Chapter Text
A twisted clump of wires lay in front of Hera. Red, blue, gray, green. Her eyes followed the lines, up and down, and back to the beginning. Round and round.
A warbling beep stopped her. She looked down at Chopper who repeated his question.
“No. I’m fine.” What an obvious lie. Nothing was fine. Chopper wheeled around back to his work, whistling a discordant melody. The eccentric astromech droid didn’t understand human minds well enough to realize that Hera would never again be truly alright. It was enviable how fast he had adapted to a ship without …
Without him. The pit in her chest, dense as a black hole, sucked at her thoughts, pulling them in. She wasn’t sure if they would ever surface again.
“Ouch!” Hera swatted Chopper’s pincers away and rubbed her thigh where he had nipped her. The droid’s rude babbling put a thin smile on her face.
“Alright, alright. Let’s put this back together.”
She picked at the mess of wires, trying to extract the green string from between the gray lines. After letting out a satisfied hum, Chopper went back to his disharmonious singing while welding two pieces of metal together.
Only think of the task at hand, nothing else. Her jaw hurt from clenching her teeth. She had to do what had to be done, and there was too much to do. Helping people, saving the world, making everything better. Leaving the lost behind on her path. She could feel it sucking at her again, thoughts gravitating around the nothingness, waiting to be swallowed.
The comm chimed. Hera jumped and dropped the wires. It might be a message from her crew, a progress report on what they were up to. They had left for another mission on Lothal in the wake of the horrible ending of the last one, and they had suggested she stayed behind. To take some time to heal. She had agreed, not finding the strength to jump to action right away. But now she was alone, unoccupied, and that was far worse. She would rather shoot at Imperials instead of losing herself in her mind.
But the message came on a secure channel, bounced between transmitters, and encrypted with the code of another rebel cell. She skimmed through the document. Meeting by high-ranking Imperials on Varudan II, unknown project. She was ready to dismiss the whole thing and relegate it to another group—after all, nobody but her was here—when she saw the pictures attached to the report. Star Destroyers in orbit, one of them with a distinct painting on its underside: two large snakes rising from a tangled nest of smaller creatures. The Chimaera, and aboard the ship, Grand Admiral Thrawn.
She froze. The feeling oozing from the hole inside her was too vast to name, hate and despair mixing and becoming more than either. The image of the hissing snakes, crawling, undulating, intertwining, filled her vision. With a clenched fist, she punched the console to turn it off.
Sure, it hadn’t been Thrawn himself who murdered Kanan, that victory went to Lothal’s Governor Arihnda Pryce, but that didn’t mean the Grand Admiral was any less guilty.
But what could she do about it? Going to Varudan would be foolish, the kind of act-first-think-later plan that would earn her crew a good scolding. Because what would be the goal here? Assassinate Thrawn on his flagship? Blow up a meeting of Imperial High Command? Infiltrate their conference and race back with highly confidential information in her hands?
As if any of these plans would work.
And yet she would still go. Everything was better than sitting here, sorting cables while holding on to sanity with her last shred of strength. For once, she could swap being the hot-headed idiot with, well, pretty much any member of her crew.
A loud clang made her flinch. Chopper had thrown the piece of metal on the console and now garbled at her, clearly impatient.
“We aren’t finishing those.” Hera took the data cylinder from her console. “Something more important came up. You and I, we’re making a trip to Varudan.”
—
Varudan’s capital was a representation of the Empire on a small scale, from the core worlds to the outer rim. In its middle rose white, shining spires, adorned with flowering gardens and bubbling fountains. The further away one got from this glittering center, the lower and less beautiful the buildings became, until you reached the outermost ring filled with squat houses stapled together from whatever the inhabitants could find. Armed ruffians loitered in the streets, but there were also hordes of children playing in the market and workers gossiping in the cantina. There were potholes and rubble and the sickeningly sweet smell of trash baking in the sun.
Hera felt right at home. It had been a good choice to land the Phantom in a parking bay here, after she had fooled the Star Destroyers in orbit with her fake transponder code. Security wasn’t as tight as she had feared, less tight than back at Lothal, actually. But when she had taken a sky-train to the center where she suspected a meeting would take place, white-clad stormtroopers were checking the passengers credentials. Her identification was expertly forged, but there was always a chance one of the Imperials had seen her face above the letters “wanted”. So she had turned back and tried to make contact with the local rebel cell. No luck so far. Hopefully they were on their own mission and not in the brig of a Star Destroyer.
Or strapped to a torture device. Her throat seized as she remembered the droid injecting her with drugs, the electricity arcing through her body. Without Kanan coming to her rescue, she would have died back then.
And if she got captured again, no Jedi would cut through the floor to save her.
One more day, she decided as she made her way through the crowded street towards the docking bays and the ship workshops. One more day to make contact on the ground or to smuggle Chopper into the city center so he could slice into the system. Then she would take her ship and go home. This wasn’t worth dying for.
All around her, noise filled the air. Power tools rumbling from the direction of the workshops. A magnetic crane dropping an avalanche of metal in a container. Speeders whooshing past. The chatter of people haggling over goods or just talking.
Among all this, there was one current, one voice, that wormed its way into her ear-cones. She slowed down, listening. Her hand went to the hood of her coat, but her gut feeling stopped her from taking it off.
“Not to worry, Captain, it will only take two days at most. I will be back for the meeting. If not, feel free to represent me.”
That deep voice, the intonation rising and falling like waves, yet ever so calm, even when he lectured her on her own culture while Pryce tortured her. Thrawn. She could pick this cursed voice out among millions. Her legs faltered, unsure whether they should rush her enemy or freeze. Adrenaline surged ice cold through her veins. All sounds were muted by the rushing of blood in her ears.
Chopper, coming from behind her, rammed into her calves at her sudden stop and shoved her out of her stupor. Blinking, she shushed the droid. With a slow breath, she forced the tension out of her muscles and kept walking, head lowered, throwing furtive glances at the other pedestrians.
There he was, visible for a moment before a tottering loader full of plastic trash obfuscated her view. He had done a decent enough job of disguising himself. Civilian clothes with a hood similar to hers covered most of his blue skin, and dark glasses muted the crimson shine in his eyes. However, not nearly good enough to fool her. She had seen his cursed face so often, in person and as a larger-than-life hologram, that it had burned itself in her memory.
“Thrawn,” she murmured to Chopper, who made a distorted growl in answer.
“Oh, I’m very tempted, but I also really want to know what he’s up to.” More tempted than she dared to acknowledge. For a moment, she let herself imagine Thrawn on the ground in front of her, the light in his glowing eyes fading. She shuddered.
The loader passed, and there he was again, putting away the comlink and walking down a side street. Hera scanned their surroundings. He was alone. No angry Stormtroopers cleared his way. No officer’s aide at his side. Not even a bodyguard. Just a single Grand Admiral out of uniform on a clandestine mission. Oh, she very much wanted to know what he was up to.
“Any unusual transmissions? This might be a trap.” Normally, she would be confident in her own stealth and that of her ship, but this was Thrawn, a man who had ferreted out the rebels on crumbs of information more than once.
Chopper hummed full of determination. The sensor dish on his head circled, then he beeped a negative. That, of course, didn’t mean it was not a trap.
Which didn’t matter anyway. Even if he had a platoon of Stormtroopers at his side, she would still pursue him. She had to. She had to do something, anything.
So they followed Thrawn from a good distance, so far away that they almost lost him several times. After a few detours, probably meant to get rid of people exactly like her, they arrived at some kind of half-scrapyard, half-workshop. A few ships, rusted and all looking like they were ready to fall apart at the slightest touch, were parked around the mountains of metal. Two cranes towered over the yard. Magnetic disks fastened to them with chains swung lazily in the air.
Hera stepped behind a mountain of bent steel pipes and waved Chopper into cover next to her. Through a gap between the tubes, she observed Thrawn as he entered the open yard. It would be so easy to draw her blaster and end him here and now. Her hand crawled under her jacket, stroking the weapon. Glee bubbled up in her stomach as she imagined killing Thrawn. Was this how he had felt when he had taken his time gloating instead of simply ending her crew?
It took a conscious effort to pull her hand away and to fight off the giddiness. She was Hera, not Thrawn. She didn’t just shoot a defenseless man. She didn’t revel in holding another’s life in her hands.
No matter how much she wanted to.
From across the yard, a stocky Besalisk dressed in stained overalls emerged from a hut bearing the faded letters “Office” and shambled over to Thrawn.
“There you are. Your ship is ready. Including all the nice stuff, all the extras, you know, but there’s one slight problem.” The Besalisk grinned and wiped his head with one of his four arms. “The Z-74-X-accelerator was a bit more expensive than I calculated. It’s the good stuff, you know, coming straight from Corellia. Import fees are killing small businesses, all those Imperial taxes, you know how it is. So …” He scratched his neck as if contrite, though the smile didn’t leave his broad lips. “Sorry, but I need just a few more credits to make up for the extra costs.”
Thrawn held perfectly still, his glowing red eyes trained on the Besalisk, who didn’t move either. Hera had to applaud the resilience—or greed—of the Besalisk. Holding Thrawn’s gaze was not an easy feat.
“We had an agreement.” Thrawn’s voice was soft and cutting at the same time.
The Besalisk shrugged, all his arms rising and falling. “You know, agreements change all the time. I have a business to run, and before you get any funny ideas, I have a lockdown button in my office. The ship doesn’t leave if I don’t want it to.”
Thrawn made a sound that was somewhere between a sigh and a hiss. “Fine. You will get your money. Are the other items packed?”
He dropped credit sticks into the Besalisk’s beckoning hand.
“All packed and prepared, in the storage shed. My loader-droid can take you there.”
With one last, uncomfortably long look, Thrawn turned and followed the beeping droid towards a long warehouse made from faded and cracked permaplast.
Hera waited until he was out of sight behind a tower of compressed metal to approach the Besalisk. The alien crossed two of his arms and studied her as she walked over to him, the wattle on his throat inflating slightly. Another arm, she noticed, stayed close to his pocket. Not that she could blame him. If she saw a clearly shady Twi’lek approach, she would keep her hand on a blaster as well.
Trying for a friendly smile, she pulled her hood back. “Sorry to bother you, but which ship did he buy?”
“Straight to the point, huh?” The Besalisk’s fingers drummed on his forearms. “And why should I tell you? My business relies on tight lips, you know?”
“Hmm.” Hera put her hand in her pocket and made the credits inside jingle. “And here I thought business relied on money. Look, I just want to take a peek inside. I …”
Her mind scrambled to come up with a good cover story. The first thing that popped into her head was that he was her lover, that she followed him because of some scandalous romance. In the next second she cringed at herself, wondering why of all things that idea had occurred to her, and hoping that the Besalisk didn’t see her grimace.
“He owes me money.” That was something the Besalisk should understand. She raised one hand. “Look, I don’t want to cause any trouble. I did a job for him, but it wasn’t up to whatever crazy standards that scughole has. Doesn’t mean he doesn’t have to pay, though. I won’t damage anything, I just want to know where he goes next so I get my credits.”
The Besalisk pursed his broad lips. “You know what they say, spend money to make money.”
He tapped his palm, and Hera put a few sticks of credits in his hand. And then a few more. And a few more. Far too many credits piled up in his palm before he closed it. She suspected that he was aware that she didn’t follow Thrawn around for money, because that would be a steep investment for an unsafe payback.
Painful as it was, Hera held up another stick. “Can you distract him when he comes back? Just for a moment.”
“Yes, yes, sure.” All the money vanished in one of the many pockets on his overall. “But I won’t cover for you if he catches you. I’ve annoyed that guy enough. You can only push so far, you know.” He paused. “Take care. I’ve met enough weirdos, and that one’s not right. You should just let it go.”
His concern would have been touching, if not for the pile of cash she had just handed him. She still gave him a curt nod. “Thanks for the advice.”
Chopper in tow, she scurried over to the ship the Besalisk had indicated, an old WZ-3072 Soraion small-scale freighter. She couldn’t even remember when she last saw one of those ancient workblurrgs. Inside though, was a different matter.
“Those are some nice additions.” They weren’t obvious to the casual observer, but Hera was far from casual. “Better engine, sensor upgrade, even a weapons system. That must have been very expensive.” A ship for smugglers or other people who didn’t want to be seen, but still had deep pockets. And apparently for Grand Admirals who tried to evade their own Empire. She frowned to herself, weighing theories from political intrigue to private vendettas.
Chopper’s grumbling brought her back into the present. The droid sparked his electro-shock prod at her.
“Put that away, Chopper! I know we have to hurry. So go on, plug in. See if you can find out where he’s going. ”
Chopper extended his scomp link and pushed it into the computer’s socket, rotating as he worked. He beeped in the negative.
“Yeah, would have been nice if he had already downloaded the coordinates.” She thought for a moment. “Then how about transmitting the hyperspace calculations to you as soon as they are done? Disguise it as some kind of random energy spike, won’t be unusual for a ship as cobbled-together as this.”
The droid warbled a response, laying out in detail why she shouldn’t even have to ask if he could do it, because obviously he could and so much more!
Hera patted his dome. “Great, and you know, hurry.”
Chopper made a rude sound, waving his prod around and rapidly rotating the socket. As much as the droid strained her patience, he was one of her oldest friends and Hera had confidence in his abilities.
She left him to his work and peeked outside. From the permaplast warehouse, Thrawn emerged. A loader droid packed with a big crate followed him, beeping in regular intervals to announce its presence. Hera shook her head. Disguise or not, with his hands clasped behind his back and his ramrod-straight posture, you couldn’t mistake Thrawn for anything but a military officer.
Even with the loader wobbling along at the pace of a Felucian snail, Thrawn would be here in minutes. If the Besalisk didn’t keep up his end of the deal, things would become interesting. She put her hand on the hold-out blaster inside her flight jacket. Maybe she would get to kill the Imperial after all.
But the Besalisk lumbered into their path to intercept Thrawn. With one more loud beep, the loader droid braked and came to a halt, the crate teetering dangerously from side to side. That stopped Thrawn. He studied the loader and then turned to the Besalisk. She couldn’t hear all that was said, but it wasn’t hard to guess that he was warning—or downright threatening—the Besalisk in case the crate fell. Suddenly all subservient, the Besalisk waved his arms, apologizing. Out of thin air, he produced straps and went to secure the load while Thrawn watched him with furrowed brows.
Hera glanced at her droid. “Chopper, we have to go. Are you done?”
Chopper rotated his dome from left to right and made a few distorted beeps.
“What surprise? No surprises, Chopper, just have the navcomputer send the coordinates and plug out. We have to leave. Now.”
Blarping rudely, Chopper ignored her words. His scomp link turned in the inlet.
At times like this, Hera understood why people wiped the memories of droids. Although she would never do that to her friend, it would make her life a lot easier. She turned her attention back outside. The Besalisk had fastened the straps on the crate and sent the loader on its way, but he still gestured at Thrawn, trying to explain something about the machine. Without waiting for him to finish, Thrawn turned and walked in the direction of the freighter. A half-hearted attempt of the Besalisk to grab Thrawn’s arm stopped the Imperial for the second time, if only to give the Besalisk his best warning stare. Hera felt a pang of guilt. Depending on how petty Thrawn was, this meeting could mean real trouble for the Besalisk.
She jumped as something bumped against her leg.
“Chopper!” she hissed, and added, “Ah, Karabast”, when she noticed that Thrawn hadn’t let the Besalisk stop him for long.
Her eyes darted around the ship. Shoot her way out? Go inside and look for a back door? Hide as a stowaway? Then her gaze settled on the loader droid that was already hovering the ramp.
Just as the crate blocked the view between her and Thrawn, she slipped down the side of the ramp. Smooth as a loth-cat.
Too bad that Chopper wasn’t a loth-cat. The astromech let himself tumble down behind Hera, banging his leg on the ramp, and using her to cushion his fall. She suppressed a curse. No need for even more noise.
The Besalisk made a bellowing cough. “Ah, damn mynocks! Crawling around my trash, eating leftover energy. Hate those blasted little suckers.”
“You have mynocks here? How unfortunate. If I find a single trace of one on my ship, we will have to have an in-depth discussion.”
The tone was ominous enough to stagger even the Besalisk. “Yes, yes, of course. I keep them away from all the ships, but if you find one, you know what, I’ll give you a discount.”
Hera used their talk to put Chopper back on his rolls and push him directly under the ramp, away from prying eyes.
“Yes, if anything on this ship is not as expected, we will have to renegotiate the price.” The way Thrawn put emphasis on that last word sent a shiver down Hera’s spine.
His feet clanged on the ramp, sending vibrations through the metal. Hera was completely still and held her breath until she could hear him move around inside the ship. Only then did she rise to a crouch to move away from the ramp. Step by step, she sneaked deeper under the freighter. Chopper followed in her path, just waltzing over the pieces of metal and trash strewn about the junkyard, crunching and clanging his way towards the other end. After every noise, she froze. And every time, the sound of Thrawn walking around the freighter would stop as well.
He could hear her. She imagined him standing there, head cocked, listening intently. The muscles in her legs spasmed. She could just bolt. There were only a few meters left under the ship, and then a few more to the next pile of junk.
Deep breaths. If he realized someone had been watching him, all this would have been for nothing. He would never go through with whatever he had planned if the circumstances changed.
A crash so loud her ear-cones erupted in pain rang over the junkyard. The high-pitched whining didn’t subside even after the racket turned into a rushing clatter. The shock made her jump, but she didn’t hesitate. She waved for Chopper to follow her and bolted straight ahead.
Another thundering roar made her head hurt. As she emerged from under the freighter, she saw that one of the cranes was working, pulling scrap metal from the heaps of trash and dumping it into a large shipping container. Whether the Besalisk had covered her escape or just restarted his usual work, she was glad for the distraction. With one last effort, she vanished between the closest piles of rubbish.
There, she caught her breath, eyes trained on the ship. She watched Thrawn emerge, walk around for a while to survey the transport, and then return on board. After another half hour or so, the ramp of the freighter closed. With a hiss, the sublight drive activated in a bright blue glow. Wind whipped around Hera during its ascent. The ship rapidly shrunk as it left the atmosphere for the darkness of space.
Hera stood up, massaging her legs that had gone numb from crouching for so long. She turned to Chopper. “Did it work?”
If not, this mission was over. Maybe that would be for the better. But Chopper tweeted in triumph.
“Alright then”, Hera murmured. She straightened. “Let’s see where a Grand Admiral goes for a secret getaway.”