Chapter Twenty-Four

The trip to the Anoat system had taken three and a half days.

It felt like forever. She had spent her share of time locked in small rooms, not counting the time she’d spent in jail. She knew what it was like to be cooped up without being able to go outside. But usually there was an outside to go to, not just the empty swirling void of space.

Maybe she had gotten used to the idea that travelling took a few hours at most. Dragon crafts, teleporters, the occasional commercial flight. She had done her share of moving around on Earth. But Earth was tiny, minuscule. One look at a galaxy map and the route they took showed that they had crossed the equivalent of a tenth of the entire galaxy’s diameter. It was a distance so huge it hurt to even think about it too long.

And all of that was behind them.

The Atlas burst out of hyperspace on the edge of a quiet solar system. A single sun sat in the distance, a bit more on the reddish side than the sun back home. Three large planets spun around it, though only one of them was of any interest to them.

Anoat, the only inhabited planet in the Anoat system was their target. Taylor didn’t give anyone points for creativity there.

“Our target is the Czerka factory,” she told her crew as they assembled in the mess hall. Their ship was too small for a proper conference room, but the hall was big enough for all five members of the crew. The two Fallen, Xarly and Qarry stared at her, and the Trandoshan, Skarsk Nek continued to clean the barrel of a blaster with meticulous care, a cloth wrapped around a talon to scrub out all the grime.

“Okay,” Xarly said. “So we’re blowing it up?” he asked. He made an explosive gesture, complete with sound effects.

She frowned a little then shook her head. The words ‘blowing it up’ were unfamiliar, but the gestures he made helped explain the general meaning. “No. We go in, find out where meatbag slaves are. We see. We... learn. We make plan. Then we take meatbags with us and then we... blowing it up.”

Her Basic was, in a word, basic.

“Slaves?” Qarry said. The Fallen’s interest was obvious. She, of all her crew, seemed like the only one that was professional. She stood with her back straight, acted with the decorum and precision that Taylor associated with PRT officers and seemed to know what she was doing.

Skarsk Nek wasn’t bad either, though it was obvious that he considered all ship-board duties to be beneath him. He did his share, but with a fair degree of reluctance.

Xarly spent more time trying to slip into Taylor or Qarry’s pants than actually working, though when he did get to work he was... passably good.

Taylor nodded. “Slaves. Yes. We save meatbags. We kill filth. Czerka Corporation is evil.” That name was hard to pronounce, the sounds in the company’s name unfamiliar in English. “We know they are evil. We take their shit. Just need to learn how much shit to take.”

HK-47 shifted. “Suggestion: Move along to the actual planning phase of this meeting. These incompetents don’t need to be encouraged to fight. Or if they do need such encouragement I will be honoured to provide it.”

“Right, yes,” she said. To be fair, poorly concealed threats aside, she didn’t think her crew needed to be sold on the idea that saving slaves was a morally acceptable thing to do. “Problems are many. Slave collars with head shortening charges. No amusing casualties allowed. Slaves need moving.”

“So, we need to infiltrate them?” Skarsk said.

Taylor turned to HK-47. “Translation: Infiltrate. To sneak, to slip behind enemy lines, to find the optimal position from which to carry out an assasination.”

Taylor nodded to Skarsk. “Yes. We infiltrate. We good because we have reason to visit and to learn. I will be rich merchant meatbag. You will be... safe maker.” She scrunched her nose and gave up on finding the right word. “We ask questions. We learn much. Then we attack. One hundred battledroids. HK-47. Us. Free slaves. Give slaves blasters. Take ships. Leave. Then we go elsewhere. Make lots of trouble for the Republic.”

“Czerka have guards,” Skarsk said.

“We learn that too,” Taylor agreed. She added the word ‘guards’ to her mental dictionary and promptly forgot it. “Also need stuff for fight.”

“Stuff?” Skarsk asked, his voice a sibilant rasp.

Taylor nodded. “Weapons for meatbag slaves. Explosives. Czerka spaceships. This ship, Atlas, not taking part in fight. Too weak. Too...” she paused. She wasn’t about to admit that she was so vain as to want to keep her shiny new ship shiny and new looking. “Small.”

“Well, if Czerka aren’t expecting us, I think we might be able to do quite a number on their defences,” Skarsk said. “I never attacked a factory before, but I was hired to help take out a small fortress... elsewhere. It is bad form to talk about the particulars of past work.”

Taylor nodded along, piecing together most of what he was saying. Their Trandoshan was a mercenary, that much she knew, that he had some experience wasn’t unexpected. “How do we do, then?”

Skarsk hissed, a low, thoughtful sound. “We need to know the layout first. That will be our first priority. That and numbers. If the factory is small, then we can take it ourselves. If it’s as big as I suspect, then we won’t be enough.”

“The droids can help fight.”

Skarsk shook his head. “No. The problem isn’t fighting. It’s a factory. They will have guards and security and maybe turrets.” He paused to let HK47 translate part of that for her. “Nothing we can’t handle. The problem will be handling all those slaves at once. If there are few, then it is not really a problem, but if there are many, then we will have difficulty with them. The authorities won’t help either.”

Taylor sat back in her seat and pondered that for a moment. If they were using slave labour, and in great enough numbers for the CIS to notice, then there was a good chance that the local equivalent of the police were aware of them, and they hadn’t acted on it.

“We have to fight the ‘authorities’ then,” Taylor said.

Skarsk shrugged. “They might look the other way. Depends on if the slaves are legal or not.”

Taylor stood up. “Let us carry out first part of plan first. Then we see when we learn more.” That said, she nodded to her crew and moved back. She still had some things to prepare.

***

Anoat was a shithole.

Taylor didn’t say it lightly. She had been in some pretty horrible places before, but in every case all it would take was a few minute’s walk and she would be in a nicer place. Even a city devastated by an Endbringer had some wilderness left untouched nearby, some places where nature took over and the filth had been washed away.

The planet hovering below them had none of that.

Even from their rapidly descending orbit she could see long trenches cut into the landscape, as if the planet were no bigger than an apple that someone had cut slices into. All of those trenches lead to the single large city on the planet. Oh, there were little outposts shining on the dark side of the world as they crossed it, but she judged them to be no bigger than a small city on Earth, only visible because of the absolute lack of light across the rest of the world.

The mega city was a huge sprawling block. Thousands of buildings squished together, some of them probably bigger than anything on Earth.

She started to question the viability of her plans. Those buildings could house millions of people. And if those were the slaves she was going to save, then she would need a bigger ship.

The place looked like a more polluted, more desperate post-Behemoth Manhattan. If the city was a hundred times as large. They crossed over what she suspected was the industrial sector, a place filled with smokestacks and huge complexes surrounded by walls. Vehicles were moving in and out, some with cargo, others without. There was even a network of rails with trains moving to and from one factory and the next.

“This place is huge,” Taylor said.

The clunk of HK-47’s feet told her of the droid’s presence by her side. “Statement: The Czerka factories on this world produce millions of tons of equipment every standard galactic year. Most of these are simple manufacturing items though they also build weaponry, droids and large scale mining equipment.”

Taylor nodded. It was impressive, even if everything she saw was darkened by grim and soot. Stepping back, Taylor turned to Hk-47 and looked the droid up and down. She had spent a few hours with him scrubbing off the rust from his armour and injecting lubricants into all of his joints. Then she masked his important sensors and spray painted him the same flat black as all of her other battle droids. With his red eye-like sensors and the danger-yellow marks she had carefully traced along the edges of his armour he looked like something out of someone’s nightmares.

“This place looks alive, at least,” she said.

The droid piloting the Atlas turned its head in her direction, it was one of the few that she hadn’t repainted in ‘her’ colours. “We are approaching landing pad Leth Mem Aurek Osk. Prepare for slight turbulence.”

Taylor’s mechanical arm grabbed into a railing and tightened as the city beyond the viewscreen grew larger. They made a few adjustments in the air as the pilot droid aimed them towards a huge skyscraper with large holes all around it where ships were slipping in and out.

“HK, set up a guard when we land. Just a few patrols of droids around the Atlas to discourage idiots.”

“Query: What sort of response shall I program into them?”

“Get them to at least ask people to back off before opening fire. Maybe use stun rounds at first.”

Atlas slid into a wide berth, the pneumatic hiss of landing gear sounding out through the whole ship as the strange repulsorlift engines she had yet to figure out roared to life and made the entire vessel come to a stop and rotate until it was facing the exit again.

“We have landed,” the pilot droid said.

“Well done,” she said.

The droid nodded its head even as its mechanical hands flicked off a bunch of switches. “Roger roger.”

Taylor was tempted to get her droids to say something else, but seeing as how HK-47 was the only one with programming knowledge of that sort on their crew, she didn’t dare ask. They would probably start cussing her out every time she gave an order.

Now she just had to move onto the next step of her plan; scouting out the enemy. Unfortunately she didn’t have the connections to pass herself off as a rich merchant just yet, which meant either making those connections or... “HK, I need the directions to the seediest bar in the sector.”

***