Birthright: Epilogue

Lod sat in the cargo space watching the holorecording of Admiral Kane. Every now and then he'd glance at the pod containing some sort of twisted Force-sensitive version of himself and wonder if this was the right thing to do.

Vanya opened the doorway as Kane continued through Lod's service record. Vanya started to say something, then was apparently drawn in by Kane's commentary.

"...the drop footage was particularly impressive, by the way. That alone earned the medal, but toe to toe with General Grievous is... well, it's a shame that it wasn't a matter of public record," the voice of Kane said as the footage popped up.

Lod rolled his eyes, taking a long pull from his glass of Steiner. He watched the tiny shuttle he'd been on as it took a burst of fire from droid fighters; the shuttle responded by igniting. His adrenaline spiked, partially out of reflex and partially from the memory. It was icewater and antimatter in his veins as he felt the battlefield mindset draw down on him.

Vanya was asking a question, quiet and polite. Lod pointed at the flaming wreck and told her the names of the pilot and the copilot. "Droids set the shuttle's atmo on fire. I was the only one in there with my armor on," Lod said. He turned to look at Vanya as the shuttle drifted off kilter and out of formation.

"It was like standing on the surface of a star. Fire everywhere. I got up and kicked that damned escape hatch off in mid-stride," he said, looking down at the deck as the holographic version matched his description. Transparent Lod took a step out on the airborne hatch and leapt, propelled by the escaping fire like the slug from his weapon.

The ballistic commando landed atop the canopy of a nearby shuttle in a kneeling position, his armor still glowing like a giant ember. He gave the occupants a thumbs up and moved towards their hatch.

Lod looked back up at Vanya as his shuttle exploded twenty years behind him. "I ran away." The view shifted, now the helmet recording from a Clone Commander on his platform. Troops filled the view, aside from two Jedi. "I ran away a lot," Lod added, glancing back at the recording. "General Gorm and his Padawan, General Maw. Lot of anger in that one," he said, indicating Maw. "Should've figured. Red lightsaber."

Maw looked like he'd been built out mountains of muscle, with a head not too far from a Rancor. Gorm was his opposite; a little overweight, yet still a dashing, well-groomed man. Grom was paying attention to a display on the hoverplatform's consoles, but Maw was pointing at something.

The Commander moved to get a look as the Jedi seemed to discuss what to do; tiny bodies flew through the cargo hold like tiny ghostly ragdolls. Some sort of bomb had gone off in the middle of the clones, but it didn't stop; more and more mangled bodies flew into the air.

"This is when he pulled out the sabers. We were trying to get clear and hit him with the big AP rounds. All the sudden it was body parts everywhere. I got knocked over by a torso," Lod said. In the holodisplay a cloud of fire and smoke burst into view; the Commander had zoomed in such that he could see Grievous now.

Grievous held three lightsabers and one crumpled rocket. He looked like he was laughing as he resumed his march forward, clones scrambling to get out of reach of the mechanical monster.

"My ears stopped ringing and all I could hear was that bastard laughing at it all."

Grievous stopped; a few meters in front of him, a commando stood up and drew his rifle to his shoulder. Grievous was back to two hands; he looked the clone up and down, then took a step towards what he thought would be yet another easy victim. Lod fired an anti-armor round, knocking Grievous to the ground.

Grievous was instantly on his feet again, this time with four lightsabers. A dozen rockets and two antiarmor rounds were sliced out of the air; the lightsabers were a blur, Grievous was moving so fast. One round had gotten through, though; Grievous had a mangled hand.

He rocketed towards Lod and turned the rifle into a series of half-melted slices; Lod rolled forward and under the droid's legs as another round of fire came in. "I got lucky; he was distracted. I popped the vibroblade and jammed it in his ass for my troubles. He didn't laugh at that one."

The two Jedi suddenly dropped into the view, each one holding a dozen plates of armor in the air like shields. The recording switched back to Lod's service record slowly scrolling by with the Kane commentary for audio.

"You'll note that I had..." Kane managed before Lod switched the audio off.

"What a pompous ass. Everything I did, everything I watched people die for, he just made it all for nothing," he told Vanya. He took another sip of Steiner. "How're you holding up?"

Lod shoved as much of the anger as he could away, focusing on his concern for the Jedi. For the team, the pod, the mission. He'd find the answers later, while sober and properly furious. Likely while armed.

"Feel like I need a slitherhorn soundtrack. This whole Tapani nobility thing has got to have some internal consistency at its core, but frag-all if I can figure it out. Mind if I sit?"

At his expansive wave, Vanya sprawled to Lod's left. She glanced at the holoprojection, then over at the tank, then looked up into the cargo hold's rafters.

"After getting my ears boxed by Ghostie Jinn, I figured I'd check up on what the Council of Lords've been doing. Gregor suggested I check up on Countess Vorthys, who's been muttering about the lack of proper baking equipment lately. Turns out she's one of the grandmotherly types, and uses brownies to distract anybody she's trying to talk into doing things her way. She can't convince Admiral d'Arcy that a proper baking oven and decent baking supplies are critical to the war effort."

Vanya grinned to herself while Lod masked his snorted laugh with a swig from his nearly-empty glass. "Yeah, that was pretty much my reaction. So now I'm trying to figure out how to interpret and predict guys from the nobility, and I'm keeping an eye out for places on the station that I can safely send her with a pan of pirate-supplied ingredients to take advantage of heat exhaust. Plus, I got an earful about the importance of filial piety, and Doing Things Just So To Attract Manly Admiration, the Vor Way."

Lod blinked. "And, uh, this brings you to me?"

Vanya shrugged without taking her weight entirely off her hands. Still gazing up into the rafters, she prompted, "Tell me about family."

There was a moment of silence. "Ma'am?"

"Anything that pops in your head. Seriously," she encouraged. "I'm looking to fill holes in my database. Cap'n Razak and his Wacky Lads are too busy with contracts right now for me to go pester them; I can't find Yeager; and the 'family' data I'd get from Spar and Asajj would not be useful." She reconsidered. "Well, first Spar would blister me a while about how Mando'ade ought to be doing everything in service of the super-family titled 'the Clan', of which he says you're all members. He's coping with a complicated universe by narrowing it all down to a very specific 'us' versus any possible 'them', which doesn't exactly help me figure out today's puzzle."

After a moment, she added, "Oh, and don't call me that. Your brothers are setting a bad example for you, if you're catching the 'ma'am' reflex."

"Wilco, ma'am," Lod replied. "I suppose my concept of family would be different than, say, Razak. Or any trooper, for that matter."

Lod nodded towards the holodisplay and the cryopod, one atop the other.

"Suppose I should start back at the beginning, huh? My earliest memories are of reassembling blaster rifles in sensory deprivation," Lod said, shrugging at Vanya's reaction. "I remember competing against other commando pods early on; some of us got shuffled around a bit as... well, I don't really know why. Training mishaps, better psych matches, who the hell knows? I stayed with my brothers, though, right from the start. Kit always had something on him; there must've been a dozen times we thought we were going to starve when he would pull out a ration he'd stolen from the chow hall two weeks earlier."

Lod grinned and drained his glass. "He was our field requisition expert," he said, grinning wider. Lod stood and pulled a bottle and a second glass from a container near the door; he refilled his glass, poured a second glass, and turned back to Vanya. Handing her a brew, he explained. "Means he stole a lot of stuff. He ended up carrying our gear because he always found a way to carry more than anybody else."

Lod shut off the holodisplay and sat back down. "Eyeball was the first to notice anything. An ambush, the target, the one bunk that hadn't caught fire; made him a natural with the sniper rifle, but he was incredible with a pistol. We ran into an ARC that couldn't draw his pistol as fast as Eyeball, which we exploited to no end to win bets.

"Every few pods there was a guy that took to the close-in stuff like it was stitched into his being; chances are that it was, but it didn't make what Twelve could do in close any less scary. He would spend down time between missions reading about close combat techniques. He learned to put all his strength into a single instant, made him a monster when he was within arms' reach of something. Saw him fold a Super in half without using his vibroblade. Not that he wouldn't use the damn thing."

Lod stopped and took a swig of his beer, thinking. "Probably not looking for the strengths and weaknesses of my pod, huh?"

Vanya smiled slightly. "I said 'anything that pops into your head.' I meant it."

"Let me try again," he told her. "I think the four of us were brothers, not in the sense that every clone is my brother, but in the sense that we had a bond from going through so much together. Some of it was good, some of it was tough, and some of it was the sort of harrowing, disturbing crap I would shoot people dead before letting another person run through it again." Lod shrugged. "It doesn't stop, though; shortly after I started doing ops for the Rebellion, I came across an eighty foot tall... hold on, you won't believe me until I show you."

Lod grabbed the holodisplay and began fiddling with it. "Still can't believe he got the recording of that thing," he muttered, "after I nuked it. I'll find it."

Lod began fiddling with the holodisplay as he went on. "If my 'father' is really Admiral Kane, I don't know if that has any impact on what my family is. I'm still adjusting to not having a family that looks so alike outsiders can't tell the difference; for most of my life, anything other than my brothers or the rest of the clones was pretty much limited to Jedi and things I had to kill. This is... well, it's a different sort of family. You guys all have something pulling you away from the experiences we have in common; that's all I've ever had," Lod told Vanya.

"Why do you ask? Wait, I think -- yep, got it. Here," he said, handing over the holodisplay.

The recording was from a helmet cam; the background was dark, though you could tell it was a big space. Dominating the image was a twisted cybernetic sort of misshapen heart, pumping and pulsing to an uncanny rhythm. The view tilted down to a panel on a rocket launcher; Lod's gloved hand tapped in a timing sequence, armed the warhead, then gripped the firing stud. The view tilted back up to the heart; a moment later a rocket raced towards the heart. When it was too small to track, the helmet zoomed in to maximum; at this magnification the stygian engravings over the onyx machinery could be seen glowing crimson. The rocket smashed into the heart, lodging the warhead between meat and an ancient pylon. Though Lod had no idea, the carvings were Sith runes; they seemed to become impossible to focus on if the view centered on any of the runes.

"Oh, beans, SithBorg again. I take it you melted that'un thoroughly? Good." Vanya took a sip of the odd-colored liquid in her glass, made a reflexive face -- "Tastes like granary rat." -- and returned her attention to the holodisplay. "I wonder if Jedi Ghosts can see holos. You might spend an interesting half-shift or so showing that bit to Ghostie Jinn, see what he has to say about it. He probably read reports on it while he was alive, if that was during the Clone Wars; maybe he remembers something about how your Giant SithBorg recording might've gotten around."

As an afterthought, she added while handing the holodisplay back, "Calling him 'Ghostie Jinn' is at your own risk, of course. I thought it was an entertaining compromise between the super-formal 'Master Jinn' and the particularly casual 'Kwai'. I'm also considered something of a smartaleck, so, you know, not ideally respectful in a Padawan. I get away with calling Masters Skywalker and Kenobi by their nicknames, but not the other Jedi that I've met; and anyhow, he's dead, I don't remember any protocol for how to address a dead Jedi in the first place."

It took her a moment of befuddled rafter-gazing, and a prompt from Lod, to remember the actual question. "Oh. Filling in the database under the heading 'family, definitions and associated nexuses'. If I get all professoral on you here, smack my shoulder or something. A 'family' is a group of people, only that's a really crappy definition. You can't say they're biologically related, because that's as likely to not be the case as it is to be true. You can't say they're a group of well-acquainted people with a common goal, either. If that were the case, private eyes would never make enough money to pay their rent -- background searches on potential employees will only bring in a third of the needed work, at most. There's really no single definition for 'family' that's guaranteed to be true universally."

Lod shrugged with the arm that wasn't holding his drink. "What's the trouble, then?"

"I think my trouble, for the moment anyway, is that I don't have a functional understanding of this whole Family concept, and it's somehow important to the thinking processes of the people I encounter in my current line of work. I can see the benefits, sure, but I also see the costs, and I don't always see why Category A is considered valuable enough in certain cases to override Category B. The Skywalkers have a healthy set, whiny teenage attitude in stereo and all. The Apes have a healthy set, totally different, but again the clear benefits more than outweigh any burdens involved. Vor society, that's still in analysis. A Tapani noble family gets more of the political trouble because of their association with each other, but they also get some legal benefits that change based on which family is under scrutiny.

"Your pod is another good example of a family that's worth it -- you have shared assets among cooperative, contributing, competent individuals, and that leads to greater resources in the whole ... like comfort, familiarity, and someone you can trust when even other pods might be working to tip things out slightly of your favor. Not that I've ever seen any clones hesitate to support the clone from a strange pod when the chips are actually down.

"But then there's the Council of Counts. It's deliberately set up so the closest to family any two members can be is a sort of pod-next-door thing; somewhat distant cousins might be on it at the same time, members of the same overarching group called a House. They're each supposed to be looking out for their family, and the non-noble citizens their family allegedly represents, and the well-being of the whole Tapani Imperium. In that order, as I understand it. But! It's a shame to your own family if you show a trend of being uncooperative with others on matters of the whole Imperium, even if that's because you're putting your family ahead of the Imperium! So the well-being of your family, number one in the list, is to generally put Tapani's well-being first."

Vanya waved her half-empty glass. "Ergo, there's me, trying to help a genteelly manipulative not-so-little old lady find a way to make her preferred bribe, when we already have problems keeping the folks on the entire station fed, so that she will uphold her family's honor by giving other families an excuse to go along with what she wants ... which, since I helped her and it was Gregor's suggestion that sent me to help, will hopefully be to go along with things that don't set me, or Greg, to popping up at subcommittee meetings that'd really rather not have our attendance. And that's just one of my family-related puzzles. You know, I do think I'm unfond of Steiner PPC. Let's do a round tomorrow of Surprise Still Inspection Tours, see how many of the techs and the pirates have actually survivable product. And dismantle the ones that'll kill the customer, of course."

After a long, contemplative silence, Vanya abruptly spoke again: "I can sort of see them, I think, when you're remembering them. Could be aftereffects. I never got the lecture course on how to get rid of the Dark Side, just 'for pity's sake, Vanya, must you poke Evil with the nearest available stick?' and another batch of vegetables to peel." Her mimicry of Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi in slightly-more-exasperated-than-entertained mode was close enough for recognition by any casual acquaintance. "So I don't have the slightest clue how it ought to work, or how it did, for that matter. I missed the whole thing."

Lod shrugged. "He kissed you, you fainted, your eyes weren't black the next time you opened them. All's good."

"Bah. I don't know if the kiss was a distraction so he could accomplish something else, or ... I mean, can you imagine Ani laying one on Feyd?"

Lod grinned. "General Skywalker? No, I can't picture him making out with any Sith. His wife would skin and mount him on the wall. She's a better shot than he is, too."

He thought for a moment before speaking again. "Maybe you can shed some light on these 'Imperial Knights' for me. The Jedi seem more like a monastic order with a number of talents as unique to the individual as they are in application; I've seen Jedi put starfighters through maneuvers a droid couldn't replicate, watched one General catch a DEMP round bare handed before she tossed it back, and sat in on briefings where a half-dozen Jedi gave a detailed description of exactly what the battle plan of our enemies where before we even knew they were in-system.

"From what little I've seen of the Sith, they're always sporting a mad-on the size of a space station, and their abilities are purely martial. I know next to squat about these Knights, though. Aside from their miracle kissing ability and ill-advised tampering with my weaponry."

Vanya set her drink down so she could wave both hands in the air. "Insufficient intel. It's like they haven't chosen. You know, close to a station there are travel channels, just like airspace in planetary cities has repulsorlift channels. You want to go east, you do it closer to this side of the open space, folks trying to go west are in a parallel channel either on the same altitude or maybe offset a little up or down. Faster travel is usually up higher. It looks worrtshit insane from the outside, but once you know the system, you realize this is essentially the most natural result of having people want to reach a Point B sometime before lunch, and not die in the process. That's not how the Masters would explain the Force, but it seems like a reasonable metaphor for the Light Side and the Dark Side: you gotta travel somehow, everybody's using the same sort of energy-to-momentum conversion, it's just that some people are trying to reach a Point B where the universe revolves around their personal preferences, and other people are trying to reach a Point B where the universe does its thing without wasting energy on making various parts of itself grind against each other. Theory goes that you can either try to twist the universe into a direction it wasn't already going, in which case you get malfunctions like pain and fear and great big honkin' entropy; or you can figure out which way the universe is set to go, and gently nudge it around turbulence if necessary, but mostly adapt yourself to the path instead of adapting it to you. Not really a logical middle ground there. Jedi are supposed to spend a lot of time smoothing out turbulence, at which I still basically stink. Dathomirian Witches, at least the ones Hana represents, split themselves between settling turbulence and making sure everybody has a good time regardless of what's going on. Mentats are all about predicting and analyzing, and they hate it when too much entropy gets involved. Bene Gesserits are ... I'm not sure; I think some of them are trying to take a shortcut, and they're surprised when hilarity ensues.

"Then you've got this Imperial Knight thing. They don't publish pamphlets, but best I can guess from observation, they're in the middle of the traffic with their engines revving and they're trying to keep from traveling very far in either direction. So where are they going, then? And just how long do they think they can hang suspended in the middle without being the focal point of a twenty-swoop pileup?"

Again she waved her hands in opposite directions, ending in a big shrug. "Sir Tam agreed that the Dark Side is inefficient. So that's something. But usually we're talking about an immediate problem at hand, and whether we're going to shoot each other's buddies. He hasn't given me any policy. I don't even know why they're working for Pruneface."

Lod rolled his eyes and pointed at Vanya while still holding his beer. "It seems like the Knights are working outside of any chain of command with the Emperor explicitly at the top. We've bumped into them twice now?" Lod looked up at a corner of his imaginary HUD, caught what he was doing, and looked back at Vanya. "However many times it's been, they've been after specific objectives that haven't exactly fit into Imperial doctrine."

"You know, if you're not feeling too much like a Jedi, maybe you should just be one of those other groups," he added. Lod tipped the beer towards himself and tried to explain himself. "All of us have changed alliances, or jobs, or what have you. Why can't you change... I guess I don't really understand, because it seems like a label to me."

Lod scowled and paused. "I'll aim for that one again: I've got talents and skills, you've got the same, roger? Well, mine is war, which is a lot more prevalent than yours, but still," he said, holding up an open hand and a beer, "we've both got something we're good at. It seems to me that you don't like everything the Jedi regs are telling you to do -- or not do -- but you're not obligated to them. Why not go with what fits your tactical capacities?"

Lod pointed at the silent holodisplay. "After all the crap that got put on that list, you and I both know that I'll never be anything but an element of warfare. Thing is, I was in a position to see what was going on around me and even further beyond that; I didn't like what I saw, and now I'm fighting against it. I don't see why you can't do something like that; a transfer, or set up your own club of Force users."

"Eh." Vanya was silent for a minute. She pushed her stale half-full glass away with her fingertips. "I don't know. I have beef with some of the traditions. I read a line somewhere when I was a lot younger, a definition for 'destiny' that rang a bell deep in my mind. Something about how half the time it's really someone getting you to do something without any inconvenient questions. I have been all about digging up the missing pieces of the whole since I was seven standard." She smiled lopsidedly at Lod. "Years old, I mean. That would be about five months in age for you lads. And I lived in a galaxy that supposedly was not at war by then. Safer for me than it would have been for you, to prod my fingers into cabinet drawers that someone else meant to keep shut. Anyway. One of the veterans tells me, 'Do it this way because this is how it is done,' I still want to look at why this is how it is done. And if maybe there is a missing piece to that whole. I ask a lot of inconvenient questions. I get persistent if the answer sounds too much like, 'Because: Destiny!' Yesterday was not the first that I got burned for it. Won't be the last, either." She looked back at the rafters. "I like the faith," she said finally. "It's the customs that I ... not 'reject'. That I'm investigating."

"Got to be tough, doing that without a trainer handy," Lod said.

Vanya nodded. "And how. Ghostie Jinn is--"

The amusement fell off her face abruptly. She scowled at the air around her, then dug out her datapad to check recent messages.

"Fierfek!" She scrambled to her feet, did that little weight-shifting thing some people used to check how far from sober they had gotten since they sat down. "You fond of that beer glass?"

Lod looked at the more-than-a-third-full glass near Vanya's foot. "What, that? Nah. Liberated a box of them around the same time I got the Steiner. What's got you bothered?"

Vanya snatched up the glass. "That idiot Ace Dixon? Said something to me earlier while trading me the flour for Countess Vorthys's baking. Asked me if I wanted string and pipettes. I saw a plasma torch nearby but figured he had done a shift welding new modules to the station."

"Okay? Sounds likely. Black Hats want to set up a poker room. They know if they want their own space, they've got to work construction."

"He's making candles, the stupid dirtsucker, lots of little candles. Good news: he's got an oven!" She held up the beer glass grimly. "Bad news: he's going to light a series of open flames. On a space station. With crappy emergency systems! Only I'm going to go up there, and I'm going to dump this beer down his flightsuit, and I'm going to drag him by his lapels over to Ulysses Boothe, at which point the shouting will really commence. Thanks for the, you know, all of it."

"Don't break his fingers, ma'am," Lod advised her departing form. "Dixon is an okay pilot."

Vanya waved that idea off impatiently.

Lod looked at the stasis pod. He looked at his holoprojector.

"Hell," he told himself, "I'm about to miss a bar fight. What am I doing?"