Force Smuggler - Glad you liked that line! To answer your questions, I've been deliberately trying to avoid too much exploration of how this story interacts with the original Thrawn trilogy timeline, avoiding anything with Luke, Leia, Han, and Chewie, while a certain crazy Jedi Master should be off on Jomark in this timeframe, frowning at the funny flickers of light-side Force-use he's detecting...
The Inquisitors' ship wasn't any type she knew, but with her brother's sense of urgency overriding the precision of her Imperial flight training, she took the helm without the slightest hesitation - powering up while the Twi'lek held a quick comm exchange with the hangar control room, then pivoting into the outer bay and looping clear of the Chimaera's hull.
She switched to ion drives as soon as she was free, turning onto the preset vector as the pair of black-glossed astromechs at the navacomp console uploaded the jump calculations. Then she pressed forward on the motivator in the centre of the flight controls, accelerating past the starlines, and divinf down the bright avenue of hyperspace... and found herself just sitting there, looking at the lightning sky through the viewports on the bridge.
She glanced across her consoles, checking the readouts and displays, then looked out at the view again.
"You're doing great," her brother reassured her - walking up behind her seat, giving her shoulder a squeeze.
"Thanks," she smiled.
"How do you like the ship?"
"Still getting a feel for her, but she seems okay." She didn't mind giving an evasive reply, because it made her brother happy.
"Kyp never thinks she's fast enough. How quickly can we get back to the Ravelin?"
She glanced at the console. She'd pushed the speed to maximum, a little above point four-five past lightspeed - fast enough, if not spectacular - but she'd let the astro-droids and navacomp calculate the course, and she had no real sense of how far the jump was supposed to run. "We ought to be there a little before eleven-forty."
"Good." She knew that he was smiling. She also knew that he was pushing her a little, but she didn't really mind, recognising the genuine emotions underneath, and the unspoken need that was driving him.
For a moment, Jaina and her brother looked out at the infinity ahead of the ship together. Then he turned away to try and work off some of his physical tension, and she checked her controls again.
The flight console she was sitting at was basically a replica of the familiar setup on an Imperial shuttle, but she was no closer to deciding if the Inquisitors' vessel was supposed to be an outsized assault craft or a miniature capital ship. The wide bridge was an awkward hybrid of a cruiser's command deck and the flight cockpit of a transport, and the way the command positions were configured was eccentric to the extreme. The co-pilot's seat beside her had been modified to control the guns, shifting the flight work onto one pilot, the navacomp was run by astromechs, and the other consoles mostly looked unused.
And the Inquisitors themselves were lounging around the space with deceptively relaxed poise, apparently used to flying the ship without any regular Navy crew at all. The female Twi'lek was sitting back with her boot-heels propped up on one of the curved side consoles, the type used by sensor officers coordinating boarding troops, though Jaina suspected she was using it as an improvised comm/scan desk, or maybe just as a footrest. The brooding, dark-haired kid was at the back, leaning against the wall where he could move to take over any console as required, or run back to the engines - he kept glancing at the co-pilot's station beside her, but he wasn't going to risk her brother's temper by making any moves towards her.
And her brother was pacing in a self-contained way that made clear he was in command, but showed no real awareness of the layout of the bridge, or what he could do to be useful. She realised that he simply didn't understand spaceships the way she did - or Imperial Navy protocols, relying instead on sharpened instincts to navigate the situations he found himself in.
Jaina smiled. She suspected she'd always known that.
"So," the the female Twi'lek said, re-crossing her heels. "Changing the subject. Anyone got any thoughts what Thrawn's up to?"
"How do you mean?" her brother asked, frowning darkly.
The Twi'lek shrugged her lekku ostentatiously. "Well, his pet idiot forced us to come all the way to his command ship to collect your sister, and then the Grand Admiral just hands her straight back to us, all wrapped up for Empire Day with a cute new layer of shiny, strict Imperial conditioning."
Shiny, strict Imperial conditioning? Jaina decided that she liked that. The Twi'lek Inquisitor definitely approved, which made her feel strangely flattered.
Her brother pursed his lips. "Kriffed if I know. None of this would have happened if that monumental ronto Kogo hadn't taken her back to the Chimaera in the first place." She felt his reassuring hand rest on her shoulder, easing her tension. "Honestly, if we hadn't had to come and get her back, we'd have still been docked with the frigate and able to handle anything idiotic our prisoners came up with, and the Grand Admiral must know that. Right now, I imagine he just wants to stop this debacle getting any worse, and cover up the fact that he contributed."
"Makes sense," the Twi'lek nodded. "Not that it matters - if all goes well, we should be out of here as soon as we can spin up that scrapheap freighter's drives."
"You think Lieutenant Ames and his idiots can hold the prisoners for long enough?" The question came from the other male Inquisitor, the dark-haired kid, leaning against the rear bulkhead beside the entrance hatchway, wrapped up in his too-large cloak. Kyp, she guessed. That felt about right.
"They'd better," her brother answered, his expression hardening. She didn't fully understand the tension simmering between the two of them, a strange combination of mutual distrust and fast-paced sparring-match. "Like Lee says, we need the Turtle, even if it is a piece of space junk. The captured Rebel freighter, Jaina. We need to get control back over that ship."
"Yes, sir." She decided not to share her observation that they could have made the jump a little faster if they'd been flying something like a Pursuit Cruiser or a Merkuni light corvette.
She realised she was suppressing an impatient urge to drum her toecap on the footplate, grateful for her Imperial self-discipline. She wasn't sure she wanted to agree with Kyp. Not aloud, at least.
She told herself the ship's low-speed handling was pretty good, and its straight-line maximum in realspace wasn't bad - her urge to gain a little extra vee before making the jump to lightspeed had been pure TIE Pilot self-indulgence. The ship's compact design meant the the hyperdrive itself was… well, fast enough, anyway.
The real problem was a frustrating sense that she hadn't really found the edges of the ship's performance. Part of that was a feedback trick - the power core, presumably designed for cheap reliability and a low sensor profile, simply didn't give enough output to fly the propulsion and manoeuvring systems to their limit - but there was something else in there as well.
She tuned out the discussion, and shifted her focus. The ship was quiet, its background noises soft, but as she got used to the hum of computers and capacitors and the whoosh of scrubbers, she was starting to make sense of the underlying music of the hull and drive components - subtract the easy top-note of the engines themselves, and the trembling percussion told her other things were being pushed past their design tolerances at this speed. There was a backbeat, too, which meant that the systems had been left to settle into their own rhythm, without any proper fine-tuning or careful maintenance since they were installed. There was none of the dangerously jagged edge that she'd expect if she was pushing things too hard, but she had a vague sense that the ship wasn't going to let her do everything she wanted.
"The ship shouldn't be run this fast for too long," she warned. "She'll hold this speed until we get there, but I'd want to overhaul the drives before flying her like this again."
"Doesn't matter," the dark-haired kid at the back commented sardonically, but there was a tension underneath his words, the vulnerable ego of the ship's usual pilot and flight engineer, and she realised that she'd managed to find a way of phrasing her opinion that targeted him rather than Jacen. "So long as we get there in time, we won't have much need for this overbuilt assault barge afterwards."
The Twi'lek's head-tails went up in real surprise, and she glanced round at the cloaked figure by the hatchway. "You're planning on coming with us, Kyp?"
The dark-haired kid shifted his stance. "Why not? I might. Just to kriff with Jace."
The Twi'lek woman - Lee - chuckled at that. "You really have no sense of boundaries, do you?"
"I know. Comes of my upbringing in the spice-mines of Kessel." A sort of smile that wasn't actually a real smile played on his lips, a gesture to a private joke that wasn't really funny. "But like I said to you the other day, I like the idea of recruiting my own Kyp's Dozen - and if he's keeping this version of his sister, I make first call on recruiting the one from the new future we're creating..."
"Fair. You've not corrupted her into blowing up any big civilian targets yet."
"Do we need to discuss this?"
"Oh, I don't know. What's wrong with sharing pillow-talk…?"
Jacen frowned. "Jaina. Go and get changed out of your uniform."
She rose automatically and turned smoothly. "Yes, sir." She realised she'd responded just like the deck officer in the hangar bay, but the subtext was quite different. Jacen wanted the sister he remembered, not the Imperial Navy TIE Pilot she'd become.
Jacen? That was his name. She smiled as she marched out to find her duffel and a 'fresher. The other two could go and kriff themselves, or each other. Maybe this is going to work out after all.
(O) (O (O)
Anakin twisted his shoulders and torso in the awkward crawlspace beneath the frigate's bridge, wondering for a moment if he should have worn a shirt, trying not to get the dirty tread of his Imperial boot in Tahiri's face as she kinked and wriggled her way through the angled gap behind him.
For someone with a Force-bond, you can be annoyingly clumsy sometimes…
Sighing quietly, tucking his feet up towards him, he focused on what lay ahead.
With Fiver already in control of the ship's security systems, they'd seized the crew deck and the engineering section without raising the alarm, easily overpowering the half-handful of Imperial officers stationed there. The only opposition they still had to take care of were a few more personnel on the bridge, still completely unaware of what was happening elsewhere on the ship.
The three Jedi could probably have simply ridden the turbolift up and stormed in with blasters blazing, but Anakin wasn't quite prepared to take that risk - the Imperials left on board were the hard core who'd refused to simply surrender and desert, and they had several ysalamiri on the command deck, which made it impossible to get a clear sense of the danger in the Force. They could have easily prepared some extra security measures in the 'lift chute, nasty surprises that Fiver couldn't detect using the ship's computers either.
So they'd opted for this improvised attack route, just in case.
Anakin rolled forward into position underneath the deck hatch, breathing a little heavily for a moment, grinning as Tahiri flashed a smirk from somewhere between his legs. They hadn't run into range of the ysalamiri yet, which was good. Their plan wasn't entirely dependent on Force-coordinated timing, but it helped to know that Lowie was already in position, and to feel the instinctive certainty about the right moment to act.
Anakin pushed with the Force, sending the deck plate above him flying upwards to slam against the bridge ceiling - a move he hoped would make the bridge crew look the wrong way - and he vaulted out of his hiding place, tucking into a tight Jedi flip and landing on the walkway to the right of the pilots' seats - and stumbling, as he found himself inside the Force-void bubble around an ysalamir, dropping awkwardly to one knee. Lightsaber almost useless in his right hand, he snapped off stun bolts with the pistol in his left - one of them sent a black-clad figure tumbling off the walkway, the other two going wide, as the Imperial officers he'd been aiming at spun and reached for their own pistols.
But Tahiri had popped up behind him from the hatch and dropped the other two Imperials with neat, well-aimed stun-shots, spinning them against the desks and viewports. Lowie had thrown open the hatch on the other bridge wing, swung his big Wookiee weapon off his shoulder, and started taking out the ysalamiri.
By the time that Tahiri had scrambled right up out of the hatch and joined him on the forward walkway, the bridge was theirs.
Anakin grimaced, wrinkling his nose at the stench of barbecued ysalamir. Maybe we should have planned that part better.
Again, he'd had too much focus, imposing his own solutions on the problem, and the result was… well, less-than-perfect.
Tahiri's amused smile suggested she had plans for lunch.
Behind them, the lift hatch opened, and Fiver rolled in, tootling triumphantly - followed by their squad of sparring droids. They were going to get rid of the ysalamiri and throw the prisoners in the cells, in no particular order.
"Thanks," he said, offering them an ironic salute.
Anakin flipped over the nearest Imperial with his boot, and recognised the same Lieutenant he'd captured the Ravelin from last time. The one sprawled in the crew pit was the girl in the black uniform, a stormtrooper sergeant, he thought, who'd had to have her forearm reattached the last time they'd done this.
"Yeah," he agreed, as Fiver bleeped a question. "Make sure she doesn't need taken to the bacta bay, or something." Is that some kind of improvement? he wondered.
Lowie dropped into the pilot's chair, and Anakin took the co-pilot's console, entering the overrides to power the engines up and give him control of the guns.
"What's that?" Tahiri asked, leaning on the shoulder of his seat, nodding a gesture forward.
Anakin wasn't sure if she was talking about the flashing indicator on the console, or the flicker of pseudomotion that had just dashed past among the stars, but the answer was the same both ways. The new arrival was a small, dark-looking scout cruiser, with a shadowy presence in the Force which matched its stealthy outward appearance. Lowie offered a mournful comment.
"Yeah," he agreed. "Jaina's on that ship. And so is Jacen. Great."
(O) (O) (O)
"The freighter anchored to the starboard airlock is our first priority," her brother said, as she accelerated towards the frigate. "Nothing else really matters."
"Yes sir," she answered, frowning at the freighter - a basic Ghtroc Industries cargo hauler running a civilian transponder as the Yavin Turtle, docked at the Ravelin's starboard boarding hatch. The freighter's unusual layout meant that it was thrust out from the frigate's side at a crazy angle, and while its own starboard docking arm was available, it was pointed more-or-less directly backwards into the space beside the frigate's engines, making it hard to mate it with a ship the size of the one that she was flying.
"Looks even less impressive from out here, does it?" the Twi'lek woman, Lee, said.
Jaina didn't comment. In truth, the Inquisitors' ship wasn't much of an improvement over the Rebel freighter - the frustratingly underwhelming flight performance was reinforced by an emphatically limited armament. The ship relied on its low sensor profile - the ostentatious stealth features were probably less important than its compact size and quiet drives, and the exotic skills of the Inquisitors in command, and she had a suspicion that it was designed to mostly sneak around, avoiding contact with opponents carrying any sort of firepower.
A ship for picking on weak targets, she thought. Or just from hiding from more powerful people.
"We're going to have to dock at the freighter's starboard hatch." That was Kyp, the dark-haired boy. "Unless any of you want to fight across from the opposite side of the frigate…?"
Her brother looked at her. "Can you?"
"Sure, so long as the frigate doesn't start accelerating faster than we can match," she frowned. They had the advantage that they'd come out of hyperspace at high speed, while the frigate was only starting to turn away and accelerate. "This is going to be tight…."
A ship the size of the Inquisitors' transport wasn't supposed to be handled like a fighter, but she knew exactly what she had to do to make the three-dimensional manoeuvre work, slow-rolling the ship onto its side and then kicking the nose up with the secondary thrusters, so that she was approaching the freighter in a sideways skid. She grinned as she realised she'd timed the move just right - the frigate's sharp acceleration meant that she didn't have to brake, simply matching relative speeds as she caught up. She nudged the controls just slightly, jockeying the landing thrusters and activating the automated landing beam, bringing her side hatch neatly onto the docking arm at the freighter's stern.
The two ships connected with a soft thud, as gentle as an X-wing's skids on a landing pad.
She frowned momentarily, as she flicked the switch to activate the docking clamps. Where had that imagery come from in her neatly-ordered Imperial thoughts?
"Come on," her brother said, leading the way.
Jaina paused to power-down the systems properly, then stood and paused again, as her commlink trembled. She frowned, and pulled the handset from her pocket.
(O) (O) (O)
"Well, that's just what we needed," Tahiri sighed, looking at the Imperial ship locked onto the rear of the Yavin Turtle.
Anakin could understand exactly how she felt. With its curved and contoured shape, overlapping armoured ridges and spiked sensor antennae along the brim trench, the ship anchored to the freighter's stern looked like a grossly outsized mechanical limpet, black as space and ugly as a rancor - and with the crazy way it was pitched upwards to fit into the space, even he was probably prepared to concede that the parking arrangement at the frigate's starboard docking hatch was starting to look ridiculous. "And it looks as if they've got Jaina doing their flying."
Lowie was adjusting the frigate's controls, and for a moment, Anakin wondered if they ought to just release the Turtle and punch clear with the Ravelin.
But that would mean abandoning Jaina, and any chance of getting back to where they were supposed to be.
"Fiver," he said, punching the comm. "Send the sparring droids into the Turtle, to try and hold up Jacen and the others. Nothing lethal. Just… delay them a little while I figure out what we're doing here?"
"You need a little time to look out the window and think?" Tahiri asked.
"Probably." Anakin frowned. "You know me too well."
Then alarms blazed on the console again, and another ship flashed out of hyperspace - a big triangular Imperial cruiser with a tall command tower rising high above the hull, arriving with enough speed and power that the accompanying energy surge had translated in the visible-light spectrum for a moment, and it left a visible rotation of the constellations in its wake.
"Oh, great," he sighed.
"Chimaera?" Tahiri asked.
"Um, yeah. Good guess."
"I'm starting to recognize that one now," she smiled. "What are they doing?"
"Oppressing us. Deploying TIEs, too. See that tight group in the middle? Looks a lot more like an escort pattern for a boarding shuttle than a simple picket line."
"I love you when you're technical with me."
"I know." Anakin pushed himself from the seat, and turned towards the hatch, wrapping his arm around Tahiri as she slipped hers around him. "Come on. You too, Lowie. Let's see if we can talk some sense into my brother, or something. Imperials being Imperials, we've probably got a couple minutes while they decide whether they can dock with this scale model of Zirtan's Anchor that I'm building without violating Navy regulations."
The Wookiee grumbled that he wasn't happy about the risk of fighting Jacen, but he swung round and headed after them, anyway.