A LONG TIME AGO, IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY…

STAR WARS: KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC

EPISODE 3: THE SHADOWS OF THE RIM

It has been two years since FORMER REPUBLIC GENERAL KAYDA JANAR destroyed MALACHOR V, and the Galactic Republic’s recovery from the Jedi Civil war is proceeding smoothly. With the continued success of the Telos Restoration Project, the healing of war ravaged worlds has begun throughout Republic territory. The MANDALORIANS are once more becoming a force to be reckoned with, but have so far confined their raiding to worlds occupied by the remnants of the Sith. On the Outer Rim, on the edges of the Unknown Regions, beyond the reach of Republic power, independent planets continue to wage war on one another, to form fragile coalitions and powerful alliances, to turn on and betray one another, barely effected by the world shattering troubles of the larger galaxy.

But trouble is brewing on the Rim now, trouble on that same world shattering scale as the wars the Republic is still recovering from. Scouts and explorers who venture into the fringes of the Unknown Region speak of a GREAT WAR, ripping apart a great civilization of the UNKNOWN REGIONS, and of a TERRIBLE MENACE rising from the ashes. Seven years ago the Jedi known to the galaxy as REVAN disappeared into the Unknown Regions, seeking the threat that lead her to abandon the way of the Jedi. Two years ago Kayda Janar followed her.

And now, in a forgotten system at the edge of the galaxy, the final chapter of their saga begins…

Prologue: Steel Vultures

Dagmar System, Outer Rim

It wasn’t an extraordinary system in any way. One star and an asteroid belt consisting largely of the remains of a collision between two planetoids some hundreds of thousands of years back. But one of those planetoids had been rich in compounds that made for good hyper-drive fuel, and so two loose coalitions of planetary systems, each united by precarious economic conditions, went to war for it. They fought, bled, and died, and they paid others to do the same, and in the end those of their hired guns that survived were perhaps the only ones to gain anything. This war, this battle, this skirmish, one of a thousand fought each year on the edge of civilized space, ended as dozens of its kind did when the both coalitions collapsed within weeks of each other, their members turning on one another when that fragile economic balance tipped.

And in the Dagmar System, those corpses not frozen in a gruesome rictus of depressurization were left to rot. Dagmar was rendered insignificant by strategic and economic shifts, and its thousand derelicts were left to the vacuum, and to the vultures.

Sakira Orobu, nineteen years old with skin left ghostly pale by years of sunlight filtered through the polarized windows of the Binary Dawn and red-brown hair that evoked both rusted iron and dried blood, was an expert vulture. She’d been circling this prey for hours now, sensors fully alert, building a three dimensional map of the asteroid cluster from various angles. The Mandalorian gunship was practically wedged between two of the larger asteroids, and the cluster itself was remarkably dense. Getting the Dawn close enough to dock would be quite a challenge, but the payout if she managed it… well, the return on the targeting computers alone would keep her flying for several more months, and even any intact personal side arms or armor would fetch good price, not to mention the fact that a find like this would significantly up her reputation in salvager circles. It was worth the risk.

A twitch of her eyes brought up a display on her interface visor. According to the visor’s link to the navcomp her map was as complete as it was going to get. The trick now was to find her route. Another twitch brought up an overlay displaying the outline of the asteroids currently eclipsed by their fellows.

Relax now. Breathe deep. Don’t hesitate, don’t overcorrect. Just fly.

And she does. It would be wrong to say that Sakira isn’t a big thinker, because she is, in her way. “Her way” is one she doesn’t know for sure is unique to her, one she grew into gradually. Sakira Orobu does not memorize information beyond the bare bones of what she needs to do her job. The rest she absorbs, from a thousand different sources. Then she just lets the connection between fact and rumor, statistic and gossip emerge. The information resonates, and Sakira doesn’t bother to separate instinct, subconscious, and calculation. She just lets it come, lets her mind find its own course. She just flies. It would be a lie to say it hasn’t failed her yet, but by and large, it works, just as it works now.

* * *

There was just enough clearance between the two asteroids encasing the gunship for Sakira to bring the Binary Dawn in to dock. Grinning in anticipation, she set the navcomp to keep the Dawn in sync with the gunship’s slow spin. That spin was important.

“Trajectories matched.” The mike on Sakira’s visor would pick up her words and transmit them to the com units each of her “crew” was equipped with, coms that shared a default frequency with her visor. “X5-M9, deploy docking ring.”

The opening between the two asteroids, which spun in opposite directions but by some miracle of physics on the same axis, formed a rough wedge. Within that wedge spun the Mandy gunship, on an axis that ran at an acute angle to that of the asteroids.

“Docking ring deployed, Mistress Orobu.” Those words weren’t spoken into any mike. XM had a vocabulator, of course. She’d installed it herself, nearly ten years ago, just as she’d installed the com unit a few years later. He simply didn’t bother with the first when he could transmit auditory data directly to her visor. Neither did she.

“Acknowledged.”

Sakira rose from the pilot’s seat and began walking purposefully towards the airlock set halfway down the Dawn’s port side. She stretched as she went, warming up her muscles for zero-g work. Fast zero-g work.

The Binary Dawn was not a large ship, or a particularly high-quality one, though it’s captain cum pilot cum owner’s modifications made up for some of that. It wasn’t big enough to handle large-scale salvage, so said captain had to be very good at what she did to make a profit. She had to be good at piloting, to get her ship into tight cracks like this one, that bigger, better equipped vessels couldn’t manage, and she had to be good at working to identify, extract, and relocate the precise pieces of hardware that could fit into a smaller hold. She couldn’t take the whole ship, so she need to know what would sell, for how much, and where. And she had to be good at doing it quickly. In this case she had to do it in 43 standard minutes, or her ship would be crushed when the spin of the Mandalorian gunship brought it up against the greater mass and inertia of the closest asteroid. Those mods to the Dawn were expensive, and had not as of yet included a navcomp good enough to re-establish a docking link with a ship whose beacon had gotten fried by a turbo-laser blast without sentient help.

XM’s flat voice once more through the visor: “Docking ring locked.” She can tell he’s worried, though he isn’t programmed to convey emotion very well.

Sakira emerged into the small chamber bordering on the airlock and flashed XM a quick thumbs-up as she began the process of donning her bulky environment suit. Bulky, but not complicated. It took seven minutes.

Depressurization of airlock: 43 seconds.

Travel time from hatch of Binary Dawn to (partially melted) hatch of Mandalorian gunship: 24 seconds.

Slicing open inner airlock hatch: 1 minute 12 seconds.

And then she’s in with forty minutes and forty-one seconds to work with before she needs to be back on the Dawn if she wants to have enough time until impact that she’ll have a reasonable chance of getting out of this alive and intact. A cable strings out behind her, ending in a net she’ll clip to her suit and stow the catch in to keep her hands free. The powered reel back on the Dawn will also add a little to her speed on the trip home, adding a bit to he margin of safety.

At 40:35 by the display on the visor she wears beneath her helmet she passes a helmeted Mandalorian corpse. A halo of blood punctuated by what she thinks are probably bits of Mandalorian brains spreads from the juncture of his helmet and the armored body suit that she knows covers him from the soles of his feet to just beneath his jaw. Mandalorian armor, Sakira knew, could protect its owner from a partial depressurization, but all it could do when faced with full vac was make the remains a little less messy. Sakira grabbed his sidearm as she glided past, stashed it in the net she was hooking to her left hip with her other hand.

At 39: 40 she reached a gun emplacement, and at 34:19 she moved on with a targeting computer and the gunner’s sidearm in the net. The comp was a bit fried, but she didn’t think it was so far gone that the cost of repairs would eclipse the sale price, if she made that sale to the right buyer.

By 30:00 flat she’d netted another targcomp, five more sidearms and a vibro-dagger. This was going well, very well indeed. Four more gun emplacements, spaced evenly along the main corridor, which looped along the full length of the ship. Figure six minutes per emplacement, two to complete the corridor’s loop to her entry point, thirty seconds to reboard the Dawn. Stripping the suit is easier than putting it on and can trust the navcomp to begin, if not finish, disengagement maneuvers. Maybe forty seconds slack. Captain Sakira Orobu is in her groove as she glides through the corridor, evading the occasional dead Mandy and snatching anything sellable that doesn’t require her to alter course. Bigger crew on this thing than she’d figured, given the schematics, but then again, this drifter was post Mandy War. Without central leadership, rules and intended crew complements lost much of their significance.

At 29:54 things go very, very wrong. At 29:54 Sakira felt the distinct, impossible pull of a tractor beam.

“What the frak?! XM, status report!”

She couldn’t understand the response. Something was jamming her.

Why? Sakira knew she was good, but she also knew that she was no threat to the kind of salvage op that could afford to install a tractor beam. She started back to the Dawn. On the Dawn she had real com equipment, equipment she could use to identify the frequency whoever was tractoring her was transmitting on and, assuming the jamming was low level, intended only to take out relatively weak signals like that of her interface visor, maybe negotiate her way out of this. Failing that, the Dawn had shields, and it had weapons. Not weapons enough to take out the kind of ship large enough to have a tractor beam worth using on something the size of the gunship, by any means, or strong enough shields to give her any chance of getting out of this alive. But Sakira Orobu was damned if she was going down without a fight.

She was ten meters from the airlock when her world faded to black.