Nar Shaddaa towered around them, neon signs advertising this and that depravity shining through the pollution. Aircars whistled past with little regard for anything but speed and avoiding the landing pad's air rents. The stench of sentient misery rose from the very bottom of the ecumenopolis of a moon to cling to the bones of all who tread on its structures.
“Come,” Anakin said and put a protective hand on his padawan' shoulder. Ahsoka twitched.
Behind them, Obi-Wan – moral support, Council watchdog, Anakin's foremost critic and dearest friend – disembarked from the same commercial shuttle. Anakin resisted to urge to see how he was doing; they were to pretend to be members of different traveling parties until they reached the rendezvous.
“Two sentients. Nothing to declare,” Anakin said as he slid the bribe to the customs officer.
The customs officer glanced at Ahsoka. “Slaves require declaration and Joravva the Hutt requires a twelve percent cut from any sale,” he said in a bored voice.
“She is my sister and she is free,” Anakin replied in the most poisonous tone he could produce.
The customs officer stared at him for a moment, then shrugged. “Work permits come from sector management and working without one is strictly forbidden. Next!”
Anakin put an arm around Ahsoka's shoulders and swept her away, glaring at the people around them like an adequately protective brother. For her part, Ahsoka made a face and walked fast out of the building.
Their cover story was that they were refugees from Shkevron who were here only to book transit somewhere nicer. They were dressed appropriately, in tatty clothes that had seen better days and not detergent. All very inconspicuous. They would blend in with the masses of refugees passing through the ports, staying for but a day or two.
What they would actually be doing, of course, was stealing a Sith holocron from the Black Sun before Dooku could pick it up. Their lightsabers were hidden in their clothes, they had the best plans of the Black Sun hideout the Jedi Order could turn up, and Anakin at least had been doing some practice for covert infiltration missions in the Temple's dedicated mass of ductwork and sliceable security cameras and locks of varying difficulties.
The sky trams were packed with sentients. Anakin and Ahsoka kept a tight hold on each other as they took a long-range one to the district next to the Black Sun hideout.
Neon-cast shadows of refuse piles morphed into rats under Nar Shaddaa's unsleeping sky. Anakin held a jumpy Ahsoka as they checked into a dingy boardinghouse.
“That thing with the rats,” Ahsoka began as Anakin used the Force to remove the bedbugs from the room. “Does that happen often?”
“What thing with the rats?”
“You know, when they just...” Ahsoka waved her arm expressively. “Appeared? One moment, nothing, the next, rats in the shadows.”
Anakin shrugged. “It's a manifestation of the moral decrepitude of the place. Don't worry.”
“Riiiight,” Ahsoka replied in her most skeptical tone.
“It just happens. You'll see more during our stay.” He sent a final bedbug plummeting to its death. “There. No more bedbugs.”
Ahsoka collapsed onto the bed. “When do we meet Master Obi-Wan?”
“Ten hours or so. Sleep,” he suggested.
“Urgh,” his new, teenage padawan said, then stretched out and fell asleep like Anakin had once been able to. The reference manuals he'd looked up had said she'd be in the middle of a growth spurt and would eat and sleep accordingly.
He stood at the window and sank into a meditative trance. Nar Shaddaa blared, loud as Coruscant and even more miserable, filled to the brim with the dying screams of a thousand sentients, downtrod and miserable. Only the oppressive air of bureaucratic negligence was missing.
Further away, the war raged. The 501st was safe on Coruscant and there were no battles near Hutt Space, but Anakin still felt the background radiation of clone troopers dying.
What must be the Sith holocron was visible through the corner of Anakin's metaphorical eye. A little clot of darkness, twisting upon itself, shadows burning in a pyre of biting cold. He let go of the unease and slid closer at an angle. A few levels down, maybe, and he thought he might be able to follow that inexorable pull to its corrupted source.
Ahsoka still slept when he returned to the world of matter. A glance at the clock revealed six hours before the rendezvous. Anakin set an alarm for four and crawled in with his padawan.
A surge of adrenaline brought Anakin from the depths of sleep to full wakefulness in an instant. He jumped out of bed, lightsaber in hand, before awareness cut through and he silenced the alarm that had jolted him so.
Ahsoka stirred but was still horizontal. Anakin nudged her. “Wake up, Snips.”
She grunted wordlessly. He poked at her until she rolled off the bed and into the refresher. Anakin touched the Force lightly as he waited for her to be done. The holocron was still there, a little twist of corruption that called him.
An hour or so and they were on their way to the rendezvous point, the streets on these levels slightly less full of the unwashed masses. The main throughfares were packed; the back alleys and various shortcuts rushed through and almost vacant. Paranoia was the mood of the world. Anakin kept his very young padawan close.
Then they turned a corner and saw Obi-Wan, coppery hair washed red by the holosign above him. “Took you long enough,” he quietly said.
“We had to give you enough time to pose impressively,” Anakin replied. “Come. It's this way.”
“You can sense it?” Obi-Wan said with a frown.
Anakin nodded. “It's ... clingy.”
The three of them wended their way through the streets. Neon lights and sharp-toothed shadows followed them with a predatory gaze. Ahsoka, young and fresh, jumped at them all. Even Obi-Wan flinched. But then again, was he not a child of the Temple, where everything was safe and sound? Anakin had grown in the trash heaps of the galaxy, property rather than a person, and knew intimately just how hostile the universe was.
“That is the main aerial entry to the complex,” Obi-Wan remarked.
They were a few levels above the landing platform, which gave them a good view of the approach. A dilapidated freighter was ponderously aligning itself for the approach. Despair and depression dripped off it, clogging the air intakes, the sheer misery of its slave cargo weighing it down.
“Master, what's wrong with the ship?” Ahsoka asked.
“Lack of maintenance, I suspect,” Obi-Wan remarked. “The criminal types generally tend to break the laws involving maintenance as well.”
The freighter's pilot gunned the engines, which would have brought it on course but for an unlicensed craft slipping up between the buildings, in hot pursuit from what passed for traffic control here. The fool of a smuggler who'd thought it possible to slip offworld without paying protection money to the Hutts pulled up to dodge a stun shot and clipped the freighter.
There was nothing the pilots could do. The smuggler lost control and plowed into a nearby building. A hundred lives were snuffed out in squalor. The freighter hit the lip of the landing platform and broke in two before the fuel ignited and the freighter went up on a giant fireball.
Three dozen doves flew out of the freighter's cargo hold. In life they had been slaves, chained and degraded, but in death they were freed.
“What?” Ahsoka cried out, obviously distressed.
“You get used to it,” Obi-Wan said with a deep sigh. “Come. I do believe we have a holocron to liberate, and this should be a good distraction.”
Anakin gave the doves one last look as they flew into the sky, free for all that meant on the Hutts' moon, and followed his sheltered master and oh so young padawan. The galaxy was cruel and hard. She would get used to it like Anakin and Obi-Wan had.
Unfortunately.