Force Smuggler - Thanks for the replies! I tried to write the scene with A/T and Alema Rar by just showing everyone being themselves - and I hope you enjoy the hangover-like sensation of time travel... because there's more of that here!
The Ravelin sang through hyperspace, her bridge illuminated by the lightning-storm sky. Looking ahead through the viewport windows into the incandescent maelstrom, the same stark brilliance brightened the straight-edged planes of the thrusting hull, making the metal shimmer with the keenness of a sharpened vibroblade, and Anakin had to reluctantly admit that without the Yavin Turtle fastened to the frigate's side, the music of the ship in motion, the choral counterpoint of drives and spaceframe stresses, reverberating in the acoustic chamber of the hull, had a clarity and purity of purpose that was close to perfect.
"Thinking again?"
"I, uhh. I may have to figure out a way to slave-rig a remote control so Yavin Turtle follows the Ravelin around at heel."
They were standing on the wing of the bridge, to the left of the pilots' cockpit. Tahiri was leaning on the consoles in front of the viewports, arms folded, bare feet kicked back, grinning brightly as she gazed out at the view. Anakin was standing beside her, with his feet apart, fists behind his back - his dad had told him it was a good pose to use when you wanted to look like you knew what you were doing in command of a capital ship, even if it did make him look a little too much like his grandfather.
"Or you two could just ship your stuff aboard this nice fast Jedi frigate we now have," Jaina interjected with a grin from the controls, "and find someplace soundproofed to have sex. Maybe the pilots' quarters, maybe the denention block…"
"We'll drop off Kogo and the others once we know whether this works," he promised her. But the fact that Jaina was making relaxed jokes about the stuff that annoyed her seemed like a good sign.
"I thought the two of you could share his quarters for a while," she laughed.
Maybe her good mood was due to the extra hands they'd added to the crew - and above all, the fact that all three Solo siblings were once again in the same place and time. Jacen was standing on the opposite wing of the bridge, wearing an old Jedi duster that he'd dug out aboard the Turtle, politely discussing something with Kyp. The fact that this teenage version of the Galaxy's most notorious Jedi Knight shared Jacen's enthusiasm for quietly intense philosophical discussion seemed weird, but somehow made perfect sense - deep down, Kyp was probably more closely attuned to Jacen's particular spectrum of intense curiosity than either Anakin or Jaina.
Alema Rar, who'd flown as Jains's wing-mate on several X-wig missions, had taken the co-pilot's chair, while Lowie had shifted to the engineer's console in the crew-pit area at the rear. Fiver was down there with him, his chrome probe jack spinning quietly as he conducted his own form of intense conversation with the hypernavigation computer.
Tahiri flashed Anakin another smile; he grinned and shook his head.
"All right." Jaina reached out and the levers that controlled the downjump, her smile echoing the growl of the Ravelin's drives, the frigate reverting out of hyperspace with a momentary flash of starlines. And then they were standing in a clear night sky, the constellations slowly rotating back to normal.
"And there she is."
The Yavin Turtle was waiting, just visible against the starry night. That was exactly where the ship should have been, considering they'd sent her here on a pre-programmed two-jump route from Koda Station - except for the small fact that the freighter hadn't shown up when it should have for its mid-route course-correction at Vassek, even though they'd been waiting in orbit. The Ravelin had moved faster across space, racing ahead at flank speed so that they got their first, but the Turtle, moving forward faster through time with its temporal compression circuit remodulated by Jaina and Lowie, had jumped into an unmodified future where the effects of their arrival weren't present. And now they'd caught up with the ship by letting it overtake them on the second leg from Vassek, so its arrival had already happened before they got there.
Anakin found a smile.
Lowie gave an enthusiastic cheer, fists raised in triumph. Even Anakin couldn't follow the complex commentary in Thykarran that followed as he translated the readout from the sensors.
"Looks like someone's just invented a practical method of time-travel." Alema Rar remarked, with a satisfied flick of her lekku.
"Just one-way," he shrugged. "And it's more of a way to escape from time-travel."
Jaina nodded. "How's the Yuuzhan Vong weird science going?"
Tahiri smiled. "We've been trying to decipher some of the more technical glossa, in the hope that we can understand how the protocol works, but I'm pretty sure it's all tied up in the specific genetics of the biots. Short of declaring hero-boy here a Supreme Overlord, I'm not sure how that's going to work."
"We've, as in you and Riina?" Jacen asked, with a wary frown. Whatever his hesitation about actually fighting them directly, he didn't like the Yuuzhan Vong, in a way that Anakin wasn't sure he'd ever understood.
"I am Riina," Tahiri laughed. "At least, she's me. We as in me and Anakin. You do know we translate ancient inscriptions together for fun, right?"
"I remember Uncle Luke's expression when you explained that Massassi triglyph, yeah," Jacen nodded, with a frown of suspicion. "Whose idea was it to let you two loose on unchecked texts that said the Sith were the good guys? You were what? Ten?"
"Nine and eleven."
"I'm glad you have some hobbies beyond making your bunkspace as noisy as possible," Jaina offered wryly. "All right. Anakin, you can handle bringing the garbage-scow you call a spaceship alongside the airlock on remote control. Jacen, do you need to check on your little menagerie aboard our brother's scow immediately?" A head-shake answered. Jaina grinned. "All right. For the rest of us, that's lunchtime."