This chapter is like pulling teeth. I just want to finish it so I can move to the final arc:
Two workers were trying to intervene, speaking in quick, clipped Huttese as they moved along the catwalk urgently.
“You can’t—please step away from the regulator,” one of them said, his hands half-raised as he neared the officer.
“There’s a calibration cycle—if you just let us reset—” the other began, already edging toward the panel, eyes flicking between the wheel and the pressure readouts.
The first worker was younger, lean, his coveralls stained dark at the cuffs, hair plastered damply against his forehead from sweat. He moved again, more decisively this time, fingers stretching toward the control interface.
The Imperial slapped his hand away without turning, not even looking at him, like brushing off an insect.
“Basic,” he said flatly. “You will address me in Basic.”
Luke stopped at the edge of the platform above the tanks.
Below him, the reservoir system breathed and shifted in uneven pressure cycles, gauges twitching as the flow struggled to compensate for what was being forced through it. A pressure gauge was flickering in a way it shouldn’t, jittering between readings. One of the secondary overflow lines had begun to backfeed, water moving the wrong direction.
Someone downline was about to lose output entirely, Luke noticed.
The Imperial finally noticed Luke.
“Oh,” the officer said, brightening slightly, as if a missing piece had just been supplied. “There you are. I was beginning to think your people didn’t keep anyone on hand who could be spoken to properly.”
“They’re asking you to step away from the valve,” Luke said, already descending the stairs.
The Imperial glanced at the wheel in his hand like he was weighing whether it still interested him, knuckles loose around it, posture relaxed. “I’m fine where I am.”
A worker edged closer again, hesitant. His eyes flicked to Luke before he spoke, voice tight with effort, in anxious Huttese.
“Boss,” he said, “if the reservoir overfeeds the lower line, we’ll lose pressure to three blocks—”
Luke didn’t look away from the system as he answered. He could smell the alcohol clinging to the officer. “He said that if you shut that down, you destabilize distribution for half the district.”
The officer tilted his head. “That sounds like your problem.”
He turned the wheel another quarter inch.
One of the workers made a small, involuntary sound—half protest, half alarm—as the flow shifted harder into the wrong channel, the sound swallowed almost immediately by the rising noise of the system straining.
Luke stepped forward. “Step away, please.”
The Imperial officer smiled. “Or what?”
One of the workers shoved the officer from the side, quick and desperate, boots slipping slightly on the wet grating as he committed fully to the motion. The Imperial stumbled sideways into the railing, boots splashing hard into the runoff water. In the same motion, the same worker slammed the valve shut.
Metal bit into metal. The system resisted for half a second, as if deciding whether human urgency counted as authority, then locked with a heavy, final clunk.
The flow didn’t stop cleanly—it fought it, surged through remaining channels, overshot the correction curve, then began to settle into a violent, contained churn.
The Imperial officer straightened slowly.
He looked at the worker in astonishment, as though trying to reconcile the action with the category he had already assigned him.
The worker was breathing hard, chest rising unevenly beneath his soaked jumsuit. Water clung to his boots up to the ankle, and he didn’t step back, didn’t even seem to register the distance anymore. His gaze kept flicking to Luke as he spoke, Huttese breaking slightly under strain.
“I’m sorry— the valve—had to close it— it was going to blow the line— I had to— it’s my job—”
“You think you get to touch me?” the officer snarled.
The worker opened his mouth again, but didn’t get the chance to finish. The backhand came fast, clean, almost casual in its execution, snapping his head sideways and sending him stumbling into the railing hard enough that the metal rang. A second strike followed immediately, then another, the rhythm tightening as the space around them seemed to contract.
A circle had formed—workers and bruisers alike, hemmed into the narrow space of the maintenance area.
The worker dropped to one knee, and Luke stepped forward, lifting a hand toward the officer, who had finally begun to register the fact that he was surrounded.
“We can take it from here.”
“Can you?” the officer spat. “You have your workers talking back to me. Laying hands on me as though they’ve forgotten their place.”
“They answer to us,” Luke said mildly. “Let us handle this.”
His voice dipped mockingly. “And what are you going to do?”
“We have our own enforcement.”
“Ah, ‘enforcement’” he laughed, and it came out loose and wet. “Your ‘bruisers’ is it? Enforcement—kriffing butchers more like.” The officer shifted his weight. His eyes moved over the workers, over the damp grating, over the valves still shuddering back toward equilibrium.
“The ones who blast beings who can’t pay into little pieces,” he continued, voice lifting slightly as if it amused him, “and send them back to their folk. Broken up. Packed in crates. Tagged like cargo.”
“Fucking savages. Efficient, I’ll grant them that. There’s something almost honest about it—debt collection at the end of a blaster barrel.”
His gaze drifted over the tanks. “Can’t expect better from this shithole planet.” The officer sniffed. “Fine,” he said, rolling a shoulder. “Call one of them up. I’ll say when.”
Luke gestured without looking around.
A Duros patrolling with Mara stepped forward and stopped close to Luke—Smoot—his posture loose.
“I’ll do it, boss,” he said in Huttese.
Luke nodded at him. “Don’t hurt him much, Smoot,” he replied in Huttese. “Just enough to make this drunk go away.”
The officer narrowed his eyes. “What are you telling him?”
Luke looked at him for a moment, then answered evenly in Basic. “To not make a mess,” he said. “People still work here.”
