True to his word, Thayer had a great idea for a place to use as a headquarters for our Terra Group revival. Twenty minutes after the meeting ended we stood in a dimly lit stone corridor deep in the bowels of the High Palace. Before us stood a pair of blast doors that I had rarely seen closed. Beads of condensation covered their metal surface and occasionally ran down to puddle on the stone floor.
“You remember what’s behind these doors, of course,” Thayer said.
“Yeah, the Pacific Ocean,” I said. I lay my palm on the door only to have the frigid metal draw the heat from it immediately.
“I’m certain you know my meaning,” he said. “But I appreciate your answer. My life has been sorely lacking in sarcasm since you left.”
“The Batcave,” I said. “Our old headquarters.”
“Your once and future headquarters.”
“I hate to rain on your parade, Thayer, but I don’t think we’ll be moving back in anytime soon. NRI shut off the hangar’s containment field and flood the whole place, remember?”
“Don’t forget, though, that while the New Republic equipped this place, Mendellian engineers built it. We’ll have it running again sooner than you think.”
“Hmmm,” I said. I heard him but my mind was in the past, behind these doors.
“What is it?” he asked, seeing my smile.
“I was just thinking about Lira Tavrin.”
Thayer frowned for a moment before his eyes lit in recognition. “Was she the-“
“Yeah, that was her.”
“That poor girl.”
——
Shortly after Sci left, NRI started sending promising young agents for training in “unconventional operations.” We always believed these interns, as we thought of them, were more spies keeping an eye on us than they were trainees. We must have had six or seven of them over about three years. They were a decidedly mixed bag. Some were great, but other we wanted to push through the containment field.
And then there was Lira Tavrin.
We were busy the day Lira arrived. Most of the team was in town because we had just wrapped up an operation the day before. Still, everyone took time out to get into uniform and go down to the hangar to meet her. Kristy, Becki, Lenka, Noreh, Mike, Arrek, Syl, and I were all waiting when her shuttle drifted down onto its landing struts.
“Hope she’s better than the last one,” Mike grumbled. “What’s this one’s name again?”
“Lira Tavrin,” Kristy said. “And you be nice to her.”
The shuttle’s boarding ramp thumped down and we straightened up to greet our new arrival. Light footsteps sounded from within the shuttle. Then a pair of boots appeared at the top of the ramp. As they descended a pair of shapely legs appeared, followed by an athletic midsection, a very well formed chest, and the face of an angel.
An angel with green skin and brain tails.
We all stirred in surprise but smothered the reaction before she noticed. NRI had strict rules about sending only human agents or those who could pass as human for this assignment. What was a Twi’lek going to do on Earth for six months?
Kristy, fortunately, recovered first. At moments like this I was glad she was the boss.
“Lieutenant Tavrin, welcome to Earth. I’m Kristy Henscheid, the commander of Terra Group and theoretically in charge of this bunch of misfits.”
“Thank you, Major,” said Lira with a genuine smile on her face. She had a natural girl-next-door beauty. If your girl next door happened to be green. “It’s pleasure to be here.”
“Oh, just wait,” Noreh said. “You may change your mind about that.”
“Why would I do that?” Lira asked.
“Don’t mind her,” Mike said. “I think you’ll have a great time here.”
Noreh introduced herself, followed by Mike, Becki, and Lenka. When Syl’s turn came she gave the newcomer a sympathetic smile that told us she had slipped into her bedside manner mode. Her brother stood next to her, staring at Lira with his mouth hanging open.
“Lira, I’m Sylvana Lorrdain, the team medic. I, ah, think there’s been some sort of mistake,” she said.
Arrek practically lunged between the two women. “Let’s not be hasty…” he said to Syl. Then he turned to Lira and offered his hand with the most ridiculously cheesy smile I’d ever seen on his face. “Hi, I’m Arrek Lorrdain. If there’s anything I can do to make your stay here comfortable-“
“Oh good lord,” I said with a roll of my eyes and a swat on Arrek’s shoulder. “Lieutenant, I’m Captain Josh Cochran, the team XO. Uh…did NRI brief you on your assignment here?”
“Thoroughly,” she said. “And I’ve been reviewing the packet on the trip out.”
Sometimes being the XO sucked. “Did the, uh, packet mention that the population of this planet is all human? And unaware that other sentient species exist?”
“I don’t understand,” Lira said.
“I’m afraid he’s right,” Kristy said. “Since Earth is cut off from galactic society, our people don’t know anything about alien life. They’ve never seen a Wookiee, a Rodian, a Bothan, or a Twi’lek.”
“But…I’m supposed to be doing field work,” Lira protested.
“I’m afraid your presence would cause quite an uproar everywhere on the planet,” I said. “NRI knows that. I’m sorry…I don’t know what they were thinking.”
“Well,” Arrek said, stepping back into the conversation, “maybe not everywhere…”
——
“That poor girl. I think we drug her to more sci-fi conventions in those six months than I’ve been to in my entire life. But she always won the costume contest.”
“And as I recall, Halloween that year was quite an event,” Thayer said.
“Lira was the only one of those interns I would have kept, but she couldn’t get out of here fast enough when her time was up.”
“Much to Arrek’s disappointment, as I remember,” Thayer said. “Come along, we have work to do.”
We moved back down the hallway until we came to a long-forgotten door set into the stone. I don’t think I’d ever seen it open. Thayer punched a code into the door’s keypad and it swung open to reveal a narrow ladder leading up. We emerged from a long climb into a narrow corridor with another door at the end. I ducked my head as we hurried down the passageway, sure I’d give myself a concussion if I stood up straight.
The room behind the door matched the hallway in front of it. The stone ceiling hung low into a room the size of a large closet. The feeble light gleamed on a pair of large wheels on the back wall. They were set about six feet apart with a smaller wheel between them and a large button beneath it.
Thayer grasped the left wheel and put all his weight into turning it. At first it didn’t budge. He paused to set his feet and twisted again with all his might. From far below us a metal shriek screamed through water and stone and the floor shuddered beneath our feet as the wheel slowly began to turn. Once it began to move it became more cooperative in Thayer’s grasp, turning slowly but steadily.
I took the other large wheel and, learning from Thayer’s example, heaved against it with all my strength. It resisted at first, but with another shriek and a rumble it too began to turn. Below us the massive doors of the old Terra Group hangar inched toward one another, powered by the oldest engines known to man. Thayer and I were in excellent shape, but within minutes we were covered in sweat and sucking in great lungfuls of air between turns of the wheels.
Finally the hangar doors met with a shuddering boom. I slumped to the floor with my back to the wall and looked up at Thayer, who stood panting with his hands spread against the wall like a criminal.
“Let’s not do that again,” I said.
“Agreed,” Thayer said. “I believe…one of the advantages…of being King…should be…ordering someone else…to handle tasks…like this.”
“Oh sure,” I said. “Now you think of that.”
After several long minutes, Thayer stood straight and wrapped his hand around the handhold of the small center wheel. This wheel turned easily. He spun it quickly through about twenty revolutions, until it stopped with a mechanical click. A red light now glowed in the button below the wheel. When he pressed it a loud clang rang through the hangar doors and vibrated through the floor as the locking clamps forced them into a watertight seal.
Along one wall of the equipment room hung a row of electrical cabinets, six in all, with a covered button in the center of each panel. Thayer gestured to them and said, “Would you care to do the honors?”
I flipped each cover open and pressed the button beneath. The buttons clicked solidly into place, like the power button on an old computer. With each button pressed a whirring sound grew until it drowned all other sounds, except for the loud rushing of an enormous amount of water.
In the hangar below, and the rest of our old headquarters, water rushed back out into the ocean. Massive pumps that had been dormant for ten years removed gallons of water per second. Within a few hours the Batcave would again be habitable.
If only those pumps could remove the water as quickly as it came in.
——
Three years earlier, in a room nearby, a crew sent by the new head of NRI prepared for the last step of the Terra Group shutdown. Those of us who remained, me, Kristy, Syl, and of course the native Mendellians, had suffered their indignities for a week. It felt more like a year.
Seven days earlier their ship came out of hyperspace on the other side of the moon, immediately lighting up every alarm we had. We had no notice, didn’t know they were coming. Didn’t know that they came to take our lives away.
Their leader, an arrogant human colonel named Starsider, swept into our hangar like he owned the place and ordered us away from our own equipment like common criminals. His guards and techs relieved us of comlinks, blasters, and datapads. They even tried to take my lightsaber, until I made it very clear that it was personal property.
Starsider seemed to enjoy telling us that following General Cracken’s retirement the new head of New Republic Intelligence had decided that we were an expensive and dangerous liability. We stood by under explicit threat of imprisonment on Kessel as they packed our gear, wiped our droids’ memories, and flew our ships away.
We watched them as closely as they watched us, of course. This group seemed to think that ‘Terran; translated to ‘incompetent’ and let slip some details of their mission that we weren’t supposed to know. Chief among them was word that our equipment was being stored at the lunar base rather than being sent back to Coruscant as we expected. I picked up that tidbit the day before while two of their officers had a whispered conversation across the briefing room from me, apparently forgetting I was a Jedi.
Now the entire miserable experience was drawing to a close. The equipment they couldn’t remove, like the reactor and the computer core, was shut down and sealed under waterproof shells. The Batcave, my second, or maybe first, home for the last eight years stood empty from wall to wall, floor to ceiling.
We could see it on a row of monitors on a table in front of us. Starsider and a handful of his technicians hovered excitedly around a portable computer terminal at one end of the table. At the other end Kristy, Becki, and I stood together in a tight knot, not wanting to watch but unable to look away. Thayer leaned against the room’s back wall with his arms folded across his chest.
“I think we’re ready sir,” said a painfully thin technician.
“Excellent,” Starsider said. “Put the hangar on the main screen.”
A large monitor above the row of smaller ones came to life, showing a view across the vastly empty hangar. Instead of the aquarium view we usually had of the ocean through the containment field there were only the two massive doors in the center of the image.
“Unlock the doors.”
On the screen the doors shuddered briefly. We were in the Palace proper, too far away to hear or feel it. An instant waterfall flowed down the crack between the doors and puddled on the hangar floor.
“On my mark…” Starsider said.
“Ready sir,” the tech said with a childlike glee.
“Hit it.”
The technician pressed the button and the hangar doors sprung apart on their emergency power charge. A wall of water crashed across the empty hangar floor, slamming into the back wall and trying flow back the way it came, as more water gushed in behind it.
From the back of the hangar ceiling the camera showed the water rising under a surface of churning whitecaps. The new inlet of the Pacific frothed and foamed as the ocean raced in to fill every office, briefing room, and broom closet in the underwater base. The
Ten seconds after the doors opened the flood reached the camera on the ceiling. A wave raced across the surface and smashed into it, and the screen went dark. The Batcave was gone.