Freedom

[Ashin Varanin]

The Razorhawk fit her like a glove, the kind that the fanatical Jedi of the Pius Dea era had used on recalcitrant Padawans. It crushed her wounds. Too loose and her slim frame would slip right out of the Razorhawk's uncompromising, compassionless frame at a hundred klicks an hour, two hundred metres above the ground. Drogheda's sun didn't compromise either, not this far into the badlands where Silk had its refit yard and atmo flight test range. She'd taken an open-top speeder out here from the yard, a Silk-9 with the Razorhawk in the truck bed. Her security detail made a loose half-klick perimeter, and two Silk employees -- both qualified instructors -- wore Razorhawks as well. On a different schedule from her, they met her here.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

"Keep your distance," she said in a voice that brooked no compromise. "I'll do this alone."

The faceless, interchangeable instructors drew back, and she pitched her voice low. A charm of protection rose from the depths of the minds within her mind, the lives she'd never lived. Something from Velok's lor pelek heritage, or his Blackguard packrat identity. The charm hummed, louder in her soul than with her voice. The instructors couldn't hear her, shouldn't hear her, but they flinched.

Eleka nahmen nahmen
Ah tum ah tum eleka nahmen
Eleka nahmen nahmen
Ah tum ah tum eleka nahmen

Whether the charm had any power, she didn't know. She had no taste for magic, but Velok had been more gourmand than gourmet. Selka put her trust not in omniscience but in her power to choose, whether or not her abilities proved equal to the task at hand. The charm, once complete, was an embarrassment .

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The Razorhawk exoskeleton, if you could apply that name to it, weighed eleven kilos. In the desert, that meant a lot when she'd been carrying it, but once its weight was distributed around her body it manifested mostly as a drag on her hands and feet. That was fine; she could throw a punch, but close-range combat was not her forte. If someone got that close to her, she'd made a mistake.

She swivelled her upraised hands, pointing the palm repulsors at the ground, sky, ground, sky -- feeling the weight of them, and how they changed her wrists' rotation. She left them powered off, or tried to; the wrong unconscious half-gesture triggered one, jamming her right arm back, twisting her upper body before she could turn it off. A moment's new-student panic was another shame.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

From a life that wasn't hers, she remembered teaching Jacen Cavill to fly, even if Velok had never mastered flight. She'd started by throwing him and the entire class off the top of one of the statues in the Valley of the Dark Lords, and letting them learn to float down. Such abilities were beyond Selka Ventus, at least at this stage. Her gifts were specific, her tricks unexceptional, her power unimpressive enough to earn her a failed and truncated career in AgriCorps. Even softening a fall was too crude, too overt for her, required too much direct influence on the material. It was the immaterial where she shone, and then only in a single aspect of the Force.

But today was not about the Force. Today was about replacing power with skill. She couldn't fly with her spirit, but she could learn to fly with her brain.

The Razorhawk Maneuvering System threw her pinwheeling into the sky.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Helplessness, lack of control of a situation, felt like fear, felt like weakness, made her hate herself more than it engendered anger. She found the right gestures and the repulsors roared to aligned life, scattering flat fragments of hardpack in a vain attempt to keep her from striking the ground. Impact knocked the wind from her. She held the instructors back with an upraised hand, a gesture that -- between the known danger of her palm repulsor and the potentially guessed hazard of the Force -- might or might not have been a threat. They got the hint. Selka picked herself up, brushed the long stripe on back and butt where she'd run into the ground, and shook dry flat clods from her hair. Once more, she rose into the air.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Six years later, and feth, she was still bad at this.

Here and now, she could feel for a moment like nothing else had changed. Drogheda's salt flats certainly hadn't, though drive efflux had scored dark lines on the distant plains. The Silk starport hadn't. The faceless guards and instructors hadn't. Even the Razorhawk hadn't; there was no Mark Two. Repulsors flaring gently, she twirled a good fifty metres above ground. She spun, she soared, and she thought about money.

Not her own; she had enough and to spare. No, she thought about the company's funds, its successes, its outlays. She'd sat on the board for a long, long time, her tenure as interim CEO almost forgotten. Some of the other board members had vague ideas of grooming her to retake the chair. The rest looked back at her erratic returns -- immense success and growth, punctuated by a period of serious meh. They looked at her deficient formal education and her poor math skills. They looked at her with tolerance, but not respect.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

She couldn't move or think fast enough to compensate for the Razorhawk, just like she couldn't think fast enough to outmaneuver the others -- human, Selkath, Droghedan -- at the top of the Silk Holdings food chain. There'd been a time when she could take a hit better than this, and she'd gotten good at failure. That didn't make her more capable of succeeding.

Ori'vod the first. Arianna Windrider. The name and face occupied her thoughts the more closely she linked herself to the personality and memories she'd taken from Velok. Windrider the blademaster, the Mandalorian, the Prophet of the Dark Side. Petite, wiry, flat and lethal. Velok's...friend, and his sacrifice. She'd gone toe to toe with the Rhandites in their own domain, prophecy for prophecy. She'd been able to choose futures. She and Velok had spent a long time talking, once upon a time, sharing the tricks they'd used to take down Dark Lords. What had she said about precognition, in the short term?

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Selka's face twisted as the Razorhawk spun her around, high above the unforgiving ground. "Remember," she snarled at herself, the fogginess of all memory compounded by the fact that she hadn't earned these ones. Hadn't lived them. "Remember-"

Her head tilted in thought, and the Razorhawk chose to send her into a cartwheel, streaking for the ground. She rolled out of it, goosed the repulsors, and shot for clear sky again with a blonde woman's face in her mind's eye. Windrider had been a duellist first and a precog second, but she hadn't seen the distinction. Maybe, just maybe, Selka could find a similarly efficient confluence in the study of flight. She'd tried it before, in terms of honing instinct, but never treating flight instinct as actual precognition. Hovering, she wondered if it would work.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Down below, a Tionese Whiteguard waved a signal to her. She cut the power to the repulsors and fell, then engaged the Repulsorhawk lattice again and bobbed to a halt a couple of metres from the hardpack. She descended the rest of the way slowly.

"Ma'am," said his filtered voice, "it's Mr. Gekooru." Her senior on the board, an old Selkath, as close to a mentor as she had. She took the comlink and did her level best not to let her heart hammer.

"Aqui?"

"Hello, Selka," said the even, polite voice of Gekooru's translator droid. "I just got off the holocomm with Granth, and I'm sorry. The last few votes are in."

Her knuckles cracked audibly. So that was it. She wouldn't be getting Silk back, not for a second term as interim CEO and maybe never. "Thanks, Aqui. Thank you for everything, really. You did your best, and I won't forget it."

"Listen, Selka. There's an opportunity here, something way out of left field. It might fit for you. It does fit you, and what I mean is, you might have a shot."

 

[Ashin Varanin]

"An opportunity?"

"Stern and Vogler just folded. The new AEI statutes forbid a buyout-" Which wasn't entirely true, but he wasn't about to talk about that little bit of gray area on an open comm, encrypted or not. "-but they're already part of the Silk Family of Companies. And it turns out they need an interim CEO."

Rave Merrill's suicide had left a hole in that area of the galactic economy. She could sympathize, but in the end-

"What makes you think AEI would be interested in me?"

"You'd be a step up. Former CEO of their parent company and all. Wilkes thinks the debt-equity ratio is in better shape than it should be, and more to the point they're looking for someone who knows hyperlanes. New hyperlanes. You worked with Jorus and Alna, you flew with the Vagrants, you've been all up and down our new ports on the Mara...well, Akure has been blazing a new lane right through the Unknown Regions, the long way around."

"You're joking."

"Not at all. They're calling it the Blood Trail. Something funny?"

"One of Rave's jokes. How long?"

"Galactographically, three times as long as the Mara, through space ten times as dangerous. It was supposed to link the Fringe Confederation with Mandalorian space, but who controls the Braxant Run is an open question. Meaning Akure isn't sure how much of the project can be salvaged. They're looking for an expert; I've got it on good authority they'll settle for you."

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Selka squinted up at the Drogheda sun. The repulsor lattice hummed and vibrated around her, and she levitated a couple of metres off the salt flat, comlink routed through an earbud. "Aqui?"

"Yes?"

"What are our tech-sharing agreements with Akure?"

"In flux. They were merging with Iron Crown, but when Rave Merrill died she left it to the Fringe again. Laundered parastatal, if you will. Oh, she reformed it to private sector standards and such..."

"Right. Would the board, our board, agree to sell the kind of tech a new lane that size would need?"

"Debatable. Like I said, an opportunity, but not necessarily-"

"Got it. Is anyone waiting on an answer from me?"

"If you gave the Akure board a call within the next eighteen hours..."

"Ah."

 

[Ashin Varanin]

"I need to think."

"Eighteen hours, Selka. Maybe less. This could be everything."

"Or a boondoggle." On the one hand, AEI had the kind of executive base that simply didn't care if its CEO turned out to be, say, a Sith. It had been built from the ground up by a Master of the Dark Side who likewise didn't care if the public knew what she was. Frankly, she might not even need to wait for her cover to get blown. She could go public in AEI, insulated from the bulk of the galaxy, and...hardly anyone would care, off the top of her head.

But she liked the secrets. That was the Velok part of her talking, or maybe it was the part of her original self that had chosen to become Velok.

"Do you think I should do it, Aqui?"

"I don't know. I do know you'll never be entirely happy as just a shareholder with a comfortable seat."

 

[Ashin Varanin]

"You should also know, Selka...I had a talk with a couple of our counterparts at Akure. I talked you up, and I told them about your knack. I didn't oversell it-"

"I don't mind."

"Akure does a lot of business in containment, and of course they got their start in what you might colloquially call artifacts. They don't have many alchemists left -- virtually all of their alchemists lost their memories or, well, died when Rave Merrill did."

"I'm no alchemist, but I'd like to think I know what I'm looking at." She stripped off the Razorhawk, stowing the pieces in a padded case. The maneuvering system came apart a little too easily for comfort. She tossed the hardcase in the back of the truck and sat on the tailgate.

"They're a mess of discontinued products, rebranding angst, shaky contracts, shared rights and capital outlay. What they need, Selka, is to take a look, a serious look, at where and what to cut. Merrill screwed them."

"And you think I can help with that?"

"Selka, I'm a Shasan. I know you, of all people, know exactly where to cut."

 

[Ashin Varanin]

"So let's sum up."

It was forty-eight hours since she'd gotten the call from Aqui Gekooru. Forty-eight hours of tough decisions, reallocations, embarrassed realizations and very little rest. Forty-eight hours of briefing material -- so much of it that AEI had imprinted it in flash memory and buzzed it straight into her head. To say nothing of meetings, reading, tours...and that all on top of what she already knew about Silk's little sister.

"AEI's assets are as follows, if I'm understanding the situation correctly. One half-finished hyperlane through the Unknown Regions, three times longer than the Mara Corridor. The...refund...from Iron Crown Productions. A slice of the Tion Hegemony Trade Nexus. Several farms and slaughterhouses, primarily terentatek, across the galaxy. Uplift facilities. Containment facilities. Patents on exclusive alchemical processes and a wide range of innovative but out-of-stock personal gear...most of which we can't currently replicate. Ongoing contracts for, among other things, tinned meats bound for the Grand Army of the Republic, and the cleanup and containment of Dromund Kaas. All of you concur that AEI needs ambitious new product lines, utilizing existing facilities and sentient capital.

"I'm not the sort to come in with a preconceived idea of what needs to change. Don't take that for indecision: I intend to listen to all of you, get the clearest possible picture of the moves AEI needs to make, and then make them as efficiently as possible."

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Broadly speaking, Akure Executive Interstellar's facilities and locations fell into two main regions. The first included Kyrikal 17, Laekia, Etti IV, Cadomai, Tash-Taral, Rudrig, Eclipstica, Bosph, Lianna, the Tion Nexus and Dromund Kaas -- the Trans-Hydian and beyond; Levantine space; the Corporate Sector; the Tion Hegemony. That region held the bulk of AEI's manufacturing and distribution capacity. The second region centered on the Blood Trail: Muunilinst, Kad V, Kalee, Serpena, Esfandia, Solovarna, and Sharb. Then there were outliers: Aza'zoth, the Colluctari Nebula, Wren'goa Station, and Otherspace. Otherspace operations had run into difficulties due to Rave Merrill signing over Jen'asha Station to some doubtless-worthy outsider. The AEI prospecting teams were using Otherdrived -- Otherdriven? Otherjumped? -- cargo containers and a basic space platform, and ore shipments had slowed considerably. Aza'zoth had a terentatek farm and that was about it; it had been a Fringe world, and the One Sith had been using it to grow Sithspawn, handwaving past the planet's ownership. Plenty of useful intel was coming from the AEI facility and transports, but the fact remained that Merrill's sentiment for Aza'zoth -- she'd been the Keeper of the Dark Forge -- weighed nothing next to the transportation costs. Aza'zoth was suitable for a remote storage sort of facility, a backup for terentatek genes and alchemical samples. It was not suitable for a critical link in AEI's production chain, whatever that chain would wind up looking like.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Left tacit, though not entirely so, was something that might be called relief. Rave Merrill, for all her ingenuity, had spent far too much time in the labs and workshops and forges to be genuinely good at business. She'd ridden a unique idea and a unique personal skillset to success, but Selka couldn't help but shine in comparison, at least in the business aspects of things. Years on the Silk Board of Directors and as CEO before that -- oh, and she wasn't publicly a Nightsister Elder and Sith Master, which had the marketing department salivating. Jedi-trained, but Jedi washout, Vagrant Fleet pedigree...it had just enough edge to be respectable to That Crowd, but looking at Selka's resume it would be clear where her priorities lay.

And since AEI was already associated with Rave, the damage done, the fallout really might not be that bad if she was outed as a Sith in one way or another. It might even help. Force knew Rave had hired so many alchemists by the power of reputation along, promising them instruction that she'd eventually taken away. For the sake of appearances, Selka might need to get a little deeper into alchemy herself. She'd masterminded the Deicide Oculus but hadn't had the power to pull it off; she'd needed Rave and Spencer Jacobs for that. Plenty of theoretical knowledge, but not a lot of relevant...skill.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The other thing that escaped her was the peripheral nature of AEI's locations. Outer Rim, Wild Space, Unknown Regions -- Silk had done the same, but Silk had been focused around the Mara, which was in the Rim. Looking at this particular map, at AEI's presence in the Corporate Sector and Tion Cluster -- two of the galaxy's three most powerful economic regions, by some measurements -- she couldn't help but look at the third and ask why aren't we in the Core?

Not the Deep Core, where travel was near-impossible, radiation was high, and Sith lurked around every corner. The true Core -- Coruscant, Duro, Balmorra. Even just places where the Perlemian reached those massive markets. Hapes, maybe. Taanab. Chazwa. The Ktilac Regions. Nouane. Immensely accessible from AEI's central manufacturing capabilities, and directly between them and the Mandalorian end of the Blood Trail.

Expansion of manufacturing was out of the question. Expansion of sales markets needed to happen right now.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Then she met with Legal.

Rave Merrill's 'last will and testament' had played somewhat fast and loose with company assets; this had earned the outgoing alchemist few friends. Some of those assets, like the secret facilities at Fort Elsa and Jen'asha Station, were not currently recoverable for reasons of not pissing off Darth Arcanix.

Others, like the four hundred terentateks Rave had spirited away, were just sitting there.

Turns out Selka Ventus didn't much care about due process, and jurisdiction was fuzzy anyway. Arceneau might be pissed -- her people had been recorded locating the first half of the alchemical 'key' -- but that was Arceneau's problem. The terentateks belonged to AEI, whatever Merrill had been trying to do with them. To add insult to injury, a genetics facility had recently been raided-

Suffice it to say, AEI reappropriated those terentateks less than six hours after Rave Merrill signed on as CEO.