Take Me To Your Leader [D4 ME]

[Vaya Mer'darrow]

It was an emotional ride for Vaya. A thrill of success at cracking the encryption, a flood of relief that Tiralia was speaking of the Calm and not the moon, guilt for that relief, a thrill of terror on hearing the Inquisitor’s voice for the first time, a moment of paralyzing comprehension as she understood what the sensors were saying.

And the nice thing about passively receiving she thought to herself, is that it’s real hard to catch you at.

Commander Poule cut in, “Inquisitor this line is compromised, traced the source to the ship, clearing this line.”

Much later, Vaya would cold-bloodedly dissect the mistake and decide that it wasn’t really her fault. She had no experience with military encryption, but plenty with computer-aided translation of ancient and incompletely understood languages. A military-grade slicer with military-grade equipment probably would never have been noticed -- that’s how listening worked. It was only the freakest of chances, she reasoned, that something in the ship’s hardware had responded to her amateur efforts by emitting something detectable to a professionally paranoid special forces type like Poule.

She was thrown back in her acceleration couch as Sinnya’s reflexes, thankfully, outmatched hers. Fully formed cogent thoughts in her brain became vaguely coherent fragments as she scrambled for her straps. “Jamming!” she slapped at her console. “The transponder! Shensor -- Shields! Sensors!” She shouted almost all of it after Sinnya had already gotten them to safety.

Please don’t ID the ship please don’t ID the ship please don’t ID the ship… she slapped at the parts of the panel that would jam sensors and communications. On a military ship, there were specific buttons for such things. Civilian ships only had the capability because the receivers and transmitters could do it as an inevitable part of their function, and you kind of had to figure out how to exceed their intended use on your own.

After white-knuckling the the edge of the console for about a minute longer than necessary, Vaya switched the jamming off and went back to monitoring comms, breathing a sigh of relief at the lack of frantic, hunt-coordination-style traffic on Imperial channels.

“Gough-” she choked. Her mouth was panic-dry and felt crusty. She cleared her throat and reached for her canteen, realized that while it was still attached to her her unsecured crash pack had bounced off the ceiling and into the hallway outside the cockpit. Drank. “Good flying, Sinnya.” Recovering slightly, she smiled at her. “Not bad for someone who hadn’t been inside a real starship as of last month.” She looked around again, post-adrenaline shakes localizing to quivering antennapalps. “Everyone else… good?”

[Qareme Torth]

While Vaya's mind went a thousand miles a second dissecting everything that just happened, Qareme was sat completely calm with her eyes closed. Hearing the Inquisitons voice again brought back memories of the prison mission.

I knew destiny would bring us together again, Neela.

When Vaya called out, Qareme calmly responded "I am fine. What is the plan now?"

[Sinnya]

"We're not getting back in there through the front door." Sinnya watched fire blossom at the lip of the village in her rear sensor panel. It looked like the cannon had clipped the cliff edge. "If we're lucky, they think they got us. But they'll recognize us if we try to fly back in."

She adjusted the freighter's course, making for the continental shoreline.

"Well... if we fly back in on a ship, anyway."

[Jenna Karath]

Having taken the time to brace herself, steady her heartbeat again, Jenna came up toward the cockpit and leaned in to speak, "You keep seeming to allude about another way in, but you don't wanna just say it... This gonna be something risky?"

[Sinnya]

"Only as risky as life is for anybody in the forest." Half of Sinnya's attention was still on her piloting, but she was visibly more relaxed now that they seemed to have gotten away safe. Well, safe-ish. Her standards may have been slipping.

"Chaldi people don't have ships or speeders, but they built up there anyway. I bet we could climb the cliffs. Or ride up, if we found somebody to lend us enough swoop wings."

[Vaya Mer'darrow]

"The Chaldi -- Sister Tirali -- have been making enemies of their neighbors. If we can find them, they might help us." Vaya rubbed her chin. "Cucklu fish. You can lure swoopwings with them. I forget where I read that. Or where you get cucklu fish." She went to stow her crash pack, and get something from the back of the ship. "Keep talking. Did anybody else notice anything in the village? Verse, when you got separated, what exactly happened?"

[Verse Aura]

She was leaning back in the co-pilot seat, quite relieved that they didn't all explode. She didn't want to explode today. Maybe tomorrow.

"Well... first I used the Force and felt Sister Tirali's emotions. There were feelings of arrogance and control there. And she might be force sensitive herself. Then, I looked around, saw some people in a building looking real frightened, and some storm troopers found me, and I managed to get one of them talking, and he said they were on lockdown since Tirali took over. Also they threathened to throw me off the cliff and bragged about their superior firepower. But that´s about all I got."

[Vaya Mer'darrow]

Vaya returned with a portable lightboard, the kind you could take notes on and connect to a datapad. This field model could be set up on legs or attached to any reasonably flat surface with magnet or suction.

Vaya ruthlessly deployed it the one place in the cockpit it wouldn't cover any instruments -- over the back wall, trapping them all inside. With her. And her notes, which she loaded from her datapad.

Neat, dense handwriting filled the lightboard, with interrelated headings: goals ("REACH TEMPLE", "contact Chaldi", Vaya wiped it out and rewrote it with "FRIENDLY" as a prefix), information, with sources and certainty ("smugglers have map to Temple, archives, low"; "swoopwings like cucklu fish, unknown, med-high?"; Vaya added "tirali coercively maintaining control of Chaldi, Verse + Stormtroopers + Sinnya + Jenna, HIGH"), assests (all of the groups' names, the ship), and so on.

"We have some time on the flight back," she said, like a professor leading her graduate students, "so let's review what we know, what questions we might be able to find answers to before we return, and come up with a plan..."

[Sinnya]

"This Tirali is breaking all the customs." Sinnya was indignant. "Locking up members of her own tribe? Selling them out to offworld troopers? The people have never had a 'queen' and nobody wants one!" She scowled at the lightboard. "She can't have that many Chaldi who support her. Not if they knew what she's planning, anyway. But that doesn't matter if she has three dozen troopers with heavy carbines backing her," she finished glumly. "She'll get more of the people killed than she can convince, and I'll bet this ship she'll never really be queen, but the Inquisitor won't care about that as long as she gets what she wants."

[Jenna Karath]

"Anyone would love to kill a Hutt," she said, pausing and coughing, then correcting herself, "what I mean to say it that anyone with the strength to oppose someone like that, someone who has betrayed and is using people like that, would jump at an opportunity to. Still, it isn't exactly our fight.." she glanced at Sinnya, "exactly, this is of course more your heart than ours. Still, these people.. I can't imagine a warrior culture like there's lacks for spirit to fight against her and these troopers, only the means."

"If we could get them that... they might just free themselves. Though, it will be hard, much as I could read off that Commander when I was talking to him is that he's a man of devotion to the job, and his troopers will be inspired just the same, they'll be tight knit and ready for almost anything we think of throwing at them. Whatever we do choose to do," she shrugged.

[Vaya Mer'darrow]

Vaya shifted on her feet. "I want what they know," she said bluntly, "but I don't want... To get the non-sleemo Chaldi massacred just to get it." The idea of yielding seemed to cause her discomfort. She looked at Sinnya. "Tell me what you know about their neighbors. Maybe we have allies. Or at least swoopwings we don't have to lure by hand..."

[Jenna Karath]

"Seems to me they might be heading getting toward getting killed whether we help them toward it or not," she said, honestly, but then shifted her gaze a bit and dropped off from the subject. Something about what she was saying, maybe it was the way she said it, but it didn't sit right with her anymore. Was she a hypocrite? Advocating for helping nudge these people toward a rebellion she herself would never invite at home?

She couldn't figure it out, and so she went silent, tackling herself in her thoughts.

[Sinnya]

"Nearest to those cliffs..." Sinnya swiveled her pilot's chair to and fro as she thought, possibly annoying anyone who might be annoyed by such things. "North are the Skull Eaters. That is, they call themselves the Yukitzi, but everyone else says Skull Eaters. They got the name because, well." She shrugged. "You don't want to get in a raiding war with them if you've got a problem being part of dinner. But they don't really fight more than anybody else."

She stopped swiveling and gestured palm up with her right hand, a clear and on the other side... gesture. "Southeast are the Hbanu. They used to be the same as the Chaldi, people say, but they're a separate tribe now, with a village in the trees instead of on the cliffs. They usually get on with Chaldi people, but with how things seem to be in the Chaldi place now..." she chewed her lip for a moment. "The Hbanu kept the Chaldi custom of breeding swoopwings. Hardly any other tribes do."

[Verse Aura]

"I agree with Jenna," she said, "I don't think the Chaldi will very much like what's going to happen to them as is. But ultimately it has to be up to them, whether they want to fight or not. Of course, we can support them if that happens. If not, well, maybe we can get what we want without trigger an immediate reprisal against the captive Chaldi, but that'd be pretty difficult I imagine."