Smuggler Archive

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Elpucko wrote:

WHERE IS IT !?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Oh. There it is.

You're welcome. Time for seconds.


Dallet 2.2

Tatooine, Dune Sea

It was two days before I first felt it. Two days of heat, and not enough water to slake my thirst. Two days of "Breath, Dallet-cha" and "Try again, Dallet-cha". Two days of sun, and rotting Womp Rat stew. Two days of that, and I probably would have believed almost anything. But this time, I knew.
"I felt him coming this morning master Kah. I felt him before he came beyond the first dune."
"How can you be sure?" He replied cautiously; there'd been failures before.
"I felt how hungry he was. Hungry enough to eat this garbage." I pointed to our stew. Calling it garbage might have been going overboard. I doubt the Empire would have fed it to Wookiees.
"That may be so, or it may be your imagination."
"Sure, " I said, "but today I saw his tracks before the wind got to them. He made it as far as the dune, then I scared him off when I went to investigate."
"Truly?"
"Yep, I used the Force. I'm a Jedi."
"You are not a Jedi, but it is a good start." He pondered for a moment, and let out the slightest sigh of relief. "It is good, because if you had not made some progress by dinner tonight, I was going to begin beating you."
"You're joking, right?" He's hard to read sometimes. The other times he's impossible.
"Not at all, I had reasoned that perhaps torture would loosen your block." He stared at me with those reddish lizard eyes, flat and dispassionate as only a Trandoshan can be. He might be serious, I thought.
"Kah, how could torturing me possibly help? It's probably what turned Petra, you said so yourself. Torturing would probably kill me, or turn me."
"Going to retrieve her untrained will certainly kill you, I was prepared to take the chance with the beatings."
"Thanks Kah, you're all heart."
"I expect you would do the same for me, Dallet-cha. I am your teacher, it is my responsibility."
"You have one funny sense of obligation." Better believe I'll give you a few whaps if the time comes lizard... I still owe you for yanking me out of the bar, I thought to myself. I thought it _quietly_ to myself, Kah seemed almost to rival the Jedi myths for knowing what was on my mind.
"Now, we will begin to exercise your new talent."
"But I just started eating..."
"You let too many words come out of your mouth when you should have been putting food in it. You may eat later. Learn now."

It came in fits and starts. At first I passed it off as a feeling of exuberance and health. Sometimes I would get a kind of... feel for the canyon around me that couldn't be attributed to just my senses working very well. They did work very well too, which confused the issue some. In fact, my whole body was working great, finally. My skin had stopped burning on a daily basis, and just turned a uniform shade of bronze. Some mornings I could go without a shirt and desert cloak until one of the suns was directly overhead, and not be too bothered by the heat. The baggy skin and wasted muscle tightened, firmed, and transformed into the picture of health. In only a few months, between near-lethal radiation poisoning and Kah's training, I lost almost a quarter of my mass, trading bulk for long lean muscles. I was faster, lighter, and stronger than I had been even in my Service days, and that had been almost a decade ago. I seemed to be able to distinguish colors better, see farther, and listen more closely. I knew rationally that most of it was from simply reducing the volume of the drugs and alcohol in my system, but some of it was something else altogether. Sometimes I felt things happening that I couldn't exactly see, or precisely hear. It was like a kind of intuition, as if someone was getting to the punchline of a joke I'd never heard, but it had a predictable ending, so I started laughing too early.
We had taken to doing some free-sparring practice to warm up in the mornings. The idea was that a few minutes of light contact (which meant mostly non-lethal to Kah) would key up my system for the all-out exhaustive work Kah had in mind. He seemed to figure that being exhausted was the key to being able to pay attention. During one such sparring session, I began to feel as if Kah was purposefully moving more slowly, as if to draw me into predictable motion. Predictable attack patterns are a big no-no for Kah. He says that an expert Teras Kasi will recognize a habit-attack on its second, sometimes even its first use in a fight, and begin to adjust for it. I knew I wasn't far enough along to be seeing his patterns, but I kept getting the feeling that I knew where he was going. For two exchanges I tried to put my finger on whatever sign he must be giving me, but I couldn't. Then I realized there was no sign. I was feeling where he wanted to go, what he wanted to do.
Because I was still lacked fluid coordination outside of the set forms, Kah could still beat me senseless at a whim. He was so fast that sometimes you couldn't see him move, he just stopped being where he was, and started being somewhere else. It was like he skipped being in between. The feeling though, it was like having an edge, so I embraced it. I stopped trying to respond like a trained Teras Kasi, and settled for just not being where he was going to strike. Even that required more thought than my exhausted mind could usually put forth, so I stopped trying to plan an evasion, and just did what came naturally. When I made the conscious decision to surrender thought, hours and hours of endless meditation practice fell away, and something completely new happened.
I did not need to be told to breathe, because I understood it fully. I did not need to think about moving, because I was already in motion. I did not need to avoid Kah's attack, because he was already too late. It was all these things and more. If you've ever had the sudden feeling that you were exactly where you should be, doing exactly what you should be doing... it was like that. I felt like there was nothing simpler in the world than breathing, and moving, and dodging, and there was nothing more perfect or more... 'right' than doing just that.
Kah began to pant with exertion. Of course he did; he could breathe, and move, but for him it was work. For me, it was less than nothing. I was merely doing what I should.
Kah stepped back, staring clinically and catching his breath. He switched his stance to something new, an unfamiliar one to me, and approached again. He seemed hesitant, confused, ill-directed. Some of his strikes were as off-target as a drunken novice's. Some of his attacks left him dangerously open for reprisal. For the first time ever, I managed to score a solid hit to his torso, a kind of token 'tap' that let him know I'd been there. If I'd been consciously directing myself a bit more, I'd have left him more than a tap.
Then, before probably even he knew what he was doing, his leg shot out as he spun, swept me cleanly from my stance, and right onto my bony rump, in the hot sands. The spell was broken, and I felt normal again.
"Well fought, Dallet-cha." High praise from the lizard.
"What in the Nine Hells was that?"
"It was sparring, we were practicing."
"No, what I did, what was that."
"It was what you should have been doing for weeks, learning to stop thinking and act."
"That wasn't normal Kah, that was something else. It was way different than a normal fight."
"Maybe for you, but for a master... "
"It was the Force, I could feel it."
"Yes, " he began, "it was. You fought with the loose freedom my old friends did, many years ago. They were always so graceful, so fast." He sighed. "That is the way a Jedi fights, Dallet-cha. Without fear or worry, without thought or pretense. When he is unafraid, and open to all things, especially the Force, he cannot fail to do its will."
"It was awesome." I was almost giggling with excitement. So many days and weeks out here, and finally something concrete. Well, maybe not concrete, maybe not at all, but something that was solid enough that I could say. I'd scored a hit on Master Kah!
"It is not a toy, it is a responsibility!"
"How did you beat me at the end?"
"Ah-ha! An old trick, passed from one Master to another. It is no secret, but it is very hard to do." He smiled. I think it was a smile, anyway. "The reason you were so much faster than me is because you knew what I was going to do as soon as I did. The only solution is to move so rapidly, and so randomly, that I scarcely know myself what I am going to do; you can learn nothing from me in the Force. I have practiced that aimless form more than ten-thousand times. I need not think about it to enter it."
"Wow. I wonder if I could do that... I don't know, slicing? Or maybe piloting? Or even with a blaster..."
"Jedi do not use blasters. It is dishonorable and imprecise."
"I use blasters, I'm good at them."
"You are also good at using drugs, do you wish to remain so?" The lizard had a point. Some of the things in my previous life weren't all that hot.

Like I said, it came in fits and starts. I was brutally exhausted after that first fight, and Kah let me sleep almost six whole standard hours afterwards. Then we meditated. We meditated standing, and sitting, even running. We meditated before a fight, and after, and sometimes I could pull off his 'no-mind' trick during a fight, and lapse into that wierd prescient state, but I couldn't do it every time, or at will. It came and went. One night we went back up to the ledge, and meditated there for many hours.
"Tonight I am reminded of my old Jedi friends, those whom Vader has slain, and even one I myself had to kill. I will meditate and think of them, and of things lost. I advise you to do the same."
I answered only by nodding, sometimes speech wasn't warranted. I too remembered things lost, and as the awareness of the here and now drifted away from me, a memory from years earlier encroached.

(Before)
Kessel

"Zillik, my old friend!" He wasn't my friend, but then again who cared? He had product, and I had need. He was a slimy sort of guy, but this place attracted all sorts of slimy people. I felt at home.
Wuda was what you might call a shipping coordinator, in the civilian vernacular. He managed a space docking facility on an asteroid near the Kessel Spice Mines. They pulled kilogram after kilogram of glitterstim (or its unrefined component) out of the mines, and they needed to sell it somehow. Usually, a Hutt took care of large transfers, workforce management, and any 'difficulties' with pirates or law enforcement. There wasn't much of either on a regular basis; the Hutts were geniuses at knowing when to bribe and when to shoot. This applied equally to pirates and police, they were both alternately on the take or on the hit list. To the Hutts it didn't matter which, because they saw both as a business expense. To me it didn't matter either, because I had an 'in'. Wudo.
He knew how many crates of glitterstim the Hutts expected to see coming out of his facility. He delivered that, and he was paid for them. Some months he made more, and he didn't bother to always let the Hutts in. I'm sure they knew too, because if information can be bought, they've usually gotten a bid in before you. Anyway, Wudo sold the overages, and I bought them at a greatly reduced price. Why, you might ask? Well, for starters, I didn't love the Hutts. I was ok helping to skim from them. Second, I wasn't going to take the hit directly if the operation went down in a fiery ball. And third, I cut that glitterstim so much when I made it into product it was almost all profit. Hell, two or three runs like this, and I would actually be able to afford the new YT I'd been drooling over for almost a year. It looked like baked bantha-crap, but the room for 'modifications' and the engines' thrust-per-ton ratio was an invitation to a hungry smuggler.
"Wuda, you have what I came for?"
"Sure, sure, old buddy. Why don't we have a drink first?" Always a good way to conduct business, in my book - if you're sure to cut it off before you get dizzy. It took a lot to put me under a table in those days.
So we drank. We chatted about things decidedly not work-related. It was a lousy enough bar that nobody would have raised an eyebrow had we offered to buy Wookiee slaves on the open market, but we were professionals, you see. Not only that, but the slavers a booth over looked like they were awfully eager to sell, and it's not that I had any real problem with slavery, but it wasn't my business, you see? Maybe they knew Wudo, I thought mildly.
"I have this problem, Zillik. I think the Hutts are on to me." Nothing new, Wudo was a paranoid maniac when things were going too well. Between the booze and the paranoia, he gave himself ulcers. He self-medicated with booze and a synthetic stim every few hours. Every few months, he got professional treatement and managed to put off dying for little longer.
"Yeah? You've been saying that for as long as I've known you. You must be pretty clever to slide by them so much." Flattery helped sometimes, but usually not once the buyer and the seller were old partners. Hey, I thought, it can't hurt.
"It's different this time, they sent someone by last night. Someone I couldn't buy."
"Oh yeah? Hunter, or a leg-breaker?"
"Hunter, some guy I never heard of before. Not in the normal registry."
"I won't even ask how you got in the registry to check. He for real, or is he just shaking you down?" Extortion of criminals is usually a lucrative prospect; they rarely go to the authorities. They never go to the authorities here, I don't even think we have them. Messing with that kind of thing can get you shot though, so I like to minimize it.
"He's for real." He held up his left hand, several of the fingers were badly broken and hadn't been set properly. Damn, I thought to myself. How could I have missed that?
"What's he want?"
"An accurate production and shipping record."
I whistled. Wuda might be pretty screwed, this time. Either that or our Bounty Hunter was going renegade and had himself a clever idea to get some royalties out of Wuda. He was going to make Wuda give him his own blackmail evidence. Smooth.
"You got your local guys on it? Maybe he could have an accident..."
"My team went silent last night. Either he bought them, or he 'accidented' them, but they aren't helping." I started to get a bad feeling...
"What do you want with me Wuda? Listen, maybe we should just get the deal done, and I get out of here."
"No, no, wait... you're my only friend now Zillik, you have to help me."
"No way Wuda, I have a thing about bounty hunters. I get the hell out of town when they look at me."
"Yeah, well maybe some day you won't get to run away, like me now. I got a good thing going here, and it could make us both rich! But only if I'm alive to pay you."
"Yeah, but neither of us can spend credits dead, buddy."
"It's a foolproof plan, listen..."

I listened, it certainly wasn't foolproof. Wuda had purchased a Twilek slave girl a few hours earlier, and she was undergoing some modifications while we were having drinks. Wuda wanted someone, namely me, to set up this 'Hunter with a 'gift' from friend Wuda, as a gesture of good faith. She would have a datapad that said the manifest and production records were being prepared and would be delivered in the morning. Until then, the girl was free to be used as he saw fit. The girl of course wasn't what she seemed, but Wuda wouldn't describe the precise nature of her 'improvements', but I gathered they'd be lethal to the bounty hunter.
"What about the girl Wuda?"
"Well, she'll be a write off, just like the explosives. I'll take it out of my cut of the deal though, don't worry." Damn, I thought, that was cold-hearted. Still, it wasn't my half, and I'd keep an eye on him to be sure.
"When do I meet him?"
"Two hours, up the tunnel at the 'Refractive Index'. Nice place."
"He'll know it's me?"
"Nah, he'll be expecting someone though."
"Yeah, sneaking up on a jumpy 'hunter in a strange bar with an exploding girl, that seems like a brilliant plan."
"I'll make it sixty-forty, Zillik. Better than half of this month's take."
"Seventy-thirty."
"Sixty-five, or I can try to send the girl on her own."
"Fine Wuda, sixty-five thirty-five. You welch and I'll send you an exploding boy."
"Done. I'll have it put aboard right now. Pay in glitter alright?"
"Just what I wanted. Now where's this girl?"

"I don't know what he did to me mister, but I feel all sore inside."
"I know kid. Drink this." She did, and seemed quiet for a while. It helped not to look at her, because when I looked at her I saw a reflection of myself, mixed with her vague hope of figuring out what the hell was going on.
"Now I'm all warm and sore. It's better though."
"Yeah, does it for me. Most of the time." I downed a double, and waved for another. It didn't last long either. I was more than buzzing when the Bounty Hunter entered the bar. I was drunk. I stumbled over, all obvious-like. You do not sneak up on guys with guns, especially when the only load you're carrying is a gut full of Vasarian Brandy.
"You the guy looking for Wudo?"
"Maybe. Did he send you?"
"Yeash. He sent this." I fumbled the datapad out real slow, the guy watched my eyes the whole time, not my hands. Wierd. Spooky, because his hands had gotten under the table without me noticing. One thing I did notice was my charge, the twilek girl (whose name I hadn't even been able to ask) sliding slowly off her barstool and righting herself. She did it probably three times while I was handing the datapad over; she was crocked too.
The human hunter looked over the datapad, eyes hooded and hard to read. I was going to sit down next to him, but I decided that'd be really stupid, even drunk.
"He sent me a drunk twilek whore?"
"Well, she washn't all that drunk when we got here. She was nervous. And she's not a whore, she's a slave."
"Yeah."
"Honest. She's new."
"Listen here, slimeball. I don't know what you two maggots have cooked up, but I'm not buying it. I'm going to take that manifest and make a bundle of credit with it. I don't want his filthy whores. I just want the money. Take her and get out of here."
"C'mon, she's already bought, she's all yours."
"Get out of here."
I was halfway out when I realized I hadn't told the girl what was going on. I went back in to tell her to try going to sit with the nice man. She was just coming from the rest room. Must have been throwing up the Brandy. Lightweight.
"Listen honey, you just go over there and sit with that man over in the booth, ok? Be nice to him, he's holding your marker." I turned to leave.
"Mister, you have to help. I think something's wrong, I don't feel good and I was just sick in the 'fresher. I need a doctor. He said I wouldn't feel sick for long."
"No you don't, a doctor did that to you." I said it before I thought about it, one of my prime failings.
"Maybe a new doctor, it hurts really bad." Sheesh kid, can't you see you're already dead? This part is just the intermission. That's pretty cold, I thought to myself. It's also poor business, to be seen in here with a bounty hunter and an exploding twilek. People will remember. Wudo will have something on me. Maybe that's why he didn't do it himself. I walked back over to the booth where the hunter was.
"I told you to leave. I have a warrant in this territory, I could kill you and forge a mark for you afterwards."
"Wudo ain't going to give you that manifest."
"Tell me something I don't know."
"The girl's rigged to blow."
"I told you I wasn't interested."
"No, I mean she's rigged to blow up!"
"You vermin rigged a living person with explosives?"
"Wudo did it... it doesn't matter. Here's the bypass code for the dock. It'll get you past most of his security. Give me an hour to get the hell out of here, and he's all yours."
"Sounds like a trap to me."
"It sounds like one to me too, but all you got to do is look at that screwed up twilek girl over there to know I'm not lying." I had no idea why that was some kind of logical proof, but it sounded a lot better when I was drunk.
"If you're lying and I survive, I'm going to feed you to my hounds."
"Buddy, if you survive that means I don't have to deal through Wudo anymore."
"Point. Fine, I'll try it. One hour."
"I'm out of here."
"What about the girl?" Crap, I thought. What _about_ the girl?

"Here, uh, darling, take this chit and get to a doctor. A real doctor."
"I don't even know where I am, or where a doctor is, please help!"
"Listen sweetie, I'm not a very nice person, ok? You've been set up, and they put something inside you that's making you sick. If you don't go get it out, you're going to die, ok?" I was talking to her like she was an infant, and she was obviously much older. But we were both drunk, so I figured it was about right.
"But-" She was going to start crying.
"No buts, kid! Get your ass in gear, and get out of here." With that, I slapped her hard on the rump and practically bolted down the tunnelway. I never saw her again. When I got to my ship, only half of the agreed-upon cut of glitter was in my bay. I gave it a hard look before deciding it was enough. Fair enough, I thought; Wudo cheats me, Wudo gets to keep the change. Left it with the 'hunter for you, old buddy.

Never heard what happened to either of them. Took me a month of snooping around to make new contacts, and it was expensive. I tried to steer the conversation away if anyone wanted to talk about Wudo. Haven't heard from him, I'd say to them. Tried to get some news about the girl, see if she ended up making her own tunnel the hard way or not. No news was good news, I guess.

(Now)

It's hard sometimes, to learn what a heartless heel you've been. As I faded back in to consciousness, my eyes felt sore and swollen, I might have kept them open for hours. I blinked to try to clear them, and settled for leaving them closed for a few minutes. Almost I drifted back into a trance. Wish I'd stayed to get you to a Doc, kid, I thought to myself. Wish I'd done a whole lot of things differently.
I drifted for a few more minutes, when suddenly a vision came of its own accord. A wavy, hazy, kind of image, as if seen from high above.
A droid, and peering with a long metallic neck over a drafting table, watching someone work intently on something. Whoever was working on the table was hunched low over it, peering intently at something. The image resolved, and the figure sat up straight. Twin purple lekku, long and healthy, were brushed back over her shoulders. She said something to the droid, who blanked the drafting table and trundled off. She looked up near my vantage point, and I got a good look at her eyes. Same eyes, without the drunken confusion. Same eyes, with a decade of healing behind them. She smiled a big healthy smile to someone else I couldn't see. She'd lived.
I smiled too, as I came back to the here and now. I smiled despite the flat gaze of my Trandoshan teacher. He was already glaring at me.
"What have you seen that makes you clown like this, Dallet-cha?"
"A girl."
"Always it is a woman with you, no? Was it Petra?"
Petra, I thought. I wish it had been.
"No, Kah. I don't even know her name."
"Typical. Are you ready to begin?"
"I'm ready, Master Kah." I tried to keep the sigh out of my voice. Still, I thought to myself, if I could be a good guy then by accident, what could I do tomorrow if I actually tried? I let the thought sustain me that day and many days to follow, and it was good.

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Hhalusin8 wrote:

how many people miss dallet already? *raise hand* /whimper lol

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It's funny, I was going through withdrawl, then I went away on vacation for two weeks. That's 14 days without once hitting the forums, and I was cured. Then I came back, and went through 4 chapters in one day. Now I'm suffering from withdrawl again, only this time its worse. Do you know what it's like to read 4 chapters in one afternoon, and then go almost a week without anything? It's just cruel.

Damn you FrankLee, damn you to hell.

Sorry... I've got to write when the mood takes me, and I've been busy all week. No time for moods. Tell you what though, I'll actually take my draft home with me this weekend and it'll be handy if I get bored grinding or inspired, or drunk.
Well, maybe not drunk.


If any of you would like to show me a token of your esteem, do me a favor and log on to farwhat.com, or just tune in to scifi on sunday night at 9. I want to see that show come back, so push the ratings up for me!