|
|
“Priire. And you are...?”
“My name is Rostek Analia,” I informed her. “I’ll buy you a drink if you’d like.”
He sea green eyes looked me over. I guessed she could tell all about me with one look of those probing orbs. They were that deep. She at least knew I was Corellian, although anyone could have told that from my name. I’d put money on the fact that she knew I was out of my element with these rimkin.
“Tell you what,” she counter-offered, “buy me a sandwich and I’ll tell you a tale.”
“What?” I asked, surprised. I didn’t realize that she knew I wanted to get a story from her. Although with those eyes I should have guessed she knew. Priire smiled and explained. “I’ve seen you around collecting stories from the others. I knew the bartender would point me out soon. I haven’t been around for a few time periods, and he wants to know what’s up.” The girl tossed the bartender a mock salute. “But I’m not going to tell him. Or you for that matter.” She grinned again. “I will give you a good tale, though. You’ll have to take it on faith, but even I don’t actually believe everything I hear in here!”
Priire did have a point. I grinned and ordered her sandwich.
She thanked me — unlike the others I’d bought for — and ate the sandwich. After finishing it, she neatly piled her dirty dishes and such. I gathered from this that she had lived on a ship where neatness was paramount to survival. When all this was done, she proceeded to spin a story the like of which I’d never before heard, or written...
Her name was Priire. She thought about changing it as she settled at the controls of her uncle’s spaceship, but had decided against it by the time it was ready for take off. This was to be the first of many thefts. She didn’t even bother to keep count of them because she didn’t care.
Fleeing all she’d known Priire found herself in a place where no one asked questions... not even of a nine-year-old with a blaster. Most would probably take her to be a shameless rimkin, but the girl had more standards than that. However, like the other lowlifes in the crowded cantina, she had her price. Long blonde hair had been cropped short and braided into a multitude of thin braids — a practical hairstyle. She wore a fitted black flightsuit and wanted one thing of the man in front of her. A job.
“You want to be an asteroid miner?” the man — Jansen — asked.
Priire nodded. “Yes. I can fly anything.”
“Well, little lady—”
The bartender interjected a comment. “That ‘lady’ isn’t a lady. She’s come out on top of at least three brawls this week. And she only started one of them.”
Jansen laughed. “Well, Priire, if you can out fly our best pilot, we’ll consider taking you on.”
With a smile, Priire agreed to his terms.
“Black Fire Nebula here, Control. All engines and weapons go,” Priire told him with an unseen smile. The grin that never touched her cool, controlled voice was hidden behind a helmet painted in the same blues, slivers, and blacks as the hull of her ship.
“Elemental Fire with all systems go. This isn’t a fight, Nebula. No weapons.”
Priire offered up her feral grin again even though no one could see it. “No weapons trained on you, Fire.”
“What in the six elements is that supposed to mean?” the other voice growled. The man she was flying against was Heis’an, a man with a fiery temper.
“I reserve the right to fire on space debris,” she clarified.
“Nebula, I am not space debris.”
Priire laughed. “Agreed, Fire. Now, we have an asteroid field to navigate!”
“What the...!” he yelped. Priire shot out from behind and cut him off. The suddenly aggressive move caught him off guard. Before she was the picture of a passive follower; now she was a dangerous daredevil, barreling through the asteroids. Priire inverted her ship belly up to a large asteroid. She was losing time, Heis’an mused, by looping around the top of the space rock... “Sith!” he cursed again as the Nebula fired her thrusters to shoot out from under the rock faster than before. Priire had used the asteroid as a push off point to increase her speed!
Three beams of energy shot out from Priire’s ship. One rock was vaporized and two others went spinning out of her path. Heis’an glared at her fleeing form dashing out of the asteroids as he frantically maneuvered out of the way of the spinning rocks. She was crazy!
Priire’s ship fishtailed. Heis’an looked to see what danger she was attempting to avoid. There it was. A dust cloud made mostly of sharp metallic shavings from the mines. He shuddered. If she couldn’t avoid it — and he knew she couldn’t — the girl would die a fiery death in the cold of space. Her shields weren’t up to handling the mass of metal.
The Nebula’s lasers fired, melting some of the fragments together into larger, more easily avoidable masses. Hopeless, Heis’an determined as the ship’s tail spun into the cloud.
Her shields crackled and failed with a spectacular light show. She must have put them all on the tail to get such a discharge. The man didn’t want to watch, but had to. With almost lazy grace the doomed ship swam through the fragments. Its unprotected hull was pierced in many places by the debris and should have exploded. The ship and her young master should have died a glorious death among the stars, but didn’t!
“Fire to Nebula, come in, Priire!” Heis’an called over the comm.
“Nebula, here, Fire.”
“Why are you still alive?”
He could almost hear her smile. “Because I didn’t die.”
“You should have,” Heis’an informed her. “You should be dead!” He paused for a moment to consider this. If she didn’t die in a situation where death was as sure as the stars she flew among, she must be... no! There hadn’t been one in years!
“You could not die among the stars because you are one,” he said almost reverently. “Starbred!”
“Starbred?” Priire was even more confused.
Heis’an went on to explain that the people of his planet are classified in different categories according to the six elements, Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Time, and the Stars. A starbred was like a goddess in their culture. They were very few and only appeared every hundred years or so. You could tell a starbred by the skill that she had with starships, the way they moved — as if with all confidence — and the stars in her eyes. The people believed that nothing in the heavens could hurt a starbred, and if you were to cut one, she would bleed the heavens out of her veins.
“Thank you,” Priire said, awed and honored that he thought she was worthy of the title. “But I’m nothing special...”
He shook his head. “No. I can tell... I can feel that you are starbred. You have the dream of the stars inside of you. Trust me.”
Yawning, the blonde realized she hadn’t slept for a long time. Despite her maturity and intelligence, she was still young and needed sleep. She settled into the bed and fell asleep...
“Priire... Priire!” someone called to her.
“Yes?” the little blonde asked, sitting up.
Out of the shadows, a figure emerged. She had on a short red skirt. The rest of her suit was basically white, with more red highlights. The other girl also had a blue bow highly decorated with gold on her chest. She smiled, and spoke to Priire. “I’m a friend. I have been sent from another galaxy and timeline to give you a message.”
Priire looked at her curiously. “What is it?” She had been taught to always take dreams seriously. They could tell you things you needed to know.
The blue-haired girl smiled. “You are special, and someday someone will come and tell you what you have been called to do.”
The words were familiar to Priire, and she wondered where she’d heard them before.
“But first, there are other things for you.” She made sure Priire was listening. “Soon there will be a choice for you to make. If you choose one way then there is a potential for you to be hurt. However, things will go much better for your friends in the future. If you choose the other way — as you did in my timeline — you will be protected now, but you’ll end up a shallow, weak, and scared person. Friends you don’t even know yet will be horribly murdered in front of your eyes and you will be powerless to help them.”
Her tone made Priire shiver. “How... how do you know this?”
“It happened in my timeline,” the other explained. “I have no desire to have it happen again. We figured out the turning point and I was sent back in time to save the future. Priire, you are a strategist. Use the gift. And this one.” She placed a necklace around Priire’s neck. It had a small black stone on it that glittered in the dream world’s starlight. “I have no desire to see you lose your le rêve d’étolies again.”
“Thank you,” Priire said. “What is ‘le rêve d’étolies’?”
A smile flitted across the older girl’s face. “It means ‘the dream of stars.’ Love the stars, Priire, for they are your destiny. The Force will be with you. Always.”
“You just want me out of your hair,” Priire accused playfully. “But I’ll go anyway. See you in a few weeks!”
“How do I get you in my expedition?”
“Excuse me?” Priire turned her black-masked face toward the man who was speaking. She’d given up her normal short sleeve or sleeveless jumpsuit for a black skintight flight suit. The mask that covered the upper half of her face was covered in blue-black flames, not unlike the ship she’d stolen earlier. All in all, the young girl was the very picture of a deadly smuggler or mercenary.
“Hire me as a merc,” the dangerous girl suggested.
Before she’d even finished speaking, the man answered, “You’re hired.” The one thing he had told her was that this could be dangerous and that there was another party interested in where they were going. Priire just laughed and told him that her first name was dangerous.
Can’t be Jedi, she thought a moment later as the aforementioned danger fell upon them in the form of an ambush. She cursed silently at letting them get the literal drop on her. Priire and the man glared at their attackers. “So,” the other man gloated. “It seems that the best man won! Or should I say, the man with the most mercs?”
Priire let a smile form on her half-masked face. “It’s not always quantity, but quality,” she informed them, yanking her employer down beside her as she crouched and started firing her blaster.
The young girl’s deadly accurate shots fell on the thick of the mercs, first killing the other group’s employer, then at least half the mercs. Finally, they surrendered to her superior firepower.
“You’re not bad, girl,” the highest-ranking merc left said.
Priire nodded in acceptance of his compliment, but not as if she was anything better than he was.
“I’m Demon, of the Red Haze.” He paused for a moment and let it sink into everyone present that this young girl, still a child by the standards of most of the cultures around, had systematically destroyed a highly trained killing team without a scratch on herself. “We could use someone like you. What’s your name?”
Remembering the dream that had come to her, Priire smiled. “You can call me the Hawkbat.”
“Why?” Priire asked, with a smile. “Two reasons. One — I’ve followed the Hawkbat’s career from start to finish with fervor. Two — I know the real Hawkbat, and she needs to be protected. Would you believe that she’s now a freedom fighter? Trying to undo all the harm she’s done over her life.”
I had the feeling that if she wasn’t lying, she wasn’t telling the whole truth. “You know the Hawkbat?” I asked.
She nodded. “We’re closer than most sisters.” Her eyes went wide and she slapped a hand over her mouth.
Smiling to myself, I put the pieces together. “You and the Hawkbat are... twins?” I guessed, smugly.
A blaster appeared out of nowhere. “Let’s pretend you didn’t jump to that conclusion.”
I gulped and nodded.
