Obi-Wan sat curled up on the throne, a datapad lying ignored in his lap as he stared vaguely out of the massive floor to ceiling windows into the darkening Coruscant sky. He was bored, and more than a little lonely, he rather wished that he was out in space with Anakin, still hunting the one remaining ship that had refused the orders of the new Emperor to stand down. The datapad chimed softly, and he glanced down with a small frown, picking it up, scanning the data quickly.
"Hmm," he mused softly, it was a report from one of the spies they still had inside the rebellion, there had been a strike against a rebel base by the Shining Sword, the missing ship, and he couldn't quite tell if the captain of the ship was getting desperate, supplies would be getting low and they couldn't exactly put into an Imperial resupply station, or if he was trying to lay a trap for the Vengeance, he couldn't have missed that he was being hunted down, and in battle, the two ships would be well matched, if Captain Torell could engineer himself an advantage in the confrontation, he could manage a lucky strike and destroy the Vengeance before even Anakin could do anything about it.
"Communications, the report you just sent me regarding the attack by the Shining Sword, has it been relayed to the Vengeance?" he asked, touching a control inset in the arm of the throne.
"No, my Emperor, not yet, communication window with the Vengeance is not for another nineteen minutes."
"Very well, when you send the report, inform them that I wish to speak with Lord Skywalker before they act on the information."
"Yes, my Emperor."
Obi-Wan took his finger off the button, cutting the connection, and looked back down at the pad, frowning slightly, before dismissing it, and dropping the pad back in his lap, there was no point worrying about it until he spoke to Anakin, and could get a feeling of if there was any danger to him or not, at the moment, all he had was vague bad feelings, and they could mean anything, he was getting nothing clear at all.
He would be glad when this last ship was dealt with, one way or the other, and they could move on with the next stage, dealing with making peace with the rebels, he would have Anakin back at his side for that, because even though they had only been reunited for a very short time, he missed him as much as he had those first few awful months of exile on Tatooine, he didn't want to be apart from him again, damn it. He settled back into the confines of the throne once more, shutting his eyes and trying to meditate as he waited to hear from Anakin.
/x/
The leaders of the rebel alliance, plus Yoda, who had come at Mon Mothma's request, sat around the circular table in the war room aboard the Freedom's Dream, studying the report on the table in front of them.
"It's the first indication of Imperial aggression in weeks, and against such a strategically unimportant target, I don't understand it. They could have done so much more damage in one strike the day Master Yoda arrived, Vader was there, he could have wiped us out, and he did nothing but tell us to leave, and now this," Leia said, frustration coloring her tone as she tried and failed to figure out the motivations.
"That isn't the only odd encounter recently," Dodonna said quietly, steepling his forefingers in front of his mouth.
"What do you mean?" Mothma asked.
"Did you know that until this attack, the only Imp ship that anyone had reported seeing was the Vengeance?"
"No, that hadn't been passed on to us," Mothma said with a hint of disapproval in her voice.
"From what we could tell, they seemed to be hunting something, and it wasn't us. There were several encounters where our ships were leaving one planet or another, and were completely ignored by Vader, not to mention this report I got in an hour or so ago, only two days ago, two of our corvettes scouting for new locations dropped out of hyperspace practically on top of the Vengeance while she was sitting just off the jump point, and they clipped each other scrabbling to avoid her, the only reaction they got; a bored sounding officer asking if they required assistance with repairs."
"What did they do?" Leia asked curiously.
"Thanked them politely, and told them they could manage," he snorted.
"So what in the name of the Force is the Vengeance doing, if she isn't hunting us?" Mothma asked in frustration.
"Looking she is for them," Yoda said, tapping the report on the attack against the base with his stick.
"A schism in the Imp fleet?" Leia mused.
"Only interested in the ship attacking were they, the day I arrived. Know we do, that new Emperor there is, said that Vader did."
"But we don't know if Palpatine is dead, or just deposed, do we?" Reikeen demanded.
"Hard it is to confirm information at times like this," Yoda pointed out dryly.
"Well, that could explain why no-one seems to have seen Palpatine recently, and why there might be a spilt in the fleet, if there is a power struggle going on. This might be a good time to move against them," Dodonna mused.
"No, they're ignoring us at the moment, the rest of the fleet no-where in sight while they're hunting down whatever ships they're hunting, whatever the reason. If we suddenly turn around and attack them now, then not only would we be no better than the Empire, but we would likely find the rest of the fleet breathing down our necks. We need to get more spies out there, we have to find out what's going on, try to find out who the new Emperor is, and if there is some kind of power struggle going on," Mothma said firmly.
"I'll get to work on it, it won't be easy getting anyone new onto Coruscant through," Reikeen sighed.
"Maybe we don't need to get anyone new in, maybe we need to try to find out if any of my father's sources are still in place, they weren't all Alderaanian, so they wouldn't all have necessarily come under suspicion, we just need to figure out how to contact them," Leia said, her heart twisting painfully at the thought of the lost planet, her family and friends all gone.
"Do you have any of the contact frequencies?"
"I don't, but he used to use R2-D2 to route the communications, so there may be something in his databanks."
"Well, we'll tell commander Skywalker to send him to the labs then, and let the techs see what they can do."
"Probably better to see what Luke can get out of him, R2 is very independent, he might wipe his databanks rather than let someone take information he isn't willing to give," Leia sighed.
"All right, so what are we going to do about this apparently rogue Imp ship?" Dodonna asked.
"Stay out of their way, tell all bases in the sectors around the one that was attacked to fall back to their next locations, and keep their heads down," Mothma said firmly.
"You want them to just…run?" he asked.
"We have nothing in that sector capable of being more than an annoyance to a ship like that, and I dare say that whatever spies the Empire has in our ranks have already reported where the Shining Sword was last seen, so let Vader deal with it," she shrugged pragmatically, they could use this apparent respite to start calling in members of the alliance who had been forced to scatter in recent months, start consolidating their numbers so they would be ready to face whatever was coming.
/x/
Anakin stood on the holo-projector in his quarters, waiting patiently for the plates to light up with the return signal. Finally an image of Obi-Wan appeared, shimmering faintly against the backdrop of the dark wall.
"Master," he greeted.
"You have the report, about the Shining Sword's latest actions, Anakin?" Obi-Wan asked without preamble.
"Yes, we have a course laid in to take us to where the attack happened, we'll see if we can pick up their trail from there."
"Stand down."
"What? But…Master…"
"Something isn't sitting right about this Anakin, I don't like it at all. Hold your position right there, stay on alert, I'm sending the Dominator out to join you."
"I'm not sensing any danger," he said tentatively, not wanting to annoy Obi-Wan, but not wanting to sit around here while the trail possibly went cold again either.
"Neither am I, not directly, but something…the last time I felt this unsettled by something so vague was Naboo Anakin," Obi-Wan said, looking away from the pickups, and Anakin winced.
Naboo, not a great memory for either of them, everything had started there, all of Palpatine's manoeuvrings, everything he had planned had stemmed from that time, that place, but it had cost Obi-Wan a very high price personally too, his world had been torn apart there, and he had never felt anything than an elusive warning that he had never managed to pin down.
"We'll hold here to wait for the Dominator," he said quietly.
"Thank you, I know you can probably handle anything they throw at you Anakin, but…"
"I know Master, we'll be right here."
Obi-Wan nodded and stepped away from the projector, breaking the connection with the Vengeance, and stood, tapping his fingers lightly on the hilt of his lightsaber for a long moment, staring thoughtfully at the windows without seeing the view beyond them.
"Emperor, the Dominator has entered the system, and the Dark Moon is fuelled an on the pad," Clipper said, entering the throne room and bowing respectfully.
"Good, let's go," he said firmly, pulling his hood up and striding from the room, his black cloak swirling behind him and the clone trooper following on his heels.
They boarded the courier, and Obi-Wan sent Clipper back to the passenger compartment to sit with the other three troopers who were accompanying them, Clipper having decided that the Emperor, Force or not, needed a personal guard. Obi-Wan himself headed up to the cockpit, taking the controls and sending the Dark Moon climbing into the sky, heading to rendezvous with the Dominator. Instinct had warned him not to tell Anakin that he was coming along with the Dominator, the younger man would go after the Shining Sword despite his orders, in an effort to keep Obi-Wan from harm, and if there was a threat that he couldn't detect, he wasn't losing Anakin the way he had lost Qui-Gon.
/x/
Luke looked up from where he was trying to persuade R2 to cough up Bail Organa's communication codes as Han came and plunked down in the seat beside him.
"What's up?" Luke asked.
"Her highnessness is being a pain in the exhaust port again. What are you up to?"
"Leia asked me to try to convince R2 to give up the comm. codes that her father used to contact his spies on Coruscant, they're hoping that some of them might still be in place."
"Oh, any luck?"
"Not so far, I did find a cache of holopics though, I thought I might ask Master Yoda about them, I think one of the people in the pictures might be Ben, another could well be my father, there are other people too, I…it would be nice to know more about my father than the lies Owen and Beru told me, or 'oh, he was a Jedi, he was killed by Darth Vader'," Luke said sourly.
"And you think the green guy will tell you about him?"
"Worth asking," he shrugged, picking up the padd he had downloaded the cached pictures to and handing it to Han.
The first picture on the padd was a young man with reddish hair in a severe haircut and a blank expression that didn't manage to hide the unhappiness in his eyes, he was sitting on a bench in some kind of garden, a little blond boy with the same shorn haircut sitting beside him, both staring off into the distance, neither of them apparently aware that the picture was being taken. Flicking through the images rapidly, Han stopped on one that made him raise an eyebrow.
"This girl looks a bit like her highnessness," he commented.
"Yeah, I noticed that too," Luke said distractedly, he had found another hidden cache, with luck, this was what he was looking for.
"Come on R2, don't be stubborn, we need the codes," he muttered, delicately shifting the probes he was using.
"Where's Goldenrod, can't he convince him to give them up?" Han asked.
"I sent Threepio for an oil-bath, they just started bickering when he tried to help, and R2 wouldn't tell me anything," Luke sighed, shaking his head.
"You know kid, your droids are weird, they act more like an old married couple than most old married couples I've ever met," he snorted.
Luke contemplated commenting that they actually acted more like Han and Leia than anything else, but decided against it at the last minute, the Corellian was already in a snit, he didn't want to make it worse.
There was an electronic sigh, and R2 finally released the information in the cache, Luke quickly plugged in another padd as comm. codes scrolled rapidly across the screen, and he patted the top of the droid's dome lightly.
"Thanks R2," he said brightly.
/x/
Anakin was in the mess with a mug of kaff and some toast when the bridge signalled that the Dominator was coming out of hyperspace, his head snapped around in the direction of the outer hull when he sensed his Master's presence aboard the other ship, bright and clear, he must have been shielding until they reverted to normal space, for Anakin to have missed that he was growing closer.
/Good morning, Master,/ he sent dryly along their bond, he felt a flare of amused affection from the older man, but his reply came not from the bond, but with the chirp of his comm. and a request to meet a ship from the Dominator in the docking bay.
Draining his kaff, he rose and strode out of the room, heading for the docking bay. The Dark Moon was settling to the deck as he entered, the engines cut and the ramp extended, and Anakin was surprised that the first ones off were four white armoured troopers, who stood two to a side at the base of the ramp, he was surprised Obi-Wan had consented to a guard. He went down on one knee automatically as the hooded, cloaked figure moved smoothly down the ramp, and he felt familiar fingers on the top of his head as the dark form came to a halt in front of him.
"Master, it is an honour to see you here,"/and something of a surprise too,/ he added the last to the formal greeting along the bond.
"I thought it best if we were both here for this,"/not to mention if I had told you I was coming, you would have taken off alone in an effort to protect me, and I think this is something we need to deal with together, besides, I was missing you,/ he replied in the same manner, tugging lightly to bring him to his feet.
/I've missed you too,/ Anakin admitted.
"Come, let's get to work on locating and neutralizing the Shining Sword, the sooner that is done, the better," Obi-Wan said, gesturing Anakin to lead the way from the bay, and resisting the urge to roll his eyes as Clipper and his team fell in behind them.