Star Wars Character Cafe - Trix Chapter 1

Title: Smugglers of the Outer Rim II: Trix
Author: John E. Martin (mrcalabash@aol.com)
Characters:   Maxx (Captain of the Wild Nerf)
                    Lo Price (Maxx's partner)
                    TC-23J (Maxx's Protocol Droid)
                    Trouble (Maxx's R-5 Astromech)
                    Trix (Maxx's former girlfriend)
                    Alaya Sedota (Trix's Twi' lek slave girl)
                    Victor Tekel (Maxx's Brother)
                    Inspecter Lewella Telares (Victor's Superior Officer)
                    Marshal Thonas (Maxx's former mentor and Trix's current boyfriend)
                    Vardun Cantrel (Mining Executive)
Era: 2 years before "Star Wars IV: 'A New Hope"
Category: Adventure/Drama/Romance
Summary: While working in the Corporate Sector, Smugglers Maxx and Lo run into Maxx's former girlfriend. This is the second of three novelettes written about Maxx and Lo, the first was "Heavy Lifting".
Disclaimer: I am not making any profit from this story. The "Star Wars" universe and non original characters (like Han Solo, Chewbacca and Boba Fett) who are referenced in this story do not belong to me.

TRIX

CHAPTER 1

Lo grinned as the Wild Nerf dropped out of orbit and slipped into the outer reaches of Rampa’s atmosphere. There was a time when it never would have occurred to her that she and Maxx would be using their highly modified light freighter to smuggle water. That was before the two of them had entered the Corporate Sector. The Corporate Sector Authority’s charter was set up to allow the business interests that controlled the Authority maximum latitude in exploiting the resources of the previously uninhabited worlds that made up the Corporate Sector as they saw fit. Many of the Corporate Sector’s worlds were strip-mined and polluted until there was no longer a business case for supporting operations on them. At that time, they were abandoned for the next uninhabited world. Lo doubted that Rampa would last much longer. The water on this world was so nasty that even the treated stuff was barely drinkable. The Authority was shipping water to Rampa in bulk freighters, but their prices were so obscene that water smugglers could make handsome profits sneaking fresh water past Rampa Skywatch.

So far these runs through the “Rampa rapids” had been a bit tame for Lo’s tastes. Still, Maxx was more than happy to reinvest the bulk of their profits in the Nerf and allowed Lo to reengineer their first year YT-1300 to her heart’s content. She remembered the day when Maxx playfully asked her if there was any system on board the Nerf that hadn’t been modified since Lo’s original upgrades two years ago on Ord Mantell. Lo was certain that she hadn’t done anything with the running lights, but that was about it. The sublight engines may have been the same basic system that they had installed prior to entering the Corporate Sector, but Lo had soon managed to replace the ship’s two YT-1300 power cores with the more powerful YT-2400 cores she had originally wanted to use. Since then, she had completely reengineered the ship’s control system, upgraded the hyperdrive and replaced the old Y-Wing ion canons in the port mandible with two heavier ion canons that their friend Doc had managed to liberate from a Skipray Blastboat. Lo was particularly proud of the new deflector-shield system she had designed. This new system was specifically designed for the Nerf and would allow the ship to shrug off multiple missile hits. Lo suspected that, this system might even withstand a direct hit from a capital ship’s turbolaser canon at point blank range, though she wasn’t anxious to try it.

As the Nerf joined the other freighters queuing for the journey to Rampa’s main spaceport, Lo started thinking about her next project. She had been working on the design for a new hyperdrive system ever since the two of them heard about Han Solo’s boast that the Millennium Falcon was able to do point five past light speed. Maxx was quick to dismiss Han’s claim. He had heard of several cases where smugglers had tried to achieve a hyperdrive multiplier lower than point six. The lucky ones had only slagged their hyperdrives. Fortunately, Solo’s boast reminded Lo of a research project that she had heard about during her last year in Corellia Tech. One of the professors she had been sleeping with had theorized that if one could streamline a ship in hyperspace, hyperdrive, multipliers lower than .6 would not only be possible, but reliable enough to be practical for commercial vessels. Lo had surreptitiously downloaded his notes into her datapad, but hadn’t thought much about them until she had heard of Solo’s claims. Going over the equations, and data from initial tests that she had downloaded suggested that a multiplier of .5 was possible for a properly streamlined ship, but that the energy requirements for such a system would have made it too unreliable for their tastes. Still, if one scaled the multiplier back to .59, one should be able to create a reliable system that would still be significantly faster than almost anything out there. She had shown her initial work to Maxx, and he was enthusiastic. Maxx even said that this was the last thing that they needed to do to make the Nerf the perfect smuggling ship. Lo grinned, little did Maxx know about some of the other little projects simmering in the back of her mind.

Suddenly something threw Lo forward into the seat’s crash webbing. She glanced at Maxx and felt relieved when he appeared to be calm. His right hand had yanked the throttle back, killing the thrust and applying the braking jets. Lo wondered what her partner was up to when she saw a bluish bolt from an ion canon flash a few meters in front of the Nerf’s bow. She then felt the pit of her stomach float as the Wild Nerf started to plummet. A quick glance to the left confirmed that Maxx had moved his right hand off of the throttle and was holding the switch to the repulsorlift drives off. “Playing dead?” Lo mused as she looked up and saw the ships that they had been flying with disappear into the heavens. Her lips curled into a grin as the ship continued to plummet. This was going to be fun.

The ship was barely fifty meters above the ground when Maxx switched the repulsorlifts back on. As she felt the repulsorlift engines cushion the ship’s fall, Lo glanced towards Maxx and saw his right hand slowly move the throttle forward. It wasn’t long before the Nerf was rocketing a mere ten meters above the landscape. Lo’s grin widened as she leaned forward in her seat. She may have wondered if Maxx had any idea where he was going, but she didn’t really care. Her partner always seemed to have a plan for whatever scrape they ended up in and she was more than content to just enjoy the ride.

***

As soon as the Nerf touched down, Maxx switched off the engines and asked Trouble to begin the shutdown sequence on the power cores. As Maxx’s heavily modified R5 astromech tootled his reply, Lo stared out the canopy at the ship’s new surroundings. The abandoned mine shaft may have appeared gloomy, but it was the perfect place to hide the ship while the two of them considered their options.

“Were you intentionally flying here, or was it just a lucky find?” Lo asked.

Maxx chuckled.

“We’ve been flying together for two years Price,” he replied, “You should know my methods by now.”

Lo smiled and leaned back against the copilot’s seat. “Typical,” she thought.

“Then you had this site picked out before we had lifted off of Ralla,” she replied casually.

Maxx nodded.

“Actually I had picked out a total of seven good hiding spots,” he replied. “This one just happened to be the best one to fly to from where we were ‘shot down’. Now what I’d like to know is why Rampa Skywatch suddenly decided to shoot at us. Were they tipped off by someone on Ralla or by our contacts here?”

Lo leaned forward and stroked her chin as she pondered the issue. Trouble had checked the sensors shortly after the Nerf left hyperspace, so they couldn’t have been trailing any water vapor and she didn’t know of any scanning system that could have spotted the Nerf’s smuggling compartments.

“Maybe someone in the Authority has finally figured out that the ID we were using was fake,” she suggested.

Maxx nodded, pleased that Lo was finally beginning to think tactically.

“Perhaps,” he replied as he stood up. “In any case, I’m going to fly into the city and see what we can learn.”

Lo unhooked her crash webbing and followed Maxx out of the cockpit.

“Just promise me you’ll be careful out there,” she said as they walked to the cargo bay where the speeder bikes were stored, “Good pilots are hard to find.”

Maxx smiled.

“You have my word,” he replied.

***

“What the Sith am I doing here?”

Maxx frowned as he puffed on his pipe and sipped his glass of Ralla mineral water. He had never given much thought to what hell might be like, but the Bantha Trax was as close as he cared to come to it. For all of the daring do and high speed heroics that came with being a smuggler, Maxx was a fairly quiet man. The last place he would ever imagine wanting to be was a night club with its loud thumping music, bright pulsating lights and crowds of sweaty people. He had tried to join Lo on the dance floor a bit earlier but he just didn’t feel comfortable with all of the bumping and shaking that was going on. His idea of dancing was something slow and graceful with clever foot work. Maxx smiled as he remembered how he and Trix used to enjoy the terlingua in her apartment by the Twi’light lounge. He liked to visit Trix after he had finished his last delivery for Marshal. They would usually sit at the small table in the kitchen and talk for awhile over elomen tea. Then Trix would stand up and the two of them would slowly glide to the music, lost in their own little world. Eventually the intimacy of the dance would get the better of them and they would stop to kiss and usually ended up undressing each other. After a very enjoyable night together, the two of them would have an intimate breakfast and Maxx would return to his apartment to check in with TC-23J.

Maxx shook his head as if doing so could drive thoughts of Trix from his mind. Those days had ended when the son of a prominent Imperial official on Tapan had died of a Ryll overdose and Maxx had suddenly become a fugitive with an Imperial death mark. Thankfully, Marshal Thonas had been kind enough to give Maxx a good price on one of his old freighters and Maxx was starting to develop an enviable reputation as a smuggler in the Corporate Sector.

He had Lo Price to thank for much of his success. Her steady string of upgrades and modifications had turned his dependable light freighter into a ship that he would happily put up against any ship in the galaxy. The Nerf’s hyperdrive may not have been able to match the .50 hyperdrive multiplier that Han Solo claimed for the Millenium Falcon, but Maxx doubted that there were many ships in Imperial space that could match the Nerf’s sublight speed and the little freighter was nimble enough to shock the few fighter pilots who had the misfortune to engage the Wild Nerf in combat. Best of all, since Lo preferred a holistic approach to systems engineering and avoided jury rigging at all cost, the Nerf was glitch free and never suffered from the unexpected breakdowns that plagued most of the other hot smuggling ships that Maxx had heard of. Maxx lifted his glass to Lo in a mock toast. There was something to be said for having an engineer as a partner.

As he sipped his drink, it amused Maxx that it wasn’t that long ago that he wanted nothing as much as getting that stupid Corellian off of his ship. Maxx wasn’t certain if it was the freedom to reengineer the Nerf as she saw fit or something else entirely, but Lo had changed so much over the past year. She was sober most of the time and was careful to make certain that the Nerf was in tip top shape before she went out clubbing. Better yet, Lo was a lot more pleasant to be around than she had been for most of that first year. She had even managed to develop a friendship of sorts with Trouble, Maxx’s prickly little R5 astromech.

In a way, these changes in Lo had created a little dilemma for Maxx. His partner had always been sexy in a geeky sort of way, but it was hard to feel attracted to someone who was as antagonistic as she used to be. Lately, Maxx was starting to have feelings for Lo that he didn’t know how to express, or even if he should bother expressing them at all. He once asked TC-23J about this and she warned him that dragging romance into the picture could easily destroy a very profitable relationship. Maxx remembered one night when Lo came home drunk, stripped off her clothes and fell into his berth while he was sleeping in it. He was sorely tempted to just stay there and see how Lo would react when she woke up next to him. Unfortunately Maxx was too much of a gentleman to do that, so he gently rolled Lo onto her back, slipped out of the berth and spent the night in the other berth. Lo had never mentioned that particular incident, so Maxx assumed that she was so wasted that she had no idea that anything had happened.

Maxx was thinking about Lo when he heard a familiar voice.

“Excuse me, have we met somewhere before?”

“Trix?” It was all Maxx could whisper as he looked up and saw his former lover standing next to his table. She was still able to pull off the ageless beauty that Maxx remembered so well during their time on Tapan. Her face may not have been as smooth as those of some of the women that Maxx had seen at the Twi’light lounge, but it didn’t look old as much as well defined. Her wonderfully expressive eyes hinted at the sharp mind that had seen much and yet had not abandoned its sense of hope and playfulness. The deep blue of her form fitting gown contrasted nicely with the soft yellow of her skin. Maxx sighed, Trix appeared to be as aristocratic as ever.

“I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage,” she replied agreeably. “You seem to know my name, but I can’t quite recall yours.”

Maxx winced, he had almost forgotten that he was in public and would have to use his current assumed name.

“I’m afraid that you’re far more memorable than I,” he replied conversationally. “My name is Morel Trellat, I visited your establishment the last time the Little Bantha touched down on Tapan. Would you like a seat?”

“I’d appreciate that,” Trix replied gratefully. “I tried to spend a few moments on the dance floor with Aayla, but I’m afraid that my knees aren’t as good as they once were.”

“Aayla?” Maxx asked.

“Aayla Sedota,” Trix replied conversationally. “She’s the reason I’ve traveled so far from Tapan in the first place. Her master ran into a little business trouble and had to auction her off to cover his losses. I had a little competition at the auction and paid a little more than I would have liked, but I should be able to recoup my expenses when we return to the Twi’light lounge. How are you doing?”

“I can’t complain,” Maxx replied cheerfully. “Business in the Corporate Sector has been so brisk that it’s been quite a few months since I’ve had to worry about the minimal expenses that the Bantha incurs. How are you doing on Tapan?”

“I’m doing well,” Trix replied, a hint of nervousness crept into her voice. “Business at the lounge is good and I have started seeing someone.”

Maxx’s face brightened at the news.

“Anyone I might know?” he asked, feeling relieved.

“His name is Marshal Thonas,” Trix replied. She was relieved that Maxx seemed to be taking this so well. “He operates a small shipping and charter operation out of Tapan’s main spaceport.

Maxx’s smile blossomed at the news, “It seems that the best man has won,” he thought as he savored the thought of Trix finding happiness with his old mentor. One thing was bothering him though.

“You seem a bit troubled,” he said.

Trix winced, sometimes it seemed like Marcel knew her a little too well.

“It seems like the flight I had booked to Tapan was oversold, and Aayla and I have been bumped,” she replied. “I have spent the entire day trying to book a cabin back to Tapan, but it seems like nothing is available.”

Maxx frowned thoughtfully as he listened. Etti IV was one of the main worlds in the Corporate Sector; it was almost unthinkable that Trix would have had trouble finding passage to one of the core worlds from here. He could understand if Trix said that the available cabins were expensive or undesirable but they should still be available.

“Have you looked at chartering a ship?”

Trix gritted her teeth.

“I’ve considered it,” she said quietly, “but only as a last resort. I don’t know any of the crews here well enough to put myself at their mercy. Are you busy?”

Maxx frowned; Lo was just going to love this.

“I’m afraid that I will have to take this job,” he said grimly. “Dallat won’t like it, but I don’t want to see you and your charge come to grief.”

Trix smiled gratefully as she listened.

“Thank you Captain Trellat,” she said softy. “I promise to pay you well for your troubles. By the way, who’s Dallat?”

Maxx shrugged.

“Dallat Ristal is my first mate,” he replied. “She’s a great girl most of the time. She just doesn’t care much for Twi’leks.”

Trix’s face clouded over.

“I get the hologram,” she replied grimly. “Maybe I should find another way back to Tapan.”

Maxx shook his head.

“If things were different, I would never have made the offer,” he replied in a voice that was both soft and grave. “I’ve been here long enough to know trouble, and you’re up to your neck in it.”

***

Lo was feeling elated as she left the dance floor. She had always enjoyed the energy of a good club, but this time was special. Maxx had actually agreed to go to a club with her. Lo had had feelings for Maxx ever since he had rescued her from Nalma the Hutt last year. “…I don’t know if I want to live in a galaxy where Lo Price isn’t safe and free.” Nobody had ever said anything like that, and meant it, to her before. In the past, every relationship Lo had ever been in revolved around what she could do for others. Her father supported her because she didn’t embarrass him. Her bosses tolerated her behavior because she could do more work in four hours than most engineers could do in ten. Men liked her because she went to bed with them. It had never occurred to Lo that someone would care enough for her to take on so much trouble just because he cared for her.

Ever since that day, Lo had been doing everything she could think of to get Maxx’s attention. The problem was that Lo really didn’t understand her partner that well. At least with most men, Lo could show a little skin and let nature take its course, but Maxx would just avert his eyes or ignore her. Lo even tried getting drunk and slipping into bed with Maxx while wearing her sexiest underwear. Most men should have taken that hint, but Maxx just slipped out of the berth and slept alone. He never even mentioned it to her.

Lo had once asked Mother about whether Maxx had ever expressed any interest in her and the droid replied that he had not. She had even suggested that Maxx may not have been the kind of man who was attracted to human females.

That may have been true, but Maxx had accepted her invitation to join her at the Bantha Trax to celebrate the completion of their latest run. Maybe she was finally getting through to him.

Then Lo turned her head and saw something that made her blood freeze. Maxx was sitting at a table with a yellow skinned Twi’lek. The two of them were leaning forward and were deeply involved in what seemed to be an intimate conversation. At first Lo just wanted to turn around and walk away before Maxx noticed her. Then something made her walk towards the couple. It didn’t take long for Maxx to notice her out of the corner of his eye.

“Dallat!” he called out to her, “Allow me to introduce you to Trix, an acquaintance of mine from Tapan. She runs one of the better pleasure lounges on that world.”

Lo felt an unpleasant jolt as she heard that name. This was Trix? The Trix? Wasn’t Maxx’s old lover supposed to be twenty years older than Maxx? Lo had always considered Maxx’s willingness to sleep with a middle aged alien a sign of desperation but as she stared at the Twi’lek, it became painfully clear that Maxx wasn’t settling for less. Seeing Trix made Lo feel hopelessly gawky, like a freighter that had just set down in a yacht club.

“I’m pleased to meet you Dallat,” Trix replied as she smiled warmly at Lo, “Captain Trellat has told me so much about you.”

Lo met Trix’s smile with a hard glare and ignored her outstretched hand. She just felt sick.

“I’ve got to leave and fetch Aayla,” Trix said as she stood up. “I’ll see the two of you later.”

With that, she strode off towards the dance floor. Lo quickly sat down, leaned forward and glared at Maxx.

“What the Sith was that about!?” she whispered harshly.

Maxx winced and felt grateful that Lo at least had the presence of mind not to yell in public. He figured he would be doing well if his partner kept her temper in check until the two of them had returned to the Nerf.

“Brace yourself,” he whispered as he leaned forward, “we’re flying Trix and her charge back to Tapan.

“What!?” Lo whispered in a mixture of shock and horror. It took every bit of restraint she had to keep from screaming right there and then.

“I’m sorry,” Maxx replied, “I know you don’t like this, but please understand one thing. I wouldn’t have offered to do this if I wasn’t certain that Trix was in grave danger.”

Lo snorted.

“But you have no trouble putting us into this danger? She whispered harshly.

“Of course I didn’t,” Maxx whispered coolly. “Danger is our specialty, that’s one of the reasons why I have never balked at any of the upgrades you have asked to apply to the Nerf.”

“I take it we’re being well paid for our troubles?” Lo asked pointedly.

Maxx nodded.

“Trix is paying us ten thousand credits for passage to Tapan,” he replied. “Half of that is yours.”

Lo nodded sagely. The usual fee for a simple delivery job like this was five thousand credits, so she couldn’t argue that they weren’t being paid well. She also noted that Maxx was departing from his usual habits. Back when she was part owner of the Nerf, Maxx used to subtract a few thousand credits for operating expenses and then give Lo half of the remainder. It seemed that Maxx was being very generous all of a sudden.