“How much longer do we have to wait in here,” one of Ccer's grandchildren said from the back area of the faux-thruster she was in.
“I'm not sure, my little chickling,” Ccer said with some impatience from her seat, at the front end of the structure. She was looking at one of the rudimentary monitor in the faux-thruster. Ccer was at the helm of the small console, where she could fly the thruster, had an emergency occurred and Captain 90 pushed the evacuation button he kept on him...basically, the two smuggling thrusters were very large escape-pods!
Ccer's and Kaird's extended family wasn't quite a village, but there were a lot of them from Nedij. Tog, one of their sons, and Kairdda, their daughter, were in the same thruster as Ccer, and they had all of their young children with them and their respective spouses. While Cceru, the elder of Kaird's offspring, was in the other pretend-thruster of Burned Cloak with his kids and wife. The entire family could all physically fit into just one of the faux-thrusters, but with the need for stocked food, clothing, and other necessities, two of the four faux-thrusters were needed. Indeed, Deacon had the foresight years ago to even install a small reliefroom with a sonic-shower in all the faux-thrusters. Though, he did not imagine stressing the recycling systems with as many beings using them as Kaird's family did. Indeed, if a situation happened and the faux-thrusters took flight, it would be a very rough trek for the Kaird family; especially for the thruster that had Ccer and the two families of offspring in it!
“Where did this Deacon go,” Cceru asked over the comlink from his thruster, with his family getting fidgety in the background. He, too, was looking at the docking bay with his crude monitoring system at his console.
“I'm guessing Deacon had to take that officer to get the Nedimix,” Ccer responded. “We'll be ok, so far, since we past the scanning phase...I've seen how this new Empire prodigal works at other star systems.”
“What will they do next,” Tog, the youngest of Ccer's grown children, asked from his seat, behind Ccer; his violet, raptor-eyes shining in the dark from the monitor. Both faux-thrusters' lights were tunred off to conserve energy.
“Well, Deacon still has to do the mining part of the job. Which means he'll have to let the Imperial officers inspect the shipment, then unload all that ore. That is, if the officer even accepts the cargo!”
“I've talked to grandfather about his mining business sometimes,” one of the male chicklings protested over Ccer's comlink. “That could take hours!”
There were groans from the Nediji chicklings and the adults from both thrusters!
“Yes, little one,” Ccer sourly admitted, “it could. So I suggest we advantage this time by saving both thrusters' portable energy. Let's shut everything off accept the life-essentials, Cceru!” Ccer had already began clicking buttons on the console, the various hums and whir eerily going silent.
“Yes, mother.”
In the darkened false-thruster, Ccer leaned back in her seat as her grandchildren in the back of the elongated structure finally began to settle down. Kairdda, her daughter, was whispering with her husband, Nej; just as Tog was conversing with his wife, Iji...no doubt, the grownups were trying to figure out why in the Galaxy had Kaird uprooted his entire family from Nedij, and put them in such an untenable situation?
Ccer had known about Kaird's smuggling side-job. He had been doing it for decades! She had her own professional job on Coruscant as a financier for one of the Trade Federation's companies. She had left that very comfortable life after meeting Kaird on one of his runs to Coruscant—though, he swore he was not there doing a smuggling run at the time they met. Ccer had always wondered what it was that Kaird did for a living, because the smuggling had always just been a side-job and there was no way he could support his family the way he did by solely smuggling!
In the darkened thruster, she realized their family's new-found refugee status had something to do with whatever it was that Kaird had done over the years, but yet failed to tell Ccer about it!
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