The Vagrant Sidestep

[Jorus Merrill]

ANSION

These stages of a voyage were always dull. This was because anything civilized was, in general, boring. There wasn't much closer you could get to Sith territory than Ansion, close enough that the whole planet might blink wrong and find itself in a red-and-black color scheme. But for the moment, Ansion was still neutral, and it only really had to be neutral once.

Jorus had no real intention of landing, but the D'Lessio's stores needed repleneshing. Still, Ansion was just the first of this route's worlds that claimed to be the end of the line, the last outpost of civilization. He'd run down the Namadii Corridor to get here, though it had been touch and go after Dorin. Sith lines of control only constituted a narrow corridor above the galactic plane, and he'd dipped away from the Corridor to go under it, but patrols were still thick. The One Sith were no joke these days.

Ansion -- the end of the Corridor, or close enough. Insignificant world, unexceptional. Plains and grasslands. Lots of tradition, lots of carbs. It had been a long time since he'd made this run, and Ansion travel bread had saved his life last time. He decided to get food elsewhere. Gilatter Eight would have to do.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

GILATTER VII

"No, I don't have a landing permit. I'm trying to reach-"

BLATTBLATTBLATT

Jorus threw the D'Lessio into a flat spin as aft shield indicators flickered like candles in a gale. The One Sith, it appeared, were encroaching in this region. As in, on his six-o'clock. Well, feth.

He half expected Beyyr's roar to resonate through the recently modified ship, but the old Wookiee was off with Mara, ten thousand parsecs away. Underground resistance fighters, men and women he'd known for years, had the guns and the gear, but it wasn't the same. Beyyr could anticipate his maneuvers and time the turret fire to match. And today, that would have been enough to make the difference between a temporary victory and a quick exit.

A sour taste in his mouth, he threw the lever for the Rago Run and the planet Sinton. Cannon fire chased him out of realspace.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

SINTON

didn't have much to recommend it. The Rago Run qualified as a hyperlane only in the most technical sense, Sinton was the definition of a backwater -- it had once been subjugated by an Imperial mechanic -- and it was only a single jump from his pursuers. So he hurried on.

Because there was no point in tipping his hand: Sinton was a hub of Underground activity and recruiting. A civilization enslaved by a mechanic didn't easily forget that kind of resentment or humiliation. And this close to the One Sith, there were plenty of Sintonese frightened and angry enough to consider doing something about it. He made a quick tightbeam transmission to a certain satellite on his way to the jump point on the other side of the system. Sinton didn't even have space platforms for customs; tariffs and fees were levied upon landfall. He had no intention of making landfall.

The next link in the Rago Run was Rago itself, but Burska was just off the road, and he took a serious look at the data. His last run through here had been relatively quick. Rago was bland, bland, bland, and he could stock up on consumables for the trip ahead. Burska, however, was a hellhole wildlife preserve characterized by gundarks and head-sized hailstones. It would also add a couple of days to the trip. He set course for Burska nonetheless, aiming to tune up the recently modded hyperdrive.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

BURSKA

The Barloz-class medium freighter, hull battered by incessant hail and serious wildlife, lay half-buried in the tundra like a wreck. Up close, from the D'Lessio's cockpit, the Barloz definitely gave that impression.

An impression that had been carefully cultivated by agents of the Underground.

Jorus unbuckled and took a short-range scan of the area. No lifesigns for klicks. No need to run into a gundark pack or some park ranger scouting party. He checked the scanners again after he finished strapping himself into cold-weather gear -- no visitors. Not a soul in sight.

The winter hit him like a shockboxer's hook. He wasted little time in crossing the tundra, knee-deep in snow, and keying in the code to the Barloz's airlock. Stale, musty air greeted him as he stepped inside, but he sealed the hatch as quickly as humanly possible. A little smell was nothing; it was a bit warmer in here than outside, or at least it was out of the wind.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

BURSKA

He wasted relatively little time in uploading the ship's sensor recordings. Here at the north pole, the curve of the planet didn't obscure readings of the jumps that fit the system plane. There was little eccentricity involved, another good thing. The Barloz had been outfitted with high-efficiency passive sensors, passive only.

His lapel comm crackled. "General?"

"Yeah. Looks like the data's good. Travel records for the last two years. Plenty of quality nighttime viewing for you, Burrt."

"Right you are, sir. You know I love a good passive intercept."

"That's what I hear." He pulled the datacard and closed the console's access hatch. "Coming back out right after I check the consumables. This place is still a functional safehouse if we ever need it."

 

[Jorus Merrill]

RAGO

was the next step, the next end of the line -- many places claimed to be the end of the line. Absolutely vanilla, totally insignificant, right at the edge of Wild Space. It was, of course, the perfect place for another safe house, but this one had a housekeeping droid and a rerouted comm bouncer, and everything checked out. No need for planetfall. Not even for food, as it turned out: an orbital refueling station had enough freeze-dried tomo-spiced Karkan ribenes to fill up the empty spaces in the D'Lessio's hold.

"Going down the Choke?"

Jorus glanced up at the cashier, a tattooed Ishi Tib. "Yeah."

"Better watch yourself down there. Flares. You been before?"

"Yeah. The flares are new, though."

"Had a big Corellian ship get straight-up disabled in there. Had to tow it out with some of those craphill Subach tugs."

Jorus' eyebrows rose. "No joke? And they made it out too?"

"Mostly."

"All right, I'll keep my eyes open. Thanks for the heads up."

 

[Jorus Merrill]

MURGO SYSTEM
WILD SPACE

Murgo was in Wild Space, which meant that it was mapped in the loosest possible sense. General number of planets and moons known, nothing more. Not much lived in the Murgo System these days, not that Jorus knew about anyway, and the D'Lessio's sensors didn't reach far enough to make a serious appraisal of the place. If it was that easy, someone would have done it ages ago. He wasn't here to map the Murgo System, though. Despite his layover at Burska, time really was of the essence.

Now for the long burn. Past Murgo, two binary star systems played merry hell with mass shadows. Navigating the Murgo Choke took long periods of sublight interspersed with short jumps. The D'Lessio's new engines and navicomputer were probably up to it, but it could wear on you, a place like this. If you weren't born to it, anyway. Jorus couldn't have felt more comfortable, here in the middle of absolutely nowhere. He'd never liked the Core-centrism of the phrase 'middle of nowhere' anyway. Not a lot of substance went into where any given soul set their center. If the Murgo Choke had been his home, his base of operations, this would have been here and Coruscant would have been a long way out into the cold.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

MURGO CHOKE

"Seriously, General, it had to be ribenes?"

"Yup."

"Barclay's in the 'fresher for an hour a day."

"It burns. Force, it burns."

"Well, he shoulda washed it down with something less spicy. Like bedjies."

"General, a man can't live on bedjies."

"No, he needs tomo-spiced Karkan ribenes. And bedjies. Balanced diet made me what I am today. Barclay!"

"Yessir?"

"I don't have a solution for ya, son. Spice is spice. Just be grateful it wasn't the other kind of spice. I wouldn't want to be navigating the Ring of Fire while tripping balls."

"Yessir. Going easy on the tomo-spiced ribenes next time, sir."

 

[Jorus Merrill]

MURGO CHOKE

"All right, folks. You've got the rhythm of the ship down now, I think. Two weeks out here, you've all had a chance to get behind the controls for sublight and for short hyperjumps. You're starting to get a feel for the D'Lessio if you didn't have one already. Some of you've been with me since Eriadu, the first time around. So let's talk about instinctive astrogation.

"This won't be a masterclass. You're fairly new to this, most of you. Maybe one, two years of instinctive astrogation experience? That's enough for the basics, but this is a lifetime thing, and I hope you stick with it. Specialize in it. Forget all this nonsense about chucking rocks around -- you're like me. None of you are going to lift a boulder anytime soon. But what we're good at is making that little bit of knack work for us. So let's talk expectations. By the end of this trip, you're all going to be able to find a safe route through an asteroid field or microjump without running into things, without a navicomputer, long as you're not injured or distracted. Truth. It'll take us some doing to get there, no question about it, but getting there is something that's going to happen.

"Barclay, you're up first."

 

[Jorus Merrill]

MURGO CHOKE

"Now this here is a Star Map, an' I hope you can hear the capital letters. Hold it careful, now. It'll -- yeah, it does that. Cover your eyes for a sec, they'll adjust. It's just recognizing you now, I think. I made the dang thing, and I still don't totally know how it works. Yeah, that's where we are -- if you've used solid charts, you'll get the hang of it quicker, I find.

"All right, so we're here and we have to get here. That's a distance of half a light-year, with stellar disturbances before and after. Barclay, you took us through the last. Can you give us some idea of what angle you'd tackle this from? There? Yeah, that'd work. Good call. Let's give it a try, and if it works, I'll add it. Here's the route overlay now. See how your guess fits that ion-front drift? Good. Now, if it doesn't work, we're disabled and maybe irradiated, but you've been a pilot for a while; you know what the risks are like. This isn't rocket surgery: most of history's greatest feats of instinctive astrogation were pulled off by people who didn't even know they could do it. Granted, most of'em were career pilots and such.

"Grier, you're next. Line us up."

 

[Jorus Merrill]

MURGO CHOKE
WILD SPACE

"Why in the cargo hold rather than the cockpit? Well, we've got a little celebrating to do. You've all done your first microjump by instinct, an' we've had only minimal damage from that. Nothing we can't fix up. But also, we've just hit the halfway point between Murgo and the Utegetu Nebula. You've done good, folks, you really have. Been a long few weeks, but this is an investment of my time and your time, and you've done good. So I thought we'd take a moment to think about why we're out here.

"Now, this here is a bottle of Whyren's Reserve. Whyren's is gone; so's Corellia. I picked this up for fifty creds a year ago; now it's worth hundreds. That's because people want to remember the good things that've been lost. We're here because people have lost things, and not necessarily us. We're here to stop people from losing even more -- and we're here to make sure that those that took it lose what they gained from their crimes. Now maybe that's a little overblown of me, but if I'm wrong, speak up.

"Everyone drink up, unless you've got medical or conscience reasons for not drinking. I won't fault a man for choosing how he'll remember the fallen."

 

[Jorus Merrill]

MURGO CHOKE
WILD SPACE

"Now that, Renkins, was a good solid jump. Seriously, well done."

"Wasn't too hard, sir. Had the navicomputer estimates and everything."

"The navicomputer estimates were wrong. We'd have wound up hit hard if we'd gone that way. You snuck us by something nasty. Good on you."

"If you say so, sir."

"Why don't you give us a shot at, say...that nebula over there?"

Renkins tilted his head, playing with the controls. "I'm having trouble getting a good feeling about it, sir."

"You and me both. Makes me wonder what's going on in the Utegetu. There's fourteen habitable planets in there, you know that? Used to be controlled by the Killiks, but they packed up and moved on a good eight centuries back. Since then, not a lot of data on the Utegetu worlds, apart from that the Chiss used to have interests on Tenupe. Not a lot of data at all. All right, I'll take the conn now. Haven't been at the controls for a week, and it's making me jumpy."

 

[Jorus Merrill]

TENUPE
UTEGETU NEBULA

Desolation. A world struggling to get by, locked down and insular, refusing all hails with only terse responses. Tenupe was proof positive that the Chiss had been screwed around long enough -- by the Atrisians, the One Sith, the Republic...and by whatever was causing trouble in the Utegetu. Chiss territory, the heartland anyway, really wasn't very large -- twice the size of Bothan Space or the Corporate Sector, not much. The Chiss coreward expansion (of which Tenupe represented the farthest extent) had tripled their territory, but even so. Chiss Ascendancy space had never been more than a big fish in the small pond of the Unknown Regions. The Empire of the Hand, now...those people had grown, and grown well. But that was the difference between the Chiss philosophy and Thrawn's philosophy.

A lonely hyperbeacon orbited Tenupe, leading away from the other worlds of the Utegetu Nebula and whatever mystery they held. Leading to the Phalanx Route.

But first, a side jaunt. The connection was tenuous, but functional: Geroon, homeworld of the Geroons. Former slaves of the Vagaari. The Vagaari Corridor was spinward quite a ways of the Phalanx, and Geroon lay between the two routes. If the Vagaari were the trouble in Utegetu, it needed to be known, and they were prime candidates.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

GEROON

Captain's log. Friendly landfall, no intel on the Utegetu except that their ships don't come back from there. Stocked up on fresh food, local vegetables and such. The Geroons are polite folks, wary but hospitable. I offered to check out the nebula for them. They've politely but firmly...accepted. Barclay's the best I've got, and there's a little fighter in the hold, a Silk-made Cutter interceptor. I'm sending Barclay for a recon run on the nebula with explicit orders to not be a hero. Going to stay grounded on Geroon until we hear from him, which should be a couple of days. Making local contacts, stocking up on consumables, giving the kids shore leave they haven't had since our last time at Rebellion Actual.

The Geroons are vaguely humanoid, but divergent enough that they're probably convergent evolution, like Wookiees or Trandoshans. Makes you wonder who decided that one head, two eyes, one mouth, two hands was the default setting. I get the distinct feeling sometimes that the Celestials had fun seeding or shaping this galaxy's species across millions of worlds. Even this little corner.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

GEROON

Captain's log. Barclay's shot to hell.

He made it back out of the Utegetu with a blind jump, straight line, no wiggling his way around anything. I never taught him that, and feth, he's a wreck. The Geroon have hospitals, and I've got enough medical databanks to get their doctors off on the right foot, but he's going to lose limbs.

The Cutter's a mess, probably unsalvageable. I've traded it to the locals for one of their combat airspeeders, the kind that can make a drop into atmo but can't leave it again. I may be able to swap in an engine and beef up the life support and seals. I'll get the boys and girls on that to distract them from Barclay -- that, and running nav exercises with speeder bikes in the local woods. Feth. We're staying here for a few days -- I can run business from the holocomm same as ever, but we're not leaving Barclay out here, weeks from anything like what he's used to, faces included. I don't want to have to reevaluate that decision.

His data's pretty conclusive. The flight recorder was intact. It's not Vagaari, Killik, or One Sith. It's something nastier, and it's not something I've seen before. I've been up front with the kids about that.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

GEROON

Captain's log. I'm taking Rens and Jowly for guns and making a solo run into the Utegetu. The D'Lessio is tuned up, jury-rigged cloak especially. Second tuneup priority is the Qektoth guns. I took a good solid look at the ship that mauled Barclay, and I'm pretty sure I know how to hit it, over and above instinct. I'm doing my level best not to get angry, even if the engagement is basically a non-audacious scout getting ripped apart by an aggressive picket or a passing raider.

Revenge is pretty definitely not the Jedi way, and I may not be much of a Jedi but I can do this right. Jowly and Rens want to dish out an eye for an eye, and that may be the best way forward, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. My first priority is intel gathering; my second is seeing if we can spot any of these lost Geroons. Judging by the kinds of weapons damage on the Cutter interceptor, my bet is the Geroons are dead and their ships are junked, but who knows -- someone might have been shot down and survived. There's a lot of worlds in the Utegetu, but I've got Geroon flight plans to go by.

Those should lead us straight to the enemy. And then we'll see.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

TUSKEN'S EYE
UTEGETU NEBULA

Captain's log. We're floating through the Tusken's Eye system. G-class primary, one habitable planet with serious weather. And wreckage, a lot of it. Wreckage too big to be ships. This was where the Dark Nest had its shipyards, yards that could build eight-thousand-metre warships. My gut says our unfriendlies are engaged in some archaeology with intent. Killik data isn't exactly easy to translate, but I'd be willing to bet someone thinks they can find construction plans or prototypes. Eight thousand metres is bigger than anyone's built in four centuries.

There's a lot of rubble scattered around, some kind of duracrete equivalent. The Geroons say the Dark Nest command ships used to use that for shielding and heat sinks, if you believe it. I'm picking up movement in the mess, but they're deep in it. They haven't detected me so far as I know, so they're not deliberately hiding from me -- they're just keeping their operation low-profile on general principle.

Which doesn't fit, at all, the behavior they displayed toward Barclay's interceptor.

Maybe it's separate groups. One salvaging while the other plays the fool; maybe they're at odds.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

TUSKEN'S EYE
UTEGETU NEBULA

Captain's log.

Easing the D'Lessio into the wreckage. These yards were gigantic, easily the equal of what I designed for the Fringe over Annaj. Of all things I regret...

Well, those were early days. Before Varanin went Sith again. Before the split in the Vagrants became more than just...well, it was a while ago.

Feth, that's a big ship. Used to be, anyway. Who knows if this thing got operational before it was gutted, and who knows how long ago that was. My bet is it's the Chiss that did the deed. There's no way they'd let another of these things go up here. Especially not if there was some kind of hive mind involved. Killik ships were optimized for hive mind species. So who or what else is out here? Who took down Barclay's interceptor -- and there aren't many ships faster than that. Who's in here, and what are they doing that's worth killing for?

 

[Jorus Merrill]

TUSKEN'S EYE
UTEGETU NEBULA

Captain's log. Feth.

Still cloaked. Locked on to part of the wreck, anchored. I've got Rens and Jowly up here in the cockpit with me, and we're just sitting here watching.

There's two kinds of ships. Two models, same make. Same structural elements and aesthetic cues, wildly different purposes. The larger one's like a set of pincer jaws made of right angles, all squared up. There's droid arms coming off it and lots of tethered workers. There's six of the big ships, industrial ships or something like it, all around one big chunk of what used to be a shipyard. There's seven...no, eight smaller ships. Fast attack craft, subcapital. Probably around the same as the D'Lessio as far as power and speed go, but if they can cloak, I didn't see evidence in Barclay's data.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

TUSKEN'S EYE
UTEGETU NEBULA
CAPTAIN'S LOG: RECORDING

All right, here's what comes next. Jowly, take the conn. Do not get heroic. Rens, you're on sensor overwatch and tightbeam comm to me.

"Where you going, General?"

For a walk.

***

I love spacewalking. A lot of guys get bent out of shape about microdebris or sharp contact, but a good tough suit and a little common sense...yeah, Rens, yeah, this isn't the most commonsensical thing I've ever done. Pellet launcher pistol for maneuvering, armored space suit, all of it painted matte black. We're in the planet's shadow; I can't hardly see the hand in front of my face.

All right, passing through the patrol perimeter. I'm small enough that I won't register on most sensors at all, like old Loronar CCIR needles. They would need visual confirmation, and this wreckage -- the yard and the ship -- it's all dark. Most of it, anyway. Some of those tethered workers are inside the wreck, and they've got lamps. Yeah, Rens, I'm keeping my distance. Bracing myself on a wreck now, hold your nerfs -- I'm pulling some macros.

All right, stabilized. Let's see what we've got here. There's two kinds of suits, and two kinds of bodies in'em. Let's call'em Skinnies and Cats. Skinnies are maybe seven feet and rail-thin, with big heads or big headgear. Cats are in crapheap suits, and they move like Trianii or Cathar. There's what looks like a ridge for a tail down the leg -- feth, that looks uncomfortable. Skinnies are armed, cats have tools but nothing that...yeah, we're looking at caste or something like it.