The Force Wills - Chapter 179 (Patreon)

By Core World standards, Tifirr, the capital of Broest, was hardly worthy of the title.

It was functional, utilitarian, spread out over a vast area with very little need to build upward. The tallest building was nestled in the middle of the city, barely reaching thirty floors, which was Salliche Ag’s corporate regional headquarters.

As most of the planet’s wealth and activity was out in the vast farming regions, the city only existed to coordinate, process, tax and export the agricultural produce, and to house the people who managed that system. The spaceport could also rank itself as among the largest of any in the Core Worlds in terms of raw surface area, as it had to manage an entire planet’s constant agricultural output. With the sheer amount of ships that had to constantly land, refuel and climb out of the gravity well, Broest was also one of the largest starship fuel producers in the sector and had an entire section of the city solely devoted to that industry, which given Broest’s large oceans was mainly deuterium.

My HK-HP had landed on the planet in clandestine fashion, almost literally chucked out the rear of a cloaked scout, whilst it used disposable repulsors to make a soft descent in Tifirr’s sparsely populated outskirts.

My connection was solid and I opened my eyes to regard the city before me that stretched across the entire horizon. The sky was hyper blue with not a single cloud obscuring it, except for the constant streams of every cargo shuttle or starship imaginable climbing and descending from the massive spaceport in the south of the city.

I unfolded the HK-HP, standing up into a proper human posture and with a shimmer of hololight, the disguise of an ordinary female human wearing a shirt, white overalls with shoulder braces and heavy synth boots. I now had skin so tanned, it was practically brown, blonde hair tied back into a rear bun keeping it out of the way, with shoulders and hands that showed my identity worked the land. To my eyes, I was in effect the ultimate tomboy at the moment, who represented practically more than 54% of Broest’s indigenous humanoid population.

A quick orientation of my position and I faced north-east, and began a lazy walk heading into the city’s western housing suburbs and similar developments. No building here rose above three floors, with relatively huge backyards, as if everyone had decided they would never obscure the sun their neighbor was entitled to.

The amount of space the people lived with was something I was not used to anymore. After fifteen years of living on Coruscant, starships and only occasionally coming down to a planet, seeing this amount of flatness and space was rather jarring. Only the desolate, seemingly infinite plains of Abafar came close, except with plantlife added.

The mid-morning sun was already baking the roads to a temperature that caused the air to distort light with mild mirages. The homes around me were mostly empty, all the city workers left for the interior using either personal speeder or public transport.

There were enough people for me to begin to get a feel for the true city beyond the surface level, and it was a microcosm for what I had sensed in orbit.

A distinct strain was settled on people’s spirits, which sometimes translated into how they walked, the set of their shoulders, the look of their eyes. They passed me in the street without a second thought as I blended into the background picture of the city.

Then when a corporate security speeder would pass by, there was the slightest of twitches and stiffening of spines. I felt the anger, despair and resentment from every local being directed at the vehicle, as if it was a tide of water that sought to crush the occupants inside. A resentment I quickly mirrored to blend in.

I left the housing district behind and began passing through areas meant to directly service it; public parks, a modest cultural center, holotheatre and a few cantinas. There was even a Temple of the Whills here, which like everything else in the city, tried not to rise too high in the sky.

My feet carried me onto a large public transport speeder, bound for the central northwest of the city.

On board was my first personal experience with Salliche security, a two man team, wearing chest armor, tactical rigging holding wrist binders, stunners, gas grenades and armed with Merr-Sonn carbine blasters.

Every local in the transport carefully did not meet the eyes of corpo security, or even look at them. They were just part of the scenery.

My sense of these two revealed another story; satisfaction, greed, a love of being unassailable. These two looked down on the locals, as if they were dirt scrabblers. People whose minds were only on the land and nothing else.

That their food came from the labor, blood and sweat of those very same people didn’t seem to occur to them.

The sheer hypocrisy was galling and if this was the standard for every corpo security on the planet, then it was very tempting to begin busting out the Force Chokes to instill some much needed humility.

The speeder landed at my destination and I hopped out before I could be tempted further.

This part of the city housed the more affluent and the local Salliche execs from mid to highest tier. It was where the governor had his residence and in true sentient nature, the houses here were large, fenced off mansions that verged on the cusp being called palaces. The district itself was a fortress in disguise, ringed with five meter walls hidden by crawling plantlife, security scanners at limited entry and exit points, security droids tirelessly hovering over the perimeter and standard security patrols in speeders.

I ducked into an alley and swiftly changed disguise - now a tall, burly human male in a Salliche security uniform, with a tough appearance I’d roughly modeled from a random assortment of classic 1980’s Earth action stars; the body of Arnie mixed with Sly and the head of Statham. My gait shifted to a male walk and it took a few tries to get it to appear natural.

This checkpoint to the district was a wide open gate with two pillars on either side of the road that radiated visible scanning beams, whilst a pedestrian entrance was guarded by a four man security detail.

I passed through the scanner giving a bored nod to the equally bored guards.

The gate flashed green and the lightest of touches on their minds, made them totally overlook the fake profile that flashed on their screens.

Salliche security was large enough that no one knew everyone else in the organization and naturally they relied on automation to bridge the gap. An automation that M8 and R2 had thoroughly sliced and subverted.

I became just another security patrol on foot, walking the streets of Tifirr’s most affluent district.

Here I saw only speeders that you could expect in the Senate district on Coruscant pass by and occasionally climb directly into the air. A clearance that was strictly monitored in the city’s busy airspace.

My final destination slowly ambled into view.

It wasn’t the largest in the district, but the total footprint was just over a few hectares. The architectural style was of cylindrical facades that bore a distinct Rylothian pattern, except made out of a blend of durasteel, transparisteel and local stone. It screamed both affluence yet bore homage to another world. With this amount of space, it featured five floors of prime real estate.

I walked up to the very sturdy front gate, where a small armored hut had another Salliche guard inside. He was staying out of the hot sun and had very little motivation to leave thanks to the internal aircon. His eyes drifted over cam feeds and security com channels then back to a datapad that definitely held something much more interesting. Given his emotions, I had a pretty good idea of what that datapad was showing.

It was therefore child’s play to walk right up to the side door of his little hut and before he could even look up to react to my presence, his eyes rolled up and he slumped in his seat; lost to dreams of the scantily clad zeltron dancers he had been looking at.

R2 brute forced a slice through the HK-HP’s wireless, overriding locally to create a perfect loop; showing the guard waking up abruptly and getting back to the very serious business he had been doing. This convinced the security in the mansion that all was normal, just another boring day.

This bought me enough time to get in and stab the HK’s interface spike in local systems, letting the two droids gain direct access to begin the subversion of the entire property.

With that done, I left the hut and strode through the pedestrian entrance gate, which parted for me without issue.

Now I was just another Salliche guard and on the computer system at least, part of the household force assigned to the specific owner of this property.

The outer yard was a perfectly landscaped space with local flora arranged in beddings with water features that was breathtaking in beauty. I took the opportunity to make a separate recording from the HK-HPs point of view, the place would be fantastic to try to replicate on Concordia.

I headed into the mansion from a smaller eastern door that led directly into an expansive kitchen where a male twi’lek chef with emerald skin and long lekku wrapped around his shoulders, tied off to keep them out of the way, was already hard at work with the day’s lunch.

He was so focused on stirring his pot, that he only took a peripheral sort of awareness of my approach.

“Yes, Wystro? Anything the matter?”

I breezed past him, my voice perfectly changed to imitate Carr Wystro, the gate guard I had just put to sleep.

“Nothing to worry about, Funak. Just a matter I have to discuss with the mistress of the house.”

Chef Zelas Funak nodded, scowling into his boiling pot with frustration as he stirred. “Just be careful. She’s in one of her… moods.”

“Got it.”

My influence on his mind kept him intensely focused and interested in his pot, eyes forward and I didn’t release him until I left the kitchen and passed into the main hallway of the ground floor.

In similar fashion, every household staff that I passed was diverted or misdirected to never really comprehend that I was not Carr Wystro. They only saw my general ‘build’, the uniform and I let their minds make the very obvious conclusion.

The mansion needed so many people to keep it functioning and presentable, yet all of it was for a single person.

Someone who didn’t have family; no husband to build a life with, no children to raise.

It felt like walking through a lifeless museum with a functionally infinite maintenance budget. The lady of the house was an avid collector of both archeological pieces and art from all over the galaxy.

Each major piece displayed in glass cases either in pillars or mounted alongside the walls.

It was extremely tempting to just stop and stare at the stone inscription of a piece of the Massassi temple straight from Yavin IV.

That was just the beginning; the next case had a purported control panel fragment from a ship of the Rakatan Infinite Empire. I could feel the slightest of Dark Side residues lingering in it, which definitely helped its case for authenticity. A fossilized Gungan precursor artifact, alongside an ancient Naboo funerary mask. Tusken Raider ancestral spirit stones and carved bone totems from Tatooine.

Just counting the potential credit value of what I was walking past was staggering.

The way they were presented was also a language in itself. It was all about pure status symbolism and conversation pieces. Each piece had a brass badge identifying it but further explained nothing, not even a small blurb. That would come from the mistress of the house. Many of the pieces were also dramatically lit, the security fields subtle, just enough to remind you they’re there without obscuring the view. Now that I was this ‘close’, I could also feel a small handful of active concentrations of the Dark Side on the upper level of the house, which could mean only one thing.

I used the main staircase to ascend to that level, turning right down a corridor until I was right outside a large double door.

A twitch of two fingers and the motivators opened it.

Beyond was an expansive office space that was another museum in its own right. Fifteen separate display case cubicles that perfectly merged with the architecture, displaying the most prize artifacts of the entire collection.

A small Zeffo tomb guardian statue, a Nightsister spirit-ichor vial, still sealed and faintly luminous; the ichor was barely holding onto a sliver of its potency, a set of Sithspawn bone fragments. This was the theme of questionable artifacts on display, but these were not the source of the Dark Side resonance I was feeling.

Well, at least she had the common sense not to display those openly in her office.

The owner of the mansion was seated on a high backed chair behind a stupidly large wroshyr wood desk, looking out of the massive armored window onto her property and the expanse of the city beyond. She was talking to the small rendered holo of Governor Kayot Worveld hovering over the chair’s armrest.

My, oh my, what a surprise, I thought wryly.

“...I’m sorry, Ethre, it’s out of my hands entirely,” said Worveld, in a rather familiar tone of address that I would expect between two people who knew each other… very well.

“You’re the governor and you sit on Salliche’s main board on Coruscant,” snapped Director Ethre Bemra with annoyance. She lightly pushed her right lekku behind a shapely shoulder and her red skin shone starkly in the overhead office lighting. She wore a shoulderless, shimmering green dress that just barely covered her ample bosom to an appropriate level, displaying a cleavage that I couldn’t manage unless I went up at least two cup sizes. Her lekku were adorned in ringed tattoos that were practical works of art, such was their intricacy. She barely had a need for any makeup and didn’t even wear the typical headdress that helped to keep long lekku manageable. That in itself was a statement among twi’lek and togruta society; that you were so comfortable and sedentary in your position, that you didn’t even need it.

Combine this with the fact that she was the relatively rare Lethan or red twi’lek, and her existence in such a powerful corporation was even more remarkable. The slave markets of the Outer Rim were mad for Lethans.

“The Navy found BX commandos, my dear. I saw them myself on the fact finding mission I undertook to the Conqueror. There is no doubt or uncertainty to use. I’m also afraid the days when any corporation could make things happen on Coruscant are waning. The fact that the Core’s food supply is threatened by the Separatists has already sent major political and financial waves brewing. Lac Abirr has been called into an emergency meeting with the Chancellor.”

Lac Abirr, the CEO of Salliche Ag himself. I really should remember to review that meeting. It was so nice that I now technically was a fly on the wall of the Chancellor’s office.

“I see,” Bemra frowned. “Has the Navy given any indication when the interdiction will be lifted? We only have so much warehouse capacity and in two days we’re going to have to begin grounding transports and stopping harvest activity.”

“That will have to wait until Separatist cell has been eliminated and the scope of their operation to infect the food supply investigated. General Skywalker is assaulting a farm in the north-west as we speak-”

“I know, Kayot. The Navy didn’t hide their approach. Please save your grandstanding for another time,” she sighed with exasperation. “Just… keep me posted.”

“I will, Ethre.”

The holo winked out and she leaned back in her seat, massaging her forehead.

I quickly switched out the HK-HP’s holosheathe to reflect my true Mandalorian Jedi armored self. Then made a deliberate forward step that wasn’t dampened by the Force.

Bemra twitched, a pulse of nerves shooting down her spine as her conical ears picked up exactly my position and the nature of the footstep. HK-HPs had padded footing that could give traction on the most tricky of surfaces and simultaneously muffled them, but there wasn’t any hiding that it was an artificial foot if you stepped hard enough.

With impressive reflexes, for a non-Sensitive, Bemra drew a blaster pistol holstered under the desk, whipped her chair around and brought up the weapon to point directly at my position.

I immediately had to do two things simultaneously to avoid drawing too much attention to this impromptu meeting.

Mechu-Deru to disable the sensor in the hidden holster that would’ve triggered the silent alarm, and just enough telekinesis on her blaster’s trigger to stop it utterly.

Bemra tried to pull the trigger in sheer reflex, then kept trying, gritting and flashing her teeth in effort, all before she had even properly registered just who she was trying to shoot at.

Then her eyes widened, pupils dilating as she comprehended the level of bantha poodoo she had just stepped in.

I made a mild come hither gesture and the blaster pistol was torn from her grip, flipped over and landed handle first in my hand.

“Nice weapon, Director,” I complimented, looking down at the customized BlasTech heavy pistol, inlaid with ivory in the handlegrip and a few other exotic materials. It even had a few technically illegal modifications for a civilian to own, but it was definitely a weapon that would put down the most sturdy of species with a single shot. Her aim had also been spot on for my center mass, just a few inches below the neck.

That she was trained to go for that spot, how she handled the weapon, combined with her reflexes, meant she would be a formidable opponent to nearly 95% of the galaxy’s criminals, bounty hunters and hitmen. She could probably give the late Cad Bane a decent competition in the gunslinger department. Add in her wealth and it's no wonder she was sitting so pretty on this planet.

Bemra winced, ruefully massaging the wrenched fingers of her right hand, breathing hard, trying to calm down and gather her wits.

She sent me a withering glare, quite successfully hiding the brewing fear in her gut from showing in her body language. She breathed out hard, which did interesting things to her chest, before sitting back, pulling back her composure like a cloak she was picking back up. 

In moments, I wasn’t faced with a frightened twi’lek, but instead a powerful executive seemingly assured of her position.

It was an illusion that I let her keep for the moment.

“General Tano, I presume?”

“Correct, Director Ethre Bemra, Regional Operations Director, Salliche Ag Corporation, Broest Division,” I stepped towards the two guest chairs in front of her desk, but didn’t take a seat. She had hidden shaped charges in them which would turn even the most sturdy person’s insides into salsa. Her desk also had a directional shield built into it, another reason for its size. 

“I trust there is a good reason you’re intruding into my home, General?”

“I wouldn’t exactly call it good, but yes, Director, there is a reason. One we can spend all day dancing around in fancy verbiage. There is a time and place for that, but today is not it. I came here to speak to the true ruler of Broest and see what can be done about the annoying little Separatist problem you’ve missed dealing with.”

She frowned at me, and for a long stretched out moment, tried to read me, searching for cues in body language. I could tell she was used to dealing with people who showed their faces and only seeing a Mandalorian helmet visor was throwing her usual social-fu off.

Finally, she nodded, “I suppose that denial is pointless, given the fact that you’re here in front of me. My information network security is obviously due for an overhaul.”

“Indeed. But you have more to worry about than just a single Separatist cell on this planet. You didn’t think that they could’ve pulled off such widespread contamination in the food exports without inside help?”

Her jaw muscles clenched in repressed anger. “And you’re here to help me root these Republic traitors out?”

I gazed at her and let the tension build, pushing with the Force on her spirit and psyche. She shuffled uneasily in her chair, a faint sweat beginning on her brow. “So easy to throw that word around these days. So easy to use it to seemingly justify anything. Strictly speaking, those who helped the Separatists achieve the contamination are traitors, yes. Yet, fruit doesn’t grow from infertile soil, Director.”

I took another step closer and put my hand on the back of the guest chair. A small gesture, but through the fear she was being clouded by, it only magnified the effect on her mind. 

“These Separatists wouldn’t have found such an easy time of it, had you not been squeezing the population of this planet for every possible kilo of produce. Using Salliche security as your own personal thugs and secret police combined. All just so you could reap the rewards to the bottom line of your branch of Salliche. To the farmers of this planet, you and Salliche are the enemy. You are the traitors, the thieves, the ones who steal every head of grain from a farmer, in violation of their contractual rights to maintain a subsistence percentage.”

She began to object but a visible pinching gesture from me and I forced her jaw shut with a light clack of her teeth.

The moment sent a new spike of fear through her. Few truly appreciated the danger of a Jedi until this was demonstrated.

“Spare me denial. If I knew enough to come to you, then you can bet your very impressive archaeological collection that I know what your standard operating procedures have been, ever since the second month of the war. That you have an entire division with droids that polices the Holonet and censors anyone that tries to expose you. That you are effectively holding an entire agri-world hostage. That you have amassed what could be called a planetary fortune these last two years, but even before that, you were the true power behind the throne, so to speak.”

Ethre Bemra had risen through Salliche Ag’s ranks through a combination of sharp intelligence, ruthless efficiency, and an absolute willingness to do whatever was required to meet quotas. She had been posted to Broest several years before the Clone Wars, only as a mid-level production overseer and rapidly climbed to Regional Operations Director. On flimsiplast, she answered to the planetary board and the governor. On the ground though, she ran day-to-day extraction of Broest’s agricultural wealth with almost absolute autonomy.

She used the planet’s official Republic loyalty and its importance as a food supplier to her advantage, pushing boundaries, applying credits and her impressive charms to make everything go her way. As long as the grain, crops, and rations kept flowing in ever increasing volumes, no one on Coruscant had looked closely at her methods.

“You see the population of this planet as a resource to be optimized rather than people with rights.”

I glared down on her, my visor catching the light in just the right way to bring that fact across. She was now truly sweating, her mouth almost slack. I tuned it back a little bit, didn’t want her wits gone. She had to understand.

“It’s a tragedy and a pity that an intelligent mind like yours is wasted on greed and wealth. I just imagine what you could’ve accomplished had you walked a different path.”

She flexed her mouth, testing whether I would shut her up again. She scoffed, “You’re not stupid, General Tano. You know what the galaxy usually does to my kind. I swore to myself when I left Ryloth that I would eat a blaster before I ended up a slave, shaking my bare ass in some seedy cantina on the Outer Rim. So I came to the Core Worlds, educated myself and it wasn’t hard to bend and convince just the right people for some starting capital. Then it was just a matter of a few clever investments and after 15 years, here I am… the woman with an entire planet in her grasp. A planet that feeds a few percent of Coruscant, nine other Core Worlds and services every ship going down the Corellian Run with consumables. And guess what General Tano, if I-”

I interrupted her by raising a single finger and her mouth shut automatically in reflex, “You don’t need to say it, I know. Why do you think I’m here alone and not landing an entire clone regiment on this district and arresting you to enjoy the amenities of Conqueror’s detention bay. Again, you are many things, Bemra, but stupid is not one of them. You knew that one day, despite all the precautions and censorship, word would leak or someone like me would see what you’ve done and you planned accordingly. Any competent planner builds for contingencies. If I pull you off this planet, your failsafe codes that you have to input every local day, ticks down and releases viruses into the planetary networks. Logisticians across the planet will find their computers have become useless bricks, the food transport grinds to a halt and all ledgers are unreadable. Manual accounting can help somewhat, but it isn’t long before everything grinds to a halt. How am I doing so far?”

Bemra’s dilated eyes blinked, she wiped some sweat away and now smiled slightly, “Quite well, General Tano.”

“Of course, that’s not all. Only an idiot would create one failsafe. After all, a sufficiently skilled slicer could blunt the impact, make ledger copies and store it where you cannot reach. Another failsafe, would be within Salliche Ag itself and in the critical infrastructure of Broest. The kind that can’t be rebuilt easily, especially with the war straining the Republic budgets and fiscus. You’ve also set up deferred bounties as a life insurance policy you could say. Anyone kills you and within the week, Salliche Ag executives find themselves the target of assassinations, decapitating the organization to wither in the chaos. To say nothing of the consequences for every agri-world that they own.”

The twi’lek woman was now positively smug, her mouth in a smirk. She also bit her bottom lip and… Oh good grief. She’s one the crazy ones that get turned on by power.   “Amazing. Is this what a Jedi is truly capable of? Just… pulling knowledge straight out of the air? It almost makes me wish I was one.”

I flatly ignored that train of thought, as Anakin sent condensed memories through the Bond on his discoveries at the flower farm, “Now that you know, I know. We’re going to discuss how we can fix this mess. Your rule has effectively created a steadily overloading hypermatter reactor and the Separatists have taken advantage of that.”

“And just what would you propose, General? I hold a lot of cards in my hand.”

“Whatever cards you hold, I hold a card that after the war, will eventually see an entire Republic fleet in orbit, with enough clone manpower to instantly depose and nationalize all Salliche Ag assets, obviating and disarming all your failsafes. This close to the Core, it’ll probably be Jedi General Mace Windu who leads it.”

It was with an amused satisfaction that I saw her face turn a shade of paler crimson.

Yeah, everyone’s gangster, right until the Jedi Master who can take on an entire droid army on foot without a lightsaber shows up.  

“Now shall we discuss terms, Director?”

She folded her hands together, gathering her composure, “Yes, we shall.”

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There were times when Anakin wished he was just a little bit more… careful.

It almost felt like a curse at times, that every shuttle he flew would eventually crash, every battlefield he fought on would see some form of disaster unfold.

He stared with supreme annoyance as an entire warehouse, holding tens of thousands of exotic flowers, each preserved in stasis for shipment offworld, was consumed with fire that reached high into the sky.

The clones of the 96th and 501st were doing their best, and had at least saved the flower fields around the warehouse by creating firebreaks.

It wasn’t his fault that a small company of BX droids had decided to make their last stand there. The battle inside had been chaotic and he’d lost eight men to the blasted commandos!

‘Only you, Skyguy,’ Ahsoka sighed in fond exasperation.

“You kriffing bastard!” Anakin turned around and glared at the farm owner, who was straining against the solid grip of Rex and Fives. “Do you know how many years of harvest and work you just set on fire!?” The man was a small fountain of rage, spittle flying from his mouth as he shouted.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have been giving aid to Separatist droids and let them use your warehouse as an operating base, Mr Fynten.”

“Do you think I had a choice about the matter?!”

“Not really,” Anakin admitted. “Yet the computer files and flimsi in your office were quite interesting reading.”

Fynten was a farmer with graying short hair, bushy eyebrows and leathery skin, with a build that came from many years of physical work. Anakin was immediately reminded of the moisture farmers of Tatooine, which alone brought up many associations he didn’t like to be reminded of. The master of the land scowled and sneered at him.

“Doesn’t matter what you do to me, General Skywalker. This will not be stopped by you or anyone from the Republic.”

“You’re free to believe that, of course. And you may not believe it, but I sympathize with the cause of your farmer consortium. What Salliche Ag has done here is monstrous and you can be assured that in the fullness of time, they will pay for everything in one form or another. Yet it doesn’t excuse you from being accessories to potential mass murder.”

Fynten blanched in confusion, “Mass murder? What?! What are you talking about?”

Anakin scoffed, “Seriously? What did you think the Separatists gave you to contaminate the food with?”

“Well…well, they said-” he blubbered in panic. “They said it was just something that would make people nauseous, cause a panic, overwhelm medical response-”

“That is partially true, in terms of symptoms, but it would eventually cause death!” Anakin snapped in anger. “They lied to you, as they do to everyone they supposedly ‘ally’ with. You were just a useful tool, to be taken advantage of and to discard when your usefulness was at an end.”

“No. No! No! We did testing! We verified the bacterial strain ourselves! It was safe.”

“Whatever they gave you was merely misdirection, to get you to agree. They knew you were generally good people, but they needed your cooperation, so they presented you with exactly what would assuage your conscience and manipulated you. It’s a playbook that they’re well rehearsed in.”

All the fight seemed to leave Fynten and he stared dumbfoundedly at the well worn path between his fields.

“We just… we just wanted it to stop. To live like this, where Salliche thugs can show up in the middle of the night, drag you out of your home, demand everything you’ve grown for the entire season or else they’d…”

He trailed off, unable to finish the thought, his being filled with horror. Anakin felt the truth, despair and trauma coming off the man.

‘Ahsoka…’

‘Believe me, Skyguy, I would like nothing better than to throw Bemra into a carbonite stasis and ship her ass straight to prison. She’s made that thoroughly impossible to do in the short term, not without effectively wrecking this planet, which will eventually lead to a civil war. Farmers on the one side, and the Salliche employed population on the other. We have to walk a narrow path here that filters the contaminated food out, stops the Separatist cell and allows normal production to resume. Thankfully, it won’t be too hard now to convince the farmer consortium that their CIS ‘friends’ betrayed them.’

‘Have you reviewed the data we uploaded?’

‘Yes, the good news is that at least someone in the consortium had some level of paranoia about the arrangement with the CIS, and recorded the liaison meetings secretly. It seems the leader of this cell is not just a tactical droid, but a chalactan called Rin Ovaye, or at least that’s one of his current aliases. He has a dozen of them and is a member of CIS Intel. Republic Intel is very interested in him and I’ve already got Conqueror’s chief spy buzzing my montrals to capture this guy alive.’

‘Can we afford the time, Snips?’

‘Maybe. In the grand scheme of things, a single spy isn’t worth the delay of allowing the new droid factory more time of free operation than practical. I could justify our remaining here to ensure this world didn’t implode behind our back as we left it. The other good news is that the Council is sending a Venator carrying a task force with the sole purpose of sorting out the mess that is Broest, along with the agri specialists that will monitor the food leaving the planet. Another Acclamator is already on its way to take our place in interdiction enforcement and we’ll be able to leave within 30 hours.’

‘Snips, are we really in the position of arresting this farmer, whilst scum like Bemra is going free?’

‘She is most certainly not going to be ‘free’, Skyguy. An HK-HP is going to remain on Broest with the sole directive of keeping her under surveillance, making sure she keeps to the arrangement. I’ve managed to convince her to ease back and stop the extortion and intimidation. The farmers will have their subsistence percentages returned and a generous compensation payment attached. If she doesn’t comply, the HK is creative enough to make her life thoroughly miserable short of actually killing her.’

‘Do I want to know how you managed to persuade her?’

‘A great deal of induced fear, not to mention her long term prospects. For all that she’s very clever, she never thought far enough ahead to realize that Broest’s population would eventually explode into full rebellion against Salliche. She always convinced herself that her measures to quell it would be enough. I disabused her of that notion.’

Anakin stared at the miserable farmer and sighed, “Rex.”

The senior ARC trooper nodded, “Come along, sir. Gunship is this way.”

Fynten gathered himself out of his misery, straightened his back and nodded. Walking under his own strength straight towards the waiting craft with a grim determination of facing whatever consequences awaited him. Even if he was going to be charged as accessory to aiding the Separatists, it could be counterbalanced by him aiding the hunt for the CIS cell and to protect him from the cell potentially silencing him in a permanent fashion.

‘Snips, we have 30 hours. I am not leaving this world without Rin Ovaye unconscious in the back of my gunship!’

‘You realize that we’re talking about a professional spy here. Determination is certainly useful as motivation, but it doesn’t alter the facts.”

“What about using Fynten and consortium, use them to bring Ovaye to a position of our choosing?’

‘He’ll be on guard for a trap. Especially now that we’re here.’

‘Yes, but he still has his objective to achieve, and going back to CIS space with a partial failure of his mission is not really conducive to a long life expectancy.’

‘Let me run the idea past Master Damsin. She’s sure to have some way we can do this.’

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It had once been a processing warehouse, sitting on the southern outskirts of Tifirr.

After nearly a century of service, it was now decommissioned and scheduled to be demolished within the month. The relentless march of time and elements on the planet, as useful as it was for agriculture, also made it a struggle for any buildings to survive within tolerances for more than 120 years without danger to occupants, even with maintenance.

900 meters away, just up the street in a caf shop that served this sector of the city, ‘Rin Ovaye’ sat at a table, mug in hand, datapad in the other. He was pretending to be just another mid-level agricultural broker in a city that had thousands of them. Dressed in respectable, practical clothes, blending perfectly with the current planetary trend in color and style. It had just the right level of ‘slightly worn’, to convey the message that he was a working man, with respectable means but didn’t feel the need to wear something new or entirely washed every day. For all that water was plentiful on Broest for every possible use, the locals had a frugal culture regarding its utilization. 

He took a calm sip of the perfectly brewed caf and idly wiped some sweat from his warm brown skin, the early afternoon sun lashed the air, the shade of an overhead umbrella mounted in his table doing its best to ease the summer heat.

Rin looked down the long expanse of street towards the warehouse in the distance, triggering his cybernetic right eye, zooming in until he had a perfect view of the northern side and the property’s entrance.

For a clandestine meeting point, it was remarkably well selected.

The farmer’s consortium or the Sons of Broest, as they called themselves, were exactly what you’d expect when you threw together a bunch of rabid individualists who prided themselves on personal independence and getting things done on their farms. A lot of loud, good intentions, with nowhere near the experience or the expertise to achieve their goals. It had been that precise gap that Rin had exploited for his mission.

Now after months of quiet, methodical work, right at the apex of his mission on Broest, it had all fallen apart with the damnable arrival of Conqueror and the newly promoted General Ahsoka Tano.

The Zessor bioweapon had been distributed, the trigger had been pulled, the first shipment had been lofted into space aboard the freighters and he had even given the Sons the technical means to ensure it happened and sending the BX droids to make certain of it.

How quickly it had all fallen apart.

He could now appreciate the stories his colleagues at CIS Intel told of their own run-ins with Jedi. Even before the war, among the intel divisions of the megacorps, it was known that if a Jedi showed up in your AO, either prepare to bug out or prepare to have your entire operation fall down around you. Now he could add his own story to that list.

Now down to only a single squad of BX commandos he could deploy, he was left to pick up the pieces somehow and take some measure of success he could demonstrate back to his superiors on Raxus.

He had already shifted his plans to begin inflaming the tensions between the consortium and Salliche, see if a little civil war could be engineered, when fifteen hours ago he had received a signal from the Sons.

It had been done to the exact specifications he had outlined to them. The duress code hadn’t been used. The dead drop location was the proper one, determined by the specific day of the week. The cipher decoded properly and nothing indicated that the communication was anything but what it seemed and genuine.

Yet the instinct in the back of his mind had sounded the alarm anyway, the instant he read the contents of the message and the request for a meeting.

That the consortium had kept a reserve of the bioweapon to themselves shouldn’t have surprised him. Not with the type of people they were. Keeping such a powerful bargaining card was just common sense in this business. It wasn’t inconceivable that people whose profession was in the growing of living things, would be able to grow more of the Zessor.

Now that the Republic was here in force, the bioweapon known to them, the Sons were naturally panicking.

With more of the bioweapon apparently available it was now entirely possible for Rin’s original mission to be salvaged.

That was the problem.

It was bait.

It was bait so obvious that it might as well be a sign painted all over that warehouse.

Yet…

The chance was equally there that this was the consortium genuinely reaching out and if he walked away now, he’d only have an eventual civil war to show his superiors and not the intended headlines of overflowing hospitals all over the Core Worlds as they struggled to treat the infected and deal with the bodies.

So far, after hours of covert surveillance of the warehouse, nothing had indicated that there was a trap in that building, nor was there anyone in the area who could be Republic Intel. The flow of traffic and pedestrians was normal. No one stood out as obviously being an undercover clone or behaving as obvious off-worlders.

He had even taken the precaution of an entirely new face and identity for this surveillance, just in case someone among the Sons had leaked the ‘Rin’ identity to the Republic.

A look down into his datapad confirmed his small spy droids were on station and hadn’t flagged anyone as suspicious.   

He waved at a passing waiter, gesturing for another refill of his mug.

He was halfway through it when a spy droid to the south-west flagged the IDs of two approaching Sons of Broest.

A quick scan revealed them to be Vubo Byrchad and Sann Seetram. Farmers from the eastern Etaa continent who had Corellian ancestry. Both had attended consortium meetings with a near religious fervor and he distinctly recalled these two as generally being the loudest in a room.

He spent the next few minutes reviewing their meticulously constructed and investigated profiles. There was nothing to really commend them beyond the common type of farmer you’d expect to see on this world. Tall, broad-shouldered, with practical clothing you could get dirty in working a field in the morning and catch a shuttle to walk into the city at night. He read a note he had left for himself that these two were the most likely to pick up a blaster to defend ‘their rights’ with little prompting.

Now why would the Sons send these two?

There were any number of more senior, elder farmers who could better speak for the consortium as a whole. However, if they were there to act as scouts and poke a toe into the situation then it would make more sense. The Sons as an organization, for all their many shortcomings, didn’t lack for smart, practical people. Rin had trained a select few in some minor aspects of tradecraft, which was mostly to help them adequately thrive to be able to one day oppose Salliche Ag effectively.

Byrchad and Seetram walked past the warehouse, as if their intended goal was beyond it, then abruptly one of them ducked through a gap in the perimeter fencing, followed by the other. Their walk was quick but not running, they kept their eyes properly on their sectors of responsibility, and approached a side door of the warehouse.

Seetram produced a code cylinder and with that the door yielded entry.

How interesting. That was an authentic cylinder, which the Sons had somehow managed to get their hands on.

Rin had managed to seed five spy droids into the warehouse interior and managed to track the two via lifesign monitoring, before directing the closest for a visual.

They moved with a forced casualness, hands in jacket pockets large enough to easily conceal blasters. Their steps echoed through the empty hallway before they pushed on a door that led into the massive empty void of the main warehouse; not even the storage racks were left here. Just the floor and steadily gathering dust, with markings adorned on the main load bearing support struts where engineers would eventually place demolition charges.

Byrchad pulled out a hand scanner, waved it around briefly, before tapping on a comlink on his wrist.

“Usk, Wesk, Grek, One, Three, Sense, Nen, Nine, Zerek.”

The encounter code matched and Rin was satisfied, directing the nearest spy droid to approach the pair and drop its masking.

A full body holo of his Rin identity was projected, appearing within a polite two meter distance of the pair.

His voice was fully subvocalized and translated through the link to the droid, and not even his nearest neighbor in the caf shop at the next table would hear that he was actually speaking.

“Gentlemen, you indicated that you have something for me?”

“We do,” grunted Byrchad. “But Old Man Rale is gonna do the talking, we’re just here for security.”

How amusing. It was like watching children play at the spy game.

An exterior spy droid spotted the approaching closed top speeder, which was marginally more impressive in terms of the coordination on display. It even had airspace rights and dove straight for the street from above.

It landed, the side door opening to reveal the graying hair of Chec Rale, one of the senior figures in the loose leadership of the Sons of Broest. He moved with the spry speed of someone in his thirties, despite being double that in actual age.

The speeder immediately took off again and Rale quickly squirmed through the fence and followed the path of his two subordinates through the building.

“Mr. Ovaye, thank you for the meeting,” Rale nodded, the man’s off blue-white eyes betrayed nothing beyond the obvious. Rin had always suspected that this one definitely had Arkanian ancestry by at least a few generations.

“You indicated that you still have some product?” Rin asked, getting down to immediate business. This was not the time for pleasantries, not with an RI division hovering near the planet.

“We do.”

“Will it be enough for a second strike once things have calmed down somewhat?”

“Not to the scale of the first, at the moment, but it’s growing under controlled conditions. We estimate that by that time, we will have enough for double what we tried the first time. Also with just a few breeding adjustments it will be an entirely new strain that would evade testing again.”

That was very good news actually. His eval program even confirmed that it was the truth as Rale believed it with a near 96% certainty. Byrchad and Seetram were just generally just bored and kept doing their jobs as ‘security’. Both didn’t even give any micro-expressions that they had just heard a lie either.

“I see. So the issue now is just evading scrutiny for long enough.”

“You know that the Republic raided the Fynten farm. Somehow they traced the presence of your assistants to that location. They now know about the Sons and it won’t be long until a portion of us are hunted down.”

Rin waved him off, “As long as you kept your own organizational cell structure isolated from each other, you will survive. That is the nature of this business, I’m afraid.”

“Sithspit, Ovaye. We are many things, but we are not some professional spy outfit. We must now watch friends, neighbors and relatives be rounded up and put in prison!”

“When you take control of this planet, you can release them yourselves.”

“Oh, and what are we supposed to do about the Navy ships over our heads?”

He smirked, “It won’t be long until they will be a little too busy fighting for sheer survival to worry about Broest, my friends. Those ships will disappear soon enough.”

“Fascinating.”

It took Rin a moment to realize the voice had actually come from right above his actual head in the caf shop. There was something really familiar about it, but he was more worried about how anyone had managed to approach the back of his chair without him being aware of it!

Then it clicked in his mind, like a code slotting into a cipher.

Two friendly companionable hands fell on his shoulders, as if a close friend had just surprised him, yet he was seemingly frozen, unable to act or move a finger to enact any of the dozen escape plans or emergency protocols. Even his jaw muscles became slack, unable to press down on the various contingencies in his teeth, even suicide was off the table as an option.

The hands lifted from his shoulders and with a few quick steps… she walked into view to take a seat across from him.

She wore a simple white sleeveless shirt, figure hugging black pants with a utility belt, a single holstered blaster on her right thigh. It was casual attire, almost risqué as the nubs of her breasts were straining against the tight shirt, her well known face openly displayed and smiling, entirely at odds with what she should’ve been wearing as part of her culture.

He tried to move again, willing every part of his mind to just… move.

It didn’t work, he felt his muscles working, but it was as if he was encased in invisible carbonite.

Ahsoka Tano raised a hand to the waiter, “One caf please. My new friend and I need to have a chat.”

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A/N: He he. Writing and figuring out spy antics and shenanigans is a fun mental exercise. The mini-arc on Broest is generally concluded now, but the consequences will linger and have to be dealt with.

Enjoy your weekend and stay awesome folks.