Ad Astra :: Star Trek Fanfiction Archive ^{Beam me up, Scotty.}

Chapter Text

Chester stared blankly at herself in the mirror. It had been two days since Dooku’s little power display, and she looked like hell. Being thrown around the salle like a sack of potatoes by a superpowered asshole with an uncanny ability to push her buttons was evidently bad for the complexion.  Just a Wednesday in Starfleet didn’t exactly ring true right now. She wasn’t sure if she’d spent a full hour in the last two days without hitting some peak of frothing rage. Frankly, it was exhausting. 

And she was sick and tired of being tossed around like an inanimate object. It made her feel small and helpless, which pissed her off even more, and around now she would have liked to be doing some of the tossing herself. She’d even caught herself wondering if going along with Dooku might be worth it to gain some of that skill, and she’d been too tired to muster the disgust the thought warranted. 

He knew she was thinking it too, the smug asshole. She could see it on his face.

Regardless of whatever either of them wanted, however, it seemed that the Jedi beliefs about training were winning out. She’d yet to move so much as a flowerpot, and while she’d wised up to a lot of the shit he liked to pull while sparring, he was still wiping the floor with her. That, he didn’t seem happy with. 

That , she could tell he was thinking carefully about, and she was pretty sure she wasn’t going to like the direction of his thoughts once he started to act on them. Which was imminent. 

“Enough,” he’d said, with the same genteel scorn of the last few days as she’d pushed herself to her feet again with shaking arms. “Clearly, you’re finished for now━ clearly we’re making no progress like this.”

She’d had no response. She’d just wiped the sweat from her face with a sleeve and clipped the lightsaber back to her belt. It had been feeling steadily worse, not better, the longer she’d spent around it.

“For such a clever woman, you have a remarkable number of ways of holding yourself back,” he said. “I think it is about time we addressed the root of the problem. Meet me in the courtyard in an hour.”

So that wasn’t going to be good.

“Sooner or later,” she said to her exhausted reflection, “he is going to make a mistake.”

Then she splashed water on her face and went out to face whatever Sithly bullshit Dooku had planned this time.

The Sithly bullshit was looking an awful lot like mass murder. 

Dooku hadn’t said anything, just imperiously gestured her to follow. She had, around the corner and through the decorative archway into the courtyard, which was filled with a lot of droids and a kneeling line of Republic soldiers, their armor and helmets stripped off and blasters leveled at their heads. 

Chester stopped dead in the archway. She glanced sharply at Dooku, who was smiling in a faint, thoughtful way she liked not at all. 

“Why are they here?” she asked cautiously. 

“To assist you, of course,” he said. “Think of this as a training exercise, Commander Chester. A demonstration of your commitment. And an opportunity to expunge one of your particular weaknesses.”

Chester looked at the line of kneeling bound men, then at him.

“You do want to return home, do you not?” he asked, all gentle poison. “You do want to help your people, do you not? You must commit yourself fully to my training, Commander; none of your habitual distrust or caution.”

The misery, the despair, vanished in a flash of total cold rage. She didn’t even have to try to feel it or push it to the forefront of her mind. It was easy to feel and easy to get lost in, and she could feel the waiting coldness resonating to it. She pressed her lips together and kept her gaze away from his, utterly certain he’d see what she was thinking if she did anything else. Do you seriously think I’m chickenshit enough to trade these men’s lives for my escape? 

Up until now, she’d had the luxury of saving her own skin. This━this changed the equation completely. These were lives in her hands now, and as many problems as she’d had with the Republic, she was not going to play stupid games with the lives of sentients. She knew at least some of them, too; men who’d called her Commander despite their unfamiliarity, despite her own recalcitrance, despite their officers’ distrust.

She was not going to let them down. 

Dooku’s smile turned a little more vicious. Perhaps feeling the flare of purpose from her, however this whole Force empathy thing worked. Chester wrestled her expression back under control. 

He had to think this was directed at the men. He had to think she wasn’t here to rescue them. Because he was more than capable of killing them all━and while Chester on her own might have risked something stupid, she wasn’t risking the other six along with it. Not right now. 

“Come along, Commander,” he said, and she did. She even walked a little faster to seem eager, a hand hovering near the hilt of the vicious lightsaber, even though her fingers wanted to cringe away like it would shock her. 

She swept the waiting line with her gaze, putting her anger right out there on her face even though every instinct screamed against it. She wound her eager anticipation into it━never mind it was really meant for Dooku, she aimed it at the men. 

They believed it. She could see it in the looks they traded, anger and determination and a certain resigned quality━why expect anything better of her? 

“Your rage is good,” said Dooku. “Powerful. But there is a certain weakness within you.” Chester checked her immediate impulse to move forward as he stepped close to the first of the clones, taking a place just behind the man’s shoulder. The clone━one of Wolffe’s men, one of the ones who’d kept his distance from her━stared straight ahead. There was a knotted scar across his face; she’d seen him in the background a few times on the way out. “We are here to eliminate it.” 

“How so?” she asked, keeping her voice sharp. Her hostage-negotiation training wasn’t applicable━faking him out before making a move was her only hope here. “You seemed pleased enough with my performance in the salle this morning.”

“That’s not what matters, my dear,” he said. “That’s sparring. Force-sensitive children do it all the time. You’re competent enough in the dance━but when it comes to what matters, you have a great reluctance.”

He ignited the lightsaber in his hand, placing it just next to the neck of the clone in front of her. The man drew in a sharp breath, but his gaze on her never wavered━betrayal and disgust. 

“My people value life,” she said, reluctant. As if it were a rote protestation, a last bulwark before the tide of her rage. She fed that rage, letting it come frothing up over and around her.

“And it makes you weak,” he said, as if it were a perfectly reasonable thing to say. “Come here, Commander.”

She did. It seemed to take a very long time; she was still shocked at the abruptness of his turn to brutality, and the scope of that brutality, and the moment of decision was very close━she had to pull this off. Was her rage enough to hide her? She had to keep herself from looking at the other prisoners. 

If he knew she wasn’t sincere, she was dead, and without her there was no reason to keep these men alive. But if she blew this, they were all dead right along with her. 

She came up just a pace in front of him and the man he was holding hostage. She could feel the flatness in her mind━that special not-caring she’d used before, when Commander Faisal had died. There was nothing but purpose, and the rage sliding over the surface. “What do you want me to do?” 

“Kill him,” said Dooku, again like it was a perfectly reasonable request, like he’d asked her to pass the sugar. 

She just looked at him. 

“You’re angry, that’s good. Use your rage. Kill your weakness.”

She could feel the gazes of the other clones on her, the anger of the man before her, determined to die as well as he could, the only thing he’d ever been given. 

“Or I will,” Dooku said, and the tone of his voice made it inescapably clear that whatever he had planned would be far uglier than anything she was likely to do. “You have your permission, Commander.”

“Kill them or else, I see,” she said softly, trying to sound━if not pleased, sharp with wanting. The cold swirled around them now, the heavy dread leaning in close. She cast a glance down the line of prisoners, then at the man in front of her. She squared her shoulders, and unhooked the saber from her belt, fighting the flinch as her fingers made contact with it. Thumbing it on was worse. 

She needed, she realized in the back of her mind, to spend a lot more time playing the villain in holonovels. She’d be much more confident in this if she’d taken at least one run through a program as Xue Yang or Rochefort. 

“I see,” she said again aloud. She met the man’s eyes, held his gaze. “You’re offering me revenge on the people who brought me here. Who trapped me here.” She tilted her head, like a villainess in the old dramas her grandmother liked so much. Please please anything that’s listening let him understand what I’m getting at! “I have to admit, it’s very good to see my former captors here on their knees , unable to save themselves. ” She flicked her gaze at Dooku, then back at the clone and moved in closer; she could feel Dooku’s anticipation crawling over her skin. She raised the saber, sliding down over his toward the man’s throat. “Your Jedi claimed you’d find a way to return me. It was a trick, and it worked on me, but it didn’t fool Dooku. ”

CT-3869, better known to his fellow clones and Jedi General as Lingo, had resigned himself to death a few days ago. Capture by the CIS seldom ended in anything else. He’d spent most of the intervening time sitting in a series of drafty dark cells with his eyes closed, remembering better times, and then increasingly wondering what was taking death so long to show up.

Being used as an object lesson in being an evil bastard was not what he had expected━though not entirely surprising, given Dooku’s everything . 

The worst part was that the lesson was apparently for Commander Chester. He hadn’t had much to do with her on the way out to Felucia, but she hadn’t struck him as the kind of natborn particularly prone to evil bastardry. Particularly Dooku’s brand of evil bastardry. That, or she’d hidden it well. He looked her in the eyes, and she looked back, hard and cold. That wasn’t the way she’d looked three days ago. Maybe she had just hidden her true self.

Well. If he had to go down, he’d have preferred to go out fighting. Word was, on the other hand, being lightsabered to death was usually pretty quick. If he couldn’t have adrenaline, he’d take the quick death. That was fine.

He looked up at her, looked her in the eyes. She looked angry. She’d been angry almost every time he’d seen her, behind the outward overtures of kindness she made to his brothers. It almost matched the anger that simmered deep in his own chest, pushed down tight where it couldn’t escape in front of anyone who could have him decommissioned for it.

The things she said to Dooku had almost the same cadence to them. A strange, artificial sound, an odd phrasing.

Lingo had been trained for intelligence, once. He hadn’t quite passed the right exams, and the trainers had shunted him sideways into the scouting corps instead. He had the instincts, apparently, but not quite enough brains. 

But he had enough to recognize a coded message when he heard one.

He threw himself into Dooku’s knees with a glee he hadn’t felt since the last time he and his batchmates had ganged up against a bullying older brother. The Count went down hard . And wherever Chester was from, they sure had no compunction about kicking a man when he was down.

The sound Dooku made upon being booted in the tackle was going to keep Lingo warm on cold nights for the rest of his life.

Chester moved the second the clone shifted his weight. With her bubbling rage and lightsaber at the man’s throat, Dooku probably thought she was going to kill the trooper as he made a desperate escape attempt; he most certainly didn’t expect the man to slam into his knees as Chester lashed out with a vicious backhand to his aristocratic nose. The clone kept rolling, throwing himself out of the way of the crossed lightsabers. And Dooku went down; he’d been watching the swords and her anger, not her other hand. Seemed like evil space wizards didn’t expect people to just deck them.

She followed him down, helping his head hit the ground a little harder with a shove and planting her knee and her full weight where most humanoids kept sensitive reproductive equipment. From the noise he made, he was no exception. Half-stunned and groaning, there was only so much even supernatural powers could do; if she really were trying to defeat him, now would be a good time to track down where he was drawing that energy from and blow it up. 

As she was not in fact Kirk, was fairly sure his powers didn’t come from something prone to exploding, and had a whole bunch of people to fish out of the drink now , she settled for slamming his head against the ground a second time before scrabbling back to her feet. He was still groaning a little, so she kicked him in the groin again to give him something to think about that wasn’t escaping prisoners. It seemed evil space wizards didn’t expect people to just nutshot them, either. 

“Gimme,” she said to the nearest droid; it was still too confused to react, so she swiped the blaster out of its hands, thumbed it to what she hoped was stun, and blasted him for good measure. The droids had started to respond, looking at one another for orders; with the blaster in her hands, a bunch of them surged forward with their programming evidently at war over whether she was an honored guest or a threat. 

“Training exercise,” she said to them, putting as much authority as she could into her voice as she dropped the blaster back in the hands of the one that she’d grabbed it from. They’d spent a lot of time watching her fight Dooku. It should be believable. If it wasn’t they were dead. 

She bent to pick up the lightsaber, as if she weren’t worried at all about the droids, passionately wishing she could just leave it there instead. 

They looked uncertain. Then one of them warbled, “Friends train together?”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s something you do with friends.” It seemed to mollify them; they straightened back to attention. The one whose gun she’d returned took a moment to realize it was now holding the blaster backwards, and quickly flipped it around. 

She looked down at Dooku. He was still breathing. She wondered if the Force gave you unnaturally fast stun recovery times, but opted against blasting him a second time; getting the men out was more important.         

“You haven’t listened to a word I’ve said,” she told his unconscious form, her voice pitched so the droids couldn’t overhear. “I am a Starfleet officer. We don’t do ‘or else’. We just bring our people home.”

It felt good to get the last word, or at least one honest jibe, but there were still droids to fool. She turned her attention to the man who’d helped her save everyone’s asses, and dragged him to his feet, none too gently. “I don’t know what you thought you were doing,” she snarled, loud for the droids, “but you’re going to regret it.” 

As he lurched up, his head close to hers, she murmured, “Thanks. This is gonna look real bad for a second, bear with me.”

“Got it,” he said, lips barely moving, and stumbled against her with an exaggerated grimace. 

She activated her lightsaber again and said to the droids, “You heard Count Dooku. I’m supposed to execute these men. But this is too good for them. I’m spacing them. Take me to Count Dooku’s ship.”

There was a tense moment. If they called her on it, it would be ugly. 

“Well, that’s weird,” said one of the smaller combat droids, “but whatever floats your boat, Commander. Roger roger.”

Chester jostled the man, pushing him in front of her. He stumbled again━this time, she was pretty sure it was an act. She hadn’t pushed him that hard.

It was a long tense walk out to the landing pad and herding them into the ship. She got the door sealed up, and looked at the men. “One of you had better be able to fly this thing, because I sure as hell can’t.”

“I can,” volunteered her hostage. “It might not be the smoothest ride, but it’ll get us back across the frontline.”

She cut him free. “Thank you━what’s your name?”

“Lingo, Commander.” He shook his wrists out, grinning.

“Thank you, Mr. Lingo. Let’s get this bucket off the ground, please.” 

He gave her a lopsided smile, then turned toward the cockpit access. “You don’t have to tell me twice.”

The other clones stared at her. Some of them seemed evaluating, others wary. There were two━younger, perhaps, particularly round-faced━smiling with relief and open admiration. “That was the best thing I’ve seen in my life ,” enthused one of them. “Little gods, I wish I had my helmet cam.”

“Standard Starfleet procedure,” she deadpanned, and then grinned. “I’m just glad Mr. Lingo here got what I was getting at.”

A slightly older man sighed, creases appearing around his dark eyes. “Not what any of us were expecting, but kark it all, I’ll take it.”

She looked at them, at their faces, and for the first time realized that this felt right . This was how things should work. “As I told our friend the Count━being Starfleet means we don’t leave our people behind. And as far as I’m concerned, gentlemen, that includes you. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

Republic Intelligence had tried and failed to penetrate the Serenno system multiple times over the course of the war. The closest agent they had was somewhere in the region of Celanon, further Coreward down the Spur. Serenno, Dooku’s home base, was a black mark on the map━nothing got in or out.

Except━four days after Chester was taken, there was a sudden burst of activity. CIS forces, running a search pattern en masse. The Celanon front went on high alert. Felucia, several sectors over, followed suit.

Plo hoped, despite himself. 

There were no indications from the Force, no further intel over the next day. Absent any continued meetings or engagements, he lingered in the base comms hub, listening to the usual chatter go in and out.

Late at night, a seldom-used relay crackled to life.

“Felucia GAR, this is━” a pause, a buzz through the line, “this is CT-7787, Chert, ARC Trooper assigned to 104th Battalion. Departed Serenno 34 hours previous; currently bearing for Felucia via Arda-7 Regional Lane, ETA 15 hours. Carrying seven personnel, 104th plus one non-GAR. Please advise route status.”

The Captain on duty lunged for the unmanned desk. “CT-7787 Chert, Felucia Comms. Name your craft.”

The line dissolved into static. The Captain waited at the station, handsigning orders. Plo joined him; a junior comms officer pressed a datapad into his hands.

CT-7787, Chert, it read, was declared MIA five days ago━shortly before the battle at which Chester had surrendered. Plo already knew this━he had stood in silent witness as Chert’s squadmates said remembrance for him, and for every other brother they’d lost that day.

The commline resolved into intelligibility once more. “ Felucia Comms, we are aboard a Punworcca-116 solar sloop. We have no access to onboard identification codes.”

Plo breathed sharply in. Solar sailers were not common vehicles.

The Captain glanced up at him, frowning. “CT-7787 Chert, please advise identification numbers and names of all passengers.”

There was a barely-audible chuckle. The trooper on the other end of the line recited the ID numbers and chosen names of six clones recently marked MIA. All six matched GAR records perfectly, with one exception━a young man on his first deployment, who had not yet chosen a name before his capture. The voice on the comm named him Joyride, and continued, “And Commander Diane Chester, of the United Federation of Planets’ Starfleet. Sir.”

There were a few startled looks around the room. Plo stood back as the Captain gave the rogue solar sailer permission to enter Felucia regional space, surprise giving way to a deep, satisfying happiness. Perhaps his trust in the Commander had not been misplaced after all.

They scrambled a complement of fighters as an escort, just in case the voice on the comms was a very accurate pretension. Plo talked himself onto the flight, because Jedi truth-reading abilities had been useful in these situations before, but otherwise deferred to the leadership of the wing captain. They jumped into hyperspace from the edges of the Felucia system, and dropped out six hours later at the Stenos junction.

The distinctive silhouette of Dooku’s solar sailer was immediately apparent on their sensors. Plo shadowed the escorts in, stretching his senses out through the Force. There was only the unavoidable taint of Darkness left behind by the Sith. He looked past the veil, into the elegant little pleasurecraft.

Seven lives, all packed together in very close quarters. He recognised them all━Chert, and the other recently-missing Pack, and then the molded-steel determination of Commander Diane Chester.

He passed the information onto the escorts. They hailed the stolen ship, and then all of them turned back and headed for home, together.

Plo landed ahead of the escorts, which gave him time to find Commander Wolffe in the masses of off-duty soldiers gathering around the landing field. Homecomings, rare as they were, were always well-attended events. Wolffe had the strangest expression on his face━somewhere between suspicion and hope.

“You’re absolutely certain it’s them?” he asked as Plo stood at his side as usual. “Nothing, I don’t know, extra, or disguised?”

“I sensed them in the Force,” Plo said, as he’d told the base commanders six hours before. “It is our lost men; nothing can mimic a Force signature that well, and I sensed nothing more than relief in their minds.”

Wolffe nodded, reluctant as he sometimes was to accept good news uncritically. “I’ll take your word for it, General. I have to admit, I’m surprised Chester’s come back.”

Plo sighed through his mask, wry. “As I said, the unbelievable option is occasionally the true one. I’ve heard she played a pivotal role in their escape━though I’m not certain how much of the chatter I believe.” Chert had given the escorts a condensed report of their escape, from languishing in dark cells to a terrifying encounter with the Sith Lord and a feigned execution. He had not lied once, no matter how unbelievable it seemed for a squad of prisoners and a completely untrained Force-sensitive to take down a Sith together. There had been an anticipating stillness in the Force, as if he had kept some information to himself, but Plo had not had the impression that he did so with malice, or out of coercion. “Or, rather, I wonder if your younger brothers have embellished a little in the telling.”

Wolffe snorted. “Wouldn’t be surprised.”

Whichever trooper was at the helm of the solar sailer was clearly not a pilot. The craft hovered uncertainly above the makeshift landing pad, then dropped with a heavy clunk onto its extended legs. A whisper of a giggle went around the watching clones.

The entrance folded open like the petals of some complex tropical flower. A ramp lowered, and a cluster of figures appeared, descending in a hurry. 

“Well,” said Commander Chester, looking around and heading straight for Plo and Wolffe. She was dressed all in black, a cape draped over her shoulder, and she held what was very clearly a lightsaber of Dooku’s design before her like a dead rat. The saber radiated generalised malice━perhaps the source of the Dark shroud he’d felt aboard the ship. “I will admit, I have had better ideas. I may owe you an apology, Master Plo Koon.”

“You have helped bring a number of our men back to us when we thought they were lost. That is worth far more than any apology.” Plo looked her in her dark eyes, recognising the sincerity in them. “Regardless, Commander, thank you.”

She smiled back, exhausted and unsure, and then her attention cut away toward the saber in her hands, her smile turning into an expression of acute distaste. “Can… someone else deal with this? It may sound irrational, but I don’t think it likes me.”

Plo reached gingerly for it, pulling his sense of the Force back, but the strength of that malice was shocking even so. He inhaled sharply as he took hold of it, a mental flinch at the discordant pain emanating from the crystal within the elegant curved-hilt saber. “I don’t believe it likes much of anything right now,” he observed. 

Behind her, several clones stepped quickly down the ramp. Plo recognised the wolfstooth tattoos on Garter and Chert, Fin’s missing eyebrows. Behind them, a man with a knotted badly-healed scar stretching across his forehead, and two nearly-identical young shinies, distinguished only by the length of their hair━Lingo, Lens, and Joyride, Plo thought, matching the names on the list to the three he did not know so well. All six smiled broadly, their minds radiating sheer relief. They were dressed oddly, not in their black undersuits or prisoners’ garb but in fresh clothing: trousers, boots, and rather old-fashioned button-up shirts. A disguise, perhaps?

Chester turned toward them, smiling. “These gentlemen helped me escape. And got us into Republic space. I probably would have crashed the ship━I’ve never seen anything designed like it.”

“No wonder,” said someone, half-laughing, because it really was Dooku’s personal solar sailer there, a ship from a production line so rare and expensive even experienced spacers might never set eyes on one.

“Commander Chester is selling herself short, sir,” Lieutenant Garter said to Plo, saluting. “She was the one to orchestrate our escape.”

“She kicked Count Dooku in the balls,” hissed one of the shinies. Garter’s eyes flickered briefly, but the rest of his expression didn’t change. “Twice!” Then there was a sharp little yelp as someone stepped on the shiny’s foot. 

Plo glanced aside. Wolffe was having trouble biting back his grin; there was a glimpse of teeth now and again, a glitter in his organic eye.

“Gentlemen, I am very glad to see you all alive and in such spirits,” Plo said. “Commander━an excellent escape. The good Count was always somewhat fond of his dramatics.” He carefully did not comment on her attire, which was clearly the result of said dramatics. Thus far Chester had not struck him as the type to choose head to toe black and off-the-shoulder capes as functional outfits.

Wolffe grinned outright, losing his battle with grace. “Welcome back, all of you.”