The Queen's Honor Guard
by Nyohah
V.
When Yen Sa fell over backward into him, Cai Yue almost fell too. At first he didn't see what was beyond the door that had caused it to open, but heard a strange snapping sound, then the painfully familiar buzz of the light-swords used by Jedi.
Tempest and Chen Yi had their weapons ignited by the time he pushed Yen Sa back onto his feet. They stepped backward away from the door as Yen Sa and Cai Yue ignited their weapons. The narrow hallway would give the Mandalorians protection if not an advantage.
As the Jedi rushed through the door, Chen Yi suddenly stumbled forward. Cai Yue looked at him in shock, then felt himself start to be dragged forward, toward several blades of energy so concentrated that they could reflect shots from energy guns and—what Cai Yue detested more than anything in existence at the moment—not even Vyrenchi could absorb the energy quickly enough to protect them.
He reacted the same moment he felt the tug, creating a gravity well on the door on the far wall—the one that led to the room where he would keep a prisoner. As the Jedi were sucked backward into the door, the Mandalorians stopped abruptly. This time Chen Yi almost fell over.
Cai Yue decreased the power of the gravity well when all the Jedi were pressed against the door, keeping it just strong enough to keep them in place without exhausting himself.
"Trapped Jedi," Chen Yi said happily.
"A fitting end for them," agreed Tempest.
Cai Yue started to say something he certainly thought was funny, but then he felt his gravity well's hold on the Jedi shift a little. They moved forward, and the door opened an inch before it slammed shut again and all the Jedi slammed against it. Those in the back groaned in pain.
He increased the force of the gravity well, but the force working against it increased as well. Struggling against the power that pushed to the side, he began to sweat, then to tremble. He knew he would lose eventually. He had the disadvantage. This power was working in one direction, against only half of his gravity well, and utilizing the power of the other half.
The door jumped open, and Cai Yue's gravity well followed it, dragging the Jedi and anything on the other side over with it. The sudden move made Cai Yue lose his concentration, however, and it dissipated quickly. Most of the Jedi fell to the floor, but three managed to stay on their feet and reignite their weapons.
A red-skinned Jedi with thick horns and striped tails coming from her head stepped out from the smaller room.
Instantly, Cai Yue lost all free will. He let his weapon go away and began to walk toward her. The other three followed him. They stopped several feet from her, and, thankfully, she ordered the Jedi not to attack.
A pale-skinned alien in a gray jumpsuit with a white towel around his neck walked out from the room also. Cai Yue recognized him. He had been the one they'd questioned back when they were still rescuing colonies. He'd seemed sympathetic to them then, and Cai Yue felt a wave of hurt at the fact that he'd been helping the Jedi all along.
But he hadn't seemed to like Jedi at all. That remembrance confused him, but only increased the hurt. When the alien walked up to them and stripped the gloves that held the means by which they created their weapons off their hands, the hurt increased into near-hatred.
He retreated from then and said, "Shaak Ti, let them go."
"No," she answered.
"You can always just do it to them again if they start to cause problems." The alien cocked his head as though listening to them. Cai Yue felt strangely as though he were being studied.
"I don't think they will," the alien continued. "Why didn't you just do this in the first place, anyway?"
"I didn't think it would work on them," Shaak Ti said, the words ringing slightly false.
The alien noticed also and raised an eyebrow.
"And I can't let them go because—" She stopped.
"Because?"
She whispered, "I can only do it when I'm angry."
The alien began to laugh. "Oh, just wait till I tell the Council you used the Force in anger. Maybe they'll kick you out of the Order, too."
Shaak Ti's head-tails twitched, and Cai Yue was suddenly able to move. The pale alien saw the Mandalorians' movements, and said, "Thank you," to Shaak Ti, who looked a little paler. Turning to the Mandalorians, he said, "I don't supposed one of you would be willing to talk to us."
Ming stepped out of the larger room and said, "I'll talk."
"No, that's all right. We already tried you. You're far too stubborn, and there's no reason we can't pick someone else who might be less so."
Ming looked at Cai Yue, then tossed her head to throw her braid over the shoulder, the movement ending with her chin held a full thirty degrees above level.
Cai Yue recognized the movement as a signal and dropped to his knees. The other three looked at him like he was insane. He coughed slightly, and they got the hint and kneeled also.
"My queen," said Cai Yue, trying to think of something as over-the-top as her chin level to say, "your loyal servants have come to rescue you."
The pale alien clicked his tongue in surprise.
Zhen Feng Qui stared at the bodies that were lying on the floor. The Jedi had dragged them from their original place of death to a small corner room to await autopsy—dissection was more the spirit of the procedure they intended. He had no intention of allowing that. He only hoped he would have the stubbornness of the queen or the natural authority of the general, or better yet, Kei Sa, to back up his wishes.
Lan he didn't much care about. It was sad, sure, the death of an honor guard member. It was the first time one of them had died, and frankly, he suspected that they had all begun to think they were invincible. His thoughts had certainly been heading that way, and the death of one of the honor guard—any one of the honor guard—was sobering when looked upon from a strictly unemotional point of view.
He'd thought all that in the half second of absolute shock before the real news had had time to hit him.
Ta Lian Shi was dead.
One could argue they had all known that before Tempest, bearing bad news, had come back to fetch them for a diplomatic meeting between the Jedi and the Mandalorians. But there had been the chance that they were only captured, or that they were injured and had managed to hide themselves, but were too injured to come back. All they had been sure of was that if Lan and Lian were coming back, they would have been back already.
He imagined that was how it was with all deaths. There was always hope until one saw irrevocable evidence. And that very hope made it worse.
He wasn't sure if he was the only one who had secretly hoped that they were not dead, just unable to return. Everyone else had been more worried about the queen than sad about Lian.
No one else had known Lian since they were seven. No one else had trained beside him for eight years before getting private tutors. No one else had fought him in every tournament in which he had ever fought and lost every single time.
Zhen smiled at the memory, but it was instantly twisted into a grimace as he held back his emotions.
He had been angry every time he lost for the first couple of years, but when he had come to accept that Lian was just better than he was, it had become a private joke of sorts, both of them laughing at the inevitability of the outcome every time. Laughing had come to define their friendship. They each thought the other was funnier than any other person he had ever met, even if other people rarely seemed to think that way.
Lian would never laugh again. He had been a perpetually happy person before they came to this place, and even when the war seemed to be dragging him more than anyone into a mental breakdown, he had retained his sense of humor, even if it had begun to be surrounded by a malice that Zhen had never seen in him before.
He had always been one whose memory could start Zhen laughing again in a completely inappropriate place hours, or days, or longer, after the actual event had occurred. So while Lian himself would never make Zhen laugh again either, his memory might.
But Zhen would have to stop seeing only dead Lian laying on the floor and getting the urge to vomit every time he thought of him first.
In spite of the deaths of two of her honor guard, Her Righteousness the Queen of Mandalore couldn't keep an unladylike smirk off her face as she watched the pale-skinned Jedi who had captured her—Braeden Leer was his name, and Cai Yue, Wei Yong, and Quy Ling had met him before—stare predatorily down at the waking human officer who had tried to keep her in the room.
He'd failed, obviously; her first hard kick to the jaw had nearly knocked him out. And the several punches that had followed had absolutely nothing to do with her anger at the deaths of her guards and her being captured.
It was extremely satisfying that it had taken him this long to wake up; all the honor guard had arrived, except—
"Where's Zhen," she asked.
"He's in the room," said Chen Yi.
"What room?"
"The room where the bodies are," answered Cai Yue, "and he fervently begs you to command them not to dissect the bodies."
She opened her mouth to protest his absence, but Tempest had anticipated her.
"Let him be, my queen," he said. "His best friend's been killed." He looked at her pointedly—or as pointedly as any of Tempest's looks ever got, which meant she could hardly tell his expression had changed.
Remembering what she had thought when Cai Yue had just disappeared and she only thought he was dead, she nodded at Tempest.
A sudden movement caught her eye, and she looked over to see that Braeden Leer had picked the soldier up by his collar and was easily holding him off the ground. "The Mandalorian Queen," he said in a flat voice, overly articulating his consonants, "informs me that you tried to shoot her with your blaster."
"Yes, that is true," answered the soldier. "Please put me down now."
He didn't. "Does it not strike you that I have every right to be angry that you tried to kill our prisoner?"
"Better the dangerous prisoner be dead than escaped."
"No. Not when you have ten Jedi to capture the dangerous prisoner." Braeden set him down. "And not when the prisoner didn't even try to escape. We're only lucky she kicked you before you actually fired your weapon."
"No, she didn't."
"What?"
"I shot her several times. She had shields."
Braeden turned to face her, and she looked to Honor where he was standing, watchdog-like, at her right hand. "Have I ever told you I love you, Honor?"
The Vyrenchi mewled with pleasure in her head.
She looked back at her captor, but he wasn't as confused as she had expected him to be. "This...energy disruption has a name?"
"He's not an energy disruption; he's Vyrenchi."
"Vyrenchi?"
"They're beings made entirely of energy that live on a planet two orbits closer to the sun than our home planet."
"Which is?"
"Mandalore."
"Which is where?"
Ming shrugged. Braeden Leer raised his eyebrows and looked around at the rest of the room's occupants. The Jedi had been made to stand outside, except the red-skinned one that had been in the room earlier. She had run away crying after she stopped the Mandalorian rescue attempt.
The rest of the room shrugged at him, too.
"This is all of you?" Braeden asked.
"This is my honor guard," Ming answered. "There are thirteen of us—were."
"There are only ten of you in this room."
"Zhen isn't here because you killed his best friend," she answered. "And I command that you return the bodies of our dead to us for proper burial."
Braeden looked dismissive. "Of course. You're a member of your own honor guard?"
She mimicked his attitude. "Of course."
He looked a little peeved. "And none of you ten, the best of your race—as I'm assuming you're the ones we call Supercommandoes, who can summon elemental forces at will?"
Ming nodded.
"None of you knows where your planet is?"
"Well," Yen Sa said. "It's not on any of your maps. It might be in another galaxy." As Braeden started to nod, Yen Sa added, "Or it might be in this one."
"We know how to get to it," Cai Yue said. "We just don't know where it is."
Braeden raised an eyebrow, then dropped his head and shook it vigorously. Droplets of water flew off his hair. "Never mind," he sighed, raising his head again. "I have a much more pressing question. I want to know about—"
"The clones," Ming interrupted. "We look upon the production of clones to be a horrid enterprise, and we would never tell you anything about it, no matter how much you wanted them because they're a disposable army. It's a transgression against all nature—"
"If you find them so awful," Braeden said, beginning to pace, "then why do you make them?"
"We don't. Some of our enemies from home do, and we think they are abominations. We will never tell you anything to help you improve—"
"Why do you bring your enemies' soldiers? If you hadn't, people wouldn't hate you so much. We're fighting you because the people of this galaxy cannot stand the thought of your having clones."
"We don't have clones!" Ming shouted. "We're fighting you because you have clones."
Braeden stopped and stared at her. A few seconds later he began to laugh.
"What?"
Braeden stopped laughing, but didn't answer, kicking the wall instead.
The soldier, from the side of the room where he was still feeling his jaw tenderly, said, "We don't have clones."
The Mandalorians were silent. They had been for awhile, and Ming suspected they had caught on more quickly than she had, distracted by her arguing as she had been. "You have to," she said quietly.
"It's all too awful," Braeden said, and kicked the wall again.
"So you've been fighting us because you thought we had clones, and you hate them," said Wei Yong, "and we've been fighting you because we thought you had clones, and we hate them, when in reality, there were no clones at all."
"That's kind of an impressive mess," said Cai Yue.
"Yes," Braeden said, "it is a very impressive mess. And there's only one thing to do about it, to stop the killing. Take it to Tascilo."
"Take it where?" asked Ming.
"Take it to Coruscant," he said, as though explaining.
"Coruscant?" she asked.
"Center of the universe."
No, she corrected inwardly. That was Mandalore.