Chapter 42 (Patreon)

Alto Stratus was quietly happy. Cautiously so, still not quite trusting the feeling, but... For more than a year, not a single citizen of his world had died at the hands of bandits looking to profit off Jabiim. Six months had passed since every library promised to Siith had been completed. Four months since the foundry had reached full capacity. For the past two months, modern hospitals had been fully operational in every major city, staffed with doctors hired from the wider galaxy. His own people had been sent to study at prestigious medical schools, while three chimerologists were now gaining practical experience in the capital: young Karray and two Jedi.

And home... Yes, his home—a place he had probably visited once every six months at best, spending most of his time in quarters scattered across military bases or in the living space set aside for him in the government building. His wife lived there now, and at last the Commander-in-Chief actually wanted to go home. Of his own free will. Eagerly. Happily. Impatient to get back. A small, private happiness for a man who had spent so long trying to make his whole world happy.

Looking back, he remembered the road he had taken. Long, difficult, bloody, exhausting. But every hardship along the way had been worth it. He had chosen that path himself, and he alone was responsible for everything he had done. Back then, still just a boy, standing over the bodies of his mother and father, he had understood one thing with absolute clarity: the life of an ordinary civilian was not for him. He simply could not live that way.

Now Commander-in-Chief of Jabiim’s armed forces and, in practice, the leader of his world, Alto had long since mourned his parents. Their deaths had not broken the boy. They had hardened him. Maybe even poisoned something inside him. Back then, watching the accursed Lythian ships vanish into the rain-dark sky, Alto had thought that a strong Jabiim would never have allowed this to happen. That was the moment the dream first caught fire in him—a dark, hungry flame, orange-red like the houses burning through the downpour, roofs collapsing inward as fire chewed through timber and flesh alike. Black smoke rolled low and greasy through the rain, thick with the stink of scorched meat, wet ash, and blood turning cold in the mud. And inside the crackle and hiss of the flames, Alto could almost hear it all again: the broken groans of the dying, the raw screams of those who had survived by accident, and beneath them both, heavier than any sound, the silence of the dead.

A dream of strength. Not for himself, but for all of them. For old Vort, sitting there with empty eyes beside the mangled body of his daughter, too numb even to notice the blood still running from his own wounds. For their neighbors, whose son Alto would never again be able to visit so they could play on the game console his uncle had brought back from Pzob. For everyone who, in that moment, could not decide whether to be grateful they had survived or collapse under the weight of everything they had lost. And for Alto himself. A dream of a future where bastards like the ones who had just descended from the sky would be dead—and the people of Jabiim would not.

But dreams were for the weak, so young Stratus chose to act. He gave the dream a new name, called it a goal, and set out on a road made of millions of steps. He chose the path of a warrior and poured every spare hour into training. Then came his first battles, his first kills, and with them the fierce satisfaction of knowing that those particular bastards would never hurt anyone again. There was an old saying: “If you kill a killer, the number of killers in the world stays the same.” So what did that mean? Simple enough. You just had to kill more than one. Then the numbers worked out.

In every battle, Alto tried to make the galaxy a little cleaner, as much as his strength and circumstances allowed. But he never lost his head. There were always good people of Jabiim fighting beside him, and their lives depended on his judgment. One mistake, and those who rushed to save an overzealous comrade who had trapped himself through reckless action could die with him. And their deaths would be on the hands of a fool who had thought too highly of himself. Bronze Halo, one of his world’s elite units, was not a gang of idiots but a force of serious professionals, and earning a place among them had cost Alto an enormous amount of work. Even with the help and influence of his uncle, Cordelia’s father, who served as a captain in the planetary-defense forces, they would never have taken him if he had not scored highly in the selection tests.

For that, he trained until the blisters bled, spent the lion’s share of his inheritance on instructors, tutors, and endless hours at the firing range. He even managed to persuade a veteran of the Black Gloves to train him, which, truth be told, had not been all that difficult. The old warrior, a true patriot of his world, had recognized and respected the young man’s determination.

His first promotion. His first real success in his career. Another step toward the goal he had set for himself. More battles fought beneath sheets of pouring rain. Victories and failures for his unit alike. The most bitter failures were the ones that had not been his fault at all, but the fault of Bronze Halo’s command, which at the time was made up almost entirely of the second and third sons of aristocratic families.

Aristocrats. Most of them could not have cared less about the problems of ordinary people. A break in the clouds, and two pirate ships had gone down through it? There was a small settlement and a mine below! Send a unit to secure the mine first. The settlement could make do with whatever was left.

And the result... A mine left completely untouched, because the pirates had never even looked its way. There was too little room in their holds for stolen ore to bring in any worthwhile profit. And a settlement left in ruins. Homes looted. Civilians murdered, wounded, raped, dragged away into slavery. The endless rain seemed like the bitter tears of his homeland, weeping for the maimed, the dead, and the lost. Jabiim suffered, and young Alto suffered with it. Unlike his world, however, the young man hid his own tears behind his helmet. Bitter, furious tears. Salty drops running down his cheeks, each one carrying a promise of death for every bastard he crossed paths with.

The decorated officer’s rise through the ranks was slow from then on. Not because he lacked merit, but because he had made the mistake of speaking far too honestly about the wealthy to someone who should never have heard those opinions. Even so, he eventually forced his way to the very top. First he became commander of Bronze Halo, and later, after earning the unofficial title of People’s Hero, he took part in consolidating four elite units into a single formation.

The Black Gloves, D.E.E.P., Stone Avalanche, Bronze Halo. All four became part of a single organization: Nimbus. And Alto Stratus stood at its head. He approached the job thoroughly. Most of the aristocracy’s little darlings could be pushed aside one way or another: framed, removed through carefully arranged accidents, or helped into transfers to more comfortable posts in the capital. Patrol routes were redrawn, greatly improving the effectiveness of the special forces. And so the already famous name of Alto Stratus began to be heard across Jabiim even more often, and with ever greater weight.

His soldiers were everywhere, and often he was there with them. The commander went into battle alongside his people, generously watering the soil of his homeland with enemy blood. Nor did he forget the fallen, fighting successfully for increased benefits for the families of soldiers who had given their lives defending the people of Jabiim. Support for disabled veterans, better weapons and equipment for the troops, promotions for officers who had earned them. He was loved and respected. People followed him. His name was spoken with admiration, and young Jabiimites dreamed of “being like Alto Stratus—the Hero of Jabiim.”

But despite all the Commander’s successes... it still was not enough. Nimbus could not be everywhere, and sometimes it simply could not arrive in time. Stratus tried to secure funding to expand its ranks, purchase air-defense systems for smaller settlements, and obtain authorization to form local militia units, but the aristocracy...

Stratus had become far too influential among the military establishment. The local bigwigs feared that one day he might use the soldiers who adored him for something other than defending the planet—namely, overthrowing the government. Without even realizing it, they pushed Alto closer and closer to that very idea. And in the end, it was they who convinced the Commander that such measures might indeed be necessary. Cordelia, his cousin and most loyal supporter, uncovered several agents who had been preparing to bring the Hero’s glorious career to a permanent end.

Those men met tragic ends in yet another battle. A simple matter of unfortunate circumstances. A shortage of personnel had forced even headquarters staff into the fighting, after all. Nimbus was an elite unit, where even the accountants were trained to fight and kill.

They had a plan. Alto, Cordelia, and their most trusted supporters were already working to put it into motion. Only two things held them back: the Republic, and their unwillingness to spill the blood of their own people. The same Republic that could not have cared less about Jabiim might still interfere. Justiciars and senators well greased by the aristocracy could easily draw attention to what was happening. And after that... it would come down to luck. Coruscant might shrug indifferently, as it usually did, or it might send in peacekeepers. And then there was the prospect of civil war...

He did not care how many offworlders died, but he wanted no deaths among his own people, no slaughter of Jabiimites by Jabiimites. Revolution always meant fratricide, and Alto was not desperate enough for that. Again and again, he sent the plan back for revision, postponed it, bargained with new allies, and waited for the right moment—for an opportunity that would guarantee both the least possible bloodshed among his own people and no response from the thieves on Coruscant.

And then he met Siith. The red-eyed sorcerer, whom Alto had initially taken for a Sith, was blunt, candid, utterly unscrupulous, and at first glance perhaps even insane. After a while, the commander of Nimbus stopped doubting that Siith knew about most of the plans concerning him and simply regarded them with indulgent amusement. He openly showed Alto and Cordelia what he was capable of, making no attempt to hide it, and spoke with disarming directness about things that could easily have been dismissed as the ravings of a madman. But when madness was backed by facts, could it still be called madness?

The sorcerer began working for Nimbus and Stratus. At least, that was how someone unfamiliar with their relationship might have described it. In reality, it was more of an exchange of favors, a peculiar kind of “barter in gratitude.” Siith, for example, supplied Nimbus with cheap but remarkably effective equivalents of personal shields, while Alto provided him with whatever he needed. Siith healed wounded soldiers, and Stratus “thanked” him in material terms. The sorcerer demonstrated his power over the weather, and the Commander ensured that he had every prospect of a comfortable life. Siith never inflated his prices or tried to gouge them simply because his abilities were unique, and Alto Stratus did his best to match that same sense of fair dealing.

Clever old sorcerer. The Stratuses had not even noticed when he stopped being a suspicious Force-sensitive and became instead the man with the habitually unsettling smile, someone to whom they owed a great deal and no longer thought of as an outsider. There had been frank conversations whenever their schedules allowed, fascinating stories, enticing possibilities. And generosity, yes. Generosity that seemed almost unbelievable to the Commander and the head of his Security Service, though the sorcerer himself did not consider it generosity at all.

Sharing knowledge? Gladly. The sooner there were mages capable of churning out charms and amulets themselves, the less often people would bother him about it. The “airspeeders,” whose design he had simply handed over to a pair of students, waving aside any talk of royalties or a percentage of the profits. The slightly frightening little Karray and her sister Karina, both of whom adored their patron and whom he was teaching the deeper mysteries of the sorcerer’s Art.

And his goals? His goals were to work on his own projects in as much comfort as possible. “I’m investing my time in Jabiim and the JMG so that, a few decades from now, I’ll have a place to work where no one keeps dragging me away from it, and perhaps a group of spellcasters who share my interests,” the sorcerer had once said.

That had been after the “pandemic” did all the dirty work for Alto. It killed off most of the aristocracy and his political opponents, opened up positions throughout the government, and made it possible to hold genuinely free and democratic elections. Fortunately, the information that surfaced in the process meant he barely had to worry about campaigning at all. More than ninety percent of the planet’s population logged into the voting portal without hesitation and chose him as the new leader of their world.

Then came... office work. Ohhh... Ooooooh... No, there had been plenty of it when he was general of Nimbus too, but the scale was incomparable. Alto shuddered inwardly whenever he imagined the sheer mountain of work resting on the shoulders of someone like the Supreme Chancellor. And Palpatine, unlike Valorum—may his name not be spoken after dark—clearly took a much more active role in the affairs of the Republic.

The Commander-in-Chief would gladly have dumped all that paperwork on someone else and gone off to fight another battle. But first, there was no one to dump it on: Cordelia was already working herself to the bone, and all their supporters had their own posts and more than enough to do. And second, he had not fought his way to power for so long only to finally gain the ability to change something and then shove the burden onto someone else.

And so Alto and his people threw themselves wholeheartedly into an offensive against corruption, bureaucracy, military weakness, the lack of a fleet, the poor standard of living, and the appalling state of healthcare. Jabiim’s problems could have filled a very long list, and fighting them consumed an enormous amount of time.

But the results... Alto narrowed his eyes in sheer satisfaction as he took a sip of the excellent caf his wife had made before disappearing into the bath. A former captive of a desert world, she could spend an eternity soaking in water, and her love for Jabiim’s endless rain never ceased to delight her husband.

The results brought deep satisfaction in the work they had done. A small squadron capable of repelling most pirate raids; an expanded Nimbus force; better-trained troops; small militia units established throughout the planet; air-defense systems, and in some places even anti-space defenses, protecting nearly every settlement.

The last part had turned out to be mildly amusing. The people of Jabiim had suffered pirate raids for thousands of years, and they welcomed the small military installations so warmly that the rations sent for the soldiers and support crews were almost never needed. Village matrons, kindhearted townswomen, and simply concerned citizens had gotten into the habit of feeding the troops home-cooked meals. The soldiers were only too happy to oblige, and command mostly turned a blind eye to it, especially since the men chipped in for groceries in return, even if some of the locals protested. The only problem was that when the Commander-in-Chief happened to attend one inspection in person, he found, instead of ten lean, fit soldiers, ten well-fed little dumplings with rosy cheeks and bellies already beginning to form.

Stratus furrowed his brow ominously as he watched those rosy, well-fed faces drain pale, then issued an order requiring the personnel at every air- and anti-space-defense installation to pass their fitness standards at least once every three months. He swept the ten soldiers with a disapproving look, sighed sadly, and asked whether they understood that if the enemy ever broke through the defensive fire of their little battery, those who survived would have to take up arms and protect the very civilians who, out of kindness and a certain lack of judgment, insisted on stuffing their soldiers without restraint. Were people’s lives really worth their laziness, negligence, and gluttony—especially when all that loving care was already beginning to spill over their belts? There were no punishments the first time around, but the squad leader was marked for closer scrutiny, and the regional defense chief received a verbal dressing-down.

The fact that pirates had been “treating” their world to raids less and less often did not give the planetary-defense forces any right to relax. Every soldier and officer had to be ready for anything, because Jabiim remembered not only raids by squadrons of two to five ships, but also massive assaults by entire pirate fleets.

And thanks to the weather-control artifact complexes, command had plans for just such a scenario. The part of the squadron stationed in orbit would evacuate the personnel from the orbital dock and withdraw, while openings in the cloud cover and ion storms, created where and when they were needed and then sealed again at the right moment, would allow the planetary-defense forces to destroy the invaders on the ground—under conditions where Nimbus would tear the enemy apart the way Siith’s mysterious dog would tear up a rag.

Recent tests had shown that even specialized cloud-dispersal compounds were almost useless if the weather-machine operators pushed their systems to maximum counteraction. So if the Lythians or Trandoshans ever risked launching a raid on that scale, they would drown in their own blood, while Jabiim would gain a substantial supply of “resources” for the creation of stasis amulets—artifacts whose value was measured against the most precious thing their planet possessed: the lives of the sentients who called it home.

Another of Stratus’s victories was Jabiim’s industry, finally clawing its way out of the humiliating position the aristocracy had left it in. Siith had a hand in that as well, once again stirring a wave of gratitude in the Commander-in-Chief. Once again, the sorcerer had not made the whole enterprise dependent on himself. He had created a smooth-running process, trained the necessary personnel, and generously handed the whole thing over to the people. This time, Stratus simply could not bring himself to accept such a gift for free and made sure a percentage of the profits was regularly transferred to Siith’s account. If he had done otherwise, his conscience would have strangled him... and most likely Cordelia would have finished the job.

Now that the foundry had reached full capacity, it was providing a substantial boost to the planetary budget. Local manufacturing had begun to grow as well. Not exactly like mushrooms after rain just yet, but the private sector was gradually coming to life, slowly but steadily supplying the domestic market and even producing some goods for export.

Those same “speeders” were wildly popular on certain worlds and among particular groups of sentients, largely because even a military-grade EMP could not disable them. Their main drawback was that rapidly recharging the reservoirs required special stationary pump platforms, but even so, buyers kept taking them and asking for more. They also kept sending the machines back for tuning and routine maintenance. Production remained limited, which was unfortunate—but scarcity did make it possible to put truly enormous markups on units intended for export.

And Siith’s latest project was something else entirely. The “Void Hide”: an interface module that allowed a mage to control a starship as though it were their own body. It required an initiated mage as the pilot, and learning to “fly” it—or, as the sorcerer put it, to use a “puppet body”—was an extremely difficult and dangerous process. The human brain had to adapt to being a starship as well, with sensors instead of eyes and engines instead of limbs. The pilot had to learn how to maneuver, take off and land, interact with the life-support systems, and push the engines into afterburner. It was difficult not only physically, but psychologically as well. Their only pilot had complained that she sometimes got confused and tried to take off in her real body. Dziha had reassured her, though, that it would pass with time.

For now, the project remained relatively classified. Access was limited to Jabiim’s fleet and small craft. Well... and to the Count of Serenno.

Alto grimaced as though from a toothache and took another sip of the fragrant drink, trying to wash away the bitter taste of his Security Service’s defeat and the phantom sting of a finger-flick to the nose. As always, caf made by Shmi Stratus reconciled him with reality and drew a resigned sigh from his lips. It had been far too naive to assume that powerful sentients would be unable to get around the information-security defenses of what was, if he was being honest, a backward world.

It was fortunate, at least, that Count Dooku was a man of genuine honor. He demanded nothing, made no threats, and attempted no blackmail. During his very first face-to-face conversation with Siith, he had even promised that if the sorcerer refused, the information would remain secret. The ruler of Serenno, a former Jedi who had somehow learned that testing of the sorcerer’s latest development was complete, had become eager to have a Dziha-Trant Control Module installed aboard his own ship.

The ship itself, incidentally, was truly one of a kind, and Tano, who was teaching the Count how to use the new interface, practically drooled over it—both over the exclusivity of the modified model and over its staggering price tag.

As one might expect, the Count’s request—a very well-paid request—was granted. Siith performed Dooku’s initiation as a spellcaster, showed him exercises for developing his aura, promised to offer advice if needed, and then dumped the Count on his only mage-pilot so far: a greedy Neimoidian in the body of a pretty Togruta, the aforementioned Romri Tano.

Their meeting as fellow rulers had gone very pleasantly as well. The former Jedi’s views on the Republic’s current state resonated strongly with Alto; the Count’s criticisms of the situation were simply too precise and too incisive not to. The result, as Dziha liked to put it with one of his sly, unsettling smiles, was a successful test of the system with a Force-sensitive, a substantial sum transferred to their dock—and therefore into the planetary budget—and generous payments to Tano as the instructor, to the sorcerer himself, and to the young engineer from Rendili who had co-authored the technical side of the project and was now the wife of Ras, second pilot and navigator aboard the sorcerer’s personal cruiser, the Rung. And then there were several verbal agreements with the ruler of Serenno which, in the future, could bring Jabiim a healthy profit... and Alto himself a fair amount of satisfaction.

In particular, Count Dooku had hinted, lightly but unmistakably, that he would be willing to take part in a raid on Lythia, whose pirates occasionally harassed Serenno’s merchant ships in the surrounding sectors. And that was another slap on the ass for the Security Service, because such a plan did exist—but only as something still being developed, not even as a proper draft yet.

The Jabiim government had launched a “Return of Our Own” program, under which any bounty hunter or slave owner who brought an abducted Jabiimite home could expect a cash reward. For now, the payments were modest—the treasury was not bottomless, and the number of people who had been taken away ran into the thousands... But Alto was working on that, as was the planet’s entire population, donating whatever sums they were willing and able to part with to the program’s accounts.

Besides those willing to return his people voluntarily, there were also places like the pirate capital of their region. Those bastards were never going to negotiate. So headquarters was now trying to figure out how to hit them as hard as possible, evacuate as many slaves as possible, and avoid getting smacked down by the Republic’s justiciars, who were unlikely to appreciate a unilateral military operation.

Alto had given the Count no definite answer yet, only promised to think it over. The Commander-in-Chief had never been spoiled by kindness from outsiders, and alongside his growing regard for the ruler of Serenno, the situation stirred his suspicions as well.

Author’s Note:

Boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen! Thank you so much for still reading this fanfic. Huge thanks as well for all the moral support in the form of likes and comments—and for the financial support too. Hapsiel smooches-smooches to everyone.)))