READ NOW on Archive of Our Own: Honor Among Outlaws, a Star Wars Mandalorian x Star Wars Outlaws (videogame) crossover adventure
Kay Vess and ND-5 walk out of a New Republic vault on a backwater moon with a satchel full of Jedi relics, one Sith holocron, and a tracker neither of them noticed. Halfway across the galaxy, Bo-Katan Kryze is begging her husband for any excuse to leave Mandalore for a week. Colonel Ward of the Adelphi Squadron has a bounty puck with two names on it, and a polite request that Din Djarin make this his next problem. Throw in a Vader-cosplaying Imperial remnant who calls herself Darth Voxon, the abandoned hulk of the Trailblazer, and one very small green opinion in a satchel, and you have the makings of a temporary truce. Set post Outlaws and post Mandalorian & Grogu.
The vault on Aldhanis IV was supposed to be the easy part.
Kay Vess crouched on the lip of a ventilation shaft three levels above the relic hall, one gloved hand braced against the duracrete, the other curled lightly around the small warm body of her Merqaal. Nix was vibrating with restraint, his amber eyes fixed on the lone New Republic technician below; the little creature had learned in the years since Cantonica that vibrating quietly was a survival skill. Kay scratched the back of his neck twice, their signal for not yet.
In her ear, ND-5's voice was as dry as the dust on the duct floor. "The patrol rotation on level six just shifted. You have ninety seconds before the door behind you re-arms."
"You said that last time."
"And I was right the last time."
There was a small, mechanical sigh on the other end of the comm, the same sigh he had been making at her since he was reluctantly reactivated on Toshara and she had refused to give him back to the Pyke. She loved that sigh. She would never tell him that.
The technician below them yawned, stretched, and turned his back. Kay rolled forward, dropped six meters onto the catwalk, landed in a crouch that her knees protested more than they used to, and let Nix scurry down the support strut on his own power. The catwalk did not creak. She had taken a job in the maintenance droid bay last year specifically to learn which catwalks creaked on New Republic installations, and that intelligence was paying for itself today.
The relic hall stretched ahead of her in a long, dim corridor of stasis cases. Each case held something the New Republic had pulled out of the rubble of the Empire and decided was too dangerous to leave on the open market, which meant, as far as Kay was concerned, that each case held something a collector in the Outer Rim was willing to pay for in clean credits, off the books.
Most of the cases were boring. A blaster that had belonged to a Moff. A scorched piece of durasteel from a Death Star fragment. A datacron of dubious provenance. Kay moved past them at a steady, professional pace, her bootfalls swallowed by the soft acoustic dampening the New Republic had installed for the sake of the relics inside.
The case she stopped at held three things: a curved metal hilt with a faded copper grip, a triangular piece of crystalline carbon, and a black geometric solid the size of her fist, faceted and seamless, that pulled at her eyes in a way she did not like.
A Jedi lightsaber hilt. A piece of Jedi temple architecture. And a Sith holocron.
She knew what the holocron was because ND-5 had identified it from the schematic of the vault he had bought off a greedy intelligence officer the week before. She had asked him then, as she was asking him now in her head, why a Sith holocron would not simply be destroyed by a sane government. ND-5 had answered that no government was that sane.
Kay slid the cutter out of her boot, set it against the seam of the stasis case, and looked once at Nix. The Merqaal flattened himself against her thigh and went perfectly still. She drew a breath in through her nose, let it out slow, and clicked the plasma cutter on.
The case was open in eleven seconds. She had practiced.
She did not, however, allow herself to be subtle once the contents were out. Subtle exits were how thieves got tracked all the way home; flashy exits were how thieves got tracked to the place they wanted to be tracked to. Kay slung the satchel of relics over her shoulder, kicked over a display plinth on her way out, used the butt of her blaster to crack the transparisteel of a case containing what she thought might be a vintage moff's pistol, and grinned briefly to herself as the proximity alarm finally registered her existence and began to scream.
"There it is," ND-5 said in her ear, equal parts patient and aggrieved. "I told you that you would not be able to help yourself."
"I'm consistent. You should appreciate that in a person."
"On my way." She was already running, Nix tucked against her chest, the satchel banging against her hip. Two New Republic security troopers came around the corner ahead of her and Kay stunned the first one in the chest before he had finished raising his rifle; the second one she shoulder-checked into a wall, because she liked variety in her work. Nix bit the second one's ear for good measure as she passed.
The roof access was a service ladder. The ladder was not where it was supposed to be, because someone had moved it during the last refit, which Kay had learned only when she had crawled into the same maintenance droid bay that had taught her about the catwalks. She climbed it three rungs at a time, kicked open the roof hatch, and emerged into the cold thin atmosphere of an Aldhanis IV night.
The Trailblazer dropped out of the dark above her with its landing thrusters already burning, ND-5 silhouetted in the cockpit window, and Kay had a brief, fond, slightly winded thought that she was almost certainly going to die one day in a moment exactly like this one, and that she was content with that.
She grabbed the gangway, hauled herself in, and slapped the close panel. "Go."
Nix squeaked and burrowed into the inside of her jacket. ND-5 banked the ship hard, the relic satchel slid across the deck plates, and Kay laughed once, sharp and bright, before she remembered that she was supposed to be a professional and schooled her face into something more dignified.
"What did you take?" ND-5 asked, without looking back.
"Things people will pay for."
He was quiet for several seconds. The Trailblazer punched up through the atmosphere, the stars steadying around them, the engine note settling into the familiar deep purr of a freighter glad to be out of a planet's gravity well.
"Kay," ND-5 said finally. "Did you take a Sith holocron?"
"I took several things. A holocron may be one of them."
"Did you take a Sith holocron?"
