Chapter Text
The next wave of fallout from the Krell Incident didn’t reach Chester until the next morning, as she returned from a second bout of frustrating training with Plo.
“Commander,” said Wolffe behind her, and Chester tensed. That was Wolffe’s ‘you’re in trouble’ voice. It was discouraging that she could recognize it so easily now. “A word with you?”
Having smoothed over most of the problem with Plo, she’d almost hoped Wolffe might consider the matter settled. But of course, life couldn’t be that simple.
And he was flanked by Rex, which was even worse; that meant she’d pissed off the clone officers as a whole. Chester drew in a long deep breath and prepared for the scolding. “Of course, gentlemen.”
Wolffe fell into step next to her. “I understand that you’re new to our galaxy, Commander, and your rescue mission has showed that you do in fact have combat experience.”
She sighed. “You don’t have to be delicate about it, Wolffe. I know there’s no way you didn’t overhear our little tiff.”
He glanced at her sidelong. “I’m trying to tell you not to take this as a critique of your competence, Commander.”
Which he’d critiqued plenty in the past. She gave him a very dry look indeed. “Don’t worry yourself on account of my ego, Commander. It’s gotten me into enough trouble for the week.”
“Well if you don’t want me to be nice about it,” he said, paused. Frowned harder at her. “Decommissioning. You think it means they kill us, don’t you.”
Of all the things for this to be about. “Sure sounded like that to me. Your younger brothers are terrified of it.”
Wolffe looked at Rex, who returned the look with a tiny shrug. Not a denial, Chester noted, a hollow feeling growing in her stomach.
“Decommissioning is a general term,” said Wolffe. His stance was military-straight, his hands clasped behind his back. “For most of what’s meant by it, the natborn officers would say ‘discharge’. Is that a familiar term, Commander?”
She nodded. “Decommissioning is only for non-living, non-sentient items, in my experience.”
A flicker of a wry smile twitched at the corner of Wolffe’s mouth. “We were commissioned to start with, Commander, so I suppose the matching term fits. It means being removed from the service we were commissioned for━the armed defense of the Republic. That includes a lot of situations.”
Which was a relief, but it didn’t explain the real fear she’d seen in Garter’s eyes.
Rex went ahead, opening a door into a cramped, undecorated office. Wolffe ushered her in.
“The thing you really have to understand is that we were made for the Jedi,” he said. Chester’s stomach took a dramatic swoop, but before the anger could bubble to the surface, Wolffe continued. “But the Jedi didn’t know it. You’d have to ask Plo for the full story━but he’d be stupid to give it to you, so don’t bother━but from what Cody and a few other brothers have been able to figure out, there was a Jedi called Sifo-Dyas who was convinced a war was coming. Years ago, he went to a place called Kamino━the best cloners in the galaxy━and ordered an army. Thing is, he didn’t bother telling the rest of the Jedi about it.
“So, my brothers and I grew up knowing we were made to fight and die in a war, protecting the Republic and its people, fighting under the command of the Jedi Order. We had ten years of training to prepare for this mess. The Jedi got━ah, what was it, Rex? About two weeks. They went from not knowing we existed to being put half in charge of all ten million of us. The other half is the Senate, by the way. And because the Jedi didn’t know about us, they couldn’t protect us. Don’t misunderstand me, we weren’t being culled like livestock━we’re too expensive for that━but you know, training for war is a dangerous thing in its own right. Sometimes there were accidents. If we weren’t too badly damaged, they’d repair us and put us to work in non-combat roles. Armies generate a stupid amount of flimsiwork. But if the cost of fixing us outweighed the value of our existence… that’s where ‘decommissioning’ meant death.”
It was absolutely fucking horrifying that death was on the table at all. Chester smoothed it away behind her best imitation of Vulcan calm. It kept her voice steady, at least. “Plo told you that? About… not knowing?”
“Not at all,” said Wolffe, a knowing glint in his organic eye. “Like I said, some of our brothers put it together ourselves. But between you and me, Commander, I’d been suspecting it since I was assigned. Longnecks, natborns, they treated us one way. We thought it was normal, until we met the Jedi. They treat us like people. ”
“Krell being the obvious exception,” put in Rex. “General Skywalker can be… excitable, and he doesn’t always remember that we haven’t got the Force to keep up with him, but he’s a decent sort otherwise. General Kenobi’s great━determined to live on caf and two hours of sleep, Cody says, but as personal faults go, those aren’t bad. Commander Tano tries her best and usually listens to our advice, and when she doesn’t, it’s just her being practically a shiny.”
They meant actually a kid. That hollow feeling grew. How the fuck old was Joyride? How old were most of the shinies?
“General Plo keeps saddling me with non-soldiers to keep an eye on,” said Wolffe, looking Chester dead in the eyes, “but on the other hand, he shelled out more than a million credits in prosthetic and medical costs to keep me on as his commander when Ventress took my eye out in battle. I was never in danger of being allowed to die, Commander; at worst I’d have been shuffled sideways into a high-level desk job. Per unit, for comparison, we’re worth about sixty thousand each.”
“The bean-counters would only pay for a low-end prosthetic, the sort that aren’t rated for lots of physical exertion.” Rex nodded toward Wolffe, his expression blank in a very careful way. “Our boy here is officially the most expensive clone in the GAR.”
Wolffe sighed. “Just because your General spends all his pay on his Senator friend…”
“I have no frame of reference for that joke,” said Chester, very dry, “but I’ll assume it’s very funny. Thank you for the explanation, gentlemen. It seems there are yet more cultural differences of which I was unaware.”
Like just how acceptable it is to buy and sell sentient lives. Like just how much has been done to your minds to make it seem acceptable to you. Like how young you are, and how your life or death hinges on a handful of currency.
She was more familiar with monetary exchange than she’d been letting on━Deep Space Nine, at the edge of Federation space, tended to be a bit of a crash course in capitalism━but the thought was still completely alien to her. And horrible. Deeply so.
They’d meant to calm her down with their explanation of decommissioning.
They had done the exact opposite.
If she were to return to Coruscant now, fuck all the non-interference regs. She was going to make as many people as possible deeply and sincerely sorry for this shit.
Still behind her calm mask, she asked, “Is there anything further I should be aware of, gentlemen?”
“Yeah, actually, there is.” Wolffe eyeballed her, both organic and prosthetic eyes gazing into hers with steely intensity. He had to look up a little; the clones were a couple inches short of six foot. “If you haven’t figured it out for yourself, that is. Every time you go out and cause problems, we’re the ones who get stuck mopping up the results. Us clones, and the Jedi, who already have their hands full trying to look after us. We’re the people the shit rolls downhill onto, in this war. Refrain from dropping us in it, please.”
“Understood, Commander,” she said, her heart sinking. There it was, part of the reason for the Prime Directive. You never knew what your well-intentioned interference might actually do. “I will keep that in mind.”
But all the same…
This was wrong. She’d be deluding herself to think she wouldn’t be put in a similar position as she had with Krell again.
Wolffe gave her a look like he didn’t quite believe her, but let it pass muster all the same. “All right,” he said, and nodded to Rex, who opened the door again. “Good talk, Commander. I’m glad we got to discuss the matter.”
Oh, now she really felt like a badly behaved ensign getting dismissed. “Thank you for the information, gentlemen.”
Well, so much for calming her down or persuading her to back off on the sentient rights abuses of this galaxy. Chester blew a long breath out her nose, trying to let go of the feeling before it made her do something stupid and ineffective. Stupid and effective was the goal.
She would not succumb to the creeping despair of all of this. She couldn’t bring herself to believe there wasn’t a way out of the mess this galaxy had made itself, but at this point solving it, even with the Bedivere at her back, probably would violate several dozen regulations and possibly, if someone at Command was feeling particularly vindictive, the Prime Directive. It was an ugly tangled mess━but she simply couldn’t accept that this was really the best that could be done.
It was, flatly, unacceptable. To accept it at all would be to slip back into the malaise of the 21st and 22nd centuries.
And if she got stuck here…
It would be an alarming choice. Standing idly by, doing exactly what she’d just excoriated all of them for, or meddling, interfering, with the assumption she was never going to get home. Oh, and also probably getting herself killed, regardless of how much training she picked up this late in life━something in her rebelled at the very idea. She didn’t want to be one of the special people with powers; she could all too easily see how that could slip into seeing the world as people who needed protecting and people to protect others from. The necessary emotional distance she’d read of in the introductory files Plo had sent to her borrowed datapad was repugnant to her.
Connections, attachment━it was what a starship ran on. She wouldn’t set that aside. Individual hero wasn’t in her line. She functioned best as part of a whole. Not someone with fearsome powers saving or condemning those without. Not a Knight, and most certainly not a fucking General. In their short time on Chenowei, she’d heard how people talked about the Jedi━half as saviors, half as meddlers.
Starfleet might be characterized the same way, but it was one thing to come in with your crew to a world that needed help, work together and figure something out. It was another to arrive alone. There was a taste to that━a single individual with such responsibility and its attendant power━that she liked not at all. Reminded her of Dooku, telling her she could destroy worlds.
No thank you.
This training would be to ensure she wouldn’t return home to become the next Gary Mitchell. Only that, and no further.
And if she got stuck here…
“Commander!” She startled, straightening out of her pensive slump, and spun quickly to face the source of the noise. Lingo and Garter, with the rest of their little group in tow. She managed an expression outside of grim contemplation, forced out a long breath. “You all right?”
“You should have told us you were going after Krell,” said Lingo, disapproving. “You don’t go after a Force-user alone; they beat that into us in training, and I bet you got something similar. You spend enough time talking about how we’re supposed to get out of things as a team━is that just an excuse so you can put yourself in danger?”
“We could have provided support,” said Garter, folding his arms. “Kept Krell from nearly slicing you in half without giving away the setup. So tell us, next time you decide you’ve got to tease a gundark, yeah?”
“Yeah,” put in Joyride. “We like you alive, Commander, you can’t make interesting things happen if you’re dead. Also little gods, what did you say to him? You got him to flip his lid in less than two minutes, one of the 257th timed it."
This was a lot easier to deal with than Plo’s disapproval, and Chester found herself smiling. “You’re right, I should have waited. I was worried he’d see you and think I was setting him up━”
Lens made a noise of disgust. “D’ya think he can tell us apart?”
“━but I should have warned you. Plo and Wolffe have both chewed me out for risking my neck, too.”
“No one here is saying you shouldn’t have done it,” said Garter quickly.
“Or that you’re not allowed to risk your neck,” said Lingo. “From the whole Ventress thing, we know you know what you can get away with. But doing it without your crew? Commander, you know better .”
Oh hit me where it hurts, she thought, touched by them using ‘crew’ like that. “Very well, gentlemen, I consider myself duly reprimanded. Will that be all, or is the mess still open? Being upbraided is hungry work.”
“I found a tooka,” said Joyride, “but Garter said you had to be suitably contrite before I showed it to you.”
She raised her eyebrows at Garter. “Well? Am I suitably contrite?”
Garter gave her a long critical look in return. “I suppose it’ll have to do.”
It turned out, a tooka was… well, it was certainly a creature. It was remarkably catlike, but in a way that gave the descriptor ‘boot-faced’ a new meaning; it had strong little three fingered hands like chicken feet, and a broad face with button eyes and a wide, disturbingly humanoid mouth. The ears were enormous. It was also sort of pink and teal.
Most importantly, it was soft and furry and purred.
“Is it native to this planet?” Chester asked, sitting crosslegged with the tooka staring affectionately up into her face, breathing cat-breath up her nose and vibrating like an engine.
“No, this one must have come off a supply ship,” said Lingo. He looked worried. “It’s been hanging around the camp since we got back. I don’t think it knows what to do away from people.”
They were in a space between two of the storage units, a narrow corridor piled high with crates and boxes. Her crew were perched around her, watching her with the tooka. Joyride was practically vibrating with the suppressed desire to come over and cuddle it again.
Chester rubbed it behind its ears. Its mouth opened a little as it pressed its head up into her hand, an expression of total bliss on its round face. “And it might fall foul of one of those plants.”
“Can we keep him?” asked Joyride. “Please? He won’t last an hour out there without us.”
“You want me to intercede so we can keep the tooka,” said Chester. She’d found the really good scratch spot and the purrs had gone frantic. There was drool now. “I’ll talk to Plo. You’d probably either die or have a devastating impact on this planet’s ecosystem, wouldn’t you?”
The tooka headbutted her hard in the jaw, making her mildly bite her tongue, and then nipped her for not petting it more. Chester had grown up with cats, and followed the obvious command. “Is the belly a trap? Will he claw me for that?”
“Anyone’s guess,” said Joyride. Then his head jerked up at the sound of someone clearing their throat.
They looked up.
One of the officers was standing in the mouth of the corridor, hands folded behind his back. Chester’s crew immediately sprang to their feet, hiding her and the tooka━a nice bit of solidarity, but ultimately useless. Chester rose to her feet, holding the creature, which seemed to have no interest at all in leaving. Indeed, it chirruped and turned its head to look at the new arrival.
Dulcet, Chester realized. She’d seen him a few times at a distance, including when Krell had ordered him and his men to stun her. Unlike the other commanders, he’d been quiet. Withdrawn. It hadn’t taken any Jedi abilities to know why.
“Commander, a word?” he said.
She handed the tooka off to Garter. “Make sure it’s secured and cared for. It could be ecologically devastating if released.”
Garter took the critter with a practiced smoothness. “Aye aye sir!” Then he winked. Chester managed to keep a straight face.
Dulcet turned a little sideways to let them past. Then he looked back at Chester, evaluating.
There was a long silence, broken by the distant sound of Joyride enthusing over the tooka. Dulcet glanced over his shoulder at that, and took a few steps forward. Chester stayed where she was, and didn’t say anything; clearly he needed to say this on his own time.
He looked exhausted, lines deep carved in his face, and while he’d been watching her with the intentness of a trapped animal, every time their eyes met, his flicked away, fast. He was also staying out of grabbing range.
She wasn’t even sure if he was aware of either of these things. It seemed like habit.
“I was going to kill him,” said Dulcet finally. He sounded, if anything, a little wistful, but it was ragged around the edges.
She was horribly unsurprised. She couldn’t blame him one bit.
She was appalled at him out and saying this to her; he had to be very sure of her because if anyone else found out… “They would have killed you,” she said.
“That’s part of the point,” said Dulcet.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You didn’t deserve any of it. No one does.”
He frowned. “Why? General Kenobi tells me he’s never going to be in charge of anyone ever again. And I…”
“You didn’t have to do it, in the end,” she said, when he’d stood there a long moment, looking like he’d come to the end of his script. “And you saw no other way out.”
He nodded.
“Why trust me?” she asked. “We both knew Krell needed dealing with but why━”
“You saved one of my men.”
She gave him a totally blank look, and then it clicked into place. “The guard━the one who talked to me. But I was the one who put him in danger.”
“You were a prisoner. And you saved one of my men.”
“He was still injured as a result of my actions.”
“Krell doesn’t stop at just throwing a disobedient clone into a wall,” he said. “And no one else cares. Do you think I didn’t report it? Do you think I didn’t write it up, again and again and━nothing happened, except he found out.” He went silent again, every line of his body humiliated rage. “I realized we didn’t matter,” he said, simply. “The other Jedi say all these nice things about seeing us as people. But they didn’t see my men as people. No one came to help them." His eyes rested very briefly on her face. “You thought he might kill you. You decided not to care. For one of my shinies.”
“Someone who does that to people under his command is the lowest kind of scum,” she said. “And if I stood by and let that happen when there was any kind of chance I could intervene, I wouldn’t be worthy of this.” She gestured to her commbadge.
“He wouldn’t have killed you,” he said. “Not once he got you from the bounty hunters. But if he’d found you on his own, he would have. If he’d found Song Tulin himself, without any witnesses, he would have. He called her the competition. He’d mention things like that, because he knew no one would listen to me. Clones die all the time━and not just in the 257th.” His expression went really grim; she wondered which of the other commanders Krell had threatened. If it had even needed to be specific. “That’s why he went after her.”
The thwarted viciousness of Krell’s behavior now made sense. “I told him I wasn’t her━wouldn’t that have made him more desperate to find her? If he thought she’d get to Dooku before him?”
“He didn’t want to believe he hadn’t.” Dulcet frowned in her direction again. “He… was becoming less accepting of the idea he could be wrong.”
“So I achieved what he desperately wanted, threw it away, and then threw it in his face. No wonder he reacted like that.”
“And they couldn’t ignore it happening to a natborn,” he said. “Yes. So I…”
He trailed off, again as if he weren’t used to talking about himself, or talking for so long. But her mind filled in the rest of the sentence anyway. So I get to live.
“Continuing after this━it’s hard. It will be hard,” she said. “You still deserve another chance, no matter what he made you do.”
“You did a Jedi thing,” he said. “When he was chasing you. If you stay…”
When had this become if you stay?! She very carefully did not look alarmed; spooking him was the last thing she wanted to do.
“You’re the only natborn I’d trust with my men,” he said. “I’ll follow orders. But you? I’d trust.”
He turned on his heel and stalked away, shoulders tight as if he expected a blow. Chester stared after him, then started trying to brush the tooka hair off her shirt. It was a good way to try and calm down again, before her incredible anger alarmed Plo, again.
Dulcet and his men had been failed by everyone in every way imaginable, and she’d barely done anything━she’d provoked their tormentor, distracted him, made him show himself in front of people because she’d gotten him to go after someone who mattered.
It wasn’t enough, it wasn’t nearly enough, and it wasn’t going to save them from the next tormentor who came along, or from dying in this stupid war, and to have any degree of faith placed in her because of that was again, fucking obscene . One rather self-serving act to make one asshole stop hurting people did not make her any kind of hero, especially with the people it had gotten hurt.
But she wasn’t going to put that on him, either.
Instead she compartmentalized the anger, breathed deeply, and went to go find something to eat.