Author: Opal Lynn (opal . lynn (at) gmail . com) For more updates, spoilers and images from the story, please visit tsrii . livejournal . com

Rating: PG-13

Characters/Pairings: Anakin/Padmé, Obi-Wan, Darth Nathema (OC), Reysuu (OC)

Category:AU, Action, General

Disclaimer:This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by Lucasfilm, Ltd. No money is being made and no infringement is intended.

This Chapter: A strange corpse is found in a back alley of a disregarded planet, and Obi-Wan, Anakin and Padmé continue their pursuit of their mysterious new enemy.

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“Anakin, there!” Padmé’s finger thrust unexpectedly under Anakin's nose, and had it not been for his precognition, she probably would have gouged out his eye. They had been following Obi-Wan's comlink trace for several minutes now, inching in on him slowly through the static and mixed signals. Comlinks had weak external traces, and Obi-Wan was traveling very fast, which made tracking him a nearly impossible feat. Anakin turned his head sharply and followed Padmé's finger. In the distance, he could see Obi-Wan trailing the Sith by roughly a hundred meters. Her deep black robes were billowing impractically behind her, slowing her down just enough for Obi-Wan to keep on her trail. The speeders were being pushed just beyond their limits, and luckily they were flying over a field of open grass - one bump or sharp turn and both of them would probably wipe out.

“Bring the ship low and open the starboard hatch!” Padmé shouted, just a little unnecessarily. “I’ll distract her.” Anakin wanted to object; no one had really given him an opportunity to help out yet, and she was already halfway out of the cockpit by the time he’d said, “but!”

He growled a little, hating to just have to sit and watch while Padmé and Obi-Wan were in danger, and since he hadn’t even been there to help when Sabé had been killed, he felt particularly useless. He sharply banked the ship starboard and pulled down parallel to the Sith woman, slowing to cruising speed and lowering the ship until it was nearly skimming the ground. He could hear the tall grass of the field below whipping at the stomach of the ship. He’d just fixed this damn thing. If a rock flew up and got jammed in the vents, he was just going to die. He tapped a panel and the hatch opened with a roar of incoming wind. His ears popped as he glared stupidly at the pitch stabilizer, unable to even glance at Padmé for risk of shearing off the ramp and killing her.

He heard her fire a few rounds, but he couldn't tell if she'd managed to land a hit, he was still unable to take his eyes from the altimeter controls. He heard a speeder whining over the roar of wind howling through the hatch, and he tried to keep the ship steady in a frustrated attempt to do anything useful. Soon, he heard his Master’s boots clunking up the entrance ramp and the hatch closed with a hiss. Padmé's footsteps trailed quickly behind. Obi-Wan rushed into the cockpit and plowed into the co-pilot chair, which rotated sharply and slapped him in the thigh with its safety harness.

Obi-Wan's face was windburned and bright red, and Anakin could feel his master's heart beating frantically as Obi-Wan sat down and tried to fasten his harness. But his breath was coming too quick and his hands were too chapped from the wind, so he just threw the clips aside and leaned forward, looking at the controls.

"Pull up and follow her from a distance. She might try to shake us; when Padmé hit her she swerved off about three points west. I managed to pick up her speeder's tracer code on my scanner..." Obi-Wan continued to mumble breathlessly as he fiddled with some instruments and locked the ship onto the Sith's stolen speeder.

Padmé entered, looking extremely haggard and windblown. She was holding her right arm to her body; a frustrated expression on her face.

"You okay?" Anakin asked, watching as she sat down behind Obi-Wan and fastened her harness with her left arm.

"I'll be fine. I threw my arm out into the wind and pulled something, but I think I'll live." She gave him an irritated look.

Obi-Wan broke into a half-smile.

"She did marvelously. I've never seen blaster fire so precise whilst one is hanging out of the back end of a ship."

Padmé nudged the back of Obi-Wan's seat rather forcefully with her knee.

"He's lying. When the wind caught my arm, I lost the pistol. But it happened to hit the woman in the face, so no harm done."

Anakin couldn't supress a laugh.

"You hit her in the face with a blaster?"

Obi-Wan grinned boyishly and said, "It was a very accurate hit."

With a roll of her eyes, Padmé turned the other way and pretended to ignore them both.

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"Well, it certainly is very strange..."

"Strange? It's flipping unnatural is what it is!"

"Yes, well, it's just rather unusual, Ravi."

"Deur, you're repeating yourself again."

"Well, all I'm saying is that it's very inconclusive."

"Yes, Deur."

At the mouth of a cramped, dimly lit tunnel, two figures stood silhouetted as they whispered anxiously, heads bowed together. Their gazes were directed unflinchingly at a dead body on the ground. One of these whispering figures was a young police cadet named Deur Rai, and presently he was trying to keep his associate's foot from prodding disrespectfully at the corpse.

All the men hovering about - including Deur and his overly curious partner Ravi - were members of the Upper Pryus crime scene unit, which had just dispatched half a dozen officers to investigate a body that had been discovered the previous night in an offshoot of Mondula’s palace; somewhere deep in the lower slave warrens. And though everyone present had seen their share of action and fatality, there was an anxious tone hovering in the corridor, almost as if this particular corpse personified a new kind of death.

The body was absolutely spotless and completely in tact. Truthfully, it was the total lack of any wounds at all that was so unsettling to the otherwise worldly officers. The man had been too young to have died of natural causes, and a quick scan of his medical records indicated that although his system was full of a number of questionable substances, he had borne no illnesses that would have shortened his life so suddenly. Additionally, there was a strange, frozen look on his face, as if he had died in a surprised sort of pain, too shocked by it to really understand what was happening until it was too late. His eyes were still open, his pupils mere panicked pinpricks in the center of his pale, blue veined face.

"You don't see something like that every day," said Ravi, still seemingly astonished.

"Well...no." replied Deur cautiously.

"Is that all you have to say? 'Well, no?'" Ravi scoffed and jostled a few other officers out of his way so that he could squat down to get a better look. "I mean, look at him! He's shit himself!"

Deur looked away from his partner, who was now poking at the dead man's curled, cold fingers with a thin sensor probe. Deur glanced at the pair of officers who Ravi had shoved out of the way, and without really wanting to, he overheard part of their conversation.

"Hey Dunlock! You know what they're saying back at Central." As if this was supposed to be obvious.

"No." As if it plainly wasn't.

"Yeah, just commed me. Think its some sorta... Jedi thing... or something."

"Some sorta Jedi thing."

"Yeah."

"Central said this."

"...yeah." Expectantly, "You think I'm making this up!"

"You dumbshit. Why the Hell would Central tell you something like that?"

"Listen! It's what they said!"

"There’s no blinking Jedi within five million klicks of Elian, so shut the Hell up, Grigg….”

Deur turned away, not wanting to hear any more of the unsettling dialogue; anxious that maybe what Lt. Grigg had said was the truth. It certainly wasn't a very funny thing to be joking about if he had been lying.

Jedi? Here? It was certainly hard to believe. For several centuries Mondula and his ancestors had done everything in their power to keep the Jedi off of Elian, and there was no reason to believe they'd suddenly changed their minds.

As long as anyone could remember, the mobs of Elian had made it their business to find every Jedi potential born on the planet and keep them from being trained; sometimes in very controversial ways. But they had never let anyone escape. No one could escape. Not even Deur himself was allowed to leave. There was no way that anyonecould have slipped off-planet and returned a full fledged Knight; every resident sentient was fitted with an implant that detonated in the electropshere. And things were better for it. Mondula had countless powerful friends that protected Elian’s many taxpayers, and Elian's many taxpayers never tried to leave. So the idea of a Jedi just waltzing through the planet's electrosphere – in either direction - was absolutely ridiculous. And a Jedi coming all the way from Coruscant? Some kind of Jedi liberation front come to free the Illegitimates? Impossible. Unless they wanted to start an all-out war.

Jedi didn't run around freeing slaves. Granted, they used to, which is one of the reasons why the Hutts hated them so much. Elian's economy had been destroyed a millennia ago when just such a thing took place, but now the lives of the Jedi were devoted to the Republic. Elian was not a part of the Republic, and the Illegitimates were no longer technically slaves, so there was no reason for them to come. And Deur was dimly aware that there was an ancient treaty forbidding any Jedi affiliated with the Republic from entering Elian space. And it was the type of treaty that had no fine print... it simply said, "or else."

But regardless, the idea made Deur jittery; and as he looked at the white-faced corpse in front of him, he found himself imagining quite against his will the horrible ways that this man could have died without even being touched. After all, like everyone else on Elian, Deur had heard the stories about how Jedi could tear off your flesh with only the power of their minds. How they could read and manipulate thoughts, how they could talk to animals and see the future. Though the planet was run by Hutts and governed by a vast underworld of bounty hunters and head collectors, there was a reason that Jedi were feared on Elian. The Hutts were unpleasant, but they couldn't rip your face off with a thought.

But what if an Illegitimate had pulled it off? What if they'd had resources shipped in from Republic infiltrators, what if they had trained themselves in the dark festering tunnels of Lower Pryus, waiting in the shadows for a test subject like this strange, spotless corpse to appear just so they could kill him with a glance? Just so he could be murdered, right here in this very tunnel, quite close to the spot where Deur's feet were resting now. What if one of them had actually managed to do it? What if one of the Illegitimates had actually pulled it off?

"Hey Deur! Get over here!" Deur started. He turned and saw Ravi waving at him, so he haphazardly stumbled over, still distracted by his thoughts.

"Well, what is it?"

"Jackpot." Ravi pointed excitedly to the dead man's fingers, where he was shining a blue pathogen light that made the skin glow neon green in a few places. Traces of blood, body fluids, usually the war paint of rapists and slashers – the off-planet gamblers who hung around in the seedier cantinas.

"What'd he touch? Was it the murderer?"

Ravi chuckled. "Heh. Don't think so. Looks like our buddy got a little frisky with somebody tonight. Probably beforehand, most likely had nothing to do with whatever killed him."

"Then why is this important?'

"Because, apparently this guy was luckier than all hell.”

"Would you get to the point, Ravi?"

"This guy turns up dead with no money, no traceable identification, no Residency chip, nothing. And yet, he's got some very spicy sauce on his fingers."

"What are you talking about?"

Ravi looked amused and slightly boyish - like a kid with a schoolyard secret.

"Have you ever heard of 'She Who Spits'? Damn, what's the slimy Hutt word for it..."

"Are you talking about Reysuu?" Deur asked, remembering something. Ravi nodded and a dirty grin spread over his face. Deur quickly amended, "Look at this guy Ravi, there's no way he was within ten feet of her. Mondula would never let some shmuck like this into his syndicate. This guy's a total nobody. No man as empty handed as him is coming anywhere close to Mondula, much less his slaves."

Ravi scratched his arm and looked doubtful.

"Deur, I've got the DNA scan right here. She's all over this guy, not just on his hands. There was some heavy petting going on before your 'shmuck' kicked it. I don't know how it happened... maybe some kind of torrid love affair or something. But it's there. You can't fight with solid evidence." Ravi flashed his pathogen beam back over the body and lifted the dead man's soggy tunic. A trail of neon green trailed over his lower stomach. "This trace is only a few hours older than the time of death. She was with him just before he died. She might know who did it." Ravi paused and looked the man up and down. "Not that it even matters."

A dark and dangerous joke was flirting with Deur's better judgment, and he questioned for a moment whether he should even say anything at all. After a moment's hesitation, he simply blurted it out, with little explanation or grace.

"Maybe Reysuu killed him."

For a moment, Ravi's face flared with an anxious excitement, before they both jumped at the sound of a tough, grainy voice.

"Shut the Hell up, cadet."

Deur and Ravi spun around and found themselves locked in the death stare of Lt. Major Dunlock, whose rather imposing frame threw a dark shadow over the corpse at their feet.

"You may be a cadet Deur, but you can't be that green." the Lieutenant growled at Deur before he turned on Ravi and his stare grew steelier yet. "And you, OfficerRavi, have been cautioned before." He stepped close to the younger men and drew his body up to it's bulkiest, most intimidating height.

"Nobody governs the Hutts, you idiots, and nobody raises questions like that where anybody can hear." Dunlock's voice lowered to a menacing hiss. "Do you want us all picked off? Reysuu's worth more than all of our skins combined, so if there's any brains between the two of you, you'd better just shut the Hell up."

Dunlock grabbed Ravi's holopad and gestured at the screen. The DNA scan lay bright green and cartoonish over a snapshot of the body.

"Delete that," snarled Dunlock. "I'm ordering clean-up down here in a hour to get rid of this cadaver, and that's the last we're going to hear about this. Put down intoxication as cause of death." With that final warning Dunlock thrust the holopad into Deur's hands and strode away.

Deur was dumbstruck for a couple of moments. What the Hell was going on? There was no reason for Dunlock to act so panicked, even if Reysuuhad killed their man, what difference did it make? She was the most valuable slave of the system's most prominent crime lord - murdering an absolute nobody was the type of thing that the Hutts and their friends did on a daily basis. There would be no need to incriminate her or press any charges, Deur had merely stated the obvious as a bit of a joke. After all, who could be surprised? It's the sort of thing you'd expect from the gladiatorial pet of a Hutt.

Unless...

Deur abruptly remembered what Grigg had said about the Jedi. Had Deur guessed wrong? Perhaps the Jedi wasn't the murderer, but the victim... Maybe Dunlock's problem wasn't that a rabid slave girl had killed a nobody - perhaps the problem was that she had slain a Jedi in cold blood. The Jedi would come to investigate the murder of one of their own, treaty be damned. With them would come the Republic and all of it's ideals, and they would strike down Mondula's entire regime, which meant annihilating Elian's entire underworld as they had centuries before. And Mondula was really the only thing holding the ramshamble of a government together.

Without a breath, Deur cleared the holopad of every bit of data he could find, but he couldn't help feeling that the damage was already done.

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“Which one was she?” Anakin blurted, his eyes tracing the signal of the Sith speeder.

"What?" grumbled Obi-Wan, his brow furrowing.

"Was she the Master or the Apprentice? There are always two of them, right?"

Out of the corner of his eye, Anakin saw Padmé glance up anxiously.

Obi-Wan’s voice dropped very low. “She was the Apprentice, I’m sure. Her rage is very new, her skills are not yet refined. But we can be sure of one thing.” His voice lowered so drastically that Anakin thought that most of their conversation must have been telepathic by now. “Whoever the Master is, he knows what he’s doing. To have trained a new Apprentice so quickly is very alarming.”

“The whole situation is very alarming!” Padmé said shrilly, before quieting herself and looking embarrassed for eavesdropping.

Obi-Wan glanced at the Queen over his shoulder and gave a sad smile. “Agreed.”

The cockpit was quiet for a moment as the situation sunk into all of them in turn. Anakin continued to watch the tracer beacon as they hovered in the stratosphere, waiting for the Sith to stop and board her ship. Anakin increased the scanner breadth so that he would detect any ship entering or leaving Naboo's gravitational sphere. Not that it would have been difficult anyway - there was not much intergalactic traffic on Naboo during peacetime.

They had been waiting for some time, and Anakin was beginning to think they had been duped.

"Master, what if her base isn't off-planet?"

Obi-Wan considered this briefly before shaking his head.

"No, she's foreign. I could feel her presence several minutes before the attack, but I didn't know what it was. She hasn't been here long."

"But she's not going anywhere... the speeder is just going around in circles and I haven't picked up any departing air traffic." As he said this, Anakin dialed up the range on his scanners another notch, just to be sure.

Padmé spoke again from behind Obi-Wan. "My guess is that she's buying time." She leaned forward to glance at the speeder's beacon. "The longer she delays her departure, the longer she can formulate a plan of escape."

"I think you might be right," said Obi-Wan thoughtfully. "Perhaps we need to use some force." He turned to his padawan. "Bear down on that speeder and get her caught in your draft. Don't discharge any weapons, we can't risk destroying her yet."

Padmé angrily asked, "Why not?"

"Because this time we need to destroy them both." responded Obi-Wan cautiously. Her turned back to Anakin, who was already lowering the ship for re-entry. "If you catch her in a draft she'll -"

A shrill alarm started ringing as the cabin lit up with a bright red message: "Unidentified vessel detected, departing Nubian airspace." This was followed by a series of coordinates and a louder beep as the ship added, "Unidentified vessel preparing for hyperjump."

"Damn!" hissed Obi-Wan, who was looking through the navshield as if he thought her ship would be visible from this distance. "Get on her, NOW!"

"I'm already on it." Anakin's hands clamped the controls and the ship made a very nauseating lurch forward as he fought to pull the ship from Naboo's atmosphere as fast as he could. Obi-Wan was frantically punching in the enemy ship's last coordinates, and luckily it wasn't terribly far from their current position, only a few hundred thousand klicks to the north. As they closed in, the Sith ship appeared on several data screens as the computer scanned and analyzed it.

"It's modified," said Anakin. "But it's an old piece of junk. I should be able to trace the jump, that model shouldn't have a cloaker on it..."

He was cut short as the Sith ship vanished in a blinding burst of light. Padmé punched her knee with a very non-royal growl, and Obi-Wan closed his eyes and sighed, clearly fed-up.

Anakin watched as the computer scrambled several nasty looking equations and finally spat out a set of coordinates.

"We've picked up her computer's hyperdrive calculations. It looks like she aimed somewhere on the Outer Rim."

Looking a bit revived, Obi-Wan transferred the coordinates to a navigation console and called up a map of a sparse-looking system.

"The Elesian Cluster?" mused Anakin, trying to connect the sparse and desolate map with any sort of memory. "I've never heard of that System."

"Neither have I," replied Obi-Wan slowly as he analyzed the map. "But it doesn't look like Republican space." He paused for a moment, clearly weighing their options. "Prepare to make the jump to hyperspace, we're going after her."

Not five seconds after Anakin loaded the data for the jump, the transmission console started flashing as they received an incoming broadcast. Anakin stared, slightly dumbfounded.

"It's the Council," he said, unable to mask his surprise.

"When the ship is ready, make the jump." instructed Obi-Wan as he hit the receive button. The transmission crackled to life, and a small blue figure appeared on the console.

"Master Gallia," said Obi-Wan politely, inclining his head.

"Obi-Wan," she returned curtly. "I'm afraid we have a very serious problem."

Anakin and Obi-Wan exchanged looks, but before anything could be said, Adi Gallia continued.

"We have received a transmission from a former Jedi; a fallen Knight named Tarlan Voss. His last transmission was dispatched several days ago, but it did not reach the council until this morning. I hope we aren't already too late." Gallia paused and inclined her head, causing her headdress to shift. "From what we can gather he was somewhere in the Elysian Cluster-"

Obi-Wan and Anakin glanced at one another again, and without warning the ship jumped into hyperspace.

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