Jackdaw

Nar Shaddaa

Khulbe's Palace - Telsa

---

Telsa, now relieved of her case of contraband, strode out onto the landing pad and toward the ship, hot on Jast’s heels. “That went well,” she suggested. The captain nodded.

“Better than I expected,” he replied. “Say one thing about Khulbe the Hutt, he gives you a fair enough deal,” he said, striding up the Raven’s boarding ramp no sooner than it touched down. Like Jast, Telsa had been no fan of the 25% up-front price, but the back-end reward for bringing in the chemist, or even just the formula, was more than enough. It put them in an interesting position. It freed them up to travel without issue, served as marginal compensation, and gave them more than enough reason to go on a bounty hunting expedition. That said, this was an expedition that put them up against one of the most powerful criminal enterprises in the Mid Rim.

“This is Pyxis we’re talking about, though,” she cautioned, hoping to raise the issue sooner rather than later, but Jast was already engaged, mid-conversation with Val, who had been standing expectantly at the top of the Raven’s boarding ramp.

“I will tell you all the details as soon as you tell me why the hell we have people falling out of my ship,” he answered their blue-skinned mechanic.

“There must have been some sort of issue with the lock on the external hatch down there. I’ve been looking into it,” she offered in return, but even as she spoke he turned down a corridor, following Boqorro’s voice.

Telsa came to a stop, hands on her hips as she followed him with her eyes until he was out of sight. She looked at Val, who hit a button on the side of the rampwell. After answering her touch with a heavy chunk, the ramp ascended. “He’s not happy about this one,” Telsa said. Val waved a hand as she waited for the ramp to finish closing.

“He’ll get over it,” she answered easily. Val and Jast had a long working relationship. Jast had never given her the story in full, but from what Telsa had pieced together Val had been a farm girl on Ryloth, repairing agricultural vehicles when Jast picked her up. Why exactly Val had signed on with Jast—why Val was working on a Rylothian farm after graduating from a Core Worlds university with a degree in mechanical engineering—Telsa had never figured out. There was some kind of story there, she figured. Point was, they’d been flying together for three years and then some, and trusted each other implicitly.

“Yeah,” Telsa agreed. “We got a good deal,” she continued, appraising Val of the situation. “I’m going to prep the valves for release so we can off-load the cargo.” She moved for the cockpit. Val followed, the Twi’lek’s nose down in a datapad as she considered what looked to be a readout of the Raven’s internal sensors. “So, who’s our surprise guest?” Telsa asked.

[@Saix @The Wyrm]

- - -

The Raven Trespass - Boqorro

---

“And that’s all I got out of her,” Boqorro finished, having relayed his conversation with the prisoner thus far in full. Jast nodded, regarding the Zelosian with pursed lips and narrow eyes.

“Thanks Boq,” he answered. Boqorro nodded and took his position against the wall. The captain turned in full toward their pale, green-skinned prisoner, who still sat on the chair Boqorro had commandeered from the mess. “T’a? That’s your name? My friend here tells me you speak Basic. Is that correct?” After receiving an affirmative response, the captain pressed on.

“Perfect. Now, T’a, you are on Nar Shaddaa, at the primary place of business of one of the most feared crime lords in all of Hutt Space. You’ve broken the laws of both the Galactic Republic and the planetary government of Ord Mantell by trespassing on my ship, and you've offended my sense of hospitality by complicating a tremendously important business opportunity for both myself and my crew. So, what am I supposed to do with you? Because the way I see it, I can fly you back to Ord Mantell and hand you off to the local law enforcement authorities there, or I can dump you in an alley here on a planet with one of the highest murder rates per capita in the entire galaxy. I'm not sure I would feel particularly terrible either way.”

Boqorro smirked as Jast finished his little speech. Boqorro wasn't much for words, but he appreciated the captain's affinity for them. Of course, Jast was far more bark than bite. In Boqorro's experience, you watched out for the quietest people in the room. Those were the real killers.

[@Mistiel]

Nar Shaddaa

Khulbe's Palace - Jast

---

Jast took another long drag on the cigarra, mulling over the Hutt’s offer. The upfront payment was less than he’d like. The twenty-five percent only came out to some seventy-five thousand. Considering the lengths he and the crew had gone to obtain it, it wasn't fair consideration for the services provided. Piracy was out of their usual area of operations, and this pseudoteth job, stolen from a Golden Mynock Chemical freighter mid-transit, had put them out of their league.

The back end of the offer was very good, though. Too good to pass up, he decided.

“That's a fair deal, Khulbe, we can work with that,” Jast answered with a smile. “I’ll take it. We'll offload the pseudoteth with your ground crew before we leave.” He wasn’t a fan of accepting an offer so early in the negotiation, but the back-end was good enough to make the low up-front worth it. There was some uncertainty to actually receiving that money, but the Hutt had never failed to follow through when Jast delivered on his end on the bargain.

And with the pseudoteth in the Raven’s hold, he didn’t have much in the way of options anyway.

He finished his glass of brandy and stood. “Good doing business with you, as usual. Anything else I can do for you?”

[@Saix @The Wyrm]

- - -

The Raven Trespass - Boqorro

---

“Hm,” Boqorro intoned. It was plausible enough, he figured. All the same, the captain had his enemies, now more than ever. Imperial Intelligence, Pyxis, certain Hutts scattered across the Outer Rim. Any one of them would be willing to track down the Raven. His spot on the ship had opened up because his predecessor had died on Nar Shaddaa, engaged in a shootout with Sith intelligence operators. They were in a dangerous line of work, made safer only be their efforts to minimize their risk of exposure to their adversaries.

Jast believed they'd gotten away clearly, and it seemed they had, but Imperial Intelligence was not so easy to dodge. Some Cipher Agent, somewhere out there, had a file on their Nar Shaddaa deal and a vested interest in finding the Raven and her crew.

He brought his thoughts back to this Zelosian girl, unlikely Imperial spy she was.

“Ship’s never stopped at Zelos,” he said. “What were you doing on Ord Mantell before you jumped on with us?”

[@Mistiel]

Nar Shaddaa

Khulbe's Palace - Jast

---

“You’ll forgive my enthusiasm, Khulbe, but I do love it when the sales pitch and the science are the same thing,” Jast answered. “Nothing sells like the facts.”

“The plan, though, that’s a good question. This isn’t too different from anything I did with the Service. Information extraction and data jobs were my line of work before we met,” he explained. The circumstances had changed significantly in the meantime, however. With the Strategic Information Service, the Galactic Republic’s intelligence apparatus, he had all the resources in the galaxy to support his operations. Intel, assets, fireteams, professional slicers, the works. Jast pulled a hand-rolled cigarra from his jacket pocket and lit it, taking a drag as he mulled worked his way into this next, critical step in the negotiation. Nothing went with brandy like nicotine.

“The fact of the matter is that I’m in the unfortunate position of working as both operator and analyst these days,” he explained, “which makes the job tough. My team and I have some intel to work with, enough to give us a start. We have some connections on Ord Mantell that could lead us in the right direction, but my first thought is to bring in my friends at Coronet Analytica, see if we can get some more intelligence on the situation before we make a move. Once we determine what we need to grab and where, my team and I go in and grab it. Could be a data file, could be personnel, could be Trithemeus himself.”

“But we can’t do go anywhere or grab anything as long as we have this pseudoteth on the Raven,” he said, taking a long drag on the cigarra. “Heavily regulated product, like I said. We pull in on some of the worlds we need to stop at, law enforcement will arrest us twenty minutes after we land. So, if you’ll buy that off us—and I’ll give you a discount on it, say 60% of value—you can free us up to chase leads on the chemist.”

[@Saix @The Wyrm]

- - -

The Raven Trespass - Boqorro

---

“It’s not refined,” Boqorro said. “We know what that would do to you. This," he continued, pointing to the bag of clear fluid to which he and Val had connected the Zelosian via plastic tubing, "is mostly water. Just enough glucose in there to wake you up after a week or so out of the light.”

“You said your name is T’a,” he carried on. He folded his arms again and leaned back against the airlock’s frame. “So, T’a, where were you trying to go when you stowed away on my ship?”

[@Mistiel]

Nar Shaddaa

Khulbe’s Palace – Jast

---

Jast took his seat across from Khulbe as directed, looking over to Telsa and shooting her a roguish smile and a wink. She did not return the nod.

He poured himself a couple of fingers of the brandy. “I have seventeen thousand liters of TDT precursor,” he started, “a chemical called pseudoteth, in the Raven’s cargo hold. That’s enough to kickstart a TDT operation, provided you acquire some supplementary reagents and get a few chemists on your payroll, but shouldn’t be a problem. The pseudoteth is the only regulated component of the TDT formula. The rest of it—red phosphorous, anhydrous ammonia, lithium, hydrochloric acid—that’s all easily obtainable. So, Khulbe, your first problem was getting the pseudoteth, and I’ve taken care of that for you already.” He pressed on, making his way to the heart of his pitch. “There’s a second problem, though. Any chemist can make TDT; not just any chemist can make Pink Kyber.”

He pulled a crystal form inside his coat, slowly, so as not to worry Khulbe’s Wookie guardians, and held it up in the light. It was translucent, colorless, and shot through with impurities. It looked like a piece of dirty glass. “This is ordinary TDT. Kyber, Pixie, Starglass. This stuff is easy to make. Any high school chemistry teacher on Coruscant could cook this garbage in a basement lab. Hell, there’s swoop bikers on Corellia cooking this in their garages right now.” He turned the shard in the light, hoping to emphasize its impure nature. “About forty, fifty, maybe as much as sixty percent of this is the wrong kind of TDT—the left-handed enantiomer, which is useless as a recreational spice. Only about fifty percent of this crystal’s chemical makeup is the active drug.

"Now, there’s nothing wrong with cooking regular Kyber and selling it. It’s cheaper than genuine spice and works well enough to sell, so it has a market,” he tipped the brandy back and took a drink, “but this chemist on Ord Mantell, guy by the name of Trithemeus, came up with a new process, a way to achieve what they call ‘chiral selection.’ With the Trithemeus Reaction, the process only produces right-handed enantiomers. Pink Kyber is ninety-five, ninety-six percent pure, right-handed enantiomer TDT. Powerful, clean, and it sells for forty, sixty, even eighty percent above the market price of ordinary TDT, depending on where you sell it.”

“The problem is that no one knows how the hell this process—the Trithemeus Reaction—no one knows how it works. Except for Trithemeus.” Jast pulled a long draught of the brandy, putting it back until he completely drained the glass. He began pouring another, and said, “My proposal, my good friend, is that we steal the Trithemeus Reaction.”

- - -

Raven Trespass – Boqorro

---

“It’s an intravenous glucose drip. Sugarwater. If we understand your physiology correct, this should get you back on your feet pretty quickly,” Val said. Zelosians were, basically, plants, even engaging in photosynthesis, which produced glucose form carbon dioxide and water. They couldn’t put her out in the sunlight, so an artificial source would be good enough, they imagined.

“No one is interested in drugging you,” Boqorro added. Probably a good idea to mention that, he figured. “We’re going to be holding onto these,” he said, referring to the blaster and stun baton, which he removed from her person and handed to Val. “Stick these in a storage locker somewhere, please.”

“Be nice to her, please,” Val said, tone pointed, before taking the articles and leaving Boqorro with the Zelosian. He nodded to her before she left. He’d do his best.

“So, T’a,” he said, arms folded. “You said you’re a stowaway. Where exactly are you trying to stowaway to?”

Nar Shaddaa

Boqorro

---

“We need to get her to the medbay. She is going to die in there if we don’t do something,” Val urged, and she reached for the airlock controls. Boqorro grabbed her hand, gently, in his.

“We cannot. If the Hutt bothers to follow up on our prisoner and finds that we are not treating her like a prisoner, he will not be pleased,” he said. He considered their options for a long moment. “We will treat her in the airlock. An intravenous glucose drip should be sufficient to bring her back to the land of the living.”

Val pulled her hand away with force and stormed off toward the medbay, pausing only to turn around and address him. “Would you at least get her something to sit on, damn it? One of the seats in the mess?” Boqorro chuckled at the venom in her voice.

It took them some fifteen minutes to set up their impromptu medical station in the Raven’s airlock. The Raven’s chief of security unfastened a small couch from the floor of the mess and hauled it down to the airlock. He and Val seated her on the couch and, with the help of the medbay’s medpad, determined the glucose and water concentration appropriate for a Zelosian. They also consulted the medpad to determine how to go about administering the drip. They were not medical technicians by any stretch.

“I think that’s in the vein,” Val said as she worked with nimble fingers.

“I believe we need to know if it’s in the vein,” Boqorro suggested.

“I’m on this ship to fix the ship, not the people on the ship. This isn’t anywhere near my paygrade.”

“If she wakes up I will recommend you for a raise,” he replied. They stood, their work done, and waited to see if their efforts would resuscitate her.

Nar Shaddaa

Jast

---

Jast and Telsa stepped to the center of the Hutt’s throne room. They were at the heart of Khulbe’s criminal empire on Nar Shaddaa now, and they found it to certainly look the part. The Hutt lord’s entourage was as alien and diverse as ever, a throng of sentients from across the universe gathered together in this nexus of criminal darkness, all eyes fixed on the captain and his officer.

Jast smiled, looked over to Telsa. His first officer stood at attention, face an impassive mask and the black case in her hands.

“Khulbe the Great,” the captain began. “It is a pleasure to see you, and an honor to join at your court today. I come before you to offer you an opportunity to bring the most lucrative recreational drug product of the Core Worlds to Hutt Space. Telsa, would you kindly?” She opened the case, revealing a glittering sea of what seemed to be shards of glass, or diamonds, all of them a rosy pink hue.

“Pink Kyber,” Jast introduced the product, selecting a single, large, irregularly cut crystal from the case and holding it up in the light for Khulbe to see. The crystal looked like a pink ruby between his thumb and forefinger. “This is a unique, enantiomerically pure strain of tethylenedioxytethylaphene that binds with the receptors of over two dozen of the galaxy’s most common species more efficiently than standard TDT. To put it simply, this is the best stuff on the market, currently produced by one laboratory on Ord Mantell that holds a monopoly on its production.

“In the spirit of the free market, which I know you love, I think there’s room for some competition.”

- - -

Boqorro

---

“Would you be careful with her? She looks like she’s half dead.”

While Jast and Telsa made their case to the great Hutt lord, Boqorro led the stowaway through the ship and to an airlock. The blue skinned chief engineer, Valera Syndulla, walked with him, repeatedly urging him to be gentler with their new prisoner.

The Raven didn’t have a proper brig, but an airlock worked well enough. It sealed from the outside, and with a single push of a button could either release a prisoner or evacuate them into the black of space. The giant security chief pushed her into an airlock and sealed it.

Boqorro and Val considered the Zelosian through the airlock’s transparisteel viewport. She did not look like a particularly dangerous individual. In fact, she looked very much like she was in need of food, water, and sleep in something that was not a crawlspace deep in the guts of a starship. Boqorro pressed a button, opening the intercom between the airlock and the ship's corridor to allow him to speak to her.

“You need to tell me everything about you right now,” he ordered. It was a simple enough request, he figured. “The more you tell me, and the more honest you are, the easier this gets for you.”

Nar Shaddaa

Media liked to portray gunslingers and soldiers as gritty, fearless warriors who wouldn’t even think about blinking in the face of a blaster muzzle. Jast knew from personal experience that this was very untrue. His blood ran cold as Jos’rizud leveled the rifle with his face. His hands went up, level with his ears, and he swung an open palm toward Boq. Telsa’s hands had shot up immediately, but the big Soroccoan had not been so easily intimidated by the Hutt’s security team. His hand rested on the grip of his heavy blaster, but he made no move to draw. Jast thanked the Force for that, and tried very hard to pay attention to Val’s voice in his earpiece over the pounding of his heart.

“…on the security camera, seems like we had a stowaway this whole time. Must have been in the access shaft to the left landing strut,” she said quickly. The Raven’s chief engineer had been on the bridge of the freighter, watching the meeting play out on the landing pad, when she noticed a figure fall out of the landing gear and hit the pad hard.

Jast looked over at the prostrate figure; a young girl, it looked like. This was an easy situation to diffuse. Simply hand her over to them, let them take care of it. The security feed on the Raven’s external cameras would corroborate the story if Khulbe even cared to check. There’d be no complications to his business proposal. They’d all get rich and never think about her again.

But what happens to a young girl you hand over to one of the most powerful Hutt kingpins on Nar Shaddaa? Jast would definitely think about her again, that was for sure. He’d fought a war in defense of the Republic’s highest values, its liberty and its democracy. He was not the sort of man who’d easily sell a girl into slavery.

“She’s ours.” Fuck, he thought, we’re really in the shit now. "She’s a stowaway we picked up on Ord Mantell, actually," he continued. "She is supposed to be,” and here he shot a pointed look at his chief of security, “safely secured in our brig, not falling out of our undercarriage. Trying to escape, I imagine, before we bring her back to the Ord Mantell Port Authority to face charges. Boq, would you kindly secure our prisoner and escort her back onto the ship?” Boq, nodded, quickly catching onto the game.

“Yes, Captain. My apologies, I thought she was secure,” he said, and made to move toward the stowaway. The confidence with which he stepped signaled, quite clearly, his absolute assurance that the Hutt’s security team would not shoot him. Jast was not nearly as confident.

“Are we okay, Jos?" Jast asked. "You know me. I don’t know what kind of stunt you think I’d be trying to play with this move, but I assure you, I’m here in good faith.”

Nar Shaddaa

Telsa

---

Telsa released the controls and leaned back in the chair as the Raven settled on the landing pad. “We’re on the ground, Captain,” she said. She loved flying, but landing was a satisfying feeling, and there was nothing quite like having a planet under your feet. She knew it was all in her head, but something about the natural gravity of a world felt more right than the artificial gravity fields on space stations and starships. It was something she had become accustomed to after spending so many years in space, but there was almost a sense of homecoming whenever she touched down on a world.

“Thank you, XO,” Jast answered, standing. Telsa stood as well and followed him out of the cockpit and through the corridor to the Raven’s mess hall. It was a comfortably lived-in affair, complete with a kitchenette, a pair of tables, a couch, and a full-color holoprojector. A few pieces of art adorned the walls, two-dimensional canvas paintings the crew had taken kept as trophies from an art heist on Obroa-skai. Sprawled on the couch was a giant of a man, reading from a datapad that looked tiny in his great hands.

“Boq, you ready?” Jast asked. Boqorro Nbara was the Raven’s chief of security. His job consisted of either intimidating the bad guys or putting blaster bolts in them, depending on the circumstances. He stood at over two meters in height, possessed a broad, powerful build, and wore red, bioluminescent tattoos that looked like flames dancing against the black skin of his face. He’d been a hitman on Nar Shaddaa, working for a Hutt affiliated with the Besadii kajidic, before Jast recruited him. He was very good at his job.

He also had a penchant for romance novels, with at least a dozen stored on the datapad.

“Boq?” Jast repeated the man’s name.

“Hm?” Boqorro asked, seemingly engrossed in his reading. “Have we landed?” he asked. His voice was not exactly high, but it wasn’t a match for his physique. Telsa, expecting a deep, rumbling baritone or something similar, had been surprised when she’d first heard him talk. He was the newest addition to the crew, replacing their previous chief of security, a Nikto named Glaato. Boqorro’s predecessor had died on one of the crew’s jobs just a few months past.

They’d been doing a deal for Coronet Analytica then, the private intelligence company that provided them with their more lucrative legitimate jobs, usually independent intelligence work that would get filtered up to the Strategic Information Service. They’d almost gotten off-world when Imperial Intelligence agents engaged them in a gunfight in a narrow, urban alleyway. They killed their contact and put a red lance through Glaato’s skull.

It had been Telsa’s first gunfight. She’d been new to the crew then, just a few weeks into her service as the Raven’s pilot. The whole sequence of events was less of a coherent memory and more a string of images strung together. A Mandalorian warrior, armor dripping with acid rain shot through with the refracting neon hues of Nar Shaddaa's lower levels. Blaster bolts illuminating the dark passage in sudden flashes of red and blue. Glaato’s blank stare, eyes fixed on the crests of the towering skyrakers above.

“Telsa?” Jast asked, and the pilot blinked, coming back to her senses.

“Sorry, Captain, could you repeat that?” she asked, realizing she’d missed something.

“You and Val will stay here and keep the ship secure.”

“I’d like to come, actually,” she asserted, surprising herself with the force in her words.

“You don’t have to,” Jast said. Probingly, she thought. The cadence of the words made them a question. “I have Boq watching my six.” Boqorro, checking the energy cell on his large, heavy blaster pistol, smiled and nodded as he snapped the magazine into place.

“Of course, Captain, but I am your XO. I’d like to be part of the negotiation team,” she answered. “At least for the purpose of observing.”

Glaato’s death had hit Jast hard, she knew. The Nikto had been one of the oldest members of the Raven’s crew, signing on with Val back when the captain had first acquired the ship. They’d flown together all those years, right up until the Sith Empire had killed him in that alley. Khulbe was a friend, but only as far as friends in the underworld go; the Hutt was an extraordinarily dangerous person, and Glaato’s death had served as a reminder about the reality of putting crew in the midst of dangerous people. Jast had since preferred to limit the people he put in harm’s way to himself and Boqorro.

Jast nodded after a long moment. “Alright. You can carry the product. Swing by the armory and grab a sidearm too,” he said. “They’ll disarm us before we go in, but I prefer to remind them that we’re the sort of people you have to disarm.”

Fifteen minutes later, Jast, Boqorro, and Telsa strode down the boarding ramp and onto the landing pad. Jast walked in front, with Boqorro on his right and Telsa on his left. Telsa carried a compact blaster on her hip, and carried a hard shell black case, some thirty five centimeters across and thirty centimeters in height. Inside the case, she carried the product, the key to their pitch to Khulbe.

Jast recognized Khulbe’s emissary, a scantily clad female Twi’lek, as Nima Tarkona, one of Khulbe's favorite slave girls. He offered her his hand. “Nima, pleasure to see you again,” he greeted, and then introduced his crew. “I have some new faces on the Raven since the last time I saw you. This is my new chief of security, Boqorro Nbara, and my executive officer, Telsa Jetstar.” Telsa smiled plaintively as Jast said her name, giving the Twi’lek a shallow nod. "We're looking forward to our meeting with Khulbe," Jast concluded.

Nar Shaddaa

NAR SHADDAA

Nar Shaddaa, nicknamed the "Smuggler's Moon," is the notorious moon of the planet Nal Hutta, homeworld of the Hutt species. It is home to a large criminal underworld dominated by bounty hunters and Hutt crime lords. An ecumenopolis, the entire surface of Nar Shaddaa is covered in urban sprawl. There are numerous crimelords on the planet; the most powerful of which is Khulbe Desilijic the Hutt.

[OOC: Welcome! If you have business to conduct on Nar Shaddaa please feel free to post here. It does not have to compliment ongoing posts from other SWPW players. It has its own Discord to encourage collaborative works if you wish to join.]