In Vagrante Delicto

[Ashin Varanin]

New Cov - first world she'd called home. CIS territory once, and free before that. Before and since, but freedom wasn't all the New Covians had hoped. As a wise man said once, if everything is permitted, no one is safe.

The Peregrine slid through the docking field and rattled as the field scoured the hull. New Cov took its docking fields seriously, as well it might. The jungle's multifarious spores could make all manner of trouble for the city in the dome. Here was where she'd learned isolation, expediency, and a defensive mindset. She'd been...thirteen? Fourteen, when she left? She'd thought it would smell or sound familiar, but apparently it really had been too long. She'd been back only twice in the intervening years, once by chance and once to bury her parents.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

That one chance visit had been years after the funeral, a misguided attempt at nostalgia. She'd come here with a young woman, a smuggler whose name escaped her. The first woman she'd ever kissed, come to think of it, long after she'd left Tam Ranox for his own safety. The smuggler's name refused to materialize as Ashin exited the ship she and her wife called home.

She'd had a different face then. Her current body, the one she'd gained from Hauntruss years ago, had no genetic link to New Cov. It had never taken in the air, water, or food of this planet. She was New Cov's most famous and infamous scion, and she had no connection left.

Nothing old, anyway, at least not that old. The connection that brought her here was one from her Vagrant Fleet days. The Battle of Void Station and Shena's heavy hand had scattered the Fleet to the four corners. Some had eventually become the Rebel Alliance, the Silent Conclave, and then the Levantine Sanctum. Others had become the Fringe. And a few had simply been lost.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Ivy choked the grounded ship - one of the permitted strains, but still as aggressive as any other flora of New Cov. The ship was a Gallofree transport that brought back more memories than her home world, which wasn't saying much. Farn Engel had flown this ship before she put him back at the bridge of the Chimaera. Right back there was the snub fighter bay where she and Kol had deployed their X-wings. Back before the Sith'ari Centrality, back before the Cult of Shadow for the most part -- back when they'd fought to make the Jade Worlds independent again. Back when the Jade Empire wasn't even a gleam in Halls Kaijus' eye. This old Gallofree had seen more hell and glory than any ship she'd ever known. She'd slept with Spencer a few times on this ship, in the decks the Vagrant Fleet had used for temporary quarters. She'd been standing on this ship's bridge when she went back to Arcanix and looked at the scars. She'd come back here after Geonosis and met with the families of Rostu's victims. She'd come back here after Spencer turned the tables on Rostu and lost him a fleet of three-kilometre supercarriers.

A long, long time ago she'd even called it home.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The airlock was open, both sides. Ivy grew through the halls, wrapping around the cables that had supplied one of the galaxy's finest SIGINT suites, Ranger transceiver and all. She winced at the desecration. Engel would be livid.

No animate life met her eye or caught her senses, but gradually she became aware of fear, located higher in the Gallofree. Her jaw knotted, and she unclipped her new lightsabre but didn't ignite it. She pressed on, making for the bridge. From there, if the auxiliary access shaft was passable, she could descend onto the top of the main hull and get her choice of access.

This was certainly a trap.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

But even so, she never seriously considered leaving, and she knew they expected that. She knew, beyond a doubt, that she was being played, but she cared about that less than she cared about the mewling idiots who judged her life. As if anyone who understood power would do anything less than make whatever decision they thought best. As if their labels mattered.

All right, so she did care. Passionately. It was why her reputation had been her sacrifice. But she refused to act on it, to care in an active way. That was letting others' opinions, beliefs, emotions and agendas dictate her actions, and she did not do that if she could help it. Not even if it meant acting predictably, not if the predictable choice was her choice.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

She climbed the access shaft, a narrow ladder-tube, and looked down across the broad back of the Gallofree. The bridge was a high, isolated nodule without structural value, affording a broad field of view. A liability in combat, but the Gallofree wasn't supposed to go anywhere near violence. If a Gallofree got attacked, someone had screwed up. Engel had kept meaning to move the bridge tower, shorten it, and get in some holocams; in the end he'd settled for thicker armor.

A narrow double-layered hatch refused to open, the ship being powerless; she cut through the viewport with three quick slashes and jumped down to the main hull. Her boot-heels rang against armor plate. Head tilted, she stretched out to the Force-

And, before she could do more than get a basic sense of what awaited, a hatch opened of its own accord.

"Come in, Ori'vod."

Abruptly, she was no longer there. Or then.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Fifteen years ago
Lucrehulk-class battleship Ineluki
Sith'Ari Centrality fleet
Battle of Quintas
Unknown Regions


Massed Charon fire poured in. Ashin sensed the ship rattling around her with a detachment that should have terrified her. Her mind was elsewhere, tuning. And whether through the mentorship of Hagron or of Velok the Blackguard, her mind had been drawn towards a specific portion of the battlefield:

The black hole. And the hypergate, and the accretion disc, and the solar flare, and their mad combination. Whoever was on that brutalized corvette had her respect. She caught hints of a mind that defied observation in strange ways; there was a subtle harmonic that seemed just a tad familiar. But she'd met a lot of people in her time, and it wasn't nearly as important as the fact that the whole battlefield seemed to resonate around a small handful of scattered points in spacetime. One was the Edict, and she was afraid to send her focus anywhere near there. Another was Kalja on the SSD. Others - mostly what she took for fleet flagships - projected a measure of importance in the grand scheme. With some surprise she noted the magnitude of her own contribution.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Fifteen years ago
Lucrehulk-class battleship Ineluki
Sith'Ari Centrality fleet
Battle of Quintas
Unknown Regions


The black hole was a big one. Perhaps that was what drew her in so irresitibly. And then, like crossing an event horizon, everything changed at a fundamental level.

She could see it all, all at once. A doctorate in black hole physics permeated her soul in some length of time with multiple measurements. The Jukre understanding of the underpinnings of reality meshed unexpectedly with the Blackguard way, understanding the universe using the Force. Knowledge by Instinct, the same simple but profound trick that let her pick passwords and names out of thin air, was probably the most to blame. Certainly she hadn't meant for this to happen; she didn't know whether her influence still altered the harmonies, but in the back of her mind she assumed so, for no other reason than that everything just felt right.

She rode through the event horizon and back again.

She felt the Tzohar cook.

She stretched out and said: let this work. Let him succeed. Let him survive or sell his life for victory.

She wasn't sure if it was a prayer or a command. Maybe a little of both.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Fifteen years ago
Lucrehulk-class battleship Ineluki
Sith'Ari Centrality fleet
Battle of Quintas
Unknown Regions



Hagron had taught her to be a conductor, to guide and shape the interplay of the music at every level - to understand and appreciate timing.

Right about the time she finished poking around the respective Schwarzchild radii of the Kerr-Newmann black hole and the system primary, the esoteric became both immediate and specific. The first violin needed help, and her gut told her the right response. She knew getting back to this state of mind might not happen again, and she sacrificed that desire coldly. She'd figure something out. Right now, she had a duty to perform. And Ashin Varanin was, if nothing else, a creature of duty - duty forgotten, ignored, fouled up, but always respected.

Her eyes opened. She let her final droning hum, and the associated Jukre tuning effect, drain away as she levered herself to her feet. Her mouth tasted foul and her clothes - tan button-up and slacks, long red-trimmed, hooded coat - were crumpled and wrinkled from sitting cross-legged on the floor of the meditation chamber. The Ineluki shivered around her; shards of pinkish crystal danced on the jittering floor.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Fifteen years ago
Lucrehulk-class battleship Ineluki
Sith'Ari Centrality fleet
Battle of Quintas
Unknown Regions




The door hissed open; she staggered through. A few hours of that diaphragmatic hum and serious Force exertion had left her...somewhat below maximum capacity, no matter how she'd been stretched by the crystal. She recalled Velok's interpretation of nexus theory, how sustained channeling of a significant Force nexus could extend the user's maximum power. Sarastro had noted something similar throughout his time with the crystal. He'd never been strong before; by any galaxy-class standard he wasn't strong now, but the change was there. She'd more or less discounted the possibility for herself. Just once couldn't do anything, right?

Then again, she'd used the crystal beyond its limits, and destroyed it.

The hallway led, at one end, to the bridge, where Biljan Szeni danced a three-kilometre warship through a xenocide and coordinated the rest of the Centrality fleet. A turbolift hissed open, and a shivering Sarastro blinked at her.

"Got somewhere to be," she said. The Dark Lord nodded and moved past her, back to the bridge, surrounded by Sith. Ashin got in the recently vacated turbolift.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Fifteen years ago
Battle of Quintas
Unknown Regions



Sarastro had prepped a ship, planning to board a Charon vessel and get some action. Ashin had the codes for that ship: the Kyr'am Mureyca, a Firespray once owned by the most altruistic Sith to ever live. Ori'vod's ship. She found it nestled in a battered and chaotic docking bay. As Firesprays went, it was in good condition, boasting great shields, a tractor beam projector, a force tube, a heuristic docking collar, and a handful of lightweight armoured space suits for short-term work. Those were the relevant things, anyways. She doffed her coat and slipped into a suit while the ship came from standby to active.

"I'm tired," she said, the words flat and muted inside her helmet. "Oh, I'm so tired."

The Kyr'am Mureyca lifted off, spun ninety degrees, and blasted out of the hangar at a thoroughly ridiculous velocity, bound for a black hole. The ship's HoloNet transceiver, keyed to Velok's private network - a bit of operational insecurity that probably stemmed from his sentimentality over causing Ori'vod's death - pinpointed the furball far ahead: the Tzohar in its polar orbit, Dolomar Daktren's fleet, a hellish accretion disc, and a whole lot of Charon.

It finally occurred to her that she could die right now. Granted, Sivter could have shredded her mind, but there was an immediacy to being out in the battle that hadn't quite carried over during her hours immersed in the underlying harmonics of the big picture. She found herself going tense.

At least it woke her up.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Fifteen years ago
Battle of Quintas
Unknown Regions


Ashin drove the Kyr'am Mureyca into the mouth of hell, an unholy conglomeration of Charon asteroid ships, Imperial destroyers, hard radiation, brilliant light, absolute darkness and menopausal solar flare ejecta. And dissonance. She could taste it - how the melody of everything was close to falling apart. It frightened her.

But - she said with a sigh - fear leads to anger, and so forth, and so on, until my chains are broken and the Force sets me free. Sith Code. Joy. So she did as the holocrons had taught her, and turned her fear into usable energy, and caught a glimpse again of the crux point that had prompted her to break off her tuning and come out here to save the people on the corvette.

She was getting close. A life pod flickered away from the charred ship, heading for Red Dagger Fleet, but her instincts drove her on through the madness towards the Tzohar and its lonely polar orbit. She was still some distance away.

A transmission set her consoles aflame. It was raw, heavy, and her systems picked up on it the same way you pick up on a fist to the jaw. Someone, it seemed, was still alive there - someone who had jury-rigged or overloaded something to achieve one last message. Could she respond?

"Tzohar, this is Ashin Varanin - Tzohar, this is Ashin Varanin. On approach. Anyone alive down there?"

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Fifteen years ago
Battle of Quintas
Unknown Regions

"Varan..psht...is Tzohar actual. Do not...pssssht...I repeat, do not appro...shhht...diation hazard is...treme." Ashin slammed the communications console with her space-suited palm and juggled a couple of numbers by gut instinct. "If you want to help, set your coursssshe along vector 6, 1, 9, and preparesshh for a zero-G retrieval. If you're just here looksss around, I suggest a lesssss lethal hobby ssjuggling chainsaws one-armed in a ssshark tank."

She keyed to the new vector. Almost immediately, radiation warnings started going off. The echoes of her transcendent experience with the black hole told her all sorts of useless things. At this point, all she needed to know was: stay on the vector between the accretion disc and the stream of ejecta; radiation is bad; armoured space suits are good, even if the light armour is only designed to stop, say, solar flares while you're EV in the short term.

The black hole kept tugging her off course. The autopilot didn't want to cooperate, so she estimated the course corrections, timed them, and headed down to check the force tube and the airlock. The Firespray-class was small and automated enough that she could control all of it from the cockpit, but if someone was coming in at any kind of appreciable velocity, they'd smear all over the inside of the docking chamber. She opened a locker, took out one of the heavier suppressant foams, and sprayed it all over the room. The foam expanded to a dense, thick, slightly corrosive mattress. Better than running into steel. No point in picking up-

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Fifteen years ago
Battle of Quintas
Unknown Regions

Her gut churned; something bad. She scrambled back up to the pilot's seat and found that her approximations hadn't quite approximated well enough. She wrestled the Kyr'am Mureyca back onto the appropriate vector and angled it to orient the airlock towards where the Tzohar would be as their vectors merged. The accretion disc, edge-on, dominated the bottom half of her viewport - made it seem like she was walking on a sea of fire.

"Tzohar, this is Varanin. Ready at your discretion."

She stretched out to the Force, already tired. She was a decent pilot, but to pick someone up with the airlock without cutting him in half or smearing him across the hull, while tidal forces made the ship groan - that was something she could only do by tapping into the Force, and even then there were no guarantees. Jedi did, from time to time, make mistakes. Sometimes you throw the lightsabre and the hilt bounces off the stormtrooper's helmet. That's life.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Fifteen years ago
Battle of Quintas
Unknown Regions

Granth's speech rolled across the airwaves, his open-air debate with Sivter, his defiance of the Cult and the Charon legions they'd conjured. His ultimate threat. Onboard a little Firespray skimming above a black hole's accretion disk, walking on a sea of fire, Ashin Varanin sat back in her chair and closed her eyes.

"And that," she said to herself, "is who I get to save today."

Wishful thinking, of course. And yet the harmony of jukreshna demanded that she be here in counterpoint. Something would fit together. A new strain would emerge from the chaos that dominated this number.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Fifteen years ago
Battle of Quintas
Unknown Regions

A cold-shirt crossing took the genius from the doomed corvette, and the next minutes were a blur of profanity. Garrett yelled it and Ashin heard the intercom echo his voice. She barely needed the intercom; a Firespray is not a big ship.

And Ashin fracking punched it.

The Kyr'am Mureyca could charitably be described as a coffin riding an engine block face-first. The engines, already complaining from the sheer volume of radiation flooding the little patrol ship, whined and rattled as Ashin diverted every bit of power from weapons, comms (a non-negligible fraction, considering what she'd had to do to punch that tightbeam through) and life support. Not ray shields, or she'd cook, even in the rad-armoured light space suit. Nor particle shields, not with every Charon ship in the visible universe blowing up at once, all around her.

It didn't look simultaneous, of course. Distances of light-minutes and more were involved, but even before the light from the insystem detonations came her way she knew in her gut that this couldn't be restricted to the battle group that had been dueling Red Dragon Fleet until a couple of seconds ago. The harmonies said it was bigger. Millions of simultaneous deaths staggered her, but she desperately needed to focus on flying through rubble and flame.

After dancing on the accretion disc, of course, it all looked petty.

He'd killed them all. Holy feth.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Fifteen years ago
Battle of Quintas
Unknown Regions

"We're clear."

The radiation died away, more or less. Geiger counters in her suit and in the ship still whined enough that she was certain both suit and ship had been irradiated, perhaps to the point of uselessness and harmfulness. If she got melanoma or something from this...well, that would be irony, but it wouldn't be surprising.

As the Mureyca shot out of the mess, heading back insystem at a good clip, Garrett came up, already shooting himself up with the antiradiation meds from the standard spacer's medkit. "Much good these'll do," he said. "Gamma burns go too deep for this generic McShavvit. Trust me - I'm a doctor. We need a heavier dose and we need it within the hour or there's a non-negligible risk of generalized sepsis from all the blunt trauma I just went through. Also we will probably get cancer."

"You're fething welcome, Giles."

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Fifteen years ago
Battle of Quintas
Unknown Regions

He blinked. Ashin made a mental note, for the next time she was feeling angsty over being a Sith Lord: she'd made Garrett Granth blink. By all accounts he had a good memory. Her hair had been shorter on Trevel'ka, and they'd met rather briefly, but she was betting he'd recognize her. Not that it mattered much, if at all.

"I just blew up a representative sample of the multiverse - made a superweapon using a doctorate and some tinfoil - executed a few million sentient beings - and you're going all soap opera on me? Of course I've had alternate identities. Get with the times." He leaned up and passed her another microderm injector of radiation meds; with his other hand, he popped an assortment of pills. Ashin took off the space suit's helmet - her dosage couldn't really get worse, after all - and stuck the injector up against her carotid. It burned all the way down. She eyed the pills, some of which looked suspiciously hallucinogenic.

"Is there anything left in the medkit?" The flippancy came without thought, a balm for the echoes of all the Charon dead, and the shockingly sudden orchestral soaring of the harmonies. Not everything was back the way it should be, though. There was more to come.

"I told you. It was crap. We need more. Here." He stabbed the display with a fingertip, somewhere in the flurry of ships and planet and whatnot. "Go here. Well-stocked pharmacy bay, relatively close, and the statute of limitations is almost up..."

"It's not done," she said, losing her focus for just a second, her voice a little foggy. "There's something else. I don't know what, but I think we'd better get treated soon, or I won't even have the option of going back to Arcanix to kill things."

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Fifteen years ago
Triage station
Battle of Quintas
Unknown Regions

There were Sith dogmae for dealing with pain, but Ashin wasn't in the mood. So she just started using syringe after syringe, reminding her of a maiden aunt with a thing for ryll kor. It burned all over and all through, and she was not a happy camper. She struggled to keep up with Granth's babble. She could tolerate it. He'd just saved the universe.

"Ship? Presumably you're talking a delivery method for the gas, right? You know, the one you're supposed to be mixing so we don't all die a horribly ironic death?" Ashin took out her comlink - which was thoroughly fried. She focused on the Force to enhance her memory, and picked the requisite comm number out of the ether. She grabbed the wall phone, dialed out, and punched in.

"Let's go," he said. And it became clear to her drug-, Force-, fatigue- and radiation-addled brain that he had zero intention of cooking up a just-add-water WMD. Then again, she didn't feel any special danger over and above the general background nasty of the Quintas System.

"Wait one. Getting us a ride. You don't need to steal everything, you know."

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Fifteen years ago
Triage station
Battle of Quintas
Unknown Regions

She fished her lightsabre out of her shirtsleeve, now liberally stained with sweat, drugs, and the occasional fleck of ejecta from Granth's ongoing tryst with the sink. It reminded her of the trenches on Runnel - filth as far as the eye could see. Noticing his glance, she shrugged. "Just in case our ride doesn't arrive fast enough. I've never killed a Charon before. Not saying I'd be that good at it...but just in case. Wow. What is in this dren?" She staggered, blinking hard, as they made their way back through the hospital. "It's like my eyeballs are rolling around in the Dune Sea."

Garrett supplied a few technical terms, as was his wont. They stumbled out of the hospital. A geiger counter in the entry way thought about it for a moment and then bleeped quietly.

A big, streamlined, white starship hovered over them, a force tube projecting downwards to the tarmac. The Sith-registered BC-714 luxury transport, Clone Wars vintage, was pretty much extraneous to the Sith'ari Centrality's war effort. It was, however, faster than your momma on a bender, as befitting a vehicle designed for Neimoidian diplomats allergic to the line of fire. Furthermore, its distinctly Magrathean design ethic appealed to Ashin. She squinted under it at the distant Charon, pouring down a thoroughfare in direct contravention of traffic ordinances.