Private Operation Swansong

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

The star destroyer Chimaera, oft-refitted in the Unknown Regions and running off two of the greatest and most terrible reactors ever built, was a grand old lady. The hired crew barely knew what to do with her. In fact, the hardest part of this operation hadn't been taking the Chimaera out of mothballs, or picking the target, or designing the orbital approaches and the microjump, or coming to terms with what this final mission meant to Ashin. All of those — resurrection, research, obsessive thought — were the next best thing to routine. No, the hardest part of this was getting a crew functional on a ship this unique: not just functional, but trustworthy. In days past she'd hired Fringe Confederation veterans for jobs like this. All of them were dead now.

The hardest part, in short, was training the workmen to the tool. She could have used another tool; there'd been other ways, other ships. Old TKO Great River tractor-pressors would have done the job, or a scoop-up in a Connestoga, perhaps. But Ashin trusted this tool: the strength of the fire in its heart, the grip of its tractor beams, the resilience of its hull. The way it shifted to her touch, intuitive as her lightsaber. The way she felt when sitting in its command chair, captain not just of some wayfarer like the Pomojema or the Peregrine, but of a ship to make worlds tremble.

A ship that said Ashin Varanin did this. Worlds without end: Varanin, and nobody else.

---

Of all the lives she'd lived and oaths she'd broken, her time as a Mandalorian still weighed her down. She hadn't exactly pursued that identity; she'd ridden a Basilisk war droid down from orbit against a Sith faction best forgotten; she'd been ritually adopted by Jasper Ordo, the Ordo. The language had come readily enough once upon a time. The culture, not so much. The Mandalorian way was myopic, innately limited in vision in very similar ways to the Jedi and the Sith. Things to learn from, and to grow from, and to abandon. Rotting logs in the woods.

As the Chimaera broke through the clouds over the forests of an obscure moon — this was the targeting run, not the approach — it did so inverted. From where Ashin sat in the bridge, the forest was above her. It looked bleak, cold. Its people were few, the files said, and the scanners agreed. And in this stretch of legendary forest, nobody lived for long.

Structural elements groaned and thrummed. No ship liked flying upside-down; few could handle it for long. But it brought the sensors to bear in the requisite degree, and more than that it served as a final test of structural integrity, following on from exercises where its crew had lifted small mountains with the tractor beams. They were a good crew now. They'd all receive mild but pervasive amnestics by the end: they'd know what they were part of, but not the details of their weeks on the Chimaera. Even in the best case scenario, this ship would never, ever fly again.

The third reason Ashin flew the ship upside-down was just to watch that forest herself. To get a feel for what kind of life might call it home, and what it might mean to rip that home away.

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

"Lord Kishan, the music, if you please."

Saavat Kishan, a mournful-looking Stennes Shifter, tore his gaze off the forest overhead. His specific role in this affair hinged on certain rituals. The coordination of those rituals hinged, in turn, on music. He nodded to the operations officer.

A rhymthic bass thrum filled the halls of the Chimaera. It spoke to assuredness, focus, purpose, a fire in the belly. The crew had trained with that music as rigorously as any of the systems or the ship's peculiarities. The timing of it also served as a dismissal: Lord Kishan gathered his robes and swept from the bridge, down to his primary position in the empty hangars. He'd wanted to spend the entire operation there. Ashin had requested that he start it here, on the bridge, looking down at the forest. Operations like these were rooted in place and sensory reality. She'd worked with Kishan for almost half a century. Getting him out of his head and out of his lab was crucial if this was going to mean more to him than any given experiment.

His departure left Ashin the only Master of the Force on the bridge. Sensing things, sensing anything, was a limitation of hers; though she'd prepared herself, she found that she felt blind without his insight. She needed to center herself and focus on the sensor displays.

The music reached the appropriate point. So did the scans of the deep, cold, craggy forest above.

"Helm," said Ashin, "right us. Operations, stand by to report damage."

The Chimaera rolled. The forest was below now, from Ashin's vantage point, and the clouds were parting for a lovely autumn day. The music thrummed on. No damage reports rolled in, no buckling old structural elements. No obstacles.

"First jump."

---

The first microjump took the Chimaera within extreme sublight range of the moon. Helm brought the prow around to point at the green-and-white sphere. This was neutral territory, with some traffic around the planet deeper insystem but none around here. No need for the cloaking device, and in any case all that power would be going to the tractor beams and the engines.

The prow aligned to a precise vector in relation to the edge of the moon. The FTL room reported no engine stress from the microjump, nothing that would abort the operation. Instinct offered no reservations.

To the tune of Kishan's ritual music, Ashin moved into a side room and changed from her utilitarian clothes into her customary black armorweave robe, crowned with the mask of Anger.

She settled back into her command chair and watched that moon, which the locals of the Mandalore system called Krownest. A moon of crags and trackless forests, including the forest they'd just scanned.

The one and only place in the universe, careful research and deep scans confirmed, where the mythosaur was not completely extinct.

"Helm, commence Odacer-Faustin Maneuver."

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

Decades ago, this ship had conducted a careful maneuver at the planet Odacer-Faustin. The payoff of that single maneuver had been foundational to certain past and current efforts unrelated to the day's work. What mattered was repeating the maneuver. That, in the end, was the heart of why she'd chosen the Chimaera for this. She knew it could do the job it had already done once.

And she hadn't been aboard that time. She'd been on the surface of Odacer-Faustin, distracting Jedi and watching her beautiful ship tear past. She'd often wished she was at the helm.

Call today an opportunity to revisit more than one regret.

Both generators threw full power to the sublight engines — the Black Hex reactor from the Dark Harvest incursion, and the Verpine reactor from the Battle of Roche. In sixty-plus years, pound for pound, few reactors had matched them and none had exceeded them. The Chimaera burned hard for the edge of the moon. Gravity added a curve to the precisely-calculated course. The helm officer, an experienced professional, didn't fight the drift. The route had accounted for it; the engine burn did too.

---

As the moon grew closer, the Chimaera rolled to put its port edge toward it. That edge slid through the frosty, tenuous upper atmosphere like a flaying. The arcing course slid through deeper layers. Gravity and the turbocharged engines threw more and more momentum behind the Chimaera's bulk.

The shields cut the air resistance. When Kishan's music reached its first crescendo, those shields dropped. A shock hit the Chimaera, shivered the bridge viewports. Clouds rushed against them, blotting out Ashin's view and the helm's as well. The helm officer was flying by sensors and by nav data now, following this exacting course.

Through the clouds she saw the familiar silhouette of a certain mountain range that the nav simulations had prepared her for. Just over that range was the stretch of forest in question, thousands of square miles. Folklore and short-lived probes and now the Chimaera's scans had homed in on that forest as home to a very small, forgotten population of living mythosaurs.

"Tractor control, one-minute warning."

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

The sensor data had yielded a number of targets, some more exposed than others. A creature of that size could cover significant ground, and it had been roughly an hour since the scans. At the unnatural speed the Chimaera had achieved, tractor control had bare seconds to pick a viable target that wasn't blocked by crags. They'd practiced that both in simulation and in the closest facsimile environments Ashin could imagine.

Ashin stood from her chair and moved to the port-side window. Vertigo clawed at her — she was staring straight down at the blurred forest, kept standing at right angle to gravity only by the Chimaera's artificial gravity fields. The music helped her keep the timing right. "Reactor One, full power to tractor beams. FTL control, one minute warning. Tractor control, engage."

Tractor beams lanced down into the dark woods. A vast shape she'd taken for a crag detached from the surface in a cloud of broken trees and was ripped along in the Chimaera's wake.

"Tractor lock," said an officer behind her. "Lock is holding."

The mythosaur was gigantic. It only fit halfway into the Chimaera's cavernous, emptied-out hangar, and it did so under protest, claws scoring battleship armor. But fit — halfway — it did.

Ashin stalked back to her chair, where a video feed had been rigged. Down there, a cloud of fog surrounded the writhing corvette-sized monster. The fog was Lord Kishan's payload: Kishan, chief of the Pomojema's biological alchemist, and specialist in poisons. Kishan: the mission's anesthetist.

"Jump two," said Ashin as another mountain range reared up. "Jump two."

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

A moment's microjump, with safeties disengaged and a Pomojema-trained instinctive astrogator at the FTL controls, covered the distance from Krownest to deep in the atmosphere of Manda'yaim. The Chimaera emerged in a bleak wilderness, a shoreline far from any habitation. It emerged still moving at a cataclysmic speed. The clouds that ripped past the bridge were grittier, scorched, and in brighter stark light from the same sun.

The music reached its last crescendo.

"Lord Kishan, get clear. Tractor control, disengage."

The half-tranquilized mythosaur dangled from the hangar, slipped, and came free to crash into the surf. The impact, the sound, the shockwave in the water, had no prayer of catching the Chimaera. Ashin moved to the rear viewport and watched the mythosaur right itself; it dwindled almost at once.

As it vanished over the horizon, Ashin sat back down at her command chair. A dozen damage reports begged her attention, none of them critical. The grand old lady had held up perfectly.

"Intercom. All hands, this is the Captain. You have succeeded in returning a living mythosaur to Manda'yaim, the devastated home of the Mandalorians, which is currently undergoing rewilding and restoration by various professionals. We did what they could not. From here they may claim other individuals based on our work; they may undertake cloning or other matters; but we were the first; we cut the path in the woods. The return of this species will have a profound impact on this world at every level. You will not remember the details of this ship. You will not remember the details of the maneuvers. But you will remember that what you did today mattered. You know who and what I am, what I've achieved; even for me, today has been a capstone. Today mattered. And you were exemplary."