Vyren Dax
Vyren Dax stared down at his right hand. Technically it wasn’t his; it had been assembled from a thousand different components, each of which had existed in once functioning droids. Except the skin, of course. That he’d purchased. If he looked closely the difference was obvious – instead of the faint meandering, crosshatching pattern of real skin, the surface was covered in minute dots that mimicked capillary action and friction so things didn’t fall from his fingers. Everything he was, everything he did, was defined by the need, construction, and history of one mundane prosthetic.
The carrier hit some sort of turbulence – some weird, vast heap of hyper dense material in the planet’s surface that dimpled the otherwise even fabric of space-time – and it shifted course shifted course. Vyren rattled in his seat, the restraining straps old and lax enough to be completely ineffective. He cursed.
“Protec always takes first timers over the Grayvian asteroid island,” the rooms only other occupant said, his mon Calimari eyes twitching and swivelling in a constant fidget. “Finds it funny.”
“You could’ve warned me yourself.” Vyren said, tugging straps that would go no tighter.
“I find it funny too.” He considered articulating what he thought of that response, but just snorted instead. He didn’t know anything about Protec or Rakkajan, other than they had a ship, were heading to Elrood, and didn’t charge too much. Through the filthy pane at the rear of the ship, the rolling curve of Lodon ocean divided blue sky from bluer sea, the moon Sharene showed one alabaster cheek off to one side. The grey-orange heap of the island that caused the turbulence shrank to a tiny mark, camouflaged against those already on the glass. Vyren mused that there weren’t enough tatooine analog planets along the Rimma Trade Route to account for the grime on the window. Whatever they were, simple local traders didn’t ring true. In the cockpit, Protec yammered into the communicator in a blistering exchange of flight information with the starport in Dinbar.
“What you here for?” Rakkajan asked. Vryen always found it disconcerting speaking to Mon calamari. The monocular dominance of their eye position meant he rarely felt they were giving him their full attention.
“Transfer flight,” he replied. “You weren’t going any further toward the rim.” Rakkajan snorted.
“I meant hiking along the Rimma TR. Most people I see without a ship are either resettling, which requires a hell of a lot more luggage than one bag, or running from something, which normally involves a lot less haggling.” Vyren thought he saw one eye tighten with annoyance. He couldn’t see the other.
“Research trip.” He answered.
“With no science vessel?”
“Personal research. I’m writing a book.” For a moment Rakkajan just stared then hiccupped a laugh, incredulous. Outside, the continent suddenly spread into view as they swept overhead, like someone pouring forests and plains onto the crystal beauty of the sea.
“Bantha
. Ain’t no one interested in a potted history of the TR or the Nebula Front. That was all over the holonet at the time, and no one wants to remember it.” The tone in Rakkajan’s voice surprised Vyren. He almost filed that away for later, to see where it fitted amongst the other snippets of information he held about them. Then he remembered he had no plan to see either of them again.
“There’s a lot more to history than what’s on the holonet newsfeeds.” Vyren replied with a shrug.
“What? Like that clown Verus Anima? Always squirting his “true facts” about whatever’s got his wookie in a huff that week all over hyperspace. No one gives a womp rat’s arse about it.” Vyren raised one eyebrow for a moment then let it fall. it was a typical reaction from people who wanted to believe Verus Anima, but found belief sat too close to hope, and the empire’s grip left little room for that.
“No, I didn’t mean him. I meant those little remnants of civilisations and societies that no longer exist, but get overlooked for the current configuration of the galaxy. For instance, did you know they speculate at least three different advanced civilisations grew and died right here on Elrood before it was colonised. Just that time has forgotten them. Fragments of great things no one wants to remember because it's belies current societies fragility.”
“What a load of Bantha – “
“Yeah I get it. I know it ain’t for everyone. Like I said, personal interest.” Rakkajan rolled his massive eye and shrugged.
“Archaeology, eh? Well guess if you want to chase around myths about dusty old relics, that’s your business.”
“I’ve got some solid leads.” Vyren smiled slightly to himself. He wondering if this possible jedi survivor from the great Purge, Jeril, would enjoy being called a dusty and old. Assuming he had drawn a true picture from the bits and pieces of information he’d pieced together over the years. And assuming he could find this Jeril and ask him. He had less faith in his ability to do the latter.
With the same casual jolts that had littered their journey, Protec planted the ship on their allocated pad and the restraining straps popped free, retracting with a creak. Vyren stood and stretched; the loose straps and haphazard trip through the atmosphere hadn’t left more that the odd bruise. The goodbyes were perfunctory, and heaving his pack over one shoulder, he hopped out of the large loading door onto the apron. A gaggle of dock administrators scuttled over, stabbing at datapads almost without looking. Vyren walked away and slipped into the currents of the starports flowing traffic.
Though he was here to find a transfer flight, he still had an errand to run. It wasn’t hard to find what he needed; the huge holonet antenna jutted out of the side of the municipal looking building that no doubt housed the flight control centre. It was fifty meters tall if it was a foot and looking impossibly slender. With clusters of smaller antennae suddenly bursting from the complex thatch of struts that made the frame, each gun-barrel straight and spawning yet more wires. Vyren thought it looked like some fractal lightning bolt frozen and cast in carbonite.
Vyren knew the holonet intimately. Until a decade ago he’d been a technical consultant for the final stages of reinstallation for the system for use with the imperial navy. When the Empire moving all news stations under their control, Vyren began actively reporting for local new stations, retrieving footage for whatever story was being primed, doing the boring legwork of data mining, searching and writing, and then sending those through the approved channels. Honest work, and one that broadened his skill set from recalibrating Holonet Transceivers. He logged his reports, collected his pay, and went about whatever report they wanted doing next
But the darkness soon leaked in. Often operating on the fringes of Imperial control, the endless scenes of rebellions and dissention brutally put down by the army changed him. What had been senseless terrorism to a more complex hue, and the Empire’s single-minded, totalitarian approach began to look more and more like it was: Tyranny. His reports and footage took a different tone; instead of sticking to whatever angle they’d asked of him, he strayed from his remit and reported the unalloyed truth. And that made no difference.
When the ‘news’ was finally prepared and packaged for transmission, his reports had been dismantled and reassembled, utterly changing what he had seen back into their original design. And it was a design, he saw. The Galactic News Agencies were little more than mouthpieces for Imperial lies, whispering to the masses to keep calm as the Empire tightened its choke hold. He stopped sending his reports and footage, instead trying to find someone, anyone, who’d believe him. For a year he wandered around with the truth in his hands, looking for a way to get it out into the light, until finally he’d made a breakthrough. Within a poorly mothballed Holonet Waystation, he found a working line into the underlying code of the net itself. It was a start, but it might just give him access to the keys he needed. He repaired it, stabilised its decaying orbit, then found the nearest planet where he could plan.
The Imperial Security Bureau took him soon after that.
In some cold cave where the air seemed mostly hot nitrogen, his torturers were thorough with him, and yet they seemed more interested in the process rather than asking questions. Thankfully it seemed they had detained him for dissent, rather than for anything to do with the holonet, otherwise they might not have been so casual. Still, it only took a month before he broke and he couldn’t take any more - and then he cut off his own hand to escape.
He lay low for what must have been months, hiding in the salvage yard of some industrial complex, stealing tools and building a new hand. When he finally got off world and began accessing the news databases, he found no mention of himself at all; it seemed they thought one journalist couldn’t be any kind of threat to the might of the empire
He intended to make them regret that decision.
At the base of the antenna, he casually slipped into a small space hidden from view and waited. No one followed. After half hour with no one as much as casting a shadow across the opening while walking past, he dipped into his bag and pulled out one of his microdroids. It was essentially a camera he’d rigged to a proximity sensor, biometric detector and a small anti-grav unit - a crude approximation of one of the camera droids he’d used out in the field to capture footage. Using his array of tools he had an access panel open in a few seconds and spliced the camera output into the powerful circuitry, creating a natural bypass.
Despite the danger, he didn’t breath heavy; his hands were steady, nimble. Perhaps ninety seconds had elapsed before he finished the new transmission configuration. It was crude, but he knew it worked. Plus it left the minimal software trail should the Empire track it back to source. Finally he pulled off the little finger of his right hand, and slotted the exposed interface adapter into the camera.
As Verus Anima he’d sent dozens of reports into the holonet, exposing the truth of what the Empire really was, pulling back the curtain to reveal the ugly, malicious workings of their power. And all of them had been done this way. The carrier virus was designed to find a specific ‘live’ broadcast, one he’d spent weeks identifying - hacking too deeply into the Empire’s intelligence network raised too many alerts, and so he could only really monitor the data going in and out. Then it was a case of using the old waystation he had repaired to identify a single transceiver’s access codes so he could get his program into the data stream unfiltered by Imperial Security, and there it would wait until the broadcast was transmitted. His new report would piggy-back onto that signal and overwrite it when it was executed.
It was time consuming and dangerous, and against the sheer size of the Empire’s proprganda machine, his handful of reports a year seemed pitiful. But it was what he could do, and if that kept the rebellion’s morale high enough to keep fighting, or recruited even just a hundred citizens to their cause, it was worth it.
With the report copied from his microdroid and held within the virus code, he quickly unplugged everything and stuffed it into his bag. He didn’t care about fixing the panel - no one would notice in time anyway. Swinging it over he shoulder, he took a deep breath and strode smoothly back out into the starport as though the small niche was nothing more than a toilet cubicle.
The program was due to execute in three hours. Vyren intended to be on another ship in half that and heading towards Lanthrym. There he would hunt down Jeril Rain, and his next report, carefully edited to ensure the Empire wouldn’t know where to look, would bring hope to the rebellion that perhaps a sliver of the galaxy before the Empire’s rule remained.
