A/N: Been a decent couple months - I've had good reason though, so don't worry. Longer life update at the end of the chapter. I'd suggest reading the last chapter to reorient ourselves with where we are in the story, but here's an arc summary.
Summary of the arc so far:
Obi-Wan has been a slave for close to a year now, under Gardulla the Hutt, an elder of the Hutt clan and Nal Hutta's criminal circles. Anakin is a bubbly eleven-month old thanks to the efforts of Shmi and Obi-Wan, but Obi-Wan is determined to prevent Anakin from ever having to take the slave-chip; he planned to contact the Jedi Temple by breaking into Gardulla's security centre, but the plan went horribly awry. Unbeknownst to Obi-Wan, an Alderaani intelligence operative recognised him in Gardulla's household; Alderaan was duly informed and Bail Organa took the intelligence to Huei Tori and the Jedi Order. Obi-Wan, wracked with guilt over the consequences of his failed attempt at escape, is serving an arms dealer in Gardulla's presence when he looks up and finds that the arms dealer none other than Qui-Gon Jinn; his master has come for him at last. Qui-Gon's first attempt at rescue is abandoned when Obi-Wan refuses to leave with Shmi and Anakin. Meanwhile, the Republic has abandoned Stewjon; Stewjon, Alderaan, Corellia, and Naboo declare war on the Hutts to retrieve Obi-Wan the thousands of republic citizens sold into slavery there, all without Republic aid. Qui-Gon decides for an all-or-nothing raid on Gardulla's estate; Tahl and Feemor have no choice but to follow his foolhardy plan. Separated from Obi-Wan, Anakin senses something terrible is coming for him and Shmi and cries out for his Obee...
Music for this chapter: Hostage - Nima Fakhara (Detroit Become Human)
Of the hundreds of thousands of populated systems in Republic space, the Rettna system holds a rather inconsequential position. A pair of industrial planets locked constantly in the cold war of a millennia-long arms race – two specks of lightless civilization in the cold wastes of the Esaga sector, flung out beyond true Republic governance in the Mid Rim, where the desolate edge of the Republic borders with the well-patrolled systems of Hutt Space.
The system sensors certainly have never registered anything more interesting than the odd cargo transport in the past half-millenia – that is, until thirteen military fleets drop out of hyperspace a mere quarter-parsec from the twin planets' suddenly-shrieking planetary defense systems.
A moment, in which every stratosphere-level sensor console on Rett I and II lights up like a Republic day fireworks display, wailing klaxons as their (fortunately pre-informed) security personnel scramble to deactivate the cacophony.
On the surface of Rett I, the Jante people point towards their sun, eclipsed now by dozens of sharp-cut silhouettes trailing comet trails of tibanna as they pass between the planet and its primary star. Continent-sized shadows slide across the silver surface of the planet itself, each the much-magnified outline of star destroyer, battle cruiser, and the distinctive bows of hammerhead corvettes.
Stewjon. Alderaan. Corellia. Naboo.
Thirteen fleets amassed between them, and all to answer the call of one young Jedi.
And yet, at this moment, the young Jedi does not know they have come.
(:~:)
Obi-Wan wakes to the icy, gut-wrenching knowledge that something is wrong.
He spasms awake in the complete darkness of the cellar, cold stone floor under his fingertips, and gasps in a breath: the wheeze of air through vocal cords that will not move under his will.
The Force has shown him danger oftentimes enough – a shriek of warning preceding the white-hot plasma of a blaster bolt, or the vague feeling of foreboding behind a locked door.
But this–
This is the Force screaming, screaming, one long, drawn out note of sheer dread that smashes through his mental shields, shrieking over and over to MOVE NOW MOVE NOW MOVE–
The chains at Obi-Wan's wrists and ankles scrape at his skin as he scrambles to find footing, flinging himself towards the door. The durasteel thuds hard and unyielding under his shoulder, and he bites back a silent scream – that had been his injured shoulder, Sith take it. A mistake that even the most junior of initiates could have avoided, and a worrying thing at that – how numb is he from cold that he has forgotten his injuries?
Down he slips, aching head sliding against the rough grain of rusted durasteel, his breath coming in ragged gulps.
The lash of an activated vibrowhip against the opposite side of the door, shuddering through the pounding of his headache and the spear of agony in his left shoulder.
"Quiet, brat!" comes the hissing snarl of a Trandoshan overseer.
Forehead pressed to icy durasteel, Obi-Wan grits his teeth against the taste of old blood and bile. Blind he may be in this complete darkness, but here in the cold shadow with only the dried blood itching on his face and the pitted durasteel of the door under his skin, the Force echoes bright and clear.
It occurs to him with a detached sort of wonder that this must be what it is like for Huei every waking moment.
And then far, far away beyond the canyons and light-bridges of the Force, a child's desperate cry.
Obee!
Anakin.
Obi-Wan stills.
An inhale, in which he breathes in the galaxy and breathes out starfire.
The door – a full handspan thick of durasteel – rips itself off its settings and catapults into the far wall of the corridor. The all-consuming groan of tortured metal and sparking iron magnifies tenfold the fear in the Trandoshan overseer's face as he stares up at the young man with the burning eyes.
"The north corridors," the overseer gulps at the unspoken question in that ice-blue gaze, his own forked tongue rasping skittishly over pointed teeth. He proffers the key-chip to the young man's bindings, scaled fingers shaking, and flinches at the click and clatter of manacles against the stone floor.
Worn nerf-hide boots step over him and down the corridor, silently, and pass like a wraith onwards, a ragged, limping form, nonetheless ablaze with power.
The overseer cringes as the young man passes, like a moth curling back from sudden flame – and even afterwards, in the renewed chill of the corridor, does not dare to move.
(:~:)
"This is the captain speaking. All personnel: T-minus five to realspace. Beat to battle stations."
The announcement echoes across the cargo hangar as the Service Corps crewman weaves between shadowed crates. It is cool and dark here; the crewman navigates only by a handheld light and the faint blue glow that shimmers from the energy field separating the hangar from hard vacuum.
The corpsman turns to go, seemingly satisfied with his inspection. This is a small supply ship among a fleet designed for war. A supportive presence behind the front lines and nothing more.
If the corpsman had spared another few moments, he might have spotted a curved white peak just barely edging above the furthest storage crate – a white peak with gold stripes, that even now rises above the crate itself to be joined by an identical peak above an orange-skinned face edged with white markings.
Ezhno peers carefully over the crate, quite unaware that his attempt to hide had very nearly proved disastrous. His montrals have matured into twin, magnificent, gold-white peaks over the past year, but there are times that he forgets that he now stands quite close to a full two metres tall and cannot hide as efficiently as his younger days.
Unable to hear the crewman's footsteps, he had simply waited until the pool of light melted away, and now flicks quick brown eyes over the stillness of the cargo hold, heart still galloping wildly in his chest. There had been no warning, earlier – one moment cool darkness, and the next the blinding luminance of the corpsman's hand-light against the wall of the hold.
The air is still.
Ezhno slides carefully back down against the crate, and breathes shallowly.
He is quite aware he is being, for the lack of a better word, stupid.
Ezhno knows there is no place for a non-combatant in a war zone – Obi-Wan had explained that to him, in fifteen minutes' worth of quiet writing, after Ventrux. Huei had emphasized the point a little while after that by trouncing Ezhno quite soundly in hand-to-hand combat in two seconds flat, despite not being able to see him. That was Jedi for you.
But it had been Mace Windu, in the smooth, soft white rooms of the healers' wing of the Temple after Ezhno's brush with death at the hands of Xanatos DuCrion, who pushed the point home.
Mace had come to sit at Ezhno's bedside that first long night after the explosion on the Senate Boulevard and the news that Obi-Wan was all-too-likely lost to lifelong slavery. He had reached out a hand in an uncharacteristic display of care to hold Ezhno's shoulder steady, and Ezhno's stomach had dropped.
Speaking slowly and gravely enough so that Ezhno could read the words even through his exhaustion, Mace had explained exactly what Ezhno had done, and the folly of it.
Ezhno had – despite having no combat training, no resources, and absolutely no sanctioned orders – sought the Cruorven alone. This had indirectly led to a kilogram of condensed tibanna strapped to his waist and the permanent etching of a howling sarlaac on the back of his wrist – the mark of the Cruorven, blood brothers to overthrow he Repbulic.
Huei had all but flown across Coruscant on foot to bring the key that would save Ezhno's life. In doing so he left Obi-Wan behind alone, to face a fallen Jedi Obi-Wan had no hope of defeating single-handedly.
It had not been Ezhno's fault that Xanatos DuCrion had turned him into a living bomb.
But it had been folly to seek him out in the first place.
Ezhno shuts his eyes tight against the burn of shame. The shudder of the cargo transport's hyperspace drive trembles up his fingers as the world flashes white beyond his eyelids – the otherworldly lights of hyperspace.
And it is folly now to come here; a desperate stowaway on a ship that will not even be in the thick of the fighting, simply so he will be where his friends are when they lay down their lives to save their last, long-missed friend – Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Ezhno, who can hack a security system in moments but cannot wield a vibroblade for his own life. Who had taken one glance at the message Huei had left him, as the Jedi starfighter corps blasted out to hyperspace, and sprinted three levels down to the Temple's Eastern hangar to stowaway in the cargo hold of the last departing transport with nothing but the clothes on his back.
What do you even plan to do? Master Windu would say if he were here.
I don't know, Ezhno thinks as he presses the heels of his hands to his brow. I don't know, Master.
He had simply not wanted to be left behind.
The light beyond his closed eyes slips away as the ship drops out of hyperspace. Ezhno lowers his hands from his face, blinking owlishly at the curtain of stars a mere second before the First Stewjon Defense Fleet flashes into being as one – battle cruisers with assisting hammerhead corvettes already undocking from their ventral tractor beams to guard their mother ships' flanks; medical frigates, strung high and behind the line of capital ships, each stacked precisely two kilometers above their respective battle carriers to avoid the worst of flanking fire; supply sloops, thin-armoured, weak-gunned, but fast, hovering between the front line and the rear, ready to ferry wounded and supplies alike.
Below them the Hutt fleet lies in wait, every ship a different make, but all bristling with turbolaser cannons already glowing with the fumes of warmed tibanna.
Below, the gargantuan, curved plane of a planet surface: wreathed in bilious clouds of yellow smoke and industrial gases, green and yellow-tinged as though the surface itself is one huge, variegated bruise.
Nal Hutta.
And beyond, further and farther along the planet's equator, the Second Corellian fleet drops into realspace, then the Third Alderaanian and so on and so forth until the ships blend into the blaze of stars to Ezhno's naked eye.
Nal Hutta, in the space of an instant, has gained a double-planetary ring, entirely made of warships.
A flare of tibanna, and moving in beautiful coordination, each Stewjon capital ship bears three points to her starboard bow, a kilometere to her stern, and two times that distance planetwards – to guard their neighbours' flanks and dorsal blind spots as much as would allow, flaring their guns in challenge.
The Hutt fleet responds in kind – a rough jerking of their two largest dreadnoughts to bear towards each other, trailing the rest of the Hutt fleet like a dark, slime-studded bird with an impenetrable hammer for a beak – one that glows and fires a live warning shot by a turbolaser charge a full quarter-kilometer wide that passes close enough to the Corellian Diplomacy that her larboard shields flicker white-blue.
There is something so terribly beautiful in the precise majesty of the two fleets arranging themselves for battle that Ezhno blinks away moisture from his vision; when it clears he finds the capital ships have uncovered their ventral hangars, and squadrons of starfighters are beginning to stream out from their parent ships, hovering in zero-gravity like beads of liquid metal.
Ezhno steps closer to the shimmering blue of the hangar energy shield, entranced despite himself by the brilliant contrast of grimy atmosphere and the clean, sharp cut lines of starfighters, the closest of which is painted with the flaring wings of the Jedi Starbird.
The two-person starfighter hovers near enough to Ezhno's transport that he can make out the navy blue headtresses poking out under the gunner's helmet from where the gunner sits behind the pilot proper, both in Jedi tunics with flight helmets pulled over the top half of their faces–
Hold on.
Navy. Blue. Headtresses.
Ezhno watches with the fascinated horror of one who knows his game is up as the gunner's head snaps towards him with the focus of a hunting thranctill. The pilot jerks in his seat to an unseen signal and looks sharply over to Ezhno as well.
They pull off their helmets in unison.
Ezhno manages a spasm of his lips that should have been a smile, and raises a hand in a half-wave.
Huei Tori and Garen Muln stare right back at him – Garen in dawning shock at Ezhno's face, and Huei sightlessly boring a hole into Ezhno's chest where his life-signature must be.
Blasted Jedi and their blasted Force-senses.
Ezhno shrugs once. Garen's shoulders begin to shake, the young Jedi's lips pressing together in an effort to control his laughter.
But Huei is not smiling.
Up come Huei's hands, forming letters in Galactic sign language.
Ezhno winces. If Feemor ever caught his padawan using those words Huei would be running laps around the Temple until the dawn of the next millennia.
"I'm sorry?" he signs in reply, and watches as Garen twists back in his seat to convey Ezhno's message to Huei.
Huei replies by jamming his helmet back over his opaque, scarred eyes and turning almost vehemently back to his gun controls.
Beyond, the squadron of Jedi starfighters drop their port wings lazily, one by one, to roll down towards the planet below.
Garen flashes a sympathetic glance at Ezhno, flicks two fingers off his forehead in a jaunty salute of farewell, and the next moment his helmet is back on and the starfighter snap-rolls a hundred and eighty degrees as it corkscrews down beyond Ezhno's field of view.
And then there is nothing, save for the sudden glow of igniting tibanna from somewhere far, far below: the first flare of a space battle beyond Ezhno's reach.
Sealed safely away behind the blue curtain of the energy shield, Ezhno lowers his head and clenches his fists.
(:~:)
Qui-Gon leaps over the wall and the nearest guard loses his head before he even has the opportunity to scream.
The howling green of his lightsaber rises to fever pitch as it reverses to plunge through the neck of the next guard, a Trandoshan whose slit-like eyes widen too late to save him. The hiss of his dying breath is indistinguishable from the sound of his flesh vaporising as it meets plasma.
Qui-Gon lets the body slip off his blade and stalks forward, chambering his lightsaber to a low, sinous hum at his side. Down comes his cowl, baring grey-streaked hair and aquiline eyes that take stock of his surroundings with sharp efficiency.
Silently dropping over the wall behind him, Tahl and Feemor lower their hoods as one, glance at Qui-Gon, the smoldering bodies at their feet, then at each other.
Tahl shakes her head. Feemor does the same.
The three of them separate without needing to speak, standard-issue Jedi boots sinking into the soft loam of Gardulla's gardens, towards whatever fate might await them beyond.
(:~:)
He cannot find them.
The labyrinth of Gardulla's estate coils and loops around itself in a torturous maze of passageways and corridors; Obi-Wan knows nearly all of them as intimately as the worn, too-short sleeves of his filthy Jedi tunics, but chamber after chamber and hall after hall yields a strange emptiness.
No guards.
No slaves.
Nothing, save for the burning breath in his lungs from the fading adrenaline, the spiking pain of his wounded left shoulder, and the lance of fire that shudders from the days-old stripes on his back up his spine to his bruised skull with every step he takes.
Somewhere beyond the screaming of his physical body and the fevered haze of his mental plane that keeps his limbs moving, Obi-Wan is dimly aware that the emptiness of the estate cannot bode well. A thousand bonded souls do not simply disappear.
Shmi and Anakin are vague points in the Force somewhere beyond – always beyond, no matter where he searches, and the air is growing thicker in his heaving lungs and the swamp-lights are flickering maddeningly in his vision and his boots are slipping and the corridors are empty and his world has coalesced now to his next breath and his next step and the seesawing edges of his vision and he cannot find them.
But there.
There, down an interminable stretch of filthy, yellow-stained corridor where the glow-lamps blink like gaseous green-lit balloons strung down a pathway to the hells.
Gardulla's Force-signature.
Obi-Wan grits his teeth, pours all his focus into that one point ahead until everything beside and behind fades into grey, and soldiers on.
Then, suddenly, a sun crests in the Force to his left.
He stumbles back, blinded – not physically, but from a mind's eye so exhausted that the first light of dawn burns and does not warm.
When he blinks the spots from his vision, he notes with some wonder that the dawn is green.
No, not the bilious green of Nal Hutta, swamp-breath and decomposition; but the clear green emerald of a lightsaber blade.
Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon stare at each other, an arm's length apart, like actors who have missed their cue and now know not what to say for the shock of their meeting.
But while Obi-Wan's gaze is fixed on Qui-Gon's face – the new lines around his mouth, the shadows under his eyes, the wild emotion in gaze – Qui-Gon's flickers to the cut on Obi-Wan's forehead, the curling of his body over his injured shoulder, the rusty stains of dried blood that edge the shredded back of his tunics. With each sharp, assessing glance, a glassy film grows over the older man's irises, welling up over his lower eyelids but not quite overflowing.
Qui-Gon's lightsaber clatters to the ground and extinguishes. He takes a ragged step forward, as though in disbelief, one hand reaching towards Obi-Wan's cheek –at his shoulder-height now, not at the level of his chest.
Obi-Wan moves forward automatically in this half-dream, the culmination of a year's worth of struggle to return home–
–and Gardulla's Force signature twists in savage victory down the hall.
Obi-Wan inhales so sharply that the air rasps in his throat. His head snaps to his right, to the double doors at the end of the corridor.
Qui-Gon's hand skitters to halt. He blinks once, as though struck.
Obi-Wan whirls back towards his master, eyes burning, lips white. His hands move in rapid flurry of signs.
"Give me my lightsaber. Now."
It is not a question. It is barely even a request.
A moment, where Master and Padawan stare at each other: one in a speechless shock and the other in fiery determination.
The fingers that had been so close to the bruise on Obi-Wan's cheek reverse, slip into the folds of cream Jedi tunics, and emerge with a sliver cylinder; lovingly polished, perfectly maintained by hands not Obi-Wan's own.
Obi-Wan's fingers brush by Qui-Gon's as he grasps the lightsaber, and he feels for a moment the barest hint of resistance as Qui-Gon's knuckles whiten – then nothing but cool air.
Qui-Gon has let him go.
And Obi-Wan moves.
Down the last stretch of grimy tile, the Hutt-stench heavy in his nose; the Force taking the stutter in his step and smoothing it into a loth-wolf's loping run; the hiss-snap of the lightsaber in his grasp, a whole, brilliant blue, a crystal in his hand as he is a crystal in the Force, padawan braid flaring out behind his ear as he snaps out a hand and rips the double-doors from their fittings.
Gardulla's receiving-room.
He glimpses the red-yellow of Gardulla's eyes turn to him, disbelief turning her reptilian eyes to slits, before the simultaneous click of twenty-four fully-automatic blasters turning onto their highest setting reaches his ears.
His tunnel vision widens to encompass the two dozen guards arranged in a double semicircle before Gardulla an instant before they all open fire.
"Obi-Wan!"
His master's shout is lost in the screech of Obi-Wan's lightstaber as the first blaster bolt glances off his blade and carves a smoking furrow in slime-soaked floor. The Force is screaming at him from all sides – each bolt a flare in space-time, whispering death in their wake.
Find the centre.
The lightsaber in his hand judders as he fights to carve a space in the maelstrom of crimson plasma. The Force is speaking to him as clearly as it ever did – he knows each guard's step before they take it, the path of each searing bolt and the time with which he has to move – but this is where his body fails him.
A year ago, with two hours a day of 'saber work and limbs lithe with constant training, he would have made short work of this.
Not now.
The Force melts away his pain, yes – turns his stuttering movements into fluidity, but the torn muscles of his back catch with every twist and the hollow waste of his stomach saps speed from his form at an alarming rate. Each breath is a soundless gasp of plasma-laden air, his eyes watering in the surging tide of smoking tibanna.
He becomes suddenly aware that he will be able to see death coming in the form of the bolt that will end his life. See it, but utterly unable to move fast enough to stop it.
Anakin, he thinks, as the next blaster bolt nearly disarms him.
Find the centre. Find the–
He can't.
The maelstrom presses closer. He is not quite foundering, but he sees the oncoming wave like an inescapable storm; when it reaches him, he will drown.
A warm presence presses into his back.
And the wave breaks around him.
Obi-Wan surfaces from the tossing surge of plasma, gasping in ragged breaths; the warmth at this back flares gently in the Force, and he holds onto it like a drowning man might to an anchor-chain.
"Breathe," a low, familiar voice is murmuring, both in his ear and in the Force. "Breathe, and the centre will come to you."
His lightsaber is no longer singing alone – it is joined by the deeper hum of an emerald blade.
Qui-Gon.
His vision clears. There is just as much plasma flying about as there was before – but he breathes in unison with the form at his back, and suddenly the shatterpoint is there and he and Qui-Gon orbit it like a pair of binary stars, as they always have – before Obi-Wan was Crown Prince Kenobi, and before Xanatos, the Sith Temple, and Nal Hutta.
He senses Qui-Gon smile.
It is difficult to say which of them decides to bring the battle to Gardulla first. For the guards there is only a sudden increase in the frenzied pitch of two lightsabers, and then their own rain of plasma turns against them.
Gardulla's bulbous eyes widen comically as Obi-Wan's last strike slices her last guard's head clean off, knocks the slave-transmitter control from her hand and continues its momentum to halt a hissing hairsbreadth from her neck.
Obi-Wan holds her gaze evenly with his own as he very deliberately raises his free hand and fingerspells three words.
WHERE ARE THEY
He hears Qui-Gon give voice to his words behind him, but the last syllable barely echoes through the still-smoking wreck of Gardulla's receiving chamber when the Hutt begins to laugh.
"Oh, flute-player," she says, a horrible guttering sound magnified by the hum of the lightsaber at her throat. "The woman and the boy, or the rest of my property?"
"Obi-Wan!"
Feemor's voice. Two sets of familiar boot-steps clatter into the room, but Obi-Wan does not turn his head.
Here, staring into the face of the one who has caused him and those he under his care more pain than anyone else he has ever known – Obi-Wan finds a new sensation rising from the depths of his being.
Rage.
He stares into the amused features of the Hutt who dared to call herself his owner, and casually allows his lightsaber to slip the barest distance closer to her oily skin.
Gardulla's toad-like lips open in a scream of pain. Obi-Wan clamps his own shut against the reek of boiling Hutt-fat. Shadows coil at the edges of his mind, eager young things that curl up from the bilious clouds of Nal Hutta that form his shields and whisper yes, she deserves this–
"Obi-Wan!" Qui-Gon's voice, this time – with the sharp snap of warning.
Obi-Wan angles his wrist back a little – just enough to prevent Gardulla from losing her vocal cords. The shadows flicker at his heels in the plane of the Force, disappointedly.
He is too busy staring Gardulla down to care.
His free hand repeats his question. He does not need anyone to translate for him, this time.
She gives him his answer; three words, then laughing so hard she coughs up blood as she does so.
Obi-Wan is gone the next moment, shouldering past a bewildered Feemor and Tahl and racing down the corridor beyond.
Qui-Gon falters a moment, glancing from the fading form of his apprentice to the Hutt slowly drowning in her own blood; but then he too pivots on a heel and sprints away.
In the ensuing silence, broken only by the desperate gurgles of Gardulla choking on her life-liquid as her weight begins to crush her lungs, Tahl walks calmly over to her, flips her lightsaber to its lowest setting, and cauterizes the gash in her throat.
Feemor closes his eyes against the agonized scream. He moves closer nonetheless, and makes sure to bring his lightsaber down on the slave-transmitter switch as he does so. Gardulla's eyes rest on the broken switch with disgust and baleful disappointment.
"Now," Tahl says, "You can tell us what you meant."
"What?" Gardulla snarls, one short arm pressed to her throat. Her voice, once silken, rotting honey, now sounds as though she swallowed mashed duracrete.
"The other slaves," Tahl says tonelessly as Feemor crouches beside them. "You said the woman and the boy, or the rest of your property. Where are they? The rest of your property."
Gardulla's throat has been slashed open and crudely mended; the reek of burnt flesh and fat still hangs in the air. She has, for all appearances, lost.
But Gardulla smiles.
(:~:)
Ben-Avi can't quite shake the sense that something is wrong.
He stands before the wide viewport of the Stewjon capital ship Aquiline, while all around him the space-battle rages. Further on the softer glow of Alderaani steel and elegant lines of Corellian corvettes flicker beyond the fluid, globular design that sets the Nubian battle cruisers separate from its allied fleets.
A column of plasma as wide around to swallow ten starfighters lances through hard vacuum and rebounds off the Aquiline's shields with spine-shattering impact, nearly throwing Ben-Avi off his feet.
The bridge crew, naturally, suffer no such indignities.
And neither does Ben-Avi's wife and Queen.
"Convor, Merle! Close up that gap in our starboard flank!" Queen Alephi is in her element; she stands tall and commanding, unfazed by the impact, surrounded by a hologrammed half-sphere. The entirety of their section of the battle spreads out around her within reach. Battle-carriers Convor and Merle acknowledge and respond immediately, their hologramed forms moving to patch up the deficit in the fleet's starboard edge.
The space there had once held the mid-sized cruiser Ibis, but her gutted form now drifts slowly towards planetside, weeping trails of atmosphere from a wound in her stern, escape pods glimmering in her wake. She had forseen a devastatingly precise turbolaser blast before the Aquiline had, and had darted forward directly into the stream of plasma rather than risk the life of her queen.
Ben-Avi watches Alephi's face harden as the hologrammed wreck of Ibis flickers across her face.
"My Queen!" a young commander shouts from her station. "Squadron six is down to four starfighters!"
"Who has fighters to spare?" Alephi yells as another near miss rocks the bridge.
"Starbird One at the ready, your majesty!" a red-haired woman in Jedi tunics responds immediately from her console.
Alephi nods. "Send Starbird One to intercept. Thank you, Master Rhara."
Ben-Avi watches, breath catching in his chest, as a squadron of two-pilot starfighters – each painted with the flaring Jedi starbird on their wings – peel away from the remains of a dogfight with Hutt fighter craft and dive directly into the heart of the battle, evading crossfire by what must surely be a matter of milliseconds and at times actually snap-rolling around turbolaser shots.
In a matter of moments they have reached the four ragged forms of the Stewjon fighters and split up, half the squadron escorting their allies out of no-man's land to their mother ship while the other half dive deeper into hellfire, carving a wound in the Hutts' mid-sized carrier defensive line.
Alephi spots it immediately. "Master Rhara, pull your squadron back! All ships, focus fire at the twenty-gunner with the lagging right repulsor, one point off port bow!" she shouts.
The indigo space between the two fleets lights up in tibanna green.
Far, far below, Garen Muln hears Master Rhara's shouted order a moment before, and has the starfighter pulled up and darting away as far away as possible even as Huei fires off one last shot from their port cannon.
The Hutt carrier Gasha is skewered through with three intersecting streams of condensed tibanna at once; a lucky shot glances the ship's magazine, and there is a terrible pause before a brilliant sheet of flame erupts from the ship's dorsal surface and eviscerates her from fore to aft.
There is a moment of hushed, respectful silence on the bridge of the Aquila as they watch the enemy ship come apart at the seams, spilling atmosphere and frozen bodies into dead vaccum.
A mere five hundred meters from Gasha's flickering ruin, Garen is pulling the starfighter into a loop to skirt the debris field back into the battle proper when his gunner takes a sharp breath behind him.
"What is it, Huei?" Garen cannot twist around to see his friend, not that he dares not do so with plasma bolts on all sides.
"You need to patch us through to the Aquila," Huei says. There is a slow horror building in his voice.
Garen grunts as he pulls them into a tight corkscrew to cancel out the vectors of two intercepting missiles. "Whatever for?" he shouts over the shudder of the missiles slamming into each other mere metres in their wake.
"I sense – the people dying in the ship next to us. They're not Hutts."
"So? Last I heard there were Trandoshans, Zabraks, humans working for them–"
"Listen to me!"
Garen shuts up. Perhaps it is the incongruous terror in Huei's voice, or perhaps it is because they are close enough now to the downed Hutt ship that he begins to sense what Huei's superior Force-senses picked up in the first place.
Bodies begin to flash past, some dead, some dying as atmosphere leaks out of their escape pods. Of the latter–
Garen sucks in a sharp breath. "They're–"
"–Slaves." Huei hisses. "The Hutt ships are manned in part by slaves."
To be continued, ladies and gentlemen. Not to worry, I've my first few days of holiday in over three months today. Since the first of July I've been working close to 100 hour weeks. First year junior doctors have inhuman lifestyles, and I work a 34-38 hour shift every 3-4 days on top of usual 10-12 hour working days. I get 24 hours off every weekend.
I've known where this arc was going for a long time, but I didn't have time to write it - I didn't get enough sleep, most of the time. I'll be posting another chapter later this week, and it'll likely be the last chapter before an interlude section leading into the next arc.
I've had a oneshot or two up on my tumblr and here since the last chapter of TSS, so do check that out!
Thank you to everyone who's reviewed and followed and favourited in this time - when I was awake for the 37th hour in a row and my fingers were shaking as I did another procedure, your words were a great encouragement. Thank you.