Anakin wanted to punch something.
He didn't know whether Kogo had actually been in command of the Ravelin, or really slumming as a TIE Pilot, or if he'd simply sneaked aboard, either on Thrawn's orders or for some other reason, and he supposed it didn't really matter. They'd been allowing an Emperor's Hand more-or-less free run aboard the ship, and he could have done a whole lot of damage if he'd been thinking a little more professionally.
The fact that Jaina had narrowly escaped being mind-kriffed didn't make him feel much better about the whole mess. The problem was that his sister's rescue had only happened thanks to a combination of Kogo himself yelling at the holocamera in the cell block for several minutes, and Fiver breaking off from monitoring the ship's security systems on the bridge, taking the turbolift down to the captain's quarters, and physically barging in on Anakin and Tahiri, blatting urgent questions about why they'd not been answering the comm.
They'd been in bed, which was evidently a lot more distracting than either of them realised, and the fact that he'd missed so much of what was going on on his own ship made him feel a little mad.
The one small bright point was that Vess Kogo was not looking particularly pleased at the discovery that he'd never been the only Emperor's Hand.
"Yeah. Mara was a Hand long before you were," Jaina told him. Kogo really flinched at that, which earned a vicious smirk from Jaina. "I think she was your master's favourite. And Roganda Ismaren, if you've heard of her. Jeng Droga. High Inquisitor Jerec. The list's pretty long, and I'm sorry if I can't reduce your self-image into quite as much rubble as you actually deserve by throwing every single name in your face, but I'm afraid I find them much less interesting than TIE aces and X-wing engine spares."
Though the way that Jaina had been yelling at him before she calmed down and settled for just destroying his entire sense of identity suggested that she was privately feeling more than a little disappointed in him - frustrated by the abrupt disintegration of another promising flirtation with a Force-sensitive fighter pilot.
Then she blinked. "Hang on. When you talked about Palpatine not knowing what you were doing half the time—?!"
Tahiri caught Anakin's eye, and shrugged eloquently. At least this time the betrayal didn't involve blowing up Sernpidal.
Jaina shook her head, sharp and angry. "I don't know if you're the Galaxy's biggest jerk or—actually, there's no two ways about this. You're just the Galaxy's biggest jerk!"
She turned and strode up to Anakin, wrapping herself tightly against him, and resting her head on his lapel. "Hey, kid brother." In her flat-heeled Imperial flight-boots, she was a lot shorter than he'd expected. "Thanks for the save."
"That was mostly Tahiri, actually. And Fiver—…" And Vess Kogo wasn't what she wanted to hear right now.
"You come as a team. Besides. I need one of the men in my life not to be a total jerk."
Kogo gave them a dirty look. "What are you people, some kind of Skywalkers?"
Tahiri shook her head. She had snatched Kogo's Force-pike off him when Jaina started arguing with him, just to deprive him of the last prop for his ego, and had been spinning the weapon around like an outsize gaffi stick - but now she quickly reversed her grip so the bladed end tapped against the ground like some kind of absurdly dangerous sports-racket, and scooted the control droid's decapitated head over to him.
Anakin caught the improvised game-ball on the instep of his boot, and kicked it back to her. She tapped it back again, starting a playful rhythm which counterpointed the quiet swaying of his sister. A warning glance to Vess Kogo completed the geometry of the room.
He turned over the situation. The fact that they needed to kick Kogo off the ship actually provided an opportunity to solve some other problems - allowing him to release the other Imperial officers from the detention block in a staged escape would get all of them off the Ravelin without anyone else knowing that it was a set-up. And because the only way to get half-a-dozen annoying Imperial officers off the ship in something with a hyperdrive was to pile them all into the cockpits of the two TIE Defenders, that would at least free up the forward launch rack, and solve the problem about where to park their own freighter once Lowie got back from Darlyn Boda.
So how am I going to organise this…? Anakin wondered. Would Kogo be reluctant to cooperate? Would he be reluctant to leave...?
Anakin's comlink buzzed, and he pulled it from his pocket with a free hand. Lowie, signalling that he was on the way back with the Turtle.
"What, already?"
The answer came back in a fast-paced, highly-technical Wookiee slang, voicing simultaneous notes of two different dialects - a private code that no human who hadn't grown up running maintenance on the Millennium Falcon was likely to be able to follow, something that had been at least half-way impenetrable to both Threepio and Lowie's own dedicated translator droid, but which was simply music to Anakin Solo's ears. The Turtle had already come back out of hyperspace after off-loading the Imperial deserters at the Darlyn Boda shadowport, and Lowie was full of complaints about the jury-rigged starboard engine and the price of bribes at the docking bay. There was a hint of hidden meaning in the Shyriiwook as well, something he didn't want to share over an open comm, reinforced by a guarded hint of concealment in the Force.
"Thanks," Anakin nodded tersely. "Copy that."
Everyone else looked at him expectantly - Jaina curious about what had been left unsaid, Kogo looking utterly baffled, though Tahiri's amused smirk suggested she'd understood at least half of what she'd overheard.
"All right," he said, taking charge. "We've got a freighter needing to dock with the starboard hatch. Fiver, you get up to the bridge and supervise from there. Someone want to put the handcuffs back on the Imperial idiot over there."
"Sure," Tahiri grinned, but Jaina glanced up at Anakin in a way that made clear that tying Vess Kogo up was something she wanted to do for herself, giving him a playful smile as she slipped out of his grip, and took the binders off Tahiri, marching up to Kogo with her pistol in her other hand and snapping the cuffs around his offered wrists, ratcheting the setting tight and jabbing her pistol into him with a definite intention to be mean.
Kogo took the abuse without complaining, which made Anakin wonder if he was at least regretting some of his Imperial posturing, or if he actually was more genuinely interested in Jaina than she realised.
"Come on," he said, nodding to the exit hatch. "Let's get back to the airlock corridor."
They marched out of the flight quarters and down the corridor in silence.
"I should get into Imperial uniform," Tahiri remarked, wriggling her shoulders and waistline in the loose t-shirt she'd thrown on. The rest of them were all pretending to be Fleet officers now, which made the way that Anakin and Jaina were marching around the more smartly-turned-out Vess Kogo seem piratical and weird.
"You kept Kogo's Force-pike," Anakin pointed out.
"Captain's Hand, then?" she teased, with a playful smirk.
"You see now why I hit on the first guy who could help shut them out of my mind?" Jaina asked.
"I dunno. I think they're pretty cute."
Anakin shook his head, though Tahiri flashed a grin. Whatever his feelings about being bossed around by Jaina, Kogo had enough misplaced bravado for an entire Imperial holdout sector.
The Yavin Turtle had already docked at the hatch by the time they arrived, with nothing left for Anakin to do beyond confirm that the airlock could be opened. The blast-door slid back, to reveal Lowie waving his arms enthusiastically, announcing that he'd picked up some old friends as passengers on Darlyn Boda.
The three cloaked figures who stepped on board behind him looked like the officers of a successful pirate crew, or a threesome of Coruscanti rich-kids who'd been slumming it on the Fringe for long enough they really knew their way around - two human males and a Twi'lek, in sharply-cut dark colours, with a lot of expensive leather and high-spec weapons worn openly their belts. And all of them were powerful in the Force, with a presence that was both strong and guarded.
A little later than he should have done, Anakin realised that he knew the young man standing immediately behind the Wookiee, carrying himself as the leader of the group - for the simple reason that he was looking at his own brother Jacen, Jaina's twin.
But instead of the intense young negotiator who Anakin remembered, he looked more confident and mature, maybe older and even slightly taller, but maybe that was just the change of look - hair clipped short, expression guarded, the sharp cut of his asymmetric traveller's cape and the way his gloved hand rested at his belt beside the lightsaber making him look tough, stylish and in-charge.
"Hey everyone," Jacen Solo said, with a flash of his old smile. "I guess this rescue mission might have worked after all. We have some catching up to do."
And then Jaina flung herself at him in a hug. This time, Kogo bit his tongue. Jacen looked surprised, and stumbled back a step as she hit him like a superlaser - but he hadn't forgotten how to hug her, breaking his disguise completely.
Amusement rippled off the Twi'lek woman who sidestepped out from just behind him - familiar amusement, breaking the act that she had been using to disguise herself. Anakin levelled his eyes in response - they didn't know her as intimately as Jacen, and she had always been good at disguises, but he was a little surprised that she'd been able to mask her identity from three fellow Jedi who had been students alongside her at the Academy on Yavin 4.
"Alema Rar," Tahiri said, making the name sound like an accusation. "Alema kriffing Rar."
"Anakin, Jaina," Alema Rar replied.
Anakin did his best to look unimpressed. The Twi'lek girl was curving her pose with a sultry confidence that was very different from her dangerous natural poise - one hip kinked out to the side, fist resting just below her tight-clinched waistline, spinning her lightsaber in her free hand like a toy, all accentuated by a costume that involved chunky boots, a low-slung waist-wrap that seemed to be equal parts miniskirt and gunbelt, a leather corset underneath a very high-waisted and tightly-tailored jacket, and a short, slanted shoulder-cape that barely came down to the elbow; but as she dropped her guard, her expression became flirtatious and provocative and familiar, her every move a knowing dance around the things she left unsaid.
She ignored Tahiri's head-shake, and Anakin's dirty look, and as if to change the subject, she glanced at their prisoner - then lifted her lekku in what might actually have been an expression of real surprise. "And Vess Kogo too." She smirked, and threw him a theatrical wink, a message with a subtext Anakin would need to figure out. "I'm spoiled for choice of entertainment now. Though hanging around with these two hasn't been exactly quiet, if you get my meaning..."
"Um, hi," said the final member of the boarding-party, a whip-thin young man with sharp green eyes that darted behind a flop of slick dark hair, his cloak and tunic worn a little loose, as if he was trying to make himself look bigger and hide uncertainty in his movements - he might still be on the upper side of his mid-teens, and Anakin didn't really recognise him at first. But while he definitely wasn't one of their own group of young Jedi Knights, he did look sort-of familiar…
"Kyp?!" Jaina asked, her voice performing a disbelieving leap.
"Um, yeah," the kid confirmed. And as he looked a little closer, Anakin was a little disoriented to realise that he was indeed looking at a much, much younger version of Kyp Durron, not yet grown up into a Jedi Master and occasional war-criminal. "Apparently, you guys sort-of know me already…?"