A/N: guest reader,thanks for catching the voxyn/vornskr thing. I knew the difference, but seem to have not bothered it while also constructing that chase. :)
Slowly, shuttles moved between Maw Installation and Republic capitol ships. Star Destroyers and Mon Cal frigates were lashed to bug fighters by durasteel and plastic umbilicals clamped down directly on the fighter's split cockpits. They had caught the little fighters unawares, or chasing the Orion with a fanaticism that only Master Kell could truly comprehend. Testing was done on the surly, mixed-species pilots, and their blood ran free with glitterstim while their minds ran Force-lines and their eyes slowly rolled up into white. They originated somewhere in the vicinity of the legal Kessel mining base, and wouldn't talk until the spice ran down.
Inside the station, Paqs Patra, Kell and De'shar of the Republic followed the Jedi in a path she traced with head high and nostrils pulling at the air in gulps. Nothing showed that she also swam in the currents of the Force. De'shar could almost still feel that...coordination, something between the pieces of her mind and the whole of Kell's, at the fringes of her skillless reaching.
"He went this way." Kell said quietly. Patra looked dubious, as much as his long face with its feathers tucked below the dark eyes could be said to have expression. De'shar kept her gaze between them. She wouldn't have been even this enthusiastic about rescuing Corran before, but some of her grudge against the Jedi had faded away, replaced somewhat by her brush with the psychic bond. And would it fade when that remnant did? She couldn't say. She felt not quite a new being, but more that the distinction between herself, the body inhabiting her boots and holding her blaster, and the other's varied forms was at a different level than that between their thoughts. There was a certainty that Patra and Master Kell were thinking in the same way as herself.
It wasn't true entirely; she couldn't say what it was that made Kell stop at a particular door and stand, the tips of her tails loosely waving below her cloak, before keying the door open.
Inside, the machine lay on the near table of a laboratory. Kel picked it up with one hand while De'shar circled around and eyed it beside her. This indeed was what they had come to secure.
"So this is what you've been all about." Patra said levelly.
Kell said, "Hmm." and turned the silver sphere over in her hands.
"If you go after him there's no way for you to come back either." De'shar said.
"I know." said Kell, minutely terse. "But if Luke is in that same universe, together they may find a way here."
"And if they're not?"
Kell shook her head and snorted, anger in her eyes.
Patra had maneuvered himself into a metal chair, his legs folded back beneath him and his tail between the struts in the back so he looked like a brooding bird. "What does the Force tell you?"
This gave Kell pause. "That...that they are alive and that we can do nothing but wait." But she muttered, "It doesn't feel right." and crouched down beside the table, the palms of her hands flat on the floor. De'shar wondered what it would be like to feel the world through scales, wondered if the Lizz-Sur was a bit like herself and knew how hard it was to comfort, and leaned her back against the wall beside the door. "Now", she said, quiet because she thought she had heard it before, "we wait."