AN : If we hit 250 power stones in 24h, there will be an extra chapter.
Sitting in his office, Dooku stared blankly at the work on his desk. The stylus in his hands didn't move as he just looked at the tablet in front of him. Outside the Palace, Sidious' pet still lurked. The beast still hadn't crossed the boundary, but lurked and observed. Somehow he had been able to evade the Royal Guards as they patrolled.
Pursing his lips, Dooku decided it would be worth it to train the Guard in how to shield their minds.
There was a knock at the door. When Dooku looked up to find his old friend, he dropped the Dark Side like he'd been caught doing something he shouldn't. "Yes?"
"Just dropping this off." Sifo stepped into the office, before setting a crystal blue and gold wire holocron on the Count's desk. "You asked for it, remember?"
"...Right, I did." Dooku reached out for it. "How was it made so fast?"
"I've always had an interest in prophecy. Ever since my one prophecy, I've kept one or two empty holocrons nearby just in case I had another."
"...Right. The prophecy about Tan'ya." Dooku paused in thought.
"The Child of the Twentieth Lost will Tear the Veil of Deception open, and reveal the circling darkness once more." Sifo recited, a distant look in his eye.
It had been so many years since he heard it, and while Dooku had never put much stock in prophecy, hearing it in that moment raised the hairs on the back of his neck. If Sidious ever found out about it, he would demand Tan'ya's death.
"...Are you sure it's about Tan'ya?" Dooku asked at last. "Am I even one of the Lost?"
Sifo considered for a moment, before shrugging. "I mean, I suppose you have other children as well."
Dooku froze, the blood running cold in his veins. "How many copies of that prophecy are there?"
"Just the one. They keep it in the vault on Coruscant." Sifo looked at Dooku, a question in his still-brilliant eyes. "Did you want one for yourself?"
"...I'm fine, thank you."
"Well, I'll see you soon." Sifo said goodbye to Dooku, before turning to leave.
"Wait." The word tumbled from Dooku's lips, and he didn't even know what to say when Sifo turned to look at him. "Perhaps we should delay purchasing the Hammerhead hulls."
Sifo raised an eyebrow. "What brings this up all of a sudden?"
Dooku's mind raced to find an excuse. "Even these few ships are much more expensive than I thought they would be. The Trade Federation fleet is sufficient for our needs, perhaps we should make do with the Royal Guard and the expanded militia."
There was a long pause as Sifo stood there. Eventually he said, "This is your decision and no one else's. Is this what you really want?"
He was out of excuses, he'd backed himself into a corner and there was no easy way out. Dooku couldn't sacrifice his hopes and dreams for a peaceful, ordered galaxy. He couldn't risk the Sith Assassin hurting his family, and couldn't sacrifice his oldest and greatest friend.
Could he tell Sifo the truth now? No, it was far too late. Sidious would still want him dead, and Sifo could never agree to work with a Sith.
Eventually, after a desperate few seconds, Dooku made his choice. "I'm being foolish. Go ahead with the inspection."
When Sifo closed the room behind him, Dooku felt something close within himself as well, and he placed a hand over his eyes, letting out a long, shuddering sigh.
...
Sifo's boots squelched through the mud, his thick hood made of thin metal foil crinkled with every step as droplets of toxic rain rolled down his back.
Every visit to Raxus Prime was a reminder not to return. The planet stank of mold and rust, when it wasn't coming down with bitter smelling alkaline rain that cleared sinuses and stripped certain kinds of paints from starships.
The mixture of old garbage and bleach smell was strong enough to give Sifo a headache. It was also unpleasantly warm and humid, being closer to the sun than Secundus and darker in color resulting in greater heat absorption on the surface. The air turned misty with the water evaporating off of the hot, exposed metal surfaces.
Even night time wouldn't bring respite, only a bone cold chill. Prime had almost no biosphere to keep the heat inside the atmosphere, meaning anyone caught outside without shelter for warmth was likely to freeze to death before the sun rose again.
The population that lived here were either offworlders who found temporary residence in temperature controlled domed cities, or poor locals who constructed their shelters beneath the surface of the world to escape the oppressive cycle. Both groups had an unpleasant reputation, the former for being greedy and exploitative, and the later for being crazy, untrustworthy, and dangerous.
Buried in Prime's endless stacks of rusted trash were countless ancient treasures. The small native population of the planet scraped together a living by collecting metal scrap, and selling it to offworld smelters to be broken down into new bars of durasteel, copper, and even aurodium.
Amidst the piles of detritus, small, potentially valuable artifacts would be claimed by eager scavengers, who would sell them to merchants for the nice occasional bonus, that is if they could reach one of the domes before it was stolen from them. It wasn't uncommon to stumble across a dead scrapper among the dunes, his head bashed open or his intestines exposed with a crude shank.
All of this was awful, and made Prime a place to avoid for anyone who had the choice, but it was even worse for Sifo as a Jedi. The Dark Side had formed a nexus around the ruined world, a frigid, nightmarish miasma of bitter, despairing madness that sawed at the edges of his consciousness. It was as if the world knew how it had been defaced, and resented all that laid eyes on it.
It was no wonder that Jedi so rarely came here.
Perhaps Dooku was right. Leaving Tan'ya at home had been the right decision.
"Here they are." The oddly nasal, slightly high pitched accent of Sifo's tour guide shook him out of his reverie. Julgut was an older man, in his fifties with a long scraggly beard that was graying at its roots. He didn't seem to mind or notice that his nose was running, and there were small driblets of snot clinging to the hairs above his lip. "Not real pretty, Prime grime will do that to you. My mate in the archives still digging up the decommission orders, but we're pretty sure they were shuttered here after Ruusan."
The hammerheads were exactly as promised, half a dozen ships of that venerable make and model abandoned in the scrap of Raxus Prime. All six of them were parked neatly next to each other, with crews of local engineers working to dig away the accumulated filth that the hulls were partially buried in. The hammerheads were skeletal, missing computer panels, blasters, hyperdrives and engines.
As a historian, Sifo guessed they probably served as escort ships for the Republic's merchant navy in the New Sith Wars, defending shipments of valuable goods from raiders far from the war front.
When peace returned, they were no longer needed, and sold at rock bottom prices to a scrapper here on the planet, who stripped them of anything of value and forgot about them. They then sat here ever since, as the detritus of Prime slowly buried them. It would be far cheaper to just buy a new Hammerhead with modern parts then to pay for these to be refurbished, but then that wasn't really an option for Serenno.
"And you can restore them?" Sifo asked.
"I can, all six." Julgut replied, confidently, resting his thumbs in his pockets. "Gonna take some time, though."
"How long?"
"A year for each hull, without delays, and there will be. There always is."
"Six years at least? Why so long?"
"Can't just fix the buggers up on the ground, we need to get to the underside, you see. Gotta elevate them, and it's one at a time, I'm afraid." He pointed over to the massive, primitive looking land vehicle that his employees were working out of.
It was as large as the Palace on Serenno. The thing didn't even hover, it just had a massive set of wheeled tracks. On the top level of the gargantuan vehicle was what looked almost like a space dock, but with cranes and winches to pull a ship out of the muck and hold it in place while it was being worked on.
It was essentially a small, mobile shipyard, but located inside a planet's atmosphere instead of floating in space. Sifo had never seen anything like it before in all his travels across the Galaxy. It was a specialized piece of machinery that could only be used here for this one express purpose.
...
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