The galactic conflict kept escalating by the day.
The Republic had finally managed to shift its economy onto a war footing, and its military output now outpaced the Separatists’ — every news outlet in the galaxy was trumpeting that fact.
Countless interviews with high-ranking officials aired around the clock.
Han and I even got into an argument about who’d win.
He figured the Separatists could simply bury the Republic in bodies and win through sheer numbers.
I sided with the Republic — rotten as it was, I liked the profiteers running the CIS even less.
So we followed the news from both sides of the front with real interest.
The Confederacy kept fortifying its holdings in the Outer Rim.
The Republic, dead set on finishing this, threw nearly every ship and soldier it had at crushing the Separatist strongholds and forcing the Confederacy to surrender.
According to a parade of military experts — all sporting impressive guts and somehow always theorizing from as far from the front lines as possible — the conflict was entering its final phase.
The Separatists’ Shadowfeed, meanwhile, kept blaring on about how unshakable their position in the Outer Rim remained, about their many victories along the front, and about the bloodthirsty brilliance of General Grievous.
A monstrous cyborg who’d killed more than his fair share of Jedi.
A metal monster, part machine, part living thing.
His armored, two-meter frame struck genuine terror into anyone unlucky enough to face him.
On the battlefield, Grievous was a brilliant commander and a gifted tactician, and his precisely planned, lightning-fast assaults terrified the Republic.
They despised him, they hated him, but everyone feared him — even the CIS leadership.
It showed: during one interview, a member of the Separatist high command visibly flinched at the mere mention of his name.
Then, at some point, news from the Separatist side stopped coming through entirely.
The reason came out the next day: the Republic had scored a major victory, knocking out the CIS Shadowfeed relay station during fighting on one of the Outer Rim worlds.
That left us relying on the obviously biased news out of Coruscant, capital of the entire Galactic Republic.
Still, that beat having no information at all.
Fortunately, Republic command had gone ahead with their plan to turn our planet into a staging post.
Setting up communications infrastructure became one of their top priorities.
A handful of Venators now hung permanently in the sky, and barracks, vehicle test ranges, and the rest of the usual military infrastructure started going up in the ruins of the cities.
I honestly couldn’t figure out the point of any of this.
Poring over the HoloNet’s published troop movement data from back when the Separatists first took the planet, the logic behind the Republic’s actions kept slipping past me.
However I looked at it, there was no upside to burning resources on this planet.
Too far off the hyperlanes, no useful minerals, no potential recruits like the Mandalorians offered elsewhere.
We had nothing worth having.
Why fight over it at all?
Surely they couldn’t all be that dense.
Then again, right now the locals had nothing but upsides.
Clone patrols kept the whole city under watch, and people finally had jobs.
The population was slowly clawing its way back from a nightmare that had dragged on for almost a year.
None of that touched me anymore, though.
I had more interesting things on my plate.
My search for the lab’s original owners finally caught a break, and it happened out of nowhere.
I’d decided to finally check where the hangar hatch led, and it dropped me into a massive cavern that fed into a tunnel running off toward the surface somewhere outside.
It went on so long that I didn’t dare follow it to the end.
An hour’s walk was more than enough for one day — maybe I’d send Han to finish checking it later.
As far as I could tell, this was how ships used to reach the lab.
But what interested me a lot more was the dispatcher’s room.
It took me a while to find it.
I roughly knew where it was supposed to be — the layout marked it — but I couldn’t figure out where the door actually was for the longest time.
As it turned out, the blast door was cleverly hidden behind what looked, at first glance, like an ordinary boulder.
I tried lifting it with the Force and only succeeded in making my vision go dark from the strain.
Even calling on the Darkness for help, I could barely budge it.
I couldn’t hold the strain any longer and let go.
The boulder dropped back into place with a metallic clang.
So this wasn’t a regular rock — it was another disguised door.
Excellent.
That simplified things considerably.
Just as I’d suspected, one of the rocks turned out to be a hidden panel.
The moment I pressed the switch, the boulder obediently slid aside, revealing a dark passage.
The room beyond was oval, with tables lined up along the walls, each holding equipment whose purpose I couldn’t guess.
I didn’t get far exploring it, though — the second I stepped inside, I started coughing like I had tuberculosis.
The dust here was even thicker than in the lab, and the air was foul and stale on top of it.
The ventilation clearly hadn’t been running at all.
So I had to wait while the droids, under Han’s direction, cleared the room out and the air got at least somewhat breathable.
Once the room was livable, I dove straight into the local data.
A pile of information lit up in front of me.
Could I actually be getting lucky here?
Two hours later, I shoved back from the monitor in irritation.
Whoever had scrubbed this data clearly had a dark sense of humor.
Most of the folders held nothing but titles — empty shells. Get faster updates on g.com.
Delivery of such-and-such parts, dispatch of some batch, entries written in cipher, cryptic experiment names.
What was I supposed to make of “Experiment Z34NY”?
Could mean absolutely anything.
Hundreds of documents, none of them with actual content.
A quick search through the HoloNet didn’t shed any light on what any of it meant either.
Still, I did come away with some useful information.
My theory that this had been a laboratory now had physical evidence behind it.
Not that it couldn’t have just been some deranged collector’s private stash of medical equipment.
From what I could tell, the work here involved cloning, life extension, or possibly both at once.
Something biological, at any rate.
A few file names weren’t encrypted, and one folder — “Class XC-41 Bio-Sample Cylinders” — made the general direction of the research pretty clear.
Right near the end, I stumbled across a file labeled “Master Lyman Jay Kurra.” The only name I’d turned up in the entire search.
It wasn’t much, but it was something — I’d need to look into this master later.
Who or what he actually was remained a mystery for now.
I handed the rest of the data off to Han to comb through and went to go do my favorite thing: trying to figure out how to make money fast.
Beyond the ideas I’d already turned over, a couple more occurred to me.
If the Force let me sense danger, could it also let me sense how dice would fall, or where a roulette ball would land?
Or nudge a game piece in the right direction without anyone noticing?
Yeah — making money at a casino became my second plan for raising funds.
It was relatively legal, it could bring in serious money, and it would guarantee I could get off this planet if I fell in with the right crowd of well-connected kids.
But that meant getting into a top-tier casino, and the three thousand credits I had left would barely cover five bets.
And there was no telling whether I could even influence something as small as dice or a ball with any precision.
Maybe once I sold off the speeders and other odds and ends, I could scrape together eleven thousand — but that wasn’t guaranteed either.
Nobody on this whole planet had money to pay a decent price for my goods right now.
My second option was stealing expensive transports and reselling them.
The problem was that my planet didn’t have anything worth stealing.
That meant nearly all my savings would go toward buying a ship in the first place, since I wasn’t willing to just abandon my current haul.
I’d need to find somewhere with decent ships to steal — and to sell them, I’d have to make regular runs out to Hutt space.
And if I tried selling within a single planet’s market, the owners could trace it back to me fast enough.
Especially if I stayed in the Outer Rim.
The closer to the Core, the bigger the crowds — but the tighter the security too.
So.
Back to the drawing board, again and again.
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