Sorry for the lack of replies, but I migrated computers.

Chapter 3

Two weeks before Ahsoka's return to Weitun

The bolt glanced off Anakin's shields, depleting them even further. He knew that one or two more of those and they would be down. With four TIEs on his tail it was unlikely he wouldn't get hit again, even more so since he was acting as the rear guard while the rest of Red Squadron landed back aboard [/I]Fearless[I] which wasn't easy to do with most of the fighter control systems non-operational. Luckily the hangar itself was fine.

He grinned when the message of 'Recovery complete' came over the squadron channel.

More laser bolts raced around him, but these were blue, and he could see the distinctive shape of the [/I]Another Chance[I] swerving around the larger hull of the Star Destroyer, engaging the few TIEs that dared to come close to the three Republic ships. Anakin sighed and slammed the fighter into a tight turn, aiming it directly at the gaping hangar and pushed towards it far faster than he would do under normal circumstances. The ship rocked from even more impacts against her own depleted deflectors even as he slowly hovered to the nearest empty spot. With the hangar doors already closed behind him and someone having reported his landing to the bridge, he experienced the short moment of disorientation when the ship went to lightspeed. He raised the canopy and did a quick survey, but the numbers didn't change, two of his pilots were dead and another three had barely managed to bring their damaged mounts back.

And it was all his very own fault.

It had been him who had volunteered Red Squadron for the rear-guard duty as they covered the retreat of the last Tierfon refugees, he had been the one to fall for an Imperial ambush that was blindingly obvious to him now. He would never be able to forget the faces of those who had died, and he would personally add their pictures to the wall of remembrance at Echo Base. He asked into the Force to beg for their forgiveness, a habit he had acquired as losses among the Remnant had continued to mount and placed his helmet in his seat where he would collect it later.

Most of his pilots were gathered around the small knot of fighters where they had parked. Anakin joined them, but unlike the other times they had done this, no one was in a celebratory mood. When they had first formed the squadron in it's current form after the Raid on the Depot, half the pilots had been Jedi, the rest drawn from the civilians, political prisoners and some Republic Navy fliers with prior experience. Of those originals only four remained, and of those only Anakin remained. Fortunately 'only' a few of the Jedi had actually been killed, most had instead been transferred out as their skills were too valuable elsewhere, but even so the death toll was staggering.

With them all being in the same mood as him, they only exchanged a few words about those that had died that day before heading off to their debriefing.

One not very pleasant hour later Anakin joined Kawgipi on the bridge.

"How bad is it?" the Vice Admiral asked.

"Two killed, two badly wounded and most of our Headhunters need a full overhaul at least."

She didn't quite wince, but the sentiment was obvious from the way her head-tails twitched.

"Yourself?" Anakin asked, knowing how much of the Republic's fortunes rested on this ship.

"Hyperdrive down to fifty percent capacity, since we lost one of the Induction motivators during that torpedo attack. Sublight is even worse, there we're down to twenty-five percent safe capacity. My Engineers tell me they can push it to thirty-five in an emergency but they'd probably never talk to me again. Our missile magazines are as close as makes no difference to empty."

Anakin stared out the viewports at the spectacle of hyperspace. Once again, all his fault.

"Admiral, I am sorry. If I had..."

If what? If he had waited on the run before this one to take off the last instead of trying to preserve his force in the face of overwhelming enemy numbers? If he hadn't fallen for the ambush and sensed the presence of that Imperial-Class Star Destroyer they'd just so narrowly escaped?

Kawgipi looked at him and said nothing. She had argued for waiting the last time, and still figured that the damage they would have taken then would be less than what they had now. Part of her blamed Skywalker for this and for the death of some of her crew. But another part knew how much he blamed himself and how keenly he felt the death of anyone under his command, not only as a force user but also as a sentient being. It so didn't fit with the old image of the great Anakin Skywalker, but over the last few years she'd learned how little of that image was accurate. He was fearless, but only because he knew the Force was with him and those he loved where kept safe by his exploits. He was a hero, but the only people whose adoration he cared about where his family.

Moreover he was a good man who tried his best to bring his people back.

"You didn't know they'd bring that Imp-Deuce here this time."

"We should not have been there to begin with. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time seems to be a family curse."

Kawgipi wondered what that was about. She knew that Skywalker's way into the Order had been far from ordinary, but what was that all about? Not that it mattered.

If he had been dismissive of her losses or blamed anyone but himself she would have jumped down his throat, Jedi or not, but her was well aware of his failure, so she was prepared to let it go. She knew he hadn't done it on purpose, she knew he wasn't incompetent and she knew that he would do his level best to not let this sort of thing happen again, and in the end, that was enough.

"So yes, this is beyond our means to repair. It's not so much that we wouldn't have anywhere for [I]Fearless[/I] to dock, it is, but more that we don't have the parts we need. We might try to get them on the black market, but we're victims of our own success here." Kawgipi said, and the Republic Council was silent.

It's eight elected members and those merely sitting in on the meetings contained a few military veterans among them and they knew what the Admiral was on about, but some of the rest of them were not, so she explained.

"Because our only Star Destroyer has been so visible to the galaxy at large, the Empire is having incredibly tight controls on spare parts for Victory-Class ships. They know we desperately need those parts so they try to ensure that we can't just go and buy them. It's probably easier to get a hyperdrive motivator for an Imperial-Class on the black market than a sensor spine for a Victory."

"So we can't get them at all?"

It was Captain Lane, head of Republic Naval Intelligence and defacto head of all Republic intelligence operations answered.

"Well it certainly won't be easy or cheap. Nor particularly safe. The only source I could see would he Hutt space. The Imps are refitting or scrapping first-generation Victories and some of the parts end up at places like Nar Shaddaa or Nal Hutta. Palpatine hates it, but all over the Galaxy these sorts of things tend to fall of the back of a speeder."

"But what's to stop them from betraying us to the Empire? [I]Fearless[/I] is our strongest ship, and they would jump at the chance to take her out while she's helpless."

Padmé Skywalker who at the moment served as something of an Ambassador at large and generally the closest thing to a Diplomatic Service the Republic had at the moment replied.

"The Hutt Council? Nothing." she said, remembering the Senate Incident during the war. "But if we can make any single Hutt an offer that he can't refuse, things are different. We might have to make a few unsavoury choices though, because someone who is going to be willing to risk Imperial anger for profit would almost have to be a criminal in his own right, by our standards as much as those of the Empire."

She sighed and took a deep breath. "My husband had an idea to that effect. He would go to Tatooine and..."

For quickly outlined the plan Anakin had brought to her.

Master Windu was representing the Jedi Council in these meetings, and he was aware of Anakin's chequered history with the planet of his birth. Five years ago he would have been far more worried than he was already, but the Anakin Skywalker of today or even right after Order 66 was a far cry from the emotionally unstable young man he'd been before the Exodus. That didn't mean there were no issues, nor that it would not be intensely difficult on a personal level.

"Senator, do you believe it might work?"

Padmé had learned to ignore that everyone called her by a title she no longer held and instead knotted her hands on the table and looked down at them. It was a good question and one she'd asked herself before.

"He believes it will, and to be honest? I do too. And even if I didn't, it's the approach with the least risk towards our position here. And besides, he owes Anakin one."

Windu wasn't so sure, and made a mental note of sending someone along, not because he thought that Skywalker needed a Chaperone, and he didn't, but to provide a different point of view. He knew who would be perfect for this.

The meeting dispersed some twenty minutes later without a final decision having been made, but Windu knew that it was only a matter of time, because Padmé had been right about one thing, it was their best chance, and Skywalker's idea was their only in into the strange world of the Hutts.

As he was about to leave, he saw that Captain Lane was remaining behind and obviously wanted to talk to him, so he waited until everyone else had filed out of the room. Lane had been leaning against the far wall of the room, and when he came up to the Jedi Master, he brushed some of the dirt of the room's bare stone walls of the arms of his tunic.

"Master Jedi, I have something you... might want to see."

He handed Windu a flimsiplast. It was a two-dimensional representation of a holopicture, and the meomnt he saw what was on it, he knew why this had been brought to his attention. It was taken at a distance, and judging by the pixelated nature of this and the fading colours near the maximum distance of a normal commercial holocam and near the end of the local day. It showed... nothing distinct, if he was to be honest, but the green glow and the shape gave it away.

"A Jedi."

"I believe so too, Master." Lane said, nodding. "Any idea who it is?"

Windu shook his head. Over the last five years a considerable number of Jedi that hadn't made it back to Coruscant when the recall had been sounded had either found their way to Weitun or been killed by Paqua and the Imperial Inquisitors. Yet a disturbingly large number of them was still missing. He knew that some had given up the ways of the Jedi, and he knew of at least one who fought his own war against the Empire on the Rim.

Yet that still lever far too many unaccounted for. The pre-Exodus Jedi Order had been a massive and far-flung organization even without the war, and every Jedi knew how to hide his Force presence, in fact nowadays it was the first thing younglings were taught. A great many Jedi were known to be dead, Masters like Kit Fisto or Luminara Unduli, but the fate of many others had never been discovered. Windu hoped that some of them were still out there somewhere and many had eventually found their way to Weitun over the last few years, but there were ever fewer.

Oh things had improved massively since the Exodus, the Skywalker twins were far from the only younglings born to one or two Jedi going through Youngling training these days, which told everyone that Skywalker was far from the only one who had been challenged by the old code. At the same time the loss of knowledge and experience by those Jedi who had perished or simply disappeared into the bustle of the galaxy was a blow the Order had yet to recover from and sometimes Windu doubted it ever would.

"Not really, Captain." he said aloud even as he continued to study the picture. "I'm afraid a green lightsabre isn't very distinctive, and the rest of this is too dark to tell what form, if any the wielder was using when this was taken."

Lane sighed, he had probably expected as much. "This was taken Trindakaa, a world somewhat like the fourth moon of Yavin. Lots of tropical forrest, old ruins, that sort of thing, except that it's been settled for centuries and that it's something of a trade note near Hutt Space."

Windu frowned. "That's clear on the other side of the Galaxy. Could it be that... person does not know yet that we still exist?"

It was certainly possible. While the Republic didn't exactly keep it's existence secret, they weren't broadcasting it either, and the Empire was certainly not doing it for them. They had yet to publicly acknowledge that the Jedi that so often accompanied the Republic Remnant were more than a few scattered survivours. Even so...

"Well, according to the most popular rumour doing the rounds, we've either made contact with the [I]Outbound Flight[/I] and permanently left the galaxy behind us or we're using [I]Fearless[/I] as a mobile base. Thing is, that Jedi might simply not know for sure and would not want to risk it. Besides, there are more than a few Rebel groups who are utterly cut off from the outside."

"This must certainly be investigated, Captain. I will bring this before the council, but I doubt they will disagree. What else can you tell me?"

"I got that information via the last courier from the Core worlds. Apparently the Imps have taken notice of that group after they blew a local HoloNet relay. Gutsy but stupid, because that was bound to catch Palpatine's attentions. From what I could find out, they normally operate in space, noble pirates if you will. I would have tried to make contact with them, but we have exactly no assets at all that far out and we can't risk Senator Organa on this."

For the next minute Lane outline what little other information he had, and by the time they parted ways, Windu had already decided who to ask to take on this mission. She may have been only back for two days now, but this side of Knight Enwandung Esterhazy Ahsoka Tano was the best scout they had. Windu hoped that she would do this, because he sensed that it was the wish of the Force that she did.

tbc

This turned into something different from what the old version of the chapter was..

Anyway, I hope no one minds that I am keeping the exact composition of Red Squadron out of the focus. For one, in this story they don't play a major part (which will change later), and for seconds, I'm being honest and say that I don't have them fleshed out much to begin with. On the other hand I have plans for how the likes of Wedge Antilles, Celchu and the others end up there, and those Red Squadron OCs would probably fade into the background anyway, at least to some extent.

Ehrm... anyway, I'm also basing my depiction of Starfighter Ops on the X-Wing novels.

As for the council, here we're seeing the beginnings of what I have in mind for the Republic in the future.

Republic Council works as follows:

A leader (Speaker of the Council) is elected for no more than two consecutive terms of four years (though he/she may run again no less than two terms later) and appoints the other members who are subject to popular approval. This is of course only for the moment, when the Republic is formally reinstated, it will be changed a lot, especially with the election of a provisional Senate.

Lastly: What the [CENSORED][CENSORED][CENSORED][CENSORED] is up with Star Wars names?