Chapter Text
21bby, first month, second day
CORELLIA RUN, EN ROUTE BACK TO CORUSCANT
Happy New Year, dear Journal. Happy New Year, dear hypothetical Reader. I write this with the customary exclamation, but let me immediately file my formal objections to the phrase. First: how absurdly arbitrary the whole affair is. Thousands upon thousands of planets wheel around their respective suns yet we have somehow agreed upon a single temporal milestone and declared that This day, and no other, is the beginning of “the year.” (Why this obsession with dating systems haunts me so, I cannot explain. This is the second time in these entries that I have found myself waxing lyrical about the calendar, should I be worried?)
Second ofjection, however, is less philosophical and far more cursing: it is not, in any conceivable definition of the term, happy. How can it be? A galaxy-spanning war continues to grind millions into dust, whole worlds burn, fleets vanish, widows multiply, and yet, in the most morally upright manner I can, I’ve gotten used to it. For my true ire is reserved for this day in particular.
We managed to capture Nute Gunray, that slithering bureaucrat of the Separatists, only for him to slip through our fingers like oil through a sieve and we can classify him as ‘gone’. He is not dead (a possibility for which I would have offered the Force a heartfelt thank you), nor even maimed in any satisfyingly ironic way. No, he is very much alive, sulking somewhere in the dark recesses of the galaxy, no doubt being chewed out by Count Dooku for incompetence. If the universe has a sense of humour then perhaps Dooku will eventually tire of his failures and strangle him with one of his ridiculous Trade Federation robes.
And so, here I sit, on the dawn of a “new year,” allegedly a fresh start, already soured by the bitter taste of failure. To lose Gunray, after all that is, in essence, not merely a loss, but an insult.
So, dear reader, if you wish me to begin this year with cheer and optimism, you will be sorely disappointed. Ergo, let this entry stand, then, as my declaration that the year ahead is already cursed, and not by prophecy, but by the simple, infuriating fact that Nute Gunray yet breathes.
Nute Gunray, in all fairness, is hardly what one might call a formidable adversary. To call him dangerous would be like calling a Hutt “sylphlike”, which is technically possible under some very obscure definition of the term, but deeply misleading. No, the Viceroy of the Trade Federation is not formidable; he is slippery as an eel, yes, and he is dumb as a rock, though a rock at least has the decency to be useful in construction. Gunray’s particular genius lies not in wit, courage, or competence, but in the twin currencies of money and influence. And somehow (and this is the more disturbing mystery), the galaxy allows those two to compensate for every other failing. How, exactly, a man so profoundly talentless came to sit atop piles of credits and command entire fleets remains a question for which no satisfactory answer exists.
Both Master Luminara Unduli and I were acutely aware of the paradox: Gunray himself was pathetic, but the power he wielded was lethal. Which meant that, absurd though it felt, he had to be guarded like a precious jewel. And so we watched him, hawk-eyed, as he sulked and sweated in our custody. That said, there was something about Master Unduli’s manner during this vigil that tested my patience. How do I put this without sounding irredeemably arrogant or disrespectful? Excessively boring. Yes, that’s it. Excruciatingly, relentlessly, monumentally boring.
Now, I hasten to clarify: I hold the Master in high regard. Her patience, her resilience, her unshakable composure, her formidable discipline in the Force; all those qualities one is expected to admire in a Jedi. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But somewhere between all that serene stoicism and her devotion to procedure, I found myself drifting perilously close to madness. I imagine if you sealed me in a chamber with her for a week, I would emerge a raving lunatic.
Anyway.
Around our first hour in hyperspace, I proposed that we… enliven matters somewhat. A little psychological pressure never hurt anyone, except the person receiving it, which is rather the point. Gunray, I suggested, might be persuaded to part with some useful morsels of intelligence, like Dooku’s current whereabouts, the Separatists’ next strategy, the usual litany of questions that are worth asking but seldom answered. Luminara, to her credit, did not dismiss the goal. But she objected most strenuously to the method.
You see, the Master’s idea of interrogation is what modern parenting calls the gentle approach. Patient questions, soothing tone, an air of infinite compassion. As if Nute Gunray, whose primary loyalty is to greed and cowardice, were a confused youngling in need of reassurance. The man will not speak simply because you sit opposite him, gazing serenely, waiting for conscience to blossom. He has no conscience. He barely has a spine. What he responds to is intimidation, cheek, and the occasional promise of something unpleasant involving an airlock.
I admit, my methods would have been less than… diplomatic. Let us call them “spirited.” But at least they had the benefit of being realistic. Luminara disagreed. She told me, with that calm, unshakable voice of hers, that my approach was “unwise,” which is the Jedi equivalent of being told one is a barbarian.
Unlike her, however, Captain Faro Argyus of the Senate Guard seemed to find my energy refreshing. A tall blond specimen of what the Republic imagines its elite guards should look like, Argyus positively smirked at my irreverence. Of course, hindsight now informs me that his smirk was not admiration but complicity, for reasons that will become obvious soon enough. At the time, though, I only thought: finally, someone aboard this ship who doesn’t think the galaxy’s most treacherous Neimoidian should be coaxed into spilling secrets as though he were being tucked into bed with a story and warm milk.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Argyus, that peacock in grey, deserves his own lengthy dissection, and I have several words for him, none of which are polite. Patience, dear reader. His betrayal is coming, and I will relish recounting it.
“Master Unduli, with all due respect, and I do mean all due respect, there is no chance that this slippery bastard will volunteer a syllable unless someone rattles his nerves,” I informed her after she had spent a good half hour attempting to coax our Neimoidian prisoner into speech. She had tried the gentle but firm inquiry, the subtle prod, even the hand-waving Jedi tricks (which, I might add, never work on Neimoidians, an evolutionary quirk, or something).
Her reply came cold, clipped, and sharpened like one of her sabre strikes: “Is that how you solve all your problems? By threats and force?”
Now, dear reader, I am not a person easily discomfited. I have been shot at, lightsabered at, nearly spaced, nearly drowned, but for some reason that remark, so simple, so measured, caught me off guard. My cheeks betrayed me by heating, and I found myself momentarily without retort.
“If it works, yes”, I said at last, pressing the point like a doubling down on a bad hand. I crossed my arms, leaned against the wall, and attempted the expression of someone both wise and dangerous.
Her eyes flickered, calm, detached, evaluating, the way one studies a curious insect. And then she delivered her coup de grâce: “Judging by your impulses, perhaps they had rushed your knighting.”
I tell you now, my tongue nearly bled from how hard I bit it. Not because I lacked a retort; on the contrary, I had too many. My first and most immediate: and there’s a reason you’re not a Council member, isn’t there, Master? My second: I’d rather be impulsive than comatose. My third: a string of words so colourful they would have blistered the ears of any passing clone trooper. But alas, I swallowed it all down. I nodded. I resembled, in that instant, the very picture of Jedi humility.
This exchange crystallised something in me: Master Luminara Unduli, for all her skill with a blade, for all her pristine connection to the Force, for all her laudable patience, is as bland as Nabooan root stew without salt. Nutritionally dense, keeps you alive, but tasteless. And what is worse, she’s insistent upon remaining so.
The matter did not end there. Later, when she chided me for profanity (and might I remind the galaxy that a rich vocabulary is a blessing, not a vice), the diagnosis was complete. The woman is allergic to spice. I don’t dislike her, I even respect her, but Force help me, I cannot be her.
So I pray for you, Barriss Offee, Padawan to this paragon of serenity. May you be stronger in patience than I am, and may the Force bless you with at least one rebellious impulse per lunar cycle.
As for me, I will go to my grave the moment anyone dares to call me boring.
By the time my temper cooled and reached that delightful stage where homicidal urges feel almost reasonable, I had resolved to abandon all pretence of Jedi patience and simply wring the answers out of Nute Gunray myself. Master Unduli need never know. Alas, before I could put theory into practice, the ship shuddered beneath the screeching descent of Vulture droids.
We had anticipated, of course, that some loyalist would come to liberate the Viceroy; it was practically written into the Neimoidian’s contract. Secretly, I had hoped for General Grievous himself; instead, the galaxy sent something infinitely more vexing.
As the ship groaned under bombardment, Master Unduli declared that she would take the clones to repel the intruders, leaving someone to “keep the prisoner company.” A euphemism, if ever I heard one. I, smouldering in foul mood and black humour, volunteered to play nursemaid. Thus, I found myself seated outside Gunray’s cell, draped in the posture of supreme calm while the ship wobbled left to right, and I was inwardly fantasising about strangling him with his own robes.
I rested my chin on my palm and regarded him as one might study a fungus specimen. “Ever had Nabooan root stew, Viceroy?” I asked casually, tilting my head. “Though I imagine you’re not terribly welcome on Naboo these days.” I chuckled at my own wit and inhaled deeply as the ship rocked, each tremor a note in the symphony of battle outside. Gunray blinked his bulbous eyes, clearly uncertain whether I was taunting him, insane, or both. (The correct answer is yes.)
The ship lurched violently, the hull taking another blast. Gunray’s composure cracked. “Is this some code?” he stammered. “How many credits do you want? You see how rotten the Jedi are, leaving you here, alone. Tell me, how many credits?”
I lifted my head slowly, my expression caught somewhere between disbelief and disgust. “Oh, shut up,” I hissed, my laugh more of a cackle. I was preparing to unleash some devastatingly witty remark, a true masterpiece of sarcasm, one for the ages, when suddenly the air thickened. I felt it before I saw it: a presence so foul it curdled the blood and made the stomach rebel, as if the Force itself had taken ill. My instincts screamed what my intellect already knew.
And then she arrived. A bald, glistening grey head slid from the ventilation shaft like some obscene reptile. Asajj Ventress. The bane of my days, the migraine of my nights, and the universe’s most persistent reminder that I must have done something truly vile in a past life.
“Come on, you again?” I groaned, rising to my feet and igniting my lightsaber in a single motion. It was less battle readiness, more weary resignation, like preparing to argue with your least favourite tax collector.
“Jedi…” she purred or hissed. It was difficult to distinguish whether she was greeting me or already delivering the death threat. I decided that it was the former. Let me have my illusions.
“Couldn’t they have sent anyone else?” I whined, though my sabre was already up in time to block her first vicious strike, which would have separated my skull from my somewhat underappreciated body. “Please tell Count Dooku to send Grievous next.”
She pressed me hard against the wall, my lungs protested and my arms trembled. But I, eternal fountain of bad ideas, kicked her sharply in the thigh, buying myself just enough space to breathe, curse, and rejoin the living. We traded exactly two blows in that narrow space, her blade like a serpent’s tongue, mine reluctantly on the defensive. She wanted Gunray, and I wanted her gone.
In the end, Master Unduli returned with her clones, her serene presence a balm I neither asked for nor deserved. Ventress, thwarted, did not linger. She slithered back into the vents like the verminous shade she is, but not before pausing to snarl, “I’ll make sure you meet him.” Whether “him” meant Count Dooku, General Grievous, or the very maker himself, I cannot say. The ship rocked again with the violence of battle, and she vanished into the darkness.
“All right, after her!” I cried with theatrical enthusiasm. My quarry, my favourite, hauntingly sexy adversary, the endlessly vexing Asajj Ventress, had just vanished into the ventilation system like the world’s angriest serpent. Naturally, I was prepared to follow, sabre blazing, reputation on the line.
Alas, fate, or rather Master Luminara Unduli, intervened. In the middle of my leap, precisely mid-air, I froze. Not by choice, mind you, but because she had seized me with the Force. My arms flailed, my lightsaber hummed indignantly, and my boots dangled like those of a child’s toy marionette. A dignified image, I assure you.
“I presume it would be best if I go,” she said evenly, her tone so maddeningly calm one would think she hadn’t just humiliated and sent me into mild psychosis some minutes ago.
Dangling like a doll, I shook my head with desperate urgency, gesturing vaguely toward the floor. “Master, that would be suicide.” At last, she relented and set me down, where I smoothed my robes.
I pressed on, with all the gravity of a scholar presenting his thesis. “I’ve encountered her on Teth months ago. She’s… well, ‘dangerous’ feels inadequate… Y-You can’t do it alone.”
Unduli, naturally, disagreed with the same stoic obstinacy that has no doubt won her admirers in Council chambers and very few friends at dinner parties. “She must be captured,” she said, eyes flicking to the shaft, “and yet we must still guard the Viceroy.”
I threw out a hand toward the trembling Neimoidian fossil behind the prison field. Gunray looked as though he had been flash-frozen in carbonite. “Look at him! He’s not going anywhere except perhaps into his own trousers. And besides, look!” I gestured grandly toward Captain Argyus, who stood ramrod straight by the cell like some heroic statue carved for the sole purpose of standing next to criminals. “Surely Captain Argyus is more than capable of ensuring Gunray doesn’t trip over his own robe and escape.”
Unduli did not smile. She rarely did. Instead, she simply said, “I must insist. Guard the Viceroy. That’s an order.” And with that, she strode toward the vent with the quiet assurance of a woman who has never once been talked out of a bad idea.
An order. The final nail in the coffin of my argument. Jedi are supposed to be serene about such things, but I confess: I sulked. She vaulted upward and disappeared into the shaft with all the grace of a swallow in flight, leaving behind only silence and the faint impression that I had just been outclassed.
I stood there for several long seconds, staring at the vent as though sheer willpower might reverse the scene and bring her back down. Then I turned my gaze upon Captain Argyus, his golden hair practically glowing in the dim light, and then upon Commander Gree, who regarded me with the thinly veiled exasperation of a soldier forced to deal with Jedi eccentricities for the first time.
And so, I did what any rational Knight would do in my situation: I sighed dramatically, folded my arms, and prepared to mope at professional capacity, all while praying Ventress might at least trip in the ventilation shafts.
“It’s best to follow orders, General,” Commander Gree intoned, as dutiful as the day he’d been printed. If looks could kill, he would have been a smouldering heap of plastoid by now.
“Ventress is dangerous,” I muttered, dragging myself down into a scowl and glaring at Nute Gunray as though his very existence were an affront to the Force, democracy, and the natural order of the galaxy. “She can’t deal with her alone, and I, personally, do not relish the prospect of mopping Jedi Master remains out of the ship’s air vents. Do you have any idea how unsanitary that would be?” I added with quiet venom.
I turned to Captain Argyus, our flaxen-haired ornament, who was busy looking like he’d just stepped off the stage of a bad propaganda holo. “What would you do, Captain?”
He gave the sort of shrug only men with perfect posture and perfect jawlines can manage, all careless nobility. “Sometimes being a good soldier means doing what you think is right.”
I blinked at him. “Yes, well, I don’t know my right from my left, so that advice is tragically wasted on me.” I very nearly finished the sentence with: but if she insists on playing martyr, then I won’t stand in her way. But I am cursed with a heart that is, on occasion, soft, sentimental, and righteous. The sort of heart that cannot, even in the foulest of moods, allow a Jedi Master to get herself bisected by a bald bog witch without at least attempting a rescue.
Was it the right decision? That, dear reader, is one of those questions philosophy professors adore; entire libraries could be filled with analyses of that moment. For in truth, the choice was between two evils: stay put and preserve our prisoner, or rush in and prevent Master Unduli from becoming a cautionary tale in the next Jedi ethics seminar.
I chose the latter. Predictably, my instincts were right. By the time I found her, Master Unduli was crumpled on the deck, Ventress’ twin sabres hovering at her throat. Heroically (and yes, I will use that word), I intervened. I brought down half the ship’s debris upon Ventress, overwhelming her into retreat. At least, I thought it was a retreat. In reality, it was a victory lap. Because as I was congratulating myself for forcing her off, she and Captain Argyus, oh yes, our blond paragon of soldierly wisdom, spirited Nute Gunray away aboard one of our very own ships.
So, no, I cannot say if I did the right thing. Perhaps if I had stayed, Gunray would still be drooling behind durasteel bars, and Captain Gree would still be conscious. Or perhaps Ventress and Argyus would have butchered us all and departed with Gunray anyway.
We immediately contacted the Council, though I suspect the concept of “disappointment” has its limits, even in beings who sit in robes and lecture each other about balance and the greater good. Their faces, while stoic, betrayed the merest twitch of vexation. The overarching lesson, however, was unavoidable, and I shall record it here for posterity: trust, dear reader, is a dangerous currency, even among those we call allies. The Force may be infinite, omnipresent, and vaguely judgmental, but our so-called companions, no matter how sworn, can be bought, coerced, or otherwise persuaded. One must always account for human, or sentient, frailty in the face of greed.
While aboard the Tranquillity, we had managed to contact Master Kit Fisto and his former Padawan, Nahdar, an acquaintance of mine from our younger days, as they were the closest allies in proximity to said ship. We sent them the location of the tracking device affixed to all Republic ships, ergo present on the same ship Gunray and Argyus used to make their escape. The two were then dispatched to bring the traitor and the prize back in one piece.