Chapter Fourteen
Jedi Sentinel: Cult of Fear
“And then nothing happened,” was far from the epic finale Ostia had wanted for her book. Not a single voice had taken up her inspirational call to arms during Xen’s raid. Not a single soul had walked off the job or told their abusive boss where to stow it. Not a one of her fellow downtrodden initiates had even tried to cross that big, black marble floor to the main entrance.
The total lack of response had blown Ostia’s considerable mind like an overloaded power coupling, stunned her into inaction. When she wasn’t working her shift, she’d lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, willing the leadership of this craven organization, some twenty odd stories above her, to just burst into flames.
But of course, nothing continued to happen.
In due course, she’d begun brainstorming alternate endings, like sneaking up to Brigg’s penthouse and setting the place on fire the old fashioned way. Less cathartic, but perhaps more impactful, was an idea about inviting the estranged families of these brainwashed fools to gather in front of the tower and beg their children or siblings or spouses or whatever to come on out.
Or maybe she’d just abduct her clothing-impared laundry boss and lock him in Accelerated Therapy for a few days, see what happened. In fact, she was seriously considering faking her own death and pretending to haunt Daros Brigg until he had a psychological apotheosis and agreed to disband his whole, rotten organization when…
The alarms went off in her room and Sabra Mul’s unreasonably attractive head appeared in a holoprojection above the bed. She looked supremely pleased with herself. “Daros Brigg has turned his back on our mission,” she declared. Ostia could hear her voice echoing down the barracks hallway, broadcasting throughout the entire tower. “He would rather help himself to wealth and luxury than help anyone else achieve the self-actualization he claims to enjoy. It’s time for new management!” Ostia’s door locked with a resounding thud, as did every other door in the wing. “Please remain in your rooms until the matter has come to a peaceful resolution.”
Ostia sat up, patted down her frilly skirt, and checked her datapad to make sure she recorded all that. Then, she pulled up the droid dispatch log. Sabra had assigned security droids to cover every exit, plus she seemed to be assembling a strike team one floor below the penthouse. Looked like the great Daros Brigg was under siege. If so, that was where she needed to be and she needed to be there soon. This was her big finale.
Suddenly, her door unlocked. Ostia wondered if she’d done it with The Force, but then she heard the other doors unlocking one by one. Ostia poked her head out to assess the bedlam. Panicked initiates flooded the hallway, crashing past each other in both directions. The yelling and cursing hit a crescendo in seconds. Now this was more what she’d had in mind. Maybe with a little less screaming and shoving.
Planning quickly, she closed her door and dispatched five security droids to her room. She packed her favorite dresses into a large case, then switched to a sensible pair of pants. She slung her datapad across her chest and tightened the strap before shrugging on a black bolero with hardened plates over the shoulders and back. Business attire. Sequined combat boots completed the look.
Her escorts arrived right on time; it was in their programming. They dwarfed her by two meters, easy, each with a cluster of sensors for a head and a heavy blaster rifle in their gleaming, metal claws. Perfect.
She ordered one of them to give her its weapon and take her luggage to a rendezvous point outside the tower. That left four to escort her upstairs. And now she had a weapon.
“Follow me,” she ordered them. The elevators were locked down, naturally, so they’d have to take the stairs. What few initiates remained in the barracks were huddled in corners, weeping into their knees or staring catatonically at the slogans on the walls. Under the circumstances, they almost seemed sarcastic.
BE NOT AFRAID
ROUTINE = FREEDOM
SUFFERING IS SELF-INFLICTED
The stairwell thundered with footfalls, dozens of initiates finally running for the exits. Ostia felt a pang of guilt over that, since now those exists were barred by murder machines. She wondered what was happening at the main entrance.
And then she wondered what was happening beneath the bottom stairs. She heard a familiar voice asking a familiar question: “Are you serene?” Iota was standing in the shadows, back to Ostia, looming over two cowering boys beneath the stairs. And she had a blaster in her hand.
That blaster.
“Are you serene?” Her voice was a hard, grainy whisper, like blowing sand. Her victims couldn’t respond in the ritualistic manner, what with all their crying and blubbering, so Iota shot one of them.
Ostia sprang forward, waving her escort away, and grabbed Iota’s gun hand. By the looks of it, she’d been shooting those bullies for a while. They had burns in their legs and hands. “Iota,” she gasped, “what are you doing?”
“Therapy,” she replied, never taking her eyes off the boys.
“It’s only been ten minutes!” Ostia knew this place was mad when she signed up, but shouldn’t absolute bedlam take at least half an hour?
“Really?” Iota asked vacantly. “I’ve been thinking about this for days.”
“I get that, Iota,” and she did, “but this doesn’t make anything better. You’re free, now, and the question at hand isn’t what do they deserve. It’s what do you deserve? Do you want to live in a world where things like this happen or one where they don’t?”
Iota shook her head as if dispelling a fog and trembled, then handed over the blaster. Ostia refused to take it. “You might need it on your way outta here, just make sure you aim it at the right targets. In fact, take this one with you.” She tapped out a new dispatch order on her datapad. “It’ll take you out through the sublevel. You’ll have to do the rest on your own, okay? You do want out, don’t you?”
The taller girl nodded and cradled the blaster in her arms. She followed her tin man back into the barracks. “And you,” Ostia stood over the wounded boys with her much larger blaster perched casually over one shoulder. “Live in the world you made.”
Two floors up, the stairwell exited into a corridor where a gaggle of novitiates were preparing for war, hiding behind an overturned table, armed with mop handles and kitchen knives, wearing serving bowls as helmets. “Seriously,” Ostia griped. “Ten kriffing minutes!”
They yelped like startled pups when they got a load of her and her chaperones. “Relax, laser brains. We’re not participating in your anarchist fantasy summer camp. Stand down and let us pass.”
“Into the mess hall?” one of them squeaked. “The level fours have taken control of the service counter, beverage station, and the kitchen. You’ll never make it past the dishroom!”
“Oh, for the love of…” Ostia banished them with a wave of her wand, meaning her rifle, and strode into No Man’s Land. All the tables had been tipped over, in columns facing each other like enemy soldiers. Sharp utensils littered the place, lodged in the tables and the floor as if they’d been launched from catapults.
Even as Ostia reconnoitered, someone behind the cashier’s station shouted “Fire!” and a barrage of spoons took flight. The small, squishy human took cover behind a barricade, but her droids let the hail of silverware clatter harmlessly off their metal bodies.
“A little cover, fellas?” she scolded them. The tin men let loose, perforating the menu screens above the counter.
Ostia charged. She took a shrimp fork in the shoulder and a serving spoon to the face, but she cleared the mess and slid across the tile floor behind the service counter, taking aim at the fork-flingers with her rifle.
“The food is ours!” a blue-hued Rodian roared, brandishing a ladle like it was a lightsaber.
“We’re just passing through,” Ostia countered, “but I’m not asking your permission.” Her clankers came in behind her and underlined her point. The Rodian sheathed his ladle and stood down, as did his compatriots.
“This is sovereign territory,” another familiar voice challenged from the kitchen. Basout Tull — shirtless again in clear defiance of health and safety standards — eclipsed the double doors to the kitchen. “Look who it is! Little Ostia Vindon, Queen of the Laundry. Where’d you get those,” he inquired, arching an eyebrow toward her droids.
“Sent away,” she deflected. “Where’d you lose your shirt?”
He leered at her. “Clothing is optional in Tulltown.”
Ostia groaned. “When did you find time to rename the kitchen? Minute eight?”
Basout paid her no mind. “I always knew there was something wrong about you, little girl. Always asking questions, no respect for your betters, and that smart mouth! What kinda man’s gonna wanna get mass married to that?! But Tulltown could always use another concubine. I’d let you join in exchange for those blasters.”
“Another concubine?!” Of all the outrages Ostia had witnessed inside Serenity, this was the most recent. And, sadly, the most predictable. For a moment, the reporter was tempted to disregard her own advice and do as Iota had done — shoot the sleemo — but that was not the world Ostia wanted to live in. “I’m deposing you, Basout,” she proclaimed, reassigning one of her escorts with a few deft taps on her datapad.
“You and what — “ the petty dictator began, but the tin man advancing on him answered the obvious question. “Protect me!” he wailed, but his supposed followers moved not a muscle. The droid clamped one claw around Basout’s neck and manhandled him into the dishroom. It locked the door and stood guard.
“Two coups in one day!” she noted. “Now, we’re gonna exit through the kitchen and you all had better hope we don’t find any concubines. That very nice droid with the very big blaster will be very, very cross if there’s any more concubine talk.” She flashed them a winning smile. “Have a good one.”
Osti and her two remaining soldiers marched through the kitchen, former citizens of Tulltown scattering before them. A few even thanked her on the way out. The droid hole in the back, behind the industrial fryers, lead to a dumb waiter full of platforms, half ascending and half descending, along rails in a plasteel shaft that vanished to a point above them. It would take them all the way to the boardroom below the penthouse, where Sabra was no doubt micromanaging her coup.
They got about fifteen floors up, watching an endless parade of empty platforms pass by on their way down, when Ostia suddenly came face to face with a crouching, golden-maned beastman. It was Coba Perge, Serenity’s head of security — or whatever — sneaking away from the penthouse with a broken gonk droid.
Ostia couldn’t imagine what he was up to, but it had to be newsworthy.
She jumped off her platform and landed on top of the gonk droid. She could’ve sworn it said “Ow!” Perge knocked the rifle from her hand before she could get her bearings. She fell backwards off the gonk droid, a left hook sailing centimeters from her nose, but there was nowhere to land. She slipped off the platform and into the precarious space between the rails, heels banging painfully against the wall.
Her bodyguards finally joined the party, landing on either side of Perge. The Cathar ducked under a rifle butt and grappled the weapon, shooting the first droid in the chest with its own blaster. The poor soldier fell into the gap opposite Ostia and she watched it get ground to flour against the far wall.
The second droid put up a marginally better fight. Perge was down on all fours; he kicked up with one leg and caught its blaster in a prosthetic paw, crushing it. The tin man kicked Perge in turn, who took it in the chest and hardly moved. Instead, the Cathar gathered his limbs and pounced.
The force of his attack carried both beings off the platform. Ostia tracked them as they crashed onto an oncoming, upward-bound car. Perge wrestled his adversary into position as it approached from below… and sheared the droid’s head clean off as they crossed.
Ostia scrambled her way back onto the platform, but not before Perge leapt back down. Much to her surprise, the gonk droid asked, in perfect Basic, “What just happened? Are we safe?”
Perge rolled his flaxen eyes. “We would be, had you not just blown our cover. It’s that reporter girl I told you about.”
Ostia ripped an access hatch off the gonk droid. Rather than the power ports or CPU or fusion generator one would expect, she found the face of Daros Brigg, Chief Enlightened Officer of Serenity Corp. “Score!” the tiny, bald girl in the black bolero hollered, raising both arms above her head.
“Sorry about your droids,” Perge apologized, “though technically they were my droids.”
“Not so technically,” Brigg corrected him, “they were my droids.”
Ostia rubbed her aching ankles and tried to look magnanimous. “Yeah, no, it’s fine. Do you guys, uh, need any help?”
“Absolutely not.” Perge shot her down, but Brigg overruled him.
“Yes, absolutely. We’re desperate.”
“I can see that,” she winked. “This is an impressive disguise, but how would you like to walk right out the front door, head held high?”
“I would prefer that.” Brigg immediately began removing his droid costume with all the grace and dignity of a chick hatching from an egg. Ostia had seen him before — in propaganda holos, brochures, wall murals, night lights, even live on stage once or twice — but up close, he was both less and more than she’d imagined. A sublime smile was carved onto his face with thick bundles of laugh lines, crow’s feet, and forehead furrows. His clothes, white robes with a gold hem, hung off his shoulders as loosely as the dark circles under his eyes.
He winked back at her and she realized she’d been staring. She wasn’t normally one to be star-struck; all that brainwashing must’ve gotten to her. She busied herself with her datapad.
Perge put two and two together. “You’ve compromised the dispatch system. How did you manage that? One professional to another.”
“Pure talent,” Ostia replied, but her mind wasn’t on wordplay. Someone had already removed the security detail from the main lobby… and closed her backdoor. Or possibly murdered Vac Uni, she couldn’t tell. Still, the entrance should be unguarded, so Ostia decided to take credit.
Perge ushered them off the dumb waiter when they reached the second floor. The beastman had to crawl through the droid hole; Ostia secretly hoped he’d get stuck and they’d have to leave him behind, but no such luck. They emerged into a wing of conference rooms and catering stations, completely depopulated. They wended their way down broad, carpeted halls that became a balcony overlooking the lobby.
It should have been a broad, empty expanse of black marble, occupied only by a golden solar eclipse logo. Instead, a mob of armed novitiates stood in their path.
“Blast it, Perge! This is your fault,” Brigg scolded his bodyguard.
The Cathar was stoic, but Ostia needed to know. “How’s that, now?”
Brigg was more than happy to elaborate. “He unlocked the barracks, quote ‘to cover our escape,’ after Sabra took control of the droids.”
“And then I took control of the droids,” Ostia finished, “so she switched to cultists.”
“So much for the reporter’s plan,” Perge summarized. “We’ll have to try the cargo lift or one of the emergency — “
“I’ve got this,” Brigg cut him off. “Just watch my back.” He straightened his bleached blond hair and walked confidently to the balcony railing. Perge tried to stop him, but Brigg slapped the Cathar’s big old paw off his shoulder. “Know your place!”
Ostia was embarrassed for him. The executive straightened his sash and tried to look dignified as he followed three paces behind his boss.
They were so spaced.
Ostia stayed in the shadows; she had one more card to play. She’d noticed it a few days ago, a single pit droid well outside its assigned sector, milling about the spaceport and not responding to dispatches… but still on the network. If all else failed, maybe she could use it to call in the calvary.
A great cry went up from the floor below and Coba Perge came charging back toward her, the leader of his cult thrown over one shoulder like a sack of dirty laundry. “Charismatic leader bit didn’t work?” Ostia guessed.
Perge only glared and bolted past her. She considered leaving them to their fate, or joining up with the angry mob, but now she’d made herself part of the story… and her big finale was running the other way.
So she sent her message to the pit droid and tried her best to keep up with the Cathar’s long, loping strides.
Written by Daniel Bayn
Cover image by Midjourney
