"I can't believe there's still slavery in the galaxy. The Republic's antislavery laws are—"
-Padme Naberrie.
ALDERAAN SYSTEM
"Help us. Please help us. We are being held prisoner in a Nebula-class freighter somewhere in the Alderaan system … as far as we know. We were kidnapped when our cruiser broke down over—"
Kallen's wife pulled at his arm. "Don't ramble. Just repeat the distress call. They don't need to hear all that." He glanced aside at her pale face, her dirty hair, her disheveled wrapper. Her hand trembled on his arm.
He turned back to the old transmitter they'd found, locked in the cargo hold. He'd had the knowhow to get it working. All they could do now was hope.
"Help us. Please help us. We are being held prisoner in a Nebula-class freighter somewhere in the Alderaan system … as far as we know. Help us. Please—"
They heard a crackle, and then a deep, resonant, cultured baritone answered. Kallen had to turn the sound down.
"This is Jedi Master Dooku on the Jedi ambassadorial shuttle Eventide. How may we be of assistance?"
Kallen looked over at Zace. Her eyes shone bright as she gripped his arm. "A Jedi master!"
Dry from thirst, Kallen croaked the words out. "Master Jedi, please come! Our family was moving to Alderaan and our cruiser broke down. We were dead in space. We were boarded by pirates who took all our belongings and everyone on board prisoner! I am locked in the cargo hold with my wife and some of the older passengers. But we haven't seen our children in three days. My wife and I have two teenaged daughters and we fear—"
Kallen stopped. He couldn't even say it.
Random clicks came over the connection; Kallen heard someone say, "—traffickers." Then the deep voice returned.
"Do you know your position?"
"All I can tell you is where we were when we broke down," said Kallen, and he named the coordinates.
They heard, "—three days ago. That's a wide area to search, master." A young female voice.
Then Jedi Master Dooku again. "We're scanning for your position. This may take us a bit. I would maintain silence, but please keep the line open as we search for you."
Then the voice grew gentle. "My name is Yan. Who am I speaking with?"
"I'm—I'm Kallen, sir, and my wife is Zace."
"We're here with you, Kallen. Do not worry. We're here and we are coming for you."
Kallen clicked the connection open and sat back, hyperventilating. The chill and the gloom of the cargo hold closed around them and the other thirty passengers who sat huddled on the floor in wraps of various kinds, even sheets of dirty plastic that lay strewn about. Only one light was on in the entire hold, and everyone else had ceded that to Kallen, while he worked to repair the old transceiver. Someone else had had a torch, but passed Kallen the battery.
"What happened?"
"What happened?"
"Did you reach someone?" A hiss of whispers arose from the huddled throng.
Zace whispered back, "Stay quiet! Don't alert them! We've reached a Jedi master in the area. They're scanning for us. We're going to be rescued!"
The place smelled like spent fuel and old grease. Only one port window existed on either side of the hold. Stars streamed past. Excited whispers buzzed against the walls.
"Shh!" Zace shushed everyone.
Who had taken them and where they were going was anyone's guess. The only thing on anyone's mind was the children. Babies and toddlers stayed with their mothers, but all the older children were gone. They had left a few of the boys, but none of the girls. The pirates were all men, three Humans, a Zabrak, and two Pantorans.
All humanoid.
Everyone held hands, held their breaths. "How long do you think it would take a Jedi ship to scan all the area where we might be?" someone whispered.
"I don't know," came an answer.
Kellen tried switching the receiver so they could hear the Jedi ship.
The female voice: "—next parsec over. I don't know, master."
"Do we need to start over?" The cultured baritone. "My feelings tell me we're very close. We have to be—"
"Master Yoda standing by from the Temple."
The sound cut.
In the round port window, one star got slowly brighter and brighter. Zace pointed as it broadened into a craft with three red wings, which drew closer and closer.
The hold beneath them shuddered. A bright bolt seared the velvet space ahead of them, off the bow of the red ship. A warning shot.
Everyone huddled at the window. The odors of unbrushed teeth and unwashed bodies thickened the air.
"That's them!"
"Has to be them!"
"They're shooting at the Jedi!"
xxx
"Shields up!" Dooku's temporary Padawan, a sixteen-year-old Kel Dor girl named Vaar Deen whose master lay in a bacta tank and had several more weeks in hospital ahead of him, held a little more anxiety in her voice and in the Force than he might have liked.
Yan Dooku had passed the mandatory retirement age for being assigned another Padawan of his own. Master Yoda continually tried to discuss the matter with him of giving up field work.
He commed the freighter. "Nebula-class freighter. This is Jedi Master Dooku of the ambassadorial shuttle Eventide. I have reason to believe you have prisoners on board. I demand you come to a full stop immediately!"
The freighter ignored him. "Warning shot," Dooku commanded. Vaar Deen aimed one laser blast under the ventral hull. The freighter turned away and accelerated, looking like some oblong sea creature with glowing eyes at the front end and the luminescence of its engines at the aft.
"Pursue," he said. He turned to the hologram of Master Yoda that stood on top of the control board facing him. "Request assistance from any other Jedi in the area," he said. "We need to corral this thing before it gets away."
"Master Dooku. A queen you carry, on the Eventide. Risk her safety, you must not!"
"Then get me some help! A freighter carrying thirty adult prisoners and an unknown number of children is not escaping me if I can prevent it."
The freighter fired again—two direct hits on Eventide's shields. The ship jolted and jerked—no doubt they'd get a visit from a royal aide very soon.
"Return fire, master?" asked Vaar. Master Yoda's hologram disappeared, which Dooku hoped meant reinForcements. He glanced aside at Vaar. "Good question. These freighters are supposed to have good shielding, but we have a trafficker in who-knows-what state of repair. I don't want to misjudge and blow over thirty prisoners into space dust." Asking aid of the nearby world of Alderaan would do no good, since the planet had no military to send. "We can try to target their engines. That would slow them down. I don't want any mistakes."
Then again, if they went into hyperspace, they were gone.
Vaar called the freighter's general specs up and Dooku aimed very, very carefully at the aft shields that protected the engines. Stretching out in the Force proved difficult, because the terror of some forty prisoners screamed at him. With a silent apology he hammered their shields in that area, again and again.
As if on cue, the Theta queen's royal aide buzzed the door to the cockpit. "Master Jedi, my Queen wishes to know what is happening."
"We've been diverted to a situation," said Dooku, conveniently leaving out the fact that he had diverted himself. "We're safe, and this will be over momentarily."
"Master Dooku," said the aide. "Master Dooku!"
Dooku and Vaar shouted, "Not now!" in unison. At last the shields gave way and Dooku narrowed his eyes as the freighter faltered, spun, halted.
"One more shot, targeting the engines, and they can't run away," he said quietly to Vaar. "We don't have the personnel to board it. Just you, me, and the queen and her retinue. I don't want to involve them in this."
One expert shot took out the ship's engine block, but it also started a fire. The pandemonium on the other ship jangled in the Force.
xxx
A terrible clank and roar speared everyone's ears. The hold shook so hard around Kallen, Zace, and their fellow prisoners that everyone fell. Kallen picked himself up on a wrist that felt sprained. He looked around for Zace and saw that her head was bleeding. "Are you all—"
An incredible Force swung them round and round. Stars streamed in the viewport; old machinery stored in the hull came unmoored and screeched across the floor, sliding into the press of falling people. Shouts and screams resounded as the one light blinked on and off. Kallen cast about for his repaired transceiver. It had slipped away from him, who knows where. He reached out to his wife as she crawled to her knees.
"Does that hurt? Are you okay?"
"It hurts, but I'm okay," she said. "I wonder if Dara and Zaina are all right."
"Goddess knows," said Kallen. "My transceiver! Does anyone see it?"
A squawk and the tinny baritone voice spewed from it again as someone handed it to him.
"—Kallen! Can you tell us what crew you're dealing with there?"
Kallen thumbed the button. "As far as we know, three Humans, a Zabrak, and two Pantorans. If there's any other crew on here, I haven't seen them."
xxx
Vaar closed the comm and exchanged glances with her new master. "If the queen would spare us some of her retinue, this won't be a problem."
Dooku said, "They're mostly traveling with ladies-in-waiting, not soldiers."
He closed his eyes for a moment and considered. With a Padawan of his own, such as when he traveled with Qui-Gon, not a problem. He had had every confidence in the boy. But this Padawan, he had worked with only one week. She had been apprenticed to her master, he had been told, almost two years, but she seemed anxious and uncertain of herself, and she seemed intimidated by him. He had to consider that the prisoners may not be correct in how many traffickers there actually were on board; they also didn't know what armaments they were dealing with inside.
He probed gently at Vaar Deen's sense in the Force, and frowned. He rather felt he'd be boarding the freighter almost on his own.
Then there was the concern that if they established an airlock, not only could the prisoners gain access to Eventide … but, quite possibly, the traffickers could, too. And that would not be acceptable with a planetary queen on board.
Dooku massaged a growing headache between his eyes. "We wait," he said.
At length the hologram of Master Yoda materialized once again. "Sending you Saesee Tiin, we are, currently on Mimban," he said, "Master Quinlan Vos and his Padawan, Aayla Secura, also are arriving from Caamas. Bringing you a Hammerhead Corvette, they are."
Dooku let out a breath. "That should do nicely. Thank you, master." Both Caamas and Mimban were close. They wouldn't be waiting long. Assuming the pirates did not abuse the prisoners, they could hold here for four hours.
Dooku opened the channel to the prisoners again in order to monitor the situation on board, then stood up.
He owed the Thetan Queen an explanation for the diversion and the delay.
"Master!" came the call from Deen. "We're being hailed by the pirate ship!"
Dooku hastened back to the cockpit. Renata, Queen of Theta was a lovely young woman who completely sympathized with the reason for the delay. Obviously, she would rather not have been diverted into a haphazard Jedi rescue mission; but she was not displeased as long as she and her retinue were not put in the way of undue harm.
He arrived in the cockpit to find a large human male in hologram on the comm. He wore a beard, but a hood and makeshift mask covered most of his face. "Jedi! I demand to know why you've attacked us and damaged my ship!"
Dooku drew himself to his full height. "Because you've kidnapped some forty people and you're holding them prisoner," he said. "Will I have the pleasure of knowing whom I'm speaking with?"
The man ignored that last. "No, we're not! We'll have you brought up on charges before the High Council!"
"You're lying and we both know it. I demand to know your prisoners are safe." Of course, he and Deen already knew that; they had been eavesdropping on the confused and terrified prisoners in the cargo hold.
"We have no prisoners, Jedi! We have kidnapped no one. You will back off, or we fire!"
"I think we'll stay right where we are."
For answer, the freighter hammered their forward shields with three quick laser volleys.
Dooku waved a hand at Vaar. "We back away," he said. Far enough not to draw any more fire, but close enough to get a visual when the frigate put out the engine fire, the Jedi settled down to wait.
Hours passed. The prisoner with the commlink assured them they were well, then shut down in order to conserve batteries.
xxx
At five hours, Dooku commed Master Yoda.
"Not present at the Temple, was I," said Yoda. "At the Senate Office Building, I was. Relayed your situation, I did, to the Council. Returned, I did, and discovered that a matter of some discussion, it was."
A slow burn started in Dooku's stomach and crept into his chest. "Discussion? This was far from an appropriate time for it!"
"Transmitted, the orders were. Understand the further delay, I do not. However. Master Dooku, let this alone, you should have. On a royal protection detail, you are, and equipped to handle this situation, you were not."
The slow burn turned into a conflagration. Dooku shot to his feet. "I'm supposed to hear a distress call from forty trafficked people, including children, and just ignore it? They would have been untraceable by the time we could send any Jedi back here!"
"Discuss this further when you return, we will." The curve of his master's ears and the set of his mouth, the lines around his eyes, told Dooku it would not be a pleasant discussion.
Yan Dooku was no longer one to back down. He gave Yoda a curt half bow, absolutely intending that the defiance in his heart should translate to the holo and all the way to Coruscant. "Indeed, we will," he said.
"Ship dropping out of hyperspace, master!" said Vaar.
Dooku turned in relief … only to discover that what was dropping out of hyperspace was no Corvette. Instead, it was a DP20 frigate.
Which maneuvered close to the Nebula-class, preparing to take on passengers.
"It appears you're too late," Dooku threw over his shoulder at his former master. "These pirates obviously belong to a larger organization." He motioned to Vaar to share their display screen to Yoda at the mother house.
The comm came to life. "Master Jedi! Master Jedi!" came Kallen's hoarse and terrified whisper. "Something's happening!" A metallic screech echoed through space.
Vaar's eyes found Dooku's, and he knew she felt what he did. A terrible sense of forboding in the Force. Sinister stirrings in the dark side.
xxx
Many more guards than Kallen even knew were aboard marched through the hull doors that had opened without warning. With them were—
Children. Zace rushed forward, her arms open. "Dara! Zaina!" Their faces had registered on her mother's heart before Kallen had even located them in the gaggle of children and adolescents stumbling through the gloom.
"Mom!" The girls rushed into her arms. Dara started to cry.
Kallen watched as the pirates seized his wife and dragged her by the arms. More marched in and pulled startled prisoners to their feet.
"Everyone up! You're coming with us!"
Rough hands gripped him and Kallen found himself hurried along, his feet forced along faster than his dazed and starved body could summon the sense to go. The scarred metal walls flashed past; he caught a scent of burned wiring and soot.
Everyone packed into a small room, windowless, close, teeming with anxiety and body heat. More and more people got thrown in after them, bodies colliding and bruised.
"Get in there! Get in there!"
The door clanged shut. Kallen could hardly see in the dark. He cast about for his wife, for their daughters, and found himself with his hand on Zaina's head.
"What's happening, Daddy?"
Before he could answer, the impossible sound and feel of a mammoth metal door in motion took the room, and a glimpse of stars.
And an onrushing of terrible cold, a terrible pulling, soundlessness, confusion … void.
xxx
They all watched in horror as some forty people were thrown out of an airlock into the hideous cold vacuum of space.
Dooku stretched out a hand. He heard a rough cry and realized it came from his own throat.
"Master!" shouted Vaar.
Forty bodies, freezing, tumbling in space.
The DP20 took on the fugitive pirates from the disabled Nebula-class and jumped into hyperspace.
xxx
Even ten years ago, Yan Dooku might have viewed this morning's audience with Master Yoda with a sense of apprehension. From the time he had first been apprenticed to Yoda as a boy, disappointing his master was something he had always felt very keenly.
As he strode down the corridor to Yoda's quarters, he reflected that he had grown a much tougher skin in the past few years.
He stopped at his master's door and tapped.
Normally, Yoda simply touched his mind in greeting and conveyed permission to go in. Today, it was, "Enter."
Dooku walked in to find Yoda seated on his meditation pedestal, legs crossed.
"Master." Dooku inclined his head in a small bow.
"Be seated, you will."
A frosty reception, indeed. Dooku crossed to a human-sized chair and sat.
Silence stretched between them. At last Yoda said, "Much anger I sense, in you."
"And I sense very little of anything from you," said Dooku. "Unfair, I think."
Yoda's ears twitched. "Inform you, I should, that determined not to impose a hearing or sanction on you, the Council has."
Dooku narrowed his eyes. "I suppose I am to be pleased at that? Hmm. 'Jedi master not disciplined by the High Council for attempting to rescue forty trafficked slaves before they were thrown out of an airlock and killed!'"
"Yan," said Yoda, with a soothing tone. His ears flattened. "Discussed, it was, that had you not intervened, alive, the prisoners still would be."
Anger flared in Dooku at that. "Which was completely unnecessary! Had the Temple responded in a timely manner, the pirates would have been apprehended and the prisoners saved. I would like to know what went on in the mother house that resulted in that untimely delay."
"Discussing that, we are," said Yoda. "But realize, you should, that interrupting a royal transport for that purpose, foolhardy it was. In danger, the queen was."
"We had that well in hand, and we never would have boarded," said Dooku. He shifted and leaned forward, one hand on his knee. "I hope you believe you trained me better than that."
"Trained you to observe the directives of the Council, I did. Rebellious, you are … you, and Master Qui-Gon, after you."
"And I'm very proud of him," said Dooku quietly. "He believes, as I do, that the common perception of the Jedi as pawns of a corrupt Senate isn't perhaps entirely correct. I know of several in the Senate who care more about the issue of slavery in the Republic than anyone in the Temple, it would seem."
Yoda's ears drooped, and he shook his head once and let out an irritated sigh. "Discussed this, we have. Ten thousand Jedi, there are. Not enough to patrol the entire Republic on this issue."
Dooku leaned further forward, burning with a sudden passion. "But, master, the Jedi have the moral imperative to lead! We are supposed to set the example, not follow it! If we did that, the Senate would have to follow suit. Member worlds—"
Yoda held up his hand. "Discussed this, we have. Nonetheless, common sense, you must follow."
"Common sense? Common sense!" Dooku rose to his feet. "Where is the common sense in allowing arguments among ourselves to delay aid to our own ship in distress by an hour and a half! With royalty aboard? If you ask me, that is what belongs before the Council!"
Yoda's eyes narrowed. "Know what happened, you do not."
Making use of his imposing height, Dooku approached to loom over his old master. "Do you? Did you investigate? Do you care?"
Yoda's ears went straight back. "Master Dooku."
Dooku raised his voice. "The inattention to the slavery issue is a grave moral failure on the part of the Jedi Order. I find it absolutely appalling that I should have to serve as your conscience in a matter like this!"
He turned on his heel and swept from the room.