Aayla woke up feeling shockingly good. Yes, she'd pushed herself to her limits, but she hadn't gone too far. Sore, but nothing torn and they had won. Clean victories had been all too rare in this war. She stood up and discovered that she had, however, fallen asleep with her shoes on, which was a mistake. That did hurt. She pulled them off and massaged her feet for a good few minutes, then showered and meant to get dressed in her own clothes, only to find that someone had also provided a Black Sun outfit. Hilariously, it was more modest than her own clothing, as well as containing a face mask that covered half her face. Purple, dark blue and gold, Black Sun colors, though the proportions varied radically. Hers were mostly blue and gold, with just brief flashes of purple. The cut was good as were the materials. SIS had done a good job on the design, and the tailors had clearly given it the highest priority.
She strapped on the blaster holster and blaster which came with it. It was slung low on her hip. The hold-out blaster went in the tall, supple hide boots, which she did not pull on at this moment, leaving her walking around in her stocking feet. Hooking her lightsaber to the blaster belt she headed out into the ship and found Leo moving around the mess, only a little less graceful than usual, making caf and passing it around to their volunteers.
Her own came out from under the heater and he passed it over as she slid into a chair. "All right, ladies and gentlemen. Your cover is simple. You're the Black Sun operatives who were on Ryloth. Black Sun involvement with the Separatists has been revealed, so you had to run. You're pissed as hell about it and at the Separatists generally. Both for blowing your cover and trying to blow up your planet."
Gobi snorted bitterly and glanced at the four other Twi'leks of his team, then included Aayla, "I think we can manage that."
"Great. I'm here to renegotiate the deal, given the increased costs and the decreased Separatist strength. I picked you up, as the Prayer was busy leaving the system. If they know the Prayer was destroyed, then I'll have to use a different set of lies, but your story and our goal remains the same."
"Which is?" Aayla asked.
"We need permission through the automated defenses and to dock with the command center. They'll scan us. It's fine if they detect blasters, but not lightsabers," he gave Aayla a look.
Without bothering to look up from her caf, she pulled her lightsaber free and tossed it to him. He caught it one-handed and made it vanish.
"It's okay to have as many blasters as we're carrying? An entire cargo container worth?" one of Gobi's troops asked.
"No, but that'll be shielded by the time we get there, right SIS?" Leo asked the empty air.
"Almost done," the intercom answered him.
"Good. Once we have permission to enter, they'll put us on a specific flight path. That creates a brief sensor shadow, with our ship between the sensor and the crate, due to the secondary sensor being nonfunctional due to Spaceways action. We drop the crate and keep moving. They handle weapon distribution. Our job is to get to the command center and take over two points. The central processing unit," he flicked a map to life and pointed, "here. And the override in the Shipyard Master's office, here," he pointed again.
"We want to wait to strike until as many slaves as possible have weapons. Once the alarms go off, things will get messy, fast, in the slave sections of the ship and it's going to take serious time to get control over the crusher bots. So we don't strike until Spaceways frells up and alarms start going off, the Separatists start shooting at us, or you hear me say the word," he smiled for a moment at Aayla, "sapphire."
Aayla snorted.
"Everyone in there is expendable, except her," he flashed the image of a smiling Zabrak woman. "She goes by Wagou on the ship, but she's actually a Spaceways operative. Do not shoot her. Seriously. It will piss her off."
There were smiles and nods at that.
"Okay, if everything goes right, how do we get fifty thousand slaves off the shipyards before we blow them? I don't think they'll fit on this ship," another of Gobi's soldiers asked.
"It would have been easier if we could just have used the Prayer and brought in an army," SIS said, walking in at last. The droid's chassis was covered in oil and dirt and it was fussily cleaning itself with its many arms and many rags.
"If all goes well, we'll take these ships," the map pulled out to show the half-constructed ships in the shipyards. "They have hyperdrive and life support, but most other systems are still under construction. If things go poorly, I put in a call to an old acquaintance. H\She's got a major freight hauler that's coming into the system on apparently legitimate business."
Aayla's eyes narrowed.
"That's lucky."
"Not really, SIS called her as soon as we cleared Ryloth," Leo explained.
"What about communications, do we need to take those out?"
"The Separatists just suffered a major loss at Ryloth and the whole point of their slave-labor program is that they don't need to keep a local fleet. If they succeed in calling for help, which they almost certainly will, we should have time to complete our evacuation. If not, we'll need to rely on the automated defenses to keep them off our backs while we escape. There is a local military on Dagoola, however, which might be a problem. However, our reports are that the locals aren't actually that pleased with having one of their main industries taken over by the Separatists and their laborers replaced with slaves. We believe that they aren't likely to risk their troops to try to reclaim the shipyards."
"Why would they? The Separatists have already paid all they're going to pay for them," SIS put in.
"We may need to do some backdoor handholding to convince them that the destruction of the shipyards won't cause a rain of debris down on their planet that kills a bunch of people, but that shouldn't be too hard. We may even lie and claim we're handing it over to them as a free people. Lots of options."
"So our job is to stand around and look tough, then shoot Seps when you say? I think we can handle that," Gobi said, glancing around at his troops.
"Good, full plans are available. Pay special attention to the Master's office. He's a paranoid little Ugnaught and is very aware he's not winning any physical fight. That has led him to make major investments in his personal security. Everybody review the plans and we'll meet back here in two hours for a discussion of tactics, all right?"
The group nodded and moved off to examine the plans. Aayla sipped her caf and asked Leo and SIS to stay a moment. He nodded and retrieved the lightsaber from wherever he'd hidden it and placed it inside the body vault in his arm. "What's up?"
Aayla smiled slight. "Did you know that part of my training as a youngling was working on a farm under the Temple? It's supposed to help you understand nature, which can be a little tricky on an ecumenopolis like Coruscant. But it turns out that there are many plants which are willing to grow in darkness, if you provide them enough fertilizer. I am not such a plant."
"Okay," Leo said. "I'm missing the meaning of this little allegory."
"I may not understand entirely how you work, but I recognize a backup plan being activated when I see one and I recognize a grumpy droid when I see one. This freighter being in position to help us…that's a bit too unlikely for me. At least not without significant prior warning. If I check its flight logs, when am I going to find it changed course towards Dagoola?"
Leo smiled, "Oh, that."
"Yes, that. Which means you knew where the slaves were going in advance, which is also why SIS was so grumpy about crashing the Prayer."
"One of the reasons," SIS said, not particularly loudly.
"Which brings me to the pertinent question. Why didn't you tell me?"
Leo frowned slightly. "That's a good question."
"It would be nice if there was a good answer to it."
Leo's frown deepened. "I'm trying to think of one."
"How about you start with the truth."
"Honestly—wow, is that really the reason? I worked for the Trade Federation for too long," he shook his head slightly and she felt a little bit of surprise, a little shame, a little concern. "I mean I could come up with a story about concern over my sources, but they were the same for both pieces of intel. SIS is pretty deep in the Black Sun systems."
"Deeper now. I'm tracing the stolen funds. Looks like Lithin was using them to pay off some serious debts inside the organization. Those lines run under interesting doors," SIS said.
"But you asked about a reason. Frankly, it was habit. Making a moral argument was a good way to lose an argument. They figured if you were making a moral argument it was because what you were proposing couldn't be argued for economically. So, if you have moral reasons for wanting something done, you never say so and instead manipulate the situation. So that's what I did. I…apologize, Aayla. You are not the Trade Federation and I should not have treated you as such."
"Thank you. It takes time to relearn responses. Where will the ex-slaves go afterwards, I assume you've thought of that?" Aayla said. The explanation didn't quite make sense. He had made a moral argument about Ryloth and the amoral argument would have been far stronger if the information about Dagoola had been appended. His confusion was genuine though. More a habit of secrecy than a habit of argument, she thought, but it was hard to know. The agent himself wasn't sure, neither could she be.
"Thanks to your generous donation to the Republic Refugee Fund, I've already made arrangements for their temporary relocation to Vraxis, and then they'll be shipped home, assuming home isn't a war zone."
Her eyes narrowed still further. "Has this been the plan ever since Jiptal, then?"
Leo laughed. "I appreciate the thought, but no. That's just a matter of making use of the contacts I don't mind being exposed to the Republic. This plan came together very, very fast, following the discovery of the Prayer. We had to do some brief digging to find evidence which wouldn't reveal how deeply we'd—"
"Ahem," SIS said.
"She'd," he corrected himself, "infiltrated the Black Sun network and some actual, you know, planning, but this is more taking advantage of an opportunity than executing a deeply laid plan. If your enemies want to think otherwise however…being overestimated isn't quite as good as being underestimated, but it's far better than being correctly estimated."
"Which is why you spend so much time and energy on camouflage," Aayla said, all too perceptively.
"Smart Jedi. Maybe let's turn those brains on our mutual enemies, eh?"
"Indeed."