Chapter Text
Somehow, her escape from Dooku had persuaded everyone that she absolutely could be trusted on her own. This was a horrible misconception, but Chester wasn’t about to disabuse them of it. Especially with Krell around.
Everyone seemed very sure that her encounter with Dooku had persuaded her of the virtue of Jedi and the villainy of the Separatists. They weren’t entirely wrong, but it had convinced her of one other thing—the absolute necessity of nipping whatever was going on with Krell in the bud. Someone with that much power, those abilities, who was an abusive asshole? It was going to get worse before it got better. If it got better.
So the next evening, she went looking for him.
Step One: find an excuse to pick a fight. Step Two: try not to get killed.
Fortunately, Krell’s entire personality made Step One very easy. She just had to find him, because whatever he was doing at a given moment was more likely than not to be a good excuse. The man could even stand offensively.
He was doing a good deal more than standing just now. He was looming over some unfortunate shiny. She caught the end of what he was saying to the poor man: “...worthless clone. You think? You’re not here to think, you’re here to obey orders, my orders,” he stepped forward, and the shiny stepped back, “and when I ask for your designation, that is what you will give me, not some made-up name.”
Yes, that would work. Chester stepped into view, hands clasped behind her back. It made it very clear she was unarmed, that she wasn’t about to attack, and that she didn’t feel at all threatened by him. She cleared her throat. Krell looked up. The shiny scuttled out of range.
“Mr. Krell,” she said, lifting her chin to look up at him and schooling her expression to that she’d worn the time she’d found one of the ensigns about to dump waste into the warp core, her tone both casual and profoundly unimpressed, “If I ever hear you speak to a sentient being again the way you just spoke to that private, you will no longer have privates of your own. Am I clear?”
There was a sudden hush; everyone on the edge of hearing had picked up something was going on, and a few started to drift closer.
Krell glanced around; all clones, no Jedi. She could see it in his eyes when he decided he’d be able to get away with teaching her a lesson. She stood stock still, hands still firmly clasped behind her back, stance relaxed, cool disdain on her face; she knew how this looked, with him stalking toward her and her, small, unarmed, and unconcerned watching him. She wanted it utterly clear who escalated to violence first.
“You dare,” he said, now looming over her.
“Is that so remarkable?” she asked. “When did calling you on bad behavior become something people had to dare to do?”
He laughed at her. “Oh I see. You think you’re a hero now because you saved a couple clones.”
“Not a hero,” she said. “Just doing my job. Just as I am now.”
“I’d mind my manners if I were you, Tulin. Someone might just tell Republic Intelligence where you are. Let’s see how that arrogance lasts in an interrogation room, where you belong.” He began to circle her.
She watched him out of the corner of her eye, not flinching. “I’m sure they’d find it a disappointing experience.”
“Don’t think just because you managed to land one on Dooku that you’re invincible,” he said. “You’re worth as much as these clones.”
“Thank you,” she said. “They’re better soldiers than you are. They’re certainly better people.”
He growled and leaned in close. “Is that so.”
“I know the road you’re going down,” she said, voice low and vicious, catching and holding his gaze. “I just got a really good look at where it ends, I just had dinner with its natural conclusion, and while Dooku thinks he’s very powerful, I’m sure, you’re trading an awful lot of pain for not an awful lot of invincibility. And you’re no Dooku; you’re a small-time bully, trying on cruelty like a new suit, dabbling and sampling a new taste of power, feeling what it’s like if you just–let yourself hurt people, as a treat, playing with the idea of taking that next step, and the step after it, and sure you like it but that doesn’t mean you’re any damn good at it. Something like Dooku, now… Dooku has purpose, he’s not in it for his own gratification. The path of the Sith isn’t going to get you what you think you want, Pong Krell; you’re not going to become a Sith Lord, you’re always going to stay a small-time misery, because you don’t have the discipline for the grand evils. You can stop right now, or you can keep spiraling, making yourself an annoyance to everyone around you until someone has had enough and puts you down.”
The moment she said Sith she saw the panic cross his face, realized that he had, indeed been aiming for that goal even though she’d only meant it to goad him or scare him; she’d stumbled on something bigger than she’d expected while needling him. He did mean to end up like Dooku, she wasn’t just going to piss him off by comparing him to an enemy he hated; she’d pissed him off and scared him because she’d just clocked him as the traitor he’d been insisting she was, and he wasn’t going to let her live now she’d realized.
He stared at her with his face twisting from fear to anger.
“Oh,” she said, still quiet. “Fuck.”
“Not as smart as you think you are, are you,” he hissed, and reached for his lightsabers. Plural. All four of them.
Chester embraced the grandest of Starfleet traditions and ran like hell.
Fives came around the corner, feet skidding in the dust, and all but hurled himself into the middle of the strategy meeting. “Sir, it’s General Krell,” he announced to the officers assembled. “He’s trying to kill Commander Chester. She said something to him and he just—”
Somewhere behind the assembled tanks, metal groaned and collapsed to the tune of a distant roar of rage. There was a presence in the distance–not Dark, not yet, not like Dooku—but close enough it made the human Jedi pale.
Fives found himself yanked into the conference tent by an invisible force. All three Generals vanished through the open tent flap.
Chester hurdled a supply crate with a speed that would have made her instructors at the Academy proud, and did not look behind her. Aside from the vital importance of not slowing down even a little, she didn’t need to because Krell was making a hell of a lot of noise. She kept a part of her mind on that, the rest of it on the vehicle in front of her; she threw herself down and slid under it, with a hot scraping pain opening up along her shoulder as she went. Minor. Just the skin. Nothing to what the enraged wannabe Sith behind her would do.
The downside of diplomacy was knowing exactly what buttons to push. The extra downside was the pent-up desire to push those buttons after ages of smiling through your teeth. The extra extra downside was when you gave in.
Chester entertained the possibility that just maybe she hadn’t been at her best over the last few weeks. Maybe, just maybe, she could have stood to be a little more restrained with the snark. Very possibly, she’d overdone it when she’d set out to provoke Krell. Less just might have been more, here.
She swerved to avoid a group of clones; she had no doubt Krell would go right through them. With all four lightsabers.
“General snapped!” someone behind her yelled.
“Krell snapped?”
“He snapped!”
Someone opened fire. Not on her. On what was behind her.
“Don’t get yourselves killed!” she yelled, and went scrambling over another pile of crates. Something tried to grab her ankle. She threw out a hand on instinct, shoving, and it let go; she went rolling over and thudded to the ground. She could feel the bruises coming up. Smell ozone behind her as he cut his way through. She shoved herself to her feet and kept running. Building ahead, some kind of temporary job open on top; she rammed through the doors, not much caring what it was.
Hardcase was forty seconds into his two-minute allotted time in the shower cubicles when the sound of gunfire outside grew loud enough to hear over the kitset water pumps and the banter of his brothers packed into the cubicle around him. That’s a Z-6, he thought, distractedly rinsing antibact soap out of his armpits. He’d know that distinct rat-tat-tat anywhere.
Then the cubicle door slammed open and the 104th’s resident Sith-kicker went barreling across the open space and up and over the head-height walls via a startled brother’s shoulders. “Krell’s gone batshit!” she yelled as she went— “Look out!”
Two brothers of the 257th dropped their soap and went over the wall after her.
Hardcase stopped thinking. He followed them.
All hell broke loose behind him. General Krell did not have the agility to follow Chester over the walls, but temporary board-and-frame was little obstacle to a full-grown Besalisk, let alone a Jedi armed with lightsabers.
There were more of the 257th outside the showers, firing on their General—Krell snarled like an animal and blocked each shot, uncaring where it went.
Hardcase dove for his own kit. No time for armoring up—his brothers needed help.
The showers did not slow Krell down nearly as much as Chester had hoped. He was still coming. She was a bit shocked that so many of the men had turned on him–she’d worried about some sort of obedience controls, god knew the Republic was fucked up enough to pull that shit–but Krell wasn’t someone particularly gifted in making friends.
Unfortunately, he was still coming, and she had no idea where the fuck she was, and frankly she was more in a mood to take her chances with Krell than the carnivorous plants, which kept her on the base. Not ideal. He knew it better than she did.
She darted around another corner, found another parked vehicle and dove under it–and didn’t get halfway before something grabbed her by the back of the tunic and hauled her out.
She rolled over. It was Krell. She started to scrabble to her feet and he kicked her flat, raising the sabers above her. She stared up at him, panting. There wasn’t shit she could do.
This is the absolute stupidest way I could have picked to die, she thought.
There was a blinding flash—she flinched her eyes closed and covered her face. A rumble of thunder went through the ground and her bones. And something heavy thumped to the ground beside her, and the oppressive sense of her own death faded.
She thought for a moment she was dead. Then realized that if she were actually dead, she wouldn’t have hands to pull away from her head.
She blinked into the sunlight.
Krell lay face down in front of her, smoking gently. Plo Koon approached from the other side, his hand outstretched. There was a smell of ozone and scorched hair. Whose? she wondered, blinking away the flash. Krell doesn’t have any hair.
“Huh,” she said, faintly dazed. That was lightning, she thought, mind racing behind the fading terror. Like what Dooku did.
Plo knelt, reached for Krell’s neck. “There is a pulse—a little uneven. Commander Chester, are you hurt?”
“Fine. Feeling a little foolish, but fine.” She pushed herself up to a sitting position, eyeing him a little warily. The adrenaline drained away, leaving her unsteady. “Some bruises, but I suspect that was getting off lightly.”
Kenobi appeared, glancing somewhat wide-eyed between Chester and Krell’s unconscious body. A whole passel of clones in various colors—and some stark naked—surrounded them, staring openly at Chester, at Krell, and at Plo.
That must have been a hell of a show, she thought, and smiled sheepishly. “I think I owe you guys an apology, huh?”
“Whatever for?” Kenobi’s confusion grew a little more obvious. “Master Krell was clearly intending to kill you. I think that absolves you of whatever damage has resulted.”
“Yes, because I underestimated my ability to annoy him.” She staggered to her feet. “I called him on bullying one of the men. That was—not the reaction I was going for. Brought up Dooku as a cautionary tale. Turns out to him it was aspirational. He panicked.”
A clone stepped forward, the slightest hint of blue-grey paint on his helmet. “There’s video of it, sirs. A few of us started recording when he started in on the kid.”
Plo dipped his head. “Prudent choice, Captain. Please forward copies to General Kenobi—and if you have any similar recordings, do the same. Master Krell has had an open investigation against him for a while now and this certainly gives us strong evidence to remove him from command immediately, with or without the Senate’s approval.” He pressed his hand to Krell’s forehead, then stood. “Anyone who is injured, to the medics. Commander Chester, with me.” He gestured, and the unconscious Besalisk rose into the air, floating steadily at about shoulder height.
She followed obediently, still badly shaken. By Krell, or by Plo’s lightning, she wasn’t sure. Or perhaps just having miscalculated so badly.
They got Krell into an appropriate cell—served him right—and then she followed Plo back to his meager tent.
She’d set out to embarrass Krell and drag his bad behavior out in the open, make it impossible to ignore.
She had succeeded a little too well for her own tastes.
She stood awkwardly by the tentflap for a minute while he left a message with the GAR sector command requesting a Jedi Healer with experience of Force-assisted electrical burns. It was—oddly relieving to see the gravitas with which he treated having thrown lightning at someone else, no matter that Krell was a bully who’d been trying to kill her at the time.
Dooku’s lightning had stunk of fear and rot, on a level beyond mere physical stench. She’d smelled only ozone and minor burns from Plo’s. Whether that was the result of a different technique, or a weaker attack, more tightly-controlled emotions… the differences helped, but not enough to ease the hairs raised on the back of her neck.
“Thank you,” she said after a moment. “I’d gotten out of my depth.”
“No thanks are necessary,” he replied, his voice still very grave. “That now makes two Jedi who have slipped into the Dark without us realizing.”
Chester folded her arms tight across her chest. “War does that to people. Especially wars like this—moral injury is more likely to cause psychological damage than simple trauma from injury or torture. And you and your Order have been asked to lead an enslaved army.”
“Do you believe we are unaware of that?” he asked. His voice was mild—deceptively so, perhaps. “Falling is a very specific thing. Psychological trauma, moral injury, these are things we deal with relatively often as Jedi—so rarely are the solutions we are able to bring to being more than disappointingly imperfect.” He paused a long moment, unreadable behind his mask; she heard him breathe in, and out. “Under ordinary circumstances, we would have the resources, and the autonomy, to deal better with it.”
“What I’m saying is,” she said, trying hard to hold her voice steady, “is this is going to keep happening.” It was no good—her anger bled through all the same. She breathed in deep. Suddenly it was hard not to scream. “You’re Jedi, yes, but you’re still people, and I don’t care how psychologically robust you are, everyone hits the wall sometime. Krell’s one thing—how soon until it’s one of the Padawans? They got thrown into this as kids, Plo! That’s fucking obscene!”
He tilted his head just slightly, impassive behind that mask. “I do not disagree.”
“Then work the damned problem,” she said, as she would to one of her officers panicking about damage to a warp core. “This approach isn’t working. You’re going to have to stop putting out fires.”
“Hm,” he said, still infuriatingly mild. “Have you any suggestions?”
“Negotiate,” she said. “Some systems are neutral; have one of them act as an arbiter.”
He nodded, as if he were unsurprised. “We have tried that. You have just personally met Count Dooku, and from your description you did not enjoy the experience. Do you believe he would be willing to negotiate? Furthermore, the Republic Senate in all its wisdom is not willing to come to the table; neither are the Separatist governments. Our attempts at negotiation have died before they started.”
“And why should they?” she asked. “Droids on one side, clones on the other. Everyone getting hurt is disposable to them. Dooku is one man, Plo, no matter his powers.”
And now he sighed. “Dooku is not alone. His powers matter only in that they offer us a glimpse at the true driving force of this war. System for system, the Republic far outnumbers the Confederacy of Independent States. The greatest problem facing us is that the CIS powerbase is solidly in governments and organizations which have a great deal of financial and political power, all of which have come by that power by exploiting everyone and everything around them. Manufacturing, resource extraction, industries of all natures; the CIS can match us on all accounts and they do not have nearly the civilian population to feed and house and protect.”
“At least get the kids out of the war!” Chester said, incensed. “What you’ve described—no one has a motivation to end this, only to continue. There has to be a better alternative. What you’re doing now is keeping the violence in a holding pattern, and what you’re telling me now makes it pretty clear no one’s coming out of it victorious, not by a long shot. Maybe my suggestions aren’t going to work, but what you’re doing now isn’t, either.”
Plo gazed evenly at her. “What we are doing now is not a good option, no—it is only the best of a deeply horrific set of options.”
“It’s only going to get worse.”
“And until we have a better option, there is precious little we can do about it. You are very angry, Commander. That is entirely understandable—this war makes me very angry as well—but if you allow your anger to overcome your ability to engage with reality you will find yourself in trouble. Some wars cannot be ended with ideals; they can only be fought, because the other option is dying.”
“I know some wars can’t be ended with ideals!” she snapped, the last brittle threads of her temper snapping. “I’m in one!”
Then she clapped a hand over her mouth, feeling completely stupid; it had slipped out before she’d even thought. She should have been more careful, but Dooku already knew.
She stepped back and sat heavily on one of the camp chairs. “Or I should be,” she said quietly, and try as she might, she could not keep the blame out of it. “But you kidnapped me. And now I’m here and my family and my crew and my entire people need me there, because if the Dominion wins, they plan nothing less than genocide. And when your bounty hunters took me, the Dominion was winning.”
She closed her eyes, her real fear coming yawning up from the depths. If the Federation was destroyed, what alternatives were there that weren’t like the Republic? Even in her home galaxy, the Federation was distinct for its size and stability. She had known that these things couldn’t be taken for granted, that many interstellar governments were not like her own, but…
…But seeing this, living here even for only a few weeks, brought it home in a totally new way. There were very different paths to the stars. With the contrast of the Republic, her home seemed more fragile than ever. And the constant dismissal by everyone here of the mere idea such a government could work made it even worse, in this galaxy where cruelty was justified as reality.
Plo watched her for a long moment. He’d been sympathetic to her problems before; he didn’t seem that way now, not really. She found it hard to care about that.
“Then,” he said, quite calmly, “you should know that much the same awaits large parts of this galaxy if the Separatists win. There is an element to this war that many people–politicians and civilians alike—are not aware of, or possibly simply do not care about.”
“And you’ve got a few million sentient beings enslaved to do your dirty work. Sentient beings disposed of like refuse when they’re damaged. Seems to me, these two things are related.”
“And if the Separatists win, they will be culled to the last child. I would call it murder, but the Separatists would not. Too many members of the Republic would not.”
She stared flatly at him. “It’s still no excuse, no justification, for what you’re already doing to them. It’s unconscionable, just as the Republic’s use of child soldiers. You’re in a bad position, yes–but that’s hardly a reason to sacrifice the very principles you claim you’re fighting for.”
“I give you no excuses, only explanations.” He sighed, deeply. “Then tell me what the right thing is, Commander.”
“Full citizenship for the clones. Perhaps it is time for the Republic to fight its own battles. Evacuate your Padawans and the other children so they can’t get dragged into this war. People like Tarkin aren’t going to stop with the Separatists, Plo. If you win, you’re going to find him at your throat soon enough.”
Plo made a soft noise, somewhere between a sigh and a laugh entirely devoid of amusement.
“First—full citizenship for the clones has been attempted no less than three times, with the full support of the Jedi Order and of a significant number of Republic member systems. Each time, it stalls in the Senate—not struck down, but shelved when issues related to the war come up. The Order does not have the power to force the issue, no matter how much we would like to.”
“How convenient,” she said. She was tired now, wishing for the Bedivere, wishing for Lieutenant Gao, mostly, who specialized in economic theory and military history and a whole bunch of other things. There were a lot of diplomats in training, too, or there had been before the war. She couldn’t sort this out on her own. But her crew—there was nothing her crew couldn’t do. She was so homesick it hurt.
“I don’t disagree, but I wasn’t finished speaking.” He raised an eyebrow at her. “With all due respect, you have been here for not quite three weeks. There is more than a thousand years of history behind this conflict.”
“And been biting my tongue the whole time.”
“Just a little longer, please.” He took a deep breath; it hummed unnaturally through his mask. “Secondly: the Republic as a central government is undoubtedly shirking its responsibility in this conflict, but there are thousands of individual planetary and system defense forces involved in the war, many of whom have mobilised without direct threats to their own populace, because it has been made abundantly clear to all of us that the Separatists will not stop at the first target. We do not have strictly accurate estimates of the forces available to the Droid Army because of its sheer size: potentially tens of billions, and the manufacturing capacity to make hundreds of thousands more in a day. The only thing slowing them is the money they spend on that manufacturing, and the time it takes to produce the raw materials.”
They were all good arguments, laying out the terrible situation in awful detail, irreproachable, but Chester kept seeing the faces of her men–the men, to think of them as hers would be to fall into the same trap as the Jedi–in the shuttle. They had been afraid of her, and they had been accustomed to it.
“Third—where can we evacuate our children to, Commander? Force-sensitives, and especially young Jedi, make very valuable slaves. The moment we break with the Republic, we paint a target on our back with both sides, and I can tell you from bitter experience that there will be far too many people willing to risk it for the payout. People like Tarkin, as you say. We could hide—but where? The Order claims three currently-uninhabited planets and one terrestrial satellite among its possessions. Two of these are so environmentally unstable that we can seldom even risk visiting, despite their cultural importance to us. The third is an ice-world, only scarcely more hospitable, and the fourth is currently in the frontlines of this wretched war. We can choose between dying of titanic natural disasters, cold and slow starvation, or other people. Believe me, remaining on Coruscant despite the danger it presents is not a decision we have made lightly.
“Finally, as I said before, there is another aspect to this war that makes our withdrawal simply not an option. It is… religious, possibly, though I’m not certain that’s the right word. Ideological, certainly. You mentioned in your report that Count Dooku told you he was a Sith, and attempted to convince you to train in the same tradition.” He gave her a searching look. “Did he share with you much of Sith philosophy while you were his guest?”
She gritted her teeth, and said, ironically, “Only as it pertained to using my anger, and then kicking my tailfeathers around the salle three times a day to underscore how bad I was at it.”
“Of course,” said Plo, still very measured. “Anger is central to Sith philosophy. It starts with fear—of a threat, of a loss, of uncertainty—and then anger—at that threat, at injustice, at the cause of that loss. Completely natural emotions, of course, and motivating, for some. Strong emotions in general allow for a deeper, more powerful connection to the Force. The Sith philosophy is that power should be sought, and it should be used. You can see how they might find your rage a useful tool.
“Always two there are; a Master and an Apprentice. Dooku is only the Apprentice. A public figurehead, we suspect, while the true master goes unseen. A thousand years ago, there were many thousands of Sith. They ruled an empire of many systems, and they waged near-constant war on the Republic and all their other neighboring states, because the Sith believe that the sole purpose of the weak is to serve the strong—and that they, as the strong, have not only the right but the moral imperative to conquer. The only rights a person can have, in their worldview, are those they can take by force.”
Chester’s lips twitched, derisive. “What an absolutely puerile worldview.”
“Yes. But a very dangerous one, in the hands of those with the genuine power to impose it on others.” He gave her a long look, not particularly warm. “Dooku said many of the same things you have, once. We did not disagree with him, but the solutions even then would have taken a miracle to work out. He understood, then, the limits to our power, and to his—or so we thought. Instead, he seems to have found a new source of power, and—how did you put it? Sacrificed the principles he claims to be fighting for.”
She tilted her head. “Are you saying I’m in danger of falling into the same trap?”
“Your anger is entirely understandable, given your circumstances, but the depth of it worries me.” He crossed his arms, less defensive than thoughtful. “You underestimated Krell. Despite having encountered Dooku, knowing at least some of what a Fallen Jedi can do—despite having sparred with me, and therefore having some idea of what a Jedi who has not Fallen can do. You are bold and very idealistic, Commander, but you are not at all stupid. If you were going to bait him into acting… unwisely, you might at least have done so when the rest of us were a little closer to hand. I will also point out that a number of the men sustained minor injuries in Krell’s rampage. None major, and no deaths, but—potentially avoidable.”
Plo sighed deeply at that, and went to sit in the other rickety field chair. “And then you accuse us of kidnapping and in the same breath attempt to tell us how to extricate ourselves from a problem that has already killed nearly four hundred of us, as if we haven’t spent the last two years trying to figure out how. I don’t begrudge the former; you certainly are not here by choice. I do grudge you the latter. But regardless of my personal feelings, making decisions in anger is a good way to court danger, and especially so when you are Force-sensitive.”
She actually laughed at that, short and sharp. “I’m not a Jedi. I’m a Starfleet officer, we don’t do things like that. I have not shown one scrap of Force ability since I showed up here, and not even Dooku was able to scare it out of me. I only use a sword when I’m off duty.”
Plo drew a datapad out of the deep pockets of his robe. “Perhaps you may want to watch this.”
She blinked. Took a breath, and stepped forward to take the offered datapad.
It was a shaky helmet cam video of her wholehearted flight from Krell earlier. She wondered how he’d gotten it so fast. Namely, it was the part where she’d gone scrabbling up over a mound of barrels. She remembered she’d felt something clamp around her ankle, she remembered throwing back a hand in a gesture of denial; now she saw that it had been Krell’s hand, and her gesture of denial had—sent him reeling back? She hadn’t even touched him.
It was very much the sort of thing she’d seen the Jedi do. Seen Dooku do, for that matter.
She looked up at him, opened her mouth, and then closed it, completely bereft of anything at all to say.
“You are Force-sensitive,” Plo said, gently, “the ability is there in you, and now that you have touched the Force once it will come to you when you reach for it–whether you do so in full cognizance of it or not. Without training, in fact, you are more likely to do so without knowing. Are you likely to slip into the Dark the way Count Dooku has done? The possibility is slim, Commander, but it will be far slimmer if you take it seriously.”
“And how would I do that?” she asked, voice faint, cleared her throat. “I—one incident can’t make—can’t mean—Plo, Dooku was all in a day’s work in Starfleet! We go up against entities that could eat him for breakfast. Sometimes we end up friends afterward. But Plo, we’re not—” we’re not the ones with powers, she wanted to say, we outthink them, we out-clever them, just like I did with Dooku.
“One incident, perhaps, but a very well-witnessed one.” He nodded toward the frozen image onscreen. “This is Commander Wolffe’s helmet-cam. I have fourteen others from a range of angles, all of which make it very clear that this was the Force. In total, there were roughly forty witnesses.”
She scrubbed her hands over her face, then stared blankly ahead. “I don’t know what to do with this,” she said. “I wanted to nip what was going on with Krell in the bud, because a lot of people were in danger. I miscalculated, but he’s not going to be in a position to be hurting the people who should trust him anymore; my safety is a cheap price to pay for that. It’s my job, Plo. And pretty much as soon as Dooku threatened them, the clones became part of that job.” She turned a pleading look at him, gestured at the video. “I don’t know what to do with this.”
“I suggest simply taking the time to think about it,” he said. “You have just had a rather trying experience, after all, and some time to rest seems appropriate.”
“Then I will need some time alone,” she said. “If you’ll excuse me?”
He nodded, and she turned and walked out of the tent, doing her best to keep the sick shock out of her expression. She immediately turned into her own tent and sat down on the ground, ignoring the rickety camp chair. She buried her face in her hands, shuddering—both with the shock of the revelation, which she wasn’t sure what to do with even now, and also the shock of the argument; she hadn’t realized how fond she was of Plo, that his disapproval would distress her like this.
She waited for that to even out, and then the full force of her earlier stupidity hit her. She had lost her temper, and let slip what she had been absolutely determined to conceal. Never mind Dooku already knew; it was the principle of the thing, and it had been much better to keep silent about it and limit the leakage of the information as much as possible. She had lost her temper because of injured pride, and she had very possibly made the Federation a bigger target because of it.
After a few moments, she took off her commbadge. This was not the time for a translator; she’d prefer no one here understand her cursing, be it in Standard or Mandarin.