Chapter 30

Chapter 30

THIS TIME, Ahsoka didn’t break into Bail’s office until she knew he was already there. She tracked his consular ship from Coruscant. He stopped on a nearby moon and dropped off a few crates that were not at all suspicious. Everything looked entirely routine, but Ahsoka, who had landed some distance away and infiltrated the spaceport while the cargo was being offloaded, knew better. She took advantage of the Tantive III being grounded to stow away on board.

Coming this far into the Core was a big risk, but she wanted to show Bail that she was serious and also grateful for everything he’d done for Kaeden and the others. At last, she felt the ship take off and the little shift that meant they were in hyperspace, and she set off looking for him.

She cracked the security on his door pretty easily and slipped inside. As on Captain Antilles’s vessel, Bail’s quarters on the Tantive III comprised more than two rooms. She was in the antechamber, which was big enough for two seats and not much else. She could hear the senator’s voice coming from the second room, which must be where he worked. She got closer to the door and overheard the end of the conversation, a series of repeated words in a child’s prattle that she couldn’t understand. He had no idea how Bail did it—maybe listening to all the shouting in the Imperial Senate was good for something after all—but he managed to answer.

“I know, love, but it’s more secure if we just talk without any visuals to trace.” There was a pause. Ahsoka couldn’t hear the answer. Then Bail spoke again. “Tell your mother I’ll see you both soon enough.”

There was another pause as Bail disconnected the call. Then he coughed.

“Do I have another Jedi break-in to report?” he called out.

Ahsoka laughed. It was nice to know she couldn’t fool him the same way twice. She got the feeling he knew exactly how much she’d overheard and that some of it had been for her benefit.

“Showing your vulnerabilities to put me at ease, Senator?” Ahsoka said, stepping into the main office. He waved her into a seat, and she took it.

“The whole galaxy knows I’m a family man, Ahsoka Tano,” he said. “The Empire is counting on it. They think it means I’ll be more amenable to certain suggestions.”

“Don’t you worry about her?” Ahsoka asked.

Bail shrugged, but there was some tightness around his eyes. Running a rebellion couldn’t be easy.

“She’s already a lot like her mother,” he said.

Somehow that seemed like a test. Ahsoka didn’t know the answer, so she let it pass. They were going to keep secrets, and they were going to trust each other anyway.

“I wanted to talk to you about what you’re doing to fight the Empire,” Ahsoka said.

“I thought you might,” Bail said. “Captain Antilles sent a glowing report. Only fifteen casualties during the Raada evacuation—one of his A-wing pilots and fourteen evacuees.”

It had almost been fifteen evacuees, but Antilles’s medical staff had been able to save Vartan. He and Selda were a matched pair now, the Togruta had joked, with four limbs and four prosthetics between them, but at least they were both alive. She’d left them on Captain Antilles’s ship with Kaeden and Miara. They were all impressed by the capabilities of real medical technology. Kaeden’s arm was almost as good as new, which freed up Miara to prowl the ship, looking for A-wing pilots to pester. When they found out how good she was at explosives, they took quite an interest in her.

“I’m glad it wasn’t worse,” Ahsoka said. “I took out that gray creature before my backup arrived. I got the impression he wasn’t the only one of his kind.”

“Was he talented?” Bail asked. “Or does he just carry the lightsaber for show?”

“He’s had some training,” Ahsoka said. “He mostly relies on brute strength. If he was going to be facing Jedi, or someone with my level of training, I’d say he wouldn’t be much of a threat. I defeated him without my lightsabers. But the others like him won’t be facing Jedi.”

Bail nodded. “We’ll do what we can,” he said. “What about Raada?”

“Well, the farmers can’t go back,” Ahsoka said. She slumped down a little bit in her chair. They’d won, but the cost had been high. “If they tried, the Empire would wipe them off the moon’s surface without even landing first.”

“I can resettle them on Alderaan, perhaps,” Bail said. “There aren’t that many of them, and there are enough refugees in the galaxy right now that Alderaan’s taking in a few hundred won’t raise any eyebrows.”

“They don’t want to be resettled,” Ahsoka said. She straightened her shoulders. “They want to join up.”

She could see Bail considering it. She knew he could use the extra people, but there were some obvious downsides. The Empire had no trouble using poorly trained people as cannon fodder, but Bail would refuse to do the same.

“They’re farmers, Ahsoka,” he pointed out. “They have only the training you gave them.”

“They’re resourceful,” she said. “And anyway, your rebels have to eat, don’t they?”

Bail laughed.

“I’ll have someone talk to them, and we’ll see what we can do,” he said. “There are a few planets that would suit us for an agricultural base, and we can start training anyone who is interested in piloting or weapons use.”

They sat quietly for a moment, and then Bail leaned forward.

“They told me your new lightsabers are white,” he said, and she heard awe in his voice. “May I see them?”

It was safe enough in Bail’s office, surrounded by the void of space. Ahsoka stood up and unclipped her lightsabers from her side. She activated them, and Bail’s office was filled with a soft white light, gleaming off the windows and reflecting the stars. The office was much smaller than a training room, being shipboard, but she did a few of the basic forms for him anyway. She would never get tired of the way they glowed. She hadn’t thought she’d ever replace her original green ones, and she still had to finish the handles, but these were all right.

“They’re beautiful, Ahsoka,” he said.

She turned them off, bowed slightly, and sat back down.

“I’ve never seen white ones before,” Bail mused.

“They used to be red,” Ahsoka said. “When the creature had them, they were red. But I heard them before I ever saw him on Raada, and knew that they were meant for me.”

“You changed their nature?” he asked.

“I restored them,” Ahsoka replied. “I freed them. The red crystals were corrupted by the dark side when those who wielded them bent them to their will. They call it making the crystal bleed. That’s why the blade is red.”

“I had wondered about that,” Bail said. “I spent a lot of time with the Jedi, but I never asked questions about where their lightsabers came from. I don’t suppose they would have told me anyway.”

“These feel familiar,” Ahsoka said. “If I had to guess, I would say they were looted from the Jedi Temple itself.”

“That raises some very uncomfortable possibilities,” Bail said. “Not to mention a host of potential dangers for a Jedi Padawan.”

“I’m not a Padawan anymore, Senator, and it’s not safe to be Ahsoka Tano,” she said. “Barriss Offee was wrong about a lot of things. She let her anger cloud her judgment and she tried to justify her actions without considering their wider effects. She was afraid of the war and she didn’t trust people she should have listened to. But she had a point about the Republic and the Jedi. There was something wrong with them, and we were too locked into our traditions to see what it was. Barriss should have done something else. She shouldn’t have killed anyone, and she definitely shouldn’t have framed me for it, but if we’d listened to her—really listened—we might have been able to stop Palpatine before he took power.”

“The Chancellor played his hand very well,” Bail said. He spoke the word chancellor with some venom, and Ahsoka knew it gave him great satisfaction not to say emperor when they were in private. “He kept us so busy jumping at shadows that we didn’t notice which of the shadows was real.”

“I thought I was done with the war, but maybe I don’t know how to do anything else,” Ahsoka said. “I tried to cut myself off, but I kept getting drawn back in.”

Bail thought of Obi-Wan, sitting by himself on some Outer Rim world. His sacrifice was to take himself out of the way, to focus only on the future and not give any thought to the present. It would be a lonely way to live, even if it was peaceful, and Bail did not envy him at all.

“I think,” he said carefully, “that you and I are meant to focus on the present.”

“What do you mean?” Ahsoka asked.

“In this fight, there will be people like Barriss who are focused on the past,” he said. “And there will be other people who focus strongly on the future. Neither of them is wrong, exactly, but even if we don’t always walk the same path as one another, ours must be the middle road.”

Ahsoka smiled.

“That’s what I thought when I was trying to find the crystals that power my lightsabers,” she told him. “I didn’t want to be alone, but I didn’t want to be a general or even a Padawan anymore. I want something in the middle of that, still useful but different than before.”

The ship dropped out of hyperspace. They were still some distance from the planet, but Bail liked to look out at the system when he was returning home.

“I was thinking about what I did on Raada,” Ahsoka said. “At first it was hard, because no one would listen to me. You told me later that you were aware that something was going on but you couldn’t step in. And I couldn’t figure out how to communicate with them. They had different priorities, and because I couldn’t explain myself, a lot of people died.”

“That’s not your fault,” Bail told her.

“I know,” she said. “But it feels kind of like it is.”

He nodded. She suspected he was also good at blaming himself for things.

“Then it happened again when you sent Chardri Tage and Tamsin after me,” Ahsoka said. “They didn’t have enough information, and I didn’t know the priorities. All I saw was a tractor beam and two strangers with blasters.”

“Chardri is never going to forgive me for that,” Bail admitted. “I slipped up.”

“My point is, both of those things could have been avoided if you had better channels of communication,” she said.

Bail sighed.

“I know,” he said. “Everything I’m trying to build is too new and too fragile. We’re not as secure as I’d like us to be, and things slip through the cracks as a result.”

“I can help you with that, I think,” Ahsoka said.

“How?” Bail asked.

“During the Clone Wars, I worked with a lot of people,” Ahsoka said. “I fought alongside clones, who took orders from me even though I lacked their experience. I watched politics on a dozen different worlds. I helped train people who’d never held a blaster in their lives. When I did all that, I had the Jedi to back me up, but I think I could do almost as good a job with you.”

“You want to recruit people?” Bail asked.

“Not exactly,” she said. “Though if I found good people, I would certainly try to bring them in. I want to take your recruits and find missions for them. I want to be the one who listens to what people need, who finds out what people can do and then helps them do it.”

“You want to take over running my intelligence networks,” he said.

“Who runs them now?” she asked.

“No one, really,” he told her. “That’s most of the problem.”

“Then that’s where I’ll start,” she said. “Can you give me a ship? I’ve lost mine.”

“We can modify something for you easily enough,” he said, a smile on his face. “I know just the droid for the job.”

“Thank you,” she said. “It’s good to have a mission again.”

“I think I’m going to end up a lot further in your debt than you are in mine, but you’re welcome,” he said.

“Let’s just call us even and stop keeping track,” she said. “I’m going to be busy enough as it is.”

“What am I going to call you, if I can’t call you Ahsoka?” he asked. “You’ll need a code name at the least, so you can deal with other operatives.”

They looked out the viewport as Alderaan grew bigger and bigger. It really was a beautiful planet, though Ahsoka would always miss the whispering grass on Raada. Alderaan was blue and green, and a good staging point for a galactic uprising. The center, where the thread of all their hopes connected.

“Fulcrum,” she said. “You can call me Fulcrum.”

“Then welcome to the Rebellion.”

THE GRAND INQUISITOR stood in the smoking fields that had once been the pride of the farming moon of Raada and glared at the ground. Everything was gone, burnt from the surface as though it had never been built in the first place. By the time the Imperial Star Destroyers had arrived to provide backup, everything had already been in flames and the last of the traitors had fled.

The Grand Inquisitor kicked at some loose soil. At least the scum could never come back. The Empire would show no mercy if they tried.

The traitors were gone, the buildings were gone, the resources were gone, and the idiot who’d sent the Empire so far out in the first place was also gone. The Grand Inquisitor wished he had been assigned the task of tracking down the man to exact Imperial revenge, but his talents were needed elsewhere.

The Jedi had done more than anyone expected. Not only had she trained the traitors to fight and helped one of them escape from jail—twice—she’d had the ability to call in a large number of ships to help her. The Grand Inquisitor would have dearly liked to have been assigned the task of tracking her down, but that had also gone to someone else.

He hadn’t come to Raada to follow someone’s trail. He had come to see someone’s work. To learn what she was capable of when pushed. To see how far she could go, would go, for her goals. In spite of himself, he was impressed. He had never razed a whole moon, even if it was a tiny and pointless one. There was something to be said for that level of destruction.

Moreover, one of his own kind had died there. He’d found the body, burned almost beyond recognition, but the Grand Inquisitor knew what to look for. The other one had been bold, too bold it seemed. He had gone fearlessly after a Jedi and paid the price. The Grand Inquisitor would not be so reckless. He would channel his hate more usefully, be more measured. He, too, longed to kill his enemies, but he was not stupid. He knew the value of a good plan.

He turned and strode back to his ship. No one else had disembarked, and as he stalked through the corridor, his agents scattered out of his way. They were all afraid of him, which he liked rather a lot. They didn’t know exactly what he was, only that he was implacable and cruel. His kind was new to the galaxy, a fresh weapon for the dark side to wield. His agents must follow his every order as though the Emperor himself had given it. That sort of power made him feel very strong.

“Set a course back to base,” he said. He took his lightsaber off its mounting on his back and held the rounded handle almost lovingly. It wasn’t the first one he’d ever carried, but it was the first he’d borne in service of his new master, and he liked the viciousness of the design.

“And inform Lord Vader that we have found evidence of another survivor.”

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