Chapter 93 · Names Before the Threshold

The next set of jumps came quietly, each one carrying them a little closer to the edge of Imperial space, and the closer they drifted toward Lothal’s sector, the more the air inside the Faded Glory shifted. Not tense — not yet — but deliberate. Purpose settling in. The kind of mental narrowing that came before infiltration more than travel.

Eli sat cross-legged on the seating area of the common room, a datapad balanced against his knee. The ship hummed under him in its usual slow rhythm. Stent stood in the doorway with the same stillness he used when thinking three moves ahead of the present, a slight sheen of sweat on his shoulders and face, he had been training on the cargo bay.

“We should decide on names,” Eli said. “Before we hit Lothal.”

Stent didn’t blink. “Yes.”

“We can’t go in as ourselves,” Eli added. “Well. You could technically get away with your real name if no one on the planet has ever seen a Chiss before, but that’s not the kind of gamble we want to test.”

Stent considered that. “Agreed.”

Eli tapped the datapad. “So. Fake identities. Trader cover. Reasonable backgrounds. Modest cargo. Nothing flashy. Minimal documentation is best — too much paperwork looks forged.”

Stent nodded and said, without hesitation, “Ren Viros.”

Eli blinked. “That’s… a human name.”

“Correct.”

“You picked a human name.”

Stent’s face didn’t change. “It draws fewer questions.”

Eli let out a low laugh. “I mean — you’re not wrong — but it’s still surprising.” He squinted at him. “You have used that one before, haven’t you?”

Stent’s answer came as a small, almost imperceptible nod.

“When?”

“Lesser Space,” he said, tone flat, as if that explained everything. “Before our joint assignment.”

Eli straightened. “Sometime, if it is possible, I’d like to know what business does the Ascendancy have in Lesser Space.”

Stent’s gaze shifted toward the corridor, briefly turned inward. “Perhaps.”

He didn’t elaborate. Stent rarely elaborated on the parts of his past that involved shadows rather than ranks. Eli didn’t push. Some answers arrived eventually. Some didn’t. You learned to live with both kinds.

A soft beep carried from the cockpit. Tee rolled into view, projecting a blue arrow on the floor pointing toward nothing in particular, which Eli interpreted as a reminder that they still had things to do.

“I know,” Eli murmured. “We’re working on it.”

Tee chirped a pointed insistence and rolled out again.

Stent watched the droid leave. “He is becoming… assertive.”

“He’s always been assertive,” Eli said. “You just weren’t listening.”

Stent didn’t argue.

They returned to the matter at hand.

“All right,” Eli said, dragging a hand through his hair. “Your name is Ren Viros. Trader, quiet, doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t answer many either. Easy enough.”

“Yes.”

“And me…” Eli frowned at the datapad. “I need something.”

“You have experience with aliases,” Stent observed.

“Yeah. Once. And I’m not sure I want to resurrect that one.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s ridiculous.”

Stent remained silent. Silence from Stent meant go on.

Eli sighed. “Back when Thrawn and I were infiltrating a smuggling ring, we needed quick names. No time to come up with anything elegant. I panicked and said I was… Horatio Figg.”

Stent stared. “Horatio. Figg.”

“It was a stressful situation.”

“Explain the choice.”

Eli rubbed his forehead. “It wasn’t a choice. I had just walked into a room full of armed criminals. Thrawn set me up in there, and when they asked me who I was, the first name that came out of my mouth was the one from the spine of the book I’d been using to prop up a broken console on the Chimaera. Some terrible old adventure novel — rickety hero, questionable decisions, you know the type.”

Stent blinked once. “You took the name of a fictional adventurer whose narrative relies on improbable success.”

Eli groaned. “Yes.”

“And this aided your infiltration.”

“Not on purpose.”

Stent considered him with the thoughtful expression he usually reserved for flawed equations. “There is value in unpredictability. The alias worked.”

“It shouldn’t have.”

“But it did.”

Eli looked down at the datapad. The name still tasted absurd after all these years, but it also carried a strange sort of nostalgia — the kind that came from remembering who he had been in the shadow of someone else’s brilliance.

“Maybe…” He exhaled. “Maybe I could use it again. Horatio Figg. Trader. Slightly incompetent. Harmless.”

Stent inclined his head. “Appropriate.”

“I’m choosing it under protest,” Eli muttered.

“Of course,” Stent said, which somehow made it worse.

Tee rolled back into the doorway with impeccable timing and projected a flashing blue question mark on the wall.

Eli looked at it and said, “Yes, Tee. Those are our new names.”

Tee beeped. The sound carried resignation.

Eli slumped back. “Great. Even the droid thinks I can do better.”

Stent didn’t respond. He simply folded his hands behind his back and said, “Then it is settled.”

“Yeah,” Eli murmured. “Ren Viros and Horatio Figg. What could possibly go wrong?”

The ship hummed around them, steady and unbothered.

Lothal waited somewhere ahead in the thin blue dark.

The last of the uncharted jumps came with a faint shiver through the hull, the kind that meant the gravimetric anomalies were thinning, not gone. Tee steadied himself beside the navigation console, dome flickering in quick pulses as he processed the harmonic echoes trailing behind them. Eli watched the droid’s careful adjustments while the starfield snapped back into clarity.

“That was smoother than the last one,” Eli said quietly.

Tee chirped modestly, projecting a slanted green line across the holopanel — their drift error, minimal.

Stent remained in the co-pilot’s chair, hands folded, gaze fixed ahead. His posture had sharpened over the past hours; Eli recognized that shape of silence — not tension, but anticipation arranged so neatly it could be mistaken for calm.

“We’ll be entering Lothal’s outer net soon,” Eli said.

“At our current speed, less than eleven hours,” Stent replied.

Eli nodded. “Plenty of time to go over the cover again.”

“We will,” Stent said. But he didn’t move.

The corridor outside the cockpit was unusually quiet. For a long stretch of the journey, Thrawn’s voice had filled it — soft, measured, unhurried. Today, the recordings were silent. The datapad lay closed on the common room table, its surface dark, as though resting after having worked harder than the two men aboard.

Eli became aware of the absence only when he passed the door. He paused. “You’re not listening today.”

“No,” Stent said. “I have absorbed enough for now.”

Eli glanced at him. The phrasing, the tone — it carried a density that hadn’t been there before. “Everything all right?”

“Yes.”

But the answer had a finality to it that nudged the air slightly off balance. Not wrong. Not dangerous. Just… deeper. Something settling into place inside a man who rarely rearranged himself in public view.

Eli let it go. Stent would speak when ready. Or not at all. Both were normal.

Later, while recalibrating the sublight engines, Eli caught his own reflection in the glossy panel above the throttle — the faint exhaustion around the eyes, the beard he had grown back, the same hair refusing to stay where he’d brushed it back, the quiet awareness settling into his shoulders that this mission was entering its next phase.

Lothal wasn’t just another stop. They both knew that.

When he turned, Stent was there, watching.

“You’re thinking too loudly,” Stent said.

Eli huffed a soft laugh. “That obvious?”

“Yes.”

Eli closed the panel with a quiet click. “Just getting ready. Lothal’s going to be… complicated.”

“Complication is anticipated.”

“That’s one word for it.”

Stent stepped closer, examining one of the stabilizer readouts. “Our identities are functional. Our cover is plausible. And your mannerisms as ‘Horatio Figg’ are natural to you.”

“That’s rude,” Eli said.

“It is factual.”

“Still rude.”

Stent didn’t apologize. Eli didn’t expect him to.

When the quiet fell again, deeper now, Eli leaned against the console and let his eyes trace the starfield. The ship drifted along a narrow route of empty space, the stars stretched thin around them. They were close enough now that certain patterns in the galactic arm had shifted orientation — the kind of changes only long-distance navigators ever learned to read.

“We’re getting close,” Eli murmured.

“Yes,” Stent said. “We are.”

There was something in his voice this time — not the reverence of the recordings, not the crisp command of a Chiss officer, but an undercurrent Eli hadn’t heard in a long while. A sharpened readiness. A stillness that belonged to a man aligning himself with the path ahead.

Eli didn’t mention it.

He reached out and tapped the final approach coordinates, letting the navicomp lock them in place. Tee chirped once, approving. The deck hummed as systems compensated.

“Tomorrow,” Eli said, softer now. “Tomorrow we start being other people.”

“Yes,” Stent replied. “But not to each other.”

Eli met his eyes and nodded. “Never to each other.”

It wasn’t a vow. It didn’t need to be.

The Faded Glory carried them onward, the hum of the engines folding into something steady and inevitable as Lothal’s gravity began, faintly, to pull.