4.02

The interior of Grakkus' palace was at the same time as grand as one might expect from a Hut, yet as austere as the Temple back on Coruscant. Instead of the usual permacrete and durasteel walls one would find in most any modern construction, the floors, ceilings, and walls were made of natural stone. Not just any stone, but high-quality marble in a variety of colors. For a space-age society where synthetic and artificial materials were the norm, transporting and shaping such large quantities of a relatively rare natural mineral would be immensely expensive. At the same time, the building lacked the gaudy decorations and extravagant displays of wealth the seat of power of major political or economic figures invariably included. What wealth Grakkus did have was thus visible only to educated people who grasped galactic economics, and was at the same time impervious to theft... unless the thief had the required city-sized landscape-stealing tools, of course.

Steps echoing sharply in the corridors as we were lead to the Hutt's throne room, I looked at the subtly prevalent power all around us and decided I liked it. Soon, we were brought upon a door easily thirty feet across, made of a single sheet of gleaming metal with a faint bluish tint. Duranium was the second toughest alloy used in shipbuilding, normally reserved only for reactor shielding and the most critical blast doors due to its cost. At the thickness of ten inches or more, like the gate before us, it became impractical to cut through with plasma cutters or lightsabers. The cortosis-beskar alloy (stupidly) named 'impervium' would have been even tougher - but cost an order of magnitude more so almost nobody used it. Still, if it came to a retreat we'd go through the walls instead; even back on Earth, nine times out of ten those who bought security doors forgot that interior walls were just brick and plaster.

With the barely audible whine of well-maintained repulsorlifts the great door opened, revealing a cavernous chamber over forty feet across and twice as long. Bare but for benches and alcoves on both sides where both aliens and droids armed with blasters were standing guard, it led to a circular dais about a foot higher from the chamber floor and taking up over half the chamber's width. Upon this simple yet obvious throne stood one of the largest, bulkiest Hutts I'd ever seen either in this galaxy or my original one. He had leathery, tough skin of a dark green color, with a dull yellow underbelly, arms as thick as my thighs with enough muscle on them to make bodybuilders green with envy, and large, heavy-lidded orange eyes that gleamed with great intensity as they scanned everything. But what really set Grakkus apart from other Huts was his legs; a dozen crude cybernetic limbs attached to his bulk, lifting him off the ground and, if what information Aurra had been able to find was true, capable of propelling him at considerable speed and agility. All in all, a very different customer than the likes of Jabba or Zeero.

"Look lively, everyone; we have visitors," the Hutt said in a cultured tone more befitting a lawyer or politician than a monstrous alien warlord. That he could speak Galactic Basic - and fluently at that - was another sign of just how different he was. "And a noble from the Core at that - how exciting for our provincial backwater."

"Great Grakkus, we come bearing gifts," I greeted him with a small bow and a smile, remembering the words of an ancient priest and oracle.

"And a great many things more, I reckon," he retorted shrewdly, thick eyebrows raised as his cybernetic legs carried him closer with dull metallic clicks. "What brings the exiled princess of House Andrim to my doorstep, her very first appearance after those greatly exaggerated rumors of her untimely demise?"

"Business, what else?" I didn't need the mild warning from the Force to know rising to that particular bait would be unwise. That Grakkus knew me at sight was both a good and a bad thing, depending on how this discussion would end. "I have several propositions for both mutual benefits and mutual satisfaction." Because one should not be confused with the other, and an entrepreneur of the Hutt's caliber would recognize as much.

"Indeed?" The oversized green slug leaned back and crossed his thick arms. "My control of Hutta city has little need for the famous shipbuilding expertise of Kuati high nobles, and while the Smuggler's Moon can provide almost anything if one has the credits, the kind of infrastructure such industry needs is one of the few things unavailable. I fail to see what we have in a common, young lady."

"Allow me to provide evidence to the contrary then," I answered back, presenting a small, unadorned case from my backpack. It was good that the Hutt didn't know everything; his shocked expression as I opened the unassuming package and displayed the contents was priceless. "This historical item recently came into my possession. Fully functional after professional restoration, still with all-original parts, magnetically and radiologically dated to year 3601 in the old calendar."

"How..." Grakkus couldn't help but blurt at seeing the four and a half millennia old training lightsaber. From how he stiffened, how yearning, greed, and deep-seated anger fused in a veritable maelstrom of emotion within him, he was about to either given me everything I asked for it... or attempt to take it by force. He was a collector, a hoarder as all Hutts were, obsessed with the addiction he'd succumbed to as much as any junkie, and I had just offered him his drug of choice. "What do you want in exchange for this artifact?"

"Nothing, great Grakkus. It is a gift meant to draw attention," I told him quite honestly. After all, the research group had recovered many training sabers from Arca Jeth's Praxeum, and with Altunen's saber to examine, they had reverse-engineered lightsaber technology as much as science could. "My and my family's recent... misfortune"-I made sure to give proper emphasis to that word-"lead me to seek fortune away from my ancestral home. The unique environment of Nar Shadda offers opportunities not easy to find elsewhere, and I thought to pay my respects to the local highest authority to ensure no misunderstandings disrupt a potentially highly profitable collaboration."

"You are certainly eloquent, youngling," the Hutt told me, hints of amusement pulsing through his yearning for Jedi artifacts. Not a way of address I was about to contest, given the immense longevity of the Hutt species. "But eloquence cannot make up for honesty, and your evasions are impolite. It has yet to be explained to me what someone with expertise in shipbuilding would look for in this place."

"Shipbuilding is the ultimate weapons building, great Grakkus. While we of Kuat have made great profits for centuries through it, disregarding the potential of more compact weaponry is unwise." Also, something that was already changing given all the materiel House Kuat was secretly producing for the clone army. "Sadly, much of the Galaxy is not an enlightened place that truly allows for free enterprise. Nar Shadda though? Not only does it lack any laws limiting weapons trafficking and production, but it also has a market for such things." I gave him my best smirk to date. "Some ninety billion customers if our 'market research' is to be trusted."

The gigantic green slug roared in laughter, layers of blubber a boneless muscle quivering. It was almost as disturbing as the sharp change in his emotions, falling into a pattern more at home in cutthroat traders and businessmen than a simple provincial warlord. Then again, there was nothing simple about this Hutt, and unless I missed my guess, things were about to become interesting.

"Ah, this certainly explains why you are here with a small armory on you and your associates. Weapons that my very experienced advisors failed to identify, that were shielded from our scans as well. It's a sales pitch, isn't it?" Well, duh. If one had to pay a hundred thousand credits for the best possible armor, they might as well cough over a few thousand more to make sure their blaster couldn't be cut through with a lightsaber, or have its prototype design stolen before it could be mass-produced. "Curious though, very curious. I could have sworn we had a no-blasters visitor policy in the palace. For security purposes, you understand. How is it that the gate guards forgot to mention it?"

"Said guards were rather impolite, great Grakkus. In fact, they were quite insulting. If they had served any less august a personage we might have had a more heated exchange."

"Oh dear, really?" Grakkus sighed. "Did it ever occur to you that an impolite guard is a feature, not a bug? I am a civilized Hutt, attempting to live a civilized life in an uncivilized place. The percentage of annoying individuals such a guard would turn away is one of the reasons I do have some hours of peace and quiet in my life." He shrugged. "Oh well. There are more such guards where he came from, so no harm done. Now, for that audition, you were so insistent on..."

Far too many of the aliens and droids occupying the benches and alcoves at the sides of the throne room raised blasters in our direction.

xxxx xxxx xxxx

​

As a hail of blasterfire shot in our direction, it became clear that whether he made a deal with me, or looted my gear from my corpse to examine them later made little difference to the local warlord. I had disrupted his schedule by appearing unannounced, taunted him with something he greatly desired, and my plans would upset the status quo, so his interest in my survival was slightly less than his interest in blood sport. He had recently opened an arena not far from his palace, after all.

Aurra Sing rolled away from the attack with such casual ease, such an aura of belonging in the place that all attackers that weren't droids ignored her after that, mistakenly believing she was either entirely unimportant or one of their group. They mostly ignored her, turning their weapons to the rest of us. Since we didn't want to accidentally bring down the building, T-666 diverted all power to his bubble shield and made a persistent blaster bolt sponge of himself. Considering the shield was half as strong as a Delta-7 starfighter's and three times stronger than a Droideka's, I doubted anything those hired guns had could harm him... which left only yours truly.

Unlike the other two members of the group, I stood my ground and raised my off-hand in a guard position. Since batting bolts in mid-flight before a Jedi-crazy Hutt was a bad idea, I activated the modified Gungan riot shield in my right bracer and a simmering blue ovoid four feet high and two and a half wide faded into existence. Without a wireframe to attach to a normal Gungan riot shield would have been unstable and thus weaker, but Arkanian science had improved the admittedly ingenious original design with far more efficient circuitry and a more powerful power source. It still wasn't a bubble shield, but the Gungan design lacked the dangerous radiation emissions of other such technologies. Dozens of bolts were deflected across the room, forcing all organic attackers to reconsider their approach. The shield shook, but held without overheating to failure; that was because the Gungan design did not absorb the bolts' kinetic impact but rather used a modified compensator to transfer them to the shield's frame. A slender user like a Gungan or an untrained one might have been bowled over by the transferred force, but I was both ready and far stronger than the Binks monstrosity could ever hope to be - to the Galaxy's everlasting relief.

The slight hesitation in Grakkus' guard contingent was enough of a lull for me to draw my new sidearm. Sleek silvery finish gleamed in the gloom as the weapon resembling a thick, sawed-off shotgun was fired in a real fight for the first time. Near a decade from now in the canon timeline, Cad Bane and Jango Fett would be using compact, high-power, rapid-firing sidearms of dallorian alloy to great effect, weapons thinner, lighter, and sleeker than most pistols but with surprising firepower. The AA-6 quad bolter was made with the same technology, except it had four muzzles, and a bulge behind the grip that balanced the extra weight and housed the larger power cell. In quad-linked mode, it could deliver lethal damage through clone trooper armor and make it far harder to deflect its shots with a lightsaber. In the rapid-fire sequential mode that I'd picked instead, it spewed out a fire at twelve bolts per second - very accurate fire. Unlike the hollow-grip light pistols it had been developed from, its handle contained the repulsor and stabilizer of a basic training remote that made it both near-weightless and recoil-free as long as it was powered up. Green streaks of death drilled through armor, flesh, and droid circuitry as I swept it around the room, firing through the shield. Normally, Grakkus' security droids would not be that easy to bring down with a sidearm, even this reinvented SMG version of a blaster, but once again I'd cheated. The bolter's beam emitters were augmented with Agrocite crystals from Father's new mining interests in Khorm. Technology adapted for millennia to Arkania's subzero climate by the Galaxy's best mad scientists had proven just as effective on another ice world and Father's business rivals couldn't keep up. With enough of the rare mineral we could augment our weapons' firepower by a factor of three, an enormous advantage when combined with all the other stuff we'd bought, reverse-engineered, or outright stolen.

As soon as the last of Grakkus' guards dropped smoking to the floor, I raised the bolter to my lips and theatrically blew out the non-existent smoke. With the exception of some fitful sparkling from some of the droids, groans from what organic guards had fallen to only glancing blows, and my deep but unhurried breathing, the throne room was now quiet as a tomb. That wouldn't do, so I broke the silence by addressing the Hutt directly.

"And that concludes the live-fire exhibition," I said with a high-pitched giggle that almost made me cringe. As much as I hated that particular too-girly reaction, I was told it was a bit disconcerting during several of my practice sessions. And when Aurra Sing, bounty hunter, mercenary, and former assassin tells you an expression is disconcerting, you know you have to use it in business deals. "Shall we discuss terms for our very profitable future collaboration, then?"

Grakkus agreed we should.