Chapter 15
Getting back to the city had been surprisingly easy, yet anything but comfortable. Squeezing twenty-something people into a speeder that was a tight fit for half that many hadn't been easy, nor had been evading the Imperial patrols that by now covered most of the continent. Because of that it had taken them six hours instead of only one to return to the city where the [I]Mynock[/I] was parked. Getting inside the city itself was fairly easy, at least on foot, and alone.
Ahsoka and Unduli had decided against taking the entire group inside, given that the perimeter of the city was secured by squads of stormtroopers, and the 'false prisoner' trick being both one of the oldest in the book and far too risky with a Sith on the planet. So Ahsoka, being the only one who knew the various access codes, had gone alone, sneaking in through a drainage tunnel that looked and smelt as if it had been in good use until very recently.
She kept to the side streets, avoiding the many imperial patrols roaming the streets. It seemed as if the Imps had checkpoints at every major intersection as well as roving patrols of at least squad strength in the wider back-alleys. That still left plenty of room for someone like her to move, but forced her to take a longer route to the spaceport. Of course getting in would have been difficult for anyone not a Jedi. The entrance was guarded by a quartet of stormtroopers that had displaced the same corrupt customs officials she had encountered when coming the other way. By now, she was sure, they were on the lookout for a Togruta, and she wished she'd risked taking Rex along, but it was too late for that now.
So instead of turning back, she turned her cloak up to hide herself as well as she could and stood in line with the few others that wanted to access the spaceport. The stromtroopers actually checked people instead of just waving them through, indicating that they were indeed looking for her. She surreptitiously took out her datapad and sent a quick low-powered signal to the [I]Mynock[/I]s onboard computers. She sighed with relief when they answered with an equally low-powered signal indicating that they were still functioning and that no one had tried to tamper with the systems. There was still a chance that that someone could have been a very good slicer and done it anyway, but at least a certain security was still there.
When Ahsoka reached the guardpost, she could see by the posture alone that the stormtroopers were massively bored with their duty to put it mildly.
"Identification please." the sergeant said, sounding as bored as he looked.
"You don't need to see my identification."
"I don't need to see your identification."
"I can pass through."
"You can pass through. Move along."
She did and walked past the stormtroopers with a half-grin on her face. Ahsoka ignored the odd looks she was getting from the others and instead walked towards where she had parked the Mynock with a brisk, but not running pace.
The shuttle was where she'd left it.
Before she lowered the access ramp, she did a series of checks to see if anything had been tampered with, but she found nothing. Filing an entirely pointless flight plan with the imps now manning what passed for traffic control as well as ducking down to the terrain and getting back to where Unduli and the others were waiting took only minutes. She landed the shuttle on the same clearing where they had hidden the speeder and took great pains to maneouvre it so that they were hidden from at least any casual observers that might fly overhead.
Ahsoka remained seated as Rex and Chewbacca piled the others into the shuttle, knowing that it would be next to impossible to move around once everyone was in. Unduli somehow managed to take the seat beside her. Ahsoka wanted Chewbacca as a co-pilot, but the tall Wookie couldn't fit through any more than she did. It was as awkward as she feared, now that they did not have anything immediate task to distract them.
"Master, I-"
Before she could say anything, Ahsoka was interrupted by a sound she knew all too well. The howling sound of Ion engines. The two TIE-Fighters screamed overhead, and while it seemed for a moment as of they were just flying by, Ahsoka knew that they had to have spotted the shuttle. With one smooth movement she fired up the engines and energized the turrets.
"Everyone inside back there?" she yelled into the intercom. Rex shoved the last of his men up the ramp before running up himself. He squeezed past the people sitting on the deck, closed the ramp and slammed button for the intercom. "We're all on board, Commander!"
"Hold on back there!" she yelled and fired the repulsorlifts. She didn't bother with turning, instead pointed the shuttles nose at the thin foilage above them and pushed the throttles to the stops. The Mynock instantly broke through the leaves, with the two TIEs still fairly far away, too far away for more than speculative fire. Her own turrets, on automode, tracked the two nearest targets and fired, but also missed.
Ahsoka knew that this close to the city it would be suicide to try and reach space, so instead she headed for the mountains, trying to put some distance between herself and any TIEs. Even empty a Rho would have had a hard time outflying them there, and now she behaved a lot more like something larger, a YT-1300 for example, so Ahsoka had her hands full. Yet the Mynock was anything but a standard shuttle, and by the point where they dipped into the low valleys of the foothills, she was still ahead.
By that time they were pursued by no less than six TIEs, and even the best piloting couldn't keep them from landing the occasional hit. Laser fire zig-zagged in both directions, but Ahsoka decided she had to risk ascending into space right now. They had to get into hyperspace as soon as possible and before the Iron Fist could bring an overwhelming number of TIEs and all her firepower to bear.
"We need to risk it now." Unduli said. Ahsoka bit back a less than friendly reply. That wasn't the time for it. So instead of saying anything, Ahsoka turned the shuttle into the next branching valley. The TIEs took a few seconds to make the turn. In fact, one of the pilots underestimated just how much the performance degraded in an atmosphere and slammed headlong into the rocks.
Ahsoka had used that time well, pulled up and moved the last bits of reserve energy into the engines. In spite of the extra mass the drive had to move, the Mynock shot towards space at nearly half again the speed a Rho-Class shuttle was normally capable of. Of course by the time they reached the upper fringes of the atmosphere, Iron Fist had executed a microjump and blocking their escape route. She briefly considered just breaking past, but the groups of TIEs clearly hounding them towards the Star Destroyer pud paid to that idea just as much as her knowledge that she would never make it past the tractor beams if she went in as close as she would have to. So all that remained was to go the only way that was open, of sorts. Straight into the asteroid field about fifty seconds at top speed away. Right about now she wished she'd had the space to install a manned turret, but the automated ones would have to do. Two quick switches took all energy away from the forward shields and distributed it evenly between the engines and the turrets.
She knew that getting a hyperspace jump calculated this jumble of drive sources and gravitational pulls was possible, but even though she had started the computer on the task as soon as they'd left the upper layers of the planetary atmosphere behind, it would take at least two or three minutes.
"You're going into that asteroid field?" Unduli asked incredulously and speaking for the first time in several minutes.
Ahoska shook her head. "No other choice, Master. At least in there that thing won't be able to follow us." she said, nodding towards where [I]Iron Fist[/I] was slowly coming up astern. Fully aware of the people crammed into the back, she tried to avoid the worst of the smaller bumps such a ride was sure to cause, but she still made a mental note to have the med-teams stand by when they rendezvoused with Fearless.
The TIEs did not follow them in.
She knew that Paqua was a lot less prone to wantonly sacrificing her people than many Imperial commanders, but she knew that the respite was purely temporary. Sooner or later she would just set her ship's firepower against the asteroids until the [I]Mynock[/I] was either destroyed or flushed out. As she followed the length of the field, she glanced at Unduli.
"Master could you do me a favour and send a message for me as soon as we get out of this field?"
Unduli was tempted to ask where to, but she could see that distracting Ahsoka any more than she did herself was a fast way to get them all killed, if her clearly Skywalker inspired piloting didn't first. But somehow she managed both, and for the first time since they'd met again, Unduli was confronted with the truth that this wasn't the young, angry and confused Padawan she'd last seen all those years ago.
What she had in front of herself was someone who could one day be one of the strongest Jedi Masters in history.
Somehow that humbled her. Even as she committed the information Ahsoka was giving her to memory, Unduli decided that she had to make amends, and not only because how she had acted out of a sense of failure. She had failed in training her own Padawan had all but tried to ignore the problem until it went away.
And that had cost Ahsoka Tano everything and the Order one of it's most promising students. And she, Jedi Master Luminara Unduli had done nothing to prevent it, just because it would have meant admitting her own failure to more than her own mind. But was there anything she could do to atone for that failure?
Glancing at the scopes on the instrument panel in front of her, she could see that they were nearing the edge of the field.
She began to set the comm system to Ahsoka's instructions. The message, nothing more than a series of alphanumeric code, was to be sent not to a specific location but aimed along a certain vector. With that in mind she knew that the range would be relatively limited, but there had to be someone along that line to receive the message. She could also see that there were still three TIEs behind them that had survived the field as well as the defensive fire from the turrets, so Unduli hoped that the jump to lightspeed wasn't too far off.
On her scope the transmission quality indicated changed from a wobbling reddish yellow to green, and before Ahsoka could tell her to do so, Unduli pressed the button with a single finger.
From her seat, Ahsoka only nodded, and when a beeping sound indicated something, she placed her hand on the lever for the hyperdrive. "Everyone hold on, we're making the jump!"
The stars turned into streaks.
She wasn't given to fear any more than any other Jedi, but when she saw that the location where they emerged from hyperspace was an empty system where the only distinctive feature was an ice planet and an asteroid field. She didn't feel any fear, she merely felt unsettled. In the pilot's seat, Ahsoka didn't seem to be too happy either, though for seemingly different reasons. In hyperspace, she had taken the time to go back and see how many extra scrapes and bruises their escape had caused. There had been no permanent injuries, but a few broken arms. She had apologized profusely even as she had done her best assisting Rex and the closest thing present to a medic.
Now back in her seat, she kept checking the scanner readouts and the comm system until...
The message was short, only a six-digit sequence of numbers that meant nothing to Unduli, but that made Ahsoka grin in a way Unduli hadn't seen since before the temple bombing.
"Master, it seems our transportation is about to arrive."
"I hoped we wouldn't have to go to wherever the coun... Order is in such cramped conditions."
Ahsoka shook her head. "No, that was never the plan, though if something had gone wrong... the Mynock would have only had the fuel to make it about two thirds of the way. We would have had to refuel at Corellia or somewhere around there to make it all the way."
"That close to the Core Worlds? Isn't that risky?"
There was no accusation in the tone of her voice, only honest enquiry.
"Of course, but if you come in on the right vector and at the right time you can hide in the shuffle. Besides, I get the strong impression that CorSec is concentrating on bigger ships, and the Imps don't have more than a token presence there. Spice, ship components and weapons are the big problems by now, the Corellians have managed to reduce piracy to a trickle."
Yes, no insecurity there. Unduli found once again that she rather liked the woman Ahsoka had become.
"I see..."
They exchanged no more words for a few minutes, yet another awkward silence settling in.
Ahsoka broke the silence a few minutes later.
"Master, about our transport-"
She was interrupted by a proximity alert as the scanners detected something coming out of hyperspace.
It was... the familiar shape of a Star Destroyer, flanked by two smaller ships.
Unduli was about to panic until she took a closer look at the biggest ship. Somehow, for some reason, it was painted in a way that the Imperial fleet would never allow, in the white and red of a Jedi star cruiser, but with an unfamiliar dark red, dark blue and white insignia. The escorts, a Carrack-class ship and a Alderaanian war frigate were decked out similarly.
She looked over at Ahsoka who smiled.
"Master, I present to you the Star Dreadnought Fearless flagship and pride of the Republic Navy."
tbc
The only even semi-canonical information I could find on the passenger capacity of the Rho was ten, but since it's supposed to be similar to the Lambda-Class, I'm splitting the difference and going with 15 for the Rho.