A Change of Plans: New Chapter 37

I uploaded chapter 37 here for you my supporters about a month ago, and immediatley began work on chapter 38. Since then I've come to the conclusion the timeskip in Chapter 37 is just a bit too abrupt, even if I think the chapter itself is decent. I've decided I want to move Chapter 37 forward to become Chapter 40, and write a few more intervening chapters to help tie off some loose ends, and set up the timeskip a bit better.

Please find below the new Chapter 37, and let me know what you think. All feedback is appreciated.
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BBY 29

When Silas arrived at Serenno, he gasped at the feeling of the Force that surrounded the planet. He felt his grandson instinctively press closer into his side out of fear, and he put a hand on the boy’s head. It was like the planet was suddenly soaked in a cold mist, the usual warmth and life of the Force made quiet with a sinister chill. 

Dooku had said that an assassin had attacked, but he failed to mention that it was a powerful darksider. A very powerful one, if they could disrupt the entirety of the nearby Force. He’d never been to a hub of the Dark Side before, but he had visited Coruscant, and the sensation reminded him of that, though less stale. How the Coruscant Jedi could stand it, he didn’t know.

The ship’s ramp lowered, and waiting for him on the tarmac was a team of House Guards. Jedi Knight Asajj stood behind them, not there to make the arrest herself, but clearly to lend support if it was needed. 

“Jedi Master Sturn, we’re here to place you under arrest for dereliction of duty.” The leader said, and Sturn recognised the voice of Colonel Gon Seith, though he was wearing a helmet.

“Of course, I surrender.” He stepped away from Yash, but his grandson clung fearfully to his side. “Yash, you have to let go.” But the boy who had just been kidnapped in the middle of the night was completely unwilling to leave his grandfather’s side. “What will happen to Yash?” He asked Gon.

“...If you hand over your lightsaber, we can let him ride with you.” Gon said. “We’ll keep him safe until the Green Jedi arrange for someone to come pick him up.”

The promises were reassuring, Sturn knew Gon to be an honourable man, even if he kept his mind shielded. All the House Guards did, and all of them were carrying scatterguns at their side. They really seemed like they were preparing to fight even the Jedi if they had to.

Sturn handed over his lightsaber, and accepted the sacanium manacles they slapped onto his wrists. Yash remained nervously glued to his side, even as the speeder they were in transported them to the city barracks. 

In comparison to the elite, disciplined and obviously highly trained House Guards, Serenno’s Armed Regulars were a much less impressive sight. They only had laminated breastplates and helmets that revealed their faces, and otherwise moved about in khaki colored clothes that covered their arms and legs. They were only equipped with blaster rifles and pistols, and none of them knew how to shield their minds. Still, they all seemed focused, moving about their various tasks, and shared a burning undercurrent of resentment. The recent assassination attempt was a fresh wound in their minds, and more than one dreamed of going to Coruscant to take revenge. That surprised Sturn. All of them seemed to regard the enemy assassin as an agent of the Republic, who they regarded with fear and distrust. 

It wasn’t long until the House Guard separated him from Yash, the boy looking over his shoulder fearfully as he was led to the canteen to get a full meal under the watchful eye of a smiling woman in uniform.

Expecting to be taken to his cell, Sturn was surprised when he was instead led straight to the commander’s office. Seated behind the desk was Serenno’s ranking military commander, Tan’ya, and her father looming behind her shoulder. The two of them presented a unified front, minds closed and regarding him with the same expression of anger thinly restrained only by an aristocratic facade.

On this planet, Dooku’s word was law. In most mid-sized towns and villages across Serenno, local nobility and custom decided punishments. In the larger cities, there were courts and judges to litigate cases, but the Count had all the authority needed to declare Sturn guilty and sentence him however he pleased, no judge or jury needed.

Steeling himself, Sturn stood straighter, calling on the Force to resist his own sense of fear. “I’m here to accept any punishment. Do whatever you have to. Shoot me if you must.”

“Oh, how very noble of you.” Dooku caustically drawled. “It must be comforting to think that you can abandon your duty to my family, and then because we shoot you, that means you’ve made amends.”

“Do you really think for a second that your own life is worth the same as Madalee’s? Or Athemeenes?” Tanya demanded. 

“How about Yash?” Sturn replied. “What’s he worth?”

Tanya bristled at that. “Even if the assassin was on the call, you could have signalled one of the House Guard. Instead you panicked and ran, abandoning your duty in the middle of a coordinated attack. You have no excuses.”

Sturn doubted that he could have made a signal with his hands that the kidnapper wouldn’t have seen. However, there really wasn’t a point in making that argument right now. “You’re right. I have no excuse. Now do whatever you have to.”

The two of them looked at each other, and Tanya’s lip curled in distaste. 

Dooku reached to his own belt, and took out a lightsaber with a long handle that he offered to Sturn. The Green Jedi blinked, shocked that they were handing him a weapon. He glanced at the two of them, briefly considering then dismissing the notion that they wanted some excuse to shoot him. Reaching out slowly, Sturn laid his fingers over the hilt, then gasped at the feeling of cold that radiated through the Force. Closing his hand around the weapon, he drew it back and thumbed the activator. The room was filled with a glow of red light, as a Sith lightsaber ignited before him, and Sturn blinked in shock at the blade, not quite believing what he was seeing.

“Did this come from the ruin?” He asked, looking at Tanya, despite knowing in his bones that wasn’t the case. The leather on the grip was brand new, the hilt gleaming with fresh polish. “The assassin?” Sturn demanded, wide eyed. “The assassin was a Sith?” 

“A Sith assassin was dispatched to kill my family.” Dooku confirmed. “And was almost certainly behind the attack on the Correllian Temple.” 

Sturn gaped, disbelieving. “The Sith are extinct!” He protested, and even as he said it, he already felt himself not believing it.

“They were extinct.” Tanya corrected him. “But Sith philosophy has only ever been a response to Jedi philosophy. Maybe our current strain of Sith are descended from the original species, or maybe not, but all it would take to recreate them is a single defecting Jedi.”

“Why are they targeting your family?” Sturn demanded. “Do you have something to do with this?”

Dooku frowned, turning his head to make eye contact with his daughter. She nodded once, as if encouraging him to continue, before with a sigh, the Count looked back to Sturn. “They attempted to recruit me. Not overtly, not at first, but they recognised my dissatisfaction with the Republic, and sought for me to join them. Of course I didn’t know they were Sith at the time, but eventually I pulled away when it became apparent who I was dealing with, and now Dark Side assassins are targeting my friends and family.”

“No…” Sturn breathed out. “No, if the Sith were active, the Coruscant Temple would have warned us.”

 “It is unwise to rely on the Jedi Council for much at all.” Dooku sniffed contemptuously. “They are totally blind to the fact that our present Supreme Chancellor Palpatine is a puppet of the Sith, as is much of the Senate. It was Palpatine himself who attempted to recruit me into their secret cause with promises of power.”

“No, you can’t prove any of this.” Sturn interrupted, even as his mind raced. The idea was so terrible that he couldn’t even consider it. The Supreme Chancellor working for the Sith? “I don’t believe you. This kyber crystal easily could have come from the ruin you unearthed, and the lightsaber could have been made in the last few hours.”

Dooku took out his compad, and pressed a few buttons. “I’m going to make available to you footage from the Sith’s attack. We also have his body in our morgue, so that you can inspect it yourself under supervision.”

“We’ll also provide a copy of this conversation to you, when you leave.” Tan’ya added. “You may need to refer to it later.”

“Refer to it later?” Sturn blinked, staring in disbelief at the two of them. “For what?”

“For when you report to the Green Jedi Council.” Tanya replied. 

Sturn froze at that. What these two were saying was completely insane, but any report he made to the Temple on Corellia would absolutely have to include a copy of this conversation. “I thought you were going to shoot me.” He murmured.

“Our military law would demand nothing less in response to desertion.” Tanya glared at him. “However, surviving what is to come requires compromises. So instead, we will put Serenno’s wellbeing before its law.”

“This era of peace is rapidly coming to an end.” Dooku explained, his stern tone seeming cordial compared to his daughter’s icy venom. “The Sith have evolved, but the Jedi on Coruscant remain stagnant and willingly blind. They take younglings in as infants, just to prevent them from developing even the potential to touch the Dark Side. They are like a man who eats spoiled food because he cut off his nose and can’t smell the rot. ” He met Sturn’s gaze, pinning him in place with a glare. “You’ve been to Coruscant. I’m sure you’ve felt the Dark Side growing in strength there. They can’t even feel that the world they live on has become an open wound in the Galaxy’s centre.”

“Okay, hold on.” Sturn held out a hand, struggling to keep up. “So there’s a Sith faction on Coruscant manipulating the Senate. Have you tried warning them?”

There was a flash of anger behind Dooku’s eyes, before he concealed it. “I’ve been warning them of the coming darkness for years. Sifo had a prophecy on the very subject. They’ve declared Anakin Skywalker the chosen one. A Jedi Master has been assassinated by a Sith.” Dooku answered. “If even that wasn’t enough, I have told Padme Amidala about Chancellor Palpatine, and she has told them. Now the Council won’t even take my calls anymore. They are beyond help.”

“Well, I’m sure relations are difficult between you, but if they knew, there’s no way they’d do nothing.”

“They are willfully blind, and they will not change their ways.” Dooku dismissed. “Tell them everything I’ve said, if you like. You will get no further than I have.”

Sturn stopped. “So… You’ve chosen to spare my life because you believe I can convince the Green Jedi of your theory. Even if I don’t believe it?”

Tan’ya answered. “You believe that we believe. You will present our evidence to the Green Jedi, and then they will investigate. With luck, they will see what we see.” 

“But it’s all just speculation. Without anything to prove Sith involvement, this is all just wild conspiracy theories.”

“We know the Sith were directly involved in the Invasion of Naboo.” Dooku said. “They made two attempts at eliminating Queen Padme Amidala. The one who would have benefited the most if they succeeded was Palpatine, who even despite their failure was able to maneuver himself into the role of Supreme Chancellor.” 

“I don’t think it at all strange that a politician would use a crisis to their advantage.” Sturn countered.

“By itself, no, but in conjunction with the fact he tried to recruit me to his secret cause with promises of power, and then when I refused my family was attacked by a Sith?”

“The only evidence you’ve given me is a red lightsaber!” Sturn objected. “There has to be another explanation then the Republic has been taken over by the Sith!”

“In the meantime,” Tan’ya added, “we’ll be contacting the other Orders. Only once a consensus is reached will we finally be able to do something about this madness.”

Dooku pushed a button and a number of House Guards entered the room behind Sturn. Without hesitation, they immediately seized his arms and painfully jerked them behind his back, before slapping durasteel cuffs onto his wrists.

“I thought you said you were sending me back to Corellia!” Sturn gasped.

Dooku drew himself up, walking around the table to stand before Sturn directly. “We are, but you are guilty of dereliction of duty, Sturn. We’re not sending you back there the way you came, piloting your own vessel and sitting proud at the bridge of a ship. We’re deporting you back to Corellia. On the way there you will be branded as a criminal, and exiled. If you ever return to Serenno, you will be executed. This is mercy, and you would be wise to remember it as such.” Dooku then turned his back on the man. “Now take him away.”

Watching Sturn dragged away from the meeting, Tanya found herself with mixed feelings about the man. His abhorrent abandonment of his duty at the worst possible moment had damn near killed her family, and her. At the same time, he seemed so hopelessly naive, Tanya almost didn’t know what to make of him. He grew up in Corellia, the Garden of the Republic. He fully believed in the ideals of the Republic, and yet somehow he didn’t seem to realise that by rendering aid to an Outer Rim Autocrat, he was betraying those ideals. 

In the end, she would be glad to never have to see him again. 

The logic behind showing him mercy was simple. On Coruscant, there were more than ten thousand Jedi ready to lay down their lives in defence of Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, while the New Temple was just starting to close in on two hundred. That was only if you included the various Teepo Paladins, Atlesian Jedi, Green Jedi and the like that hadn’t yet fully committed to joining, but had at least stuck around.

All this was to say that if the Coruscant Jedi fully committed themselves to crushing the New Temple, a coalition of lesser orders would be their only hope of victory.

“I don’t like this.” Dooku murmured.

“A basic rule of PR is that if you’re not actively communicating with your audience, someone else is.” Tanya replied, eyes locked on the door Sturn has been just dragged through. “Palpatine is going to be doing his best to discredit you, and by extension our alliance, if he isn’t doing so already. That’s not even mentioning the risk of your secret getting out. We need to get ahead of the scandal, and have our version of events circulating among Galaxy's political circles. Besides, what better way to discredit the Supreme Chancellor than with something somewhat close to the truth?”

Dooku regarded her, and Tan’ya felt his gaze on the back of her neck, but chose to ignore it. After what he’d done, it would be ridiculous for him to try and argue with her proposed strategy. The man had just about done his best to work Serenno into an unwinnable corner through nothing but stubborn pride! Only now, after an assassin had almost killed his family, was he finally able to admit to his role in an insane conspiracy that was doomed to fail, and take everyone associated down with it!

The convoluted layers of this self proclaimed Sith Lord’s plan were so absurd as to make Tan’ya howl with laughter, if not for the fact that when, not if, when it was found out by the Jedi, she would find herself caught in the fallout.

A single Sith Lord, maybe with a few assassins to call on, seriously thought he would be able to overcome the ten thousand strong force of the Jedi that were a literal city block away from him? It was only down to the intervention of Being X that this Lord Sidious had gone undetected for so long, and thank goodness for that, because it gave Tan’ya a chance to drag her father out of the scandal!

Once the lesser orders began to investigate, they would draw the attention and scrutiny of the Coruscant Temple towards Palpatine. Once the Jedi Council realised who he was, the Dark Lord of the Sith was a dead man. However powerful he might be, he stood no chance against the ten thousand strong horde of Jedi zealots that would soon kick his door down.

“It won’t work.” Dooku rumbled.

Tan’ya blinked, turning to look at him. “Once the Jedi Council sees the truth, they will take action.”

“They will never see the truth.” Dooku replied. 

“What makes you so sure?” 

“Yoda was the most stubborn fool I had ever known, until one day he was finally surpassed in that regard by a padawan named Mace Windu.”

It wasn’t that Tan’ya doubted the sincerity of his words, but she suspected the two of them would say the same thing about her father. 

Either way, the presence or absence of a Sith Lord was irrelevant. Nothing would ultimately change the course of the Republic, or avert Being X’s obvious plans. Serenno and the rest of the Outer Rim were growing in power, and with demand from the increasingly decadent core far outstripping supply, some form of civil unrest was inevitable. As Coreworld markets destabilized, the Senate would find the distant upstarts the perfect scapegoat of public’s ire, and war would break out. 

In simple terms, the Outer Rim Alliance and the New Temple stood no chance. Though most of the Outer Rim possessed much more martial cultures then the Core, and many had experienced combat more recently, effective military tactics could and would be learned by any society exposed to conflict for long enough. The Core enjoyed a major economic advantage, as well as being vastly more industrialised, with a much larger population. It might take a while to find its stride, but a fully mobilised Republic was an unstoppable juggernaut that had crushed half a dozen Sith Empires, as many Mandalorian Crusades, the Kingdom of Xim, and countless other Galactic upstarts besides. 

The thought of it left her stomach roiling with anxiety.

But that was the most insidious part of Being X’s plan, wasn’t it? She could walk out the door in a heartbeat with a fortune all her own just from accessing public funds. Of course she would never be a trillionaire, or even a billionaire, but she could certainly live in comfort far away from the concerns of a burning Galaxy. But he had placed her somewhere she would inherit countless responsibilities, and to see such potential for her world and its people, all just to force her into a corner. If the goal was to retire into comfort, there was absolutely nothing preventing Tan’ya from doing that at this exact moment. 

The only problem was she didn’t want to. Serenno had such potential, its people hardworking and with a long history and rich traditions. They weren’t thieves or robbers, bandits or slavers, just ordinary folk who had been subjugated under the heels of first the Sith, then later the Senate for almost their entire history. Tan’ya could feel something here, a shape waiting just below the surface whose face she had only just begun to reveal. 

She didn’t want to leave Serenno, she wanted to build a legacy here.

“Alright.” Tan’ya breathed out. “Now we need to prepare a briefing for the other Force Orders. First we-”

“Daughter, stop.” Dooku interrupted her. “I can manage them myself, I’m perfectly experienced in matters of diplomacy. I have another task for you.”

Tan’ya paused, trying to think of what he could be referring to, but coming up short. “What are you thinking of?”

“If the Sith are going to target my friends and family, then I will need to be sure they are protected. From now on, Athemeene, Kenth, Madalee and Ideon will all travel with me whenever they’re not at the New Temple, but your work is far too important to disrupt. You need to learn to defend yourself, and you need a guardian who can teach you. One that I approve of, one that we can trust. Asajj is the only option. You will become her Padawan.”

Tan’ya frowned, annoyed, though she understood his reasoning. The recent attack had highlighted the vulnerability of the entire family, and if the Sith were going to continue targeting them, she would need to be able to defend herself. Still, she resented the idea of continuing deeper into the Jedi cult. Was there no way she could study the Force in a secular capacity?

She filed that idea away for the future. A secular school for the Force.

“I see you don’t like the idea. You would rather continue with your other projects…” Dooku smiled, then the expression on his face froze, and a look of worry replaced it.. “But daughter, I know you used the Dark Side here.”

“Of course I did!” Tan’ya defended herself. “It was that or death!” 

“I agree. I’m glad that you did, because you’re still alive. However, the Dark Side is not without its risks. Imagine a black hole. You can observe it from a distance safely, and you can even come close enough to feel its tug, but eventually a threshold is crossed, and escape is impossible. It’s good that in this case, the Dark Side was able to save you, but if you do not master the Force, and do not learn to fight without relying on it as a crutch, it will consume you.”

“But haven’t you used the Dark Side?” Tan’ya asked.

“Yes… and look where that’s brought us.”

Tan’ya supposed she could see his point. “Very well. I’ll call Asajj right away.”

“And I’ll prepare a diplomatic package for every Force Order.”

“Including Coruscant?”

Dooku gave her a long-suffering expression.

“Father, you need to send this to Coruscant as well.”

“They won’t believe any of it.”

“Maybe not.” Tan’ya agreed. “But we can’t have them thinking we’re trying to build a coalition against them.”

“That’s exactly what we’re trying to do.”

“Which is exactly why we can’t have them thinking that.”

“...Very well.” Dooku at last ground out. “I’ll send… Ky, I suppose. Perhaps he’ll have the patience to talk to those fools, because the Force knows I do not.”