The Riddle of Steel [Mandalorians]

[Laira Darkhold]

ArmaTech’s mines on Concordia were abuzz with activity, having been made aware of the imminent arrival of the CEO they foremen were whipping their workers into a fury, trying to make the former Death Watch hideout look presentable to their employer. After all if I signed their pay stubs I must control them seemed to be the mindset they held. Granted these weren’t real mandalorians. They lived in space controlled by my people, but they were not raised, not taught, not kept to the resol’nare. These were mere workers brought from all across Mandalorian space to work in a hole in the ground owned by a man some, or most, of them have never met. In fact, I only spoke to a few of them if any, but here they were, frantically running around to make this place look and feel like they were operating at peak proficiency before I arrived.

I had arrived yesterday.

I just simply didn’t tell them, took tours of the facility, when asked if I was upper management I just nodded and continued my rounds, watching these miners work. They were good men all, but Mandalorians they were not. I knew the difference. The first difference was they cowed to me, a man, because I had more money, more possessions then them. They didn’t bow down to me because I could invade their minds and leaving them a drooling vegetable with my own telepathic might. No. They bowed for love of gold and money, and they wanted to work their lives away trying to earn some of mine.

 

[Laira Darkhold]

While in practice the lifestyle played heavily to my benefit as they worked for whatever wages I gave them and produced some of the most valuable substance known to exist out of the ground for me. Beskar was what I was referring to of course. The Mandalorian war machine was fueled by the stuff just like the Sith were fueled by their desire. Without it our people faultered and almost went extinct, not with a bang, but with a whimper. It was only the rediscovery of the substance, a few times now, that had brought our people back from the brink of nothingness and into the spotlight of warfare.

And now we were fading again. The ore that fueled us was strong and seemingly ever present in our society, but it felt like our society was fading this time. The hard loss on wayland had taught me many lessons. How to shield my mind from my enemies, how to destroy vast swaths of primeval soldiers, and how to be driven from a world like dogs by a determined foe. The other lessons it taught me was that while our enemies evolved and brought newer weapons and tactics against us, it seemed that we had stalled. There were some amongst our noble people that had evolved with the times, but they might not be enough. This disparaging thought echoed through my mind. I had brought my family into this culture, and I would not see it die off because of some monsters from the Unknown Region or some Vong loving Sith.

And so, Concordia had been my next stop. The beskar mines on Concordia were shared by Mandal Hypernautics, MandalMotors, Mythosaur Customs, and a few others. Individuals often ventured to the moon of Mandalore seeking the ore that fueled our engines of war as well. I had done that very thing a few times myself. But this time I was here not for me, or for a friend of mine, or for an order. I was here to try and find a future. For me, for my family, for my people. Call it grim, call it dark, it is the truth.

 

[Laira Darkhold]

A worker bumped into me as I became lost in my thoughts and instantly I reopened myself to the Force to gain awareness of my surroundings. Introspection was nice, but you still needed to be aware of the here and now and what was around you.

“Hey, watch yourself sir. There is a lot of dangerous equipment and I don’t wanna have an accident on site with the boss showing up today.” He said, his thoughts sincere to his words, but he didn’t add the insults he was thinking.

I just smiled at him and nodded, “Of course, I wouldn’t want to have to tell my wife I lost a finger while I was visiting.” I said seemingly absent mindedly. The man froze and his heart sank. I pressed a finger to my lips, gesturing for him to be quiet and he nodded in confirmation before hustling off to work. I could feel him through the Force. He wanted to shout it, to tell the rest I was already here, but he wasn’t about to while I was still in ear shot of him.

I moved towards the office building and entered through the lobby, approaching the supervising foreman of the mine’s office. The secretary smiled at me. “He is in a meeting sir, you will have to wait.”

 

[Laira Darkhold]

“Oh. I don’t want to interrupt. Is there a conference room?” I asked, and she lead me around a corner and let me take a seat inside the room. It wasn’t but twenty minutes later the supervising foreman entered the room.

“Hello, may I- Sir. I’m sorry I was just trying to contact you to ask when you would arrive.” He said, cutting off when he recognized me from a few of our holo-meetings with each other.

“Not a problem. I wanted to observe the mining operation here before I decided what to do and how to do it. Production seems good, boys stay busy, droids keep working. Certainly worth the cost of upkeep from my recollection.” I said to him as he stood there, waiting to be offered a seat. “Go get the rest of the foremen for this. It ought to be heard by all of them since they will all be involved, even the off duty ones.” He nodded and left me alone in the room again, leaving me with my thoughts about my family and what I was going to do.

 

[Laira Darkhold]

My mind swam with pictures of my family, especially since I sat holding the small aurodium locket that had immortalized a memory of Chiasa and I sitting in a field of purple flowers. Her voice, the sweet taste of her lips, the curve of her hips. Everything had been perfect, and so I had made sure that the memory would stay with me forever. It was one of the few things I never parted with, during the day, or at night. I kept it in a pouch normally, but sometimes I carried it under my chest piece or wore it to sleep. While it was closed it was just an expensive aurodium trinket, but open it projected and image of she and I silhouetted against the setting sun. I wanted more of these memories. That was what I fought for. That was what I spent countless hours training, conditioning, practicing, forging weapons for. For the continuance of my family, and I believed, deep down in my soul, that Mandalore was the best bet for staying alive and keeping my family alive and well.

My own survival mattered little in this scheme, beyond that I would then be separated from my love and my child, but that was not my highest priority anymore. Survival had always been a focus I had driven into my work, my armor, my tanks, and now, my ships. Months ago I had commissioned a think tank to convene and design me a ship worthy of carrying Chiasa’s nickname as its own. What they had come to me with was devastating. A pair of monsters that made use of the Makeb Project’s Firestorm Isotope-5 Generators, oversized and over buffed to compensate for the myriad of weapons and systems. In short when I had asked for ‘great monstrous ships of metal and fire’ they had delivered on every level. I was proud of their designs, so proud that I named the close quarter’s variant after myself and drove the mine on Mandalore into overdrive to produce the ship, despite using so little Beskar in each vessel. The Micronized beskar sheets that the ship’s hull used made the beast much more than I could have hoped for. The two classes of ships would be my pride and joy, and the keystone for the future of Mandalore with any luck and some determination. All we needed was Beskar. Lots of Beskar.

 

[Laira Darkhold]

I sat waiting, and eventually, the foremen arrived, all of them from the mine to hear what I had come from Mandalore to say to them. The filed in and found seats, some clutching caf, others disheveled and dirty from working, while others wore clean clothes as though they hadn’t been working yet. “Gentlemen, ladies. Thank you for coming in on such short notice, but in truth I had not decided what to do with this project until now. I have thought about it, I have debated it, and I have slept on it several times. I have written lists and I have asked those closest to me for assistance. And the only constant is that the wave of the future passed Mandalore by years ago.”

I waited getting a reaction from them. From what I could gather from their thoughts, they were unsure what I meant. Given the turmoil of the Mandalorian government right now, it was fairly vague, but I got the reaction I had wanted. “When the One Sith came and stormed the core worlds we were strong. We were at the pinnacle of warfare. As time progressed they evolved we remained the same. More time progressed and they left us behind. In the cruelty of nature, you adapt or you perish. It is time we adapted.” Another short pause to let them process the opening part of the speech. “The Dark Blade revolutionized starship production. The Noble was an attempted counter to that monstrosity the Sith have saddled in their dry docks. Then it continued. More and more followed the first, and then even more. Then more worlds fell. Then more. It did not stop until the Netherworld tore apart the galaxy. Before then, they had cut a bloody swath through Republic space and only supernatural forces of the Netherworld were able to slow them.” It was true. Prior to the Netherworld event, the One Sith had claimed all the way to Kashyyyk from the Republic, effectively cutting the government’s territory in half.

 

[Laira Darkhold]

“When the Republic called for help, Mandalore answered the call. We fought them on Empress Teta and we were beaten. That was the first call for adaptation. But we did not listen. More calls have passed us by. But now, ArmaTech is prepared. Is capable to answer the call. And answer it we shall. We will fight them through the void of space, the burning ashes they leave behind, and the beaches they storm. We have excelled in all of these aspects but one. We, as ArmaTech, have never been able to hurt the Sith in void of space. That ends today. Project Phoenix is green lit and we are evolving. We will mine this region from the surface to the core if we must. A Harvester and several other mining rigs are in route from Mandalore. Tomorrow when they arrive we will prepare them, and we will begin mining the Moon of Mandalore for as long and as extensive as is needed.”

The revelation that we would be expanding the mining of this moon to such a degree that we would be carving deep canyons into this world that starships could land in, that there would be craters in this region like those left by orbital bombardment, and that we would not finish this endeavor anytime soon, sunk in and I felt their emotions. Most were worried about the sheer volume of work and man hours that would go into this endeavor, others were excited to be a part of the project as it had the chance to sky rocket them to importance. I knew that there would be obstacles to mount in the completion of this project, but that was what determination was for. Project Phoenix would rise from the ashes of those obstacles.

 

[Laira Darkhold]

In all my years of mining, working, smuggling, and crime, I was still in awe at how quickly a properly motivated work force could operate. What had been a relatively small mine attached to a refining compound was rapidly being transformed into a hub for a massive regional mining operation intended to refine such vast quantities of beskar ore into a workable substance and forge it out in to the thin sheets that would be needed for Project Phoenix. Offices were cleared, people were hired and relocated and droids swarmed the area preparing the earth for small modular buildings or setting up those prefabricated structures.

The workers had wasted no time in gathering up and putting together the store houses that would be needed to take the forged ingots to the waiting transport ships which would in turn take the ingots to be worked and forged into sheets and used in the construction. But until then there was a Harvester to build along with numerous smaller mining walkers. If only someone had built the ancient and destroyed Nomad City this might have been able to go faster. Mole miners played a large role in this operation for drilling smaller support shafts into each area that would be swarmed with workers, laborers, droids, and miners. Sensor scans needed to be taken of Concordia’s crust to get exact locations, but until then set up was all we could do.

And there was so much that needed to be done before we could begin mining anyway. So much had to be done that was needed, and so many people and droids were required to do it I wondered why I had not just built a corporate city here instead crossed my thoughts. Oh, because those were expensive and permanent, and this was hopefully a long term operation, but not permanent. With any luck or if there was a greater power, or if the Force was truly sentient and guided us, peace would find us sometime. And if it was benevolence, it would find us soon. We all needed a little peace right now without the looming threat of war and violence hanging over our heads, but then again, as an arms dealer on a scale that made most smugglers weep, I needed war to thrive. Financially at least.

 

[Laira Darkhold]

On a personal level I wanted nothing more than to find a house, stock it well, and live in it without a care in the galaxy. Occasionally going exploring, letting Meliha play outside without having armed guards posted. That just wasn’t the way the galaxy was. It probably never really was, I had just been ignorant prior to my emergence into the galaxy at large, but part of me missed those days. Other parts of my mind loved gearing up for a fight, commanding soldiers from great beasts of iron, and leaving my foes bloody, burning heaps of wreckage and bodies. I liked the smell of fire and smoke, of burnt iron, and of battlefields. I was born to fight, and so war was where I was needed most.

The closest mining anything came to combat was commanding a Harvester on the prowl, and so when Project Phoenix had gone live, I had immediately ordered one to relocate to Concordia. It had taken time to do, but it was here now. The only problem was the things were enormous and had to be mostly deconstructed to be transported anywhere without making use of massive ships I didn’t own, or want to for just moving one walker around to the locations I liked to mine for resources. Makeb, Seltos at one point, Gromas, and Gallos to name only a few where this Harvester had been for some period of time since I had owned it.

 

[Laira Darkhold]

The crews that gathered around the bulk freighters that brought it from Makeb landed in the massive clearing just south of the compound that was currently a buzz with activity. A foreman walked up with a datapad, “Sir, the Harvester has arrived, there doesn’t appear to be any travel damage, but its going to take a few days to construct and get ready to go. I suggest focusing our efforts on the smaller rigs that we can have running within a day or so, then we can turn our attention to the Harvester.” He said, confidence echoing into the Force. Good, confidence was good for a job like this.

I smiled and stood up from behind my desk, Netra looking up from where he sat in a corner. “That sounds good, put a team on the Harvester to get it started but get everyone else getting the smaller mining rigs ready to get to work. We need all the beskar ore we can get from Concordia if we are going to complete this project.” I said, turning to face the window for a moment. Looking out at the hundred thousand workers moving through the compound, the surrounding woods and clearings, and into the mountains that overlooked this place I could feel the overall good mood the workers were in. “Make sure the men keep regular hours. We have three shifts for a reason, but let’s see if we can keep the commute to the cities for the weekends unless necessary.” I said, trying to imply that I was not trying to keep them here, just trying to keep them from running rampant everywhere. This many drunk miners could set a city on fire with little to no issue so a handle needed to be held somewhere so that things didn’t get out of control. Keeping them on shifts kept them in a few smaller groups. May not have been the best plan to go with, but it was the best plan the me and my ‘experts’ if you called them that had been able to come up with when we decided to proceed with Project Phoenix. Good things were on the horizon we had only to reach out and take the opportunity. “You can go now, I will be out to see the Harvester tomorrow and will personally oversee her construction.”

 

[Laira Darkhold]

As mining droids swarmed behind walkers, repulsor lift platforms, mole miners were lifted into place to begin their descent, and great mining rigs were erected across the local area, I could do nothing but wonder how man had achieved such feats as this and still hadn’t done much worse than we had. In ages past we had built machines that tore planets apart, ripped their surfaces to shreds and forged them into machines of war, and blasted whole worlds to pieces, but we had not done anything like this in a long time. The last time something like that had happened it had been at the hands of a terrible and powerful Force entity that ripped Corellia asunder. Compared to those feats, turning a single region on a planet inside out for its valuable ores was child’s play.

A man approached me, snapping me from my introspection. “Sir sensor teams have been sent out and mole miners are being used to get accurate drill measurements. What do you want to do with the minerals besides the beskar ore, sir?” He asked, ready with his datapad to inform the crews of my will. It was understandable that he was unsure. We needed an immense amount of materials besides beskar in order to produce ships and Concordia was home to numerous minerals and substances we could use besides the ore it was most well known for.

 

[Laira Darkhold]

“We mine areas rich in Beskar ore, but we will separate everything of use we find in those areas. We will have need of more materials than I can possibly quote here today, so we will take everything we can use.” I said after a short moment of contemplation. He typed on his datapad for a moment before turning his attention towards me once again.

“Orders relayed sir. Is there anything else you needed before I see to the mining sectors?” He asked, raising an eyebrow quizzically, as though I might have twenty questions for him and he needed to be ready to answer them all at the drop of a hat.

“What is the status of the Harvester, has she been brought out yet and constructed?” I asked, eager to be out in the field commanding the immense walker as it tore through this world like a great beast tearing into a village in the ancient myths.

“She isn’t online yet, but we are working on it steadily. Tomorrow she should be green lit for active duty and you can put her to work here.” He said, checking to see if there were any notifications on his datapad about the massive walker. The crew working on constructing her on this world logged any issues or damages they had found throughout the process while they worked steadily on her frame and form. It was always good to have well paid, happy employees when dealing with such expensive, and rare, equipment less they make a few mistakes or get sloppy and the result renders the equipment useless or damaged in any way for that matter.

 

[Laira Darkhold]

I nodded sagely after hearing the update. “Good. I am sure they will do a fine job. Once she is brought online and put to work, we can expedite the mining process and get Project Phoenix past the resource gathering stage and into the construction stage.” I turned, pressing a few buttons on the data terminal that sat on my desk, updating my personal logs with the information he had just given me. Through the Force I could feel the emotions throughout the compound relatively easily, albeit not pinpoint. Most of the workers were either just neutral in their emotions or were slightly happy to be here. The pay raise the workers on Concordia enjoyed making them more apt to want to spend their days mining the moon’s crust for ores to be used to fuel some other person’s war effort.

The man nodded “Yes sir, I will keep you posted with their progress. Like I said, she should be fully operational sometime tomorrow.” With that he excused himself and left the office that had been re-appropriated for my use.

I sat back down in the chair and glanced at the data feeds. I didn’t want to be here. I wanted to be home with Chiasa and Meliha, spending time with them. But this needed to be done if we were going to live in any kind of security. I glanced at a few more things on the data terminal, wrote something on a notepad for later, and then pulled out the small aurodium locket, smiling at its external plainness and knowing that what it held inside was more precious to me than any money or gold.

 

[Laira Darkhold]

Another knock on the door snapped me back. These people needed to learn to give me a moment’s peace every now and again before I lost my mind. “Enter.”

A different man, the surveyor, in charge of deciding where the best places to mine for Beskar on the world. “Sir, survey reading have been taken and I have highlighted the five riches veins in the area. There are two major veins in the area we should hit hard, the others are good supplemental veins we can use to complement the main operation. If we hit one of them hard and leave the other for prolonged operations we should be okay for a while.” He said, handing me the datapad and letting me look over his surveys. The three dimensional images I saw showed the massive deposits of ore throughout the crust of the moon.

“This looks good. Get the mining rigs in five groups. We will hit each of the veins with one group being assisted by the Harvester and its complement of workers once it is finished being built.” I said looking over the map. “The harvester can clear away most of the excess dirt and get us to the ore while the other rigs in the group make supporting mining shafts. How long until we can move into the area and begin?”

“We can start moving tonight, but we won’t be operational until tomorrow.”

“Perfect, let’s get moving on this then.”

 

[Laira Darkhold]

The night was restless for me. It had been the second night in a long time I had spent away from my family, hidden away somewhere on the outer rim, moving from numbered, uninhabited system, to the next every few days, staying hidden and undetected as much as possible. Confidence in their safety did not put my mind at ease. I was used to being near them and being away, even the Rha there watching over them along with dozens of my most trusted soldiers, was uneasy. The last time I had left them alone I had almost lost them for eternity, and only by some miracle had we been reunited.

I rose from my quarters and took my time getting ready for today’s work, being deliberate and methodical this morning, knowing that I wouldn’t sleep for a while following the events of the day. This was the first of many days like this for the workers, but for me it was the most important of a select few in the near future. I sat at a table, eating a decent breakfast of nerf steak and eggs, drinking caf casually while reading exerts from the holo-news. There was little of interest. Druckenwell had been claimed by the Techno Union, largely due to the assistance of ArmaTech and a few Mandalorians, the One Sith were still expanding as rapidly as ever. Nothing much of note, nothing really to draw concern, but it was always good to read up on current events. Especially since they would be the foundation that the new order of starships would be built on.

A woman walked in carrying a stack of papers and a datapad with a stylus. She set the papers down on the table in front of me and looked over her glasses at me. “Good morning sir, I have the update from the night crew for you when you are ready.”

 

[Laira Darkhold]

“Alright, I guess I am finished for the most part. All I have to do is suit up and go out to meet the Harvester at this point. I suppose the least I can do is be well informed when I get out there.” I responded, looking at the small stack of papers now sitting in front of me. Most of these were data sheets that didn’t truly require any real attention from me, the foremen just wanted some form of oversight so that if I was displeased they could say they informed me of the situation before hand. It was the simple covering of bases workers often did to ensure job security. To me the end result weighed much more heavily than anything else.

“Well, first off the Harvester hasn’t been green lit yet. There was some minor damage to one of the leg joints in transit that was exacerbated in construction. Mechanics say they need six hours to fix it and they want to run full diagnostics to make sure they didn’t miss anything.” She said, skimming across her datapad with a flick of her finger.

“Second, the rigs have begun digging and they are on schedule, but that schedule is slow going without the Harvester to handle the really big obstacles. They are requesting a deadline extension of six hours in coordination with the Harvester being inert at the moment.”

“And lastly there seems to be an issue with the refining processors. Calibration is having to be done by hand because of some mineral displacement or something. I don’t know the jargon but the forgemaster seemed to think it was really important that it be done before we put an ounce of Beskar into that machine.”

 

[Laira Darkhold]

“Well he is one of the master smiths from Gotal’Vemen so he knows what he is talking about. I trust him if he says it has to be done. Did he give an estimate on how long it would take him to calibrate the device?” I asked her, hoping it was a reasonable amount of time.

“He says he can have it done in a few days, but he needs that time with the processor off line and cold so he can manually calibrate its settings. I don’t know exactly what it is, but he alluded to the ones we had weren’t meant for Beskar and so he has to adjust them to that. That or you needed to buy thousands of Beskar calibrated machines. Those just don’t come in large sizes from my understanding.” She said, tapping on the datapad.

“Well, that isn’t so bad. I am not an expert in forging Beskar but there is a specific process that needs to be done in the forging process, and the refining process is very important to the strength of the metal and so I would assume it has something to do with that.” I said. In truth I knew more than I was saying, but it was of little consequence. She didn’t need to know, and she didn’t want to know. “Tell him to take all the time he needs to get it right. I will check with him tomorrow once we have the Harvester ready to go and we actually have ore to be refined and processed to send to the forge.”

“Yes sir, I will let him know.”

 

[Laira Darkhold]

After that I donned my armor, not because I needed it to keep me safe or keep me from being attacked, but because it was like a second skin. I was rarely without in when awake and even rarer did I speak to those who weren’t my close family without it. When people saw me they saw an armored warrior ever vigilant, ready to bring death to those that would threaten what is mine.

The trip out to the harvester on the plains just past the forest in this region of space was uneventful, the workers who saw the nine speeder bikes and the large beskar droid fly through the air towards it they knew what it was. It was their boss surrounded by guards and a beast going to tear the world asunder in the name of eventual peace.

In war we made use of great metal monsters, so massive and so impressive that they could evaporate whole groups of people with their fire power. We could unleash death from space, and send plasma hurtling into space at our foes. But all of these things were paltry concerns compared to what we did to planets. In the past we had strip mined massive planets of everything useful and left them barely liveable husks. Duros, Fondor, and others had been rendered polluted, smog choked, barren worlds because of humanity. Concordia was a lush place with a temperate forest, beautiful mountain slopes, and soft rolling hills. But not this region. This region had become home to vast swaths cut from its land, deep gashes to the bedrock and scars where areas had been hydraulically mined in brutal displays of effectiveness.

 

[Laira Darkhold]

And amidst the terrible destruction of the Region, there sat a beast, above all the others. There were none like her within five thousand miles, and there were few in the galaxy. Like the alpha predator she sat, towering over a dozen smaller rigs, still the size of small ships, her shadow looming over them. This could be seen as a great shield or a great oppressor over the others. She was the Harvester, here to expedite the mining process of drilling straight from the surface to the vein of beskar buried under this region. Deep within the rock and earth the ore hid from sight, and above it layers of ferrite and lomite blocking the path down to it. The black sheen from the Harvester in the afternoon sun glinted and shifted as the trees swayed around the area and the howling of the cold mountain wind swept through the valley we were mining, but nothing compared to her. She was a mountain in her own right, and she was almost ready.

“Sir the damage to the starboard knee joints are repaired we are going through auxiliary system start up sequences before moving to secondary and then primary. We should be online within the hour, sir.” The chief engineer said to me as I walked into the command center. Spacious for a mining walker, the command center was bustling with operators staring at data streams and officers moving from station to station checking their work. The crucial moments of startup right after diagnostics were thus for going smoothly with no serious incidents. Anything out of place with the startup system would result in a delay, quite possibly a lengthy delay to solve whatever problem there was. With equipment as rare and as expensive as the Harvester nothing was left to chance, everything needed to be operating at peak capacity and with no issues. It was simply not worth the risk given the cost of maintenance and replacement.

“Excellent work. Keep me posted and make sure to double check the drilling systems before they go online, those are the most likely to cause serious damage to the vessel of anything else.” I ordered, wanting to keep my expensive walker running properly if I could help it. “Check in once all startup is ready.”

“Yes sir.”

 

[Laira Darkhold]

With that I moved elsewhere, taking my leave of the command center for the remainder of the startup, keeping to myself and letting the crew handle the work and staying out of their way. They worked quickly and efficiently without me, and they didn’t need another set of eyes looking them other and staring over their shoulder. I was just as apt to assume they would do their jobs well rather than watch every move they made.

Almost an hour later sitting in the office aboard the Harvester going over data from the other sites in the valley my comm-link buzzed. “Sir, all lights are green and we are ready to fire up and go.”

“Perfect. I will be there shortly.” The brisk walk from the quarters to the command center was filled with anticipation. I could feel the anxiousness of the crew seeping into the Force. They trusted this great metal beast to pull through for them and they were ready to get this vein drilled into chunks and sent off to the processing and refining plants. To be fair, while I could care less about the process, I was anxious myself. This was to be my legacy for all intents and purposes, the weapon I left to my people long after I was gone. In a century when I was dead and ashes Mandalorians would still see my ships sitting over our home, guarding them. But that was in the future, for now, the only objective was to strip mine this entire valley and push those ships into production.