The worst part about all of this was that Ahsoka had no way to know which of the clones had their inhibitor chips removed because all of them had their helmets on. She knew Jesse was trying to help her, and Rex too, but other than that, she had no idea. Every time she saw another clone, her heart rate spiked and she felt a moment of sheer panic as she raced past them, hoping they wouldn't try to shoot her down.
So far though, all of the clones she had passed were only chasing her towards the hangar with Jesse. They shot periodically, but just enough to make it look like they were trying to hurt her. They had done a good job of clearing the way otherwise, thanks to closing certain blast doors so no one else was in the way. Some of the hallways didn't have doors to close, but the clones who saw her fly past saw Jesse and the others chasing her and let them be.
She was about halfway to the hangar when the ship started to shake. Oh, come on! How much worse can this get? Ahsoka stopped running as her balance was disrupted, thankfully in a section of the hall that had been mostly closed off, so no one saw her. The clones behind her paused too, trying to stay on their feet.
"What's going on?!" One of them shouted, but Ahsoka only had a vague answer.
"Something must be wrong with the hyperdrive, the engines aren't engaged right now!" She looked back at Jesse, and he patched into the public channel for the battalion.
Sure enough, someone from the command center was trying to reach soldiers in the hyperdrive room. "Trooper? Trooper! Status on target number two!"
They all waited for a response, but none came. Ahsoka's face fell. "Maul went for the hyperdrive, that Sith piece of sh-"
"Jesse! Jesse, come in!" Rex interrupted her, over the lieutenant's comlink. "Keep the general moving! Do you hear me? Someone just opened the hangar doors, and we're headed right for a moon! We need to get her out of here!"
Ahsoka darted off, continuing in the direction she had been going, and the troopers tailed her as Jesse responded. "We're getting close, no more than two minutes until we're there."
Her mind raced as she pushed herself to run faster. If Maul had already destroyed the hyperdrive to the point where it was no longer operational, the damage would probably affect the engines as well. They were too close together: if one went down, it was almost guaranteed that the other would too. This cruiser wasn't going to stay in the air for much longer. Everyone needed to evacuate.
Rex's plan had been under the assumption that the cruiser was going to make it to Coruscant, but that clearly wasn't going to happen now. If Ahsoka had to guess, Rex was guarding a shuttle meant for a few people at most, and probably less than the number of troopers helping her. There were already eight troopers following her, and there were probably a couple more with the commander. That wasn't going to work.
"Jesse, get ready to improvise!" she called behind her, hoping no one other than his men had heard her. There was no time to check, though, they needed to keep moving.
The doors to Hangar 12 slid open to reveal Rex and three other troopers standing guard next to a shuttle that was too small for all of them, as Ahsoka had predicted. She ran straight for it, but instead of boarding she tackled Rex (she was doing that quite a bit today) and held him in front of her, pretending to use him as a shield. She pushed him down on his knees and held her lightsaber in front of his neck. Her other hand was on his shoulder, trying not to shake and failing miserably. All the other troopers pointed their blasters in their direction, but no one fired anything other than empty threats.
"Is there a bigger shuttle nearby?" she whispered, trying not to hold her lightsabers too close to him. Her hand wasn't that steady right now and Ahsoka absolutely could not hurt Rex.
"Behind you, about thirty meters," he told her, following her train of thought. "We'll follow you in, just get in the cockpit."
She pushed him forward with the Force so he was caught by his brothers. Ahsoka darted in the other direction, knowing Rex would relay the message. Her eyes found the shuttle Rex was talking about and she jumped on, knowing that any second now the rest of the cruiser would begin the evacuation protocols and their time would be up.
Ahsoka didn't know how long Rex would need to board his men, so she began the flight sequences before she closed the ramp. There was no time to do safety checks, she was just going to have to make do without them. She fired up the engines and hovered over the ground, waiting desperately for Rex to give her the all-clear. It wasn't long before he ran into the cockpit, shouting, "GO! GO! JUST PUNCH IT!"
Obliging, she shut the ramp and activated the thrusters, exiting the hangar and getting them clear of the doomed cruiser. Rex wasn't kidding, the ship was headed straight for a moon, although Ahsoka didn't recognize what system it was in. It didn't matter, they just needed to get away from it before anyone sent fighters to shoot them down.
Jesse ran in, breathless and taking off his helmet. "We got everyone, but we need to ditch before they try to bring us in!"
"Rex, send confirmation to the cruiser that target one has been eliminated," she ordered, diverging from the cruiser's flight path. "Jesse, set the navi-computer for the nearest system. Doesn't matter where we go, just get us into hyperspace." Activating the shuttle's sound system, she announced to the troopers in the back, "Everyone strap in!"
"Oh, this is going to suck," Rex complained, grabbing the edge of Ahsoka's seat and activating his comlink. He knew enough about improvised plans to know that they were in for a rough flight, but he also knew that improvised plans worked around here. "This is Commander Rex. Ahsoka Tano has been eliminated, but-"
Ahsoka spun the steering, sending the shuttle into an uncontrolled spin away from the moon. Rex nearly lost his com and Jesse barely managed to cling to the navi-computer, but they managed to stay on their feet. She pulled the controls back, steadying the ship.
The admirals in the command center of the cruiser bought their act. "Commander? Are you all right?"
"The ship's controls have been busted!" he lied, pretending to fiddle with them without showing them that Ahsoka was in the pilot's seat. "There's no way to control the engines, I can't-!"
She pulled up, sending the ship into a shakey loop. Mortis, she hoped this looked convincing.
"Sir!" Jesse called, trying to hang on to something to prevent from being jostled around the compartment. "The hyperdrive has taken damage! We're about to jump!"
"Where are we jumping to?" Rex asked, playing along. Ahsoka kept making wild movements with the ship, movements that probably would have given Obi-Wan a heart attack if he was there.
Clinging to the navi-computer, Jesse answered, "It's towards a nearby system, but there's no way to stop it! If we don't do something, this ship is going to fly straight through a planet!
"Destroy it!" Rex ordered, sounding frantic. Out of the view of the comlink, Jesse gave Ahsoka a thumbs up. They were ready. "If we don't stop the hyperdrive, we're all dead men!"
Ahsoka jumped to hyperspace, and Rex prematurely cut the call off before he finished his sentence. For all the 332nd Company and the Republic knew, Ahsoka Tano was now dead, and Commander Rex, ARC Trooper Lieutenant Jesse, and ten other troopers were now missing in action. They were free.
Jesse collapsed on the ground, tired from having to set the coordinates while also dealing with Ahsoka's erratic flying. Ahsoka herself wanted to do the same, but she got up out of her seat and opened up the panel to the shuttle's computer, finding the wire that sent the ship's coordinates to the transmitter and pulling it. She was going to have to do some more work to ensure that the Republic couldn't track them, but it would work for now.
She closed the panel again, breathing hard and shaking ever so slightly. Now that she had a second to think, the events of the past half-hour were finally starting to process. Resting her head on the wall, Ahsoka tried to even out her breathing. She still needed to talk with the troopers, and she wasn't going to be able to do that if she was panicking.
When she turned around, Rex had pulled Jesse to his feet and was waiting for her. "That's the kind of stunts I remember you pulling," he joked, making Ahsoka laugh a little bit.
"This whole day has been crazy," she realized, letting her bag drop to the floor next to the wall. "I didn't even think I was going to leave Coruscant when I woke up this morning."
"Yeah, I think the plan changed just a little bit," Jesse noted, smirking.
Ahsoka shook her head, trying to undermine just how true that statement was. Even Rex's plan to get her off the cruiser had changed. The clones weren't supposed to escape with her, but now...
She walked to the door of the cockpit and saw them all standing up, having unbuckled from the ride earlier. Rex and Jesse flanked her as she walked out to them, who were taking their helmets off and looking to her.
It was eerily reminiscent of the scene she had walked into on the 501st cruiser yesterday. It was no longer a full squadrons standing before her, but ten men with two more behind her. They were troopers who were loyal to her had helmets with her markings on them, but those helmets weren't hiding their faces anymore. It was only now that she could see that every one of them had a faded scar on the right side of their forehead.
"How?" she asked, turning to Rex beside her. "How did you do this?"
He grinned just a little bit as he explained. "Order 66 says that any and all Jedi leadership is to be must be executed for treason against the Republic, but we have a directive of our own: Protocol 5555."
"Rex made it not long after the Lokori mission," Jesse explained, giving his commander the credit. "Under the Fives Protocol, unless proof that a specific Jedi has done something to deserve being executed for treason has been provided, any clone with the ability to choose whether to follow Order 66 or not is to take advantage of that choice. Needless to say, we knew ours."
"I managed to spread the word about the inhibitor chips, but the rest of them are with the 501st on Coruscant," Rex told Ahsoka. "This is everyone we had with us."
Ahsoka looked back at the troopers again, all of them with their eyes trained on her and standing tall. Either they hadn't realized what this meant for them, or they had realized and they had chosen to defect from the Republic anyway. For her.
She knew what the consequence to that was, she had nearly faced it over a year ago. Fives had faced it too, but it was because of his sacrifice that the Fives Protocol was made, and Rex had made sure it was worth it. All of them had risked their allegiance to the Republic just to save her.
"Thank you," she said quietly, only just loud enough that all of them could hear her. "There's nothing I can do to pay you back for this."
"That's the point," Rex told her, resting a hand on her shoulder. "You already have."
Anakin's words came floating back to Ahsoka: 'It's a sign of respect. They know what you went through for them, day after day, battle after battle. Loyalty means everything to the clones.'
She smiled, nodding to show that she understood. This wasn't about the Republic's rules anymore, it was about what was right. And what was right at the moment was that she protect her men as they had protected her.
"If Order 66 has been activated," she began, addressing all of them, "then no Republic system is safe anymore. I doubt the Separatists are about to help us either, so that limits our options from here."
"We might have a problem, then," Jesse admitted. "The closest system to where we were was a Republic system. It's small, though. I doubt there will be much military force waiting for us there."
Ahsoka crossed her arms, thinking. "We won't be able to stay for long, but we'll use it to reset navi-computer. I have a better idea of where we can go."
One of the troopers asked, "Where's that? There are only so many systems that are neutral these days."
"It's not a neutral system, it's an abandoned one," Ahsoka explained. "Were any of you on the missions General Skywalker took to Xlenia?"
Recognition crossed their faces, and even the troopers who didn't raise their hands understood what her plan was to a degree.
"No one will be there to send a message to the Republic," she thought aloud, "and once I disable the tracker, no one will think to look there either. Until we understand more about what's going on, our best move is to hide there."
"It might be worth it to get a message to General Skywalker," Rex suggested, hoping that his men had gotten to the Jedi Knight first. "If you can keep it out of the Republic's hands, he might be able to make it out there to meet us."
Ahsoka nodded, hoping he would still be alive to receive the message. "I'll get to work, but it's going to be hours before we get to Xlenia." She looked around at her men and the room they had to work with. It wasn't overly extravagant, but it was comfortable enough. "Get some rest during the flight. I can't guarantee what will be waiting for us when we land, if anything, but it's been a long day for everyone. I'd rather we all have a decent amount of sleep."
The troopers nodded and responded in affirmation. Jesse turned to the general. "I'll get them comfortable, sir, but you two should see if you can get any information about what's happened."
"Thanks, Jesse," Ahsoka told him, walking back into the cockpit. Rex made to follow her, but Jesse stopped him before he could.
"Make sure she gets some rest too, Commander," the ARC trooper reminded him. "Don't let her work for too long."
Rex nodded, having had the same thought. "I won't," he promised, and they passed each other to their respective duty. The fight was over, but the mission wasn't. They still had work to do.