"Should we have Master Yoda here for this?" Garm had led them to the lounge before stopping just short of the entrance. "He was a general after all."

Luke glanced at Mara, who was unreadable. "We can ask him."

"What is he doing here anyway? Shouldn't he be fighting the Empire like you two?" Garm's intense curiosity wasn't audible or visible, but in the Force it was painfully obvious.

"He's tired." It wasn't the best defense Luke could muster for the old master, but to a degree he shared the admiral's thoughts. He was coming to learn that the Jedi's reluctance to get involved was more justified than Garm could easily understand. As he spent more time with Yoda he could feel the death of the old order echoing around him, constantly reminding Yoda of his failures. It made him wonder if Yoda had still felt the same way when he trained him, and he just hadn't been capable of perceiving it. "He's had a long life, and much of what he spent it on is gone."

"Yet more time I have to spend, I think." Yoda's cane tapped along the corridor, and Luke had a hard time seeing him in the Fire. Intellectually he knew that Yoda had once walked with the leaders of the galaxy, but so much of how he saw him was based on their first meeting. To him Yoda was a creature of the swamps and the Force, not the pristine halls of Mara's starship. He was pretty sure she'd set the cleaning droids on triple rotation, the floors shined so brightly. "Your tactics, about them I have my doubts, yet your goal I must support."

The Jedi shuffled past them, before taking a footstool as his seat. So much of the galaxy was designed for humanoids that it was still occasionally surprised Luke to see how beings with other shapes fit into it. "Young Mara and I have spoken. Her future, and that of others like her, must be protected. Sidious must be defeated." For a moment Yoda let them feel his uncertainty, but this time it was shot through with resolve. "Admiral Bel Iblis, years in exile have not improved my manners. I remember your actions guarding the Corellian Run, few could have done as well."

The compliment put him Garm on the back foot, but he quickly recovered. "Thank you, General Yoda."

"No need for the title, that one I've never desired nor deserved."

"We'll have to agree to disagree on that, general." The interplay revitalized him, and the admiral strode to the holoprojector and flipped it on. "I've been thinking about this for some time, ever since our little zoological adventure and I think it's starting to come together."

Luke didn't recognize the crest hanging in midair, but from Mara's snort she clearly did.

"Mandalorians? Seriously?"

Garm shook his head, but he didn't look surprised by the challenge. "No, even if they weren't crazy they broke themselves with their constant infighting. Look closer, this is the heraldry of the Neutral Systems."

"What use will a bunch of pacifists be?"

"They weren't all pacifists." Garm switched to a map and highlighted a dense blob of stars. "Some were just opportunistic, and that's who we need."

"If the Republic or Separatists couldn't buy them what chance do we have?" Luke hadn't been to any of the places Garm had picked out, the Outer Rim was enormous, but there were commonalities among its polities. Without the general prosperity and rule of law of the inner galaxy systems tended to be controlled by a single powerful entity. During the Clone Wars it would have been cheaper and easier to buy the rulers than to subjugate them, but what was cheap for a galactic government was still impossibly beyond their means.

"We're not getting them, we're just taking their stuff." Garm zoomed in to show a small cluster with tactical readouts popping up next to each star. It showed a formidable fleet, except that the icons all indicated the ships were damaged.

"At the start of the war the Separatists had ships to burn as they replaced their fleets. The initial Lucrehulks were just modified freighters, guns and armor bolted onto commercial hulls. They were powerful, but vulnerable thanks to compromises in their designs. Those were rectified, but they still had hundreds of old ones that it didn't make sense to upgrade. They used them as bribes."

The map changed again to show a single system with three of the massive ring-shaped ships orbiting an airless planetoid.

"Unfortunately, they weren't quite enough to persuade the people of Gerson to join up with them, and at that point the Confederacy was still trying to hold the moral high ground. They probably planned to get their revenge at some point, but well, they lost and those battleships have been there ever since."

"How are we supposed to steal them then? We're good, but I don't know if we're that good." Mara voiced Luke's objection. He didn't doubt that they could destroy the ships, but even heavily automated ones would have hundreds of people on board, any of whom could alert other ships or the Imperial Navy before they could get away.

"Shut down they are. No crews walk their halls." Yoda didn't move from his stool, but the hologram changed as he adjusted its focus with the Force. "The Master Control Signal would have still functioned."

Garm was nodding as he spoke. "Exactly Master Yoda. They're inert, empty, and entirely intact. No bombs or tripwire forces, just a cash strapped world that's too proud to scrap or sell the last remnant of their brief relevance."

"So we board them, boot them up, and just fly away? It will still take hours, maybe even days." The research they'd done the first time they'd thought about stealing Separatist ships was coming back to him. "They'd have to be pretty blind to not notice that."

Garm grinned, but it was closer to an apex predator baring its teeth than normal levity. "Or distracted." The ship vanished, to be replaced by a large compound with neat streets between simple buildings. "Gerson's economy is primarily driven by its mineral wealth, they mine a wide variety of minerals and ores, but the relevant one is ionite."

He could almost feel Mara's sudden understanding. "They've got prisoners mining it for them then, that's a work camp."

"And the prisoners are mostly former Separatists." Garm cracked his knuckles as he got to the heart of his plan, clearly enjoying explaining himself. "I hope you two don't mind a little repetition, but if you bust open that installation I guarantee that no one at all will be watching when we wander off with a few battleships in our pocket."

Luke gave the camp another look, eying it with the experience of a hundred similar raids. "It could work."

Mara's fierce expression was a match for Garm's. "With the talent for mayhem you've got Farmboy? It will."

"The prisoners, what will you do with them?" Yoda's questions preempted Luke's retort.

Garm didn't hesitate "Leave them. There's only three of us, we don't have the resources to help them."

"Four you shall have." Yoda seemed to grow, the slump that had been a constant vanished from his shoulders. "The war, part of the fault is mine. Too long have I been content to react and wait. No more."

Garm couldn't keep some skepticism from his voice. "Well we're of course happy to have you, but there's at least ten thousand in that camp."

Yoda's ear twitched in response. "Eight hundred years I have been a Jedi. This prison break is not my first. I shall take care of their escape."

"How? Ships big enough to carry that many people aren't easy to find."

"Regrettably, that is incorrect. In the outer rim there are many ships built only to carry living cargo, and I trust there will be no objection to claiming some for our own purposes."

Luke couldn't help but remember what Mara had told him about his father, that he'd hated slavers. "None from me at least."

Garm accepted the adjustment to the plan with grace. "We'll need other things too, astromechs first among them. From my math we'll need at least four days of uninterrupted time on the ships before we're even ready to start overt preparations. After that we'll have to kick the reactors on and we'll need the distraction to be in full effect at that point."

"Good droids are expensive; how many will we need?" If only they'd had Artoo along, Luke didn't think it would take his droid four days.

Garm shrugged, for the first time not entirely sure of himself. "Less than a hundred per ship I think." A flowchart showing the dependencies and work hours needed appeared, but there were more question marks than Luke would like on the timescales. "They'll be able to activate the Lucrehulk's own complement eventually, but a lot needs to be done in advance so that we're ready to get going as soon as possible. I'd like you all to look over the plans, to make sure there's nothing I missed."

"We'll have time, if we're getting a few hundred droids we'll need credits." Mara's voice was brisk, she was already planning their next steps. "And conveniently there's a going to be an awful lot of them sitting in a casino vault very soon. I hope you're all as sick as the damp as I am, because where we're headed there hasn't been surface water in two thousand years."