The Ruins of Dantooine (3 page)

Luke moved closer to her. “You’ve sent one of your best agents to retrieve it, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” Leia replied and didn’t bother to hide the weariness in her voice now. “Yes, I’ve sent another one out into the void, perhaps to death again. One more …” She lowered her head on her knees and squeezed her eyes shut. And not even Luke’s comforting arm across her shoulders was able to ease the burden the Princess of Alderaan had to bear alone.

“Where do I go?” Dusque Mistflier shouted to her colleague. She turned to look up at him, barely able to hear herself over the noise of the crowd.

“I believe we have seats farther to the left,” he replied.

Several members of the rowdy assembly turned at the sound of Tendau Nandon’s unusual voice, despite the raucous atmosphere. It was a rather difficult sound to make out, and it had taken Dusque many months to understand the unusual harmonics of his speech.

Nandon was an Ithorian, a species some referred to as “Hammerheads.” Standing nearly two meters tall, he had a domed head that rested atop a long, curving neck. What lent his speech such a curious tone was that along the top of his neck, he had not one, but two mouths. So whenever he spoke, there was an unusual stereo effect; some found it disconcerting when he used Basic and impossible to understand when he communicated in his native tongue.

Dusque nodded to him and turned to face the direction he had indicated. She brushed her nearly waist-length, sandy-brown hair out of her eyes and cursed herself again for not tying it back away from her face. But Dusque hated fussing with herself, considering it too feminine a trait. Being feminine, she was learning, was not the most ideal situation within the Empire, so she made a concerted effort to appear as unfeminine as possible. She even thought about cutting her hair short. In her heart, she was certain her gender was why she was being held back and not utilized to the best of her abilities. Her current assignment, she felt, was proof enough of that.

Of course
, she told herself,
I’ve only been assigned to the Imperial corps of bioengineers for a few months now, but that still should afford me a measure of respect I have yet to see.

Instead, she found herself on the relatively peaceful and beautiful planet of Naboo at an animal handler and trainer event, sponsored by a casino, of all things. Not exactly a dream assignment, and Dusque suspected she had been given the task of collecting genetic tissue samples and recording trained animal behavior simply because most of her other colleagues, who were senior to her, felt the assignment beneath them. Granted, there was always something of value to learn from captive behaviors, and Dusque would have been the first to argue that fact to anyone else, but she wondered for the umpteenth time just what could be learned from this debacle.

The Aerie was a new casino that had opened very recently near the city of Moenia and was already touting itself as one of the premier gambling facilities in the galaxy. And as Dusque surveyed the throng of Bothans, Rodians, humans, Corellian animal traders, and others in attendance, she couldn’t deny that it had drawn a very large crowd, adding credence to its claims. A special arena with chairs had been set up near the casino, and impromptu betting tables had been hastily erected for the event. Hundreds of people had shown up. Dusque saw that nearly every seat was taken and that scores of other observers were hanging around behind the official viewing area. As Imperial scientists, Dusque and the Ithorian had ringside seating.

Dusque spotted two empty seats up front, and she picked her way over to them very carefully. She knew that Nandon was not comfortable walking planetside, and she adjusted her stride accordingly without drawing his attention to the fact. She didn’t want him to think that she was patronizing him, but she knew his struggles. Ithorians in general spent most of their time in floating cities above Ithor, never setting foot on their beautiful homeworld, so most were comfortable only on ships or other artificial constructs. Some of the more adventurous of the peaceful species had made their way into the stars, though. Tendau Nandon was one of those pioneers. But that didn’t change his discomfort.

Dusque was still learning about his species, but she understood how much they revered nature. In
fact, they worshiped the very nature of their planet and referred to it as Mother Jungle. Considering how highly they regarded the natural ecology, it was no wonder that many of the Ithorians actually came to be biologists and bioengineers, fascinated by all forms of life. And Nandon was one of the best biologists Dusque had ever known. The only reason her current assignment was at all bearable was because he had requested to go with her when no one else would.

Dusque was unaware what a sight they presented even in the eclectic gathering at the arena. Standing a full human head shorter than Nandon, Dusque was a slim woman, but she expertly hid her wiry form under loose trousers and an oversized top. Nandon had clicked in disapproval of her attire. Even he had recognized the false importance of the evening and had dressed accordingly, donning a special wrap he reserved for solemn occasions. He had urged her to wear something more formal, and Dusque had chuckled at his surprise when she informed him that she didn’t own any dresses.

“What would be the use?” she had asked him, her gray eyes twinkling. “You can’t run or climb with any amount of ease in the blasted things, so why have them?”

“That’s not what they are meant for,” he had countered.

“I don’t see you wearing one, although that wrap does set off your silver skin very nicely,” she said, and they had both shared a laugh. Once again, she
was glad she had an ally among her stoic colleagues. Despite her growing friendship with the Ithorian, however, Dusque still felt like an outsider in the sterile labs of her workplace.

“Here we are,” she said and seated herself, trying not to sound too discouraged.

“It could be worse,” Nandon told her in his lyrical voice.

“How so?” Dusque sighed.

“It could still be raining,” he pointed out, and that brought a crooked smile to Dusque’s face. She sighed, realizing that he would always point out something on the positive side. And he was right. It had rained heavily the previous night, and there was still a decidedly slurping sound as they had maneuvered through the spectators, but their chairs didn’t sink too far into the ground as they made themselves comfortable for what was undoubtedly going to be a long night.

Tendau’s right
, she told herself.
We’re bioengineers and this is our job.
Resigned to her assignment, Dusque pulled out a datapad and a stylus, ready to make notes on her observations. But her heart wasn’t in it. Not for the first time, she wondered where the choices in her young life had taken her.

From a large family, Dusque had been the youngest. And she had been the only daughter her parents conceived. Growing up on Talus, she had alternately been the baby and the pet, always under the watchful eyes of her four brothers. She had followed them around on their childhood adventures,
eventually growing strong enough to keep up with their running and climbing and building makeshift camps. Their tricks and pranks had made her tougher than most, because Dusque felt she had to take their teasing with a stiff upper lip. There had been no such thing as tears when she was little. Her brothers didn’t cry, so she didn’t, either.

Her father had toiled diligently for a small company manufacturing starship components. Not as prestigious as those companies located above Corellia, but it had been good work. And he had been a hard worker. Her mother kept the house and bandaged up the children when they had their cuts and scrapes. It had been a simple but good life. Unfortunately, it didn’t last.

Even though she had been little more than a child at the time, Dusque remembered when the Imperials started to make their presence known to those who worked on Talus. And she recalled how her father would come home at night, exhausted and worried, wondering just what the ships he helped construct were being used for. Many times he and her mother had talked late into the night about it, and Dusque remembered sneaking out of bed to listen in on them once in a while. There had always been tears and accusations when they spoke on the matter. But most of all, there had been fear. Even she had sensed that her parents were frightened. Tensions grew in their modest home. And then there was the day her father didn’t come home.

Her mother received word that he had collapsed
in the manufacturing facility and that by the time his coworkers had carried him to the medic, it had been too late. His heart had simply given out. Everything changed for Dusque at that point. Without her father to hold the family together, it frayed at the edges and eventually collapsed. Her mother never really recovered from the loss of her husband and became more of a shadow than ever. She catered to her sons and moved about like a ghost, as though she had lost her substance and ceased to exist. It was at this point that Dusque swore an oath: she would never let herself become like that, no matter the cost. And she would never again care about anything as she had for her family, because the price of loss was too steep.

Her two oldest brothers quit their studies and took up their father’s crafting profession. Dusque saw how it aged them prematurely, so she buried her nose deeper into her schoolwork, determined not to take that path. And when her studies were done for the evening and her home too somber, she would sneak out of their small compound and hide out in the forest where she and her brothers used to camp in happier times. She became more withdrawn from people and spent hours and hours studying the creatures native to her town. She began to prefer their company to that of other people, finding their cues and habits easier to read than those of humans. Her youngest brother joined the ranks of the Imperial forces, determined to become a pilot and soar through the stars, as resolute as
Dusque was to leave their small home behind. A few months after joining, he died in a training accident. And for the first time since the death of her father, Dusque saw her mother display an anger and a fire she hadn’t known the woman possessed.

For one moment, her mother was like a raging animal, and Dusque glimpsed just how deep her hatred for the Empire ran. She blamed them for her young son’s death as well as that of her husband. But her rage burned out quickly and once again she was only a shell of the woman she had formerly been. That was the year Dusque graduated with high honors and chose to pursue a path of bioengineering. In her eyes, this career combined her two greatest desires: it let her continue to study and track animals, and it got her off her homeworld. But because it was a profession that answered to and was governed by the Empire, Dusque was never really certain how much her decision might have broken what was left of her mother’s heart.

For the next few years, she completed the advanced studies required to proceed to bioengineering. The only effort she needed to make during her course work was mastering a medic’s knowledge of organic chemistry. That turned out to be the one she had to struggle with, because it wasn’t intuitive to her. The scouting aspect of her career choice came as second nature. Survival skills, as well as trapping, hunting, and exploration, were instinctive to her, and she excelled among her fellow students, finishing second in her class. Her high ranking
caught the attention of several prominent scientists of the Imperial party, along with garnering a stellar recommendation from her trainer, and she was awarded a position as a bioengineer.

Dusque, however, soon found it frustrating to distinguish herself from her male colleagues when she was no longer competing for scores and marks on exams. She answered to an older supervisor named Willel, who never seemed to trust her with any project of worth no matter what she did. Boring assignment after boring assignment came in, each of which she dutifully completed. She even found ways to make the assignments more exciting for herself, although her superiors never knew of her extra excursions. Still, she continued to receive the most simplistic studies, and the only thing she could conclude was that she was trapped in a male world. Most of the others she worked with had held their positions for decades, and there appeared to be no room for advancement within the ranks. She had traded what she felt was a dead-end life with her family for what looked like a dead-end career with the Empire. And her current whereabouts just affirmed her certainty.

“I think it’s going to begin,” Tendau told her, interrupting her depressive reverie. Dusque returned to the present and looked in the direction the Ithorian had indicated.

A slight, humanoid figure in a garish robe was entering the arena from the side and making his way
into the center. His green skin, antennae, and flexible snout told Dusque that he was a Rodian. She wasn’t surprised to see one of his species taking center stage, so to speak. She knew of several clans who had escaped the watchful eye of the Grand Protector and left the devastated ecology of Rodia. Most became dramatists of the highest caliber, and Dusque had recently viewed an excellent performance by a traveling troupe. But there was always something she found shifty about them, with their multifaceted eyes that were nearly impossible to read. Dusque placed a great deal of value in what she saw in another’s eyes.

The announcer cleared his throat before tapping a small transmitter attached to his cloak. “Let me extend a warm welcome to all of you this beautiful evening. My name is Eban Trey, and I will be your host for the tonight’s festivities,” he said with a great flourish.

“Let me be the first to welcome you to the finest gambling establishment of the Mid Rim: the Aerie Casino. To launch the official, grand opening of the casino, we have a night of extraordinary events for your entertainment. In a moment, I will turn this stage over to an incredible mix of exotic animals that the majority of you have never seen the likes of before or will ever see again in one venue.

“Coupled with their trainers and handlers, they will be pitted against one another until only the most skilled is left standing. But”—he added with a dramatic flair—“that will not signal the end. After
the winner has been awarded his or her prize, we will officially open the doors to the casino, and the first one hundred through the entrance will be given one hundred credits.”