I've decided to stop rambling about myself during these. I do have a bit of insight regarding a sort of format, that I'll explain in the end-note, but unless I've got a reason to say something here, I won't. I do not own Star Wars. Please review or comment.
The Dark Return
Chapter 7
Galen stood in the middle of the Council Chambers, hands bound, surrounded by the most powerful Jedi in all the galaxy, and he had to smile to himself. If anyone had told him he'd become what he had become, that he'd one day stand before the Jedi Council and tell them all he knew of his people, then pledge to help them in the fight to come, he would have done far more than assume they were mad.
"Much as I appreciate the overestimation of my skills these imply," he raised his hands so the shock cuffs were more obvious, "I feel I'd be doing myself a disservice if I didn't tell you they aren't necessary."
The total lack of response was telling. They still didn't trust him. He wasn't surprised. Just concerned. They'd have to trust him eventually. But it would be better for everyone if they started sooner rather than later.
"I think it's time you explain some things." Luke Skywalker said. Things like who you are, where you're from, and just who it was that attacked us."
Galen had to stop and think. This was it. What he'd planned to do all those years ago. He just had more to tell them now. And yet… some part of him resisted, wouldn't accept what he knew he had to do.
He thought of Aelyndra. The fact that he could vouch for her counted for nothing; she'd been lead straight down to the holding cells. But he knew what she'd do if she were here, if she knew the indecision he was suffering.
"I am Galen Heyral, former Knight of the Imperium of Sith."
He could almost feel the shock and disbelief. He could also see how quickly those were turning to annoyance, to the idea that he was maybe some cultist seeking to rile them up. "Before you all start shouting and bickering and whatnot, allow me to explain." Galen said, raising his voice for simple effect.
All the Masters sat back in their seats. Not a one of them looked cowed, but now they looked… intrigued.
"I take it you are all familiar with the Great Hyperspace War," Galen began, "What if I told you that at the end of that conflict, when the Republic was purging the Sith from Korriban, a small fleet of around 50,000 beings fled into the Unknown Regions? That they found a world, and from that world, rebuilt what they had lost? And they have spent the last 5,000 years working towards a single goal: vengeance?"
That left them all thinking, wondering. Nearly all.
"Can you prove any of this?" Corran Horn asked.
"I'm sure your Grandmaster knows a few ways to determine my truthfulness…" Galen said "Though, if you favor less invasive methods, there should be information in my ship. Unless Aelyndra purged the databanks sometime in the last fifteen years."
"You called yourself a Knight," Cilghal cut in, "What exactly does that make you?"
""Former" Knight, Master Jedi. My titles have since become more along the lines of "expendable" and "traitor." But, to answer, a Knight of the Imperium is… a sort of middle ground between Apprenticeship and Lordship. Those with the power and influence to be truly autonomous from their Master, but not enough to become a true Lord."
"Why is that? That you are now considered a traitor?" Luke cut in.
"Because I betrayed my people?" Galen countered.
He let that blatant insult simmer for few seconds before he continued.
"In al seriousness, there was a time I never dreamed I might be anything but a loyal servant of the Imperium. But one day, a vision opened my eyes. Showed me the truth of the man I had sworn to serve. The truth of Emperor Vaugrus."
"It must have been some truly vicious backstabbing, then." Kyp Durron offered to pointed looks.
Galen laughed. He couldn't help himself.
"Forgive me. I can't expect you to understand, but…" Galen lost his composure again, and had to take several seconds before he regained it. "I, ah, I do not speak of the Emperor as a title that has been handed down over millennia. In five thousand years one man, and one man only, has borne the title. Has sat upon the Black Throne."
"That's impossible." The expressions of the rest of the Masters mirrored the sentiment.
"It would be if he were an ordinary man, but he is not. He is far from that."
"What did this vision show you?" Luke asked.
"The Emperor was once merely an exceptionally powerful and unambitious Sith, Darth Vaugrus. Near the end of the Great Hyperspace War, he enacted an ancient Sith ritual on his homeworld that he had come to rule. He… absorbed the life force of the world. Every one of his followers, every animal, every plant, every living thing, was drawn into Vaugrus. The life force of an entire world of Sith, drawn into a single being."
He stopped then, and let them consider that.
"If that's true, it couldn't be that simple-" a Master whose face Galen had somehow forgotten began to say.
"The power was… transmuted by the ritual. But that is not all that I saw," He shifted on his feet, for this, what he had seen, still haunted him. "While the effects of the ritual were potent, Vaugrus either erred in its performance or it was never intended to prolong life and power across thousands of years. Vaugrus has preformed it on a smaller scale twice since the Imperium was founded. A prison-world and a fledgling colony, both sacrificed that he might live on," Galen stopped, as the memory bled over him, the images of planets slowly crumbling into husks, the people Vaugrus had sworn to lead dying for the sake of prolonging his own life. "That was simply what he did to ensure he lived long enough to see his people take their vengeance. What might he do when all the galaxy is his?"
Galen obediently walked through the door into his admittedly lavish cell. The stun cuffs came off and the young Knight walked back out, leaving him alone.
He'd expected this, of course. Knew it was foolish to think they'd simply trust him. But he didn't think it was foolish for them to not abide his offer; let him stew down here until something happened, then let him prove himself. The only issues were those of time and impact. Every minute he spent down here was another minute the Imperium had to prepare, and that would mean their opening salvo would be that much more destructive.
Turning, he gazed through the small window in the side of his cell and into the one next to his. At the young Zabrak woman who wasn't yet aware he was in the cell next to hers.
At least they'd granted him that much to start with.
Jaina looked out the window of the small apartment at the early morning traffic and reflected on how much she enjoyed the relative normalcy.
The apartment had been Jag's idea, and she hadn't needed much convincing. It was quaint but fairly spacious, and it gave her more or less a permanent place to live outside of the Temple. She thought back, several years, to that house her parents had bought. The reasoning being that they simply wanted a permanent place on Coruscant. A home. She'd understood what they meant back then. But looking around now, she understood much better. Walking back into the kitchen to refill her caf, she stopped at Mia's room. Took a moment to gaze in at the infant girl sleeping in her crib.
Then the door rang.
She muttered a curse to herself as it rang again, and she faintly heard Jag rouse himself, and Mia softly complain at the disruption of sleep.
Opening the door, she saw a deliveryman on the other side. He held out a package, followed by a datapad and pen. Sighing, she took the pen and began to sign.
Then ducked back as a knife swung past her and nearly cut her throat open. She swung her hand, which still held her mug, into the deliveryman's face. It shattered and he reeled back. Jaina reached for her lightsaber, but the man struck out, and sent her cannoning back into the apartment.
Dragging herself up from the floor, she realized how hard he'd just hit her. It felt like she'd been hit by wookie. A fairly weak wookie, admittedly, but a wookie nonetheless. But this man certainly wasn't a wookie. He was an average-looking man. Who was about to force his way into the apartment.
Jaina reached out with the Force and hit a button next to the door's keypad. The door slammed shut, but not before the man somehow dove inside. Reaching behind himself, he quickly produced a blaster pistol and started firing. Jaina dove into the living room, ears ringing with blasterfire and Mia's screams of fear. She could see Jag rushing down the hall, rifle in hand. He fired a few shots down the hallway, taking the assailant's attention away from her for a few seconds. Those few seconds were all Jaina needed. She lit her lightsaber and buried it in the man's chest. Jag quickly reached her, and gave the man a prod with his foot, simply to make sure he was dead. They turned to see to their daughter when Jaina got a sense of danger so acute from the body on the floor, she barely noticed that Mia's cries increased drastically in volume. Reacting on instinct, she used the Force to hurl the body through the window she'd been looking through barely three minutes before. Then she was thrown against the kitchen table by a wave of force as the body exploded.
Galen got up from his meditative pose as he heard the door open. He turned around to find Luke Skywalker standing before him.
"Well, that didn't take very long." Galen said. "What was it?"
"Someone attempted to kill Jedi Solo and her husband."
"Would this be the Solo husband or the- right, the Fel husband." The look from the Jedi Grandmaster told Galen everything. "Right. First, let me and Aelyndra out of our cells."
"Did you by any chance keep the kit bag?" Galen asked Aelyndra.
"Of course I kept the kit bag." Aelyndra said, as though Galen was an idiot for thinking otherwise.
"Skywalker, send someone to our ship. There should be a black bag in the quarters with a gold seal on it. Have someone bring it down, and if you could get a message to your niece and nephew-in-law to drop by in a car, you'd save us all a lot of time." He turned to Aelyndra. "Tell me you remember how to crack Intel encryption."
He almost cringed at the glare she gave him. "Alright, you do. No need to… just, be ready to hack remotely."
"You're leaving me here?"
"If I remember correctly, you referred to my ability to hack things as "having no ability at all would be an improvement.""
"True."
"If I might interrupt," Luke said, "Why do you need Jaina and Jag to come here?"
Galen turned back to Luke.
"So I can see what's left of whoever tried to kill them." Galen started towards the elevator. "In the meantime, get the names of everyone in the government and military you couldn't fight a war without and get them under guard. Jedi guard, preferably."
"I don't mean to make things difficult, but this is somewhat irregular." The morgue attendant said.
"It's Jedi business." Jaina said, brushing past the man.
"He doesn't look much like a Jedi." The attendant said, looking at Galen.
"I'm a special consultant."
Galen strode into the morgue and looked at the various unmarked doors. "Which one?" He asked.
The attendant checked his chart.
"36-G."
Galen swung the door open and yanked the slab out, gazing at the burned remnants of the assassin. Nearly half the torso was still intact, and all of the head remained. That was odd. Almost enough to make him wonder if he was wrong.
He did have one way to find out for sure. He reached out with one of his talons and cut into the scorched flesh beneath the jaw on the right side.
"Hey, you can't-"
"Jedi Solo, if you could keep him from interfering." Reaching the talon into the hole he'd cut, Galen felt around until the talon tapped against something that wasn't bone. "Gotcha."
He pulled out a tiny glass tube, wiring and a few flickering lights visible inside. He pulled a cart over to his side with the Force and set the device down.
"What's that?" Jaina asked.
"Subdermal radio. Which is all I needed to see." Galen said as he grabbed the corpse's shoulders and flipped it over onto its chest. Galen dropped the black bag he'd slung over his shoulder and rifled through it, coming back up with a handheld scanner and a large metal spike connected to a boxy data storage deck.
"What are you-"
"Intelligence loves, and I mean loves, their subdermal implants. Especially where deep-cover operatives are concerned." Galen began to explain as he held the scanner over the body's head. "These guys, they are serious about keeping contact to a minimum. As far as I know, they generally only even meet their handlers twice. When the job starts, and when it's done. And they aren't stupid enough to send and receive information and instructions via conventional methods, so…" Galen paused as the scanner beeped and he held the spike up over the area. "They have a little computer crammed into their brain, so that all that stuff they'd normally have to leave around in some digital form that could incriminate them even if they deleted it gets beamed right into their head." Galen stabbed the spike down into the brain with a wet squelching sound, followed by a metallic click.
"And the stabbing the brain with the spike is you… what? Hacking the implant?"
"Gold star, Jedi Solo."
"How do you know all this?" Jag asked.
"My mother worked for Intelligence." Galen said. "And this is not the first time I've had to go into the head of a botched deep-cover operative." Galen started tapping on the data storage deck, then reached up to activate his helmet comlink. "Lyn, I've tapped the neural hub. You're go."
"Alright. Give me a few minutes. It's been about seventeen years since the last time I had to do this." Aelyndra's voice said in his ear.
"I'd say take all the time you need, but-"
"But I can't, I know."
Galen turned and saw that Solo and Fel were so… distracted by the gruesome spectacle display they didn't the morgue attendant extend a hold-out blaster from his sleeve.
Galen didn't waste time warning or going easy. He yanked the attendant into his hands with the Force and engulfed him with Force Lightning. He dropped the smoking body to the ground a minute later and dove for his bag.
"What the kriff was-" Jag began.
"Had to short out whatever countermeasures he might have crammed into him." Galen took a second to slice into the attendant's jaw and dug out a tube identical to one he'd pulled out of the operative's body. No sense in not making sure. Galen returned to his bag and came up with a large syringe and a white patch, connected to a datapad.
Galen jammed the needle into the attendant's chest, and stood back as the man shot up, screaming and jerking. Galen drove his fist into the man's face, then turned him over and attached the patch to the back of the man's head.
"What was-"
"Had to get him back on his feet," Galen grabbed the attendant's hand and pressed it to the datapad's screen. It beeped, and he tapped a few commands. "If we can access his implant then… Lyn, change of plans. I've got another hub, and it's live. Linking now."
"How did you…" Aelyndra began, but stopped to think. "Morgue attendant?"
"I really don't know how I didn't figure that."
"Don't beat yourself up over it." She lapsed into silence for several minutes. "Wow." She sounded genuinely amazed at whatever she'd done.
"What?"
"I've already got access. The Intelligence division either had massive cutbacks, or…" She lapsed into a worried silence.
"We get any names?"
"Yeah."
"Dig deeper, and then dig even deeper. Give the Jedi whatever you find." Galen said.
"Why go through the rest? We already have at least six aliases. Unless they-"
"Leave layers of information in the implants-"
"So anyone going into them gets easy access to false information-"
"And they just thank their good luck and get the wrong people taken in-"
"While the real operatives are free to keep doing their jobs."
"They know their work, have to give them that."
"They certainly do. Kriff."
"What?"
"That whole 'completing a sentence together' thing. Forgotten how much I missed that."
"Same here."
So, a quick word on the new sort-of story format. Things will be kinda episodic now; that is to say, instead of focusing a single chapter to a single key bit of story, now multiple chapters will encompass a wider arc of story that is still somewhat self-contained, with maybe a chapter or two of filler in-between and the end of the filler period setting up the next "episode."
Also, yeah, Jaina and Jag have a baby girl. AU escape clause.
