Force Smuggler - Glad you liked that update - was that a deliberate Kenobi quote? I'm honoured, either way!
"You Rebel scum."
The Imperial officer's face twisted in a darker scowl, and he swung the weighted end of his shock-baton into Anakin's midriff, making him sway backwards with an emphatic oof!
Then the Imperial reversed his weapon, leering hate at Anakin's half-naked, well-muscled body, and just when he had straightened back to his feet under his cuffed fists, the officer jabbed the shock-prod probes into his ribs. For a moment, all Anakin could do was hope that electricity was as good at cleaning his teeth as it felt like.
The odd sound he'd been hearing in the background had been as much from his own throat as it had been from the weapon being used to torture him, he realised.
As practice at rolling with the punches went, this latest play-session of no-questions-asked interrogation was getting pretty intense.
This time, it took a moment to think straight, and focus properly.
"Not bad," he breathed, looking up at the leering Imperial - his shoulder-muscles twisting against the cuffs that held his hands above his head. "But I have a girlfriend. She's also really into this sort of thing. You need to work your issues—oomph!"
The Imperial had answered by smashing the shock-baton into his face, snapping Anakin's head round to one side. The flash of pain along his cheekbone felt like it had opened up a gash.
"Kriffing Rebel. You think the fact we've gone easy on you so far means this is all the Empire's going to do with you? Well, the Inquisitors are off the ship, so no-one's going to give a kriff if I break you now."
Inquisitors? Anakin wondered. Did that mean Kogo, or someone else?
The Imperial's brow furrowed with a puzzled look of his own, as Tahiri's legs, supple and smooth-tanned, slipped akimbo round his neck. She lifted him off the deck with casual ease, his body twisting in a way that seemed decidedly unnatural, then he made a short, ugly noise, went slack, and she dropped him soundless to the deck.
"Did you…?"
"Just stunned," she shrugged, chest heaving beneath her t-shirt. Flashing him a smile.
Anakin looked down at the crumpled, black-clad form. "Too bad."
The narrow entrance hatch, behind where the Imperial had been standing, slid abruptly upwards, and revealed an astromech droid with a distinctive triangular main lens on his sensor dome, tootling a cheerful greeting. Fiver.
Anakin shot the droid a lopsided look. "What took you so long?"
The droid wobbled down the steps to the cell deck, blatting something about needing to wait until some people were off the ship, and held out a magnetic key on one of his manipulators as if to offer an apology.
"Well, that's great," Anakin remarked, tugging his cuffed wrists, glancing down at his boots, and then at the ysalamir above the door, wondering how he was going to unlock the binders. The droid could probably incinerate the ysalamir, and that would let him levitate the key up, but Anakin had spent too much of his Jedi career setting living things on fire - swathes of Yavin jungle, for one thing.
"Hang on," Tahiri said, balancing the toes of one foot on the droid's curved dome, lifting up the key with a neat curve of her other sole, and then swinging round to balance on his shoulder, passing the key up to his hands. She smiled at him, from within the curve of her contorted body.
"Thanks," he said, fumbling with the lock - then frowning, as she simply pirouetted out of her own cuffs, and dropped neatly to the floor in front of him.
"Let me," she smiled, bouncing upright, taking the key from his fingers and releasing him. "You're too slow, sometimes."
"Hey! How did you do that?"
"Thinking like a vornskr," she smiled, ruffling his hair and giving him a tight embrace. "You ever notice that they can sense Jedi even in the planet-wide Force-void on Myrkr?"
"So they use the Force inside an ysalamir's supposed Force-void," he murmured, glancing at the creature, then frowning as he caught the meaning of her movements. "We do sort-of need to get out of here."
She pouted, irresistibly, and pressed him back against the wall - but the noises of an angry Wookiee from the next-door cell drew their attention away, so she simply stole a kiss. "We can discuss whether we want this guy tied up in here when we come back," she smiled.
(O) (O) (O)
"Lieutenant Vane," the Grand Admiral said. "Perhaps you might like to catch up with our guests, and make sure they find their way back to their ship?"
Vane didn't have to think before accepting - it was only as she stepped back onto the command corridor that she realised that the conversational question was a direct command from the Empire's highest officer.
She fumbled for her pocket comm, wondering how easy it was going to be to catch up with three Force-sensitives who maybe didn't want a chaperone, and whose attitude to the Imperial chain-of-command was… uncertain, to say the least.
She needn't have worried. Three Imperial Inquisitors having a shouting argument just around the curve of the corridor were hard to miss.
"—telling me you've been an Inquisitor all along?!"
The Baron d'Urron answered with a flourish of his cloak. "Technically, it was Thrawn who told you that. But yeah, I was on Kessel to pick you up, and I was the one who came up with the plan to let the two of you 'escape'—" he made sarcastic quote gestures with his hands—"so we could steer you into the places we could make you useful."
"This is so kriffed up. And I'm guessing the version of you from twenty years in the future is an Inquisitor who successfully infiltrated the Jedi Order the moment Uncle Luke founded the Academy?"
"Easy." The Twi'lek girl was trying to wriggle in between them, and calm dow the First Brother—Jace she'd called him. "At least this explains his dress-sense and his attitude."
Jace actually snorted a laugh at that.
"Whatever happened to you two avoiding details that might compromise the timeline?" Inquisitor von Urron asked.
"You betrayed us!"
"Hey. I'm the one who's kept the two of you alive. I didn't know you'd be so stubborn…"
"What's that mean to mean?"
"You think Tremayne would have just let you rot in a dungeon on Prakith if you'd kept being uncooperative? Either you were going to be given to Colonel Zuud for a reprogramming that wouldn't have left a useable Inquisitor at the end of the process, or they were going to ship you out to Zeta Zero Nine for a Ssi-ruuk entechment process, bolting your disembodied consciousness to the networked A.I. of a whole constellation of new torture droids. Okay, you were my project, I wanted you to be a success. But kriff, Jace, I like you, and not just because you're good in bed."
"Hey—!" the Twi'lek interjected.
"No offence, Lee. I like you for other reasons too."
"Oh, that's much better." The Twi'lek girl seemed genuinely amused. "Hey, here's that cute Lieutenant Smoochenbacher. You think she does double dates?"
"Uhh," Vane said, sounding completely bewildered by the exchange that had just flown past her. "The Grand Admiral sent me to escort you back to your own ship."
"So he wants us off his Star Destroyer, does he?" the First Brother asked, recovering his poise.
"I suspect so, sir."
"We best get going," the Twi'lek girl said, indicating an ysalamir perched above a hatchway. "Too many of those Myrkr maggots on this ship."
"Fine."
And so they strode off - the First Brother leading the way, the Twi'lek following him, creating some space between him and Inquisitor von Urron.
"Call me Kyp," he smiled, offering a handshake to Lieutenant Vane, who was trying to keep pace without following at the tail of the group like a uniformed housepet.
"Thanks," she smiled, then paused, and shook her head. "That's a mind-trick, right?"
"There was probably nothing you could have done about Jace's kid brother the other day," he assured her, though she had the uncomfortable sense he was still messing with her.
"Thanks, I guess." She frowned, and weighed them up some more. The First Brother was still simmering - in the command corridor, he had veered abruptly between towering rage and soft, ironic cynicism, but there was none of the Vader-like darkness Vane had seen from him in the throne room - she had the sense he was overplaying his emotions to defuse that risk.
And Inquisitor von Urron had done a wheel-turn, the moody shiftiness he'd shown earlier replaced by ostentatious self-confidence. Had his earlier behaviour all been an act, or was that how he came over when he was watching people's reactions to manipulate them?
At least the Twi'ek didn't seem much different, though as her whole persona seemed like an act, that was maybe less reassuring than it looked.
They waited for a turbolift, filed in, and stood in silence as dropped towards the hangar deck.
"You haven't told me your name," Inquisitor von Urron smiled.
"Lieutenant Vane, sir," she answered. "112th Assault."
"You ride AT-ATs?"
"I command an assault platoon, sir. E-HWBs. We're trained to deploy from heavy armour if requried, but we normally ride in hoverscouts when we need mobility."
"You slum it with the Fanboys, huh?"
"Yes, sir," she answered cautiously. Fanboys was the heavy armour crews' nickname for the hoverscout platoons, reflecting both their unusual propulsion system and the perception that the little armoured vehicles were simply eager, underperforming imitators of larger counterparts like AT-ATs and Juggernauts.
That wasn't a view that Vane thought was particularly fair, but she wasn't sure the Inquisitor wanted to know the details of internal rivalries in the Empire's ground formations.
Then the 'lift doors slid open, and they were coming out on the main hangar deck, with what Vane suppose was the Inquisitors' ship parked in front of them - sleek and sharp-nosed like a miniature Star Destroyer, kitted out with black stealth plating and spiky sensor probes, hunched at the stern around an outsize group of engines. Vane thought it looked ugly and self-important, an ostentatiously technological design that was probably being sold for far more credits than it cost to build, by some third-tier corporate whose support for the Empire was based purely on how readily incompetent black-cloak departments like the Inquisition facilitated their own ability to work scams.
There were a pair of Imperial officers standing on the deck beneath the cockpit - a line officer with the insignia of a Navy lieutenant, who she recognised as that idiot Lannier again, and a short girl with the rank badge of a second lieutenant, dressed in the smart black uniform of a specialist division - the long gauntlets she was wearing identified her as a TIE Pilot or Navy gunner, probably a pilot from the way she stood.
Vane frowned, as she realised that the female Flight Officer had to be the prisoner who the Grand Admiral's agent had brought aboard Chimaera, the same Rebel girl they'd let escape aboard the Jedi freighter a week previously - she seemed shorter than Vane remembered from the brief run-in they'd had on this same hangar deck.
"You're dismissed, Lieutenant," Inquisitor von Urron said, with a gesture that Vane vaguely recognized as a mind-trick. "We can handle this from here."
"Yes, sir," she said anyway, turning away towards the hatch that led back to the parade deck. She felt grateful to be free of all the craziness - and she wasn't entirely sure she wanted to stay around to see what happened next.
A man was leaning against the hatch, she realised - big, wearing a cloak and dark civilian clothes, but his roguish grin suggested he was much more friendly than the Inquisitors, and there was something she liked about the casual way he stood up, even if he did pick up a ridiculous long-hafted vibroax that had been propped on the wall beside him.
"Lieutenant Vane?" he asked. "My name's Kogo. The Grand Admiral's assigned your platoon to work with me. Apparently our Skywalker-to-Stormtrooper ratio hasn't been too good this month, and we're still waiting on the replacements from Mount Tantiss."
"Also, they don't normally carry more firepower than E-11 carbines, sir," she answered, snapping to attention.
Kogo grinned, and nodded in approval. "You sound like my kind of soldier, Lieutenant. Come on. Let's get ready to blow things up together."
(O) (O) (O)
"Just how much firepower do we need?" Tahiri asked, tossing her Yuuzhan Vong knife in her hand, the blade scything hilt-over-tip into the high ceiling space of the detention-block's entrance lobby, and catching it smartly again as it dropped down.
"As much a possible," Anakin answered, searching through the weapons locker for a heavy pistol. "A lightsaber's all well-enough for honour-duelling Yuuzhan Vong, but heavy blaster set on stun is sort of useful when you're trying not to disarm Imperial storm cadets in ways that give them cyborg hands. And maybe a belt of stun grenades as well."
The news that Jacen, Alema Rar and Kyp were all working for the Empire was taking some getting used to. But at least they'd headed back to the Chimaera, with Jacen apparently trying to rescue their sister.
Anakin wasn't sure what he made of the fact that Jacen hadn't asked for help, and had left them tied up in the hands of some angry young Imperials instead.
But apparently neither Inquisitors nor deck officers paid much attention to droids. Fiver and the other astromechs were all working for the Rebellion, and they'd sprung the three of them from the detention block as soon as they were sure that all the Force-sensitives were clear of the ship.
The other good thing was that the Imperials had followed standard practice, and thrown all their personal weaponry in with the other confiscated equipment in the detention locker. Jaina's weapons were mostly missing, just like she was herself - Kogo had flown her back to the Chimaera on his TIE Defender, Fiver said, assuring the droid that he was just trying to protect her.
Anakin wondered how much the Emperor's Hand believed his own lies.
Still, even without the extra lightsaber and her big service blaster, they had enough weaponry left to share out between them.
Lowie had his Wookiee bow and his lightsaber, as well as a bandolier of grenades over his shoulder and a pair of heavy pistols, which seemed close to overkill even by his standards, but Anakin wasn't going to argue. Tahiri had her lightsaber, her fighting knife, her tsaisi strapped around her wrist, and her bandolier of thud bugs, and she was playing with Jaina's holdout pistol again.
Anakin checked out a short-barrelled DL-21, a standard officer's pistol, and decided that would have to do.
Fighting against opponents who used blasters was a strangely new experience for Jedi who had grown up having to cross blades with the Yuuzhan Vong - Tahiri could flirt with a pistol, but their objection to technological made-things led most of them to disdain anything that resembled the design of a beam weapon, or even the chemical mechanics of a slugthrower charge. Instead, the warrior caste favoured armour that could stop energy-bolts, bladed weapons and grenades. Most of their short-range projectile weapons were plasma rockets, whose propulsion systems were closer to volcanos found in nature, more easily replicated from the protocols of the Qang qahsa.
Or airguns, Anakin reflected, reaching behind his back and rubbing the nasty scar where he'd been shot on Yavin. Technically, I'm still Domain Kwaad property because of that, he reminded himself, not that that particularly bothered him considering which member of the Shaper bloodline he belonged to.
Tahiri twirled her knife between her fingers, with the nonchalance that meant that she was annoyed with something. Even the fact that he was naked from the waist up wasn't quite enough to lift her mood.
The real issue that was annoying her was the squad of sparring droids which Fiver had persuaded to join their assault party, standing guard with blasters at salute. Tahiri had no problem with dismembering them on a regular basis in ritual combat, but fighting alongside them against the Empire seemed to be a different proposition. Maybe she was worried they'd try to shoot her, or something.
"Can you perform some ritual to make them more acceptable?" he asked.
"What, like I did with you and your lightsaber?" she smiled. Riina of Domain Kwaad didn't play in public that often, but when she did, the results were usually spectacular.
"If you like," Anakin grinned. Lowie was growling impatiently, pointing out that even if there were only a handful of Imperials left on board the frigate, they were the stubborn officers who'd refused to desert or surrender, and they were probably being a lot more cautious than the last time they'd captured the ship. "Yeah, yeah." He slipped the blaster he'd selected into his belt holster. "Fiver's got this. The security screen on the bridge just has that jerk beating me up on repeat. Everyone ready?"
"As rockets. I always like it when you take me on adventures."
"All right. Let's take back our ship."
(O) (O) (O)
She stood beside the boarding ramp of the black-hulled ship, a little uneasy in her new uniform, watching as the three Inquisitors strode across the deck - the Twi'lek girl and the long-haired boy in the outsized cloak seemed to be the types who liked to draw attention, but her attention was focused on the young man in the centre - in the lead. She supposed his clothes were stylish, with a dark cloak on one shoulder. There was an intensity to him, reinforced by the way he looked straight at her.
She was glad that all she had to do was stand there at attention.
The officer who'd escorted her out there snapped a salute, as if he was on parade for the Grand Admiral.
"Lieutenant?" the lead Inquisitor sneered, his dark eyes hard as space. "Why is my sister in Imperial uniform?"
"She's undergone full Imperial conditioning, sir - her own choice, I'm told. The Grand Admiral asked me personally to assure you that her memories and personality will return in time."
Then the Lieutenant swallowed, uniformed throat flexing, as the lead Inquisitor narrowed his eyes, one hand resting dangerously on the weapon at his belt.
"You're not worth the effort," the Inquisitor sighed, and made an irritable gesture - a simple flick of his gloved wrist, which somehow sent the deck officer flying abruptly sideways, yelling in alarm.
From somewhere to her right, there was the sound of a flailing body slamming into deck furniture, drums and cargo boxes scattering from the impact.
The Inquisitor's lip twitched. Then his gaze switched to her, and those dark eyes softened into liquid pools. "Jaina?"
She let the Inquisitor wrap her in a hug, his cloak enfolding her like a warm night on a jungle world, arms tight around her in a way that she responded to instinctively. She only knew what she'd been told, in a very rapid holocomm with the Grand Admiral. The Inquisitor was her brother - she suspected she'd have known that, somehow. She was to go with him, and stand by for further orders.
Grand Admirals outranked Inquisitors, even if no-one else did.
"Are you okay?"
"Uhh, yeah," she nodded. "This has been a confusing afternoon." She gestured at the duffel on the deck beside her. "My civvies are in there, sir. Lieutenant Kogo said I might be needing them."
The Inquisitor frowned, as if there was something else he wanted to say.
The commlink in her pocket trembled. She pulled the handset out, and pressed the activation key.
"Flight Officer?" Thrawn's voice.
"Yes, Grand Admiral?" She wasn't sure why the audio pickup was loud enough for the First Brother to hear.
"You might want to tell the High Inquisitor that there's a prison break taking place in the detention block aboard the Ravelin. If he's so concerned to keep hold of that Rebel freighter that he captured, he might want to get back there and take care of it himself."
Jaina frowned, trying to remember what she had once known about the Rebel ship, or why the Ravelin's name seemed half-familiar.
"Fine." The Inquisitor turned and strode aboard the waiting shuttle. "Come on, sis. You better fly."