Sins of the Father/Part 4

Narasi glanced at the blurbs on Circumtore and Shell Hutts as her data crystal absorbed the information, but they flew by too quickly for her to read. Intelligence on Runganna was locked against Padawans, but Master Coreski accessed it for her. When it got to nuclear weapons, though, the download took just long enough for Narasi's eyes to widen and her stomach to twist in unease. A ravaged landscape stayed with her even after the computer beeped and she pocketed the crystal.

"Up for a fighter lesson?" Yan Razam asked when they passed in the hall.

Narasi groaned with longing. "When I get back, definitely!"

Yan cocked her triangular head. "Didn't you just get back?"

Grinning, Narasi lamented, "A Padawan's work is never done."

She tried to take a shortcut to the hangar bay only to run into a cluster of Initiates too, all of them holding dried flimsiplasts and wearing expressions ranging from smug satisfaction to deep disappointment. Ayson Sokos looked delighted, though Narasi thought part of that might have come from running into her.

"Lookit what I made!" he exclaimed when he pulled away from her hug.

They had all painted the stylized winged lightsaber crest of the Jedi Order. Ayson had chosen sunshine yellow on Pantoran skin blue, and Narasi grinned. "It looks great, buddy! Gonna paint this on your cheeks next?"

He gave her the grave look only a six-year-old could wear. "No, those are only for my family marks. Pantorans have to remember we're Pantorans."

Narasi poked his belly. "I know, I'm just teasing."

"Where's Tirien?"

"He's actually waiting for me," Narasi confessed. "I gotta go."

"Okay. Say hi for me!" He gave her another hug, then ran off to catch up to the line.

Narasi took off at a run herself, though Tirien was already at the Second Chance, bags nowhere in sight, by the time she ground to a halt. Engaged in conversation with the Givin ExplorCorps ship tech, Soolorl Throkhab, he didn't look away as he asked, "She's ready to fly?"

"It is," Soolorl said. "It is our policy to refuel Jedi craft immediately, lest they be required for service and unavailable. A policy which you no doubt will agree is prescient, given the circumstances."

"I agree," Tirien admitted.

Soolorl turned his skeletal face to her. "Hello Narasi. Can you solve 5/x-3/(x+4)=2?"

"What? No.  No wait, yes!" Narasi mouthed the equation to herself, running the numbers through her head.

"We have an auction to attend, Narasi…" Tirien hinted.

"Just a second! Divide by two…"  She closed her eyes, tracing one clawed finger through the air, then opened them and grinned. "X equals 5 and -2."

"I am relieved to hear it. May the Force be with you both."

Soolorl and Tirien bowed to one another, but Narasi said, "Hey, wait, that reminds me—I have a joke for you."

Tirien's eyes narrowed as Soolorl cocked his head. "A joke?"

"Yeah! Will a native of Yag'Dhul ask you a math problem?"

Soolorl nodded. "Probability suggests that result, as the population of Yag'Dhul is approximately 99.9999872364%—"

"It's a joke, Soolorl," Narasi reminded him.

"…yes, of course. Very well: will a native of Yag'Dhul ask me a math problem?"

Narasi grinned. "Well, yeah—that's a Givin!"

A beat passed, followed by a clang and a groan as Tirien banged his head against the Second Chance ' s hull. Soolorl's empty black eyes showed no emotion, but he nodded. "Yes, I see."

Chuckling, Narasi shook her head. "Bye Soolorl."

"Safe travels."

She patted Tirien on the shoulder as she jogged up the ramp. "C'mon Master!"

He followed, rubbing his forehead. "Get us underway. I'll plot the course."

Stopping only to pet Gizmo and deposit him on her shoulder, Narasi took the pilot's seat, cleared them for departure, and pulled the Second Chance out into space. As she was flying clear of the fleet for a clean lane, she noticed Tirien still plugging away at the navicomputer, glancing occasionally at a map on his datapad. As she watched him, her transponder buzzed, and she took it out to glance at it.

"Everything all right?"

"Yeah, it's just Aldayr, I'll send him a reply later." To get him off the subject, she asked, "Don't you have the calculations yet, Master?"

"Patience, Padawan. There are a lot of legs to this trip."

She looked over his shoulder, and he pointed. "Look, we come up to Pax, reroute south, get on the Duros Space Run at Darkknell—"

"Darkknell?" Narasi growled.

"We're not stopping," Tirien promised. "Once was enough. But then we take the Run over to Enarc…"

He traced out a meandering path that somehow managed to go through the Arkanis sector and Bothan Space before finally ending at Circumtore. Narasi shook her head. "Geez, could you find a more roundabout way?"

"Well, if we went to Gamorr from Molavar instead of Kothlis—"

Narasi facepalmed hard enough that she nicked the heel of her hand on one of her own horns. Wiping the speck of blood on her tunic, she traced a rough hypotenuse to his grand tour of the Outer Rim and said, "Master, we could go up from Pax, through Milagro, around Daalang, and right to Circumtore! Three stops, and we could meet Master Darakhan for lunch on the way."

"It would be good to see Mali, and Milagro," Tirien admitted. "But this area north of Milagro is all Gasald's territory, and Daalang is Osydro's."

"It's still a lot faster."

"Unless one of them has deployed gravity mines along the way, and if they have, that double gun isn't going to be enough to get us out of what they might have waiting. There's no point in haste if we're racing toward our deaths."

"How long is this whole thing gonna take?"

Tirien typed a few more coordinates into the navicomputer, scanned the readout, and frowned. "About a day and a half."

"Isn't the auction in two days?!"

"It is," he said, reaching for the hyperdrive lever, "so we'd best be going."

Gizmo did not leap down when the stars blurred to hyperspace, and Narasi rubbed his back. "That's my brave boy!"

He cooed in her ear as Tirien stood and said, "Bring the brave boy back to the hold. Or don't, come to think of it, but come."

She brought him anyway, setting him down when they reached the hold, where he hopped across the deck and into the nest she had built for him in a disused cabinet. Tirien glanced at it, but didn't comment as he held out his hand. "The data?"

Narasi tossed him the data crystal; as Tirien plugged it into his imagecaster, she remembered what it contained and felt the smile slide off her face. Once he had copied the information to a datacard, he tossed the crystal back and said, "Let's dig into this. I'll start with Runganna and the Shell Hutts; you take nukes.  We'll meet in the middle at Circumtore."

The better part of an hour later, Tirien sat cross-legged in the center of the hold, projecting two different screens and going back and forth between them, while Narasi lay on the floor halfway into the sleeping cabin, her feet up on her bunk and Gizmo dozing on her stomach. She had a better understanding of the physics involved in nuclear weaponry, accompanied by a fervent desire to ensure they didn't lose the auction. She kept scrolling back up to the wasted landscape she had seen—a slaughtered world.

"What's bothering you?" Tirien asked without looking her way.

Too used to him to be caught off guard, she said, "It's just this one picture."

"Show me." He looked over, and when she held up her datapad, his expression of narrow-eyed curiosity softened. "Serroco?"

Narasi scooped Gizmo into one arm so she could sit up and stare. "How did you know that?"

"Because it's one of the worst war crimes in galactic history that wasn't perpetrated by the Sith. The Mandalorians unleashed nuclear weapons and devastated Serroco.  Much of the planet was depopulated, and the native sentients were pushed to the brink of extinction."

Narasi thought about her history lessons. "Is that why so many Jedi joined Revan?"

"One of the reasons. The Republic kept losing; I imagine a lot of beings were eager to follow anyone who could win."

"Think that's what Master Z'dar is banking on?"

Tirien grimaced and didn't answer, and after a moment Narasi found a different question. "Master, why are nuclear weapons so rare? I get that we've outlawed them, but why do the Sith care?"

"A good question to ask—you're thinking critically. It's a combination of factors.  If memory serves, most nuclear weapons use uranium or plutonium?" When she nodded, he said, "Both of those are needed for starfighter fuel, rare enough that we can't waste what occurs naturally, and too expensive to synthesize in greater quantities than we already do. They're also almost useless in space combat; particle shields will stop the missile and energy shields stop the blast and the radiation.  Unless you managed to get one aboard a ship, I suppose, but something that radioactive would be visible to sensors halfway across the system."

"What about ground bombardment, like Serroco?"

"Planetary shields should be able to handle them too, and if you get shields down, you can wreak the same kind of havoc for a fraction of the cost with turbolasers, and avoid the radioactive fallout. You just read it, so you'd know the exact durations, but residual radiation can take a long time to clear.  As brutal as the Sith are, they want to conquer the galaxy, not destroy it.  If they decimate a planet with nuclear weapons, they'll likely have killed all the beings they could have enslaved and rendered their prize uninhabitable for a generation or more.  Remember that their economy runs on slavery as much as anything else; if they try to support increasing territory with a flat slave population, eventually the Empire will collapse under its own weight."

Narasi grimaced, and Tirien's eyes narrowed. "Now's as good a time as any to discuss it, I suppose. Circumtore is in Hutt Space, and I'm sure at least Runganna will have slaves; maybe others, depending on who's there.  I know it's wrong, and I know you'll want to free them; I will too.  But we can't."

"Master, we're Jedi! If we don't—"

"I get it, Narasi; I really do." He looked tired. "But the Hutts are neutral in this war. They'll sell arms and information from time to time, but so far the kajidics have stayed united in keeping their real power out of the conflict, and we can't upset that balance.  We can't save a palace's worth of slaves if it brings the Hutts into the war on the Sith side."

Narasi crossed her arms. "You once told me that cost-benefit analysis with people's lives is risky for Jedi."

The ghost of a smile touched his face; Narasi couldn't make heads or tails of it under the circumstances until she realized he was proud of her. "That's a fair point, and you're right to raise it. But the Republic barely has enough forces to fight one full-scale war, and we're already fighting one with two smaller ones besides.  Right now we're losing; if the Hutts join the Sith we will lose, and then the entire galaxy will be enslaved."

Narasi looked away, trying to find another argument, but none came to her. Tirien said, "Choosing the least of the evils is still choosing an evil, but this is a case where we have to make a choice, because it's been forced upon us. If we try to take the weapon by force, we risk the Hutts declaring war; even if we ignore the auction altogether, that's a choice too, because someone else winds up with a nuclear bomb or something just as bad.  Playing Runganna's game is the best of our limited, bad options."

Put that way, Narasi had to concede the logic, even though she felt like she was holding something slimy that oozed all over her. Petting Gizmo absently—and, after that mental image, glad yet again that he had dry, smooth scales—she redirected her ire and asked, "Who is this Runganna, anyway?"

Tirien reached for his datapad. "I was hoping there would be more, truthfully…"

"That's all the database had."

"Oh, not you," he explained. "I mean I wish the Republic had more. I spent enough time spying and skulking with Suwo that I know how hard Republic Intelligence's work is, but sometimes even they don't give us much to go on."

He typed on the datapad and the imagecaster projected a holo of a Hutt that seemed slimmer—if that word could be applied to a Hutt—than other images Narasi had seen of them. Less bloated, maybe, she thought. It was the bulging frog eyes, she decided—Runganna looked surprised by something outside the holo's frame.

"Runganna the Hutt," Tirien said. "Her cuirvas—the second name, a clan identification—unknown. She's part of a sect called 'Shell Hutts'."

"Why are they called that?"

Tirien projected a new image, and Narasi didn't know whether to go with a laugh or a blank stare; she settled for a narrow-eyed giggle. "Why would a Hutt need armor?"

"Conventional wisdom would suggest not being assassinated, which admittedly is an occupational hazard in Runganna's business," Tirien said, "but evidently it has the additional benefit of not requiring any exertion to move. See the repulsors along the underside here?"

Narasi nodded, but raised her eyebrows. "Wow. Just…wow."

"Quite. Anyway, the Shell Hutts are a relatively new phenomenon; we've only heard about them in the past century or so, and they're only found on Circumtore."

"Any environmental hazards?"

Tirien shook his head. "I had the same thought, but no. It's an artificial planetoid, and the system had some cataclysm in the past, but all the reports say it's habitable and safe enough—apart from the residents, anyway."

"What's Runganna's thing? Arms dealing?"

"At some level, but in a way she's too young to have much of a 'thing' in the first place. She's only two hundred twenty or so—probably more than our lifetimes put together, but barely out of adolescence for a Hutt."

"If that's true, and if nuclear weapons are really rare, how'd she get her slimy hands on one?"

Tirien narrowed his eyes. "No emotion, Narasi."

She took a breath. "Right, that wasn't fair. How'd she get her armored hands on one?"

This time he rolled his eyes, but he said, "Nothing in any of these files explains that, and it's a question to which I'll be very interested to learn the answer."

"Is that the priority? Figure out where it came from?"

"It's a priority, but first is to get control of this one. We can't let any other group get its hands—slimy, armored, or otherwise—on a weapon of mass destruction."

"Who else do you think got an invite?"

Tirien frowned, and Narasi could tell from the tightness around his eyes that the same question had been bouncing around his head for the past hour. "She invited the Republic, and few groups could hope to outbid us except the Sith Empire. The Muuns, maybe, if Muunilinst pooled all its wealth.  Some of the major conglomerates, but why would they want weapons like this?  It's much too extreme to protect shipping.  But that's assuming Runganna wants credits.  If she plans to auction for something other than money…who knows?"

"So basically, it could be anybody?"

He nodded. "I'll be very interested to find out."