Polis Massa, 836 ABY

[Ashin Varanin]

Three and a half million for the rock and the bugs; bless Galindas Exports, and bless the name of Popo.

"Well," said the Ithorian dubiously, "your credit checks out. The asteroid's yours."

The Barabel, whose ship she'd flown for the last year, had been a pyronium prospector. And by prospector she meant thief. He'd had grand plans to sell his take to a nameless archivist he was meant to meet on Obroa-Skai, right between the Republic and the Sith Empire. Some people couldn't get enough of naturally occurring localized hyperspatial manifolds. His ship's files had held notes about a certain asteroid in the Polis Massa system, a remote little thing that, he said, had played host to a certain rival in...prospecting. It was also home to a disused defense station, halfway decommissioned: no power, at the moment. But she wasn't buying the guns and so forth, she was buying prospecting rights. Through various connections and means, the Barabel's rival had apparently kept caches on the asteroid. Caches of some really high-end things. She could double her investment. Triple it.

Quintuple it.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The asteroid was a good two klicks across, riddled with boreholes from immature space slugs. Most of those had been exterminated a while back; their silicate crap floated around the asteroid in a nimbus. She watched her step.

Part of her big take had gone to fixing up the Barabel's terrible ship. Another part had gone to getting a proper space suit for a petite Twi'lek. Human was, as ever, the baseline: when it came to space suit design, you had to shop on Ryloth or in Hutt space, or go bespoke, or take your chances. She'd picked this up off Honoghr and scooted past home without a wave, on her long way from Roche to Polis Massa. Triellus Route all the way. There was a better than even chance that the suit had been used by a slave miner; it smelled like fear and the kind of cheap recreational stimulants that Hutts gave the people they wanted to work into the ground. A non-negligible fraction of her take had gone toward cleaning it, and the ship.

The asteroid was nickel-iron, and her mag-boots worked well enough on the ore-heavy parts. The ore, mundane though it was, was the reason that perpetual sole prospecting/salvage rights had cost three point four million. If she'd had a good solid mining ship, and a crew, she could have recouped her investment in a serious way. But she had no idea how to manage a crew, or operate a mining ship, or get a crew in the first place with no money available. A backup plan, then, in case this didn't pan out. The Barabel's surveillance notes were pretty good, though. This shouldn't be too bad. The old guy he'd been tracking had paid multiple visits to this system, and this asteroid most of all. He was clearly keeping something here.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Two hundred and seven days later, Alu's credit account was empty, as was the hold of her ship. She had found no pyronium and no cache of any kind.

This is approximately when everything went to hell.

She'd blown a bit of coin, when she had it, on a comm intercept/decrypt suite for her crappy thirdhand ship (the Barabel had not been the original owner).

...is Polis Massa traffic control. I say again, identify yourself...

...vectors aren't right. Going for a close scan...

...authorized, but watch it...

...some kind of reddish growth on the hull, like conduit worms...

...space? Yeah, I know...

...say again, no individual lifesigns but an awful lot of biomass...

...reactor's running hot. Antimatter, but nothing I've ever...

...better get out here quick, before the Confed...

...reactivate the defense...

...my lord, I would not contact you on this channel except...

...the Chancellor has personally...

Interesting few hours, to say the least. Alu spent them packing. She had a little prefab shop outside her landed ship; nothing much, just prospecting tools. She lugged it all back inside as ships began to blossom in the sky. More ships than she could count. From multiple directions.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The call, when it came, was peremptory: some second lieutenant informing her that the asteroid was being reactivated. No mention of her salvage/prospecting rights, nothing. She was required to get gone.

She was no stranger to evacuations. She'd spent most of the Omni crisis last year in a refugee shift; that was where Rolf Hamur had picked her up. Or she'd picked him up; he was fading in her memory to the point where she couldn't recall how they met. Couldn't recall much except his death, his Omwati wife, the sex, and how she'd left his body in the hold when she sold the Transcendent as scrap at Nickel One. Not a moment for regrets, this.

Her old ship groaned as it pulled away, breaking the asteroid's minimal escape velocity in a heartbeat. By long-range scans, there were fleets present from the Omega Protectorate, the Republic, Black Sun, the Confederacy, and the Sith Empire. Especially the Sith Empire. Massive fleet, right beside her, bearing down on her asteroid landing ships first. Clearly they meant to appropriate and reactivate the defense assets, things her salvage rights hadn't covered. Her freighter skimmed between Acclamator analogues, but none of the TIE Taral escorts fired. They had better things to do.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Weapons fire lit up her viewport as she arced the Tarkona out of the Sith fleet's fringes. Someone had taken notice, or just decided to throw a potshot her way. She gunned the engines, feeling the old ship's groan in her teeth. And groan it did: it had some serious years behind it, to the point where she wasn't sure what the original model might be. The manuals were long gone, and the systems diagnostics suggested three different manufacturers. All of whom shared the blame for the Tarkona's poor acceleration relative to the Sith Empire starfighters attempting system dominance.

A mass landing was in progress. Someone anticipated a ground battle for control of the asteroid's defensive facilities, so troops and tech crews were fanning out in staggering numbers. Indignation flickered, but Alu had her priorities. First and foremost, determining which fleet was least likely to annihilate her if she got close. The battlefield was already going complex, highly encrypted comms scattering noise through her intercept gear.

Her gut clenched as a chevron of connected the distant Republic fleet to her asteroid. The Sith had made a critical error: the Republic was happy to eliminate the defense emplacement rather than contest it. That put an awful lot of weapons fire in Alu's way. She turned in the direction of the Confederacy, but they were fleeing the field as quickly as they'd entered it. Which left the Omega Protectorate and Black Sun. The latter was clustering around another asteroid, from with the Confederate fleet was withdrawing. The former was contesting the mysterious ship with the Republic; comm chatter was insane, boarding crews were away. Tentatively, she headed in that direction.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

...only to face a stream of small, vicious Antarian Ranger patrol ships gunning for the other side of her asteroid. They'd come from the direction of the mysterious arrival that had provoked this. But the people aboard considered themselves ethical, and nobody even popped off a shot at her. Heart still hammering, Alu entered a segment of relatively empty space. There was, she realized, a division within the Republic forces. Several different commanders: Chancellor Ardak Serifen, someone controlling the patrol ships, and also a Hapan admiral. The Hapan was an idiot playing games with herself, that much was clear. Serifen, meanwhile, was going back and forth on open comms with Ayden Cater. The Starfall looked no worse than the last time she'd seen it.

Her eyebrows rose proportional to the tension between Chancellor and Exarch. Even so, she kept her eye on finding potential safety and on the fact that her beautiful asteroid was turning into slag behind her. Hundreds of thousands of Sith troopers and technicians were dying.

There would be a metric fethton of salvage on her asteroid. Most of it melted beyond recognition, sure, but scrap had value, as did military intelligence. A plan took form. This was nowhere near the Sith Empire, well beyond its standard force projection range, which meant someone else would be taking charge; the Protectorate, probably-

Her comm suite exploded. Dead ahead, around another asteroid, parts of the Confederate, Black Sun, Protectorate and Republic forces were scattering in all directions. Attacking each other, their allies, their shipmates. A massive free-fire zone. And something tickled at the back of her mind: a whisper of unreasoning terror. Something or someone was warping the Force on a scale she couldn't comprehend.

She arced right and noped away.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

By the time she'd reached clear space, taking damage from stray fire, the shooting had mostly stopped. The Confederacy had withdrawn entirely; the Sith Empire had cut its losses and likewise skedaddled. The Republic and the Protectorate were still shouting at each other, both claiming ownership of the mysterious overgrown vessel. They'd been allies before today. From the tenor of the discussion, that was not the case any longer.

Black Sun had saved the day, isolating and destroying a thing that had produced wide-scale terror and madness. The Polis Massans, thus saith the comm intercepts, wanted to make a statue of Domino. A Republic force had engaged with an asteroid base, and found it full of...warped people. Undead, some said, like the plague that had hit Denon so hard last year.

Hovering at the edge of the battlefield, Alu turned her ship around and took serious stock of what lay before her. This might be the largest space battle in centuries, far larger than Roche -- which had claimed that honour handily. She also took stock of the Tarkona's capabilities. Cargo hold, tractor beam...

She kept an eye on the long-range scanners and settled down to wait for the cooling slag.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

And here came the salvagers, crews big and small, looking to shear apart the innumerable wrecks. Undamaged or gently used components, military-grade, untraceable, would flood the markets like it had after Roche. She'd often thought of going back and chopping into the derelicts at Roche, at least before she'd realized that everyone else had the same idea with the added benefit of preparation. There were crews, interstellar associations, dedicated to this kind of thing. In short order, they'd converged on the wreckage to starboard, where the madness had been. Others were swarming her asteroid, and that just wouldn't do.

She commed them. They ignored her. She commed again, offering to sell her salvage rights. They ignored her again. With a grimace, she gunned it and crossed the quiet battlefield. She found the asteroid half-melted and split, with a feeding frenzy around the remains of the defense emplacements and Sith warfleet. The pain of personal loss and disappointment -- a wasted three and a half million, a wasted year -- hit home more profoundly than the endless, needless death of a hundred thousand souls. That shamed and irritated her, and perhaps contributed to her dive through the salvage cloud into the deep crevices. Republic bombardment, sustained, had split and shattered the asteroid. She'd checked everywhere else. Maybe inside was the key. And to everyone else, this was nothing but an average nickel-iron asteroid with a dug-in gunpost.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The Tarkona slipped into the largest crevice. At the top, it looked like frosting dripping off the edge of a slice of cake. Farther down, where the heat hadn't reached but the impact stress of detonation sure had, the crevice's edges were sharper, more crumbling. Pebbles and boulders rattled off the deflector shields, floating in zero-gee.

It took her a good three crevices before she spotted what she'd had a hunch she'd find: a duracrete shaft sunk into the asteroid, broken. Clearly its top end had been too well disguised for her. She magclamped the ship to the rock face near the breach, suited up again, and went out for a walk. Half a klick away, the feeding frenzy continued to scour the surface. She linked the intercepts to her helmet comm and stepped out the airlock.

She clambered around the shattered duracrete and shone a light down the shaft in both directions -- both ways were dark. Lower chance of being visited while she descended. If this place had had gravity, the shaft would-

A sudden tug; she caught herself on the crumbling edge. Localized artificial gravity field turning an innocuous stretch of vacuum into a long and lethal fall. Whoever the old Whiphid had been, he'd had a grim sense of humour.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

She dragged a repulsorpack out of the ship, re-checked sensors, and descended. At the bottom was a flat permacrete surface. She shone the light around -- a chamber. A vault's entryway.

But that was what a Koensayr KUT-42 Stark Plasma Torch was for. Sure, it weighed almost as much as she did, but it had its own repulsor sled. The dang thing could shear a frigate in half. Wary of triggering or breaking something, she dialed the blade length down to about six inches and got the torch emitter right up against the vault door.

Two hours later, the door yielded, revealing a junk drawer. Loosely stacked shelves -- old books, dirty pieces of metal, crystals and all manner of nonsense. A poor reward for a year of searching, but people would buy anything at auction. "Welp," she said to herself, "I guess I'm in the antiques business-"

Vibration carried through the soles of her boots. Rubble had fallen down the shaft, and was continuing to fall. Light danced -- headlamps or glowrods focused by the long stretch of shaft. Alu hissed and began scrutinizing the vault's shelves. Her breath caught as she spotted a lump of pyronium. She grabbed that, lingered-

The rubble was still falling. She scrambled back, dragged her plasma torch into the shadows of a corner, and waited.

They came down quickly but carefully, a six-man team, lights dancing from their weapons. They noted the melted edges of the door, the gap where the lock had been, and presumably cursed in vacuum silence. They entered the vault, weapons ready. It was at that point that she stepped out and triggered both her pack and the plasma torch's repulsor sled. Blasterfire chased her up the shaft, but she got herself on top of the torch and used it for a shield.

Her crappy old ship sat there alongside something sleek and nasty. Something that could and would blast her if she tried to escape. With a grimace, she dialed up the plasma torch and engaged it. A twenty-metre bar of starfire punched into the raider ship's cockpit.

Later, she wouldn't remember getting the torch aboard her vessel or even coming aboard herself. She wouldn't remember much about flying out of the crevice with a small fortune in her pocket, but clearly that happened too.

Only after she'd left Polis Massa far behind did she call up her fence: Galindas Exports.

"It's Alu'ravenor. I've got my hands on some more of the...stuff."