New Vertica

Boaz walks the swoop to its berth before deactivating it and pacing quickly to the external door controls. With one hand on the control panel and the other on the grip of his blaster, he closes the doors and reactivates the voice seal. Giving the hold a quick look before releasing the grip on the blaster, he walks back towards Taera.

Of course, galley is just up the catwalk.

Boaz pats his chest, indicating the bottle beneath his coat.

I figure we should crack this open and see how badly I cost the barkeep.

Boaz laughs, he'd been called many things, but none of them quality.

That's a new one. I've just been around long enough to have contacts in a few useful places. Now then, about that tour....up the stairs we go.

Boaz leads the way up one of the skeletal catwalks.

"Wild hairstyle and obnoxious visor?  Not long."

Aherk barely looked in the direction of his former apprentice, not letting slip the true reason he'd been able to track her down.  Bugs didn't just drop dead in clusters, and there were few people in the galaxy that Aherk knew of that could make them do so.  It was such a specific form of comm jamming that a local syndicate had contacted Aherk personally to root out the cause, as it was something they'd never seen before.  Comlinks still worked, the HoloNet was uninterrupted, but any purpose-built listening device became useless.  And if one could afford bugs, one would understandably be upset at how a fairly pricey investment went down the tubes (especially in an industry and on a world where knowing more than the other guy is a necessity).  And while he'd had a few guesses as to who could be behind it all, Alena Karso - as he'd been led to believe she called herself now - was always the prime suspect.  From there, he installed his own bugs and waited for them to conk out.  After enough were, he was able to extrapolate his wayward apprentice's rough location.  Four days of searching later, here she was.

He expressed his annoyance with a small huff as the miniature datapad he held in his pocket buzzed violently, indicating one of his own bugs had been caught in the invisible blast.

"You shouldn't do this for every back-alley meeting you conduct, it ticks off the other guys."

"Job offer."

No sense in drawing things out.  New Vertica was hardly a welcoming place, and Aherk made a point to stay indoors if at all possible.  Out in the open, he was exposed to exactly the kind of people who wouldn't care how well-connected he presented himself to be.  At least the more organized gangs knew when to lie low.  A random mook on some dodgy street likely would not.

"Sounds like it'll pay decently enough for skill sets like ours.  High position, lots of underlings.  I'll tell you more on the way if you're in."

Having spotted what he'd been looking for in the grease-stained window, the black-clad man abruptly stood to his full height and briskly walked back the way he came, not waiting to see if the brightly-colored young woman would follow or not.

"Some group called 'The Organization'.  They're looking for an investigator, and I'm sure I could swing for a tech specialist.  They've kept their tracks well-hidden; I haven't been able to find anything more than rumor so far, nothing that can be directly linked to them.  And to be frank, that's intriguing.  Almost nobody covers their tracks that well, no matter what they're trying to do.  I want to know why."

Aherk paused and came to a halt, as the pair had arrived at the turbolift that would take the pair to his ship.

"And the pay scale didn't look half bad, either."

"Somewhere in the western Outer Rim.  They didn't give me anything more than a set of coordinates.  Cryptic, this lot.  You'd like them."

The turbolift door opened, exposing the pair to a platform practically overrun with Sullustans.  Waving at a particularly portly one - the leader, if his solid not was any indication - Aherk smiled as the leader of the band started barking orders in their native language, his crewmen scrambling to move crates onto a GR-75 transport.

"Met Gual and his boys off of Abrion Major, trying to get glitterstim to one of the production facilities planetside.  Tripled their pay and offered silence to their activity if they helped me get to a few places.  Odds are they might even know where this place is."

"Hair and shades like yours and you're gonna talk to me about discreet?"

Aherk spoke with just a hint of disappointment.  When she answered to the name of Darth Vila, the younger woman had preferred sleek and smooth and small, fitting both her size and preferred method of operations.  The trouble, however, was that she had a specific and unique look to her creations.  Whether it was her signature powered armor or her personal starship, it looked like everything she designed had been cut from the same sheet of metal.  Sleek, smooth, small, and immediately recognizable.  Everybody would have noticed the Hunter II.  But nobody would pay any undue attention to a cargo hauler whose model was more common than dust.

He ignored the crack about his resources entirely.  Alena must have known that due to his compound's ever-online security, he could never have risked using the vast amount of information and credits formerly at his disposal in the past seven years.  But Alena did not need to know that he'd only heard of the organization a short while ago, let alone received the coordinates that very day.  Nor did she need to know that his old Kaminoan compound - where he held in storage copies of practically all public (and even a lot of private) information the HoloNet could conjure - had been all but destroyed by her best friend, robotic invention, and an older smuggler.  Only his precious data terminal had survived the blast, and only barely at that.  His lightsaber was gone, all five of the KR-03 guard units had been dispatched (the first of which had been taken out with the novel approach of igniting the droid's oil line), several dead bodies had been burnt in the garbage disposal (prevented from fully closing via another clever deactivation of one of the towering durasteel sentinels), and  - most troubling - Project SO-6 had broken out sometime in the intervening seven years.  For all intents and purposes, Aherk Fyyar was no better off than the average CorSec or CSF detective.

Besides, the young and eager Alena might misunderstand.  He knew as well as she did that the brightly-haired woman was tired of hiding.  Force knew he was as well.  Aherk feared that the mere mention of Vidalu and her robust robotic companion might spark a manhunt for the pair, even if they had not yet taken their scheduled journey across time.  Aherk didn't even know when that was supposed to take place, save for the fact that it would be soon.

"Trust me.  It's big and fat and slow, and it's just one of several million.  Nobody'll be looking for this thing."

"Not long.  Considering that the Mandalorians are about to gum up the lanes on their little crusade, these boys are likely itching to make it back home before things go critical."

Aherk simply smirked and walked towards the transport, his stride quickly taking him past Alena.  It was true; the Sullustan gang were moving double-time, practically ready to strap engines to their backs and turn them on if it meant getting off-world any faster.  If they were stopped, any materials that could be used for the war effort - and considering the number of spices they had in bulk that could provide major combat benefits despite dubious legal status, that was at least seventy percent of their shipment - would be appropriated without a second thought, and they'd be out a small fortune.  If they could get back to the Run before lasers started flying, they'd be able to reroute their existing contracts to avoid the more war-torn areas of the galaxy.