Chapter 14

Olin had ended up going alone. For one, the contact he had couldn't know that he now had company, but not only were Bothans simply too rare on this world for Master Hudorra not to be noticed, and Noirah insisted that he not be left by himself. It all fit together with what he would have done had he not run into the odd pair.

His path took him from where the shuttle had landed and where his new friends had stayed aboard to the trading post itself. After spending a day in the capital getting a new, and expertly forged set of papers to complement the story they'd cooked up, and that now told everyone that Noirah was his niece and Hudorra his father's old secretary, they had flown the shuttle to the trading post on the far side of the planet. Olin expected to be back in a few hours either way, but if his contact hadn't started breaking his habits, then he would still be fairly close and more than willing to talk between drinks.

As he walked the streets of the comparatively small town, it has less than a hundred-thousand inhabitants, he realized that leaving the Master and his Padawan behind had been good sense. A single more trader didn't stand out, but the stormtroopers were stopping anyone even the least bit suspicious. He knew that the official story was that a Rebel cell hereabouts had attacked the transport of the Sector Moff, unsuccessfully, but with enough collateral damage to ensure that the Empire had to be seen doing something about it. It had all the obvious consequences of the populace, which shuffled about through the town far more subdued than he remembered. He was fairly sure that the Imperial hold would relax somewhat eventually, but it would never again be as relaxed as it had been. While this would create some resentment towards the Rebels as the Moff hoped without a doubt, it would push far more people into active resistance in the long run.

Yet... as Olin cornered the block of houses and came into the street that held his contact's favourite watering hole, he could see something that let his heart freeze. In front of his eyes, even as he darted back around the corner with a few steps, a squad of stormtroopers was hauling everyone in the cantina, including his contact out and onto a Military Police speeder.

He had retreated behind the corner as soon as he had seen them, but it was too late, as he had hesitated for a fraction of a second too long.

"Halt! Surrender!" came the voice of an Imperial officer through the loudspeaker mounted on the roof of the speeder. Olin didn't bother hanging around to find out if they meant him but instead took off down the street. Sure enough, he could hear the sound of a speeder coming after him, and as fast as he might be, on foot there was no chance to shake them in this one. Luckily for him, the locals had structured their town very oddly, in that it was partitioned into massive 'blocks' that each held, nominally at least, up to a thousand house holds, with an overhead magrail and elevator system providing access to every one of them, while the ground streets were little more than a honeycomb of narrow access ways and rarely used by anyone who lived here. Olin took off into the nearest one of them, knowing that the speeder might hover overhead, but if they really wanted to catch him, they would have to disembark.

Once more, he was proven correct, as the blaster bolt missed him by millimetres and instead impacted in the wall behind his head.

He kept running, knowing that they would be after him in seconds. On the other side of this block there would be a thoroughfare, the main road connection between this town and the capital, so maybe he could hitch a ride, double back a bit and then come in from the other end of town near the shuttle before making the quickest getaway in the so far short history of this Rebellion.

Unfortunately, the guy commanding this particular unit was sharp. Olin could see the speeder flying overhead, probably to deposit some more stormies up ahead and to give them all a bird's eye view of the chase. He figured he was maybe two or three hundred metres away from the road, so time to even the odds if he wanted to reach it. Sure enough, upon reaching one of the many small courtyards, this one covered by some sort of plant and lit up by a complex system of mirrors funelling in light from the roofs thirty storeys above, a second group of stormies appeared up ahead and began to fire. Had he not ducked behind a flower bed, the bolts would have riddled him. He returned fire, more to keep their heads down than for anything else and dashed over to the next door. He reached it, it closed, he shot out the door control panel even as blaster shots impacted in it. The door held, but he could feel the heat from where he was standing, so it wouldn't do so for long.

Ignoring the shocked bystanders and the elevator, Olin ran up the stairs with all the force-enhanced speed he could muster, so by the time the Imperials breached the door and arrested everyone in sight, he was already five stories up and kept going. Unfortunately for him, this one turned out to be one of the few buildings with a shuttle pad on it's roof and therefore lacked access to the magrail system. He lost precious seconds trying to decide what do, and by then the stormtroopers, using the elevator, had caught up.

"There he is! Blast him!"

Olin took cover behind a ventilation duct and a fierce, if somewhat one-sided firefight began. Olin knew that he was fast running out of time. Not only because they wouldn't remain in cover behind the rest of the roof's adornments of infrastructure for very long, but also because in six hours, Master Hudorra would take the shuttle and continue to trawl the Outer Rim for clues with only his taciturn Padawan for company. Time to do something a bit more pro-active, he decided and risked a glance around his cover. The stormies had taken cover behind air ducts and what not, except for one...

He was out in the open, about to throw a grenade.

Olin remembered that one thing about the clones was that they were strong of mind, something they had inherited from their template, but that didn't mean the Force was useless. Instead of force-suggesting anything, he instead reached out, pulled the grenade from the man's hand and tossed it among the group. Even before it exploded, he leapt up, rushing towards their position, and as the fragmentation grenade exploded, sending splinters everywhere. Of the six troopers that had followed him to the roof, three were dead, soon joined by the original owner of the grenade as Olin shot him as he rushed their position. Another bolt destroyed the control panel of the elevator just as it began to open, cutting off any reinforcements for his enemies. The the remaining two were wounded, so merely kicked away their weapons and then ran towards the edge of the roof. Behind him he could hear the speeder approach, so he ignored the depth of the gulf and leapt over to the next building and the next and the next, using the Force to enhance his speed and the width he could jump.

Between those two abilities, he managed to keep enough of a lead by the time he reached the covered roadway that he managed to slip down on it and into a maintenance hatch without them seeing exactly where he was going. It wouldn't keep them back at all when they scanned it, but it gave him those precious few seconds he needed to crawl forward towards the interchange and open yet another hatch. There he dropped on the back of a delivery speeder. It was a long fall, and by the time he awoke, the speeder, it's pilot unaware of the new passenger, had parked it near a large hotel complex back in the capital.

It took him a few minutes to shake off the daze he was in, and when he checked his Chrono, he cursed. Olin had been asleep, knocked out cold, what have you for almost four hours, and he was pressed for time. The area he was in was the utilitarian sort of duracrete box that comprised the behind the scenes in any sort of public establishment. A short distance away was a loading bay where a few utility droids were unloading several supply speeders, and he managed to get off his transport without being spotted. Hardly difficult since this sort of droid only had enough programming to fetch freight pallets and avoid running into anything while they did so. Any surveillance systems would be remote camera pickups and the like. Still, he didn't trigger any alarm.

When he came across a doorway that led out of this part of the facility, he noticed that it was shielded against both blasters and sensors, as well as with a very elaborate alarm system. It wasn't particularly difficult to defeat, it only took precious time. His door-breaking gear was hidden in the same pouch where he hid his sabre, and he carried the weapon under one arm while he worked on the door.

The mechanism was eventually defeated after Olin had spent precious minutes tracing the wires of the various fall-back and trap circuits in the lock. Without putting the sabre back into it's place, he walked forward. The door led to the VIP parking section, with the loading bay serving as an emergency fire exit. Olin selected a speeder to steal, one that was parked reasonably far away from any entrances he could see and also had a pillar giving him a measure of cover as he crouched under it and tried to hotwire it. In the past, that had always been more Skywalker's thing, he mused. He chased the unbidden and unwanted thought away, and concentrated on the task at hand, but a small part of him did wonder if his old.. rival..whatever, had survived the purge.

He was so concentrated on the task that he did not sense the approach of the vehicle's owner. What helped was that the owner was absolutely non-threatening, be it because he believed that Olin might be hotel staff and/or just picking up something that had fallen down and rolled under the speeder.

"I don't think that is your vehicle, Mister."

Olin was utterly and completely freaked out, and without thinking, he rose, jumped over the speeder to confront and ignited his sabre. He cursed himself for revealing his status as a (former) Jedi, but he knew that he likely would not be betrayed by this person. He only knew him through holovids and by reputation, but this was clearly Senator Bail Organa of Alderaan. He had always been a friend to the Jedi, but at one point the same had been said about Palpatine. So instead of attacking or running away, Olin kept up his guard position and the sabre lit.

"What's that to you?" he said, giving no indication that he had recognized the other man. "You want to go back to the restaurant and have a second breakfast."

"I do not, and well, it's still mine. And as a Jedi, you have enough things to get the Empire on your trail." Bail replied and smiled thinly. "But not from me."

Nothing changed as both men stared each other down for a while. In the end it was the Senator who decided to make the first step.

"I am Senator Bail Organa of Alderaan, and I have been trying to make contact with you."

Olin shut off the sabre. He tilted his head, as if trying to decide what to say. He knew that Organa had been a good friend and supporter of the Order just as much as the late Senator Amidala. Yet Olin was by now so conditioned towards not trusting anyone, especially not someone from this high in the Imperial hierarchy.

"Then I'm sorry to disappoint you, Senator. I don't know where the Jedi are any more than you do, apparently."

The Senator's disappointment was obvious. "Then, that would have been too easy, wouldn't it?" He shook his head with a wry smile.

"I would ask you to tell me what you know, but if we consider what happened since the Order... left... Coruscant, it's hardly surprising. Though know this Jedi Knight, there are many in the Senate who aren't any happier than you are about those events. They, as I, mourn for the Republic. But at the moment -"

"The Emperor has all the ships and blasters in the galaxy." Olin interrupted. "Still, I am merely a former Jedi, and I hadn't been with the Order for years when the Purge began. I truly cannot help you, Senator Organa."

The 'even if I wanted to' was left unsaid, but by the face he was making, the Alderaani had heard it well enough, even though he was surprised that he had run into someone who had left the Order before the purge, something that he had thought to be impossible.

"I see I need to convince you to trust me. Some will have my head for this, but very well. So, this all began..."

Bail went on to describe the two-thousand and the laughable efforts they'd made in the last year. Oh he knew for a fact that there was much discontent, especially on the Rim where Palpatine's methods were under far less scrutiny. Bail doubted that one in a hundred citizens in the Core had ever heard of something called Base Delta Zero for example. That sort of thing was bad enough as was, and never be politically possible closer to the core. He left nothing out except names and disguising locations in such a way that Olin could infer it was nothing personal and as much for his own security as for that of the dissidents within the Senate.

However, when Bail reached the tale of his so far fruitless search for the Jedi, he left out certain parts of the tale that were not his to tell, the wisdom of that was reinforce when he saw what had to be at least mild dislike flash over Olin's face when he had mentioned Skywalker's name. The Hero With No Fear had supposedly been seen on a hundred different worlds, and Bail had spent most of the last week hunting down some of the more plausible sightings before coming here.

"So that's where I stand." he said after concluding his tale. "We have a common goal, and I have a ship that would be at your disposal."

Olin sensed no deception, even though he had a fairly strong hunch that for a non-Force user, the Senator's mental defences were strong, and he certainly wasn't weak minded. And yet, he was not just speaking for himself. Were he alone... the Master would need to know about this first. At the same time it wouldn't do to tell Organa about the others at this point.

"Well, I cannot decide this yet. For the moment I still need transportation back to where I came from."

"And where is that?"

"I had some... Imperial entanglements in The Trade City a few hours ago, and... for reasons of my own I need to get back there as soon as possible."

"It seems that our goals converge even more. I will take you." Organa replied in a voice that allowed no give.

Bail stepped through the hatch onto the Tantive IV and was greeted by Captain Antilles. The Senator's message via the encrypted comm unit had been.. well, cryptic enough to make the Captain worry. When he saw the Senator arrive alone and unharmed, he was both worried and relieved.

"Sir, your message..." he said by way of a greeting, but Bail waved him off.

"Don't worry, Captain. If my hunch is right, we will have a few additional passengers soon. Have some of the VIP cabins prepared and instruct the crew that they are to see nothing. Am I clear?"

Antilles nodded. "Yes, Sir. Perfectly."

"Hmm. Then see to your duties, Captain." There was a promise for at least some sort of explanation in the Senator's voice, so Antilles went and did as he was told without further questions. In all likelyhood, the Senator had found at least some of the information he was looking for, and in exchange had offered someone transportation off-world. He knew better than to speculate openly, but in the back of his mind he could not help but wonder. But as a diplomatic ship, they had seen their share of things they were meant to forget or not see in the first place, so he stopped and had the quarters prepared.

Two and a half hours later, the ship's comm system picked up a short, three second burst transmission on a rarely used Organa Family channel not containing any words but only a pre-arranged series of timed clicks that might be mistaken for static by anyone listening in. Bail had been monitoring it himself, so he was awaiting his guests near the entry hatch when they arrived.

Olin was first through the hatch, followed by a female human maybe around seventeen standard years old and a middleaged Bothan, who was identified as Jedi Master Hudorra when introductions were exchanged. When his new Jedi guests had settled into their cabins, Bail invited them into the small conference room near the bridge. They arrived in one group, the Padawan with one hand on the hilt of her sabre as if she expected to be betrayed. The others seemed fine, but Master Hudorra was acutely uncomfortable, even though none of the Alderaani crew showed the distaste for non-humans that was the Imperial party line.

As ordered, the crew had treated all the Jedi, former and current, with the utmost respect, and it had begun to thaw some of the ice, at least with two of them. The woman whom Organa presumed to be a Padawan not too far from her knighting, she still looked at everyone as if calculating how to kill them with the least fuzz and attention. They settled into their seats and took the refreshments that were offered.

"Shall we begin by sharing what we know?" Bail asked, and in order to reaffirm that they could trust them, he decided he would be first again. "For me, this all began like this..."

tbc

So, not happy with this, but that's what you get when you write something with less of a plan than usual and over three weeks.