Balancing himself against the ladder beneath Terephon's surface, Corran pushed up on what turned out to be a trapdoor and climbed out of the resultant hole. He waited for the Solos and their accompanying Hapan police officers to climb up out of the hole before the six of them looked around at the forest surrounding them.

"This must have taken months to have organized, at least," Corran observed as he looked back at the hole in the ground. "You'd think the Free Men would have been better organized in their assassinations if they could plan out something like this with no one knowing."

"There are soundless drills, you know, Corran," Han pointed out. Soundless drills that came from worlds like Coruscant, Dorvalla, and Chandrila could dig beneath the earth of a terrestrial world - so long as said planet's upper soils were soft enough to dig through - without making any kind of noise or even vibrations, thanks to their lasers.

"Yeah, but I mean, there should have been maintenance crews that would have noticed something like this in the time it took for the Free Men to create something like this," Corran countered. "And if the Free Men were able to have murdered any such crews in that time, wouldn't somebody notice?"

"Good point," Leia acceded. "And then the fugitives who came out from that hole no doubt escaped on a ship around here that took them out of the Terephon system."

"Well," Officer Bajak interceded, "now that we know how the fugitives most likely escaped, I'll update Captain Jono and let her know of this discovery." The cop then took out her commlink and activated it before she turned from her five accomplices to speak to her superior.

"So," Han said to those who weren't occupied with talking to Jono, "do we have to take the sewers back to the Ducha's place?"

Leia smirked at her husband's obvious disgust with the sewers that they just traveled. We'll all have to take nice long showers after this, she thought idly.

At that moment, however, she felt the arrival of several hundred presences in the Terephon system, all of whom had a dark intent in their auras. She looked at Corran to see if he got the same impression, and he wordlessly nodded to confirm her thoughts.

The two Jedi then looked up to the sky, and the sights of their four accomplices followed. There, all six of them found two Battle Dragons silhouetted against the skies of Terephon.

"That doesn't look good," Han commented dryly.

.

"Unbelievable," Jaina said.

"What?" Jag asked.

"The male servants escaped, and they didn't think to get rid of any recordings from this room?" Jaina asked.

Jag's eyebrows shot up in acknowledgement of his wife's statement. "Agreed. That is pretty stupid." He then followed her inside the room they just found.

The Fels, now split up from Ben and Tahiri in their search throughout the late Ducha Pollona's abandoned household, had just entered another room, and it was the vidcam room. All the viewscreens that would display images of the mansion's interiors were darkened, as they'd no doubt be by now. But perhaps they still had power to show the Fels the recordings of how the male servants of the mansion had escaped and killed Pollana.

Sure enough, they did, and Jaina and Jag watched as they watched the events of only a few days earlier play out before them. A male servant had apparently collapsed against the exterior of this very vidcam room, which prompted the two guards inside to come out and find out what was wrong with them. Unfortunately, the seemingly-unconscious servant had produced a vibroblade from each sleeve to each guard's throat, killing them both in an instant. Once the guards were down, the treacherous servant produced a commlink from his belt and said something into it.

Following that, male servants all throughout the rest of the house went about with tactical strikes throughout the house, dispatching each and every one of the guards in an incredibly efficient manner, unbecoming of lowly male servants that were the royal equivalent of slaves in the Hapes Consortium.

Once the rest of the guards, both in and out of the mansion, were all dead, chaos then reigned supreme for several minutes as the treacherous servants roamed about and destroyed and damaged the house, as if order itself had collapsed in the household. And it wasn't long, even in those few minutes, before Ducha Pollana was dragged into the middle of her dining room, where she was promptly stripped of her noble dress and her clothes and...

Jaina had to look away as the Ducha was violently gang-raped by her servants. Jag instinctively embraced his wife after she had turned away, to comfort her from the view of this tragedy.

From what he was seeing, as he watched that poor woman on one of the monitors cry and scream her lungs out from the violation of all these men she once ruled, Jag suddenly felt the same loathing for the Free Men that he got when he watched Ducha Lorangal's public broadcast.

The Duchas were bad, the Free Men were bad. Who could Jag route for in this conflict?

Once the gang-rape was over, and Pollana laid there on her stomach in pain, one of the men - who didn't take in the gang-bang - took a blaster to the back of the Ducha's head and pulled the trigger, completely dropping her form.

"It's over now, Jaina," Jag said, patting his wife's back in comfort. "It's over."

With that, just as Jag carefully turned his wife back to the viewscreens, the rest of the male servants turned and made their way out through the front exit of the estate. They followed their leader - who shot Pollana - up toward a distant mesa.

A little while later, all of the men had disappeared over the mesa's horizon, and a few more minutes later, an unidentified vessel rose from the distance to fly off into Ket's daylight skies.

"We should take the recordings," Jag suggested in an objective tone.

"We should," Jaina replied in a wavering tone.

It took the Fels a few minutes to collect the recordings of the events of that day and stuff them into Jaina's satchel before they left the room in silence.

Just when they turned in one direction down the hallway, Ben and Tahiri were right there.

"Did you guys find anything?" Ben asked.

The Fels nodded wordlessly.

Ben and Tahiri's expressions both stiffened.

"We're not gonna like what you have to bring to us, huh?" Tahiri inquired.

"Not one bit," Jaina remarked humorlessly.

Then all three Jedi froze in their places, and Jag looked between each of them worriedly.

"What's wrong?" he asked his wife.

"Several hundred presences just entered this system," Jaina answered.

The foursome then hurried over down the end of the hallway that the Fels were facing before they entered the living area. They then rushed over to the window to look out of it and upwards, where they spotted two Hapan Battle Dragons silhouetted against Ket's daytime sky.

.

From the daylight skies over Terephon, a Hapan military shuttle descended and landed right inside the estate of the late Ducha Tragon, several dozen meters away from the mansion itself. The cops in the immediate vicinity backed away from the shuttle as they eyed it.

Then both doors, from either side of the shuttle, opened up to discharge approximately two dozen armed Hapan soldiers, who spread out without a second's hesitation to cover the entire estate, from both inside the mansion and out. None of the soldiers interacted with the cops in any meaningful way beyond getting out of the others' way to begin whatever it was they were doing.

Seeing this, Captain Jono marched up toward the shuttle, which had discharged its last passenger, another soldier who bore the rank of commander over her breast pocket.

"Excuse me," Jono said to the commander, "can you please tell me who you are and why you're involving yourself in police business?"

"Captain Jono, is it?" the commander asked.

Jono nodded impatiently. "That's right."

"I'm Commander Penna," the soldier said as she flashed her ID from within her military jacket before promptly returning it to its place. "My soldiers and I are all here to commence an investigation regarding the death of Ducha Tragon."

"Well, in case you didn't already know, Commander," Jono replied, "my officers and I are already handling the matter."

"Ducha Genenon needs more assurance than that, Captain," Penna replied. "We'll be more than happy to aid your department in this investigation. But one way or another, we will be conducting this investigation ourselves."

Jono looked out to the soldiers in the area, who were already crouching at nearby areas that had already been investigated by her own officers. She then looked back at Penna. "Look, I'll save you and your soldiers the trouble, Commander. I just received a call from one of my officers who say that she and her accomplices have discovered the means of escape that the treacherous male servants took on the night they murdered Ducha Tragon. I have already dispatched a ride to return them to the estate from their current location."

"That's great, Captain," Penna said in a tone that conveyed the sense that she didn't really care. "And while that does fulfill one aspect of our investigative parameters, we still need to know what exactly went down."

"We're still trying to discover that," Jono replied. "The escapees were smart enough to have destroyed all of the estate's vidcam recordings before they left, apparently. So we're still trying to find out just what went down. We can tell you what we've uncovered so far to aid in your own investigation, save you the time."

"That would save me the time," Penna acceded.

"But first, before either my forces or myself can divulge what information we have uncovered, I'm first going to need to see your own investigative warrant," Jono said.

"That won't be necessary," Penna said in a straightforward tone.

Jono looked at the commander in both confusion and suspicion. "What do you mean? That's standard issue in all areas of both the military and the local police forces on all the Consortium's worlds-"

"You don't need to remind me of that, Captain," Penna replied.

"Well, apparently, I do, because neither you or your forces are cooperating-"

Jono was cut off from the sound of a muffled blaster shot. The police captain looked down to her stomach, where she felt the abrupt, intense pain come from, and she saw the cauterized blaster wound there.

With what energy she could muster, she looked back up at Penna in shock, though unable to even shape her expression to one of betrayal and confusion.

"Our search isn't documented in any way, Captain," Penna said.

Then the commander quickly shifted and aimed her blaster elsewhere to another cop just as a firefight between her own forces and the forces of the now-late Captain Jono's erupted. Jono herself keeled over and died from the fatal injury that she sustained.

.

Leia sat in the front passenger seat of one of the two police cruisers sent to pick her and her five accomplices from the forest that was relatively nearby the owner-less Ducha estate. In the backseat, where prisoners were seated with stuncuffs, were Han and Corran, while the three officers who accompanied them rode in the second cruiser.

None of the non-Hapans in the six-person party said anything about placing the men, one of whom was superior in rank to Leia, where captives were usually placed. While it was an unsubtle form of sexism against them, it was still pointless to bring it up, and even Han knew that it would only make things worse. It wasn't as if there was enough conflict concerning men going on in the Consortium right now.

However, all that was pushed to the back of everyone's minds, Leia figured, as soon as the cruisers pulled up on the Ducha's estate, where a firefight was currently in progress.

"All three of you, stay here!" the driver of the cruiser that Leia and the men were in commanded them. She then took off her safety harness and rushed out of the vehicle to join her four colleagues as they hurried to the open gate of the estate, bearing their standard-issue hand-blasters in the process.

"Can you help us outta here?" Han asked his wife wryly.

Leia wordlessly pressed the button the cruiser's console that opened up the back-doors of the cruiser, allowing Han and Corran to exit the police landspeeder and join their female counterpart as they hurried to the gate.

"So, who do we help?" Han asked as the trio headed to the gate, the enemies of the cops - those being Hapan soldiers - easily identifiable at this range now.

"The police," Leia answered curtly. "They were at least somewhat nice to us." Her answer was as wry as her husband's typical responses and remarks.

A few seconds later, the non-Hapan trio entered the gate, with Leia and Corran brandishing and activating their lightsabers to block off incoming laser bolts, both stray and intentional, from hitting them. Han, meanwhile, smartly hid behind his wife as he brandished his own classic blaster and began taking shots on the soldiers around them. Whatever soldiers who didn't fall to either the ricocheted shots from the Jedi's blades or the blades themselves were gunned down by either Han or the cops who continued to live in the battle.

After only a minute of this process, when it seemed as if the battle would end in favor of the cops and their three non-Hapan allies, several soldiers burst forth from the Ducha's house, either through the front door or the first-floor windows. They had come out, no doubt, to help their comrades on the outside against their enemies, but they contributed little, for if they weren't mowed down by the cops who fired from within the mansion, they were still just as easily cut down or had their lasers ricocheted back against them by Leia and Corran.

Soon, the last of the Hapan soldiers had been downed, either dead or seriously injured. About less than two dozen cops around the estate had survived, including the ones from inside, who had all come out to see the outcome of the battle outside.

Seeing that the battle was now over, the two Jedi deactivated their lightsabers and replaced them at their belts, while Han did the same for his blaster.

"Well, let's see if we can sort out this mess," Corran said as he walked over to one of the cops who were no doubt in the battle since its inception. "What happened?" he asked her.

"Wouldn't you like to know, male Jedi?" the cop replied with contempt and grief for the deaths of her friends and colleagues.

"This is no time for anti-Jediism or sexism right now," Corran said curtly. "And as insensitive as it is for a Jedi like myself to say this, you have to grieve for your friends later. Right now, I want answers. What happened here?"

Another cop approached the one who Corran was questioning from off to her side and consoled her with a hug as her colleague began crying.

"The commander of these soldiers, right over there," the cop who consoled her sobbing colleague said as she pointed to one of the seriously injured Hapan soldiers, "had just shot and killed Captain Jono, and then started this firefight against us for no reason. Now leave us alone, Jedi man." She said those last two words with spite.

"Thank you," Corran replied professionally, then turned away to approach the injured Hapan commander.

He bent down to inspect her wounds. She had received several hits around non-fatal areas of her body, such as her legs and arms, but she was lucky - relatively speaking - not to have received any against her torso or head. She was still, surprisingly, conscious in spite of her wounds and groaning from the pain. Corran hoped that she would last long enough for him to interrogate her, Leia knew.

The Jedi Master grabbed the soldier by the collar of her uniform and pulled her close. "Why did you do this? You will answer me." He put the power of the Force behind his words as he attempted to use a Jedi mind-trick on the commander.

The soldier narrowed her eyes on Corran and shot him a spiteful smile. "Go kriff yourself, you stupid sack of Jedi male poodoo," she practically spat.

Corran rolled his eyes in annoyance. He turned back to Han and Leia, who were standing a few meters behind him. "I hope you guys don't mind if I turn Sith for a few moments to torture the information out of her, do you?"

"That's not funny, Corran," Leia said in a matter-of-fact tone.

"I know," he said in a downtrodden manner.

"Still, we can use drugs on her," Han said. "Not only to help treat her wounds, but figure out why she did all this."

"I'd rather die before I helped any of you!" the commander shouted.

"Yeah, yeah, we heard all that before," Han said in a completely uninterested tone. He looked off to one of the cops out around the estate, who were all surveying their dead comrades and opponents. "Hey, do you think we can get this one some medical treatment so we can find out why the commander of this group did all this?"

All of the cops who heard this hesitated, given that it was Han who said it, but they all nodded in agreement and rushed to the commander in a seemingly-hive-minded conglomeration to, ironically, help her.