Chapter Text
While their initial conversation had seemed pleasant enough–and despite the nervous energy in the Commander’s presence, he had hoped that she would recognize the gravity of her position and settle in to let the Jedi help her–Plo found out just what he’d signed himself up for later that night.
Commander Chester, collared by two of the temple guards, stared straight past him as, behind her, Mace Windu pinched the bridge of his nose. They’d caught her rappelling down the outside of the Temple, headed for the hangar.
She was completely unapologetic, and also apparently unaware of the danger she’d placed herself in. Beyond the immediate threat of Republic Intelligence, the winds at altitude on Coruscant could be sudden and treacherous. The Temple had very few open balconies for a reason.
It was, however, also quite possible she simply didn’t care.
“These restrictions are for your safety, Commander.” Mace’s voice was cool and steady, but the movement in his dark-stormcloud presence gave away his frustration.
“So you have indicated,” the Commander said. Her own voice was neutral in a way that nevertheless communicated the depth of her disapproval, her presence grey and steely.
Mace persisted. “We do not want you arrested by the military authorities and handed straight to the likes of Admiral Tarkin.”
“Neither do I. However, I cannot help but notice I am still detained by you .”
“It is for your own welfare; we cannot release you until Republic Intelligence confirms you are not the subject of their investigation.” Or until they lost their fondness for 'enhanced interrogation', but petabytes of research on the complete lack of efficacy of such methods had yet to convince them. The wellbeing of a lost extragalactic officer was unlikely to feature in their decisions.
“And so I am still detained.” Chester’s expression went harder still. “I appreciate the better treatment.” And then she clammed up and refused to talk further.
The second time, she tried walking straight out the front door.
Plo had trailed her at a distance, having learned from her first attempt. She had wandered idly around the public section of the Temple for more than an hour, inspecting plants and gazing at artworks along the way… and then she had turned and strode out into the evening sunlight, bold as anything. He’d almost been impressed. Almost.
“Please do not get yourself killed!” said Mace that time, openly aggrieved. “I don’t know what else you’re hoping to accomplish here.”
“The first duty of a captured officer is escape,” she said. “I apologize. But I have my duty to return to, and I am needed.”
Mace blinked, slowly, the way he often did when faced with young knights hellbent on stupid ideas. “May I suggest that you will achieve these goals much easier without the threat of capture and interrogation by the Intelligence Bureau?” Not that they have exhibited much intelligence recently, went unsaid, but if Plo knew Mace it was being thought very loudly.
Their guest gave him an even look. No doubt also thinking very loudly, and none of it complimentary.
“I do appreciate your efforts,” she said. “However, as you have pointed out, the issue of my freedom is still pending; your intelligence entities may yet decide your evidence is insufficient, and take me anyway. If your political standing were such that you could contend with such an order, I suspect you would have taken action already. Perhaps my quiet return–in a way that does not implicate the Jedi Order–may be in the best interests of all concerned.”
“She does have a point,” Ki-Adi-Mundi admitted in the Council later that evening. “Intelligence is not quite suggesting that our healers may have fudged the genetic scan to protect one of our own, but it is an easy conclusion to draw from their phrasing. It doesn’t help that certain media outlets are already reporting on the capture of a ‘Separatist agent’.”
“Without implicating the Order, though? That’s the hard part.” Obi-Wan’s shoulders slumped, and a sigh crackled through the long-distance comm. “We can’t just allow her to escape–as unfamiliar as she is with the Republic, she is vanishingly unlikely to succeed in getting off-planet, let alone back to the Unknown Regions. Intelligence will quite reasonably suspect that we allowed her to leave, which then gives them ammunition to further erode our independence from the Senate.”
“It may be further than the Unknown Regions,” Plo put in, reluctant. “The trail goes cold in the Abbaji Western Field, specifically in the sector local navigators call the ‘wormfield’. The registered stable wormhole in that sector leads to extragalactic space–and there are other wormholes nearby, unexplored, unregistered… not necessarily stable. If Commander Chester were to choose wrong–or be led wrong, perhaps–she might end up in a far worse position than she is now.”
For a moment, nobody spoke.
“I think you should tell her that, then,” said Mace, with the deliberate steadiness of a man holding back a deep sigh. “That is, if you think she will believe it.”
Plo thought about it. “Perhaps,” he began, “I ought to ask Madame Nu if I can borrow one of her planetariums.”
The third time, it was Yoda.
Having tried the obvious approaches, and dismissed the impossibility of brazening her way out through a massive complex of telepaths and empaths, Chester decided to try the service tunnels. The droids were accepting enough; the universal translator handled most simple concepts in their programming languages, and most of the janitorial ones–simple automata, built to handle one job and one job only–seemed to sort her into the category of ‘fellow droid’ rather than living being. Suited her just fine.
So, while her diligent babysitter was reluctantly occupied with his Council duties, she snooped around for this galaxy’s equivalent of a Jefferies tube, found a likely candidate, and wriggled in. No small feat, for a woman of her height.
She had thought she was making good progress, operating off the schematic of the Temple she’d downloaded to a datapad, when she scrambled down a ladder, turned a corner, and came face-to-face with the diminutive Master Yoda. He was sitting cross-legged in the middle of a junction point, his eyes closed. He was also hovering a foot or so off the ground.
“Ah, Commander Chester,” he said. “Serene, the service corridors are, yes?”
Above them, something large clattered past with a screech of binary cursing.
Chester let out a long resigned breath, and dropped into a similar cross-legged seat, ass firmly on the ground. “All right. You got me.”
“A virtue, patience is,” said Yoda. The tip of a gremlin-like ear flicked.
“My people don’t have time for me to be patient!” It came out before she meant it to, and she looked away, vexed with herself for letting it slip. Yoda opened an eye, thoughtful.
“Afraid, you are?”
“Yes, very ,” she said bluntly. “I didn’t leave at a good time.”
“Mm. Suspect, I do, that never a good time it would be.”
“Yeah, well, there’s bad times and worse times. And this isn’t a good time for your people, either. I’m not too thrilled with the way that Tarkin would like to use me against you .”
“Worry about Tarkin’s designs on our Order, allow us.” He cocked his head quizzically. “Your crew, you fear for. Need you, you say they do.”
“Yes.” She sat back, closing her eyes. The thought hurt–she could still see Captain Steenburg in her ready room, the fear shuttered away behind her face. “Yes, they do.”
“Why is that?”
“Because–” She caught herself before it slipped out in its entirety, and she wondered if that had something to do with his own abilities. How to convey her fears without revealing too much?
Go basic, she told herself, just some of the facts. It didn’t need to be all of them. “I’ve been the first officer for only three weeks,” she said. “Commander Faisal, my predecessor–and my mentor–was killed less than a month ago. And everyone is shaken. Losing two first officers in less than a month…”
Yoda’s ears drooped, and he reached out to pat her hand with a small dry claw. “A bitter blow, that is. But a strong community, your crew must be, or speak of them so, long for them so, you would not. Alone, however, you are.”
“Are you saying I’m trying to get back for my own sake more than theirs?”
“Both, likely it is. But talk about yourself, you do not.”
She tilted her head at him with a frown. “I don’t understand.”
The look he gave her was one she’d worn herself often enough, that of a teacher too experienced to tell a student they were being extraordinarily dense, but certainly thinking it veiled under several dozen layers of concern and compassion. “Alive you must remain, in order to return to your ship. Alive, in order to return you, we must keep you. Making this job very difficult, you are.”
Chester sighed and rubbed a hand over her face. “All right. Fine. Point taken. I’ll be more careful. It’s only–the hell else am I supposed to do?”
Yoda visibly perked up. “A conversation with Master Plo, that should be. Escaped his watch three times you have, so far. A break you should give him, hmm?”
Plo found himself terribly, deeply unsurprised when he went to check in on Chester after the meeting and found she wasn’t there.
It was getting to be genuinely impressive, the way she managed to evade notice. If only she had been born in the Republic, he thought wistfully, a little self-consciously irritated–what a Shadow she could have made.
Luckily, Yoda had been the one to corral her this time. He seemed to find the attempt more amusing than anything, though there was a strong thread of sympathy running through his presence as he handed the good Commander over to Plo. Was it just him, or did she seem a little more downcast this time?
He led her back to her quarters, where she pled fatigue and retired to the little bedroom. Plo sat down on the couch, listening as the discontent in the Force ebbed and her strong presence greyed out in sleep. He sent Madame Nu a missive, asking for a timeslot in the Archives’ main stellarium, and then went trawling through the Galactic Navigation collection for any information on the Abbaji wormfield.
There wasn’t much. Pilots had historically steered well clear of the region; such a dense clustering of anomalies tended to play havoc on the instruments. Mapping was sparse, limited to remote surveys and a few daring exploratory missions. The only confirmed stable wormhole had been investigated using remote drones, and later, unmanned ships with integrated astromechs. The region of extragalactic space it led to had yet to be identified.
He meditated, the rest of the night. (Meditation was no substitute for proper sleep, but he would sooner put up with the fatigue than face Mace’s disappointment yet again.)
Chester emerged in the early morning, dressed neatly in the robes she’d been given. She raised an eyebrow at his presence on her couch, but refrained from commenting. No doubt she knew why.
“Good morning,” he said. “I would like to show you something, today.”
She gave him a very knowing look with no little humor in it. “Lead on, then. It’ll be interesting to see parts of the Temple not immediately related to possible escape routes.”
Plo shook his head in resignation. “Of course.”
He took Chester down to the main refectory first, and set her loose on the kitchen. The Jedi on serving duty gave her a searching look, though not hostile–the Temple gossip network had gotten hold of Krell’s failure the moment he filed his mission report. Chester ignored the scrutiny in favor of the food, trying everything labeled as compatible with human physiology and sinking deeply into conversation with anyone who cared to offer commentary—and this was nearly everyone, curiosity being just as much a Jedi indulgence as any other group of sentient beings. The meal was significantly extended by the demonstration of correct dumpling-pleating techniques from three different species, using the refectory napkins.
Once the food had been eaten, Plo waited for the conversation to die down naturally before guiding Chester onward, to the Archives.
He introduced her to the Archivist on duty at the front desk, a friendly Mon Calamari woman who produced a general-audiences access card for Chester and waved them on with a smile.
The main stellarium was occupied by a class of senior Initiates. The lesson had run overtime, said the apologetic tutoring assistant, but they were welcome to wait at the back of the ring-shaped room; it would only be five minutes or so before the class was done.
The students, apparently, were being introduced to the regional hyperlane network. This involved a lot of zooming out to re-orient them within the greater galactic network, then zooming in sector by sector to look at how each regional feeder route intersected with the transgalactic lanes, and with the spray of third-level lanes that facilitated local inter-system travel. Chester watched, plainly fascinated, but as the lesson went on her presence in the Force began to cloud over, darkening with concern. Once the class concluded, she walked forward into the still-glowing hologram and stood there, staring up, for several minutes.
“I…” she said, turned in place. Then, more quietly, “I don’t recognize–any of this.”
She gestured, mimicking the instructor’s manipulation of the model with remarkable accuracy, so she could look at the full galaxy at once. “This might be…”
And then she fell silent, just looking at it with flat despair. “Will this show me the neighboring galaxies?” she asked, quietly.
Plo made the requisite adjustments. For a few moments, she just stood there among the slowly rotating galaxies, looking profoundly lost. “There,” she said abruptly, reaching for one–relatively small, relatively young, but in universal terms not too far away. She zoomed in; it was barely charted, full of blurs of stellar dust. “There, this is home–”
And she looked over her shoulder at the Galaxy, and back at the one between her hands, and her shoulders slumped. “The only way I could have gotten here,” she said softly, “is through some kind of wormhole. And we’d better sincerely hope it’s stable. Because otherwise–this is millions of years of travel, not just lifetimes.”
She looked at Plo, then, and he saw the burgeoning fear on her face–she was afraid she’d be trapped here, far from home, unable to get back. Grief and desperation brightened the glow of her presence, red-hot weaknesses. If she could not find the right wormhole, she’d be an unwilling exile for the rest of her life.
“There are thirty-six long-lasting navigational anomalies in the Abbaji wormfield,” Plo said, as gently as he could. “One is a confirmed stable wormhole. It is well within the realm of possibility that your captors have made use of another.”
He’d meant it to be comforting, but Chester’s despair grew deeper, if anything.
“I have people who need me,” she said, her voice very small. “My crew. My family . I have to get back.” But her voice had dwindled so much at the end it was almost a question, and she stared down at her home between her cupped hands, hardly more than a swirling blur of stars, and her shoulders shook as she squeezed her eyes shut. One long breath. Another, as she fought herself back under control, and finally managed to look up at him again. There was nothing showing but determination now; it was a mask for everything underneath, and whatever mental discipline she was using to control her reactions, it had the same effect as shielding herself, so he only caught the faintest edge of her dismay.
“We have to find those bounty hunters,” she said.
“In that, we are agreed,” Plo said. “Could you describe them for us? It’s possible we may have had dealings with them before.”
“I only saw one of them,” she said. “A tall humanoid woman, very pale skin, shaved head except for a topknot here.” She indicated the crown of her head. “Seemed to prefer a long rifle. You know, alternatively you could ask Krell who he paid.” Her tone went sharp and sardonic. No doubt there were a great many things she’d have liked to ask Krell, and probably none-too-politely.
Plo sighed. Of course it was Aurra Sing.
“Fortunately, that won’t be necessary.” He pulled his personal datapad out of the sleeve of his robe, pulling up the Council’s database of contacts among the Bounty Hunters’ Guild. “That is very interesting, because as it happens I believe I know this particular individual–she was recently partially responsible for the deaths of several thousand Republic soldiers and naval officers.”
Aurra Sing’s pallid face stared maliciously out of a five-year-old mugshot. She hadn’t changed much. Plo flipped the datapad around to give Chester a good look at the photo. “Is this the person you mean?”
“Wait,” said Chester. “Several thousand? How many ships did she get?” She leaned in to look at the picture and nodded. “Yes. That’s her.”
“Just the one, but it was a troop carrier at the time. A little over three thousand dead, from a complement of nine thousand.” Plo typed out a quick message to the Council’s shared inbox: guest identified Aurra Sing as bounty hunter contracted to capture her. This was going to piss Mace off personally, and for good reason, but beyond the pointless deaths of so many good men, the fact that Krell had stooped to dealing with someone who had already played a hand against the Republic was deeply suspicious. “Which means that I doubt Master Krell would have willingly shared her identity even if I had asked. It certainly wasn’t in his report. Interesting, and very concerning.”
Chester raised a very sardonic eyebrow at him, but chose not to comment.
The next morning, Plo collected Chester from her quarters and brought her back to the stellarium.
“This is the Mygeeto front,” he said, zooming the projection in on the region of Separatist space between Entralla and Ketaris, “so named because Mygeeto is the primary focus of combat in that region.” He loaded a slightly-out-of-date projection of the Republic and CIS lines in the area, color-coded red and blue for Chester’s convenience. “Master Krell’s report notes that he followed Knight Tulin’s trail to Abbaji, which is a minor spaceport on the very edges of the Unknown Regions.” He zoomed in on that system, floating off on its own just past the frontier. “Coruscant to Entralla takes about three days in hyperspace with the very fastest ships. Entralla to Abbaji is another nineteen hours in eight jumps. Master Che estimates that your injuries were about a week old by the time we brought you to her, which leaves just over three days at most to account for.”
He focused the projection on Abbaji, loading a specialised navigation program that required senior pilot access–a web of glowing green lines materialised within the projection, stretching between marked systems. There were tens of thousands of hyperlanes beyond the primary routes; short jumps, traversed near-exclusively between neighbouring systems. “If we limit ourselves to courses which can be traversed within seventy-five hours or so, this gives us a basis from which to start looking for your way home. Broad, yes, but workable.”
He’d spent much of the previous night running projections. These he applied now, highlighting those routes which could be run in the three-day timeframe and marking the locations of each anomaly within the wormfield. Thirty of those routes came up highlighted in bright orange; these either passed or terminated near an anomaly.
“Given that the bounty hunters felt comfortable passing through this unknown wormhole personally, I suspect that its location will be known at least informally to spacers operating in the area. We may be able to ask around.”
He turned to the young Commander. “I cannot put a timeline on our ability to return you, but we will find a way, with or without relying on the paltry honor of a bounty hunter. I give you my word as a Councillor of the Jedi Order.”
Her eyes were fixed, hungrily, on the map. “Thank you,” she said. “That means a great deal.”
“We could rightly do nothing less,” said Plo–and he meant every word.