And this was where it got complicated.
The Garden of Unending Delights hadn't actually jumped yet. None of the Mando ships had. Alec was still waiting on the jump order when her pocket shifted, as if a baby gizka had decided to take a chunk out of her undershorts, but a good bit milder. It took a moment for her to register the strangeness of that and slip her hand into her pocket.
I've got a bad feeling about this was scrawled, in her handwriting, on a wadded-up strip of flimsiplast. A strip she recognized.
Her slim copy of the Code of the Outer Rim was tucked under the dash. Her gut started to churn with causality fear, the tense apprehension that came about whenever her long and turbulent history with time dilation entered the picture. She flipped open the Code to page twelve and compared the top corner to the strip. Same double-dog-ear, same stimcaf spot. With a curse, she crumpled the strip again and tossed it at the recycler. She caught a glimpse of her own reflection on the comms panel -- her own reflection, plus bruises. Plus burns.
Just a glimpse. It might have been nothing. But on this ship, the home of two very different timewalkers, both of whom had bathed in the Pool of Knowledge and bartered spacetime with the Aing-Tii -- this ship, which had seen spatiotemporal anomalies and flown the length and breadth of the Chiloon Rift -- well, maybe it had been something after all. Stomach churning, Alec glanced at the fallen piece of flimsiplast.
Feth.
She chewed at the inside of her lip, caught in an agony of indecision. In the end, instinct was only instinct, and she was not strong in the Force: that had been subjectively and objectively proven. 'Force-attuned' was the technical term, weaker even than an untrained Force-sensitive. Attuned, though, to something wholly other than your average Jedi trick, by virtue of birth and death and error and deliberate intervention. That much she knew for certain -- had known for a long time. And from that long experience she knew that the warning wouldn't be taken seriously. Not just because her fellow Mandalorians had, on average, less respect for the Force than others might, but because they would see in her the same lack of certainty she saw in herself. Even if this was a genuine temporal glitch, which was far from certain -- she'd been tripping on glitterstim less than forty-eight hours ago -- there was no reason it was a solid one. 'Always in motion is the future'; that was the dictum. This could literally be nothing but nerves.
No jump yet. Betna would still be talking with the client. Out here in the deep black, light-years from anything, the Core blotted out half the sky. She'd gone in there more than once, sometimes in this ship, sometimes in others. Braving hard radiation, stellar fragments, faulty S-thread boosters...that was a kind of fear she knew. And she'd gone hand-to-hand with the enemy before, staged raids on Coruscant itself, tackled facilities on major worlds, and she knew that kind of fear too. But this was something else, more qualitatively than quantitatively. It was one thing to know the risks. It was something else entirely to think that maybe the forty- or fifty- or sixty-percent chance of failure...wasn't. That failure might be inevitable.
Logic closed in around her like a prison; time had little to do with the cause-and-effect of sentient choice, so far as she knew, and she figured she could guess how any conversation would go down. Or maybe that was part of the inevitability.
A woman could go crazy, trying to find the Rosetta Stone for twisted causality.
For the moment, but just for the moment, she did nothing. It didn't help that they were trusting the client's information one hundred percent, and preparing to jump in effectively blind. That gnawed at her. With a grimace, she tapped the comms. "Betna, this is Rekali. I've..." Got a bad feeling about this. "...had second thoughts about the timetable." So what if it makes me look the coward. Minimum acceptable precaution. "I think we need a good recon run first. We need our own eyes in there to say what we're getting into before we move."
