A Young Girl’s War Between the Stars
25
Serenno, 41 BBY/959 GSC.
[Situation Report: Serenno – 959 GCS – #10-15. Postmortem summary of loss of fleet and ground assets.]
It’s been six days since the loss of our orbital fleet and multiple ground assets. The final reports and postmortem analysis of what happened are in.
Casualty list included [here] for seizure and disbursement of assets among those remaining.
Full postmortem report [here], but I’ll summarize events as they happened.
At approximately 0040 ship time, synced to local time in Serenno City, the sensor operator on the Rape Machine picked up a small sensor blip approaching the fleet from the Lagrange point mining field. They determined there was not enough metal content and it was too small to be any kind of missile or bomb, and with an asteroid coming out of the field, their report shows they noted it up as a small, inert asteroid. It hit the hull of the Metalstorm and disappeared from sensors.
The Metalstorm made their hourly check in at 0100 with the rest of the fleet. No issues were noted in their report.
At 0123, the Metalstorm pulled away from the fleet and began accelerating towards Serenno. Attempts to contact the freighter were made, but all hails were ignored. Less than a minute later, the Rape Machine detected missile and torpedo launch from Metalstorm at the fleet and ground targets. In the subsequent surprise attack, all of our ships except the Rape Machine, Abyssin Toll 9, and Spinward Bound were either destroyed outright or disabled and fell into the atmosphere, where they subsequently burned up upon reentry.
Over the course of the next hour, multiple of our sites groundside around Serenno City were struck with torpedoes, destroying them outright. The Metalstorm itself struck our main base north of Serenno City, destroying it. Several smaller outposts and FOBs were ignored or missed, while our largest ground-side airbase took only a near miss. I guess we have someone in Procurement to thank for the shit quality targeting systems there.
At 0300, the airbase came under attack. The fuel depot and many of the fighters were destroyed by missiles in a first strike by enemy fighters buzzing the field. They deployed fighters to intercept. At 0322, our fighters were ambushed by ground forces using AA turbolaser batteries and destroyed. The facility was evacuated, but there were few survivors. None of them saw their attackers.
The next day, at 1301, a partial distress signal was broadcast from one of the ground defense systems and our tech team operating in the capital began an investigation.
At 1302, eight of the ground defense systems fired and subsequently destroyed Rape Machine and Abyssin Toll 9. Spinward Bound was struck twice and badly damaged, but managed to jump to hyperspace before another shot could finish it off. It returned roughly twelve hours later after completing emergency repairs and maintained orbit around Serenno’s moon, outside the range of the ground defenses, where it has taken up station to observe the planet and watch for intruders to the system.
The tech team shut off the ground defenses and investigation discovered that nine of the stations were attacked and turned on the remainder of our fleet. One of those failed to fire, due to its fire control system having been destroyed. They were able to recover internal video surveillance recordings from all but two of the stations.
It was a team of Mandos and a fracking Jedi.
I’ve petitioned the client to order reinforcements. After lengthy and vocal discussion with the client, he has refused to pay for Abyssin reinforcements and instructed me to recruit from the local populace instead. By force if necessary. He has contacted his friends and will be receiving several more shipments of droids as well since, to quote Count Ramil, ‘it seems to be a better deal than hiring more of the mercenary trash who let some drunken pilot cripple your own forces.’
I’ve instructed the men to begin rounding up local conscripts and take their families and entire villages if necessary as hostages to ensure compliance. So far, we’ve only had to make a few examples and it seems like they’ve made the smart decision to comply. It’s obvious they’re dragging their heels and not giving their best effort, but the sub-commanders believe we can sort that out with a few more examples, so I’ll allow it.
We’ve begun searching for the Mandalorian forces and the Jedi, and we’re still searching for the client’s sister and her rebel forces, but with our air support and recon cut off, that’s going to be a challenge.
Perhaps we should consider some method of incentivizing the locals. I’ll bring it up with the client.
[End Report #10-15.]
Two landspeeders flew over the streets of Serenno City, moving with the flow of traffic as they approached their destination. In the first were Dooku, Jaster Mereel, and two Mandalorian guards while the second carried Qui-Gon, Obi-wan, Satine Kryze, and two more guards specifically for Satine.
The old master sat in the back seat with Jaster, his eyes closed in meditation, while Jaster made a last minute check of his weapons as a matter of habit. Glancing over at Dooku, Jaster asked, “So, this countess is your sister.”
“Yes,” Dooku answered without opening his eyes. “Though I did not learn that fact until many years later. Long after being taken in by the Jedi Order. It was when we were visiting Serenno to attend a galactic festival, oh, nearly fifty years ago now. It was there that I met Jenza and Ramil. I spent the day with Jenza showing me around, until a minor earthquake collapsed the building we were in on top of us. We were eventually rescued by Master Yoda and it was then that we learned the truth from our father. We kept in touch by letter after that.”
“And him not being around anymore is the reason for this whole mess?” Jaster asked, and the old master hummed.
Frowning, he opened his eyes and looked out at the city passing by outside, the streets bustling even with a civil war on. Considering it for a few moments, he finally said, “Before, I would have said yes.”
“But?”
The old master smiled, a chuckle slipping out. “Then I had a very interesting conversation with a young girl entirely too mature for her age.”
Jaster barked a laugh. “Hah! Sounds about right. What’d she say?”
“Oh, she gave a very detailed analysis of galactic economics.”
Jaster studied Dooku as the old man smiled, considering what he knew of Tanya and how he suspected her mind worked. Finally, he asked, “I’m not gonna like what was in that analysis, am I?”
“Probably not,” Dooku murmured, shaking his head. “To make a very detailed report short, all of the evidence points to buildup by the Trade Federation as a prelude to war. Which brings us to Serenno, where it seems my brother is getting aid from and has likely allied himself with the Trade Federation and potentially has a backer, if not more than one, within the Senate.”
“So we might not be just fighting pirates,” Jaster rumbled. “I would have liked to know that going in.”
Dooku shook his head. “They won’t tip their hand. Not here and now. They may send some small measure of support, but if they haven’t already sent one of their fleets to blockade Serenno and take it by force, then they won’t. If they escalate beyond pirates, we will handle it. Though I am hoping that we are able to negotiate a peaceful solution before it comes to that.”
“Wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up faster,” the old Mando grumbled.
Dooku sighed, then nodded once. “Quite.”
The groundspeeders slowed as they turned off the main road onto a service road. From there, they only stopped to open up an access point to the network of maintenance tunnels and sewers beneath the city, before continuing on. Not long afterward, Dooku spoke up. “Driver, slow down and stop ahead, at the next intersection.”
The speeder slowed to a stop and Dooku got out. “Stay here. I’ll be back in a few moments.”
Walking forward into the beam of the headlights, Dooku stopped in the center of the intersection, then turned right. He waited for a few moments, before the sound of boots echoed off the corridors. Several men in dark clothes stormed out of hidden doors on either side of the intersection, pointing blasters at the vehicles.
“Just who the hell are you?” a voice called from the door as a woman wearing robes stepped out, her black hair shot through with silver streaks, though her face was still the picture of beauty.
Dooku smiled. “Jenza. It’s good to see you again.”
The woman blinked. “Dooku?” she asked, and he nodded. “Lower your weapons!” she ordered, rushing through the crowd and colliding with the taller man with an audible thump. She sighed as she squeezed him tightly. “It’s so good to see you again.”
Dooku hugged back reflexively, nodding. “It is. It has been a while since my last visit.”
Making a happy sound, Jenza pulled back a bit and eyed her older brother curiously. “You got old.”
“My dear, I believe that is a case of the pot calling the kettle black,” he retorted, earning a glare in return.
Looking back to the two vehicles, Jenza raised an eyebrow. “Mandos and more Jedi?”
“You asked for help and so I came. I’m sorry it took so long. Shall we head inside?”
“Yes, of course!” Jenza nodded, turning away. “Back inside, everyone. Open the vehicle bay doors. Then someone get our guests some refreshments and send them to the conference room.”
Nodding, Dooku turned and waved for the vehicles to go ahead as two large sections on the far right wall opened, revealing a large bay full of ground vehicles. “How bad is it?” he asked quietly, the question lost beyond them to the sounds of people and equipment moving.
“Bad,” Jenza sighed, wrapping an arm around Dooku’s side as they walked together. “Whatever happened last night helped, and it’s going to take the pressure off for a while, but we’ve still got work to do.”
“Then let us get to it.”
[Situation Report: Serenno – 959 GCS – #10-20. Missing patrols.]
It’s been one week since the Mandos and Jedi began hostilities.
We’ve lost another three patrols in the southern quadrant. No survivors this time. Scouting droids detected nothing—whoever did it, they left no trace. Two subsequent recon teams sent to investigate in person have also disappeared.
I am restricting movements in jungle sectors until we have some kind of strategy other than burning it all down. The client refuses to allow it.
The conscripts are refusing to be sent out ahead of our own patrols and actively choosing to die rather than go. We need the numbers too much to simply kill them. I’ve reassigned them to urban patrols and pacification operations.
The men are getting nervous. Scuttlebutt says there’s someone out there.
One of the locals claims to have seen a second Jedi pass through their village one evening to buy food. Not the one seen with the Mandos. If she exists at all and it’s not just someone spinning a yarn, all we’ve got to go on is that she’s a short female human or near-human.
That doesn’t exactly fracking narrow it down, but I’ve instructed the men to keep an eye out just in case.
[End Report #10-20.]
“Is that it?” Satine asked quietly, sitting in the top of a tree and looking through the branches, leaves, and hanging moss of intervening trees between them and a well-lit base in the swamps to the south of Serenno City. Beside her, Obi-wan stood, one hand resting on the tree trunk as she looked through a set of binoculars.
Obi handed her the binoculars and nodded. “It is.”
Satine held up the binoculars and blinked at what she saw. Several groups of humans patrolled the exterior—natives of Serenno from the look of it. All of them looked like they would rather be anywhere else and didn’t appear very attentive. They didn’t bother looking too closely at the area outside of the base—only occasionally looking that way when a jungle sound caught their ears.
“I can’t believe they would betray their own people like this,” the blonde murmured. “Perhaps the rumors of forced conscription are true?”
“They are.” Satine nearly jumped at the voice from below. Looking down, Tanya faded into view, sitting on a lower branch. The red girl wore a cloak covering her distinctive red skin and white hair that would have been visible even this far out if the light happened to catch it. She had apparently done a bit of modification to her cloak to add grass and moss, leaving her looking more like a lump of plant growth sitting there than a person.
The younger girl continued as she opened up her field pack and pulled out a ration bar and a canteen, biting into the bar and wolfing it down quickly. “None of them are here by choice. They’re miserable and full of hate and anger every time they look at their captors. Half of them are thinking about running. The other half are too, but something is holding them back. I can’t tell what, but if I had to guess, their captors have leverage.”
Satine thought for a moment as Tanya finished eating, put away her things, then lifted the blaster dangling from her chest. Looking through the scope, she fell silent, watching. Finally, Satine said, “We should free them.”
“No.”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Obi winced beside her as Satine frowned. “Why not?”
Tanya was silent for a few moments before she asked, “If I kidnapped your family and told you to fight for me or I was going to make them wish they were dead, would you?”
Satine winced, but couldn’t find it in herself to answer in the negative. No, she would. She would hate every second of it and do everything she could to sabotage the enemy, but she would do it.
“Exactly. And if I killed your captors, but not their boss, who had other men holding your family… would you thank me, or would you go running back to your boss and do literally anything to prove your ‘loyalty’ and keep your family safe?”
The blonde sighed. “Okay. I understand.”
“It’s horrible,” Obi murmured, dropping down to sit beside Satine. The blonde smiled and leaned into her side, turning and sending her companion a fond smile, silently thanking her for the support.
Below them, Tanya moved, standing up. “Stay here or return to base. I need to move closer to observe them for a while before I move.”
With that, a leap took her to the next tree, then the next, until she was lost in the dark. A confused look passed over Obi’s face briefly and Satine let out a quiet laugh. Turning a curious look on her, Obi asked, “What?”
“Nothing,” Satine shook her head, looking away and turning her attention back to the base. Reaching down, she pulled at her shirt, the material sticking uncomfortably to her skin. Using the cloth to fan herself and get a bit of a breeze going, the blonde duchess sighed. “I am starting to hate jungles.”
“We can go back to the city—”
“I need to see and understand what goes on at the ground level, so I understand what it is I might one day be sending people into. And this is the safest place and time for it,” Satine shook her head.
“Being out here makes my job more difficult,” Obi grumbled, before a pout pulled at her lips. Quieter, she added, “It’s not fun to cuddle or… do other things when it’s this hot.”
Satine brought up a hand and covered her mouth as her shoulders shook silently. Turning an amused look on the other girl, once she got herself under control, she sighed. “Don’t remind me. I want a real shower and a proper bed. None of this sonic nonsense. We’ll go back and check in with the others soon enough. We can have our fun then. Until then, let’s focus on the mission.”
Obi smiled and turned back towards the camp as Satine did the same. After a few moments, the Mandalorian girl frowned. “…What’s she doing?”
“What do you mean?” Obi asked, squinting as she looked through the dark. Reaching out with her senses, she felt Tanya, but barely and only because she knew who and what she was looking for—if she hadn’t, the other girl would have blended in with the background.
The jungle around them stilled. The sounds of animals, birds, even the bugs fell silent and the air became heavy, filled with an oppressive atmosphere of anticipation. Then, there was a sharp spike of fear and pain—not from Tanya, but someone near her. Satine quietly gasped.
“She, she just killed them! They’re not soldiers, they’re conscripts—!”
“Shh!” Obi hissed, and Satine turned a glare on her as she stood. “Later. If she’s moving, we should go.”
The blonde glared at her a few moments longer, before nodding. Reaching down, Obi helped Satine to her feet, then pulled her into a princess carry before leaping for the next tree, then the next. Only when they were far away enough not to see the light of the camp did Satine grumble, “I’m going to talk to her about it later.”
Obi suppressed the urge to sigh, stuck as she was between wanting to defend her friend’s actions as necessary, and wondering if maybe Satine wasn’t right and Tanya should have found a way to spare the poor people who had been forced into this against their will.
[Situation Report: Serenno – 959 GCS – #10-27. Sabotage of FOB Zeta.]
Twelve days since hostilities began.
The supply depot at FOB Zeta was hit last night. Sabotage.
Fuel tanks ruptured, munitions cooked off, vehicles destroyed. The building was infiltrated and our security office was destroyed, along with the computers storing the footage.
No alarms, no sign of forced entry. The bodies of the conscripted sentries were found in the underbrush, throats cut.
Troops investigated when the sun rose. One set of footprints that they swear just appear from nowhere, same thing on the way out. Prints and stride are consistent with someone of small stature.
Another sighting the night before in a nearby village. A child or very small female, human or close enough. Witness claims they saw her carrying a blaster rifle.
Intel team thinks this is the same person who’s been taking out our patrols. Some kind of elite sniper/sapper, maybe.
My sub-commanders have assured the men it’s just one girl. We’ve put a 10,000 credit bounty on her head and are offering a 1,000 credit reward to information leading to her identification, capture, and/or death.
Mandos and the Jedi continue to harass supply convoys and fuel shipments.
Several of our conscripts have attempted to desert. I’ve given the men permission to start using the hostages if the conscripts refuse to comply.
[End report #10-27.]
Sheeka Tull watched as Jango and the scary Jedi girl talked, planning out their unit’s next mission. As she watched, once more she was convinced that this was becoming less and less a case of Jango leading their unit, as it was the girl—Tanya—giving the orders. Oh, she very carefully never overstepped, but the signs were all there that Jango had effectively turned over command to her. What Sheeka couldn’t figure out was why.
“Current intel has them moving a supply convoy out of the city to resupply their bases, tonight. We could use those supplies.” Jango pointed to a section of map to the west of Serenno City. “Their route should take them west, out of the city, then north up into the mountains where they’ll meet up with some small cargo ships to load most of it for distribution.”
“They don’t want our fighters shooting them down again,” Tanya murmured, earning a nod and an affirmative noise from Jango. “Then the best place to hit them is here, where the road narrows coming into the mountains, where our men can start with a height advantage and descend onto the trucks. The surrounding mountains will be too tall for the drivers to see up into them. Which they’ll know, so they’ll probably have guards. Have snipers take those out if possible, land on the trucks, take them over, then turn them around and send them back. Otherwise,” the red girl paused, considering for a moment, before a grin stole over her features that sent a shiver down Sheeka’s spine, “find where the meeting point is, take the ships, load everything up, and leave with it all without a fight.”
“Either could work,” Jango nodded. “But what if we did both?”
“Hm?” Tanya asked, looking up and raising one fine white eyebrow. “Explain.”
“We split our forces. One group sneaks in and takes the freighters first. If we just took the freighters, there’s a chance they might suspect foul play and try to question us to make sure they’re not handing supplies over to the enemy. But if we have the second group hit the trucks coming into the mountains, then get ‘repelled,’ they’ll be too busy looking over their shoulders for another attack to question whether they’re handing the supplies over to the right people or not.”
She considered it for a moment before nodding. “I like it!” Turning back to the map, Tanya looked over it before pointing to a section of the map to the southeast of their target, on the edge of the swamp. “I’ll go create a distraction to draw attention and make sure their security forces are occupied.”
“What are you going to do?” Jango asked, checking the location against the key they had showing what was what. “That’s… a staging ground for training conscripts.”
That smile was back. “I’m going to give them a reason to be afraid of the dark~. Click,” she rapped out a short pattern of five knocks on the table—tap-tap-taptaptap, “to signal you’ve got the freighters and are ready, then I’ll hit my target.”
“Roger that,” Jango nodded.
Tanya turned and hurried from the tent. As she left, Sheeka pushed off of the tent pole she’d been leaning on and came over to stand beside Jango. Cocking her hip to the side, she bumped him. “You’re good with her.”
“It’s not hard,” Jango shrugged, chuckling.
“It’s good practice,” she murmured, and he sent her a questioning look. The woman smirked. “My tent, after we get back?”
“Sounds good. I’ll bring something to drink.”
[Situation Report: Serenno – 959 GCS – #11-15. More patrols missing.]
Thirty-one days since hostilities with the Jedi and Mandos began.
We intercepted garbled comms and a partial holo from an ambushed patrol. Screaming. Wild blaster fire.
They swore they had been ambushed by an entire platoon of our own people. Several of the conscripts turned on our men in the confusion. The attack ended with no enemy bodies recovered and we’re down ten more men, one of them an officer. All kill shots and one up close and personal.
My sub-commanders insist it’s just paranoia—jungle shadows playing tricks on them. At least, that’s what they’ve told the men.
We know the truth.
Five frames of holo video and a second of audio. That’s all we’ve got, but it was enough.
We’ve finally got an image of her. Not enough to make out more detail than what we already knew, but it’s confirmation. There’s no mistaking it. No mistaking the sight and sound of a lightsaber, or the wounds they make when they take off someone’s head.
There’s a second Jedi down here. But this one’s different. Not fighting like any Jedi we’ve ever heard of.
We’ve put out the image and upped the bounty to 50k credits.
[End report #11-15.]
“It seems you’ve made a name for yourself,” Jaster chuckled as Tanya frowned at the bounty poster on the table. He tipped his bottle of beer in Tanya’s direction and teased, “But those are rookie numbers. You’ve got to pump those numbers up if you want to compare wanted posters one day.”
“This will make things more difficult,” Dooku pointed out, and Tanya nodded, even as she rolled her eyes at Jaster.
Taking up her cup of caff from the table, she took a sip before answering. “Yes, but it does what I wanted. It gives them a ghost to chase. Stirs paranoia and fear within the ranks. If we keep up the pressure, eventually, morale will break.”
Opposite Dooku, the purple skinned Master Kostana frowned as she sipped her own cup of tea. “Fear. Paranoia. Anger. These are the tools of the dark side. Dooku, what are you teaching this girl?”
“Not I,” Dooku chuckled, shaking his head.
Jaster frowned, looking at the woman with the purple jewel in her forehead. “You say that, and maybe you’re right, but the truth is they’re the soldier’s weapons. An army marches on its stomach, but an army with no morale doesn’t march. You do that by making the enemy not want to be there. That means scaring him. Pissing him off. Making him afraid to take a shit for fear that you’ll shoot him while he’s got his pants down. If he’s checking every food shipment for micro grenades or poison, he’s wasting time and energy that would’ve been spent on something else. Until eventually, the people in charge can’t make the lower ranks do anything and they’re forced to withdraw. This is why big armies, like the Republic, cycle their troops through an area and give them R&R. These are mercs and conscripts and we’ve killed enough of them that they can’t do that. Every night of lost sleep is one step closer to victory.”
Master Kostana put down her cup as she met the man’s frown with the look of a teacher looking at an unruly student. “It is different for Force users. Our emotions and the emotions of everyone around us color everything we do in the Force and reflect back upon us. Negative emotions, such as anger, fear, hate, react with the Force and become a volatile mixture. Think of it like throwing fuel on a fire. By itself, neither the fire nor the fuel are bad. Both have their uses. But while your fire is but a candle and your fuel oil, our fire is a bonfire and our fuel starship grade. One makes a small flare up, the other can cause an explosion that destroys everything around it. Creating suffering with good intentions can be just as bad for a Force user as using those emotions directly to empower our use of the Force. It takes someone with exceptional willpower and clarity of thought not to fall into a self-perpetuating cycle of anger, pain, and misery for themselves and everyone around them. The simplest method of preventing it is to not engage in those sorts of activities in the first place.”
“Master Kostana, has the possibility occurred that perhaps, I might be just such a person, with the willpower and clarity you speak of?” Tanya sent the older woman a curious look.
“You’re mature for your age, but you’re still a child,” the purple woman shook her head.
Tanya nodded. “I understand. That seems to be a sentiment most of the High Council share. At any rate,” she drained the rest of her cup and put it down, before standing. “I have to be going. I’ve got work to do. I think we’re close to finding where their commander is hiding.”
The girl left and for a moment, the room was silent. Finally, the old woman turned a look on Dooku. “What are you hiding?”
“I’m not—”
“Don’t lie to me. You’re terrible at it. Always have been.” She glanced at Jaster briefly before turning back to Dooku. “Whatever it is, your friend here doesn’t seem to know.”
“Would it help if I told you that it’s nothing to worry about?” Dooku asked, and Master Kostana shook her head.
“That just makes me worry more. Out with it.”
Dooku considered for a moment, before shaking his head. “It is her story to tell, or not.”
“Tch. Stubborn. Fine. Have you located that brother of yours?”
“Not yet,” Dooku shook his head. “We may need to lure him out…”
[Situation Report: Serenno – 959 GCS – #11-27. Morale critically low.]
Forty-three days since the assault began.
They’re calling her the Ghost.
Even hardened veterans refuse to go out after dusk. We’ve lost any ability to force the conscripts to patrol at night or anywhere near the jungles.
She doesn’t just kill—she plays with them. Sgt. Daro was found strung up in a tree, his own bootlaces around his neck. Perimeter sensors are useless, either not picking anything up, or constantly going off and keeping the men awake day and night. The men report hearing whispers in the dark every night.
Several patrols have been attacked and wounded, then just left where they fell. Alive and screaming over the radio with maydays. Whatever weapon she’s using, it blasts chunks out. Our Abyssin men can’t regenerate fast enough to get back on their feet, so we thought we’d send men out to go get them.
That’s what she wanted.
Anyone that went out after them lost their head. Just blasted right off. Exploded like someone stuck a grenade in a rotten gourd.
The sub-commanders had to stop sending help. After that, the men stopped cooperating. The sub-commanders have requested evacuation, which I’ve denied.
Against my orders, our forces have given up the jungle outposts entirely. Not to the Mandos, but to the Ghost. One person. They’re like a fracking playground for her. They’ve pulled our remaining forces back to the city and our few mountain outposts remaining.
Ramil’s droids are completely fracking useless for jungle warfare. Too much clutter in the environment for their sensors. Too stupid to detect primitive traps. The men have seen them strung up in trees by the score, crushed beneath swinging logs or rocks, fallen into pits only to be burned by whatever accelerant was in them, or just knocked into the swamps and sunk.
I think we may have a bigger problem there, however. One of the droid control ships was lost. Not destroyed, lost. We believe it was captured. The systems are all locked down and keyed to Ramil, so the tech team is relatively confident that they can’t turn the droids on us, but they can’t rule out the possibility either.
That does not fill me with confidence. If the Mandos turn those murder machines on us, they outnumber my people, conscripts included, ten to one. We’d lose the planet inside of a week.
I’ve attached a list of those insubordinate sub-commanders for future disciplinary action, but at the moment, I can’t do anything to force them to go out and reclaim what they gave up. And I worry that it might not matter soon.
I’m losing control of the situation.
[End report #11-15.]
I exhaled and twisted, pulling with my arms and upper body. My body slid through the ninety degree bend in the vent and I allowed myself a moment to breathe. The air was cold, coming in drawn straight from the mountaintop outside, and the chill of it burned my nose. Combined with the dust in the vents, I had been fighting a sneeze for a while.
And wouldn’t that be just ~hilarious~. ‘Achoo!’ from the vent. A guard reflexively calls ‘gesundheit.’ Then they start arguing over who sneezed, before turning their blasters on the vents. Haha, no thank you!
An illusion formula tied to a scanning formula brought up the map of the base and I found my position within it—along with those of the guards I was feeding it based on my senses. Checking my position relative to my destination and seeing I didn’t have much further to go, I shut it off and began inching along again.
The radio in my ear clicked twice. The enemy had wised up quickly over the months we had been on Serenno and started trying to listen in to our comms, or at the very least monitor for the presence of them. We were operating on radio silence at the moment, but with a system as shitty as the one this galaxy seemed to have in place, a few clicks and a little static were expected—nothing to draw suspicion.
Months on planet. Multiple raids against enemy assets and bases. More time spent in the jungle than I ever wanted to spend again—to the point that I didn’t think that the sonic shower was actually getting me clean anymore and the need for a water shower was a constant, gnawing itch in the back of my mind. Night infiltrations and a whole bunch of silently sneaking through tunnels, sewers, and crawling through vents to steal enemy intel or slit throats.
The Abyssins hadn’t gotten any reinforcements after the devastating blow I’d struck them using their own ship to perform an orbital bombardment—though we knew they had requested it from their client. Stolen enemy comm gear had allowed us to decrypt their frequencies and listen in. He had refused, citing cost and effectiveness versus droids given the loss of their fleet and many of their bases and personnel. Instead, at the direction of their client—Ramil, Master Dooku’s own younger brother—they had begun press ganging the locals to fight for them, under threat of death, and the deaths of their families.
There was now a ‘third force’ in the war, at least from the civilian perspective. Converts from the native population who had rallied behind Ramil, now openly acting against his sister Jenza to take control of the planet. The reality was, they were just another arm of Ramil’s forces—but it was difficult to convince the population of that when they were the ones getting the worst of it.
They had a half-decent propaganda campaign, I’ll give them that. Ramil was promising to deliver on the protection from pirates, slavers, and others that the Republic had promised but failed to deliver. He was using his own hired mercenaries to terrorize the locals, then having his legitimate forces come in and drive them off—but there were a surprising lack of casualties on either side after any engagement between them. They were also claiming that our Mando forces and the Jedi working with Jenza to attempt to secure the planet and negotiate a cease fire were here as the enforcement arm of the Republic trying to prevent Serenno from leaving the Republic and declaring its independence.
Which, to be fair… the Jedi kind of were part of the enforcement arm of the Republic, historically speaking.
With any luck, however, that was all about to change today. We had picked up intel on the location of the commander of the remaining Abyssin forces. If we killed or captured him, we could force the remaining Abyssins to release their hostages—which would in turn give those people who had been press-ganged into fighting for them no reason to continue fighting and every reason to go home to their families. Then perhaps he could tell us where his employer was hiding.
Ramil had been on the run since the day we showed up, conducting his war efforts from his personal airship and we had been unable to locate it to date. Something, or someone, was shrouding him within the Force and keeping us from simply going straight to him to put an end to this whole ordeal.
I resumed my crawl through the vent and eventually, I reached my destination—a little storage room near the center of the base, on the lowest level, where the commander was holed up. I carefully used the Force to undo the grate and slipped out, falling lightly to the floor with nary a sound. The Force closed the grate up again and I looked around the room, taking in the multitude of cardboard boxes full of generic office supplies. A smile stole over my face as I spotted an empty box.
Well, if it worked for Snake…
Making sure my combat knife was loose in its sheath in case I needed to silence someone, I flipped the box over, crouched down, and made my way out of the room and into the hall.
[Situation Report: Serenno – 959 GCS – #12-30. -She’s coming.- Situation normal.]
-She’s coming for me. I can feel it, like eyes on the back of my neck everywhere I go.-
-The intel department noticed a pattern of commanders disappearing. It seemed random at first, but now, they say it’s more directed. All people who have been in contact with this base recently. With me.-
-I’m relocating to the client’s airship. Maybe there I’ll be safe.-
No sign of the enemy. The men have been unable to locate her. Reports of this ‘Ghost’ seem to have been greatly exaggerated.
I have a plan to take care of the ‘countess,’ Jedi, and the Mandalorians in one fell swoop. I need to meet with the client to discuss it.
[End report #12-30.]
