Delusions of Grandeur

7

Aryn Dro Thul stood on the busy bridge of the flagship Tradewyn, gazing out into space. She turned slowly to get the full 360-degree view of her fugitive fleet. A simple gown of midnight blue shot with silver draped around her like the star-dusted vista of space. Her fingers plucked absently at the material of her garment.

Even surrounded by the entire Bornaryn fleet, she felt alone. Her husband was missing, her brother-in-law kidnapped, her son Raynar returned to the Jedi academy.

The merchant fleet looked to her for guidance and reassurance, but Aryn had no one to rely on but herself. As the wife of Bornan Thul, she was their leader, and she could not let them—or herself— down. She would not let them down.

Aryn forced herself to stop fiddling with her gown. She excused the communications officer from his post. Sitting down at the station, she quickly calculated the coordinates for sending a routine message to her staff on Coruscant, composed a dispatch, and set the message pod’s origin memory to scramble as soon as it left the Tradewyn. Taking care of business details like these kept her busy, kept her mind off her own troubles.

Aryn sent a similar message pod every few days to corporate headquarters on Coruscant. The reports were encrypted with a proprietary code, based on a complex combination of music, light, and speech, which Aryn and Bornan had devised together while they were still students at the university on Alderaan, a long time ago.

In this way, she managed to communicate with the fleet’s administrative staff, who also sent out regular messages in encrypted scattershot packets, hoping that the fleet would intercept at least some of them. So far, Aryn had only obtained the messages numbered two, seven, and fifteen. She took a deep breath, straightened her shoulders, and launched the new packet with its instructions for the staff and a special note to her son Raynar.

Then Aryn scanned the hyperwave frequency bands in hopes of finding one of the message bursts sent from Coruscant. A minute later, her efforts were rewarded when she located a transmission packet carrying a Thul family identifier. Grateful to finally have some news from headquarters, Aryn quickly retrieved and decoded the message while her navigators and helmsmen calculated a new jump through hyperspace.

Staring off through the viewports while she waited for the usual audio message to begin, Aryn Dro Thul was astonished to see a tiny hologram appear in the air above the comm console.

Bornan Thul, himself.

It was her husband, alive and well! The image of his face seemed thinner, and he wore the rough-woven garb of a Randoni trader, but he seemed healthy.

The figure seemed to stare directly at her as it spoke. “My dear wife and son, I’ve been hiding for so long now that you may have feared me dead. But I am very much alive—for the moment at least. In my tradings I learned of a conspiracy so powerful, so … evil, that the fate of all humanity may depend on its prevention. I can tell you no more without placing your lives in great danger. I will not contact you again until I’m certain this threat is no longer to be feared. I hope I can survive long enough to do it. My thoughts are, as always, only with you.”

The tiny figure raised its hand as if to turn off a recording device, then seemed to think better of it. In a low voice, Bornan Thul added, “Perhaps I have too rarely told you in the past, but I love you both.”

The image dissolved into static.

Silent tears of relief, joy, and loneliness ran in rivulets down Aryn Dro Thul’s face. She reset the holomessage and played it again from the beginning. Lifting a finger to touch the tiny image in front of her, she listened.

Again. And again.