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I don’t know whether to be smug or terrified. I’m sitting in my cabin aboard the newly salvaged Broken Spanner, a TL-1800 freighter that has been souped up into something totally other than the designers intended. She’s got a point-seven-five hyperdrive, a navigation computer that might very well be insane, and more hidden nooks and crannies than my parents’ old ship.
Dangerous, fast, and built to keep certain things from bothering the excise authority… Yep, she’s a smuggler’s ship, all right.
Chuckle
And all mine. The moralists on the Rose can argue all they like, but I understand how to handle a ship like this and I’m the one flying her. She’s mine. In the meantime, she’s a good scout ship as we head out to the hind end of nowhere. It’s a shame that it’s bad luck to change the name, and I’ve got a feeling that name’s giving me an indication of how much trouble that tricked-out hyperdrive is going to be.
Rebellion poster-boy Dev is co-piloting. He doesn’t look old enough to shave, but he can fly, and he’s proven he can handle a gun-turret like he was born to it. Since I can’t poach the Rose’s command crew, Dev will do nicely.
I’ve also got Waith staying down the hall. He was getting a little nuts from three weeks of hyperspace on board the Rose – who wasn’t – but he’s apparently the only one with enough nerve to risk flying with me on this little time-bomb.
Given our track record, I won’t be at all surprised if the Spanner loses her hyperdrive within the next four weeks – that would be par for the course – but I’ll be sorely disappointed to lose her. She could be my ticket out of debt.
Duvessa asked me if my taking this ship counted towards my five-percent take of the Jedi temple that may or may not be awaiting us. Chuckle. Silly girl. She’s learning pretty fast – by virtue of having Val beat the hell out of her four hours a day whether she needs it or not – but she’s still got a long way to go in harsh realities.
Speaking of harsh realities, we’ve got a poor sap that has just got an awful big dose of those. Shortly before running for our lives from a blackhole-powered experimental hyperdrive that was sucking an abandoned base from under our feet clear into another dimension – oh, don’t ask – we unearthed a lieutenant colonel of the old Republic who had been in stasis for quite a while. Sigh. Poor guy – climbs into a tube hoping for rescue and gets it - thirty years later.
Duvessa is welcome to dealing with that one. Senior military are indistinguishable from politicians, so the good colonel and our shiny-eyed senator speak the same language. Looks like it’ll take Val to convince him that the Jedi are gone, though.
Things aren’t all that rosy, though, despite the past couple of days. I’m still stuck heading out to the edge of nowhere for a bundle of loot that might not exist, and I’m not convinced that we don’t have another traitor on board. As I’ve said before, it couldn’t have been DeLorik who tipped off the Empire on Paranoth. DeLorik wanted us to get to that damned temple.
And I’ve got a veteran of the 58th on board. The Imperial 58th.
I don’t like the idea, but Dev had a point when he brought it up. We don’t know Waith – or anyone on this crew – very well. But we swallowed the holy-Waith line as blithely as everyone else. They all thought DeLorik was lily-white, too.
I don’t think Dev appreciated it when I told him that we were expendable – that it’s preferable for Waith destroy the Spanner, rather than the Rose with all hands. Dev’s a kid – a lucky one – and I don’t think he’s figured out that he’s a mortal as the rest of us, just yet. The lucky ones always take longer to learn that one. Chuckle. Look, who’s talking, Yahnna…
Still, I’m going to be keeping a very close eye on Waith for the moment. It’s a shame that the faint possibility that he’s a traitor derails a few personal ideas of my own, but they can wait. I’m very patient, and I’m in no rush to get burned again.
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