Chapter 7
The last Imperial Navy ships in the local area had finally arrived, a Gladiator-class escort carrier along with a pair of Dart-class gunships serving as escorts. It only added a single squadron of older T-70A Imperial X-Wings along with a squadron of ARC-175 ‘Spark Arc’ attack fighters, so named due to the paired Ion cannons mounted on the older birds intended to knock down shields so that the follow on bombing runs were more effective.
Ayres now had a potent little squadron under her command, although only Impetuous, Tyrant’s Bane (the Vindicator light cruiser) and Adina (the Nebulon-B) were actually modern designs. She had 2 squadrons of Imperial X’s, although one was of the older variety that was being phased out as quickly as possible, a squadron of older but still effective attack birds, and an entire wing of obsolete interceptors.
And she felt naked, exposed, and vulnerable. The distorted curtain of the hyperspace anomaly hung before her, pulsating and shifting ominously. She had no idea what was on the other side, in truth, but questioning the survivors had indicated the presence of something called ‘Death Squadron’. Captain Liskin had never answered any of their questions about it, although Triselka had told them that the flagship of this Death Squadron was called Executor, which made Ayres very nervous indeed considering her relative dearth of modern snubfighters.
But all she could do was wait, drill the rest of the squadron, and prepare. The 1175th was a few days away and she’d not yet gotten a response as to whether or not a numbered fleet would be dispatched. But until then she worried.
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Triselka still felt rather shell-shocked. Her brother, her only blood-family, the man who’d saved her from being a crime lords toy, was dead. Killed when the hatch that should have sealed off his turret had failed and the big guy had been unable to get to the emergency locker before dying.
She felt like something of herself had died with him. And just when she needed Aloni to be a shoulder for her to cry on, her skipper was a complete wreck herself, her encounter with her double had shaken her far more than she’d ever admit.
The Crescent was pretty nice, however, and if anybody had ever told her that Imperials would charter a luxury transport to take her to Coruscant she’d have thought them totally insane, but her surroundings were extremely comfortable. Fancy leather, wood paneling, carpets, gorgeous views. Aloni and her had their own private cabins, and the transport crew seemed quite determined to spoil them for any other kind of transport.
The steward who’d gotten them situated had somehow gotten her to tell him her homeworld and had somehow managed to whip up a breaded nerf steak dish she’d not tasted since she was a little girl, with all the right spices and everything. He’d actually managed to coax the same information out of Aloni and had served her a dish that could have come from any home kitchen on Ryloth.
Considering that the galley was roughly the size of a closet it was the closest thing to an absolute culinary miracle she could imagine.
It had briefly raised her spirits, then they came crashing back down as she thought to share it with Jaond, only to again remember that he was dead. But the steward had done his best and she managed to keep a brave smile on her face throughout.
The red-headed supposed Skywalker had given her a data disk with information about this Empire, and Triselka could scarcely believe most of it. No Palpatine? No Darth Vader? No ISB or Ubiquitorate? No COMPNOR? Something called the Imperial Declaration of Sentient Rights? An Imperial Senate with actual, meaningful, impact on the affairs of the Empire? The Skywalkers as the Imperial Family? Luke and Leia being TWINS? For crying out loud, she shipped those two!
No Moffs, no Tarkins, no Death Stars. She’d tried to discreetly look up information and found nothing about herself or Jaond in any of the holonet archives she had access to from the ship, not even any notices about rewards for her capture. In fact, it looked like she didn’t exist at all. She’d looked into Aloni and found basic public records about her counterpart, but nothing all that interesting as that only showed her name and rank with no other personal details.
She’d been rather surprised at just how open the holonet was here, access was publicly available even to civilians and while she was sure there were plenty of classified areas, that didn’t seem to extend to gossip and rumors and such, some of which she was morally certain would have gotten anybody in the Empire she knew and hated a visit from the ISB if they’d dared think them too loudly. But there were entire message boards that seemed to be devoted to scandalous rumors about the Royals. And holoshops. She’d certainly not mention the ones she’d made of… never mind, she was not going to think about that, thank you very much.
She did check and confirm that Luke and Leia were, in fact, fraternal twins.
And that Luke, Leia, and Mara had a pair of younger siblings, one of whom was listed as a junior Padawan to… Imperial Jedi Master Obi-wan Kenobi? The other was listed as attending the Corellian Academy of Medicine. Which from what she remembered (and from their listing on the Holonet) was ‘The Premier Medical Training School In The Galaxy’. She could believe that, since somehow there were still Corellians surviving to adulthood it meant that they had to have really good doctors.
She hated the Empire. But the evidence was very compelling that this wasn’t the Empire she knew and loathed. The Empire that had murdered her parents, the Empire that had turned a blind eye as she was sold out of a COMPNOR holding facility to be a slave. This wasn’t that Empire. And she didn’t know what to think.
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Aloni knew she was letting Triselka down, but she couldn’t be what the younger human needed her to be right now.
She’d always prided herself on being cool under pressure, of never breaking down, of never letting emotions overcome her. When she killed it was in cold blood and only when she was sure of her target. She acted, never reacted.
And yet somehow she’d gone mad. She’d allowed the rage that had always bubbled beneath the calm, cool exterior to overwhelm her control. She’d wanted to kill somebody just for existing, not for any crime they may have committed, but just for daring to look just… like… her.
And it shook her terribly. Losing Nik, Jaond, and Scrish at the same time ripped a hole in her heart. They were her people. And… her mind shied away from the thought like a skittish gizka hiding from a hsiss.
Learning that her uncontrolled rage might not have been her fault? It didn’t help nearly as much as the redhead had thought it would. So what if it was because of some Force malarkey? She was stronger than that, she had to be stronger than that. She should have been able to resist it herself.
She hadn’t.
Triselka wouldn’t believe her if she said it, and she was pretty sure none of these Imperials had the slightest clue, but she knew, in her gut, that they were telling the truth. The moment she’d seen her double she’d known. She was just too bloody-minded and stubborn to admit it.
This wasn’t their universe. This wasn’t their home. These weren’t her people. And there was nothing she could do here. She had no ship, no crew, no knowledge, no contacts. She was adrift in this place, cut off from the Alliance as surely as if she were in an Imperial Prison Camp being tortured by the ISB.
So what, she was sitting in a luxury yacht being whisked off to Coruscant. A golden cage was still a cage, and she was cynical enough to consider this a very polite and genteel prison transport. No doubt she’d meet more very polite people who’d be very nice about things, because that was how it seemed this Empire worked.
But she still was caged.
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Taber was frustrated, but in a way that she couldn’t even complain. In her opinion moving from piloting her own Imperial-X to being the co-pilot and gunner on the Hydaspes Star was a severe demotion. She was no longer flying her own snubfighter, after all. Sure, the Intersector was a lethal little combatant in her own right, but still, Mara would be flying her, not her.
And she was frustrated by the lightsaber lessons. She’d never met a clumsier Jedi than Irolia. The Chiss seemed to have two left feet, ten left thumbs, and all the grace of a drunken bantha. OK, she thought to herself, she might be doing a disservice to drunken banthas.
Intellectually she knew that learning physical grace was far harder for those who came to it later in life, but she’d not thought the Chiss to be old enough or that to matter although, obviously, it apparently did.
If she tried to get Irolia to go above one tenth speed on a velocity she’d inevitably get crossed up and wind up falling flat on her face. If she tried an ultra-slow speed training duel that any youngling in her memory would be bored to tears by, the Chiss would inevitably manage to not only fail to parry any of her attacks but was more likely to hit herself than her Twi’lek opponent.
But Taber was determined to stick it through. She firmly agreed with her Master that no Jedi is worthy of the title if they weren’t at least minimally competent with the lightsaber. Of course, intellectually she was quite aware that her standard of ‘minimally competent’ was high enough that most Imperial Jedi would dub them ‘near Master grade’, but the Twi’lek was very proud of her saber skills, and by the Force she’d push her peers to attain similar skill levels if she could.
Of course, the tables turned completely when Irolia worked with Taber on Force techniques. Taber was at this point completely certain that there was no situation in the Universe for which little blue didn’t have an obscure technique to deal with. Whenever Mara or herself challenged Irolia on how the Chiss would solve a situation, the phrase ‘there’s a technique for that’ seemed to be the single most common response, to the point that the two of them would now include ‘barring obscure Force techniques’ in their questioning.
And the damn thing was that the little Chiss would still manage to find a completely orthogonal use of a common Force technique to solve the problem most of the time.
To be fair she’d never even thought of some of the uses for Telekinesis that Irolia so casually threw out there for consideration. And she knew full well that she’d aced every single training class on Force Telekinesis that was offered at the Temple. The Chiss lacked her extremely fine-grained and hard-won control over her TK, but little blue didn’t need that level of control given the sheer power she could apply. That didn’t stop her from giving tips and ideas that were perfectly usable by Taber, as if the younger woman could fully understand how to use tiny bits of power to solve a problem, but just didn’t bother.
Despite that she was finding that she and Irolia were quickly becoming friends, the Chiss was perfectly willing to suffer through the indignity of flailing around like a loon during saber practice and readily acknowledged Taber’s abilities unlike many other more Force-powerful Jedi in the Twi’leks experience. And it was rather enjoyable to have somebody who had even more scholarly chops than she did to debate with.
Now if only little blue would show any improvement in her saber technique, that would be great.
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Irolia knew she was utter rubbish with a saber. Knew it and, truth be told, didn’t mind there being something she wasn’t naturally brilliant at. Or at least that others could easily tell she wasn’t brilliant at. Growing up in the ruins of the old Jedi Archives on Ossus had left her quite isolated. Apart from Master Bnar and the work crews she’d not had any other people to talk with for years and had thus devoted her time to her studies.
She loved researching things, she loved finding obscure little bits of lore and figuring out how ancient and lost techniques actually worked from fragmentary descriptions. To her, the Force sang all around, a mesmerizing melody that often left her rather distracted from the ‘real’ world. The Force was like an eager puppy, all happy to lick her palm and do tricks and play. Master Bnar had seen the Force much like she did, although he did warn her that the Dark Side could turn the Force into a snarling, raging monster eager to consume all in its path.
And she could sense just that sort of snarling kath hound growling and scratching and snarling on the other side of that anomaly. There was a coldness, a cruelty, that seemed to ooze from the anomaly like a stain of hate and despair and madness. She shied away from it, but forced herself to observe it, to study it, to attempt to discern what it would do next.
Oddly it seemed that much of that loathing and hate was turned inward on the being projecting it. She wanted to talk with Master Bnar about that, because it struck her as very odd.
But her meditations had yielded other things. On the bright side, there were no other Rebel strike fleets within her rather considerable range, at least this portion of the sector should be clear of that menace.
On the dark side, however, she could sense that the dark being on the other side was intending to probe the anomaly in some way. She doubted it would come through itself, there was a sense of frustration at not being able to lead that she interpreted as that at least. But something would come through, and she was working to pinpoint what and when. The why was obvious, that consuming hate sought to conquer and destroy, if only to distract from its own self-loathing. The how was also obvious, just enter hyperspace as normal on a course that intersected the anomaly.
OK, obvious to her. She’d need to warn Captain Ayres and Master Skywalker and Knight Ban about it, once she finished her meditations.
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Mara Skywalker was busy. When she wasn’t consulting with Captain Ayres she was busy communicating with Sector and Imperial Command. When she wasn’t doing that she was sending reports straight to her father. When she wasn’t doing that she was trying to get in some saber practice with Taber and some Force training with Irolia, shamelessly making use of two prodigies to sharpen her own considerable skills. And when she wasn’t doing that she was working on the Hydaspes Star to further tweak her. She was only a backup Intersector from the Palace pool, so while it had all of the standard upgrades for an Imperial ‘shuttle’ meant for the Imperial Family, it hadn’t yet gotten the personal attention of dear old dad on one of his tinkering binges. And, unfortunately as far as Mara was concerned, her honorary (don’t tell mom!) uncle Raith hadn’t been by to visit since the vessel had joined the pool.
Well, unfortunate in her opinion, the Treasury would probably have a conniption like they did the last time Raith had ‘upgraded’ some of the Imperial Family’s Intersectors. Who knew that diamond-boron armor plating wasn’t cheap? Not that Raith seemed to understand the concept of ‘budget’, to hear mom grumble. Usually with ‘and he’s such a bad influence on Anakin and the kids’ thrown in there at some point.
But it would sure be nice to have a Sienar Special at her disposal right about now. She might not be as powerful as Irolia, but her Senses were more than acute enough to feel the Dark from the anomaly and know that it meant that they were on the clock. There was an enemy on the other side who would come for them at a time of its choosing.
And Mara would be waiting for them. She’d been at Third Alderaan. She could handle anything after that nightmare. Come, bring on all that you got, come the Sith Hells, come high water, never stop.
Because she wouldn’t stop until the threat was gone. She was the adopted daughter of Anakin Skywalker. Sister to Luke and Leia Skywalker, an Imperial Jedi Knight in her own right.
Bring. It. On.