Star Wars - Series Fan Fiction ❯ Covalent Bonds ❯ Chapter 42

[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]

The Dark Side was here, in the Temple, Adi thought. Besides Dooku, something oozed its way into the very nexus of Jedi beacons of the Light, something sneaky and spying, perhaps in the Map Room, though the pull from the Force came strongest from the west hangar. I wasn't deluded. Sometimes paranoia is justified. Regork said so, though he didn't use the word 'paranoia.' He hissed 'ssusspicionss,' instead. Adi thought back to her last meeting with him in his sparse quarters under his basking lamp. Soothing warmth and light, geared to avoid any depression due to winter's darkness by brightening one's mind as well as one's soul, the lamp was a perfect place to insert a listening device. Jedi confessions, worries concerning battle strategies, no, not strategies, but inclinations or a chance dropping of a planet's name that would lead to decisions being made ...decisions ... Adi skidded to a halt. "You. Go to Soul Healer Regork's quarters and pretend to fetch something for him. Talk to yourself."

Bursting with purpose and desire to help, the Whiphid flamed in the Force. "What about, Master?"

"Mutter about how boring it will be on Dantooine when you accompany the Olanet Three Hundred and the Jedi geriatrics to the Old Folks' Home there. Say you don't know why the old draigons couldn't pass into the Force properly in the Temple."

The Knight caught his breath and blinked his long lashes. He rubbed the circular tusk in use as his lightsaber ring nervously. "I-I'd never say that --- "

"It's a ruse to trick who's listening in, oh, never mind, just do it! Take ten minutes to rustle around and then rejoin me at the west hangar." No need to tiptoe about this now, Adi. "There is a listening device in Regork's lamp that the Separatists planted. Stomp around his quarters and make noise but speak near the lamp, got it?"

"Dantooine. Old Folks' Home. Temple. Near the lamp. Got it, Master." His forearm muscles bulged enough to nearly split his tunic before he replaced his lightsaber on his belt and pelted down the hall.

The lamp near where Jedi in need told their troubles housed a small diode that peeked out of the switch, where Soul Healer Regork's claws could not feel it. Someone knew a Glarsaur would operate this lamp, be insensitive to its small bubble of a diode, someone in Dooku's thrall had planted this lamp in the auction for Regork. And now the deception would be used against the Dark and for the Light. A light, in use against the Dark. Appropriate. Adi had never had a vision, yet this was real as a vision. She knew that something vile listened to their plans to cut the feet out from under the Jedi. Planting the lead to Dantooine as she had planted intel for Tholme was a good thing. Wait, Adi. You're at the west hangar. Don't charge in there alone. She peeked around the corner of the door from the Temple staging area after casting her senses into the large space. Is a Dark Sider in there? Is there? Is there? She was slightly over the top and knew it. Her senses murmured a reply. Along with six Force-blind beings inside, there blossomed a pure flower of selfish need, polluting the Force from a single being. Adi brushed aside a decoration from her Tholoth headdress that blocked her left eye and looked again. Master Yoda?

Yoda must have flown his repulsor chair at breakneck speed to get to the hangar before her, but then, he would. He was circling a idling Jedi transport, obviously helping a civilian employee check its readiness. He moved stiffly, as if his phenomenal age had finally caught up with him. There was a smell of another transport's exhaust, the peculiar smell of ion engine exhaust in the takeoff stage. The transport that Yoda circumnavigated had not yet reached that stage. Adi's heart dropped. Someone has left recently. I'm finding out who.

"Master Yoda!" Adi trotted into the hangar, stopping in confusion a few meters away from Yoda. This was odd, this was unheard-of. After years on the Council interpreting his speech patterns and deciphering his cryptic phrasing, she had thought she had seen everything. She had fantasized that she was his friend at times, and at other times his Padawan in the Jedi manner, and all of the time, she had respected him. This interpretation of him was new.

Yoda stopped tagging along in lockstep with the transport tech, but continued moving, rocking back and forth strangely on his feet that were shoulder-width apart. He moved one foot backwards and then back to the base, making a triangular step on the ground. He gave the impression of launching into a dance, or going into battle. This was not like the preliminaries to his usual Ataro form. The rest of his body swayed slightly, as if to an unheard melody. A martial melody.

"Master, where are you going?"

Yoda spoke in T'ra Saa's voice. "I don't want to hurt you, Adi. Let me go. I'm warning you." With Adi's snap-hiss of her lightsaber came T'ra's own. T'ra's large Yoda eyes burned into Adi's. "Adi. You're leaving the Order. Don't die for this."

I know what I'm up against. Reinforcements, where are you? "T'ra, it's not too late. We'll all help you, Tholme will help y--- "

"Not too late? It's already too late. For the Jedi." T'ra swept a fist backwards and the confused tech spun away to the far corner of the hangar as if in a whirlwind. Her fellows gathered her from the ground and skittered out the open door. There were only Jedi inside the hangar now.

Adi registered that footsteps thundered to her unguarded left side, but she never took her eyes off T'ra. T'ra shifted and grew upwards into her familiar shape, a shape that lacked heft and weight, because when T'ra continued moving her feet in her queer triangular steps, her bare toes resembled the thinnest of twigs while her legs in the short Yoda-robes took Adi back to memories of Knight Fee's topiary efforts. Adi stared at the gray hangar walls visible through T'ra's golden-skinned thighs. She's lost mass. She's stretched to her limit. The transport rumbled in its lowest warmup level. T'ra glanced at it once in longing.

"Adi! The guardss outsside Dooku's cell ssaid that Master Yoda came for him!" Regork drew his white lightsaber after setting Tholme down carefully.

"She was Master Yoda. She freed Dooku." The four Jedi faced off.

"T'ra." Tholme's voice was still hoarse from one full day without water. "Don't do this. Stay what you have always been, a Jedi. Rejoin your better nature."

"Adi is leaving. She is deserting your precious Order, Tholme."

Adi straightened her spine. Regork thrust out his tongue at T'ra, tasting her resolve. There iss no give in her. He went into his usual Form I stance, his basic one since Padawanhood.

Tholme tried again. "She talked with Master Yoda. She talked with me" --- but did not try to recruit me, why is that? --- "she thought things through so that she and the rest will be well-supported wherever they settle, so she did things the right way, can't you see that?"

T'ra Saa said the words that would break Tholme's heart. She was thankful that she did not have one. "The old Code is no more. It is a natural event, Tholme, for growth to occur when the roots of a thing are divided and replanted. Far better than some ways I can think of that a discrete body can change, reseeding only when it is burned to the ground. Our way, the Republic lives and the CIS lives. Wouldn't you agree my way is better than burning?"

Tholme's eye with sight looked as baleful as his unsighted one. "You're a traitor. To me. To Master Yoda. To your Order. What did you think Dooku meant to do, T'ra? What did he tempt you with?"

T'ra shifted again under his gaze. This time she appeared as young as when she first turned Romin, a tiny fraction of regained youth from her long lifespan that most would have overlooked. After thirty years with her as her closest companion, Tholme caught the difference. "Don't plead our relationship with me, T'ra." His voice was as even as it was during any interrogation. Anyone overhearing this encounter would have said so.

"Let me go. I want to be with Dooku now." He'll never do it and they'll never do it. It's time to strike, Jedi upon Jedi. I am as ready as I have been for anything in the past century. T'ra brought up her lightsaber in a Makashi salute, a deliberate insult to Tholme to use Dooku's Form II. She intended it to hurt, which it did. She intended it to unsettle him, which it did not. He had faced Dooku with strength and purpose on Bakura after Geonosis. He had been marked forever by the encounter and accepted that he had done his best. He could do no less with any enemy of the Order. He brought his own blade up in defense.

T''ra turned her triangular shuffle into a deadly dance. Diving for the weakest member of her opponents, she cartwheeled in front of Tholme, who brought his blade down to cut her in two, but she wasn't there. She had turned the cartwheel into a double spinning kick while she rotated on the ground on a hip, knocking out his game leg from under him. He collapsed with a moan, aiming his lightsaber at anywhere on her insubstantial body as he fell to the hard duracrete, but she had already rolled away. Adi and Regork took up the attack after Tholme had crawled to the side, holding his leg and his face grimmer than normal.

Regork's strengths were verbal, but his white lightsaber made an acceptable spear as he threw it at T'ra. She formed a hole in her body to create a passage for the lightsaber, and it only burned the rapidly shredding remnants of Yoda's stolen robes. While Regork called his lightsaber to him from where it had clattered against the wall, T'ra dodged Adi's strike and moved dangerously close to Regork's clawed feet. He kicked at her and his claws caught in her lattice-like body. He shook his foot that was impaling her torso, his large frame off-balance, and she laughed as she ducked under his hands. She cut off his tail a short distance from its root and detached herself from his foot as he screamed. The spurting crimson blood spattered Tholme, who had crawled under the transport to stay out of the way.

Tholme Force-pulled Regork to him. He whipped off his robe, cut away a swathe of material and used it for a bandage on the stump. Blood stickied the lubricant-stained floor with every pump of Regork's stressed heart. Tholme detached his leg brace and used it for a tourniquet twister with more strips of the robe. The stump stopped bleeding and Regork lay in shock against Tholme, his eyelids half-shut, some of his fine newly-grown scales falling from his hide. "Here, over here!" Tholme shouted as six Jedi stormed into the hangar.

"Master Yoda!" Adi called. Adi danced the new dance with T'ra, a gavotte of forward moves, retreats and kicks. Adi didn't know what to make of T'ra's style. The moves and rolls were beyond Adi's experience and she had fallen more than once for T'ra's feints. Her Tholoth headdress and the upper tip of an ear were burned away, but T'ra showed no signs of weakening. Adi's gasps and grunts of effort had no mirror in T'ra, whose breathing analog reflex seemed long-forgotten. Adi had not laid her blade on T'ra yet.

"Kenobi and Skywalker, between Saa and the transport, station yourselves. Escape, she must not. Mundi, see to Regork and Tholme. Tiin --- "
Saesee Tiin saw at once that his bulk would only be in the way. He concentrated on being the physical block to T'ra's departure. He raced to the hangar doors and planted each rock-solid foot in front of them. He called on the Force to shape a net, practiced throwing it to the top of the coaming and saw that it would only stall T'ra's transport. He pulled his comm unit out of his boot. "CorSec. CorSec. Master Tiin comming from the Jedi Temple. Reinforcements needed to block an escaped prisoner from entering orbit from the west hangar, repeat, the west hangar."
"CorSec here. Understood. Help is on the way."
"Make it fast, CorSec. Tiin out." No, he hadn't another idea. Yes, he would trust in the Force to save this situation from being a complete disaster. Adi, remember the Stark Hyperspace War? You and I handled things well together. We will handle events on Dantooine as leaders, and we will prevail here. Courage. He braced himself against the onslaught of distressed thoughts and agonized physical responses from his fellows. His telepathic senses were not always a help in battle situations. From his standpoint twenty meters away, he observed the fracas.
T'ra faced Yoda, Obi-Wan, Anakin and Adi, four tried-and-true Jedi adept at lightsaber battles, and flashed her blade over each of them with knee strikes delivered from her own knees against Yoda, handsprings and overhead chops at which Anakin battered ineffectually, and thorny elbow strikes against Obi-Wan that were delivered so close in that he did not dare to use his lightsaber for fear of severing his own or others' arms. For five heartstopping minutes, Adi thought that T'ra would defeat them all, especially after T'ra's headbutt against her throbbing head made her see stars. As if choreographed by a Sith, T'ra dropped and sprang up, cartwheeled and dipped her blade in and out of their attacks. Once she tripped Adi and Adi thought she was headed for the Force, but Anakin stepped in with a well-placed boot to crush T'ra's sword arm against the floor. T'ra made a strained face and popped her arm into its proper shape again. She stabbed at Anakin's knee, but he whipped it back just as Obi-Wan joined him on the attack. Adi, Obi-Wan and Anakin fought her as one as she snapped herself to her feet again and then Yoda, who had retreated to spy what his smaller form could do, pulled the spinning double kick on T'ra that she had used on Tholme. T'ra dropped and Anakin, Obi-Wan and Adi took arms and legs and torso to immobilize T'ra as she had Tholme for so many hours. T'ra froze in place. Her aura grayed out and they all Sensed her exhaustion.
Saesee came running up. "Master Yoda, CorSec is here."
"Need them, we do not. Send them away." Another of our own, turned against us. Gone wrong, so much has. Yoda plucked T'ra's lightsaber from her crushed hand. "Master T'ra Saa, I hereby suspend you from the Jedi Order. A shame to it, you have been."
Defiance made all of T'ra's body rigid, then realization of her defeat scoured the strength from her. She collapsed in on herself, and Anakin and Obi-Wan and Adi tumbled towards each other awkwardly on top of the nearly flat Neti. T'ra wasn't laughing as she had when mutilating Regork. From the corner of her eye, she saw the Glarsaur aided onto an anti-grav by Tholme and a few CorSec officers. Tholme caught her eye and hobbled over to her with Ki-Adi-Mundi's help. T'ra closed her eyes and seemed to shrink even further.
Never had Tholme wanted to weep so much as at the sight of T'ra brought down so low. Never before had he wanted to shout and rant at her. But his mouth was dry. "T'ra, you'll be punished. And you know how." For a Neti, there was only one sure imprisonment. In the dark, in the cold, where lack of sunlight for photosynthesis would leach all of her cells of energy. A Neti could hibernate a thousand years in that state, maybe more if she didn't starve first. Tholme had always known that he would pass into the Force before his longtime friend. To think of it as inevitable blackened his soul. It had been far better when he and she had battled the Separatists or any number of pre-war threats in their long careers. At least then he had not known absolutely that she would outlast him. In a small corner of his thoughts, that had comforted him even as it had embarrassed him at his lack of equanimity with her. I am not attached.
Maybe I can still use him. "Tholme!" Her colleagues watching her in sadness, her companion severing all ties to her and her plans for helping Dooku --- but not that metal monster Grievous --- come to naught, T'ra played her last sabacc hand. "Tholme, I know how Dooku and the Separatists were getting information, harming the Jedi and the Republic, don't put me into the dark and I'll tell you --- "
"I won't interrogate her, Master Yoda, not even for you or the Order." Yoda said nothing. Tholme leaned against Ki-Adi-Mundi as he looked down at the shriveled Master. "T'ra, we already know about the lamp. You had to change diodes frequently, didn't you? Our Light side power fried your technology." There was a commotion as a Whiphid Knight hurried up to the group.
Adi shrugged off the Knight's concerned frown about her ear. "Report."
"As ordered, Master."
"Good work, Knight. Master Yoda, I need to confer --- "
"Later, Master Gallia. Weary, I am, and rest we all need." Obi-Wan couldn't think of when Yoda had appeared this tired. "Knight, to the Archive's storeroom you will go, and quickly. Fetch the sealed container called Artifact Number 2416. Linger with the talkative clerk, you will not. Hurry!" T'ra no longer spoke. Her black foliage shrouded her new face, a cluster of gnarled roots that resembled naynabo clumps. Where she had retreated, no one could say, and the Force was silent. Obi-Wan walked to where Anakin waited beneath the transport's control surface. The young Knight ran a thoughtful hand over its gray metal as he waited for the strained conclusion to this episode.
"She's to be put into storage. She'll be lucky not to starve." Obi-Wan could not read his friend's mood.
"Obi-Wan, you know that I don't need a nav computer to calculate hyperspace jumps. Master Tiin and I have that in common."
He's on the track of some plan. "It's a gift that I wish I had."
"I'm the logical one to go after Dooku."
"We can propose to go on this mission to Master Yoda, after we're properly rested." I don't like the sound of this. Adi stayed guard over T'ra's unresponsive form, lightsaber at the ready, Obi-Wan saw. He pulled his attention back to Anakin.
I'm a Knight, I'm going to be a parent, I'm the Chosen One if that still means anything anymore. I've got to go after Dooku on my own. "We're stretched thin." The responsibility of full Knighthood hit Anakin like a neutronium weight. He looked to Obi-Wan for support but Obi-Wan was looking at Ki-Adi-Mundi's slow retreat from the hangar bracing a proudly-upright Tholme and missed the appeal. This will mean Mastery for me if I succeed, Anakin thought, and then I'll be on an equal footing with you, regarding rank anyway. "I'll go after Dooku," he repeated. "I do not know the way now, but I'll find it. And I'll need your help here, with all the Temple's resources." He rubbed at the spot where his Padawan braid used to be and pulled out the binding on his Knight's tail. The hair reached the bottom of his ears.
Obi-Wan thought of the braid resting in his cloak back at the Council chambers. This is how to love him now. Don't hug him, don't touch him. Listen to him. "I shall do my best."
Meanwhile, at the Vice-Chancellor of the Republic's office ...
"Cousin Enri, thanks for giving the children at the Museum rides in the Torpedo. Some of them are underpriviliged."
"My pleasure, Cousin." Cousin Padme's neck is like durasteel. I'm going swimming with her and loosen her up.
Those hands, oh ... "Nggh, eh, that's enough. Much better."
"Beat you to the spa."
"I've got too much work, but thanks for the thought." Padme rustled flimsies. "And Organa is gone today. Breha time, you know."
I can't picture making love on a timetable. It ought to be natural, spontaneous and above all, not work. "Our Supreme Chancellor is supreme."
"He juggles many balls, true." Alderaan, now there's a place to raise children. Not here in Coruscant, unless it's a home like the Jedi Temple.
"Are you certain that I can't tempt you? A nice synchronized swim? I am better at it. You're an amazing teacher for a hick like me."
"Never. You're never a hick, or a burden. Why someone hasn't gobbled you up into the dating game, I don't know. I would, if we weren't, um ... " Stop.
Go ahead, Enri. Enri loomed over her, hands back on her neck. He fit each palm around half of the slender white column and felt the life pulsing there, the need, the dedication to the Republic. Her need today was for his friendship. "I'm a virgin, Cousin," he said. "I think they figure it out here after a while." Don't laugh.
What? Padme stared straight ahead. After a whole minute had passed, she spoke. "I'm flattered that you confided that to me. It's rare."
Enri rubbed the soft skin of her neck and moved down to her shoulders. "You're family, Cousin," he chuckled. "Varykino Parish has some nice ladies, attractive ladies, but not the right one, I suppose. I've liked datapads better than women for companions lately. I'm in no rush to attach myself. I'm only twenty-nine." Take it easy. Everything has a season. Mine hasn't come yet.
Ninth cousin, two times removed. Ninth cousin, two times removed. Ninth --- "There's a private spa in this building. I have the key," someone with Padme's voice said. "Maybe I could use some relaxation for an hour." With no expectations.
No expectations. "That sounds pleasant. Will you need your aide for your disrobing? That is an expensive bit of costume."
"It's summer, Cousin, and this is a duracotton sheath. Easy on, easy off. I don't need to impress every day." And I have no more handmaidens. There is a war on and we economize where we can.
"You see? I am a hick." She's smiling.
"Oh, you fooler, you. Come on."
TBC