The Force Wills - Chapter 177 (Patreon)

You truly began to appreciate the speed of the Acclamator-II class when you covered a distance that would’ve taken the Resolute a full four days.

In less than 39 hours the Conqueror blitzed down the Entrella hyperspace route and turned briefly west along the part of the Celanon Spur that the Republic still controlled. Two hours in the Dorin system to transition to the Namadii Corridor, which would bring us into a straight shot to Coruscant in just another two days.

The trip up to Scipio originally had been a bit of a stop-start affair, but now the Conqueror truly showed off her legs. I felt giddy and a mild satisfaction that the ship would definitely now be the owner of a speed record for an active duty warship under arms within the GAR.

“...and we’ve been informed that a cargo shuttle is to rendezvous with us in the Bilbringi system carrying the new immuno-injector for all GAR personnel,” Commander Arril declared as he read down the day’s situation report.

I turned my very comfortable command chair around and gave my XO a raised eye ridge. “Which includes me as well? This is not just clone only?”

“Yes, General,” Arril nodded, looking down at his large datapad with a frown. “GAR Medical and Kamino developed this with the intent to head off or at least blunt the effectiveness of biowarfare attacks by the Separatists. It’s been in development by the Kaminoans for a decade already, mostly to harden their other cloning products.” My XO felt disturbed by his own words, since he was one of those products. “It has since been updated and can apply to naturals as well.”

It was yet another horror and distinct possibility that Voe Atell would pull more bioweapons out of the forbidden weapon toolbox.

That it was happening at all was a worrying sign that Palpatine was not feeling sure that his control over the new CIS regime was absolute, or that he was hedging his bets at least.

Savage’s latest report had indicated that Atell had been successfully ‘educated’ on who truly ran the CIS from the shadows. The memory he had shared was both disturbing and satisfying in equal measure. Getting briefly Force Choked by a Sith Lord, a supposedly extinct order of Force Users, through a hologram from across the galaxy had awoken a distinct primal fear in Atell. Naturally, Palpatine didn’t tell her his true identity as that would’ve probably caused her a mental breakdown and the CIS would need a new prime minister already.

Now she had quietly accepted the status quo, but Savage could tell that she wasn’t truly cowed and he expected her to begin building some form of internal counter-conspiracy against the Dark Lord of the Sith.

“All right, but send word to that shuttle that they’re going along for the ride and we’ll drop them off at Palanhi. We don’t have time to waste standing still on this mission.”

Arril tapped in a note, “Yes, ma’am. Next item, the Destroyer Thunderbolt and the 2nd Fleet will be meeting us at Pantolomin, just half a day before our arrival in Coruscant. They’re to take delivery of Dooku’s body.”

I massaged my forehead in irritation, “We could get it there so much faster, but no, the spectacle, the politics and COMPOR wants its propagandistic pound of flesh.”

“There is a danger that the count’s body would be otherwise intercepted in a clandestine fashion and reclaimed not just by the Separatists, General. Intelligence has picked up word from the criminal underworld that unsavory parties had been planning a raid to ransom the body back to the highest bidder.”

I snorted with amusement and held out my palm, a curved elegant hilt hovered from my belt to float above it.

Dooku’s lightsaber was in my keeping as another lesson from Taria, specifically in handling and eventual disposal of dark-side artifacts. It had to always be within reach for security purposes, yet I had to also contain it, holding a low-level suppression technique through the Force constantly.

The hilt wasn’t actively a malicious artifact such as a Sith Holocron, but it was a corrupted kyber crystal steeped in the Dark Side and Dooku’s calculated malice. It was in fact, the original kyber crystal Dooku had harvested as a young padawan from Illum, 76 years ago. With concentration, I could feel the echoes of every significant battle or duel the blade had engaged in, even every use of Force Lightning.

It wasn’t psychometry, just my experience and affinity for kyber crystals.

It was old enough to begin developing the faintest of ‘voice’, though it was still an infant in comparison to the Darksaber. It was still raging at the death of Dooku and directing it all at me. That I had beaten its former wielder was the only thing that gave me some measure of respect from it.

“I wonder what Dooku would’ve thought if he saw what a fuss the galaxy was making about all this.”

“Can’t exactly speak to that, General,” Arril said delicately.

A gesture and the hilt zoomed to its place at my hip. I had four blades there… Just a few more and I’d be giving ol’ Grievous a run for his money.

“Very well, amend our course with these new rendezvous points in mind. Oh, inform the Thunderbolt we will be doing a direct ship-to-ship docking for the transfer of the body. I can just imagine some daring raid, coming out of hyper to intercept any shuttle we would use normally.”

“That will be a delicate docking maneuver, General,” Arril’s eyes shone with apprehension.

“If you or Nav don’t feel like you can-”

“It’s just something we haven’t done since the simulator training on Kamino, ma’am.”

It was understandable, you don’t casually park anything the mass and relative sizes of an Acclamator and Venator within hard dock distance of each other. It was a maneuver only done for mass emergency evacuation, where using escape pods or small ships was inadvisable or suicide, such as a stricken ship near dangerous astrophysical phenomena.

“You take the lead, I’ll be standing over Nav’s shoulder, just in case,” I nodded, giving him a mild supportive smile.

He straightened his back subconsciously, “Yes, General. We won’t let you down. Next, our consumables storage report.”

A small datapad was handed my way and I quickly browsed through it. “Eighteen months?”

“General will recall, we had to tap into a significant volume to supplement food rationing during the siege. We replenished as much as we could from Scipio, but they only had so much they could give us in turn. They’re a net food importer.”

“I’m not going into the unknown without our holds filled to bursting point.” I swiped my hand through the air in front of me, bringing up a navigation holo of our course through the galaxy, inputted a few filters and searched for any agri-world along it. “Amend our course, we’ll take a slight detour to Broest as we go down the Corellian Run.”

“As ordered and noted, ma’am,” he confirmed, tapping on his pad.

“Anything else?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Dismissed.”

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The Conqueror emerged from hyper at the outer edge of the Bilbringi system, beyond the orbit of the outermost body, Bilbringi VII.

This was very necessary for safe navigation for the onward jump point as the system featured six distinct asteroid fields in dense clusters around the local star and no planets. Looking at it and with only a modicum of astrophysics and geology knowledge, the only conclusion one could draw was that the system had been witness to a cataclysmic battle in the ancient past. It had been enough to thoroughly obliterate every planet, overcoming the natural gravitational binding energies. To me it looked like someone had gone to town with their own Death Star. Yet nothing I could research or the known history of the system would indicate that.

It was the content of these dense asteroid fields that put it on the map beyond as just a major route to Coruscant. Almost every critical element in starship construction was held in abundance in all these floating rocks tumbling in the night; giving rise to the Bilbringi shipyards, which had been serving the northern inner core of the galaxy since the Old Republic. That told me that someone in the distant past had decided it would be more expedient from a mining perspective to create these asteroid belts from the planets. After all, why waste constant fuel and effort of mining and climbing out the bottom of a gravity well back into space.

Even Bilbringi VII was actually a large airless planetoid. Just a rather big asteroid by some definitions, where the shipyards and the entire system’s population was generally housed in a massive sprawling station built right into it.

Traffic going through the system always skirted the outer reaches, burning a course for three hours to reach the onward hyper point, never going into the navigational mess of asteroid clusters.

It was during this window that our medical cargo shuttle appeared, seemingly coming from the opposite direction.

It transmitted recognition codes and encryption, perfectly verifying their identity.

The shuttle was large enough to almost completely fill the Conqueror’s port landing bay and given the importance of what it was carrying, I decided to meet it personally with a small squad escort of 96th ARC troopers and Mando Blades.

The rear and forward cargo ramps hissed and opened.

First out was a senior clone medic with the commander rank in full armor, bearing the symbol of Kamino on his shoulder pauldron, alongside the Republic roundel.

“Commander Zippyg?” I smiled.

The clone medic who was escorting a three meter, rectangular repulsor container stopped in his tracks in surprise. He was unsure of the welcome he had received, before stiffening to a salute. “General Tano.”

“Welcome to the Conqueror. You’re here to give us our immuno shots?” I asked with a mild smile.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good, I’ve arranged for the berthing of you and your staff. Space is at a premium, so your men will have to hot bunk.”

“Nothing we’re not used to, ma’am.”

I gave salutes to my escorts, dismissed them and gestured for Zippyg to follow as his medical staff began their unloading with my own deck crew. I noticed the cargo pallet kept a floating pace beside him as we walked to the turbolift.

“Is something particularly important in there, commander?”

“The equipment and injector shots for the command team, including yourself, General. I examined and sealed them myself, they haven’t left my sight.”

“Your caution is well taken, commander.” We stepped into the turbolift and with a bit of maneuvering, the floating cargo passed through the door. “Diplomacy Deck.”

The ride passed in easy silence, most of which I spent sending the lightest of probes through the Force towards Zippyg. Each one told me the same thing; a kamino clone, nine years old, an indoctrinated mind that yet still had the freedom of initiative and creativity within certain wide paths. Yet like any learning sentient being, the strict ‘programming’ was steadily being eroded over time as experience in a chaotic galaxy began to outweigh it.

I could only marvel at this.

It would take more than my lifetime to master what I was seeing.

With that aside, I began subtly tapping the controls on my vambrace.

The lift arrived and we stepped onto the deck.

A final tap when the lift closed and I turned to face one of my mentors in disguise and bowed.

“Master Ha. Welcome to the Conqueror. This entire deck is obscured to my Republic Intel division.”

With one blink of the eye, I was no longer looking at a clone medic, but instead a toweringly tall, slender kaminoan Jedi with a mild smile and large black eyes of inscrutable depths with millennia of experience behind them. She was only wearing a loin cloth and a strap over her chest, not that a kaminionan female needed much support up there. Kina was of a distant generation that still held some of the natural vestiges that supported procreation and rearing of young, something that was nearly entirely gone for the current era of her species. Even her current attire was something I suspected she did just for my benefit. Her look wouldn’t be out of place among the traditionalist togruta.

“Thank you, Ahsoka,” Kina said softly, putting a large three fingered hand onto my shoulder. Her gaze through the Force left me utterly bare to a spiritual level. It was a struggle to endure the weight of that stare. She wasn’t judging, but it was hard not to squirm and feel nervous. I liked to think that I had some reasonable level of self-awareness, but the niggling fear that I was missing something critical continued to worm around insidiously. “You have done as you expected of yourself. You stood in front of people you swore to protect and did so at the cost of yourself. There is no greater definition of a Jedi than that. I’m also glad that you are not carrying Dooku’s death on your shoulders. Many are those that I have seen, carry that as if it was their own. Parading it to excuse their own folly.”

“Dooku made his decisions, he lived with them and now he died for them.”

I turned and gestured for her to follow down the corridor.

We only stopped at the furthest end of the deck, the last ambassadorial suite.

Fives was on shift and guarding the entrance. He stiffened and saluted us both. “General, Master Ha. Reporting all clear and intel bypasses are holding.”

“Thank you, Fives.”

The clone inputted a code, which allowed the door to swing open with a near silent hiss.

The suite’s living room had been rearranged and most of its furniture relocated to neighboring suites. It left the dark gray, cylindrical stasis capsule lying on the floor looking rather starkly out of place. Only a small strip of transparisteel near the top, let you see what was inside.

Dooku’s head had been lightly reattached with a bio-epoxy to make it more presentable, but otherwise the body was as exactly as it had been since Scipio. His legs were a scorched ruin from my blades, including the hole through the chest from Taria’s blade.

Kina gestured and her cargo pod hovered forward to rest next to the capsule, before it too opened to reveal another Dooku in stasis storage.

“M8, full comparative scan, please,” I ordered, standing over both bodies.

Her verdict was given in just a few seconds, “Identical, mistress. It would take a detailed near destructive scan to separate the two bodies. Even the damage pattern from the lightsabers and other weapons used are a match.”

That would be very easy for someone of Kina’s precision and inexhaustible patience to achieve, since I had sent her the memories of the duel. She had even gone so far as to infiltrate Serenno to steal a set of clothing from Dooku’s personal tailor.

“This is amazing work, Master Ha.”

She gave me a mild smile in response and gestured with a long finger.

The two bodies rose into the air and changed places.

The stasis capsules whined as their lids closed.

It was done.

I let out a small breath I didn’t know I had been holding. It was a constant, niggling feeling these days. The shadow war was in its most critical phase, where the slightest misstep could bring disaster.

My helmet unlocked and I pulled it off to look at Master Ha directly. “The immune therapy? It is exactly what is expected?”

Kina nodded her long neck in confirmation.

“Will it work?”

“As in all things biological, there are no guarantees, Ahsoka.”

My hands curled into fists as I wrestled with my emotions. “I see.” The side of the pod opened under Master Ha’s will, and one of three injector stims floated into the air towards me. I grabbed it and regarded it with a grimace. “You know this is totally unnecessary, Master.”

“In your case, or in any competent Jedi Healer, yes. Just think of it as another mask. It would be too suspicious and slightly hypocritical for you to be without it.”

I let out a weary sigh, “Might as well be injecting saline.” I held up the injector to my neck and pushed the button.

A slight pinching sensation and it was done. I was now officially ‘protected’ in case Atell decided to be stupid and release a weaponized plague. It was difficult to contain my paranoia as I felt the nanodroids go to work in my bloodstream, targeting the immunity cells and making slow steady adjustments.

I isolated the adjusted immune cells immediately, herding them towards a random bacteria they hadn’t gotten around to killing yet…

They acted as they should.

“Can you please wait outside Rex?” Kina smiled kindly at the veteran clone.

“Of course, Master. General,” he nodded to me and left the suite.

“There is a potential opportunity for Fulcrum I want to bring to your attention and I want your opinion and foresight regarding it.”

I shuddered slightly, forcing my attention away from what I had just injected myself with. “Go ahead.”

“I have been looking over the intercepts and data coming from Palpatine’s office. It’s all fragmented but a clear picture is building. HK-47’s analysis indicates that our chancellor is using a multitiered distributed approach to his security. He has no single place where he keeps his data secure. He’s clearly using the work of Plageius for this shadow network. In HK’s words, its sophistication has ‘muun meatbag’ thinking and techniques all over it. This network contains encrypted transaction logs, holorecordings and communication data, that would undoubtedly link Palpatine’s accounts in his alternate persona to Republic military contracts, the CIS loans, and cloning facility payments, to Kamino and Spaarti Creations.”

Kina could’ve hit me with a training lightsaber and I wouldn’t have flinched.

“You’re telling me we’ve finally found the first major, non-Force based, proof of Sheev Palpatine’s dual identity and financial control of both sides of the war?”

“Yes, Ahsoka,” Kina smiled with a distinct look of satisfaction. “The infiltration of Scipio’s Main Vault also helped enormously.”

“Well, not even Force assisted memory could possibly keep track of a network and operation that’s been built for nearly a thousand years.” I would know, since while Fulcrum had seen controlled exponential growth, I had taken careful vetting of each seed of the organization I had planted. There also wasn’t any one physical place linking the various Fulcrum cells.

Kina nodded, “Not even Plagueis’ exceptionally smart mind with the Force could hold a fraction of that accumulated data.The problem now is actually getting our hands on the shadow network, or at least a verifiable copy. It would require an infiltration heist at multiple locations, simultaneously, to extract this… let’s call it a shadow ledger. In HK’s estimation, we would need nine synchronized access points to obtain a usable and decryptable copy of the ledger.”

I really wished that there was something to sit down on. “Nine worlds, nine locations with the best security in the galaxy? Master, I hate to use this word, but achieving this without tipping our hand in some way… Even if we recruit disposable criminal operatives, the element of chance and some form of nerfshit will happen!”

“Is that what you see, Ahsoka?”

I sighed heavily and plunged my prescience forward, searching the probability lines. Some of them were rather harrowing… Fulcrum exposed wide open to the enemy… bounty hunters and Inquisitors, contracted criminals wiping out my network in mere weeks!

“The best we do is seven successful heists, the other two fail and we’re left with nothing but an alerted Palpatine who scrambles to secure everything and succeeds!”

Kina folded her hands behind her, doing her own form of divinations in the Force and using the weight of millennia of experience. “I was concerned that would be the case. HK has also calculated that the performance of criminal ‘meatbags’, no matter how professional, would not be optimal and lead to disaster. His first suggestion is that you allow him to essentially fork himself into eight more superior chassis and conduct the operation that way.”

I gave Master Ha a flat look, “Unleashing his brand of psychotic madness is bad enough with him only in one chassis. How long until he twists my permission to make an army of himself? No, absolutely out of the question.”

She actually chuckled in her serene voice, “I told him you would refuse.”

“So, what are the other suggestions? I see you’re working me up to something.”

“No system, even one as robust as the shadow ledger is unassailable, Ahsoka. We are approaching the problem from an outsider’s perspective. What we need is an insider.”

“A muun, preferably one who is in the IGBC and would be… recruitable,” I nodded. It couldn’t be someone high up like Clu Lesser, nor could it be someone too low, who wouldn’t have the access or the expertise.

“Anyone spring to mind, Ahsoka?”

My mind and prescience aligned immediately in a way that told me I had just found focal shatterpoint in the probability line.

The face of a specific injured muun, a volunteer sergeant in the SVD, lying in hospital flashed before my mind.

“Yes. M8, search your memory for a muun I healed in the hospital. Find me a facial profile match.”

“Searching, mistress!... Match found at 91% certainty due to all the bandages on his face. Sadiveet Kaith, Senior Risk Analyst, Collateral Assessment.”

I held up my hand and a profile holo of the muun in question appeared.

Master Ha smiled, “Well, it seems you’ve got a new recruitment to do, Ahsoka.”

“I’m going to need a dedicated HK-HP and ship for this from Concordia. No half-assing this.”

“Well, I’ll leave you to your planning, General,” said Commander Zippyg with a salute, where a moment before Kina had been standing.

Frak, no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t spot the shift in her Force presence. Every sense I had told me a clone was in front of me. “You’re too good at that. Do I have enough of a lifespan to even attempt that level of mastery?”

Zippyg shrugged, “I can’t say. That is entirely up to you, General.”

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Even with a rush order to Concordia, outright buying a suitable ship from MandalMotors that was sitting in a catalogue lot, and walking the HK-HP on board myself. It would still take eight days for it to reach Scipio.

So I had to content myself with the day to day life of a starship captain, as over the next two days the crew, 96th Legion and the few companies of the 501st that Anakin had brought with him, were administered the immuno injections.

Kina Ha left on the cargo shuttle by the time we reached the crossroad system of Palanhi, beginning the journey east with Dooku’s actual body smuggled on board.

Every moment in the journey felt like the galaxy was increasingly holding its breath, as if everyone on board the Conqueror was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

We emerged from hyper in the Pantolomin system and waiting for us just a few thousand kilometers off the busy emergence waypoint was Thunderbolt and the 2nd Fleet.

2nd was one of the ‘Home’ fleets, intended to defend Coruscant and featured one of the upgraded Mandator dreadnoughts with a hyperdrive that actually gave it some strategic reach. It was renamed the Shield of Coruscant, after its refit in KDY and had actually spent most of the war in space trials to iron out all the gremlins in the system.

That they weren’t using the Shield to transport the body was someone’s idea of being sneaky.

The docking maneuver between Thunderbolt and Conqueror was almost anti-climactic, in the face of everyone passing through the waypoint gaping at the rare display of a Mandator at hyper point.

Something you learned in command school and war very quickly, was that boring was good. It meant nothing had gone wrong, no enemy had decided to ruin your day and systems meant to keep you alive were still working. My Nav crew had been simming for twenty hours a day in shifts to achieve it. My only actual contribution was to order them to bed, relax before the ‘big event’ and standing over their shoulder as they maneuvered two ships with a combined mass of many thousands of kilotons to dock.

Meeting us in the formal ‘handover’ was Master Mace Windu, with a contingent of the masked Temple Guards, Senate Commandos and even one of the red robed Chancellor’s Guard.

A camera drone from COMPOR was there as well to document the event. It meant that both Anakin and I were forced to come in our best, polishing our respective armors and half-robes to the level of a bloody stage production.

The instant Dooku and visiting parties were off my ship, I ordered to undock and make the best speed onward.

I had hardly made it back to the bridge when I was intercepted by my XO and I could tell immediately that our general luck had run out.

“Yes, Commander?”

“Alert dispatch just decrypted by Intel division,” Arril reported, holding up a datapad.

I gave it a look as if he was holding an ancient terentatek, then glanced at Anakin, who was doing his ‘supportive master’ thing at my side. So far, during the voyage, he had been practically ‘glowing’ with the Force. It wasn’t something that normal folk could generally pick up on, but to me it was like standing next to a lighthouse, with the potential luminosity of a star. Not to mention taking advantage of his every free moment to return to the Diplomacy Deck.

Wonder how long it will take them to actually tell me that Padme is pregnant?

I sighed wearily and began reading.

“We just lost Korvaii, Numidian Prime and Bandomeer. That’s a huge chunk of the Selanon Spur and the Separatists are knocking on the door of Taris,” I said flatly, handing over the pad to Anakin.

His eyes widened, “What? How?!”

I let him read the answer and headed to my command chair.

A few swipes brought up the intel holo of a new model of droid that the Colicoid Creation Nest had decided to gift the battlefronts of the galaxy.

Three and half meters tall, standing on four pointy legs, with two dual rapid fire cannons carried above its single red photoreceptor head. Spindly, with minimal armor, my first impression was that I was looking at freakish mechanical scorpion. It hardly looked like anything that could cause the GAR to lose three key worlds on the trot.

Right until you dug into the system specifics and realized that this was the droideka’s nasty big brother. It carried a full shield system, properly configured for atmosphere and void warfare. There was no rolling a droid popper through the shield at slow speed and it laughed at radiant EM blasts. It was called the Scorpenek annihilator droid.

One of the first tactics used was a cluster of droidekas deploying under the umbrella of the scorpenek’s shield. The level of concentrated firepower made mincemeat of anything facing it, and it could burn through even high level fortifications, normal cover was utterly useless. It was essentially like facing a heavy starfighter on legs.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, the things could also crawl around on the hulls of CIS ships and add their firepower to make any close range bomber approach a suicide run, and the added intercept capability it gave to destroy incoming torpedoes.

The only good news was that the scorpenek couldn’t engage their shields without interfering with the ship’s they were standing on. PLX missile launchers were still effective, but required concentrated hits to batter down the droid’s shield. Frontline GAR units burned through their stock and reserves of missiles in hours, leaving infantry with no portable anti-armor capability.

Shabla! Frak!

Now the question was, would we be facing scorpenek’s at our destination?

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We barely stopped in the Coruscant system, only slightly pausing to launch a military shuttle to take Padme back to the ecumenopolis.

The secret couple parted from one another with great reluctance.

I couldn’t help but feel a slight twinge of inner relief.

I’d had to keep their Bonds closed to me, but it still meant that I knew. The sheer stamina Padme had now was almost on the level of her husband. A fact both enjoyed with extreme vigour.

Despite our precautions and using non-standard routing, it still took almost six hours for our clearance to jump into hyper at the very busy Ixtlar waypoint; the official beginning of the Corellian Run.

Nine uneventful hours of hyper later, we made a course change at Wukkar and slipped off into a secondary hyper route that took us to Broest.

The orders for the resupply had definitely been transmitted, the credits had changed hands and multiple supply tender ships should’ve been waiting for us in orbit.

Yet we were instead directed to dock directly with the planet’s main orbital supply depot.

I stared directly into the holo of a very nervous looking local aerospace controller who was practically sweating bullets from his forehead. He was Corellian and rather young for such a critical position.

“Mr. Odee. I specifically requested tender support and even paid for that. So that I wouldn’t have to descend into a busy orbital queue and delay my very critical mission.”

Odee visibly swallowed, “Uh, sorry, Com- I mean, General Tano.” His voice even painfully squeaked, his dark eyes were wide open as he stared at me with fear, yet was that a current of attraction and arousal in the background? Frak. “A number of our tenders went down for unexpected maintenance. There isn’t enough to handle your order, even though you’re in the military priority segment.”

My fingers drummed rhythmically on my armrest as I stared the controller down. I debated whether to just go with a reduced consumables load or go through the slog of heading into the lower orbit. The proximity of Broest meant that it was one of the primary agri-worlds that kept Coruscant fed and therefore its orbital slots were nearly as busy as the world it fed. There was no other agri-world that offered the convenience of its proximity to the Corellian Run. All the others along the route would require Conqueror to make a major hyperspace lane deviation and add days to our journey.

“Very well, Mr. Odee. We will take the docking slot.”

The young controller looked instantly relieved. “Uh, thank you for your understanding, General. T-transmitting course and you’re in Dock 37 Sen.”

“Conqueror out.”

I cut the transmission pointedly with minimal effort to polite communication protocol.

The ship docked to the massive primary supply station which was a blocky disc nineteen kilometers in diameter. Dozens of ponderous freighters were coming and going from it, docked directly to the station edges like ticks. Conqueror looked positively miniscule next to these cargo behemoths that were constantly working to keep Coruscant fed.

After I felt my ship shudder as hard dock was achieved, I turned to my XO, “I want strict level six security screening of every pallet that is coming aboard. No dockworker is allowed, and only Conqueror crew will handle the lifting.”

Arril frowned, recognizing something in my tone, “As you command, General. Is there something wrong?”

I stared at the space station and beyond it to the lush fertile planet below. “It’s been a while since I’ve been in touch with what you could call the ordinary folk of the galaxy. Close enough to sense them in detail, at least. And what I’m getting from the planet below is that a significant part of the people of Broest are not content with their lot.”

“I will double security at the docking port, General.”

“Agreed, the bridge is yours, XO.”

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The next few hours I spent doing something that I had hoped to avoid.

Properly move into the Conqueror’s Captain’s quarters.

All my belongings and war chest from the Resolute had remained in their crate, and I had only unpacked as necessary. Not that it was much, but it still felt like I was either admitting failure or losing something in the process.

For so long I had lived on that ship, it had seen us through so much and now I was leaving it.

Still an Acclamator-IIs captain berth was a significant step up in personal square meters available to me and relative creature comforts that were immediately on hand.

I had my own bedroom, attached kitchenette, a living room that doubled as a private office. I even had a ward room where I could hold dinners with officers and department heads. That was served by a designated Chief chef from the mess staff, who also doubled as the man who I could effectively treat as my personal butler.

Currently that position was held by a clone going by the name ‘Cloud’.

A nickname he fully earned from his batchmates by being always present, quiet, and smoothing over problems with drawing attention. For most of the original hectic journey to Scipio, I had barely comprehended that I had a ‘Personal Steward’ in the Chief Mess Officer of my own ship. He had been an unobtrusive presence at department meetings, just getting things done as I ordered with a quiet efficiency.

Every day I came back from a duty shift to find the captain’s cabin and my messy bed perfectly arranged to original specification. At first, I had assumed one of the cleaning droids was responsible, but that was proven wrong when I had a cup of perfect caf, exactly as I liked it, waiting for me in my office.

It was during my convalescence in the repulsor chair that he stepped out of the background and formally introduced himself as my Steward and that he would be taking over certain ‘duties and tasks’ that I, as ‘The General’ , shouldn't have to bother with.

For the first few days, my general paranoia had been quite high, as my own clandestine activities would now need to work around my steward. He could’ve been a conditioned RI operative. That was quickly proven false with judicious use of prescience and a few other clandestine ‘tests’; such as leaving a datapad on the bed with ultimately useless fake classified files that just appeared ‘juicy’ on the surface.

Cloud had simply picked it up and put it in its proper place.

His spirit was like the kaminoan cloners had somehow found the avatar of efficiency, cleanliness and mixed in a bit of the culinary skills of Chef Marco Pierre White.

It was therefore not a surprise to find my steward was waiting for me outside the captain’s cabin in his immaculately perfect naval duty uniform.

“General,” he greeted with a respectful salute.

I smiled warmly at the man, “Chief Cloud, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were Force Sensitive. You know exactly when and where you’re needed.”

He gave me an arched brow and retorted dryly, “It’s simply called being meticulous and observant, General.”

“Admirable qualities, certainly. You’ll have to forgive me, I’m still not that comfortable with being… stewarded.”

“Understandable, general. I researched the general upbringing that you would’ve received in the Jedi Temple. Self-sufficiency is a goal every being must strive towards. However, everything has a season and role. Your role and responsibility now means that you can’t afford to waste time on managing your schedule, personal logistics, preparing your meals and maintaining your cabin.”

“And again, I’ll accommodate you taking over in those areas, but do understand that I also enjoy the process and art of cooking. So do not feel slighted when I’ve already prepared something.”

He nodded seriously, “As you say, General. Shall we get to organizing your cabin?”

I placed my hand on the security scanner, using a bit of Mechu-Deru to manipulate another mechanism I had installed that would trigger a silent alarm directly to M8 if it wasn’t adjusted in just the right way. Cloud was the only other who could enter beyond this door and I would know if someone tried to use him to breach beyond it.

“Yes, Chief. It’s time I moved on.”

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I was taking my breakfast the next morning, with Cloud’s unobtrusive presence in the background when he stiffened as a small alarm from his datapad drew attention.

“General, the XO is calling, do you wish to take it?”

Another function I had to get used to, he effectively acted as a filter during my off-duty private time for any ship or GAR business.

I put down the fork of delicious nerf meat and eyed the poached hanat eggs I had yet to touch; they were blue-green and nothing that color had any business smelling so good. Cloud had definitely been looking up dishes that would agree with a togruta palate.

“Fine, send it through.”

The upper body holo of my XO appeared over the table, “Sorry for disturbing your breakfast, General. There’s been a development over the last shift with the supplies we’re taking on.”

I stifled the groan that threatened to worm its way out of my mouth, “Yes, XO?”

“We did some random test probes on the ration packs and food pallets. Evidence has been found of deliberate contamination.”

I could feel Cloud’s quiet outrage burning like a small star behind me. Any Chief Mess Officer would not be happy to hear that news.

“Have you managed to localize it? To a specific batch or shipment?”

“We’re in the process of doing that now. Preliminary indications are that its food that comes from the north-western continent of Broest. Whoever did this also didn’t want to make it easy to trace, as we’re finding contamination in other batches as well.”

It was really tempting to smash my fist through the table at this moment. Of all the obstacles to throw in my way, sabotaged food was a new one. In retrospect, it was an obvious vector of attack to the GAR, an army marching on its stomach and all that.

“What do you recommend, XO?”

“Clean ship, General. We take every pallet loaded from Broest and throw it back in their faces. If they don’t want to take it, we throw it out the airlock.”

“I appreciate your enthusiasm, XO. While that would certainly solve the short-term problem, the greater problem we’ve encountered still needs addressing. This world is one of many that serves Coruscant and the Core. The enemy has already attacked agriworlds with bioweapons and now that we’ve hardened against that, they’ve seemingly found another more insidious way of messing with the Republic and more specifically the GAR’s food supply. Has CMO Curty tested the potential effect of this contaminated food on crew?”

“Yes, General. It ranges from severe diarrhea to even death if left untreated. He’s confirmed that it’s a foodborne pathogen, naturally occurring but shows signs of artificial weaponization.”

A grim feeling rang up and down my spine, “Now the question is, are we the specific target, the first to be hit or has this managed to make it to the Core worlds as well?”

“It could possibly sneak through standard scans, General. If you hadn’t ordered a high level security protocol for the pallets, we wouldn’t have caught it either.”

It didn’t take long to make this decision, not with something as critical as this. Every hour it didn’t happen, was another freighter leaving with potentially deadly food.

“XO, you’ve stopped loading operations?”

“As soon as the first contamination reports reached me.”

“Good, go to Condition Two. Undock from the station and put us in an interdiction position of the planet towards the Wukkar hyper point. I noticed that there is another Navy Acclamator docked here, the Deceptor. Get her captain on comms, warn him of the food and that I’m taking overall command. He’ll have at least a few fighter squadrons that will help tighten up the interdiction.”

“At once, General. XO out.”

“Am I to assume you will not be finishing your breakfast, General?” Cloud asked dryly, his tone laced with disapproval.

Good grief, it felt like those words could’ve been coming from my previous life’s grandmother!

“I will, if you can do the job of getting me the planetary governor on comlink.”

How a Jango Fett face could remain perfectly neutral, yet convey that he was insulted at the mere suggestion that he couldn’t carry out such an order, was quite impressive.

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Broest as a planet, technically belonged to the Salliche Agricultural Corporation. They owned and had the right to every acre of arable land on the planet, which they were constantly expanding by delicate geological engineering projects.

Therefore the ostensible ‘governor’ was actually a high level executive in Salliche, assigned by the company, whilst the local citizenry and farmers only held a ‘punitive’ vote for him/her. If the governor didn’t do a good job, a vote could be called and if a majority agreed, the governor would be fired by Salliche; in theory.

In practice, it rarely happened and the galactic food megacorp knew very well at this point how to manage the populations and farming employees to keep them walking the line.

The current governor was a coruscanti man named Kayot Worveld.

Just one look at his floating holocom image as I walked through Conqueror to the bridge told me almost all I needed to know.

A career executive, he wore the current high coruscanti fashion of half-suit and elegant overrobe in a dark blue, made of materials that probably cost as much as his line employees and farmers made in a standard year. He had graying short hair with a face and body that had never seen a hard day’s work in his life. His green eyes were flashing with equal measure of alarm and fear. Even looking beyond with the Force, didn’t change the impression of the man. A crony executive, worried only for his own career and skin.

“What?!”

“You heard me, Governor. I am declaring a quarantine of this system after a weaponized bacterium was discovered in the food supplies being delivered to my ship. I can only conclude that this is another form of Separatist attack on the Republic, by undermining the agriworlds that feed the Core. You can also appreciate the psychological ramifications when everyone starts to look twice at their next dinner, wondering if their next meal is going to kill them.”

He wrung his hands, his eyes desperate, “How sure are you of this, General Tano?”

“As sure as I can be of anything, I’ve already reviewed my CMO’s report and the evidence at hand. There is no mistake or uncertainty. At this point, you have two choices. Support me and order all freighter ships to either land, dock or remain in their parking orbits or oppose me; upon which I will begin using my fighters and ion cannons to disable any ship that tries to run the interdiction. I will also send a GAR commando unit to arrest you, since you’re clearly then acting in support of Separatist-"

“No, no! Of course, General. Consider it done.”

“Good. Stand by.”

The bridge bulkhead doors opened ahead of me, the lights inside all in the amber of Condition Two.

XO Arril stood immediately from the command chair and regarded me with a grim look, “General, the station is refusing to release the docking clamps and they’ve got localized tractor beams locked on.”

“What?!” babbled Worveld’s holo.

“The game’s afoot, it seems,” I sighed wearily, sitting down in the big chair. “Comms, get me the station commander immediately.”

“Hailing, General.”

Five seconds passed as I watched the naval clone work and speak into his headset.

Another ten before he shook his head, “No response to our hail.”

My hand gestured over the chair armrest and the holo of a naval clone captain appeared.

“Captain Ontir of the Deceptor. A pleasure to meet you.”

“And you, General Tano. My own XO has briefed me and we’re ready to deliver full support.”

“I assume you are also unable to release docking clamps?”

His holo looked to the side, “Confirmed General.”

“At this point we must consider ourselves under attack. Go to Condition One and launch your ready squadron of fighters. They’re to target tractor beams and docking clamps holding both our ships hostage.”

“At once, General. Battle stations! Launch fighters!”

“General Tano! Please,” Worveld groaned, holding his hands together in a pleading gesture. “This has to be a misunderstanding. You’re going to damage Salliche assets and property…”

“Then your station commander should pick up his damn holocom!” I snapped. “His silence at exactly this moment is damning and we can’t afford a single freighter ship to leave this system until this is dealt with! Now do your damn job and order the lockdown or I will do it for you! And you can be a guest on my Detention Deck!”

Worveld paled, “A- a- at once, General.”

He cut his link.

“Comms, full monitoring of all frequencies, I want to know the instant Worveld gives the order.”

“Fighters are approaching firing positions, awaiting final confirmation,” Ontir reported.

Understandable, as we were opening fire on civilian infrastructure, “You have authorization, captain.”

“Peth Squadron, open fire!”

Twelve Z-95s swarmed towards the station and began their calculated precision strikes.

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A/N: Oh dear, Palpatine's game board is looking a bit shaky there ;-)

Hope you enjoyed and have a great weekend. As always, stay awesome!