Thanks guys! I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it
*********************************************************************
Bel didn't even bother trying to hide her emotions. She looked at her family with a grave troubled expression, dreading what she was about to say.
"Danint's not coming home. He was killed by Imperials."
Shocked silence filled the room and everyone was staring at her. She had never felt so uncomfortable in her life, and she had dealt with some real nasty beings in her time. Finally Erik just said "what?"
"The reason he had been going on longer runs was because he had started smuggling to make some more money on the side to try and help the business. But he got caught. Instead of just killing him or imprisoning him they experimented on him, nasty biowarfare stuff. We found him afterwards but it was too late. I… I’m so sorry.”
Tears were in her eyes, it was as bad as reliving it. It had happened about three months previous, on the second mission she had done with the crew of the
Qanotha. Her path had started with the corvette’s crew long beforehand though she hadn’t realised it at that time. The promiscuous smuggler had tricked a young cocky Imperial officer in a cantina after hearing him drunkenly boast about some important information he had. She had gotten him more drunk then slept with him, stealing a datachip containing confidential information after he passed out before making herself scarce. The heavily encrypted datachip was sold on and she thought that was the end of that, though it was the Alliance who purchased the information when it was decrypted. Months later Bel herself unwittingly was the courier of that information and the mission details to the
Qanotha, and they went on to hire her to aid them in their mission to the gas planet of Alvor. There the Empire had been working on a new superweapon and they were tasked with finding more information about it and destroying it.
Bel’s small group were an advance team and their mission was endangered when the smuggler was recognised by the very Imperial officer she had stolen the information from. She had managed to turn the tables on the flustered man after he had attempted to kidnap her, but a fight had broken out in the marketplace on the satellite station Touk which they had infiltrated. The Empire, fearing a breach in security, decided instead to kill the thousands of people in the marketplace. Bel’s small group had narrowly escaped the slaughter while the second Alliance team infiltrated another station. Unable to do anything to help Bel’s team had left the system and gone to Nar Shaddaa to find more information. After discovering the true nature of the Empire’s superweapon in development they flew back to Alvor to find that the second team had completed their mission by destroying the weapon and were attempting to escape. Bel was able to help them fight off the TIE fighters and escape back to the
Qanotha. They then discovered that the weapon on Alvor was only part of the Empire’s plans.
The Empire’s true weapon was a deadly biological agent, designed to be delivered into a planet’s atmosphere by the prototype weapon they had destroyed on Alvor. The agent was being developed on the small moon Drongar Alpha, and the
Qanotha was tasked with finishing the job by infiltrating the research facility and destroying the weapon. Bel used her knowledge of the underworld, her ship and a mercenary alias she had as leverage to become part of the strike team under the guise that she was in it for the pay, though that was only partly the truth. The Empire’s ruthless slaughter of thousands of innocents at Touk had affected her more deeply than she cared to admit. They gained access to the research facility by assuming the personas of slavers, bringing ‘prisoners’, the strike team from the corvette, in as test victims for the scientists. It was while carrying out their mission to find out all information they could about the bioweapon before destroying the facility that Bel discovered her cousin Danint had been captured by the Empire for smuggling and was an unfortunate victim.
They had been too late to save him, but it had haunted her since and started her down a very different path to the one she had taken beforehand. She was no longer the same free-spirited smuggler who worked for whoever offered the most credits with no allegiance to anyone. She had only recently started to come to terms with Danint’s death but having to explain it to her family was bringing it all back. The silence was eventually broken by her mother beginning to cry. Aves put his arms around his wife and held her close. Gavin and Erik had matching murderous expressions on their faces. Bel crossed her arms and hugged herself, feeling absolutely terrible. The tall executive officer of the
Qanotha came over and put his arm around her shoulder to comfort her. Finally Erik choked out an angry “how the kriff do you know this?! What were you doing?!”
“I…. I can’t say. I really wish I could tell you but I’m not allowed to. It’s not safe for you or us if I tell you. I promise we weren’t working for the Imperials, I’m never working for those bastards again. You have to believe me.” The words were choked out as Bel struggled to keep some composure.
Erik clenched his fists in anger and glared at her and Kardac. Gaven asked flatly “are you sure he is dead?”
Bel nodded, her voice still choked. “He told me what happened with his dying breath. He asked me to make sure I came home and let you know what had happened to him. We watched him die.” It was a lie but she couldn’t tell her family that he’d died in the destruction of the facility at the Rebel's hands. The Imperials were the ones to blame regardless. Her mother’s sobbing got louder.
“I’m so so sorry. I wish I didn’t have to be the bearer of such bad news.”
“Karking Imperial scum!” Erik spat out and stomped out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
Bel looked after him helplessly not sure what to say. Gaven stepped forwards and put a hand on her shoulder, tears in his eyes and shoulders slumped.
“Thank you Ari. For telling us. Erik will come round just…. Give him some time.”
He took the hand from her shoulder and walked slowly from the room like a man defeated and looking ten years older in that short time. Aves watched after him but kept his arms around Mia. Her mother sniffed and looked at Bel, her face filled with a mix of sadness, outrage and despair. Erik and Danint had been more like sons to her. When their mother died the boys had often lived with Bel and Mia while Gaven and Aves worked away. Bel had grown up with them, seeing them more as brothers than cousins.
“This is why I never wanted that life for you! That could have been you!”
Aves hushed his wife and sat her down on the small couch, then came over to his daughter and wiped the tears from her face. His own eyes were tear filled.
“I’m so sorry you went through that Ari, but I’m glad he had someone with him at the end.”
He pulled her in for a hug and Bel wrapped her arms around him, tears running silently down her cheeks. Aves held her for a few minutes then looked back over his shoulder at Mia. He carefully steered Bel into an adjoining office, beckoning Kardac to follow. Once they were somewhere more private he spoke quietly to the two of them.
“I’m going to take your mother home. Please Ariruuna, don’t push her. Everyone is a bit upset right now and it won’t help anything. She has missed you terribly and has blamed herself for you being gone for so long. Please promise me you won’t go anywhere.”
He redirected his gaze to Kardac. “Don’t let her go anywhere. I know my daughter, she has always had a habit of wandering. She is worse than her old man.”
Kardac nodded. “Aye, we will stay here. My condolences to you all for Danint.”
Aves looked hard at him for a moment. “You are a military man aren’t you? Or at least used to be. I’ve seen enough of yous in my travels to know that hardened look to death. I don’t think you are Imperial either, I severely doubt my Ari would have brought you here if you were. Don’t worry we have no love for the Empire, even less now. Look after her, I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
He nodded towards Bel and gave Kardac a pat on the shoulder before walking out of the room. Bel looked at her friend and sat back on the edge of the desk.
“That was….. that was horrible. I don’t know what I was expecting but I don’t know if it could have been much worse. How do you do it? How can you tell families that their loved ones aren’t coming home?”
Kardac came over and leant back against the desk next to her. “Because I have to. The families deserve to know and it is my duty. It doesn’t get any easier no matter how many times you do it.”
He put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her close, giving her a kiss on the top of her head. She wiped the tears from her eyes and gave him a slight smile.
“I think I need a drink.”
She opened the office door quietly, seeing that her parents had left. While the couch had been replaced since she had last been home everything else looked the same as from her childhood. She went to a cupboard above the sink and reached her hand to the back, standing on her toe tips and feeling around. With a small grin she pulled out a bottle of whiskey.
“They always thought it was well hidden back there and that we kids didn’t know about it. So predictable that they still keep it in the same place.”
She opened the bottle and took a mouthful before leading Kardac out a different door and into the warehouse itself. Her uncle was sitting on the edge of the drop down from the office to the main floor a metre below. Bel hesitated but he heard the pair come out, turned his head and waved them over. Bel sat on the edge next to him, her uncle eyeing the bottle in her hand and wiping his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt.
“I always suspected you three knew where to find that.” He motioned for her to hand it over and had a long pull from it before handing it back to Bel who did the same thing. She offered it to Kardac. Gaven gave her a small smile.
“I remember the time I found you and Danint drunk in the corner of this warehouse. You were what, 15? Danint said you’d only had one glass. You begged me not to tell ya ma. I can’t remember how many times I covered for you, you were always such a trouble maker.” His eyes flicked up to Kardac. “I bet that hasn’t changed.”
Kardac grinned in return. “No it hasn’t. I’m not the least bit surprised she used to get into such trouble. She can hold her liquor better now.”
Gaven chuckled. “Of course she can, she’s a Corellian through and through! Her ma never quite understood our love of drinking and mischief, she wasn’t Corellian you see.”
“Hey, I’m right here you know” Bel protested mildly about being talked about.
Gaven smiled and put his arm around her. The two occasionally shared the bottle but otherwise sat in silence. At one point Gaven shuffled sideways and looked at the grip of the blaster sticking out of the holster on her hip.
“I see you haven’t lost your love of blasters. May I?”
Bel hesitated a moment then handed over one of her deathhammers, grip first. He took it and turned the heavy blaster pistol over eyeing it appreciatively.
“Lethal looking piece of equipment there my dear, and you have two of them. Still any good with them?”
The smuggler grinned slightly. “Do you have to ask? I could whoop your arse in target practice with dual blasters now.”
Her uncle grinned. “You could whoop my arse with one back in the day, I have no doubt you have improved to wield two just as effectively. It’s a strange thing, seeing you all grown up. No longer that young lady so eager to see the galaxy. You look like you have seen more than your fair share of things now.”
Bel sighed as he handed her blaster back. “You have no idea.”