Zsinj's Grand Plan
The Super Star Destroyer known as The Iron Fist was one of the Empire's last remaining Executor-class dreadnoughts. Unfortunately for any Imperial loyalist, the ship had become one of the first things the infamous Warlord Zsinj had seized following the Battle of Endor. The human Admiral had earned the respect of its crew and when the time came he took control of the ship, its crew, the ground forces within and the starfighter corps in its hangars. The ship, along with two entire fleets composed of several hundred star destroyers and a few thousand support ships such as corvettes and frigates which would later become part of Zsinj's armada. Now, the Iron Fist became the center of his military, political and economic activities. While Sereno was the official capital of his empire, Zsinj had created a parallel capital aboard his ship. From here he controlled his vast financial empire both inside and outside his own territory. It also served as a command center for his military forces and he could also communicate with the different planetary governors who ruled on his behalf. The most important part of this was that his enemies weren't aware of this, and it was done on purpose. Every faction in the Galaxy believed that Zsinj's empire concentrated in Sereno. He had ensured that the nobles there spread the word that Zsinj had centralized his power onto a single planet in order to consolidate his forces. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Following the battle at Onderon, Zsinj and his friend and ally Rua Skirata had left the bridge toward Zsinj's personal command center. This room, located in one of the deeper and more centralized part of the ship served as Zsinj's personal quarters, office and as a secondary bridge. From here he could coordinate battles without risking his own life. It also doubled as a lounge, which he often used to entertain guests or dispose of them. The two sat down in a set of comfortable lounge chairs, a server droid then brought them drinks. From where they were sitting, they could see the planet Onderon through a viewport in front of them. Zsinj smiled, turning to Rua and raising his drink.
"To another victory." Said Zsinj, offering a toast.
The plan was executed almost perfectly, capitalizing both on the infighting and division within the Republic and the malaise and incompetence of the Imperial Remnant’s leadership. Oh Alliance intelligence was clever, and placing a Republic outpost and intelligent depot on a planet that was almost an historical cliche was rather genius. No one, but no one would think to look on Onderon! Why every major potentate, dictator and maniac in history placed their secret bases on Onderon. A planet, infamous for its beast masters, it’s beast men and its legacy of being an ungovernable cesspool and most of those organizations and individuals found their purchase on Onderon’s soil dubious and often eroded far in advance of the arrival of their enemies. So of course the Republic did it, they’d even given enough bribes to the locals to keep them mostly calm, it was meticulous, it was efficient, it was doomed. Doomed because the Alliance leaders viewed Onderon as a backwater, bribes that lacked the gift giving nature offended the hypocritical pride of the Onderonians and Zsinj was studious enough to realize that. It became a simple matter of extending respect, trading for information and when the time came, leverage. All this and more was in Rua Skirata’s head as he made his way towards the true command center and in many ways, the capital of the Empire. Rua hadn’t stopped to remove his armor, heading to a logistics office to speak to requisition the proper bribes for their assets on the ground and then to the barracks to talk to troopers and one or two spies. Evidently, the gossip below was that not one, not two but six force users were present on Onderon and that not all were on the same side.
Which was a nice bonus, so far each side of this unstable game had a force user except the Remnant, intelligence reported they’d found some Imperial inquisitor who had been lost in deep space since Yavin, but reports of the description and of the other group, the beast boy and his master left him wondering. Wondering which mitigated only when he arrived and caught the scent of Alsakan brandy. “Ahh, Boss, your sense of taste is as impeccable as ever” Rua bowed his head, while he might have called him “boss” and spoken informally, he was always careful to make sure his body language was deferential, they’d been allies for a decade. He’d been Rua’s mentor and they might have even been friends but Zsinj had more than earned the right to be master here. “You’ll be the first person without force powers to conquer Onderon without firing a shot and most seem to hail you as a conquering hero” Rua raised his glass “To victory! May it be the pebble that starts a mountain slide!”
One Galaxy, one Emperor, two peoples. A united Mandalorian people, the right hand of Zsinj, his answer to the Jedi and everyone else, all united behind the banner of Zsinj. It was a nice goal and if he could play a part in it, he wouldn’t complain overmuch. “Apparently Jerec and Luke have some competition by the way, spies tell me there were three seperate groups of force users planetside and only one of them were Jedi and the other? Was with the Remnant and get this. Our Bartender says the crazy bitch claims she’s the “She Wolf” returned from the dead! Hah!” Rua shook his head, while crazier things had happened, it was hard to imagine the embodiment of Jedi fanaticism taking orders from the biggest sycophant of the Sith to ever exist. “Our spies are still working on the other guy, but maybe he’s just some eccentric old hobo who used to be something” Rua shrugged, the Galaxy was filled with washouts from the Jedi Order and former Agrocorp members who simply weren’t worth the Empire’s time.
It was irrelevant anyway and he relayed the information more because he knew Zsinj was a fan of military history and would appreciate that it wasn’t just drug lords and Alliance terrorists they lured out but the galaxy’s mental patients and change beggars too.
“Onderon puts us in a sweet position strategically, doesn’t it Boss?”
Zsinj took a sip from his Alsakan brandy. The mentioning of the Force users in Onderon was not unexpected, after all it seemed everyone knew what they were looking for on the planet. However, there was an unknown variable in there. A third party of Force users. Could it be?
"Did you get a name for this third party?"
Zsinj was not the type of person to underestimate his enemies. While he was confident in his power, he knew that a single Force user could turn the tide of a battle if not dealt with correctly. Especially one such as this. A third party with no allegiance to either the New Jedi Order or Pestage's sorry excuse for an empire. It was a variable he needed to know about. Before Rua could make up an answer, he started looking through his memories. He swore he had heard of an old Jedi Master who had settled in Sereno several decades ago. The nobles couldn't stop talking about him. Especially, when they found out that this particular Jedi was one of them. Could it be him? He certainly had the resources and capital to do it.
“Unfortunately no, all our spies were too busy focusing on the unhinged female claiming to be a dead woman” Rua made a mental note to pester his contacts in house Janus, to see if she was one of the myriad daughters born to that noble line gone crazy and was playing out a fantasy or if it was just some random inquisitor talking nonsense. His eyes flickered towards Zsinj the moment the man seemed to go silent lost in his own memories, he knew the look, it was the look the man sported when he felt intelligence failed (which it had) and his own memory would suffice (which it often did). “Our sources did give a generic description of the man in question and I ran it through the old imperial database on force users unaccounted for after the Jedi purge” Rua remarked, his voice somewhat tense. He’d killed force users before, besides Boba Fett he was probably the only Mandalorian in a thousand years who could say it and probably among the handful of sentients who could, but he didn’t like it, beyond his own personal youth it was too damn dangerous, fighting an enemy that could enhance itself in real time, modify its own anatomy to make itself faster, stronger and could anticipate your movements and drop you with its mind. Rua lost an eye to the petulance of one Mara Jade and his replacement eye flickered responding to the rise in his body heat as he mulled things over. Zsinj took all force users seriously, but he was taking this one far more seriously than he’d seen him take any since that fateful day with the Nightsisters, where Rua used a neutron bomb to settle a galactic dickwaving contest between darkside adepts on Zsinj’s behalf.
The descriptions were generic enough to yield ten different results. D’jinn Altis had likely died of old age and the Altisian Jedi were likely joining the New Jedi Order so Rua ruled that one out. “The description matches, several “fugitives” and given none of them look alike, it tells you the value of eyewitness accounts” Rua shrugged his shoulders, his gemstone like robotic eye flickering the images passed his ocular nerves. “But since you seem to know something I’ll start name-dropping and you can tell me if any of them sound familiar.” with another sip of his brandy Rua leaned back in his chair, his dark hair falling about the armor and robes, giving him the look of some wild, mercenary king in the service of a greater liege, one that didn’t merely wear the trappings of civilization but sought to embody them. “Quinlan Vos, Rahm Kota” Rua got a laugh out of that last one, he’d killed Rahm with Mara Jade, it had been how he lost his eye. “Tholme, Drun Carnwick and uhh...this name has to be an alias of some sort Ja’karr I’m pronouncing that right, I’m sure of it” Rua paused there, allowing the name to roll around his tongue, unsure why he stopped there, though he went on rattling off a few other names, including one female which again went to the value of eyewitness testimony, or lack thereof.
“Another claims he was the former High Inquisitor Antinnis Treymayne himself, but Jerec killed him over Ord Mantel, Adalric Brandl, Hydra and Volytar were killed in remnant territory but we still don’t know by who” Rua finished his brandy placing it onto the bronze tray the ever attentive service droid scurried over with.
“I can...investigate this personally if you need me to Boss..I’d much rather not, mind ye. “Rua muttered the last bit, responding to his own offer as a man who’d just been handed a bundle of venomous serpents.
"That one!" Zsinj shouted, standing up abruptly making the brandy in his hand spill on the floor. The female servant droid came running, kneeling over the small pool of brandy on the metallic floor as she attempted to clean it with a towel. Zsinj on the other hand was muttering something in Huttese as he ran over, as fast his body could take him, toward the main console computer in one corner of the lounge.
"That blind bantha. Piece of…" He continued, typing away furiously at the blue screen. Finally he found what he was looking for. "Jarn Dakarr! Yes! I knew it!"
He pulled up a series of reports on the screen above the console. All of them detailing a series of thefts to Sereno nobles. Every single one of them involved Sith or Jedi artifacts from the Civil War. "It has to be him. He was the most prominent Sith and Jedi artifact of the Clone Wars. Rumors spread by the Sereno aristocracy say that he was a Jedi Master at some point. There are too many coincidences."
“Dakarr? That last name sounds familiar” Rua remarked, wondering if he’d gambled with or fenced too, or assassinated people for that House. Quite a few bravos from Sereno, young, upstarts from minor noble houses had also challenged him to fights something about “an upjumped commoner” taking such a position of power besides the new Emperor. Both his synthetic eye and his remaining organic one flickered in amusement recalling their indignation. Sereno nobles weren’t as provincial as Chommel Sector upstarts but nonetheless. While clan Skirata wasn’t as wealthy or powerful as Clan Vizsla or Fett, or Kryze but his lineage boasted three Mandalores which put him a bit higher on the Galactic pecking order for arrogant fools who thought the achievements of dead men meant more than the victories of the living. The man who would be Emperor paced, mentioning albeit, with manic zeal relic theft and a foremost collector of odd artifacts. Rua whistled “I’m surprised the Inquisitors weren’t on his ass if he was buying up force cult relics, especially if he wasn’t part of the Imperial elite”
Rua had been given a scroll written by Odan Urr as a gift by Governor Tarkin for completion of a mission and he recalled that a minor Inquisitor had to be physically present to witness and log the gift, such was the extent of the Emperor’s paranoia. Rua made a mental note on that, perhaps he could use the trinkets he’d been given or “liberated” when clients failed to pay as bait? Granted, he had no way of determining if any were impressive enough to be worth stealing. Thinking about bait made him grumble, he really, really didn’t want to fight another Force user. “What do you want to do about this guy? If all he’s doing is running around collecting kriff and ignoring the Galaxy unless he gets cornered, he isn’t so much of a threat for he might do as the heat he’ll bring on us if he’s still involving himself socially or financially in Sereno. Maybe we should freeze his assets and repo his holdings? Then send a notice to the New Jedi Order and whoever this crazy cunt really is, in Remnant space and let them know we only care about containing Sith and Jedi treasure because blasted force users always burn the galaxy down whenever they have one of their sectarian domestic fights” Rua spat the last part out with unusual venom, for the first ten thousand years after the fall of the Rakata, the Taung and their human followers, who’d become known as “Adherents of path of the Mando’a” and then, eventually just “The Followers of Mandalore” then simply Mandalorians had been the preeminent force of order and peace in the cosmos, a race then religion of warrior poets who brought civilization to the stars. Then the damned Jee’dai reorganized themselves as Jedi some thirty two thousand years ago and flooded the stars, competing and vying with the Mandalorians for cosmic order and when the Republic was founded those sanctimonious prelates bent the knee and a once mighty people were reduced to brigands and pillaging thieves, then found honor in conquest once again and in opposing their hated enemy.
“Sorcerous trash, usurping dogs, Jedi, Sith, whatever the Kriff this blind thug is, they’re all the same to me. A class of malignant parasites who’ve distracted the Galaxy and held us all back for too long” Gloved hands tightened but the rage seemed to pass, much as he tried to revile the Jedi order his mind always wandered back to the blond girl who’d been like a surrogate mother to him and a mentor and whatever hatred he could kindle was drowned out. Still, this Ja’Karr, or Jarn Dakarr presented a problem.
He let out a sigh “Every major power has a force user except us, you’ve got me. But that still leaves this blind guy, what do you want to do about him boss?” He figured, the unhinged fraud could be dismissed, she was probably some low tier inquisitor trying to boost her value but this one? A former Jedi Master? Who’d survived decades of history, that was a problem.
A big one.
"No, no. Dakarr is clever, yes. He's been avoiding the Inquisitors and the Emperor himself for years. At least, that is what the rumors say. While he is a competitor in the markets…" Zsinj paused for a moment to calm down. The fact that some no-name Serenno noble was able to compete against his vast financial holdings hurt his pride. But he knew better than to blindly go after someone who had survived so much. "If we freeze his assets in Serenno he will disappear for good. Then, he will never be found. Hmm." Rua could sense conflict within Zsinj. He despised the man, not because he was a potential danger but because the Serenno noble had done something to hurt the Fondor Warlord's pride. Wouldn't be the first time something similar happened.
"I want to send a message." Zsinj turned, pointing a Rua. "Find him. Use everything at your disposal. Favors, spies, contacts, everything. And when you do, tell him that he should stay out of our way or face death."
Before Zsinj could rant any further, an Imperial Commando officer entered the room. The officer, wearing a black uniform and a captain's rank insignia approached and saluted the Warlord.
"Sir!" He called out, drawing Zsinj's attention. "The package has arrived."
"What?" Replied Zsinj, walking away from the console. Before the officer could repeat himself, Zsinj interrupted him. "Yes, yes. I heard you. Go and fetch them for me." The officer nodded and walked out of the room. Zsinj, then turned to face Rua. He had a smirk on his face. The good news seemingly washed away the fury from earlier.
"I don't think I ever told you how I got my hands on that little artifact from Onderon." Zsinj began, chuckling to himself as he approached Rua once more.
Rua let out a sigh, of course he wanted the mando to go hunt a force user. Dark side adepts and renegades of the light and Bendu fence sitters didn’t bother him the way hunting Jedi did, but it all bothered him because he really detested the risk involved in facing Force users. The man’s dark hair fell over his mechanical eye which began to twitch, processing statistics and data, feeding his brain information from the holonet as he began to formulate precisely how he would go about this without getting himself killed. Beyond him, the serving droid returned with a tray and some more brandy “Leave the bottle” Rua muttered before allowing himself a bit of a manic smile. “I hate fighting force users boss, but every time I do I earn glory and honor which is essential for a Mandalorian, especially one who aims as high as I do. That’s what I’ve always liked about relationship, you understand the cultures you seek to conquer or coopt, like Grand Admiral Thrawn did and you aren’t so paranoid and shiftless that you don’t see the value in advancing your subordinates” Which was true, Rua never acted the sycophant, the fact that he was willing to complain about this mission was proof enough. Zsinj took his advice on tactical matters as Rua learned from Zsinj like an eager student when it came to strategy. Zsinj had been able to establish himself so well because he understood as those below him rose, so too did Zsinj who rose ever higher, bringing himself one step closer to Emperor. “Intimidate, don’t kill but make enough of an example to remind him we’re not to be taken lightly.”
He could do that, hopefully without provoking the wrath of said force user. As he was about to ask if Zsinj wished him to inquire more about the Remnant and Pentastar’s force users a trooper came in and Zsinj seemed to cheer, to switch from that wounded pride and dark fury that moved him to send his best warrior on a potential suicide mission into waxing nostalgic about manueverings done in the dark over the last few months or years. The light in Zsinj’s eyes burned and Rua shook his head “No, I don’t think you did” He could guess well enough, but he never liked to voice his theories until he had at least partial confirmation. “How ever did you manage to hustle six different force users Boss? Including two kriffing Jedi Masters…” Or three, if the crazy lady wasn’t so crazy at all.
“And what exactly is the artifact? Don’t tell me it's a damn holocron or some manuscript of Nomi Sunrider or Arca Jeth?”
"See for yourself."
The Imperial Commando officer returned along with four Storm Commandos. They were escorting a boy, not older than 20. He was wearing the usual robed given to padawans by the Jedi Order and even had a lightsaber on his belt. Though, by the look on his face he probably wished he was elsewhere. When he was presented before Zsinj, he looked away from the Warlord's gaze as he approached him.
"Go on, boy. What are you waiting for?" Said Zsinj, growing increasingly impatient as the kid reached into his robe. From it he pulled out a triangle crimson holocron. So this is what everyone in Onderon was after? Some dusty old Sith holocron? As soon as the Jedi Padawan presented the holocron, Zsinj took it from his hand.
"This." Said the Warlord, turning to face Rua. "This is our reward. Neither the Jedi, the Sith or Dakaar have what they sought after. According to my sources, this is the last Sith holocron in existence. By keeping this holocron under our protection, we deny our enemies the vital knowledge they require."
Zsinj glanced toward Onderon, before fixing his gaze on the artifact in his hand. "Their orders will waste vital resources as they scramble to find it. Eventually, they will come for it. And when they do, we will destroy them! We'll draw them into a trap from which they cannot escape. And then together, we can bring order to the Galaxy. A Galaxy in which the Force is no longer relevant."
It was hard to tell whether Zsinj had completely lost his mind or if he had come up with the most ambitious plan in his life. While the holocron was a vital tool for the respective orders, would it be possible to use it against them. He was right, both Jedi and Sith would spend resources to find it. However, whether Zsinj's forces could use that to their advantage was another matter. r matter entirely.
From his seat Rua raised a scarred grizzled eyebrow as the wastrel entered the room. A boy, adorned in Padawans robes, those silly brown robes that Jedi always thought was some compensatory gesture to make up for the fact that their existence cost the New Republic about as much as it cost to maintain seven full battlegroups and a quarter of a million soldiers. “You think that stupid costume hides your hypocrisy? I could fund a mercenary team of twenty with what the Republic spends on you, boy” Rua chuckled, it was a bit cruel and he didn’t entirely mean it but the youth had the look of someone who had given up and Rua despised broken men and despised powerful ones all the more. As the boy held up the artifact a scarred, halved eyebrow rose over his artificial eye and Rua let out a whistle. “Ain’t that a pretty thing, pretty and dangerous” Rua added, a gloved hand reached for his songsteel knife, he knew well enough the danger of Holocrons. Mandalorians spent tens of thousands of years battling their creators and the Jedi who reverse engineered the technology from the Rakata and began to fashion their own and the Sith ever after. As Zsinj began to unravel the web of contradiction and risk shrouding his plan the Mandalorian slowly smiled a predatory, feral smile. Yes, he thought, as it should be, a Galaxy ruled by an Emperor whose law was enforced by the Mandalore many had asked why he supported such a man, when he had the wealth and the esteem to break off on his own and it had always come down to one thing beyond loyalty, Mandalorians weren’t rulers, they were a race of conquerors, warriors, but they needed to be united behind one leader, who bent the knee to one great man.
“A crucible of truth, to burn away the the millennia old deception of the Force Using cults and their value...I like it” Rua turned, sneering, disgust evident in his face, though less for a hatred of force users and more in the memory of Scout, her love and her patience and the blind Jedi he’d killed with Mara Jade and how pitiful it was this one betrayed that which so many died or remained lost because they refused to forsake their vows. “How does it feel boy? To know you’ll be responsible for the extinction of every single infernal sect of your nonsense mutant brethren?”
Rua laughed and rose “Don’t bother answering” turning he bowed to Zsinj and departed, it was time to prepare to act the part of the intimidator.
It was time to alter the course of History.
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