A Bridge Too Far

[Ashin Varanin]

An old Sith Empire cargo barge exited hyperspace over Gromas. Defiantly bricklike, it had no semblance of aerodynamic value nor elegance. It did, however, have a false telesponder gleaned from one of her Iron Crown contacts. That telesponder went back a ways, suggesting some under-the-table dealings between Iron Crown and AEL/Mohc, in the days before Mohc had been sold off to investors both inside and outside the Tion Hegemony.

One wall of the barge's cabin held a corporate labyrinth of string and flash-paper notes, ready to ignite if the ship was taken. There was a pattern here, and it involved people Ashin knew -- people she'd liked, or answered to, or learned from, or opposed. It looked like a war, a quiet economic war predicated on personal feuds and impersonal avarice, and Gromas -- the place where Circe Savan had kidnapped Rave Merrill -- sat smack dab in the middle of the pattern. Merrill had divested herself from Gromas almost immediately after the incident, selling that entire subsidiary.

So why had AEL traffic increased in nearby systems? And where were those ships coming from?

 

[Ashin Varanin]

She didn't know, not yet, what course she would take. Not in the sense of astrography, though that was a blank too, but in the sense of purpose and action. She could come down on any side of this, conflicted as her loyalties were. She could find herself squarely at a point of decision, caught between the Fringe -- if this was a Fringe operation -- and her duty as a Jedi if this turned out to be malevolent. To make that choice, to find herself at that overdue point, that moment of truth, she needed knowledge -- she needed the facts. So she was running to the place that would make decision mandatory.

In some ways, this moment had been coming for years. It came down to the same dilemma she'd always faced: Values, or valued friends. Principles, or those who relied on her. Not that the Fringe needed her anymore -- or did it?

She was no longer sufficiently informed to know.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The old Imperial AT-SAT barge - Q-something-or-other - lumbered into the moons of Gromas like an off-target pool ball. At what passed for a helm, Ashin shed velocity by looping around moonlets, bound for the sixteenth, the blood moon. Mohc Extractives, ominously named as it was, belonged to a wide variety of shareholders, and that list had cost her in blood. Publicly available, of course, but half of those names were aliases. She wondered if Ayden Cater and Danger Arceneau knew they shared ownership of Mohc with Warren Valik and Lord Dissero. Among others.

Until last month, though, the majority shareholder had been Rave Merrill of AEL, Ashin's former boss as Fringe High Councilor. Merrill would have cleaned out the records, but Merrill was a late-twenties Dathomiri alchemist. There might be traces. There might have been mistakes.

She had brought an accountant droid.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

In the old days, her name had opened doors. Now it was more of a courtesy thing, when it happened at all, and only from the oldtimers. She'd gone up against Masters whose Masters' Masters had been trained by her. Sometimes it got stupid.

She was thirty-two years old.

The barge descended to the red sixteenth moon of Gromas, and the Mohc facility there. Old phrik mines, stripped bare by the Sith Empire, pitted the landscape alongside tikulini burrows. The lethal cave worms were gone, now, or close enough, removed by AEL to farming operations elsewhere. Her barge touched down inside one of the facility's docking bays, and she emerged to a one-protocol-droid reception committee.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

"Jedi Varanin, welcome to Gromas. I am TK-343." Not a designation she knew, but everyone and their dog made droids these days. "May I inquire as to the nature of your visit? Would you like some refreshment?"

"Investigative." She had no lie prepared, nothing that made sense, anyway. The answer, she knew, would close doors; if that happened, what mattered was which doors closed, how fast and how hard. "The last owner had some troubles with Subach-Innes not far from here, and I need to look into it." Two thirds of the truth had come out, and maybe that would be enough. "I'd like to look at system sensor data from that day."

The droid's head tilted as it consulted someone or something by internal comm. "Of course, Jedi Varanin," it said after a moment. "Please, this way."

 

[Ashin Varanin]

They gave her an office and a terminal. Minimal security; her talents were known, and slicing was not one of them. The accountant droid was not permitted to join her, though TK-whatever made it clear that she could take a copy of the data for offsite analysis.

The fight unfolded on the holoscreen: a Subach frigate, the Lethewalker, two Azalus frigates, starfighters, carnage, capture. Standard Subach improbable grabby audacity. A shuttle, some extravehicular action.

And, at the edges of the screen, ingress and egress vectors for a handful of cargo ships. Vectors that made too much sense, or none at all. Aargonar, The Wheel, others -- nearby worlds, important worlds, she'd conquered most of them, some personally. But Mohc and AEL had nothing to do with those worlds...did they? Aargonar could have served as an AEL dumping ground for tikulini, even terentateks, its climate approximating that of Korriban. And then there were the other vectors.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Some of those vectors had innocuous labels, alphanumeric, like intermediate corporate jump points. But she knew all the registered jump points AEL/Mohc had used in this immediate region, knew them well enough to recognize that PFR-07 made no sense when only six PFR-designated ingress points had been disclosed. She'd have to backtrack with the droid's help, no question about that, later.

But her gut said it would lead nowhere. Empty space, empty vector, nothing probable, no worlds along that line for hundreds of light-years. A deep space drop point of some kind. The sensor record showed it to be a Silk-built light freighter, Tachyon-class. Cheap and unobtrusive.

There was nothing more she could get from this. They were ready for her questions, but she took the copy of the data and dashed off as politely as she could, and they didn't seem offended to see her go. When Subach was involved, time was of the essence. She just hoped they hadn't learned that she technically worked for Subach-Innes.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

She spent a week on that vector, centering herself on the Force, using her blend of empathy and precognition at various dropout points, back and forth, back and forth. No time to train in other things, though she'd have loved to spend some more quality time with Faalo's third cadence; she unstrung her bow morning and night with repetitions of the first, which took long enough as it was. She could ill afford the many, many hours required for the third. Not right now.

She found no staging point, no relay point, no waymarkers. Granted, space was immense, but Forcers had an advantage in this area. If there was anything to be found, she should have found it -- or else she was more of a has-been than ever. Even comparing mystery transport vectors from AEL ships entering the Perlemian at the best onramp to Tion -- even that triangulation yielded a massive volume of space. Massive, and empty.

If instinct guided her, then it was instinct that put her at that point on the Perlemian when a Tachyon-class light freighter emerged from lightspeed on her own vector. It had not, so far as she could tell, ever entered hyperspace anywhere along that vector.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The Tachyon was reorienting for its next jump, and Ashin stretched out across space to find the mind of its pilot. Empathy, Spencer Jacobs-trained empathy, gave her only the most fleeting of impressions. Immense relief, love of black space and bright stars. Relief from oppressive...grayness.

Her blood ran cold. She dug a little deeper.

Spiderlegs.

The Tachyon leaped to hyperspace again, heading for Tion space, and Ashin missed her chance to follow it. Memory pinned her to her seat. Ichor in her mouth, in her cuts. Hospital halls filled with spined things like people with too many limbs. Bugflesh hissing to acrid smoke under her lightsabre. Garrett G. Granth pumping her full of antiradiation meds while she killed an army, while a transdimensional invasion force flared into constituent atoms overhead.

"Charon..."

 

[Ashin Varanin]

She needed to clear her head. A call to Spencer and Ibaris helped, and if she could have gone offstation she would have made for Korriban to patrol again, but she craved something more physical. When faced with memory of being physically overwhelmed, only lightsabre training would do. She had days, maybe weeks, until the next ship appeared.

She went down to the cavernous hold and set up Faalo's third cadence. One hundred eighty candles in a circle, at varying heights, each separated by two degrees of lateral arc. She'd mastered this, in time gone by, but her mastery had faltered (to put it mildly) when the Force had been stripped from her. Normally she had a droid do the setup, but she needed the distraction. One hundred eighty ball-bearings.

Repeated ninety-one times. Ninety point five, actually. Each candle was tall, specially made, with ninety or ninety-one ball bearings embedded in it. Maneuvering such a thing into place without breaking it -- that took a level of telekinetic discipline she'd once had, but now she was forced to do it over a substantial period of time. The cadence itself would take three hours. Setup took almost two.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

She'd always been rather good at keeping her balance. Her trademark technique, at Master level, had involved anchoring herself to the ground while surrounding herself with a full-body Force Weapon-scale protective aura. Armour lock, some called it; she'd never given it a name. Such a thing was beyond her, though this time around she was specializing her skillset to reach that. She'd trained in balance this time around, against Spencer and others, but that anchoring technique, grounding -- it had eluded her.

Until today. Maybe because she needed foundation.

She centered herself, connected her core to the deck, solidified her stance, and it was as natural as breathing again. She became one with the direction, with the deck, with the hull, immovable. Her stance shifted as she walked an exploratory velocity around the circle of candles, and she kept that grounding linkage strong, even though it slowed her. She grounded herself in fits and starts, then, at moments when her movement solidified into a low strong stance of one kind of another. It had been her trademark only months ago. Maybe all that had stood in her way was her doubt that she could do it. That seemed philosophically consistent.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

She stepped into the ring of tall candles and centered herself again. And lashed out, sabre clipping the topmost ball bearing from a candle in front of her. Then every fifth after that, the high ones.

Over the next four hours, without turning, without moving her feet, without ceasing to anchor herself, she wore herself to the bone. Every fifth candle lost a ball-bearing knuckle, like organized criminals disappointing a boss. Metallic smoke stung her nose, and burning wax. Candle-sections fell like rain.


Four hours. Slow, too slow. She could attribute some of that to an increasingly meditative mood, and some of that to her anchoring, and some of that to the very significant mental and physical demands of holding a single stance for hours at a time. In the end, though, no intact ball bearing rolled across the deck. There was nothing left but candlesticks and smoke and a floor coated in half-melted wax. Exertion had heated her, dried the sweat to a cake layer on her skin, set her muscles alight. She'd needed this, needed it badly. The Charon were still present in her mind, the Otherspace invasion she'd helped repel in the Unknown Regions ten years ago, but after four hours of this, everything was a target. Nothing was a bogeyman.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

One repetition did not a perfect velocity make, and Faalo's cadences were velocities like any other; she'd known several that incorporated props or specific situations. She'd known one or two that could only be accurately performed on a balance beam. Faalo's third cadence was, admittedly, the most complex cadence ever invented, in the sense of props. The fourth required no ball-bearings at all, only three hundred and sixty candles; the fifth required no props whatsoever. Their challenge was of another kind. The third, though, presented plenty of challenge.

Nobody could do a velocity perfectly; or, better put, nobody could ever be finished learning a velocity. Her training had focused on them, on patterns and transitions and breathing sequences, and it had made her pretty close to unstoppable -- based on her track record, anyway.

Suffice it to say, she liked velocities. She hated Faalo's third cadence. But she repeated it anyway. This time she had droids set up the tall candles, their cylindrical forms choked with more steel than wax. She repeated it twice a day until she ran out of supplies for it, and until she was halfway satisfied with her form. Basic compentency, only basic, was satisfied by hitting the ball bearings in the correct order. Actual skill had more to do with timing, breathing, completeness of motion, extension and overextension, hesitancy. Those were the arenas where she fought for self-improvement.

At last, the droid called down -- a Tachyon was reverting.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The alert caught her a quarter of the way into another repetition of the second cadence. She ducked between candlesticks, brushed against one, sent it tumbling to the floor. The barge's turbolift ran up the side of the massive hold like a spine; she took it to the bridge, forty metres straight up, and scrambled into her seat. The Tachyon was just getting ready to jump.

"We have the vector?"

"Aye, ma'am," said the Antarian Ranger who had the helm. "Or close enough."

"Go."

Moments after the Tachyon jumped, her barge followed. She'd turned off the false telesponder -- no need for the Tachyon to hail an apparent AEL ship.

Ten jumps and not a little luck took them through the Tion Cluster and out the other side, down the quiet lane that Silk used for Levantine access. A reminder, if she needed it, that AEL was part of the Silk Group of Companies, and wasn't that a thought to fester. The Tachyon might or might not have noticed them.

Which was why, just before jump seven but just after the Tachyon jumped, Ashin left the barge behind and followed in a starfighter. That massive hold had plenty of space.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Two weeks she'd been at this, since that trip to Gromas, and dozens of hyperjumps since then. And now, and only now, did she find something like a solution. The ship was a StealthX, an elite fighter she probably shouldn't have, but the Republic was routed and a Jedi Knight with starfighter experience and a combat record (albeit mostly for the other side) started looking pretty good on an assignment chart.

The StealthX slashed through Levantine space like a ghost, never noticed, though that was more because she didn't poke things than because it was that far superior to Levantine tech. The Sanctum had been a prototype dumping ground for ages; there were ships and guns out here that nothing could match. She kept her distance, and was pleased when the ship she followed -- content that it had shaken its pursuer -- made a jump that wasn't in her navicomputer. The jump was from a point near the Kyrikal system.

She backtracked, she asked around, she kept it quiet. Humans were rare on Kyrikal's moons, but the hard-drinking barfighting Ithorians of Kyrikal Seventeen told tales aplenty when she picked up the tab. Within a week, she'd found the story she was after.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Three weeks. Three sodding weeks, and the StealthX left hyperspace over as bizarre a solar system as she'd ever seen. Two main sequence stars, a red dwarf not too far, a white dwarf a bit farther than that, a massive ring of gas and dust around the two system primaries. Her sensors found nothing in that ring. Sunward, she found two hot gas giants with multiple moons, all devoid of settlement or its potential. The outer system held a gas supergiant with pulverized moons, and a frozen rock beyond that. The supergiant nearly held brown dwarf status; the heat off it might extend the functional habitable zone to some of its remaining moons.

She made multiple passes through the mess. Found nothing. Not until yet another Tachyon exited hyperspace and descended into the ring.

She followed, of course. The world loomed up like an oncoming wall, and her little stealth ship squeezed into an elliptical orbit over the icebound sphere. Icebound, but livable, with technology readings to boot. The Tachyon found solace on, or under, a glacial plain, and in due course the StealthX settled down near the place where the freighter had vanished.

The world was known as Kelsier.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Three weeks she'd been away from the war, and her holocomm offered precious little in the way of detailed news. Worlds could be falling, probably were -- but she just didn't matter like she used to.

The StealthX held basic winter gear, and it might not be enough. And getting the gear out of the storage compartment while wearing only a flight suit -- suffice it to say, she went subsonic and flew recon for a while, looking for a place to land out of the wind. She found a snowcapped boulder the size of a walker, set down in the lees, and suited up in frigid air. There'd been a time when tapas was as natural to her as breathing, but it was just another of the powers that had slipped her grasp when she was busted to Padawan. She would have to deal with the cold like a mortal -- grin and bear it.

A sensor pack led her into white oblivion, into heavy snowfall, with nothing but a unidirectional sensor lock to lead her back to the ship if she got lost. Two hundred metres on, she found the outcropping where the Tachyon had vanished. An underground docking bay, her sensors confirmed. She was cold.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Empathic senses confirmed life in there, but nothing seemed to have noticed her. Then again, if this was an AEL base, it would be new -- the company hadn't been big for very long. Maybe perimeter defenses, cameras and the like, hadn't been installed yet; this place was fifteen kinds of remote. Maybe the snowstorm had given her cover. Whatever the reason, she had evaded their attention. She set about to change that.

A hummock of snowdrift turned out to back an entranceway, freshly cleared but frost-rimed. Her sabre flared to life for the moment it took to slash through the lock, and she descended into a quieter, darker cold. Too late, she thought to stash the sabre and use her blaster on the lock. Before a camera could pick her up -- at least, as far as she'd seen -- she tossed up her sabre and floated it to the ceiling. She moved it along the ceiling, out of her own line of sight, and then proceeded. The sabre followed her, up there, above the line of sight of cameras or guards. When they caught her, took her gun, slapped her in stuncuffs, the sabre remained on the ceiling. It was an old play, something Mara Jade had done, but not many guards in this day and age had ever had access to pre-Darkness personal records.

Cuffed but warmer, she followed her escort's guidance deeper into the facility. She caught a glimpse of heavy blast doors down side tunnels, heard heavy machinery through the vents, felt the floor reverberate. In her mind's eye she put together an image of a multilayer, L-shaped subterranean base, protruding above the tundra only for hangar access. Its purpose, however, remained unknown, and the guards had well-dissembling minds; she got nothing from them.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Their minds dissembled too well, their guns were familiar, though not explicitly so. Their uniforms had been made by one of Iron Crown's many subsidiaries. They were used to Forcers. They worked for AEL, owned by Merrill, who had been a High Councilor. They were polite to her.

[SIZE=14.4444446563721px]It took a minute too long to click. [/SIZE]

This was a Fringe facility. AEL, to be sure, but Fringe in every way that mattered, whether Fringe's highest leadership knew of it or not. A galaxy away from Annaj, this place belonged to people and ideals for which she'd given blood and conscience.

How close was this, come to think of it, to the backup plans she'd ordered Merrill to make in time gone by, when the Republic was their biggest fear? How close was this to the Ssi-Ruuvi factory ship in the Colluctari Nebula, and the other ships spread out across the galaxy? A map refused to coalesce in her head.

A door opened, and there was a map a galaxy wide. Holographic, twenty metres across, with high-fidelity satellites from Firefist to Grek. A figure in sleek gold armor rose from a chair like a throne.

 

[Velok the Younger]

The base on Kelsier had the following levels of security.

The only hyperlanes that connected to this system were functionally unmarked, known only to a few local traders, unrecorded in virtually every navicomputer.

The system had four stars and five worlds; its gravitic patterns were more complex than most ships could calculate.

A torus of gas and dust surrounded the two system primaries; Kelsier orbited within that concealing shroud.

The planet concealed within the torus was defended by Kelsier's centuries of Echani culture, cloaked starships, ghosts who knew the torus and the gravitic lay of the land.

The planet was a matter of isolated legend.

The planet was heavily secured, paranoiac in a sense.

The base proper was hidden beneath the ice in a remote place on Kelsier's surface.

The base contained a Ranger transceiver and the hyperwave sensors of a Silkworm hypertransit package.

The base had a reasonable amount of corporate security and only intermittent transit, rare small unmarked ships. Those ships, when they departed, often vanished from known hyperlanes entirely.

The base contained the most powerful Nightsister off Dathomir.

"Arbiter Varanin, welcome to Kelsier."