A Young Girl’s War Between the Stars

  11

  Dathomir, 42 BBY.

  Looking at master Dooku holding his newborn daughter for what may be the last time, I kept silent as he and Augwynne shared a quiet moment. The man was calm on the surface, but every now and then, I felt his emotions flare up revealing the storm he was keeping tightly in check. Just from the little bits I saw, he was a mess of pride, joy, sorrow, anger, longing, and more—felt in brief flashes so intense I’d had to wall myself off completely and still felt the occasional outburst slam against my mental walls.

  There was nothing more to say on the matter, really. He had made up his mind to adhere to the Jedi code, regardless of the fact that this was perhaps the moment when he regretted it most. Nothing I said would change his mind—at least, not today.

  Personally however, I couldn’t help but wonder if the Jedi weren’t insane, with their ‘no attachments’ rule. That a man couldn’t have a family in the true sense because connections lead to fear, fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering as master Yoda so eloquently put it in one of his many lectures to the younglings. Ironically, that missed the fact that connections with other people made us stronger by giving us a network of people we could call on when we needed aid—that we could draw strength, skill, ideas, and other resources from. You should do everything you could to make and encourage connections with others and earn their loyalty. Even I knew that!

  …Certainly, it took fighting a war and living in the trenches for a few years to drill that particular lesson in and teach me the true value of other people as more than useful ‘human resources’ or meat shields, but I’d learned in the end! And it galled to see that lesson I’d learned in the loss of the people I held dear to nuclear fire and the petty spite of a false god just… discarded as problematic.

  Something to look into when I get back. I’ll dive into the Archives and see if I can find anything on it. Records of stable, normal relationships not falling to the dark side. Maybe I can track down when the change was made and why.

  It was a problem for later. For now, I had more pressing concerns. Namely, research on Serenno. I needed data and I had hit a roadblock on my searching. The map data I found was all horribly out of date and something told me that was intentional. I was going to be doing some legwork tracking down whatever I could once we got back to Coruscant. If we were going to be engaging in a ground war, information was key. I wouldn’t go in blind if I had a say in it. I wanted to know the layout of every potential combat zone well in advance, and then I’d update that information once we got there—but the less I had to update, the better.

  I also needed to dedicate some time in the archives to studying these ‘Mandalorians.’ Their customs, history, what to expect. I didn’t want to embarrass myself or masters Dooku and Dyas when we got there—or worse, commit some avoidable faux pas, offend someone, and destroy our chances of recruiting their aid before we ever got a foot in the door. The Japanese salaryman in me wouldn’t stand for the shame of being the reason we were unable to recruit allies to our cause, because I didn’t take the time to learn that you were supposed to bow exactly forty-five degrees to be polite and anything more was an insult, while anything less was considered not showing proper respect.

  I was pulled from my thoughts as Dooku sighed and handed off their daughter to Augwynne. “Look after Allaya.”

  “Of course,” Augwynne smiled. “You should visit when you can.”

  Dooku began to make a denial, but after a moment, he nodded once. “As I can.”

  Augwynne’s attention shifted to me, her eyes meeting mine. “Seven years. Make sure you’re here for your second trial.”

  I nodded, giving her a smile. “I will,” I agreed, before glancing at Dooku and giving voice to a thought I’d been considering for a while. “Maybe she’ll be ready for a different kind of training by then.”

  “Is that allowed?” Augwynne asked.

  Master Dooku made to answer, but I quickly cut him off. “I wouldn’t know. I’d just be returning a favor that was done for me. If the council learned of it after the fact and informed me it was against the rules, I would of course apologize for the breach in protocol and promise not to do it again.”

  Dooku chuckled, his hand landing on my shoulder. “Yes, it is a shame no one took the time to formally educate you on this matter, Tanya. It must have slipped my mind, what with everything going on with Serenno. And speaking of, I believe it’s time we depart. Are you ready?”

  “Everything is packed and ready.”

  “Good. Then let us be off. Augwynne, it has been a pleasure.”

  The woman smirked. “The feeling’s mutual. Don’t be a stranger, Dooku.”

  We left her in her office as Allaya began to squirm and make hungry baby noises, collecting our packs as we left. We passed the trip back to the ship in silence—unbothered even by the native wildlife. When we reached the ship, I stowed my gear and made my way up to the cockpit. Master Dooku had already taken his seat and gestured at the controls.

  “Why don’t you get us underway, padawan?” he asked, leaning back in his chair and watching.

  I nodded and began the preflight sequence. As I worked, I quietly said, “There may be an issue with the flight recorder. It may not properly record us on our way back from Serenno…”

  Dooku sighed, then shook his head. “No, I’m sure it’ll function just fine.” At my raised eyebrow, he gave a soft smile. “I worry that if I return any time soon, I won’t leave.”

  “Mm,” I nodded, looking away. “Serenno is a war zone, is it not? Even a master Jedi could be overrun and overwhelmed, or simply hit with an orbital bombardment and vaporized…”

  The old man chuckled as the ship shook and began to lift off. “I’m sure I’ll be just fine. I still have much left to do as a Jedi. Chief among them, seeing to you.”

  “As you say, master. Setting course for Coruscant.”

  “Have you had any luck getting those maps?” he asked, his tone curious.

  I shook my head. “Nothing less than a decade old. Smells like foul play.”

  “Quite,” Dooku agreed. “Unfortunately, I won’t have the time to look into it when we return.”

  “I’ve already made plans to start looking. I’ll check our Library and the records first to see if anyone has been there recently, then move on to the planet’s data center if I need to. If it’s been edited or deleted, there will be an audit log and likely backups. If this is enemy action, then hopefully our enemy is technically illiterate. Unfortunately, we can’t count on the enemy being incompetent, so I have other options in mind. Surely, someone on Coruscant has been to Serenno recently and, if so, their ship would have automatically taken and stored scans—not as detailed as we’d like, but it should at least give us an idea of what we’re going into.”

  Master Dooku hummed, considering for a moment. “There are free traders, outside of the Trade Federation. We have contacts within their ranks. I’ll get you the contact information you would need to reach out to them.”

  “You suspect they’re involved?” I asked, and he nodded once.

  “The possibility is there. And if they aren’t, it’s still better that we don’t draw their attention and let them know we’re aware of their plans.”

  “Avoiding them would just as surely tip them off. Any break of pattern in our dealing with them,” I pointed out.

  “Yes. That is why we’re conducting business as usual for the moment. But in instances like this, there is always a risk of espionage, information leakage, and retaliation. I would rather keep you away from them than put you directly within their grasp, in case they’ve learned what we know and that you were the one who brought it to our attention.”

  That made sense. There didn’t even need to be a traitor among the Jedi for the information to get out. Poor IT security or simply overhearing someone say the wrong thing at the wrong time could account for it. With that in mind, I made a mental note to be extra mindful of my surroundings when I went out to work on this project once we got back. Perhaps I should request some backup? It couldn’t hurt.

  Soon enough, we were out of Dathomir’s atmosphere and into hyperspace. I made my way to my cabin and got to work, busying myself with my latest self-improvement project since I couldn’t work on the Serenno problem until we arrived. Today’s book? Intelligent Systems: Droid Construction, Maintenance, Repair, and Modification.

  I had spent my free time on Dathomir training my mind by learning programming and slicing when I wasn’t training my body. Six hours a night every night and I had completed all of the classes available in the Technical University of Coruscant’s online self-study course—one of many such institutions that had deals with the Jedi order to offer courses and certifications free or at a steeply reduced rate.

  Of course, just having a certification did not mean I was ready to start trying my hand at slicing into anything more complicated than my tablet or the ship’s non-essential computers. Nothing I would trust my life with. I was still studying, learning, and developing my skills. There was also a list of equipment I’d need to buy once I got back. There was only so much I could do with my tablet and by repurposing some extra wires and parts from the ship, after all.

  One day, I aimed to have the skills and equipment necessary to get in and out of any secure facility I needed to breach, pass through whatever security was present, and do whatever it was I was there to do—all without leaving a trace of my presence behind, until it was far too late to do anything about it. But I felt like I was nowhere near that goal yet.

  In that proposed scenario, it would be a droid carrier or factory I’d be infiltrating, likely with the intent of either destroying it or subverting their forces to our cause. I felt like my goals there were entirely practical and reasonable, considering we were perhaps a decade out from a war where our enemy had foolishly decided to make up the bulk of their army with automated forces subject to hacking, reprogramming, and turning against their masters. If I could end even one battle without a shot fired or a life lost, I’d consider it time well spent.

  Which was why I was now moving on from pure programming to working with droids. I knew the models the enemy were manufacturing. I had been studying the forums discussing the issues around their software and digging through pirated copies of the base programming the things ran on to get an idea of what I would need to do, and in doing so I’d realized that a lot of it was very droid specific—especially the logic/emotion engines running even the basic B1-series battle droids. I wasn’t sure why anyone would want to equip a droid meant for combat with emotions, but if it could be exploited, I wanted to know how.

  “You’re making a face.”

  I nodded, pulling my mental shields in tighter and reinforcing them against the noise of Coruscant. That wasn’t the source of my discomfort, however. No, it was twofold.

  Firstly, there was a smell. The planet reeked. Coming back to it after being on Dathomir for so long, with nothing but fresh air and none of the industrial pollutants, exhaust, and other odors just made Coruscant’s noxious funk just made it that much worse. It stood out in a bad way. Like walking into a platoon’s shared latrine the morning after bratwurst and sauerkraut night.

  The other part was the dark side of the Force. Dathomir had had more, given that it was a wild planet with both light and dark in a natural balance, but here… Coruscant wasn’t a wild planet. It was entirely tamed eons ago. It wasn’t the presence of the dark that was a problem, it was the relative lack of light to balance it, and it seemed like it just… fed on itself and grew. A planet full of trillions of people, many of whom were being actively exploited, most of them miserable—it was a malignant soup that strangled most of the light here.

  And worst of all? The moment we got close to the Jedi temple, I realized that it was sitting on what might as well be a geyser of the stuff, where the dark side was even more concentrated. Maybe it was the training on Dathomir making me highly aware of them but the closer we got, the less I liked it, as it felt like stepping through a veil that interfered with my Force senses.

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  Before I could think too much on it, we were greeted by a pair of familiar faces in the form of master Dyas and Obi, the latter hanging back a bit and letting master Dyas go first. He nodded in greeting to master Dooku and sent me a brief smile. “You just got in and I know you’d prefer to take some time to settle back in, but I’m afraid duty calls. The Council wants to meet about Serenno, then we have a meeting with some of the senators we’ll need to sway before you speak to the rest. The senator from Naboo expressed his interest in the matter, in particular.”

  “I see,” Dooku murmured. “I can’t say I’ve met them. Who is it?”

  “Sheev Palpatine. He’s about twenty years your junior,” Dyas grinned, his tone teasing.

  Master Dooku didn’t rise to the bait. Instead, he took off his pack and offered it to me. “Tanya, would you be so kind as to return this to my quarters?”

  “Of course,” I agreed, taking the bag.

  “We will speak later, then. Let me know if you need help,” he nodded and gestured towards master Dyas as the two walked away. “Have the Council suggested what it is they’re hoping to achieve with the intervention on Serenno?”

  “Well…”

  I stopped paying attention as I was suddenly pulled into a hug and my face pulled into a small pair of breasts. “Welcome back,” Obi greeted, squeezing tightly.

  I let go of the bag with one hand to return the hug. “Thank you.”

  Letting go quickly, she stepped back and visibly looked me over, before a teasing look came over her face. She tilted her head, bringing one hand up to partially cover her lips, but her tone told me she was barely holding in her laughter. “What are you wearing?!”

  https://img3.gelbooru.com//images/a3/68/a368a90d0d5efd6a0cb37f29468078f4.png

  It was a particularly bratty look and part of me, the part that was Lt. Col. Tanya von Degurechaff, wanted to throttle her! PT her until she passed out, then wake her up and do it again! The part that was a Japanese salaryman recognized the look in a completely different context, mostly involving mesugaki tags…

  Wires crossed somewhere in my head and I felt myself blush. “Shut up! It’s what the locals wore! And I outgrew all of my other clothes, besides,” I grumbled, brushing past her and hurrying for the temple entrance. It was not a retreat, tactical or otherwise! I was just… advancing in another direction. I had work to do, after all! I didn’t have time to stand there and be teased and feel confused about it!

  Obi let out a strangled laugh and hurried to follow, her longer legs quickly letting her catch up as she walked by my side. “Is this why you stopped sending pictures and never sent video messages?”

  My eye twitched as she hit the nail on the head. “Reception on Dathomir was poor and they don’t have their own infrastructure to support data transmission. I had to route everything through the ship. Sending those sorts of things would have needlessly wasted time and resources.”

  “Uh huh. Sure~.” I could feel her amusement at this range. “Well, it’s a good thing you’re back now. We can go get you some new robes that fit and I can take pictures—”

  “Don’t you dare,” I hissed.

  “Oooh, scary~! Ufufufu~. So cute!”

  I let out a strained sigh as I reached out to the Force and followed it towards master Dooku’s quarters. “Enough about that. If you’re not busy, I would appreciate some help.”

  Obi straightened up immediately, her attitude shifting from playful teasing to serious. “Master Qui-Gon told me we were going to be going with you, master Dooku, and master Dyas to handle the Serenno issue, so I’m free. What do you need?”

  “Maps,” I answered simply as we found master Dooku’s quarters. I opened the door long enough to drop his pack off before closing it up. Considering my next stop, I decided on getting new robes first and began heading that direction. “Everything I was able to dig up while on Dathomir was outdated by ten years and I didn’t have a good enough connection to dig further. We need to check the archives and the records to see if we have any more up to date maps or if someone was out that way recently, and if so if they have maps. If we don’t have anything within the last year, we’ll need to seek outside sources. Master Dooku gave me a list of contacts to run down. He also said I probably shouldn’t go alone if we need to speak with them in person, so I would appreciate your company, if you’re willing?”

  Obi’s smile returned and she nodded. “Sure, I can help with that. I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to my cute Tanya when I just got her back.”

  I let out an exasperated sigh and she bumped into my side with her own. “Thank you. It’s early in the day so I’m sure we can get most of that knocked out today and still have time to look around for some parts and things I need. And that reminds me…”

  “Hm?” Obi asked as I pulled my pack off and opened it up, finding the cloth wrapped item in the middle I was looking for. Taking it out, I closed the pack up and settled it back where it belonged. Obi raised an eyebrow as I offered her the small bundle. “What’s this? Don’t tell me you got one of those outfits in my size! I, I don’t think I’m ready to wear something like that!”

  “What are you—no!” I protested, earning a giggle in response. “Just open it.”

  Obi unfolded the cloth and made a quiet, appreciative noise as she took it in. “Ooh, pretty! Thank you!” she grinned, and I quickly found myself wrapped in another hug. “But I didn’t get you anything!”

  “It’s fine,” I waved her off.

  “Sooo, where’d you get it?” Obi asked as she let go and began playing with her hair to get it on. To my amusement, and her annoyance, once she had it in place the fringe of her bangs covered it and was too short to really brush out of the way and stay there. She made an irritated little huff but didn’t comment on it.

  “I took it from a Spiderclan Nightsister assassin trying to kill me.”

  Obi stumbled briefly, before turning a wide-eyed look on me. “A what?!”

  “Perhaps I should start at the beginning,” I murmured, fighting off my smile at getting her back for the earlier teasing about my clothes.

  “You think?! Ta~nya~! Don’t mess with me like that!”

  After a shower and a change into my new clothes, we hit the library and began searching. Deciding on an appropriate division of labor, it was decided that I would be digging through our digital and physical records for any maps of Serenno newer than a decade old, while Obi would look into the mission logs and run down anyone who had actually been there, then go talk to them. I was pretty sure she picked that job just because she didn’t want to do actual research, but she was here and helping, so I wasn’t going to complain about the help she offered.

  Besides, she was cute and personable, and relatively well-liked within the temple whereas I had a reputation now, as I’d learned even just walking through the halls. It would be far easier to turn Obi’s weaponized moe into getting the information we needed out of other Jedi than trying to overcome the fact that people seemed to think I was either some hothead, or had usurped Obi for the position of troublemaker in the making—or as they put it, the next Qui-Gon.

  She may be his padawan, but apparently the temple rumor mill didn’t really have any dirt on her. Whereas my ‘duel to the pain’ with master Billaba had spread and become common knowledge in the time we were on Dathomir—with each retelling apparently having further contorted a simple fun sparring session into first a spar gone bad, then a lesson in hard knocks turned on its head, followed by a fight between a master and a student, then an actual duel, and finally a live lightsaber duel where I was threatened bodily harm and removal from the Order over hurting another innocent youngling that I then won and then had to flee and I was only back and not dead because I was master Dooku’s new student and nepotism won the day as he had seniority as a master over master Billaba.

  Worse than the rumors, I had to put up with more teasing! Obi had been relentless and I was seriously considering developing a Force Grab-and-shake technique just for her.

  Her being a pill aside, Obi proved more useful than I did in our little scavenger hunt. My research turned up nothing. Maps and figures twenty years old at least, that had apparently been neglected given that a check of the records showed not less than three separate visits to Serenno. That sort of lackadaisical attitude towards information gathering and record keeping would have seen Lt. Col. von Degurechaff requesting a transfer to a pillbox for someone if I’d found out about it! My people knew better!

  That the Jedi didn’t, or just didn’t care… it told me they were getting soft. Soft, fat, and lazy. It was a sign that nothing had threatened them lately and they were starting to slip. Things like this were symptomatic of a larger organizational problem. In both corporate and military hierarchies, attitudes of those at the top were reflected in the work of those at the bottom—as above, so below, as it were. Those small mistakes, lapses, slips, and neglect of duties added up, compounding and eating away at an organization from within like a spiritual cancer.

  In a corporate environment, it led to loss of productivity, errors that required redoing work or recalls on products, losses in revenue, and if it kept up eventually it would lead to failure. In a military environment, that sort of lack of care and attention led directly to preventable deaths when people got careless, inattentive, and lost their edge.

  It was worrying, especially with a war we would definitely be pulled into on the horizon. And no amount of effort on my part, filing my own reports and submitting my own data gathered from Dathomir and other places in the future, would truly change anything if I couldn’t change the underlying attitude—which I couldn’t do without being in a position of power. It was a frustratingly familiar situation—seeing a problem coming miles ahead, pointing it out, only to see that ultimately it didn’t matter much or if it did, it was far too late to stop what was happening and could only be used to react, the initiative completely lost.

  Unfortunately, for as useful as Obi was in running down the last Jedi to visit Serenno, that was still five years ago—well before this mess kicked off. It may as well be a hundred years ago for as much as it would help us figure out what was going on now.

  No, perhaps I was being too pessimistic there. It was recent enough to serve as something we could work with and there were other sources of data I could find and use along with what we now had to update it. If I had to, I’d dig into property records, tax records, building permits, and the like as that stuff was all backed up offsite from most planets right here on Coruscant as an extra-planetary off-site backup. I highly doubted any slicer who had messed with the most recent map data would have been so thorough as to also delete all of that. It’d take time, but I could work with a five year window. Maybe write a little program to search for those records, find any blueprints and relevant location data, then feed them into the digital map we had to update it…

  That would only be if we didn’t have any luck at our next two stops, however.

  Obi and I climbed out of the automated air car as it set down on the roof of the planet’s tertiary backup data hub. These complexes were essentially huge server farms, storing and backing up all of the data that flowed through Coruscant. The way I understood the planetary network structure after my research on the subject, it went like this:

  Data came into the network of satellites around Coruscant and was beamed down to various receivers on the planet. It was then sent off to the primary data transfer network which handled all of the storage and access requests coming in from across the galaxy and the primary backup network where it would go into Read Only mode and never be overwritten, only incrementally updated with each update logged. From there, it could be accessed from any hub within each network, which handled all of the load balancing to minimize lag on requests.

  At my suggestion, we skipped the active network altogether, since it was compromised—there was no point in wasting time trying to sort out why that was right now, when a report sent in would do, after we got what we wanted. Instead, we went after the backup network, where the data didn’t get deleted—or at least, it shouldn’t be. Which was why we were at the tertiary hub instead of the primary or secondary, just in case someone had gotten clever and organized a convenient server room fire to physically destroy the storage media.

  Making our way across the small landing zone, past a commercial aircar labeling it as Coruscant Technical Solutions, we headed inside to the main security desk. Obi smiled at the guard on duty—a green Twi'lek man sitting in front of a bunch of screens showing cameras. The man frowned as we approached.

  “Huh. Busy today,” he mused, before shaking his head. “How can we help the Jedi Order?”

  Obi smiled and leaned against the desk. “We’d like to see about accessing some data. You see, we’ve found what we think is an error with something on the main network and we’d like to see the backup data from the last few months to confirm. The data is critical to an ongoing operation, you see?”

  The guard frowned at that. “Sure, let me call the boss. He’s not gonna like this. First, trouble with some of our gear, now Jedi coming in and reporting tampering,” he shook his head and reached for a dumb phone on the desk.

  “Wait,” I held up a hand and he looked up as he picked up the receiver. “That was today?”

  “Well yeah. Repair guy came by with some paperwork and orders from up top to replace some data storage units in one of the server rooms—”

  I leapt over the desk and pushed him aside demanding, “Which one is it?!”

  “Uh, this one,” he brought up the camera feed, showing a human-looking man, though when he turned towards the cameras we could make out bony ridges around his eyes and forehead, and a wider nose. “Imzig guy. Name tag said, uh… Atris? Something like that.”

  Obi hopped over and joined me in looking at the monitor as the man worked. “Did you call and confirm he was supposed to be here?” she asked, and the guard rolled his eyes.

  “Listen, I don’t tell you how to swing a lightsaber around, you don’t tell me how to do my job. We got an email this morning about it, saying to expect it. It’s just a routine repair.”

  There was a flash from the screen and the man turned and began to run for the door, leaving behind a smoking piece of equipment. I could hear the grinding of my own teeth and Obi turned a smile on the guard. “I’m not sure, but is it standard practice to shoot the computer with a blaster when it stops working?”

  “…Pretty sure it’s not,” he muttered, standing and pulling the blaster pistol from his belt. “He’s gotta come back this way to get out.”

  “Good. Put that away and take cover. We’d like to question him,” I instructed, pulling out my lightsaber as Obi did likewise and we moved to take up positions behind some decorative pillars in the lobby near the elevator he would be exiting from.

  A few moments later, the elevator opened and the man came dashing out, only to slide to a stop as Obi stepped out, the familiar snap-hiss and buzz of the blue blade springing to life very much like this universe’s equivalent to the sound of a shotgun being racked for the effect it produced. I used the distraction to step out silently behind him, my own saber ready but not on. Obi smiled as she took up a battle stance. “Surrender peacefully and come with us.”

  The man fumbled the blaster pistol at his belt before pulling it out. I watched in what felt like slow motion as he raised it to his head, radiating terror. My lightsaber snapped to life and he flinched, squeezing the trigger and sending a shot into the roof as he spun to look behind him—too late as the white-silver blade swung through the air and caught the blaster, destroying it and the hand holding it.

  Before he could truly process the pain, Oni was on him, her saber on training mode as she swept his legs out from under him and sent him to the ground. He clutched his ruined hand to his chest as we held him in place, the threat of our lightsabers and the ruin of his hand warning enough I felt to cooperate, or else.

  “We’re going to ask you some questions and you’re going to answer honestly,” I smiled, and the man shivered.“You don’t have a choice in the matter,” Obi murmured, twitching one of her hands and I felt as he visibly calmed.

  “…I don’t have a choice. I’ll answer your questions.”

  I sent Obi an impressed look. “Should I be concerned about how good at that you are?”

  The girl grinned. “Surely not. Ufufu~.”

  “So, definitely,” I shook my head and she only grinned wider. I turned my focus back to our prisoner. “What was on the drive you destroyed?”

  “Don’t know. We were given a numbered unit to pull and destroy, not told what was on it.”

  “We?” Obi asked, and he nodded.

  “Lots of people from different companies. We thought it was just, you know, some senator wanting their dirty laundry cleaned up before it could be aired.”

  “You were given internal unit numbers?” I asked, and he nodded.

  I turned and sent Obi a look, to which she nodded. The guard, who had come out of cover and joined us, hissed the thought we were both thinking. “Fucking inside job.”