Interlude: Cold Calculations

Arkania. A world of ice, pale light, and cold machines designed, made, and run by even colder people. A place with a deep history of both light and dark, one the Jedi had had under protection for hundreds of generations. Or, more accurately, under guard against the influence of the dark side. Not that it did us any good in the end, the slim, dark-skinned, feather-topped figure thought and shivered. Twenty years before a civil war between the totalitarian yet legitimate government and a movement of freedom-loving but horribly unethical scientists had broken out, with atrocities from both sides forcing the Jedi to intervene and enforce an end to the hostilities that had satisfied no-one. Two decades later, a Master of the Council stood once more upon Arkanian permafrost to address a problem... one she wished she didn't have to. If anything, because the polar temperatures and harsh light from the pale star overhead were so inimical to her species that she'd had to wear several layers of protective clothing just to be able to function.

Perhaps the Council should have sent someone else... but who? Yoda was the Grand-master, a dedicated trainer of younglings, and the Watchman of Coruscant itself. Yaddle was preparing for that peacekeeping mission on Mawan. Mace and Depa Billaba were still developing that promising new style of theirs. Jocasta Nu was the caretaker of the Archive. Most of the others were too new in their position, still trying to catch up with all the work accumulating after their predecessors' deaths. Ultimately, neither the climate nor the necessity of this mission truly annoyed her.

"Hey honey, I got an extra thermal blanket if you need it," shouted her companion, and bane of her existence.

"Shut up and keep your eyes on the job, Knight Voss," she hissed back then banished her anger to the Force... for the hundredth and fifty-second time since landing.

"I be doing contact Psychometry, Adi," the short, burly young man with the chocolate skin and long black dreadlocks answered with a smirk. "Means I keep my hands on the job while me eyes roam... unless ye'd prefer the inverse? I'm game, if so."

"You're insufferable," she stated and kicked a piece of shattered permafrost to vent. The jagged white rock flew sixty feet into the air then dropped... and dropped... and dropped. Several seconds later, Adi Gallia's sensitive hearing caught the faint sound of it hitting bottom nearly a thousand meters deeper into the ravine dominating her view. No, not a ravine; it was more a jagged hole in the ground two kilometers wide and half as deep. Not a crater either; too steep and uneven for any explosion or impact event. And the worst of it? It shouldn't have been there at all. "Has your little 'magic touch' at least discovered anything?" The sarcasm was so thick in her voice it'd be hard to cut with a lightsaber. Of all the Jedi in the Order, Quinlan Voss was considered the craziest... but after spending only a day with him she had formed a different opinion. He was sane - the most irreverent, arbitrarily contrary, unorthodox sane Jedi she'd ever met. That he kept propositioning her - while insisting one night stands were not against the Jedi Code - only made it worse.

"You're not going to like it," Voss said as he stopped patting the icy ground with his bare hands, somehow having avoided severe frostbite after several hours of doing so.

"The Jedi Master and Watchman of Arkania vanished right after reporting suspicious activity in an old Sith site. We come to investigate ourselves and find the entire site gone." She rolled her eyes. "This is well past my not liking it."

"Until now it wasn't past my not liking it so it didn't count," Voss replied, shaking his head. "But this is way too much excitement even for me. The Sith Library was not destroyed. Nor was it mined in the day it took us to get here. The visions show it being ripped off the ground - literally."

"What?"

"Yeah, that was my reaction, too. Buildings the size of hills ripped off the ground along with their foundations, their presence in the Force gone along with them." He frowned. "I don't suppose them secret Archives only you Council guys and gals can get to mention anyone that strong in the Force?"

"No... no they do not," she said with a whisper. Not anyone that wasn't part of ancient legends in any case... legends thought greatly exaggerated by the majority of the Council.

"Oh well. I do hope the Temple Guard is up to par in their mastery of Tutaminis then," he said sagely, "or when the super-secret Lord of the Sith attacks we'll quickly find the Temple in orbit, closely followed by the Senate and other semi-important buildings." He gave her one of those silly grins of his, showing far too perfect white teeth. "In other news, I'm requesting permanent reassignment to Mos Eisley, Tatooine. Nothing ever happens over there, and they got great bars."

"The council has yet to find conclusive evidence of a Sith Lord existing in the Galaxy - especially one with close to such strength," she replied with the standard denial to all such queries the Council had to answer over the past three years, but even to Adi's ears, it sounded hollow. Who else would be interested in the contents of the ancient Sith Library and have the power to remove it from the planet, a feat the hundred strongest Jedi in the Order working together might be unable to manage?

"That's rather the point of being super-secret, isn't it?" Voss asked with a raised eyebrow. "'Sides, Master Jinn died to an apprentice, and here we have a recording of Master Alturen falling to another apprentice." He patted the backpack full of the broken remains of some sort of security droid. "Unless ya think that little girl was the Master herself?"

"Out of hundreds of droids, such a salvage operation must have had we find the remains of only one. Remains who just happen to have a recording of Master Alturen's fight with the Sith in memory, from just too cheap a recorder said Sith is not clearly recognizable in the images? Doesn't that strike you as highly suspicious?"

"Maybe they missed this droid when taking the rest of the area with them? The fight did not seem staged to me." Voss sighed. "Magic touch ain't giving more clues. Take what we got to Coruscant, then?"

"Might as well." Adi Gallia was sick of the howling, freezing winds anyway. "Just one more question."

"Sup, boss?"

"You called Sefira and Qui-Gon masters but not me. Care to explain?"

"Sure. It's called respect," Voss said with that bloody smirk of his. "They could both kick my ass in a fight and I'm the best Knight in the Order, so they got to be Masters, see?"

"Not everything about the Order is about fighting, Knight Voss," Adi Gallia told him with an air of a teacher addressing a youngling; maybe that would work despite his thick skull? "In fact, we're diplomats, mediators, and investigators far more than we're warriors. To become a Master you must understand that truth, among others." Let him chew on that on their way back to the ship. Hopefully, it would keep him silent for once?

"Huh. Well then, if fighting prowess doesn't count..." He only considered the implications for a few seconds before continuing. "Master Jinn was a really awesome Jedi Master then, seeing as he snubbed you and the rest of the Council repeatedly and was never thrown out of the Order. Every padawan thought he was totally cool and we tried to emulate him."

"So I suppose this borderline insubordination is you following in his footsteps then?" That would at least make it tolerable. She only ever had respect for Qui-Gon Jinn and how in contact he was with the Force.

"Yep." Quinlan Voss sped up then, running back to the ship as fast as he could. Did he see something that requires urgency? Adi Gallia was about to ask when he shouted at her over his shoulder. "As for Master Alturen, she did sleep with me!"

xxxx xxxx xxxx

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"I told you we could do it," the old, deceptively frail-looking Professor Magrody said, triumph echoing in his voice. "If we could only fix a few minor errors, this would make for a revolutionary maneuver, from trading to mining, to military action."

"A few minor errors, was it?" Captain Andrim asked, pale face stretched in a disapproving frown. "Two tractor beam projectors fried, six disabled, a hundred and eighty-seven tensor field generators in need of re-calibration and recharge, and nearly half a million credits' worth of hypermatter fuel for the operation. And we wouldn't have suffered any damage at all if we'd limited ourselves to just your research complex; two and a half billion tons of rock and soil was far too much, not to mention worthless."

"Worthless? Captain, the historical value of those buildings alone is astronomical," the too-pale Arkanian scientist enthusiastically gestured with a four-clawed arm at the manifest of artifacts already recovered. "Their scientific value is even greater! Most of the complex has been ruined by explosives, but there are still pieces of ancient technology we can analyze and reverse-engineer. There are biological samples from species now extinct in Arkania, maybe the Galaxy at large, not to mention traces of our ancestors with four thousand years fewer genetic modification. Even simple foodstuffs from that long ago can help archaeobiologists and xenogeneticists improve their understanding of life, because almost nowhere else would we get ancient civilization so well-preserved in ice."

"It is good that you like ice, Professor," the Captain replied coldly, "because we're dropping you and your new project off on the Hoth outpost as soon as possible. That will leave us just enough hypermatter supplies to reach Bespin with our following jump."

There was a reason nobody had built hyper-capable cities yet, Captain Andrim thought. Sure, existing hyper generators could translate into Hyperspace ships even larger than the Donut (his daughter's name for the old ship had grown on him), but hyper generators got exponentially more complex with size, as well as considerably slower. You'd probably need at least a decade to design one from scratch, and since one large ship was slower in hyper than a larger number of small ships, nobody bothered. Now, one could use a small generator to move more mass than normal, but in this case, the hypermatter fuel cost rose exponentially as you exceeded your hyperdrive's efficiency margins. Ripping that complex out of Arkania's gravity well with tractors had barely been within the ship's ability, but carrying a weight larger than the ship at full load had nearly left the fuel tanks dry.

"Hoth? I don't remember any ice world with such a name."

"Neither do most people in the galaxy, which is precisely why we're using it as a base." Prior to his daughter's suggestions, Hoth had not even existed in the ship's trade database. That was probably because that particular ice world was uninhabited, and had never had been inhabited in the past. While marginally more hospitable that Arkania itself, it stood on no-trade lanes, had nothing to export, and nobody to import goods for, not even a landing pad, let alone a spaceport. And yet the whole system had abundant resources. Volcanic inner planets for smelting, gas giants similar to Bespin for fuel refining, an asteroid belt for mining, even a marginally habitable world with just the sort of bad weather to conceal illegal bases of any size.

"Eh, one secret base in the icecaps is the same as another," the Professor said dismissively. "As long as we can continue our experimentation without ridiculous limiting laws and can profit from the results, who cares?"

Who cared indeed? In the plans he'd made with his daughter's help, a slow reinvestment and buildup over the years were necessary to remain hidden from the several hostile factions that would crush them if their efforts were revealed too soon. Since hiding the wealth of one of Kuat's main Houses was impossible in the long run, investing it in visible projects that would draw attention while secretly developing hidden capital and a full resource base away from any authorities or spies had become necessary. The looting of many Kuati-owned trade ships and the reprocessing of their military escorts was already bringing in significant profits, but it was the projects like Bespin, Hoth, Thyferra, Drongar, and Metalorn that would eventually become the core of their power.

If they survived long enough. Personally, he had his doubts..., especially with his daughter's little side projects. Perhaps it was time to put her in control of one of the projects rather than leave her to her own devices. If anything, she'd at least work in the family trade - or close enough - and be away from people with glowing swords of various colors and supernatural powers.