Force Smuggler - I hope you don't think ysalamiri are too much of a McGuffin? How else is Tahiri going to get time alone with Anakin like that? And vornskrs don't mind them so much, but that's a discussion for another update...
Also, a general note to readers: I'm not sure how much some of the character psychology in this scene is going to work for any of you - feel free to be critical in your replies?
Jaina Solo's head stank. As she slowly tried to work out where she was, she'd wondered at first if she'd been roped into a drinking game by Major Varth or Tesar.
But even if she had too much experience waking up with a filthy hangover, fully dressed in places that weren't her bunk, this wasn't one of those days.
The heavy binders round her wrists and ankles, the slanted metal slab aimed upwards at an array of annoying spotlights and spiky, multi-jointed interrogation arms, and the blinking ysalamir perched on top of the whole thing, made clear she was a prisoner of the Empire.
Jaina frowned.
She'd been shot several times with stun-bolts - heavy energy slugs at point-blank range, not like the corridor-clearing wide-beams from her earlier fight with the stormtroopers on Chimaera. She had a strange suspicion that the shooter had been Alema Rar, but that might have just been bias, because out of the three people who should have been able to get the drop on them from the aft decks aboard the Ravelin, the Twi'lek dancer was the easiest one for her to think of as a traitor.
Easier than Kyp? Apparently so.
She groaned, and tried to make out something of her surroundings past the glare of the bright lights. The room was manned by droids on a raised gangway on the left, some hovering and others standing at consoles. Once she'd filtered out the ache inside her head and the humming of computers, and focused on the background rhythms of the ship's drives and power systems, she was pretty sure she wasn't aboard the nice, efficient little frigate that she'd stolen from the Empire.
This was something bigger than a light cruiser. Maybe even back aboard the Chimaera.
She supposed she would have already noticed if the Ravelin had an interrogation suite like this on board, though that reflection came more slowly than it should have. She groaned, and rested the back of her head against the cool support of the metal, lying there feeling powerless, until a door slid open, and a broad-shouldered, dark-haired man walked in.
Somehow, she should have known he'd be involved.
"Hey, Lieutenant," Vess Kogo said.
She scowled at him. The hangover helped with that.
The Emperor's Hand had reclaimed his long-handled vibroax, and swapped his TIE Pilot uniform for a vaguely military-looking set of civilian clothes, with a square-cut cloak that might have passed as fashionable on whatever dead-end Mid-Rim hyperlane he came from, but his self-important style was offset by an easy confidence as he vaulted down from the access steps and strolled up to her torture rack.
"I'm sorry about the theatre," he said, gesturing to her surroundings. "But we weren't very confident about whether an ordinary detention cell could restrain a Jedi girl trained by Mara Jade… especially not one who took down an entire platoon of stormtroopers after she'd been stunned to the point that her Force abilities were scrambled."
She tensed against the cuffs, and gave him a dirty look.
Kogo frowned, as if he'd hoped that this would be easier than she was making it. "Listen," he said. "Can you impersonate a trained Imperial flight officer?"
She gave him a blank, puzzled look.
"The Grand Admiral says this will make sense eventually," Kogo shrugged. "You know what his plans are like…"
She frowned at that, a different twist of her eyebrows.
So you kidnap me, haul me aboard Chimaera, lock me up like this, then ask me if I can play the good Imperial, and try to sell it by telling me it's one of Thrawns' ideas…?
She wasn't sure what she thought.
"I'd be a pretty terrible Imperial TIE Pilot," she said instead.
Kogo snorted, though he could have been annoyed rather than amused. "Probably true," he said, with a faint half-smile.
"Wait a moment," she said, swivelling her head in the collar. "This place is set up for the sort of shavit Kato tried to pull on me. You're wanting me to play a brainwashed conscript?"
Kogo's lack of an answer made clear that she was right.
"Kriff," she breathed. "And if I say no, do you just replace my personality anyway?"
"No," Kogo said, as if he was deciding something. "The Grand Admiral said I ought to improvise."
"Oh, great." She rested the back of her head against the metal, and looked up past the lights. "Your idea of improvise always involves punching down the front door and going in swinging your big dumb vibe around, right?"
"I think the Grand Admiral may want me to extend my range of tactics," he shrugged, and tapped a code into a console. The shackles holding her in place opened with magnetic clunks.
"Thanks," she said, sitting up and sliding to her feet, rubbing her freed wrists. "I don't suppose you're going to tell me what happened so I wound up here?"
"Everyone's unharmed," he answered, cautiously. "I brought you back here and left the others on the Ravelin."
"And you can't tell me who your agent was?"
Kogo frowned. "I—"
"Never mind. There are three possible answers, and I like none of them."
She wasn't particularly grateful that he managed to look a little sympathetic.
"Four, actually," he said.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Do you want to know?"
"Not really, no." She paced, thinking hard. Thrawn wants to know how easily I can act the brainkriffed Imperial recruit. But if he just wanted me reprogrammed, they'd have done that already. "The Grand Admiral's gaming me here, isn't he?"
Kogo shrugged. "Probably. I find it helps not to overthink…"
"You sound like my brother." She paused, looking at the flash-training rig - a simple upright box with a ribbed uplink cable hooked at the side, with a metal disk on the end, patterned in a way that looked vaguely like an Imperial badge. There were droid inputs at one side, but the activation switches looked simple enough for someone like Vess Kogo to use. "So, this setup is for turning unsuspecting recruits into loyal and disciplined TIE Pilots, huh?"
"We don't normally do that on ordinary recruits. Just outlaw elements like criminal swoop-gangs or pirate flyers, who take conscription in place of execution. Makes sense to give them a second chance, even if we wipe their memory in the process."
And stormtroopers, Jaina thought. She remembered the incident on the Outer Rim when she'd been a kid, when the machines on an old Imperial battlestation had managed to brainwash Uncle Luke and a couple of other Jedi Knights, overriding their loyalties and memories for a few days until they managed to shake off the conditioning. Those flash-printers had been designed for clone troopers, who had no early memories to overwrite, simply reinforcing their existing training and adding false memories of a childhood scarred by fictional Jedi kill-squads. Not everyone who the Eye of Palpatine had picked up had shaken off their braintwisting - a tribe of Gamorrean stormtroopers were still serving as an honour guard for Lord Elegin, the rakish ex-Imperial leader of the Senex Sector. Though she supposed their new career had reinforced their conditioning, and they clearly enjoyed what had been done to them.
"Does the flash-training work without a memory-wipe?" she asked.
Kogo looked like he'd never had to answer that before, a handsome frown. "I guess so. From what I've read, the process can scramble your memory and personality, but people get everything back together within a few days."
"Good." Jaina picked up the input cable, and hit the power switch.
"Hey. What are you doing?"
"Making myself into a good Imperial girl," she said. Before he could reach her, she thumped the uplink disk against her forehead, and punched the activation switches. "Say hi to me when I wake up."
She heard the whine of a power generator, and felt her head snap back, as lightning threw her backwards into darkness.