Chapter Text
Dizord’s Reach, Galactic Core, Quadrant M-11, South of Columus, 50 ABY
Vestara Khai hurtled herself out from the shade of the permacrete barracks, her breath-mask’s hose slapping her stolen miner’s utilities as her lungs taxed its output. Her feet dug into the loose sands and threatened to send her shooting out on ballistic arc with each step. The thin atmosphere of the world cut deeply into her face with the speed of her passing, she grabbed at the planet and supplemented its weak gravity with the pull of the Force. Her boot struck the side of a stone, and she let herself fall and tuck herself, then burst out to the side with the leverage of the rock. It went one way, she went the other, and a cluster of blaster bolts screeched through the space she would have occupied. Vestara felt the hairs on the nape of her neck prickle-- not from her miraculous escape, as in her twenty-three standard years she had cheated death more times than she could easily count, but because she didn’t see the bolts coming before she dodged.
As she continued to race south across the ochre sands, now bouncing like a bolo-ball between unseen marks, Vestara wondered if Ben Skywalker was right, and she really was turning Light, really was “surrendering to the will of the Force”. She’d just have to never mention this incident to him. As yet more repeating blasters added variation to the impending doom that hounded her steps, she reflected that her pursuers were actually trying to help her.
“Khai, Lambent, say position,” hissed a voice over her earbud comm.
“Lambent, Khai, I’m passing Pit 7 right now, southbound,” she replied, as she leapt over a mound of spoil from the nearby open wound in the planet’s surface.
“Which Pit is seven?” the harried voice of Lambent shot back.
“The one with the excavator on the east side, south of the main complex,” Vestara answered. Can’t the woman read a map? she groused internally.
It wasn’t a reasonable thought, seeing as Lambent—Tahiri Velia—had just jumped into the system to rescue Vestara from capture, interrogation, and certain execution. Besides, she had likely never heard of this dirtball before being copied on Vestara’s distress call. However, after the last hour or so of playing hide-and-seek in the battered mining complex she had been investigating in yet another we-really-need-you-I’d-so-appreciate-it request from Ben-kriffing-Skywalker, Vestara wasn’t in a mood to be reasonable.
“Roger, I see you. Looks like you’ve made some friends.” Tahiri’s voice came back over the comm in moments, with a tone that was all smile and teeth. Why, Vestara thought, of all the Jedi, did the one closest, in the fastest ship, have to be the one who trusts me least? As she evaded yet another fusillade from her ‘friends’, Vestara caught a glimpse of something dark and fast dropping out of the cloudless umber sky.
Too fast.
The speck resolved itself to a dart, then a wedge, then, as Vestara ducked still more blasterfire, a MandalMotors Bes’uliik starfighter, coal-black and headed her way at a supersonic speeds, almost hugging the ground. Abruptly, the Bes’uliik’s nose thrusters fired, whipping it into a rapid yaw as it still shot forward on its momentum. Must have disabled the aetheric rudder, Vestara guessed, as the ion wash from its four burly Slayn & Korpil main engines threw a cloud of dust and grit into her face, blinding her.
“Jump on,” Tahiri commed, but Vestara was already in motion, boosting herself with the Force into a leisurely arc in the planet’s weak gravity, then, as the Bes’uliik passed below her, tugging with the Force upon it, pulling herself to it like she would pull her lightsaber to hand. She shot between the reverse-articulated canopy-halves as they opened into the rugged craft’s second seat. Her feet stung as she slapped into the footwell behind the reverse-oriented seat, the pain quickly overshadowed as her knees, not yet moving at the same speed as the skidding fighter, smashed into the seat edge, and then forgotten entirely as her head pitched forward into the seat, her clenched teeth somehow managing click together as she was rammed about the ascetic cockpit.
Vestara recovered, now half-squatting in the footwell, and looked out the now-sealed cockpit to see the rugged, unlovely hills whirling as Tahiri resumed the starfighter’s flat spin, the centripetal acceleration blurred by the inertial compensators into the background of Vestara’s still-spinning head. The ion engines growled as Tahiri slammed the throttle to its stops, and the view outside swung madly as she pitched up. The ship bucked like an uvak in a tempest as she reengaged the vector plates, a shudder passing through the ship as they noted that they were not aligned with the direction of movement relative to the local gravitational reference frame, and bled speed from the vessel to swing their velocity arrow back in line.
The canopy quickly darkened to black as they raced out of the atmosphere of the blasted mining planet. Vestara was pressed into the back of the third seat by the force of the fighter’s acceleration, even through the efforts of the acceleration compensator. As the sky faded and the crowded stars of the Core appeared, her head cleared enough to hear Tahiri say “Looks like your buddies aren’t giving up. Want to hop on the rear turret already?”
“I’m in the second seat, di’kut,” Vestara growled back, her hand rising to fumble the third seat’s headrest down as far as it could go, still not enough, she thought, adding an unprintable Keshiri curse under her breath.
“Latch is under the seat, if you feel like helping me save you,” Tahiri snarked back. Swallowing a sarcastic comeback and closing her eyes, Vestara sent a flock of questing mental fingers below the seat, wrapping around shock struts, structural bracing, and… there. She exerted herself in the Force, and the latch snapped up, sending the third seat bowing over and Vestara sliding down its back, now inclined against the direction of thrust. She narrowly stopped her head from being rung against the transparisteel canopy with her upthrust hands, then, biting down another vicious swear at the audible smirk of amusement from the pilot's seat, tucked herself against the clear canopy, sending her curled legs shooting past Tahiri’s headrest.
As her oxygen mask was rammed uncomfortably against the unyielding window, she flicked her head like a ronto bothered by a flinat, and the seat snapped back upright. Curling herself in further, Vestara tucked her backside into the console and drew her legs around the headrest, shoving her feet onto the seat before twisting about. Finally in the right orientation, she stuffed her legs to brace against the footwell. She gestured, and the five straps of crash webbing flew around her chest. Vestara snapped them together, balancing in an improbable hunched position, before twisting the tightener. She allowed herself to be sucked in the seat, then yanked off her askew breath-mask, allowing the hose, trapped by the taut straps, to deflate.
Vestara flipped the controls on the console, dead, she quickly surmised. “If you want me to use this thing, you might trying turning it on,” she growled at Tahiri.
“Whoops, sorry,” came back the unrepentant answer, but the controls flickered on, so Vestara let it pass. It’s not like I’d trust her in my ship, a traitorously reasonable part of her whispered. As the targeting screen lit up, she saw the symbols of a dozen-odd CloakShape fighters racing up their tail.
The CloakShape was considered obsolete by respectable militaries everywhere, dating as its design did to decades before the Clone Wars, but its high maintainability and easy accommodation of upgrades had earned it a loyal following among the more piratical of armed forces, ensuring that variants of it had stayed in continuous unlicensed production in various locations throughout the subsequent almost-century of near-constant galactic conflict. It was also dirt-cheap and untraceable, which fit the procurement policy of the Lost Tribe of the Sith exactly.
Vestara swung the rear-mounted laser cannon around. The Bes’uliik that Tahiri had stolen from a hapless Mandalorian bounty hunter was vastly more sophisticated. But MandalMotors’ dedication to multirole capability meant that, while it was far more maneuverable than their hapless pursuers, its acceleration was sluggish enough that the heavily modified CloakShapes were actually outracing it. The targeting computer beeped agreement as Vestara took a bead on the lead fighter. Its shields flared gold as she sent a burst straight into then, the fighter desperately jerking up into a climb, its speed falling rapidly off as she chased it with her cannon. Satisfied that it wouldn’t be catching up anytime soon, Vestara blasted the next fighter, its obviously rookie pilot likewise over-correcting and falling behind.
The next fighter she shot at, however, smoothly slid into a displacement roll a hair before the laser bolts arrived, the pilot dancing aside from the threat while staying in hot pursuit. But Vestara was a predator, and not about to be drawn into a duel, however satisfying, so she switched off firing at the nimble fighter and began scattering the weaker members of the squadron with more shots from her weapon. “We’ve got a Sith, right on us,” she called over her should to Tahiri.
“Force, another one?” came the exasperated reply.
And that about sums up the situation, Vestara thought glumly. Since the Lost Tribe had burst onto the galactic scene just eight years ago, the Jedi had been reeling against the simple reality that they were direly outnumbered. Some few hundred Jedi stood against tens of thousands of Lost Tribe Sith. Vestara had revealed Kesh’s coordinates to the Jedi three years ago, now, but the Sith had long since evacuated their war-making capacity (that is, their Force-sensitives) from the planet. Bombarding the Lost Tribe’s homeworld, aside from tripping over every moral inhibition the Jedi had, would do nothing but give the Sith the perfect excuse to take out their frustrations on the wider galaxy.
The galaxy had given them much to be frustrated about, too, as its people stubbornly failed to bow before their self-anointed masters. Subversion of the government had failed, and now there wasn’t enough solidity to Coruscant’s rule to actually achieve anything by trying again. Piracy and brigandage had become the order of the day, and the Sith were slowly crushing the galactic economy, like a parasite killing its host.
And so it was that Vestara had been spying on a Sith attempt (to be honest, a successful Sith attempt) to infiltrate Core mining concerns and further destabilize GA shipbuilding, as favor for Ben and out of a sense of guilt for helping unleash the Sith on a war-weary galaxy. It would be so much easier if I didn’t have a conscience, she thought morosely for the thousandth time, wincing as a volley of return fire exploded around the fleeing starfighter. She sent more shots sailing back at their pursuers, the incandescent ribbons of neutronium causing the enemy fighters to break in fear, falling behind as they bled energy into their turns.
Except, that was, for the fighter piloted by the Sith, who presciently dodged around every shot Vestara sent his way while eating up the distance behind them at an alarming rate. The CloakShape would easily draw into concussion missile range before the Bes’uliik could escape into the relative safety of hyperspace. Even the fighter’s signature micronized beskar armor wouldn’t stand up to the kind of sustained pummeling the CloakShape could then dish out, much less the relatively weak shields of the stolen multirole fighter.
Tahiri had evidently drawn the same conclusion, as she called “Shadow bomb out,” and the spaceframe shuddered with the deployment of the Jedi weapon. Vestara carefully avoided hitting the sleek, dark cylinder as it fell behind the racing spacecraft, and began to drift without visible thrust under Tahiri’s firm grip in the Force. “Keep him distracted,” she ordered. Reluctantly in agreement, Vestara sent a renewed stream of shots at the onrushing starfighter, forcing the pilot to bend his Force awareness fully upon dodging the spiraling pattern Vestara laid out.
The Sith fighter was drawing closer, still occasionally managing to send a blaster bolt smashing into their protective shields, when the targeting screen Vestara was eyeing dissolved into static as the evanescent flash of a baradium detonation flickered far to their rear. “Scratch one,” Tahiri crowed, with no real joy in her voice.
After the demise of their presumable squadron leader, the rest of the CloakShapes were only too eager to allow Vestara to chivy them into wasting their energy in evasive maneuvers, and the fleeing craft drew ever nearer to the planet’s hyperlimit and safety. Vestara, briefly forgetting the hard-won wisdom of dozens of Skywalker-related near-catastrophes, was just beginning to think that might make it out in one piece, when the ship’s alarms flared. Tahiri cursed in some language that sounded like teeth being ripped out and was probably Yuuhzan Vong, and called back, “Strike-class cruiser, right on the hyperlimit. Hey, Ves, I think your buddies might actually have it in for you.”
Ignoring Tahiri’s editorializing, Vestara asked, “Can we go around, or will we be going through?” The cockpit fell quiet for a moment. Secure in CloakShape’s retreat, Vestara twisted around to see… a headrest, a corner of crash helmet, a stray lock of blonde hair, and not much else.
The hair and helmet then bobbed, and the ship made a slight adjustment to its course. “They’ll be able to take some shots, but they came out in the wrong place to stop us. Hold on to your seat, this might get a little hairy.”
The converted strike fighter flew forward unmolested for almost a minute, then the hairs on the nape of Vestara’s neck began to prickle with her danger sense, and Tahiri began to wiggle the ship around its flight path as turbolaser fire bloomed all around them. The ship shuddered down to its frame as a lucky shot flared brightly against its shields. The barrage intensified, blasts smashing through the shields to spray the starfigther’s beskar hull with radiation.
“Do you think you could hit a few more of them?” Vestara complained, as the ship was bounced laterally by a heavy shot that just barely glanced off of its shields.
“We’re coming up on the hyperlimit, so maybe show some appreciation,” Tahiri snapped back, as she swerved the fighter around a sickly-green spear of coherent light. Seconds later, the craft’s wild oscillations stilled, as they leveled off for the jump to hyperspace. After a tiny moment that seemed to stretch into eternity, Tahiri grunted triumphantly as the stars stretched into lines around the ship. At the same time, they were thrown about their seats as one final shot landed, and then--
Inside Vestara’s head, the galaxy imploded.