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tehlaen · 7 years ago

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Day 8: “Magnetic Interference” (Morality)

Day 8 of the 30 Day Star Wars OC Challenge from @smuggler-captain that I’m doing with @lessdenied! Previous posts are tagged with #30dayswchallenge.

This is a bit of a deviation from the listed thing; the prompt for Day 8 is “Morality,” but I already touched on that a fair amount in previous entries. Instead, I decided to share a bit of fic that show-don’t-tells Teh’s morality in action.

(Also, I’m a day late and possibly a little rambly, thanks to the mind-fogging effects of head colds and the cold meds meant to make them bearable. So, ya know, be kind!)

The system didn’t even have a name, so far as Teh’laen could recall. Just a seemingly random sequence of letters and numbers that some bored surveyor had assigned it before hurrying to put the unremarkable collection of mostly stationary rocks behind them. Pretty much described every spacer’s feelings on it, she reflected. It was conveniently located just off the major hyperlanes that connected Hutt Space and the portions of the Galaxy still occupied by the reeling Sith Empire. Aside from its location and a seemingly endless supply of asteroids full of useful, if common, minerals, it had absolutely nothing else to recommend it. Ships dropped out of hyperspace, fueled up and resupplied, then put the ugly little system out of sight and out of mind.

Teh’laen hated it, but it was a reliable source of income for her, so once again, she found herself cruising through at a leisurely pace, one eye fixed on the long-range sensors. A couple of passenger liners. Tiny mining pods and their motherships—some belonging to conglomerates, others operated by wildcat miners. A heavy cargo hauler looked promising at first; she swung around, paralleling the transport at a distance that could be considered mildly suspicious, but not outright hostile.

“Essix, peek in the window; let’s see if they’re carrying anything good.”

The droid toodled an acknowledgement and went to work. The comm panel lit up as Essix, through the subspace array, spat out an electronic handshake. The other ship’s transponder answered automatically; unless the crew was particularly astute, they probably wouldn’t even have noticed that their ship’s computers were being pinged. Essix used the handshake to piggyback on the signal to slice into the ship’s mainframe.

Teh had paid out the nose for Essix’s slicing module—top-of-the-line, military-grade, the kind of thing that made planetary governments both envious and deeply uneasy. It had cost a small fortune, but it’d proven a worthy investment time and again. (And, if she was being honest, she couldn’t say no to Essix and adored spoiling the little rustbucket.) Bypassing the cargo ship’s firewall was child’s play, and data began streaming across a secondary monitor as Essix plundered their quarry’s files.

Teh’s lips curled down in a frown. Agricultural products, medical supplies, some heavy construction equipment and prefab structures...Its manifest was chock full of goods that were neither especially portable nor valuable, and certainly not at the ratio necessary to justify the risk and effort… or, for that matter, the ethical implications of stealing food, medicine and building supplies from people who probably needed it.

With a sigh, Teh’laen peeled off, increasing speed to clear the hauler’s comfort zone. If she wasn’t going to steal from them, there was no reason to hang out uncomfortably close and make the crew nervous.

Her wandering flightpath took her through the farther reaches of the system--close enough to scan ships dropping out of hyperspace, but not so close she had to worry about getting run over by some mega-transport like an insect on a speeder’s windscreen.

Her control board lit up and Essix bleated a warning; another ship apparently had had the same idea as she had and was prowling the vicinity.

Active scans, but no intrusion. Good.

Since they’d already been rude enough to hit the Yime’Dizoh with active scans--the spacecraft equivalent of bracketing her with a spotlight and scrutinizing her with macrobinoculars--she felt no compunction against returning the favor.

A three-dimensional mockup of the other craft sprang into existence, the results of her scans highlighted with orange and red arrows. Heavy weapons, reinforced shields, plenty of cargo capacity… She had a sinking feeling in her gut, and a glance at the ship’s registry confirmed it: It belonged to the Labor Alliance, the largest consortium of slavers in this region of space.

Both Teh’laen and the slavers altered their course in an unspoken, apparently mutual decision to leave each other be. Under other circumstances, this sort of detente could have been construed as professional courtesy; on those occasions when she and another thief had bumped into one another while targeting the same mark (a situation that occurred more often than one might think), they almost always came to a similar arrangement and went their separate ways.

By now, the slavers would have had time to make their own assessment of Teh’laen’s ship and its decidedly atypical outfitting, and they had likely come to the (accurate) conclusion that she was a pirate, engaged in similar activities to theirs. She suspected that they let her be as part of that unspoken professional courtesy... In the Twi’lek’s experience, slavers often saw themselves as pirates specializing in a very particular commodity; their counterparts rarely appreciated the comparison, and Teh was most definitely among those who resented any such equivalence. Thief, sure; slaver, never.

On Teh’s part, at least, the decision not to attack was purely pragmatic; she relished the idea of erasing a few slavers from existence. But the two ships were probably evenly matched, which made the potential conflict decidedly not to her liking.

“Essix, keep an eye on them; lemme know if they do anything interesting.”

The droid chirped an affirmative, and a little halo surrounded its blip on her sensor readout as Essix tagged it.

Another ship dropped out of hyperspace and Teh glanced at the sensor readout. What she saw elicited a grimace: a decrepit medium freighter, with weak shields and engines that looked to have been cobbled together in a junkyard.

“Faithful of Bezhil, huh? I dunno what a ‘Bezhil’ is.” She glanced at Essix questioningly, and the droid chirped in agreement. He, apparently, had no idea either. “Alright, this is almost certainly a waste of time, but check it anyway.”

Essix repeated his feat, slicing into the Faithful of Bezhil’s computers effortlessly. The manifest scrolled across her screen; as expected, nothing but passengers.

“I’m going to assume that they’re not passengers worth robbing,” Teh said dryly as she looked at Essix. “Nobody would choose to travel on that piece of junk if they could afford not to.”

A strobing flash out of the corner of her eye drew her attention to the sensor readout; the icon representing the slaver ship had changed course and was set to intercept the Faithful.

Oh, shit.

Teh’laen chewed on her bottom lip as the slavers came up on their target’s stern and roared past with barely five hundred meters separating them. The pilot of the passenger ship goosed the throttle, and it lurched forward. Even an idiot could tell that there was no way the Faithful could outrun the slavers; even with its burst of speed, it crawled like a drunken Hutt in comparison to the raider that had it in its sights.

The slaver vessel pulled up in a lazy loop, then dove at the passenger ship, laser cannons blazing. Hard light chewed through the weak shields like a blowtorch through butter.

“Unidentified ship, this is the passenger ship Faithful of Bezhil!” Teh cursed as the panicked shout of the transport’s pilot blared through her earpiece. “Please, we are unarmed, break off your attack!”

Unsurprisingly, their pleas did not have the desired effect; a second strafing run, this time with ion cannons, left the transport drifting, its vital systems disabled or destroyed. Its subspace comm array, at least, was still functional: “I repeat, we are unarmed! We are transporting religious pilgrims on a holy voyage, we have no valuables to steal!”

Teh’laen glanced at her comm panel. The stricken vessel was broadcasting on an open channel--either because the pilot had flailed at their console in a panic, or as a calculated ploy to beg assistance from any vessels within comm range.

If they’re betting on charity in this part of space, they are sadly mistaken, Teh’laen thought to herself. And yet…

She sighed and brought the Yime’Dizoh around in a lazy loop. Essix trilled a question at her, and she didn’t bother glancing over as she answered. “Yeah, I know. Just be ready.”

With its shields and engines disabled, the pilgrims’ ship floated, helpless, as the slavers grappled and docked at the port airlock. Teh kept her eyes on the controls and the holographic mockup of the slaver ship and steadfastly refused to contemplate what was happening aboard the Faithful.

The Yime’Dizoh orbited the two joined vessels, just out of weapons range of the slaver ship. Coupled to its quarry like this, it couldn’t bring most of its armament to bear even if Teh’laen’s vessel was in range, though a couple of turrets tracked her as she flew past.

Her scanners swept the attackers and she started to formulate a plan of attack. Slavers were a predictable bunch, and this crew was apparently no different. The raider’s shields and weaponry were top of the line, but the people making the purchasing decisions didn’t bother to consider less straightforward angles of attack. The ship’s electronic-warfare and countermeasures suite was hopelessly, hilariously outdated by modern standards.

Teh’laen’s lips parted in a predatory grin, baring gleaming, sharply pointed teeth. “Essix? Let’s have some fun.”

As expected, Teh’laen and Essix quite enjoyed what followed, and the slavers--likewise according to Teh’s expectations--most definitely did not. With the Yime’Dizoh docked to the Faithful’s starboard airlock and thus shielded from the slavers’ weapons by the transport’s bulk, and with unfettered access to the slavers’ electronic systems, the confrontation was over in a matter of minutes.

Seated in her ship’s lounge, booted feet kicked up on the holotable and munching contentedly on a slice of beto melon she’d found in the galley, Teh’laen’s fingers flicked casually over the simulated control panel that Essix projected for her. Opening and closing the correct blast doors in the correct sequence shot most of the slavers out into vacuum before they even realized what was happening. By the time a couple of the brighter slavers--contradiction in terms, that--caught on, they were cut off from their ship. One grabbed a hostage, hauling him by his long, braided hair through the corridors, trusting that his unseen assailant wouldn’t space both attacker and victim. Which, Teh had to admit, was true.

That said, she reflected, if one were counting on a hostage to save one’s life, best to keep that hostage close and not drag them along a corridor with one’s arm outstretched. Particularly when a slicer had control of the blast doors and hatchways.

When she’d finished, the only trace of the slavers still aboard the pilgrim ship was a length of the late hostage-taker’s arm, severed just above the elbow. The hostage was having a fit; but, she thought to herself, better to be having a fit on this side of the airlock.

Teh’laen rose to feet, double-checking the charge on her blaster as she strolled to her ship’s airlock. “C’mon, Essix, let’s go clean up.”

The droid toodled at her derisively and she smirked. “Not literally. These poor fools want the blood mopped up, they can do it themselves.”

The Faithful of Bezhil was a mess. Passengers from more than a dozen different species sat, slumped or lay about in varying states of distress. Their clothes were rough, almost certainly hand-made, and their possessions were few and strictly of sentimental value.

“Vow of poverty, I guess,” she remarked dryly to no one in particular as she picked her way carefully among the pilgrims. They looked up at her with expressions ranging from guarded optimism to gratitude to mortal terror to near reverence, and it was the last that she found most discomfiting.

None of them had any symbols indicating rank, and since their clothes were uniformly shabby, she couldn’t even rely on the otherwise universal rule of “better clothes, higher status.”

She sighed and opened her arms, careful not to accidentally point the blaster held loosely in her right hand at any of the already traumatized passengers. “Anybody want to tell me who’s in charge or what the hell’s going on here?”

Faces turned in the direction of an old Zabrak, the tattoos on his face faded with age and the horns atop his head weathered and chipped. He gave Teh’laen a warm smile and stepped forward, holding out both of his hands to take hers.

She didn’t oblige, instead planting her left hand on her hip and letting her right arm dangle by her side, blaster pointed at the floor. “You in charge?” she asked coolly, one eyebrow arched.

He smiled and Teh’laen’s eyes tightened. “Our deity, the Great Consciousness Bezhil, is who’s ‘in charge’ here, Captain, as They are in all aspects of our lives.”

Fucking great. A sermon. No good deed, huh?

Teh’laen holstered her weapon with perhaps more force than was necessary and crossed her arms over her chest. “Fantastic. So can I talk to Bezhil? Or is there someone a little more corporeal that I can have a little chat with.”

A startled murmur rose from the Zabrak’s congregation and Teh set her jaw. Showing more sense than she would have thought, he bowed his head politely. “I suppose that would be me. My name is Hagen and I lead this group of adherents.”

Teh’laen glanced about, scanning faces, then returned her gaze to Hagen. “Okay. That answers my first question. My second question, though, still stands.”

The beneficent smile on the old man’s lips faded somewhat. “I apologize, Captain. What question was that?”

She sighed heavily. “What the hell is going on here? More to the point, what the hell were you thinking, traipsing through one of the most dangerous regions of space in a ship that, if I hadn’t personally seen it drop out of hyperspace, I would have mistaken for space junk?”

His smile grew again, and Teh’laen couldn’t fully keep the scowl off her own face. “Ah. As I said, we are pilgrims. This,” he waved around, indicating his flock and their vessel, “is but a test of our faith. In search of the enlightenment that will make us one with The Great Consciousness Bezhil, we travel the stars, trusting in Them to watch over us and provide what we need.”

“Right,” she replied dryly.

“Because we rely strictly on Their largesse, we do not keep any but the most rudimentary supplies on hand. Truth be told, I am not certain why those pirates attacked us; as we tried several times to explain, both before and after they boarded our humble ship, we have nothing of value to steal.”

“Idiot,” Teh ground out between her teeth.

Hagen looked at her with eyes wide, and shocked gasps came from the pilgrims closest to them. “I beg your pardon?”

“They weren’t pirates, you stupid bastards.” Her voice was less a recrimination than a dejected sigh, disappointed in their naivete. “They were slavers. They weren’t after credits or jewelry. You’re all poor, but the one thing they want, you possess in abundance.”

An expression of horror dawned on Hagen’s face and dozens of voices began to shout over one another. Teh’laen stood there, arms crossed, until the cacophony diminished.

The group’s leader recovered his composure first, and he bowed his head toward her. “Then we are doubly grateful for your assistance, Captain. Truly, Bezhil has rewarded our faith with protection.”

The Lethan Twi’lek shifted her weight from one foot to the other, losing patience. “Maybe next time you should ask Bezhil for blaster cannons, deflector shields and engines that actually work.”

Hagen’s smile turned almost to a smirk, and Teh’s hands tightened on her arms to keep herself from reaching out and slapping it off his face. “No need, Captain. They sent us you.”

That does it.

Teh’laen lunged forward, grabbing the shoulders of Hagen’s roughspun tunic and bunching the fabric up in her fists. “Are you stupid?” she spat. “Your god didn’t send me. I’m a pirate. The only reason they took your ship instead of me is because you’re poor and don’t have anything I feel like taking from you.”

The look of panic on his face set off a guilty twinge in the back of her mind, but she didn’t let it show on her face. Good. Maybe he’ll realize that he can’t count on someone coming along to save him and his friends.

She released her grip and took a step back, then turned in a slow circle to take in the other pilgrims. “I scanned the damage to your ship; it’ll take a day or more to get your engines operational, and at least that long for shields. If it’s even possible to repair this thing. I’m not sticking around that long. I’ll be leaving in a little under two hours; anyone wants a ride, I suggest you be at the starboard airlock before I return. Only what you can carry. Though,” she added after a moment, “I guess that shouldn’t be a problem--vow of poverty and all.”

The quiet ripple of laughter heartened her, and she looked at Hagen. “Anyone injured?”

He shook his head. “Not seriously. We have medicine enough to treat them.”

“Good. I’ll be back.”

The slavers had been busy.

Teh’laen focused on the task. She refused to count the beings crammed into the hold, or speculate at their ages, or think about their injuries beyond what sort of treatment they’d require and whether she could provide it.

The controls for the shockcollars affixed to their necks was a closed circuit, not linked into the ship’s other systems, but once she and Essix had physical access to it, the droid’s slicing protocols made quick work of them.

Her voice was softer, but still briskly professional, as she swept her eyes over the freed slaves. “I’ll be leaving shortly. If you’d rather not stick around, you can get a ride to some place with a medical facility, maybe even a Republic embassy. I can’t promise th….”

She trailed off as she spotted a Devaronian near the very back. Something was off about him; Teh’laen’s eyes narrowed to slits of amethyst and she pushed through the crowd to face him. He cringed and shied away from her.

Too clean. That was it. She grabbed one of the Devaronian’s horns with one hand, wrenching his head around so that her other hand could pull down the neck of his freshly-laundered shirt.

“No shockcollar, hmm?” Her scarlet lips, pressed into a thin line, paled to a sickly pink.

“N-no, they j-j-just captured me!”

“Uh huh.” Teh let go of him and he straightened his shirt, looking around warily at the freed slaves starting to press in upon them.

A small vibroblade dropped into her palm with a flick of her wrist, and she reached up and rent the fabric from navel to collarbone.

The Devaronian clutched the ruined cloth around him, trying desperately--and futilely--to conceal the tattoos that marked him as a proud member of the Labor Alliance.

Teh’laen regarded him coolly. The former captives watched their former captor with bloodlust, but they glanced at the tall Twi’lek before they made any move.

She shifted her weight to one hip, holding one elbow in the palm of her hand as she inspected her nails with studied indifference.

“Hm.”

Nearly a hundred eyes stared at her.

“I’m leaving shortly,” she remarked offhandedly, then turned for the hatch. “Make it fast.”

#my writing #teh'laen #essix #space piracy #swtor #swtor oc #30dayswchallenge

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