At some point, they'd probably have to think about securing the Ravelin's main decks and making sure the remaining Imperial personnel were all under guard - but right now, that didn't seem particularly important.

Jaina and Lowie were at the controls, like they'd been flying stolen Imperial cruisers together since childhood. Ensign Verrer had taken the rest of the former Imperial command crew off to one side, and was talking quietly with them. Fiver was watching them, but no-one seemed to want to argue with the four Jedi who'd just taken over their ship.

So Anakin simply stood with his arm round Tahiri, watching through the viewports as the Ravelin accelerated upwards through the Bespin sky. The climb out of the gas-giant's gravity-well had become a sharp diagonal ascent, but the dramatic angle of the deck just made the towering cliffs of cloud in front of them look even more majestic.

Tahiri looked up at him, her body turning in his arm's embrace, a complex dance around herself, a wordless question in her eyes.

Anakin smiled in answer, and for a long moment, they simply lost themselves in the kiss. Anakin wasn't sure quite what prompted them to eased back out, smiling at each other, but when he looked out at the sky again, he understood exactly why.

"Watch this bit," he whispered.

In front of them, the tops of Bespin's highest thunderheads were tumbling away beneath the frigate's climbing bows.

For a moment, as the ship emerged into the clear blue sky, there was a glimpse of a vast curved horizon, incomprehensibly immense.

"Wow," Tahiri said.

"Yeah," he agreed. On a world as huge as Bespin, you could see for incredible distances across the surface of the cloud layer. What really mattered was that the human mind instinctively recognized the tremendous scale - but Anakin had done the basic calculations when he'd been a kid, after his first visit to Cloud City, and if he'd done them right, the sea of clouds that rolled away in front of them stretched away for almost twenty thousand kilometers beneath its endless sky.

"How big is that view?"

"I know. A little larger than the planetary surface area of Coruscant."

But within moments, Jaina had pushed the ship up so that even the curved horizon fell away - mostly an illusion as she lifted the bow a little higher, but the sky was moving rapidly from bright day through a sea-deep twilight, with the first stars of the night appearing overhead. The higher constellations always appeared first, because even with the horizon out of sight below the hull, the huge planet looming underneath the ship still filled the lower sky with reflected light, but the sky darkened rapidly as Jaina brought the frigate up into the night. A slow roll completed the manoeuvre, reorienting them towards space so that all that remained of the planetglow was a diffuse light behind and around the ship, haloing the outer edge of the widening starscape up ahead - reminding him for a moment of a curtain being pulled back on a fancy theater stage or holoscreen.

"They don't normally break orbit this fast," Tahiri remarked, a little wistful at how quickly they'd left Bespin behind. "Or this steeply."

"We picked a nice one," Anakin agreed, hugging her tighter for a moment - proud of how smart and fast Tahiri was, how quickly she identified the essence of something new.

She'd always been like that - but when he'd taught himself to read hieratic Sith hieroglyphs at the age of eleven, it had seemed entirely natural that his opinionated, multi-lingual nine-year-old best friend could keep pace with him. The fact that the adult Jedi were no good at it had been more of a puzzle.

And now...?

Well, Anakin was impressed by the speed with which they'd climbed up, too. Most capital ships were built for linear acceleration in deep space - designed to scout across a system in a few hours, and hold point five past lightspeed from one side of the Galaxy to the next, not for climbing quickly through the atmosphere. A freighter or a snubfighter, built for dropping in and out of orbit, was able to throw a lot more power through the repulsors, and even a robustly straightforward ship like the Yavin Turtle, slow in all the ways that combat pilots thought of as important, could normally punch past a low-orbit blockade before the opposing capital ships could catch them.

Speaking of which...

Anakin felt his lip twist, as he realised that Chimaera was giving chase - there was a fireworks display of turbolaser fire to starboard, as the big ship hurried up in pursuit - but that seemed a long, long way away.

Tahiri looked alarmed - or maybe just excited. "Are they-?"

"No," he grinned. "We're okay..."

Anakin did some quick mental calculations to confirm his instinct, but there was no need to go into much detail. Thrawn had brought Chimaera down deep into the Bespin sky - part of what Anakin now realised had been a very well-planned trap for the Yavin Turtle, which they'd lucked out of largely by not recognizing they'd been caught - and an Imperial-class ship simply couldn't get back up into space as fast as their stolen frigate. The steep angle of the Ravelin's ascent wasn't just for show, either - Jaina had been keeping the ship's sharp arrow-bow aimed straight along the invisible slope defined by the vector sum of forward motion from the thrusters and the upward surge of the repulsors, so they hadn't just outpaced the big Star Destroyer in the race up towards deep black, they'd also angled sharply away in terms of distance around the planet's orbit. "Remember, when we started, they were maybe twenty-five kilometers above us, and directly overhead. Even the thin upper atmosphere is going to burn off their turbolaser bolts, and we're probably well out of effective range."

Jaina said something about TIE Fighters on their tail, but Lowie answered with a confident growl, a simple flick of switches - on a ship the size of Ravelin, with the TIEs shooting at long range, the weapons impacts on the shields weren't even noticeable.

Abruptly, they were free and clear. Open space, with the constellations stark and bright ahead of them, huge moons looming on the left.

Fiver sang a little droidspeak song about navigation calculations being complete. Jaina grinned, leaning forward on the jump levers.

The deck growled beneath their feet, as the stars ahead of them stretched out into starlines, and the Ravelin leapt forwards into hyperspace.

Anakin looked out to the lightning-storm sky, though his focus was on a distant abstraction, his thoughts somewhere far away.

Tahiri gave him a curious look. "Everything okay?"

"Just thinking about how we could have done it better," he shrugged.

"How do you mean?"

Anakin exhaled. "We could have actually surrendered, then taken control of the ship in a way that didn't involve going through all the stormtroopers."

She laughed quietly at that, running her hand up his back and kneading out some of the tension. "I might not mind being marched around in shock-binders, but can you imagine Jaina or Lowie being comfortable with that?"

Anakin didn't really answer. The fight for control of the ship had felt dangerous in subtle ways that had nothing to do with Imperial idiots shooting blasters at them. As usual, he reckoned it was his own fault - he'd been thinking too hard, imposing his will on the situation, not letting the Force guide his actions. And trying to control the friends around you meant you ended up derailing their actions.

The real danger lay in not trusting other people, not allowing them the necessary freedom to follow their own patterns in the Force - Tahiri's upbringing in a tribe of Tusken Raiders and her more recent Yuuzhan Vong religious transformation gave her horizons of perception and action far wider than the usual human boundaries, and Lowie's aggressive fighting-style was driven by his natural hunting instincts and fierce Kashyyyk honour-code. Neither of them belonged on a leash - at least in battle, considering that Tahiri sometimes wore one in bed, and Wookiee sex-lives were nothing of his business. The answer - as profound as it was simple - was to always let them be themselves. But it was hard to balance the freedom that they needed with the tight focus that was required to hold back Jaina - her military training had already distorted her, converting her into a machine to perform fast, mechanical sequences of combat moves, focused on achieving rapid and decisive destruction, and Anakin was determined not to let her go too deep into that pattern of attack.

That was why he'd spent the past few years regularly slicing the Rogue Squadron computers, to prevent her recall to active duty.

Anakin exhaled. Perhaps if he relaxed about his sister, she'd relax as well.

He just stood there with Tahiri for a while, until he realised that he was listening to an interesting counterpoint in the mechanical rhythms of the ship, a syncopated beat which came from having an ungainly freighter docked to one side of the hull, an incongruous addition that introduced an unusual overlay in the physical vibrations of the frigate's drives and hull, and which demanded unusual patterns of compensating effort from the hyperdrive and inertial systems as they powered the frigate forward.

But the juxtaposition which mattered more was the twine of Tahiri's body with his own.

"So, we really stole a Star Destroyer?" Tahiri smiled at him.

"Yeah," he said. "We did."

She gave him a thoughtful look. "And you reckon we can fly this thing with just the four of us?"

"I think so," he said. "Let's have a look?"

They walked to the command console on the bridge wing. Anakin entered Aunt Mara's override again, and began calling up the technical readouts of the ship they'd just acquired. Tahiri watched the holograms with apparent fascination, and Jaina and Lowie wandered over from the flight controls, no longer needing to stay on the helm now that their course in hyperspace was programmed in.

Even Ensign Verrer wandered up, in case they had any questions he could help them with. Anakin suspected he just didn't want them to break the ship.

The Ravelin was only a little smaller than a New Republic fleet escort, and the weapons and drives were normally manned by dedicated gunnery crews and engineering teams, but as Anakin had suspected, they were designed to be controlled remotely from the bridge if needed, and built for simplified maintenance in the best Imperial tradition, with replacement sub-assemblies waiting in a cargo bay, ready to be swapped in by a complement of astro-droids who Fiver had already persuaded to defect; it meant a little more workload than the average freighter or fighter, but nothing that was out-of-reach for four Jedi used to flying the Millennium Falcon - or the Yavin Turtle.

But now that they felt confident in their control of the frigate, there was the small matter of the Imperial crew to attend to. Leaving Fiver to monitor the ship from the bridge, they set about to secure the rest of the ship properly. Lowie and Jaina, both of them now tooled-up with as much stolen Imperial weaponry as they could carry, went with Ensign Verrer to round up the rest of the crew, while Anakin and Tahiri marched Lieutenant Ames down to the detention block, and then went to collect the rest of the recalcitrants. Five more officers had opted to stay as prisoners, until they could hand them over to the New Republic. Most of the rest just wanted out of the war - conscripts and enlistees, men and women with little motivation to fight.

They weren't exactly the Empire we imagined, Anakin reflected, as he stepped into the 'fresher. Not under Palpatine or Thrawn.

Most of Anakin's previous battle experience had been against the Yuuzhan Vong, whose sense of warrior honour meant that they saw being shot down by an X-wing or skewered on a lightsaber as a path to salvation and rebirth, and Anakin's instinctive certainty in the innate justice of the Force meant he was paradoxically willing to believe them. The rest of their military he approached more methodically - infantry thralls which were really only borg-implanted animals, organically-generated armoured vehicles that were actually closer to chemically complicated rocks, and their Peace Brigade auxiliaries, slavers and thugs who would cause more harm to the Galaxy if they weren't stopped with blaster-bolts and lightsabers.

At least, that was the argument he used with himself.

But behind the mask, the Empire was just... people.

That made things far more complicated. The Empire looked like an impersonal military machine, but its human components were ordinary men and women - shooting one stormtrooper was just going to make the rest of the platoon hate you, and the story of a heroic crusade against the faceless legions of the dark side concealed a more complicated reality, in which there was a risk of walking into all kinds of psychological and moral traps.

Anakin exhaled. Had Palpatine designed the Empire that way, to turn his opponents to the dark side? Or was that just the nature of Galactic power and revolution?

How did Mom and Dad manage to do this? he wondered. Trusting the Force? That didn't seem like his Dad's style. I guess we just have to copy them.

Anakin finished tidying himelf up in the 'fresher, and stepped back into the corridor, where Tahiri was waiting for him.

"You wear too many clothes," she teased, pushing off from the wall and falling into step with him, an odd mix of professional support and perfect girlfriend. "What now?"

"Are we good?" he asked.

"We're good," Tahiri confirmed.

Jaina had discovered that there were two TIE Defenders docked between the bow mandibles, and gone off to inspect them, conscripting one of their pilots as a tour guide. The recalcitrant Imperial officers were all locked up in a single cell in the detention block, with Fiver monitoring the security system to make sure they didn't try anything stupid. Ensign Verrer and the rest of the crew were gathered in an empty mess hall, guarded by Lowbacca. And the ones who they'd overpowered with blaster bolts and lightsabers as they fought their way through the ship were in the bacta bay, being patched up by the quiet efficiency of its complement of multi-limbed repair droids.

Most of them were stormtroopers. With their armour off, without orders or adrenaline to drive them, they were nondescript young men and women, smoothly artificial musculature sculpted by their shared gym routine, bland expressions and unfocused eyes detuned by too much time behind the display visor and vocoder of a faceless helmet. The gender mix surprised him, as well as the number of troopers who weren't baseline human - Anakin recognized a pale, angular Echani, a heavy-boned cyborg who was probably a Yaka, and more exotically, a Mirialan with olive skin and geometric facial tatoos.

Most of them had bacta patches strapped around their torsos, showing where they'd been hit by deflected blaster-bolts in the chest and shoulder. Anakin was surprised that the damage wasn't worse.

"A standard blaster round from an E-11 carbine is calibrated to inflict only temporary incapacitation on an opponent in combat-grade body armour," the hovering FX-series droid explained, with an oddly eloquent gesture of its multi-jointed arms - providing an unexpected context for all the war holos where Imperial Stormtroopers had gunned down unarmoured Rebel fighters.

Anakin could take a pretty good guess at the Empire's logic, maximising the number of shots available without reloading, minimising the amount of Imperial resources required to take care of captured fighters and the security risk of holding them outside of detention blocks, making their prisoners more quickly available for intelligence and interrogation - or perhaps just logistical inertia in cumbersome procurement infrastructure inherited from the days of the Old Republic, when minimizing harm had mattered to the government.

The black-uniformed girl whose hand he'd cut off gave him a silent look. She'd had the fist re-attached, her forearm encased in a miniature bacta tank, strapped up diagonally against her torso. That probably didn't make it any easier. There was strapping on her nose, as well, which Anakin had broken with his punch.

Anakin sighed, turning away to look at the men floating in the bacta tanks - two stormtroopers who'd run into a Wookiee with a lightsaber, and the Imperial Security Bureau agent who Tahiri had taken out on the bridge. "How long until these three are out of bacta?"

There were lots of details to take care of, he realised, as he listened to the explanation. Once they were sure they'd shaken off Imperial pursuit, they would have to detour to a planet where the deserters could jump ship, someplace they could slip quietly out of Imperial space, join a freight crew, or simply head back to their home systems. The half-dozen officers who wanted to be handed over to the proper New Republic authorities would be trickier to handle - it might be easier to just let them escape, so they could rejoin the Empire without too many questions being asked, but keeping them segregated from the deserters was probably important.

Whether things would be less complicated on-board the Ravelin once they'd off-loaded the Imperial crew was something he wasn't sure about quite yet, but at some point, they also needed to start thinking about the fact that they were twenty years in the past.

So he thanked the droid, and turned for the hatch, gesturing for Tahiri to follow him. She'd been leaning on the bulkhead, chatting to a female stormtrooper and showing her how her lightsaber worked, giving the droids some funny looks - but focused more on him than anything else.

She nodded, pushed off, and fell in step as he walked out into the corridor.

The two of them just headed down the deck, footsteps holding the conversation for a while.

"So, hero-boy, what are you thinking?"

"She's a nice ship," Anakin shrugged, smiling as she smiled at him. "I was thinking we could go and see what the forward turbolaser turrets look like on the inside. There's a gunnery control room in each of them, with an interesting upside-down deck-gravity arrangement."

Tahiri laughed, and hugged herself against him. "I love the fact that you know exactly what I'm interested in..."