Battlefront II, page 12
“We’ll be fine. Even that growing boy of yours,” Dahna reassured him as she helped herself to the rations and walked over to where Seyn sat. Seyn let her eyes flicker up, then down.
Dahna sat down beside Seyn and handed her a cube, the milk, and the meiloorun. Seyn accepted the milk and cube, but shook her head at the proffered piece of fruit. “Thank you,” she said, glancing at the Kage, “but this is plenty.”
Dahna smiled a sad, bittersweet smile. “I know those words,” she said. “Those are the words of a slave. Want to know how I know?”
Looking up at her cautiously, Seyn nodded.
“I was a slave myself. Ever since I was an adolescent. The man who took me and half my village said he liked how I danced.” Dahna spat the word, then laughed humorlessly. “He’d never seen me dance.”
She looked over at Seyn. “You ever have to ‘dance’ for your master?” When Seyn shook her head, Dahna nodded, looking a little relieved. “Well, thank goodness for small favors. What did you do for him?”
Seyn suspected the query came from a genuine place of concern—one slave to another. But by the way the others were listening now, she also knew there was a deeper layer to the question. They had just—to the best of their knowledge—risked their lives to free her and had taken her with them. They wanted to know what she might have done to help the Empire, and also could do for them.
Slavers, rebels—they’re all the same, she thought, and answered, with what she hoped was the proper beaten-down shyness of a former slave, “I know Rudaga was into some pretty bad things. Spying for whoever paid him. The black market. When he found out I knew how to read and write Basic, he put me to work in his shop. I helped him with numbers, cataloging—that sort of thing.”
But the actual former slave was shaking her head. “Honey…it’s all right. I know you did more. You had to have done more, or else he’d just hire someone and pay them starvation wages.”
Seyn feigned hesitation, looking around at the faces that were now turned toward her. Except for Kaev, who was still stinging from Dahna’s upbraiding, they seemed more curious than suspicious.
“I have a steady hand and a sharp eye,” she said. “He put me to work forging. Letters, documents—you know, certificates of authenticity. Things to make stolen goods seem to be legitimate. Things like that.”
Now even Kaev was looking thoughtful. “Do you know languages?”
Seyn shook her head. “Only Basic and Huttese. My mast—Rudaga wanted to make sure I couldn’t eavesdrop on some of his conversations. I’m sorry.”
“No need to apologize. When we get to the base, we’ll see just how good you are at forging,” Dahna said. “I know you’re ashamed of what you had to do, but now you can turn that skill to something worthwhile. Something that matters. Do you know who we are?”
“No. I just know you killed Rudaga and others who were helping the Empire. So I’m guessing you’re rebels.”
“Of a sort,” Dahna said. “We call ourselves the Dreamers. We’re what’s left of the real partisans—people like Saw Gerrera. I’m sure your master must have known about us.”
Seyn nodded solemnly, and Dahna continued. “What you saw back there…we do things like that a lot. And sometimes we do things that seem cruel, but they’re necessary. I think I can arrange for you to stay with us, if you would like to. Otherwise, we can take you somewhere safe.”
Seyn bit her lip and looked around. “You saved me,” she said. “I want to repay that. I’ll stay with you, if you’ll have me.”
Dahna looked around at her crew for a minute, the tips of her lekku twitching as she pondered something. “Kaev, Ru—you should go take a look at that new tool that got us our newest recruit. Piikow, you were telling me you could use it to do the same thing on thermal detonators, right?”
The Kage and the human, of course, could see right through the Twi’lek’s request, but the Chadra-Fan clearly didn’t. “Absolutely!” Piikow’s furry face was filled with enthusiasm. “Let me show you the schematics.”
All three rose and went to the front of the cabin, allowing their commander and the “new recruit” some privacy.
Gently, Dahna took Seyn’s hand and placed the fruit in her palm. “It was awhile before I told anyone,” she said quietly. “I felt ashamed. It took the Mentor to show me that none of what happened to me was my fault. Maybe Rudaga didn’t make you dance.” She indicated Seyn’s bare arms. “But I can see the marks. He wasn’t a gentle master. Did you ever try to kill him?”
The words and the soothing, gentle voice in which they were uttered were such a bizarre juxtaposition that Seyn lifted her eyes from her plate.
“No,” she said. Even though the entire story was fake, somehow, these words stung. Seyn was fond of this “character” she’d created. She didn’t want Seyn the Slave to look like a coward. “But…I wish I had.”
“Don’t.”
The Twi’lek was full of surprises. “Why not?” Seyn asked.
“Because that kind of killing is personal. And when it gets personal, it gets ugly, and some of that ugliness spills onto you.”
She wasn’t looking at Seyn as she spoke; her eyes were distant, unfocused. Seyn had debriefed enough agents to know that expression. It tended to hang, like a miasma, only around those who knew from experience what they were talking about.
“But…isn’t what you’re doing personal?” she inquired. “Killing people, taking their lives—I mean, that seems personal to me.”
It wasn’t personal at all. But it seemed like the sort of thing Seyn the Slave would have asked.
“You can’t think of it like that,” Dahna said. “You have to remember what we—and now you, too—are fighting for. We’re fighting to end what happens to people like you and me. Oh, the Empire doesn’t come out and endorse it officially, but I have danced a time or two for those who wore command caps. The Empire knows it happens, and they just don’t care.”
Her lovely face was hard as she continued. “They don’t care about anything except themselves and that horrible, evil man who shuts himself away from everyone. They don’t care about the billions whose worlds they’ve destroyed to get their metals, or their kyber crystals, or whatever the hell it is they’re looking for this week. They don’t care who dies or who lives. It’s all for the glory of the Empire, honey, and don’t you forget it.”
“I won’t,” Seyn said earnestly.
And she wouldn’t, either. The treasonous words were emblazoned in her memory.
Smiling at Dahna, she bit into the meiloorun.
It had been years since Iden had visited her homeworld. She’d always assumed that, one day, she’d return. Eventually. It was not a place with the happiest of memories; better things had happened to her at the Academy and during the months she’d been assigned to the Death Star’s TIE fighter squadron. Vardos was where she had been born, in a comfortable, gleaming apartment in one of the high-rising buildings in the capital city of Kestro. It was where she’d lain awake at night, listening to her parents argue. Where she had kissed her mother goodbye as Zeehay Versio had left for a new assignment on Coruscant, and then to other worlds seemingly as often as Iden changed her uniform. Where Iden had been raised—more by Headmaster Gleb of the Future Imperial Leaders Preparatory School than by her own parents—studying human and alien anatomy before she was ten to know the most vulnerable place of attack.
Where she had killed for the first time, at age fifteen.
Her brief time on the moon of Yavin had been Iden’s first experience with anything resembling a place that wasn’t almost completely covered with duracrete and transparisteel.
She looked down at the city of her birth through the shuttle’s windows as the vessel descended; at its orderly roads, all of them leading to the Archive, the world’s most secure and valuable building. How odd and upside down everything was, Iden thought. When she’d imagined returning, she had seen herself doing so in triumph. She’d dared visualize parades along the city streets, perhaps with father and daughter participating side by side in positions of honor. The streets would be crowded as the planet welcomed the return of its favorite son, the man who had brought them under the benevolent and protective wing of the Empire, and its best-loved daughter, the hero of the Empire.
There were crowds gathering at the base of the Archive, all right. They were, as Vardosians always were, orderly; there had never been a riot here during Iden’s lifetime. But the crowds had not come in anticipation of a parade. They had come hoping to get a glimpse of the traitor.
The shuttle settled down on the building’s roof. One of the two stormtroopers who had been sent to “escort” Iden rose and strode to her, towering over her as she sat with the crash webbing on.
“Hold out your hands,” he said brusquely. He, his companion, and nearly everyone else outside of Inferno Squad itself were under the impression that she was truly a traitor, and while the trooper wasn’t rude—Iden was still, after all, Admiral Versio’s daughter—his contempt for her was evident in both the tone of his voice and the disapproving frown that wasn’t yet hidden by a helmet.
Wordlessly, looking up into his cold eyes, Iden stuck out her hands. The second stormtrooper watched, his blaster trained on her, while the first one snapped a pair of stun cuffs on her wrists.
“You know how these work, right?”
“Yes,” she said, coolly. “Of course I do.”
“Got a big crowd out there,” the other was saying. “We deliver her to J-Sec and then we wash our hands of her. They get to handle this from there. Blasters on stun.”
“Copy that,” the first one said. Just before he put the bucket on, slipping into the comfort of plastoid uniform anonymity, he said, “Anybody else, they’d execute. You…you get a job.” He shook his head in disgust and put the bucket on.
As Iden followed him down the ramp onto the roof of the Hub, she was glad that she’d seen them both set their blasters to stun. Even so, she felt a phantom, anticipatory itch between her shoulder blades.
Gleb was waiting for her, clad in the familiar uniform Iden remembered from her childhood: dark-blue shirt and trousers, with a wide maroon belt. The uniform wasn’t Imperial. It was unique to Vardos, denoting the wearer as someone who had been granted certain powers and rank in the eyes of the Empire, but who, obviously, wasn’t an official member. The uniform was also distinctly non-Aqualish in design, and that was deliberate. Its lines gave Gleb the profile of a stocky, rather dumpy human—if one could get past her four red eyes and two enormous tusks.
Gleb stood at attention, waiting for Iden to be escorted to her. She had one three-fingered hand openly on her weapon, even though she was flanked by several armed Jinata Security officers. There were others gathered on the large rooftop: prominent Imperial officers and high-ranking representatives of the primary nonhuman species. Above, getting the best angle possible, hovered a cam droid broadcasting the drama live to the HoloNet.
“Iden Versio,” Gleb said, speaking through the gold-colored translator around her thick throat. She spoke loudly, for the benefit of the broadcast and the crowd. “It has been a long time. How low the mighty have fallen.”
“Hello, Major Gleb,” Iden said. “Please allow me to thank you for the opportunity to work for you.”
Gleb narrowed her top set of blood-colored, glittering eyes. “It was only as a favor to your father. Although you have dishonored him tremendously, his great love for you believes that you can redeem yourself with hard work. Perhaps you will remember some of what you once learned here, before you saw fit to speak ill of the glorious Empire.”
The lessons. The school. The punishments.
Iden’s jaw clenched, and she loosened it with an effort. “Perhaps I will,” she said.
Gleb gave the Aqualish equivalent of a harrumph. “Do not think you will receive any special treatment.”
“No, of course not.” Iden almost snapped the words. She was supposed to act as if she felt she should be cowed but wasn’t. It was extremely easy, because Gleb was starting to irritate her.
Gleb gazed at her for a long moment—long enough, Iden thought uncharitably, to make sure that the HoloNet cam droid could get a good close-up of her face. Then Gleb addressed her officers.
“Take her away,” the Aqualish instructed, then turned and strode briskly toward the door.
The two officers, a Zabrak and a Duros, seized Iden’s arms and all but shoved her to the entrance of the second waiting shuttle. Iden stumbled but caught herself, and glared at the Zabrak. All for a good show, she thought. She couldn’t wait till this was over.
There was no chance to speak with Gleb in the shuttle to the J-Sec headquarters. As the shuttle settled into the hangar where the official vessels of Jinata Security were located, hundreds congregated outside there, too, held back by crowd-control droids. And there were HoloNet cam droids capturing everything while Iden was walked, the Duros and the Zabrak each holding one of her arms, through a gray durasteel walkway to the detached buildings that were Gleb’s private living area.
Even then, the two officers who had manhandled Iden on the rooftop followed them into the gleaming, flat-topped metallic structures draped with long red banners adorned with the white cog of the Empire. “The instructions of your father,” Gleb said, bridling slightly. It obviously displeased the Aqualish to be required to submit to anything that might make her look less than completely capable. “You see, Iden? You may only be under house arrest, but there will be no escaping.”
Iden stayed silent.
“Iden will accompany me to my office,” Gleb instructed the J-Sec guards. “I will brief her about what is expected of her during her…stay. Come on, girl.”
Iden followed Gleb into her office. The door hissed closed behind them. “Do not worry,” Gleb told her, “this place is entirely private.”
As far as you know, Iden thought but did not say. She held out her hands to Gleb and looked meaningfully at them. Gleb unlocked them, glancing down at Iden’s wrists.
“They did not use the right size,” she said. Iden’s wrists were raw.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Iden said.
“I am not going to treat them,” Gleb said. “An injury will help make everything more believable.”
She’s enjoying this, Iden realized, then wondered why she was surprised. When she was younger, she’d idolized Gleb for a short time. The Aqualish had stepped in to fill the void created by her parents’ divorce. With her mother traveling the galaxy and her father home only irregularly, Gleb was the only adult authority figure the young Iden had.
It wasn’t that Gleb was physically cruel. She was too smart for that. No, it was the subtle things. She liked to be in control—of everyone and everything. And now she was going to oversee not just Admiral Versio’s only child, but Admiral Versio’s grand plan for Inferno Squad.
“Have you watched any of the coverage?” Gleb inquired. Iden sank into one of the chairs. Elsewhere in Gleb’s life, she espoused the austerity of the Empire. But here, in her own residence, it seemed she enjoyed her creature comforts. She went to a sideboard and opened it, taking out a bottle of golden-brown liquid and a glass.
“No, I wasn’t allowed to,” Iden replied.
“You should. It is glorious. Everyone hates you.” Gleb poured the beverage into the glass, one specially designed to accommodate her tusks, and drank. It was an ugly, slurping sound. Both sets of her scarlet eyes were bright.
“Thanks, I’ll pass. I had my fill of that at my court-martial. I just hope it’s enough to attract attention. How in the hell are the Dreamers going to get to me if you’ve got me locked up, anyway?” The thought of this farce dragging on for more than a few weeks was too unpleasant to contemplate.
“I do not think you understand quite how unpopular you are. All you need to do is keep that up. Make everyone around you believe that you do not really regret what you said about the Empire. That you are tolerating this only because there is no way out for you. The Dreamers are hungry, and they are angry, and they are desperate. They will come for you, all right.”
Iden leaned back in the sofa and rubbed her eyes. Those involved in her court-martial and sentencing had gone easy on her because of her father, who, even though he was supposedly “outraged,” had gone on record as being convinced that his daughter would change. She knew what was usually done to prisoners—especially traitors. She had been present at interrogations. But even this seemingly lighter sentence was draining.
“In the meantime,” Gleb continued, “you will be sharing my quarters. You will have a small area to yourself, including a private courtyard. You have a couple of messages waiting for you.” She hesitated, then added, “From your parents.”
Iden stiffened. She’d expected to receive an update and instructions from her father upon her arrival in Gleb’s house. But her mother…
It hadn’t been that long since she had seen her mother; when Iden had returned as one of the few survivors of the Death Star, Zeehay had contacted her as soon as she’d been notified. It had been a good talk, though brief. As her illness progressed, Zeehay tired more easily. But Iden wasn’t looking forward to this one. Loyal Imperial and respected artist Zeehay Versio might be, but Iden could count on one hand the people outside of Inferno Squad who had the security clearance to be told the truth, and her mother wasn’t among that number. Iden had urged her father to reconsider. “Mama’s not doing well, and she should know,” she had said, but her father shut her down at once.
“This is top secret, Iden. She doesn’t have the clearance. I’m surprised you’d even suggest such a thing.” The words had stung, because she knew she shouldn’t have asked. But she wasn’t sorry she had tried. Zeehay Versio’s condition would not be improved by her daughter’s court-martial.
She nodded at the decanter of brandy. “Don’t suppose there’s one of those in my room?” She didn’t drink often, but some liquid courage might help her handle what she was about to face.
