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| - In the final analysis, Anej had to admit Shakvial would have won that bet. The debriefing, which was in truth an interrogation, they were forced to endure lasted only two hours and five minutes, far better than anything he’d expected. Shakvail helped. Contrary to his expectations the Jedi seemed to know exactly when to stay silent, when to speak, and precisely what to say when it came time to answer. He’d lived on Denon all his life, and had family in politics for most of it, but could not come close to matching such polish. “How’d you know what to say?” Anej asked when they finally got into the DPSF airspeeder he’d requisitioned for the assignment. “My master taught me,” Shakvail shrugged. “Authority should be treated with deference and respect. Often that is all that is required to achieve harmony with its goals. Besides,” she added, lighter in tone. “I’m used to academia, compared to that, your customs agents are remarkably straightforward.” “Right,” it made a certain sort of sense, if he didn’t think about it too hard. With a depressing realization, he considered that many things about this woman worked that way. “Well,” Anej pulled the airspeeder out into traffic beyond the spaceport. Under his practiced hand it moved smoothly into the seemingly chaotic stream of repulsorlift vehicles traveling in every direction. “So, maybe I should take you to that apartment now?” It was hard to accept that something so mundane had been the original objective for the day; not after all that had just happened. To the soldier’s surprise Shakvail shook her head quickly. “No, not yet,” she spoke softly, barely audible, but her words were iron. “We should stop by your base first.” Taken aback, Anej tried to puzzle out her meaning. “Ah, okay, I mean, we can do that, I was panning to have you put into our system anyway…” Unable to hold back the inquiry, he stumbled ahead. “But why now?” “Laster Iringe,” she whispered, staring straight ahead into traffic. “Oh,” he’d been trying to blot it all out, mostly; the soldier wasn’t ready to come to terms with what he’d done today, the men he’d killed. His hands wrapped tightly around the wheel just thinking on it, and he knew his knuckles must be white with strain beneath his dress gloves. He hadn’t thought about the Jedi. Glancing at her now, in between turns as he began the long, looping spiral down through the levels towards Quadrant Headquarters, he could see the difference. This wasn’t her first day taking a life; mercenaries cleaved by lightsaber blade or smashed by fuel hose simply added to a tally in the ledger of her scars. She was marked by a different wound, a death taken by the hands of another, one she’d failed to prevent. They were silent for a long while, the light faded away as they traveled down, its reach dissipated several kilometers below the high skyscrapers. They skimmed across the tops of the great block levels below, the Lower Strata. The speeder wound between antennas, chimneys, pipes, and scaffolding, until it shot out at last into a wide, open space. Locally it was twilight, the sun vanishing swiftly, but as they passed into that vast emptiness light burst all around them, finally free to pierce down toward the lost surface of the planet, unobstructed by the teeming fabrications of industry that obscured it elsewhere. “Oddly pretty,” Shakvail nearly whispered. “Shame it is in the service of militarism.” The Jedi glanced down, even as their craft shifted in the same direction as her gaze, descending rapidly. Anej’s vision matched his passenger’s. They stared down to the bottom of this cleared cube; to at the vast bulk of an immense half-dome, covered in armor plates and broken only a by an isolated, immense barrel capable of swallowing their airspeeder whole. “Hmm…” Shakvail’s pursed her lips. “Do you show this to all the girls?” The soldier’s head spun around, a raspy-retort on his lips, only to swallow it when he saw the ridiculous grin on the Jedi’s face. Deftly as he could, he shifted his response. “No, it invites too many jokes about ‘compensating’ and the like.” “So your base is in the shadow of this emplacement?” Shakvail pointed to a series of outbuildings clustered in the corners of the square kilometer cleared section that sheltered this mighty emplacement. “Seems like poor planning in the case of attack.” “Not really,” he explained, welcoming a chance to talk shop. “All those structures are non-essential, the combat controls, targeting, and command are actually underneath the mount and its buried power generator. Besides, when you start talking about bombardment big enough to destroy a planetary ion cannon, well, the whole district’s liable to be in trouble.” “Good point,” she admitted. The Jedi fell silent for the next few seconds; time enough for the airspeeder to land in a small lot. “I’ll have to check you in,” Anej explained to his passenger. “It’s kind of an involved process. Things were scheduled for tomorrow, but we can do it now, droids do most of the work anyway.” “Very well,” she nodded. “Just look up the mercenary while I’m occupied, if you could.” “Sure,” he paused, thinking about what awaited him. “Though I’m going to have my own debrief, and a report to file. The base headquarters was a modest, blocky building of three stories, drab-gray and marked only by service crests and regimental banners. A pair of armed battle droids stood at absent-minded attention by the main door, staring off into space. “No human honor guard?” Shakvail questioned, looking at the scuffed and pitted units, each bearing the obvious marks of years standing in the same place. “Budget,” it was a tired remark, one of countless acknowledgments of an unpleasant reality. The droids observed impassively as Anej submitted his badge to the scanner by the door and then tapped out a brief code. The light on the console went from red to green and the door swooshed open a moment later. “After you,” he gestured to the Jedi. They swept into a small foyer, bordered on the right by a guardroom; a vast array of cameras and monitoring equipment piled up all around a massive desk. A single, narrow visage emerged from behind this wall of electronics at the sound of their footsteps. “Hey Anej, you’re back!” the chipper, youthful enthusiasm of the voice belied the gray-haired and wrinkled head producing it. Dark brown eyes dominated that face, and widened when they fell upon Shakvail. There was an audible intake of breath. “And who’s your friend?” Trying not to sigh, Anej turned to the older man, noting the unspoken snickers his thoroughly ruined dress uniform was drawing at a second look. “Gedd, this is Shakvail, she’s a Jedi. It’s all in an incident report forwarded from Kivvarc Spaceport Security that should have come through the net at least an hour ago.” The graying head vanished, as the man ducked behind his screens to unleash a rapid-fire storm of tapped commands. “Ooh…yes…it’s all here.” A brief stream of inaudible muttering followed as he read something off. “It looks like you’ve several messages from Captain Berallin.” “Is the captain present?” the solider thought he already knew the answer, but he had hopes otherwise. “Nope,” Gedd’s smile faded when he faced Anej’s scathing reaction. “He went home at the end of his shift, over an hour ago.” The duty officer finished lamely. Sputtering slightly, Anej took a good three seconds to stare at the ceiling. He contemplated his options for a moment, a succession of choices, all equally frustrating. “Never mind,” he muttered under his breath, but out of the corner of his even he saw Shakvial turn. The Jedi fixed him with those blue-black eyes, and somehow he was sure she grasped the entirety of what he was feeling. Reminded by her face of his next step, the soldier forced his focus back to what he needed to do right now. “Gedd, I need to read those messages and draft an incident report. Shakvail needs to be input to the network with VIP-level guest privileges. Can you do me a favor and take care of it?” “Sure, I got it,” a wrinkled hand reached under the desk and pulled out a battered datapad. Blinking twice as he input a set of commands, Gedd passed it over to the Jedi. “Couple of data inquires first, just start at the top.” The evening would go long indeed, two people sitting in separate dimly lit rooms in front of screens and speaking almost entirely to droids while they complied with the myriad demands of interlaced bureaucracies. By the end of it, Anej was thanking the Force that his liaison position was authored flexibly enough that meeting Shakvail at the spaceport qualified as ‘on-duty’ and looking up Laster Iringe in every database he had access to simply as a way to banish the onslaught of forms. What he discovered shot his estimation of Shakvail’s Jedi insights through the roof. “It’s a kriffing conspiracy,” he blabbered, trying to parse the returns, and failing. Too tired, worn, and generally beaten down to process the whole story in that little office; but it was nevertheless clear Merr-Sonn had become involved in something truly deep. A mercenary claimed by an assassin’s bolt earlier that day was not even scratching the surface. Unwilling to go further, he copied out a summary file for Shakvail, closed the terminal, and walked back down to the entryway. His timing, at least, was good, processing was almost complete, and he only had to wait five minutes before the Jedi returned, bearing a newly minted guest badge and an access cylinder. She gave him a look that was all Jedi serenity, but it could not completely shake the image of a young woman in crumpled indigo robes with dirty hair and flecks of blood on her boots. “Let’s go,” she spoke tersely, and Anej only nodded. It was only a handful of minutes by airspeeder to the small government apartment complex where Shakvail had been granted a spare room. A towering, square building filled with identical room blocks painted a solid, uniform pale gray; it housed tens of thousands of lesser members of the planetary ministries, the bureaucratic masses that were the capital’s principle distinguishing group. After parking and a short turbolift ride, Anej passed a card over the door reader to welcome the Jedi into a singularly barren one-bedroom affair. Droid-painted, unadorned, and with nothing but pre-fabricated furniture, the soldier found he was actually looking at something that made his own very modest on-base accommodations appear welcoming by contrast. “Sorry this is all we came up with,” he muttered lamely, disappointed at how his planet was treating their august guest. Shakvail merely shrugged. “Bed, kitchen, refresher, terminal, all the essentials. Having a roof is a plus. So don’t worry.” “Uh, thanks, I guess,” he gave her a quizzical look, but whatever meaning the comment possessed he could pull nothing from behind those eyes. “You look tired,” she said instead. “And I am. We can speak again in the morning.” “Right.” Not knowing what else to do, Anej saluted before turning to go. On the way out, before the door closed behind him, the Jedi whispered a final line. “Killing is never easy to face, nor should it be. If you wish to talk of it, I will listen.” Anej spun about, but the door had already closed. For a long, terrible moment of silence the soldier considered going back. He hesitated; his hand hovered over the keypad, and then slowly, inevitably, lowered. He wasn’t ready to talk about it, the memories percolated chaotic, disordered, in his brain, it wasn’t time. “And maybe,” he muttered, consumed by an odd impulse. “Maybe I shouldn’t go to a Jedi first.” As he rode the turbolift back to the airspeeder, Anej recalled one other thing from earlier. Shakvail had promised him excitement, and she had certainly delivered. Could he do his duty, and keep pace? Could anyone not endowed with the Force run with a Jedi? Staring at the sky as he drove home, the glowing expanse, all stars hidden by the lights of the city, offered no answers.
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