Smuggler Archive

I only need to write a few more pages and proof this week's episode. Expect it this evening before 11 EST.

Dallet 2.8

Buzzard, Tatooine

"Look, GreenStar," Captain Stark said slowly, "the thing is, you're drafted. It's all official, and it's been recorded."
"You guys must be really hard up, drafting the dead and all." I said, opting to hold off my 'scream your head off' plan until later. I've heard the Jedi were outstanding diplomats. Perhaps they were hard of hearing as well, I find that it helps with diplomacy to be deaf. I tried flashing him my infamous 'Just kidding' grin to take the sting out. He wasn't having any of that.
"The droid cannot directly certify that you were dead. Besides, there's no strict rule against it, and there's so many levels of 'dead' with all this technology... Either way, you're in the service. Learn to love it, because you don't have a choice." He went back to fiddling with his desk computer. If I read my dealer's intuition right, he wasn't done talking, and he wasn't as hard-nosed as he tried to pretend.
"Is there some sort of a deal we could work out maybe? I've got a ship back in dock, it's not a great fighter but it might-"
"No deals, Private. This isn't a street corner that you can push drugs on." He might not have been as angry as he was acting, but my dealer's instincts were getting a bit muzzy as I got away from the practice. Well, I thought, so much for diplomacy.
"Yeah, right. I never did have much luck selling glitter to dead men either, they didn't pay me back on time. Course, I tried not to bill too many dead guys."
"Listen, you ingrate! Pemwik wanted you under her thumb so that she could return a favor. We're probably going to have to tell what's left of the town that 'we're very sorry, but we're pulling out.' We're probably going to have to ask them to bury a few of our own dead here soon, when we tuck our bloody tails and run. She drafted you so she could be damned sure that she did everything she could to get your stinking carcass out of here before the poodoo hit the repulsor!" He shouted, obviously more worried about not being heard than being overheard.
"You don't owe me anything, she doesn't owe me anything!" I thought back, summoning her face from my memory. She'd been assigned to detain and question Kah and I in the desert - a little encounter that turned injurious after someone stunned Kah into oblivion, and I broke her wrist. Afterwards when I'd come-to, she'd questioned me about my identity and the usual police-state greeting I receive when I wake up in confinement. She wasn't all bad though, and she had mounted the rescue operation after I'd been taken by the Stormtroopers. I'd been taken buying time for her escape though, and she must have felt obligated. Obligations were a bad idea in my previous occupation, but I wasn't sure how they stood with me now. I suspected they were important.
"Listen Private, here's your deal: I don't want to have to deal with insubordination, and I don't want to have to feed you and wipe your rear until the end of the war. So please, " he said, touching a button on his desk, "allow me to officially tell you that I'd be bloody thrilled if you were to disappear when things get rough. I'll even mark you as deceased in the line of duty, because that's how we found you." He tapped the recorder off. "That good enough for you, swindler?"
"Suits me just fine, Captain, " I said while rising. I snapped into a rigid mockery of an Imperial formal salute, and waited for his return salute. He surprised me by standing to full attention, and returning my joke with a crisp salute. There wasn't a hint of sarcasm in his body language either.
"Make sure you tell Kah when you're going to fall down Private, you might tell him the same goes for him too. Dismissed."
"Yes sir."

"Rotter, how are the new guys doing?" Pemwik didn't need to say which new guys, and Rotter knew better than to make a point of it. A week ago he'd been digging through the wreckage of a supply depot looking for enough equipment to make two packs of basic-gear for two new and unusual draftees. Unusual to Rotter because he'd never met another soldier that had been forced into service; he'd always been in volunteer units.
"Ma'am, they're alright. The human was in the service before, so he knows the score. His drill's a bit rusty, but I don't think we'll be on parade any time soon." He smiled, showing off several replacement teeth that gleamed much more whitely than the real ones.
"I don't think so either, Rot. How about Kah, he holding up?"
"Sure is ma'am. He slept for about 36 hours after you drafted him, but he's been going strong since. I've got him and Dallet teaching some hand-to-hand drills to the boys, in case we get in another mess indoors. That lizard is fast-"
"Trando, Sergeant. He's not a lizard unless he says it's ok to call him one." Fiti glared at him.
"Yes ma'am, a Trandoshan. He's got the fastest hands er, claws, that I've ever seen. Heck, he wrestled Pesh to the ground in about five seconds. Pesh claims it's cause he ain't got both eyes back in yet, but I was there with them talking, when Pesh told him it couldn't be done. If he'd have had both his eyes in, he might have gone six seconds, but he'd have gone down either way." Rotter spoke with just a little bit of awe in his voice. It was a remnant of his upbringing on a backwater planet; he'd been continually amazed for months until everything got boring and he'd become tired of being made fun of for his naivete.
"He's a master of his art, Rotter. They don't make them any tougher than that."
"That Dallet's almost as fast. At least he is now. He wasn't good for anything right after he got out of the tank. 'Least he don't stink as bad now."
She ignored the last bit. "He studied with Kah for a long time before we found him."
"Can you imagine that Lieutenant? Having all that time to do whatever you wanted with it? Not having to dig latrines or repair picket-droids or hike supplies all over creation? I used to hate farming, but it looks better every day." He said wonderingly.
"Rotter, you'd be bored out of your skull back on your folks' farm, and you know it."
"Yeah, but I'd probably live a whole lot longer." He smiled again, showing gaps where teeth should have been. It really was hideous, but it was infectious. Fiti smiled with him.
"That'll be all Sergeant. Don't work them too hard, we might have to run at any time."
"Roger that, Lieutenant."

I took stock of the lessons I'd learned that morning. I've learned that Stark doesn't like me any more than Shedfall did. Maybe it's something about the desk, they both used the same desk. They both probably looked up the same incriminating history about me, so it might very well have been the desk. Pemwik likes me enough to draft both Kah and I into her crazy crusade. Pemwik did not have a desk. Maybe the anesthetic I'd made her for her wrist had numbed her brain too though. It was important to note that in recent times I'd been in more deadly encounters because of people who supposedly liked me than people who supposedly hated me. That Debs fellow had hated my guts and almost tortured me to death, but at least he was polite about it.
I wandered Buzzard in search of a way to kill the afternoon. I'd served my time as sentry, I'd been coming off-post when I went to see Stark. I didn't have any pressing foodprep or latrine duty because just about everything was locked down tight and packed away in case we had to blow out of there any minute. Kah wasn't teaching again this afternoon, so he wouldn't need the human punching bag to serve as his attack dummy again for a while. Still, things seemed vastly unsettled in my mind.
It'd been more than a week since I pulled myself out of the warm pink goop they call bacta. I'd never thought about how cloying that stuff can get in the sun, but I'd always been able to shower the remnants off quickly. In our present situation, there was no spare water for bathing, and no spare fresher units for sonic showers. The rest of the unit didn't seem to mind the conditions too much, but the rest of the unit hadn't spent days in an antiseptic healing vat either. I smelled funny, and I'd almost sent the Lieutenant into anaphylaxis when she came to politely inquire about my fitness for duty. She'd left in a sneezing, coughing huff, and I'd felt oddly self-concious about it for days. Well, it wasn't that odd; it really did stink for a long time.
My body was mostly recovered from the wounds I'd received while a guest at the G2 facility. The Imperial treatment had left an arm, several ribs, one cheek and my jaw broken. My face was a mask of bruises, I'd had a serious concussion, and those were just the things I'd remembered to ask the droid about. Strangely, even considering the soaking in bacta for hours and hours, I'd healed unusually quickly. Kah claimed that it was the clean living of the Teras Kasi way, but I could have sworn I could feel the cells in my body working furiously to knit and repair. I'd eaten voraciously and slept the sleep of the dead (which I feel safe in rendering an opinion about). I'd begun to work the forms with Kah again, and I could feel my fitness improving every day. Soon I'd meet or exceed my good health prior to the unfortunate incident at the Imperial facility.
Still though, I thought discontentedly, it isn't enough. I'm supposed to be doing something, making something, being something. It nagged at me that I didn't know exactly what. I knew that by choosing to live I'd chosen to walk a path that had certain responsibilities, but I didn't know exactly what they were. And, I thought bitterly, the only people I could have asked about it were long dead or in hiding so profound that they probably didn't remember where they were themselves. They'd been tight-lipped about their order before, so little information had been circulated to outsiders about their structure or study. Then when the purge came, they'd been villified, hunted, and killed. Their archives had been destroyed, and their very existence had been stricken from some public records, and left twisted and incorrect in the remainder. I was at a complete loss as to how to proceed.

When you're a new recruit who happens to have a lengthy criminal record and is considered a flight risk, you don't get much time to yourself. You also don't get a gun right away, but at least they'd relented on that issue. That morning I'd finished up my duties a bit early (although punitive duty always seemed to take longer than the strictly routine stuff) and even managed to evade the Lieutenant's ever-present gaze for a while. Alone alongside what used to be a supply depot, I sat quietly, focusing on my work. It's a hell of a thing to see, stones and debris moving by itself, outside of a repulsor field. I mean, I knew how repulsors worked, pretty much, I knew what they were made of and how great they were to the shipping industry and all that rot... I just never expected to _be_ one. But there I was, making things float.
The Force was becoming easier to sense. In a way, it was as if it'd been whispering to me my whole life, but I hadn't been paying attention. Once in a while, back in my old life, I'd set up the details of a drug deal in a noisy bar. The buyer always understood me, and I always understood him, despite the raucous activity going on around us. If you're properly motivated, everything else fades to a dull buzz, and you can pick out what you need. It's not like you're ignoring your lookout at the bar or the police-channel commo tucked discreetly in your ear; it's just that you file the information away. That's what I was trying to do with the rocks, but selling drugs was easier.
If I thought about the Force as a kind of gas that permeated everything it touched, it helped. I could ask the gas to get denser or lighter, as if it were in a breeze. I could ask it to move, and by moving it brought things with it. Sometimes big ten-kilo rocks, sometimes dust. I couldn't really control what I got, and sometimes I couldn't get it to do a thing for me. I suspected that with a proper Jedi instructor, this part of my learning might take only hours; in my case, it was going from days to weeks. If I was going to fit the mold, I'd need to think like a Jedi. Except the only ones I'd ever heard of were viscious criminals and mass-murderers, and even those ones were dead. Sometimes I made myself recall the holodramas and official histories of the Jedi Knights, trying to play them back in my head to glean any salient information out of them. Instead of learning though, it usually became an exercise in revealing just how propagandized and corrupted their history had become, and served only to show me how impossible my task would be.
Then again, the only Force using person I really knew was a marginally psychotic woman I thought I'd been in love with, who now wanted vehemently to kill me. Not that she provided the perfect role model, but at least she'd taken her own first tentative steps. Of course, if I took too many steps down the path she'd travelled, Kah would undoubtedly kill me without batting an eye.

I found myself back near the repulsor pallet that we were calling the 'new' supply depot. It hovered underneath a concealing tent, ready to be loaded onto trapsort of some kind when the evacuation call finally came. There was a grizzled Twilek sitting in the shade, tinkering with a broken droid motivator, his attention focused on his work. One of his eyes bore a comical patch with a mockery of a winking blue eye painted on its surface. The other eye was squinting in frustration, the furrowed brow moderating the struggle between the angry eye and the hysterical one.
"Pesh! I wondered if you could help me out, " I called out in a friendly fashion. Pesh seemed like a wheeler-dealer to me, and a mischevious codger. That is to say, I liked him straightaway.
"There'll be no more smacking around of the Pesh until I've got my new eye laddie! I told the old lizard that we'd have at it again then, not before. It's a sad advantage he took of me!" Pesh growled, then looked back to his work without rising to meet me.
"If Kah wants to run around picking fights with everyone in his new unit, that's his problem." I said, knowing it was a severe embellishment of how it'd happened. Pesh had been asking for it, and Kah had taken it easy on him. Just about every one of the students back at the farm could have put Pesh in his place, but I didn't see the need to tell him that. Maybe Jedi diplomacy and the old 'dealer's grease' weren't so different after all. A bit of a tribute had to be made, and it didn't hurt to make it. "No, sir, not me. I've been looking everywhere for someone to help me with a problem. Everyone says the same thing. Go see Pesh, they said. Old One-Eye, he'll tell you how to build it, if anyone can."
"Build what, youngin?" He asked, his good eye opening in curiosity akin to the painted one's expression. I pretended I didn't hear him.
"It's not every day I need a power source like that, I mean, it's certainly not standard or anything. Hell, it's probably impossible." He looked at me, and I kept my eyes downcast. "I'll just shelf it until we get into space, maybe with the stores they'll have on a cruiser..."
"If it can be built, Stinky, I'm your man." Did I mention that the grunts had developed a brilliant new nickname after the rancid-bacta incident?
"Well, it's a power source, but it's got to be really small..."
"Shielded?" He set down his tools, and the part he'd been fixing in his lap.
"Yes, handheld. Human rad-tolerance."
"How much output? How long?"
"Thirty krekmas," a guess, on my part. "At least. Recyclying, low duty-cycle use."
"Oh laddie, they were right. You aren't going to swindle an old Twilek into that one. It's too hat for a blaster, and not strong enough for a launch pack. Even a cutting torch or welder, they don't need to recycle, you're talking about needing a power source, and a wave guide, maybe a focusing field, or an emitter. I'm patching a droid's eyepiece up with some broken glass and epoxy, this isn't even a proper shop, I've got no..." He paused, midsentence, and the wind went out of his bluster. "What did you say you needed it for?"
"I didn't, " I replied, thinking furiously. It had seemed like such a good idea, and so unguessable just minutes ago. "I can find all the other parts, the er, wave emitter and the focusing guide. I have all that stuff, I just need a safe source for thirty krekmas, bipolar and rechargable..."
"C'mon now Stinky, almost anything will run off of one of those squarepaks, they put out a half-krekma for almost a day."
"They're too big. This is handheld."
"You could hold one of them in your hands, but it'd be terrible heavy. I reckon maybe a backpack..."
"It's got to be light, like a glowrod."
"Laddie, c'mon now! You'll be asking me for a starfighter next, to fly you home. Or maybe you'd like to be a wealthy Hutt financier. You're asking the impossible."
"I've seen them, my friend made one recently, they're not hard, but I think there's a trick."
"Aye? Where's he now laddie, Alderaan? Next you'll be telling me you've got the Emperor's home commo frequency, and he has you over for dinner."
"C'mon Pesh, it's not that impossible. What if I could get you some generated schematics?" Wrong thing to ask.
"Schematics! Palp's Ass! I've never needed droid blueprints to make a bleedin' battery! There's no bloody art in one of those beeping little..."
"Alright, alright. Fine. I'll think of something then. Sorry to bother you." Something had come to mind, actually, while I'd been making my failed attempt.
"Now you listen up, bucko. Maybe it's a might strange, what you're askin' for, but if it can be made, Peshee can make it. Hows about you check in tomorrow, mayhaps I've got something that will do the trick."
"Really?" The old twin-stalked codger had surprised me.
"Really. That is, of course, " the 'catch' was so blatant it was virtually audible, "for a modest fee."
"How modest?"
"Well, I'll need to be pulling some strings, to get the source I'm thinking of. It's a hard to find item. I'll be some thirsty after that."
"I'll buy you a drink then." Could it be this easy?
"I was thinking maybe that you could find me a vintage bottle of Heaven's Breath. Something sweet." It wasn't.
"You're serious? That's not even easy to find on the planets where it _is_ legal. No way would Pemwik let me out long enough to buy some."
"You seem to me to be a resourceful lad. Tomorrow morning Stinky, we'll talk again."

Jundland Waste

The humanoid shape finished laying the last dark panel out in the sand. It fit into a pattern that formed a kind of squashed ellipsoid around a long, bulbous ship. Parts were in piles all around the ship, and the panels were connected to one another by cables, and routed into the ship via a receptacle near the rear hatch. The humanoid shape moved toward the panel slowly, optimizing its use of energy.
It tapped some commands into the rear access panel, and lights in the ship's interior came to life, guttered, and went out.
The shape slowly cocked its head quizzically, and leaned slightly to look into the ship. After a few moments, it leaned back, and slowly drew its arm back. The sun glinted from the glossy black surfaces where a human's eyes would be. Above the eyes, two antennae reminiscent of insects' twitched fitfully.
The hand crashed forward, smashing into the ship's hull with enough force to rock the whole ship perceptibly.
The lights came back on in the ship, and remained lit.
The droid removed its left hand with a deft twist of its right, and thrust the stump into a charging receptacle alongside the power cables. After a several moments of inactivity, it removed the arm from the ship's outlet, and reattached the hand. It then walked briskly about the ship, and began sorting through the piles. Sometimes it wouls switch hands, to equip a torch or spanner, sometimes it would cast a part aside and find a new one. It was obvious that the ship had been heavily modified, and would continue to be altered as the droid saw fit.
When the suns went down, the droid collected the panelling and stored it in a bin welded to the hull. The remaining parts he left in the sand. He went inside, and the hatch closed.
He walked foward until he was just aft of the cockpit. He climbed into a cobblecd-together frame, and interlocks closed around him. The ship's lights extinguished, and the droid began his powersaving shutdown routine. It was interruped by communication on a reserved frequency.

Buzzard

"En-See, come in. En-See, this is Dallet. Do you copy?" Had Kah given me the wrong commo? Why had Kah even had the new commo frequency?
"I copy, Captain Dallet." Was that happiness I heard in his voice? Not possible.
"It's good to hear your voice again, NC." I didn't know why, either. First off, it was a droid, and I don't get warm and fuzzy about droids. Second, it was a droid, and droids don't get warm and fuzzy about people. Especially not conniving, treacherous droids like NC. Droids didn't care one whit what sentients thought about them, ever.
"Does that mean that you are no longer considering destroying me, Captain Dallet? I am also pleased to hear you." Ok, most droids didn't care. I've long suspected that NC was insane though.
"Listen, I'm in a town called Buzzard." Not that I figured it'd be on the survey, but it was worth a shot.
"Is Kah with you? He is well?" I pondered. If droids could use drugs, I'd have suspected him of being on something. If he was, I'd been missing out on a huge market segment. I pushed the thought away.
"Yeah, Kah's fine."
"That is good to hear. I am pleased to hear that."
"Are you alright NC?"
"No sir, I am not. I have been subsisting on solar power for months. I have sold your location forty-one times to different sources of inquiry. I was frequently forced to eliminate contacts after they learned that I did not have your actual present location. I was unable to maintain our berth, and have been forced into the desert. I have bartered with Jawas for parts. I was forced to eliminate some Jawas when they attempted to ionize my circuits."
"Wow, I'm sorry to hear that."
"Further, " he continued, "I have had no sentient contact with anyone except the human boy named Bindi and the deceased Jawas. I have been repeatedly removed from local holonet connections for lack of a credit source. I have been shot at. Once the ship was boarded, and the officers wished to arrest the pilot. They refused to believe I was the pilot. They refused to talk to me. I attempted to bribe them but they wanted nothing in the ship. I offered them the stash of narcotics in the belowdeck - "
"Hey!" I interrupted. I didn't think he knew about that stash, and it was mine! "My stash is not yours to-"
"They would not take it. Their droids were instructed not to interface with this ship or myself for fear of becoming infected."
"NC, since when do you care about conversation?" My ship's droid had cabin fever. In the desert.
"It has been terrible, sir. Simply terrible."
"You've got to be kidding."
"I cannot kid sir. I cannot practice any humor in solitude."
"Ok, we're going to get you a nice programming adjustment and maybe an oil bath. But I need a favor."
"Certainly sir, we are still your vessel. I would very much like an oil bath."
"Right. I need you to trace me, and come here. But first, you have to find a way to get a hold of a bottle of this stuff..."

"Who was that? Who were you talking to?" Lieutenant Pemwik rounded the corner as I finished my conversation with NC. It had taken considerably longer than it should have; who'd ever heard of a talkative navigational droid? Still, it was a bit disconcerting for a man of my dubious talents and expertise to be caught arranging a meeting by a flatfooted officer.
"My ship. NC." She stared at me incredulously. "From our outpost? Are you crazy? It could have been traced."
"Nah, it was really brief, " I lied, "and trust me, nobody was listening in on this droid's calls." She didn't seem mollified.
"We've been trying to track some emissions for a month, there's this... Wait, you have a ship?"
"Yeah, of course I have a ship. It's called the Angry Knob."
"I should have guessed." She frowned, one of those 'you continue to disappoint me' frowns that made me feel oddly uncomfortable. Women must practice that look. There was an awkward silence while we both began to realize that a Lieutenant doesn't take a vested interest in her newest recruit, and I could almost feel the mood go from personal to professional. "You do realize that the ship now belongs to the Rebellion, don't you Private?"
"No way, Lieutenant. You can't have it. It's private property." I almost chuckled at the pun, and unless I missed my guess, she did too. At least she didn't press the issue.
"No more private communications Dallet. You clear it with me first, or you go through Sifer."
"Yes Ma'am."
"What'd you say the droid's name was? Antsy?"
"En-See, like Navigation Computer. Not very inventive, but it works."
"Your computer is in a droid? Is it an astromech?"
"Not really, he's kinda in both of them at once. He has some kind of good transmission or something and he just 'remotes' to the droid. Or he used to, before... well, a while back."
"That's not supposed to be possible, those algorithms are really tight for a navicomp. The personality and self-awareness are overlays. I heard they were too unstable to crosslink with with navicomps."
"Yeah, well, I wouldn't call it a shining success. I think he's going nuts."
"How can you tell?"
"Well, let's see. He's been kicked off the holonet, he's been extorting funds, he aced a few Jawas, and now even other droids won't talk to him."
"That seems a bit unusual for a droid." Did she just giggle? She wasn't looking at me, but it felt like she was smiling.
"And he wanted desperately to talk to me when I called him up."
"That's a sure sign he's crazy, " she said, and laughed aloud. "He must have gotten cooked in the sun. Get him mindwiped."
We were kind of mutually walking back towards the enlisted barracks. My watch was coming up.
"When does he get here Dallet?"
"Morning. I'll tell the watch not to shoot him down."
"I'll tell them, I'm not sure the newest recruit gets much pull."
"Well, at least they mostly stopped calling me Stinky. That's got to count for something." They'd stopped calling me 'Stinky' behind my back. I susptected it was because it was far more gratifying to do it in front of me.
"They're good men Dallet, all of them. Give them a while to get used to you. They've been through a lot together, and you're the new guy." She didn't sound apologetic, she just sounded like she was stating the facts. It doesn't matter anyway, I thought, because when the shooting starts Kah and I are going to fall down and play dead. Then we'll hook back up with NC and see about getting off this dustball. Oddly, I felt as if she'd cast me the 'you continue to disappoint me' look when I thought that, and she wasn't even looking at me. Wierd. It made the silence taste funny.
"Goodnight Private." Two words that screamed there were about a thousand other words that needed to be said.
"Goodnight Ma'am. And thank you." To her credit and my relief, she didn't ask me what for.

I yawned, and squinted at the horizon. We'd had to move away from the campsite a few kilometers for security's sake, and Pemwik hadn't wanted me out alone. It would figure that she'd send Pesh out with me to keep an eye on me. No chance of keeping the droid or the ship quiet after that, the biggest storyteller in our unit right at the landing site with me.
"The Lietenant said that your droid might be going a wee bit crazy?"
"Yeah, but he's pretty reliable." Yeah, I thought. Pretty reliably wierd.
"Well, if he goes round the last moon, if you know what I mean laddie, you hit the deck. I'll handle him."
"C'mon Pesh, we've got guns. He won't go nuts if he knows we'll slag him." Of course, if I knew NC he was a walking arsenal by now. Especially if Bindi had been helping him out.
"I've seen you shoot, Stinky. It's not something that puts the fear of death in me." He chuckled hoarsely, scanning the horizon casually.
"I'm as good a shot as most, " I said defensively, "and I can hold my own in a fight." I used to be, anyway. It'd been months since I had to shoot at anyone.
"Sure you can, you and that lizard be good with your hands and feet. But only a gritchpa brings a knife to a gunfight, and you two don't even bother with the knife."
"Whatever."
"You see that rock over there, the one with the split in the top?" I looked where he was pointing. There might have been a rock with a split top there, but it was only a handspan or two tall, and had to be a hundred meters away. The codger had at least one damned keen eye.
"Yeah, so? Anybody could hit that." I drew my standard issue pistol (which was no longer so standard), aimed, and fired. I hit it, barely. It fell to one side, and became about half as tall as it had been.
"Not bad laddie. I think you winged him." He unlimbered a carbine, and I started to protest. He turned away from the stone, looking the other direction.
Quick as a panther, he spun around and shot. He probably fired even before he was all the way around. He put three rounds into the rock, blowing the top clear, and knocking it completely over.
"Nice shot."
"Just gettin' me range." He turned his back on the rock again. I could barely make it out at all, and was pretty sure I couldn't have hit it without a scope or an aerial bombing run. He lifted the eyepatch off of the empty socket, and slid it around to cover the good eye. He grinned evilly at me, spun, and fired again. Two of the three shots hit the rock, the last was overkill; it passed through a hot cloud of dust that used to be a rock.
"Damn." I spoke before I could remember to be tough and unimpressed.
"You just remember to hit the deck if your friend gets batty."
"Will do."

"That was Sifer, " Pesh said a few minutes later, after receiving a communication from the camp, "He says our delivery will be late. Your batty droid called and says there's something wrong with his clearance."
I shrugged. Who needed clearance to fly over the most worthless chunk of desert this planet had? It was going to be hot, and uncomfortable. A year ago, I'd have griped the whole time. Having spent longer days in worse heat, and a few days pretty much dead, I didn't let little things like sweat bother me too bad. I called up a topo map from my datapad and looked for some place that might sport some shade, mostly for Pesh's benefit. Because I was linked into the base's intel, I noted that we weren't too far from a blip on the pad. Being possessed of an unhealthy boredom and a curious datapoint, I investigated. Of course, the incident file was classified. Identified by date and time, but all information was locked out. If it had been a terminal, or maybe a droid-managed information hub, I could have sliced it. The datapad I had was grunt standard read-only however, so trying to bypass security would be useless.
I thought about the date shown there. I'd come a long way in the months since my disasterous orbit around Dallet-2. I'd been changed permanently, and I'd been changing ever since that time. In a few months' time, I'd gone from a marginally successful criminal concerned only with my next fix, to a confused student of a dead calling. My focus had broadened drastically since the date on my datapad, which was only a month or two after my ordeal in the escape pod. The day I mark as my rebirth.
The escape pod.
I looked at the date again, and the topo map. No, I thought, what could the odds be against that?
"You want to go for a walk Pesh? I want to check something out."
"Whatever laddie. I don't suppose you snuck a taste of brandy out in your canteen?"

Escape pods are a collection of designs all aimed at making the (soon to be dead and frozen) occupant believe that hope is not futile. Some of the more lavish ones were almost cozy and probably let the rider live for days with a healthy buffer of heat and atmosphere. The economy models were much more of the pragmatic mindset, and were designed along the idea of keeping the mortal remains of the dead and frozen occupant in one place for collection. Regardless of the design though, they all had one thing in common. The universal docking ring.
A perfectly round ring of one and one-half meters, made of sturdy enough material to survive one or more forceful ejections from a primary mass, also to survive one or more reconnections with another universal docking acceptor. For a while you could get the rings and the collars that allowed them to be fused with the pod for almost nothing; manufacturers knew that you weren't going to pay much money for the door to a pod that served little other purpose than keeping a corpsicle on ice. Because they had mandated specifications, it was a common (but grim) joke that you'd see the ring before you saw the rest of the pod; often only the ring survived.
In this case, that was about all that I found.
There were a few finger-sized chunks of metal nearby, which I suspected came from the same source. The ring itself survived, along with the hinges to the inner airlock mechanism, but little of the mechanism or the door remained. Two of the pressure-equalization tubes were loosely attached to the ring; the heating and cooling of the two different metals had sprung all four of the interlocks, and only these two remained. The remains of the pod didn't seem familiar to me, but I knew they should have. It used to be the escape pod for the High Tide, carrying the former owner on one last de-orbit.
"Well, wasn't this a worthwhile hike laddie? A docking ring, maybe next we can go look for spent booster canisters."
"I put this pod here. I sent it here." I tried to hint that it was important to me.
"I say then, you're a worse pilot than I thought, but you're lucky as sin!" He broke into a loud laughter, that completely derailed the moment I was having.
"C'mon, it's not like I was in it!"
"You don't say!" That brough on more laughter, and I have to admit, I was laughing too. It was absurd, that anything so transformed by the heat and pressure of reenty could even be remotely associated with safety.
I reached down and plucked one of the equalization pipes from the ring, hefted it in my hand. It was twice as long as my hand was wide, and that seemed about right.
"Ah, I see, " Pesh said while reaching into his backpack "you'll be wanting this then." And he handed me a length of gadgetry. It was warm to the touch, more than the day's heat would account for.
Without really thinking about how he knew, or why I was doing it, I slipped the power unit into the tube, and heard it slide down to the crimped, melted end. It rattled inside loosely, and I shook my head. I slid the unit back out. It had felt like the right thing to do, but it hadn't been.
"Too big," I said, about to drop the pressure housing.
"Nonsense, bucko. It'll be needing an evacuated chamber."
"Huh?"
"The source bleeds heat, lad. It needs to be vacuum-sealed if you want it to hold a charge. You get the insulators and the bonder in there, and she'll be just right. Strange though."
"Strange how, " I asked, "this seems perfect?"
"It is perfect. Strange how you just walked out here without no nevermind, and came across the perfect piece."
"Just lucky?" I felt like he knew I was charging too much for drugs I'd cut twice. I tucked the tube and power source into my pocket.
"Lucky." He looked down at the ring. "Luckier than that guy, anyway."

The Angry Knob didn't look like I remembered it. I didn't remember so many wierd protuberances and cobbled-together looking parts. Granted, when I'd left it last, it was a barely livable ship, more like a hastily modified flying gun, with living quarters added on as an afterthought. The desert had given it its own kind of paintless paint job, which made the additional parts look even worse by comparison.
The side door dropped open, and NC stepped out. At least, I thought it was NC.
"En-See?"
"Captain Dallet! It is so good to see you!" He spread his matte-black arms wide in a too-slow, too-jerky mockery of the classic human pose. I stepped just slightly to the side, so Pesh could vaporize him if required.
"NC, when did you get the new chassis?"
"Bindi and I assembled this chassis from other components. I am very certain that it will not suffer from the same deficiencies that the earlier one did, Captain. For instance..." His chest plates snapped open, and guns sprouted out rapidly. I'd seen the trick before, and was either too trusting or too stupid to jump right away. Pesh sunk to a knee and set the tracing beam on his carbine to the midline of NC's torso.
NC, seemingly oblivious, retracted the guns quickly and began describing in detail his own, and the ship's structural modifications. I let him ramble on, while Pesh got up and cast me a meaningful look. I shrugged him back a meaningless one.
"And, " the droid went on, pleased with himself, "I have included quadruple-redundant antennae, implantable repeater units, and two very powerful line-of-sight transceivers. One fore, and one aft."
"Uh, great. Why?" I wasn't that big on talking, why'd we need all the radios?
"I will never again be disconnected from the ship, Sir."
"Does that strike you as a bit of overkill NC?"
"Sir, you see-"
"Pipe down, droid!" Pesh held his commo to his ear. NC ignored him, and prattled on about modifications and bandwidths. I ignored NC and focused on Pesh. Whatever it was, it wasn't going to be good news.
"Fire her back up, Stinky, we need to get back to HQ now."
"We have permission to be here-" I protested.
"Not anymore, we're moving out. Word is the Imps broke airspace and are on the way in."
"Can they call for reinforcements or something? Maybe some local ships."
That brought a smile to Pesh's face.
"What do you think they just did, laddie? We're the reinforcements.." I swallowed hard, and climbed aboard. I heard Pesh asking NC about his promised booze, and by the time I had the engines primed, it sounded like he'd already sampled it. He must have liked it, because he'd succumbed to NC's chatter and was beginning one of his favorite stories in response.
"Take a slug for me." I said as I turned the nose towards the HQ, but neither of them heard me.

---

W-Axl wrote:

Outstanding work Franklee. I saw this thread for the first time today and spent the entire afternoon reading it instead of playing swg/jtl. I'm not sure what your job is, but from what I've read, I sincerely believe you should write for a living. I seriously hope you continue to write and if you haven't already, look into getting published. Do you have a site with some of your other work? I enjoy your writing style and would love to read some of your other stuff while waiting for the next installment of "The Dallet Series"

---

That's kind of you to say. I have written several short stories, but nothing of this length before. Most of the shorts were an RP supplement to the table-based SWRPG we were doing, and they're either entirely lost or consinged to someone's long-term inbox by now.
I started this one when I was just getting the feel for smuggler. To put it quite bluntly, it's been exercise. You'll note the style jumps around a lot in the first section; that's because I wrote the first as a standalone, and wasn't concerned with a sequel. I've been experimenting with just how I'd write a long term story, and have settled on a format that's basically a series of shorts interlinked, like TV episodes.
In any event, thanks for the compliment. I don't do any creative writing in my profession. My 'regular' job is as a QC-chemist for a superalloy manufacturer, and my hobby job is a kenpo instructor at my local dojo.

I'll be working on the next episode, 'The Battle of Buzzard' this coming week. Might get sidetracked with holidays and family and such though.

Thanks again gang, this is my first creative writing that's been public, and it's great to get such positive feedback.

That's perhaps the best compliment my writing's ever received. You have my heartfelt thanks. That one will go on my fridge. America's interests are my interests, and bless you for looking out for her, at home or abroad. If the story was even three seconds of entertainment or diversion, then it's been worth more than any time I've put into it.

Makes me want to quit my job and write full time. Well, almost. Probably wouldn't be as much fun to do it for a living.
I love the genre. I love the story of good versus evil played out over the theme of self-discipline versus chaos. The GM (also a player on Scylla) who got me interested in SW roleplay deserves all the credit for making the conflict interesting. Every adventure was a fight to remain good, as much as a fight against evil. Eventually though lives and schedules got in the way, and we had to quit gaming.
I thought trying to tell the story from the gritty perspective of an admittedly flawed vessel; an addicted drug dealer, might be a fun angle. It was. You can get away with a lot when your protagonist can only go up.

Alright, back to reality and the last hour of my shift.

Originally I had no intention of making Dallet into a good guy. Maybe a likable bad guy, but that was about it. The only problem is, there's only so many stories that can be told about a fairly static character, and static characters aren't all that realistic if the story's been exciting. Not that laser swords and hyperspace are realistic, but you catch my drift. If Dallet had been exposed to all these improbable and incredible situations and come away unchanged, he'd be one of the wooden characters the serial novelists like so much.
To tell you the truth, I don't know how much I'll like Dallet myself, if he drifts further away from where he started. It's fun to take him down the crooked path, but I have to honestly say I'm still not sure where he'll end up.
I'm really glad you liked the droid's changes too. I'm still worried that they come off as contrived, but I've got a plan in mind for NC.

Haven't gotten much done for the next chapter, because we're doing a bunch of wierd off-hours labwork. Hope to have more soon! As always, thanks for the feedback.

I'll PM you what I think about protesters, otherwise I'd get my only multi-page thread locked.

My favorite D'argo quote of all times... they're aboard the ship rigged with explosives, about to crash it into the planet with huge petroleum oceans. They're going to try to deadpod (minus a pod) while they crash the ship. D'argo and Crichton will be floating space junk, and only John has a spacesuit. John asks why, when they're almost certainly going to die, he's not afraid.
D'argo: Fear accompanies the possibility of death. Calm shepards its certainty.