Force Smuggler - Hey! That's actual canon from the JJK kids' books!
"I'd forgotten just how much your sister eats when she's in a good mood," Tahiri remarked, as they strolled back together from the Turtle into the Ravelin's corridor, fingers almost touching.
"She's always been addicted to old Imperial ration-packs as well. I think this ship is her idea of spacegoing perfection."
"I think she's just happy to have her twin brother back."
"That too."
"So…?"
For some reason, they were up against the bulkhead beside the turbolift. At least, Anakin was up against the bulkhead, and Tahiri was up against him, with her lean body stretching against his, balanced on the toes of one foot with her other knee against his flank like he was some kind of riding-animal, one hand in his hair, drawing his lips in for a conversation with hers.
"I was, uhh, thinking I should go and talk to Jaina. She went to meditate in the engineroom."
Tahiri gave him a quirky look. "This is about your brother?"
"Um, yeah."
"You never struck me as the jealous type."
"Hey—it's not like that. I just haven't had a chance to discuss this properly with Jaina yet."
"I know." She smirked. "I'll just wait here and we can… continue our own conversation, when you're finished squaring things with your sister."
She stole a snog before releasing him, leaning against the bulkhead with her arms crossed and a hurry-up expression in her eyes.
"Thanks." Anakin was shaking his head as he ducked into the turbolift, but he was grinning, too.
Remembering how to key in the instructions to take the turbolift one deck down to the drive core took more conscious thought than he'd have normally expected.
The Ravelin's main engineroom was a scaled-down version of the power core used on older Star Destroyers, a cavernous space with a gangway running down the centreline, suspended in mid-air between a pair of vertical generator spires; further back, the walkway widened into a platform for a semicircular control desk, with a power regulator suspended overhead. At the rear, beyond the desk, a pair of armoured blast-doors provided access towards the secondary ion drives, and underneath the gangway, massive power couplings were connected directly to the hyperdrive generator in the frigate's keel.
Jaina was sitting on the walkway, just behind the pylons, where the narrow bridge widened into a circular platform for the control desk, legs crossed and forearms balanced on her lap. The posture was a popular enough mediation stance, for Jedi and non-Jedi, but Jaina was the only person he knew who liked to use the inside of a hyperdrive as a space for centring herself in the Force - a trick she'd probably picked up on the Errant Venture earlier in the war, when she'd been aligning the focusing array of the pirate Star Destroyer's massive… well, the special modification he was careful not to even think about around Jacen and Uncle Luke.
"Hey," Anakin said, swinging round and kneeling down beside her. "Mind if I join you?"
"You're here to talk, not meditate," she answered with a look that was probably supposed to be annoyed, but ended up more amused than anything.
Anakin unfolded to sit more comfortably on the deck. "You seem a lot more relaxed since we got Jasa back."
Jaina pursed her lips. "When are we going to tell him?"
"What, about the fact we're from three years further in the future than he is? We were right, he was caught on the wrong side of the Yuuzhan Vong, and hiding to avoid being noticed. We just didn't know that that meant he was hiding in the past. And it's not like we didn't spend as much time looking as possible."
"You know Tahiri's known about this Vong time-travel garbage all along?"
"In fairness, I've known about the baanu al'tiirna all along, as well. I actually knew about it before Jacen and Alema Rar went missing - we went through the qahsa cortex-by-cortex for the New Republic. We just didn't think the Yuuzhan Vong would be able to do something like this with it..."
"Fine," Jaina exhaled. "So what happens. If we let Jacen and Alema Rar return to their own timeline, then how do we go forward again from there? Does this mean that we get there and my twin's still missing in the past, or do we arrive and find that our timeline has been kriffed up by whatever we've just done…?"
"Ah," Anakin admitted. "I hadn't thought of that."
Jaina traded him a sneaky, conspiratorial grin. "The good news is, I think I've worked out a way to travel backwards with just a hotwired compensator."
Anakin blinked and stared at her. "You've what?!"
"I realised that if the compensator can be modulated, you can reverse the polarity of the flux capacitor so that you move backwards. Sort of like switching a repulsor from lift to descend. Well, exactly like that actually. The hardware architecture is the same."
Anakin found a grin at the implications of what she'd done. "My sister, who a few days ago was telling me that this was crazy, has just worked out a practical time-travel technology."
"Hey, I am a Solo."
"The littlest Solo," Anakin smiled, ruffling his sister's hair.
"Shut up." She punched his shoulder.
A blaster bolt echoed through the bulkheads of the ship, answered by a spike of brilliant alarm from Tahiri, hardening into outright fury, and then transforming into a song in the Force - a distinctive combination of Tusken Raider, Yuuzhan Vong, and the aggressive dance-notes of a lightsaber.
"Kriff, what's that?" Both of them were already standing up, lightsabers unclipped from their belts.
The question was answered before they'd even finished igniting their blades, as a blonde in a blaster-burned t-shirt tumbled through the turbolift hatch, lightsaber blazing in her hand, hair tousled and body moving in the quick, fluid way that he recognised as her most instinctive, most aggressive combat style.
"Battle droids!" she yelled, scrambling to her feet. "Imperial ones! A whole squad of them - they came at the port airlock! Only ran into me because I was waiting for this idiot outside the turbolift!"
"Kriff." The three Jedi had huried together, their postures combining into a defensive line across the engine gangway, lightsabers at the ready. The curving 'lift hatch behind Tahiri had slid shut, but the lights above the doorway showed that the turbolift was returning again, and then the blast-doors had opened, and a squad of armoured battle-droids had stepped out, their chassis plating giving them the look of hulking black-armoured stormtroopers, perfectly locked into formation, and with blasters levelled at the Jedi.
"Dark Troopers!" Jaina yelled, as the red bolts of the Imperial droids' blaster-fire began to shatter and burn against the shield of their spinning blades.
"I'm more worried about the ysalamiri," Anakin growled. Each of the Imperial droids had one of the furry-scarf creatures draped over its shoulder armour, which explained exactly why they had been able to get aboard the Ravelin without any of the Jedi noticing.
Jaina spun, her angling lightsaber behind her back, and caught a blaster-bolt square-on, sending it streaking back into the face of the droid that had fired. The optics of the Dark Trooper shattered - though Anakin suspected they were mostly for display, maybe housing backup optics. Their main targeting sensor was probably in the top scope of the blaster.
Then Jaina shifted her stance, and shattered another blaster-bolt of her blade, sending a shard ricocheting straight into the lens of another droid. "Aim for their gunsights!"
"Keep low and don't try to attack them," Anakin warned, as Tahiri went low to batter back the shots aimed at their feet. She had an urge to lunge forward and physically attack any droid, which in this case might not be the best idea. "They're not lightsaber-bait like the security droids we vaped when we took this ship." Or like Kato, he thought.
"Oh, I know," she grinned. A shot pitched upwards from her blade, catching a Dark Trooper in the jaw, and its head exploded.
The droid paused, servos twitching for a moment - and kept on marching forward.
"Not fair," Tahiri rolled her eyes.
Anakin gave a half-smile, and focused on his own block-and-backhand moves - they'd sparred a little against a couple of remotes controlled by Fiver, hotwired from stormtrooper armour and security-droid chassis parts, but his frontal power-fighting style wasn't quite as quick to cause major damage to the Dark Troopers.
But gradually, the three Jedi seemed to be getting the better of them anyway - someone had managed to Force-slam two or three of the droids against the armoured sides of the drive chamber, and the rest of them were staggering under the deflected energy of their own focused firepower, the one-two-three of Jedi lightsabers pirouetting entire salvos of blaster energy back into the same points on their armour. Three droids had all their targeting scopes shot out and were trying to recalibrate in confusion, two had been stopped by deft shots from Jaina and Tahiri, and Anakin had managed to knock one out by the sheer brute-force of repeatedly hammering blaster bolts into its heavy chassis plating. They were down to just three or four ysalamiri, too.
The Dark Troopers also seemed a little target-fixated, their attack focused entirely on the Jedi lightsabers in front of them. Perhaps they were programmed to regard the Ravelin as an Imperial ship, and maybe more tactically limited than their reputation suggested - or perhaps they were simply programmed to avoid wild shots inside Imperial power-cores.
The only drawback for the Jedi was that they were giving up control of the gangway to the droids, retreating towards the rear of the drive space - as much to keep out of range of the scrambling effect the ysalamiri had on Force-perceptions as to avoid close-combat with the droids.
"Do we have time for this?" Jaina asked, whipping her hair back from her face, as she whipped blaster-bolts away with forward-thrusting lunges of her 'saber - a move she must have learnt from Aunt Mara. "We're running out of deck here!"
Then the turbolift hatch behind the droids slid open yet again, and a Wookiee charged out in a blur of fur and strength, igniting a massive bright-gold lightsaber, and slicing into the Imperial droids from the rear.
"Lowie!"
The last Dark Trooper toppled off the gangway and crashed to the floor below, landing with a heavy crunching sound. Jaina walked up to the brink and drew her big service-pistol, shooting blaster-bolts into the weak points of the armour until the machine stopped trying to shoot back up at them.
"There," Anakin breathed. Tahiri had one knee on the neck of a droid which had been brought down on the walkway, and was eviscerating its helmet with her bare hands.
She glanced up at him, sucking blood from a gash across her knuckles, eyes dancing, flirting inappropriately.
Anakin heard the hatch behind them slide open, but the stun-shot caught him in the back before he could turn round, and he heard the quick repeat of a marksman shifting targets. Other shots, footsteps, and the sound of more stun-bolts, making sure that all four of them stayed down.
Anakin felt himself frown, realising that there was some part of the puzzle that he'd missed, a thought that seemed more important than trying to stand up - the turbolift which Lowie had come out of was the only route for anyone to get from the boarding hatches and the crew quarters on the gundeck to the bridge, the engineroom, and other high-security areas at the back of the ship. Whoever had come through the rear hatch had been coming from the section at the frigate's rear, where there were only the ion-engines and the officers' quarters.
Whoever had just knocked them out had already been aboard the ship.