Alema Torr
SWRP Writer
- Joined
- Nov 20, 2019
- Messages
- 30
- Reaction score
- 11
Republic-flagged transport ship Sanguine, present day
Taking charge of routine transport inspections was one of Alema's duties, but it was not one that she had been required to do of late. After a brief and flirtatious episode with the halls of power, perhaps her superiors had decided it was time to humble her. At any rate, she had been on inspection duty for a few weeks and she was very nearly freed up from the drudgery. Unfortunately for the sailors of the infamous Carbonite Run, Alema had developed a reputation for exacting and incisive inspections of cargo going to and from the Deep Core.
The Twi'lek officer had cut her teeth in sector customs, so she easily sank back into the routine: go over the checklist with the captain, grill the crew on a few questions, and pop open cargo containers while the naval police made sure he didn't intervene. The Sanguine wasn't much different. She'd detected some nervousness in the captain, but the cargo was supposedly pretty dangerous: a shipment of carbonite stabilizers to the Empress Teta System, and a segregated compartment of tibanna gas from the Outer Rim. If the chemicals mixed, the explosion would probably be visible from Coruscant itself. What struck her as odd was that the ship had come down the Corellian Run, which was awfully far from Bespin and the tibanna-rich gas giants in the Galactic Southwest. Given the risks, it was a long way to go with such a volatile cargo.
Opening the Tibanna chamber wasn't difficult. The captain had given her the wrong codes- something he was sure to blame on a faulty memory -but she was a quick hand at slicing cargo containers. A gas rig like this couldn't be outfitted with military locks without arousing much more suspicion than a missing code, and most inspectors only used the gas-port analyzer. Alema suspected that it would read 99% Tibanna no matter what was in the ship, and she was becoming increasingly suspicious that this captain really wasn't hauling gas.
As the sealed bulkhead door opened, Alema listened for the hiss of pressurization... But as it swung open with only a groan of rusty metal, she saw the reason for the deception. Standing in the center of the room, her eyes wide with fright, was a girl. She couldn't have been older than 14, and her blue skin and pale hair marked her as a Pantoran. Clutched in her right hand was the reason she needed such covert accomodations: a handmade light-saber, its owner too scared to even activate its blade.
Alema shut the door and left the cargo bay. Five minutes later the ship was charging for a jump to hyperspace, its manifest stamped and approved: 200 tons of carbonite stabilizers, and 20 cubic meters of refined tibanna gas.
Through the viewport of her patrolcraft, the Twi'lek watched the aging transport shudder, then recede from view in the blink of an eye. "I kept my promise." She said, and smiled as she reminisced about a time long ago.
The cargo hold of the Brentaal, 10 years ago
The light of foreign stars spilled through small holes in the roof of the metal shipping container, illuminating the meager pallet that the Twi'lek girl had slept on for almost a week now. She had no expectations of comfort when she spent her savings on a ticket to Coruscant. This was just something temporary, something to endure until she could get a better life.
In any case, it wasn't the ration bars, or the stale water, or even the bed that dominated her thoughts, it was the waiting. Every time they stopped outside a planet and the crew loaded cargo, Alema wondered if they would find her. Once a customs officer had almost opened her container, but he had picked the one next to her instead. She also heard the crew moving around her sometimes, and once they had moved her from one side of the vessel to the other. That was the worst part. One day she feared someone would notice her, and when that day came she wondered what they would do...
...What she didn't know, was that today was that day.
@TheMorrigan