Chapter Text
It takes a while, but eventually the bustle in the office dies down. The Senator’s mother kisses her cheek and takes her leave, the various aides and Assembly pages stop bustling in and out, the droid housekeeper deposits a steaming teapot on the desk and shuffles away for the last time with datapad in hand, and all that’s left is Riyo Chuchi, sitting alone at her desk with her ridiculous formal headdress tossed to one side and her lavender hair spilling in long coils down around her shoulders, chin propped on one hand as she squints at her own datapad with tired eyes.
There’s still a household full of people close by, though, and a fully armed officer of the Pantoran Guard on sentry duty outside the door, so Stealth waits, trying to ignore the deepening ache in her left shin and the heavy, spiced scent of the unpoured tea both—which is hard; it’s been four rotations now with nothing to drink but lukewarm, stale-tasting water from her canteen and she’s not used to that any more—for long enough to give all of them except the sentry time to move away before she drops camo and takes exactly two steps forward from where she’s been waiting since just before the Senator’s shuttle touched down at the Pantoran City spaceport earlier in the afternoon, into the shafts of light falling from the grilles carved high in the outer wall.
“Senator.”
Her voice is quiet, but at the sound of it the Senator’s head jerks up and her eyes shock wide, datapad dropping from her fingers to the desktop.
“Don’t be alarmed. I’m a friend. And we’ve met before, on Coruscant, though I don’t expect you’ll remember me.” She reaches up, moving slow and careful and watching the Senator’s hand where it hovers at the edge of the desk, ready to drop onto an emergency call switch.
Golden eyes narrow warily, and then open again in—not surprise, but recognition, as Stealth lifts her helmet off and shifts deliberately to at-ease stance with it tucked against her hip. “Actually, I remember you quite well,” says the Senator, equally quietly, and clasps her hands together above the desk. They’re shaking slightly, but she does a good job of hiding it. “Though I don’t think I ever heard your name. Did Rex send you?”
The confirmation of her guess—both her guesses—makes Stealth smile a little, but she shakes her head. “No. I’m here on my own. I’ve come to ask for your help.”
The Senator blinks at that. “My help?” Then she props her elbows on her desk and looks at Stealth over her clasped hands. “What kind of help, and with what?”
It’s not agreement. She’s asking for information. Stealth nods, and takes another step forward. “Covert operations rely on a lot of infrastructure to be successful. I have an operation to run, and I don’t have access to the kind of infrastructure I need any more, so I want to borrow yours.”
“Hm.” Another slow blink of those bright eyes. “To do what?”
Stealth grins. “Have you ever heard of a disgraced scientist called Doctor Royce Hemlock?” she asks, light and quick, already knowing what the answer will be, and watches with satisfaction as the Senator straightens in her seat, her eyes widening, her knuckles turning pale blue as her hands tighten on each other. “He’s taken my friend Omega.” Because if the Senator remembers her, she’ll definitely remember Omega.
“Go on,” says the Senator tensely, and Stealth bites back a sharper grin. Bait taken.
Twenty minutes later the captain of the Pantoran Guard company assigned to protect Senator Chuchi’s person and official residence intercepts the droid housekeeper outside the office door and carries in a fresh pot of tea himself, stiffly, his narrow face stony with the affront to his dignity. Hip propped against one of the heavy visitors’ chairs, Stealth snorts quietly at his expression, then laughs out loud as the man registers her presence and freezes, unable to either make himself drop the tea-tray or suppress the instinct to reach for his sidearm.
“Senator—!”
“Oh, Captain Chioru! Thank you.” The Senator smiles at him serenely and waves a hand at the empty expanse of her desk. “Let me introduce Corporal Stealth of Clone Force 99,” she carries on as the captain finally unlocks his joints and stalks over to put the tray down, not as hard as he’d clearly like to. “During the next few rotations she’ll be launching a covert operation to infiltrate a key Imperial research base and liberate some clone prisoners being held there from here in Pantoran City. I request that—”
“Oh, she will, will she?” The captain shoots Stealth a narrow look. “May I ask what—our contact on clone matters has to say about this?”
“Nothing,” Stealth says before the Senator can respond, and hears too late the flat hostility in her own voice. She knows she owes Rex gratitude, for everything he did for her—for all of them—with the chips back in the day, but—
Silence. Silence around her. For the first time in months, silence inside her head. No pressure, no pain. Tears of relief well behind her eyelids; she swallows and reaches up to brush her fingers over the side of her head, feeling a small, already-healing wound just where Rex had promised it would be. Even her hand feels impossibly, unbearably light as it moves.
“Stealth?” Tech’s voice, calm and clinical. “Are you—”
“Yes.” She sits up, looks for an instant at the ring of wary, worried faces around her and buries her own face in her hands. “It worked. It’s gone. I’m fine.” Her voice is a thread.
Another moment of silence; then: “What’s gone?” asks Rex, his voice tense.
She shakes her head. Even after all these months it’s hard to find words to describe it. “The, the pressure. The weight. The voice,” she says at last, and pushes herself up off the operating table, a little unsteady still, and walks away from the understanding that’s beginning to dawn in their eyes.
Of course it’s scragging Rex who comes after her and presses a canteen into her hands. “I remember how it felt, when—the order—went out. As if a whole different reality had just swept in and replaced the one I knew. I tried to fight it. I knew about the chips—knew what must be happening. But I could only hold back the tide for a few seconds.” He smiles, faintly. “Just lucky for me that a few seconds was enough.” He takes a deep breath. “I can’t imagine doing it for months on end.”
“Well.” She hunches a shoulder, swigs water and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, wanting him gone. “Defective, remember? It wasn’t exactly operating at full strength.”
“Neither was Crosshair’s, from what Hunter says.”
“No.” She leans her head back against the dull, cool metal of the wall. “When I figured out what was happening I tried to help him push back against it, but it was already too late. He couldn’t hide what he was hearing like I could.” And he’d never had anyone to teach him that politics were the context for the orders soldiers were given, except her, and she’d never really bothered to try, so he hadn’t had the tools to help himself. “And then they took him away, and then suddenly he was a good soldier, following orders. And that was that.”
“You think the Empire—interfered with the chip’s function? Intensified it somehow?”
Scragging idiot reg. How does he even survive when he’s so slow to see the obvious? “’Course they did,” she snaps wearily, and turns away. “I’m tired, Rex.” She hasn’t dared sleep deep or long for months; her bones ache with it. “Leave me alone.” And he turns to go, but before he can the words burst out of her: “If you knew about the chips before it happened, Rex, why the kriff didn’t you say something?”
He stops for a moment, but doesn’t respond, just shakes his bowed head briefly and goes. And then he has to go and open his idiot reg mouth again at the wrong moment and it’s Wrecker who pays the price, and so she has to go and fight again, help bring him down and bring him in and see him through to the other side because she won’t lose another of them to this, this thing on top of all the other things that have been done to them, not ever again. Not now she’s free.
Yeah. She owes him gratitude, but it doesn’t mean she has to like him, and it doesn’t mean she has to work with him. But she can’t afford to lose these two over it, so she takes a slow breath and says, as mildly as she can, “We operate independently for the most part, for safety reasons. I can call on his group for backup if I need to—” And she never scragging will “—but he’s not running this operation. I am.”
The captain’s cheeks flush darker blue under his family markings. “Senator, I must protest—”
“Captain.” The Senator’s voice is not so much stern as it is absolutely assured, and the captain’s protest crumbles under its weight. “The matter is not up for discussion. You are to give Corporal Stealth all the assistance she requires to complete the first phase of her operation. Yes, that is an order,” she adds as he musters one last spark of resistance, and he subsides at last. “Now, if you will please sit, the corporal will brief you on the mission plan, your role and that of your company.”
Somehow, in the midst of everything, the Senator has produced extra teacups from somewhere—small, elegant porcelain things in the curving style the Pantorans favour. She pours three, matter-of-factly, and slides two of them across the desk; the captain ignores his and lowers himself stiffly into one of the visitors’ chairs, clearly uncomfortable sitting in the presence of his principal. Stealth doesn’t follow him. Instead she picks up her cup and cradles it between her hands, breathing in the steam and letting the heat sink through her gauntlets to her palms as she leans a bit more heavily on the back of the other chair to take some weight off her aching leg, but not drinking. Not yet.
Something changes on the captain’s face as he watches her, and she realises that he can spot the signs of a soldier who’s been under operational conditions for a while and will be going back to them soon. Not a paper officer by anyone’s estimation, then. That’s good.
After a moment, she nods and looks away from him, and launches into her mission plan. “Senator. According to your public schedule, you spend tomorrow morning in front of an Assembly committee and then you have a lunch meeting with Chairman Papanoida in his office. Is that accurate?”
They’ve already talked about this, but the Senator nods anyway. It’s all part of persuading the captain. “It is. After the meeting with the Chairman I have two hours unscheduled, and then another meeting with local Guild delegates in the public office downstairs.”
Stealth nods. “Good. So, when you leave the Chairman, you’ll return here via the morgue at the Pantoran City Central Hospital, where you will request a viewing of the body of the clone assassin who attacked you on Coruscant. The release of the body for viewing will trigger a data spike that’s embedded in the morgue’s scheduling system, and when the system updates at local midnight it will add the assassin to the official list of autopsies to be performed in three rotations’ time, with just enough detail included in the listing that someone who knows what they’re looking for will be able to identify him.”
The captain looks irritated. “An autopsy has already been performed—”
“I know. I’ve read the report, not that it did much beyond confirm my hypotheses.” She rolls her eyes at the look on his face. “Look, I got here a rotation and a half before you and I did not spend them sitting on my arse in this office waiting for you to catch me up. Assume I know things. It’ll save us all time.” He subsides, still fuming a little, and Stealth eases down to sit on the arm of the chair, her legs stretched out before her. “The point is that this Doctor Royce Hemlock, who likes experimenting on sentient beings and currently has two of my squad in his prison, doesn’t know. He was overconfident in his experiment’s efficacy, and so he made a mistake. Like the report says, there’s no kind of tracker anywhere on that corpse. Hemlock’s assassin vanished off his scope the instant Rex shot him, and you’ve successfully kept everything about the body off the record since then. He doesn’t know where it is.”
“And yet you’ve read the very off-the-record autopsy report,” says the Senator, a touch ruefully, and Stealth laughs.
“I’m good at my job.” Then she shrugs. “And to be fair, I already had an idea of where to start looking.”
“Clearly.” There’s a reluctant professional respect dawning in the captain’s eyes. “And you think this man Hemlock is looking for the body.”
She nods, slowly. “That corpse is a loose end. In the right hands—the hands of someone who knows what they’re looking at and what to do with it—it could blow his operation, whatever it is, wide open, and then he’d suffer the same fate as Vice Admiral Rampart did: flung to the waters to drown so the Emperor he serves can stay afloat.”
He heaves a breath. “And the right hands are—”
He knows the answer already, but Stealth opens her own hand towards the Senator nevertheless; she goes suddenly pale under her markings, as if she hasn’t fully made the connection until this moment, but the captain nods slowly. “And you’re sure this Hemlock will see the autopsy listing?”
“Oh, yes. The Empire already has eyes on your senator; you know that. Her visit to the morgue will be noted. And as soon as the autopsy listing comes up Hemlock will connect it to her visit and know that he’s out of time. He’ll have to send an operative to either recover the body or destroy it.”
There’s a short silence following her words. The Senator sits back in her big chair, nodding faintly. “You’re sure he won’t just send another assassin to kill me instead?” she asks, her voice a little unsteady, and the captain leans forward over clasped hands.
After a moment, Stealth tips her head to one side as if she’s just now considering the point. “It’s highly unlikely,” she says after a moment, her tone carefully measured. “Killing you wouldn’t resolve his loose end, and it would create a new one that he also doesn’t need. But we can evacuate you from the city with the captain here as your bodyguard if you wish, just in case.”
There’s a long pause, and then the captain, finally, gives a decisive nod. “And what will my company be doing while I’m busy bodyguarding my senator?”
Trap sprung. Stealth covers a smile of relief by digging into her belt pouch for two of her dwindling stock of painkillers, and swallows them down with a blissful gulp of still-warm, fragrant tea before saying, as matter-of-factly as she possibly can because this really is one scragger of an ask,
“They’re going to be my eyes on the sky.”