Ba'jurir

[tasteoftruth]

Byrne had come to the Japanifornia space station about eight years ago, shortly following the death of his wife. In accordance with Japanifornia's legal traditions the fledgling prosecutor had been paired with a seasoned detective meant to show him the ropes and keep him in line. Badd had only managed to accomplish the former.

Japanifornia was off the beaten space-path and its inhabitants disinterested in the goings-on of the rest of the galaxy, which made it an enterprising place to start a law career and a perfect base of operations for criminals. A large smuggling ring shipped priceless cultural artifacts in and out of the station, and large businesses were covers for money laundering operations that underpaid their workers while threatening those who stepped out of line. They were not above the occasional silencing, either. Byrne tried to take the fight to them in court but found himself tripped up by bribes and forged evidence at every turn.

They had been the Yatagarasu together, taking the identity of the messenger of the gods to bring truth and light to the creeping corruption on the backwater space station. They had exposed the rot of Japanifornia at night and then prosecuted it during the day. They had fallen in love.

And then Byrne had left him behind.

"You need to be in bed, Kay."

"No, you need to be in bed. You never sleep, you're always working." Kay, clad in pajamas imprinted with blue space cows, stomped her foot insistently. Stubborn, like her father, and impossible to deal with once she got an idea into her head.

Badd shook his head and waved her off, barely looking up as he typed in yet another sequence of name/date/location/actions taken and circled relevant areas on the crime scene photo. "I'm an adult and I'm busy. You have school tomorrow."

"I'm not going to bed until you go to bed!" Kay set her hands to Badd's shoulder and began trying to move him from his desk with all the efficacy of a mouse attempting to push a mountain, an expression of deep seriousness upon her face. "Gar shuk meh kyrayc, Uncle Badd!"

Later, Badd would blame the late hour. He would blame the extra cup of coffee he had an hour prior. He would blame the stress and the grief and his straining eyes. And then he would throw all that out and blame himself entirely for the way he slammed his stylus down and snapped back "Speak normal, all right? You know I can't understand you when you talk like that."

Kay shrank away from him. "I...sorry, Uncle Badd. Sorry." Before he could apologize she'd scuttled from the room.

Badd slumped forward and put his face in his hands, staring down into the purple face of a random thief's scowling mugshot. Byrne did not discuss his personal heritage very much, even after he'd outed himself to Badd as a Mandalorian. He had taken Kay off to visit his "alliit" once or twice a year, and he would speak mando'a to Kay when they were at home, but Badd asked for nothing further and Byrne gave him exactly that. It wasn't until Calisto Yew put a blade through his chest that Badd had cause to regret it.

A few minutes later the old detective slipped up to Kay's room and perched on the edge of her bed. Kay kept her eyes closed but Badd had tucked her for far too many years to not know when she was pretending to sleep.

"You know I love you, right? My addehka?" His tongue tripped over the word he'd heard Byrne use for her when she was fussy and he was apologetic.

"Ad'ika," Kay grumbled against her pillow.

"Right. Ad'ika."

Shit.

Comments

[scarred_warrior]

"We need to get that armor back." Novoc's words were firm and colored with urgency. Badd had already mentioned that Byrne had been murdered; in Novoc's current frame of mind, it felt natural to assume that his killers had taken it. "It belongs to Kaye now. And the beskar, the tech...Not the kind of stuff we want to leave in foreign hands, especially at a time like this." Not that it was likely that anyone on this station had the skills to hack Byrne's encryptions, but they could always send to it someone else, or just cut it up and re-use the beskar. A proper mando'ad would choose that fate for themselves over letting it happen to their armor.

[tasteoftruth]

"I know, I know." The last was said with gritted teeth, the lollipop beginning to fracture between his jaws. He took it out and used it to point at the other room. "Look, maybe take a glance over his helmet. I can't figure out how to work it but maybe you can."

[scarred_warrior]

"Good idea." And good to see Badd could use his anger constructively. Maybe this wouldn't be so difficult after all. He stood, following the gesture into the next room. But it would be up to Badd to bring the helmet out. He wasn't about to digging through somebody else's stuff, unless he knew them really well.

[tasteoftruth]

Badd had it hidden in the back of the closet in a beaten-up box. If you locked it up people could still take the box, and it would be more likely to be taken in the first place. Nothing useful would come out of a box that had five holes and twelve sparkly heart stickers.

The helmet would be easily recognizable as Byrne's, if Novoc had seen it before. Badd ran his thumb over the crest above the eyepieces before reluctantly passing it over to the Mando.

[scarred_warrior]

Oh, Novoc recognized it all right. His face was solemn as he took it from Badd, gaze lingering for a moment on the view plate. Almost as good as a glimpse of Byrne's face, to a mando'ad -- but only almost.

It felt uncomfortably tight over his braids as he slipped it on, but hopefully he wouldn't have to wear it long enough to matter. The on-board computer responded to his body heat, booting up immediately. Good; it would have been awkward if Byrne had keyed it to his specific biometrics.

"I'm accessing the helmet's records," he informed Badd, voice muffled slightly by the helmet. "Any idea what I should be looking for?"

[tasteoftruth]

Badd had worn the helmet before, mainly at Kay's insistence and once when Byrne was showing off the first version of Little Thief. He'd tried it on after Byrne's death, just to find the rest of it, but it was all in mando'ade.

Kay could have read it. But Kay didn't need to know what her father had really been doing with his evenings. Ideally Novoc would see it that way too, if things ever spilled out to him.

"Is there some kind of tracking device for the rest of the armor? Maybe a listing of cache locations? This station's pretty old, there's plety of little niches and vents that everyone else has forgotten about." Badd sat on the couch arm, lollipop dangling from his fingertips.

[scarred_warrior]

"Let's see..." Pulling up a map of the station was a matter of a few pointed eye movements and blinks; doing anything much more complicated than this would be tricky without the armor's gauntlets, and the extra sensors they contained, but for now he wasn't having any trouble. He could also see Badd through the helmet's visor, watching him impatiently.

The map came up with a folder prosaically labeled "Filters", but when he tried to access it, the screen greyed out. Access restricted?

"There's a lock on the map," he informed Badd, surprised. Why seal off this program, but not the entire helmet? On a hunch, he back out, checked the language settings -- yes, it could be set to either mando'a or Basic -- and switched it over. Then he went back into the map, took the helmet off, and handed it to Badd. "Here," he said. "Give it a try now."

[tasteoftruth]

The helmet digs into his forehead as he puts it on, hiding his scowl. "Isn't going to work, I can't read a damn thing in your language and I definitely don't know how this thing works."

He sees the same notification pop up when he dons the helmet as he did the last time he'd tried it. In mando'a, he'd assumed it was some kind of welcome message, or a keep out error.

HI, DETECTIVE.

Badd lets out a loud, rough chuckle. His hand presses to the side of the helmet, as if touching someone else's cheek.

"That asshole, he must have stolen my biometrics out of my file at work and programmed them into the helmet..." Badd's voice is full of adoration for his asshole of a partner. "Whatever you did, I can read the words now. How do I make it work?"

VOICE ACTIVATION, DI'KUT.

The letters were basic, but Byrne hadn't bothered to translate that particular word. Didn't need to. Badd knew a handful of mando'a phrases and Byrne adored throwing that one at him and teasing that it meant this or that glorious honorific, until Badd 'interrogated' its true meaning out of him. Di'kut--someone so stupid they couldn't even get their pants on properly.

"Find Byrne's armor," he said, how holding the sides of the helmet in both hands. "No, put it on a map, I can't read that. Okay. Oh, hell."

He turned his head towards Novoc. "I found it. It's not far from here, it's in the business district. Byrne brought the helmet back but looks like he couldn't sneak the rest of the armor home without attracting attention."

Wait. Badd sat up a little straighter. "Can this thing export data? From its cameras, or whatever? There might be something on it I can use." Whatever Byrne found that night was valuable enough that they'd killed him for it, when before they'd been willing to leave the tripartite bird alone. And if they didn't want Byrne to have it, Badd wanted the whole damn world to see it.

[scarred_warrior]

"Probably, yeah," Novoc said, unconsciously mirroring Badd's pose. He couldn't actually leave the room while the other man was communing with Byrne's helmet, but that didn't mean he was comfortable just sitting there listening.

"Assuming there's not another biolock, we could set it to download data to any computer in the apartment." Getting a Mandalorian computer to recognize foreign tech could sometimes get a little tricky, but after living out here for so long Byrne's helmet was probably half foreign anyway. He'd have had to do nearly all of his own repairwork, all these years.

"What's your plan?" he asked, eagerly.

[tasteoftruth]

"I wasn't with Byrne the night before he died, just that morning. I know he found something, I know the bare basics, but I don't know what about it was so groundbreaking that it made them finally decide to knock us off. If I can get that data, we might be able to nail the bastards to the wall anyway."

The first hints of real, strong emotion were starting to creep back into his voice after hours of running on steel-eyed noir deadpan. Maybe their bird was missing a leg or two, but it might still be able to take one last flight.

Badd got to his feet and felt around for his own tablet, having trouble navigating the helmet's HUD with the map in front of it. Nail them up over the entire damn city and let everyone else watch while they writhed...

"Hey, you. Helmet. Novoc Vevut, profile." The helmet obligingly came up with the helmet's data on Novoc. Badd took a moment to look it over for warning flags, just in case there was something that Byrne had wanted to keep from him, but that the man looked clean. "Give my level of access to Novoc Vevut for the next twelve hours. Okay? That'll be the next user after me."

ACCESS GRANTED TO NOVOC VEVUT.

Badd tugged the helmet up and over his head. He finally pushed it up and Novoc could see there was an actual smile on his face, narrow and sharp. "Here."