As many others have said in far more eloquent/humorous/intriguing words than I could muster- it all belongs to Bioware, I'm just mucking about in their Universe.

This is my first real fanfic, and though I did a few original pieces over at fantasy writers dot org, it has been several years since I flexed my writing muscles, so please feel free to leave feedback, but be gentle- I bruise easily :).

She was so hungry, and the wink of bright metal and shine of coppery wires promised her at least enough credits to get a meal at Gardann's lousy excuse for a cantina. She shifted the filth and rotting garbage off of the tech slowly, piece by careful piece.

Quiet, quiet. Can't let them hear.

Most of the other street kids were too scared to scavenge around here, and of the few who would come near at all, only Aodhni was bold, or desperate, enough to search the alley while Bilal and his toughs were 'entertaining' in the warehouse that fronted the area.

Iziz, for all its vaunted splendor, was not an easy place to live; at least not for children like Aodhni. Her uncle had told her once that her mother hadn't wanted children, just a rich husband. She'd never gotten one, of course. Instead, her uncle told her, she'd gotten a knife in the belly after one of her clients had had a little too much booze and a little too few credits to pay for the evening. When the investigators finally came out in response to the landlord's complaints about strange noises and a terrible smell, they found Maryam Hassan's mangled body, a depleted Spice stash, and three year old Aodhni hiding in the closet. A few days after her uncle told her the story, he decided that Aodhni was old enough to take on a few clients of her own.

Aodhni shuddered and forced the memories of her uncle's "friend" down into the pit of her stomach. It had taken six days for her to heal enough to move after that incident, and another three for her to work up the courage to steal her uncle's money and run. She'd been on her own ever since, and even though there were times, like tonight, when she felt dizzy from hunger and cold, she'd never looked back.

Aodhni had moved enough garbage to see her prize a little more clearly, and she drew a sharp breath as she realized what, exactly, was in front of her. It looked like the memory core off one of the loader droids that Bilal used in his warehouse. The scrap merchant that hung out by the skyramp paid good money for droid parts, and Aodhni's head was suddenly filled with images of hot food and a new blanket. She began prying the last bit of debris, a twisted shard of metal, off the memory core with such focus that she didn't notice the back door of the warehouse opening until it was too late.

"…yeah. I'll be back in just a sec. Gotta take a leak."

Aodhni froze when she heard the rough voice behind her. She knew she needed to run, to hide, but the shock of being caught just as she was about to get her hands on something wonderful, kept her frozen in place. She barely had time to feel it when the calloused palm grabbed her shoulder and yanked her sharply around.

"What do we have here? Don't you know it ain't nice to eavesdrop, little girl?"

…and we have to be nice, little girl. Come be nice to Uncle's friend.

Aodhni's vision went white. A scream, primal and desperate, came from somewhere deep inside her. She kicked out as hard as she could and violently thrashed her body from side to side. The man holding on to her stumbled back in shock and pain, and Aodhni sprang forward without a conscious thought.

Nice girl. Got a present for you little girl. Just for you.

Her mind was wheeling in terror and she could hear high pitched shrieks of rage and pain echoing down the alleyway. She wondered vaguely who was shrieking so desperately, but the thought swirled away as she swung her arm forward wildly. Again and again she lashed out at the man in front of her, only dimly registering that she still held the twisted metal scrap from the garbage bin. The man tried to raise his arms and back away, but his feet were tangled in the trash littering the floor of the narrow street. He tripped, and Aodhni was on him in a flash, still swinging the arm that held the discarded piece of jagged metal. She didn't stop, she couldn't. Everything in her urged her to do anything, anything at all to keep this man away, to keep him from hurting her. She barely knew who she was, but she knew that she had to keep stabbing. Even when she was covered in something wet and slimy and dripping hot blood, even when the man's pained howls had faded into low, breathy moans, even when he eventually went still beneath her, Aodhni kept jamming her makeshift weapon into him.

That was how Bilal Mahnoon found her; glassy eyed with shock, covered in blood, and sitting atop the lifeless body of one of his lieutenants. Normally, his instincts would've had him pulling out a blaster and taking care of the problem with the minimum amount of fuss, but something about the situation struck him as profound. He'd seen the dead man in front of him take down enraged Gamorreans without batting an eye; that the hardened veteran had just met his end at the hands of a child was puzzling to Bilal. Perhaps the kind of puzzle that was worth solving.

"No! Stupid little savage! The M-41 has more kick than that little sporting blaster the boss lets you play with. Tuck your elbow and brace your wrist. You wanna break your hand on your own time, be my guest, but right now, we got a job to do."

Aodhni snarled at Saacro, but made sure to tuck her elbow and brace her blaster wrist across her right forearm. This was the first real job that Bilal had ever sent her on, and she was determined not to screw it up. It had been a few years since Bilal had taken in a skinny, blood-covered, little street rat and set her to work. At first, she'd just scampered around a few back alleys and cantinas, pretending to be nothing more than another scavenger but keeping her ears open and reporting everything she heard back to one of Bilal's men. In return, she had a place to sleep, and even things to eat sometimes, when there was extra, or if one of Bilal's thugs was feeling particularly generous. Sometimes his men would hit her if they were drunk, or pissed off, and she wasn't fast enough to dodge, but he never let them touch her, not that way. Bilal Mahnoon was a slimy son of a Hutt with no qualms about selling Spice to kids and then shaking down their parents to pay the bills, but he didn't tolerate baby rapers.

Lately, fourteen year old Aodhni had noticed that she was starting to have some trouble squeezing into her usual hidey-holes, and the kind of people who'd never before given a second thought to seeing a dirty little urchin pawing through the garbage had started taking notice of her when she wandered into an area. The looks Bilal's men shot at her were starting to change too. She worried that she'd be cut loose if she started becoming less useful, or worse, that Bilal would withdraw the tenuous sliver of protection he'd extended to her over the years. She'd be fair game then, not a baby anymore, and no reason to expect that she'd end up any better than her mother.

Then, last night, Bilal had called her into his presence. His top lieutenant, the Weequay whom everybody just called "Weequay" and the only alien Aodhni had ever seen, was standing to Bilal's left, and two of Bilal's street runners, Saacro and Lunta, were leaning against the walls of Bilal's warehouse office. Aodhni was terrified that Bilal had decided she was a liability. She had expected to get blasted then and there, but then Bilal had actually smiled.

"You've been useful, little Pikobi," Aodhni had never heard that tone in Bilal's voice before, it was approving, and almost paternal. "I think it's time you took on a new challenge..."

Now, here she was, new blaster in hand, and ready to help Saacro and Lunta take out a few members of some street gang that Bilal felt was getting too bold. Apparently, the men she'd been sent to "clean up" were selling death sticks without bothering to get permission first. Before last night, Aodhni was only distantly aware of the existence of an organization called "The Exchange." She'd heard the name once or twice over the years, but up to now, her world had been completely contained by the strong, high walls of Iziz City. She knew local names, local faces; who to watch out for, who might be good for a spare credit or two, and who to listen for in conversation, but life in the rest of the wide galaxy was pretty much a blank to her. In Aodhni's world, Bilal was the boss, the ultimate authority over life, death, and everything in between; the idea that Bilal might actually have a boss of his own was nearly incomprehensible to her. Even now that she knew Bilal belonged to a crime syndicate that had bases and ran operations in pretty much every corner of known space, it was still hard for her to wrap her head around the idea. Bilal was in charge of things here in Iziz, but somewhere out there, there was someone else, someone with an even longer reach than Bilal, someone who had noticed a decline of profits, and that someone had ordered Bilal to take care of the problem.

"Pay attention, you barvy little slug!" Lunta hissed at her. The clunky, ancient, cybernetic ocular lens that served in place of his left eye whirred as he focused on the wall in front of them. "Looks like we got all four of them inside. Three sitting around a table or something, and one standing in the back right corner. Think he's facing away from us."

Saacro nodded once and motioned for Lunta to take point. "Alright brat, the one in the back corner's yours. Aim right between his shoulders, and pop off two bolts right away, got it?"

Aodhni bobbed her head and did her best to look to like she was calm and ready for what was about to happen.

"Try not to shit your pants kid," Saacro smirked at her "You're going in second. Just keep your eyes on your mark."

Lunta held up two fingers, waited a beat, and then burst through door. Aodhni ducked in after him, blaster raised, heart racing. She scanned the room and saw her target just as he was starting to turn around, the set of his shoulders radiating shock and alarm. Time seemed to move in extreme slow motion as Aodhni drew a ragged breath. Her brain suddenly took her back to a time when she'd heard some spacers in a cantina talk about a colleague who'd flown too close to a black hole in some place called the Hydian Way.

"Just got sucked right in. Poor old Sacobi, helluva way to go," the spacer took a long drink and wiped his mouth. His companion nodded her head soberly and applied herself to her own drink.

Aodhni was paying close attention to these two- outside visitors were rare, and Bilal always liked to keep tabs on them. After a moment, the woman spoke up too,

"Heard time gets funny, when you get too close to one of them things," she said. "Heard it almost stops, so when your body gets pulled apart, it can take, like, a million years to stop feelin' the pain."

Aodhni wondered if this was what it was like to get drawn into a black hole. It almost seemed like she was existing outside of time as she felt her finger slowly drawing the trigger of her blaster, each micrometer of movement seeming take forever. When the pistol finally went off, it was almost a surprise and suddenly time seemed to rush back at her, everything seemed to speed up to a thousand times its normal rate, like the universe had just realized that it made a mistake, and was trying to fast forward events to catch up with reality. Her shot went a little wide of the mark, catching the target in the upper part of his right arm and causing him to spin around.

He faced Aodhni for a split second before she fired off another bolt, and she had just enough time to register the obvious youth written across his face before her blaster bolt slammed into his chest and knocked him off his feet. She stood where she was, blaster still raised and gaze boring into the empty face of the fresh body across the room. She heard Saacro shout something, and then the loud report of his blaster rifle rang out, but she didn't even twitch, she just stared at the boy who had been alive not two minutes before.

She wondered what his name was, and whether he had been a child like her, unwanted and unloved, or if he had a mother, a brother, a father out there somewhere who would wonder what ever became of him. She wondered what he'd done that day; had he eaten breakfast, sold some product, visited a lover, made plans for his future? Had he guessed that he might end up just a pile of garbage, dumped into the incinerator behind the Eastern recycle station? Or had it just been an ordinary day for him, until she came in and ended all his plans with two quick shots from her blaster?

She was pulled out of her reverie by Saacro's victorious whoop and Lunta's grouchy complaint. "Damn, you're a cold bitch, ain't ya? I damn near pissed my pants after I did my first sharpie."

"Aw, you're just pissed cause the brat cost you twenty creds. Come on ya' scroggin' bunch of rancor turds, pay up!" Saacro grinned over at her in way that almost felt like camaraderie, "He bet me twenty creds that you'd either barf or slag out."

"S'not natural," Lunta grumbled as he dug in his pockets for the credits. "Little Bishwag is scroggin' vicious."

Aodhni turned toward the irritable thug and bared her teeth at him. Something in her grin must have been vicious indeed, because the tough stopped his moaning and began discharging the heat from his blasters, studiously looking away from her. She was glad she managed to pull off a fearsome look, because inside she was shaking like a whipped Akk dog.

"Alright kid," Saacro's voice was rough as ever, but for the first time, sounded almost friendly. He'd never called her anything as nice as "kid" before. "Fun part's done, now comes the messy part. We gotta get rid of these stiffs before someone comes nosing around."

Author's note:

For anyone who is not a complete Star Wars nerd like myself, and have only played SWTOR because it's a Bioware title, Onderon is a pretty important planet in the Star Wars verse. It's featured in KOTOR, Star Wars the Clone Wars television show, and many other sources. For info on the planet I'd recommend looking at the Onderon wiki on wookiepedia (All hail wookiepedia!)

Some of the language is pretty common Star Wars slang, but hasn't (to my knowledge) appeared in the game. If you didn't understand something, and the explanation isn't listed below, just head over to Wookipedia and type the phrase in the search box.

Weequay: humanoids with thick, leathery skin that range in color from tan to dark brown and known for lipless, scaly faces with a frill along each of their jowls. Many are slaves to the Hutts and are often found in the position of mercenary, body guard, or criminal henchman. On their homeworld, they communicate with clanmates mostly through exuding a series of pheromone combinations. Since they use scent and complex "pheromone codes" to identify one another, many Weequay never find the need to adopt a spoken name, although some Weequay that choose to stray from their clans choose "use-names" in order to fit in more comfortably with non-Weequay society.

Pikobi: fast-moving, flightless reptavians native to the Gungan swamps of Naboo and the jungles of Onderon. "Quick as a Pikobi," is akin to saying "Quick as a mouse," or maybe "Fast as Falcon," since Pikobi are not quite as defenseless as mice.

death sticks: A drug akin to acid. They are sticks of a cilona-extract that offer euphoria in exchange for a horrific outcome. They produce a twisted version of reality enhanced by bright colors and are commonly taken as an additive to a drink. They are commonly seen in small tubes of red or yellow liquid and with each dose the user's life is shortened, and the successive dosages take away larger chunks from a lifespan. Strictly banned in both the Empire and Republic space, but somewhat more common in neutral regions and on "outlaw" planets.

barvy: crazy

the Hydian Way: a super-hyperroute that begins at the Corporate Sector on one side of the galaxy and continues through the core to the other side, past Eriadu. It is the only route that passes through the entire galaxy. There is a black hole located along the route, near Dathomir, that smugglers will occasionally skirt in order to avoid authorities. Unfortunately, as the poor spacer I dreamed up for the opening chapter found out, skirting a black hole is a dangerous affair.

sharpie: initially intended, I think, to mean "sharp-witted." Crimson Jack uses the word to describe Han Solo, but I kinda readapted it to suit my purposes. In this case, it means "hit" or "victim of a professional hit."

scroggin' or scrogging: a mild curse, like saying "fricking" or "f-ing"

bishwag: an expletive used by many Humans during the last decades of the Old Republic to indicate an untrustworthy being.