And There Was Another✔️

Chapter 10: Up Into the Lower City

Three days passed.

They were three very long, sometimes frustrating, sometimes annoying, occasionally painful days. But at the very least, Seth felt like he was directly contributing to the cause. The rest of that first day had been spent entirely scouring the base for any and all parts, tools, and basically anything else Yex thought they might need. Yex himself spent all of that day first sorting through the list, and then figuring out what they needed to fix to get the ship into orbit and then past the Sith. He had also confirmed that the two things Nova had initially discovered about the ship that she thought would break through the Sith in orbit were functional and would do the job. Although he said it was technically possible...if they could fix it.

Reluctantly, he'd left Yex at the military base the first night so that he could get back and let Nova know they hadn't died. Walking back through the Undercity alone was something he particularly wasn't looking forward to. But he'd done it, and let Nova know the situation. Now that she trusted Seth at least to be a great fighter and to defend the settlement if it was attacked, she'd finally decided to risk having her and Yex out at the same time, and had decided to spend the night at the military base, because she had a fair amount of technical knowledge and she wanted work on the ship to be nonstop. And so she'd gone.

Seth had spent a few hours making sure the defenses were tightened up and then finally he'd caught a shower, a meal, and a check-over from Seri, who kept bugging him to come see her when she'd heard he'd come in contact with that combat droid. After getting checked out, he'd slept. The next day, Nova had shown up early in the morning, looking like crap, and had sent him off. And that's how the next two days had been. Yex worked twenty hour days three days in a row, saying that ithorians didn't need as much sleep. He was clearly the one doing the most work, but Seth and Nova did offer a fair amount of help.

And then they ran into a problem.

Yex determined that there was a small, though crucial, component in the radar scrambler. They simply could not leave Taris without it. After discussing the problem for awhile, they had eventually determined that they would need to buy it, because the chances of coming across it in the Undercity were pretty much non-existent. But it was a rare part, and they doubted they'd be able to find it in the Lower City either.

And so Seri had offered them a solution.

She had a contact, a doctor in the Lower City, who had an in with a local smuggling network, as he agreed to fix their agents up quickly and quietly in exchange for good money. After that, they began to ask who would go up, although Nova simply pointed to Seth as soon as the question was posed. Nova herself was obviously out because although she was the most likely among them to be accepted, or at least tolerated up there, she was still on the run. Likely from people who ran in the very same circles the smugglers they were trying to contact did.

Yex was out because he needed to keep working.

Seri would draw too much attention, as selkath on a world like Taris were very rare.

And the exiles were out because no one wanted to put them in danger, and they still didn't really know what was going on, (although they had had to be brought in at least a little because of the nature of the plan), and on top of that they were exiles. No one truly knew what kind of records the upper crust of Taris kept on those who had been exiled, and they felt it was very unlikely that a child of an exile, or even a third generation exile would be immediately recognized, but this was too risky to leave anything to chance.

So Seth was chosen to go.

Next was basically convincing the exiles to let them take not only every single credit they had managed to save, but also a few of their most valuable pieces, including a pretty decent pistol, a pair of compact but high quality power cells, and some nice jewelry. Put together, it was about a thousand credits worth of stuff. Between the four of them, they'd managed to convince the exiles that they were onto something big, something really big, and absolutely needed it. And so they'd gathered it up and moved on to the next part.