Book Four: A Complicated Profession
Chapter Eight: In Which a Fraud is Uncovered
Location: Cockpit, the Cloudburst
Date: 32 ABY
"Meet my employer, Marras Tavik. The
real author of
A Cage of Phantoms. Your guy Soriano's a fraud. He isn't even a real Miraluka."
That left us all silent for a moment. Shock and confusion radiated from Gand's exoskeleton like a cloud of ammonia. I couldn't get a read on whatever OOM-99 had in place of emotions, but I'm assuming he felt the same way. As for me, I didn't know what to believe— the effort of keeping my tendrils under control was taking up all my spare attention. Was it always going to be this hard?
I just
knew Seran was watching me, I could feel her eyes on me like a deer watching a predator, unsure if it was a threat. That hurt, but I'm not going to pretend that it didn't make sense. The onus was on me to prove her discomfort wrong.
Gand looked at me, head-plates flexing in a quizzical look. I shrugged, occupying myself by studying the holo of Tavik. "So that's him."
"That it is," Seran said.
"He looks like the Vong did a number on him."
Her indigo tendrils rippled like a midnight ocean, in a way I was learning from experience signalled strong emotions being held in check. "When the Yuuzhan Vong conquered Alpherides, they tried to use the Miraluka as slaves, but realized it wouldn't work. See, Miraluka see using the Force somehow. I can't touch the Force myself, but the way I understand it, the Vong, the Chazrach, and all their biotech can't be seen or affected by the Force. So you can imagine how using them as slave labor wouldn't work out."
"Yeah." I looked at the bleak, weary expression on Tavik's scraggly bearded face, at the barely-healed lesions all over his cheeks. My tendrils squirmed in a way that perfectly mirrored the sinking feeling in my gut.
"And this Gand can imagine what the Vong would do to conquered peoples they cannot find a military use for," Gand chimed in.
Seran nodded. "An entire planet— tens of millions of Miraluka, all rounded up into prison camps. Prison camps made out of materials they couldn't see, and staffed by invisible guards who hated them. When Marras hired me, he told me the whole story." Her tendrils writhed more strongly, and her frown deepened. "It was every bit as horrible as you're imagining right now."
I nodded wordlessly— I'd read the books, but words on a page can never compare to the full-sensory misery of being in a real-life prison camp. Death camp, more likely.
She continued. "They kept Marras in a camp outside the city of Settori. He had always journaled before the war, and he went out of his way to write down his experiences on any kind of paper he could find. Prisoners were killed if they were caught writing messages, so he kept it a secret. The only person Marras told was one other prisoner, a human merchant who'd been trapped on Alpherides when the Vong invaded."
"Soriano," Gand said with a frown.
"Man," I said, tendrils squiggling. "Imagine being the only prisoner in the camp able to actually see the walls and guards. That's a lot of power to have over people."
"Exactly right. Soriano was the only one who could interact with the guards, and he leveraged that power to become the most powerful prisoner in the camp. He could get them things, alert them to what the guards were planning next, possibly even get punishments reduced… or
increased. The temptation to use his influence for his own enrichment must have been enormous, and from what I understand, Marras wasn't the only one whose tendrils he clipped."
Disgust gathered on her smooth indigo brow, and her eyes went from mercury to steel. "This guy overheard the guards talking about the Alliance forces coming to retake the planet, then got Marras sent to the torture racks over some trumped-up nerfshit and stole his notes. Marras didn't get out until the camp was liberated, and by then he had no idea what happened to his notes. At first he thought their hiding place had been destroyed in the fighting. Until he saw Soriano's smug little worm face on the HoloNet in a fake blindfold, getting interviewed about his upcoming book. Marras destroyed his body to protect those books, he trusted Soriano when he had no one else to turn to, and what did this human do? Betrayed him. Sold him out and ran, like a vulture-rat. And I'm going to bring him to justice."
"That's— very admirable of you," I said, half-stumbling over the words as my brain tried to compliment her and keep my tendrils absolutely still. "He can't be paying you much."
"Marras had some money saved offworld before the war he's paying me with," she said. "But I'm not doing it for the money. I'm doing it because letting Soriano take credit for this man's work is more than unjust. It's evil. And Marras is far from the last person he screwed over and hurt. He can't be allowed to get away with it."
"Miraluka have no eyes, correct? But they can still see?" Ninety-Nine asked. "How's Soriano managing to pretend to be a Miraluka in public, all day every day, if he's gotta keep his eyes covered?"
Seran sighed. "I don't know. He always wears the same blindfold, so I'm thinking that must be the key. Could be one of those trick blindfolds they use in magic shows, that let the wearer see out while looking totally opaque. Miraluka don't remove their eye coverings around other species to avoid creeping them out, so he's got the perfect cover. And far as I can tell from the HoloNet, nobody suspects a thing."
"Then why would he vanish?" I asked.
"Your guess is as good as mine," Seran said, shrugging liquidly with her tendrils. "I don't really care why, so long as we can find this scum and make him face up to his crimes."
"Perhaps Soriano felt someone was onto him," I suggested, "and he thought he needed to lay low."
"Or someone took him," Ninety-Nine said. "Maybe another prisoner he fucked over, maybe just a stalker or a guy looking for an easy ransom from his publishers."
I frowned. "Then why would the Qreph guy not have mentioned a ransom message or anything? It's been a while since Soriano disappeared. If this was a kidnapping for ransom, they would've heard something by now."
"All this speculation is pointless," Gand said. "The computer is still decrypting the boarding fob data from Iseno, but once it's done we should be able to get the answers we seek."
"How long will that take?" asked Seran.
"No more than an hour, this Gand would think."
Ninety-Nine unleashed a tinny groan. "All this hurry-up-and-wait stuff's reminding me of the Separatist Army, Boss."
"That is expected when one has to jury-rig a flight computer for code-breaking. It was never going to be optimal. Perhaps if you had let this Gand install that upgraded slicing suite to your intrusion subroutines—"
"Negative, no way am I letting any organic mess around with my motivator again! One slip and it's as good as a memory wipe. That's some foul
demagol shit, Boss."
"You are exaggerating the risks, and what's more you're doing it on purpose."
"I am
not, you've seen the schematics of my head! My personality matrix is barely…"
I'd heard this argument spin up far too many times to be interested in it yet again, and it never amounted to anything anyway. On the contrary, now seemed like the perfect time to slip off.
I turned to Seran, who met my gaze as she packed away her datapad. Her silver eyes were fiercely patient, almost raptorial. "So… has anyone given you a tour of the ship yet?"
"Not yet," she said. "I get the feeling you're offering, though."
"You sure you're not Force-sensitive? That was some first-order mind reading…"
She snorted, and her tendrils briefly braided with amusement. "Wiseass. Alright, Mister Tipros, you've convinced me. Give me the grand tour."
As we left the cockpit, the last thing I heard was Ninety-Nine call Gand a "chakaar," whatever that means. Probably nothing good.
— — —
The Cloudburst isn't really that big as ships go, so the tour went quick. I showed Seran through all the different compartments, taking the lead as we went. Part of that was so I could warn her if any of Gand's repairs were coming loose, and just to point things out in general. But also, I figured she might not like the idea of me being behind her, where she couldn't see me.
Plus, being able to smell-taste her but not see her was actually helping my tendril control. Or at least it seemed that way. I guess there was only one way to know beyond a doubt— keep practicing with her around until I had a lapse in concentration and she called me out. At the same time, though, that's a maximally fucked situation to put someone under. What kind of person would let themselves be harassed like that?
I knew, difficult as it was, that I couldn't put lay my lack of
thassiaprae at Seran's feet and expect her to solve it for me. This was a challenge I had to face on my own.
Now that I knew what I'd been doing, I had no excuse for doing it again.
We came to the crew cabins, basically just tiny private rooms set into the port bulkhead, scarcely more room inside for a small bed, some shelves, and a footlocker. The Cloudburst came standard with four rooms, and only two of them were occupied at the moment— I had one, and Gand had the other. Ninety-Nine didn't need to sleep and only needed the occasional recharge, and Gand used the third room as his workshop. The final room, the only one with an open door, was unoccupied. It would be a guest room, except we didn't have many guests.
Seran had already dropped some of her things on the hard little bed, and Gand had mentioned that she was welcome to use the room while we were all working together.
But…
"If you wanted to stay on board long-term," I said, mentally fighting my tendrils and holding them still as I could, "you could have this room for yourself. We'd have to discuss it as a group, but I think Gand and Ninety-Nine would be okay with it. You're pretty handy in a fight, and I'm sure we'd all like to have you. Well, Ninety-Nine may take some convincing, but he's just naturally paranoid, and I…" my voice trailed away as I realized I was rambling. I coughed the awkward out of my throat and continued. "Well, the choice is up to you."
Seran looked at me with a carefully blank expression, and her indigo tendrils riffled like a shuffling deck of cards. "Thank you for the offer. I'll think about it."
"No rush, I'd still need to talk it over with the guys first anyway. But you'll think about it?"
"I will. Traveling the galaxy alone is… exhausting. It might be nice to travel with some others. And I don't really have any other plans at the moment. Or ever, really."
I tried to ignore her vanilla smell-taste in the air. "You sound like you've been on your own for a long time."
She sighed, looking around the room. "Not really," she said. "Just long enough that I know it's not what I want. But I don't have any better ideas at the moment; I'm just sort of… drifting across the galaxy. I thought I knew what I wanted to do once, a few years back."
"And what was that?" I asked, feeling my tendrils slide past each other slightly faster.
"I was an Interstellar Relations major at the Trell— sorry, I forgot, that's Trellum University on Mikkia— and loved it. So I applied for an internship at the New Republic Intelligence Service. It was pretty prestigious, and I was so proud and excited to get in." A flash of silver as her eyes darted away from me. "But it wasn't long before I realized that intelligence work wasn't for me. Now, I drift."
I nodded, feeling an uncomfortable twinge of memory. I'd had the same feeling strike me Back Then, and it nearly cost me my place in graduate school. "What happened?"
Seran's tendrils writhed snakelike for a moment before returning to their normal flow. "Look. Tipros. It's personal, and I
barely know you. I'd prefer keeping it to myself, if you don't mind."
I stepped back out of the room, tendrils squirming. "Right, sorry."
"You didn't know," she said. "It's fine."
Neither of us said anything for a long time. Seran might have been waiting for me to continue the tour. She might have been thinking back to whatever had happened to cast her out across the galaxy. Or, she could have been thinking of something totally different.
Finally, I changed the subject. "Is New Republic Intelligence where you learned stava?" I asked.
"Oh, that? No, it was an internship as an analyst, not for espionage or anything. I just started doing stava for exercise when I was a kid, and just stuck with it." She shot me a fierce silver-eyed smirk. "It's pretty effective, huh?"
"That's a polite way to put it," I said with a mental wince. Once we were away from Iseno I'd whipped up a mouthful of bacta-spit and mopped away the bruises with healing drool, but not Vergere's Art could do nothing to erase memories of getting launched down a flight of stairs. "My swordfighting's a little rusty, I guess, but you're never really prepared to get thrown like that."
She turned back to me and leaned against the doorframe. "Swordfighting, huh."
"Yeah," I said, clamping down on my tendrils. "I spent a year at the Ossus Academy, just recently. I was going to become a Jedi, you know."
Seran's eyes went wide. "Really? You can touch the Force?"
I nodded, and her voice became thoughtful. "Well, that explains all the jumping. I'd thought maybe you were hyper from being high on some kind of spice."
A laugh came out before I could stop it. "No way, really!?"
"You'd be surprised what some criminals will do to get the edge in a fight."
"So you really thought I was some spice-addicted pervert in the middle of a drug frenzy?"
"That I did." Seran frowned. "Well, I'm still not sure about the pervert part. I see you tendrilling me up, Tipros."
I flinched and brought my suddenly frenzying tendrils out of control, before catching the mischievous grin lifting the corner of her mouth. My mind went blank.
"Hey, I was just joking," she laughed.
A weird noise came out of my mouth, half-giggle and half-outrage. "You… you… it… that's so
mean!"
"A little. But at the same time, you're actually doing a lot better already," she pointed out. "It's still creeping out for a second or two, but I can see you're trying to control it. Jedi are supposed to be good at controlling their emotions, so that's probably a big part of it."
"Probably," I agreed. "Even though I'm not a trainee anymore, I try to keep up with my meditation and all that. It seems to help."
"Whatever works," she said approvingly. "Just practice your
thassiaprae and don't get complacent, and maybe one day we can take you to Mikkia without some poor woman's family beating you to death."
I probably shouldn't have laughed at that, but I did. Mostly I was just relieved.
Finally, after far too long, something was starting to go right.
"Hey, it's getting close to an hour," Seran said. "Your friend's going to be calling us any minute when the data decrypts. If they're not still fighting like an old married couple, that is."
"I wouldn't worry about them," I said, taking the lead back into the corridor. "They argue a lot, but it's never amounts to anything serious…"
— — —
Indeed it didn't.
We opened the cockpit door to find Ninety-Nine and Gand back at work, argument seemingly forgotten. Gand was fiddling with the emergency light over the copilot's chair, while Ninety-Nine had his datajack-arm plugged deep into the flight computer's socket and tapped on a datapad with his free hand.
The little battle droid's head swiveled around when he heard us come in. "We were just about to come get you,
vod. The computer just finished slicing the fob, and we have a trail for the hunting."
Seran's tendrils tensed, and she turned to Ninety-Nine with that raptor's look in her eyes. "Does that mean you've got a lead on Soriano?"
"We think so," Gand said. "Look at this."
He scrambled down from his folding stepladder, punched in a code on the holoterminal, and instantly the air above it was filled with ghostly blue alphanumerics in line after line like waiting legions.
"Uhh, Gand, what's this actually mean?"
Seran leaned in. "I think I know what this is," she said. "That's astrogation data."
Gand gave an affirmative buzz. "Yes. This is the three-dimensional coordinate plot for Soriano's boarding fob. They are all continually broadcasting to the starliner's computer, which then hyperspace tightbeams them back to the spaceport they departed from."
"Okay," I said. "so what's it tell us?"
"It says that Soriano spent the entire flight to Bellassa onboard the liner," Gand said. "Nothing unusual happened at all, and he exited at the Ussa Spaceport on Bellassa along with all the other passengers."
"That doesn't compute, Boss," Ninety-Nine intoned. "The Qreph rep said there was no cam footage of Soriano in the spaceport."
Seran squinted at the code, coordinates reflecting off her indigo face. "Well, maybe not. He may have just been avoiding their fields of vision, or wearing a disguise for some reason."
"The data is actually stranger than that," Gand said. "This Gand cross-referenced the fob coordinates with the blueprints of the Ussa Spaceport, and look—" He tapped a second key, and the coordinates dissolved into an image: a floating blue floor plan of the spaceport, flipped at a ninety-degree angle and slowly rotating in place like a mica panel trapped in a tractor beam.
A shining yellow dot appeared. "That is the first security cam Soriano would have seen upon disembarking."
A red dot appeared around the corner from it, and slowly converged on its location. "And this is the path Soriano's fob took. Watch what happens."
We watched the little red dot's journey in silence. It slowly tracked toward the corner, like a comet approaching the perihelion of its orbit, then stopped. The dot held position for no longer than ten seconds, before abruptly swinging around and backtracking back toward the loading dock. The dot sped up at this point before reaching the edge of the blueprint, and vanished.
"Soriano enters the spaceport, then immediately turns and leaves before a cam can spot him. After that, he leaves Bellassa entirely." Gand returned us back to the snowstorm of astrogation data. "He leaves the planet again on a slightly Rimward bearing, and of the planets in the hypercone extrapolation, there is only one capable of bearing life."
A planet zoomed up from nothing, a greenish cloud-swathed orb surrounded by orbital data— and prickling with coal-red flags denoting Alliance travel warnings.
The fan of tendrils around Seran's face tensed, their tips hooking forward like snakes preparing to strike. She practically spat the name— "
Metalorn."
"The biggest Peace Brigade recruiting ground outside of Hutt Space," Gand buzzed in agreement. "And the only one left in the Core."
My tendrils writhed in unease as a sinking feeling plummeted through me. "Fuck. I can only imagine what the Peace Brigade would want with a guy exposing the horrible shit that went on in Vong prison camps— or someone they
think is responsible for it. So here's the question: did he go there on purpose, or was he taken?"
"This Gand does not know. But the route his fob took coincides perfectly with the flight plan of only one ship leaving Bellassa that day."
Gand pressed another set of keys, and pulled up the image of a small cruiser shaped like an Art Deco skyscraper capped by a cluster of four comically oversized engines. "The
Regeneration, a
Consular-class cruiser registered to an Ithorian named Kar Powreemu. Who, by the way, is one of the highest-ranking Peace Brigade leaders not yet captured by the Galactic Alliance."
The weight of that statement crushed the noise out of the room. It took us a while for the implications to finally seep in and set off the fireworks of comprehension.
Ninety-Nine was the first to comprehend. "
Haar'chak," came the soft curse.
I gripped the arm of my chair tighter, feeling an intense sense of doom over my head. "Yeah."
"It is safe to assume, then," said Gand, compound eyes glinting with a grave expression, "that Hudio Soriano was either kidnapped or in league with the Peace Brigade."
