Compartmentalization (Seydon)

[Jorus Merrill]

Compartmentalization of information. Any given fact or supposition or file or dataset resides solely in the hands of those who need it. For the last...oh, quite a while, ever since the One Sith raid on Ossus and before the Jedi Council disbanded, certain pieces of information had been entrusted to exactly two people: Jorus Merrill, Master of First Knowledge, and Kiskla Grayson, Grandmaster of the Jedi Order.

[member="Kiskla Grayson"], who'd been captured two hours ago at the Second Battle of Manaan. The battle was still ongoing, both armies continued to rack up kills like points in a hologame, but the war was bigger than Second Manaan.

A YV-929 splashed down on wet sand at a beach's edge, deep in Levantine territory. Maybe too deep. From it emerged a certain Captain J.Q. Merril.

Flustered.

The man he faced was a primitive sort, visually at least -- scars and beard and long hair tied back, all of the above whitened by alchemical exposure, and not the voluntary kind.

"Unless you're hunting the Akure itself today, Seydon, I need your help right now."

[member="Seydon of Arda"]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Jorus Q. Merrill was in fortunate luck.

A dug-out fashioned like an ancient Serudan-rig, broken masted but strenuously hauled out of tidal reach, was kept resting a bed of smoothed palm-fern logs near a canopied treeline. Local Ardans made occasional beach-fall to visit, trade, ask for favor in return for aid out of their camp. Outsiders, however, were further seldom. The water-world was an extreme outpost of gently settled atoll-reefs and beyond the purview of most empires. For that reason, its natural seclusion, private skies, Seydon of Arda took up his rare sleep here.

Someone emerged up from beneath a sun-bleached swatch of sail-cloth, coming down the beech in long, hurried strides. Seydon was just partially dressed: swimming breeches, finned boots, belted with skinning knives and an axe.

Captain Jorus looked aggrieved, and beginning to pale.

"...What's this about, Captain?"

[member="Jorus Merrill"]

 

[Jorus Merrill]

[member="Seydon of Arda"]

"I'm, uh, the Master of First Knowledge for the Jedi Order. At least I think I still am. Bottom line, I'm the one who hid every holocron worth hiding. The Great Holocron. Tionne's holocron. The Codex of Tython. Belia Darzu's holocron, and a dozen other Sith records and relics. All in very secret places, with security measures and encoded quantum ansible callback comms and stealth and Force-nullification and feth, Seydon, I hid them better than anything's ever been hidden. Plenty of Jedi and Levantines can access the Jedi ones in a limited way with an untraceable audio-only quantum comm - the Jedi library card -- but only two people ever had the callback codes -- the means to locate them, and call them home. That's me and Grandmaster Kiskla Grayson, and she's just been captured at Manaan. The One Sith have the Grandmaster. There's nothing I can do about that, but I can sure as feth stop them from getting their hands on the holocrons. I need to change the codes and send relocation orders, but I buried my end of the quantum comms too deep. There's Sithspawn all over it. You're the only man I trust not to want the holocrons, for yourself or to control them and keep them safe -- only man apart from Jaxton, and he's not here." Over and above being out of breath from various mechanical gyrations, he was tripping over his words; he knew that. Feth, he hadn't been this flustered since the early days with Alna.

At last he conceptualized the point, came around it, and got a handle on himself. He let out a slow breath and was still for a moment, then fired it off. "Seydon, I need you to help me kill things and save thirty thousand years of history from people who'll use it to make superweapons. Zero exaggeration. I need you, your sword, my ship, right away."

 

[Seydon of Arda]

A beat.

Seydon blinked. Then sucked in a hard hiss of breath and took off in a bolting sprint up the beach-dunes, shouting over his shoulder. "Get it cycling onto lift off! Well go on!"

Momentarily, he was joining Jorus up in the closing teeth of his vessel hold. The Dunaan had taken ten seconds to strip out behind the sail-rig and another sixty to dress. Farwalker armour. Belted harnesses kitted with buttoned pouches, various sharpened implements sheathed in silver and complex runes of abrogation, a knife, an axe, and brother-swords kept at hilt across his backbone. He smelled thick with sea-salt, not yet having shaved.

"You're saying they took the Grandmaster? We've maybe days before they begin breaking down her conditioning. Where are we voyaging, Jorus? ...Am I better off not knowing?"

[member="Jorus Merrill"]

 

[Jorus Merrill]

[member="Seydon of Arda"]

"Place doesn't even have a name. Fethed if I know how the spawn got there."

The Gypsymoth, scourge of the Bando Gora, was still warmed up, so alive she barely put her weight on the landing struts. He'd grown up on this ship; some days he felt he'd grown old on it too. He moved through it like any man moved through his home, if any other man's home was a few hundred tons of weaponry, space tape and rust. A far cry from Seydon and Rosa's ship, though Jorus had only caught glimpses of the interior now and again, on days they shared ports. He'd never been what you might call close with either of'em. More so Rosa, ever since she came along for the Roon raid and conclusively saved his life. Seydon was more of a friend of a friend, but they'd moved in the same circles long enough that he was sure-

He'd rather have Seydon on his side, Sith poison or no Sith poison, scars or no scars, than any Jedi he could name.

The Gypsymoth's hatch closed- "buckle in, liftoff in about ten seconds" -and the old '929 soared pretty well for a brick.

This was the tricky bit. He'd experimented with shaving seconds or minutes off his surface-to-space jump time, using his unique abilities to jump closer and closer to any given planet, but he'd rarely been so truly down to the wire. Eyes screwed shut, he engaged the hyperdrive long before geosynch height. Seydon might feel the Force warp around Jorus, the ship, the fabric of the universe -- Jorus wasn't really one to feel his own actions.

With a ship that mounted a 0.5 hyperdrive, or when the Gypsymoth had boasted a class 1.0, he'd been able to hit 0.18 consistently. A few months back, he'd installed a 0.5 on the Gypsymoth. Suffice it to say, they went very, very fast.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

He was strapped forward in the mounted cockpit, saddled either side of the armrests by strap-locked console modules and mechanical cross-sections fitted with glassy tarping, peering at rapidly oscillating constellations. Jorus he knew by just a lot of tentative stories and sheer, brave reputation. If you gave him a crop-duster, he'd have it coasting through lightspeed on spirit-gum, tuck-tape, and handfuls of spat acoustic glue.

Nameless planetoid. Sick with alchemical infection. Doubtless anchored in a Lagrangian point shivering between equally dead and necrotic space bodies. Scared, desperate purpose. The Dunaan thinly smiled. And then Force-power rich with triangulating patterns wafted round the pilot's controls. Pressure snapped across his eyes like a flung stone. The Gypsymoth beaded trails of parsing reality in her wake and jumped to hyperspace.

[member="Jorus Merrill"]

 

[Jorus Merrill]

[member="Seydon of Arda"]

Jorus loved Lagrange points. There was something poetic about them. This one was bad poetry, the kind of clogged, self-important rubbish that one experienced in liberal artsy-fartsy ports. Debris of better things as far as the sensor could scan. The planetoid barely merited the name, locked in tidal thrall to a gas giant and its largest moon. This was an L4 point, sixty degrees ahead of the moon's rotation about the giant; the smaller planetoid wobbled around it in an ovoid orbit. Someone in ages past had sealed off almost half of the little planetoid's surface, made a biodome of it, and installed the kind of airlocks that worked on clockwork and ram-action and lasted for millennia. Inside the pitted glasteel, the biome was a wreck, its atmosphere dangerously oxygen-rich. Sparks wouldn't do here, not at all. He'd left his guns and brought a knife, but the bulk of the fight was in Seydon's hands.

The Gypsymoth trembled behind them, anxious to leave. "In a minute, girl," Jorus muttered, sealing the analog airlock, and gestured at a loose path through the confined jungle. A black starscape wheeled overhead, interrupted by slices of celestial orb and straight-line artificial lights with geothermal power behind them. "I buried it this way."

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Jorus had uprooted Seydon and planted him boots-down in a black-tuber jungle on the opposite rimward roll of the Galaxy, then told him to mind his step.

It was his element. The air had long grown rotten with stagnant oxygen, what little pitches of CO2 and nitrous elements providing enough flavour to pitch up the moss-stink. The Dunaan took up a walking lead sixteen paces before Jorus. They were navigating onto rough hitches of just barely visible animal trail, passing beneath ash-canopies, rippling noiselessly through copses of splintered willows crazed by wood-burrowers. E're so often they had to pause, and the Captain watched his aid go to a knee and breathe in. Seydon read the surroundings. Animal track, dried fecal deposits, insect haunts, entire webs of scent-spectrums, and the heat and chill of soil, loam, tree...

...And those nine-eyed bark-walkers that suddenly dropped from overhead on swinging lichen-vines. The Farwalker armour. It's treated leather was writ with tempting spells taken from an abandoned codex writ when time was still nascent. They couldn't help being drawn. Seydon drew Winterfang before they'd yet touched earth. Motion blur. Executed cross-hacks, pin-point skewers, a whirlwind of tight rage and steel.

Finished and wiping blood-sap off his face, Seydon gestured Jorus on. They were making for where the canopy interlocked ahead, robbing what little, cthonic light they had available. The Dunaan witcher kept in the lead, tracking. Bush rustled and the beasts came on again, and again, increasing in number, frequency, size, and derangement. He bled the forest dry in turn.

[member="Jorus Merrill"]

 

[Jorus Merrill]

[member="Seydon of Arda"]

Sixteen paces might as well have been a parsec -- the kind that had to do with distance. Har, har. Apart from a tikulini singlet under his shirt and jacket, and the knife he used with respectable precision, Jorus wasn't much. Not compared to the whirlwind of metal and spattering blood-sap sixteen paces ahead of him. That turned into eighteen paces, then fourteen, then twelve. He just flat-out couldn't hold up his end. Fluids of variegated colours stained his jacket, one he'd worn since the Vagrant Fleet days, right up to the elbows. Knife, and a set of electrified brass knuckles in his off-hand, the set he'd used on Parker back in the day.

The jungle parted- "Here we go, this little depression by the tree" he called out. Maybe Seydon heard, maybe he didn't, but a Dunaan didn't have human ears. So they said, anyway. Bleeding from half a dozen cuts, aching from another dozen blunted blows, feth but he could use a drink.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Hiking was frenetic, challenging both to keep up their quickened strides, balance, asking for sharp senses where foliage melted apart and introduced three-tongued, two-jawed monsters. Seydon kept count: six kilometers traversed uphill, carpeted in their wake by shewn, twitching cadavers. Rancid vitae stunk up the skin inside their nostrils. The Dunaan was bleeding from a squared lacerations taken over his hip and left pectoral, and a long cut gnashed on his brow. Jorus was fairly panting behind him. He paused, helped him scoot over a guarded edge lined by fallen logging, scaling down a long slope padded with composted leaves.

The tree, fat trunked, pinned by spider-branches, leafs swabbed from bough to bough, swung up overhead by at least twenty meters. Red eyed arachnids were scaling down over silver bark. Seydon counted maybe a score, as more kept up a chitinous rustle in the canopy proper.

"Good eye," The witcher called back across the small clearing, genially. He slipped out his throwing-axe. The tomahawk cocked behind his shoulder, then flew beard-over-pommel and found purchase between the first spider's nest of compound eyes. It shivered, even while its carapace-head split like a blood-fruit, kicking off the tree in death throe. The rest cast ropes of swollen silk-threading, swinging down with surprising gain and chattered their pronged feet in the earth. Exoskeletal detritus kept pecking over Jorus' shoulders while he worked the dead-drop.

"Is that all?" He had the gall to ask after Jorus. Seydon ducked a clawed blow for his throat and punched Winterfang through a hairy thorax-belly.

[member="Jorus Merrill"]

 

[Jorus Merrill]

[member="Seydon of Arda"]

Maybe these bark-spiders had some sensitivity to where Force-sensitives had been, as if they'd been drawn here by his footprints, months ago. The lockbox eighteen inches down certainly didn't have a Force resonance to draw them. Or maybe he and the spawn just had similar tastes in trees and clearings. He'd trusted them to hold down the fort in a general sense; the nest was a new one. As Seydon kept the clearing clear, Jorus knelt and dug with his combat knife. The dirt came up easily enough once he took up the first couple of inches. Beneath, the earth was still loose enough to scoop out by hand. He dragged the lockbox up by main strength, one end first, and cracked the lid. Thick cables projected from the bottom end of the box, down into the earth in stiff loops. The lockbox was only the interface. Taking this back to the Gypsymoth wasn't an option.

"Fethed if I know. It wasn't near this dense when I was here."

Sixteen codes, averaging about one and a half tries each. Sixteen codes to cover the activation of the hardlink ansibles, then send activation signals to prep the stealthed extragalactic receptacles for movement, but first lock [member="Kiskla Grayson"] out of the system entirely. She'd had the option to disable his access too; that his codes had successfully activated the ansibles at all said volumes about her mental resilience. Force or no Force, regardless of torture or coercion, a Grandmaster was a Grandmaster.

"Hold this spot for five minutes and I can -- yeah, just give me another five and we're golden."

The droid-piloted stealth fighters, reachable only by present ansible pairs, needed new coordinates.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

The captain wanted an uninterrupted three hundred seconds kept spare for him to work unbothered on the safe-box. Which meant keeping up enough distracting cacophony and violence to attract further under-brush horrors onto the witcher, and off of Jorus' back. He looked hunched in, concentrating on repeating out slaved coding on a faced key-set. Bark-walkers, darkly fattened spiders, naked and multi-jawed scabs with forearms ending in keratin-swords, and even a squat, powerful wyrm-lizard armour scaled from bladed snout to crunching tail broke from fern cover for the clearing.

Seydon settled into arrhythmic struggle. His preference was the longsword, in efficient, precise brutalism. He crossed off a stroke aimed at his ribs from one grey-faced thing, cocked Winterfang, severed three arteries in its thigh, belly, and throat and kicked it away to die. Four of the creatures managed to time their assaults into a four-way, four-directional attack meant to shred his blade-work. The Dunaan kept turning, a liquid-twister, nicking off limbs, heads, anything in the bubble that neared too, too close. Old Ajax, elder witcher, emphasized their long tutelage with the adage to fight as he was, not as what Seydon had been.

So he didn't fight like he possessed limitation. He fought like a monster killer. And the wyrm-lizard went flying when thrown off its feet by a drop kick to its ribs, bone traumatized to porous dust, to rebound off the bark and trunk above Jorus' head. Seydon was crunching something in his hands to watch after the Captain momentarily. He grunted. Damn it if something hadn't skewered a poke through his foot. Winterfang slashed the offending limb free and followed in after its owner.

[member="Jorus Merrill"]

 

[Jorus Merrill]

[member="Seydon of Arda"]

Seydon's cover was much appreciated, but Jorus was superego-deep in instinctive astrogation, the variant that actually involved hyperspace math. Even for someone with his encyclopedic knowledge of hyperspace, and having been the one to put the packages in the starting coordinates anyway, creating jumps from thin air remotely, without the gut-instinct feel of the warp and weft of hyperspace between himself and his destination -- even for him, that was an awful lot to ask. So as Seydon showered the clearing with ichor, Jorus assigned general vectors and approximated jump distances to the hypercapable stealth pods. There was a risk, and not a small one, that he was putting the Great Holocron into some extragalactic pulsar. He'd thrown capital ships, in whole and in part, into hyperspace. This was, by far, the hardest thing he'd ever done. Hardest to get right, anyway. Approximations were easy enough. He could get eighty, ninety percent probable safety just doing his normal thing. Eighty, ninety percent wasn't enough, not for this.

With a grimace, he put in the final numbers and stood. His knees screamed in protest; his knife, grip choked with blood and dirt, barely fit his hand. It took him a moment too long to reenter the fight.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Paired off, blade and knuckled dirk, they made a running fight back along the gored up path they had flighted along initially. Seydon only stopped to kick the damned strongbox back into its disturbed grave, palming and heeling earth, lichen, bruised plant-matter over the hole until it was buried and lidded. They had not risked both expense and health to chance some random violence affecting Jorus successes. He reached and hooked up one arm in beneath the Captain's right arm-pit, Winterfang growling down in his off-hand, to give his beleaguered tendons some mercy.

The Farwalker armour was working. Residual spell-echoes leaking off the leather and chain-link was calling out for kilometers in radius. Looking up, walls of clinging foliage and bracken umbrage were vibrating with attracted motion. They sped down the old predatory trail and followed blooded leafs where it began failing into grassy scruff. Seydon shifted his freed arm, catching a loosed throwing knife into his palm. Tough keeping an ample hold to both handles between his fingers. But pausing enough, he struck his boot down and hurled the dagger spear-true. Their pursuer danced off its feet with the hilt shoved thick to the hilt into its nose and skull behind.

"Where's that door?" The witcher groused. ...There. Ahead, through a part in ominously linked, freegreen trees. An analog, steel-cast entry portcullis gnashed together by cog-teeth. He helped Jorus limp for the manipulator controls, and returned to snarl a wall of concussive Force-power into their crowding pursuers. The air was stiff with too much O2.

[member="Jorus Merrill"]

 

[Jorus Merrill]

[member="Seydon of Arda"]

The ram-pumps did their level best to lift the door; Jorus got his back to the grid, but not close enough to catch his bloody jacket in the gears. "These boys really don't like you much," he said. It wasn't much of a quip, and he didn't mean it as one. Humor just didn't fit the moment.

He was keenly aware that, knife or no knife, he'd have been ground nerf in minutes before he even reached the clearing. He'd never had much talent or desire for lightsabres, but for the first time he could legitimately appreciate swordwork.

Between his newfound appreciation and the realization that the local Sithspawn had an unnatural interest in Seydon -- obvious analogies mothed through his mind -- the day's revolution didn't click until the airlock let them in. He cranked a square-sectioned lever, releasing chain. The door slammed shut with a splish of what could only be described as gore.

"And that's it," he said in the dark. "Last thing I ever swore to do for the Jedi, more or less. There'll be a new Grandmaster, maybe a Council again, and I'll hand off all of this. I've saved this clart two, three times now." The ram-pumps opened the second half of the airlock, and he sagged against the outermost hatch of the Gypsymoth. "I'm done."

 

[Seydon of Arda]

"Wait."

Jorus was bound up the debarkation ramp lolled like a tongue into motley, silty earth that was almost phlegmatic, wet. The Dunaan had raised a hand for him to pause and looked as if there was one more issue of conversation to be hand. Behind rocked the air-lock frame-jamb, battered at by scaling creatures that were coating up the biodome like ants caught against a glass trap. Fetid heat was traded for a long, aching cold. Hostile stars glared through orbital gauze. Seydon came up to Jorus. Saying nothing, he only patted down his liquid-drenched jacketing until his fingers caught something. It was small but black as onyx, a little shard of keratin that was almost volcanic obsidian. The long spine was threatening to saw into his kidney. It cut into Seydon's palm as he gripped and propped it free.

"There," He said, and they disappeared up into the hold. The Dunaan palmed the ramp controls. Glistening piston-servos drew the lid back, back, up into its catch and locked primely.

"So we're clear?" The two were marching for the small ship's mess. Jorus haggardly so. "You don't owe me for this. I was never here, and you needn't ever be obligated to discharge any secrets my way. Just find me, if you're ever needing back in.

"...You did very good work, Mister Merrill."

[member="Jorus Merrill"]

 

[Jorus Merrill]

[member="Seydon of Arda"]

"You sound like me when I'm talking to a rookie." The Gypsymoth's inner hatch irised shut, and he slouched onto the jumpseat just inside the hold. The dang thing creaked under him. Been a while since he'd tightened the nuts. He barked a self-depricating laugh to cover the scritch of claws on the grid, four metal doors away. Something else had followed them, followed Seydon, and Jorus found himself wondering just how much the bearded man loved his job. Enough to take a swing at something unspecified but interesting, even once they'd reached safety?

Having seen the Gypsymoth torn up once or twice, he felt it wise to lock the hatch, so as to avoid finding out the answer.

"If those are your terms, I'll respect'em. I'm a talker, but I'll keep quiet when asked. Case in point." He gestured vaguely in the direction of the buried ansible nodes, and stood from the creakin jumpseat. "So yeah, you were never here, but better believe I'll give you a call next time I need a slit-eye. Yeah, I've run into your kind once or twice before you. Friends of friends, you might say. I'm told Dunaan and Wardens of the Sky tend to get along with each other as well as they do with anyone."

He cracked a locker and procured a couple of compact medkits; he tossed one to Seydon and set about tending his own relatively minor, but already pungent, wounds. "Which isn't to say any Warden I've known could match a Dunaan for sheer bloody-minded crowd control. That, back there, that was art."

 

[Seydon of Arda]

"It's what we're built for," Said Seydon, swishing water to and fro in a long necked beaker he promptly drank from. When finished, he sighed for a heavy second and replaced it back into a crusty holder folded out from the arm-rest. It smelled faintly of evergreen and pine in the pilot's bog, noting a folded chain of air-freshener dice bobbing from a diode reading riveted to a module space in the canopy ceiling. "'Whether one or one thousand', my teacher said."

Conversation paused, to breathe. Seydon glanced at his gloves, noting where they'd need patching, resewing, both the fabric and the skin below. Already his flesh was overhauling to staunch and repair torn epidermal rents. "...He spent a year with me, in the dark, breaking and then repairing me. Until I could use a longsword 'capably'. You would like it, Cap'n. It's technical, practical application, robust and adaptive discipline versus just sheer strength. Dunaan don't fight like it's spectacle. I just fight as it's my work."

[member="Jorus Merrill"]

 

[Jorus Merrill]

[member="Seydon of Arda"]

"A year in the dark." Somewhere out there, past four layers of metal, a howl rattled the artificial sky. Jorus stripped off his jacket. Antibiotics and synthflesh stung the old familiar way. "Think my wife would kill me. I did boot -- a few times, here and there. Most growth needs breaking down first, and that's the truth. Gotta be done, for fighting as work. Fighting to kill. I mean, people put that much work into fighting for fighting's sake, style and all -- I did my time on the Jedi Council, and you wouldn't believe the flashy garbage they treat as combat training out there. If I see one more rainbow-colored pinwheel flip, I'll seriously-" He choked it off with a hiss as he pried animate splinters from the underside of his forearm, where he'd missed them in the meat.

"You used to work for my sister, didn't you."

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Seydon held up a tin mug beneath Jorus' harried arm and was catching the livid splinters caught like zippers into his meat. Then replacing the cup with a machine-washed, sterile bandage spool, he gave a hand applying septic, then kolto swabs, empathizing at the nerve-lance pain sometimes bleeding into the Captain's eyes. The witcher was halfway close to re-packaging the first-aid kit and stowing it below the dashboard. At the mention, he was struck into a stop.

"I did," He said. "Rave was one of the few characters that regularly contracted me out. She built her business on my blood. I know she hired out to anyone lusty enough to take down the creations she wanted for the coin she was willing to shill out. They played their parts too. But we were never much acquainted beyond that Rave trusted me to take care of her more serious tasks. Hides for coin. I should have burned every carcass I left. ...But concession was the only thing making sure I came back to - to my wife with something to get us fed. A dead monster is a dead monster, I suppose. I did what I could to help people outside of her and that strange, sycophant cabal she kept up with in the Tion. That meant more to me. And more to those truly affected."

[member="Jorus Merrill"]