Rebellion

[Pryde]

"Why did I come into work today," Andros muttered to himself. He was night security guard for a small research company on Coruscant. The job didn't pay well but word had it the company was on the verge of a major breakthrough. They were also on the verge of a major break-in. It was only pure luck that Andros had noticed the crooks on the security camera but even though he had hit the alarm the criminals were still coming and right now they were just outside the office door he was hiding behind.

He could hear them working out in the hall and tucked back further behind the file cabinet clutching his stun rod to his chest. For the umpteenth time he wished the company would let him carry a blaster, but wishful thinking wasn't going to help him now. Finally the door opened and six shadowy figures entered the room. They moved with skill and precision, knowing exactly what they were looking for. Andros had waited for several of them to pass before leaping out and trying to grab one. Unfortunately, that proved to be a big mistake.

The large muscle-bound man grabbed him be the arm and twisted it, driving his own stun rod into his chest. Andros cried out in pain and then fell limply to the floor unable to move. Meanwhile Jax had turned to Aurora Eclipse who was busy seating herself in front of a computer terminal.

"Fifteen minutes," he said simply and Aurora nodded.

She started typing furiously at the keyboard and when one of her other companions leaned over to look over her shoulder she glared at him. "Give her some room," Jax said and everyone backed up.

Aurora seemed satisfied and continued to type though unbeknownst to her companions the typing was just for show. She had already had complete access to the company's computer system and was busy rooting through each file looking for the one she wanted. She had a reputation for being the fastest slicer on Coruscant and there was a reason for that. Unlike most slicers Aurora didn't need to use commands or hardware interfaces, she could communicate with any electronic device directly through the Force. Cutting off the alarm was as simple as asking it to turn off and downloading a file... Well, downloading a file was even easier.

"Got it," she said, pulling a data chit out of the computer.

"Alright, let's go," Jax told them and everyone hurried out of the room to their rendezvous point.

In the distance they could hear the Imperial security forces closing on them but by the time they had arrived Aurora ahd her friends had already piled into a hover van and were gone. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief as they leaned back in their chairs. "Gimmie the file, Love," Jax said to Aurora and she tossed the chit over to him.

Jax smiled, "Our employer's gonna pay top dollar for this. Good job on the hack."

Aurora said nothing and turned away. She was always like that, quiet, dismissive. She wasn't much for personal interaction and mostly kept to herself. The others didn't question it, she was good at what she did and that was all that mattered. They didn't need to know who she was or where she came from, they had all run from something in their past and they knew not to ask questions about it. There was no more talking after that and a short time later they'd arrived back at Sanctuary.

Sanctuary was kind of a safe haven for miscreants and misfits, it was where Aurora met Jax and the others. Most of the kids who hung out at Sanctuary were orphans and everyone got by through petty theft. It was Jax who had turned the place into what it was now. He put together a crew, built a reputation and turned this place into paradise for displaced kids. It was pretty much the only thing Aurora liked about him. He didn't care much about the types of jobs he took but he was always charitable when it came to the kids.

After they had arrived Jax had departed to go meet with the buyer. He had always made it a point never to do business around Sanctuary. Aurora, meanwhile, crossed the main floor of the warehouse past a myriad of various entertainments and row upon row of arcade games to residential area in the back. Jax had worked hard to provide shelter to as many of the kids as he could, but Aurora and the others on his crew were award the special privilege of having their own rooms for which Aurora was thankful. She spent a great deal of time by herself away from others despite Jax's attempts to bring her into the fold and Joran's unwanted advances.

Once she was in her room she locked the door behind her and leaned against it momentarily. A part of her, a small part, wanted to be out there with the others. To be normal like them, but she was far from normal. She eyed her dresser across the room, knowing full well what lay contained within, a silver cylindrical object, a mark of her past. Her latent Force abilities got her noticed by the Imperial Knights and her talents with electronics got her noticed by someone else. She was one of three students that she knew of that was placed into an accelerated program. They said they were training her but she felt more like a lab rat. She couldn't remember much from the program, most of it she blocked out but what little she did remember involved a lot of needles.

They tried very hard to indoctrinate her, to turn her into the perfect weapon, and when it didn't take she faked her death and escaped. With her abilities erasing her identity and admission into the program was a simple matter. Covering up her escape with an explosion was much more difficult. After that she wandered the streets of Coruscants underground until Jax found her half starved and passed out on the side of the road. That was when he brought her to Sanctuary and she'd been here ever since.

A sudden knock on the door startled her and she jumped away before turning back to open it. Joran was on the other side and he had a concerned look on his face. "What," she asked impatiently.

"Darien wants to see you," he said and then he turned and walked away.

Aurora had a sinking feeling in her gut. Joran usually never passed up an opportunity to flirt with her. Whatever it was Darien wanted to see her about it must have been important. Darien was basically the person in charge of Sanctuary. Jax ran the jobs that Darien picked out. Essentially, if Jax was the muscle then Darien was the brains and when Aurora found him he was absorbed in a holo broadcast depicting some kind of murder. The others were there as well and each of them had horrified looks on their faces.

"What's going on," Aurora asked and Darien quickly silenced her. She turned to look at the holo broadcast and audibly gasped when she saw Jax's body.

"The feds found his body way too fast," Joran said, "That sleemo set us up. We gotta find this guy and kill him."

"We got more important things to worry about," Darien said, "We gotta make sure the Imperials don't follow Jax back to us. For the time being I'm calling a halt to all of our operations until we know more."

He finally turned around to look at them. Darien was an older gentleman, somewhere in his late thirties or forties, Aurora was never sure. "You guys go back to your bunks and relax, there's nothing to worry about. In the meantime I'll have some of the girls work on a memorial for Jax."

The others nodded quietly and filed out of the room. "Aurora," Darien said suddenly just before she could leave, "Come here."

Aurora walked over to his desk and Darien waited until the others were gone. "I want to get the son of a bitch who did this," he said, "and I want to make sure he pays. Jax was a very dear friend of mine, you understand?"

Aurora nodded.

"Good," he said, then he handed her a data chit. "The job was an anonymous request but there's everything we have on the address he used to contact us. Work your magic on it and tell me what you find."

"Okay," Aurora said as she took the chit from him. She glanced at it for a moment then looked back at Darien who had turned his chair around to continue watching the report. Aurora waited quietly a few seconds later before she too turned and left the room.

She couldn't believe what was happening, Jax dead and now an Imperial investigation? All of her survival instincts were telling her to run but she couldn't leave Joran and the others behind. Not to mention Darien who had entrusted her with uncovering the identity of Jax's killer. She had to stay for now, she needed to see this through. For Darien and for herself...

[Mir]

The amount of stubble on his was directly proportional to how tired he was. He’d just finished a stretch of work. It was time to go home. Grabbing his duster, he tossed the green article of clothing around his medium sized frame, and turned, trying to toe the chair behind the desk. That was a failure. Deciding that he didn’t care enough to try again, he did make sure to close the top of his datapad, putting the machine to sleep. Last thing he needed was to come in the next day and find it dead from the battery dying or something like that. He wasn't the greatest with technology, which was crazy when you considered the galaxy that they lived in, the level of interconnectedness. He definitely wasn't as good as his old partner, Borin Khale. However, he didn't have his friend's proclivity towards overextending himself, financially.

No, Rohn was very careful with his money. Careful with most things, at least the serious things, the important things. If he did have a problem, it wasn't the lack of knowledge about technology. It was the fact that he gave credence and importance in his life to things that others didn't. Family was less important to Rohn than getting the job done. Maybe that was why he'd never been able to have a relationship that lasted more than a few weeks. There was just never enough time to get everything done, and if that meant missing a dinner date or something like that, well, people could eat alone. It was doable.

He was almost out of the building, when a voice stopped him.

"Basher."

Rohn turned at the sound of the nickname. When he'd been coming up the ranks of Imperial Intelligence, he'd made a name for himself, as always being the number one man when it came time to stack up. Nobody wanted to be the number one man. You were the first person potentially shot at, the first person who had to deal with any rigged traps or explosives. The first to wade into the fire. But Rohn had never had any qualms about it and had often volunteered to make things easier for the rest of the people that he worked with. So they'd given him the nickname after one particularly vicious room clearing and it had stuck, even when he had transferred to the more investigative side of things.

The station chief waved him over. "We've got something."

Rohn's eyebrows knit together as he walked forward. "I'm almost out for the day." He said.

"Yeah, but you hadn't made it to the door yet. Still on my time." The chief said with a smile. "Besides, we both know you're not doing much of anything.

He's got a point there, Rohn considered with a shrug.

"What's the situation?" He asked, as he reached where the chief was and they started walking towards the man's office.

"You ever heard of Sanctuary?" The chief asked, holding the door to his office open for Rohn.

"Yeah, it's a place for runaways, street urchins, things like that." Rohn replied as he walked through and stood behind one of the chairs in front of the chief's desk. "Couple people think that more than a few street robberies and what not can get traced back to there." He said. "What about it?" He asked.

"We found a body."

Rohn shook his head. This was ridiculous and he didn't know where the other man was going with it at all. "That's not Eye-Eye work, that's local police work. This is Coruscant. There are bodies everyday, chief."

"You're preaching to the choir." The chief said. "The real problem isn't the body. It's what they found on the body." He said. "A datacard, no a datachit, even smaller, from a rather well known research facility on planet." The chief said. "Now, you and I both know that it's an internal security problem for the company and a municipal issue. Until..."

"There's something on the datachit." Rohn said. "There's always something on the datachit."

"Exactly. Sensitive data from more than one research project. It just so happens that one of the projects is directly related to the Imperial Army. That makes it us." The chief said.

"Well, shit." Rohn said.

[Pryde]

Aurora Eclipse leaned back in her chair and frowned at the terminal in front of her. She had been following up this lead Darien had given her for days now and had finally come back with nothing... Or at least nothing useful. The employer had bounced his signal off of so many different IPs that he nearly lost her--nearly. However, when she found the origin of the signal she learned that it had come from an abandoned facility. No security cameras, no guards, the place was supposed to be locked down.

"You look like you're having a day," a voice said and Aurora turned to see Joran walking up to her.

"How did you find me here," she asked, a bit annoyed that he followed her.

"There are only so many places nearby with public terminals and Darien said he had you working on something for him. So how's it going?"

Aurora rolled her eyes and turned back towards the terminal. "Bad," she said, "Darien asked me to track down the man who ordered the job. Best I could do was an abandoned facility with no cameras, but...," she stopped and Joran raised an eyebrow.

"But," he asked.

Aurora didn't answer immediately. She was typing at the computer but again that was just misdirection. When she finished she had brought up an image taken from a security camera near where the call was placed. There was a man walking away from the facility about the time the transmission was sent and with a bit more manipulation she could get a clear look at his face. "At least I know what he looks like," she finished finally, "but that still doesn't tell me who he is."

"Well, it's a start," Joran replied, "How hard could it be to get a name?"

She gave him a look and he held up his hands. "Okay, pretty hard, I get it. But maybe there's a way we can speed this up."

"How," Aurora asked him, her confusion plainly visible on her face.

"Well, we got a face, right? All we need is something to match it to."

"You mean facial recognition," she asked, "Because I have access to the software and a database large enough to help."

Joran shrugged, "No, you don't... But the Imperials do."

"No," Aurora said quickly, "I'm not even going to think about that right now, okay? Darien asked me to figure out where the call came from and I did, this is the best I can do."

"But you said so yourself, we don't know who this guy is. Bastard killed Jax and now he's gonna walk if you don't find him."

"I'm not breaking into an Imperial facility," Aurora replied hotly.

Joran fell silent for a moment and tried to calm himself down. "Look," he said patiently, "we all owe Jax a lot. Sanctuary wouldn't be what it is right now without him, but you--you owe him much more. You wouldn't even be here if he hadn't helped you. Are you really going to let his killer get away?"

Aurora looked away from him, her eyes falling on the face of the man that had killed Jax. Every instinct was telling her to quit right now, to let this go and just move on, but Joran was right. She owed Jax her life. He fed her when she needed it and gave her a place to stay. Had it not been for him she'd have died a long time ago. Just another displaced stray in the eyes of the public.

"Fine," she said finally, "I'll do it, but we may need help."

"I'll round up the others. We'll get this taken care of, you'll see."

He turned and left, leaving her sitting alone in a public cafe with a foreboding feeling deep in her gut. Nothing about this felt right to her. Why order a group of thieves to steal information and then leave it on the body? Just what kind of game was he playing? Did he make a copy of the information or was the whole thing just a way to get to Jax? That last thought sent a chill down her spine. Why would someone want to kill Jax? She shook her head to clear it. That was something she didn't care to think about right now, not while she was on the verge of possibly breaking into a highly secure facility just to steal access to facial recognition software. Going after the Imperials was stupid and she knew it but she couldn't think of any other way to get what they needed. She just hoped that the situation wouldn't get any worse...