Feet of Clay (Seydon)

[Jorus Merrill]

[member="Seydon"]

NIBELUNGEN
UNDERCITY

The Hawkbat Cave, like any Underground bolthole, boasted a variety of escape routes. One such was a drop chute, modeled after the parabolic slides which Je’gan Olra’en had used to connect the old Coruscant Temple to phrik vaults. Shaking and smoking from a threadbare escape, Jorus hauled his way up the drop chute by the recessed handholds in the ceiling. The lower half of the chute offered no purchase for his feet or knees. The climb depended totally on upper-body strength.

He flopped out of the chute and sprawled under the workbench that concealed it. After a good minute or so, he rolled out and got up for a drink. Feth, he could barely grip the canteen.

“How we doing on perimeter sensors, Shenna?”

The tiger-striped Twi'lek put down a hydrospanner and swiveled her chair. She'd crammed her latest speeder retrofit between a wall of crates and the main comscan. “Looks like you led’em clear. Not a patrol car in sight.”

Jorus sucked back about half the canteen and slumped into another chair. “There was local burlap on foot too, by the end. I lost them a while before I went to the chute, but they could still be sniffing around. What do we have on lifesigns?”

“Hawkbats, conduit worms, no humanoids this deep. Well, apart from Seydon.”

“He's back?”

“Yeah, just coming in.”

“Good, that's a load off my mind. Any word from Jaxton?”

Shenna'vala nodded and went back to torquing the stolen speeder's guts. “Yeah, Ravos checked in. He's still busy with the thing.”

“Makes sense. Thanks.” Jorus planted a boot against the ferrocrete wall and shoved his wheeled chair over to the coldbox. “I'm gonna nuke a bunch of ribenes and salt up some bedjies. Bet Seydon's starving too. You want any?”

“I'm good, thanks.” The Twi’lek outlaw tech patted her belly. “Alna and I fixed up some gourmet ration bar surprise this morning, and it's still sitting heavy.”

 

[Seydon of Arda]

The grate beneath the tool bench rattled aside and gloved hands scrabbled for purchase. A few fingertips caught against a lip of concrete and pulled taut. Seydon, brushed with ferrocrete dust, inexplicable fuel stains, blood, crawled out and stood. Matted hair stuck to his brow. New rends showed in his coat and a ragged stitch of open skin was dark with blood clot under his left cheekbone. The harness holding Razorlight to his shoulders had been repaired with a fast knot.

Shenna coasted up, proffering a canteen. “That looks awful. ...Smells awful, what happened to reconnaissance?”

“Constables made me. Patrols are running closer, thicker now. I think I’ve got a bead - “ He said between sips. “ - on a ‘recirculation’ gaol."

“Recirculation,” She echoed.

“Mmmnn...” Seydon passed the canteen back. He’d briefly tasted from a half-eaten nutrient pail left out on an unguarded veranda. There was an element behind the mineral grit sensation and watery barley-like clumps drifting in broth. Like furnace roasted calcium, rich arterial iron, a heavier sodium flavour that made his gut churn. Bile still clung under his tongue. He washed his mouth out with one last swig and strode to a nearby fusion stove.

“Ribenes.”

“Hey. They’re cheap. Good source of protein. And I don’t have to synthesize barbecue sauce,” Said Shenna.

Seydon slid off his gloves, loaded a small paper plate with meat and a spoonful dashes of brown pea-pork rice, and sat at the edge of a long duranium table. Subterranean breezes pushed flimsi-sheets about against datapad paper-weights. Blunt languor slackened his face. He pulled his hat aside and ran a hand through his shortened hair.

“Place is sick...” He murmured, to no one in particular. He caught Jorus’ profile amble into his peripheral and wiped rib-sauce, rice-grains from his mouth. “...Heard you giving the robes a hard run around. Is our bolthole still good?”

[member="Jorus Merrill"]

 

[Jorus Merrill]

[member="Seydon"]

Fething recirculation. Not a common penalty, but the locals judged it suitable for the incorrigibly emotional, the repeat offenders who damaged the planet's calm. Criminals, dark-tainted young adults, and serial adulterers faced a painless execution.

The practice grew naturally from three factors. One: a population which included billions upon billions of empaths and many Force-sensitives. Two: a system comprising one planet and five moons, all dominated by cityscape, with no room for farmland. Other ecumenopoleis relied on agricultural worlds, like Ukio and the Ag Circuit - not an option in this isolated region. Molecular furnaces and other means of recycling turned all excess matter into survival.

And three: luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.

Jorus and Shenna finished serving up and sat down with Seydon. Chewing furiously, Jorus passed Seydon a synthflesh dispenser for his wounds.

“Yeah, I had burlap after me for a bit there. And I'm talking the genuine article, too. Hair-shirt flagellants from a harsh fething school, self-deprivation and Control powers. You wouldn't think ascetics could run that fast, but heck. But yeah - we're still under their radar.”

He took another bite, chewed and swallowed. Rain-soaked permacrete had left him chilled; the food gave back a portion of his warmth.

“Good news, by the way. The Underground brought in a new Coalition stealth ship, parked it maybe ten klicks north of here. It's enough to run supplies in and get rescued folks outsystem, long as we keep everything small-batch.”

 

[Seydon of Arda]

“...Might work our way. Recirculation,” Seydon defined, washing the ribenes down with a pale Kashyyyk wodka. Part of his vest and under shirt were crumpled back, exposing further gashes and abrasions mending on his frame. He checked the synthflesh applicator, then squirted a handful of milky webbing on.

“Grey heads won’t ask where a dozen individuals disappear to, every so oft?” Shenna looked up from her plate.

“Just so.” Seydon finished redressing his torso, slipping Razorlight free. Caked gore tarnished the steel up to the curled hilt steel-work. From a small satchel, he selected a dense glass phial, lengths of soft cloth, cleaning down the length of the blade ridge and edge pattern. Light from hanging electro-cell torches caught the sick hue of his gaze.

“They’ll have registers somewhere. Maybe at the courts, maybe in the jails, if they have realignment and education camps, another place to look. There has to be lists, however, of individuals marked for potential reclamation. When we find one... Just need to pick who’s escaping. ...Who do we save?” Seydon asked softly, surveying Razorlight, replacing its gleam back into its sheathe.

[member="Jorus Merrill"]

 

[Jorus Merrill]

[member="Seydon"]

“Whoever we can, is my first instinct, but instinct’s not what we need right now. There's so much injustice around that gut feeling won't help us sort out our priorities. In principle, I figure we need to focus on folks that’re getting the rawest deal and won't cause us too many problems. Probably means a bias for the young. Maybe folks that don't react well to Everpur. Maybe Zeltrons - can't be easy for an empath around here, and footage from the Grandmasters’ Senate doesn't show much pink skin. And we should probably avoid confirmed darksiders for practical reasons. They stand out on a mental level, I only had the one taozin amulet for you, and let's face it, the dark side is a mood-altering substance that most folks can't handle.

“Oh, and crappy though the situation is, we should take.your suggestion a step farther and focus on people that nobody will miss. No big visible rescues, unless there's a really compelling reason.”

 

[Seydon of Arda]

“The kids then. Youth is meant to rebel. Easier to take stock of school districts versus plummeting through heavily armed and armoured prisons or administrative fortresses. And kids have an attraction to mystery, don’t they? Maybe indoctrination hasn’t set in yet, not wholly. Maybe there’s more than a few that like to dream. Imagine what music could be, so on. Might be apt to keep a secret or three. You remember keeping some things to yourself growing up, don’t you? ...Still have to tread lightly.

“Gossip is grease-lightning in any youth culture. If someone bows out, maybe we try approaching the wrong kid, chances are they’ll blab. Word will jump from clique to clique, until adults start hearing about it. Strangers in foreign garb trying to entice their pupils and children away. You know how it was in the Republic. Even a suggestion of conspiracy was enough to turn the hounds loose. This system... Somehow, it’s even worse.

“...And we’ll have to kill,” Seydon added, eyes darkening. He flexed the muscle under a glove, feeling tendons and leather tighten against skin. “Again.”

He rose off his chair, rubbing a spot on his lumbar, and retrieving his cap. The sharp peak drove a shadow over his face as he drew up the facial cloth. “Sure our tap into their data structure is all we need. We pick a spot and see who’s got detention after dark.”

[member="Jorus Merrill"]

 

[Jorus Merrill]

[member="Seydon"]

Two hours of research and travel put them in a rezblock. The arcology’s tall, broad chambers and corridors felt cramped to Jorus. He blamed the shades of dun, clean but dingy. Orderly and ordinary. No Jedi spires here, just a few hundred thousand plebes of the billions that worked for the Orders.

“What would it be like,” he murmured to Seydon, “to be a parent here? Your kid's only real hope of making a difference or getting another life... is to get born sensitive and taken away.”

He'd brought a handy Undergrounder gadget that projected holo-fuzz, blurring their outlines and features so far as security holocams were concerned. Even so, long habit kept him turned away from the cameras that watched every other intersection.

“And what would it be like to grow up knowing you didn't measure up, that your brother or the kid next door was born special and you were destined to be their servant?”

He waited for a camera to rotate, then dataspiked a door and slipped through. The secondary school took up a quarter of three contiguous rezblock levels: it served something like ten thousand kids. A murmured chant led Jorus to a gallery overlooking an amphitheatre. Twenty kids knelt on the floor in a circle, around a small blue pyramid.

A single Jedi in brown robes walked the circle’s outer perimeter. Repetitions of the Jedi Code, in call-and-response form, percolated up to the shadows of the gallery.

“Looks like we found detention.”

 

[Seydon of Arda]

They’d ruminated privately for answers to Jorus’ heavy inquiries. Seydon gathered ‘Everpur’ was the public opiate keeping such doubts, resentment, and personal anguish at bay for want of artificially induced serenity. Until, one day, the routine of waking, making the rounds at whatever half-private or civic employment they were conscripted into, returning home for regurgitated food and regurgitated evening broadcasts and stale, flat water, going to bed with another depressant dosage, took their exacting toll and condensed the Nigelungen citizen into a binary cog. A barely self-aware function within the greater planetary machine, at beck and call, heedless of whatever unfairness faced because there was no such iniquity. There was only Everpur. And the will of the Grandmasters. And the paltry, unknowing, cuckolded will of the ‘Force’.

The middle school was a cloistered abbey. The general architectural aesthetic brought up comparisons with Nabooian polish and easy planes, gradually realizing there were no sharp corners apparent. They crept down corridors where the stone had been fashioned into undulating patterns. Like the interior of colon or an esophageal passage, bringing literalness to the ‘student body’. Seydon saw devoid walls in gradients of washed silver and old, wan grey. At intervals were gun-nailed motivational posters, each depicting differing but concurrent adages highlighting Nibelungen’s various Orders. He saw a holo-portrait of a wizened Grandmaster, nameless, floating over an archway. The elder’s smile curled up vacantly. The eyes were wrong too, Seydon felt.

“There is no emotion - “

“ - There is peace,” Intoned a score of voices, droning simultaneously. A singular sub-sonic throb swelled out from the spire of the miniaturized meditation cone. The amphitheatre echoed the buzz, tuned it to a vibration Seydon could feel tickling the small bones of his ears.

“There is no ignorance - “ The Headmaster intonated.

“ - There is knowledge.”

“I’ll distract. Get around his blindside,” Seydon murmured. He reached under his coat, behind his lower lumbar, and produced a lumpy, holed knot of wroshyyr wood. Holding a breath until he saw Jorus soundlessly demure into piqued shadow, Seydon brought the knot’s mouthpiece to his lips and began exhaling with care. Fingers plumbed the abscesses and adjusted the note.

“...What is that?” The Headmaster snapped, interrupted. The class of ‘difficulties’ paused their half-hearted dirge. A few tucked burlap hoods behind their napes and dared to turn up from the pyramidal centre piece. Freckled, acne pocked faces, some chubby with juvenile pudge, others a little sharper, leaner with maturity, all hollow-eyed. Now a little brighter with something daringly rare: curiosity. And just maybe, a little embyrionic wonder. “Excuse me? Excuse me, who’s there, this is a private recitation!”

“What was that...?” Asked a girl. Fourteen years old, Seydon guessed, and took a hard draught of air. ...Fourteen, coming off a stern flu, drowsy with medication, stressed with hormonal imbalances.

“Hush, child! You there!” The Headmaster began climbing the stairway to Seydon’s gallery. The Dunaan put the ocarina away and leaned against a gallery post. Razorlight in its scabbard waited cradled in his arms.

“...Who – What is the meaning of this interruption? I don’t know that... sound.”

[member="Jorus Merrill"]

 

[Jorus Merrill]

[member="Seydon"]

In principle, Jorus had agreed with Seydon’s assertion that violence would be needed. In the moment, however, he'd failed to find the words for the obvious caveat: as a Jedi, he wouldn't kill without cause. This situation spoke to him, illustrated the difference between the fundamental assumptions that Seydon and Jorus brought to the table.

Or else the Dunaan just knew him well enough to expect the lunge, the jab, the stun rod sizzling against the Headmaster's right kidney.

The local Jedi crumpled in a bundle of limbs and burlap, slouched between seats. “Don't think he got a good look at your face,” said Jorus, hefting the stun rod. He let that serve as his recommendation to spare the man’s life, and turned to look down at the students. They'd come to their feet, most of them, but the Everpur or the unprecedented situation kept them glued to their circular formation.

Jorus shoved the stun rod back in his belt alongside his battered lightsaber. “So this is detention - chanting the Code for an hour or two on your knees. What got you here, folks? What'd you do?”

 

[Seydon of Arda]

“Headmasters kept saying... We’re not taking to the catechisms like the others,” Said a boy. Tear-salt bleached the skin beneath his sallow eyes. He strode up Jorus, a slow pace at a time, wringing his hands through a heavy rope girdle belted across his waist.

“Who are you?” Asked another, an older girl. The cut of her robing didn’t camouflage heavy scourge bruising running like stripes over one shoulder. Her hands shook. Everpur influence had dilated her eyes wide, swallowing any iris colour. She blinked rapidly, combating the effects to have some measure of wit. Another girl folded in beside her, taking her hand.

“We didn’t do anything!” One boy stood and protested. His teeth were bared in an excruciating expression; anger, woe, pain, and too much fear and confusion. His habit looked frumpish, purposefully unkempt. “We just... I just... It’s stupid! It’s just... stupid... I wanna go home...”

“Who are you...?” The eldest girl repeated. Her hands were rigid and white-knuckled.

“He’s Jorus; a ship captain. I am Seydon. I hunt,” The Dunaan strode up and took a station off Jorus’ shoulder, looking down over the small student assembly.

“...Your eyes-!” One youth shuddered and cried, pointing up at his face.

“Don’t be scared,” Seydon held out a flat hand, fingers splayed. “Don’t be scared... You’re all very tired of being afraid. Aren’t you?”

The students shuffled in their cord-sandals, turning about furtively to each other. A few kept spying the poleaxed detention master up in the gallery, stuck against the banister with an arm hanging through a part in the wood. Smoke still wept off his stun-lashed robing.

“Are you with the courts?” Someone hissed.

“No.”

“I... I don’t understand,” A boy, on the cusp of late adolescence, moved through a part in the little crowd. “Who are you both? Really... Why’d you fry the Master? ...What do you want with us?”

“...Was that music? I mean... Was that... new music, you were playing?” A hand reached out and tugged on Seydon’s glove.

“We’re here to offer you something new. A choice,” Seydon said.

“’Choice...?’ To do... what?”

“You can stay here. Face roll call, eat vile food, listen to hammered lessons depicting your place and worth on this world, get drunk off Everpur and maybe one day, if you’re fortunate, pass away comfortably numb. Or... You can come with us. Leave Nibelungen, and from there, choose your own futures.”

“That’s nuts...” A boy scowled. “You can’t... No one leaves off world. Where are we gonna go, one of the moons?”

“No,” Seydon smiled. “Right out. Far out. Beyond the system, to any of those far away stars you can sometimes see in the twilight smog.”

“Impossible...”

“I don’t believe it...”

“It’s a trick, gotta be...”

“One of the Houses got to be testing us, that’s it...”

The hand on his arm, belonging to a thirteen year old girl, gave another yank. He glanced down and met her fitful, steady gaze. “...Do those places out there... Do they have more... music?”

“So much music. There’s no place in the galaxy that could hold all the sound there is out there. What’s your name, lady?”

“...Abbhegael.”

“Abby, shhh!”

“Oh shut up!” She turned and glared. “I’m sick of being told to be quiet! I’m sick of the medicine, the lessons! Sick of it! All of it! I won’t grow up into another deadhead! I want music! I wanna feel what I did when he blew into that flutey-thing! I wanna be alive!”

[member="Jorus Merrill"]

 

[Jorus Merrill]

“Kark, Seydon, that never clicked for me. Of course music's locked down. Nothing says emotion like music.” Jorus rummaged in his tool belt and produced a small datapad. “For one fething example…”

Strings twanged out a rapid jaunty rhythm, the closest thing Jorus knew to an anthem of liberation. The music swelled, courtesy of acoustics designed to carry lectures and approved entertainment to numb ears. The inimitable sound of the Hawkbats filled the rezblock school auditorium.

https://youtu.be/JoGweOFqapU

The music came to a close. “Now, that song’s about a toxic relationship ending. I figure that pretty well describes what your lives were going to be.” Jorus slid the datapad back into his toolbelt. “Now you've got options. Time for you to break up with the burlap brigade.”

 

[Seydon of Arda]

“Now or never,” Seydon added. “What’s it gonna be?”

Abbhegael stamped her foot, turning on the assembly. “Well don’t be deadheads, come on! We’ve all dreamed of something like this!”

“Yeah? How do we know this ain’t just a dream then?” Said a churlish boy. Surly bruises darkened the corner of a lip, hair tousled. “It’s like every little plan we come up with, there’s just another constable or some other waiting to foil it.”

“There will always be risk, and reward is never a guarantee,” Said Seydon. The little assemblage seemed to quiet, turning heads downcast, chewing on lip or waist rope tassels. “We’re offering a way, nothing more.”

“So we just... We just... chance it?” A girl raised her hand, confounded by the concept. Their lives had been regimented since their first detection of sensitivity, doubtless while still in utero. Tomorrow and every consecutive day beyond were terminally immobile and stagnant with medication and loyal, unswerving, unquestioning obedience to the will of the Grandmaster’s council. Choice and chaos were obscure concepts. Frightening in their scope and potential for unmitigated development.

“You do. I had to, once.”

“Why?”

The Dunaan pulled the cloth-mask under his chin and tucked his hat under an arm. They took in his chalky pallor and greyed out hair, the pronounced point of sharp eyeteeth, and running skeins of blue capillary vessels just under his skin. “I just had to. If nothing else, you come with us and you’ll never have to listen to anyone tell you how to feel. That will be your power.”

“We go with you, out there... We can be anything we want?”

“You can. So long as you try,” Seydon emphasized. The youths were teetering on the breadth of initial actualization. He could see ‘I’ beginning to form as light began poking through the drug-malaise in their eyes. Doctrine, dogma, were beginning to lose their iron grip. Doubt and fear still shackled their bravery.

Passing Abbhegael’s hand to Jorus, Seydon strode forward and freed Razorlight out of its scabbard. Agog students parted out of his way. He stepped and cut, driving the sword through the low meditation cone set into the black-and-white tiling. For a moment, the pyramid looked mockingly unharmed. The Dunaan snapped a gesture forward: a rocking telekine blast, enough to crack and peel back tiling and mortar, walloped the construct. It tore free off iron anchor stakes, tossing across the amphitheatre, showing off Razorlight’s bisecting cut that parted it cleanly from summit to base. The cone struck the stage, collapsing into jade dregs.

“You don’t need that. You don’t need him,” Seydon pointed up at the felled detention keeper. Then at the vaulted ceiling recessed in faint shadow. “You don’t need this. What you need - “

He went to a knee before one of the younger girls, touching to his sternum and then brow. “Are these. And the power to exercise them as you must.”

“...We’re scared...”

“Be scared! Fear is not an enemy! If you feel shame or hesitance because of fear now, don’t. ...Fear is one of the marrows of our lives and it is what gives bravery definition. If you’re scared, be scared. There is fear... And there is the Force. There’s you, right betwixt them. The only part of it that matters. You. ...You can be terrified and still make a choice.”

“...What was that word? ‘Kark?’ ...Kark. Kark! Kark it!” One boy hopped on the spot. “Kark it! I’ve always wanted to swear! Kark it! Can you swear out there??”

“Much as you want.”

“Kark yeah! I don’t know about anyone else, but Abby’s got it! Kark this place! I’m getting the kark out and I feel like I gotta pee and this is all weird and scary and I just don’t kark care!”

Slowly, the mote of rebellious jumped from youth to youth. Kark became the mantra. Some shyly mouthed it, then grew in volume. A few cast off their robes and habits to rush up in sleeping wear, showing off thin limbs and the lines of hard rib-cages. Even recycled nutrient meals were only so capable of introducing needed nutrition. The Dunaan wondered at what generation would the system of quiet cannibalism finally collapse as epidemics of wasting muscle and poor, brittle bones began striking through the populaces lower echelons. A gang of bare foot kids were now jostling around the pair. Seydon smiled wryly and caught Jorus on the shoulder.

“Come on.”

[member="Jorus Merrill"]

 

[Jorus Merrill]

[member="Seydon"]

“You missed your calling in life, you know that, right?” Jorus gestured at the sword. “Should have been a motivational speaker. I can see it now, you on stage in a suit, yuppies hangin’ on your every word.”

He paused at the door, eyeing a conduit. “One of you kids want to give me a boost?”

Ingrained obedience-as-virtue ran into their new reality and manifested as a large teenage boy asking the most fundamental question - “Why?”

“Because Seydon and I have gear to mask our faces, but you don't, and the less time you spend on camera the better. There's a lotta holocams between here and the edge of the rezblock. I'm going to short out the monitoring system in a way that'll look natural until long after we're free and clear.”

The straightforward explanation secured him a boost up to a service loft that would ordinarily have required a ladder. He cracked the conduit, tested feeds, and used a rubber-handled knife to fray two cables at a kink - an old Undergrounder technique.

His boots hit the floor; he grunted and stood up, dusting off his hands. “Security feeds are out for a little ways. Let's get to it.”

 

[Seydon of Arda]

“...Have you done this sort of thing before?” A voice asked.

“He has, at least,” Seydon propelled students along the vacant hall with a clap to their backs, anxiously noting the still-doffed detention keeper. He was gurgling phlegm and tossing now and then, babbling nonsensically whenever his rigid tongue relaxed. The Dunaan closed up behind their modest procession, jamming up with the magnetic locks with a dagger point.

“Can we play more of the music?” Whispered a student.

“Soon. Hush for now. Follow Jorus.”

They passed through silent architraves, bypassing nightly patrols boredly crossing parallel hallways and dimmed, segmented cloisters. Padding feet rebounded off drum walls. Seydon kept Razorlight silent in its scabbards but with a hand tucked up under its crossguard, trying to keep a bead on the numerous boot-steps vaulting about their floor, above, and below. Sound played mutely in the rezblock. Like as if even voices were encouraged to stay silent and immaculate. Once, holding the rear guard, Seydon briefly tucked himself and a student away in a hallway apse as torch-light swept up the hall.

Out through a low droid maintenance hatch led to a disused backstreet running down a choked half-kilometre behind the north-east corner of the block. Students picked their toes up from ragged trash and plastic litter. Through and beyond another quiet residential tower-block, they were brought to a secreted depot formed under an on-ramp curling up into a levelled garage. A non-descript low repulsor-van, subtly modified with ‘cooked’ engines and blanket transponder codes waited under sensor-cloth tarpaulin.

“In, in,” Seydon urged their gang aboard.

“Where are we going?”

“A place out of sight.”

“But... There aren’t any places they can’t find. The constabulary... They always say they can see ‘o’er all.’”

“Constables can’t see in the Dark,” Seydon said, closing up the van hatch. He vaulted into the passenger seating and looped on a thin crash-web belt, reaching over a shoulder to peel a small plate aside to peer into the aft cabin. “Everyone seated? Buckled in?”

“Yeah. ...Smells sorta manky in here.”

“Promise it won’t be long.” The Dunaan turned and shut down the forward cabin lights. Instrumentation holo-slates turned hard shadows over their faces. “...Captain.”

[member="Jorus Merrill"]

 

[Jorus Merrill]

[member="Seydon"]

The harsh light of the displays, contrasted with the cool dark of the speeder's cabin, set Jorus at ease for a variety of instinctive and obvious reasons. He relaxed into the vehicle's seat. Like all their other 'burner' speeders, hidden and not, this one had been stolen. It had been decades since he'd jacked a speeder and felt good about it. He'd just about squared his conscience with that by getting his people to focus on speeders owned by people in positions of authority with a knack for dickery. Code of the Outer Rim, line seven: only screw over those that earn it.

Darr and his boys had retuned the engines for speed and silence. The jittery kids' backseat questions and banter washed over Jorus, drowned out the speeder's limited noise. He was reminded of raising a teenager, and not in a good way. Feth, whose responsibility were these kids going to be before they could get smuggled offworld? Little twitchy hormonal problems waiting to happen. Operational security nightmares. Odd smells.

He grimaced and changed course abruptly, winding through a skyscraper jungle. They'd been making for the Hawkbat Cave; instead, he aimed for the place where the Underground had stashed the new stealth boat. "What's going on?" one of the kids squeaked. "Why're we going this way? Are the Jedi following us?"

"Nope, just changed my mind about where we're headed. You're gonna see some things you ain't seen before."

In pretty short order, he slid the speeder into the Outer Rim Coalition stealth transport and shook some hands. The crew was all Undergrounder, with a couple of his fellow Judges thrown in - the Coalition's dusty gunslinger equivalent to the Jedi. It transpired that Shenna had procured the stealth boat's supplies and redistributed them, leaving it pretty much good to go back outsystem whenever. One load of the next best thing to adolescent political prisoners would fill up the hold pretty well.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

More than a few students fought against clinically inculcated revulsion to the unknown. They’d never encountered something like a sleek-hulled black shuttle vessel in their readings, media absorption, it’s arrowhead contour like a beast out of the void many recycled House sermons orated against. It woke some out of a complacent mode; exodus was tangible and less than a dozen paces away. Abbhegael was over, running her palms across the hulling. Her fingers tried grasping in against weld lines and played over hard plasteel guide lamps drilled in under the ventral wings.

“Where’s it taking us?” A girl, fifteen, asked. Her braces knocked with her nervous chatter. She jumped, then stilled, when Seydon’s hand fell on her shoulder and squeezed carefully.

“Offworld and then out of system. To another safe house, maybe a full shadowport or a larger cruiser,” He said.

“...It’s real. It’s really... real,” Said one boy. He was missing a finger off his left hand, with the knuckle-nub capped by a tin thimble.

“Everyone go aboard,” Seydon directed. “Crew will get you situated and comfortable.”

They filed into a rehearsed line, footing up the hold ramp, under dark stanchion pillars and recessed glow-strips highlighting riveted panelling. Some of the flight crew emerged through secondary airlocks, busily putting on Corellian charms and Outer Rim spacer twangs, decked in brown coats, pistol braces, and equipment bandoleers. They were rogues, and were easily catching the students’ teenage imagination. Seydon watched Abbhegael pause at a hatch, turning round to catch his eye. She grinned, played her fingers on a make-believe ocarina, and then was gone.

The Dunaan pulled his face-cloth over his mouth and nose. “...Nothing left now. Come on. The night’s still young.”

[member="Jorus Merrill"]