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“I’m telling you, they’re my memories. It’s not a trick.”
Rex glares at his idiot brother. “You can’t know that for certain. What if they just want us to lower our guard?”
Cody looks like he wants to smack him, but refrains for fear of Kix. “Nobody else knows my passcodes.”
“Passcodes?”
“Yeah? I admit I didn’t have ‘crazy space wizard crams three years of my own memories of the future into my head’ in mind when I made them, but they still work. Future-me knew them and everything checks out.”
“What do you mean passcodes?”
“In case I get reconditioned? So I can remember the most important things, and know they’re true.”
“I . . . have never heard of that.”
Cody looks appalled. “What, you’re just walking around without any way of protecting your memories?”
“I guess?”
“For the love of fuck, how are you still you?”
“Does that even work? How does it work?”
“It works,” says a low voice from the other side of the room. Cody and Rex stop arguing and turn to look at Fox. “It keeps working. I’m pretty sure my brain’d be mush by now if I didn’t have a similar system.”
“See!” Cody says triumphantly.
“You can tell when someone’s tried to mess with them too,” Fox adds, and then shuts his eyes. “It hurts.”
“Anakin didn’t hurt me. It was disorienting, but it wasn’t painful.”
“Anakin,” Rex says under his breath.
“He’s an idiot, but he would kill for us. A lot of the Jedi would. They’d even kill their own who hurt us.”
Both Rex and Fox look at him in disbelief.
“Really. I’ve seen it. I think at the end General Koon was running a freedom smuggling ring with General Ti, and I don’t know where our brothers were going but the ones who wanted out were getting out. I was finally understanding why they’re so invested in not getting attached to people. They’re terrifying when that happens and something threatens those who they consider theirs.”
“Is that how I got here, then?” Fox asks. “I was in the barracks, and then I was here. I didn’t get on a ship. It just happened.”
“Probably. Obi-Wan was yelling at Anakin for being stupid, so I think he did something.”
Rex makes a vaguely disgruntled sound.
“Look, just give them a chance?”
“Your General was stalking you,” Rex insists. “He was scaring you.”
“Not on purpose! I understand why he was doing that now. It’s not something we can just turn off. And he was trying not to when he realized I didn’t like it.”
“They speak our language,” Fox says.
“Yeah, I know that, future-us trusted them enough to teach them,” Rex starts.
“No. They speak our language. They’re fluent. And the Senator’s fluent. Have their tubies even heard a word of Basic yet? They wanted to learn. From us. They bothered to learn something every natborn thinks isn’t real.”
Rex looks startled. “I didn’t think of it like that.”
“I think they might have contributed to it as well,” Cody says after a pause. “Their version is much more . . . comprehensive? than what we have now, and there’s loanwords from Huttese and Nabian and even a bit of Binary as well as a lot more Mando’a than what we ever learned. Between them, they’re all fluent in at least one of those apiece.”
“Hm.”
“Look, I’m still not convinced I’m not dead, but I have an extremely well-honed sense for maliciousness now and I’m not getting anything from any of them,” said Fox. “Yeah, I panicked when I woke up, but you would too. There’s no holes in their story, the Senator knows things about us Corries that only someone we worked closely with and who treated us well would know, and we don’t know what weird shit the Force can do and Skywalker’s basically a god incarnate with it –”
“What,” says Rex.
“ – I do not want to repeat all the things the Chancellor said about him, I don’t know if he wanted to enslave him or seduce him or both and I don’t want to think about it. He’s the most powerful non-cryptid being alive right now in the Force and if anyone could make time run backwards so they could fix their fuckups, it’d be him. Now shut up, my head is killing me and you idiots aren’t helping.”
“Hey –”
“I will tell Kix,” Fox threatens. Rex snaps his mouth shut and glares at him.
“Go back to sleep,” Cody says to both of them. “We’re safe, I promise.”
~
“Cody!” says Anakin cheerfully when he enters the briefing room.
Cody considers leaving again.
“Hey, is Tipoca City the Kaminoan population center?”
“No? It’s not nearly big enough.” He pushes past him to look at what they’re planning. A projection of Kamino floats above the holotable. “What are you doing?”
“Well, we can stop the war pretty fast if we go get all the vod’e, so I was thinking, why not do that? We’re not doing anything else.”
“Ships,” Obi-Wan says patiently. Anakin snorts and waves a hand.
“We’ll take the city and then go steal some big ones from the Separatists. They don’t need them. And all their ships have life support already, which is pretty weird since most of them are run entirely by droids. I wonder if . . . anyway, there’s plenty of ships if we just go get them.”
“I’ve always wanted to be a pirate,” Cody says, mostly to annoy Obi-Wan.
He looks thrilled. Oh no. “But not very often.”
“We could steal some ships from the Trade Federation,” Obi-Wan suggests. Anakin beams at him.
“Now you’re getting it!”
“I hate them.”
“Jedi do not hate,” Anakin says primly.
“Fuck that, I left. Let me hate capitalism in peace, Anakin.”
“Fair enough. Oh! Once we have a couple more star destroyers we can go slag all the Hutt bases and take their ships!”
“With a bunch of children on board?” Cody says, realizing in dismay that once again he is the sensible person in the room.
The two unsensible people do stop to think for a moment. “Sure,” says Obi-Wan. “I mean, we’ll definitely keep them supervised and out of the direct battle, but it won’t hurt them. And that’s a lot more than the Order ever did for me and I turned out alive.”
Cody notes that down as something to investigate later. It’s very suspicious.
“Hey, can we go exterminate Death Watch?” says Anakin, who has the attention span and prey drive of a tooka on lothnip. “That’d fix so many problems, and we could pick up some sweet gear, and maybe even the Darksaber.”
“What would we do with it?” Obi-Wan says prosaically. “The armor and weaponry would be nice, though.”
Anakin shrugged. “Think Rex’d like it? I’m trying to think of a good apology gift for scaring him.”
“I don’t think giving him a planet will help, but it would be funny,” Cody says. “But back to Kamino. If we attack, they’ll hold the cadets hostage.”
“So we infiltrate. How many – wait, you said Tipoca isn’t the main planetary settlement?”
“Of course not. It didn’t even exist before us. It’s just where the scientists live. I don’t think most of the regular Kaminoans bother to pay attention to what they’re doing as long as they’re not irritating them. That’s why they packed them all off there to begin with.”
“Fascinating,” says Obi-Wan. “They always made it seem like they were the only ones on the planet.”
“There’s like thirty of them,” Cody says, baffled.
“Really?”
“We could just go in and assassinate them,” says Anakin.
“There’s still the trainers,” he cautions them.
“Oh please, like if someone hadn’t shown up and unlocked the armory and told you to have fun, you wouldn’t have killed them when you were a cadet.”
Cody shrugs. He can’t deny it. “So your plan is just to sneak in, kill the leaders, and then start a mutiny?”
“It should work. That’s how most successful slave uprisings go.”
“Oh, we need to work out a way to deactivate the chips for a short time,” Obi-Wan says. “Those could be a problem. We probably won’t have to work around any internal or external detonators though. Keys shouldn’t be much of an issue; we’ll be there and not in any Force-suppressing gear so we can take them when we kill the guards. The city’s big enough to house everyone and it has some defensive capability, so with our ships in orbit and a comms blackout we should be able to hold position until we can evacuate. What?”
“How do you know how to plan an uprising?” Anakin demands.
Obi-Wan blinks at him. “Experience?”
“What.”
“I was pretty good at it by the time I was fifteen, Qui-Gon didn’t even bother trying anything else if we had to break up a ring or get money or transportation somewhere. He’d just send me in, I’d be there for a while, and then I’d escape and get back to the Temple.” Obi-Wan frowns. “You know, that’s one of the reasons I really didn’t think he should have been your teacher. Even if you knew it was fake, it wouldn’t have been nice to pretend to sell you.”
“What,” says Anakin. The edge of the table creaks where he is holding it.
“What?”
“He – you –”
“I was young, pretty, and Force-sensitive. Practically no one didn’t fall for it.”
Cody wonders in a distant way if that was where he picked up the atrocious habit of flirting with anyone hostile to get them to drop their guard.
“I wish we’d gone back in time a bit more so I could –” Anakin breaks off with a growl.
“It’s nothing to get upset about,” Obi-Wan says placidly. “Can we focus?”
“Let’s – let’s just go to Kamino. Ba’vodu please tell me you see the problem here,” Anakin says in a rush.
“Yes,” Cody says, and narrows his eyes at his idiot, who has the self-preservation of a gnat and looks bewildered.
“I don’t?” says Obi-Wan.
“I know,” Cody says as he moves forward and grabs both of them by the back of the neck. “I’ll tell the pilots to set course for Kamino and be stealthy about it and outline the plan for everyone. You two are going to go take a nap.”
“But –” says Anakin.
“A nap,” he repeats. “With your family.”
Obi-Wan, in a rare display of awareness, wilts and lets Cody steer him towards the door. Anakin does not.
“But I should –”
“Oh look, the Generals are very tired and need someone to pile with,” Cody announces loudly as he opens the door onto a hallway with quite a few of his brothers in it. Most of them perk up at the news.
“Fuck yeah, cuddle time,” he hears as half of them go stampeding away to collect mattresses.
“Rec room four!” he calls after them. “Bring the Senator and the little Commander! Everyone’s invited!”
“Ow,” Anakin complains. Cody kindly releases his ear after he stops fighting him. “You’re evil.”
“Yes,” he says smugly. “Let’s go.”
~
If I was getting paid, nothing would be enough for this, Cody thinks as they gaze out at Kamino, shining blue and grey in space before them. His view is blocked a little bit by the person he has inexplicably chosen to spend the rest of his life with, who has glued himself to the window and hasn’t stopped making an oddly endearing string of gleeful and appreciative noises for the last five minutes.
“But what is it,” Anakin almost yells, pacing around the room. “It’s the size of a moon! Where did it come from? Why is it here? What kind of ship is that?”
Cody eyes the source of all the panic and . . . whatever transcendent emotions Obi-Wan is experiencing with wariness. It has to be a ship; they can see engines occasionally flaring white-blue as it orbits Kamino, and it’s not organic enough to be something natural, but it’s like no ship he’s ever seen.
“Maybe if you’d gone to your classes, you’d know, you uncultured child,” Obi-Wan says, and goes back to being a nerd. Cody’s never seen him so excited about anything to do with a ship before, so it must mean something or be significant in another way.
It’s very odd, like two pyramids glued together at their bases so one is upside-down. It’s not very sleek or aerodynamic, but it is massive and rather majestic. It sort of reminds him of the . . .
Cody tilts his head to one side, then the other side, and then uses his hands to block out all but the very top of the ship. Huh.
“Get eyes on the top of it,” he says. “Close as you can zoom in.”
He examines the video feed in his HUD. Those are buildings on the top of the ship, rather battered, but clearly structures built and anchored on it.
“We’re getting a transmission,” says Rex, and the holocall flickers on.
“ – make this thing work, swear to the Force this is older than anything I’ve ever studied in my life, maybe we should just rig up some boosters and try personal – oh,” says the grainy figure in the holo before straightening up and looking rather embarrassed.
“ . . . General Windu?” Rex says hesitantly.
“Where the fuck did you find a Tho Yor?” Obi-Wan almost shrieks as he abandons the window for the holocall. “Mace. Mace. What the fuck? Where was that? Do the cannons still work? Do you know how useful that would have been?”
General Windu stares.
Cody sighs. “Basic, cyar’ika.”
“We could have absolutely – huh?”
“Basic,” he reminds him. “Not joha’vod.”
Obi-Wan glares at him, makes an indignant noise, and waves his hands. “Give me a minute, all right?”
“ . . . Can you remember how to speak Basic?” Cody asks, suddenly rather worried.
“Yes, in a minute, let me switch over. This always happens, I hate it so much. Anakin! What’s the word for ‘giant laser cannon powered by the Force’?”
Cody takes a moment to appreciate how efficient the language they have made is; somehow that’s a single word. A rather long word, but still one word.
“ “Giant laser cannon powered by the Force’,” Anakin says unhelpfully. “Uh, Master Windu, are you on that weird giant ship?”
“No, in Basic,” Obi-Wan snaps. “There’s got to be a word for it, surely.”
Master Windu is looking utterly baffled. Cody wonders if he should help for a moment and then decides it’s funnier if he lets his Jedi continue being idiots while pretending it’s not happening. He wraps a steadying arm around Obi-Wan’s waist, hauls him closer to the holotable so he doesn’t have to shout, and stoically ignores the bickering that is breaking out.
“Hello, Master Windu,” he says, in Basic, because he might be a troll at heart but he’s not rude. Then he reels Obi-Wan back in as he tries to lunge for Anakin. He wrestles him around in front of him and neatly pins his arms behind his back. “To confirm, that giant ship in orbit around Kamino is you?”
“Yes, Commander, um –”
“Cody,” he supplies, not offended, and takes a second to sort out his memories. As he thought, at this point in the war he hasn’t ever met General Windu in person and has barely spoken to him. “212th.”
Anakin and Obi-Wan are still shouting at each other. Cody fends Anakin’s arms off and plants a hand on his face, keeping him at a distance. “Anakin, calm down, you’re not a failure. Obi-Wan, calm down, you’re being an incomprehensible nerd again.”
“But that’s a –”
“Brain worms,” Cody says calmly, and Obi-Wan scowls. “Master Windu, why are you here?”
“The Force brought us here,” he says. He seems distracted. “Er. What is going on?”
Cody, tired of wrangling two Jedi at once, shoves Anakin back and then picks Obi-Wan up under the arms. He dangles there like a cranky kitten with his feet an inch above the floor, daring Mace to laugh. Cody has never been happier that he’s the taller one even if it’s not by much. “I will stun you,” he warns Anakin. “Or Padmé will.”
“She wouldn’t,” Anakin argues.
“I would,” Padmé says, entering the room and looking around. “How can I help?”
“Master Windu appears to have brought a large ship to Kamino and isn’t sure why, Obi-Wan is trying to remember how to speak in Basic and says he just needs five minutes to switch his brain over, and Anakin is . . . not helping.”
“Hey!” Anakin says indignantly.
“Shush,” says Padmé. “Hold your child.”
She goes over and hands him one of the twins. Dogma is trailing behind her, looking like a gangly and nervous teenager and cradling the other twin very carefully. He looks . . . happy. Anakin blinks at him and then looks like his brain has crashed and is rebooting.
Padmé turns to the holocall. “Greetings, Master Windu. What can we do for you?”
~
The equipment around them is understandable after they spend some time poking and prodding at it, but it’s simultaneously more advanced than anything any of them has ever seen and so ancient it’s laughable. The ship follows the course the Force plotted for them using Mace’s hands, but nobody is sure where it goes.
Kamino, as it turns out. Shaak had recognized it immediately as they dropped out of hyperspace.
“But why are we here?” Kit finally yells over the confusion of far too many Jedi arguing about ancient spaceship controls, Kamino, what to do about the clones, and what the Sith hells has happened in the last few days.
“We could go kill the Kaminoans,” Depa suggests.
Mace worries about that girl sometimes. “No,” he says patiently, then reconsiders. Grey and Styles are looking sad. He does not want them to look sad. It’s like kicking a wet puppy. “Not yet,” he amends. “They have hostages.”
“Also we don’t know if we have any weapons on this thing,” Agen says. “I think these are cannon controls? Maybe? Or it’s a map. It might be both. I think the Temple as we knew it only took up about a tenth of the actual size of this place.” He pushes some buttons and a hologram pops up on the dash in front of him.
A silence slowly falls as they all stop arguing and turn to look.
“The Temple was a Tho Yor?” Luminara whispers. “The entire time? You’re joking.”
“That explains the giant hole it left,” Ki-Adi says. He seems a little better now, but he’s still sitting on the floor propped up against two of Depa’s men. They should probably find somewhere he can sleep and recover from Force exhaustion. “It must have been one of the first things on the planet, and Coruscant grew around it.”
“Know where everyone else is, we probably do,” Yoda says, looking relieved.
“Where?”
“Eight other Tho Yor there are. Connect to each other those portals did, probably. Highly stable they were and unusual that is. Unknown the other ship locations are, but mobile they will also be. Come to us they can.”
“Huh,” is the general consensus.
“Well, the Force wants us to do something here, which probably means helping the rest of the clones. I feel like doing anything else is morally reprehensible at this point in any case. Suggestions?” Mace asks, looking at Depa’s men in a vague hope that they’ll have some crucial insight.
“Get all the cadets out and then burn it to the ground?” Grey suggests tentatively after she gives him an encouraging nod.
“Uh,” says Mace. He hadn’t been prepared for that level of hatred, though he probably should have expected it. The sheer disbelief in the air when the clones realized they hadn’t been herded into the healing halls to die –
“Sure,” says Shaak. “I want Lama Su’s couch though. That thing is unbelievably comfortable.”
“Ooh,” says Agen, ignored. “There are cannons.”
“We do have space for everyone,” Plo says, eyeing the map holo critically. “If I’m reading this right, there are massive reserves of fresh air and water in what was the deep underlevels, and the gardens up on top where we lived have essentially been built into a biodome, so they’re infinitely replenishing and refiltering. We still have all the greenhouses and everything that made us self-sufficient, but we have lost most of the ones who tended them. However, if the clones don’t mind helping us out, we can all live here just fine.”
“That’s good,” Shaak says. “We don’t really have anywhere to go, do we? But if we can keep living here, we’re set. We’re just a bit more mobile than usual.”
“Be harder for the Republic to catch us if we can fly away,” Kit says.
“Oops,” says Agen guiltily as a cheerful chime sounds. They turn to look as a small asteroid explodes in the distance. “Good news, everyone! We’ve got weapons!”
“Agen, step away from the . . . whatever you just did,” Mace says. He feels very tired.
“Hey, there’s a ship,” says Depa, who has been glaring at Kamino. “It looks like one of ours. I stand corrected, there’s three ships, star destroyers. They just dropped out of hyperspace but they’re hanging back from the planet.”
“Contact them before anything unfortunate we do, we should,” Yoda says firmly. “Our men they may be, hm?”
For some reason, they make Mace be the one on the holocall. Luminara is the one who crawls under the cabinet that holds the unit and does something with muffled cursing and a roll of electrical tape to make it work, but he has to be the one on camera. He’s complaining under his breath about the interface when the call connects, which is awkward.
“Ah,” he says, hastily trying to look dignified. Then he takes in what he’s seeing. There’s a clone near the transmitter and another one further away, nearly at the edge of the range, and movement of more people blurring in and out. They both look vaguely familiar.
Grey takes half a step forward from where he has been hovering around Depa, eyes wide.
Obi-Wan comes into view, very excited and shouting something at them in the clone language. The clone further away sighs and says something in a rather reproachful voice to him. They have a brief conversation during which Obi-Wan looks annoyed and the clone looks fondly tolerant, and then in the middle of a string of words Obi-Wan says “Anakin!” and Skywalker answers from off-camera.
The clone tucks Obi-Wan into his side with a firm grip around his waist and moves forward. Obi-Wan moves with him, matching pace thoughtlessly as he continues to look away and talk at someone, probably Skywalker.
“Hello, Master Windu,” says the clone in Basic, perfectly composed and straightfaced as he pins a flailing Obi-Wan to his chest in an armlock. “To confirm, that giant ship in orbit around Kamino is you?”
That’s good, that means that the ships aren’t enemies and they’ve located Kenobi and Skywalker. “Yes, Commander,” Mace answers and then blanks on the name.
“CC-2224,” Grey murmurs behind him as the commander says “Cody, 212th.”
It’s Obi-Wan’s commander, which means the other one is probably Skywalker’s. They did both look familiar.
Skywalker finally comes into view. It seems that a classic Kenobi-Skywalker lively discussion is happening; that is, they are screaming at each other like feral raccoons fighting over the last bread slice in a dumpster. Mace wonders how on earth they’re in the same lineage as Dooku. Then he remembers Yoda exists and has no more questions.
And for some reason the Council thought it would be great to let those two idiots co-raise a fourteen-year-old girl with a high prey drive and the unfortunate propensity to bite first and ask questions never, for all that she was bright and sweet and an excellent student. She was also only five years younger than Skywalker. Mace represses an internal scream of terror.
Commander Cody reaches out and puts a hand on Skywalker’s forehead, pushing him back. This lets Obi-Wan escape, but he gets an arm around his waist again lightning-quick and plants his feet, holding the two bickering Jedi apart with practiced ease. “Anakin, calm down, you’re not a failure. Obi-Wan, calm down, you’re being an incomprehensible nerd again.”
That is . . . interesting.
Obi-Wan objects to this assessment of his character, but does not object to being manhandled. He actually looks rather content about it. Skywalker is slapping ineffectively at the Commander’s arm, but there is no real intent behind it. The Commander just says “Brain worms,” like that means anything; it must to Obi-Wan, because he stops arguing. Skywalker does not stop flailing. He looks a little like one of those inflatable advertising displays.
Oh. He also asked him a question – Mace replays the last few seconds in his head. Nobody else is being useful. He glances around the room and sees the esteemed members of the High Council all either staring in blank shock or badly repressing laughter.
“The Force brought us here, er. What is going on?”
There. That was dignified, calm, and gave no hint of the ‘what the fuck what the fuck first names and touching and what is going on’ that was running through his mind.
Below him, Luminara crams a fist into her mouth and shakes with nearly silent giggles. She hasn’t even bothered getting back off the floor.
Commander Cody shoves Skywalker back, hard, and then locks his arms around Obi-Wan and lifts him off his feet, holding him still upright but unable to do much of anything. Obi-Wan stares glumly at the camera and makes defiant eye contact with Mace. Commander Cody does not appear to notice or care that he is holding his General like a misbehaving tooka.
Grey makes a muffled choking noise.
“I will stun you, or Padmé will,” the Commander says to someone out of view, probably Skywalker.
There is a strangled noise of denial and indignation, and then Senator Amidala’s voice comes over the call. She is also speaking the clone language. Thankfully, she switches to Basic as she comes to stand beside the Commander.
“Greetings, Master Windu. What can we do for you?”
Mace takes a moment to look at her. She’s dressed more casually than he’s ever seen her, in a set of trooper blacks that must have belonged to a cadet, and her hair is pulled back into a sloppy knot on top of her head with a . . . he does a double-take. There’s a vibroblade holding it in place.
Now that he looks closer, Obi-Wan is also wearing blacks, but he has a Jedi robe over them. Mace is officially lost.
“I don’t know,” he says honestly. “The Force brought us here. We’ve evacuated from Coruscant, and everyone else went through portals to somewhere we don’t know. The only people here are the Council and Vheh Company.”
Amidala and Commander Cody look unfazed. Obi-Wan looks delighted. There is a cackle from the background that sounds like Skywalker.
“Oh, and we killed Palpatine,” Depa shouts from behind him. “He was doing absolutely atrocious things to the Guard, did you know about that?”
“We’ve guessed,” the Commander says neutrally. He looks at Amidala. She shrugs.
“Plagueis is dead by now, so I don’t think it makes much of a difference? We’ve already blown the timeline to pieces as it is by deserting so early, and I can think of a dozen bills that won’t pass or won’t be created without me being there just in this first year. Tyrannus might be a problem, but we know how his mind works, he’s not an unknown.”
“We looted his stuff too,” Luminara says, rolling to her feet and peering into the camera. “We’ve got jewels and artifacts and credits.”
“Nara!” Obi-Wan says happily, and waves. She waves back.
“Fuck Palpatine!” Skywalker yells from the background, the first comprehensible thing Mace has heard from him.
“Kids!” Amidala snaps.
“Sorry.”
“Wait, where’s the rest of the army? Did you leave them behind?” Obi-Wan asks, and while it’s nice he’s speaking a language that’s understandable, Mace doesn’t like how his fingers twitch and spark.
“No!” he says hastily. “They . . . sort of deserted en masse after Skywalker’s message. Vheh is only here due to some miscommunication about investigating the chips in their heads, which we have resolved.”
The Commander regards him with narrowed eyes before giving a small nod. Amidala relaxes. Obi-Wan does not. The Commander lowers his head and murmurs something to him before kissing the top of his head.
Mace does not understand what is happening.
“Oh, fine,” Obi-Wan says, and his fingers stop sparking. “Where did they go?”
“We don’t know,” Luminara says when the silence becomes awkward.
“They –” says Grey softly, and then stops.
“Go on,” he hears Depa encourage, and they come forward.
“Wild Space, probably,” Grey says more confidently when he is in front of the transmitter. “With all long-range comms disabled, so they can figure out how to get rid of the chips.”
Commander Cody looks thoughtful. “We did the same, but we haven’t gotten around to removing any yet.”
“Vheh is clean,” Depa says. She has a hand between Grey’s shoulderblades, and he is leaning back slightly into it. Mace is a little fascinated by how quickly her men have imprinted on her like lost ducklings now that they apparently aren’t terrified that she’ll turn them over to be murdered at any provocation. He hopes that maybe the rest of the clones will come to trust the Order in general as well. “As soon as we find the healers again, I’m sure they’d be happy to help, or share their notes.”
“No decommissioning,” Grey says, and something dark and solemn flashes across the Commander’s face. Grief, Mace realizes.
“Never again,” he says. Obi-Wan nods.
“Yeah, I’ll kill those fuckers for you,” Skywalker says, off-camera. “Don’t repeat that, kad’au’ika. Or help you kill them, if you’d rather. I mean, I was already going to hunt them for ba’vodu Cody, but if you’ve got anyone in particular to add to the list just let me know.”
“Anakin,” Amidala sighs. “We’re not marooning the trainers on a planet and hunting them for sport. You’ll destroy the ecosystem! We can design an arena or something.”
“I think they might be safe from the chips being activated, if Sidious is dead,” says Obi-Wan. “The orders were probably locked to his voice, and I can’t see him giving power like that to anyone else.”
Skywalker makes a vaguely horrified noise in the background. Obi-Wan looks like he’s having forty unpleasant realizations at once and then repressing them at the speed of light with the power of a lifetime of practice. “Not now, Anakin. Obviously we still need to get those things out, but it’s not the emergency that it would have been.”
“So we were here to take Kamino,” Amidala says brightly when the Council has nothing to add. “Want to help?”
“Yes,” says Mace with feeling. “Absolutely.”
“Dibs on Lama Su’s couch from the office!” Shaak yells.
“Priorities,” Plo chides. “The little ones first. Then furniture.”
“We were going to take all the cloning tech we could, both so it’s in the hands of those who should rightfully own it and so it can’t be misused again,” Amidala says. “Tipoca City is the home of a relatively small group of extremist scientists, and most of the other Kaminoans do not care what happens there. As long as we don’t threaten them, they won’t stop us from emptying the city and destroying it.”
“Hey, does the Tho Yor really have giant laser cannons powered by the Force – I cannot believe how long that takes to say in Basic,” Obi-Wan says. “It’s literally just a single word in joha’vod!”
“Yeah,” Agen calls. “I tested one and it blew an asteroid into crumbs.”
“Why don’t we do this in person?” Depa suggests, deftly heading off the discussion. “Plo, did you see anywhere they could land shuttles?”
“They could land their ships,” he answers, and Mace turns to see him pointing at the holomap. “There are massive hangars, and now that I’ve got the interface set to a more modern version of Basic, if these measurements are accurate, your destroyers should be able to land with minor difficulty.”
“We’ll check in person,” Mace says firmly. “And call you back?”
The Commander nods. “I think consolidating our forces is the best idea for now.”
Amidala and Luminara exchange polite farewells and the holocall blinks out.
“Okay,” says Kit into the resounding silence that follows. “I’ll say it for everyone. What the fuck is going on with Obi-Wan and his Commander?”
Grey mumbles something and then flinches, hard, when all eyes turn to him.
Depa pats his arm. “You don’t have to say,” she tells him. “We won’t force you. We’ll never force you.”
He looks at her. “I – but it’s – might be important? They traveled backwards in time?”
“Yes,” Plo says, moving forward. “Three years or so, as we gather – but you were the one to translate the message for us, so you know as much as we do.”
“They’re married,” Grey says bluntly. “Or as close to it as we can get since we’re not legally people. They’re wearing each other’s armor – that’s what we can do, we learned it from the trainers. It’s part of the riduurok.”
“What’s that?” Kit asks. He sounds curious but not as surprised as he could be.
“Mandalorian marriage customs. We don’t have any others.”
Kit and Luminara exchange a significant look.
“Ah,” she says. “The vambraces?”
Grey nods.
“I thought it was odd he was wearing them. And you can tell by . . . what, the designs on them?”
He nods again.
“Would Obi-Wan know that’s what that means?” Shaak wonders.
“Yeah,” Kit says. “He spent a year and a bit on Mandalore when he was a padawan and came back obsessed with the place. He knows.”
“He’s fluent in Mando’a too,” Luminara adds. “And I think that if they didn’t want us to know, his Commander would have either kept him off camera or taken them off. He seems well able to manage him.” She smiles. “I’m glad.”
Mace decides that the floor looks really comfortable, actually, and sits down and leans back against the holotable. “Well, good for him,” he says, and almost laughs at their surprise. “What? He’s not in the Order anymore, and anyway this entire mess has shown us that the Code needs some serious thought put into it. It might have worked hundreds of years ago, but we’re crumbling from the inside out. And Kenobi’s needed someone like his Commander for years now, if we’re being honest. He deserves someone stable in his life who isn’t constantly creating drama.”
“Hangar,” Agen says after another awkward silence. “Maybe some food?”
“Recon, food, call them back, get some sleep before we do anything stupid,” he agrees, yawns, and adjusts his last statement to “before we do anything more stupid.”
“What did we do that’s stupid?” Kit asks. He sounds offended.
“Well, I did assassinate the Chancellor of the Republic today. Sometime in the last forty-eight hours.”
Is it him, or is the ship shaking a little?
Someone sits down next to him. It’s Depa. She puts her arm around his shoulders and the room stops shaking. Agen presses close on his other side.
There are voices, and Plo and Yoda are debating something in a friendly way. Ki-Adi is asleep, and Luminara is rewiring something else by the holomap of the ship (the Temple) and Depa’s men are settling down around the edges of the room or leaving through the doors at the back. Grey’s still in her shadow, and Styles is following Kit now.
“We’ve got time,” his daughter in all but blood says, and presses his head down onto her shoulder. “We’ve got time now, Master. It’s safe.”