An agent like my Hallena. If it were her in that position, wouldn’t I want another ship to do what it could?
Rumahn walked back to Pellaeon’s seat and leaned close to his ear. Ahsoka watched with the intense curiosity of a child who knew the grown-ups were having a private conversation; Rex took a couple of slow strides to stand between her and Pellaeon, presumably to distract her.
Good man, Rex.
“Sir,” Rumahn said quietly. “Intel thinks it’s genuine. They’ve not received the signal, either, but they say Orla Taman is an operating alias for their agent who arrived in Athar on JanFathal a couple of days ago. They say that if we’re operationally capable, they’d appreciate our help with an extraction because we’re a day or less closer now than any other ship.”
“Very well, let’s RV with the Jedi ship, cross-deck Altis and his key people here, and we’ll get a plan going. Rex, are you up for this?”
Rex turned around. “Well, you don’t have any troops embarked other than us, so—yes, can do.”
“Excellent,” Pellaeon said. “We’re not equipped for this at all, but I like a challenge. Good for morale when we pull it off.” Good for that poor woman down there, too. “Did they happen to give you her real name, Rumahn? I hope so. That way she’ll know we are who we say we are.”
“Yes, sir.” Rumahn looked at his ’pad. “Hallena Devis.”
Pellaeon felt his heart stop. It was still pounding away, he knew that, but a strange raw sensation ran from the roof of his mouth into his chest, and it took all his self-control not to blurt out a curse.
Rumahn hadn’t a clue who Hallena was, of course. Pellaeon had at least been discreet about that. But Ahsoka whipped her head around to stare, no doubt able to sense his shock and fear. Rex, who seemed to use Ahsoka as a smoke detector, stopped fiddling with his helmet circuits.
I have to save her.
But I’m too close to this.
And if I’m going to ask men to risk their lives…
They had to be told. It was only fair.
“I need to declare an interest,” Pellaeon said quietly. “I don’t want there to be any misunderstanding about why we’re doing this. You need to know that Hallena Devis is… a friend of mine.” He took a deep breath. “A very good friend indeed.”
Chapter Five
A prisoner is a burden to his captor and a liability to his comrades. Neither take a prisoner nor let yourself become one.
—Ancient Irmenu military doctrine, said to be still practiced today
Conference Room,
Republic Assault Ship Leveler
Callista had never been in a ship of Leveler’s size before, and it fascinated her.
It felt… alive.
She walked up the passageway behind Master Altis, distracted by the sense of nerves and blood vessels around her. It was the only way she could describe it; she’d felt the same sensation on other vessels to a lesser degree, but this ship, this self-contained city, was another order of magnitude altogether.
“What’s wrong?” Geith asked, nudging her in the small of the back to keep her moving. “What are you staring at?”
“Can’t you feel it?” she asked. “The power in this thing? It’s like a pulse. Like brain activity.”
“You and machines…” He kept looking at members of the crew as they went about their business, from an assortment of beings in gray uniforms to white-armored clone personnel with their helmets on. “You’re going to be communing with droids next.”
“You sure you can’t feel this ship? The electrical charge?”
“No, but that background hum is getting on my nerves.” Geith gave her a playful swat on the backside. “I think you’re hypersensitive to electronics because you grew up sea-farming. Lots of fish and sea creatures depend on detecting charges and electrical fields, don’t they?”
“True.”
“If we ever need the income, you’d make a great electrician—”
She turned to make an arch comment back at him—they were on a serious mission, and he was in one of his rebellious moods—but when she looked back, she saw a little Togruta female walking behind them, looking quietly stunned.
She was wearing a set of blue fatigues several sizes too big for her. A lightsaber hung from her belt.
“Oh,” Callista said. “I didn’t realize Leveler had Jedi on board.” She stopped to let the Togruta catch up with them. “I’m Callista. This is Geith.”
“Ahsoka Tano,” the Togruta said, incongruously adult for a moment. “General Skywalker’s Padawan. You’re really Jedi? Not just Force-sensitives?”
She was looking at Geith suspiciously. Callista felt a strong sense of shock from her, and… guilt? Fear? Disapproval? Of course. She’d just seen Geith openly showing affection. Ahsoka was a mainstream Jedi, raised on scare stories of how attachment led to the dark side, so the child thought she was watching them falling to the Sith or some such nonsense. It was only when Callista saw Ahsoka’s reaction that she realized how much of a gulf lay between the two schools of belief.
“Yes, we’re Jedi.” Geith’s tone had the faintest tinge of impatience. He rarely met orthodox Jedi, and Callista hoped his urge to point out the narrowness of their ways didn’t get the better of him now that he finally had a target. “There’s more than one way to use the Force for good.”
Ahsoka said nothing more. She simply walked ahead of them in silence, but the impression she left in the Force was more eloquent than any comment: she was confused. Callista waited for her to disappear into the doorway at the end of the passage, then caught Geith’s sleeve.
“You know what happens,” she said. “Other Jedi see us, and we scare them. There’s no point arguing about it.”
“Okay, okay…”
“Promise me.”
“No point debating with a kid, either. But it’s more than the fact that we can marry and they can’t. Oh, and how many Padawans a Master can take. Like any of that matters. No, this is about dogma. About control.”
“Like I said, we unsettle them, and the best thing we can do is to let them go their way while we go ours.”
She gave him her I-mean-it look. He sighed, then smiled and nodded. There was a time and a place for ideological debate, and this wasn’t it.
But then they walked into the meeting room, and she felt Geith react again. Not to a shocked little Padawan this time; to the clone troopers sitting in a group by the holochart, helmets off, deep in conversation. It wasn’t so much their identical faces that got her attention as how very young they looked, even the shaven-headed one who had captain’s insignia on his armor.
Younger than me. Younger than Geith. But otherwise—just like us.
No Altisian Jedi had come across clones before setting foot on this ship. Everyone in that community had its views on the ethics of breeding combat troops, but views were just empty theory until the subject of those views sat right there in front of you. Callista could have predicted what was going to happen without any assistance from the Force. Geith walked straight over to the clones and held out his hand for shaking. Then he sat down with them. It was a statement—not to everyone else, but to those men—that they weren’t a means to an end.
That’s why I love him. He lives what he believes.
Pellaeon activated the holochart and got immediate silent attention without saying a word. Some of his officers sat at the table watching him intently. Callista focused on their name tags.
“Ladies… gentlemen.” Pellaeon used none of that listen up, people tough talk she’d seen on holovids. Despite looking somewhere in his thirties, Pellaeon seemed an old-fashioned man. And he also looked like an anxious one. “We’ve been tasked to extract one of our agents from behind what’s now enemy lines. We don’t know if she’s alive or dead, or even where she is. That puts us at something of a disadvantage.” He paused. “And it’s only fair that I tell you she’s a very close personal friend of mine. I mention that not to encourage you to try harder, but because I
need you to tell me if and when my judgment’s clouded, and my emotions put you or this ship in unreasonable danger.”
Callista liked Pellaeon instantly. A courteous, decent man. She could see that Altis did, too; he smiled to himself.
“We’re volunteers,” Altis said. “Agent Devis shouldn’t have less expectation of rescue simply because her lover happens to be the first command to respond. If we didn’t allow those we love to help us, think of the faith we would have to place in those who hate us.”
Pellaeon still looked stricken, but the frown lines in his forehead relaxed slightly.
“Indeed,” he said. “And that means that I expect to shoulder the risks in this rescue.”
“You don’t mean go on the mission, do you, Captain?” The clone with the shaved head and captain’s insignia folded his arms across his chest. “It’s not really your job. It’s mine, in the absence of any embarked troops. And I’ve done extractions before. Except we’ll do this one my way, and with any luck it won’t turn out like Teth.”
There was some unspoken debate going on between them. Hands-on commander, Callista thought. Doesn’t want to look like he’s letting others do the dirty work. Ahsoka watched, eyes unblinking, clearly still unsettled by the new Jedi.
“Of course, Rex,” Pellaeon said at last. “I’m just indicating my willingness to front up and do what you require of the ship. Plan?”
“It’ll be entirely guesswork. Locate, confirm she’s alive, have one team to distract while the other extracts, and then we exfil.”
Ahsoka cut in. “What about the other ships? Isn’t General Yoda sending reinforcements to repel the invasion?”
Rex raised an eyebrow. “Too late for that, littl’un. Master Skywalker’s on his way, but that’s your lot. All we can do is try to get that agent out, and then regroup to fight another day. Assuming there’s not another hundred worlds more critical than JanFathal.”
“I’m volunteering for the recon,” Geith said. “Nothing like a Jedi for locating people. And we know a little about what happened before she lost contact because we have the ambient sound recording from her comlink. She’s been taken by people we can identify locally.”
“Rep Intel were gracious enough to tell us a little of what they were up to in Athar,” Pellaeon said sourly. “Hallena was undercover as a union agitator. If we could raise the JanFathal intel people, then we could pin that down, but the comms to Athar have been cut.”
He’d used her name. It suddenly made it all very personal, and Callista had no problem with that.
“Ask them if they know who Merish, Varti, and Shil are,” Altis said. “Those are the names we heard.”
Pellaeon nodded to his first lieutenant, Rumahn. “Get on to them, Number One. Don’t accept any interdepartmental need-to-know nonsense from them, either.”
“And that’s our plan?” Ahsoka asked.
“Can’t do any more planning until we know the location,” Rex said. He indicated the holochart in front of him. When he magnified the images hanging in the air, they resolved into street plans and the layouts of key buildings. “That’s why we’ve been familiarizing ourselves with the delights of downtown Athar. Once we get an approximate location, then we can apply a plan.”
“You just happen to have charts,” Callista said.
“No, someone thought it would be a good idea to collate capital maps and building plans from as many Republic allies as possible, just in case,” Rex said. “Not exactly comprehensive. But we’ve got access via our HUDs, and any information at all is better than going in blind.”
“That’s why we should do it,” Geith said. “No offense, Captain, but we have our special uses. We can do things on our own that you’d need a lot of equipment to duplicate.”
Rex exuded wary suspicion in the Force. He gave Geith an appraising look. “Suddenly everyone wants us to take a day off.”
“None of you have any choice,” Geith said. “But I do. So you tell me what needs to be done, and I’ll—”
“We’ll do it,” Callista interrupted.
“That’s very thoughtful of you, but this is my job.” Despite his apparently relaxed expression, Rex was deeply troubled by the conversation. Maybe he was offended that Geith thought he needed protecting in some way. “I’m not trained to do anything else. You can see I’d never make a living at hairdressing.”
“We’ve trained all our lives for this, ma’am,” said one of them. Callista longed for a name, but they had no visible IDs like the Leveler officers present, none of whom were clones. “We want to do the job for real now.”
It sounded as if he’d never been in action before. Geith looked stricken. Altis was simply watching, saying nothing, and so was Pellaeon; given the urgency of Agent Devis’s plight, Callista wondered if the officers thought this debate was an irresponsible waste of time. But she knew this was the heart of the matter. It was how Altis had trained her. There were no ethical shortcuts to be taken, no hand-waving and promises to do something unsavory just this once because the circumstances were pressing. Because there was never just this once. It became habit.
“You won’t feel right if you don’t do this, will you?” Geith said.
“No, sir.” Rex seemed to be getting agreeing nods from the other clones. “I definitely won’t. We definitely won’t.”
Pellaeon slapped his hand down on the table. “Very well, let’s get on with it. What about your original mission, Master Altis?”
“It can continue without us,” Altis said. “And we’ll rejoin it when our work here is done.”
The meeting broke up so quickly that Callista almost felt everyone was escaping rather than face a barrage of arguments from Geith. She was probably imagining it; it was just the urgency of the situation. Ahsoka shot out the doors after Rex, pausing for a split second to glance back at Geith and Callista, much less like a child and suddenly more a caged animal seeking escape.
“And so you show me,” Altis said. He gave Geith that wonderful smile, the lines of age and wisdom mapping out a lifetime of discovery. It was the smile not of a teacher who’d succeeded in making a lesson stick in a student’s mind, but that of a man who had learned something precious. “Thank you, Geith. I asked you to make sure I witnessed the time you had to make a moral choice.”
Geith didn’t look happy. “And I didn’t. I just went along with it. And so, Master, did you.” He looked at Callista accusingly. “And you. We all do it. That’s how slippery the slope is. Why are Rex and his men expendable, to save someone who has no more right to exist than they have?”
“That’s true for any soldiers, not just these men. You think that’s what your decision was about?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you concede, then? And what would you have done instead—refused to go on the mission, and left those men to fight alone?”
“I backed down because it was so clear they wanted to do it,” Geith said. “And if I’d been able to make them do otherwise, then I’d have been as guilty as the Jedi Council of denying them choices.”
“Exactly. This is for the troopers’ peace of mind, not yours. Choice isn’t as simple as it appears, is it?”
“That’ll make me feel so much better if they get killed.”
“Now you see the true nature of bad decisions,” Altis said. “Even if we’re not the ones who make them, if they’re bad enough, they force us into other bad choices because they’ve so affected reality. But we can’t isolate ourselves from them by refusing to take part in the world they create. That’s irresponsible.” He turned to Callista. “You’re very quiet, for once.”
“I’m ashamed, Master.” She was; she was sure she would take a principled stand, but when the time came she found no position to take. It was far easier to do the right thing if you could work out what it was. “And I can’t think of an alternative.”
“Then make what good you can of this particular situation, as will I, because I am as compromised as you are.”
Altis le
ft. Callista had never asked how old he was, but he was still fit and strode away at a decent pace to leave them standing in the semi-darkness of the deserted room. She wondered if Master Yoda ever told his acolytes that he hadn’t a clue what to do next and that he was as ignorant and flawed as they were.
It wasn’t what most beings wanted in a leader. Yet, for all his apparent lack of clarity, Djinn Altis led.
“Make the best of a bad job,” Callista said. “Do no harm. That’s our dilemma. I can see why the mainstream Jedi view proves more popular. Clarity.”
“Submit, forget those troublesome feelings, and don’t ask awkward questions. Yes, no angst-ridden issues there.”
“You’re in a real snappy mood about this, aren’t you?”
“One day, we may well be asked why we let this happen, or why we did nothing to stop it. And what will our answer be?”
Callista didn’t have one, and neither did he. That was what was frustrating him. He took responsibility gladly, but he had nothing to grasp here.
“Let’s concentrate on saving Agent Devis first,” she said.
Geith looked as if he was about to argue again, but then he took her hand and they ambled down the passage to the hangar deck. Around her, the ship breathed and pulsed, its systems almost tangible in her particular awareness of the Force like parts of a living body. All any being could do was to make decision after decision, moment by moment, and strive for the cleanest choice.
Unfortunately, some choices looked identical from every angle.
“Cheer up,” said a voice from behind. One of Rex’s men, the one with sergeant’s insignia, overtook them. “When you pull off a mission like that, it’s the best feeling in the world. Ale in the mess afterward, okay, sir? Ma’am?”
He walked on, whistling, helmet under one arm.
Callista gave up on clarity and simply decided to do whatever it took to keep everyone—clone, agent, and Jedi—alive.