and with her permission, told Brat to move it as he promptly left the room through the holographic wall.
But Najima's eyes trained across the room. From the hall on the opposite end of the control room, following the new girl and Priya, a tall man with olive skin and a thick, black, scraggly beard entered the room. The others nodded as he approached Najima and looked her over. He had a gaze like granite, his cheeks decorated with scars, and his body was well built, his arms looking as hard as the cave’s walls.
"You look even smaller up close, kid,” he said, in his deep, gruff voice. “Not exactly what I expected when I was told you saved my friends.”
"I can hold my own," Najima returned with a grin, no hesitation in her voice. "Are you the boss man, then?"
He returned her grin. "My name is Otto al-Kara, and this is my little group of heroes. What's your name?"
"Najima Dezetoiles."
"How does it feel to be hanging around with a group of terrorists, Najima Dezetoiles?"
"I'm sure robbing food strikes fear in the heart of your enemies, Otto al-Kara."
Otto laughed in return, and loosened his demeanour. "At least she has a sense of humour. Why did you decide to help my crew?"
"They wanted to good. I like people who do good."
Najima had an odd feeling around this man, like seeing an image in a haze of fog as he spoke to Bri, asking how their escape went. Although Najima was usually able to judge a person very quickly. But she could not find a place for this man. He had a dense uniqueness blinded by something abstract; something just beyond the tip of a tongue, like a thought that was almost remembered, but which never came to fruition.
But he listened eagerly to the escape from CP. Priya enthused about how she dove off the balcony, and Bri swore by Najima as well. “Nothing but praise, it seems,” he replied, before turning back to Najima. “Are you going to stick around with us for a little while then?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Always. Of course, now that you know where our hideout is, if you say no, we’ll have no choice but to kill you. Nothing personal.”
Bri insisted he was kidding, but Najima was already grinning, holding Otto’s gaze. How desperately she wanted to know what was going on in this man’s head. “I could stick around for a bit.”
"You're in the right place then," he said. Otto wrapped one arm around Priya, the other around the girl who had followed him in. “You’ve met most of the team already: Bri, our in-house chemist; Priya here, our little tech expert. And this lovely lady is our team doctor, Annapurna.”
“Not really a doctor,” she said with a modest nod. “I mostly just do whatever the rest of them can’t. Errands and stuff.”
“Tell that after you say how often you fix us up after we get in a scrape,” Otto laughed as Bratindra reentered the room from a staircase off to the side. “And who can forget our vehicle expert, Brat. Where've you been?"
"Moved her raft to the hangar with our ship," he grumbled, returning to his fancy anti-grav car.
"You travel by raft?" Otto asked Najima.
"You have a ship?" she returned.
"Just a small corvette called the Hayagriva. Nothing to write home about. Most of our planetside travel is done in that contraption of Brat's." Otto pointed to Brat’s vehicle, which he called a Trogan. These were specially designed anti-grav vehicles which Najima had seen on the Stream. Unlike Doyels, Trogans were manually driven instead of automatically piloted, and were exclusively used for professional racing. “We stole it from some snooty aristocrat on a different planet. Four identical models like this one.” Otto added that they felt the aristocrat would do fine with three. He patted Bri and Priya, and told them to get back to their work, before he called across the room to Brat. "Is that thing ready?"
"Been ready. I was just calibrating the engines. We can leave whenever you're ready."
"Leaving so soon?" Najima joked. "Got fancy terrorist stuff to do, I assume?"
“We’ll stick around for a bit, so hold that thought. Annapurna, is dinner ready?”
“Just about,” she replied, which elicited several whoops from around the room.
"A risky day of work deserves a good meal to end it, am I right?" Otto said. "Care to join us? Or are we a bad crowd for you, Matam Dezetoiles?"
His smirk and his tone were like a lasso. "I could stick around for a little while."
"Then its settled. Let's eat!"
∞∞∞
Dining with terrorists was not what Najima had first expected. For all this talk of Otto's group being dangerous in the news, everyone seemed jovial and fun, trading inside jokes over steaming curries set on platters. The fragrant aromas of the food stood out to what Najima was accustomed to, filled with spices foreign the region of the galaxy she used to call home. The deep red curry that was the main dish, Otto said, was one of his personal recipes, an inheritance of Otto's life in his home system of Rangpur.
Najima remembered learning about Rangpur when she was still in school. She was taught that the Rangpuri were villains who rebelled against the Empire, and seized control of a solar system and carved out a democratic nation of their own. Resenting their initial successes, the Emperor responded by destroying the entire fledgling republic in an act known as The Quell, a moment that still ached the hearts and memories of many.
But from her seat on the floor, around the stumpy table in the kitchen, all Najima saw were friends. They spoke of music, and of films that debuted on the Stream; of books, food, and desserts. The only hint that Najima was not at a bizarre slumber party in a secret cave was the frequent talk of guns across the table. But having spent the last year around her own laser pistol, this was not foreign to Najima.
The group wanted to know all about Najima. They asked her questions of where she was from, where she was going, what she was doing; Najima gave them her typical answers - the same responses she gave anyone who asked - the same response she had already given Brishti.
She was from space, she was looking for something she lost, and she would go anywhere she had to in order to find it. Sometimes she almost felt like a fairy tale when she spoke in such abstracts, and always wondered, especially when surrounded by such friendly people, if her secrets were worth being kept. But she told them no more specifics, instead drifting the conversation to more relaxed topics.
Eventually, when the last scraps of naan were mopping up the last drops of curry on their plates, the conversation drifted to galactic politics which brought about much contention even between the group. "It's not fair!" Brat hollered, waving his hands as he spoke. "People on the border, like on Nanda, didn't ask to be colonized by the Empire. The fact that they aren't up in arms like us makes no sense."
Bri wrapped her arm around Brat's arm as Otto leaned back on his pillow, laughing while Najima eyed him, as Annapurna contended with Brat. "You can't blame them. The last time people went against the Empire, the war happened. Most people don't want to fight anymore."
Priya chimed in next, "The Dravidian Empire has been around for over 5000 years. They were around, and colonized the entire galaxy long before the Vengali Commonwealth even existed."
"The Vengali Commonwealth is just history catching up to the present," Brat said. "The Vanga Kingdom was around for thousands of years too, way back in the day. And they fought the Empire's crazy colonialism."
"And they lost," Priya replied. "The Vanga Kingdom was already falling apart, but too stubborn to assimilate with the Empire like all of the old kingdoms back then."
Brat steamed with a grumpy face, knowing he had been argued out of options. "Well it's still stupid that the Empire won't let people be free. At least I haven't forgotten why the Vengali Commonwealth exists today. The only reason that the Vengali have a country now is because we stood up and stayed strong when the Empire told us no."
"So is this it?" Najima said. "I mean, I'm Imperial. Do you all hate the Empire or something? Is that why you fight?"
"We don't hate the Empire
," Otto said, his voice commanding the entire room's attention. "We just don't like them. Bratindra and Annapurna are Vengali, but Priya and Brishti are both Dravidian."
"It's hard to explain," said Annapurna, "And it might not make sense to everyone. But we believe in freedom, and in justice. The Empire might have stood for freedom once," Brat moaned crankily as she spoke, "But regardless, they don't anymore. I mean, there are three nations in the galaxy: The Principality of Eelam, on the western end of the galaxy, and now the Vengali Commonwealth, in the northeast. Everything else belongs to the Dravidian Empire. And how do they treat these other countries? On the west, they blockade the entire area for thousands of years with a demilitarized zone, and with the Commonwealth, they fight a horrible war. I used to love the Empire... but they lost that love when they started wars."
"People deserve freedom," Priya said as Annapurna's explanation began to trail. "I think everyone can agree that people should generally be able to do what they want. But the Empire doesn't allow that anymore. It didn't when Eelam wanted to separate and try their own, new government. They didn't when Rangpur wanted to be a democracy. And they didn't when the Commonwealth tried to be democratic too. Democracy is popular. People want it - they want choice, even inside the Empire. But the Empire won’t allow it. So we fight the Empire because they aren't letting everyone express that freedom they deserve."
"And it's