I have a message from another time... Eyrie Productions, Unlimited presents UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES FUTURE IMPERFECT - SYMPHONY OF THE SWORD No. 4 - Seventh Movement: The Revolution Will Be Televised Benjamin D. Hutchins with Janice Barlow Chad Collier (c) 2004 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2409 09:02 AM LOCAL TIME ALDERA, ALDERAAN "I'm Nanami Jinnai for Big Time TV News, coming to you live and direct from the meeting chamber of the High Council of Jedi Masters, in the central temple of the Jedi Order on Alderaan. Today we're witnessing an unprecedented event in television history - an official hearing before the Jedi Council. ... And the councilors are entering the chamber now, so it appears the proceedings are ready to begin." The seven Jedi Masters entered the room and took their seats with unhurried calm, despite the unusual crowd that had gathered in their council chamber. The room was configured like a courtroom, with six councilors seated in a row where the judge would normally be and the seventh at what looked rather like the prosecutor's place. What was to happen here was not precisely a trial, but its structure was similar enough that the furnishings were familiar. The "prosecutor" remained on his feet as the other councilors seated themselves. A tall, rather grim-looking human male with dark skin, he had an air of severity and a military bearing - close-cropped hair, his robes just so, his stance erect, his visage forbidding. "Esteemed members of the High Council," he said, "we are gathered today to hear evidence in the unfortunate affair which took place last week on the Klingon homeworld of Qo'noS, and the parts played in that drama by two members of our Order." Turning, the man raked his eyes over the assemblage of "guests", his expression making it clear how welcome he felt most of them were in the chamber. "For those of you who do not know me," he said, "I am Master Jason Lock. As Prime Sentinel of the Sentinels of Light, I will preside over this hearing. My fellow councilors will now identify themselves for the record." At the far left side of the bench, a white-skinned and comely young twi'lek woman who looked (and dressed) more like a dancer than a Jedi Master said in a tone that hinted at nascent boredom, "Zaerdra vos Kevtiin abti'kva Slaarti-rykom Kinshasa of Ryloth." A few of the more perceptive onlookers thought they saw Lock bristle very slightly at that, but he gave no overt sign. Next to Zaerdra was a diminutive green figure with a pair of sharply pointed antennae and large, glossy purple eyes. He was dressed in a long (for his size) black coat and had a faintly pugnacious air. "Invader Vert," he said, his voice surprisingly mellow for that of such a creature. "Irken Elite, retired; serving the Force by the grace of the Tallest." To Vert's left, a woman in ornate robes combining the styles of the Jedi and the Minbari warrior caste got smoothly to her feet and inclined her spiky-crested head. "Jedi Master Faloon, Archivist of the Jedi Order." As Faloon returned to her seat, the man next to her rose. He was a dark-skinned human like Lock, but completely bald and somewhat less severe-looking. He had a gold-inlaid lightsaber at his belt and carried himself with a lethal grace that stood out even in -this- room. "Jedi Master Mace Windu," he said. "Chairman of the Jedi Council." Windu returned to his seat. The next councilor, a Rodian, didn't stand. Instead, he gazed mildly at Lock with his big, unnervingly blank black eyes, held it just long enough to make the Prime Sentinel shift uncomfortably, and then said in a calm, slightly reedy voice, "Jedi Master Bolo Burke of Rodia, Chief of the Intelligence Service of the Order of Jedi Knights." Then he sat back, steepled his sucker-tipped fingers, and settled into a meditative immobility, his shiny black eyes still fixed on Lock. At the end of the line, on the far right of the council's tribunal-style bench, the last of the councilors shifted slightly on his cushion. Like Burke, he didn't rise. He merely inclined his wrinkled, white-haired head and said, "Yoda am I. Mm." Lock regarded the ancient Jedi Master for a few seconds, expecting him to say more, but more was not forthcoming. After a few moments, he cleared his throat, turned around, and said, "Very well. The Council will begin hearing the testimony of witnesses." "You are Corporal Michael Tucker of the 131st Special Mission Force, Tactical Division, International Police Organization. Correct?" Tucker shifted slightly under the piercing gaze of the Jedi Master, but his voice was steady as he replied, "That's right." For this occasion, Tucker was wearing his full field kit, less weapons - Frame, Barrier, helmet, the works. All the Repo Men were. It wasn't necessary, they were hardly likely to be attacked -here-, but they'd chosen to do so anyway. It was symbolic of their combined resolve or some such. It provided a certain psychological advantage, too. Tucker, for one, knew he felt more comfortable with the familiar armor around him, even if that comfort were purely imaginary. "You were present for the entire Qo'noS incident?" Lock inquired. Tucker nodded. "I wasn't involved in every action - there was a lot going on at any one time - but I was on the planet for the whole incident, yes." "Mm. Suppose you tell the Council how the trouble began, in your opinion, Corporal." Tucker considered. "Well, that'd have to be when that Klingon cockbite took a shot at the Commodore." /-- MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2409 QO'NOS, CAPITAL OF THE KLINGON EMPIRE Commodore Utena Tenjou, interim commander of the International Police Space Force while its founder was out on bereavment leave, generally despised giving speeches. This one, commemorating the pact between the Klingon government and the IPO, wasn't so bad, because she'd had some leeway about it, and she was delivering it in Klingonese; the overall effect reminded her of afternoons spent with Kraalgh in the Castle, trading jests in the Warriors' Tongue around exchanges of steel. She fell into the martial rhythm of the language and started to actually enjoy herself as the speech wound up to its conclusion. Utena said. Just then Utena's AEGIS operative, former Psi Cop Carmela Sunderland, who was watching from the audience, shot out of her chair like a bullet from a gun. Sunderland shouted for backup and made for a man dressed in Klingon trooper's livery about eight rows from the podium. The man stood, turned as if to flee, then whirled and yanked a disruptor pistol from his baldric. Utena's eyes widened in surprise; she made to throw herself out of the path of the bolt, thinking as she did so that she was probably too late - - when from behind her there came a tremendous bellow and a blur of motion. The slight distortion in the air behind the Commodore (which few had even noticed before now) abruptly resolved itself into a hulking, blue-armored shape looming protectively over her. Tuncer's appearance was as sudden and startling as a ship jumping unexpectedly out of hyperspace. "AaaaAAAAAaaa bokokata TENjou WURTWURTWURT!" the Last Elite roared as the disruptor bolt, a pulse of modulated energy capable of vaporizing a human in her tracks, slashed across the room. Tuncer moved with impossibly fluid quickness for a creature of his bulk, raising his right hand as if intending to catch the bolt like a baseball - and that was exactly what he did. His normally invisible bodyshield coruscated blue-white as the advanced Covenant energy barrier blocked and shed the blast. "Holy shit!" Sgt. Pete Stacker blurted. "Holy SHIT!" said Tucker. "MAdre de DIOS!" cried Adrian Mendoza. Still moving - his motion had never stopped - the Elite hurled himself from the podium into the crowd, barking a guttural order to his troops. The Repo Men scattered around the chamber were already on it, elbowing their way through the confused and startled crowd, dogpiling the would-be assassin, Sunderland wrestling the disruptor out of his hand. Utena didn't sit still and gawk at Tuncer's move; even as the Elite was intercepting the disruptor blast meant for her, she dove and rolled across the stage. She came up back-to-back with someone else, her lightsaber in her hand, and the snap-hiss of two sabers igniting echoed across the chaos in the room. Anne Springsteen smiled briefly over her shoulder. "So, Commodore," the Jedi said conversationally. "How does it feel to be important enough to be assassinated?" "Well, shit. And here I was just saying what great friends we all are," Utena quipped. "Where's Anthy?" "Bastila and a couple of McCandless's troopers evacuated her when things went south," Anne replied. "Probably back on Challenger by now." Utena chuckled darkly. "Well, they'll live to regret having done -that-," she said. Anne joined in the chuckle. "No doubt. They weren't sufficiently briefed," she added. "They think she's a regular dignitary's wife. Anyway, I think this is over," the Jedi observed, shutting down her lightsaber and looking warily around the room. "I don't sense any disturbances in the Force, and Carmela hasn't picked out any other malcontents." Utena deactivated her saber and surveyed the scene. Tuncer was shaking the unconscious Klingon and roaring at him. Tucker, Mendoza, and Dubbo stood watching him uncertainly, their weapons at port arms. The White Legion troopers were leading the last of the assembled spectators from the room with the aid of some Klingon security officers. Carmela was standing with the Repo Men, looking at Tuncer with some concern. "Tuncer!" Utena called. "Easy! Let him down already. He's not going anywhere." "Boko WURT nakaTABA kaAAaa'aka," Tuncer replied, giving the Klingon a last shake for good measure. "Damn, amigo," Mendoza observed in the sudden silence. "I'm glad you're on -our- side." "Fuckin' A," Tucker agreed. "Tunce, don't kill the motherfucker, we might need him later." --/ "The would-be assassin wouldn't talk, except to say that he acted alone. My efforts to determine his truthfulness were not conclusive," Carmela Sunderland reported calmly. Lock gave her a judicious look. "And what does that mean?" he asked. Sunderland shrugged. "He'd had high-level security training. It's not all that uncommon for soldiers and security operatives to be able to hide things from a surface scan." "But you're a P12 AEGIS operative," Lock pointed out, "and former Psi Cop. A trained telepathic investigator." Sunderland nodded. "And if I'd had the authority to use all my skills, I could have learned whatever I wanted to know," she replied with unperturbed confidence. "However, AEGIS regulations have very clear guidelines as to what levels of telepathic force are permitted under what conditions. With no concrete evidence linking the man to any sort of conspiracy, I had insufficient probable cause to perform a deep scan." "I see," Lock said. "So you were unable to determine whether the assassin had any motivation beyond a simple dislike for Commodore Tenjou and what she represented." "That's correct. My Klingon counterpart, Chief Investigator Ektaar Thalekh of the Imperial Criminal Pursuit Force, believed otherwise, but his application of more conventional local interview techniques was no more fruitful than my own effort." A dark chuckle made the rounds of the gallery at Sunderland's elegant euphemism for "Klingon torture". Lock shot the room a hard look, then turned back to his questioning. "What happened next?" "Things were quiet for the next couple of days," Sunderland replied. "Investigator Thalekh and I pursued some other leads, but nothing came of them. Commodore Tenjou continued her talks with the Council and the Klingon High Command. Nothing else happened until Wednesday." "What happened Wednesday?" Lock asked. Sunderland smiled slightly. "All hell broke loose." /-- WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2409 12:18 PM LOCAL TIME QO'NOS "What's going on?" Utena asked as she entered the High Council's chamber. "We don't know yet," Chancellor Krojaar replied, a little testily. "The military communications network seems to have broken down." "It's not a breakdown," General Ktarl, the Chancellor's chief of staff, growled from the master control console. "Hard links have been cut and transmissions are being jammed." Utena tapped her IPO commbadge. "Tenjou to Challenger. Hoshi? Lore?" Nothing. "Tenjou to Red Team. McCandless, you there?" Again silence was the only response. She frowned. "Definitely not good." She transferred her attention from the badge to the other communications device she possessed, one for which she knew of no effective jamming method. [Lore! What the hell's going on?] The mental "voice" of her executive officer, Lore Soong, replied, and it bore no trace of its usual whimsy. [I was just about to ask if you knew,] Lore said. [A considerable force of Klingon starships has just jumped into the system, along with... well, I'm not really sure -what- it is. Some sort of mobile battlestation. I've never seen anything quite like it. Whatever it is, it's kicking out a lot of subspace interference, making scans difficult.] [Any communications?] [None, but they're approaching the planet in a fairly standard pre-blockade formation. All in all, I'd classify the outlook as 'ominous'. Worse, transporters won't work with this kind of jamming going on,] Lore noted. [We'll have to arrange conventional transport to extract you.] [OK, hang tight. All comms are out down here. I'm trying to piece together where my forces are.] [Roger that.] Utena broke the connection and went "looking" for the only other Lensman in the local contingent. [Tuncer, this is Commodore Tenjou. Where are you?] There was a short pause, and then the Repo Men's commander responded. Having Lens conversations with the Last Elite always felt a little weird to Utena. The hulking alien's mouthparts didn't do so well with Standard, so in person he usually spoke in his own language and let one of the Repo Men translate if anybody needed it. Of course, the limitations of one's body didn't apply to a Lens conversation, so his response came back perfectly clear, but his mental voice "sounded" the same as always. It was strange to hear that voice speaking in words she could understand. [Tuncer reporting,] was the response. [My men and I are in the southeastern district of the capital zone, conducting assault and evasion drills with the Klingon Defense Forces. What is the trouble?] [I'm not sure,] Utena replied, [but I think we might be standing in the middle of an impending coup.] [Indeed. That would explain the strange behavior of the local Klingon garrison commander. He seems inordinately preoccupied.] [Damn. I don't like this at all. I need you guys back here at the Capitol ASAP.] [Aye, we'll disengage and move out immediately. Tuncer out.] Michael Tucker was creeping through the underbrush, attempting to flank the simulated Klingon position and get himself placed for some sniper action, when his helmet comlink clicked to the secure channel and everything changed. came the voice of Tucker's commander, speaking now in his guttural native tongue. The Elite's voice was curiously muffled - he was subvocalizing, keeping his mandibles shut and using his mastoid pickup. Tuncer went on. Up in the top left corner of Tucker's helmet HUD, the leftmost icon on the row of squadmembers ticked from blue to green. Tucker stopped crawling and got busy. First he reached to his holstered plasma sidearm and switched it from training mode to full power. Then he toggled his Frame's shield generator to defense mode. As the charge indicator slid to the right and brightened, he pulled the magazine of training markers from his S2-AM sniper rifle, slotted a mag of genuine armor-piercing shells, and chambered a round. Satisfied that he'd completed the switch to combat mode, he tagged in, switching his own icon on the roster from blue to green. He was the fourth trooper to do so, having been slowed down slightly by the need to reload his rifle the old-fashioned way where the troopers with standard armaments only had to flick a couple of switches. "Tucker!" another voice crackled in Tucker's headset. "What's going on?" "I don't know, Caboose," Tucker replied under his breath. "I heard the same message you did." Private Dougal "Caboose" O'Malley was Tucker's spotter, and though he was decent at the job, he was personally a bit irritating. He had an unfortunate habit of asking dumb questions at bad times. Like now. At the Klingon command post, Commander Kroj vathKanlor looked over the tactical plot, then went to the window of his CP and had a look at the simulated battlefield. Not simulated for much longer, he thought to himself with a smile. said his executive officer, Sub-Commander Vargh tai-Kalek. Kroj's smile broadened, showing his sharpened teeth. Vargh nodded. Kroj's jagged grin became wider still, and nastier. He stabbed a finger down on the command post communications panel. Karg, son of Larg, had been waiting for that moment all day. As the heavy weapons specialist of Kroj's battalion, he'd had his eye on the big reptilian beast the humans called their leader since the exercise began. He'd heard the stories of the Covenant Elite's legendary resilience and battle prowess. Klingons had fought in the Covenant War, centuries before, and the stories of those glorious conflicts had come down to Karg's generation. The phrase for the beasts in the Klingonese of the period translated literally to "Boatman of the Black Fleet". As the wielder of the battalion's Mark XII heavy disruptor, the most powerful man-portable weapon in the Klingon arsenal, Karg considered it his duty and his privilege to show this "boatman" what modern Klingons thought of his kind. Now, receiving the order to commence true battle, he jacked the massive weapon's power output to maximum, raised it, and fired. The brilliant orange beam lashed out, ripping apart the very air in its path with a sound like a thunderclap, and struck the towering alien square in the back. Tuncer roared with fury as his shields went offline with a tremendous POP and sirens began sounding in his helmet. He whirled, trailing smoke from the scorched spot on his back armor, and raised his plasma rifle, but Karg's next blast tore into a Klingon light utility vehicle that was parked nearby, sending the vehicle up in a giant fireball. The shockwave slapped Tuncer down, breaking his grip on his weapon, and he vanished in the wash of flame. Shaking with laughter, Karg sprayed the area with disruptor fire, turning a significant chunk of real estate into a charred and blasted ruin. He only stopped shooting when his Mark XII overheated, a condition which automatically locked the fire control system until the coils cooled back to a safe operating temperature. Karg cried triumphantly. He was interrupted by a guttural, wrathful snarl from behind him. Whirling, he saw a sight his brain at first couldn't interpret: One of the squat, heavy-wheeled vehicles the Defense Forces had recently bought from their IPO allies - the humans called them "Warthogs", a name that didn't translate well into Klingonese - appeared to be rising unsupported into the air. Then something beneath it flickered, shimmered, and resolved itself into a distinctive blue-armored shape. With corded muscles bulging under his scaly hide, a thoroughly non-disintegrated Tuncer heaved the multi-ton utility vehicle into the air above his bullet- shaped head. His quartet of jagged-fanged mandibles swung wide open. "AaaAAaaa kapataka WAMba chaTUkaaa!" Tuncer snarled, and then, with a mighty heave, he hurled the Warthog at Karg. The Klingon snapped up his disruptor and yanked the trigger, but the weapon was still overheated and refused to fire. <... no,> Karg murmured, his mind locked in total disbelief. WHRUNCH. Pete Stacker, who had just emerged from a thicket of small trees near the burning Klingon vehicle, winced. "What's the plan?" he asked. Tuncer replied. Tuncer's alien face made the expression his squadmates had learned to recognize as his version of a sardonic little grin. "And then?" Tuncer found his plasma rifle, picked it up, checked it over, and then turned to Stacker. At that moment, Utena was taking stock of what resources she had, and not liking much of what she was seeing. The Repo Men were entangled in the woods to the southeast of the city. Jay McCandless's Red Team was somewhere in the western part of the city itself, at a Klingon Defense Forces training station. She'd heard nothing from them at all. Bastila was with the Repo Men, Anne Springsteen with the Red Team. The Repo Men had left their Napoleon mini-tank behind when they went out on maneuvers with the KDF two days before, but its commander, Chips Dubbo, was out with them. The unit's Pelican transport and its pilot, Carol "Foe-Hammer" Rowley, were present as well, but the Pelican was slow and unarmed, which made it of limited utility. As for Red Team, they'd left their Pelican too, but not its pilot. Sachiko Asaki was also a trooper - the number-three trooper in the squad - and she was in the field with the rest. All of which left Utena with relatively few assets right where she could put her hands on them. She had Carmela Sunderland, her AEGIS operative. She had herself. She had Anthy. She had her flagship overhead, being closed in on by a much larger Klingon force that was probably hostile. And that was pretty much it. Against that, she wasn't sure what she was up against yet. The Klingon Defense Forces seemed to have fragmented, with some units suddenly turning against the government with the approach of this unknown force and others still professing loyalty. With the communications network fragmented, it was hard to get even a semblance of a picture. All General Ktarl knew for sure was that the capitol garrison, all hand-picked men and women, remained loyal. There had been no announcement yet from any organized opposition. The thing was unfolding haphazardly, in a piecemeal fashion, and if there was a central force guiding events, it hadn't shown itself yet. Utena had just finished relaying that information, such as it was, by Lens to Acting Chief Steve Rogers when that part of the report became obsolete. one of Ktarl's subalterns called from the communications panel. Ktarl ordered. A moment later, the holographic projector in the center of the Klingon High Council's chamber glowed to life, and above it appeared the image of two men. One was dressed all in black, with a hooded cloak obscuring both his face and figure to the point where he was unrecognizable. The other was -instantly- recognizable, and at the sight of him Utena, the general, and the members of the Council all stiffened in sudden shock. He was big and burly even for a Klingon, and he was dressed in armor of a great and ostentatious costliness. Jeweled rings gleamed on his fingers; a large gem twinkled on a chain around his neck. His long hair was snow-white and drawn back into an impressive warrior's queue. he boomed with a broad, triumphant grin. Utena was the first to find her voice, pronouncing the man's name with a combination of shock and venom: "KLAYVOR!" --/ "I could see that it all became clear to Commodore Tenjou at that moment," Sunderland said. "I didn't have a clue myself, not having been around for the beginning of that particular drama, but she filled me in later." "Do you feel qualified to give the Council the broad strokes?" Lock inquired. Sunderland nodded. "It's reasonably simple. Klayvor vestai-Klavaar was a renegade Klingon warlord, the head of a noble house. He's the uncle of a friend of Commodore Tenjou. They once had a run-in regarding Klayvor's niece, I believe, after which Klayvor used one of his family's battlecruisers to ambush the Commodore's first command, the starship Valiant, on her maiden cruise in 2406. The Valiant's crew handed Klayvor and his house troops an embarrassing defeat and took their ship, but Klayvor disappeared. He wasn't seen again until his arrival at Qo'noS last week." "But in the interim he amassed enough of a following within the Klingon Empire's military hierarchy to seize control of a large portion of the Defense Forces - enough to launch a putsch." "Apparently so." "Thank you, Agent Sunderland. That's all I need from you at the moment." Sunderland was replaced in the witness box by a tall, broad-shouldered man with neatly trimmed dark-brown hair and a lantern jaw. He wore an immaculate black military uniform and adopted a precise parade-rest stance. "First Lieutenant John Jay McCandless, Company A, First of the Twenty-First, GENOM Seventh White Legion," he said, then lowered himself smoothly and precisely into the chair, his bearing perfectly correct, perfectly military. This was the kind of thing Lock, a military man himself after a fashion, liked to see. He smiled slightly. "Very good," he said. "Lieutenant McCandless, can you tell the Council where you were when hostilities began?" McCandless nodded. "Certainly, Master Jedi. I was in the western district of the Klingon capital, covering Jedi Knight Anne Springsteen's back while she stole a vehicle." Lock blinked. "... And why did Jedi Springsteen feel it necessary to steal a vehicle?" he asked frostily after taking a moment to collect himself. "It seemed the most expedient way of escaping from the Klingons who were trying to capture or kill us," McCandless said. "We were off-duty at the time. The rest of my squad was within a KDF training compound on a rest cycle; they were captured easily." "But you and Jedi Springsteen were not." "No, sir. We were at liberty in the city proper." "If your entire squad was available, why were they not with you?" Lock asked. McCandless arched an eyebrow slightly. "Respectfully, Master Jedi, do you take the rest of the Council with you when you buy a girl lunch?" Zaerdra Kinshasa didn't even bother stifling a laugh, drawing an instant's glare from Lock. /-- "I'll say this for you, Jay," Anne Springsteen observed wryly as she worked at overriding the garbage truck's control system while disruptor fire thudded and zorched into the metal of the compactor bay behind the cab. "You're never dull to be around." McCandless laughed, though the mirth was a bit forced. Per regulations, since he was off-duty and not in an area designated a combat or militarized zone, McCandless was wearing his class-B uniform, not his White Legion armor. The black duty uniform of a Legion officer incorporated a microweave that made it more durable than it looked, but it was no impervium bodyshell. It didn't have a carbine holster, either, so the only weapon he had was his standard-issue officer's sidearm, a KYD-21 blaster pistol, complete with the muzzle brake that made it sound just like a TIE cannon. Not anywhere near as powerful, though, alas. The stormtrooper lieutenant caught movement in the side mirror. Twisting his body, he leaned out of the passenger window of the truck, facing backward, and pegged the Klingon who had started edging around the end of the compactor. The man staggered, his armor having absorbed part of the blast, and McCandless shot him again. A second later, Anne got the truck started and they were off. McCandless laid down some covering fire as more Klingon troopers came into view, falling behind the truck, but he didn't think he hit any of them. He slid back through the window and into his seat, checking the blaster's charge level, and was just about to remark on the situation when they passed under an overpass and he heard a heavy THUD on the roof of the cab. "Hear that?" he asked. Anne nodded, jamming the wheel hard over and working the thruster pedals to slew the heavy truck around a corner and onto a distressingly narrow side street. "Sounds like we've got a passenger," she said. A second later, a disruptor blast sheared through the thin metal of the cab roof and punched down through the floor, narrowly missing McCandless's shoulder. He considered returning fire, but wasn't all that keen on firing blind in a built-up area. Presumably there were -some- Klingons around here who hadn't just inexplicably turned against them, and it wouldn't do to go shooting up the whole town. Anne took the problem out of his hands by drawing her lightsaber, flipping it upright, igniting it, and then shoving it through the ceiling. The thrust drew a cry of pain from above, and then McCandless saw a Klingon soldier fall from the truck to land heavily in the street. A moment later, a severed hand tumbled down the windshield, rolled across the hood, and disappeared in the slipstream. "Good aim," McCandless remarked as the Jedi put her lightsaber away. Anne shrugged. "Lucky guess," she said, then kicked down some counter-thruster and pivoted the truck like a racing hovercraft. The massive vehicle skidded sideways down a permacrete embankment and onto an expressway, much to the consternation of the traffic already on that road. "We've got to get back to the base as soon as we can," McCandless said, scanning the mirror for pursuit. "God only knows what kind of mess Julius is making as we speak." As it happened, Julius Van der Groot, McCandless's top sergeant, wasn't making a mess at the moment. He wasn't really in a position to do so, on the face of it, since he was strapped quite immobile to a torture device. After throwing the rest of the Red Team's members into cells in the training compound's brig, the Klingons who had seized control of the facility took Van der Groot out of his to the interrogation room and strapped him to a device whose name loosely translated, if his Klingonese were up to the task, as "the agonizer table". This was a sort of rotating pallet that could, with the simple movement of a lever, be turned to bring more or less of the front of the victim's body in contact with a large array of energized probes and needles. The device worked by using phased energy to stimulate nerve endings directly, so it left no outward damage. Van der Groot could almost have admired its elegance if he hadn't been busy being subjected to its effects. The Klingons were apparently doing this just for fun. No one had asked him a single question in the hour or so it had been going on. They just tipped him this way and that, zapped him over and over with different sections of the probe array, occasionally slapped him around a bit for a change of pace, and laughed. It seemed to be grand sport to them. Well, that was all right. He was a Dutch Valerian, a native of a colony whose gravity was nearly three and a half times that of Earth, and he could handle punishment. Better they'd decided to put the big guy on the rack and see if they could break him, rather than turn their attention to one of his squadmates. All the members of the team were necessarily tough - one didn't get to be a trooper in an elite special action force of the White Legion by being weak - but the others didn't have the same amount of mass to work with. Besides, if they were really torturing him just for the fun of it, that was fair. He did, after all, intend to smash their heads together just for the fun of it once he got loose. From his elevated command post, Kroj vathKanlor looked out over the tiny swarm of human IPO troopers trying to escape the exercise area and sneered. He turned to Vargh and pointed, laughing derisively. he said. Vargh made a noncommittal noise. the smaller Klingon replied, Kroj nodded, rubbing his hands together gleefully. In the corner of the command post, two of Kroj's subordinates glanced at each other in surprise. one asked the other, who shrugged. Private Leonard L. Church, deceased, cleared his borrowed throat quickly. Most of the time, he sounded really strange when he possessed someone - sort of pinched, or squeaky - and they always made that weird noise when he jumped in. He couldn't mess this one up. Tucker was counting on him to lure some of these guys out of cover. And besides, he was a -Klingon-. This was -way- cooler than the time Stacker had needed him to possesss a Gungan. Tucker would probably wet himself if he could see Church from here. He flexed for a second and turned back to the other Klingon. "The fuck is he DOING?!" Tucker said, peering into the scope of his S2-AM sniper rifle. "He's up there doing some kind of Klingon beefcake shit when we're supposed to be killing people. Christ." Caboose O'Malley shrugged. "Maybe he's having a problem possessing the guy," he offered. "I mean, has he ever, you know, done that to a Klingon before?" "I don't know," Tucker admitted. "Guess we stay here until he gets back and see what happens. I'll take any shot he can give me." Caboose settled back against the trunk of the tree they were perched in and went back to carving his initials in the branch with his Ka-Bar. "Hey, Tucker," he said suddenly, as if he'd just had a great idea. "Tucker! Tucker, hey, Tucker, Tucker." "-What-," Tucker growled. "You got anything to eat?" Tucker sighed and leaned over the rifle again. Vargh tai-Kalek was an ambitious man, but replacing Kroj vathKanlor after the latter had ignominously choked on the field of battle was not what he had had in mind for his own ascension to power. He contrived to look concerned and punched Kroj in the arm. he asked. Church turned, cleared his throat again - the rumbly sensation was sort of interesting - and hoped to God he didn't fuck up. Kroj roared. Vargh blanched. he lied smoothly. Kroj demanded. Vargh eyed him warily. he replied. Kroj said dismissively, waving a hand. "Tucker?" Caboose asked. "What?" Tucker replied, adjusting the rifle. "Can I, you know... ?" the other Repo Man asked. "NO, Caboose, you -can't- be the sniper this time," Tucker said exasperatedly. "Last time, you killed Church. Again." "But that was the mission!" Caboose protested. "Next time?" "Sure, sure," Tucker mumbled, lining up a shot on the smaller Klingon. "That's it, Church, draw him a out a little more... " "Tucker?" Caboose asked after a moment. "What!" Tucker snapped. "... how do you know which one's Church?" Caboose asked. "I mean, they both look like Klingons, how do you know which one is really Church?" Tucker turned to the younger Marine and replied with some asperity, "Caboose? When you get me get killed someday, which I have no doubt whatsoever that you will? I am going to HAUNT your noob ass. And when I do - when your ass is haunted like MINE is - you will know EXACTLY howIknowWHICHONE'SCHURCH. OK?! Now fucking let me take my SHOT already! Christ." Caboose relented. Tucker sighted on the smaller Klingon and tightened his finger on the trigger. Vargh pondered his commander's increasingly erratic behavior. It was said - by the rank and file, of course, merely a trooper's superstition - that those marked for the Black Fleet were taken by battle madness in their last stands, the better to slaughter the enemy and arrive in Sto-Vo-Kor covered in glory. As a rational man, Vargh doubted such tales; however, Kroj's erratic behavior and strange, bestial noises were not precisely reassuring to his rational mind. In addition, Lord Klayvor disliked treachery in his ranks - but he disliked incompetence even more. Vargh pondered that. Treachery. It was one thing to fell one's commander in cold blood upon his field of battle... ... but quite another to arrange a convenient accident in the heat of war. He sidled behind Kroj and drew his d'k tagh silently. "Well, FUCK," Tucker expostulated. "What?" Caboose said, swinging his legs from the branch gently. "What what? What?" "I'm gonna have to shoot Church," Tucker said, the way a normal person might have said, "I'm gonna have to take the expressway." "So?" Caboose wondered. "Not like you haven't done THAT before." "I didn't shoot him before," Tucker said testily. "I blew him up with a grenade." "Oh," Caboose said. "Uh, yeah, I can see where that'd make a huge philosophical difference. Do you want me to do it? I don't have any ethical problems with killing someone who's already dead." "Shut the fuck up, Caboose," Tucker replied. So saying, he turned back to the rifle and put a round neatly through Kroj vathKanlor's head. Vargh might have expected his commander - enraged by battle madness as he was, and not in control of his faculties, after all - to turn and destroy him for his betrayal. He certainly did not expect Kroj to fall backwards upon him, pinning him beneath the full dead weight of a Klingon warrior. He struggled to force the d'k tagh back into his belt, lest anyone find him in such a compromising position. he ventured. Tucker's next shot silenced the second Klingon's confusion, but after that things got a bit hectic. The other Klingons in Kroj's command staff, looking around in puzzlement after their commander's fall, saw the contrail from the shot that downed their deputy commander, and shouts and disruptor fire started following its vector back toward Tucker and Caboose. "Shit," Tucker growled. He slapped the S2AM's bipod against its barrel shroud and slung the sniper rifle on his back. It was a hell of a weapon, but it did have that one unfortunate feature that the engineers had never quite cracked. "Think they made us?" Caboose asked. A moment later, a disruptor blast ripped through the foliage of the tree, shearing away a thick branch right over the trooper's head. "No," Tucker replied sarcastically. "I figure they just really hate this tree. Come on, let's get out of here!" As he and Caboose beat it through the underbrush away from the enraged Klingon squad, Tucker heard a crackle in his earset and then the voice of Church, speaking with exaggerated patience. "Tucker," the dead man said, "I realize tactics were never your strong suit, so I'm gonna explain this again, slowly. You. Are. Supposed. To. Kill. The. KLINGONS." "Well, then next time how about you actually draw one into my line of fire?" Tucker shot back, crashing through a bush with thorns the size of daggers. Wouldn't want to try -that- without a Frame, he thought offhandedly; man, even the PLANTS on this planet are hostile. "I had the shorter guy cold until you freaking turned -around- and -got in front of him-," he continued. "I was -trying- to lead him out into the open. Figure a few of them would have followed him, you could have set up a domino shot!" "He was about to stab you in the -back-, Church!" Tucker said. "What the fuck did you SAY to him, anyway? I think it's safe to say you blew your cover, anyway." "How am I supposed to know?" Church replied. "I thought I was telling him to follow me, we'd flank the humans and wipe them out, but this language thing isn't an exact science, you know? I sure as hell didn't say 'Iiii am the ghoooost of Chuuuuurch! Follow meeee so my teeeeamkilling buddy can bloooow your head off along with miiiiine!'" "Hey, lay off that teamkilling stuff, man," said Tucker. "I'm telling you, Tucker, your squaddie nickname oughta be 'Own-Goal'," Church continued remorselessly. "It goes well with 'Wrong-Way' and 'Two-Backs'." "Hey, Tucker!" said Caboose eagerly as he thrashed through the underbrush alongside the haunted trooper. "Is that Church you're talking to?" "No, Caboose," Tucker snapped, elbowing down a small tree in his path rather than detouring around it. "It's my own fucking id." "Oh. Well, tell it I said hi," Caboose said cheerily. Back at the Capitol, the news for Utena Tenjou was going from bad to worse. [The enemy fleet is nearly in blockade position, and they're calling on us to surrender,] Lore reported over the Lens. [We're going to have to get out of here within the next ten minutes or we're going to find ourselves very, very outnumbered. Recommend you assemble what personnel you can and use the Pelicans to evacuate.] [I'm not going to abandon the Red Team and the Repo Men, Lore, not to mention our Klingon allies,] Utena replied. [Commodore, I love a good scrap as much as the next android, but with all due respect, this situation is -hopeless-.] [Maybe it is up there, but down here I think we've got enough to put up a decent fight.] [Only until they vaporize you from orbit,] Lore pointed out. [I don't think that's likely. Their ground forces have nuclear weapons. We'd already be plasma if they wanted to go that route.] [You're betting a lot on that hunch,] Lore noted, his mental voice carrying a note of something like admiration. Utena chuckled. [I always do. Listen, here's what you do. Get out of here while you still can. Get the ship to Babylon 6 and report in. I'll get Captain Rogers on the Lens as soon as we're done talking and update him as to what's going on. Stand by and wait for my signal.] [Your signal to -what-?] Lore asked. [Either to come and get us... or not to bother.] There was a long pause. [I hope you know what you're doing, Commodore.] [Me too, Lore. Now get going! Even Challenger can't take on a force like Klayvor's. Get Lu to start pulling together as much of the fleet as she can muster at B6. You might need them later.] [Aye aye, Commodore. Breaking orbit now.] Another, shorter pause, and then Lore's voice came back in a less businesslike tone: [Good luck, Utena.] [Thanks. We're gonna need it.] On a side street in the west end of town, a group of heavily armed Klingon troopers prowled restlessly, poking into trash barrels, peering into Dumpsters, and thrusting their weapons into anything they thought might hide their quarry. They were growing frustrated. It was a simple assignment and they'd managed to bungle it somehow. How do two Earthpeople elude a squad of Klingon soldiers in the heart of the Klingon capital itself? It's not like they could blend in with the populace. With this heartening thought in mind, they kept looking, slowly widening their search radius around the abandoned garbage truck. Behind them, Jay McCandless chinned himself on slimy concrete and watched them go through the slot in a curbside storm drain, then let himself carefully down. "OK," he murmured to his companion. "They're gone." Anne Springsteen nodded and consulted the holographic display of a pocket computer. "If this is a coup," she observed, "it's not a very organized one. They haven't even shut down the city's navigational assistance computer." "They'll think of it before too much longer," McCandless said. "Too late now," Anne said with a wry little smile. "I've saved the map to local memory." She looked at the display for a moment, turned it so McCandless could see it, then switched the device off and put it away. Without another word, the two started making their way through the storm sewers - back toward the KDF training compound. Back at that compound, Julius Van der Groot had just about had enough. He was catching a glimpse of the post commander's wrist chron every time the Klingon smacked him in the face. From those glimpses, he calculated that roughly two and a half hours had passed since the Klingon security officers had rousted everyone in Red Team out of their guest quarters and thrown them in the brig. That was time enough for the guards to get settled back into their routines. It was time to leave. The next time the Klingon headman brought Van der Groot's chest down on the array of agonizer probes, the big Dutchman did something he hadn't done once throughout the two hours of torture preceding: He screamed. The four Klingons in the interrogation room with him took great satisfaction in that. Most offworlders put on the agonizer table screamed immediately, and even Klingon warriors usually cracked after an hour or so. They had to admit a sort of grudging respect for this beefy human's resolve - but that was over now, and it was all downhill from here. Van der Groot wasn't screaming because of the pain from the torture device, though. He was screaming because it was a way for him to focus his mind and body for the task that lay ahead. At the touch of the agonizers, every muscle in his huge body went fully tense, as hard as iron, all pulling at their anchorages to his super-dense bones. The exertion lit his whole body up with a radiance of pain that made the simple skin-scorching sensation of the agonizer seem like a mild itch. A normal man - even a normal Valerian - couldn't push himself like this, thanks to ancient reflexes that prevented people from putting such dangerous strain on their bodies. Some clever Valerians, though, had noticed that their genetically engineered bodies were actually much more durable than those ancient human-calibrated self-preservation reflexes thought they were. In the twenty-second century, they developed a mental discipline for overriding those reflexes and tapping into some of that reserve capacity. It's a dangerous trick - the band between the upper bound of the reflexive inhibition and the point where actual injury awaits is finite - but with sufficient resolve, it can be done. Van der Groot was trained in this Valerian art, known as lichaams beheersing - literally, "body mastery". With concentration, he could ask things of his body that few others could do, and get away with them thanks to the incredible resilience of his superbly conditioned heavy-gravity physique. The first sign the Klingons had that anything was going wrong was when the frame of the agonizer table began making a deep metallic creaking sound. The straps holding the Dutchman's wrists, ankles, and midsection to the frame weren't going to give way - they were molecularly aligned ultrapolymer, with a breaking tension of something over a hundred tons. Straps of the same material were commonly used to hoist parts for armored vehicles and Destroids into position. The table's frame, however, was made from welded steel square tubing - and under the incredible strain being placed on them by Van der Groot's muscles, the welds were failing. By the time the Klingons figured out what was happening, the table frame had radically deformed. A moment later it disintegrated altogether, wrenched apart into a collection of unconnected, mangled metal tubes. Van der Groot dropped free, already twisting his body so that he wouldn't fall with his full weight onto the agonizer grid itself. By the time he hit the floor he was already springing up with a speed and sureness that were visually at odds with his enormous bulk. The Klingons snarled challenges and drew weapons. Two had those spade-pointed daggers of which Klingons were so fond; the other two had pistol disruptors. Van der Groot whirled, using a chunk of table frame still strapped to his wrist to extend his reach, and smacked one of the disruptor-wielders across the temple. The blow sent the man reeling and caused him to drop his weapon. One of the knife-wielders lunged. Van der Groot let him come, slipped aside from the blow, grabbed the man's shoulder in one dinner-plate-sized hand, and flung him toward the second disruptor- wielding guard - the one who had been operating the agonizer table - just as he fired. The flying Klingon intercepted the blast and disintegrated. Roaring with rage, the second man with a knife closed in. This one was more cautious, trying for sweeping slashes instead of lunging in for a thrusting attack. Van der Groot avoided the first two attempts, caught the third on his segment of pipe, twisted the man's blade out of position, and punched him in the face, feeling bones crackle and pop under his fist. The force of the blow drove the Klingon over backward. He crashed down on the agonizer grid, then screamed as its still-active probes energized his entire metal bodysuit with their painful energies. Van der Groot seized him by the breastplate, unmindful of the fact that this sent another jolt of the agonizer's fire through his hand and arm, then lifted the man off the grid, spun, and hurled him across the room. He crashed face-first into the tempered-glass front of a case full of truth drugs, creating a spiderweb of cracks in the wire-reinforced window, then slid bloodily down to the floor and lay still. The still-standing chief torturer grinned ferociously and leveled his disruptor. Van der Groot grinned right back, as if daring him to shoot. The Klingon did, but by the time he finished squeezing the trigger, the Dutchman had thrown himself down and forward in a flying tackle. The orange disruptor beam flashed over his broad back and carved a glowing arc in the far wall before Van der Groot hit the Klingon low and hard, bowling him over backward to the floor. Somehow, the headman had kept his grip on his weapon. Snarling, he twisted in Van der Groot's grip and thrust the disruptor into the Dutchman's face. Van der Groot reached up, closed his left hand around the weapon and the Klingon's right, and crushed them. Then he straightened up, carrying the Klingon with him like a rag doll, turned, and shoved the man's face square into the disruptor grid. "Hurts! Doesn't it!" Van der Groot remarked cheerfully as the chief torturer yelled and twitched. To the right, the Klingon he'd clobbered with the pipe got back to his feet. He couldn't find his pistol, so he drew his knife and lunged in to take care of business while the towering Dutchman was amusing himself with the headman. Van der Groot saw him coming out of the corner of his eye, took a half-step back, and let the Klingon soldier stab his own commander in the gut. Then he grabbed the shocked trooper by the collar, slammed the two Klingons' heads together, and let them both fall from his hands like wet towels. Moving briskly but not hurriedly, Van der Groot freed himself from the restraints and discarded the broken frame segments that had festooned his body throughout the brief fight. Then he bent and checked the commander's chronometer again before swiping his security pass and leaving the interrogation room. By this time, as Van der Groot had expected, the other members of Red Team had made good their own escapes from their particular confinements and into the base at large. Each employed his or her own particular strategy, and each was successful. Sachiko Asaki took the time-honored "taunt your guard until he comes into your cell to teach you a lesson" tack, which worked especially well for her in these circumstances since she was small, human, female, and a master of kempo. The squad's other female member, scout trooper Grace Waldron, had opted for the "feigned seduction" technique. Her squadmates were always amazed when Waldron could pull something like that off, since she was as wiry as a bicycle frame and as plain as a one-credit coin; hardly the picture of a voluptuous seductress. On-duty or off, feigned or serious, her approach usually worked anyway. It even worked across some species barriers, as today. L0-P3Z, the squad's military interpreter droid, had been hauled off to the station's droid recycling facility by the Klingons, who took him for a simple army talkdroid like the Cybot Galactica M-series. Once there, Lopez - who was in fact a fully capable battle droid who happened to have linguistic-aid capabilities as well - activated his backup power supply, incapacitated the droid techs who were trying to dismantle him, and made for the brig armory, where the Klingons had stored all the squad's weapons and equipment. Dexter Grif, Dick Simmons, and Frank Donut distracted the other guards' attention from what Asaki and Waldron were up to by staging a towering row that eventually made the gleeful Klingons release them all into a common cell in hopes of seeing a fight. By then the two women were loose and Lopez had looted the brig armory, though Grif and Simmons were tempted to fight anyway just for the hell of it. While all that was going on, sniper Doug Berry did what he always did in situations like this - sat back, relaxed, and waited for Waldron to spring him. She was the squad scout trooper and thus his spotter. As far as Berry was concerned, that was part of her job. Shortly thereafter, Van der Groot emerged from the interrogation wing to find that they'd all gotten loose and mopped up the cellblock's guards. Waldron took her gear and went to look around while the rest suited up. They were just about ready when she returned and reported, "Lieutenant McCandless and the Jedi aren't in this block. If the Klingons have them, they're being held somewhere else." "Didn't they have a lunch date in town?" Donut asked. "Oh, right," Waldron said. "No doubt the Klingons sent out people to bring them in, though." "They'd never catch those two," Simmons said. "I'll bet they're miles away by now." Just as Simmons finished, the ceiling vent above the formation crashed down with Jay McCandless riding on top of it. The squadleader straightened up, dusting debris from his uniform, and grinned at his troops as Anne Springsteen dropped lightly down from the vent behind him. "What, and leave you guys unsupervised?" McCandless asked. "Who's got my armor?" Once McCandless had his gear back (bidding a sad farewell to his much-abused class-Bs, which were deemed unsalvageable), he put aside the jovial banter and got serious. His squad was, after all, at large in the middle of a hostile military establishment. "Communications are out except for extreme short range," Asaki reported. "All right. We can assume that Commodore Tenjou is still at the capitol, either as a prisoner or helping to lead the resistance," McCandless said. "We'll make for the city center and try to assist her, whichever way it's gone. 621, 1049, find us some transport." /* Overseer "Stompbox" _Wreckage_ */ They made for a sight that the residents of the districts to the immediate southeast of the Capitol Plaza would remember for quite some time to come. It was one of the most memorable sights of that entire unforgettable weekend: a single Targ-class heavy anti-gravity tank, racing through the streets of the capital at top speed with a group of blue-armored humans, a woman in brown robes, and a hulking reptilian alien clinging to its upper hull and turret, pursued by a company of Klingon soldiers in hoverjeeps and troop transports. At the helm of the tank, Pete Stacker struggled with the unfamiliar controls and cursed creatively, heaving the sixty-ton vehicle around corners and up side lanes at speeds entirely unfeasible for such a monstrous ride. Up on the hull, the rest of the Repo Men had the magnetic plates in their bootsoles energized and braced themselves with handholds as they exchanged fire with their Klingon pursuers. "Oi! Bastila!" Chips Dubbo called to the squad's Jedi liaison, who was up on the turret providing cover for Tuncer with her lightsaber. The Elite's shields hadn't recovered from the beating they took at the hands of Karg and his Mark XII, leaving him especially vulnerable to the Klingons' shots, but he was still up there hurling defiance and plasma fire at them. "What?" Bastila said. "Are we 'avin' fun yet?" Dubbo asked with a grin as he tried to draw a bead on the driver of one of the troop transports with his plasma rifle. "No, Corporal, we are not," Bastila replied tartly. "Oh, come on, luv," Dubbo said affably, pegging a couple of shots at the enemy driver and missing. "By Repo Men standards, this's a fine day out!" "I hardly call being pursued through the streets of an alien city by hostile soldiers a fine day out!" Bastila snapped, deflecting disruptor fire away from herself and Tuncer with spinning sweeps of her double lightsaber. Around them on the tank, the other Repo Men grinned at the conversation. Dubbo and Bastila had been at this for almost three months, ever since Operation Counterweight started back in August. The laid-back, no-worries Australian had set his cap for the team's tightly-wound Jedi liaison almost from the moment they were introduced, and her reactions to his light banter had amused the squad for all the time since - especially on the rare but slowly more frequent occasions when she unwound enough to give a bit of it back instead of just getting stiffly disapproving. "Aw, that's just because you haven't been with us long enough. Stick with me, luv, you'll get to like it. Right, men?" "OO-rah!" the Repo Men chorused. "Oh, that's rich," Bastila said. "Charles Augustus Dubbo, if you think for a -moment- that I intend to 'stick with' you for an -instant- longer than my current assignment requires it, you - what?" The last part wasn't actually a comment to Dubbo, but rather a reaction to the fact that while she was chewing him out, a small electronic device attached to a dart had whipped through her guard and stuck to the front of her Jedi robes. She glanced down at it, reached to pull it off, but before she could get hold of it, she disappeared in a sizzling wash of orange light, vanishing completely in the space of a couple of seconds. Dubbo blinked, then turned to look in the direction the dart had come from. If it had been fired by one of the Klingons in the leading troop transport - the most likely possibility - he couldn't tell which. None of them seemed to have the kind of weapon that could have thrown something like that, but then again, with Dubbo's platform and theirs both moving at upward of 60 miles per hour and maneuvering violently through the streets, it wasn't like they were all in parade formation for him to check out their gear. His face going brick-red with anger, Dubbo half-rose from his crouch by the tank's turret and yelled, "Son of a - HEY! WHAT THE HELL DID YOU BASTARDS DO?!" "What's going on back there?" Stacker's voice demanded in his commset. "The bad guys got Bastila!" Mendoza reported. "'Got' her? She's hit?" "No, sir!" Mendoza said. "She's been captured." "Dubbo, you disorganized, grabasstic sack of shit!" Stacker said. "How in the hell did you manage to LOSE our JEDI?" "I didn't LOSE 'er, Sarge!" Dubbo roared, blazing away at the Klingons with his plasma rifle. "The sonsabitches TAGGED 'er!" "Christ," Stacker grumbled. "Everybody double-check your transport barriers. I don't want anybody -else- getting quick-beamed to some Klingon dungeon." Dubbo fired until his plasma rifle, a design extrapolated from the main Covenant weapon of the byegone war, overheated. When it did, he yanked his hand away from the forestock and cursed as its cowling popped open and vented steam. "What about Bastila?" he asked. Tuncer growled. "Let's be realistic, sir," Stacker interjected. "We're outnumbered a zillion to one on a planet that just turned hostile. Once we're bottled up in that capitol building, we're ALL gonna need a rescue!" Tuncer replied. "I'm not sure that meant what you wanted it to mean, sir," Stacker said dubiously. Tuncer just chuckled, raised himself up straighter, and thumbed his plasma sidearm into overcharge mode. "REEpoman bakado kinjai INTO watabo WURTwurtWURT!" he roared, then launched the forced overload in a single blast at one of the pursuing hoverjeeps. The vehicle's engine compartment flew apart; the jeep flipped nose-first, flinging its passengers in all directions, and plowed into the street. "REPO MEN!" the others cried, picking up their rate of fire. --/ "At the time, did anyone know what had become of Bastila?" Lock asked the Repo Man now on the stand. "No, sir," Private Adrian Mendoza replied, shaking his head. "We knew she'd been tagged with a transponder and beamed away by the enemy, but not where they'd taken her or why." "I see. And once you reached the Capitol, what happened?" "We were boxed in. The rebel forces laid siege to the capitol plaza. Kronos City has a, whaddaya call it, acropolis in the center, with all the government buildings on top. The Klingon rebels surrounded it. Hell, we barely got up there before they cut the road. We had to slug it out all the way up the hill. That's when Caboose got it." "You're referring to Private O'Malley?" "Right. He got a pretty bad burn from a disruptor just as we were abandoning the tank at the front gate. Stayed in the line until we got out of there, though. He's still in sick bay, but they say he'll be OK." "How fortunate," Lock said dryly. "That's all, thank you." Mendoza stepped down and was replaced by Sgt. Sachiko Asaki, the number-three trooper in Jay McCandless's special squad. "I believe Lt. McCandless's team arrived at the Capitol shortly after Captain Tuncer's group?" Lock asked her. "Right. The Repo Men covered us on our entry. Got their minitank shot up pretty bad in the process, but nobody else was hurt." "What did Commodore Tenjou do when she was informed that Jedi Shan had been captured?" "She asked Anne if she could locate Bastila. That didn't work - too much background noise from the civil war, I suppose - " "We'll ask her about that when it's her turn to speak," Lock cut in. "Just tell us what you observed." Asaki looked mildly annoyed, but continued, "Well, then she wondered what Klayvor wanted with a Jedi captive. Anne, the commodore, and a couple of the others talked about it for a while and decided to wait and see whether Klayvor mentioned that he had her the next time he called. He liked to gloat, so it seemed likely he would, and Commodore Tenjou was hoping he'd tip his hand in the process." "And that was all? No rescue operation? Not even a plan for one?" "It's hard to rescue someone when you don't have the faintest idea where she is," Asaki pointed out. "We needed a clue, and the only person who could provide it was Klayvor." Lock folded his hands behind his back. "I see. What else did she do at this point?" "There wasn't much anyone could do," Asaki said. "She helped General Ktarl and his staff as much as they'd have it." "As much as they'd -have- it?" "Klingons are a proud people, Master Lock. Ktarl had lost tremendous face by having three-quarters of his army mutiny on him and take the other quarter prisoner. He wasn't in a position to accept a lot of help from outsiders." Asaki shrugged. "Under Commodore Tenjou's overall command, we offered ourselves as forces to be used in his defense of the Capitol, but he wasn't about to have her or Tuncer telling him how to mount that defense." "I see. So what -did- she do?" "She apprised Acting Chief Rogers of the situation by Lens and asked him to send whatever backup he could arrange, if any could be got through the Klingon space blockade. He told her to sit tight, help was on the way - a little at first and then a lot later." "And?" "And we sat tight," Asaki said flatly. "Nothing much happened for the rest of that day and into Thursday. Klayvor's forces made sure they had a good firm hold on the rest of the planet before they tried to do anything about us." "Did you get the backup Chief Rogers promised you?" Lock asked. Asaki smiled. "You could say that." /-- THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2409 10:29 AM "I just hate all this waiting around," Sachiko Asaki said. "The rebels obviously need to take or kill the High Council in order to complete their takeover. What are they waiting for?" Pete Stacker nodded sympathetically. "Wish I knew," he said. "The boss Klingon's probably working on his speech. Ah, well. At least they're not shelling us." He chuckled. "My first incoming, on Kletavu, there were these three bunks, and I asked one of the guys - I'd just sat down! - I asked them how they could tell the difference between incoming and outgoing... " "Hey, what's that?" Asaki interrupted, pointing up at an indistinct streak of light in the sky. Stacker grabbed his binoculars and looked in the indicated direction. "Moving too fast to get a fix on," he grunted. "Me and my big mouth. REPO MEN! INCOMING!" The Repo Men exploded into action, readying their weapons and taking cover where possible. Asaki's shout to McCandless's men prodded them into a similar flurry of movement. The stripe of fire in the sky was becoming more apparent by the moment, its course bringing it ever closer to the courtyard. "Doubt that's a friendly, amigo," Mendoza noted to Tucker. "Oh, right, Mendoza," Tucker replied. "Here we are in the middle of a civil war on Klingon territory, and that's going to be the Good Guys' Welcome Wag - " Anything else Tucker might have said was lost in a deafening howl of metal and a sudden wave of heat that staggered the assembled troopers. A white-hot ball of light resolved from the streak, angling downward to the courtyard in uncontrolled freefall. "COVER!" Stacker bawled over the clamor. The object smashed into the pavement in the center of the courtyard. The shockwave from the impact knocked Asaki off her feet and into Caboose O'Malley, who valiantly attempted to right her before Stacker knocked them both to the ground. Debris rippled up around them; the dark bricks of the courtyard became lethal projectiles, embedding themselves in the black front of the Capitol building. All the windows facing the courtyard burst and rained down to ground level. A long moment passed before anyone managed to struggle upright, but unsurprisingly, Van Der Groot was the first. He took off at a run toward the object, rifle at the ready. Berry, Stacker, Asaki, and Dubbo followed hard on his heels. "Now," Asaki said dryly, "I understand the difference between incoming and outgoing." "Madre," Mendoza observed, spitting up gravel. "Let's rock, compadres." The clearing dust and smoke revealed the object to be a metallic cylinder about ten feet in diameter and twenty feet long, buried several feet into the surface of the plaza. It was still sizzling and steaming, throwing off heat like an opened oven door, when the assembled Red and Blue forces came to a halt before it. Utena, Anthy, and Anne, who had come pelting out of the building at the sound of the crash, got there first; they were standing back a safe distance, looking confused. "Sensors don't report anything explosive, Commodore," Asaki said, saluting absentmindedly with the hand that wasn't holding a tricorder. "It's some kind of exotic alloy... cooling rapidly. I've got life signs inside! One Salusian, I -think-... a Kilrathi... two humans... " She blinked, looked more closely, and blinked again. "...and, uh, a dog, ma'am. At least, I think it's a dog." Utena blinked. "What the hell?" she said under her breath. "Did Lore send me Wolfgang to keep my feet warm?" "Doesn't look like a Klingon device," Anne observed. "They tend a little more baroque, generally. A dog, though?" "Spread out, Repo Men," Stacker barked. "I want every weapon in this outfit trained on that capsule. Nothing's getting out of there until we say so." The Jedi, the assembled combat troops, and the Cephireans waited in a tense silence. The capsule continued to ping softly as it cooled. After a minute or two, Utena stepped forward and used the edge of her jacket to shield her hand as she touched the side of it. To her surprise, she found it already cool enough to touch. Feeling slightly foolish, she rapped gently on the exterior. "Anyone home?" she called. "Hello?" The cylindrical capsule had come to rest mostly upright, leaning over at a jaunty angle. As the troopers and others watched it warily, the flat top suddenly stirred, then started to unscrew like the top of a Thermos bottle. After a few slow, grinding turns, it came away, hefted as though it were a styrofoam prop by a pair of green-armored arms. A small "wurf!" echoed out of the interior of the craft. Utena blinked. The arms tossed the hatch casually aside, and then their owner climbed up to the edge of the opening and jumped down. Utena took a step backward in surprise. There was only one soldier in the universe who showed up for missions clad entirely in green Salusian MJOLNIR Mk. V battle armor, and no one present could fail to recognize him. He introduced himself anyway, with a crisp salute. "Master Chief Petty Officer John Spartan, Royal Salusian Navy, ma'am," the Master Chief said. "Captain Rogers sends his regards, and a few reinforcements. I have a note for you from Professor Ravenhair." He produced a small envelope and handed it to Utena. She opened it and withdrew a card in Skuld's ornately angular handwriting: Utena - Thought you'd appreciate this. My best new trick. It took years to develop and cost a fortune; fortunately, your father had both. I call it the Martian Cannonball! - S.R. Utena threw her head back and laughed. "Well, all right then, Master Chief," she said. "And your troops?" "Come on out, team," the Chief said, turning to the capsule. First out of the gate was a bald, shades-wearing human in a disreputable sheepskin bomber jacket over a black battlesuit that looked like an earlier model of the Repo Men's armor. He carried a helmet, a shotgun, and a satchel of gear, all of which he tossed over the side of the cylinder to the ground. Utena recognized him from the IPO personnel files: Lensman Xander Cage of the CID, a former TacDiv Marine and general hellraiser. Utena seemed to recall he was also a friend of her regular crew's CID agents, Janice Barlow and Neal Krummell. "WOO!" Cage yelled, raising both fists to the sky, standing about waist-high out of the top of the cylinder. "That was all RIGHT!" Leaning down to address someone else still inside, he called, "Geek! You still alive or what?" "I think so," another voice replied. "When are you gonna come across with the Kilrathi Snack you promised?" "Later," Cage said, his broad grin widening. He raised his fists again and addressed the sky: "WOO! Thank you, Dr. Ravenhair!" Then he put a hand on the edge of the cylinder, vaulted over it, and sauntered toward the observers. He stopped and saluted Utena with a grin. "I owe you twice, lady - once for gettin' me out of cleaning the house this weekend, and once for settin' me up for that ride," he said. Utena laughed. "On the whole, I'd rather be cleaning my house, but whatever works for you. Nice to finally meet you. One of these days you'll have to show me how to do that dirt bike barrel roll thing you do." "I'll trade you for some'a that swordfighting shit you do," Cage replied. "I had a mission last fall on Nueva Castilia? Damn near got myself skewered trying to fight off these three guys with a fireplace poker." Utena grinned. "We get out of this alive," she said, "I'll see what I can do." X gave her a nod and turned to the troopers. "Every time I think I got out," he said wryly. "See my boys are all here." The Repo Men crowded around Cage and pounded him on the back. From the chorus of "OO-RAH!" and "X, you old bastard," Utena figured they had history. She let him be carried aside by the fan club and turned back to the capsule. The next occupant had a bit of trouble extricating himself from the small hatch, due to his sheer size. He was an Imperial Kilrathi, burly and tiger-striped, carrying what appeared to be an ExoSal sniper rifle on his back. In addition, he was generally loaded for bear beneath his impressive black drover coat. A small, squarish, blue-lit camera drone wobbled out of the hatch after him. The Kilrathi presented himself to Utena with a bow and shook her hand professionally. "Chad Collier, ma'am," he said. "Pleased to meet you." "Ah," said the camera unit. "tenjou@nit.edu.td. A distinct pleasure to meet you at last. I am 343 Guilty Spark, monitor of the Xander Zone. I trust you enjoyed 'BASEing Blood Gulch'?" "Yep - though to tell you the truth, it was a little flat after 'X Marks the Spot'." "Mm, I warned him that might happen, but does he listen to me? Of course not. I must warn you, though he is considered decorative by most females of your species, you will find him to be the most pigheaded - " "Spark, she called for backup, not a date," Cage interjected. "Sorry about that," Collier put in sheepishly. "Spark's getting a little eccentric lately. It MIGHT be time for a MEMORY WIPE," he added through his (considerable) teeth, glancing significantly at the hovering droid. "You don't scare me, sir," Spark replied placidly. "Wipe my memory stack and you'll never find half of those websites again." "Stripes!" came a call from the hatch, forestalling further exploration of that topic. "Take your damn fucking dog, will you?" A bundle of wriggling fur - which, Utena observed, appeared to be wearing goggles - emerged from the hatch. It was indeed a beagle, like Wolfgang, but it wasn't the Lenshound. Wolfgang was a honey beagle, while this dog had the more traditional tricolor pattern. Chad snickered, accepted the dog, put him down on the ground, and turned back to Utena. "Your security officer has quite a mouth on her," he said. "I got to hear a lot of it on the way down here from orbit." "... -Janice-?!" Utena said. "Right here, Cap'n," the redheaded Ragolian said, following the beagle out of the hatch and accepting a hand down from Collier. "I thought you guys had an assignment on Tomodachi," Utena said. Janice waved a hand dismissively. "It's handled. Steve heard you needed help and we were handy." The beagle shook himself, recovering the dignity damaged by his unceremonious decanting from the cylinder, and barked. "And this is Collier's mouthy dog," Janice added, ruffling the dog's head with abstract affection. "His name's Riddick," Xander Cage put in, "and he ain't Geek's dog, he's mine, Red." "Then why do I always see Chad feeding him?" "'Cause Geek's kissing his ass, that's why." "He doesn't like the way you do his food," Collier objected. Utena raised an eyebrow. "O... K... is this a roommate thing, or what?" Collier shook his head with a tigerish grin. "No, he told me so," he said. Cage made a finger-twirling-around-the-ear gesture and shrugged. "So - what the hell's going on, anyway?" Janice asked. --/ Lock raised an eyebrow. "In response to an urgent request for help from the acting head of the Space Force, the acting chief of the IPO sent only four people?" he inquired archly. "Well, for openers, yes," Sgt. Pete Stacker said. "My guess would be that they were all the forces he had readily available for that delivery method at the time, but you'd have to ask him. At any rate, it's not like he could have FedExed us the whole WDF, though we certainly could have used it." "Did the arrival of these new forces have any effect on the stalemate?" "Not immediately. Commodore Tenjou and the Master Chief started discussing the situation immediately, but things remained relatively stable until 1830." "What happened then?" Stacker frowned. "That was when Bastila came back." /-- THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2409 06:29 PM When the alarms sounded, everyone in the Capitol initially thought this was it - the enemy had stopped waiting and launched their final assault on the building. It was only when the first disjointed reports started coming in from the guard units - first at the outer perimeter, then at the gates of the building itself, and then inside - that it became clear there was only one intrusion taking place, a lightning thrust intended to penetrate, not overwhelm, the Capitol's defenses. In the High Council's chamber at the center of the building, Chancellor Krojaar epetai-Korgoth requested an explanation from his chief of staff. General Ktarl's frustration level was peaking. After spending a few minutes trying to raised guard posts and get answers, he threw down his earbud with a snarl and said, "I will go and find out." Then, before anyone could stop him, he drew his bat'leth from his back and stormed from the room. For several minutes, the councilors sat listening as the faint sounds of yelling and weapons fire grew louder and more distinct, until at last, it sounded as though the fight were right outside the doors. Then the doors burst open and the bulky form of General Ktarl hurtled backward through them, his limbs windmilling, at the end of what looked like a bolt of lightning. The Chief of Staff to the Chancellor crashed into the speaker's podium at the back of the council chamber and crumpled against the wall beyond it, then lay still with smoke curling up from his armor. In each of his hands he clutched half of his bat'leth. The weapon looked like it had been cut in two with a blowtorch. Councilor Klov jumped to the general's side, bent to check him, then turned to the other councilors and declared, "He's -dead-!" A low chuckle came from the doorway through which Ktarl's body had just come. "He and a good many others," said a woman's voice. By this time, the commotion from the front of the building had drawn the Repo Men, who had been mustered in the back courtyard to have their own look at the tactical situation, into the Capitol. Some came into the back of the room at ground level, others onto the upper balconies, all ready for action. What they saw at the front of the room pulled them all up short with cries of surprise. The person who had spoken - the person who had cut down General Ktarl - stepped into the room. The intruder was a lone woman dressed all in black with brown hair drawn back into a pair of short plaits, and several small ridges at the bridge of her nose marked her as a Bajoran. Bastila Shan. "Christ," Pete Stacker said through gritted teeth. Switching his Frame's commset on, he called, "All allied forces, this is Sgt. Stacker on emergency two. The intruder is Bastila, and she's hostile. She's just killed General Ktarl. Request -immediate- backup in the Council room." "Say again, Sergeant?" Utena's voice crackled back, soaked in static from the jamming even though she was within the capitol complex and therefore surely close by. "Bastila's -hostile-? How did that happen?" "How the fuck should -I- know?" Stacker snapped. Utena accepted that as her due for asking a stupid question and replied, "Hold tight, Sergeant. Tuncer, Jedi Springsteen, the Master Chief and I are headed your way from the situation room." There was a loud noise at the other end of the transmission. "Dammit!" "Commodore? What happened?" "The tunnel from the situation bunker just collapsed. Mortar damage, most likely. You'll have to try and hold her until Tuncer can dig us out, Pete." Stacker fingered his plasma rifle's grip. He was a smart and realistic soldier; he knew that he and his men, tough, skilled, and well-equipped as they were, didn't stand much chance of bringing down a Jedi Knight. On the other hand, it wasn't like they had a lot of choice. She was advancing on the High Council now, and when she reached them, who knew -what- would happen? Stacker swallowed. "Roger that, Commodore," he said. Then, turning to the others, he said, "OK, Repo Men, you heard the lady. Let's try not to get killed." "Hang on!" Church's voice crackled in his squadmates' helmet comms. "I'll get her." "Church, WAIT - " Stacker yelled, but he was too late. The spectral form of the undead soldier had already resolved, charging toward Bastila. Before anyone could call out to him further, Church lunged - Bastila wheeled, raised a hand, and sent lightning arcing across the space between them. The Repo Men automatically expected this to pass clean through Church's ghostly shape, as ordinary electricity would have - but this was no normal electrical discharge. What was flowing from Bastila's hand was the distilled essence of the Dark Side of the Force, given a resemblance to electricity in form and effect by her own expectations. It was spirit energy, just like the ghost that was Church, and it tore at him like steel blades would have torn living flesh. Church screamed as concentrated hatred ripped into his spectral being. The blast halted his charge, sent him reeling back, and then, before the horrified eyes of his squadmates, tore him to bits and scattered him like mist before wind. "CHURCH!" Tucker cried, aghast. Bastila closed her hand into a fist, cutting off the flow of energy, and then turned a cold smile to the rest of the Repo Men. "Well?" she said. "Let's -do this-, Repo Men!" Stacker said, his voice snapping his troops out of their shock. "Attack formation G. Shields to full power, and make sure your Barriers are charged. If she gets close, you're gonna need 'em." /* Bad Religion "Come Join Us" _The Gray Race_ */ Two minutes later, more allied forces arrived in the Council chamber, in the form of Janice Barlow, Chad Collier, and Xander Cage. They'd been resting in guest quarters upstairs and were still strapping on equipment as they hustled into the council chamber to find a scene of utter chaos. Klingon guards and Repo Men were scattered everywhere in various states of disrepair. The Repo Men, at least, seemed still to be alive, though some of them looked decidedly uncomfortable. Xander Cage was the first one to arrive, bursting through a side door onto the floor level of the room to see Bastila deflect a barrage of plasma fire from Pete Stacker's rifle. She tried to redirect it toward Chips Dubbo, who was approaching her from the other side, but her aim - or perhaps her concentration - was off, and the pulses of energy scattered harmlessly into the rafters. "Bastila," Dubbo said, trying to keep his voice even, "I don't want to hurt you." "Don't worry, Charles," Bastila replied with cold amusement. "You won't." There was a strange edge in her voice, underlying all the other tones. Janice, up on the balcony level with Collier, zoomed her cyberoptic in on the Jedi's face. Bastila was haggard, her face grey and drawn, her eyes bloodshot and sunken into dark-rimmed sockets. She looked like she hadn't slept in a month. Her mouth was pressed into a flat line, and her sunken eyes had a queer light in them. To Janice, the woman was clearly, to use a technical phrase, out of her fucking tree. Janice pulled her focus back and opened her organic eye - zooming the cybereye with the other one open was a good way to toss lunch - to see Xander Cage down on one knee, sighting through the telescopic sight on his heavily customized A&K Mark 23 pistol. Bastila whirled, seized a chunk of rubble from the floor with the Force, and bounced it off Stacker's helmet, in the process giving Cage a perfect shot - - which he didn't take. Instead, swearing, he holstered the pistol, drew a riot prod from a boot holster, and started running toward her. "Cage, you had a shot!" Janice barked into her tac headset. "Why the hell didn't you drop her?" "I ain't the type to shoot a friendly in the back'a the head, Red. Call it a character flaw." "In case you haven't noticed, she's not looking too friendly right now," Janice noted. "I don't think she knows what she's doin'. Cover me. I'm-a go try and explain it to her." "Stupid, stupid, STUPID," Janice grumbled, then drew her Varista and lobbed a couple of shots at the Jedi. Bastila whirled, evading one shot and getting her lightsaber in front of the other, and then Cage roared and lunged at her with all his considerable speed. She pivoted, cut the riot prod neatly in two, then thrust out a palm. X stopped as if he'd hit an invisible wall. Bastila smiled slightly and nastily, opened her flattened hand into a sort of claw, and then lashed the bald Lensman with blue-white electricity. Cage yelled in pain and collapsed, twitching, on his back. "X!" Chad Collier cried. Then, with a snarling roar that reminded Janice of the jungle beast the Kilrathi resembled, he vaulted the gallery railing. By the time he hit the floor, rolled once, and came up running, he'd already thrown four small, razor-sharp knives at Bastila. Since she was gathering her concentration for a second volley that would have finished frying Cage like General Ktarl, Bastila was actually hit by the first one. She yelped, more in surprise than pain, as the blade sliced across her upper arm, parting her sleeve and drawing blood. Then she turned to face the charging Kilrathi, waving aside his other thrown blades with the power of the Force. Janice Barlow hit the ground running five paces behind him, though his longer stride meant she wasn't gaining on him when Bastila's counterattack hit him full in the face. Collier went over backward and landed heavily next to Cage, in a similar twitching-and- sparking posture. 343 Guilty Spark swooped around to cover his boss as best he could. Bastila ignored him. What did she care if the battle was recorded? Janice wasn't a close combat expert - in the parlance of the Ragol Hunters' Guild, she was a Ranger, not a Hunter - but she knew that standing off and lobbing fire at Bastila was probably not going to get her anywhere. Of course, closing with someone who had a lightsaber and knew how to use it wasn't the best idea either, but what the hell. Maybe she'd get lucky. "Mitra! Covering fire!" she ordered, and her Mag combat remote peeled off to the left, then started blasting at the Jedi with its built-in Photon weapon. Bastila growled and swatted it away with the Force, sending the football-shaped drone tumbling across the room and burying it in a pile of rubble near Ktarl's corpse. Janice kept running; she could see from the status readings in her cybereye's information package that Mitra was undamaged, just a bit stuck. Anyway, the distraction worked. She powered on her Barrier, then raised the arm-mounted energy shield in front of her as she charged. Lightning from Bastila's free hand sheeted over it, making its power indicator in her cybereye's status display dip with alarming speed. Barriers weren't too easy on energy cells to begin with, which was why they were both stronger than suit shields and unable to be turned on all the time. Having been trained on the Frame and the Barrier from childhood, she was able to divert power from her main shield array into the Barrier, a trick even the Repo Men would have had to stop and check the manual to pull off, on the fly. That was good; it kept her from losing her left arm as she used the Barrier to block Bastila's lightsaber. Thrusting the sputtering Barrier against the bright yellow beam-blade as hard as she could, Janice used the remaining momentum of her charge to bring her right fist hard into Bastila's midsection. "On the bright side, sirs," 343 Guilty Spark noted as he hovered near Cage and Collier, his camera eye trained unblinkingly on the fight, "this will net us some mad ka-ching once I can upload it to the Zone." "Geek? Soon's I can move my arms again," Cage grunted, "I'm gonna trash your camera drone." "But he's -right-," Collier replied, mustering a weak grin. The Jedi staggered back, her blade sliding out of contact with Janice's Barrier. Janice regrouped, taking a half-step back herself, and considered her next move as her Barrier's charge indicator flashed red. Her main shields were nearly recharged, but the power wasn't coming back to the Barrier. She suspected one of its coil elements was burned out; the shield was sparking and flickering ominously. She shut it down before it could blow entirely and considered her next move. Dubbo was the only Repo Man left on his feet. Desperate now, he slung his plasma rifle and drew his sidearm, thumbing it into overcharge mode. He didn't want to do it - Bastila wouldn't be able to deflect the explosive overload charge with her saber, but it would probably kill her - but what the hell else could he do now? "Bastila!" he yelled, drawing her attention away from Janice. "Don't - make - me - DO this!" Bastila laughed. The sound was intended to be merrily mocking, but it came out with a sort of slate-on-slate undertone of madness. "Go ahead, Charles," she said dismissively. "It won't do you any good." The blue-armored IPO trooper scanned her face for some sign that his desperation was getting through to her... and saw none. "I'm sorry," he said, and fired. Bastila didn't move, only narrowed her eyes. The crackling sphere of blue-green energy got halfway to her - and then stopped and reversed course without striking her saber or anything else. "CHRIST!" Dubbo yelled, diving for cover. The overload pulse blew the Councilors' bench behind which he dove to pieces, strobed his shields clean offline, and sent him crashing through the bench behind him. He stopped under the next one back, rolled onto his face, and didn't move. Janice charged again, this time aiming to take advantage of Bastila's distraction to come in opposite her lightsaber and - The Jedi turned, made direct eye contact with her assailant, smiled slightly, and then sent Janice hurtling across the room to crater the mural of the Battle of Klinzhai Prime on the far wall. Fuck, thought Janice, and then she peeled away from the wall, hit the floor face-down, and blacked out. A moment later, Mitra freed itself from the rubble and autohomed to her position, where it took up a hovering defensive position over its unconscious mistress. Bastila ignored it as she'd ignored Spark. She looked around, saw nobody else offering to oppose her, and made a slow circle of the spot where she'd just fought off all comers. When she got to X and Chad, she stood looking down at them in surprise. "Chad Collier! You're a -filmmaker-, for pity's sake. And not a very good one, either," she added archly. "Is this what the IPO sent for reinforcements? Pathetic." Xander Cage hauled himself painfully up on his elbows and said, "When I get up, I'm gonna throw you a beating." Bastila smirked slightly, took a half-step back, and then kicked him smartly in the forehead, knocking him out. Chad snarled, tried to lunge up, failed (his muscles were still not quite ready to obey him), and received the same. "Well," she said brightly. "Is that everyone?" With a sudden shower of golden light, a small bend in spacetime appeared and then winked out again in the center of the room, depositing a single brightly-clad figure between Bastila and the stunned Klingon High Councilors. "No," said Anthy Tenjou in reply. "Not quite everyone." Bastila's lip curled. "You should have stayed hidden, witch," she said. "Lord Venger will reward me handsomely indeed for bringing him such a prize as -you- along with Klayvor's quarry." Anthy's emerald eyes narrowed. "I am -no man's- prize, Shan Bastila," she said coldly. Bastila's greyish-pale face flushed slightly when Anthy addressed her with her names in the traditional Bajoran order. For reasons Anthy didn't know, the Jedi had abandoned her Bajoran heritage and all such indicators of it long before whatever had happened to her now, and the nerve was evidently still sensitive enough that it could be prodded. That might be useful. "Get out of my way or I'll kill you, and Venger's desires be damned," Bastila snapped. "Do what you feel you must," Anthy replied. Bastila ignited her lightsaber - both blades - and lunged, howling with wrath. Anthy met the charge, a staff of reddish-dark wood appearing with a lightning crack in her hands. Bastila's sneer returned - this would be easy - and she set herself to destroy the witch's weapon and end her. The half-svartelven witch had no intention of making it easy for her. Perhaps Rosenjaeger couldn't stop a lightsaber's blade - she wasn't sure, and wasn't inclined to find out - but it didn't have to. Drawing on the techniques she'd learned from Corwin Ravenhair in the use of the Draconic warstaff, Anthy concentrated all of her blocks and counterattacks on the -middle- of Bastila's saber. The double saber might have looked and even handled something like a staff, but it could never really be used like one, not the way a normal lightsaber could be used like a regular sword. For her part, Bastila was astonished and infuriated, not only by the witch's skill with the staff, but also with her speed and agility. The woman was visibly, if only a little bit visibly, pregnant, yet she moved with a grace that would have done a fully trained Jedi Knight proud - if Jedi were permitted pride. She was able to not only keep even with Bastila, but actually get a half-step ahead of her - - and then the double saber was gone, wrenched out of its owner's hands by a clever trick and sent spinning across the room. She turned and tried to call it back to her hand with the Force, but Anthy capitalized on the momentary distraction to deal the Jedi a staggering blow with one of her staff's armored endcaps. This was an opponent too dangerous to look away from even for a moment. Bastila snarled. No Force-blind trickstress was going to get the better of -her-, a full-fledged Jedi, a Sentinel of - - wait - She recoiled, a look of intense pain crossing her face, and Anthy pressed her advantage, knocking Bastila back, then sweeping her legs from under her and beating her painfully down. Anthy wasn't holding anything back. Her normal mildness was completely erased by her unhesitating certainty that if she faltered for even a moment, this opponent would destroy her and those she sought to protect. It was the sort of straight-ahead, teeth-gritted purposefulness she'd learned from both her loves, and it served her well in this clash. Once Bastila was down, Anthy whirled her staff away from her adversary and glided back, regrouping. It wouldn't do to get so caught up in pressing her advantage that she found herself drawn into a trap. But Bastila's distress was no trap. The fallen Jedi lay where Anthy's blows had put her, then slowly rolled onto her face and pushed herself up to one elbow, her bloodshot eyes staring wildly at the littered stone floor of the Council chamber. She looked as though her battle were now as much with herself as with Anthy. "Your pagh has been badly damaged by whatever's happened to you, Bastila," Anthy said, her voice mild but tinged with the uncompromising tone Corwin liked to call her witch voice. "If you don't stop this right now, I'll make it possible for you to feel just -how- badly." That seemed to put some wind back in Bastila's sails. She shoved herself up to her knees, raising her furious eyes to Anthy's, and spat, "I don't believe in that superstitious Bajoran nonsense!" "Then you've nothing to worry about... -have- you?" Anthy replied calmly. Bastila roared and threw herself forward, hands outstretched, all her powers and skills washed away by a burst of blinding rage and the need to crush the life from the witch with her bare hands. Anthy made a small gesture and spoke a single syllable, and the air in the room reverberated like the inside of a cannon. Bastila reeled, her charge snubbed as if by a concrete wall. The witch moved her hands in a more intricate pattern then, her scarlet raiments flowing around her as if blown by a small cyclone, and chanted in a language no one else in the room could understand: >Heart of the World, hear the call of thy High Priestess! And I shall shed thy light over dark Evil, For the dark things cannot stand the light: The Light of the ROSE PRINCE!< In the basement, Utena was watching as Tuncer and the Master Chief cursed and dug at the rubble blocking their way while Anne Springsteen concentrated on keeping the rest of the tunnel from caving in around them. Suddenly she flinched and staggered back against the tunnel wall, her rose seal suddenly pulsing with a brilliant white light. "What the hell - ?!" the Master Chief blurted. In the Council chamber, as Anthy completed the invocation, a beam of unbearably bright white light leapt from the brand on her forehead to Bastila's chest, suffusing the black-clad Jedi with its brilliant glow. Bastila shrieked, her body going taut, as the light of Cephiro's purity tore at the shadowed places in her spirit - and right now, that was most of them. The light show and the screaming went on for five seconds, then stopped as if someone had thrown a switch, and Bastila collapsed to the floor on her face and lay unmoving for a few moments. When she did move again, she first slowly pushed herself to hands and knees, then remained there, her shoulders heaving, as her tears spattered the stone near her hands. "... what... have i done?" she whispered. Then, raising her bloodshot, anguished eyes to Anthy, she said, "Well? Finish it!" "I don't think there's any need for that now," Anthy told her. "DAMN you, you self-righteous WITCH - did I ASK you to HELP me?" Bastila raged. "Did I ASK you for COMPASSION? Did I ASK you for PITY?!" She heaved herself to her feet, fueled by pure anger, and demanded, "FINISH IT!" Anthy made another small gesture and replied in a quiet voice, >Sleep now.< Bastila's rage-blackened face was cleared for an instant by a look of immense surprise, and then she sagged and fell unconscious to the floor. A moment later the main doors, which had been held by Bastila's power since she invaded the room, burst open. Through them came the rest of the allied forces - Utena, the Master Chief, Tuncer, and Anne, along with Xander Cage's dog Riddick, all running in advance of the Red Team. "Anthy!" Utena cried as she rounded the wreckage of the speaker's podium. "Hang on, we're - " She skidded to a halt, both physical and verbal, as she saw the devastated room and the crumpled, black-clad Jedi lying at her wife's feet. Utena started to ask what had happened, but Anthy held up a hand to forestall any questions, then closed her eyes and concentrated. She held her hands cupped toward each other in front of her, much as she would when summoning the Heart of the Rose from within her husband, but instead of a bright sphere of light forming between them, a misty whitish glow gathered slowly there. Anthy drew a deep breath through her nose, compressed the wispy sphere of mist slightly between her hands, then raised it, opened her eyes, and blew gently into the manifestation. Rather than dispelling the strange, glowing vapor, her breath seemed to strengthen it, making it grow larger and denser - until at last it resolved itself into the slightly transparent shape of a man in an armored suit. "BWASRGHuhHURGH!" Leonard Church blurted, then took off his spectral helmet and shook his head. "Phoo! Now I know how -that- feels. -Damn-." He noticed that he was almost standing on Bastila's unconscious form, then looked around at the wreckage of the Council room. "Ooooh. What'd I miss?" "Church!" Caboose O'Malley blurted as Julius Van der Groot helped him up off the floor. He winced, favoring his wounded arm, then went on, "You're alive!" Church gave Caboose a look. "No," he said. "No, Caboose, I am in fact still -dead-. However, I am no longer scattered all the hell over the -building-, and for that I'm grateful," he added, turning to Anthy. She smiled. "You're welcome," she said. Utena stepped to Anthy's side and gestured to the general scene. "Did you do this?" she asked. Anthy nodded. "Mm-hmm." "Did you invoke me?" "Yes." "OK. Good. I couldn't think who the hell else might have done it." Utena put a hand on her wife's shoulder. "Are you OK?" "I'm fine," Anthy replied positively. "All right," Utena said, her tension relaxing slightly. She raked a hand back through her hair, turned to take in the devastated room, and said with a sigh, "I guess we'd better see how bad the damage is." --/ "Seventy-three percent of the Council Guards unit wiped out; the only remaining loyal flag officer in the capital dead; four more of the IPO troopers injured," Jason Lock mused. He shook his bowed head and added rhetorically, "A -monumental- disgrace to the Order. As its perpetrator's teacher, I hold myself responsible." "So do I," Bolo Burke agreed gravely. Lock shot him a sharp look, then covered it and turned to the others. "Fellow councilors, we will discuss my apprentice's failure and my own culpability later. For now, let us finish gathering the facts of the incident surrounding it, that we may better understand its context." Faloon nodded. "Very well. Call your next witness, Master Lock." Lock nodded. "Charles Dubbo," he said, turning to the gallery. "Step forward, please." Dubbo did so. "You are one of the troopers of the IPO special mission force involved in this matter, correct?" "That's right," Dubbo said. His usual laid-back Aussie equanimity kept him from quailing much before Lock's severe aspect, unlike some of the other troopers so far interviewed. He sat relaxed and calm in the box, addressing Lock as an equal rather than a superior. Like the other Repo Men, he wore his Frame, but in place of its helmet he had on his much-battered, much-loved bush hat, the left side of its brim pinned to the crown. "Were you present in the Klingon command center when Klayvor vestai-Klavaar next communicated with the High Council?" Dubbo nodded. "I was indeed. That would've been about 2200 Thursday night, a few hours after Bastila's attack." "What was the general tone of that communication?" Dubbo grinned. "Well, I'm no expert on Klingon psychology, you understand, but I should say he was right pissed off, especially when Utena got to jerking his beard." /-- Utena stood with her hands on her hips and gave the holographic image of Klayvor a nasty smile. "Looks like you're going to have to try Plan B, Klayvor," she said. "Thanks for sending our missing Jedi back - you know how I hate it when I misplace things. By the way, who's Venger? Your decorator?" Klayvor's scowl could have cracked plate glass. "I'll see your insolence repaid in blood. First yours, then that of everyone you love," he hissed. Utena just snorted. "That'll be an uphill climb. Good luck with that." Klayvor gritted his teeth, then ignored her, turned to Chancellor Krojaar, and spoke to him in the hardest and harshest of Klingonese dialects. The grey-bearded Chancellor regarded Klayvor's holographic visage for a long moment, as if considering his officer. Then he emitted a single bark of laughter and a single Standard word: "Nuts!" Before Klayvor could even react to that, Krojaar made a short chopping gesture and the transmission was cut off. Utena chuckled. "Good choice, Krojaar," she said. "He'll have to go look that up." Krojaar laughed, then sobered. "Two hours. Our situation, I fear, is worse than General McAuliffe's. There will be no Patton to come to our rescue." Utena glanced from Krojaar to Anne Springsteen to the middle distance, then chewed thoughtfully at her lower lip for a second. "Maybe... maybe not," she mused. Then, tapping her commbadge, she said, "Master Chief Spartan? I need you, Tuncer, Sgt. Stacker, and Lt. McCandless in the situation room ASAP." "On my way," the Master Chief's voice replied. It said something about Klingon culture, Carmela Sunderland reflected, that their highest government building - the Klingon equivalent of Earthdome in Geneva, or the Federation Assembly Hall in Paris - had a detention center in the basement. Brings a whole new meaning to the old adage, "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer," she mused wryly as she passed the Klingon guard at the door and entered the brig itself. The trooper looked a little nervous, and Sunderland couldn't blame him. After all, it wasn't every day a man stood guard over a brig containing a rogue Jedi Knight. Not that Bastila Shan looked particularly dangerous at the moment. She sat crumpled in the back corner of the detention cell furthest from the brig entrance, knees drawn up, head down upon them, the very picture of defeat and misery. She barely glanced up when Carmela shut off the force door. "Come to have a look around?" she asked dully. "In a manner of speaking," the provisional AEGIS operative replied. "You told Commodore Tenjou you don't know what happened to you while you were missing." Bastila nodded slightly, her eyes fixed on the metal bulkhead opposite her. "Well," Carmela pressed on, "we need to know what happened before we can try to put it right... so if you can't remember, I need to go and see if I can find any clues in your subconscious mind." Bastila finally turned her head to look at Carmela, then shrugged faintly. "Do what you want," she said, then sank back into apathy. Carmela stood looking at her for a second, then sighed and knelt down in front of her. "I'll be as careful as I can," she said, "but this may be uncomfortable." Bastila didn't respond, so Carmela closed her eyes and began. An hour later, a slightly wan and tired-looking Carmela Sunderland reported to Utena back in the situation room, where she and the others she'd called before were still looking over the big holographic map. Utena and Anne Springsteen left the Master Chief and Tuncer debating some point of tactics whil they broke away to take Carmela's report. "I know what happened to Bastila," the ex-Psi Cop said without preamble. Utena arched an eyebrow. "Oh?" Carmela nodded. "She's suffered a - well, the technical term is 'acute cerebropsionic insult', but that hardly does it justice." Utena frowned. "Telepathic rape." "Essentially, yes. Someone - a powerful and well-trained telepath - struck at the weak points of her mental resistance structure in a way designed especially to overcome it. When that happened, it triggered a fugue state similar to the one that happened to your friend Juri when I tried to immobilize her on Tau Ceti. The main difference is that that was an accident caused by a rare combination of factors. What happened to Bastila was deliberate." Anne looked grave. "So you're saying... " "I'm saying someone set out specifically to wreck Bastila's self-control," Carmela said. "Which means whoever did it knew what that would do to someone with Bastila's training," Anne said, catching on. At Utena and Carmela's questioning looks, she went on, "We Jedi are pretty well equipped to deal with telepathy, even though we derive our own psionic abilities from a completely different vector... but there are gaps." Carmela nodded. "It's not just limited to Force-users," she said. "Some normals are also highly trained to block telepathic intrusion. Zardon Judges are notorious for their resistance, for example." "Can't a powerful enough telepath just smash through that, though, given enough time to work on it?" Utena asked. "I mean, I've been zapped by Psi Cops myself, and I held 'em off, but it hurt like hell. I wouldn't want to try it for 48 hours." "Theoretically, yes, but there's a danger. Breaking through someone's psionic resistance is like trying to crack a safe. Just applying sufficient brute force isn't enough - you run the risk of destroying the whole structure and what's inside it. In order to break it open without wrecking its contents entirely, you have to find weak points and attack them." "In turn, we're taught to cover those weak points," Anne said, "but... " She paused, looking for a way to phrase what came next. "Some of us more readily deny we have them." "Against normals, unfulfilled desires and unconfronted fears are the most common levers," Carmela said. "And I would guess - with all due respect, Master Jedi - that members of a monastic order like the Jedi have more than their share of unfulfilled desires." "We're -not- monastic," Anne said. "Not all of us." "But the Sentinels of Light... " Utena mused. Anne nodded. "Yeah. Bastila would have been particularly vulnerable to something like that, too. She was taken by the Order at just exactly the wrong age. Old enough to have permanent memories of her family, too young to understand why she was leaving them. It would've been explained to her later, of course, but... that kind of thing leaves a mark." "Or, as in this case, a crack," Carmela noted. "Mm. One that our unknown telepath exploited ruthlessly." Anne folded her arms pensively. "That's diabolical." "It's worse than that, I'm afraid," Carmela said. "By training and inclination, I'm a forensic telepath. I can read the signs left in a mind that's been tampered with and tell things about the person who did the tampering. In this case, Bastila's mind bears the hallmarks of a particular sort of Psi Cop - the ones we internally called Dominators." "... which means... " Utena mused in her I'm-putting-these- pieces-together voice. Carmela filled it in for her. "Which means Bastila was pushed into a rage fugue by someone who has Dominator experience, and who knew both the weak points of a Jedi's mental resistance -and- the consequences for a traditionally educated Jedi who is put in a position where her actions are governed by anger." Anne blinked. "So we're looking at someone with both Psi Cop and Jedi training? Is that even possible?" "Roger Tremayne," Utena said, her face going grim. "Roger Tremayne? He was killed in the Titan incident," Carmela said. "Your own forces - " Utena shook her head. "He was wounded - we all thought mortally wounded - but someone beamed him away before we could see him die, and the body was never found." She drove a fist into the opposite palm. "That explains a lot about this whole cockamamie setup." "How so? Aside from Bastila, of course." "Oh, the whole standing around waiting for us to lose heart and surrender thing," Utena said with a vague gesture. "That's been puzzling me all day. It's so... un-Klingon. But it makes perfect sense if one of the people running the offensive is a Sith Lord. Never just crush your enemies if you can humiliate them too." "I think he's underestimating you rather badly, then," Carmela observed archly. Utena chuckled dryly. "He wasn't expecting me to be here, and by the time he found out, his side was committed to the strategy. Klayvor's not good at thinking on his feet." She shook her head. "Roger must be grinding his teeth flat." "Why would a Klingon warlord and a Sith Lord be teaming up to overthrow Krojaar's government?" Anne wondered. "The Sith like to make a mess, true, but usually they have something to gain from it." "It's a safe bet Klayvor's government won't continue the Empire's alliance with the IPO," Utena pointed out. "What weakens the IPO weakens the galaxy's resistance to the Sith, especially now that we've solidified our partnership with the Jedi Order." "True. I didn't think they were that organized, though. Until very recently we've thought they were extinct altogether." The blonde Jedi gave a wry laugh. "This will make a very interesting set of reports for all of us, assuming we survive to write them." Utena grinned. "I plan on it," she said. "Come on. Let's get back to it. Good work, Carmela. How's she doing?" "She's... very low," Carmela said. "She's mostly recovered from the attack itself, but its consequences... well, I'm hardly qualified to say what might help her there. In her eyes, she's betrayed everything she spent her life working toward." The ex-Psi Cop produced a crooked little smile. "I know the feeling, but there's not much I can do about it. She'll have to work through it on her own... " One level up and a hundred yards or so to the south, Xander Cage was in the guest quarters, sorting out his stuff and trying to get a clear picture of what worked and what didn't after his dance with Bastila. When Janice Barlow arrived at his room, she found him sitting on the edge of the bed, facing away from the door. He had his Frame torn down and spread out on the bed in front of him, its central module connected up to a diagnostic unit, and he was sitting there in fatigue pants and unlaced boots, looking critically down the slide of his dismantled sidearm. Janice paused in the doorway and just took in the view for a moment - jeez, the guy was built like a fuckin' concrete railway overpass, complete with interesting graffiti - before clearing her throat to get his attention. "Hey, Cage. You OK?" "Huh?" Cage turned around, saw her, and nodded. "Yeah, I'll live." "Listen... sorry I yelled at you," Janice said. Cage shrugged. "You were probably right." "Well, yeah, in a purely military sense, maybe, but... " Janice hesitated, then went on, "That's not how we're supposed to do things in the IPO. I guess I'm still getting used to that. Where I come from, something wants to kill you, you kill it first. You don't think about why it's doing what it's doing." The burly agent grinned. He had an oddly disarming grin, one which broke up his customary muscled, bald-headed, tattooed, forbidding tough-guy air so suddenly and so completely that Janice always found it a bit shocking. "And I thought I came from a tough neighborhood," he said. "My whole home planet's like that," Janice said. "The wildlife tends to be huge and homicidal. That's where all this gear came from," she added, gesturing to Cage's Frame. "Back on Ragol, we've got a word for people who don't have weapons and armor and know how to use them." Cage leaned back against the headboard of the bunk, hands behind his head, and gave her a lazy smile. "Oh yeah?" he said. "What word is that?" "Lunch," Janice replied, straight-faced. Cage laughed. "We had some pretty big rats back in Delta City, but nothin' like -that-." "So how does an underground extreme-sports folk hero with a penchant for civil disobedience end up a Lensman, anyway?" Janice asked. "Heh. Civil disobedience. Haven't heard it called -that- before." "Seriously. How'd you ever end up in this line of work?" He gave her a skeptical look. "You really want to know?" Janice sat down on the corner at the foot of the bed and nodded. "OK. I'll tell ya. Once upon a time, there was a kid named Xander. He wasn't a good kid. Pissed off at the world, outta control, headed for a bad end. You know the type." Janice nodded. "Until one day, the FINEST-lookin' redhead you ever IMAGINED in your LIFE comes along and kicks Xander's ass for him. And when she's was done with that, she says, "'Listen, you little bastard - you're a piece of shit, but you've got potential. You can either let me unlock that potential, or I can throw you in the deepest hole you ever saw and leave you there to rot. So what's it gonna be, sport?' "Well, Xander, he's a gamer," Cage went on with a smile, "and he figures he can play along and then pull some shit." As he talked, he disconnected the diagnostic module from his Frame and started putting it back together. "What he doesn't realize is, he's up against the -original- gamer here. Nobody plays Kei Morgan, least of all some punk from New Detroit who thinks he's hot shit." He spread his hands. "So here I am. Xander Cage, Lensman, Defender of the Galaxy." Janice threw him the skeptical glance again. "Just like that." "Well, no, I left some shit out, but it ain't like we got all day," Cage replied, reassembling his sidearm. "You're not shitting me, though? Kei Morgan made you a Lensman?" "No, -Skuld- made me a Lensman," said Cage mock-pedantically. Then he sobered, slapped a magazine into his pistol, dropped the slide, set the safety, and said quietly, as if talking to himself rather than to Janice, "... Kei made me a person." Janice had nothing to say to that. "Well, anyway," said Cage briskly. He holstered the A&K, pulled on a T-shirt, and stood up. "That's all for 'True Confessions in the Xander Zone' today. Let's go see what kinda mess the brass is gettin' ready to make." He whistled, waking his dog from a doze in the corner of the room. "C'mon, Riddick." "OK, sure," Janice said, standing up to follow him. "Hey, listen... thanks for telling me that, Cage." Cage grinned his disarming grin again. "Thought I told you: Friends call me X." The next time someone switched off the force door to her cell, Bastila was feeling sufficiently interested in her surroundings to at least look up. What she saw was Chips Dubbo, rather the worse for wear. He wasn't wearing his Frame, and the coverall-style Tac Div uniform underneath was crumpled, dirty, and none too sweet-smelling. Dubbo himself was unshaven and tired-looking, though he'd washed his face and hands recently. The white square of an analgesic slap patch was clearly visible on the side of his neck, and he walked with a slight limp, favoring his left knee. He had on his non-regulation bush hat, which had escaped being lost with most of his other non-field gear because he'd left it behind in his minitank. Bastila glanced at him just long enough to take all this in, then looked away and murmured bitterly to the wall, "I suppose you've come to gloat." "Nope," Dubbo replied with his usual Aussie cheer, sitting down on the hard, narrow metal shelf that served the cell for a bunk. He tossed an object onto the floor in front of Bastila, who raised her head slightly and peered over her knees at the plastic SLAP of it against the diamond-plate decking. "Came to see if you wanted something to eat," Dubbo added. Bastila slowly uncoiled from her hunched brooding posture to a sort of sidesaddle seated position on the floor, then reached out and picked up the object Dubbo had tossed down in front of her. It was a military field ration, universally known as a P-ration after the black plastic pouch it was sealed in. "... Something to EAT?" she demanded. "I abandon everything that's ever meant anything to me, slaughter dozens of people, nearly kill you and your squadmates, and generally make a stuPENdous ass of myself, and YOU want to know if I'm HUNGRY?" Dubbo shrugged. "Yeah, basically." Bastila stared at him incredulously for a few seconds, and then - almost despite herself - smiled a little. "... I am a bit," she admitted. "Cheers," Dubbo said, raising his pouch in salute before tearing off the end. Steam rose from the open top of the packet as the pouch's auto-heater energized, flash-heating the food inside. "Aw, bugger it," the soldier went on, sounding disappointed. "Spaghetti again. What's yours?" Bastila tore off the end of her P-ration, looked inside, and took a cautious sniff. "It looks like some kind of meat stew." "Don't suppose you'd like to trade." "Is the spaghetti bad?" "No, but I've had it the last four meals in a bloody row." "Ah." Bastila traded pouches with him, peeled the memory-plastic spoon off the side of the pouch and watched with detached fascination as it stiffened from a spoon-shaped strip of flat, ductile plastic into a solid, three-dimensional utensil, then started eating. "You ought to see Tuncer eat one of these bloody things," Dubbo noted presently. "He shoves the whole thing in his face, works it for a few seconds, then spits out what's left of the pouch. It's the stuff of your darkest nightmares to watch that bastard eat." At Bastila's skeptical glance, he nodded and went on, "We went to a pig roast luau on New Oahu one time. The sheer carnage beggared description. I'd never seen him eat anything that was still recognizably an animal before. To this day I can't look at a ham without feelin' queasy." Bastila eyed Dubbo, unsuccessfully suppressing a snicker. "You're making that up." "Maybe," Dubbo said with a shrug and a grin. Bastila finished eating, then got up from the floor, tossed the packet into the waste chute on the wall, and hesitated for a moment before slowly sitting down on the bunk-shelf next to Dubbo. "Charles... " she said, then stopped, her voice trailing off. Dubbo wadded up his empty pouch, lobbed it overhand at the chute, and made a small satisfied noise as it went in. "Mm?" he replied. "I always thought... this would be different." Dubbo blinked. "Er... sorry?" "I've thought before about what would happen if I gave in to my anger and the Dark Side took me," Bastila said, looking down at her hands. "I never thought... I never thought I would regret it afterward if it happened. I didn't think that was the way it worked." The Repo Man's look of puzzlement deepened. He didn't have the beginning of a clue about Jedi philosophy or metaphysics, but he sensed this was important, so he took a game stab at it anyway. How did that smartass psychoanalytical software do it? General questions, man, general questions. "OK... for the sake of argument, what did you -think- would happen?" Bastila thought that over. "Well... I don't know... it's hard to explain it to someone who's never felt the Force, but... I always thought it would be like I had died, and there was a new person where I used to be. A vile, despicable person who would laugh at the suffering she caused. But I feel... like the same person I've always been, with the knowledge that I was still that same person when I did the things I did." She looked down at the floor, her shoulders hunching, and went on in a small voice, "I think I would prefer having died." Dubbo put an arm over her shoulders, leaning close, and spoke as soothingly as he knew how. "Hey, now. Church aside, there's nothing to be gained out of any situation by -dying-. Besides, this wasn't your fault. They messed about with your head. No court in the galaxy would convict you." Bastila shook her head. "You don't understand," she said miserably. "I should have resisted what they did to me. I should have been -stronger-. I'm - I was - a Sentinel. The last line of defense. I've been trained since I was six years old to face and put down monsters like Darth Venger... and when it came to it, not only did I -fail-, I let him turn me into his puppet. Dead, I could at least be forgotten. Alive, I'm an embarrassment. To my master, to my calling, to the whole Jedi Order." She bowed her head further, tears running down her cheeks. "It's just as well none of us is likely to leave this building alive." Dubbo searched his mind frantically for something to say. "Listen," he said finally. "I'm not the right guy to ask about the Jedi stuff, I'm about as unspiritual as a