Ever since she'd returned to her ships something had been... off. Increasingly so. It wasn't Ranma who was in danger, and the danger wasn't to her. She excused herself from the bridge and retired to her quarters to ponder and meditate about it.
She burst out of her cabin moments later, rushing to her station on the command deck and shouting. "Drop fleet from hyperspace! Turn ship around! Communications! Imperial Fleet broadcasts! What they say?"
The orders were obeyed in a rush. They were scarcely returned to normal space when the comm officer began to pick up a broadband transmission.
"... Naval Tribunal at Foster formally decided on guilt, condemning Bart Mancuso to death and stripping him of his rank. The execution will be a formal ceremony on Coruscant..."
"Navigation." Shampoo growled soberly. "Plot track, Foster to Coruscant. Then take course to intercept! We no let good officer die."
===========
A prison ship wasn't first class accommodations. They weren't meant to be.
Rather the opposite, in fact. They were meant to be brutal, cruel and inhumane to break the spirits of those who travel in them. What's worse, they had several provisions against escape. Imperial Dungeon Ships didn't even have hyperdrive controls for fear of Jedi escaping and using them to effect an escape even without a navicomputer. The ships relied on coordinates fed externally by stations running automatic jumps to guide them through the void.
The guards were nearly mindless Imperial Sentinels. They could not be bribed, convinced, seduced or coerced and were nearly immune to Jedi mind tricks.
Bart Mancuso's sole consolation was he'd done enough to earn this. Even if the real source of his betrayal wasn't what they'd condemned him for, he'd earned this and he'd do it again in an instant. Still, it rankled that they'd sentenced him based on a set of false charges that could never have stood up in a Republic court. Failure to win a battle wasn't any reason to kill a man. Only reason he was okay with his fate was his crew had gotten off when he'd taken sole blame, and they'd been finding a fertile field for their recruitment drive as the resentment against his own treatment rubbed all the old families just as wrong as wrong can be.
He was just going through this sober train of thought, trying to comfort himself for the thirtieth time since this trip began, when the ship suddenly shuddered and he could feel as it fell out of hyperspace.
This wasn't in the plan. It was too early by far. He perked up, paying attention to his ears. There it was, he could hear the shields go up. Someone was powering up weapons and igniting the sublight drives. Sounds like a battle.
He began to grin, thinking he knew what was going on.
His hunch proved correct when the hull shuddered, lights went out, and the only power was the chaotic display of ion energy playing across the inner bulkheads and casting off an eerie glow.
He got up and straightened his uniform cap, snaking an arm out of the now open door (its magnetic seal having failed with the lights), picked the blaster out of the holster of his badly confused guard, and shot him in the back of his head. The sentinel went down like a sack of mug roots.
Somehow Bart felt he'd got his reprieve.
===========
The rescue wasn't a dramatic one. Multiple cruisers versus a small freighter-type prison ship was hardly much of a fight. Bart took to his assigned quarters with a smile and a salute to the Jedi rescuer.
There hadn't been any other Jedi sharing a prison ship with him. They'd come for him alone, and that made him feel special. He fell to work right away, learning all he could to get the most out of these ships when the next fight came.
Meanwhile, the data stolen from the prison ship's core proved to be very useful indeed. In spite of their frightening weaknesses to avoid capture by mutiny, the guards who knew nothing and the cruel men for crews, to be useful as a prison fleet they had to go where they were needed, and that meant information tracking, knowing who had important captives who were worth this special pickup.
Shampoo learned the identities of many lost Jedi she now knew were gone, lost forever to torture and death in the Empire's prison systems.
But she also learned
See other episodes by Lionheart
(Posted Fri, 09 Apr 2004 02:45)
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