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The trouble with making big plans was the risk of disappointment, and Lieutenant Rae Sloane was balancing so many big plans that could crumble at a moment’s notice when it came to her career, that she decided not to overextend herself when planning her twenty-eighth birthday. It wasn’t the most exciting number. It was an age that you might look back on as part of your youth, but in the moment you’d never been so old in your life. The big three-aught was two years off.
She chose the planet of Courtsilius for her day of shore leave, in the Hosnian system, simply because her ship, the glorious Executrix, flagship of Grand Moff Tarkin, Governor of the Outer Rim, was temporarily stationed in orbit there; she hadn’t wanted to ask her superiors for more lenience than that. It was a whole planet, a Core World, there was plenty to do.
At first she’d completely drawn a blank when imagining birthday activities. There certainly wasn’t going to be any pin-the-tail-on-the-bantha. She could take herself out for good food and drink, obviously, but she hated parties unless they were sophisticated affairs, and she knew that made her seem snobbish, but she didn’t like rowdy strangers or being the center of attention in a mob.
But there was hope: the venerated historical library in the capital city.
Rae knew she’d made the right choice when she got off the hoverbus on the steps of this looming cathedral of knowledge. It wasn’t the most famous library in the galaxy by a long shot, but neither was Rae the most decorated lieutenant in the Empire (nor was twenty-eight, as she had previously reflected, the most exciting birthday). This place was still magnificent. It was built during the Old Republic, and had sustained damage during the Mandalorian Wars that it memorialized in black stone bricks contrasting the pearly marble, making the exterior piebald and scarred.
As a Core World, Courtsilius was loyal to the Empire, and even though Rae was dressed in civvies — admittedly still a plain gray jacket, but she’d bought a colorfully patterned scarf to tie up her hair — one wave of her ID, showing her rank, had the Ithorian at the main desk hastily bowing their long sluglike neck.
“It’s not official business,” she told them airily. “Just let security know I’m here.”
“Of course, of course,” the alien croaked. They still seemed uneasy.
“I’m here to browse. It’s my birthday,” she added, not knowing why she would share this. This librarian wasn’t being unwelcoming, but they were being too deferential; Rae wasn’t trying to intimidate them.
The Ithorian handed her a pass. “I’m sure you’ll want access to the upper floors,” they told her.
“I might,” she uncertainly agreed, then took it with a shrug.
She didn’t plan to use the pass right away, there was enough to do on the main floors. Carried simply by wanderlust, Rae picked up a datapad that a previous visitor had discarded on a shelf, and looked for a private nook to establish herself in. Her normal duties kept her from browsing the Holonet or Imperial archives, so it really was pleasant to search with frivolous abandon.
The Courtsilius historical library was intriguing because of how it organized information; the banks of computers were adaptable to whatever you were searching for, and altered their content based on what you selected to view from each shelf. If you accessed information about food customs on Coruscant from shelf 23V-45Q, then the shelves close by would bring up other volumes by the same author, other books about food from the same era, other books about Coruscant. But then you could direct shelf 22V-43Q to display a criminal database, and the shelf in between those two would summon, if it existed, a novel about a murder on Coruscant carried out by a killer diner owner, or something of that nature. And the shelves around those two would try to create a web of association based on those inputs. It would be incredible for research if it wasn’t so damn distracting.
Rae felt like a mad alchemist as she combined search terms on a whim; it was especially amusing when you stumped the algorithm and it gave you something nonsensical as the missing link between several books. Perhaps there was a hidden connection that could only be guessed if you were intimately familiar with the books’ contents.
She’d be so embarrassed if anyone caught her doing this.
Finally she arrived at a more focused search; she translated today's date into all available calendars and sifted through records to find out if anything of interest had happened at this time in the standard galactic year cycle. Just one more round of searches, and then she would move on, and pick a more respectable pastime.
There were other birthdays, death-days — though looking at those reminded Rae of one of her junior officers who was obsessed with the idea of reincarnation and would insist on looking up whether someone interesting had died close to when you were born, and other significant signs. Rae was about to chase a clue trail that said there was a mysterious outbreak of unexplained animal pregnancies preceding her birth year, but she tore herself away; she didn’t want to get sucked into that rubbish.
Of the notable events on her birthday, she found the best stories were apocrypha. According to archaic historians, in the early stages of the Republic, the first senator of the Gossam homeworld of Castell was appointed by a random lottery, and the winning lot was held by a meat packing plant employee. Apparently they’d believed the lottery was influenced by their gods, but when it chose someone ordinary, they — with apparently little fuss at all — completely rewrote their religion, to save face with the rest of the galaxy.
There was a story about the aged eleventh king of the Kron Dynasty in Toydaria, seven thousand years before Rae was born, who went hunting and fell into a ravine when his wings failed; he refused any help from his courtiers and declared that a new palace should be built around him instead, because in those times a king never touched ground anywhere that was not his palace.
Rae settled down into a curved, cushioned seat by a round window overlooking the capital city, to read about a man who claimed he was immortal. She was expecting the story to end with the prophesies about his invulnerability having an ironic loophole, but instead, he was assassinated with a heavy chair.
And deserved it too, the arrogant prick. Rae grinned and kept scrolling.
A voice stole her from the moment, quick as tripping and falling.
“I finally—”
Rae swiftly swung her legs out of the window seat and planted them on the floor. She choked on her tongue before she could speak, when she saw the man framed by the archive shelves. Tall, broad-shouldered, brown-skinned, seeming to carry the warm glow of Ganthel, her homeworld, in his eyes.
His hands were clasped, nestled under his chin, holding up a nervous gleaming smile. “—found you.”
Rae wiped her eyes to clear away a burst of blurriness, and then slapped her datapad angrily down on the cushion. “How!?” she cried out.
“Holy kriff,” he hissed, giggling. “This is a library, be quiet.”
“Emil—!” Rae snapped indignantly.
Her brother kept laughing, as his eyes puckered up and the apple of his throat bobbed. He was holding back waterworks too. “Is this okay? Do you mind me being here?”
Rae tightened her jaw and composed herself, wondering if Emil would notice how much more disciplined she was now, because the last time they’d spoken in person, she was a green cadet. “I don’t know why I would mind. Weren’t you the one who disappeared?”
Sighing, Emil shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket. “I did disappear, if that’s what you call keeping my life to myself. If you want to be upset with me, I get it…”
“I’m not,” Rae said. “I’m not upset.” It wasn’t true. Why did it have to be on her birthday, to get this in-person reminder of her older brother’s vagrant ways? Just like her, he’d grown up with an itch to roam the galaxy, but if you weren’t flying with the Empire, if you were traveling as unobtrusively as Emil was, you couldn’t possibly be following every law.
Those suspicions pained her. When she was little Emil would skirt around rules up until Rae got involved, and then would always be the responsible one. Rae used to be so much more of a troublemaker than him…
“But I do need answers. How did you find me?” she demanded.
“I know which ship you’re stationed on, you’ve told Mom and Dad. And it’s not on a secret assignment.”
“I didn’t tell anyone I was at the library until half an hour ago, and that was just the front desk.”
“Rae, I guessed you were here. I knew you were on shore leave for your birthday, and I was going to ask around more, but this is exactly the sort of place you’d go. I used to pick you up from the school library every afternoon, remember?”
“I remember,” Rae admitted, mortified.
“You’re such a dork, Raesie. You think I’m a slicer? You think I’m a bounty hunter? I tracked you down?”
“Well, perhaps you did.”
Emil bowed his head. “That’s my line of work. I hunt people down on their birthdays. I throw surprise parties for them.”
“Don’t you dare throw a party, I came here to relax.”
“Clearly, you still hate being interrupted when you’re reading.”
Rae stood and sighed and walked over to Emil so she could put an arm around his shoulder and lean on him for a moment.
“My little sister hugs like someone who’s forgotten how,” he said, but thankfully he didn’t try the obnoxious high-pressure squeeze he once might have, because Rae truly wasn’t used to it anymore.
A lot of her fellow officers and crew had siblings who were serving the Empire, or even their whole families including their parents. Rae saw how it could make you worry about them, but it was so much easier to keep in touch with them, since they could relate to your active duty work. Everyone outside the ranks was a chore to talk to, because even the news holos didn’t tell the average people what protecting the Empire was like from the inside. It wasn’t their place to know.
“Of course I’m glad to see you,” Rae grumbled.
“I swear I’m not here for any reason but reminding you that I exist. How has your birthday been?”
“We don’t make that much of a fuss about birthdays; with a large crew they’d be happening all the time. I’m lucky to have shore leave today.”
“And you wanted to spend your shore leave reading?”
“Don’t worry, I’m not reading anything practical. This is meaningless trivia.”
Emil beamed fondly. “Good to hear you can cut loose every once in a while. Live life on the edge.”
Rae wondered if the reason she thought of herself as a serious person, besides the fact that she was, was growing up with Emil gently making fun of her for being that way. One might imagine teasing having the opposite effect, but children clung to the identity they were given.
When she was little, he told her she was responsible, because when she did behave herself, that was easier on him whenever their parents were busy, and needed their eldest to look after their youngest. Her grip on her emotions and impulses was as spotty as any child’s, and she knew she did some outrageous things, some her brother knew about and some she’d never shared, but when Emil told her she was oh-so-responsible, oh-so-uptight, she believed him and started to act like it. It wasn’t that he was being cunning and playing her psychology, but he stumbled on something that worked.
“So, what is it like, living life on the edge, then?” she asked, jabbing a finger at him.
“It isn’t the kind of edge you’re thinking of, Rae. I just don’t work for a huge corporation.”
“What kind of people hire shipping companies too small to insure their cargo, or fend off pirates?”
Emil pressed his palms together and let out a long sigh. “I’ve told you before, Little Miss Officer, I’m not a smuggler. You might not like to hear this, but the galaxy is teeming with smugglers—”
“I don’t like to hear it,” she agreed shortly.
“Yeah, so, it is genuinely hard to get in on that business with so much competition! And you know I hate organized crime as much as you do. You can’t smuggle without making deals with them.”
Rae believed him. Maybe it was naive of her, but on this matter she thought she could trust her brother. Their family had gone through a lot because of the Ganthelian gangs. “So what is it you do again?”
“We go everywhere no one else wants to, where there isn’t much profit. All the tiny colonies and research outposts and backwater worlds that weren’t particularly blessed by the shape of hyperspace.”
“Is that so?”
“I could tell you a thousand stories about so many places you’d never visit. I came here from an asteroid belt in the sector close to Iridonia, where one old man takes care of lichen from a long-ago shattered world. Before that I brought supplies to this group of daredevils who spend one night on any dangerous planet they can find, and carve their names on a rock where they camped.”
“Sounds like a bunch of lowlifes.”
“Maybe, but I don’t mind meeting strange folks. I’ll have a lot of stories to tell my grandkids — I’ve got to impress them, right?”
Grandchildren? Rae suppressed the pang of confusion in her heart that she always felt when she thought about whether she wanted a family. “I thought you were’t interested in, shall we say, the process by which children occur.”
“Hey,” Emil countered. “Since when is wanting kids and wanting ‘the process’ the same thing? Are you thinking about kids every time you go out and ‘process’ some cute thing at the nightclub—”
Rae smacked her knuckles against her palm.
“That was the generic ‘you’.”
“I should think so,” she said frostily.
But no matter how annoyed she could get at Emil, it wasn’t the same as wanting him to get lost. He made talking easy.
“I’ve got stories, too,” she asserted, because of course he brought out a competitive streak. “I’ve got plenty.”
“I gotta hear them. What do you say about lunch while we catch up?”
“Wait a moment,” Rae said, pulling the library pass from her breast pocket. “We could go down and eat, or we could take a look around the staff-only upper floors. The librarian gave me a pass.”
“Is there anything worth seeing up there?”
“Paper books, apparently, and other degradable works, so they keep it climate-controlled. I’m sure all those books are in the database, but they have charm, don’t they, when they’re bound and printed?”
“If I ever write a book,” Emil said, hand to his heart, “I will make sure to send you a paper copy.”
When the next turbolift came, Rae waved the pass in front of a scanner, and two more numbers appeared on the menu of available floors. She pressed the first one. “What would you write a book about?”
“Hmm… my opinions on things.”
“You think I’m going to carry around a big kriffing book of Emil’s Opinions?” Rae scoffed, wondering why she’d felt a stab of distaste and fear. She wanted to tell him that his adolescent rants about everything wrong with the galaxy wouldn’t sound as harmless right now, because he couldn’t know how many internal threats the Empire was dealing with. They were sparks, nothing more than scattered embers that could be quickly snuffed out if you caught them, but you never knew which one might start a fire.
Emil poked her forearm. “I can’t let you escape them.”
The lift doors opened, and within taking a few steps, Rae breathed in ash. It seared her tear ducts and wrenched a cough from her throat. She clutched her mouth and nose and recoiled from what she was seeing.
Shelves were broken and emptied, the vaulted ceiling was clogged with smoke, and stacks and stacks of paper volumes were heaped in a pile while fully armored stormtroopers stood back and scorched them with flame projectors. The floor was dusted with the gray hues of cremation.
Horrifyingly, idiotically, when the troopers realized they’d been walked in on, two of them swung the barrels of their weapons up, as if they were ordinary blasters. Rae stumbled back from the gouts of fire.
“I’m an Imperial officer, you oafs!” she snarled, activating her ID and wielding the blue projection as a symbolic shield.
She grabbed Emil’s wrist as she moved back, making sure she stood between him and the squadron.
The troopers shut off their flame projectors hastily, and their commander, by his colored pauldron, stepped around the pyre and confronted Rae with an accusatory finger. “We weren’t told there’d be anybody in plain clothes.”
“I’m Lieutenant Rae Sloane of the Executrix. Tarkin’s flagship. You’d better believe he’ll be hearing about it if a hair on my fragging head is singed!”
“Who’s your companion, then?”
“My bodyguard, obviously!”
Emil sucked his teeth in surprise. Rae didn’t care about the risk; it was a white lie, told to fools who didn’t deserve the truth, and needed an easier story to swallow.
“Huh? Where are his weapons?”
“They’re hidden, how else would I be able to dress in civvies and not draw attention! Don’t you dare waste my time with this nonsense; you’ve already put me in a bad mood!”
The trooper couldn’t show his expressions, but he hung his head in embarrassment. “Sorry, ma’am.” He wagged his finger at the troopers instead. “You two! Get your fingers off those triggers!”
Rae coughed raggedly into her hand. The smoke was inescapable; she wasn’t going to last here for more than a minute. The troopers were wearing modified helmets with thick air filters on their chins, and so they stood around unconcerned by how inhospitable they’d made the upper floors of the library. It didn’t look like they were bothering to ventilate either; by the time the smoke settled, everything would be coated with black tar. But that was absurdly dangerous, even if it kept their activities secret.
How could this be going on while people were peacefully browsing below? The building should have been evacuated.
The pages of the books flapped and curled as they burned like the wings of dying moths trying in vain to fly away.
“Why are these being burned?” Rae demanded. To buy herself some more time, she unknotted her scarf and wrapped it around her face to cover her mouth and nose, though her eyes would still be watering. Her hair, after being tightly trapped for the whole morning, burst open like a firework and fell in a curly heap around her temples.
“Reports of seditious material,” the trooper captain blandly replied.
“But some of these books are thousands of years old! How can all of them be—!” She had to stop and cough again.
“Not my problem. I got orders to condemn the library, you can verify them if you want.”
“You know what is your problem, though!? The fact that if you don’t put this damn fire out, you could cause an explosion, a backdraft!” Rae thanked the stars that she was posted aboard such an important ship, because otherwise a navy lieutenant wouldn’t have the authority to intervene. “Do any of you know how fires work? Who authorized this?”
“I authorized it,” the trooper captain blustered. “But the Courtsilius Loyalty Bureau reviewed the tip-off as well and found reason to act—”
Rae wanted to say, well, they hired a bunch of hapless goons, but instead of inflaming the troopers’ indignation more, she decided it was time to defuse the situation. “This action has been carried out in an unreasonably unsafe manner. Extinguish these fires at once.”
“And what about the rest of the books?”
“Leave them. Shelve them. They’re only flimsi, what’s the hurry? No one can slice copies of them out of here.”
The captain was grumbling about having to change plans so quickly, but his squad seemed to be heeding Rae’s warnings; they might have been young under those helmets, or at least inexperienced, and they hadn’t realized what could happen if the fire got out of hand.
So they switched their flame projectors to the opposite setting; Rae knew these combined projectors with the safety foam installed were more commonly made for civilians, for industry workers rather than soldiers. They weren’t regulation Imperial-issue. They probably weren’t as easily traceable, no serial numbers.
The troopers hosed down the heap of books with white flame suppressant crystals, then turned them on the rest of the room and started freezing the shelves and walls. The foam blackened when it passed through smoke, and the smoke rained down as soot.
It was still hard to breathe without coughing, hard to see without eyes watering.
“Let’s go back down,” she muttered to Emil. “Call the lift.”
His silence was getting to her.
As they retreated from the sad remains of the upstairs archive, Rae wanted to slump against the side of the lift and hide her face, but instead she stood straight and stared numbly at the doors. Her skin was crawling; everything that had happened was mortifying, even though she wanted to be proud of taking control and keeping a level head. Her head didn’t feel level anymore; it was swimming with shame.
The stars only knew what Emil would think of Rae and the Empire, after seeing that. She couldn’t bear the frustration welling up in her throat. “I don’t believe them,” she blurted out. “There’s something else going on!”
Emil was hastily stuffing something into his jacket. He met Rae’s eyes with stiff defiance.
“What is that…?”
“One of the books. It was still on its shelf. No one saw me take it.”
“I know they were being destroyed, but I don’t think you should be stealing them…”
Emil flared up in anger and then settled before he could speak; he let the fury out with a harsh breath. Then he hugged his jacket against his chest, protective towards the book and accusatory towards Rae. “You don’t think at least one of them deserves to be safe?” he muttered.
“I’m on your side,” Rae insisted. “Something is really fishy here, and they won’t get away with it. This was a mistake — or worse!”
The lift opened up to the ground floor and Rae stormed out. Her skin was hot, as if she could still feel the echoes of those flames licking the pages of ancient texts that had been treasured and cared for, for millennia. All gone in a flash. It wasn’t the same as when the Empire cracked down on treasonous propaganda, the kind of rot that was written to stir up trouble. Some of those Old Republic texts might have been misguided, or even malicious, but they were from another time.
The Ithorian at the front desk clutched their datapad to their chest and physically shrunk, pulling their muscles taut so their long, bent neck tightened and thinned, when Rae planted her hands on the counter between them.
Emil raced to catch up to her. “Rae, don’t you dare scare this poor lady.”
Rae couldn’t fathom how Emil knew the gender of the alien, but she didn’t work closely with many Ithorians and perhaps he did. She knew his tone of voice, though; it was when he was switching from older brother to her “little dad”, a role he learned to play since he had to supervise her so often throughout their childhood.
“You gave me that pass,” Rae told the librarian. “How much did you know about what they’re doing in the upper floors?”
The woman struggled with her non-humanoid mouth on her neck, stress keeping her from forming the right syllables for Basic. “I am sorry, I am sorry if I made trouble. They hired me ten days ago.”
“Ugh! Stop panicking. We need information! What else happened ten days ago?”
“Rae, cut it out.” Emil opened his jacket. “Ma’am… we did what we could.”
He held out the book he’d recovered; it was slim and sad, scuffed by mishandling, its blue leather cover flaking, one corner singed.
The Ithorian cringed more viscerally, her skin undulating, and clutched at her eyestalks. “I’m only an intern,” she whispered. “I don’t know what happened to the head librarian. I just came here to work with the books. I love books.”
Rae dropped her hands to her side and turned away, swallowing hard as if that would relieve the pit of guilt in her throat.
“This isn’t your fault,” Emil told the librarian gently.
“The Empire doesn’t believe in wanton destruction!” Rae blurted out, slamming her fists against the table once again. “Whatever’s happening in this library, I have no doubt it is criminally unnecessary!” She shot out her hand. “Give me your datapad.”
Maybe Ithorians normally had clammy skin, but this one seemed to be especially rubbery and cold, when Rae’s palm brushed against the alien’s long fingers while taking the datapad — and the Ithorian recoiled from being touched, as if afraid Rae would be angry about it.
“If those stormtroopers come back,” Emil told the librarian, “please don’t confront them. Do whatever they tell you, and don’t draw attention to yourself. But you really should start telling patrons to leave. This building isn’t safe. I promise—” He gripped her wrist, squeezing a couple of times. “I’m not your enemy.”
“Come on.” Rae grabbed her brother by his arm. “I need your help with this. And yes, you, whatever your name is, tell everyone the library is closed.”
Emil was still making some kind of reassuring gesture to the Ithorian woman as Rae hauled him away, and she did straighten up, her muscles unclenched, and she stopped looking quite so shrunken and limp.
“You’ve still got that old book with you?”
“Yeah, I’ve got it.” Emil kept apace with Rae while she marched him out into the midday sun, but he gave her a little sideways shove as they were hurrying down the front steps of the library. “Where are we going now? And can you stop being so martial about everything? If you were in uniform I’d think you were arresting me.”
“That’s not funny. We’re going to that restaurant, all right? I need caffeine, and I need calories.”
And she needed Emil to finally see the value of serving the Empire — learning the skills and the temperament to tackle real problems like this. All he saw right now was that the Empire was to blame, but this authority was a tool, and Rae wasn’t going to quit until she could use that tool better than anyone else. She didn’t need Emil to enlist, he probably wasn’t cut out for this life, but she was tired of being quietly shunned.
They found a seat in the restaurant, a Twi’lek-run spot that specialized in barbecue based on the intense aroma of sizzling meat, that was across the double-width street from the library. Rae chose a table by the window, so she could keep an eye on the library upper floors, wondering if they’d start to smoke, or if the stormtroopers could suppress the fire by themselves.
“Do you honestly think you can help?” Emil asked. “The worst has already been done.”
“I can find out the truth.” Rae first tied her hair up with the scarf, settling with a ponytail since wrapping it again would be a chore, then turned on the librarian’s datapad and started browsing. She immediately detected that a huge amount of data had been wiped from the archives. The physical archive, and perhaps a part of the digital archive, had been accused of being anti-Imperial, whether that was political propaganda or indecent content.
With such a vague accusation, the only way to mount a challenge would to bring the matter up with the loyalty bureau. Rae didn’t believe she had that kind of influence, so she needed more evidence of unscrupulousness. The main lead she was working from was trivia about the library she’d read on the Net when she was scoping out the location for her birthday. She’d known they had paper books because a tourist guide mentioned the collection had been there for decades on a generation-spanning loan from a wealthy family, the Krythasollan estate.
What a coincidence it was that those books were not owned by the Courtsilius government, but were someone’s valuable property.
The family that donated the books was enormous, a whole clan of aristocrats who loosely gathered in the Hosnian System but had offshoots throughout the galaxy. It was unclear who in the family had loaned most of the books in the Krythasollan Collection; strange since usually such philanthropy sought public recognition. But Rae thought she could narrow down the search.
“Pass me the book you borrowed, Emil.”
“So we’re not saying ‘stole’ anymore.”
“Yes, Emil, we’re saying ‘borrowed’, it’s part of an investigation now.” Rae carefully took the book and wiped the table with a napkin vigorously before laying it down. The cover had such ornately decorated lettering, tufts of leaves sprouting off every which way, that she had to peer at the spine which had more readable lettering to confirm the title. The Completion of the Opus, by a single-named author, Simni.
A server came with two plates and two cups of caf; Rae shielded the book with her body as the plates were set down. She didn’t want a spot of grease on its ancient leaves, even though it was in far from pristine condition now.
“Does this ring a bell to you; Simni’s Completion of the Opus?”
Emil tapped his chin, tugged on the little tuft of beard he was growing there. “He’s a philosopher.”
Rae furiously tapped search terms onto her datapad. “An Old Republic philosopher, unknown species, wrote about those who dedicated their entire lives to one great work. I don’t see what the Empire would object to about it yet.”
“Maybe Simni had some scathing opinions.”
“They were still only scathing opinions about people who lived millennia ago. But it’s not the content that interests me. I thought there might be something like this on the datapad — I’ve got contact information for rare book sellers throughout the galaxy.” Rae took a long sip of caf while debating her next move. “I could send one a message. It would be innocuous; I see plenty of short research questions went out from this datapad in the past month.”
“Rae.” Emil’s voice had hardened. “What if you make someone powerful, very irritated, with all this poking and prying?”
“Since when do you care so much about my career?” Rae said, refusing to look up. “Or do you just know you’d have to find a better job if I lost mine, for Mother and Father’s sake?”
When Emil didn’t answer, Rae went back to composing her message. After a standard greeting, she wrote: “How quickly can you trace paper codex copies of Simni’s Completion of the Opus? We have realized there is missing information in our database about the ownership history of our copy.”
Emil was pushing his steak around his plate like a picky child. “It’s charred,” he said slowly, dragging his two-tined fork over the skin.
“Call a server and send it back if it’s too done for you—”
“I mean I don’t really want to look at anything burned right now.” Emil stood up abruptly. “I need some air.”
Rae let him leave, but she wished he wasn’t acting so defeatist; it was souring her mood. For some reason she had thought Emil would appreciate what she was doing. But had he really given up on trying to fight corruption? If he was telling the truth about his business, did that mean he didn’t care about trying to improve his station and was drifting around the galaxy, scraping by while avoiding the parts he couldn’t get along with? Was he going to fall into despair the way their father had when he realized he was too deep in debt to provide for the family?
She hadn’t meant bring this up with him, but maybe it needed to be said — the credits she sent home out of her salary let her parents stay in retirement, and she knew their father was past his prime for the shipyards and their mother needed her caregiver droid, which was expensive to maintain.
Rae set the datapad down and dug her knife and fork into her grilled steak. Was what she was doing right now risky for her career, and so for the people who depended on it? Maybe, but she refused on principle to be held back by anyone, and that included her family. They would want her to achieve as much as she was capable of, wouldn’t they?
Her plate was half empty when she saw the datapad had a pending message.
That rare book seller was no slouch. They had dug up a provenance for every known copy of the Simni book, including the one that survived the fire. Easy-peasy, the message crowed. Perhaps the book seller and whoever usually used the datapad, the Ithorian perhaps, were close friends, and spoke familiarly all the time.
Rae’s unwitting contact probably didn’t know what just happened to the library. That whole operation had been carried out abruptly, in secret.
Time to find out why.
The book was sold to the Krythasollon family several hundred years ago, but following the inheritance, the most recent owner was a garment industry tycoon, Konn Krythasollon.
Over the course of the other half of the steak, Rae had three important scraps of information. The first was that Konn was known to gamble dangerously at the fathier races. The second was that his wife was the head of the Loyalty Bureau on Courtsilius. The third was that by the laws of the Hosnian system, condemned property would be reimbursed by the Empire.
I knew it. I knew this stank.
The theory was sound: Konn needed credits to bet with, and he remembered a collection of books that would be hard to outright sell because of how long they’d been loaned to the public; Konn would have to admit he was flogging his valuables to pay for vice and addiction. But they could have an official value, since they weren’t really public property. Konn’s wife could have the books accused of anti-Imperial values and send a squad to destroy them. Then Konn would collect what amounted to insurance.
The Empire was being scammed.
With some trepidation, Rae took out her commlink. Once again she put the message into text instead of opening a direct channel. The governor was a busy man who didn’t need interruptions.
She laid out her theory: she had a suspicion about activities carried out in the Courtsilius historical library, concerning the destruction of rare books, and there was a possibility of corruption and theft of Imperial resources. She cited the personal connection Krythasollon had to the official who signed the order about the fate of the books. If Governor Tarkin wished to delegate this matter to any of his subordinates, Rae Sloane could help in the investigation.
But now, she thought, the matter was mostly out of her hands. Time to see where Emil had gone off to, and maybe apologize for snapping at him. The adrenaline rush of finishing this job she’d set for herself was draining out of her system.
The commlink flashed — an incoming holo. Rae went as rigid as if she’d been dunked in ice water. Not in the middle of this restaurant! She tucked the book under her arm and bolted from her seat.
Microseconds wasted could mean lost reputation; Tarkin valued promptness. Rae shoved open the door of the refresher in the back of the restaurant with her shoulder — thankfully it was a single room, not a bank of stalls, and it was unoccupied — and set the commlink on the metal sink.
Her surroundings wouldn’t show up on the hologram, so she swallowed her distaste and snapped to attention. This was more private than the nearest alley. It smelled intensely of cleaning fluid in here, nothing worse, to her relief.
Tarkin appeared like a specter from the emitter, so poised in what presumably was his office that his presence took command of this unremarkable steakhouse washroom he had no idea his image was inhabiting.
“This report intrigues me,” the skeletal-faced governor said, tapping an object to the side of where the projection stopped, presumably a datapad or console.
Rae concealed her shock that Tarkin had taken an interest in this so quickly. If he considered it important, then it was important.
“Shall I provide further information, sir?”
“Have you further information, Lieutenant Sloane?”
“Yes, I could describe the incident, I could describe my research into a possible motive for Konn Krythasollon, but before I do I should say I was following a hunch, and I’m aware this is beyond my normal duties…”
“Then what was it about the circumstances that aroused your suspicion, Lieutenant? What gave you this, ah, hunch?”
Rae thought hard about this. “I knew the books were privately owned. The way they were being destroyed seemed furtive and unprofessional and put a landmark building at high risk. Besides, the reimbursement that Krythasollon would get from the books would be quite a lot, but far below their true value. If the Empire made this decision, I imagine he would be challenging it, and he is wealthy and influential enough to try. But I discovered he is a gambling addict. It fits such a profile to make a snap decision for immediate personal gain, even if the backdraft — literal and figurative — could be severe.”
“Hmm,” Tarkin opined, stroking his chin.
Rae tried to unclench her jaw. She hoped that whatever she’d just said made sense.
“I think this is in itself a minor incident, Lieutenant, but it reflects a situation that is orders of magnitude larger… I will deliberate on the matter. I advise you do not trouble yourself with this any further. Your shore leave will not be granted back to you no matter how you spend it.”
“Of course not, sir,” Rae said, stiff and proper.
Tarkin’s hologram winked out. Of course he wouldn’t spare much time, he was a busy man. Rae heaved in a detergent-scented lungful of relief.
She had one of the waiters at the restaurant box what was left (most of it) of Emil’s steak. But when she stepped outside, she started to worry that he’d gone without a trace, without a way for her to contact him. She paced up and down the length of Library Boulevard, peering in the side streets, until she saw that her fears were unnecessary.
The afternoon sun dropping from the peak of its arc cast a shadow shaped like a squashed, stunted version of herself on the pavement, a child-sized Rae stretching its limited length out towards her brother.
“I finally found you,” she said.
Emil stirred. “Oh. Sorry, I had to walk it off.” He smiled while his forehead remained tightly crumpled. “Did you get the answers you were looking for?”
“I did!” She approached, arms outstretched to him. “I think the books’ owner destroyed them so the Empire would pay him a token amount of reparations. It’s a fraud.”
Emil’s brow un-bunched as his eyes opened wide. “What a foul thing to do.”
“I can’t prove it yet, but I found the owner by tracing this book from the collection,” she went on, tapping the codex with her knuckles, “and he’s rich, he stakes all his money on fathier races, and he’s married to the head of the Courtsilius Loyalty Bureau. He must have figured he’d get money out of the books quicker than selling them.”
“And so the galaxy pissed away a priceless treasure.” Emil sucked in his lower lip; it was starting to quiver. “Or, rather, the rich man saw everything in his path as unbanked coin.”
Rae clenched her fist. “People like that can have their misdeeds brought to bear on them, Emil. They can be dragged out into the light.”
“Yeah? You think you’re going to get this guy?”
“Governor Tarkin got my report and contacted me straight away. He’s looking into it.”
Emil pushed himself off the wall he was leaning against. “Interesting. I wonder what’ll happen with that. But I’m afraid I can’t stick around to find out.”
It stung a bit to hear, though Rae knew it wasn’t fair to feel that way. She chose to spend her time on the investigation, instead of with Emil. But there was residual bitterness over the fact that his anger, his shock, had been what motivated her, and he didn’t seem impressed at all. “So you’re leaving.”
“I have deliveries to make. I do take my work seriously.”
Ah, right. She hadn’t been completely fair to him. “I was too harsh earlier.” Rae put her hand on Emil’s shoulder. “I was caught up in the moment. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what you do. At heart you aren’t tied down. You may be a subject of the Empire, but deep down you’re not an Imperial.”
Emil gave her a strange, guarded look, and held his tongue for a moment. “Then what am I?”
“I can’t tell you that for you. Stay out of trouble, though…”
His face contorted with incredulous disdain.
“I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. I know you’re going to tell me I’m one to talk, but I’m an officer.”
They dawdled in the alley, waiting to find something more to say. “We’re both going to the spaceport, then,” Emil said.
“I haven’t seen your ship.”
“It’s nothing to write home about. Just a junky old transport with almost enough cargo space. We get pretty cramped in there, the stuff we haul usually spills out into the corridors.”
Rae pressed the singed book into Emil’s hands. Perhaps the last survivor of the Courtsilius collection. Or perhaps the others would be spared. “If you have any room.”
Emil solemnly took it. “Isn’t it your birthday? Yet you’re the one giving me gifts.”
“It’s not a gift. I just think that this mess might not be cleared up quickly enough. You know a lot of hobbyists and eccentrics from your work, don’t you? Maybe one of them has a place for this book.”
Emil nodded. “I have storage units that can protect it from degradation. I’ll do my best.”
“I’m trusting you not to sell it on the black market.”
“Rae. If I’m told to look after something, I take that seriously.”
The corner of her mouth twitched up. “Yes. I know.”
When he grinned back, she wanted to embrace him. Really hug him tight, and soak in memories of a home that was never perfect, but could be so vivid when she let herself remember it. She had to put that urge aside.
She didn’t know why two thoughts shared space in her head at the same time — My brother is a good man, and, My brother doesn’t belong in my world.
“Safe travels, Emmy,” she told him.
It wasn’t until soon after her birthday had technically already passed, though Rae was still awake and enduring a very subdued celebration in one of the officer’s lounges, that she found out about Governor Tarkin’s decision; she received a message to meet him in his office. Thankfully Rae hadn’t had as many of the cocktails being offered at the bar as some of her fellow revelers, but she was worried about the few she’d allowed herself.
The other officers who’d shown up for the booze were chatting amongst themselves instead of hanging around the birthday girl, so she easily slipped away without being noticed. But which was more flattering, anyway, being fawned over by one’s juniors or being asked to speak on political matters with one’s seniors? She rubbed the jitters out of her fingers before entering Tarkin’s office.
Once again, in contrast to how important this was to Lieutenant Rae Sloane, Tarkin had the air of someone clearing out a backlog of mildly interesting tasks, leaning back in his seat with his fingertips latticed, though he did rise to his full height after Rae came to a disciplined stance of attention a few meters from his desk.
“Not many of my lieutenants file reports while on leave,” said Tarkin, “except for the particularly avid ones interested in rapid promotion.”
“I have no complaints about being described as avid, sir. But I didn’t bring this up with you because I thought it was impressive, rather…”
Tarkin held up a finger. “No, unfortunately, this seems more like a personal grievance of yours, which I in general do not encourage.”
Rae held her tongue, chastened. Emil’s reservations came back to haunt her; what if she’d overestimated the power of the Empire to punish the indiscretions of the rich, what if she’d misjudged the situation and the Loyalty Bureau’s ruling was right?
“Still, you brought to my attention how lax the Courtsilius laws are when it comes to those who are judged to possess undesirable texts. You found that in certain cases a person may even be rewarded for it.”
Rae dared ask, “Were the Courtsilius library books even undesirable, sir?”
“Perhaps they were, Lieutenant, after all, they were written at a time when the treasonous Jedi were idolized and granted an influential role in the Republic.”
Of course that was true. Rae cursed herself for forgetting.
“In any case.” Tarkin tapped the pads of his forefingers together. “I of course do not govern Courtsilius, but I can take its failings to heart. I think it is time for the Empire to institute stricter measures when it comes to condemned, anti-Imperial texts. No more of this reimbursement nonsense. Anyone found in possession of a book deemed anti-Imperial should face a harsh punishment. Wouldn’t you agree, Lieutenant Sloane?”
The buzz of those cocktails must have progressed into a less comfortable stage of inebriation, because Rae Sloane felt slightly queasy and couldn’t figure out why.
“So under such a law, a man like Konn Krythasollon—”
“Would have to rid himself of his collection if it was in fact anti-Imperial, and would be quite discouraged from raising false alarms. Do you find that acceptable, Lieutenant?”
“It’s not up to me, Governor Tarkin, but yes, I do.”
Tarkin seemed satisfied; he dismissed her with the merest twitch of his finger towards the door.
When Rae finally put herself to bed, wrapped herself up in her blanket on her simple cot in her tiny but private quarters, she remembered.
Being back aboard the Executrix had numbed memories of anything outside the naval routine, as she mentally prepared to return to her duties, and there had been those drinks… that must have been why she forgot about Emil, and the book.
Rae stared at the plain metal ceiling, eyes not yet adjusted to the darkness; all she saw were a few faint floaters in her vision like microorganisms crawling around on a slide. They made her think of the Force, how heretical texts like the one she’d given away might have spoken of space filled with creatures that watched all and danced in and out of sentient bodies. She closed her eyes - the floaters remained - and was transported to a vision of Emil passing through a spaceport customs checkpoint with that ancient book about great works under his arm. What did it say about great works, anyway? Did it admire or scoff? Did it think they were doomed to meaninglessness?
I should try to warn him, she thought. Tell him to get rid of it. Even if he’d look at me with those tired, disapproving eyes. Even though this isn’t my fault. I should tell him what I did.
But in the morning, she didn’t.