Halcyon Diary: Luxury Cruise

After being made a Jedi Knight,  I was told to head to Coruscant to root out the new darkness that the Council sensed.  I was routed to the Republic Fleet, and when I started to take the normal shuttle, I was told that the Council had arranged for a seat on a more luxury transport instead if I wanted to take that.  Well, that got both my Force and CorSec senses tingling.  Obviously, my Force senses just gave me a vague feeling that something important was going to happen.  But my CorSec senses were telling me that the Jedi Council weren’t in the business of giving new Jedi Knights a luxurious trip to Coruscant, no matter how impressive that Jedi Knight is.  So for them to do something like this, they themselves had to be feeling something in the Force, whether conscious or unconscious.  Either that, or they had some intelligence that something was going to happen and as usual weren’t inclined to share it, especially with a new recruit to the Order.  Knowing them, probably both, actually.  At any rate, all of that put together suggested that this wasn’t going to be a simple, pleasant trip to the Republic capital.

It didn’t take long for the catch to appear, as an Imperial Dreadnought attacked, demanding a Republic diplomat who was traveling on board and landing troops to try to capture her.  Fortunately, she’d made contact with me earlier and so we were able to put together a plan to retake the bridge and kick the Imps out.  Once we got to Engineering, however, she came up with a plan to unlock the controls we needed that would vent that section and kill everyone there.  I, of course, didn’t want to do that and so took the slightly longer option of running around and turning off various generators manually.  It might have taken slightly longer and might have been a bit more risky, but it’s never a good idea to kill off … well, to ever kill off your own guys, but especially not the ones who were giving you the ideas that you were using to retake the ship in the first place.  Even pragmatics dictates that you keep them alive in case you need their knowledge again.  So our diplomat seemed to be pretty short-sighted.

Of course, she wasn’t the only short-sighted one.  After getting to the bridge, we heard the formal demands and weren’t about to hand her over to the Imperials, so I decided that I was going to get on-board the Imperial ship and disable the tractor beam that was holding us in place.  That seems like something a Jedi should do.  The diplomat pushed her way into coming along with me based on some theoretical knowledge she had about the ships, which didn’t make up for the fact that we were taking the very person the Imps wanted to get on their ship, well, onto their ship.  But it suited the Republic officer in charge fine, because he suggested that I just leave her there and get back so that the Imps wouldn’t bother chasing us.

Again, short-sighted.  After we went through all that trouble to not give her up, just giving her up didn’t make sense, and the Imps would be more likely to just blow us out of space — and would have nothing better to do since they’d have her in custody than chase us to blow us out of space.  If I could find a way to stop them from chasing us, we wouldn’t need to hand her over, and if I couldn’t, handing her over wouldn’t help us anyway.  Of course, simply handing her over to the Empire wasn’t the right thing to do, especially if I was going to have to betray her to do it.  As we went along, I told her what he had planned but forestalled a lot of her indignation by pointing out that she was going to sacrifice a bunch of people for herself, too.  That’s what fear can do to people.

Anyway, I managed to disable the tractor beam and get everyone back to the ship, and we jumped away.  The ship didn’t follow, so we got away pretty much clean, and the confrontation between the diplomat and the Republic officer was resolved without blaster shots or even bruises, so I have to consider the whole thing a success.  I only hope that what the diplomat does was worth the trouble.

If a short trip to Coruscant had that much drama, what was I going to face where the Jedi Council had explicitly sensed darkness?

Tags: TOR Diary