"Well, they're not shooting us down. Everything looks to be in place." She didn't answer Canderous, only nodded in agreement. Everything was in place; her life, those she loved, her past, present and future. Now it was just a matter of it all fitting together.
"It looks a lot nicer this time around." She heard Dustil murmur behind her.
Everything would look nicer once they were back on Telos. She had been telling herself that ever since she had left it nearly a year ago.
"This is the Ebon Hawk requesting permission to land." Canderous said, and she thought of how it was his voice that gave him his power, that authority that wouldn't be questioned. Strip away the formidable appearance, Mandalorian warrior history, and a will that couldn't be contested, but as long as he still had that voice, she didn't see how anyone could argue.
Power came from everywhere it seemed; to some men from timbre, to other men from the inability to desire it.
She waited patiently for what seemed like ages while the port authorities on Telos checked and rechecked the legitimacy of their request.
"I still don't see why you won't let me fly her," Mission said, reaching her hand past Canderous towards the controls. The Mandalorian stared at it as if he might bite it off.
"We want to land, not blow the planet up again," Dustil answered.
"Ebon Hawk, you are cleared for landing at dock twelve."
"There's more than one?" Canderous muttered.
"The rebuilding process must have begun with the construction of more space ports," Bastila, who had been as silent as she had for the duration of their approach to Telos, offered.
"I bet I know who's been prodding them into moving it along." Mission's words were met with no reaction.
She refused to utter his name. Not now, not when she was so close to him. The next time she said it, she wanted his raised eyebrow, his cocksure smirk, not the deafening finality of silence.
"Understood. Beginning our descent," She finally replied.
She was realizing everything, with enough work and patience, could eventually be put back together. Destroyed planets, broken bodies.
Even incomplete identities.
"Perhaps it would be better if we hid our lightsabers," Bastila murmured into her ear. Katrina scoffed. They had Jedi written all over them, despite the weapons hanging from their robes.
For one thing, they weren't as dirty and unkempt as half the people around here. They weren't even out of the facility yet and already she had a pretty good idea of what the planet awaiting her would look like.
Dark, suspicious, and aloof. The workers eyed the two Jedi with that same hatred and accusations that the two medics who saved her had. It seemed they knew exactly who she was, could see all the dark blots upon her life.
She tried to keep her eyes focused ahead of her, towards the hangar that held the ruins of the Jedi Chaser.
"Hold it!" For a moment she was tempted to simply keep walking past the man who was now holding out his ancient blaster as if nothing would please him better than to shoot her.
"I've never seen you before and I've worked here for the better part of my life. Now you want to tell me just what you're doing wandering around in a restricted repair zone?" Not even the guards now were threatening her- just common workers and citizens were hounding for her blood too.
And everyone had a blaster. That she had noticed right away.
"I was with Admiral Onasi when our ship was attacked. I'm on my way to see if it's been repaired," Katrina carefully repeated the spiel she had been repeating ever since leaving the sickbay.
Begin with Carth, a man they all trust, end with an understandable task. She couldn't tell them that she was a Jedi searching for the people who were trying to murder her former-Dark Lord self. They didn't seem to trust anything that wasn't as beaten-down and worn-out as the rest of them.
"Onasi? Carth Onasi?" the man repeated dumbly, letting his blaster fall a little.
There is no raging impatience, there is no desire to just slash through all these fools.
"Yes, Admiral Carth Onasi." She wondered how many times she would have to say his name, how many times she would have to remind herself of him.
The man said nothing in reply. With a gaze that still said he would have liked to use the blaster, he stepped back and allowed them to pass.
"They say the Mandalorian War cost the Republic more than they could ever imagine. Planets like this must be the example," Bastila said.
She couldn't help feeling a certain frustration that this war which had changed so much for so many, a war she helped begin, had vanished completely from her memory.
"Is it us they hate, or just people in general?" Or is it me?
"I should think that the Mandalorians might be at the top of the list, but we are not Mandalorians."
"Very astute observation," she couldn't help adding, smirking to herself at Bastila's exasperated sigh.
You can take the girl out of the dark side, but you can't take the dark side out of the girl. He was probably the only person she let slide with comments like that. Anyone else was liable to get the receiving end of her lightsaber.
They reached the hangar. Not unsurprisingly, three armed guards stood outside of it. The place seemed overrun with guards, as if every moment the people in it feared another attack.
"Repair crew's expecting you. Go on in." Katrina exchanged glances with Bastila as they headed inside.
The Jedi Chaser looked older than the Ebon Hawk. Scourged, burned, and scarred by the explosion, she looked like wreckage from a minor war rather than the practically brand new ship she had been only a few days ago.
"I wondered when you'd be coming down to check on her," The voice was coming from a set of legs poking out from an opened bulkhead on the hull of the ship. "Got banged up pretty good, but nothing you probably can't fix, if you're still the pilot you were a while back-"The rest of the man emerged from the bulkhead. He was covered in grime and soot, not unlike having gone through the attack with the ship himself.
"You're not Onasi," he said curtly.
"No, I'm not," Katrina replied carefully, trying to size the man up. Some grizzled white hairs poked out from the filth around his chin, and a pair of keen eyes seemed to be more curious about her than accusatory.
"You must be that girl I heard was with him- Pretty enough to fit the position, I'd say." She smiled, wondering if this kind of roguish charm was a Telosian trait.
"Where is old Carth? Never knew him to not be concerned about his ship."
He probably is. If he still knows he has a ship. If he still knows he exists at all.
"Admiral Onasi was injured in the attack and is recovering," Bastila answered for her.
The man gazed at her again with that curious, wondering look.
"Sounds like Carth all right," he murmured.
"Well, I'll fill you in since I assume that's why you're here," he said, straightening up. "I'm Genides, head of repairs around this particular watering hole."
He turned and began to walk around the ship. Katrina hurried after him.
"Now, like you might have heard by now, nothing horribly critical was damaged. Hyperdrive, life support- that's all still intact. The controls to all of that however, were destroyed, basically making the rest of it not worth a tinker's damn."
She gazed at the destroyed shell that was once the cockpit and wondered how she had possibly avoided the death it meant for her.
Oh. Right, that.
"Do you know what could do this type of localized damage?" Genides leaned up against the ship, sending a cloud of soot into the air.
"To be honest, no one is entirely sure. Telos barely has the facilities to keep the few of us alive, let alone investigate strange attacks on alien ships. Hell, you're lucky they found you and brought you here at all. Of course, it being Carth's ship and all made them a lot more receptive to helping you out."
"The running rumor is that it was a hand weapon detonated in space, something like a thermal detonator." Genides shook his head.
"No, I wouldn't bet all the credits I had on it, even though that isn't very much. While a thermal detonator would be the kind of easily explainable weapon due to the fact that no idiot detonates one in open space and we really don't know what kind of damage it could do, it couldn't have possibly contained itself just to the cockpit. It probably would have done more damage, and this kind of attack seems more calculated than that. No, I would say it was something else, though probably still thermal in nature." Katrina nodded.
"Do you have any idea of what kind of a weapon that would be?" Bastila asked.
"I haven't really been out much lately," Genides said somewhat ruefully, rubbing the back of his neck. "Not much of Telos knows what's going on in the galaxy anymore. The only thing I could think of would be something with a specialized kind of detonator, one that could pinpoint the exact moment of detonation the user chose. Now the only planet I know of that used to be big on demolitions is Anelli, but whether that's true anymore or not, I don't know."
"How did you know Carth?" The question came out without her meaning to ask it, and it made her chest ache.
He would be her relation to everything it seemed; on Telos, at the very least.
"Back in the days when he was just a pilot, I was on his squadron's repair crew. He'd bring his ships in broken to pieces, but he'd always stay and fix them up. These other guys would come back, not a scratch on their hulls. But you could always tell Onasi pushed his to the limit." Genides glanced around for a moment.
"He's not uh, he's not hurt real bad or anything, is he?"
She turned around and strode out of the hangar as quickly as she could.