Chapter 125: Connections and Butterflies

*Warning - Chapters 122-126 were all published together. Returning Readers, make sure you're picking up the story from where you left off :-).

Chapter 125: Connections and Butterflies

– Kalee – 23.4 BBY –

Aayla had to admit that she hadn’t expected what she’d found on the planet of Kalee. Having pulled data from the Jedi and Republic archives both, she’d expected violence and some sort of Sith plot. Instead, what she’d found was a people who were starving to death, laboring under a ridiculously unfair set of embargoes. Apparently, the only thing that had been keeping them afloat at all was a deal with the IGBC, one that had expired with the death of their greatest warrior and his elites. That had been almost three years previous, and the planet was rapidly falling apart again.

Thankfully, it was something she could fix, though she found it annoyingly ironic that it was the very skills she’d told Izuku she wasn’t suited for that she now needed to do the job.

The very first thing she had done upon realizing just how karked the situation on the planet was, was to call for multiple of the League’s Serenity-class relief ships. They, along with a large convoy of bulk freighters normally used for League naval logistics, brought in massive amounts of food and medical supplies. Doing that stemmed the immediate tide of problems, along with getting the locals to actually talk with her, rather than spit at her for being a Jedi. Not that she could blame them for that, as it was becoming increasingly obvious that a horrifying miscarriage of justice had occurred here.

Sort of.

In truth, the situation was extremely complicated and messy. From what she’d been able to sort out, the expansionist Yam’rii of the planet Huk had attacked and conquered Kalee, enslaving the locals. Eventually, the locals had managed to revolt, freeing themselves…and then promptly and understandably took the war to the Yam’rii. What happened after that was a two-fold problem. First, the angry Kaleesh war leader had settled on a war of annihilation, fully intent on utterly wiping the Yam’rii from existence in revenge. Second, the Yam’rii had reached out to the Republic and lied to the Republic and Jedi’s faces about the cause of the war.

The fact that the Jedi hadn’t properly investigated pissed her off, and she had very carefully and pointedly taken note of the Jedi involved. If she had her way, every single one of them would be before an internal tribunal at the very least, and possibly dragged before the Judiciary on charges of crimes against sentient kind. Yes, stepping in to prevent the Yam’rii’s total destruction had been justifiable. No, what happened afterward had not been. Nor had the Republic’s response and embargoes, which led to the second step that Aayla had needed to take.

That step was reaching out to those worlds which had sent Observers into the Crusade. Naboo and Alderaan had been two of the first, but others had eventually been authorized, and Aayla reached out to all of those worlds now. That got Observers and investigators moving to Kalee to look into just what had happened here and why. She, herself, would be investigating the Jedi part of what had occurred, but she trusted that the holier-than-thou Peace Party types that were behind most of the Observers would be raising a stink about the Republic side of things.

She hoped so, anyway.

Kalee was, unfortunately, much too far from the League’s borders for more than a relief mission. There was no realistic way to open trade here to help them rebuild, and Izuku’s expansive trade network and businesses within the Republic were subject to the embargoes. She knew he would sign off on helping get some home-grown industry going for the planet, to help offset those embargoes. But that alone wouldn’t be enough, not with the crushing debt the Republic had inflicted in the way of ‘reparations’ to the Yam’rii. For whatever reason, the IGBC had bought those debts up and wasn’t currently pursuing them very hard. But they weren’t helping the planet, either.

Well, for whatever reason, the Force was telling her that it was important she do what she could to fix the planet. Why, she genuinely had no idea, particularly as this wasn’t really her field of expertise, so much as it should have been someone like Fay’s. The Force insisted it had to be her specifically, though, so Aayla would dig in and do the job right. She wasn’t at all against helping these people, after all. She just knew that Izuku was going to endlessly tease her that she’d gone off to Follow the Force…and ended up doing exactly the things she’d claimed didn’t suit her.

The Force had a strange sense of humor, at times…

… … …

– Muunilinst – 23.3 BBY –

Reconstructing the life of Hego Damask II had been a massive undertaking. Far more so than Celeste had originally anticipated. The fact that she’d been delayed for a bit by an emergency request from her apprentice for support on Dathomir against the Night Sisters hadn’t helped. Admittedly, it had been a worthy distraction, as well as a bit of a revelation to discover how far some of those at the Ossus Academy had come.

A number of individuals from different Force traditions, as well as a few trained purely at the Academy itself, had also responded to the call for aid. Together, they had helped the three clans of Witches who’d forged an alliance completely erase the Night Sister cult from the planet at last. Something which had been extremely satisfying to take part in, and which had also resulted in a rush of new students from those clans for the Academy. After they’d witnessed the wide variety of things those from Ossus could do, to say that the clans had been ‘interested’ was a bit of a gross understatement.

Still, even if wiping out a Dark Side cult, particularly such an old and entrenched one, was always worthwhile…it had pulled her away from the cold case that was Hego Damask II for a number of months. Given that it very much was a cold case, it didn’t matter a lot, and the Force had been insistent that helping the Witches and getting them to commit to some of their own being trained at Ossus had been more time critical. Why, she didn’t know, but it wasn’t her job to question the Force when it insisted that something was so.

Regardless, she’d been back to reconstructing Hego Damask’s life the moment the Night Sisters were done with, and she’d made a lot of progress before being called away in the first place. The results of her efforts were somewhat instructive, as she’d been able to track at least some of his efforts as a Sith. In particular, she was completely certain that she’d uncovered who his master had been, a Bith named Darth Tenebrous, who matched descriptions of the other Sith who’d had dealings with Beldorion the Hutt.

Exactly what Tenebrous and Plagueis had gotten up to, she had only bits and pieces of information about. Sowing discontent throughout the Outer Rim territories of the galaxy seemed to be at least part of it. Though she’d also found several additional abandoned laboratories reeking of the Dark Side that indicated they’d been up to the worst sorts of foul Sith Alchemy as well. Some of it nearly as dark as what she’d experienced from the Muur Talisman.

The problem with going the other direction to find the current Sith Lord was that Damask’s influential position meant he’d had regular contact with a lot of people. Many of whom remained in positions of power. Up to and including some level of association with the current Supreme Chancellor of the Republic. Just as one example of how far his connections went, the Munn had also apparently been critical to the negotiation of the Free Trade Zones, which resulted in the Trade Federations receiving full voting privileges in the Galactic Senate. An idiotic mistake to anyone with a functioning brain. Which, sadly, didn’t include most politicians.

It highlighted the difficulty of her task neatly, however, as it meant that Damask had been in regular enough contact with higher-level members of the Trade Federation. Any one of those people could be her target. As could dozens of high-ranking members of the IGBC, who he’d had even more frequent contact with. The Munn’s circle of influence had been irritatingly broad, forcing her to prioritize and filter. The Veil was getting in the way of any attempt to filter the list with the Force, so she was reduced to her own critical thinking skills as an investigator. With that in mind, she settled on checking those among the Trade Federation and IGBC first. Not only could she do so with less effort than some of the others, having already penetrated the IGBC systems in particular once, but even if she turned up no Sith, she would likely find quite a number of things that Izuku and his people would want to know about.

After all, if there was one thing she was now completely certain of from tracking Damask’s history, it was that the current conflict brewing in the galaxy had firm roots in Sith manipulation of events…

… … …

– Jedi Temple – 23.2 BBY –

Shaak Ti was surprised how little like home the Jedi Temple felt these days. While she’d never quite felt fully at home here, the massive city planet that was Coruscant simply too fundamentally alien to her Togrutan sensibilities, it was still somewhere she had spent a major chunk of her life. Including her formative years as a youngling, after having been given over to the Temple as an infant. It had left enough of an impression that at least a part of her had always felt grounded to the Temple, even if she suspected her feelings were far weaker than for most Jedi. She had been more than a little unusual in choosing to train both of her own students on her homeworld of Shili, rather than travel the galaxy and take missions with them. Something which had been questioned more than a little by other Jedi…doubly so since both of her previous students had died not too long after they’d risen to Knighthood.

As it always did, that thought brought a pang of sadness and old pain, yet it was something she’d long ago come to terms with. The pain was easily put aside as she focused on the now. The now in which she realized that what attachment had remained to the Temple had faded even farther from her most recent round of absences. In part, she suspected that was because none of her lovers were here. Padmé and Sabé were technically on the same planet, but they hadn’t yet fully connected with her the way they had Izuku and Aayla. Nor was there any real excuse to go see them.

Yet, despite that ‘attachment’ causing at least some of her diminished feelings, she didn’t believe that such was the bulk of the reason.

No, far greater cause were the changes that had come about in both the Temple and the Order itself in recent years, many of which having happened while she was away. Despite recent, sustained efforts by the High Council to squash the factionalism that had been caused by the Hutt Crusade and many Jedi deciding to participate, there was less unity of purpose to be found here than ever before. Many of her fellow Jedi had…divided opinions. On the Hutt Crusade, on the Separatist movement, on the efforts being made to prune corruption from the Republic, on the new security measures and somewhat invasive security sweeps that had been done for virtually all members now.

Which didn’t even account for the damages the discoveries made by those security sweeps had caused. At this point, over a dozen Dark Side practitioners had been found within the Order itself, as well as nearly twice that many Jedi who were actively corrupt and taking orders from various Senators or political parties. Five Jedi had already been expelled from the Order, at least as many more were likely to follow, and many among the lower level of Knights and Padawans were afraid of a witch hunt brewing.

Knowing what she knew, she fully understood why the High Council was cracking down. She even agreed that many of the actions taken had needed to happen. Yet, she had to admit that she was worried about what the overall effects on morale were going to end up being. The only two things keeping said morale afloat at the moment were the series of rapid successes the Order had managed in taking down corrupt elements of the Republic, and the fact that the returning Jedi from the Hutt Crusade were in comparatively high spirits. They, at least, were almost universally satisfied with the work they’d done in freeing tens of billions of slaves and helping build up a new Regime in former Hutt Space. One that seemed like it would genuinely do good by those freed worlds.

Unfortunately, the rapid, easy successes were drying up as the Veil healed from the damage done to it. Likewise, the uplifted spirits of those who had served in the Crusade were rubbing many traditionalists who still hated that they’d been allowed to leave the wrong way. Efforts were being made, by Grandmaster Yoda and others, to smooth out the rough edges. But when they were simultaneously pushing some reforms intended to tighten security and prepare the Order for war? Mixed signals were being sent, despite their best efforts.

Well, she would simply have to do her best to help repair, or at least paper over, the cracks as well as she could. Something which she was going to start today, by introducing the Holocron of Bastila Shan to a carefully selected group of individuals. Ones who crossed the divide of traditional and progressive, but whom she’d hand-picked as being individuals she thought would respond well to the story of the ancient Master’s life. All delivered, of course, in the guise of revitalizing a few skills which Master Shan had been particularly adept at.

She just hoped that First Knowledge didn’t get clued into her having the Holocron. It was only on loan to her at the moment from Aayla and Izuku after all. She suspected that the hoarders of all things shiny and Force that made up First Knowledge would not take well to the idea that the Holocron wasn’t theirs to seal away in a vault somewhere…

… … …

– Antar 4 – 23.1 BBY –

Rahm Kota strode grimly by the bodies of the dead terrorists who had planned to bomb the few Antaran Ranger chapterhouses that were still on Antar 4 itself. The splinter group, Roshu Sune they’d called themselves, were apparently radicals who had formed in response to the declaration of the Confederacy of Independent Systems just a few months ago. Had security on the moon remained as light as it had once been, they might have had some chance to succeed. With the Rangers having expanded so much, and been keeping such a careful eye on the locals to ensure their shipyards were not discovered, the group had never stood a chance of remaining undiscovered.

Yet, the fact that they’d formed so fast in response to Dooku’s move, and done so on a world that was known to be extremely friendly to the Jedi Order? It was something that Rahm refused to believe was mere coincidence. No, this was enemy action of some sort. It only remained to be seen if said action had threatened their operational security here. Something he meant to find out as he approached the Ranger Captain that was assigned to investigate after they’d cleared out this group of idiots.

“Captain Telvian. I trust you have something for me?”

The Gotal, who had looked up from studying a display over a tech’s shoulder at Rahm’s approach, nodded firmly.

“Yes, sir. Good news and bad news both. The bad news is that you and the General were right. Someone was backing this group. Someone with a lot more money and resources than anyone local, and they specifically picked up as many people with an axe to grind with the Jedi as possible. Including a fair few displaced mercs and bounty hunters from Hutt Space. The good news is that they weren’t expecting the sort of resistance they got. It seems whoever was backing them didn’t have current intelligence on the Rangers. Not even what we’d done before you arrived and lit a fire under the General. They were working on old information that hasn’t been accurate for years.”

Rahm untensed a little at that. The bad news was something he’d considered self-evident, so it wasn’t a major issue. The good news was very good, as far as he was concerned. The longer they could go without it being discovered that the Jedi were preparing for war, the better. Preferably, no one would know until the first time the new fleet dropped in on some idiot in the process of doing something stupid.

“Excellent, Captain. I trust the Sentinels are already trying to track where the money and supplies came from?”

Telvain nodded, gesturing to the screen he’d been staring at.

“Yes, sir. Someone tried to make it look like it was criminal elements. But we’ve already turned up evidence that it was likely the IGBC paying for everything. This looks like direct action by the CIS to try sabotaging a Republic ally.”

Rahm hummed a little doubtfully. This seemed a bit more directed than that.

“I hope you’re right, Captain. If that’s all they are up to, that means they don’t know what we’ve been up to. Don’t hesitate to let myself or the General know if you need anything to keep a lid on this.”

With a quick affirmation from the Captain, Rahm moved off to see if he could turn up anything that the official investigation hadn’t. Given that the Sentinels had been through here already, it was unlikely. But he’d do his due diligence and make sure they didn’t have any leaks…

... ... ... ... ... ... ...

A/N 1: Grevious is already becoming Grevious, so the events on Kalee aren't going to turn him away from killing Jedi. The not-really-Jedi of the League, though? Well...that might be a different case.

A/N 2: Celeste is closing in on answers! What will this mean for the future...