In Confidence.

[Alkor Centaris]

The job was straightforward, if dull. Assess the Bestine yards and decide how much time and funding would be necessary to bring it to modern industrial standards. With the Confederate War Machine operating at full capacity, the more shipyards and repair facilities they could count to their credit, the less money would have to bleed outside of their borders.

Sure, the Corellians or the Coalition could work on ships- but why outsource for labor when the potential was all around for jobs to be created within their borders?

All of that hinged on Alkor's report, of course.

Alkor's report, and his partner in this venture, the other Knight Commander Madalena Antares. They had never been formally introduced, and despite her best efforts to change that, Alkor proved to be more of a hermit than anyone could have counted on. It took an act of both [member="Darth Metus"] and [member="Elessar Talon"] forcing them onto the same job, and even still, he was strictly business.

His mood only proved to become more foul after the events on Tanaab...

[member="Madalena Antares"]

 

[Madalena Antares]

[member="Alkor Centaris"]​

Madalena had to quiet down the initial rejections of her body once she'd landed on Bestine IV, a world known for its yards and… Water. The months she had spent in her sister's body had left several marks and scars on her that only time could heal, and water was one of those things. While Madalena had learned to swim and handle water bodies, her sister ha not, and in that body, the initial primal fear of too much water still resided. For Madalena, it took a few moments to remind her brain that this was no longer something she feared. Quite the opposite, in truth. She loved to swim, and she took to the water like a fish once the panic dwindled some.

But her visit here now was… Odd. Madalena had pretty much no experience with actual yards or anything of the kind. She didn't have the skillset to know, while looking, whether they would be useful to them, or whether they were even running fine. She had a few theories on how to tackle the subject, but at the bottom line of it all she could not quite understand why it was not one of the more advanced droids that was sent to make the technical assessments before the people who were directly in charge made the final decision. Madalena was a woman who cared about those who had been put under her care – yards were not.

Still, she knew she would do as best as she could with the task set forth. Donned in her Knights Obsiidian armor, tinted red to show the difference in position, she arrived shortly after her partner in crime arrived.

[member="Alkor Centaris"].

She knew of the man. Brought up to the position shortly after joining by the new Dominus Prime. While she had heard no complaints about the man and was more than certain that he was capable, she found it somewhat odd that they had never even as much as stumbled across each other before. She remembered names, and faces, and his was new to her. At one point she had also found it odd they'd never met, yet as time went on and her own schedule was so loaded that it had become hard to successfully schedule a meeting, and she could only assume that he was dealing with a similar work load that was the source of this. The Confederacy sure loved to keep them all busy, and in times like these, it had all the reason to.

Arriving at the meeting point, Madalena had nothing but a warm smile to offer to the man as she held her arm out. "Knight Commander Centaris," she greeted him, the sounds of the shipyards behind them decorating the introductory scene with noise of machinery and sharp things, "Madalena Antares, I'm so excited to finally meet you!"

She almost added that Knight Darcarth had only good things to say about him. But she stopped herself before her mouth even opened. After the events of Taanab and what had happened to one of their best people there… Perhaps it was best not to bring it up immediately. Or potentially, at all, during their first meeting.

Looking behind him for a moment, Madalena's glowing green gaze settled on Alkor's face again. "I suppose we're about to get a grand tour of the place before they try to stick us with more paperwork to go over to complete the mission?" she laughed, her voice light. While she still knew absolutely nothing of the man, there was no reason for her to treat him differently than anyone else – like a lifelong friend to be comfortable around. That's what everyone got from Madalena Antares nowadays, unless they gave her reason to behave otherwise.

 

[Alkor Centaris]

He was a lost child drowning in thought. That was the best way to describe Alkor to anyone seeing him for the first time, and exceptionally true in the first few moments when [member="Madalena Antares"] saw him today on Bestine IV. He had grown up in the slums of Coronet City and was no stranger to drydocks or orbital yards. It was easy to see that there was wear and tear to the facilities at first glance.

The amount would take some time, and a good look over for him to make an assessment. He snapped his gaze up to Madalena as she greeted him, one arm folded across his chest and the other with fingers touched to his lower lip. He knew from her armor before she spoke. His counterpart.

Alkor lowered his arms and gave a respectful bow as she approached. "Thank you for coming on such short notice," he said dutifully, though honestly he was uncertain why both of them were scheduled for the same check on the same day in the same place. It seemed like overkill. "I've only begun preliminary assessment, so you haven't missed any of the exciting parts."

Sarcasm. A newer part of his repitore. He was getting better about talking, if not about enjoying the experience.

There was a pregnant pause thereafter. He didn't laugh at his own joke, nor did he know exactly how to follow the humor with normal conversation. It would be a painful transition, and probably with a degree of awkwardness. But he did continue.

"In terms of the paperwork, it shouldn't be much more than a sign off from us, or failure to pass code. If the yards can't be salvaged, the best we can do is open them up to the public as a museum and try to make the most of it. That's worst case scenario, obviously." It was obvious between the two of them, one was personable and one was not. Social interaction had never been his strong suit. It never would be. Still, he took his duty very seriously.

There were whispers of how serious floating around Geonosis, even, after Knight Darcrath was admitted to ICU. If there was any sign that he had been upset or his thoughts dwelled on the woman, he did a fantastic job of not wearing it outwardly.

However, his right arm seemed to hang lower at his side than usual...

 

[Madalena Antares]

[member="Alkor Centaris"]​

​

​

Although she noticed the not so subtle matters that apparently caused [member="Alkor Centaris"] look like he was plagued by something, Madalena made no show of it. Without knowing him, there was no way for her to make an educated guess as to whether this was his usual self or whether this was residue of Taanab. It could also be multiple other things.

Listening quietly, she nodded as he said he'd begun the preliminary assessments, and… A joke! She grinned, though she could not bring herself to actually chuckle or laugh when he did neither that nor smiles yet.

And for a moment, Madalena was struck. A small coin had dropped – Centaris was reminding her of someone, and now she knew who it was. Cardinal. Short sentences, informative, dutiful, with humor that was not surface level giggles.

Though her warmth had been genuine, it now ran ever so slightly deeper.

Centaris was very business-like, jumping straight to the matter of why they were there, speaking of the paperwork, what could be done, and all of the rest of the stuff that Madalena could not help but wonder if he found it as boring as she did. It was clear, at least to her, that neither of them actually wanted to be there to do the thing. She... She would have preferred a mission with action, and she wasn't certain what he would prefer. Maybe sit in an office?

"Sounds like everything is under control then," she smiled, and motioned with her head to the opposite direction. They had the entire day, which meant that the shipyard could wait a little bit. On the other end wasa small street with a bunch of dabba's – little food establishments for the working men. They usually worked on fast street food, and the crowd came and went quickly. Madalena had learned, on one very adventurous day, that you always got your food from the ones with the heavier traffic. Never the quiet and empty ones. She also knew… That many of them offered more than enough drinks.

That, combined with how he reminded her of Cardinal…

"Come on," she said, turning her body towards the dabba's, "I don't know you yet but you feel like you could use a drink. We go have one and come back in twenty minutes and still meet our deadline like the champions that we are."

 

[Alkor Centaris]

In truth, Alkor would have worked all day and forgotten to eat or drink anything if not for the sudden suggestion. There was certainly that workaholic aspect of his personality, born of constantly being assigned to one task or another; but there was also the burning desire to think about nothing else but his duty. To ensure he never again failed in a given task.

It wasn't so somber on the outside as it was in his mind. Alkor never had been the type to broadcast his thoughts, nor would anyone claim he was like an open book. He could easily suffer in silence for a great, long while, and no one would ever know.

It was a good thing his counterpart understood how to break odd silences, and how to not make already awkward situations worse. He knew now he could count on her to be a face for enforcement of the rules, where he had always excelled at being the gavel. "Nothing will change without us," he agreed with her, "if the condition of the facilities are already bad beyond repair, they won't horrendously worsen or become suddenly better in twenty minutes time."

A drink- nothing ever sounded sweeter to Alkor than the only nectar that he had ever known.

"Aye, I could use a pint," he conceded. "I could do with a clearer head."

[member="Madalena Antares"]

 

[Madalena Antares]

[member="Alkor Centaris"]​

​

​

A pint for a clearer head. While that gave Madalena a tiny pause on her inside, she hoped that it didn't show as he began to lead the two of them towards the dabba's area. Her own sister used to be like that – needed the liquor and would take it in almost any form, claiming it numbed some of her pain and thus made it easier to think or do things. Yet she had spent enough months in her body. She knew that it was little more than a vicious lie. But, she did not quite know the other Knight Commander; knew nothing of his personal history or what ran inside his head.

So before a handful of steps were done, Madalena had already decided on how to tackle it. She would be supportive. Not to the habit but, to the person. For better or worse they were locked together in their jobs and the lives of the Knights Obsidian often relied on their shoulders. As far as she was concerned, there was only one way of doing it properly, and that was by removing obstacles, and working together. And she had every intention of finding the best way to do that with him.

Minutes later, they were already seated. In truth, the place was not much different from the bad sort of cantinas; the smell of body odor and sweat was strong in the air, and if Madalena had not been wearing armor, she might have been worried about the dirty chairs being an STD hazard. But those sort of places could provide what they needed – as Centaris had said, a chance to clear their heads. Drinks were ordered quickly, and as was some food. As many places, this too had the infamous Bantha Wings. She never passed up on a giant platter of those.

"I went on this mission once, almost a year back," Madalena began to speak as the local organic waiters began to bring their food and drink, "A cult was kidnapping children all around the galaxy. Found a way to hide them in a pocket dimension. I was just a Pathfinder at the time but I begged them to let me lead the mission, and they let me. We did all we had to do, from research to arrival. And it was… Wild."

Madalena sighed, taking a good long gulp from the mead she had ordered. She hated that mission so much.

"We found the children," she resumed, "or at least, some of them. They'd been turned into ice statues, frozen in gardens, being snowed on. Our powers worked only partially, some of our tech only worked partially, and our enemy had things that were perfectly functional. And we failed. The enemy had ways of sending us back. We never even found out more about who had done it or why. The children are still there. And more are sometimes disappearing, though the rate has somewhat slowed down."

And as mission leader, the failure had been hers. The first… And thus, only major one. And truth be told, it was not the actual children she cared about, the matter of failing. It hurt and pained her. And it meant that a handful of children – that she did happen to be fond of – were in constant potential danger.

"We have the means of going back there… Only once more," she said at last, "If that time fails, there will be no more attempts possible. And as far as I am aware, no one else has made the attempt to solve it."

 

[Alkor Centaris]

Eventually, when you start tapping into the dark side of the Force, it starts exacting a price. For Alkor, one of the earliest taxes was the blissful freedom afforded by alcohol. He used to spend days in a stupor, free from angst and rid of the fever dreams that were born of the vile deeds done in his youth. Like many things that followed, that slipped away almost unnoticed

Until the nightmares returned. Now all he had was the taste he had grown so fond of, and sometimes he wondered when the Corruptor would deign to take that, too.

His reality was that he hated the Force. Dark, Light, or otherwise. It was a power source, and it was good for nothing else but sorrow. The flavor of the alcohol was welcome, as usual when Madalena began her story.

He watched her for a moment as she spoke of failure, and his fingers drummed the table reflexively. It could have been a coincidence. She might actually have known something. It was better that he make no assumptions, and only consider this something that she felt she needed to tell him.

"Knowledge is like most other resources. Valuable, but finite." There were things that could be known, and things that could not. "You had skilled hands, and you came up short." He paused and glanced toward the woman thoughtfully. "How well did you know your enemy?"

[member="Madalena Antares"]

 

[Madalena Antares]

[member="Alkor Centaris"]​

​

"As well as I've always known them," Madalena answered, taking another long gulp from her drink, "which is very little. For lack of a better term, we refer to them as a cult – the cult of the Aeshma. We have dealt with them several times now, and even during the collisions that we won, we came out short. Alf a year ago, they set an elaborated trap for us. We thought we'd found them, at last, at a small planet in the Unknown Regions. The damned planet didn't even have a name. We had scouts surveying it for months before we finally went there, a small army of nearly a hundred people."

Sighing, Madalena shook her head. That had been the beginning of the end for her in her sister's body, but that was not relevant detail. It had not been relevant to the mission, and it was not relevant to now.

"Only four of us made it back alive," she said quietly, signaling for a drink refill. "Mission complete failure. And two of us four almost died en route to Geonosis. My own ship had myself and one of the executors on it… We were stranded for a few days outside of the antennas reach, with no way to even contact the Confederacy and let them know we were alive. And we are still not a step close to finding out who these people are, what they want outside of destroying the Confederacy, or even why they want to destroy the Confederacy."

She could send Knight Commander Centaris the file on them later if he wanted to look it over.

"Our job is never a safe one," she eventually shrugged, "the people we care about, at varying degrees, are never safe while doing it. Both my sister and I have been doing this for as long as I've been on this dimension and maybe longer, and I still lose sleep when she goes out. And she does for me. And both of us do for those we care about. And whatever we do, it's never perfect. Even when we win for the Confederacy, the people we love are hurt, almost die, or just die along the way."

 

[Alkor Centaris]

Alkor sipped at his drink and guessed at the various flavors of hops and malt from across the Galaxy that had gone into its creation. Different barleys and wheat came from the Core than what was harvested in the Outer Rim, and the more exotic the crop, the more distinct the flavor. Corellian Ale was a favorite of many non-Coruscanti denizens of the Mid-rim and Core Worlds, largely due to how refined the tastes of the upper class Ecumenopolis lifestyle were.

The drink Alkor had in hand was nothing like either of those things. On the paler, lighter side of booze, the flavor was milder and toward the end of the sip. He glanced at Antares thoughtfully. "When you have an enemy," Alkor began slowly, " you devote minds, bodies, and capital into not only understanding them, but breaking them down to their base level."

He turned to fully face her, placing the drink on the table so he could gesture with his hands. "You can analyze what you know, which in this scenario sounds bare bones, and still never find what you need. There's someone out there who knows what you need. There's always someone willing to loosen their lips, whether you name the right price, or you know what they fear most to lose. You have an equal level of clearance to what I do in the Knights, you may even have seen what lays behind some of that black tape on my background."

Alkor spun his fingers in a quick motion and revealed a credit chip. The serving Droid came around and ran it. "Safety is relative in this Galaxy. You may never be of interest to anyone, or you may be unfortunate enough to be marked by the Hutts- but no matter where you go, you're never really safe."

He replaced the chip in his pocket and folded his hands. "Failure, though," he muttered, "that's something else entirely."

[member="Madalena Antares"]

 

[Madalena Antares]

[member="Alkor Centaris"]​

​

Madalena smiled. She had expected no less from the lesson her colleague was attempting to bestow. Duty, systematic, with a plan that was probably already broken down into the smallest of bullet points within his head. Having been used to people like her sister, it was always refreshing to come across people who not only thought the way he did, but were not ashamed about it and spoke of it as well.

"All the clearance does not help me," she said as she neared her face a few inches, taking another gulp from her mead, "I even pulled some strings with the Ministry of Secrets and came out empty. Outside of our own records, the name Aeshma is not mentioned anywhere. We cannot find their people, those who have heard of them, or those who have even sold them toiler paper. There is nothing."

She had spent months trying to discover even the end of a tail, and had always come up empty. But now – he knew. Things that pertained to the Aeshma, those were her failures, both as Knight and as Knight Commander. And she worked tirelessly to compensate for them.

"Would you find it entertaining if I told you that the Hutts do not worry me?" she said with a smile, "My grandmother was a slave on Tatooine. My sister sometimes hunts Hutt bosses for her personal pleasure. Unless I am to be caught and instantly executed, my odds of surviving and coming out on top are pretty good considering the knowledge they've bestowed on me."

As the two began to walk back towards the shipyard, the Sith Sorceress only had a shrug to offer. "Failure is failure. You can lose a fight or you can lose a war, but the L is still there. We do our best to minimize the amount we collect, and sometimes adding one more to the pile is inevitable."

Glowing green eyes cast their gaze to the ugly shipyard. It seemed they were going to have to go on that tour anyway.

"Are you ready?" she asked him softly, pretty much knowing by now that both of them would rather be elsewhere. However, she would not object to spending more time with her colleague. Beneath the lost child of darkness, Alkor Centaris was proving himself to be an interesting companion.

 

[Alkor Centaris]

"As strong as Confederate Intelligence is, when you have channels that are limited in the scope of collection, you'll always end up with a hitch." Alkor snagged a piece of chicken from her plate and gestured to it, "the same people using the same methods becomes old, tired, and ineffectual. You won't find an answer by operating within the same constraints and parameters. You find someone who the other side doesn't know, someone who doesn't stand out, and you don't have them ask the right questions."

Alkor lifted the food to his lips, took a bite, and considered the flavor. He was never one to indulge his appetite, so flavor was often a brand new experience. The foods others raved about, he rarely ever heard of. His eyes fell to her food and he nodded approvingly.

"You want to find a whisper, you send a whisper. Get yourself a fresh spy, someone with few to no connections in Golbah. Don't send them asking about the people that were lost. Don't go asking about the cult. Send them despondent, strapped for direction, looking for a purpose. Religious and terrorist organizations are always looking for people to exploit. Give them what they want."

As they stood, he offered her a sideways look. "Failure may fall well within error," he added in a much softer voice now, "but that should not make it any more acceptable."

He took that moment to comport himself, cleared his throat, and replied. "Yes, I'm ready. Thank you, Miss Antares."

[member="Madalena Antares"]

 

[Madalena Antares]

[member="Alkor Centaris"]​

Madalena listened quietly, giving her fellow Knight Commander the space to speak his mind about everything. She knew, logically, that what he said was supposed to make sense. Yet, as far as she was aware, he had not actually had to deal with them on any of his missions.

Sighing, she had little to add to his cold logic'd theory as the two got up and credit chips were tossed to cover their food expenses.

Madalena waited for them to be outside of the cantina before she actually resumed the conversation.

"Perhaps you ought to take taking care of them over," she said. There was no teasing in her voice though; she was very much serious. "I have been unsuccessful – maybe you could make some strides and advancement with it."

Quickly, the two were back at the shipyard again. Force. Madalena was pretty sure that if something wasn't fine, the place would've blown up by now. So far, everything looked proper and well oiled.