Rating: T (dark themes, mild swearing)

It had been a quiet night. We'd received a report from the meteorologists and meteotechnologists that there would be some rainfall. I had figured it would be relatively calm, then; most people got fair warning about these changes from Coruscant's usual nice, warm evenings, and as soon as the word rain entered their brains they locked their doors and didn't venture out until they were certain the scheduled calamity had ended.

As expected, we'd only gotten two calls in a span of four hours. Nothing big – one was a public assist call for some poor elderly Nautolan who had fallen and needed help getting up, and the other was a psych call (honestly I can't even remember the details anymore… I wasn't the one to answer it anyway). But then, close to midnight, all hell broke loose.

Literally.

I remember the very first call had been some woman who hadn't been entirely helpful. She'd said she saw smoke and thought maybe a speeder had crashed. I figured maybe she was right, but there had been no other calls to indicate as such, so I eventually had wondered if maybe someone was burning some trash in her block. She'd been pretty vague about it anyway; just said some smoke was coming from east of her apartment. But then we got another call. And another. And another. I remember my partner looked at me and asked if maybe an entire block was lit up. I hoped it wasn't the case; we would've had to call in fire departments from more precincts, which would have pulled them away from their own first due. I remember I'd actually chuckled to the others, saying it was ironic that there was a fire the same night the meteorologists had scheduled it to rain.

Eventually my partner finally got enough info out of someone and triangulated the source of the smoke. I remember he just stared at the little holographic map he'd made, frozen. He was stiff and couldn't speak. Then he'd furrowed his brow and looked over at me and the others.

"It's coming from the Temple," he'd said.

Nobody really knew what to do all of a sudden. I mean, sure, we had protocols and the like, but… the Jedi were kind of their own autonomous thing. Heaven knows they didn't need police toned to their location… and we all knew they had their own medical facilities. They really were self-contained. We figured they had some firefighter droids too, just in case. We kind of sat around for a few seconds, waiting for somebody to have a solution.

One of us eventually found the protocol for such an incident, and the first thing it said was to call the Jedi communications center. They always had a line available for emergency dispatchers. We'd never called the Jedi before – hell, we'd never seen a Jedi in person, and we were the emergency dispatchers for the Jedi Temple Precinct. Yallora said she'd contact the Temple since the rest of us were busy receiving calls from more people witnessing the fire.

The first indicator that something was really screwed up was when I finally got a caller who had braved the rain to investigate. Just as Yallora told us that she wasn't getting any answer from the Jedi, my caller suddenly said, "What the… it's the clones! The clones are torching the Temple! They're shooting, there's blaster fire in there!"

I'd stared at my information screen in disbelief. What the hell could this lunatic have been talking about? The clones wouldn't do that – they were our soldiers, and so were the Jedi. The bad guys were the Seps, and creator knows we'd had a hell of a time dealing with their siege on our homeworld. I asked the man to repeat what he'd said.

He yelled, "They're killing the Jedi!"

I immediately had pulled up satellite images, and just as I did, a message transmitted in to the Emergency Communications Center. It was a statement from the chief of police saying that the chancellor had been attacked by Jedi, and that we were not to do anything to prevent the clones from their siege on the Jedi Temple.

The room had suddenly grown quiet. Despite all the calls coming in from distressed citizens, despite the petrified shrieks from the guy I had on the line who was screaming they're killing the Jedi continuously, the room was just dead silent. We stared at each other. We didn't know what to do. Nobody had known what to do.

Whenever there was an emergency, we were the ones people called. Whenever they said, call the first responders it would always be us to answer the comlink. But in this instance, there was no one to call. No one to dispatch. Nothing to do. There was nothing we could do. I stared at the satellite image and watched the live feed. Watched the fire burn. Watched the shadows of figures running around. Watched the brief sparks of light like lightning as blasters fired inside. Stared at the corpses on the steps. And I did nothing.

And then the call came in.

I had answered since everyone was a little sluggish from shock (not that I wasn't, but I just happened to get to it first, feeling like I could at least do something and think about anything but what was happening). A frantic woman had been crying on the other end – she'd been in such a frenzy I could barely understand her. My training kicked in, and I immediately tried to calm her down. I asked for her address, her name, all the usual stuff. When I asked what the emergency was, I expected what we'd been getting for the past ten minutes – something's on fire, I can see smoke.

Instead, I got, "They're killing my baby! Stop them, please, please you have to stop them!"

My nerves surged with electricity. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I'd gone rigid. Everyone in the room could tell, too – they knew something was wrong by my demeanor. The ones assigned to dispatching crews immediately locked on to the stations, looking at the information I'd received so far, waiting for me to give them the signal.

"Ma'am, who's hurting your baby? What's going on?" I'd asked.

"My youngling—she's two, she's only two, what are they doing?!"

"Ma'am, where is your daughter now? Who's with her? What's going on?"

"She's in the Temple! Oh gods, please! Please, she's in the Jedi Temple, we just gave her to the Jedi a week ago, please, get someone there, get the police, get the fire department, please gods, please!"

I froze. No. No. This couldn't be happening. No.

"Please, stop them! Get the police! Gods, please do something! Help her! Help her!"

My partner waved to get my attention. Mouthed where she should send first responders. Mouthed who to send, what to dispatch it as.

I could only stare at her.

"Stop them! They're killing my baby! Stop them!"

The woman's screams grew more frantic, more hysterical. She started to sob so much I couldn't even decipher anything apart from please and gods and no.

And I couldn't say a damn thing. I couldn't do a damn thing!

My partner waved more frantically than before. Mouthed again all the same questions. I didn't speak. I didn't cut the connection to the frantic mother. I didn't move. I couldn't. All I could do was stare at the satellite image of the Jedi Temple and listen to that mother sob. More calls came in, the others answered – more people talking about the fire.

After a few minutes, my partner switched the call over to him. When he realized what had happened, he grew similarly quiet, but he had to the wherewithal to tell the mother that he would send someone and then cut the connection. I couldn't have done that. I couldn't have lied to that woman, couldn't have given her any kind of hope.

I still remember how the shift had ended so quietly. The calls had ceased. The news had broken all across HoloNet – the Jedi were traitors. They were all traitors. We left quietly, barely exchanging any words with our compatriots on the day shift, all of whom had so much to say about the news. I went home to my husband and two younglings. I'd gone straight to their rooms, ignoring my husband—who was too busy gaping at the HoloNet receiver anyway—and I'd just looked at them. And looked. And looked. I had a two-year-old daughter. She was in her crib that we'd gotten from my mother-in-law. Her round little face was soft and slack in slumber, and she was holding her favorite stuffed toy.

And I'd broken down and sobbed.

To this day I can still hear that mother crying. To this day I wonder where she is now. It's been twenty years – my younglings are all grown. But that two-year-old baby never got to grow up. Never got to become a Jedi Knight. She died in that Temple, died because of some karking idiotic Jedi who decided to try and kill the chancellor, died because the bastard emperor decided that all of them should pay for only the actions of a few. I wonder if the mother ever moved on. She probably hasn't; I know I wouldn't.

To this day I hate the emperor, and the stormtroopers and clone troopers… all of them. I hate all of them.

But most of all, I hate myself for doing nothing that night. Even if the police had refused to go, even if the EMTs and the firefighters had said there was nothing they could do, even if my own partners had refused to dispatch anyone… at least I would have done something. I couldn't even comfort the mother.

I still hear her screaming every night.

This story is dedicated to all emergency communications workers - the unsung and unseen heroes who are there for you at your darkest moment and the ones who have to live with everything they hear long after they've hung up the phone.

I was inspired to write this story after reading about the #iam911 movement, which is basically all the 911 telecommunicators relaying stories about what they've endured in order to make a point. Recently the U.S. government recommended that 911 dispatchers' jobs be listed as "clerical," like a secretary or a taxi cab dispatcher. They're not clerical, and they want to make that point known; putting their jobs in that category not only disregards everything they have to endure, but it also may prevent funding that could help improve the system and prevent them from getting better wages. People all over are trying to rally support for them as a result, so this is my way of doing so; as a first responder myself, I know that what they do is indispensable. All I ask of you guys is to show your support for your local emergency dispatchers any way you can; they never get a thank you for what they do.

Thanks for reading, and sorry for the preachy rant - I figured it was worth a little preaching for all that they do. I hope you liked the story. :)