Archaeology

Archaeology is not history armed with a shovel, but a detective story in which the investigator is a thousand years late to the scene.

I did not decide to return to Alderaan right away. At first the idea was to fly to Naboo. To see the city, the scenery, and so on, to see my mother, of course... But I had to give it up - the current status quo, namely, getting away from the Jedi Order and going deeper into "simple" life was like air to me. Becoming what I was in "that" reality, but bowing to either the Sith or the Jedi Council was not something I wanted to do. The Council in general made me very cautious about it. I might have thought they were suddenly concerned about my person, but I saw no sign of any investigation. If they had been looking seriously, they would have found me easily in a couple of days, and all they had to do was make an official request to the government, where I would have been easy to find, because that is where they register and keep all the data on transactions and contracts, such as the agreement on the training or the purchase of land...

But this did not happen - no one found me, although I was sure that with this level of midichlorians they would not have just left me and dragged me into the temple. I remember in canon Yoda flirtatiously pretending that he wouldn't take me as a Jedi... the little green coquette - they paddle everyone they can get their hands on. And if not to the central temple, then to any other temple-the only place on Coruscant I could think of.

Although I had nothing against the Jedi themselves, despite the council's misdirection, the Jedi were mostly positive people who had kept the Republic together until now. They prevented wars and other cataclysms, stayed out of the caca that is politics and private-proprietary consumerism, which has kept them pretty healthy mentally. Like Buddhist monks, or samurai, who honor high matters like karma or honor above carnal pleasures and the presence or absence of material values...

I gave up the idea of visiting my family, but the desire to know how my mother was doing did not leave me. I opened my eyes and looked at the dashboard of the ship, I turned and lazily threw to the droid:

- Erdva, prepare the ship for departure. We're going to Tatooine.

- Aye, aye, Captain. - he squeaked. Where did he pick up that lingo?

The droid began to prepare the ship for departure. All that was available to me, I have already learned - my mother was listed in the retinue of the Queen of Naboo, Padme Amidala. There was nothing more about Mom on the local network, and it was the same on the Nabuan Infonet. It was... sad, since, in my opinion, the Queen's SB had rubbed out all mention of Mom, leaving only the official details in the list of the Queen's retinue. But I knew that as it was, so I was quite saddened. I could not find out at once, but we Bolsheviks are persistent guys - I will hire a man to find out everything and bring me the information.

In ten minutes the ship was ready to take off, and I, after talking to the spaceport, received permission to take off. The ship broke away from the concrete of the pad and sailed upward into the sky. Overcoming the atmosphere, due to the lack of opportunities to accelerate well is a slow matter - the height of the stationary orbit, from which you can start in hyper was four hundred and a little kilometers, and the speed of my flying stool with a motor - about five hundred kilometers per hour. And in spite of the fact that I could accelerate in thin atmospheric layers, it took about a quarter of an hour to reach orbit. During this time the captain left the bridge and went to his cabin - Erdva is a smart guy, he will drive himself, I do not need to get under his arm. I couldn't make such a long voyage with power navigation anyway, so all I had to do was rest. Tatooine was not close, or rather it was the edge of the galaxy, even in the Huttian sector.

While I had time, I sat down to meditate and checked my sword again after the first real use - no excesses had occurred. The data from the systems was recorded and I quickly reviewed it and dumped it onto the datapad, into my collection. As the first real fight involving a light-sailor and a force.

And then... what happened next was pretty boring - I meditated, honing my control of the subtle power flows further and further - in the end I, not being able to rely on the amount of power because it was prohibitive, trained the subtle influence first. It was... fantastic. If I discounted the fact that I was now flying in my own starship, it was still fantastic. In order to control my power, I found more and more training, more and more areas for self-development.

Sitting on my bed, I reached for the speedbike downstairs and began to disassemble it partially, using telekinesis to remove the bolts, the steel panels, the repulsor fork, and the microreactor. As it turned out, I was worried for nothing - the local equipment ate gasoline and oil in very limited quantities - only as a lubricant for droids and fuel for jet engines, and nothing else, because all the engines of the starships were exclusively powered by reactors. The reactors, in turn, were powered by a special synthetic fuel, which was more of a concentrate-jelly, created from a variety of minerals and materials. Theoretically, the range of fuels for ships and land vehicles was extremely wide, and the reactors, almost all of them, gobbled up just about anything. But, as is always the case, His Majesty Reality intervened. It was possible to fill the reactor with fuel which it was not designed for in normal operation and get a boost in power output, or it was possible to increase the service life by de-forcing the engines and the power system with soft, low-saturated fuel. True, the output will drop drastically. In part, such a universal solution to the energy problem multiplied all fuel crises by zero. And already, how many gossip and legends among smugglers such a detail has sown - not to count, from mythical superfuel, to evil compositions "diluted with donkey urine". But the flight from Corellia to Tatooine only cost me, in fuel terms, about a hundred credits - incredibly cheap, considering the engines and hyperdrive would last a long time.

I took the reactor off the speedbike, unbeknownst to me, and after changing the fuel and oil, I moved on to modifying it. I'll be done in a week. The first victims were repulsors - they were cleaned from the slightest flaws and accelerated almost one and a half times, then came the turn of the power cables. Unlike the machine, these are the main fuel lines, so I took them apart with great care and turned the metal of the wires into an alloy, finding a more suitable composition for this case, which reduced the resistance by five percent. After putting them back together and putting them to the side, and I could feel everything going on right below me in the cargo cabin perfectly, I took the wheel. Overall, the layout of the Hawk was classic; in terms of design, it was similar to motorcycles from the eighties and early nineties. I had nothing against the design, but still removed the body panels and changed their shape - now the bike looked like a race bike, and the most, in my opinion, modern. Smooth contours of the sides as laid next to the bike - the work took me a couple of hours, but I was not going to stop - the next dissected were the seats, fork repulsor handlebar. Slightly lowering, and making the seat more recessed, I ensured myself a good fit in the future. And finally, the most important thing - the heart of the bike, its reactor. Since the other parts could give out more parameters than it could provide, I strengthened the reactor. It's easy to say, though - the machine was quite complicated, and before I started, I had to work hard to understand how it worked. It was very different from the ship's reactor. By tweaking the metals and the core, where electricity was released by the chemical reaction of the loaded fuel and catalysts. The fuel was already in the reactor, and it worked "at idle," giving out power to nowhere. In order to increase its power, I had to make a little bit more complicated the catalyst mechanism itself, so that the reaction would be more active and more fuel would get into the active zone, as well as to significantly revise the process of electricity generation - all conductors were replaced with the chrome-copper-steel alloy that I had already tried - the alloy had proven itself well. Since chromium was a superconductor, I had to conduct it with thin strands through the common fuel line, as if it were a big rope of strands, chromium, steel, copper... The presence of the superconductor in the metal and its constant contact with the other metals gave a tremendous increase in system performance, although it required separately isolating and stabilizing the resulting molecular rope with a winding of strands of neuranium. But it was easy - all I had to do was to melt it and connect a foil-thin layer of neuranium and the wire itself. The system stabilized quickly-neuranium was an incredibly heavy metal with medium conductivity. However, it was too early to write me down as a genius technician - I only "overclocked" the iron, strengthening and improving the metals and changing the design, in the image and likeness of the top models I had seen and felt in other machines. Such technical solutions were unnecessary for a bike - they were on high-altitude speeders, whose reactors generated power almost like little shuttles. It was too expensive to do the same but in miniature - first, when you need more speed, you can use a more powerful bike or speeder, or even a fighter jet, but to put a mega-motor in a bike... no way.

I supplemented all this with a beautiful stylized windshield. It was above the level of the pilot's head, and the wind was supposed to go around the top surface of the bike, protecting me from the occasional pebble. It wasn't glass, of course, but the transparent metal used to make the portholes on spaceships. In fact, getting the metal for my experiments was easy-all I had to do was pick up old junk parts from the spaceport and melt them down, cleaning up the metal and restoring its structure.

After the work was done, I telekinesis and forcefully assembled the machine, and after feeling it for flaws, I didn't notice how I fell asleep. The work took a lot of time and mental energy - it was incredibly hard to keep my attention all the time. But I could boast that I could overhaul a bike even from the next cabin - just by the power of my mind. I'm cool. That ability could come in handy - like taking out the droids that are considered cannon fodder here, or like quickly repairing something without even physically looking there. As a flight mechanic I was definitely a merry-go-round, but I wasn't particularly proud of it, or should I say, I didn't care for it. I trained my strength control perfectly, becoming more and more adept at changing the physical world. It is true that my cherished dream was to learn how to influence living organisms the way I do with metals. I even decided to buy some guinea pigs, but so far I haven't gotten around to doing it. You could find native lizards on Tatooine, and desert critters like mice were not uncommon there.

After thinking about mice, I finally fell asleep.

In the morning, I put on the costume of a traveler on my ship - a shirt of rough cloth, the same pants and slippers, I took a cup with hot herbal tea and went to the control post. There, in the spacious cabin, was Erdva. In front of the ship was a blur of hyperspace, a multitude of dots flying by, obscured objects that were impossible to see. Most likely they were optical illusions created by the hyperdrive field.

- How was it? - I asked Erdv, taking a sip from my cup.

- We're on a master course, captain! - the droid answered, and buzzed some sort of servo motors or repulsors.

- Is that so? ETA?

- Five days, four hours and twenty minutes, captain!

- So that's another five days..." I frowned, counting the days left to the end of the vacation. I had nineteen days, excluding round trip time, which I could have spent on anything. I didn't want to stay long on Tatooine-I wouldn't be able to make much money there, and would I be able to race? It was kind of a season, but there was no need to shine yet, and the stakes for last season's winner weren't supposed to be as lucrative as last time. The only thing I could get from Tatooine, other than, of course, hiring someone to follow me, was the purchase of illegal goods - powerful weapons for the ship, which wasn't really needed, since I could always go into hyper, even without a navicopter or path calculation. There were also high-end hyperdrives, weapons, metals...

Metals... Tatooine was basically a giant, colossal graveyard of ships. In its sands, ships of many different races and eras-beginning with those of the endless Rakat Empire-have found their final resting place. The Jawas make their living by searching the deserts for scrap metal and other junk, and selling it off-and they're not out of work, are they? On these ships, you can find ancient units that are more than ten thousand years old. Of course, they are long and reliably obsolete, but I thought it would be a good idea to use my power scanner to go through and see what I could find in the sands. You could find at least a dick with horns and a hyperdrive in between...

Though most ships were left there, because they'd used up their resources. Scrapping them isn't the cheapest way to get rid of a ship, and you can't always get rid of them for scrap metal, so they just drop them wherever you can.

My power scanner was fairly well developed - on Mandalore I could sense quite scattered metal through a many-meter-long layer of rock, so the ship...

It might have been an excellent training for my abilities. Of course, I wouldn't mind learning combat, since I was a total zero in terms of swordsmanship, but isn't the circle of strength abilities closed on waving a light saber and hurting those around me?

Generally speaking, hyperspace travel, I mean regular, legal travel, is so boring! The life of smugglers is really interesting - the patrols they run from pass through asteroid fields, which in addition have monstrously unstable gravity, land on planets with a thin atmosphere, where they have to seek temporary shelter, burrow into the ice poles of planets with water, and just drive in vain through places where no normal person would take his ship. A smuggler-pilot is a real expert in piloting, who can squeeze every bit out of his ship's possibilities. You can fly like a white swan, with no malfunctions, no adrenalin, no speeding up.

We set off on a general course - in the smugglers' vocabulary this means that the navicomputer the ship was equipped with calculated the main jump - from Corellia on a secondary route one jump to the main interstellar route, and then once more, but this time all the way to Tatooine. Tatooine was situated in a rather favorable location for smugglers of all stripes, which also kept the sandball alive.

So I looked for something to occupy myself with. Time was slipping away as if through my fingers - I had to endure the fact that I had five more days, five more precious days, to scoot back to the planet. It was... annoying. But no more than that-the studies were not a burden on me, and the desire to see Alessia at last loomed on the edge of my consciousness.

I looked at the instrument readings and the haze behind the windshield for another five minutes, and then decided to go to my room to do some work. First, I visited the bike I had rebuilt yesterday - it was exactly as I had felt it in the force - with a smooth bodywork, a deep seat and a powerful reactor... it could easily reach seven hundred kilometers per hour, which was a good rate of acceleration compared to the four hundred in the passport, but I would only know the exact specifications of my bike after I took all the readings on the planet. It was more of a nostalgia than a necessity to ride the sands of Tatooine.

I also found myself thinking about Jav's profession, or rather, digging up all the scrap metal from the sands of Tatooine. No, the prices of common metal were not so great as to be seriously engaged in them, but from a purely historical point of view, it would be interesting to see what could be found there.

Having finished examining the bike, and satisfied with the work done, I decided to train my brain, not my strength, and went to find a secretary droid to start classes on the next course. Unlike me, Alessia probably doesn't suffer from bullshit and would be happy if I could help her with her understanding of the lectures at the beginning of the second course. And the tasks, because, after the vacations, few students are able to switch instantly to the study mode - the post-holiday syndrome was very familiar to me from my past life, too. And this was the first time this life had given me the luxury of no tasks and no immediate goals-even on Tatooine I always had something to do, let alone the time of smuggling, where it took a lot of work for Ju and me to get a good reputation and earn money...

Tatooine didn't seem to change over time - still the same desert, baked mercilessly by the two stars, still the same spaceports, from a bird's eye view more like tent camps. But there are no birds on Tatooine -- too hot, too little water, too little food.

Tatooine has never changed. But I did change, and I perceived this planet in different ways. My transporter entered the planet's atmosphere. No one asked for callsigns, of course - come whoever you want, land wherever you want, big Tortuga, where there is no power except for one Hutt, who has not cared about anything for a long time.

As the G9 descended to the planet, I sat sprawled out in my chair. There were no parking rules here - put your trough in a vacant space, or take it to the docks if repairs were needed. So there was no politeness or negotiation with the surface. The haze of hyperspace was replaced by the whistle of wind and repulsors, as well as the overcoming of rare feather clouds. We were descending - me in the first pilot's seat and Erdva, who was standing between the seats and connected to the ship through the shunt. I could have done it wirelessly, but it works about the same way as wi-fi, that is, on the transmission of microwaves, and given that the actual speed of the ship's computers and the droid is about thirty gigabits per second, then with a wireless connection Erdva turns the cabin into a small microwave oven. Of course, none of the equipment burns, but radiation of that intensity could leave me without offspring in the first place, so the ship's control channel is a standard shunt in the first place. If the USB standard had lived a thousand years, its descendants would look the same. For exchanging small packets of information, though, Erdva uses the wireless standard, WSUN. In Galactic, this acronym stands for Wireless Standard of Unit Network, (no analogue in the great and mighty has been found). This is the "stick" that most of the galaxy used. In galactic, of course, it doesn't sound as strange.

Erdva lowered the ship lower and lower, the little patch dotted with dots of buildings turned into a rather large spaceport. Mos Eisley, the Siamese brother of Mos Espa, which was located practically right there.

I took control of the ship and flicked the manual control toggle switch - Erdva pulled out the shunt and stared at me with his eyepiece eye. I didn't pay any attention to him, but lowered the car down into the port area and flew at a low dive over the outskirts, littered with various large pieces of ships dug right into the ground and marking the boundary of the spaceport, landing the ship at the farthest corner of the spaceport. The ship could easily withstand temperatures up to plus two hundred degrees, and didn't require much parking space. It was about a kilometer to the spaceport building, and the entire ship site was about a kilometer by a kilometer. On this rather imposing airfield there were rows of light transports, mostly manufactured by my new partners, the CMC.

I unbuckled from my seat and looked at Erdev:

- Pack up, my iron friend, we're going out.

- The sand is terrible. It's clogging the undercarriage," Erdva squeaked.

- Well, then close all the cracks and fly higher. About a meter above the sand there's not much of it in the air.

- I will," the droid squeaked again, and turned around to knock out all the ship's systems. Theoretically, deep theoretically, these ships have three crew members - a pilot-captain, a co-pilot-navigator, and a flight-mechanic-keeper. But even the documents state that the minimum crew is one person, the nominal crew is two. A droid takes care of the flight mechanic function, and any of the pilots can supervise the loading and unloading.

When Erdva left, the cabin fell into complete silence - I seemed to hear my own breathing, and it was very loud. A lamp under the ceiling illuminated the cabin with a white light. It's still nice to be alone for a while, with only the droid and the ship with you. Sighing, I drove away the obsession and threw off the remnants of meditation - the habit of hanging out thinking about something is not good - it is necessary, it is necessary as soon as possible to change into traveling clothes and go to work. The first thing is to hire a spy. Anybody would agree to such a relatively easy job, and ten grand, I think, would be enough. As an advance. I got up and went to my quarters, changed my clothes, and dumped the sum of ten thousand on one of my credit cards. My main credit card was a name card, and they don't take those here - too troublesome to change money into the local semi-illegal currency.

I got dressed, went down to the cargo hold, and took my sword, blaster, and money with me, and got on my bike. Now was the time to try out my hand-monster in action.

- Open it," I nodded to the droid, and the ramp slid down. When it wasn't quite open yet, I sprinted forward, dashing down. The repulsors buzzed, but prevented contact with the surface. A second later the wind of Tatooine began to blow against my shoulders-not as hot as I was used to feeling it. The speed on the holographic indicators crept upward-a hundred, two hundred, four hundred..." With a deafening whistle of wind on the windshield, I circled the transporter and flew out into a pretty line of ships. They whizzed by, and after five seconds, when I had to keep my speed at three hundred kilometers, the rapidly approaching structure of the local spaceport could be seen. Since there were no bureaucratic delays, I bypassed the structure-it was more of a trading post for fuel and other consumables for ships. Erdva, aided by his rocket engines, was struggling to catch up with me. It was a mauvais ton to fly through the city at that speed, so I slowed down and drifted down the winding Mos Eisley street. The locals, the local draught animals, were walking leisurely up and down the street in front of the fork of my bike. They weren't going to get around me, so I had to turn on the repulsors and climb higher, about four or five meters, to get a view of the town's skyline.

Beyond the town I could see the seemingly endless dune sea. It was, in a sense, endless - it stretched for many thousands and thousands of kilometers. The Jawas plowed through it in their crawlers, searching in the sand for the remains of long-dead ships.

After jumping over another obstacle, which turned out to be a wagon filled with some kind of cargo, I steered my bike in the direction of the area where the cantina I was looking for was located. It was a small restaurant, but one in which the occasional mercenary was regularly spotted. Unlike the one in which Ju and I, or other smugglers, were usually hired, this one had a more serious crowd, and the work often involved murder and espionage. As I flew closer, I left my bike outside in Erdw's care and went inside. Inside... pretty cool, civil, the kind you wouldn't expect from Tatooine, you could see the work of the designers and air-conditioners. I didn't attract much attention-it was in some second-rate barf shop that the local ghouls would stare at the person entering, but here it's not customary to annoy. In general, the higher the status, the more polite people are to each other, and the meaner, greedier, meaner they are. I glanced around and took a table in a prominent place. After ordering lunch and some juice through the menu, I decided to see what kind of crowd was gathered here. The order was brought quickly.

The first to enter the cantina was a man who looked like a mercenary, a bounty hunter. The pay was so good that I considered trying it myself, but the risk was too great, and I preferred not to risk it unnecessarily.

When the food was finished, the waiter took away the dishes, and I was left to sit in a prominent place and wait for the visitor I needed. Bounty hunters are the first to arrive. Though I had no one to kill for the time being, the other black market professions did not suit me-no smugglers, much less pirates. So I sat in the corner for perhaps an hour, until luck smiled upon me in the form of what I thought was a young hunter. He was a man, about twenty to twenty-five in appearance, dressed in light woven armor, with a blaster on his belt and a somewhat thoughtful look. He came straight to my table-apparently he couldn't find another customer because of his age.

- Are you free?

- It depends on what you're with, - I smiled, - are you interested in a job?

- Yes, it wouldn't hurt," he sat down opposite me. He looked me over from head to toe, of course, but did not insolent.

- Then I have one not very dusty business," I took the bull by the horns and waited till he ordered a cocktail: - I need to gather information on one man. Superficial information. How he lives, where he lives, how he's doing, that sort of thing.

- It seems too easy, - he shook his head, - have you searched the holonet?

- Do you take me for a fool, sir? In the holonet the information about this man is controlled, and there are no details.

- How much do you pay?

- Ten thousand. An advance, and the same amount upon your return. The terms are simple, you should not be noticed.

- It gets more and more interesting..." - the man smiled. - And who could notice me?

- For example, the royal guard. A man from the retinue of the Queen of Naboo. Sector Chomell.

- So I have to sneak up on the queen," the man rubbed his chin.

- That wouldn't be much of an inconvenience. The death penalty for gathering information has not yet been invented, so the details after the contract.

- I agree," said the hunter, "how shall I transfer the information to you?

- On the datapad. In an encrypted packet. I don't think there's much secret information in it," I shrugged.

- Who should I be looking for?

- Chomell Sector, planet Naboo, Teed City, royal palace, maid named Shmi Skywalker. As far as I know from open sources, she is part of the queen's retinue, so don't expect to approach her easily. Not a word about me to anyone, even if you get caught, the laws there are pacifist, so the most you could face is a fine for invasion of privacy, and that's unlikely.

We talked a few more minutes and went our separate ways - the mercenary went to the hangar to fly to Naboo, and I flew back to my ship. I wanted to sweep the sands of the desert for valuables that could be stolen from the old ships. What about valuables-just a disassembled hyperdrive gives me about forty kilograms of valuable metals, which I can use with my abilities in any way I want.

The ship was still standing in the sun- Erdva remotely opened the hatch, and we flew inside, where I had already stopped my bike. It was going to be an interesting job.

The question immediately arose - how? How could I use the scanner from inside the ship? There was absolutely no way to do this-its ship being metal, it created a lot of interference-although on Mandalore I only smelled the deposits after pulling the ship aside. I had to sit in the pilot's seat and think. Think hard. Ideally, I'd want a speeder made of nonmagnetic materials, but it was impossible to make one, given that I needed the kind of material that wasn't forceable. Leaving the droid in the cockpit, I ordered him:

- Erdva, bring the ship up, fly northwest, fifty miles.

- Aye, aye, captain! - the droid squeaked.

And I went off to think. Went to the cargo cabin and waited there for my arrival. All that was left was to look for new forms of working with the force.

* Hyperspace, bounty hunter *

The Deckard ship with the resounding name "Star of Life" came out of hyperspace. I finished inspecting everything I would need in the surveillance process-microphones, bugs, cameras, sound recorders, and other equipment. All of this went into a small case that was well shielded from weapon detection sensors. In addition, I only brought civilian weapons with me, so there was no need to risk unnecessarily or make the guards nervous.

When the ship finally approached the planet, I had to go to the cabin and report the purpose of my arrival to the controllers. And it was quite simple, and in addition, waiting, as on Coruscant, no one tormented me - immediately issued permission to fly to the capital, and to land near the royal palace.

Naboo...Naboo deceived my expectations. After the strict orders of the customer and the payment of the advance, I expected the work to be difficult - the palace guards to be fooled and get inside, the unfriendliness of the surrounding servants to an outsider...

It was just my imagination. The excursion to the royal palace cost me five hundred credits. A large sum by the standards of a common man, but for a non-Nabuan, an adult, alone, and also in the daytime and not in the morning, the rates were maximum. Fortunately, finances allowed - after half an hour of a rather boring trek through the palace with stops at each fresco or painting, the guide let the group go and we all dispersed... It was also possible to look at the queen - when she went out to her subjects, or on business walking through the palace. It was on one of those walks that our paths crossed. I stood by the painting with one eye on the work of the Nabuan artists and the other on the royal chambers. My expectations were not deceived-a few minutes, or rather a dozen minutes later, the doors opened, and a procession emerged from the room. The guards were the first to go, and between them, a woman with tall hair, all in makeup. Obviously, I did not take any weapons or microphones with me, otherwise they would not let me through. After the queen came a flock of women or girls, wrapped in bright, sunset-colored clothes. I couldn't see their faces, but according to the customer, one of them was the target. I looked at them-it was far enough away that no one would let me within shooting distance. The queen had disappeared into the other chambers, and the maids followed her.

I finished my inspection-all I needed to know was a complete disregard for personal safety. The queen did not seem overly afraid of my colleagues. And in vain.

The plan worked out immediately - the maids are women, and they must have someone close to them among the men of the palace. Why shouldn't I ask the common servants what goes on in the retinue?

From that I could get if not exhaustive information, then at least the strings to get what I needed out of them. The plan was put into action immediately.

- Excuse me, lady, am I interrupting you? - I asked when I saw the young lady with the cleaning supplies doing a little cleaning.

- No, no, not at all," she smiled. The lady's cheeks blushed. I didn't take much care of myself on Tatooine, but once I was in decent society, I took care of my appearance, cleaned up my face, hands, and everything else, so I looked as good as an aristocrat. Women always liked it.

- May I ask you a little trivia. I'm just curious about those ladies who walked with the queen...who were they?

- In the orange robes? "They are servants of the Queen's retinue," the maid began to say, "they say the Queen personally chooses them, and they all look like her. It's a tradition," the maid began to say. The calculation was correct-the servants liked to gossip a lot. They knew better than the chief of guards everything that happens in the palace. The girl went on: - You know, they're usually so quiet, although they sometimes talk to us, yes ... but recently one of them decided to get married, although it's not supposed to be by the rules ...

- Marriage? - I raised my eyebrows involuntarily. Luck was that there would probably be a lot of guests at the wedding and we could find out something.

- Yes, yes, Shmi Skywalker is getting married next week," the girl nodded, "there will probably be a big celebration.

I stood there thinking there must be some kind of catch. That's right, some kind of catch, because there can't be a job like this for such good pay. After examining the girl, I smiled at her, causing another explosion of embarrassment.

- And who is she marrying?

- Oh, some man from the local technicians. Sort of like the boss in shipbuilding... I don't know exactly, Edward sort of. I saw him once, a handsome man, about forty or so... pretty..." She bit her lip, which made her look more seductive. In fact, the whole conversation she stood like this, and then she darted her eyes... it was obvious that she was single, but she wanted it very much.

- Thank you. I think I'll be going..." I said.

- Wait, why do you want to know? - She asked me, glancing at me again.

- No reason... I work for a media portal, writing an article about Naboo and the life of the royal palace..." I lied. It's easy to make up a legend just in case - there are a lot of media companies with their own journalists, and sometimes they pry into places where a normal reasonable person would never pry. That is, as a legend for my work, very much so.

- Do you by any chance want to attend a wedding? - The lady asked, smiling.

- May I? - I wondered.

- You are on Naboo, not Coruscant. If you want, everyone is invited, if the wedding is someone's, all friends, acquaintances, colleagues are invited...

I wondered. To attend the wedding of a target? Isn't that the pinnacle of wishful thinking when observing? I decided that it was better to check with the customer and give him all the accumulated information, and to ask to visit the wedding. At a decent wedding, a couple thousand credits is usually enough for a gift. The customer's own words are definitely not enough here, and you should first ask Edward himself for all the information. Pretend to be a correspondent of some portal that writes about Nabuan traditional weddings... I smiled.

- Lady, I still did not know your name...

- Inga," she answered with a little gasp, "and you are...

- Tyber Kossler, at your service," I indicated a bow. The girl blushed a little again, but after a second managed to cope with herself, gathered courage, and before I had time to say goodbye, turned to me:

- Can I ask you a small favor ... you know ... I would really like to go to the wedding and see the queen! Can you take me with you? - She looked up at me with her eyes. Blue ones.

I had to surrender:

- Uh... if I'm allowed to attend... I don't see anything wrong..." I wondered what I'd gotten myself into again. However, Inga was quite beautiful. I would even say very pretty, so that inside I was fighting the desire to get to know the girl better and the demand to do my job cleanly and without traces. In the end, the essence of a man weak to female beauty overcame the arguments of professionalism - if I come with someone from the local, it would be even more preferable than a single guest, and Inga ...

- Wonderful! - she glowed, and came closer to me. I wanted to pull away, but did not do so. She briefly hugged my shoulders and smiled. - So you will go to the wedding?

- I do not know anything yet! - I blurted out at once. The girl a little discouraged pulled away, and I continued. - But I'll try to make it. Inga, I have a request for you... of a personal nature..." I hesitated and cleared my throat. The conversation, together with the pauses and the redeployment of us from the corridor to the bench, took about twenty minutes, which I had to talk a lot.

- Yes?" she asked in surprise. I moved closer to her ear and forged iron while it was hot.

- You see, no one here knows me, so I don't know how they'd feel about the idea... if you could play along with me a little bit... Say, tell you that we have some kind of relationship? - There was a little bit of heat coming out of the girl's face, and I went on. - Say, just for the time being, could I say that I'm connected to Naboo in this particular way?

- Wh... what do you mean? - She asked me astonishedly. It was ostentatious, and I could tell she'd got it right. Well, it's a good thing to have someone close to the target.

- That's exactly what I mean. Why don't we... tell everyone that we have something between us? Well, you know what I mean..." I made an indefinite gesture with my hand. Inga followed him, and after a second she leaned toward my ear:

- If the young man promises to keep his hands to himself. At least until the wedding ... - she herself realized how ambiguous it sounds and blushed, but did not pull away.

- I promise," I smiled, "I want to talk to Edward... so it's okay if I say I'm yours...

- I think that's perfectly acceptable," she smiled.

All I have to do is talk to the customer and take a cold shower. The colder the better - now I understood why the mission was so difficult - the girls on Naboo were beautiful... to put it mildly. And hard to resist. In the confusion of my senses, saving what was left of my mind, I said goodbye to Inga and walked out of the palace in the direction of the local tech corps she had indicated...

* Tatooine, Anakin Skywalker

Twenty-four hours. For twenty-four hours the ship flew over the surface of the dune sea. The terrible heat, the relentless sun turned me into a Jawa-like creature. Thank the Force, before my visit to Tatooine I had guessed to fill all the water tanks and to take with me about fifteen hundred liters of water in large thirty-liter office bottles. This heat was terribly annoying, and by wrapping a white cloth around me like a turban and a robe, I was able to improve the situation, but even this did not save me completely. I had to endure the discomfort.

The daily routine on Tatooine is as follows - the hours from four to six and from eight to midnight are the most active. During this time, the temperature is kept at an acceptable level. I had to take measures to work during the day, but the morning was still bearable. I drank my tea and climbed out onto the surface of the ship, hovering a short distance from the ground - about ten meters so that the Jawas and other desert nasties wouldn't get in. G9 had a pylon, sticking out to the side like an airplane wing, but only one, and it served the function of additional space - there was no place to cram a relatively large hyperdrive into the main body, so the designers had to make a trick. I came out onto this pylon, which was placed to the side. A small hatch led to its surface from the cargo hold - for astrodroids-repairmen, but given my rather small size, I easily passed through it. Once on the pylon, I strode to the middle of it - it was a decent seven meters long from the hull to the turbolaser gun at the end of the pylon. When I got to the middle of the pylon, I sat down in a pseudolotos, though I could have just laid down. To keep the pylon from heating up, I forcefully changed the top layer of metal and picked out a piece of chromium alloy from the scrap metal in the hold, isolated three kilograms of chromium, threw the rest of the steel back. Actually, the "steel-chromium-chromium" alloy, in which three percent chromium and the rest steel and chromium in half, was used in the inner lining of the fuel lines and as a cheap material for the reactor cores. The alloy resisted acid corrosion well and provided the fuel system with a decent lifespan and low cost. It was the piece of the fuel line that I dismantled, isolated the chromium and coated the pylon with it, as well as the whole ship on top, having previously "smoothed" by force - melted by force the upper quarter of a millimeter of the hull and coated it with chromium. It was still yesterday and took only five minutes - the work was extremely simple - no complicated metamorphosis was required. It wasn't just a simple job - I could do it even if I dozed off, too primitive for my level. I was working with zero-to-five grade hyperdrives, which is the pinnacle of complexity by the standards of metalwork. You could look into the pylon like a mirror - the distortions were only those planned by the design, and the pylon was straight. But in the evening, after the chromium application, the ship's hull stopped heating up - according to Erdva, who polled the sensors, the absorption of the stars' radiation was down ninety-eight percent. It was... well, how can I describe the thrill of melting sand from the heat and smiling on cold metal?

The ship moved leisurely toward the dune sea. Actually, it was everywhere around here, but I was headed toward the center, away from the spaceports. Erdva steered the ship, which floated leisurely over the surface of the endless dunes. The power scanner was on full blast-the ship was glowing, of course, but not as much as if I were inside the ship.

As the warm breeze blew around my face, I sat in a pseudolatrous pose with my eyes closed. My perception was much stronger that way. My "feelers" dug into the sand, going a few dozen meters deep, and the ship, moving, moved me along with them. An analogy came to mind - a plow being dragged across a field also digs its blades into the ground. The rake, the hoe... it's hard to explain. Following the example of the modern plow, I divided the stylus into several and plunged them into the sand.

Empty, empty, empty... emptiness, sand, sometimes small desert dwellers - lizards and worms... emptiness underneath. Erdva gave the gas a boost and the wind blew in my face with renewed vigor - not less than a hundred kilometers an hour we would cover. The ship flew like that for a few hours until I realized that I could see something metallic below.

- Halt! - I shouted into the comlink, and the ship braked sharply, swinging forward like a swing - otherwise I would have fallen off the mirror-smooth surface of the pylon.

We came to a stop. I ran my probes down again, and this time I felt the metal clearly. Next I had to climb into the ship, sighing, and land it on the sand. Erdva stayed behind to monitor the situation, while I stepped off the back ramp and felt the ship clearly. A big one, bigger than mine, but not a battleship or even a corvette. It had a rather peculiar shape - the feeling of exploring a ship by force is impossible to convey in words.

I put a deaf mask on my face beforehand, so I reached out and felt it. Next, I simply pulled it up with my telekinesis. When I used my telekinesis to turn hyperdrives weighing five or ten tons, I learned to ignore the mass of the object. The force was governed by other laws, and moving a single neuranium spoon weighing five kilograms could be heavier than moving a hundred-ton ship. It was...

But in order. First the sand burst in front of me, like a deep-sea explosion, and then the bow of the ship slowly began to emerge from it. The sand at my feet was pulled toward it - even though the ship was going upward, it was releasing quite a large volume and the sands tended to fill it. A minute later, a large transport ship was hanging straight up in the air above the torn barchan. I placed it on the sand in front of me and opened my eyes as the dust settled.

A transporter, with a horseshoe-shaped fuselage and a crest of tech bay leading to the engines. The nose of the ship was straight, not aerodynamically shaped. Thirty by thirty meters approximately. Quite... an interesting specimen. I was not a great connoisseur of ships, though I was interested in the subject, but historical ships had never been among my interests. The transport might have been here for ten years or ten thousand-sand preserved metals as well as marshes preserved mammoth carcasses.

- Erdva," I said over my shoulder when I heard the sound of the droid's repulsors, "can you find out what kind of ship it is?

- Of course, Captain. - the droid squeaked.

I meant get into the holonet, but Erdva didn't bother with such complications and flew straight to the pulled transport. In a second his shunt went into some slot, after which he, squeaking in a special way, swearing, blew compressed air into the slot and inserted his shunt into it.

The process didn't take ten seconds before something clicked in the door of the ship, and a heavy cargo ramp fell down, under its own weight. Erdva, just in time to bounce, flew inside. From my seat I could see the black mouth of the cargo hold and the boxes scattered in disarray.

Five minutes later Erdva returned to me, with glad tidings:

- A dynamite-class transport ship. Built by the Corellian Mechanical Engineering Corporation, in the year twenty-one thousand two hundred and seventh of the founding of the Republic. That is, three thousand seven hundred and sixty years ago.

I only had to whistle. I had never dealt with anything so old. What's more, on earth, they're already hauling some thousand-year-old contraption into a museum!

- What's inside? - I asked, hoping to hear the answer.

- The reactor's gone dead, the damage to the hull is moderate, they were hit by the interceptors.

- What do you mean? - I did not understand. - Which ones, can you find out?

- Relatively... no. All the crew members are dead, there's not a single entry in the ship's log. The last one was about the start of a shipment to Mos Espa.

- Mos Espa is a long way from here," I interrupted the droid.

- They hoped to get through without problems, but they were ambushed. Pirates or Sith, or local barons... who knows now," the droid squeaked uncertainly. - What do we do with them?

- Who's "them"? - I don't understand.

- The ship and the crew," the droid answered.

Oh, dear... I had to take the lantern myself and look at the local smugglers of the Sith wars era. The air in the ship was stale, so I had to take my breathing apparatus-just enough for half an hour. I shined my flashlight and stepped inside. Erdva followed me and showed me the way. However, I quickly figured it out on my own and made my way to the cockpit. Well... this was exactly what I expected to see. Two skeletons in decayed clothes. There were no traces, no smells-they were thousands of years old. Even though the ship's airtightness was compromised, the air flow was decent and the ship hadn't become a "tin can." In the pilot's chair sat a strapped skeleton in, judging by the iron parts of the jumpsuit, which had not decayed, a man. Next to him, in the co-pilot's chair, lay a skeleton, too.

Unlike horror movies, they were not frightening. I was uncomfortable, though-the silence of the long-dead ship was getting on my nerves. Erdva whistled his repulsors over my shoulder.

- Well, let's start by burying the pilots' remains, and then see what we can take from their ship. I'd hoped to find something like that and restore it, but we don't need that transport," I said. Erdva flew back in silence, and I took the skeletons out by force and brought them out into the sunlight.

The co-pilot, judging by the glittering necklace and pendant left on her, was a woman, no other than the wife of the first.

When I had finished with the black business, namely, burying the skeletons in the sand with my "power hands," I returned to the transport ship and searched it for valuables. Erdva wasn't left out either. The crates gave us nothing as their contents had long since decayed, but the hyperdrive and the reactor shared no less than a dozen tons of high-grade rare metals. Just in case, I split them up and smelted them into metal pots and threw them into my ship.

- Let's go, Erdva," I turned around, and we returned to our G9, leaving the transporter to the sands of the desert.

The flight and scouting continued. I had enough captured metals for my experiments. Though I could have bought some, but I didn't see the point if there were tons of valuable metals buried in the sand. The scrap metal I found was worth five or ten thousand credits. That's a very good salary by the standards of the galaxy - beginning officials were paid about a thousand. And burying former colleagues was not unreasonable. They should not sit forever in their pilot's chairs, it's time to retire..." I smiled. It is impossible to deal with death without a share of black humor, otherwise I would be afraid. And it is problematic to be afraid of something that can make one laugh, that is why one needs black humor as a remedy for the fear of death.

The combing resumed. We had been flying over the barchans for about three hours, and already the sun was beginning to burn to the point where I thought of taking a siesta, as my dipstick hit metal under the belly of the transporter. Again. Just when I'd given up thinking about the dead smuggler, I got the signal again.

It seemed that the rumors were true- more than a thousand ships had found their last resting place in the sands of Tatooine.

- Halt! - I yelled into the comlink. Deja vu. Or is the sun beating down on me?

The ship wobbled and again I, after coming to a complete stop, went to the cockpit and landed it on the sand again.

This time the exit into the light was marked by my misunderstood face. The dipstick, launched downward, struck metal half a hundred yards below. I moved the probe from side to side, but the metal was everywhere!

- Erdva, there's something big down there. There's something fucking big down there," I was immediately stripped of the rest of the meditation I had been immersing myself in while sitting on the pylon. - There's something really fucking big in there! - I turned to the droid.

- I got it, you don't have to repeat it," the droid answered me, "shall we lift it?

- The Sith knows..." I thought.

I could lift a ton, I could lift ten or a hundred tons without feeling any difference, but by the roughest estimate what was underneath us weighed many millions of tons! Ships weighing that much had never landed on planets-at least not at the time. If the depth of the transport was shallower, and it was almost as buried as it was, then it must have been here for at least several thousand years.

- I..." I gathered my thoughts, standing in the shadow of the ship, "I'll think about it. I'll try.

The greed in me fought caution.

Erdva didn't stop me from thinking.

An hour later I climbed the pylon, but not in order to fly away. If when pulling out the transport the sand moved off to his side, filling in the voids, this time I'm afraid to even imagine what's going to happen here!

The main thing for me is to believe that I can do it. The Force doesn't care about the mass of the object, na-never mind. I said it like a mantra, raised my hands toward the sands, and went into a deep trance, letting myself feel with the power. There was indeed something huge below.

- Erdva, back up. One hundred meters," I said, and fell back into the trance.

The feeler hands were discarded as an ineffective neophyte method - I felt the power in the object and pulled it up with willpower. Not immediately, but it yielded-the effort to pull it out, buried under a giant layer of sand, was even greater than I had imagined.

But it was only an effort of will. The further up the climbing operation went, the more interesting it became. A hundred meters away from me, the sands had risen, with all the sand together with the barchans, and gradually began to crumble to the sides. Under the belly of the ship, the sand also began to move and started pulling toward the object with great speed. It seemed as if a sand eruption had begun in the middle of the desert. A fountain of sand surged into the air as I finally began to pull it out. I had to help forcefully push the sands apart, or they would crush the hull of the ship.

It was a ship-the Giant, like a white claw. I pulled it meter by meter until I had it all free, and held it suspended over the sand. Carefully I set it on the sand. Even that small amount created a shock that crumbled the barchans in the area, smoothing slightly to the surface.

The droid squeaked strangely as the ship was pulled out.

- What is it, Erdwah?

- It's enormous! - the droid squeaked, "Only military ships are that big.

- Yes?" I collapsed tiredly on the pylon, and after a minute, when the cold metal had cooled me down, I climbed into my ship. From the cockpit of the G9, the view of the raised monster was respectful-a claw shape, with two blocks on top and bottom. From above, the ship looked like an imperial star destroyer, only it had a flowing shape. At the back, I could see the engines - big, black ones.

It took me a few more dozen minutes to get a good look at the ship.

- Just a second, I'll get the information," the droid said and went silent.

While I stared at the ship unsteadily, the droid found what it needed and began to tell me:

"A forbidding type cruiser, designed by the galactic republic, manufactured by the sith empire. Six hundred meters long, crew of five thousand two hundred and twenty-four, minimum allowable crew of seventeen, thirty droids. Hyperdrive second class, backup ninth. The hangars contain forty-eight Sith interceptors, two shuttles, one transport ship.

All I have to do is whistle:

- We're the lucky ones to get in...

The droid commented:

- But we don't know the technical status.

- Let's go scouting. I hope we don't have to bury anyone this time.

The ship was overwhelming in its monumentality and size as they approached. Even standing on its belly it was as tall as a skyscraper, and if you put it on engines, it would shove the height of many earthly skyscrapers. The bridge above the engine compartment alone was the height of a sixteen-story house.

I steered the ship by hand. The hull of warships was thick, armored, if not for that, it would have been crushed by the sands before I arrived, but such shape and compressive strength must have been well thought out by the designers. I flew closer and sat right on top of the ship, near the superstructure. Funny to say, but there was a door in it, in the superstructure, so that the crew and Droids could get out onto the hull. At least, I knew right away it was an airlock.

When I landed, I immediately ran outside. The giant ship stood steady and firm, so I wasn't afraid to look away from it.

The same thing as with the transport was repeated again, only the area of all the decks of the ship was such that I could not dream in a terrible dream. Good thing there were no bodies inside. And there was not much damage - the ship retained its airtightness to the very end.

Through the dark corridors, in the trembling light of my lantern and Erdw's searchlights, we reached the bridge. The bridge was a room, the size of a large university office, littered with computer terminals, chairs, and other things like a holoprojector table.

It was... quiet. Quiet, dark. It felt like Erdva and I were explorers, looking inside the pyramid for the first time.

I scanned everything around me forcefully, but there was no sign of organics. Erdva flew up to the terminal and beeped:

- Captain, can you give me a hand?

- Ascic? - I was distracted from looking at the ship's ancient controls.

- We need to get the memory module out of this terminal.

- Yes, yes..." I nodded, and began. So I quickly pulled out the module and gave it to Erdv. He began to look through the logbook and other things, and I continued to look around. After a few minutes I got bored with it.

- What is it, Erdva?

- Just a second. The ship was built in the Sith Empire. There's no shipyard listed. It went down in an emergency, the crew abandoned ship.

- So," I nodded, "anything else useful?

- Description of the damage. Hyperdrive damaged. Severely damaged, backup's working, they used it to jump here. Hull damage, depressurized several compartments, heavy damage in the fuel and reservoir area, several hits in the sublight engines area, one was malfunctioning. The crew abandoned ship and escaped.

I had an idea of the work front. Theoretically, it was realistic to get it up and running, but to do that I had to repair all the damage first. It's a lot easier to do with power, but there was still a... decent amount of work to be done.

* * *

Mornings are wiser in the evening, a saying that was never followed on Tatooine, for mornings and evenings were working hours. I got up early this morning. I reached for the cabin and stopped when outside the window I saw a huge ship with ours on top, instead of the usual desert or outer space. It was a sight to behold.

In my head, I grimaced - it could take a whole week to heal such wounds, at least on a primitive level. And a week in galactic is five days! Groaning, I, cursing fate, went to look at the property. The droid had stayed all night on the foundling ship, fixing the primary electronic equipment. He'd learned enough about the power while he'd been flying with me as an assistant flight mechanic to be able to tell the difference between something I could fix with a wave of my hand and something he needed to fix himself.

Surprisingly, the first steps in repairs were obscenely simple - caulking. It's so simple I can't even find the words - melt the metal and put it back together as it was.

Erdva found a detailed blueprint in the cruiser's storeroom, so he told me how it was originally, or projected an illusion over me, and I figured it out on my own.

It took two hours exactly to repair the hull - about a hundred holes were patched during that time. But that was only the beginning of the journey - after looking at the hyperdrive through the force, I flatly refused to repair it. This mishmash of metals, punctured by turbolasers, only for scrap! The ship's hyperdrive weighed about nine hundred tons, so it took me a while to get the valuable metals out of it, but I had plenty to repair.

There was no more energy left for the reactor, so I returned to my ship, where I was caught by the call from the man I had hired to communicate with Naboo.