Chapter 20

Now that he had finished the deal with the auction house, Renato had to go back to his original purpose for coming to Dac, that is, finding the crystals for his eventual lightsabers. Currently, he wasn't feeling any kind of pull or similar so that probably meant that he had to start the search manually.

To be honest, the number of times the force helped him during his early life, he figured it would point him directly towards the stones so that he could be done with it. But now that plan was bust so he had to manually start digging through the planet for clues.

He had a basic idea that his lightsaber crystals were probably Ultima pearls or as they were known in the wider galaxy Dac pearls because those are the only lightsaber crystals naturally occurring on Dac. But the problem was that, like all pearls, ultima pearls were nearly impossible to find.

Ultima pearls were silver, lustrous pearls found on the ocean floor of Dac. Mysteriously all known ultima pearls were found without a mollusc nearby but analysis of the pearl shows that it was a biologically created pearl. It was rumoured that the pearls were made inside of the mysterious knowledge bank species.

Knowledge bank was the collective species name for a type of sentient mollusc found on Dac. These knowledge banks were all telepathically connected to each other and according to the legend have recorded the entirety of Dac's history since their species came into existence. Essentially, they were sentient hive-minded oysters.

He spent some time searching possible locations for the pearls, he searched through auction houses, and pawnshops. He also went snooping near rich people's houses in hopes of finding the pearls or at least even the knowledge about the locations of the knowledge bank, but he had no luck.

With the main objective now seemingly unreachable, Renato decided to put it on the back burner and decided to work on the secondary objectives. He currently had three secondary objectives on Dac. The first was deeper industrial espionage in Dac's shipyards, the second was helping the calls for help he constantly received from the force, and the third, looking further into the Dac preservation society.

Out of the three, the first would also need to be put on a slight halt as he didn't want to do any espionage until he was ready to bounce from the planet in case he got caught. From what he felt in the force, he felt that the second and third were interlinked.

From the moment he arrived on Dac, his force senses constantly fed him the desperate cries of help from a lot of the people on the planet. At first, when he felt the cries for help, he immediately wanted to rush over to the person in distress, but Renato suppressed this urge as his occlumency forcibly pushed his rational mind back into control.

Even if he rushed to the sources of distress all he would do was save one or two people, even in the best case not more than a dozen people. All it would accomplish is scaring off the real culprit and making it further difficult to catch him/her/them in the future.

But just because he suppressed his urge doesn't mean he didn't want to help. Even without the force urging him to help, Renato was too much of a bleeding heart to not help someone when he had the resources to do so without any significant impact on him.

He just wanted to get his work done according to their priority so that he would have more resources to help him when he did want to help the people.

"Paddy, I would like you to collate as much info on the Dac preservation society as possible from the holonet and then send a copy of the data to HK. Also, please pass a message to HK to start his investigation into the Dac preservation society."

"Ok, just wait a short while whilst I sort the data from the truths and falsehoods as much as possible."

While he wanted to investigate the DPS (Dac preservation society is getting too long to type) himself, as he too had the investigative knowledge and techniques from Halo, he still gave the investigative lead to HK.

This was due to the simple fact that all his knowledge of investigative techniques came from Halo, and the number of complex things like technology, different species, and other unique species related techniques added to the investigative procedure was underrated and huge.

As such, HK as an assassin droid who was made and had lived in the Star Wars galaxy the entire time had a significant edge over Renato in this area. One of the long-term goals he had was to learn the investigative skills of the Star Wars galaxy so as to not to be completely dependent on HK.

Slowly a report formed on the HUD screen as Paddy finished collating the information on the Dac preservation society. The report was nicely sorted into tables, as the information ranged from highly likely true, mostly true, and lies as well as the status of the confirmation of the information to check if the information was proven true or false.

"So, our two leads to the DPS other than the pawnshop are a cantina in the capital city, and a "cultural" college run by the DPS? I think I have had enough Dac culture, for now, please ask HK to go through the college, I will look into the cantina. It would probably be weird for a droid to go into a cantina without an owner"

"Yes, that is probably for the best, do you want me to look into renting an underwater suit or do you want to buy one?"

"Do you have to ask? Of course, we are buying one and then taking it apart! I heard some suits can even go to the ocean floor. Can you imagine the amount of pressure the suit would need to bear to provide human survivable pressures at the bottom of the ocean?

Not to mention the fact that these suits have an oxygen filtering system which can actually filter oxygen from the water completely eliminating the need for air tanks."

"As I said before, young master, Illusion of choice."

Now that he had a plan of action, Renato got to work. The first thing he had to do was rob some guys because the suit he was eyeing to study was super expensive and he was currently broke.

He couldn't get the money for the items until they were auctioned and the auction was at least 2 weeks away.

His target for robbing was one of the local gangs that followed him yesterday. Since those guys followed him without outside intervention, without even knowing about the shield generators, it was safe to say they did the same thing multiple times before.

He followed the HUD map directions given by Paddy to their hideout which now that he noticed was near the dockyards. He wondered why in most cases gangs are either at a factory or a dockyard. Were they ex-workers of the dockyard/factory perhaps? Well, whatever it was he didn't feel like putting in the effort to research the cause right now.

Maybe in the future when he was setting up his own government, he would look into it. As he reached the hideout of the gang, he noticed a distinct lack of people. There were only a dozen or so guys at the place and it was very empty.

Not wanting to alarm the guys, he decided to sneak in from the roof of the building which he reached quickly with the help of a few well-timed force jumps. Using an access hatch on the roof he entered the building.

Slowly he explored the building while taking care not to be detected and eventually came across what looked like a leisure lounge, where most of the people not patrolling were hanging out.

"Man, when is the guy Yatorn coming back, I am feeling bored without his antics"

"Ya, without Yatorn this place is lifeless. No one can crack jokes as good as him. What's the time again?"

"It's 14:20, the deal is at 15:00. Barring any unseen circumstances, they should be back by 15:30"

" By the way, who is our supplier this time? I heard our last supplier was killed by the Hutts because he tried to cheat them?"

"Ya, I heard he was put into a gladiator match, but didn't last a single round. You would think that someone with the balls to undercut the Hutts would have some skill to back it up, but no, he died so fast it's almost a new record. Anyway, the new supplier is a Rodian, though that's all I know about him."

"Whatever it doesn't concern us anyway, Yo check this hottie out, just look at the jiggle. Ah, I could only hope to one day..."

Renato tuned out the rest of the conversation as he had gotten the information he needed. There was some type of major deal going on and that meant that there would be a lot of illegal cash up for grabs.

He then proceeded to explore the base a little bit more until he came across the room of the gang leader. Disabling all the security features of the room, Renato started rummaging through the stuff in the room. Other than the personal artefacts of the guy, Renato didn't find anything else.

Frustrated, he went to the security panel he had in the room and started slicing into it. It only took Renato a couple of minutes to get into the system, and he was surprised at what he found. How irresponsible was this guy that he was chatting on the security console of the entire base? Not to mention the fact that it would have been easier to just use his commlink for that, but whatever he wasn't one to judge people.

Based on the chat records, the deal will be at dock XXX at 15:00, so Renato knew he had ample time to get there and have a stakeout. Other than that, Renato dug into the computer for more data but didn't find anything more substantial than gigabytes of porn.

He never understood porn downloaders, like you can obviously watch it online, and there weren't any network speed issues in the galaxy at least, watching the same porn the second time just isn't as hot as if seeing it for the first time. Anyway, as a good samaritan Renato helped the guy free up space by deleting the porn.

Seeing that he wasn't going to get more information from this place, Renato decided to skedaddle out of the place. Seeing how lax the guys were, Renato didn't feel the need to go the hard way and just walked out of the front door.

" Good morning!" Renato greeted the guards as he walked past.

" Good morning!" x2 from the guards

The guards simply watched as Renato walked away through the front door.

"Nice lad greeting us eh!? Nobody greets us here bloody mannerless brutes."

"Yeh, no respect for our work at all, bloody ingrates, do they even know how hard it is to guard?"

Renato was having a hard time holding in his laughter listening to their talk, if he had enough time, he would have stuck around to hear some more but he was already cutting close to the supposed deal time.

"Paddy, send a message to HK to meet me at the deal site"

"Are you sure? I don't see the need for HK just to deal with some thugs."

"No, I don't need his help to deal with the thugs. My plan is to wait until the deal is over and while I ambush the gang on their way back, HK will track the suppliers to their base or ship and then kill and take over. You don't need to let good money go to waste"