’s going to have a fit when they hear that. They’ll say it’s a conflict of interest; a stunt that got out of control.”
“How can they? It’s a coincidence, if it’s anything. The Board can say what they want. The planet’s full of Jedi; I’d be surprised if my brother wasn’t there.”
“Not the same.”
Rev wondered if that was condescension he heard in her voice, but decided not to make a big thing of it. He was willing to overlook her pettiness for reasons he didn’t understand—telling himself she didn’t mean to come across as peevish—but there were times when her tone bothered him; like when she directed it at him.
Better just to ignore her.
“Where is he now?”
“The Jedi Temple, I suppose.”
“I meant your father.”
“Jer’glo doesn’t know. Nobody’s seen him since the Jedi left.”
“Oh, this just keeps getting better.”