Son of the Six Sisters

[Jorga the Hutt]

UNNAMED SLUMS
METELLOS
ONE SITH TERRITORIES

The speeder truck had been stripped down to the frame and propped up on cinderblocks. This did not make it unusual. It had been divested of its repulsorlifts, power cells, steering controls, force-field harnesses, and headlights. This, too, did not make it unusual, not for this neighbourhood. Nor was it unusual to see that major structural elements had been carved away for scrap, revealing an empty cargo container.

Parash examined his Scanpack again, shifting through broadband modes. "And you're sure it's been here for..."

The Gran shrugged. "Long as I be live here. Eight year."

Parash repressed a frown. Glowering was a tool for the weak and flamboyant. "Eight years, and nobody noticed the power spike? Or that the inside is smaller than the outside?" With a final glance at the Scanpack, he shook his head and climbed into the rusty container. He pulled his lightsabre and ignited it. "Come on in. You might as well see this."

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

The Gran followed him with palpable trepidation. Even Parash's Force potential, weak and always getting weaker, could pick up on that. But assuaging the Gran's fears was not his priority at the moment. Frankly, the sooner the Gran moved outside -- despite his invitation -- the happier he'd be. Either way, Parash paid no visible attention. He raised his crimson lightsabre with commendable lack of expertise and stroked the tip across the base of the false wall. When no nanokillers, acid pools or toxic slurry emerged, he drew the other three sides of a broad and precise rectangle, then stepped back and let the sheet of metal fall away. It slammed into the deck a couple of inches from his toes. The Gran cursed behind him; he stepped over the glowing edge and onto the sheet.

"Hello there..." Parash murmured to himself, eyes flicking over the lights and wires. The metal gleamed, secure from Metellos' dust despite years of neglect. About six years, if his guess was accurate. The sealed compartment had done its work well.

"Sir Darth sir, maybe should keep watch."

"If you insist," he said absently. As the Gran clambered out of the gutted speeder truck, Parash deactivated his lightsabre and knelt by a small plate like any other. He removed it carefully, using a sonic servodriver rather than the Force. Behind it was a data terminal, the rotary-segment kind. The Imperial kind.

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

He tapped the data port with the sonic servodriver, listened closely, then used sound-sweeps to clean oxidation from the inner links. He checked the Scanpack again and watched its lights blink in time with the hunk of metal as they perceived each other. The machines were of vastly different scales, one handheld, the other half the size of a battle tank. The newly mated rhythm changed as Parash plugged the Scanpack into the Ranger transceiver's data port. Six years of accumulated, decrypted, analyzed, winnowed and packaged subspace intercepts from a sphere two hundred light-years across -- the Scanpack's drive could only hold the highlights. The rest-

"Sir Darth sir? A truck is here, says is for you."

Parash's head whipped around. His cloak still covered the Scanpack from the Gran's point of view. "For me? Who are they? What do they want?"

The Gran, a longtime One Sith intel contractor of the most minor sort, cringed agreeably. "Did not say, sir Darth sir."

"Feth." He stood, and the Scanpack shot back to its belt clip as he turned. "All right, I'll handle it. You keep your distance. I don't like this."

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

There were six of them, each one masked, each moving with the easy grace of an Echani commando. Republic people. Overkill and then some -- for him. But proportional to the machine and the data it contained. They carried sonic shotguns and EMBU-style energy swords, and despite himself his gut turned sour. Maybe it wasn't about the machine or his...assignment. Maybe an old debt had come home to roost.

Their translucent swords hummed to life as they closed in around him, forming a circle. He snapped out a hand, felt the Artusian crystals go cold against his chest, and put two masked Echani through the side of their flimsy vehicle. A leap took him inside before the others could close the circle; he swirled his lightsabre through a lethal Makashi flourish, then dive-rolled through a new gap in the other side of their speeder truck.

They came around the back and the front, preceded by a hail of sonic charges that popped his eardrums with near misses. He leaped left toward the cab, flicked the sabre intensity control and slammed the red-hot blade into the nearest Echani. Armorweave smoked with the impact, and the man fell. Another dragged him back as a third engaged Parash from behind.

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

They were Echani under the military-grade headsets; they moved fast, as one, prioritizing their swords over their sonic weapons. Those were a fallback, he knew, should he prove too competent with a lightsabre for the first time in his life. His crimson plasma-blade skirled and whined against their lesser swords, throwing sparks from their machinery -- but the commandos had the edge on him when it came to speed and coordination. To match them he drew on the Force as hard as he could manage. The crystals pulsed cold under his robe, freezing him from throat to solar plexus. That was the price of being Force-sensitive but not born that way. To become a member of the One Sith, he had voyaged from the Obroa-Skai libraries to Artus to Ruusan itself, and his twisted Force presence had been the result. And he'd learned quickly, methodically, applying the scientific method to his frankly unnatural and insufficient Force affinity. He'd developed no special skills apart from a degree of technopathy, which he'd applied over a long career as One Sith technical support. And absolutely none of that helped.

Slowly, methodically, they drove him into their vehicle. There were prone bodies in here -- he didn't look. He'd spotted them, added to them, when he blew through the flat-panel wall. He warded off a pair of blades and bailed out the gap. A smoke grenade went up, obscuring all sight except for the part involving energy swords.

Swords that deactivated as their wielders moved in. Without the plasma sheath, the sword was nothing but metal, but metal could kill. Parash closed his eyes and drew on the Force until the crystals' cold penetrated his chest.

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

Behind him, he sensed and heard movement in the breached truck. A robed man tumbled past him and crumpled to the ground, a deactivated energy sword protruding from his back. Sonic discharge ruffled the gray smoke, bruising the fallen man until blood came out his ears. The forms of Echani commandos emerged from the smoke, or at least came into view -- the sensor-reflective pall extended for a good twelve metres. Beyond it, metal squealed and Gran feet ran. No Echani would pursue: they liked leaving witnesses to their effectiveness. Besides, better that than a suspiciously false chase. As if anyone would believe a Gran could outrun these...ghosts.

Parash deactivated his lightsabre, sent out a pulse of pain and fury, and cut himself off from the Force. Concealing your presence could be mistaken for death, even by well-trained close family members, and of those he had exactly zero within the ranks of the One Sith.

"All right, sir?" murmured a voice at his elbow, and he flinched despite himself as another Echani melted out of the smoke. Parash handed him the lightsabre, and the commando knelt to fit it into the callused hand of the fallen man. A sonic blast broke hand and sabre, mulching them together. Sonics: bane of the Sith.

"I'm fine," Parash said belatedly. For a moment of awful fascination he strongly considered turning the dead man onto his back, but he knew what he would see; no time or need to verify it. Beneath his robe, he stripped off the metal-and-cloth assembly that held the Artusan crystals to his chest. He knelt and fitted it to the dead man beneath that robe, which was of familiar cut and had enough broad, overlapping openings to make the transfer easy. The smoke was dissipating as commandos flitted back and forth between the two trucks. "You soak him?"

"Lake Natth, long enough to get the aura but not long enough to pickle him."

"Still alive?"

"Until just now. Sir, it's time to leave."

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

The commandos' speeder truck accelerated. White, with two damaged side panels, it was more than a little conspicuous. Right up until it accelerated through a furious slum underpass and turned green while repairing itself. Mimetic paint, memory-metal walls, a new license tag and a complex traffic pattern. And, crucially, not a functional traffic camera for a hundred klicks in any direction. Metellos and infrastructure were not on speaking terms.

Only once the innocuous speeder truck had gotten lost among ten million just like it did Parash stop being Parash.

Without the Artusan crystals, the Force wanted nothing to do with him. Its loss hit him like a cold plunge into a mountain lake on Eshan. But like that cold lake after a long hike, Forcelessness was a relief and then some. "Kit," he said, strapping himself into a medical bed at the very back of the truck. As the 'dead' commandos finished checking their injuries, another commando passed him a small machine. He touched it, felt a sting-

"Fifteen hundred and holding."

Now, and only now, did Rel Connory, Bard of the Hyperlanes, allow himself to relax. The bed reclined and he looked up at an array of needles. Off to his left, another commando engaged a portable inertial dampener, and the jolts and jostles of the complex trip vanished. "Hit it."

The reconstruction unit whirred to life around him. The anesthetics didn't quite kick in, but some kinds of pain were pure freedom.

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

Metellos, the Coruscant That Wasn't, matched its partner for population, location, and antiquity. Just not order or wealth, and in this planet-sized equivalent of Level Thirteen-Thirteen, getting lost wasn't something you had to try for. It was something you tried to avoid. Unless you were an inertially-damped speeder truck (external performance unaffected) containing six Echani commandos, a Spaarti Appearance Reconstruction Unit, a successfully failed midichlorian test, and a three-term Republic senator, as well as a few terabytes of highly compressed data. Data from One Sith terraforming and Vongforming operations, geothermal power plants, secretly-SCINET-infected capital shipyards and recent conquests. Data from eight years of upgraded Ranger transceiver interception, planted on Metellos by a foreign power during an era when the Republic's counterintelligence apparatus had been incompetent or otherwise occupied. Data, too, from one of the most advanced sensor suites around, winnowed and processed by the man who'd invented it.

A man who now existed again.

A commando undid the straps, and Rel Connory, still shaking and anesthetized, rose from the reconstruction unit. Another commando passed him a mirror.

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

Rel Connory and Darth Parash had been different men. Rel had been a couple of inches shorter, a decade older; his ears had been different, his skin paler, his nose less sharp and its bridge less strong. He had not been Force-sensitive, and now, with the removal of the Reborn crystals, he was non-sensitive once more.

Whereas the dead man back there was most certainly Darth Parash, promising but largely underachieving young technopath. A Sith acolyte who'd kept a shameful secret that any Master with experience would have known just by sensing him: he'd had his Force-sensitivity artificially enhanced so he could become a Sith. A temporary and disappointing process. And with the recovery of those crystals, and with his brutalized and freshly killed body still slightly tainted by the Dark Side, and with any psychometric reading on crystals or sabre showing only a man who matched-

Darth Parash was dead. Rel had been too, but only one of them was getting up to walk away.

The inertial dampener deactivated and the truck doors opened. Surrounded by six fellow space laborers, Parash -- no, Connory -- limped into the light of Docking Bay 94.

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

The starship Precious Cargo was a modified Washburn-class freighter and thus absolutely ubiquitous. That made it one of the top five bought and stolen ship models -- and thus, the first looked at by any competent intelligence service. Such as the intelligence service which would be looking into this very, very soon, when a panicked Gran and a lone security holocam's loop revealed the quote-unquote truth. Republic commandos had intercepted a Sith acolyte who'd stumbled across the wrong secret. The acolyte was demonstrably and thoroughly dead, but that was fine: Darth Parash had been only moderately useful and more clever than powerful or promising. He'd been present at half the One Sith's major territorial expansion efforts, but had never really done much, let alone reached knighthood. He'd flown a stately and crappy Sith Empire Veratus-class shuttle -- certainly nothing like the cloaked vessel that had done its best scans in the thick of the action. He'd been known to tinker with everything from geothermal power to network security to terraforming to stealth, but never with especially impressive success. He'd managed to score an apprenticeship with Darth Carach and then failed to live up to it. He'd never done anything, been given any hugely important access -- he'd been fated to die as cannon fodder against the Republic. So what if it came a bit early?

A fitting coda to the life of Darth Parash.

The ship beside the Precious Cargo, a sporty but run-down surplus medical ship, lifted off with Connory and his rescuers aboard. The Liberty's Veil, properly cleared and under a false telesponder, soared out to space and leaped past lightspeed.

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

Front lines and borders had almost no relevance in a modern war, but that didn't do much for crossing from One Sith to Republic territory. Frankly, it made things harder. Customs stations, blockades, hyperlanes and praedia (less common this close to the Core, but still navigable with the right drive and the right information) formed lines of connection and forbidding, across which mere merchant shipping could not cross. Even getting to the Namadii Corridor, let alone making the final jump from Pantolomin to Borleias -- even that was a moderate nightmare.

Fortunately, the Liberty's Veil ranked among the finest stealth ships in the galaxy, despite predating virtually all of them. Stygium cloak, gravitic modulator thrust trace damper, enough early-warning sensors to stay out of range of magnetic detection -- the Veil had, in a very serious way, been the prototype for the modern omnicapable stealth vessel. Connory knew how to put it to good use better than anyone but Mia Fething Monroe, with whom he'd called this ship home for years. The Veil had backups of most of his data, in case of capture, but they'd gotten away clean. Now, navigating Republic space post-Borleias with fully authentic Republic telesponder data, Connory turned his thoughts to the future. Allowed himself to believe he'd done it. Made himself Force-sensitive, infiltrated the One Sith, gathered the necessary intel, exfiltrated, stripped himself of the Force-

Now it was time to come in from the cold. So to speak.

He set course for the Six Sisters and Eshan.

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

***​

​

"Senator, it's been too long. I heard you were hiking. Have you met Darleine?"

"As in baleen?"

"Pardon?"

"Nothing." Parash -- no, Rel -- took yet another sip of his dry white wine. This was his life again. Attendance socially mandatory. Everyone thought he'd been...hiking to aid his recuperation. Best way to explain the soreness, the awkwardness. He'd pretty clearly bitten off more than he could chew, but at least he was doing better -- words laden with subtext. One didn't just resign from the Republic Senate after three terms, no matter how one had been injured. Well, maybe one did, but not an Echani -- and so it went. Mild scandal, mild loss of reputation in some circles, moderate gains in others. He'd been back on Eshan six hours, staring at a blank wall in a dusty office until this dinner party, and over and over all he could think was I should have stayed dead.

They all think I was travelling for my health. As if I'd spent this whole deep-cover nightmare sipping tonic water at the Flamewind of Oseon.

I need to get out of here. I need to see her. Now.

"Excuse me, I'm sorry, I don't...feel well."

One call and one fast ship.

[member="Mia Monroe"]

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

In a way, he supposed, becoming a Sith had let him come to terms with his emotions -- not just understand them, but control them. He'd deliberately stepped into enemy fire at the Battle of Serpena, not long after building replacements for Mia's hands. Not long after the Sith tortured her. He hadn't just attempted suicide in those times, he'd reconnected with his Mandalorian self, and invented cruel things in the process. But all of that was in its proper place now, and not just because of the euphoria. Not just because he'd pulled off a victory, no matter how potentially useless, against the Sith.

He hummed a tuneless song to himself in his dusty office, one he hadn't occupied in years. Reams of holobriefs flitted across the screen; he skimmed them, fighting the urge to spin his chair. She'd have waited for him, off leading the life of an ex-Mand'alor: he knew that much. Stars burned down, Sith and Jedi swapped color schemes like keys at their preferred sort of party, but Mia Fething Monroe would remain constant. More reliable than one Rel Connory, certainly. She'd be here, sooner or later. And then, and only then, would he have succeeded.

 

[Lina Ovmar]

"Miss Monroe?"

Mia brush a strand of hair from her face, looking up from the datapad in her hand and settling her grey eyes upon the hologram of her AI. "You asked me to inform you if Rel Connory appeared back on the radar." Mia shot to her feet, knocking a cold cup of caf across her desk. She scrambled to rescue the datapads it soaked, a stream of curses running from her lips. She snatched tissues from a box and began mopping it up. "Where?"

"Eshan. Would you like me to contact him?"

"No. Send a message to Siobhan and Galina," she abandoned the mess of her desk, frantically moving round the apartment and shoving clothes and supplies into a bag. "Tell them..." she paused, pensive for a moment. She'd never spoken to anyone of her relationship with Rel. Their sensitive political positions had prevented them such openness. "Tell them i'll be gone a few days...maybe more. I'll keep in touch and let them know."

"Preflight checks are commencing as we speak."

"Thank you." She left Ori'vod and the apartment, making for Laekia's space station at a run. Only once she was on the freighter and the blue of hyperspace reflected on her face did she really give herself time to contemplate what she was walking into. She'd compartmentalised everything, choosing solitude for the most part over contact with the rest of the galaxy. She'd no idea where he had gone, only that he'd gone. She'd always had faith he'd be back, but she'd never thought about what would happen when he did appear. Would she angry with him?

Perhaps a little, but in all honesty, she just wanted to know he was safe and alive. They could argue the finer points of dropping off the radar without calling your girlfriend later...much later. Or probably never, it wasn't like Mia had any ground to stand on where disappearing was concerned. She whiled away the hyperspace trip pacing and making food only to find she was too wound up to eat. She was hugging her knees when the alarms trilled to warn of the revert to realspace. A short conversation with airspace security and hasty landing that left the staff at the landing bay cursing her, she shoved a cred chit at them for silence and left in a hurry.

Maybe she should have called ahead, sent a message warning of her arrival. She felt sick as she came to a standstill outside his office door, her stomach tying itself in uncomfortable knots as she tried to push the worst from her mind and knocked.

[member="Rel Connory"]

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

[member="Mia Monroe"]

He didn't have the Force anymore, but he knew. A change shot through him, almost a thrill, almost fight-or-flight, nothing he could entirely name. He switched his desk display to the reception camera to verify -- time with the Sith had taught him not to trust his instincts, oddly enough; there was nothing more easily deceived than a feeling. And there she was.

He dialed his top aide -- "Clear my schedule for the day" -- and hung up in as long as it took him to stand. He took a step and almost fell over; the cane found his hand and he shuffled for the door. This was his third recuperation from major body reconstruction, and the physical consequences were commensurate. He told himself he didn't quite need the cane, and that he'd stop using it tomorrow. He'd told himself that yesterday, too.

The door hissed aside.

"I'm sorry you had to see me like this," he said, suddenly tongue-tied despite the hundreds of times he'd pondered what he would say. All there is to talk about, and that's what you choose to apologize for. Smart, Rel. Smart.

 

[Lina Ovmar]

She had to give him some reprive right? After all she'd died, and rocked up on his doorstep in a different body, so she could sympathise with his inability to say the right thing, right?

Mia raised one eyebrow slowly. He was alive and more or less intact from what she could see. She said nothing, not trusting herself just yet to speak as she stepped over the threshold and sealed the dor behind her with a small flick of her wrist.

You're an idiot.

"Its better than the states I've imagined you in...both before and after this conversation." Her tone was more icy than she imagined it to be and she found herself torn between kissing him and hitting him.

Both were equally appealing.

[member="Rel Connory"]

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

[member="Mia Monroe"]

"Promises, promises," he said with half a sharp grin, still not blinking -- and not stepping back. Didn't so much as flinch when a dar'manda ex-mand'alor got up in his grill. And just like that, he had his feet under him. The cane stopped wobbling. With it, he tapped a low-key button on the wall, and the office fell to silence. The privacy field cut out all the background noise that radiated through the walls, however subtly. It kept secrets, and it guarded moments. And if she beat him to a well-deserved pulp, at least they wouldn't be dogpiled by Echani security before they could resolve this.

"I was in deep cover. I infiltrated the One Sith. That's where I've been and what I've been doing, Mia. That's why you haven't heard from me." Obvious things to say, but they needed saying regardless. He leaned on the cane's tip again, but more firmly this time.

 

[Lina Ovmar]

She sucked in a breath, held it and counted very slowly to ten in her head, eyes snapping away from his as she did. Her anger rose like bile, burning her chest and she tried desperately not to give in to it. She wasn't sure what made her more angry, the fact that he felt that was a viable excuse for not contacting her, or the fact that he'd done it in the first place.

Her hand clenched and unclenched at her side. "You could have warned me." She managed, still not looking at him.

[member="Rel Connory"]

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

[member="Mia Monroe"]

She was avoiding his eyes at very close range. He didn't much like that. And he didn't need his vanished Force-sensitivity to know she was pissed. "I've gone undercover before, remember? I knew I couldn't have done it knowing that you might come look for me. I had to be Darth Parash. Had to be someone else entirely. I couldn't do that while worrying you'd get yourself killed trying to watch out for me. That's what I thought at the time, anyway. In hindsight...I'd have done it differently."

The cane clattered to the floor as he slammed her against the door, right through the privacy field. "I'm sorry," he said, and kissed her as hard as he ever had.

Right hook inbound in three...two...

 

[Lina Ovmar]

She kissed him back despite her anger, fingers curling about the scruff of his shirt. He was far too close now for a right hook. She shoved him back slightly, breaking the kiss but still clutching his shirt and offered the only reprive she had for her desire to hit him.

She headbutted him.


[member="Rel Connory"]