"Still nothing?" asked Obi-Wan as he entered the bridge of the ship. Anakin had come up an hour ago, to 'clear his mind'.
"Nothing," replied Anakin, walking away from the trooper he was talking to. "Almost two full rotations and not a single Separatist ship has shown up on the radar, or any other ship for that matter. Are we sure this plan is going to work?"
"Master Windu seemed very certain that the Inquisitor would come," insisted Obi-Wan. "The galaxy is a big place, Anakin. Give it time. News does take time to travel, and she could be on the other side of the universe for all we know."
"We could be out there defending other systems, and instead we're back on this lifeless rock, waiting for someone who might not even come." Anakin walked with Obi-Wan back out of the bridge, and down the hall towards the command center. "I just saw a report, the Sister just raided a Republic base on Thabeska, only a rotation ago. It's not even that far from here. If she had heard, or cared, she would have come already."
"Well, we're not leaving unless we receive orders to," Obi-Wan paused in the middle of the hallway. "You might as well get comfortable if you're so sure she won't turn up."
Anakin diverted his gaze, staring down the hallway. "She probably knows this whole thing is a trap. We both know she's smarter than she seems."
Obi-Wan focused his stare on his apprentice. It was true, the Republic hardly ever publicized their missions, and they had no business on an abandoned system like Xlenia. If the Inquisitor was as smart as she had shown to be earlier, she could probably tell what they were planning. Either she would come with plenty of reinforcement, or not at all.
The Jedi Master sighed in defeat. "I suppose you have a point, but that doesn't mean there is any use grumbling about it. This will only be as bad as you make it."
Anakin shot a half-hearted glare towards Obi-Wan but didn't say anything. He knew his master wasn't to blame for the mission in the first place.
"I heard you had a chance to see Senator Amidala the other day," Obi-Wan remarked, changing the subject. "How is she these days?"
Suddenly grinning quite wide, he answered. "She's good. She's heard about the issue, but none of the raids have been on Naboo, so her people have been mostly safe." Anakin hoped his face wasn't giving away too much.
Obi-Wan smiled. "That's good to hear. She has a very large circle of influence. I would dare to go as far as to say that the Republic needs her voice of reason now more than ever."
"If only they would listen," commented Anakin, and his master chuckled.
"I'm going to go meditate for a while," declared Obi-Wan. "Care to join me?"
Anakin shook his head. "I'm going to see if I can dig up more on the Sister. I think there might be a pattern to her raids that we haven't realized yet."
Nodding in affirmation, Obi-Wan walked away in silence. Anakin stared after him for a few minutes, before entering the command center he had been walking towards with his master earlier.
Obi-Wan let loose a few chuckles he had been holding during their conversation. Anakin's extremely drastic mood change had not gone unnoticed by the Jedi Master, but that wasn't necessary, as he knew the nature of Anakin and Padme's relationship. There was a certain loyalty between the two of them that suggested that they were more than friends, much more, by Obi-Wan suspicions. He didn't dare say anything, but he couldn't help but poke at the possibility of Anakin slipping and confirming his assumptions by accident.
Anakin pulled up a map on the projector and plotted the locations of every raid or mission that the Inquisitor was present for. When all laid out at the same time, the Jedi noticed that she didn't travel much farther towards the Core than the Inner Rim. Most of her strikes had been in the Outer and Inner Rim, although there were a couple of exceptions, one of them being Christophsis.
He had heard about the defense of Christophsis, from Obi-Wan and from Caleb Dume. Obi-Wan had told him about the details of the battle, how the tanks had all been mysteriously unarmed. Depa Billaba had attributed the anomaly to a flaw in the production line as all of the tanks had experienced the same problem.
Caleb Dume, on the other hand, hadn't been a part of the main battle but had been face-to-face with the Inquisitor herself. Anakin had overheard him talking to the same group of Younglings that he had overheard a while ago about Ahsoka. Apparently, the Younglings and Caleb had become united and quite close over the topic of the Inquisitor.
To his credit, Caleb had been very humble about the whole encounter. He told them (and unknowingly told Anakin) that the Inquisitor hadn't seemed interested in killing him and was more interested in the base itself. Everything about her, from her abilities to her appearance to her mannerisms, lined up perfectly with what Anakin had already experienced. All in all, he hadn't learned anything new except that she had a soft spot for Dume. The Younglings were more convinced than ever that the Inquisitor wasn't Ahsoka.
He had avoided Caleb for ten months now. It was just too hard, knowing that Ahsoka had been so close to him. Every now and then, he would do or say something that was clearly taught to him by Ahsoka. They were small things, such as a phrase, or a certain move during his training. Anakin didn't know how he had handled her trial and never asked about it. What he did know was that Ahsoka had impacted him a lot, and now she was gone.
Anakin also forced himself to forget that the mission had been on Christophsis, the place he had met Ahsoka. It had to be a coincidence, he told himself. It had to be.
The nagging feeling that the Inquisitor was Ahsoka had faded since he had last seen her, and he hadn't felt the thread in weeks. It was possible that it was because he hadn't seen her recently, but Anakin was sure that they were separate entities now. If only the Council agreed with him.
He stared at the map of the galaxy, trying to focus on the task at hand. Anakin opened a new projection and plotted the times of the Inquisitor's strikes on a timeline. There wasn't any correlation, as far as he could see. The attacks were spontaneous, and he could see no chronological pattern to them. He turned his attention back to the map. Red dots decorated the edge of the galaxy, with a select few sprinkled close to the Core.
Anakin furrowed his brow, then closed the timeline down. That wasn't going to help him. Instead, he cleared the map of red dots and started again. This time, he told the computer to plot the points in chronological order and to connect the path they took across the galaxy. He started the animation and stood back to watch.
The first attack had been on Xlenia, where he was now. The rest of the sightings were connected by a thin red line that crossed the map with no pattern. There was no order, no clue as to what was inspiring the strikes.
At least not at first. As the plotting continued, he realized that most of the attacks had been in the Outer Rim. Xlenia was one of the few ex-mega systems that were located away from the Core. As the weeks progressed, however, the Inquisitor had started striking bases closer to the center of the galaxy. With the addition of the connecting line, it almost looked as if the Inquisitor was trying to work her way inwards.
Anakin realized this and immediately started thinking strategically. It would make sense, from a commanding point of view. Start the new fighter off with some smaller missions, and then work your way up from there. Christophsis had certainly been a large jump, but Grevious had been there so that didn't surprise Anakin.
What did startle him was the notion that eventually, she would work her way to the Core, where the Republic was strongest. The Sister's words from their first meeting came rushing back to him: 'Within months, your precious Chancellor will have no choice but to bow to Darth Sideous.'
It was no secret that the Chancellor's office was on Coruscant. If the Inquisitor was working inwards, then she might be planning to bring her own prophecy to fruition herself. If Anakin was right, then they only had months before she would strike on Coruscant itself. Not only that, but they had one month less than when she had declared her intentions.
Anakin anxiously tried to calculate the time the Republic had left. The Inquisitor had attacked the Outer Rim for two weeks, then started moving inward. There were about six territories that were widely accepted by the galaxy as dividers between different sections of the stars and systems. If the Inquisitor had attacked two of the territories in four weeks, then, if Anakin was right, Coruscant had two months before the Sister would strike at their system.
Two months. Two months.
Suddenly, without warning, Anakin became painfully sick to his stomach. He doubled over and knelt down, leaning on the projector table for support. He groaned as the stabbing knives inside him worked their way around his abdomen. When he could think clearly again the thread was back, the thread linking him for some cursed, unknown reason, back to the Sister.
He didn't have any time to acknowledge why, though, for at that precise moment his communicator crackled to life. "Anakin!" Obi-Wan's voice broke through the silence of the command center. "Come to the bridge, now! She's here!"
Anakin sprinted to the bridge and looked out of the windows for a Separatist fleet. He was surprised to see empty space in front of them. He approached Obi-Wan, asking "I don't see her. Is the ship behind us somehow? Or is she on the other side of the planet?"
"Neither," came his master's reply. "I'm afraid that she's not exactly here here."
"What do you mean?" He questioned, but just then, the stars around them streaked backward, and the cruiser was flying through hyperspace. Anakin turned to Obi-Wan and tried to decipher the older Jedi.
"Obi-Wan, what's going on? I thought you said the Inquisitor had arrived."
"I misspoke," admitted Obi-Wan. "The Inquisitor did arrive at a Republic cruiser, but not ours."
Anakin stared at him, confused, for a moment. Then he realized that the only other Republic cruisers that could be considered 'here' were with Master Windu.
"We got the call seconds before I called you up here," explained the Jedi Master. "And you were right, she did know it was a trap. She, or someone else, brought three Separatist ships to match our three. We are in one of them."
As Anakin processed this information, his expression darkened. "We only released that we were going to Xlenia. We didn't say anything about how the trap was set up, or that Master Windu was a part of it. We didn't even know their location, until now, apparently." He lowered his voice. "How did they find Windu if we didn't even know where to find him?"
"I don't know, Anakin," was the worried reply, "But you were correct about one thing. She certainly is smarter than we anticipated."
The two Jedi started ordering troopers to their stations, preparing for an air battle, but Anakin's mind was preoccupied with his new findings. He would have to wait to tell Obi-Wan, although that didn't stop the looming deadline from swirling about his head.
Two months, he thought. Two months, two months, two months.
Two months.