Chapter Forty-One: Mandalore
Their team agreed to leave Greez, Merrin, and Artoo behind with the ship while Cal, Cere, and Obi-wan accompanied Ahsoka and Rex to the Rebel Mandalorian camp. Ahsoka would have liked Diya to be here, but the girl was in the Outer Rim on a mission that she would only give Ahsoka vague details about and would have taken too long to rendezvous with them. Ahsoka decided not to ask exactly what the girl was doing in the Outer Rim. Diya was a lot less reckless and much better trained in combat than she'd been almost five years ago. As long as she was still maintaining her duties in the rebellion, Diya could do what she wanted in her free time. Still, Ahsoka had a feeling she should ask Vader if he knew anything about what Diya was up. They hated each other, for sure, but maybe Sabé had asked for Diya's help. She knew the two were frequently in contact and sometimes even commiserated on their respective employers.
Ahsoka shook her head. What Diya was up to could wait, especially in light of her current problem.
"Every time I think your Jedi stuff can no longer surprise me, something happens that surprises me," Rex said to Ahsoka as the Mandalorian rebels led them to their leaders. "It's a wonder you've managed to keep you and the General's batchlings secret as long as you have."
"I've got a Force bubble around us. No one can hear us," Ahsoka commented. "You can stop calling them me and Vader's batchlings for right now."
Rex shrugged. "It's what everyone thinks happened anyway. Point still stands."
"How was I supposed to know he had psychometry?"
"You wouldn't have ever found out if you weren't willy-nilly letting people hold your lightsaber."
"I was trying to give him more understanding. It's one thing to tell someone how something works in the Force, but you can't really understand without feeling it."
"He got more understanding, alright," Rex responded dryly.
"He didn't find out anything. He didn't even recognize Anakin."
"And all it will take is for him to find some old holo that managed to escape Palpatine's censorship for him to put the pieces together. And then our resident Darth is going to be even more furious than he's going to be when he finds out this happened."
"That's why we're not telling him."
Rex gave Ahsoka a pointed look. "And if the kid starts talking."
"He told me he wasn't." Rex gave her that look again. "He was sincere. I believe him."
"Vader won't."
"Which is why we aren't telling him. He'll try to find a way to make sure Cal's killed to ensure his silence."
"In a hypothetical scenario, if Cal did open his mouth, what's the worst that would happen? A witch, another Jedi, and that captain know. Kenobi already knows, so he's a non-factor," Rex said dismissively.
Ahsoka didn't reply. Most people would have mistaken that as her contemplating. Rex wasn't most people.
"Kenobi does know, right?" Rex asked.
One of these days, Ahsoka was going to see if Rex was willing to test his Force sensitivity.
"Kenobi doesn't know?" Rex asked incredulously.
"I was planning to tell him. I was! But when I went to see him, we were both in a really bad place, and I was a lot angrier at the Jedi than I thought I was. And it had been a rough couple of years, and he was a convenient target."
"Was this before or after you hooked back up with the General?"
"After."
"Serious?" Rex asked, unimpressed. "You can forgive him for a couple of genocides and work out that he was a victim of a bigger scheme, but you hold a grudge against Kenobi?"
"I hadn't really forgiven Vader back then… and we certainly weren't friends again at the time. I just needed him more than I hated him."
Rex scoffed. "Bantha shit."
"I know! I'm going to tell him. I just… didn't know when. And I didn't expect him to show up on the rebel base."
"Welp, I'm sure we'll have plenty of downtime in the next couple of days. Plenty of chances to tell him about your kids and about Vader."
"Are you insane? The twins are one thing. But Vader? Last time they met, they tried to kill each other. He'll think Vader's corrupted me or that I'm blinded by my feelings or something."
"Are you?"
"No," Ahsoka answered quickly. Rex gave her a skeptical look. "I'm not."
"That's hard for me to believe, considering the last time I saw you two together, you were flirting with each other."
"We weren't flirting," Ahsoka disagreed. "Besides, you caught us on a good day. Most of the time we're down each other's throats." Rex raised his eyebrows. "Not like that, Rex! Goodness. Give me a little credit. I mean we're always bickering about one thing or another."
"You were doing that during the Clone War," Rex reminded.
"But back then, there usually wasn't a risk of lightsabers getting involved."
Rex sighed, muttering more to himself than to Ahsoka, "Why are all the Jedi I get involved with so insane?"
Ahsoka relinquished the Force bubble around her and Rex as they were marched into the Rebellion camp. The camp looked as half organized as her new Rebel base was. Ahsoka guessed that recently they'd been forced them to flee their old camp to start a new one in a dark once-abandoned dome city on their planet's surface. They were led down a row of metal trailers, all the way to the biggest one at the end. Their escorts stopped right at the bottom of the steps and turned to them.
"Your weapons," the Mandalorian escort said.
Ahsoka felt everyone's eyes move to her.
"You'll understand our apprehension," Ahsoka began after a moment of consideration, "about giving up our weapons when you all are so heavily armed. Surely warriors of such caliber as the Mandalorians aren't really afraid of a few lightsabers?"
Ahsoka sensed Obi-wan's and Rex's unease at her thinly veiled insinuation, both unsure how the Mandalorians would take it.
"I could ask the same of the Jedi and blasters."
A few weren't the problem, Ahsoka thought to herself. It had been blasters in the hands of thousands of clones descending from a Mandalorian that helped kill the Jedi. Their odds here were better, and Ahsoka had already categorized possible escape routes, evaluated the weaknesses in security, and figured out who she would need to take out first if things got ugly. With or without her lightsaber. Still.
"You're the one who called us here with vital Imperial intel. If you knew what to do with it, you wouldn't have requested that I come to your planet to discuss it. So we either keep our weapons, or you can escort us back out, and we'll find our way off Mandalore," Ahsoka replied evenly.
It wasn't a bluff. At the worst, she'd have to contact Vader and ask if he knew about any Imperial projects that would have made Mandalore get over their pride to contact the Alliance. If he didn't know about them, then he could send one of his spies or one of the maidens to find out.
"It's okay," said a voice at the top of the steps. "Let the Fulcrum and her entourage keep their weapons. Besides, you've heard the rumors of her prowess. Taking her lightsabers isn't going to make much of a difference if she decides to fight us."
The escort stepped to the side to let Bo Katan down the steps. She stopped directly in front of Ahsoka and said, "It only took you seven years to get here, Tano."
"Well, you know. Got tied up being betrayed by the government I served and then hiding from the Empire while building a rebellion," Ahsoka responded with a shrug. "And then when one of my agents tried to get in contact with you, you turned them away."
"So you're the Fulcrum," the woman stated more than she asked. "Not what I was expecting." She paused before saying, "Good."
Bo-Katan then turned and gestured for Ahsoka and her team to follow her inside.
Later, Ahsoka would wonder how she kept her composure when she laid eyes on the second older human woman in the room. Probably a combination of falling back on old Jedi teachings, always practicing a blank face as to not give away her secrets, and the patience she had to exercise during High Command meetings. Whatever aided her, it did so long enough to let her take a deep breath, gain a hold of her rising anger, and calmly say her next words.
"Clear the room," she said in a light, even tone.
"General," Rex said slowly.
"I said, clear the room," Ahsoka repeated. "Except Master Kenobi."
Rex sighed and gesture for everyone to leave, very purposely brushing his shoulder against Ahsoka's. Ahsoka sent a dark glare his way to which Rex gave her a disapproving look.
Once everyone cleared out and the door was secure, Ahsoka summoned a seat to herself with the Force, sat down, and crossed her arms. Then she said, "One of you is going to explain to me right now why I'm looking at a dead woman who very clearly isn't dead."
The dead woman being Satine Kryze.
The official reports said she'd been violently overthrown after Darth Maul betrayed Bo-Katan and Death Watch. The unofficial report to the Council that Ahsoka got access to when they'd assigned her the Mandalore mission and from what she'd pieced together from Anakin and Obi-wan included the facts that Obi-wan had been present, and Maul's takeover was an elaborate revenge plot against Obi-wan.
In all reports, Satine Kryze was dead, a conspiracy that was undoubtedly orchestrated by the three left in the room with her.
The three in the room exchanged a look before Obi-wan said, "She was gravely injured. We weren't sure she was even going to live. Maul did think she was dead. We decided the deception was necessary to keep Maul from pursuing her again. You would have learned that if you'd had the opportunity to get here during the war. It wasn't intended to stay a secret forever."
"Then, the Empire rose. They ran Maul off-planet, but we still had to run into hiding without the resources to resist."
"The Rebel Alliance has been reaching out to you for years to get you to join. You've always refused," Ahsoka pointed out.
"Mandalore has had its fair share of governments with their own self-interests intervening in matters that aren't theirs for nothing in return. And yes. I know we called on the Republic for help to take back Mandalore, but look what the Republic turned into. It's clear more than ever that Mandalore is going to be on their own," Bo-Katan said.
"Not to mention," Satine said, speaking for the first time, "that while I have conceded to my sister the fact that we may be forced to resort to some violence in an effort to defend ourselves, I had no desire to ally with another warmonger."
Ahsoka opened and closed her mouth, taken aback by the accusation. Some members of High Command had implied it but had never said it to her face.
"I'm no warmonger!" she finally exclaimed.
"That's not what our intel says about you," Satine continued.
"Don't believe everything you hear. The stories of my ruthlessness are greatly exaggerated."
"The Zaddja incident?"
"They attacked my exploratory scouting crew first."
"Nal Hutta."
"I couldn't let my identity get back to the Empire."
"Regardless, one could accuse you of instigating the Empire."
"Instigating the Empire? Are you listening to yourself?"
"Whether we agree with them or not, they are the legitimate government. It was your senate that voted the Empire into existence."
"Based on lies, deception, manipulation, and outright treason!"
"From a point of view."
"From a—" Ahsoka cut herself and rolled her eyes. "No wonder you and Obi-wan dated. That's his favorite phrase."
"It doesn't defeat the point."
"The point is that it doesn't matter that it was legal. It was wrong. And when the law and the government are wrong, the only right thing to do is resist," Ahsoka shot back. "Palpatine started this whole mess by orchestrating a war and annihilating the Jedi Order. " Ahsoka turned to Obi-wan, "Is your girlfriend serious right now?"
"Ahsoka," Obi-wan said, sighing and pinching the bridge of his nose
"She attacked me because I'm not under the delusion that we're going to avoid war with the Empire. Especially when the Empire and Palpatine started everything," Ahsoka snapped.
"Pardon me if I'm not particularly eager to team up with the illustrious leader of the Rebel Alliance whose stories of ruthlessness and battle hunger is only rivaled by Darth Vader's," Satine said wryly.
Ahsoka snorted. "I am nowhere near as ruthless and battle-hungry as Darth Vader," she assured. She knew that personally. "But if you think I am, then me and my envoy will just be on our way. And you can figure out what to do with your intel."
Ahsoka let the ultimatum hang in the air while Bo-Katan turned to her sister and gave her a stern look.
"She's the only one who might be able to do something about what we found," the woman said with a stern look.
Satine looked like she wanted to argue, but sighed and said, "My sister's right. The intel we found is more important than our differences in politics and how to deal with the Empire. If we didn't think that, we wouldn't have contacted you."
"You're the one who started hurling insults," Ahsoka said, not quite ready to put her differences aside. Obi-wan gave her a longsuffering look that used to only be reserved for Anakin. Ahsoka was caught between rolling her eyes and smiling. She ended up doing the former. "Fine."
She comm'd everyone back in. If anyone noticed the tension, they didn't comment.
Bo-Katan didn't waste any time as she took out a small round device and clicked the button to show a picture of a large round, not even quarter-finished piece of tech.
"What's that?" Ahsoka asked.
"Got this from a reliable source who got it from a reliable source of his. It's a space station. According to the intel, it's even larger than the designs for the Super Class star destroyers the Empire is rumored to be designing," Bo Katan explained.
The Super Class star destroyers weren't a rumor. Vader showed her the schematics for them right after their mission on Eriadu. He'd been complaining about the flaws and inefficiency in the designs of the terrible war machines. When Ahsoka asked if he was going to make his complaints to the emperor and the engineers, he'd scoffed and asked why he'd give his enemy a possible advantage by making his weaponry top notch. He'd save his own ideas for when he was emperor.
"It's the size of a small moon specifically," Satine added. "Supposedly, it has the capability to destroy planets."
"That's impossible," Rex said.
"I wouldn't say that so quickly," Ahsoka said grimly. "I grew up witnessing the impossible."
"That may be true," Obi-wan agreed, "But the kind of power a weapon that can destroy planets would need is astronomical."
"Like kyber crystals?" Cal asked.
Ahsoka turned to look at the young man. "What do you know?"
"I don't know anything. I just know that a couple of years ago, I went to Illum in search of a new crystal, and they'd mined nearly all the kyber from the caves I could actually access. I wondered why. Seems like they could have just made it an impenetrable Imperial stronghold if they wanted to keep Jedi from daring to venture back there," Cal said with a shrug.
Cal looked to Cere, who nodded in agreement and said, "He's right. They had an extensive operation going on there. And there's no telling how many other planets with kyber the Empire is mining in the same way."
They wouldn't need to mine the kyber for the Force-sensitive children Ahsoka knew the emperor was kidnapping and grooming for his service. Still…
"Who did you get this information from?" Ahsoka asked. "You trust your source. But just how reliable are his sources?"
"We don't know," Bo Katan admitted. "That's why we called you here. We have the coordinates for where this thing is at."
"You want us to destroy it before it's anywhere near working order," Ahsoka stated.
"We want you to investigate it first, and if it is true, destroy it. Something we don't have the resources to do," Satine admitted.
Ahsoka resisted the urge to point out that Satine had argued against her "warmongering" tendencies but didn't mind requesting them for Mandalore's benefit to destroy a possible planet-destroying machine that they weren't sure existed.
The emperor kept Vader out of the loop of a lot of things until Vader stumbled upon it or proved himself worthy of knowing about. Still, Ahsoka was certain Vader would have known about this. He was well-acquainted with the top engineers and battle station designers in the Empire. Someone would have told him about it, even if the emperor hadn't. If this planet-destroying battle station was real, Ahsoka was positive Vader knew about it. And he hadn't told her.
A quick comm call could confirm it, but he was on Coruscant right now, and intel expired almost as quickly as they could get their hands on it these days. If they didn't move now, it might be too late by the time she could get in contact with Vader.
"We leave in a rotation," Ahsoka decided. "What are the coordinates?"
AN: 1) This was my first time ever writing Satine or Bo-Katan, and I feel like I have a better grasp on the latter. I always got the sense that the Clone Wars meant to portray them both of being on two different extremes and that they'd only be able to find a true success in meeting halfway. Hence why at the end of season 7, Bo-Katan seems to realize that even though there are times to pick up arms and fight, there was a time to also stop the fighting and pave a way for a new Mandalorian future. Hence, Ahsoka tells her that her people need a new kind of leader.
2) Satine isn't dead. Something I kinda regretted mentioning in Force Distortion about this world. But I had to stick with it and decided she'd make an interesting foil to Ahsoka as far as their ideals went. Spoiler alert, the two don't get along now and never will in the future. Ahsoka finds uses for Satine's dedication to diplomacy and dedication to non-violence, though.
3) I always planned for someone to eventually call Ahsoka out on her behavior to Obi-wan even though her feelings were valid and could be defended. Rex fit that part so perfectly.
Anywho. Hope you enjoyed. Review, please. I appreciate all your insights.