"I'm starting to think I'm not a very good ally."
The painkillers were still working.
Of all that concerned me while waiting for the Jedi to land their ridiculous slice-of-champignon-looking ship on a landing pad in the heart of the Nikto sector, I was most worried about the painkillers wearing off a few hours early. Now granted, I knew exactly how to metabolize the happy juice in record time, and I was making very sure to not do that. I liked being able to stay civil.
Just in front of me, the Jedi ship came to a rest. Hissing and clicking as the vessel cooled, the boarding ramp descended in a cloud of steam. No doubt there was some hissing, too, but the rest of the ship was making too much noise to make it out.
Eventually, a pair of figures descended: A man, dressed in a combination of brown robes and gleaming silver armor plates. His head was bare, revealing a healthy mane of brown hair falling to just behind his ears. At his waist rested a single lightsaber; matte silver on top, wood on the bottom, with a big red button in between.
A Jedi.
What are the odds?
Trailing the Jedi, however, came someone unexpected. Or rather, came a little trashcan on wheels. On top of a boxy body sat a squashed dome sporting a giant eye-lens. Two legs stretched forward, terminating in flat pads that no doubt obscured wheels. Behind the droid, however, a single large stabilizing wheel trailed.
This… was an astromech droid. More than that, it was an old astromech droid, undeniably crude compared to what I knew would come in a few thousand years.
Which made this Jedi not merely a Jedi Knight but the Jedi Knight. The Hero of Tython. And outside of my weight class by an order of magnitudes.
Next to me, the Little Jedi had clearly picked up on my realization that I was, in fact, the weakest Force user in the building by a significant margin. Though my ability to read thoughts was crude at best, I knew a smug grin when I saw it.
For shame. Jedi were supposed to be above such petty feelings.
The Knight approached at a startlingly brisk pace. Then again, he was a fighter instead of a diplomat, a man of action at heart, so I really should not have been surprised. Part of me suspected it was all part of a carefully calculated powerplay, as almost everything was in politics, a stratagem to give me even less time to find some semblance of a plan to improvise around.
The rest of me proceeded to ignore that part of me and chose to roll with it.
Instead of approaching him, instead of panicking, I waited as the Jedi Knight stormed towards me. Could I have approached him? Sure, if I wanted to put myself in a subordinate position. Even meeting him personally, face to face, at the landing pad was chancing it. Doing so implied I had nothing better to do than meet with him.
But I was low on people to act as valets, and I really did not want to ask the Little Jedi or the gangsters I worked with to pick up the slack. That would have just sent the wrong message.
… and Natia and her allies were on break, too. I was starting to regret letting them off early, but what could I do?
Thus, I waited on him. Not for long, of course; In a matter of seconds, the Jedi Knight had crossed the distance between us and stood in front of me with a decidedly neutral expression on his face.
"Master Jedi," I said in greeting, extending a hand. "Thank you for agreeing to meet me. Although, I must say, you are taller than I expected. A good sign, that."
"A pleasure to meet you, too, Lord Sith." The Jedi's greeting was equally respectful, accepting the offered hand. A solid squeeze and shake later, our hands came apart without any silly attempts to prove our strength. Though I liked my chances at winning that contest, that would hardly have been diplomatic. "You make it sound like shorter people are a negative, yet one of them stands at your side."
If the Little Jedi took offense to being spoken about in her presence, she did not show it.
"Clearly, you have not read the tabloid articles I have. Or seen what they call art. I may not be a smart man, but I am capable of pattern recognition," I said, miming a shudder. "But we are not here to compare how much each of us has suffered, are we?"
"No more than we are here to discuss the fate of the galaxy on a landing pad," he agreed.
"How very fortunate that I have a meeting place prepared," I said, turning around and inviting the knight to follow me. "Though our meeting will not be with my entire team. They're still off celebrating our success."
"Your team?" he asked, falling in beside me. The droid followed at a pace's distance while the Little Jedi trailed behind just a bit further and to the right.
"Sith can have allies, too," I said lightly. "We are not as strictly hierarchical as you might think."
"Only one of them is his ally," the Little Jedi chimed in. "The other three are her allies. And only one of them is reliable."
"This wouldn't have anything to do with that mental burble you're putting out, would it?" he asked, and I grimaced beneath my mask. That wasn't going away anytime soon, huh?
"For one of them," I allowed. Poor Levin. Trying to convince him to stick around would be difficult enough. Add in an inability to get away from someone who constantly gave him a migraine was going to make things a bit more complicated. "A side-effect of an accelerated and abbreviated training, I suspect. No doubt my master found it useful. Of course, he died before he could explain any of it."
A stream of electronic chattering came from the droid trailing us.
"You overestimate the helpfulness of the average Sith, T7," the Jedi Knight commented. Somehow, he had managed to divine some sort of meaning from the sounds of a modem having a stroke. "No offense."
"If something like that got under my skin, I'd have ditched Lia immediately after meeting her," I said lightly as we entered in the Nikto-run warehouse that hosted my center of operations. "Besides, I am anything but typical."
"For which I am grateful," he said. "My team's plans have briefly stalled."
Our merry group of four crowded into a turbolift that shot us up to the top floor of the warehouse into the richly appointed apartment where I had planned out the disastrous visit to the Intelligence Outpost. As expected, the place was empty, though a small pile of dirty ceramic cups by the coffee machine suggested that Levin had not taken his role of mission control as seriously as one might have expected.
"Stalled how?" I asked, walking in and taking a place at the large table dominating the main sitting room. There was a head to the table, but I actively chose against it. Would it have been a great power move? Yes, yet it would have been. But I was not here to one-up anyone.
I wanted a partnership, an agreement between equals. Something to show the galaxy that Jedi and Sith, Republic and Empire, could come together and handle threats to the peace together.
Which meant I was going to have plan out a press release in the next few hours or so, assuming everything went well.
"I managed to kill Darth Angral's son and recovered the man who designed the superweapons Darth Angral was after before they could capture him," he revealed, taking up position opposite me. That, too, was good. Though we were on opposing sides, he wasn't trying to take the upper hand. "But that does leave us without a next step."
"You're referring to Doctor Godera, I take it?" I asked. A bit of theater to play up how much I knew, that was all it was, but it seeded the idea that I knew things. People who knew things were generally better kept at hand to be used.
"You're well informed," the Jedi Knight said. "I presume you got that tip from Imperial Intelligence?"
"Call it a trade secret," I said with a hidden smile.
"He has sources on Taris," the Little Jedi revealed, having taken up a position at the foot of the table, and I froze for a moment. She knew that Janus was just another one of my cover identities. Revealing that I had sheltered and kept Doctor Godera safe would have been catastrophic and undermined whatever good faith I had cultivated.
But the Little Jedi said nothing more.
I should not have been surprised, of course.
"Sure, reveal all of my secrets," I snarked. "What's next? Telling him that I padded my jacket? That my shoes have inserts?"
"Really? The jacket is all you padded?" she asked, raising an eyebrow.
The droid chirped again, causing the Jedi Knight's lips to quirk in a smile. No doubt it had been something incredibly clever and incisive. At my expense, most likely. The flash of annoyance from the Little Jedi, however, discredited that notion.
Eh, a puzzle to solve later.
Or never, most likely.
"How about we stay on topic?" the knight asked. "How is your mission going?"
"My team and I removed one of Darth Angral's apprentices," I said. "Lord Sadic, who was working with Imperial Intelligence. There is also a non-zero chance that Angral is aware of my efforts to hunt him down."
"Lord Sadic set up an ambush for us with the help of Imperial Intelligence," the Little Jedi explained. "It failed, obviously, but it does mean he is aware of our efforts. He's dead now."
Not a word about the bugs?
"We narrowed it down to three possible leaks: either Imperial Intelligence got wind of it, my current master sold me out, or one of my ally's allies sold me out," I continued, choosing not to dwell on what the Little Jedi wasn't saying. "I'm leaning towards the first and second. The third is unlikely, but still unactionable."
"So you don't have a lead either?" The Jedi Knight asked.
"I know where Darth Angral sent his other apprentices," I explained. "But since they presumable never learned where, precisely, the superweapons are being kept, we are mostly safe. Searching an entire planet is slow work."
"Which means you're going to wait for him to act and then respond?"
"Not at all," I said, turning on the projector with the Force and pulling up a map of the galaxy, cleanly divided into Imperial, Republic, Hutt, and Neutral space. Countless white dots signified the star systems falling into each polity's sphere of control. "Darth Angral has a Harrower-class dreadnought at his disposal. Given the lack of sightings, he is in uninhabited space. As it is a massive ship, it needs a lot of supplies to remain operational. Heck, we could ask the Bureau of Ships and Services for a records request to see where its transponder was last pinged. We can narrow down the possibilities to something manageable, investigate, and strike."
"He makes it sound so simple," the Little Jedi remarked. "Two ships against a star dreadnought makes for a rather lopsided fight."
"We can secure donations," I said, undeterred. "Put out a press statement, release an interview, show how much we were able to do on our own, and the private sector is bound to take interest. War is bad for most business, and it is in their best interest to maintain galactic peace."
"And conveniently, this whole plan relies on us working together," the Jedi Knight observed.
"Call it the hallmark of a good deal," I said. "The kind where everyone wins."
"Except Darth Angral," the Little Jedi pointed out.
"That is a price I am willing for him to pay," I countered.
The droid chattered again, interrupting our exchange.
"… I can work with this," the Jedi Knight allowed. "It needs some expansion in some areas, but it is serviceable as far as plans go. I find it hard to believe to your fellow Sith will feel the same way."
"Luckily for me, they are in too deep to back out now without significant risk to themselves," I said. Strange how often my plans for getting people to go along with my plans involved the sunk cost fallacy working out in my favor. "And if they do have a good excuse… well, I'll come up with something."
...
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