Remote Alazhi Field, Thyferra

Sturm stared out into the jungle, taking in an intoxicating scent of the luscious jungle flora. A few leaves rustled as a Vratixan blood eagle swooped overhead. The man quietly dropped to the ground, hiding underneath the verdant Alazhi leaves. He blended in flawlessly with the environment, partially because his blast dampening armor was of camouflage pattern, and partially because netting trapped bits of the native flora to him. His hand reached out down his holster, silently retrieving his customized shattergun pistol; rebuilt primarily for greater durability. Alexander felt a gentle nudge at his boot. The former law enforcement agent peered up to stare into a bulbous, black eye. The Ashern Rebel crawled up to the man cautiously, clutching its own adapted blaster. His mandibles clicked quietly.

“Is there anything here?” questioned the alien softly.

“Not sure,” whispered the man, peering about the field, “I thought I might have heard something.”

“Better safe than sorry,” quoted the Vratix gnomically.

“Indeed,” agreed the man quietly, “but if there doesn’t appear to be anything.”

“One can never be sure,” murmured the alien, handing him a datapad.

The man grasped it.

It is rare for our people to agree with yours, human, but Vratix must agree with you. The stench of oppression makes us grow wearily of even breathing. We distrust these electronics; these comlinks or holoprojectors, or even this datapad. A courier will meet a member of your cell back in Xozhixi with what information we have gathered.

The man nodded. Thyferra was a world ripe for rebel activities. Two significant portions of the populace hating Palpatine’s Empire and its offspring for generations. The Vratix for the typical Imperial treatment of aliens, and both the Zaltin humans and Vratix for the oppression caused by Imperial occupation. When Ysanne Isard was in power, both groups had banded to together to oust the head of Imperial Intelligence; obtaining freedom. But the Empire had come back under a new woman: Bhindi Drayson. A woman both feared and loathed, just like her beloved Empire. But fear breeds anger, and anger actions. And soon, the Empire will know the our wrath. They had only wait for information to be compiled on local Imperial forces before they struck.

The sun was at its zenith, its rays washing over Xucphra City in an endless stream of light. Flocks of wide-winged cabarann dove through the metal canyons of the metropolis, their black and orange feathers rustling as they flew and giving quite a show to those tireless executives and secretaries who deigned to look up from their paperwork and watch. Of course, there were few spectators - there was, after all, a commercial enterprise to run.


The light which penetrated the towers of Xucphra Corporation complexes fell onto the tops of great mouris trees which lined the streets and avenues, giving the city a paradoxical aura: manufacturing centers and spaceports were separated by botanical gardens; stacks of black and grey belched smoke and steam alongside alazhi plants that produced oxygen with the same mechanical zeal of nearby droids. A million people lived in an uncharacteristic harmony of natural splendor and mass-produced glory.

A
nd watching over it all was Moff Trebik Alezhon Brathis. Such an impressive display, this realm of his. From the central tower of the Complexus Administratum, he looked down at everything he lorded over: the resorts along the shore of the the Azoran Sea, the sprawling Taim&Bakk facility where turret compenents were slapped together by an army of robots, and of course, the Xucphra Corporation's private complex which was five times larger than the city itself and ran from the city's edge into the horizon.


How things have changed! The squat Moff turned away from the panorama and plopped his girth down into a roling chair that his inertia pushed away and to the side of his broad desk. On the wall was a sweeping holo of what Thyferra had once been, a view of the past so to speak. Some of the Moff's aides thought it belonged in a museum, but he kept it there was a reminder of how far the Empire had come. Thyferra was once home to perhaps a hundred thousand humans who exploited a hundred million Vratix. That callousness had earned the Empire a rebellion and lost it the the most lucrative monoply in history.


Things had changed, then. Two generations had come and gone since the time of Ysanne Isard. The Empire changed. Rather than exploit the natives once the world was re-conquered, it was decided to use them. The definition might be similar to a layman, but the Empire had grown smarter in its nearly endless defeats after Endor. The Vratix were given everything they wanted to become productive but the final goal was kept just out of reach. With every increase in productivity their rights were restored and prosperity increased until now they walked the same streets as Imperial Citizens. True enough, they were Imperial Citizens. The xenophobes hated every step of the process calling only on human superiorty, but their anger was drowned out by the painful reminder that the tenents of human superiority had lost the Empire two Death Stars, a hundred battles, and a billion lives.


Now... The Moff pulled himself back to the center of his desk and looked deeply at that holo-picture, that reminder. Thyferra was now a world of seven hundred million Vratix and fifty million humanoids, spotted with spaceports, factories, and cities. Surely there were still hotbeds of trouble, including the Ashern who had never gone away. However, a plethora of police forces kept their collective eyes on all dissenters. Things were far from perfect, but the visage of perfection was maintained at all costs. The carrot and the stick approach had worked....and it had worked well.


Now, things work. And I don't have to.


The portly Moff smiled and accessed the computer terminal built into his desk. And there, plain on his schedule program for all to see, was his agenda. It was empty. He had nothing to do.


And he was happy about that.

“All oppression creates a state of war.”
~Simone de Beauvoir

Xozhixi, Thyferra

Xozhixi, the capital of Thyferra, as it was called by native Vratix had been rebuilt out of shambles by the Empire. But they had called it Xucphra City, much to the chagrin of the native peoples. Sturm turned his eye from the window of a middle-class apartment to a lean man approaching him with a bottle.

“Brandy, Native?”

Glancing at the rest of his cell mates about the room, Sturm shook his head, “No thank you, Lantern.”

Thyferra resistance solely used codenames as forms of address, even when in person in a safe location. Never knowing anyone’s true name had made it initially difficult to trust anyone, but after several months, Sturm had “settled in”; if one could ever settle within a resistance group. But truly settling in was an impossibility. Paranoia still ate away at him.

“Did you learn anything from them?” asked a younger man. Years ago, in the flower of his youth, he had been a soldier in the now disposed Jutraalian Empire on Thyferra. But times had changed. What had been his stomping grounds were now the Empire’s. Shame and revenge now claimed the man for the resistance.

“Yes,” tersely replied Alexander, “I did.”

“Well,” questioned a woman, once a member of the now-disposed of Zaltin Corporation, “what did you learn?”

“The Ashern have been mobilizing to fight, just as we have been,” explained Sturm, “they seem to have a lot of gear stockpiled from the Bacta War, and even from Vratix Occupation. It’s definitely outdated stuff, but it’ll definitely work; blasters haven’t changed that much over time…probably have more stuff than we do.”

“But our’s is of higher quality, I imagine,” replied Lantern, sitting down, “thanks to Handy.”

The first man nodded appreciably, “The best Fearson’s could buy, at the time. A changed man he is now, bowing down to them…”

“But he could return to greatness, if he threw off the yoke of the New Order,” suggested Native, “we must at least try and give him and the other leaders of a galaxy that chance.”

“But to do that,” replied the feminine voice of Turtle, “we have to take out their support.”

Sturm nodded. “Xucphra has to go. Anyone who supports the Empire politically and economically has to go; they prop up the war machine which is the tool of the Emperor’s oppression.’

“Easier targets too,” smiled Lantern, “I like the prospect of actually living.”

“Excellent, because that’s what the Ashern are up to, and we’re going to help,” agreed Sturm, “You can only appease people for so long before they want it all. The Empire has given the Vratix but a taste of what they could have, and they want more of it.”



Two days later…

‘They’re moving into position,” whispered Sturm, staring through the macroscope of his hunting rifle.

“Great,” replied Lantern quietly, “now let’s hope they do their job well.”

From their vantage point in a grove of trees, the two cellmates could barely make out the refinery. But through their macroscopes, the Xucphra complex stood like an imposing fortress, speckled with Vratix and their human counterparts. Several of the apparent workers approached a pair of guards at the entrance. The three Vratix lead the guards around the corner…into an ambush. A pair of Ashern stood waiting for them in the dark corner, and immediately gunned the two down with silenced slugthrowers. A few minutes later, a loadspeeder pulled into the facility. Within a half hour, the Ashern rebels filtered out of the facility, and the fertilizer bomb within the landspeeder exploded, wiping out the refinery in a giant blast.

XC-16 was not a glamorous name, certainly not when one considered just what XG-16 was: one of seven individual refining centers in the sprawling Xucphra Industrial Center. Other than the ten thousand beings that labored within it, monitoring, repairing, and operating, the regular Thyferran knew - and cared - little about it. Of course, that was then.

Now, with flames that challanged smoke stacks and air-exhaust scrubbers for height supremacy stretching into the night sky, the name XG-16 would be immortalized. Barely had the first sirens started screaming into the darkness when news stations across the planet broke into normal programming and reported the devastation. Now workers in blue, flame retardent jumpsuits and helmets that fit clumsily regardless of species raced out every available exit. Against the exodus came Vratix in red suits driving all manner of rescue equipment. Water monitors built into the ferrocrete started pumping thousands of gallons a minute at the inferno.

Somehow, I'll get some measure of blame for this. Sergeant Ovorra was a short but muscular man, barely topping a meter and half. His shoulders were as broad as a man far taller, giving him an almost comical appearance as he pulled himself from his squad car. He straightened his Xucphra Company Police tunic and shuddered. Even a night, the refinery was lit by thousands of lights on hundreds of towers and a mind-boggling number of pipes and tubes. He could see the flames and the damage with ease from the main gate and he knew, with all certainty, that weeks would pass before the flaming unit was operational again.

" What the hell happened?" screamed another sergeant, this one running at a gallop from a nearby administration building. Ovorra knew he was asking no one and everyone at the same time, but he could understand. The main gate officer responded. " Speeder crashed the gate, went into the refinery and boom. A few jumped out and ran, but the driver must've gone up with the speeder. Some sort of bomb."

Ovorra shrugged. " Did you get any of the runners?"

" We shot, sure. Some of my guys are out searching. The question is how they got through the first perimeter!"

The question faded into the cacophony of small explosions and the crackling of burning bacta tanks. Another siren grew louder, one that definitely did not belong to any refinery fire vehicle or police cruiser. It was a distinctive whine that gave away its owner long before it could be seen. All three Xucphra police officers felt themselves sink as the siren neared.

A Xucphra Police vehicle approached, followed by a black speeder sporting mirrored windows and only one symbol - the Imperial Crest.

" Oh frell..."

The speeder stopped near the gate. barely had the door popped when much screaming came from inside the refinery: one of the cooling towers was collapsing. Ground-monitors and a quick fire team and contained the fire, but the targetted unit would probably be burned to the ground. Such violence was an excellent - and horrible - precessional for the black uniformed man that approached the gate. He might have been pulled out of bed by the explosion, but he showed no sign of it. Instead, he walked calmly and deliberately up to the three police officers. Removing his glasses, he surveyed the destruction, the devastation, before him.

" We can handle this," Ovorra muttered, totally unimpressed with the arrival of Imperial Intelligence.

" I don't doubt you can, now. All you have to do is direct traffic and count bodies."

The gibe made all three cops grit their teeth, but the Intelligence officer simply turned back towards them. An eerie grin seemed pasted onto the Imperial's face, sending a chill down each policeman's spine.

" What's so funny? People are dead!" the Gate officer asked, unable to restrain himself.

The Intelligence officer pointed at the fire. " This is," he quipped, smugly. " The question has never been if we will be struck, just when and where. There are a dozen rebel groups on Thyferra and one of them just made its largest mistake!"

" What the fu - " Ovorra put his hand on the other Sergeant's chest, stopping him from saying something he would probably regret, something that would, in all likelihood, get him a trip to prison.

The Intelligence officer pointed to a Vratix firefighter on a picee of fire apparatus from Refinery XG-72. " Can't say which group now, of course - perhaps the Ashern. They have been around for almost twenty years. They want to drive a wedge between the natives and the Empire. By striking the largest employer of natives on the whole world, they've killed many of them. All they've done is give the Vratix a reason to hate the Rebels. As we speak, fire-teams from the Navy and Army are en-route here. A few will be hurt in the process of helping to save wounded Vratix and the sentimental natives will be even more loyal than they were before!"

" You can - "

" Of course I can. You would be suprised what a little death and destruction can accomplish, Sergeant. Good day."

As nonchalantly as he came, the Intelligence officer re-boarded his speeder and drove off into the distance. The Rebels truly do need to plan more...

“Okay…here they come…now….fire.”

Sturm squeezed the trigger of his hunting rifle once. He watched in pained fascination as the slug surged silently through the night air, and into the breast of a bewildered Xucaphra policeman. Screaming, the man pressed his hand tightly over his heart. Alexander winced. Poor guy.

He tapped the trigger again.

Seconds later, another one of his slugs passed through the officer’s body.

The policeman collapsed to the ground, a new stream of blood gushing down from his head. He was silent now; he was at peace, in the midst of chaos; in a chaos in which none of the other officers noted the man’s untimely death.

And why should they?

One does not stand around and gape when bullets were whizzing by.

Sturm wasn’t the only sniper. Several other Ashern and other rebels were taking out police officers and military persons at random with their own silenced slugthrowers. It was not a terribly difficult task, with XC-16 and its area being bathed in light from the towers. It was the perfect shooting gallery, from the perfect point. The snipers were hard to locate, from the alhazi undergrowth, from the darkness, and from no sound or visible light coming from their weapons.

Yet the chaos wrought by those rebels was insignificant to the main event.

Brief gouts of flame sporadically leapt up from the darkness which enshrouded the fields which surrounded XC-16. Rockets and missiles of various makes soared through the air, and reigned fire and terror on the good Samaritan firefighters of the Imperial Armed Forces, setting up to battle the blaze.

In a rare moment of irony, firefighting equipment succumbed to the blazing fires and fireballs of rebel explosives. Shrapnel from the hit vehicles and the equipment shot through the air, ripping into the flesh of the Imperial firefighters, and into the few Xucphra policeman and firemen nearby. Several of the wounded fireman rose, and promptly fell under the bullets of the snipers. Sturm drew his bead on an Imperial serviceman, and pulled the trigger; the fireman officer fell, in the middle of issuing orders to his men. Sturm’s wrist chrono buzzed. Crap. Got to run. Local forces are probably going to start getting here in a few minutes.

The rebel immediately lowered his rifle, and quickly disassembled it. Hurriedly stuffing the weapon into a small duffel bag, the man immediately began to jog away to his cell’s escape vehicle; one of the countless landspeeders used by Alhazi Inspectors across the planet. He ran several hundred meters to the craft parked by the side of the road. Already, he could make out the dim shapes of the cell’s three other members.

“Hurry up!” demanded Lantern, “we don’t have that much time.”

Sturm clammered into the back of the vehicle, and the landspeeder pulled away into the night, flitting among the chaotic traffic of civilian onlookers, news groups, firefighters, other company vehicles, and more likely than not, several law enforcers. Their skimmer casually drifted through traffic, being passed on several occasions by racing Xucphra policemen. Sturm, having removed all of his hunting gear into the trunk, idly watched the work of their destruction. Fires had spread into the nearby alhazi fields near XC-16, whether from the rebel racketeers or from the blazing complex, Sturm did not know, nor did he care. What he did know, is that Xucphra would be taking more losses from the field’s damaging, and that any traces of the rebel’s presence were being disintegrated. Turtle lightly tapped him on his arm.

“Do we have back-up, if we need it?”

“Back-up is already here, just hidden in case we need it.”

Turtle nodded. “Cool. Most of the other rebels are out…right before the cavalry arrive.”

“Classic hit-and-fade…”



Previously…Rebel Planning Session

“Are you serious? You want me to stay hidden in a field, and watch the Vratix blow up a refinery?”

Sturm nodded. “Yes.”

“Are you crazy? Risk my life for nothing, and give suspicion to other people by taking off of work?” replied Handy.

Sturm smiled corruptly.

“It’s a bit more complex than that. It’s a trap. Hitting a refinery is nice, is does economic harm to Xucphra, and to the Empire. But it has its problems. But that can be changed by hitting it in the evening.

Why? Because if we hit in the late evening, the refinery is going to have minimal staff, or to us, minimal civilian casualties. Secondly, we’re all going to be off work, living our own lives from work; it won’t be hard to concoct an alibi for where we were during the blast…we were out drinking, enjoying the company of our friends at the start of a new weekend…”

“You haven’t explained why we’re there in the first place…” reminded Turtle.

“True,” smiled Alexander, “but do you really think I’d have us go out just to see fireworks? Really, the explosion is the bait for an ambush; one that we’re going to set.”

“What?”

“What happens when a building catches fire?”

Lantern shrugged. “People evacuate, firefighters and police come to deal with the flames…”

“Exactly. Firefighters, police, military personnel all come to take care of the disaster. Who do we want to kill? Policemen, soldiers, and other government workers…just who we have all arriving at the scene in a rush.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” said Handy, “I understand killing the policemen and soldiers, but why the firemen?”

“Because they’re government workers…” mused Turtle, “and without workers, a government fails. Even supposing that the attack doesn’t kill that many government workers, how many of them are going to want to show up for work? Not many, it’s demoralizing. They’re going to want to find new and safer work…and not in the government or Xucphra…”

“Which destabilizes both organizations…without people to run them, they’ll collapse eventually,” added Sturm.

“Until they get droids,” grinned Lantern.

“Which we get to blow up instead…” replied Handy with a twinkle.

“In any case, the attack demonstrates that the neither Xucphra or the Empire is all powerful; and we, Xucphra, the Empire, and everyone else needs to be reminded of that,” stated Sturm, “and I’m sure neither the Empire nor Xucphra are going to love the dent in their pocketbooks from the operation…”

A Remote Vinda Corporation Alazhi Plantation

Dirk smeared the beads of sweat rolling down his much scarred face with the matte black back of his cybernetic hand. Thyferra’s sun Polith though sinking low into the western horizon still burned like fire. He rested his shovel on his shoulder as he made his way back to his hut. Another day of back breaking labor as a human outcast among the Vatrix was behind him.

Through the eyes of most this kind of work seemed below a veteran of the Commonwealth’s war with the forces of the Domain, but primitive agriculture suited Dirk just fine. Too many battles had sated his once youthful lust for adventure. He’d escaped his parent’s farm ten years ago to see the galaxy for himself, but now he was again doing what his teenage self had hated more than anything and loving every second of it.

After a prestigious career in the Commonwealth Army ended with a medical discharge a year ago, he had immediately been offered a job by the Vinda Corporation. He turned down many other career paths with the conglomerate for this assignment. The tranquility that came with supervising the most remote of Vinda Corp’s bacta interests on Thyferra was just what Dirk needed to get his life back together mentally following the war. He was on the edges of galactic civilization out here in this remote patch of jungle.

Much of Thyferra’s pristine jungles had been leveled to make way for the Empire’s new vision for the planet, but Vinda Corp held on to a small portion of it. Making bacta the traditional way had its advantages as far as quality is concerned.

“Dirk, you know there are easier ways of doing things than that old shovel. I mean it’s not even automated,” chimed in Dirk’s HLH persona companion Tarp.

“Easier but not better… or even equivalent,” responded Dirk.

“Fair enough Dirk, your terse logic defeats my holographic brain once again,” jested Tarp.

Tarp was the only being who spoke to Dirk in anything other than broken basic on the entire plantation. He was officially a Doppleganger Persona of fallen soldier from Dirk’s unit. His brain had been scanned onto a bio-chip seconds prior to his death on Kirima. Tarp’s death had not ended their friendship. He now assisted Dirk in administration of the plantation and served as a bodyguard in his Hardlight capacity.

Suddenly the hologram tensed up as only someone with human tendencies could.

“There’s been an explosion at the refinery,” said Tarp. “I’m getting negative status readings on the Vinda Corp. associates stationed there,” he added coldly.

“You’re letting that computer jargon invade again, Tarp,” said Dirk as he dropped his shovel and ran to the plantation’s speeder.



Inspector Zate Gunnang and Colonel Linz Tau had barely powered down their Commonwealth Secret Service Valkyries when they hopped on a speeder destined for Thyferra’s morgue.

They had been dispatched by Commonwealth Intelligence to investigate the explosion. The pair had poured over the available Imperial reports on what had been labeled an act of terrorism, but the reports were ripe with the INS’s trademark censorship.

The voice of higher up in the Vinda Corporation rang in Zate’s head.

“I don’t care if they don’t let you two anywhere near the site of the explosion. Just make sure that they remember that a percentage of that bacta is ours.”

Verifying the identities of the charred remains of the Vinda Corp. associates was painful, but nothing new in their line of work.

The morgue had not been designed to hold the amount of dead that the explosion had produced, so they had simply been put wherever space allowed.

“The final count is ten Commonwealth nationals and the same number in VC employed Vatrix,” reported the Twilek colonel.

“Damn… that’s more than we expected isn’t?” murmured Zate.

“‘fraid so old friend…” answered the Twilek.

“How’s Dirk doing?” asked the inspector.

Dirk had been shot through the right shoulder blade while assisting the Imperials in trying to evacuate the wounded from the explosion site, and was currently being submerged in bacta.

“He’ll live. He’s got more lives than a Krayt Dragon from what I hear. That Doppleganger of his can run the plantation until he's back on his feet.”

“Well, I guess things could be worse,” sighed Zate as they walked out of the morgue.