Chapter Text
Jakku Bay was a peaceful enclave on the edge of Galathea, and as Benjamin Organa-Solo — Captain Kylo Ren of the single-mast fishing yacht Renata — sailed into its limpid calm waters, he could see why the Lord of this City-State would want to preserve its peace, and want the killer sharks taken care of.
The almost perfectly circular bay was enclosed in a crescent of blue and green covered mountains that continued out-ward into the sea, making the alabaster minarets at its heart shine like pearls in an Abalone oyster — one of the main exports of this little fiefdom
Food staples grew on the terraced slopes, and fish abound in the lagoon, and were it not for the remote location, this ‘newly discovered’ bay might have become a major trade port.
He squinted at the line of fuzzy mountains lining the city like a wall. He saw no breaks in it inland. A formidable defense. The open passage to this bay was the only ingress in hundreds of miles of sheer cliff face on either side. And it was merely half a mile wide.
“It must have been paradise,” he muttered.
“Paradise? Possibly.” Armitage Hux, Captain of a fleet of Royal ships, stood beside him. “Now the King fears its waters. That’s why you’re here.”
“Sharks. Yeah, I know sharks.”
“You have the reputation of the best shark hunter in the country, yes?”
‘Greatly exaggerated. That Great White wasn’t nearly as big as Moby Dick. The gall of calling it that.”
Hux chuckled but added: “Still. Twenty victims. Half of them other shark hunters.”
Kylo pinched his lips: “Some of them my friends. Two of them my crew.”
“Ah, yes: The Knights of Kylo Ren. Funny you call them that.”
“Funny, isn’t it? But it’s what my old mentor called them. Ren. May he rot in Hell…”
Hux harrumphed, he’d heard rumours; nothing he wanted to discuss, for fear they would be confirmed. “Well, we approach the docks. I strongly suggest you shave. Don’t embarrass your mother anymore than she already is.”
Kylo rankled at the insult, but didn’t break character. Armitage wouldn’t dare call him by his family name to his face, let alone reveal it. The King forbade it in any case. His cousin’s indiscretion was not to be discussed. “I won’t. but I won’t shave.”
“Suit yourself. Now if you don’t mind my using your desk, I have a few entries to log before we enter the city.”
The red-headed officer gone, Kylo’s second in command Vicrul came to stand with him. For a moment, both were silent watching the approaching city gleam bright in the sunlight.
“They keep trying to impose their standards, don’t they,” Vicrul finally spoke.
Kylo looked his crewmate — his most trusted man — up and down. Flowered shirt and knee length skirt, and barefoot on the wooden deck. Kylo himself was normally barefoot, but had donned his old military boots for the meeting. He’d debated polishing them, then decided against it. This was a business meeting; one he didn’t want.
“Nice skirt.”
“My favorite.” Vicrul looked down. “You’re gonna get that gimp toe again if you wear those boots.”
“Are you coming with me? Go dig out your own boots.”
“Those streets must be clean as my ma’s kitchen floor, bless her heart.”
“They sure as hell won’t let you near the King without boots. And proper pants. Now go.”
Vicrul grumbled but obeyed. He was ex-marines. Most of them were, thrown out for ‘conduct unbecoming’ or unrenewed contracts when they realized they loved the sea more than they loved the uniform, or women. Unfortunately, the men they loved didn’t always appreciate the sentiment. And Officers were off-limits. Vicrul had learned that the hard way.
Now he was technically an ‘officer’ himself, but the man he loved was still off-limits.
Kylo Ren — his alias, since he was the son of a princess and a scoundrel — remained celibate. He’d been presented with a few candidates as a youth: from the merchant class, a compromise for his bastard status, but the only one he had been somewhat interested in had had an unfortunate ‘accident’, and now would have nothing more to do with men. She had joined a convent instead. He wondered if she was still allowed to play the harp.
He shook himself. He would never leave this boat to live grounded in a house. And he would never take advantage of his Knights. The occasional harlot in a port would do. He was an ugly man anyway.
The city kept rising above his beautiful ship’s decks as they neared the docks and he resented the hard leather soles that kept him from feeling her under his feet. His home. His real wife. Renata, Little Queen.
He touched the flint and steel attached around his neck, a precaution he’d learned from being shipwrecked a week on an island with no means to make a fire. The flint was kept in a leather pouch. The steel was forged to curl around his fingers, shaped like a siren.
At forty-five imperial feet, the the single-mast fishing yacht had four cabins, and his six men — Vicrul, Trudgen, Cardo, Kuruk, Ushar, and the youth, A’plek — shared them between them. The pairings occasionally switched, but things seemed to have settled now. He had the smaller cabin to himself. He didn’t mind: he also had the wheelhouse.
Technically a swordfish/tuna fishing boat, unofficially an occasional smuggler, the crew of the Renata was also known to hunt down and kill troublesome sea creatures like killer whales, ‘kraken’, and great sharks that occasionally lost their healthy fear of humans and made trouble for fishing and leisure boats alike off the coasts of the kingdoms of Galathea
Now such creatures had invaded the King’s favorite vacation spot, and he had sent a small detachment from his navy — led by Captain Hux — to find and ‘escort’ the Renata to the remote paradise of sun-drenched Jakku.
…
The pier was of blue-green stone instead of wood, surprisingly, solid and dead underfoot, and as the three of them — Kylo, Hux, and Vicrul — marched towards the big house of the city lord, he saw the city had been scrubbed clean while the King visited. The other crew members had come ashore to get fresh water and ale, and whatever goods they could find for their next trip.
The Lord of the city was one Mayor Plutt, fat and obsequious and Kylo immediately disliked him as he vaunted his great city, with its beautiful minarets and domes built from the very bones of the mountains they had been digging through for the past fifteen years or so to built a tunnel that would be a passage to the ‘civilized world’. The main pier had been built of the same dark stone, though now the sun bleached it a sickly green.
“Soon,” the pompous man announced, “the Best People will come here to see how truly wonderful this bay is, and we can receive them with the comfort and privacy they deserve, and…” he prattled on, until the King, silently sat on a wide upholstered chair that had to be the Mayor’s but was now the king’s seat, interrupted him with a harrumph and a “Yes, yes, but now you have a problem, and I see Captain Hux has finally brought to me the solution. Captain Ren. Advance, please.”
Kylo stepped forward. He was a free man, technically, but King Luke knew him by his lineage, and still held power over him through his mother, who was still part of the Noble class, if a minor family. He knelt.
“You’ve grown hardy since I last saw you, boy,” Luke grumbled, and whispers started among the few dignitaries and servants standing there to either witness the negotiations or serve the house as their duties required.
“Supreme Leader, sir.”
Luke waited for more, but Kylo kept silent. He was a fisherman now. Not a marine. That he was a nephew twice removed was of no meaning to him. But he wished no ill to his mother.
Armitage Hux, who’d served a couple years with him, sighed impatiently. Vicrul held back a smirk. The Lord Plutt huffed, sweating, then seemed to remember the reason for this meeting and called for his chief clerk to bring the small wooden desk and the papers for the contract. Kylo was bid rise and come to the desk.
For five thousand gold crowns, the clerk explained to him, the crew of the Renata would rid the Bay of Jakku of the fearsome shark — or sharks — that had already killed four people in just the past week and prevented the King from enjoying his yearly fishing trip aboard his beloved little skit: the Supremacy II.
“Four people. In just a week?”
“Yes,” Lord Plutt confirmed. “Some of them quite close to shore. One of them an Abalone pearl diver. our most precious export, as you may know. One of our fishermen will give you all the information you need.”
“I’ll speak with them before I agree to the contract. I’ll need maps and soundings of the whole bay, to understand why sharks would suddenly venture into these waters in the first place.”
“Ten thousand,” the Mayor added, “if you resolve this before the week is out. The King cannot indefinitely extend his stay, and there are other considerations that may not seem obvious to you but are of great import to the city.”
Vicrul clucked.
Kylo countered, “Twenty.”
“Done! Sign here. The clerk will go through the details with you. You will dine with us, of course—”
“— forgive me, but we will dine with the fisherman you say has seen the beasts?”
The Mayor almost gasped at the affront, but he saw the almost-relief on the King’s face to not have to endure this troublesome guest, so he didn’t press the invitation. “The fisherman says he saw… something.” A pause. “But at the least, he knows this bay like the back of his hand.”
Kylo scratched the parchment contract with his still adequate signature. Dismissed, him and his Second — Vicrul — turned about and made their way back down the main way, to the shore, to his boat.
“Twenty! And I think you could have asked for fifty and got it.”
Captain Hux caught up with him before they made it to the piers. His schooner was coming in on the last of the high tide, while his own flagship — the Finalizer — was with the rest of the fleet that had set anchor near the bay’s entrance for the night, only a few officers and the men needed to row the distance would come ashore over the next week. If the King did not find the leisure he hoped for — a yearly affair for only the past ten years — the fleet would simply pull anchor and move to safer waters. That they had found the Renata was sheer bad luck. He’d been informed the value of the rare blue-green pearls had suddenly risen, and been offered a small but profitable cargo haul. He’d been on his way to pick it up, when he was flagged by the Finalizer and granted his old brother-in-arms permission to come aboard.
Now the sudden appreciation for the pearls was explained, but he’d probably lost the opportunity — he’d been given literally bigger fish to fry — so had told him Hux.
At the pier, the men watched their respective ships, now docked side to side. Hux’s schooner the Silencer was big enough to make the Renata look like little more than a sloop beside it. Yet, the crew knew how to make the little fishing boat fly.
Further out, near the eastern tip of the crescent, a simple wooden dock, down from a multi-storied building that looked precariously latched to the cliff-side: the Lord’s castle.
Kylo squinted to see the little boat tied to the pier: the King’s own fishing boat. He shrugged. For all that the King was ruthless, he was the son of a fisherman, or so the history went. He’d fought in the Great War and carved himself this part of Galathea into a kingdom.
“Ten years, you say?”
Hux nodded. “While you and I were still sailors in the marines, the king came here for his peace and quiet, and came up with the brilliant strategy that won us independence. He’s come back every year since.”
The little wooden boat bobbed up and down like a cork. White and gold. Single sail furled and forlorn, waiting for one man and maybe one crew to take it out on the bay to catch fish and think of the kingdom’s future. It was a very impolite fish that was disrupting His routine.
“Alright, let’s pick up some bread and wine and visit with this fisherman who saw the shark.”