And Others Fell by the Wayside

[Jorus Merrill]

Q-27
Wild Space

Memory played across his mind's eye as he piloted the Gypsymoth, the old ship that fit him like older shoes. The battered YV-929 rose from the nighttime ocean in a shudder of sluicing water, running lights off and repulsorlifts the ship's only support. Q-27 was a bucolic paradise, utopian, pre-technological, and his home for the last decade.

It was also entirely secret from the galaxy. He'd gone to great lengths to keep it that way, he and Alna both. When the Moross Crusade had stumbled across this system en route to Ceto, he'd engaged them with this ship. He'd walked tall enough to hammer out an agreement with one of their living gods, and demonstrated things that should never have needed demonstration. He'd made them see how deadly serious he was about keeping Q-27 isolated, its people innocent. They'd never known war, not ever. Their planet's crust contained a fortune in aurodium. He and his wife shared the full-arm marriage tattoos of the islanders, and Mara had grown up here. The lengths to which he would go for this world's secrecy were unknown even to him.

He'd retired. He'd retired hard, and burned a few bridges in the process. His long tenure at the Levantine Astronautical Academy was done, he'd resigned his Sanctum commission, his Pyre reserve commission was a thing of the past, and others ran the day-to-day at Baobab Astrography. The Underground ran itself, as ever. And he'd given the greatest holocrons to Voidstalker and stepped down as Master of First Knowledge to the entire Jedi Order -- the position he'd held for over half a decade. The role that had made him a fugitive, not to mention an absentee husband and father.

But not all regrets were insoluble, hence the time he'd spent here on Q-27, designing ships in theory with his wife and helping Mara recover from her crippling injuries at Lameredd.

Memory had a grip on him. He realized he'd swung his customary loop far away from land, rising on repulsors until he could engage engines and be taken for a shooting star. The old Moross sensor/relay station, the one he'd modified to within an inch of its life, was on the far side of a little moon, and he'd set a Hohmann transfer orbit to get there without realizing it. Of all the steps he had yet to take, this was probably where he had to start.

He shook sand from his graying hair and touched a flatpic of Alna, glued to his console a decade back. Then he set about figuring out who to kill.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

The Gypsymoth arced around the moonlet and touched down in 0.05g beside the automated Moross emplacement. Jorus' space suit was a simple thing, brown and lightly armored. It had been red once, a long fething time ago. It still fit, though, and that was something. It still held air, and that was something else. He double-checked the helmet seals and cycled the airlock. Pressure eased away as the chamber went to hard vacuum, pumps frosting gently. The outer door irised open, revealing a desolate moonscape, an irregular horizon, and a cathedral-like comm relay-slash-watchpost. Unmanned, heavily modified, just one more forgotten bastion of the Moross Crusade. "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair," he grunted, and stepped out of the artificial grav field.

He approached carefully. Escape velocity for one-twentieth grav was still pretty high, but you could hurt yourself if you moonwalked wrong. He spent most of his suit time in zero-g, and there was a big difference between that and being at the bottom of a grav well, no matter how shallow. His boots cast up plumes of silver dust the size of starfighters, the largest as he decelerated at the base of the emplacement. His alterations were a stark, workmanlike contrast to Moross engineering. He'd added early-warning hyperspace sensors, high-capacity, and a Ranger transceiver for eavesdropping on anything that got within thirty parsecs. The highlights got piped down to the Gypsymoth or the Daragon, which was still submerged. But he needed more than the high points.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

A Ranger transceiver could eavesdrop, and do full-scale decrypt, across a hundred-light-year radius. That wasn't much, in the grand scheme of things, but certainly enough to measure and monitor traffic along the nearest hyperroutes. They weren't much -- a couple of praedia that only linked with larger lanes every other year, and a few straight jumps that saw a ship maybe once a month if that. None of them came within twenty light-years of this system, except for the old top-secret accidental Moross lane that skimmed the outer system a few dozen astronomical units away. That route had nothing. Dead silence since the Crusade packed up, and that wasn't so comforting a statistic as it might have been once. The odds that this Covenant of the Black Rose would find that route were infinitesimally small, but he'd made a long career out of beating odds like that. And not every decent instinctive astrogator had Merrill, Starchaser, or Blake for a surname. What he had done, others could learn to do, and when that happened there'd be nothing but another seven years of running.

And the thing about running: you couldn't take home with you.

The moonlet rolled around, revealing the oceanic marble of Q-27, dotted with paradisaical little islands. The Daragon was down there, underwater, but apart from that ship and this one and the comm/monitor station, this system had nothing of technological worth. Nothing, specifically, that could be used to evacuate a world on short notice if necessary, especially when that world had never so much as seen a ship.

No, if there were solutions to be found, they weren't here. He could fill this system -- an insignificant little dot in wild space -- with defense stations and all kinds of lethal assets. He could use this Moross comm station for its original purpose and invoke the deals he'd once made with living gods. He could load Q-27 with guns that made a mockery of command ship shields or circumvented them entirely. He could call in favors and make trades at high levels, build someone a new hyperlane in exchange for a fleet.

All of which could easily draw attention here, not to mention compromise the innocence of Q-27's people. Whatever he did, it had to seem to be for other reasons. They couldn't so much as guess he was protecting his home, these Covenant people. He'd spent enough time exploring and defending this territory for the Omega Protectorate; he could trade on that, maybe, for deniability. Or he could sign on with the Galactic Alliance, the obvious rivals, the kind of government he'd always backed. But dusting off his uniforms or getting another one -- that wasn't a life he could live anymore, not without a powerful itch and a lot more time with Alna.

The Covenant had to die, but he would need to be seriously careful. Subtle, even, if he was capable of that.

Jorus stood there in the moondust, feeling the starlanes in his mind's eye, and wished he'd made more time. Been less selfish, less spastic, less bound by the tension between taking and rejecting responsibility. It was, it seemed, time to take again.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

The existing early-warning hypersensor would do, he decided. It was reliable tech, he'd installed it himself, and all the diagnostics looked good. You would also need to stumble over the actual star system to find it, and that put it head and shoulders above his earlier plan of seeding deep space with comparable gear. People could find those. It had been known to happen. So long as he kept his operations within a few tens of thousands of light-years, the sensor would give him enough notice to get back long before any traveler realized this part of the system might be of interest.

It wasn't as cut-and-dried as a defined radius, though. 'As the crow flies' was less relevant in FTL travel than at sublight or on land. You could spend a lifetime trying to cross the galaxy with praedia and local two-system connections, or you could hop on the Hydian and cross from rim to rim faster than liquor turned into regret. The Rimma and the Corellian Run weren't especially close, but they extended his operational range massively. He'd pondered the numbers many times over the years -- how far away he could go and still get back in time. The absolute maximum would be something like Hoth, two switchbacks and a detour away down good roads. Nothing as far as the Inner Rim, for sure. Nothing too far down the Death Wind; certainly not the Mara Corridor. The super-hyperlane he and Alna had built together was just too long a jaunt, no matter how well he knew it.