Reentry

[Audren Sykes]

Location: Kyrikal

He'd picked a good spot; Kyrikal 5 was as close to ideal as he could have hoped for. It was well off the beaten pat but developed enough that he could keep an eye and ear on the galaxy if needed. Remote, but with enough traffic for ships to be relatively common. Enough people for him to blend in yet plenty of space to disappear into. And disappear he did.

The Sephi had grown weary of the whole situation with the exception of his companies, and it had already been handily proven that he didn't have to be present to run them. Just some trustworthy people at the top and the occasional good Holonet connection. He absolutely had that for Ceredir - it was almost like Korynn had been groomed to run the company. There were a couple promising people at TransGalMeg, notable among them one Athin Blaise, but nothing concrete yet. Hence the solid Holonet connection.

So without a word to the Silver Jedi or Galactic Alliance, Audren left. It had been surprisingly simple: he already had some ships and not much to transport. No Padawans to train. The largest difficulty had been securing a place to live. The land purchase was done through a series of cutouts and middle-men, and had resulted in as anonymous an ownership as was legally possible. It wouldn't be impossible to track him to, merely difficult. The residence had been designed by a friend and built by contract workers shuttled in blindly by pilots under Ceredir's employ. All in all, the place was as disconnected from his name as it could be. Not bad for someone of his background.

 

[Audren Sykes]

The land procured was optimal for his purposes. It ranged far, fifty square kilometers at least, and was untouched by the developing world. The size had of course raised some eyebrows but fewer than it would have in the Core. Here in the far Outer Rim land was still plentiful. A farmer could purchase a plot and grow enough crops to feed a town with room for a dozen neighbors on either side...all doing the same thing.

While the plot was ideal for growing things, it wasn't set up for farming. Most of it was covered with thick forest. Not the heavy jungle of the type he'd originally called home, but a healthy expanse of wildlife and plants. It wasn't just forest either. It backed up to a fair-sized lake, several streams, and steep hills bordering on mountains. None of the wide open needed for farming, and none of the tameness of a planned or cultivated forest. This was untouched but for the alterations that Audren made.

Those adjustments were minor at best. Where some might purchase droids or hunters to go through the area and clear it of predators, or perhaps stock it with prize hunting game and turn it into a private hunting reserve. Maybe clear out the underbrush and forge some footpaths or a road or two through the trees. He did none of that, left the entire place as it was. Well, almost the entire place. He did make some changes near his dwelling but strove to make them as minimally invasive as possible. He was not here to colonize after all, but to blend into the background.

 

[Audren Sykes]

The dwelling that had been built...that was something else. There had been many options available to him of course. After all, who would judge him? Very few people would ever see the place, and of those only a handful would know him. He could be as austere or as grandiose as he wanted without even needing to consider the opinions of others. Yet another disconnect from the greater galaxy. Though he typically chose his own way, he had to at least consider how his actions would be viewed, how they would affect him, his companies, and others around him.

Audren had been tempted to choose the extravagant. He'd seen the castles that some Sith had, focuses of dark power that oozed shadows while causing fear upon any who glanced on their walls. Would it not be fitting to make their antithesis? Yet nobody would see it. Nobody would care but him, it would affect nothing for a whole lot of effort. On the other hand though he had no desire to live in a barebones hut.

The final design was something between mansion and hut. No castle here, in a place that was supposed to be hidden retreat rather than stronghold. A normal house, though much larger than he needed for personal use. Room enough to host several guests comfortably as needed. Heck, who was he kidding: the place was big enough to host a board meeting and the entire board of directors. Two stories, no more. No need for more. The exterior was built with durability in mind, yet with a stateliness that suggested more. It was beneath the canopy, though there were enough breaks to allow light through. Foliage left on the roof concealed what little the canopy did not.

 

[Audren Sykes]

The dwelling - he couldn't bring himself to call it a house - was two stories tall and was clearly separated into three separate sections. The central area contained the primary entrance, where stone steps led up to a pair of doors taller even than a Wookiee. It also held a dining hall, fully equipped kitchen, and somewhat formal gathering room with holoprojectors and decorations one would expect to see in such a place. The right 'wing' (when looking at the front of the place) housed a workshop designed to allow the inevitable repairs that would be required as well as a small but well-stocked armory. In contrast, the left was more or less dominated by what was best termed a workout room. Plenty of open space for combat practice, with various sorts of equipment along the walls or in concentrated sections. A small conference room was also present.

Living quarters were almost universally on the second floor and could be accessed by stairwell. As the place wasn't symmetrical, the number of rooms varied between sides. In addition, the geometry was subtly off in areas. The amount of steps between each door was almost never exactly the same, which made it difficult to tell that some rooms were sized differently than they should be. Someone performing calibrated measurements would be able to tell, but most would simply have a stray thought that something about the room wasn't quite right. It was the secret rooms and passages, of course. Nearly all the rooms were accessible in ways other than their primary entrance, though the methods and access sizes varied. The access wasn't necessarily obvious from the hidden side either. Practical at times, especially for concealing rooms such as his private study, but also put into place just because he thought it was cool.

For all that it was excessive, it was also fairly plain. The gathering rooms had panels that would display decoration when turned on but otherwise appeared to be part of the walls. The guest rooms were decorated but were typically kept shut unless someone was actually using them. The rest of the place was utilitarian, undistracting. It fit his personality.

The hidden portions wouldn't be very useful if they were recorded. So they didn't appear on the official blueprints. Or the unofficial ones for that matter. He'd personally drawn over the blueprints after performing research on such styles of architecture, then had the second story completed by labor droids. Once the work was completed he personally deactivated each droid, then removed and destroyed the memory units as well as the re-written blueprints. The machines were placed into storage for future use, either with work around the place or for the Sephi to teach himself about automata. It was no use having secret rooms and passages if the information was available for others.

 

[Audren Sykes]

Remote though it was, with few - if any - visitors expected, Audren still could not ignore security. It occurred to him that he could go the whole nine meters of a paranoid hermit and have the property set up with full defensive measures. Those could include a planetary-grade shield, defense guns, mine fields, armored walls, and battle droids. Except that he wasn't a paranoid hermit. He wasn't looking to withdraw from the galaxy, just from influencing galactic affairs.

Certain basics were necessary, of course. Passive sensor units were set up along the perimeter, either buried or planted within the various foliage. Concealed holocams could provide real-time video and audio or could be set up to simply watch for abnormal motion. More concealed holocams watched the grounds immediately around the house. He had the Force as well, but that was not insurmountable. The walls were not armored by any means, just durable; while they would take a beating, they were not designed to withstand an all-out assault. In fact, there were only two rooms in the place that were: the armory and his study.

There was a hallway that was reinforced as well. It was his escape route, designed to be closed behind him in the event of facing overwhelming force. Some might call it cowardice, others would say it was living to fight another day. That tunnel led to a small hangar large enough for just a single ship. The hangar was seamlessly concealed in the cliff face and would take tremendous amounts of concentration and effort to get to let alone into, and they had had to find out about it first.

Not a fortress, but a retreat. Given the location, Audren dubbed it Gwaiaun: Wilderness Sanctuary in his native language.

 

[Audren Sykes]

In his time away, Audren didn't let himself slack off. He estimated that about half of the time that he was on his property was spent outdoors. He'd grown up outdoors in an environment much more dangerous than this and was now better trained and equipped. A walk in the park, predators and all. He hunted for his own meat, gathered the other food he ate. He didn't use the Force for the hunting...that would have been cheating, unfair, and possibly of the Dark Side.

He didn't ignore other areas either. His Force senses were kept as sharp as ever through the monitoring of his land. Speed and motion by moving around various parts of the environment, typically giving chase to the creatures that inhabited it. Stealth by sneaking up on them. Fire and thickly-wooded areas didn't match, so every so often he'd find himself at a lake and practice pyrokinesis there. When some superstitious hikers inadvertently saw the show from a distance though, he had to lay off for a while. His mind was kept sharp by studying the schematics of his own company's ships, studying the droids with him, and designing new ships and devices.

Nor was he bound to his plot of land. He did occasionally make trips into the nearby cities for various purposes, or offworld. Much of his offworld travel was business-related, and very rarely did he find himself involved in situations requiring a Jedi. Such situations tended to be noisy however, so occasionally his description stuck around. Whether that description accurately described him was in the air however. He'd learned the basics of disguising himself from Galactic Alliance spooks, and with the vastness of space even minor differences were enough to throw identities into question.

 

[Audren Sykes]

The Sephi did not work to gather information. That was not his business; if it was, he'd be far busier than he currently pretended to be. He didn't even keep an ear out for news about the galaxy's state of affairs. Yet when he traveled, he heard things. Charros for instance, or rumors that a contingent of Silver Jedi had traveled to Alderaan. Another attack on Ossus came out of the woodwork as well as the unexpected news that Arisa Yune had resigned as Grand Master and largely disappeared. There were even rumors that the Galactic Alliance was starting to follow a dark path, but who knew what truth was in rumors about the other side of the galaxy.

Audren didn't follow up on the rumors, didn't stick around to even listen further. Not his problem. Yet...there was something else. Something on the edges of the horizon that had toughened spacers shutting up fast. They were nervous. Yet when the Master stretched out with the Force, he couldn't sense anything untoward. No massive and ominous threat in a particular direction, nothing out of the ordinary. One time encountering that sort of behavior was an aberration. Twice was a coincidence. But three, four times? That was a pattern.

Upon returning to Gwaiaun, the Jedi Master decided to meditate. He'd meditated during the time he'd been away, but not like this. He'd never been very good at it after all. To the wilderness he headed, divesting himself of almost everything unnatural; clothing and his lightsaber were all he kept with him. Into the Force he stepped, centering himself first in the small area that was his home, then releasing control and merging into the greater stream of things. As always there were pools of conflict and of peace throughout the galaxy, through which he could tentatively identify borders. There was no map of course, and no real indication of anything terribly wrong.

Nearly a full day into the meditation, Audren had just about decided to end the attempt. Clearly he was missing something. It was then that the bare sliver of his gift of premonition came into play. Events in the galaxy started to speed up, and his view changed just slightly. Through the ripples caused by peace and war, he could barely detect the cables that tied events together. It was at the edge of his vision, like a shadow moving in a twilight forest...whenever he tried to sharpen his vision, focus on it, it would slip away. All that remained was the sense of growing tension. Something was coming.