Chapter 3: Into the heart of the enemy

Our ship, to be perfectly honest, left little to be desired. The shields were fairly decent, standard models that had become the norm among non-war ships during the Clone Wars. Our weapons were sparse too, leaving only one forward turret with a short firing range after the rear and side mounted guns had been removed to accommodate some extra storage space that the previous owner had used on smuggling runs. None of that particularly mattered, seeing as our aim was not to get into danger of any form. Still, it was always good to have a back-up option.

The main thing that had begun to grate on me from the moment we had taken off, however, was the ship's definite lack of speed. The engines had been scaled down to provide more cargo space in the in the engine room, allowing bigger shipments to be smuggled into places. From my own knowledge, I would have thought that speed would be a necessity if one came into close call with either pirates or a Republic brigade. Apparently not, according to the ship's previous owner, he had been good enough to avoid complications and entanglements. Wayii, that guy had been full of himself.

Actually, after meeting the obnoxious man and purchasing his ship – once named the Rogue's Bounty – my wife and I had decided to rename it. Although our current ship was nothing like the one that we had chosen to base the Bounty's new name upon, we had finally come across the name the Crimson Flame. It was a risk that Keisha and I had chosen to take at the possibility of being recognised and hunted down by the Republic to honour the memory of my lost brother-in-law, naming the ship for him after his own ship, the Crimson Breeze. For now it was the best way we could preserve his memory before we could visit the Temple on Coruscant and lay a proper memorial to him.

I shook my head and cleared my thoughts as I once again resumed looking blankly at the Flame's navi-computer, futilely trying to think of an appropriate destination for our next galactic hop. Currently we were orbiting around the smuggler's moon of Nar Shaada, after refuelling the Fire with some highly over-priced fuel. I had been hoping that by sticking to criminal, outer rim worlds that we would be out of the scrutiny of Palpatine and his clones. Yet again, I had been wrong. After encountering a squadron of clones on our minor hop to Ryloth, we had barely escaped being recognised.

Now I knew how determined Palpatine was becoming to exterminate the last of the Jedi, and how careful we needed to be to avoid any kind of a threat.

I barely registered footsteps entering the cock-pit whilst immersed in my thoughts until a pair of arms were looped about my neck and my wife's head appeared on my shoulder. "Have you found our next planet to visit?"

I nodded and reached out to tap the screen of the navi-comp that was showing an image of the last planet that I had been pondering, "Naboo. I heard that the Queen was receiving some hassle from Republic clones, so I thought we could swing by and lend a hand."

Keisha frowned. "I thought Master Kenobi told us to keep our heads down until the Order returned to free the galaxy?"

I looked to the side and flashed her a boyish grin. "He did. But take a look at the holo-net, sweetheart, there's news all across the galaxy of "treacherous Jedi" that are trying to threaten the Republic. I thought we might as well join in."

She squeezed my shoulders and took a step back, releasing me from the embrace. "Nice idea. It'll give me a chance to search for our profiles on Republic wanted lists and see what they know happened to us after the battle of Coruscant."

I nodded and was about to reply when my Force danger sense was erratically awakened many moments before our scanners became alive with the transponder codes that identified at least half a dozen Republic shuttles and battle cruisers reverting to real space all around us. I pounced forward to regard the console myself, though I already knew the extent of the danger we were now in. "Oh….gartal."

Keisha rushed up to my side and gripped my forearm so tightly that the limb began to grow numb. When she spoke, her voice was tight with fear and concern, "What do we do? They're everywhere!"

"Get out of here," I muttered as I sprung into action, diverting power from our shields and one remaining gun turret into our sub-light engines in an attempt to put as much distance between us and those ships as possible. No point in pretending to be someone else, they would have guessed our identity by now. All we could do was run. "I'm going to need some hyperspace co-ordinates now, and fast."

Fighting away her fear, my wife nodded as she replaced me at the navi-comp and began to co-ordinate us a journey through hyperspace.

"Come on! Come on!" I growled at the throttle controls as if that manoeuvre would encourage the ship to move any faster. I glanced at the scanners and felt my heart sink. The ships were moving into attack position. Blast it! How had they tracked us here? Did they know of our journey to Tatooine? Of our meeting with Obi-Wan Kenobi? Did they know where he was and they had finished him off, and then they had pursued us to finish the job?

"Keisha! I need those co-ordinates now!" I yelled as I prepared the hyper-drive, angling us towards clear space.

My wife's hands were trembling as she slumped back in her chair. "I can't! The navi-comp won't respond!"

I glared at her in utter horror as the cock-pit was tossed into an eerie silence. A single alarm rose, alerting us of a target lock. There was nothing we could do.

I leapt up from my chair, gripping Keisha by the wrists and yanking her up with me. I took her head between my hands and kissed her for a long final moment and then pulled away, looking deep into her eyes. "I love you. Never ever forget that."

Tears of fear and desperation welled up in her eyes as she buried her face into my shoulder as the ongoing silence became unbearable. I eventually growled in exasperation, "Just do it already!"

Surprisingly, I was answered once the com-unit bleeped, indicating that there was an incoming transmission. "Crimson Fire, halt your retreat and prepare for boarding, or we will open fire."

With one quick look at my wife I released her and dashed to comply with the order as she glared at me and exclaimed, "You want us to get captured?!"

I looked back at her after I had cut out the engines completely, "Well, what else can I do, Keisha? At least this way we can stay alive long enough to escape later."

She frantically pointed at Tee-Dee. "But what about Tee-Dee? If the Republic get their hands on what is inside of him…"

I raised a hand and she slowly quietened, "You forget that he was once Lao's droid, and your father's before that. He'll have some much security programming in him that no one will be able to access him.

She did not calm down, but I could tell that she was a little less worried about our situation. I knew how much Tee-Dee meant to her and how much we could not afford to let the little droid fall into enemy hands. Whatever the droid had inside him would be of valuable use to Sidious and his puppet Skywalker, due to the fact that all the information within him was top secret documents on mandates that Kegan had been given by the Jedi Council.

Our ship was jerked violently forwards all of a sudden, lurching me back into the piloting chair as my wife tumbled backwards and landed in my lap, then asked me when she was a little more stable, "What the blazes just happened?"

"Tractor beam," I groaned, causing her to look at me in a confused manner. "They obviously think that we may try to run away."

"As if we could even try to!" She exclaimed as her eyes went wide. "They have us completely surrounded!"

I looked over my shoulder and out of the viewport towards the fleet of ships that were clustered around the belly of a dagger shaped ship. A Stardestroyer, I presumed. I had never seen one of those ships personally up close, for most of my time had been spent on the ground fighting alongside the clones themselves. That had always been my preferred mode of combat. I had seen them dotted high above in the sky sometimes whilst we were fighting on the ground, and even then they had looked like a foreboding sight. Yet now, the cold wedge of the 'destroyer looked far more terrifying as he edged closer to it. There was something on board that was niggling away at the back of my mind, something elusive that I could not place a finger on. It was more like black smog crawling across my mind's eye. It was angular…sharp edged even…like the outline of some predator's helmet…

I let out a gasp of breath that I did not realise I had been holding. He was alive…

Keisha looked at me and the horror on my face, but seemed to be unable to detect what I had sensed. "What is it?"

"Skywalker…" I muttered, more to myself than in response to her question. "…he's on that ship."

"What?" She gasped. "It can't be! Master Kenobi killed him on Mustafar! He can't be alive!"

"Apparently the Kid was stronger than we all thought, because he is definitely on that ship," I replied and neglected to tell her the details of the helmet that I had seen. I sagged by in my chair and rubbed my temples, groaning, "We will not get out of this alive."

"Probably not." Keisha pushed herself up from her seated position on my lap and dropped down onto the floor. Her voice was unnaturally calm for this kind of situation. "But at least we can take Skywalker down with us."

I winked up at her, pushing a smile onto my face to put up a brave front, "There's the woman that I married."

"Let's hope that she stays around for a while. I could use some of her courage right now." She took a deep breath as the forward viewport became filled with the dashed grey of the approaching hanger bay of the Stardestroyer. "And no heroics. We still have a chance of escaping from captivity."

I gave her a wide smirk as the ship began to lower gently towards the hanger deck plates, "Since when did I start acting like your brother?"

She flashed a side long glace at me. "You already do, dear. You just don't realise it."

I heard a clunk reverberate through the ship, followed by a screeching scream that belonged to a laser torch and so quickly waved Keisha back to her chair. "Look casual. We don't want them to think that we're nervous."

My wife complied, and must have seen a glint in my eyes as she hastily hissed at me, "Don't do anything foolish."

"Hey, it's me." I replied to her with a wink and settled back further into my chair, crossing my legs over one another and letting my shoulders hang loose. All for show, but I didn't want to appear weak and afraid in front of Skywalker and his cronies. Survival of the fittest and all that. Eventually, the shattering, piercing sounds of the 'torch stopped and I could hear the boom as the boarding ramp came crashing to the ground.

I fixed a small smile on my face as a squad of clones burst into the cock-pit, their blasters trained on all of us, including Tee-Dee. I tapped the chrono that was fastened to my wrist as I looked the lead clone in his helmet lenses and made a slight tutting noise. "What took you guys so long? Skrag, standards have dropped since you betrayed us."

I took note of the clone to the lead's left as his posture stiffened considerably whilst his superior replied to me, "Kick your weapons towards us or we will open fire."

Now came the real test. I spread my hands wide and out to my sides, making no effort to retrieve my lightsaber from my belt. "Go ahead. I have nothing left to lose."

The leader withdrew his blaster pistol, just as I had been expecting and scattered a single shot against the wall behind Keisha's head so that the shot grazed her hair as it zoomed past. I continued to smile pleasently when she nor I flinched an inch. "Like I said, we have nothing to lose."

"Let me handle this, Captain," boomed a deep, mechanical voice that drew everyone's attention towards the doorway. I was hardly surprised to see the man behind the voice, though his appearance did startle me somewhat. The sharp, angular looking smog that I had seen earlier was definitely a representation of the man's jet black helmet, his tinted red lenses and grill-shaped vocabulator were the only things that made him look vaguely "human". The winking lights on his chest flashed in random sequences upon a board that I presumed monitored the status of the suit that he was in. This was what Kenobi had reduced Skywalker to? I looked up into the helmet, his towering height not fazing me at all. He deserved every thing that had happened to him.

I could feel Keisha tense considerably, and it took most of my strength not to let her concerns rub off on me as I gave him an open gesture that required me to turn my palms upward and keep my arms out by my sides, "Be my guest. Your clones aren't doing a very good job so far."

Skywalker did not let his attention sweep towards my jibe. He continued to look down upon the lowly clone leader as he spoke in a passive, motorized tone that lacked all emotions, "One thing that you need to learn, Captain, is that if you want a person to comply with an order, then you must attack his weakness strongly."

"Yes, Lord Vader," the clone replied with a crisp salute.

I was powerless to stop it when the black-clad man decided to make an example of this weakness. With no more than a gesture of pointing five gloved, splayed out fingers towards my wife, lethal, electric-blue lightning crackled out of them and struck my wife in the centre of her chest. I pounced forward as her body shuddered twice due to the excessive electrical energy that coursed throughout her nervous system before she collapsed to the floor in a smoking heap.

I was at her side in an instant, pressing two fingers against her neck. A series of shallow thuds were the only things that I received to indicate that to indicate that she was barely alive. I crouched next to Tee-Dee and pulled my wife's limp form protectively close as I glared up at the Sith and hissed, "Aruetti!"

The dark Jedi looked down at me with almost pity, I could tell by the way that his head was slightly cocked to the side. "Now, weapons."

I yanked my lightsaber hilt from off of my belt and tossed it to the ground about a meter away from his feet and then retrieved the twin lightsabers from off of Keisha's hips and thrust them towards him as well.

Skywalker raised a palm and the three hilts rose into the air and dropped down into the awaiting hands of the stiff trooper. "See to it that they reach the prison cells unscathed. The droid can remain here until maintenance arrives. I want every inch of this ship checked."

The two clones to the clone leader's right tried to approach Keisha, but with a sharp, ice cold stare from me they kept their distance. I gently lifted her into my arms and was about to follow them out when I paused and spoke to Tee-Dee, "Keep safe, old friend. I'll see you soon."

I did not catch the end of his reply as I was roughly shoved out of the cock-pit and out of the ship: and into the heart of the enemy.