Interlude: The Smuggler's Tale
Well, feth. There went her favorite nightclub. What a karking waste.
From atop the parking garage of the Royal Imperator Hotel and Casino, the smuggler watched as the Saffia District was engulfed in flames. She was a short, thickset woman with a crooked nose and a long, jagged scar running from her left eyebrow to her earlobe. Let none be fooled, though; her build was hard-earned muscle, as many a handsy cantina drunk had discovered the hard way. The firelight rising from below played over her sallow skin, pale from too little time in the sun, a stark contrast to her short jet-black hair. She was not conventionally beautiful, would never grace the cover of a fashion magazine, but there was an undeniable strength to her.
You could see it in her ice blue eyes. Strength... and a cold, calculating callousness.
She bore some responsibility for all of this, she knew. The Maw had made a beeline for Saffia because of the cargo she'd helped to hide there, the vehicles and artillery they needed to stand a chance at cracking the fortresses that held down Imperial control of New Carannia. Deep in the back of her mind, she wondered; if she hadn't agreed to smuggle in their speeder technicals, would they have delayed the invasion, or even picked another target? Would they at least have steered clear of the entertainment district, which had vanishingly little tactical value on its own? She shook her head, banishing the thought. If she'd said no, someone else would have said yes.
Sorscha Thanlis was not given to wallowing in regret. She'd come too far to back out now.
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She was twelve again, running with a crummy little gang of beggars and pickpockets calling themselves the Pellaeon Pirates. Dad hadn't stuck around to see her born, and there were in fact several candidates for who exactly "dad" might be. Mom spent her days drinking, cussing, and inviting over potential candidates for her next brat's absent dad, so Sorscha didn't stick around. She'd rather sleep in whatever abandoned building the Pirates had managed to bed down in this time, surrounded by others who came from equally broken places, others who genuinely
understood. Not like the people out on the street, who grimaced at another unwashed child underfoot.
She
loved separating those people, those stuck up sleemos, from their credits.
Even in those days, without a lick of schooling or an ounce of muscle on her too-skinny frame, Sorscha had a nose for opportunity. She might hate the
average citizen of Nirauan, but she looked up to the gangsters, the people who'd crawled out of the same gutter she had and still managed to seize the trappings of a good life. It wasn't an easy thing to do under the harsh rule of the Sith Empire, who'd held the planet back then. There was vanishingly little tolerance for crime, and people she knew were always getting sentenced to hard labor - or simple execution. But people she knew were also getting rich. You had to risk the former for a chance at the latter.
She'd started out carrying messages for the local adult gangs, and when she'd proven reliable at that, drug shipments. There was plenty of demand for a release from reality on a world in the durasteel grasp of the Sith, and patrols were far less likely to stop and search one of the countless dirty, unruly children running through the streets of the city's poorer quarters. She had to pitch the packets a few times, tossing them down drains or behind dumpsters, but she never got caught. Among people who had nothing, reputation was everything, and she was steadily building one. By age fourteen, she wasn't just transporting anymore.
She was
dealing, and to a wide range of customers.
When the Imperial Civil Wars had begun, and Nirauan had changed hands, Sorscha had done what she did best: adapt. The new laws were different, if not all that much less draconian, but one thing certainly didn't change: there were still controlled substances, and that meant there were still people willing to pay extra to get their hands on them quietly. Gangs and syndicates squabbled and turned over as the wars raged on. By the time Sorscha was eighteen, a muscular young woman with a collection of battle scars, a new power was ascendant, ruling from the glitzy Saffia District: the Zord Kajidic, run by Jinnosha the Hutt.
Jinnosha had quite the advantage, elevating his organization well above the other gangs. The government seemed to overlook his operations, a deal made in exchange for his keeping crime out of sight and under control.
When Sorscha started working for the Zord Kajidic, moving product through the glitzy young city of New Carannia and the Saffia District in particular, it'd seemed like the sky was the limit. She'd been making more money than ever before, rising steadily through the ranks. But then she'd hit a ceiling. She'd wanted to become a lieutenant, to expand with her own branch of operations. She'd been told, in no uncertain terms,
absolutely not. Whatever arrangement Jinnosha had with the NIO governor, he valued the stability of it more than any expansion of his profits. He didn't want to rock the boat, not when business was good.
But Sorscha was hungrier than that.
That was how the Mawites had gotten to her, of course. She didn't know how they'd gotten her name, but they'd somehow heard she was less than content with the present, unambitious state of affairs. They'd felt her out slowly and carefully, their operatives buying her drinks in her favorite cantinas and listening to her complaints. They'd never tried to preach to her, never tried to sell her on their whacko religion. They'd sold it to her as a business opportunity, the kind of chance her boss just wasn't offering her anymore. She'd grown too big for Nirauan, they told her. Why not leave with a hold full of riches, go establish herself somewhere with a lot fewer rules?
Somewhere she could be the
boss, and no one could tell her what to do?
It'd taken them a while to talk her around to it... but when they'd shown her what they could offer, the plunder of dozens of worlds in exchange for a pretty easy job, it'd been harder and harder to resist. In the end, she'd taken them up on it. She and her crew had smuggled in the Mawite speeders - and their gun attachments - piece by piece, disguising the components among crates of other vehicle parts, where they hardly stood out at all. Then they'd reassembled them over the course of several weeks, hiding the finished vehicles in vacant warehouses and parking garage sublevels. It'd all been pretty easy, especially given the payout on offer.
All that was left was to facilitate the pickup... and then to live with the consequences.
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So as the city burned, Sorscha waited. Her contacts reported that the first of the Mawite squads were starting to arrive at the designated points... and for all their reported wildness, they were leaving her crews unharmed. Even barbarians could honor their contracts, it seemed. The smuggler herself had already been paid; local cultists had finished loading up her ship, the
Coin Toss, with plundered aurodium ingots and priceless cultural relics that morning. They knew she wouldn't leave without seeing the deal through. She couldn't; she'd be shot down in the chaos of battle, targeted by NIO air defenses for violating the city lockdown.
They had her right where they wanted her, because if they lost here, she was as karked as they were.
So she waited. She watched as the streets were cratered by artillery fire, and landmarks she'd navigated by for years were reduced to powder. She heard the explosions, and the laserfire, and the screams, echoing up to the landing pad atop the Royal Imperator. Not her problem, she told herself, and not her fault. It wasn't like she'd full-on thrown in with these psychos; she'd just made a deal with them once, just for the money, continuing the long and proud galactic tradition of getting rich by war profiteering. And it wasn't like they could actually
win against the whole galaxy anyway. They'd be stopped eventually, and everyone would forget her role in it.
If she hadn't done it, she told herself again, someone else would have. She repeated it, over and over.
She was trying as hard as she could to believe it.
Kyrel Ren
Saaveina
/Imperial Knights/NIO
