A Young Girl’s War Between the Stars
12
Coruscant, 42 BBY.
It didn’t take long to question our captive and get the information we needed out of him—not with Obi making sure he was willing to answer every question put to him. It left me with more questions and a very uneasy feeling about the whole situation, and no answers or relief in sight. For instance…
Who would have reason to go to this much trouble to hide map data? The destruction of data was unquestionably enemy action, which implied that the answer was, generally speaking, the enemy.
Which led to the next questions: Who is the enemy? Or perhaps more accurately, who here on Coruscant would have an interest in seeing Serenno fall into enemy hands, the knowledge of what was going on and what they needed to do to help further their cause, and the connections to hire an intermediary party to get the job done quietly? Obviously, the answer to that question would be someone who had done this before… which implied some things I didn’t like.
Obi had given voice to those thoughts herself, with the quiet comment, “Master warned me not to get involved with politicians…”
Why had he tried to kill himself? I had asked that only as we were wrapping up, but the answer he had given was perhaps the most worrying of all.
The people who had hired him, after meeting in person to hand off the proper credentials and paperwork, along with a blaster, had threatened to kill his family if he ran his mouth or got captured and gave away anything that could identify them. Not that he could—they had been pretty thorough in covering their immediate tracks. Whoever they were, that they had worn full environmental suits to the meeting and used a protocol droid which had been given a script to read, so he couldn’t even identify their species. I had some thoughts towards investigating places that might rent out droids, but… our captive said it looked old, so there was every chance that it was a second or third-hand used purchase paid for in cash, or at least the equivalent, in physical credit chits. Given how common droid ownership was and how popular protocol droids were, I suspected that was a dead end.
One question we could answer, or at least I hoped, was what did the maps show that was worth going to this much trouble to destroy the data? Not immediately, but eventually. With some research. Because in the end, we did manage to get our hands on the data we needed. It took speaking with the local site administrator and having him put out a message to all of his peers to refuse anyone showing up for ‘maintenance’ anytime soon, then requesting that one of the data centers that hadn’t been hit yet send them a copy of the data. He loaded a drive up for us with the data on it himself after we verified it was the real thing before we went on our way, handing the entire thing over to Coruscant’s police to deal with. It was less than a year old and showed the latest official survey of Serenno prior to the start of the civil war.
As we boarded the skycar, Obi asked, “Do you think this will help?”
“It must show something they didn’t want anyone to see,” I murmured, my fingers idly drumming on the small rectangle in my pocket. Thinking it over, I quickly came to a decision. Pulling out my tablet, I went to the message Dooku had sent me with contact information for non-Federation traders. “I think we should go knock on a few doors.”
“Oh?” Obi asked, sending me a curious look.
“Mm. Someone has been there more recently. I want what they have. With that, we’ll have three points in time: five years ago, just before the civil war, and after the war began. With that, I can make a program to compare the three and tell us what’s different. I can get more points of data by having it pull recent land and building purchases, permits for construction and maintenance, tax records, and that sort of thing.”
Nodding, she asked, “What will that tell us?”
I grinned. “Everything they wanted to hide. If they had just left it alone, we’d have just gotten the maps and gone in without looking too closely. Now I’m curious!”
“Huhu~. It’s cute when you get all excited,” Obi grinned, and I felt my cheeks heat up as I sent her an annoyed look. “Just tell me where to go first.”
From there, we spent the rest of the evening and into the early night talking to freighter pilots—the equivalent of space truckers. It took a while, but eventually we managed to find someone who knew someone, who knew someone through four or five levels of connection in that chain, and we were able to catch up to a woman who had been to Serenno within the last month just before she was due to take off hauling a load of supplies to some mid-rim agri-world. She parted with the data her computer had recorded for a small fee and the promise that whatever we were doing with it, we wouldn’t mention her or her ship.
Our last stop was a store to buy me a much beefier computer than the tablet I had been working out of. A laptop specifically, or the local equivalent at any rate. It looked very much like a ruggedized laptop and functioned practically the same way—they just called it a ‘portable computer.’
I had noticed that this universe was a bit weird when it came to tech development. They had things like working FTL, lightsabers, blasters, flying cars, and genuine AI, but the concept of a cell phone was apparently alien to them. Oh sure, there were the small communication devices like the ones Obi and I used, and there were tablets like mine, but no one had thought to just stick those two things together and miniaturize them.
I didn’t know all that much about IT in my first world, but I’d worked in HR and establishing and nurturing connections to other departments was part of the job. To that end, I’d tried to get in good with every department in the company, including the IT department. I’d spoken with them enough, and overheard enough of their complaints about our company and ‘users’ as they called everyone who wasn’t IT and thus an administrator, to pick up some things.
What I’d learned by osmosis seemed to imply that Coruscant’s and the wider universe’s network infrastructure was weird in a few ways. Both very paranoid when it came to securing data and entirely too trusting in the same breath. The closest comparison I could come up with was to ask, why would every European Union country decide to host all of their off-site data in, say, France? Yes, they’re all part of a larger governmental union, but each of those are still sovereign countries entrusting a supposedly neutral third party to hold onto copies of things that might be important, if not necessarily secret.
The only answer I had was the same one I had for the other technological gaps and oddities. That the current state of the universe was a jumbled up mess countless civilizations spanning tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years, all building on the bones of previous civilizations’ technology and a lot of things had just been declared good enough and not developed much further. For instance, we didn’t all use the same type of FTL because it was the only option available. We all used the same method of FTL because it was developed thousands of years ago, it worked, and it was good enough, so why bother looking into alternative methods of faster than light travel when that’s what we’ve always used and it’s proven tech?
It was a puzzle, but not particularly important at the moment. Maybe later, if I could find a way to exploit it and introduce a few ideas for things they didn’t have. But that was years down the road and not something I could worry about right now.
The moment we got back, I shut myself away in my room and got to work. I quickly lost track of time as I settled into the thing every corporate Japanese salaryman had come to dread and yet had burned into their very soul: the death march. Yes, even people with jobs that shouldn’t require long overtime hours had been subject to it. Many companies liked to use it as incentive to spur their employees on.
We all suffer together!
Your coworkers can’t go home until you’re done! Work faster!
Oddly enough, that hadn’t changed much in my second life. Except it became much more serious. You can’t go home until the war ends. Or, if you sleep now, you could get your entire unit killed!
I was used to it and knew how to prepare. I’d brought a couple of trays with meals from the cafeteria and an entire carafe of what passed for coffee before locking myself in—after putting a note on the door in Basic threatening dire consequences if I was disturbed in the next thirty-six hours.
Obi apparently either decided that warning didn’t apply to her, or took it as a challenge. Thankfully, she was quiet and didn’t distract me much, except to drape herself over my shoulders to watch, or bring fresh food and caffeine. I say ‘much’ though because there was one incident…
The sound of liquid pouring and the scent of coffee were familiar. So familiar that I responded entirely by reflex. “Thank you, Visha.”
“Hm? Who’s Visha?”
I blinked, looking up, to find Obi standing beside me with a carafe of space coffee. Shaking my head, I picked up my cup and took a sip. “…A friend.”
She looked like she wanted to ask about it, but after a moment, the older girl simply smiled and nodded. I was grateful that she left it at that. I didn’t want to have to try to explain things. Instead, I drained the cup and got back to it, putting thoughts of another life and the people I had lost aside. It was something I had gotten good at, over the years since waking up in this universe.
It was dark, my surroundings lit only by the familiar, baleful light of flares. The smell of the dead and dying filled my nose and mouth—blood, shit, piss, gut shot. The moaning, crying, and praying of wounded and terrified men and women was the lullaby I had long since learned to go to sleep to, punctuated by the occasional gunshot, burst of machine gun fire, or pounding of mortar or artillery like a thunder storm getting closer.
I could feel and smell Viktoriya curled up behind me on the single cot we shared to save space and for the extra body heat, shivering in her sleep and for a moment, my heart lurched, but I couldn’t remember why. Something about it felt wrong but I couldn’t put my finger on why.
What woke me up? I wondered, my brain hazy with sleep deprivation. That happens on the front lines, when you spend weeks at a time fighting in the trenches. Eventually, it just becomes a dull, constant pain behind the eyes and an all over ache that never seems to go away, sapping away at the will to do anything at all.
I felt something brushing at the edges of my senses. It wrapped around me like smoke, carrying the stink of death and making it hard to breathe, hard to see, hard to sense anything. It seeped into my pores, through my nose, down my throat, into my eyes and I felt it reaching inside me—squirming around, digging deep into my brain, phantom tendrils brushing over memories of the Great War and all the things that made me angry, sad, but it seemed especially interested in the things that made me afraid…
Something pounded nearby. Mortar fire? No. Someone pounding down the door to the barracks— Barracks? In the trenches?
My thoughts scattered as the door gave way to a form silhouetted from behind by the light of flares. I didn’t recognize the outline—something about it stood out as out of place. It was an enemy soldier, clearly wearing an American uniform and shouting in English… with the head spikes of a Zabrak. Red and black skin. Gold eyes. He held up a weapon and two red lightsaber blades ignited.
I reacted purely on reflex. I didn’t have a weapon handy, but at this range, I didn’t need it. An explosion formula flared to life and I pointed at him, releasing it as he charged—
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An explosion knocked me out of bed and I thumped onto the floor, stunned as I wondered what the hell was going on. Dust filled the air and I coughed, reaching out with the Force and making a wide, telekinetic sweep to disperse it. Sitting up, I looked around my room. Everything seemed intact inside, but through the door, I could see the wall to the room across the hallway had been demolished—blasted into rubble. A Jedi student lay in the hall on his back, not moving. Grabbing my robe, I threw it on over my under things and stepped outside, quickly checking him as other students came running to investigate.
Reaching out with the Force, I found the boy—a tan Zabrak I recognized vaguely from a few of the more advanced lessons I attended—mostly unharmed, aside from a minor concussion, a ruptured ear drum, and a couple of cracked bones. Reaching inside myself, I tapped into my life force and touched his head, reaching out and touching his own life force and coaxing it into doing the majority of the work using the healing technique I had pretty much mastered in my time on Dathomir—it had been a requirement given how much strain I’d put my body under and how many injuries I took daily just from everyday practice against other Force users. I’d gotten many long hours of practice in using it and by now, I was well versed in healing not just myself but others.
Zabraks are known for their dense skulls. For one of them to have gotten a concussion, the blast had to be pretty big, I mused, turning my head to examine the damaged wall and the mostly empty room beyond as more students gathered to see what was going on, standing around uselessly. Looking at the blast pattern, I hummed quietly.
Concussive. No heat. Low yield. No shrapnel other than the stone of the wall. I don’t see the remains of any kind of casing. Judging by the blast pattern, something hit the wall and blasted it inwards, not outwards—so it was more akin to a shaped charge. He only caught the barest edge of the explosion. No smoke and nothing smells off. Just lingering Force in the air—more than the usual. What caused it?
A thought crossed my mind—that I had somehow sleep-cast an explosive formula, but I discounted it almost as soon as I had it. I had been working on converting magical formulas over to use the Force instead of mana for years now and that one had always eluded it, being both too complex and too power intensive to get working—at least, without a computation orb. There was very little chance that I had cast something purely on reflex that I had been unable to do consciously.
Some doubt remained, however. Little chance, but not zero… And if I did, that means it’s possible. I have to question him to see if he saw what happened.
My thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of a group of four Jedi wearing more ornate robes and face masks—temple guards—and another that, judging by the marking on the bag she carried, was from the medical corps. One of the temple guards immediately demanded, “What happened here?”
I made to answer, only to cut off as the medic knelt and began examining both the zabrak and myself, along with what I was doing to him. Several of the other students began explaining how they heard an explosion and rushed to check it out, while the medic quietly looked at me and raised an eyebrow.
“That’s good,” she nodded, laying a hand over my own and feeling along as I worked. “Where did you learn this technique?”
“The library,” I shrugged. “I just got back from a mission to Dathomir. I spent a lot of time practicing it on myself and others.”
The auburn haired woman chuckled, a smile pulling at her lips. “I imagine. You’re nearly finished. He should wake soon. Do you want me to take over, or do you want to finish it?”
“If you wouldn’t mind,” I nodded, and she quickly took over, picking up the technique of coaxing the boy’s life energy to heal himself just as I had done.
I stood and dusted myself off, and the temple guard who had been questioning everyone directed his attention to me. “Tell me what happened.”
“I have no idea,” I shook my head. “I was asleep. He opened my door for some reason, then I was thrown out of my bed by an explosion.”
“You didn’t see anything? Sense anything? Anyone fleeing the area? Malicious intent?”
“Sorry, no. I dressed and came outside, then began rendering first aid.” The guard made an annoyed sound, but nodded. “If the area’s secure and we’re not in any danger of an attack, I’d like to get back to bed if you don’t mind.”
The man tilted his head, radiating curiosity and incredulity. “An explosion just happened right outside your door and you’re just going to go back to sleep?”
I shrugged. “It’s not the first time, and I’ve been up for the last…” I tapped into the incomplete computation orb dangling from my neck, “seventy-nine hours. I’d only been asleep for four when this happened.”
“‘Not the first—’” the man quietly repeated, before shaking his head and looking to the medic. “Did you clear her?”
“She’s fine,” the woman agreed. “My other patient is waking.”
The boy on the ground jerked, then sat up with the medic’s help. “…What happened?” he asked, looking around in confusion. “Why’s everyone staring at me?”
“We were hoping to ask you that,” the medic smiled. “What were you doing here?”
“Uh,” he scratched his head and thought about it for a moment, before spotting me. “Oh, right! Master Mundi sent me to get Tanya. He said the Council wants to speak with her.”
I held in the annoyed sigh I wanted to let out, even as my eye twitched. Before I could say anything, the guard asked, “So you came down the hall to her room. Did you notice anyone suspicious nearby? Anything that looked out of place?”
“No,” the boy shook his head. “I knocked on her door and when she didn’t answer, I knocked harder. After a few minutes, I opened it. After that… I don’t know? I remember ducking, and then a loud boom behind me.”
The temple guard turned back to me, radiating suspicion and worry. “Did you throw something at him?”
“No.” I moved to cut that line of questioning off by pointing out the obvious. “Firstly, I don’t have any grenades. They’re on my list of tools to acquire, but I haven’t had time.” Incredulity radiated off the guard, but I continued. “Secondly, a grenade would have done much more damage. Depending on the type, either he would have been left as little more than red mist and fragments of meat and bone, or the entire hallway would be scorched and he’d be nothing but a charred corpse. Look at the wall. See how the debris goes in for the most part, not out? That indicates a shaped charge of some sort. No debris from the casing means it was either an energy weapon, or the casing was a material that burned up entirely upon detonation.”
“She’s right, captain,” one of the other guards confirmed, from the other side of the hole where they had apparently gone in to inspect the room. “Definitely a shaped charge. On a proxy sensor maybe? Went off a couple of seconds after the kid arrived, so…”
The guard captain crossed his arms over his chest. “That would mean someone breached the temple’s security, made their way to the student dormitories, and randomly planted an explosive across from a student’s room—and did it wrong. All while somehow not alerting an entire temple’s worth of Jedi’s Force senses that should have alerted them to the danger.”
“Come off it,” the medic stood, brushing her legs off. “We all know security is minimum at best in most areas and we get guests coming and going all the time. Someone could easily just walk right in if they wanted to, claiming they were visiting a student or master. As for the rest…”
“A third party,” I murmured, drawing their attention as dots began connecting in my head and I began to suspect another possibility—something much more likely than accidentally doing something in my sleep that I hadn’t been able to replicate while awake. “A few days ago, Obi-wan and I encountered a man who had been hired as part of a plot to destroy data. A contractor paid to do a job and not told anything beyond exactly what was needed to do the job. It’s… possible that in intercepting, questioning, and turning him over to Coruscant police that we might have upset the party that hired him, or whoever hired that party to hide him. From there, it wouldn’t be difficult to ascertain our identities—we didn’t exactly hide who we were. One could theoretically hire a courier, have them deliver a parcel, learn the location of my and Obi-wan’s rooms, plant it on the wall across from the—”
I blinked, a thrill of fear running through me. “You should go check Obi-wan’s room for a second explosive.”
The guard captain jerked his head at two of his men and nodded. They blurred away down the hall. As they left, I finished, “If the courier had no ill intent and the device was inert until it was remotely activated or something like that, then it’s possible that it wouldn’t have been sensed until the last moment.”
“Alright, we’ll look into this,” the guard captain sighed, before turning to his last remaining man. “Go get someone down here to start collecting evidence.”
“Sir,” the last guard left quickly.
“Well, if we’re done here, I’m going back to my infirmary for the rest of my shift,” the medic nodded, before sending me a smile. “You should visit some time. Talent like yours shouldn’t be wasted! You’ve got a place in the MedCorps if you want it.”
“I’ll consider it,” I nodded, before heading back into my room as everyone began clearing out. I quickly swapped out my night robe for my regular clothes and robe, got my boots on, and made my way through the temple towards the Council chambers.
The elevator opened and I stepped into the room to find only four members gathered—Master Dooku, Master Yoda, Master Windu, and Master Mundi. Stepping into the center of the room, I gave a respectful half bow. “Masters. You called.”
“You’re late,” Windu pointed out, the question of why implied.
“I was sleeping and there was an explosion,” I answered simply.
“Explosion, you say?” Yoda asked, and I nodded.
“Something blew up the wall across from my room when a student came to get me. The temple guards are looking into it. I have reason to believe it may be related to the investigation Obi-wan and I undertook, regarding the Serenno map data,” I sent a look towards Master Dooku who nodded, a concerned look on his face.
“Troubling news indeed. Were you able to discover anything?”
“We did,” I confirmed. “I just spent the last several days coding a program to collate the data and tell us what was so important that it would apparently motivate someone to attempt to kill to cover it up. I’ll spare you the boring details. It should be finished running by the time we’re ready to leave, and if not, then before we get to Mandalore. If that was all…?” I asked, eager to get back to my warm bed and sleep.
“It was not,” Master Mundi spoke up, and I turned a questioning look on him. “We’ve gone over the report on the events that transpired on Dathomir and spoken with Master Dooku. In the report, you stated that you killed several natives.”
I frowned as I felt an undercurrent of worry travel through the room—or at least, from two of the three masters present, with Masters Dooku and Windu being the exceptions. Dooku felt calm as ever, while Windu felt… expectant? Like he was waiting for something. “In self-defense, yes.”
“The report stated that you were hidden and then sought them out, stalking them through the wreckage of the Chu’unthor and killing them. Those actions don’t so much fall under the conventional definition of ‘self-defense’ as they do ‘assassination.’ Why did you not try to escape? Why did you seek out combat?”
Taking a breath, I shifted my gaze from Mundi to Yoda, then Windu, and finally Dooku. Yoda looked expectant, but somehow disappointed. Windu still just looked like he was waiting. While Dooku… Master Dooku smiled encouragingly and nodded minutely. Taking that as the signal to proceed, I straightened up, coming to parade rest.
“I wasn’t aware that I was going to be put on trial for the actions I took to defend myself and our allies against a hostile force actively hunting anyone in the area when I compiled that report. If that’s the case, I request to be allowed to consult with legal counsel before this continues any further.”
“A trial this is not,” Yoda shook his head, briefly turning a reproachful look on Mundi. “Wish to understand your motives and actions, we do.”
Windu laced his fingers and leaned forward a bit in his chair. “We’ve read the report, yes. But we want to hear it from you. Tell us what happened.”
I took a breath in and held it for a moment, before nodding. “Very well. I finished up my personal projects in the Chu’unthor’s machine shop and began to leave the ship. I detected several hostile presences outside the ship entering it and beginning to search for me. With two outside waiting for someone to try to flee, I didn’t want to put myself between their forces. So, I engaged in stealth tactics, isolating and eliminating the enemies within the ship to avoid alerting the rest and having to fight multiple opponents in an enclosed space. Once the enemies inside were eliminated, I took out the guard on the door, then went after the last threat both to gather more information and ensure that I didn’t leave anyone behind who could perhaps track me back to our allies, then return with allies and start a larger conflict when we weren’t prepared for it. I questioned her and she confirmed that her forces were there to kill whoever had been in the ship. She offered to recruit me into their tribe and I politely declined. Negotiations broke down after that and a fight ensued. I won.”
“As I told you,” Dooku spoke up, looking amused, “a tactically sound, well-reasoned decision on Tanya’s part. Were it anyone else, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion.”
“It’s not anyone else,” Mundi pointed out. “Your emotions cloud your judgment, Master Dooku. You forget that this is a child. Not even a Padawan yet. We don’t teach those sorts of tactics to just anyone, and certainly not to our younglings. Is this something she learned on Dathomir, or is it a sign of something more? We need to know.”
“They do,” I answered, drawing the ire of the man with the disturbingly penis-like head. “Dathomir’s biome is extremely hostile. Due to this, flora and fauna both have adapted against predation, either by means of poison, camouflage, natural weapons or defenses like spines, and the like. Hunting on Dathomir requires both stealth and precision.”
Everything I said was one hundred percent true. It was also a lie, in that I didn’t learn using stealth tactics against enemies on Dathomir. No, I honed that particular skill in the trenches, sneaking under the line of machine gun fire, avoiding the sight of snipers and the detection of mages, to be able to slip close enough to introduce someone to the business end of my combat knife—or teach them the wonders of the trench shovel.
“Did you enjoy it?” Master Windu asked.
“Hm?” I sent him a curious look. “Enjoy what, exactly?”
“Killing them.”
“Ah,” I nodded. “If you mean, did I enjoy the battle? Then yes. Absolutely. I’m not some battle junkie, but I won’t deny that coming out the victor of a good fight feels amazing.”
Windu shook his head. “No, I meant the taking of life. You killed five people. Ended their lives. Normally, a Padawan’s first kill leaves them sick, shaken for days later—if not longer. It breaks some entirely. And yet, here you stand. Completely unaffected. So we have to ask, did you enjoy it?”
I sent the man a confused look. “Yes. Of course I did. Why wouldn’t I?”
All three of the masters aside from Dooku shifted nervously and I continued. “They must have known I was a child from whatever tracks they found, and still they intended to kill me. These were not good people, they were murderers. They came at me with the intent to kill, and enjoy doing it, because I was a child. Their goal was to set up an ambush and kill anyone else who came by as well. I am satisfied and happy that I ended a threat to myself and others. I am happy to be alive, to have survived an attempt upon my life by a numerically superior force. And I will not lose a moment of sleep over it. I’ll sleep soundly knowing that I did the world of Dathomir a service and avoided the fate of being fed to their spiders.”
Dooku chuckled and I looked over to see the man grinning. “Again, I told you. You were worried for nothing.”
“Surely you must concede that this is—” Mundi began, only for Yoda to raise a hand and cut him off.
“Return to your quarters, you may. That is all for now,” he sent me a nod.
“Thank you, Master,” I sighed. Yawning, I turned and made my way towards the elevator.
Stepping inside, I heard Mundi continue. “It’s not normal.”
“I’ve found that with Tanya, little is,” Dooku murmured as the doors slid closed.
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