Lothal.
Jaina looked out from the bridge of the Ravelin at the planet rising high above the apex of the frigate's bows, squinting slightly at the mix of sprawling landmass, open water, and vast white drifts across the higher latitudes that might have been clouds or icecap.
She felt like she was trying to track a sensor echo that she hadn't quite identified.
She pressed her lips together, adjusting the calibration of her sensors to sweep for the gravitic whisper of Yuuzhan Vong warships lurking nearby, reflecting for a moment that she'd have once performed that sort of search from the cockpit of an X-wing, hunting ahead without relying on the support of a capital ship - and then shook her head, reminding herself that trying to overload a fighter with that sort of workload in the first place was just a bad habit she'd picked up in the Rebellion.
They'd spent two days recalibrating the frigate's weapons, shield harmonics and sensor arrays to fight the Yuuzhan Vong - they could have probably done it in a quarter of the time, but her brother and his girlfriend had discovered some maintenance bays under the main turrets that they wanted to get to know better. Then they'd headed towards Lothal using the smugglers' routes that curved spinwards down the remote spiral arm that circled to the rear of Hutt Space, beyond the limits of Yuuzhan Vong control - at one point, they were yanked out of hyperspace by an improvised asteroid minefield, but a potential confrontation with a mean-looking flotilla of gunships and blastboats was averted by what Anakin and Tahiri claimed was a Huttese spice-freighter authentication they'd bought from one of Booster Terrik's contacts. Jaina suspected they were using Peace Brigade recognition codes, but she wasn't going to argue.
And now they were at Lothal.
She stood up, straightening the big blaster holstered at her hip. "Keep hunting them, Streak," she said to the Wookiee at the co-pilot's controls, giving him a reassuring shoulder-shake. "I'm relying on you."
Lowie answered in the affirmative, and threw her a Rebel salute. She laughed, and headed aft to the turbolift, smiling tightly at the commentary from the astromech socketed in the crew pit.
"Yeah," she agreed. "I trust you two with the ship."
They had reluctantly decided to leave Lowie and Fiver aboard the Ravelin, along with the rest of the droid crew, for the simple reason that they had been left with a single TIE Defender in place of a shuttle. The Wookiee was the least easy member of their group to cram into the cockpit - she found herself shaking her head, imagining Lowie in Imperial flight gear for a moment - and the astromech had flatly refused to travel aboard a fighter that he said had an even more inflated idea of its own importance than a protocol droid.
That meant the landing party would consist of Jaina, Anakin, and Tahiri.
Jaina rode the turbolift down to the main deck, and walked forward to her quarters - she'd taken over the flight complex, though Kogo had cleared out most of the hard-copy music and holomovies, and she'd installed herself in the bunkroom meant for new recruits. She was already wearing her Imperial flight suit, so getting ready for the cockpit was a simple matter of tightening the wrist seals, tugging on the gauntlets and twisting her hair into a regulation updo, then wriggling her body into the flight armour and tugging on her helmet, before stepping back into the corridor, and taking the two sharp turns that brought her into the docking corridor, where her passengers were already waiting.
Anakin was wearing Imperial flight gear like her, though he'd opted for an unarmoured harness for his chest-pack, the lightweight type some Interceptor pilots favoured, with his lightsaber hanging from one of the straps, and he had the helmet off, tucked under his arm in the slightly awkward carry civilians always tried to use.
"You look like a pirate," she told him, grinning underneath her mask.
Tahiri, in contrast, was wearing a Yuuzhan Vong vac-suit she must have had cached somewhere, a tight black bodysleeve that showed off every contour of her physique, subtly barbaric-looking in its utter lack of compromise, and she'd styled her hair into parallel braids that curved back across her scalp and swayed behind her ears, a look that Jaina suspected was an imitation of some sort of Vong style. She even had a Yuuzhan Vong bracelet strapped around her wrist, a tight spiral band with the blade of her knife thrust down behind it against her forearm, and a supple leather travel-pouch bulked at her left hip which looked suspiciously alive, even with the familiar hard-edged cylinder of a lightsaber visible among the things bundled inside.
As if to confirm just how much she'd assimilated to the alien culture of her former captors, she fished her fingers in the bag, returning with a breather muzzle that looked like some sort of splay-footed sea-creature, which wriggled slightly as it masked her face up to the cheekbones and the bridge of her nose. Simultaneously, the neckline of her bodysleeve rolled up over over her scalp to encase her head in a tight black vac-hood - there was a sort of bulbous transparent goggle across her eyes, and the way the ropes of her alien hairstyle bulked underneath the black material had the look of some sort of savage alien crest.
She caught the tilt of Jaina's mood, and made a strange noise, and complex fist gestures.
"Just like her Tusken desert gear," Anakin translated with a shrug, pausing to don his own helmet. "She says you shouldn't worry."
Then Tahiri wrapped herself against him and they nuzzled for a moment, a familiar gesture that counterpointed whatever weirdness they'd been through.
"Passengers first," Jaina said, liking the way her voice sounded through the helmet vocoder, watching as they rolled through the boarding hatch. She heard Anakin make the quick fist-signal that was their private all-clear, and ducked in after them.
Her brother and his girlfriend were already wrapped in a tumbled clinch behind the pilot's seat, experimenting with just how much they could express their feelings for each other through the jawlines of an Imperial helmet and a Yuuzhan Vong vacuum-muzzle, but she squirmed past, slipping into the seat, and exhaling like she'd just jinked out of a tight dogfight or an asteroid cluster.
Jaina smiled. She was in the cockpit of a TIE Defender - her own TIE Defender, properly kitted out in Imperial flight gear with masked helmet and body armour. She took the controls, checked the readouts, adjusted up the scope. All she needed was some X-wings to shoot down.
The fact her brother and his girlfriend were pushing the limits of public decency and spaceproof clothing in the back of the cockpit wasn't going to spoil her mood.
"You're enjoying yourself too much, sis," Anakin teased her.
Like you aren't? "I'm enjoying myself, Rebel Brother," she agreed, powering up. "But too much? No."