The black waters of the Indian Ocean rolled beneath my gaze, paying no heed to the complex swirl of emotions I felt. The six Ewok commandoes sharing the cabin of the airspeeder kept their silence, a fact for which I was grateful. The vehicle's highly capable autopilot left little for me to do except stare at the ocean swell and think - a situation which could easily be judged a less than perfect blessing.
I wasn't sure what reaction I'd expected from Kristy. Sci and Cracken had had all sorts of sensible reasons for keeping things quiet. Hell, I'd suggested more than a few myself. But once our uninvited visitors showed up, those weren't the reasons that kept me from giving her the whole story. Initially I'd told myself that I was telling her as little as possible because it was Sci's call on how much she needed to know. Even at the time, I knew that to be a complete load of bollocks. If I judged it necessary for Kristy to know everything, Sci was always going to back me on it. We'd even discussed briefing her on the scheme a few times, on occasions where it didn't look like the world was in danger of blowing up in our faces. Each time, we'd decided to keep our silence - but it was never a clearcut decision. Probably why we kept bringing the option up. I smiled to myself. The vague sense of guilt that came with keeping secrets from her had nothing to do with it. Nothing at all.
I thought back a few days, to the glib answer I'd given Sci when he'd made his comment about amorality. He knew what I really meant. He knew I had my own ideas about right and wrong. He also knew how hard they could be to articulate. Simply letting people peg me as the cold, calculating, amoral bastard was easier, not to mention safer for my friends and family. My line of business could be hard on people I cared about. Unfortunately, it seemed our current unwelcome guest had either done his homework extremely well, or hadn't done it all. Given the requests he'd made of the ever-so-reliable Bill Skywalker, I strongly suspected the latter. Ultimately, it didn't make a great deal of difference though - he'd figured he could use Josh to get to me, and he'd turned out to be right. Asshole.
The anger I still felt almost amused me. Even when the Empire attacked us in New Hampshire last year, I hadn't felt such a cold fury. The Imperials had launched a sneak attack, sure, but they were still just soldiers doing their jobs. That hadn't stopped me from doing everything in my power to stop them - I didn't take pleasure in their deaths, but I didn't expend much effort grieving for them, either. Occasionally I thought about the wives whose husbands would never come home, and the kids who'd never see their fathers again, and I felt a little sad. But war was a dirty business, however you fought it. You kept it as clean as you could, but when it came down to a choice between you and the guy on the opposite side, well, that was no choice at all. That decision had already been made when you decided to join the war in the first place. This mongrel though, this Mr Star, as he called himself, had _chosen_ to make it personal. Right off the bat. I shook my head. Intellectually I'd known the people I'd been helping Cracken hunt down were nasty pieces of work, but it was now obvious that deep down I'd been expecting them to play at least partially by my rules. Fine. I'd learned better. And this Mr Star was going to experience the results of my education at first hand.
Strangely enough, that actually managed to bring my rather depressing thoughts close to full circle. Kristy was the one who'd pinpointed the location of the people holding Josh. After I'd filled her in on why I suspected the people who'd taken Josh were interested in me, rather than Terra Group in general, I'd rounded up this mob of heavily armed Ewoks and headed for Paris. Probably not the most effective course of action, but better than any other ideas I'd had. We were still over central Australia when I got a call from her, saying she'd picked up an unidentified ship heading southeast from Paris. After a brief burst of encrypted comm traffic, it had settled down in the Saharan desert. Her cameras had picked up an exchange between its occupant and someone piloting an obviously non-Terran landspeeder. The landspeeder had departed with an additional occupant, and a short time later, the unidentified craft had blasted off for space. No doubt, Vickie's Trandoshan had been making good his escape. And, no doubt, delivered his unwilling passenger to Mr Star before he left. I wasn't sure why'd he'd stuck around so long after making the exchange, but I didn't really care either. It was the landspeeder that had my attention, and caused me to point my vehicle's nose a bit further south.
Tracing the landspeeder led Kristy to a seemingly innocuous patch of desert, where it casually disappeared. Some time later, it emerged again, travelling some distance away, apparently to make a single broadcast. It turned out that transmission had been intended for me. It was Star's demand for payment in order to secure Josh's return, along with evidence that Josh was still alive, if not necessarily well. From the airspeeder, I'd sent my curt reply, agreeing to the proposed exchange. Kristy knew where they were. Once she knew where to look, the sensors she brought to bear could have picked out a diamond dropped amongst the dunes. Any masking technology able to hide a starship from those sorts of scans would necessarily eliminate the target's ability to use all but the most rudimentary of passive sensing techniques. Star's ship remianed stubbornly concealed. Ergo, the only things he could possibly be seeing on his sensors were signs of the focused active scan, and quite possibly not even that. All of which gave us a very good chance of getting close enough to eliminate Star and rescue Josh. More information would have been desirable, as the current plan was not without risks, both to us and to Josh. But going ahead with the exchange would have been even worse. There was no doubt in my mind that Star had more in mind than simple extortion. The only people who would finance such an expedition to Earth were the ones I hadn't wanted to tell her about - my former clients.
And so the depressing loop closed completely. Once again I was pondering the question of why I had been so reluctant to tell Kristy about Cracken's clemency deal. If I was being brutally honest with myself, I hadn't wanted to tell her the whole story because I was worried about how she'd react. Telling her involved revealing some less than complimentary things about my own recent personal history. It also involved accusing her of tacit endorsement of slavery. I didn't actually put it like that of course, but that's what it amounted to. I sighed. I generally managed to avoid thinking about that particular topic. Going over it with her had brought it all to the surface of my mind, and now, on this interminable ocean voyage, my drifting thoughts kept returning morbidly to it. I guess it was a sign of the respect I had for the New Republic pilots and agents that I was actually bothered by what I'd been doing. Twelve months earlier, I hadn't batted an eyelid about any of it. Neither had any of the other Terrans who'd known about it. Now it seemed that I'd acquired a thoroughly galactic point of view and I was far from comfortable with my previous actions. I didn't really know how any of the others dealt with it. It still wasn't something we were entirely comfortable discussing. Even Sci was still sorting through some of the issues. He'd known exactly what was going on, and it never even occurred to him to wonder if Cracken might be less than happy about it.
As for Kristy, she'd only been on the edges of it. I was pretty sure she hadn't thought through all the implications of what we'd been doing, and it turned out I was right. Telling her about Star's likely origins involved stepping her through the entire process of the New Republic's reaction, through the course of action Cracken, ultimately, had chosen to keep quiet. Which naturally led to her questioning her own role in those events, and her own attitude towards the rest of it. I wasn't the only one whose perspective had changed in the last year. I guess I'm just glad she's far too smart to decide to shoot the messenger. I don't think she was all that happy with what I had to say, but she didn't try to take it out on me either. The thought actually crossed my mind as to whether or not Mr Star could ever be persauded to see the error of his ways. Perhaps it could be pointed out to him firmly, and he'd head back home and mend his ways. It was just a thought. I had no intention of giving him a chance to demonstrate his adaptability. No chance at all.
Beneath my bleak gaze, the black waters of the Indian Ocean continued to roll unconcernedly by.