Smuggler Archive

Finally, good work on the latest part.

this is great, cnt wait for the next one

Great job

Just because I know some of you have wondered, and asked... I wrote a short to cover something of a dangling loose end. Now, it's barely been proofread, but I figured I'd put it up this time instead of sitting on it for weeks. It's brief, but it should excite some curiosity.


Space, Baleetra System

The sleek white ship floated above the dark planet, locked in synchronous orbit. There had been no hailing communications from orbital control, no inspection by planetary or systemic defense forces, no scan by automated droid-satellites. The sleek white ship had not been distressed by the lack of interaction with some kind of ground control, it was beyond caring.
Navigational computers had become a technological work of art. Ecliptics and azimuths, black holes and white dwarves, the navicomp was the composer of a symphony of epic proportions. All of space was moving, emptiness becoming filled; mass and inertia, planets spinning away from one place towards another, falling predictably towards a center that they’d never meet. The motion of a tiny body (like a sleek white ship) through these extraordinary forces was a prodigious exploitation of physics, borrowing gravity from one place, speed from another, and turning a million straight-line vectors into a graceful propulsive curve.
Normal navicomputers operated with a variety of redundancies and fail-safes. A functional navicomp was virtually impossible to mathematically swindle, hard to disorient, and if properly programmed would rarely lose a hand of sabacc. A well-coded navicomp could plot a survivable course through a field of multiple black-holes while maintaining enough gravity and atmosphere to keep any of the thousands of sentient creatures it might be ferrying warm and comfortable. A navigational computer was solicitous, informative, and caring. It was programmed with the overwhelming desire to see no harm done to its occupants, regardless of their capacity to do harm to themselves. A good navicomp was an inspired artist, and the safety of its every cargo was its magnum opus.
Aboard the sleek white ship though, someone had murdered the navicomputer. It had locked into a stationary orbit almost as an afterthought, as a safety mechanism so simple and rudimentary that it was practically physical in nature, rather than digital. The engines and the spaceframe suggested an orbital gravitational constant, and the skin had required temporary relief from the system’s damaging radiation. The planet’s night was long, a predicted nine-hundred hours. Locking on the dark side fulfilled all of those requirements.
She stood in the fresher, leaving the door open behind her. A functional navicomputer would have reminded her that leaving all compartment and bulkhead doors open was poor atmospheric discipline, but that solicitous device had been destroyed. She stared into a flat plate that projected her image back to her. In its basic form it was a mirror, although with a little creativity the cameras could be moved to accommodate non-frontal eye placement, and if done right, the ‘mirror’ could be made to display the back of a humanoid’s head instead of the front. This humanoid wasn’t concerned with amusement though, and examined herself with a flat stare.
It was hard for her to remember how long she’d been aboard the sleek white ship. In her mind there was the blurry painful part, and the sharp-hot part when the voice started talking to her. It was a hungry voice, and it seemed to take things away from her while they talked. She knew the voice was a figment of her overstressed mind, and the more she thought about it, the fainter the voice became. She could make it disappear altogether sometimes, but it always came back. Besides, she’d been in space a long time (at least it felt that way) and while the voice took things from her mind, at least it left her with some company. She couldn’t actually claim it was satisfying to hear the litany of anger and rage that it seemed to generate from the memories and moments it devoured in her mind, but it was marginally comforting to feel not so alone for a little while. On the trip to the Baleetra system, Petra had realized that she was just about the most alone person in the whole universe.
She could see it in her eyes most easily. Her face still bore the yellowish tinge of mostly-healed bruises and not enough sunlight. Her split lips had healed, and the on her cheek had faded to thin dark lines. Her body was healing on the outside, but the voice was still hungry on the inside, and it showed in her eyes. She left the mirror active and walked out to the cockpit.
The navicomp had been savagely delivered from its cabinet onto the deck of the cockpit, and hacked to pieces. Some units had been left intact, and some portions had been virtually annihilated by the previous owner of the vessel. The voice ranted about him frequently, and it laughed in a satisfied way. Petra didn’t feel very satisfied with the memory of the previous owner, but she couldn’t remember exactly why. She absently clutched the end of her left arm, where her left hand used to be. The voice hadn’t eaten that memory yet, and she wished it had.
She curled up in the pilot’s chair, and ate another of the protein rations. Staring out of the planet-side window, she couldn’t make out any of the features of the terrain down on the planet; it was nighttime below her. There were no sources of light down on the planet that she could see, and the computer couldn’t be coaxed into providing her with an enhanced image. She finished her meal, and walked idly back to the living quarters, shushing the voice in her head with some concentration.
She’d been living in these quarters for a long time. Much of the time she’d enjoyed, when the ship had been doubling as a home. The voice had glutted itself on those memories, but there were enough of them left for her to remember the gist of her time on Tatooine.
There’d been a man, a human named Dallet. He’d betrayed her, he’d done nothing but constantly betrayed her, but for a time she’d believed in his decency and even thought she’d loved him. He’d been one of the very few people that knew her dream, to become a Jedi. She’d been granted a vision of him, years ago, and had foolishly dreamt as well that he’d share the vision. In the end, she’d broken free of him, but those days still lingered in her mind as warm, exuberant times. She sorted through their clothes, kicking his possessions into a pile. From her own belongings, she extracted a tight-wrapped set of undergarments favored in the desert. She stripped down, and dressed in the brown garments. From another container she removed a tube of metal, and hefted it in her hand. She checked a readout on the tube, and satisfied left the quarters for the cargo hold, the biggest portion of the vessel.
She’d dismantled the work table days, maybe weeks ago. She remembered that it had made her frightened, so she’d cut it to bits. The burned-looking refuse of that workbench lay in small piles all over the bay. She took a steadying breath, gripped the tube in her hand, and closed her eyes. Some of the pieces lifted from the piles as if they were in zero-gee, but she remained firmly attached to the floor. This was a game the voice and she had played so often that she could almost do it herself. She let the voice handle the junk, while she practiced.
A fist-sized chunk left its family of garbage and struck towards her as if thrown. The tube in her hand sparked to with a menacing hiss, and a harsh beam of light lanced out from it. The beam terminated abruptly, turning the tube into a hilt, and the beam into a blade. The blade smoothly intercepted the offending chunk and made it into two smaller chunks, vaporizing a portion of it in its passing.
More chunks separated from their families and began to assault her. Sometimes they were clever and took curving arcs, sometimes they were brutal and drove directly for her. She became the sun of a very small, very turbulent little system; her body providing the pull, and her blade providing the energy. The result was always the same; more chunks with less mass. The blade made her eyes water if she looked at it, but it killed the table a thousand times, and it made her feel better. Not good, but better.

An instant before the ship broke orbit, she felt a change that heralded it. She woke, rose, and stepped into the cockpit. The navicomp displayed a pitiful readout, indicating that it had been suborned by orbital authority. It didn’t respond to queries, refused to relinquish control to her, and eventually stopped responding at all. It powered down and restarted, but she ignored it. She watched the planet grow larger in the main windows until the were obscured by the heat-shielding. She walked back to her room and found her Tatooine garb again. It was probably not right for the atmosphere, but the smell of it reminded her of happier times, and it was comfortable. Besides, the thought darkly, it’s not going to stop blaster bolts any better than something fancy. She tucked her lightsaber into one of the folds of the wrapped garment and walked back to the cargo bay.

The sniffer cycled, and reported a clean, human-tolerant atmosphere. She hit the control for the cargo bay door, and the ship’s mechanical jaw dropped open. She stood at the verge where the flooring became ramp as the wall tilted away, and gripped her lightsaber tightly. She’d been dragged to this system as a bounty, and while no longer captive to any hunter, she was a captive of circumstance, and she knew her options were limited. The voice had told her to remain cautious, but it had also counseled conflict over compromise. She had learned a certain grim lesson aboard the High Tide, and preferred violence as a known quantity rather than the trickeries of negotiation.
The door dropped, and she stepped out onto the ramp. On either side of the ramp stood stormtroopers, two ranks deep. The first was kneeling, the second leaning forward over the first. Both ranks had rifles trained on her. Their armor wasn’t the polished white she remembered, but a dark ashen gray, almost black. Not one of them flinched or fidgeted when she ignited her saber.
Be ready, the voice crooned happily to her. We can take care of these. We have been waiting for this!
She felt a kind of exhilarating anger well up in her, crushing her fear and concern like an insect beneath her boot. She readied herself ward away blaster bolts as she had the torture table before, and the Voice had something planned to make them stop shooting until she could cut them…
“Clearly, we have been misinformed.” A man walked up center of the aisle made by the troopers, until he largely obscured their line of fire, and filled most of her field of view. He wore a charcoal black suit, with a black cloak billowing behind him.
“We were notified that you might be held prisoner, Miss Gullings. We were only taking this precaution in case your captor had planned on changing the terms of our arrangement.”
She remained silent, and the saber remained lit. The Voice had been raving about killing the troopers, but had become eerily silent when the man appeared. She stared at him.
Human, tall, well built. Had a kind of wiry frame, but seemed to drip with confidence. It was telling that he seemed unconcerned about the lightsaber.
“A bounty hunter took me captive. I escaped. He was taking us here, “ she said finally, “to sell me. You were the buyer.”
“Yes, “ he said, smiling. “I’ve spent a great deal of money looking for you. The price was quite high, and I stipulated that you be brought to me alive and unharmed.”
“That’s not what Spak’ta said.” She moved her shortened arm out in front of her body. “He said the offer was dead or alive.”
“I am going to make bit of a leap here and guess that he might have told you several other things that might also be untrue as well.”
She pondered that. He made a curt gesture, and the troopers snapped to attention, then left.
He extended a gloved hand to her, standing on the ramp. She took it as a gesture demanding her lightsaber.
“This stays with me. I’ll kill whoever tries to take it.”
His gesture turned into an expansive one, as if he were merely showing her the landing bay.
“Of course, I would have it no other way.” His sweeping hand moved down to his cloak, and slid it aside from his right hip. “I wouldn’t surrender mine without a fight either,“ he said, smiling.
“What do you want with me?” He’d turned his back on her, as if expecting her to follow. She extinguished the saber.
“I want a student, Petra Gullings. I want a follower, a companion, a friend in these terrible times.” He stopped, and turned back to her.
“But you’re not a Jedi, you’re with the Empire.”
He chuckled. “Where better to hide from their oppression than within their very machine? Out here in the middle of nowhere, on a system I have repeatedly redesignated as ‘officially useless’, with a company of hand-picked men. We are safe here. Oh my, where are my manners?” He bowed slightly, in archaic greeting. “I am Muud, Colonel Forge Muud. Welcome to the Baleetra monitoring station, Petra Gullings.”
“I’m not your friend, or your student. I want to go back home.”
“Certainly, you are free to leave.”
“Free to leave?”
“If you are foolish enough to turn down what I have to offer, then I have no use for you as a student. Or as anything else.”
“What do you have to offer me?”
“Power. Real power. You have felt some of it, or you wouldn’t be here. You would never have survived. But what you’ve had is only a taste. A drop of wine when you could have the whole cask. What I have to show you is a whole ocean of power compared to that single taste.”
“I don’t believe you. I don’t trust you. I should leave right now.”
“Possibly,” he smiled again, “you should. But you should at least let us repair your hand while you’re here, and get a decent meal.”
“You can fix this?”
“We have a full surgical suite, Madam. We could certainly fit you with a synthetic.”
“Alright, but I’m not agreeing to anything, just medical treatment. I can pay.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it, Petra.” He motioned her towards the hangar door, lit by harsh floodlights against the overbearing darkness of the planet. “You are my guest. And please, call me Forge.” The door slid noisily open, and they stepped inside.


Let me know what you think, and Happy Thanksgiving to those of you that celebrate it!