As much as I would like to say I own Disney I don't so I don't own Star Wars, either.
Yes, xenomorphs, of a sort. They don't quite work the same way, some changes to better fit into my needs and the Star Wars universe.
Jenni ignored Keda's scream, just as she ignored the flashes of metallic-shiny-long-sharp-claws-whippet-tails-too-many-teeth in the holographic feeds from Threefer's and Asajj's helmet cameras. Ignoring Keda's fear beating against her was more difficult, but fortunately she didn't need the deep immersion of Overwatch, much less total immersion when she merged with the currents of the Tao. Instead, as her fingers flew over the pilot seat's side keyboard to bring up a wire frame shape of the asteroid outpost's rough outline, she focused on her last memory on Overwatch, and the hints of movement that had started up throughout the base. There had been much more than just in the central room with the away team. There must be some sort of hive mind going on, the alert went out to all of them. The outpost frame completed, her fingers flashed through it, pausing for a split-second at each spot where she'd sensed movement to let the computer know to leave a point of light there.
Then she was done, and she paled at the miniature star field she'd created ... and how many of those stars were along or close to the route the away team had taken to the control room. They couldn't come back that way. So how do they get out? It looked like she was going to have to go for a deep dive, after all.
At least Keda wasn't screaming anymore. Jenni waved to get their guest's attention. When the pasty-white-faced Human looked over at her, she said, "I'm going back on Overwatch for a bit, the monsters they're fighting aren't all in the control room and I need to track the rest. Please keep quiet and at least try to control your fear."
Keda jerked a nod, and Jenni leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes, trying to sink into the Tao. Keda's fear still beat against her but slowly became meaningless white noise, and Jenni again found herself swept along by the Tao's current—only where before it had been calm, even placid, now she was being swept through rapids, almost dizzying as she whirled through eddies and around whirlpools caused by the presences she'd barely been able to sense at all before. She still had trouble sensing them, they were almost like holes in the current—but unlike droids they were holes that the current swept around instead of through and so were easier to track even if they had no flames of their own. She reached out for those flames that were her other selves burning bright in the current as they fought for their lives, centered herself in and around them, reached out, expanding her sense of the currents around them for those holes ... and hastily pulled herself free of the union to breach the current back into the waking world. If her hands weren't gripping the edges of her seat they'd be shaking, and she suspected she was as bleached white as Keda. Remember, the party never ends. She tapped her com over to all-channels.
/\
Luminara stood with her legs slightly spread, the lightsaber gripped by both hands a vertical humming bar in front of her. She was part of the circle the away team had formed around the 'captain's chair' and its corpse on the dais in the middle of the room. It had been purely instinctive, that circle, created when everyone had bolted away from the walls as soon as the shadows above them came alive. Now they all stood waiting with lightsabers and blasters at the ready for a renewed attack from perhaps a double handful of horrors like she had never seen before—shaped like bio-mechanical travesties of the corpses of starvation victims, though they had strange, tube-like protuberances on their backs and their shiny-smooth, curved heads were like no sentient she had ever seen. But the saliva dripping from their jaws and the animal grace with which they prowled in eerie silence about the circle, spine-ridged, stinger-tipped tails whipping about, said they were very much alive and not the mechanical constructs she'd initially taken them to be. Machines didn't typically have acid for a circulating fluid, either, and the corpses of the monstrosities that had been unfortunate enough to be within lightsaber-reach of the circle when the team turned to face them slowly subsided sizzling into the floor.
"What are they waiting for?" Padme asked from her place on the opposite side of the circle. And if her voice shook a little, Luminara couldn't blame her—she'd been in many more battles than the former Senator, and she was feeling a little weak-kneed herself.
As it turned out, even if the question was rhetorical Jenni had an answer. "They're waiting for reinforcements. I don't think they're a hive mind, but there is definitely some kind of mental link—when I said there was movement all around you, I didn't just mean in the room with you, I meant all around you. It's like the entire outpost came alive, and they're all moving in your direction."
"So we have to move," Luminara said. "We're in a cul-de-sac here, wait and we'll be trapped by an ever-growing mob we'll have to cut through."
"You can't come back the way you came," Jenni warned, "for some reason these things are especially thick on the side of the base with the hanger bay."
Luminara heard a choking sound through her ear bud, then Padme responded—and now her voice wasn't just shaking a little, she was stuttering to the point the Jedi Master couldn't understand her.
"Deep breaths, Pad. Remember, the party never ends."
Padme actually laughed at Jenni's nonsensical quip, or maybe the nickname, but she calmed enough that she could be understood. "Most of these things are on that side of the base because that would have been where they caught the victims they gestated eggs in. None of us want to be captured by these abominations, a clean death is better."
Blaster fire shattered the eerie silence. "And here comes the first to join the party. If we can't fight our way back to the hanger bay, how do we get out?" Luminara didn't recognize the voice, but she thought the response was from Threefer. She couldn't be sure, with the additional blaster fire echoing in her ears. "Maybe there's a hidden entrance somewhere in the floor?"
"If there is, we don't have time to find it. I have an idea. We need to get over to the entrance, then I'll need you to cover me."
Luminara didn't like the dark undercurrent to Anakin's voice, and she wasn't heartened by the unhappily resigned sound of Ahsoka's voice: "Oh, wonderful, Sky Guy's got an idea." The tension had been growing to the point that Luminara could feel it in spite of her laser-focus on the abominations prowling around them, and the way it spiked was not promising.
"Do you, Snips?"
"No, I don't. Lead on, big guy."
"Hey, no talking about your love life, we don't want to hear it!"
The laughter at Asajj's snark broke the tension.
"Right, we'll save it for the hold," Padme said, her voice much steadier. "Let's go."
The circle began to shift toward the sliced-open hole in the blast doors, and Luminara sensed a faint twitch in the Force warning of danger as all the creatures prowling around the circle instantly sprang toward them. She ignored the blaster fire and increasing pitch of active lightsabers in motion as she focused on the two coming at her, freezing one in mid-air a handspan away from her face as her lightsaber swept up to take the head off the other. She kicked the corpse away, stepping to one side to avoid the spatter of acid blood, and another faint twitch in the Force had her dodging the second set of teeth that shot out of the gaping jaws of the one she held suspended. Those tiny jaws snapped only centimeters from her face as she pushed it away only to lose her hold when a scream of pain through her earbud tried to slam her head to one side. It dropped to the floor and sprang toward her, only for her to freeze it in place again as her lightsaber's tip thrust between its jaws and out the back of it head. She threw the corpse across the room and looked around, then relaxed when she couldn't see any living abominations. "Who screamed?"
"Master Unduli, Ahsoka, Fun'tac, Joker, guard the doorway. Padme, how's Threefer?"
"I've gotten the acid neutralized but his mask's ceramaplast is gone, maybe the bacta tank will be able to save the arm. Threefer, I'm going to give you some painkillers. You'll be able to walk, but you'll be too woozy to aim straight. I'm afraid you just became the package. So Ani, how do we get out of here if we can't go back the way we came?"
"We make a new exit. Jenni, from the way these things are moving, are there any corridors or rooms directly below us?"
There was a pause as Padme helped a wavering Threefer over to a seat in front of on of the stations, then joined Asajj, Ahsoka, Luminara, and the two clones at the doorway. Without so much as a word, the six had fallen into the natural tactical positions, at least for an enemy that couldn't shoot back—the two clones in front of the entrance where they could fire through the hole carved in the blast doors at anything that came down the hallway but several meters back, Luminara and Ahsoka on either side where they could deal with anything that made it through the blaster fire into the control center, Asajj and Padme flanking the clones—out of their line of fire, but close enough that they could deal with anything that got past the other two Force-users. While the angle kept Luminara from seeing anything, the two clones immediately started intermittent firing through the carved-out hole in the bast door, their blaster fire answered by the shrieks of monsters that were no longer silent.
Then Jenni was back. "Anakin, you're absolutely insane. But yes, there's a corridor not far below the wall eleven o'clock with the entrance at six, running through to three. Get it done, we'll be waiting to pull you free from the Void."
"I know you will." Anakin strode to a point at the far side of the dais and looked around. "About here?"
"You're dead center."
"Good." Anakin knelt and slowly thrust his lightsaber into the floor almost to the hilt. He peered into the hole. "What I was afraid of, the saber doesn't go all the way through." He punched a series of holes around the first one, then rose and turned to face the doorway. "Now comes the tricky part. You need to let one—and only one—of those things through."
Luminara's ears were almost ruptured by the group shout of "What!" Including her own.
/\
Jenni actually laughed as she pulled away from the others in the Bond—she hadn't needed the rush of sheer disbelief from Barriss in the Tom Joad's command center and Ahsoka in the base to know how they'd react. Not Padme, though, she actually had a thread of humor under the worried acceptance ... two years, and she still knew their husband better than the other Bondmates (including Jenni, she'd cheated by dipping into Anakin's thoughts for a moment).
Jenni ignored what was happening in the outpost for a moment, both sensed through the Bond and displayed in the projections from Threefer's and Asajj's helmet cameras that Keda was watching in terrified silence—no, only Asajj's camera was working, Threefer's camera must have been caught in the same splash of acid blood that had destroyed his helmet's ceramaplast visor.
Speaking of Keda, their trainee's overpowering, gut-clenching fear was back, hammering at Jenni's mind, but it wasn't threatening to overwhelm her this time the way it had before. Either Jenni was learning to filter out that fear (along with Barriss's), or the need to ignore her own fear twisting in her gut and choking her breath was having a carry-over effect. Normally for a mission like this both she and Barriss would have been with the rest of the team, with some of the clones that had joined them manning combat center and pilot's seat alike, but this time pregnancy and exigency alike had separated the Bond, and she would have been too busy or focused—or both—for her own fear to have much effect. Now she set aside that fear, both hers and Keda's, and submerged herself in the Tao sweeping around them, feeling out the current she needed to follow as she used the Tom Joad's maneuvering thrusters to slowly push the ship into motion.
As the view through the cockpit's transparisteel began to shift Keda yanked her eyes away from the holo-projection of Asajj's camera feed to Jenni and shouted, "What are you doing?!"
"They can't come back out the way they came in, so they'll have to make their own exit. And when they do, we'll be there to pick them up."
'When', not 'if'. Keda stared at her for a moment, then nodded sharply and turned back to Asajj's camera feed. Her fear was still strong, but no longer overpowering. She hadn't noticed that Jenni hadn't said that they'd all make it back, or how hunting predators focused on the weak and wounded.
/\
Luminara's ears were still ringing when Padme said, "He's going to use the acid blood to eat through the stone underneath the flooring, do as he says."
Luminara glanced over at Ahsoka on the other side of the door, and the Togrutan rolled her eyes but nodded. Okay, no one told me that joining a Bond made you crazy. But Luminara's lips stretched into a tight smile, and she stepped back out of immediate reach of whatever might come through the opening. Looked at objectively it wasn't that crazy of an idea—yes, lightsabers could carve through that stone more efficiently than acid blood however potent, but it also drained their power—and since the floor was deeper than the blades of their lightsabers were long they wouldn't be able to just cut out a circle, they'd have to carve out wedges and lift them out, all while holding off those monstrosities. And they didn't know how thick that stone was.
The clones didn't seem any more enthused by the idea than Luminara was, but they stopped firing nonetheless, and showed how much they trusted the Bond—when the first black monster sprang through the hole, landed on the other side, and sprang toward them they didn't even flinch. Padme stepped forward, her own white blade held humming in front of her, but the monster froze in mid-air.
Luminara didn't see any more, she and Ahsoka had their own job to do. Refocusing on the hole in the blast doors, she stepped forward and her and Ahsoka's lightsabers chopped the next creature coming through into multiple pieces. As she stepped back to avoid some acid splash (she couldn't believe that their lightsabers weren't completely cauterizing the wounds inflicted on creatures that, as horrific as they were, were only man-sized), the clones resumed their blaster-fire through the hole to a fresh chorus of ear-piercing shrieks.
And the chamber abruptly filled with the presence of the Dark Side, thick enough to choke on. Luminara's head whipped around, to find only Anakin standing beside the pattern of holes he'd punched in the floor, arm outstretched as he held the creature he'd captured suspended beside him—but an Anakin whose eyes had changed to the yellow-rimmed black the Jedi master had seen all too often over the course of the war, in hate-filled faces of enemies trying to kill her and hers. Even as she watched, Anakin's fist slowly clenched, and the screaming creature just as slowly crumpled like a crushed fruit, its blood splashing down like fresh juice to run into the holes in the floor. A minute later the spurting flow was reduced to dripping, and Anakin cast the crushed husk aside.
"Master Unduli, eyes front!"
Luminara spun back around at Ahsoka's shout, and her lightsaber bisected another of the creatures that followed directly behind the one that Ahsoka was carving to pieces. The two corpses landed on another corpse lying in its own bubbling blood and smoking from multiple blaster bolts. More blaster bolts flashed past them through the holed blast doors.
"Next!"
Luminara stiffened at Anakin's call and glanced over at Ahsoka, who sighed and nodded. "We'll explain later, let's get through this alive first." After a moment's consideration Luminara nodded and stepped to the side, bringing up her lightsaber as the clones stopped their suppressive barrage, ready to step back in and stop the follow-ons after the next ... and the next ... and the next...
She lost track of how many she'd let through, how many of the creatures she'd killed, how many times she'd heard the dying shrieks and crunch of the creatures that Anakin was squeezing like fruit. Like the battles of the war, her world narrowed to repetitive action combined with an expanded awareness of any possible threats around her as she fought for their lives. Even the cloying, suffocating feel of the Dark Side surrounding her, pressing in, was familiar—in a tiny corner of her mind not occupied with survival, she thought to herself that she was going to be spending more of her time meditating than sleeping for the next week, as old memories haunted her dreams.
Then rather than the call to allow another monstrosity, the sound of tearing metal had her turning to look at Anakin again—if somewhat more cautiously this time, with an eye on the blast doors—to see an entire section of the stations along the wall peel away to float over to just above a spot on the floor obscured by drifting tendrils of smoke from acid-vaporized steel and rock, next to where Anakin stood with one thrust straight up.
"Ani, wait!"
He turned to look at Padme still standing by the clones, and she pointed toward the hole in the blast doors. "That first." He nodded without speaking, simply waving Luminara and Ahsoka away from the door, and as soon as they hastily backed away swung his arm down. The crunch of the collapsing stations and the shriek of steel scraping against steel echoed through the chamber as what had to be over a ton of metal compacted itself into the hole carved in the blast doors.
Everyone in the room relaxed, the Force-users shutting down their lightsabers. Padme hurried over to check on Threefer again, and Asajj stepped over to the other clones. "That was a lot of rapid fire you were throwing down range. How's your blasters?"
"They should be all right," one of the clones—Fun'tac?—said as the pair swapped out the battery cells for fresh ones. "We'll want to do some maintenance when we're back on the Tom Joad, make sure the overheating didn't do too much damage, but we've done rapid fire longer during the war without too much problem."
But that was peripheral, barely noticed by Luminara as she stared at an Anakin standing stiff and straight, face stony, his yellow-ringed black eyes staring at the wall almost seeming to glow. Before she could think of anything to say, Ahsoka stepped over and embraced him. Her face pressed against her shoulder, she murmured, "Come on, big guy, time to come home."
For a moment Anakin didn't move, but then his arms rose to circle his bondmate's shoulders and his head dipped to rub his cheek against her montral, his eyes closed. When they opened a moment later they were back to their usual blue. He tightened his hug. "Thanks, Snips."
"Anytime, Sky Guy."
Again, Luminara struggled to come up with something—anything—to say, but before she had the chance her earbud crackled to life again with Jenni's distorted voice, overriding what Luminara suddenly realized was the soft sound of Threefer giggling ... he really had gotten the 'good stuff'. "Welcome back, Big Guy, I'm bringing the Tom Joad around to your exit point now." Apparently, 'Big Guy' required capitalization now, at least for Anakin.
"Where is that?" Padme asked as she helped Threefer to his feet. She hadn't just been checking up on him, she'd also pulled up his emergency helmet.
"I'm riding the currents, wherever the Tom Joad ends up will be where your exit is located."
"And we're as ready as we're going to be," Asajj said. "Skywalker, stop hugging your squeeze, time to make that hole."
"Right." Anakin stepped away from his former Padawan and reached out toward another bank of consoles.
/\
The ambush hit them about the two-thirds of the way to where the Tom Joad waited for them.
Jenni had reported that, as best she could tell in the faint shifts in the currents, the creatures seeking their worse-than-deaths were gathering outside the entrance to the control room now sealed by crushed consoles. She'd also reported that she hadn't been able to see any hint of coordination among that gathered mob—they didn't attack each other, but they didn't work together either. And as the away team had fled for whatever exit the Mother had directed Jenni to, the corridors they were going down as rapidly as stealth allowed had more and more often become simple corridors rather than tunnels of hardened secretions, the light level improving with more and more of the overhead panels uncovered. Finally, those secretions had become only the occasional patches around doorways opening onto the corridor. And so the away team—clones and Force-users alike—had relaxed, only tensing up when fresh patches of the alien amber came into view.
The darkened doorway from which the skeletal spear-tipped tail whipped out to thrust through Fun'tac's chest and out his back in a spray of blood didn't have a hint of amber.
The bubbly shriek of Fun'tac's last breath ringing in her ears, Asajj leaped back from her position at the front of the line beside Anakin, her lightsaber blade still springing to life slicing through the bone-like eco-skeleton of the tail yanking out of the collapsing corpse. Her follow-on strike took an arm off the thing even as she Force-pushed it back into the room's dark interior to avoid being splashed by its blood. She took up a position in front of the doorway, the glow from her lightsaber's humming yellow blade casting at least a little light into the room. It was apparently a barracks, without a hint of amber anywhere she could see. It was also apparently empty, but she would have to step inside to be sure and there wasn't a chance in all the hells she was going to do that—not with the way these things were practically invisible in the Force. She shouted, "Everyone get by me!"
And a faint ripple in the Force and a shout from Padme signaled the next attack. Asajj whirled around just in time for Padme to push a stumbling Threefer into her arms as the former Senator's own glowing white blade bisected a creature in the doorway on the other side of the corridor. The collapsing monster's body shielded the next one's lunge, and Padme's shout turned into a scream as jaws closed on her wrist and the lightsaber still clutched in her hand dropped to burn a line in the steel floor for a moment before the blade winked out.
Asajj reached out through the the Force and yanked Padme back against her and Threefer, careful to keep the lightsaber in her hand away from both the others as she stepped backwards into the barracks that she was praying was as empty as it had looked. The creature that had bitten off Padme's hand hissed at her as it tensed to lunge, and with Threefer in one arm and Padme leaning against her with one hand gripped tight around the stump of the other to keep blood from spurting out there was nothing Asajj could do about it—only for a point-blank blaster bolt from Joker to shatter one side of its head even as the yellow-green blade of Ahsoka's shorter shoto lightsaber thrown from the back pierced through its other side.
"Padme!" Anakin's scream blasted from Asajj's earbud, and she staggered with her burden as the floor shook under her feet and steel panels fell from walls and ceiling as cracks ran through the underlying rock. Anakin leaped toward the doorway the monsters had come out of, only to be body-checked by Ahsoka and shoved toward Padme, Asajj, and Threefer as her shoto yanked from the head of the corpse lying at their feet in a bubbling pool of its own blood and leaped to her hand.
Asajj didn't hear any orders so they must have been communicating through their bond, but Anakin turned toward Padme and grabbed the medkit from her belt. Yanking it open, he grabbed scrabbled for a pressure bandage and dropped the rest while he tore open the package and hastily wrapped the bandage over her stump. Gathering his white and shaking Bondmate and wife against him with one arm, he turned to face the other doorway as his lightsaber leaped up from the floor where he'd dropped it into his hand.
Ahsoka stepped through the doorway into the hall. "It's empty, those were the only three."
"But not the only three left in the base," Jenni reported, "and the rest of them are headed your way, fast. You have to move now!"
Without another word Ahsoka raced ahead down the corridor as Anakin snatched up Padme in a bridal carry and summoned her lightsaber to his hand. He knocked her hand off it, hooked it to his belt, and glanced down at Fun'tac's corpse for a moment before shaking his head and racing off after his Bondmate. Asajj was right behind him carrying Threefer over her shoulder, summoning Fun'tac's blaster to her empty hand as she went, Joker and Master Unduli bringing up the rear. Asajj didn't have any trouble realizing what that glance and headshake was about, she'd noticed during the war that the Grand Army of the Republic had a custom she'd considered irrational at the time of not leaving their dead behind—not something the Separatists with their droid armies had had to worry about much, or her own matriarchal people had cared about much. But with two of them already hampered with two living bodies, they couldn't justify encumbering a third with a dead one.
Another ten minutes running, with Ahsoka presumably being guided by the Bond's constant sense of where they all were, and they found themselves piling into a tiny room that Asajj didn't recognize. But Anakin did, looking around at a long, thick steel tube running the length of one side of the room to what must be the outside wall of the asteroid base and the console Ahsoka was already standing at examining something she'd brought up on a projected holoscreen. He gently lowered a visibly shaking Padme to the floor. (She had done her best, but Asajj had been able to hear her moans of pain hissing through clenched teeth every time Anakin's feet hat hit the floor as he ran.) "A missile launch bay. Apparently Sidious's pawns didn't want anyone to be able to sneak up on them from behind, and with all the junk around them turbolasers would be nearly useless. Primitive, though, they must not have wanted to keep the stone floor as thick they would need to for a standard launch tube. And that means—"
"That we can use the tube to leave the base," Ahsoka finished. "But we can't just cut our way into the tube, if we do a pressure hatch will close at the end sealing it off. And if we cut through that, I don't fancy trying to get the wounded out through the tube with an entire outpost's atmosphere trying to push its way out with us. Cheap bastards didn't bother to install bulkhead doors, the pressure will rip out any doors still closed. And for accessing the launch tube we're in the wrong room, we want that one, it must be the armory." She pointed at a closed door on the interior wall where the tube entered the room.
"Right." Without bothering to put down Threefer, Asajj strode over. She didn't even bother to try to see if it would open, just sliced through the lock panel with her lightsaber and hammered the door open with a Force-enhanced kick. She stepped into the armory and glanced around—standard Separatist tech and setup, racks of missiles and the mechanical arms to move them from rack to tube, which meant the panel to disable the missile feed would be ... there. The panel showered sparks as her lightsaber thrust through it. "You can run the missile launch sequence now without risking blowing up the Tom Joad. You'll get a missile feed failure alert, you can override it safely."
"Right," Ahsoka replied, "starting it now—"
Even as the tube's hatch popped open and the expected alarm sounded, blaster fire erupted from the other room. "Here they come!" Joker shouted.
Asajj lowered Threefer to the ground as Padme shuffled into the armory, clutching her stump to her chest and gritting her teeth against the pain, Anakin right behind her. With a nod to Anakin, Asajj walked past them into the control room. Joker was at the door firing down the corridor, Master Unduli against the wall by the door ready to deal with anything that managed to make it through the blaster fire, just as in the central control room. Asajj said briskly, "Ahsoka, I'm taking over. I know Separatist equipment the best and Anakin's going to need help getting the wounded into the tube one at a time—one of you is going to need to go first."
"Groc and Craft are at the airlock with grappling lines," Jenni added, "But having a Dancer come through first that can shape the currents to the airlock would be best."
"And no way is Anakin going first and leaving Padme behind."
"No. And these monsters are just the skirmishers, the real mob that gathered outside the control center will be here within fifteen minutes, so hurry."
Joker cursed. Ahsoka glanced toward Master Unduli, and sighed when the Jedi nodded toward the door. "Don't get yourself killed, Master, if you do Barriss will be a long time forgiving us." Without waiting for a response she rushed for the door. Less than a minute later she announced, "I'm in the tube."
"Launching."
After that it was routine, Ahsoka followed by Threefer, then Padme, then Anakin. Even as the stud signaling the outer hatch opening for Anakin lit up, Asajj called out, "Master Unduli, you're up!" She nodded toward the door. The Jedi hesitated, then nodded back and headed for the armory. Asajj said, "Joker, you're next."
"And how will you get out? You aren't going to be able to run the panel remotely." Joker's voice was calm, even as he continued to fire through the door to the hallway at targets Asajj couldn't see at this angle. They were very lucky that the missile control room was at the end of the hallway, not one of the rooms that were along it.
Asajj had been wondering the same thing. The stud signaling that the tube was closed lit up, and she opened the outer hatch for Master Unduli. "I'll cut my way out."
"Jenni, how close is the main wave?"
"Maybe a couple minutes, you need to move!" Jenni's voice was a lot less calm that Joker's.
"Asajj, you aren't going to be able to cut your way into the missile tube then out the outer hatch with these things on your tail. You go. I'll last long enough to run the controls, I was trained on standard Separatist equipment." Asajj groped for something to say, and he glanced at her for a moment—she could see his smile through his enviro-suit's helmet—before refocusing on the corridor. "Asajj, it's you Force-users' job to come up with the miracles that save lives and win battles, it's our job to keep you alive long enough to come up with the miracles. Let me do my job, so you can do yours."
"He's right, Asajj, and even if he isn't you don't have time. Say hello for me, Joker, I'll see you on the other side. The party never ends."
Asajj struggled for a moment to come up with a counter-argument, but Jenni was right—they didn't have time; if she tried to fight him over it, they would both die. Voice harsh, she repeated, "See you on the other side." She opened the missile tube, then straightened and gave him the Grand Army of the Republic's salute—the first time she'd ever done so for anyone. "The console is yours."
Even as she ran for the armory door, she heard the suppressing blaster fire behind her stop. A screeching sound she only now realized she'd been hearing ever since the firing had started, that had to be those monsters when they weren't trying to be stealthy, was rapidly getting louder, but was cut off by the closing hatch to the tube.
And then the outer hatch irised open and she was pushing herself out into empty space, the Tom Joad only a couple dozen meters away, the light around the airlock shining bright showing Master Unduli 'climbing' a floating cord 'up' to it ... the same floating cord that ended a few meters from Asajj. And behind her, the dim presence she'd been focused on since abandoning the console winked out.
But Joker had lasted long enough to get her out, as he'd promised.
As she reached out with the Force to pull the cord over to her, she could hear nothing but breathing through her earbud.
Author's Note: I know, this chapter is really late. Partly that's because of the size of the chapter, partly Thanksgiving, but mostly because this clusterfuck of an election has really messed me up. Ah well, we'll see if I can get myself back into my usual routine now that it's mostly over—until 2022, at least, when we might get to do this all over again. So, two more smaller chapters or one more bigger chapter and this story's put to bed ... novella length, as intended.