The Millennium Falcon and Corran Horn's Skipray Blastboat touched down on Terephon in the woods of the planet closest to the former estate of the late Ducha of this world. Corran provided himself and the Solos three speeder bikes in total to travel to the estate to begin their investigation.
There, they found that the estate was cordoned off by a local police blockade while the officers and investigators continued to roam the grounds, both inside and outside the considerable walls of the dead Ducha's home.
When the Solos and Corran had disembarked from their bikes, which they parked across the street of the investigated estate, the trio was met by the blonde police captain, who had spotted them and approached them from across the street.
"Jedi Solo, Master Horn, Captain Solo," the captain said, "I am Captain Felegra Jono of the Terephon Security Force. Her Majesty has already informed us of your arrival. If you are confident that you can find what we couldn't for the past couple of days since Ducha Tragon died, we'd be..."
"Did you check the sewer system beneath the estate?" Corran asked. He was currently looking past Jono toward a sewer grate in the middle of the street.
The police captain looked at the Jedi Master in confusion. "Excuse me?"
"Did you check the sewer system?" Corran repeated as he looked back at the captain.
Jono shook her head. "No. We didn't."
"And why not?" Corran asked. "It's a common escape way for criminals."
"We didn't think that there would be any male servant who would dare try to escape via the sewers," Jono explained. "Males in the Consortium tend to be very clean and as vain as any other Hapan. Sure, female Hapans are more likely to get themselves physically dirty when necessary, but unless they are ordered to do something like mud-wrestling, for example, Hapan males aren't all that likely to get totally dirty."
"Well, in case you didn't notice," Han interjected, "there's kind of a revolution going on right now. And I think that any male slaves-"
"Han," Leia enunciated as she nudged her husband in the ribs with her elbow.
"Sorry," Han said to his wife before returning his attention to Jono. "I think that any male servants would take whatever means they thought were necessary to join the Free Men, even if it means getting dirty, or dirtier than usual. After all, they just killed their own Ducha."
"That's understandable," Jono acknowledged neutrally. "Treachery is natural here in the Consortium, and given this male uprising, as you said, Captain Solo, I'm not surprised that they would resort to killing their Ducha."
"But you didn't think they'd get their hands literally dirty, did you?" Han asked pointedly.
"It would make sense to escape unnoticed," Corran backed up. "After all, even if they escaped as soon as their Ducha was dead, it would still take them quite a while to get to a space-worthy. I'd imagine that they'd attract quite a bit of attention by traveling across a populated area like this, and that were the case, you would have had them in custody by now."
While Jono's outward expression - both body and face - conveyed the sense of objective evidence-gathering and conjecture-judging, Leia could sense from her relatively unrestrained Force-aura that she couldn't take how these two men would dare question her authority and how she conducted the investigation. Combine that with the fact that she had to deal with two Jedi and a male smuggler, and she was amazed that Jono could possess this level of self-control.
"Well, let's see if your hypothesis turns out to have some validity, Master Jedi," Jono said as she waved toward the grate in the middle of the street.
Corran nodded to her and walked past her toward the grate, unwary of any vehicles that may come this way given the police blockade, and bent down at the closed manhole. He took out some plastic gloves and put them on before he removed the grate.
"Do you wish to have any of my officers escort you, Master Horn?" Jono asked. Her tone was subtle, but Leia could practically hear her holding herself back from saying, "Please go down there and die with your Jedi and smuggler accomplices."
"Yes, three of them, if you don't mind," Corran said as he turned his head back to look at the police captain. "I understand that you would probably want an equal number of your officers looking after us."
"As a matter of fact, I do," Jono replied, barely biting back the reluctance in her tone, before she lifted her commlink to her lips and activated it to call in three officers.
"Han, Leia, you're coming with us, too," Corran said.
A minute later, three female officers - one a brunette, another dark-skinned, and the last one yellow-skinned - came trotting from the open gate of the estate.
"You three, go down there with the Solos and Master Horn," Jono ordered the officers. "And listen to whatever he has to say." She pointed at Corran.
"But-" the brunette started to say.
"That's an order," Jono interrupted.
By then, Corran had already climbed down into the sewers, and Han and Leia had followed. The three of them waited for the reluctant cops to follow them down into the sewer waters.
Han had his hand covering his nose in disgust. "I could see why you gals wouldn't wanna search down here anyway," he said to the cops. "Even I'd doubt that these male sl- Uh, servants would wanna come down here to escape."
"We can handle something like this," the yellow-skinned cop insisted, though with something of an attitude. She then looked past him down toward Corran. "What are you doing?"
The Jedi Master was kneeling in the dirty, shallow water with a waterproof glowstick beneath the waterline. He was looking a little ahead but still downward at what the light was shining at.
"You see these footprints?" he asked his five accomplices. "Pretty recent, by the looks of it. I'd estimate about a day or two old, probably around the time that Ducha Tragon was killed and her male servants all disappeared."
"Captain!" the dark-skinned cop called up back to the open manhole above.
"What?" Jono called back.
"The Jedi was right!" the cop replied. "The male servants did decide to walk in these infested waters to escape!"
"Thank you for the update, Officer Bajak!" Jono replied. This time, though, the contempt she held toward Corran for being both a male and a Jedi slipped somewhat in light of the news that he actually found something that none of her investigative force could have found in the first place.
Corran then stood up from the waters, turned off the glowstick, replaced it within his robes, and called back up to Jono. "Captain, would you like to focus more of your forces' attention down here?!"
"Would it be alright if you continued with the officers you already have, Master Horn?" Jono countered diplomatically, even with a necessarily-raised voice.
"If you say so!" Corran called back. "Good luck with the continued investigation inside the estate!"
Corran then took out his glowstick again, activated it, dropped it into the water, then turned to the other Jedi in his party. "Leia, if you'd be so kind?"
She nodded, then reached out a hand to use the Force to begin floating the glowstick along the path that the slightly-faded footsteps had left in their wake. At Corran's lead, the rest of them followed him and the glowstick to where the footsteps led them.
"Why is she floating that glowstick for you?" the red-haired cop asked Corran.
"I, unfortunately, lack telekinesis as an ability," Corran said.
"Oh," the same cop said in realization. But then her expression shifted into one of smugness.
Corran didn't see it, for his attention was on the sewage-infested trail ahead. But Leia noticed it and thought, Wow. You Hapan women really do pride that notion of feminine superiority, huh? But the Jedi Knight shook her head and returned her focus on keeping the glowstick moving beneath the water.
"You're gonna need to get your robes and hands washed after this, you know that, right?" Han asked Corran.
"You won't have to remind me," the Jedi Master replied stoically.
.
"What kinda dumb Ducha would wanna have a home here?" Ben asked as he, Tahiri, and the Fels looked out toward the desert mesa where the late Ducha Pollana's estate was. From the looks of things, it had been abandoned, with not even a police blockade around it.
"Maybe she likes to go Ketton hunting," Jaina suggested idly.
"Ketton?" Jag wondered. "What are those?"
"The native nomads of this world," Tahiri answered. "They're kinda like Tuskens, only peaceful."
"Oh," Jag said. "Well, did she actually decide to stay here to hunt them for sport or something?"
"There weren't any reports of that from what info we got from Tenel Ka on the way here," Jaina reminded her husband. "Then again, I wouldn't actually be surprised if she did anyway and it was kept out of any records. This place doesn't even have a planetary security force. I guess Pollana was arrogant enough to think that she had such a firm grasp on her male subjects that she wouldn't think they could betray her and try running off."
"But they did, and if this place actually had a force, they'd have caught them," Ben observed.
"Wait, wait, wait," Jag said. "If this world doesn't have a planetary security force, then how can it be that that report say that there was?"
"Officially, Ket has a security force, when in reality, it doesn't," Jaina explained. "No one really comes here, and its official statement of even having a police force is just to assuage the public at large in the Consortium."
"But why doesn't this place have a planetary security force?" Jag asked.
"No one's quite sure, but like I said, Pollana was probably just arrogant enough to think that Ket didn't need a security force," Jaina said. "The only way that it was even discovered that Ducha Pollana died was because of the beacon surgically placed in her heart that, when she died, had alerted the media that she had died."
"So we're the first to actually investigate her estate then," Jag concluded.
"Exactly," Jaina confirmed.
"Well, then, let's get started," Ben said.
The four of them then turned, mounted the speeder bikes that Ben and Tahiri had brought along with them, and half a minute later, they were all zooming down the hill for the abandoned estate ahead.
.
A lone Hapan shuttle dropped out of hyperspace in the Aldania system and began flying toward the system's titular world.
The pilot, Captain Flesha Gajab, activated the ship's intercom and said, "Alright, boys, are you all ready back there?"
"Yes, sir, we are," a male voice replied from the other end.
"Good, 'cause we're comin' up on the drop point, and as I said before, when I say go, you get that door open and you go," Gajab reminded his charge.
"Understood, Captain," the male representative of the "boys" in the shuttle's cabin space replied.
After Gajab closed off the frequency, it wasn't long until his shuttle encountered Aldania's planetary defense force, which was signified by the chiming of Gajab's shuttle's comm. He activated it.
"Shuttle One-One-Five-Seven-Eight," the authoritative, female voice on the other end said, "this is Aldania Orbital Security. Identify yourself and your purpose here."
Gajab quickly made sure that his vocal scrambler, which made him sound like a Hapan female, was on before he replied. "Aldania Orbital Security, this is Captain Henar Oloan. I'm here to deliver some silks and spices for Her Noble Ducha Lorangal."
"Wait a minute, Captain Oloan," Orbital Security replied. Exactly one minute later, she came back with, "Captain, your ship's credentials check out given our scans. You may proceed to deliver your cargo to the Ducha's estate."
"Thank you, Orbital Security," Gajab replied. "Have a good day." He then signed off on the frequency and proceeded for the world ahead.
.
Aboard Aldania's Orbital Security space station, the operator who talked to Captain "Henar Oloan" watched as the shuttle proceeded for the planet.
The operator smirked at the doomed ship. "You can't fool Aldania's Orbital Security, Captain Gajab," she said as she played back the recording of her brief conversation with "Oloan." "Not when our beloved Ducha is expecting something like this."
Every word that the faux Captain had spoken was through a man's voice, revealed thanks to the installed package next to the operator's computer.
.
As soon as the shuttle was through Aldania's atmosphere and descending, it wasn't long before it was immediately surrounded by a squadron of Miy'til starfighters that began firing upon it with blue lasers.
Gajab quickly threw the shuttle into the best evasive maneuvers he could kick out of the ship, especially when he didn't dial the inertial compensators for this unexpected dogfight.
"What's going on?" was one of the questions that Gajab had heard coming from the shuttle's cabin behind him. Among that were simply murmurs of concern and fear for something that none of them could have seen coming for the planned assassination of Ducha Lorangal.
Barely a quarter of a minute after the attack began, the shuttle took a hit in one of its engines, and it began going down, angling away from Lorangal's estate so that Gajab couldn't even pilot it for a suicide run, in spite of his efforts to yank the shuttle that way.
Seeing that he wouldn't make it out, he activated the intercom. "Gentlemen, go, go, go!" he shouted.
A few seconds later, he could see through the forward viewport every single one of the commandos that had been trained for this mission descending for the estate off to the side and below.
Satisfied that his men at least escaped to try to carry out their mission, Gajab closed his eyes and embraced his fate.
.
The male commandos, all sheathed in black jumpsuits that hid their entire forms, activated their parachutes as soon as possible before they landed inside the grounds of Ducha Lorangal's estate. When they landed, they heard the crash and explosion of the shuttle that ferried them here, but none of them turned back to view the plume of smoke that rose in the horizon behind them.
Instead, they continued forward, shrugging off the backpacks that had their parachutes and then hurried toward Lorangal's mansion, pulling out their assault rifles in the process as they quickly shot down the security guards that came out to meet them.
Once the guards were all dead, the commandos crashed through the front door of the mansion and its first-level windows as they began their search for the Ducha herself. But as soon as their search started, several of the commandos were gunned down not only by Lorangal's own security team, but also by the Hapan soldiers already stationed in various places around the house.
The entire confrontation between the rightful Hapan soldiers and these male anarchists took only ten minutes, which resulted in massive property damage, much to Lorangal's consternation as she watched the events unfold live on her datapad.
In the safety of her Battle Dragon, which hid behind Aldania from where the shuttle first arrived.
At least the male commandos were all defeated and killed in the end, though more of Lorangal's security force were killed than the soldiers secretly shipped in by the Queen Mother.
Once the battle inside her now-ruined mansion was all over, Lorangal decided to call up Djo on her commlink.
"Hello?' the Queen Mother's voice came through the frequency.
"Your Majesty, it is I, Ducha Lorangal," she said. "I give you my thanks once again for sending those soldiers of yours to my estate. They have been incredibly helpful in defeating the commandos that have stormed and ruined my mansion."
"Oh, so it was a commando attack," Djo said with a hint of disappointment. "I thought the Free Men would muster up more than that. It seems they still do not have the resources to pull off a full-scale attack on any Ducha yet."
"I owe you my life," Lorangal said.
"Nice try, Ducha," Djo said. "But those words will sound empty when you try to send over more assassins to try to eliminate myself and my daughter." The Queen Mother then signed off.
Lorangal only snorted, but thought no more of it before she dialed in Genenon's code.
"Did you get all the support you could get, my friend?" Lorangal asked once Genenon answered.
"I have," Genenon said. "Did you?"
"Yes," Lorangal said. "Shall we begin our search for the Free Men?"
"Let's," Genenon agreed with the hint of a smile.
With that, Lorangal signed off from her quick communication with her fellow Ducha to get the proverbial ball rolling.