"Come on Doc, it's getting late. I'm not sure I've ever had a field watch that lasted as long as... whatever you are doing right now," the Clone guardian groaned. He lightly dinged his helmeted head against the metal cover over one of the many arrayed supercomputing ports that were lined up, going out for miles in either direction. They were stacked in rows, with hallways spaced between them for engineers and technicians to access them.
Dr. Shina ignored Bucket, working from her chair, which she had parked nearly within one of the maintenance alcoves.
"Doooooc, I'm starving over here! Can you at least explain to me what you've been doing for the last... What, twelve hours? I'm not used to being around someone and not talking to them," Bucket whined.
Shina took a deep breath, first in, and then slowly out, though her fingers did not cease their tapping, and her eyes, bloodshot and intense, did not blink. Before her were data streams and holo access points, each laid out and scrolling past at simultaneous interludes which she had set. Eight of her digital proxies were maneuvering within the system, operating at various levels, and all at her direction. Currently, all of them were occupied, each one engaging with the security systems of the Senate's Communications Record Cache in one way or another.
"I've been trying to slice into the Supreme Chancellor's private communications history," she murmured, dry eyes darting.
Bucket slumped at the news and shook his head.
"Why? Don't you work for the Chancellor?" he asked.
"We all *work* for the Supreme Chancellor," the doctor said, dismissing the comment with barely a thought.
Bucket crossed his arms and shook his head more vehemently.
"I mean, you work with the Supreme Chancellor. Directly. Right? Can't you just ask him to let you see?" he suggested.
Shina almost paused, and found herself laughing. It was the first time she'd laughed in days, but the laughter was not of a genuine sort.
"It is because I work with him that I know that would never work! Sure, he will placate me, maybe show me something. Something he wants me to see. But if it's something he doesn't want people to know, then I won't see it.
"At best, I'll be deceived; at worst... Well, he'll know I know something about something he doesn't want me to know. And I'd rather not make an open enemy of my employer, much less the Supreme Chancellor," she said.
Bucket tilted his head.
"And the way you are choosing to NOT make an enemy of the Supreme Chancellor... is by illegally slicing into his holo records?" he asked.
Shina nodded.
"More or less," she said.
"But... then why even bother? If he finds out you did this, you will be his enemy no matter what you find, even if you find nothing," Bucket said.
Dr. Shina nodded and licked some sweat off her upper lip. She knew that! Of course, she knew that. Her heart was beating so fast, and had been for all these twelve hours. She felt exhausted, but nothing she felt now could compare to what she had felt back on the *Honor Hound*.
Nothing could scare her as much as that... that thing she had seen. That thing that had killed Renphi, killed Gaphin, and everyone else on that ship. That thing had not been human, she was sure of it. It had been too large, too powerful. Its eyes still blazed, still watched her from her memory, burning, kindling, judging. Its last words whispered to her in her dreams, in her idle moments, in the maw of silence:
*~I am an Angel of Death... and I have come to Render Judgment.~*
The natural question then, of course, was, for what? Judgment about what? What was it judging and why? Why had it judged them all worthy of death? But she had that answer already, yet, while she knew why... she did not know... *why*.
"Doc?" asked the clone bodyguard.
"Bucket, do you remember what happened right before the battle? There was a... a situation. One of the enemy ships had come out of... hyperspace, right in front of the fleet, and ahead of its own forces. It was massive, a huge ship," she said.
Bucket nodded, the back of his helmet clinking against the casing he leaned against, though she did not turn to watch him, fingers still in a frenzy, eyes still wide as she worked.
"I remember," he said.
"And then something happened. One of our ships broke ranks. Do you remember that?" she asked, her voice a breathless whisper, as though she feared she might be overheard.
Bucket nodded again.
"I... yeah, I remember that. Captain Kraken lost his mind, and... suicide rammed the enemy ship. We were almost part of the group sent to help evacuate the wreckage. If we had been... well, then we'd both have been in trouble," he said.
"Good, I'm glad you know that much. But do you know which ship Kraken used to do it?" she asked.
The clone shrugged as he answered.
"Well, I guess it would be his ship, the *Honor... Hound...*" he started to say, trailing off, already realizing why that made no sense.
"It wasn't," she confirmed for him.
"It was a new ship. A modified Venator called the *Bellejore*, which was given over to Renphi just before the mission began. That ship was personally gifted to him by Supreme Chancellor Palpatine."
"Well, that's... odd, I guess," Bucket said.
Shina nodded, tapping roughly against the glass keys of her chair-mounted console.
"It gets odder. I was on the bridge when it all happened. Kraken was getting our commands, was hearing our transmissions, but he wasn't responding. He chose not to respond. It was like... like he was just..." she started to say, struggling to find the words.
"Just... following orders..." Bucket muttered softly.
"Exactly! I almost want to say he was in a trance, but if you've seen the holo, then you know how precise that jump needed to be to actually hit its target. Captain Kraken was lucid, and he was at the helm, and he used all his skill to cleave that huge ship right down the center," said the doctor.
"And doing that... Fragging Moons of Frag, doing that started this whole war in the process!" Bucket said, only realizing the implication of the act.
"Yes, yes, that's the part that's obvious, Bucket! But there is just one particular thing that does not add up, even more than all of these other oddities. One thing that is pushing me to find out more... despite the... obvious risks," Shina said.
"And what's that?" asked the clone.
"All Republic hyperdrives have inhibitors built into them, fail-safes that pull the ships out of hyperspace if a sufficient mass shadow is detected in the path of the vessel. These are hard-wired, and undoing that safety takes time and equipment. Too much time, in fact."
Bucket paused to consider her words but shook his head after a while. "I still don't get it."
The doctor sighed, breathing out her annoyance and increasing the rate of her tapping fingers. "The *Bellejore* was modified for fringe space exploration. Its modifications included non-standard changes to critical systems. The shields, the crew quarters, the life support systems, the navigation sensors, aaaaand..." She said, letting the last word hang in the air.
Bucket fumbled with his thoughts for a moment before gasping as the answer struck him. "The... the hyperdrive?" he asked.
"Precisely! The listed changes appear to make it seem safe enough, but I'm not convinced of that. Not after the *Bellejore* succeeded in accurately throwing itself down the center of that Imperial starship," Shina said.
"Wait, so you think the Supreme Chancellor had already prepared that ship to be used as a suicide ram?!" Bucket asked, aghast at the very suggestion.
Shina did not answer; she only typed more. Bucket, however, continued. "But, if that were the case, then wouldn't the order to ram the ship have come from—"
"And now you know why I need to know. Maybe the ship had a ram feature that Captain Kraken abused. Maybe he was drugged, or replaced by a separatist infiltrator, or got the order from somewhere else. But the simplest answer is often the correct one... and... and in this case, the simplest explanation is..." Dr. Shina said, trailing off.
A silence started then, and the clone seemed to take his position as lookout more seriously. Shina's hovering chair was wired into a nearby console, and while this section of the Senate's labyrinthian technical and maintenance access spaces had been utterly deserted for all the hours they had spent there thus far, suddenly everything seemed much less safe than it had been before. At least, to the clone.
"Uhm, doc..." Bucket said.
"Yes?" she asked.
"I'm no computer expert... but if you actually manage to break in there... won't there be some sign left that you did this? I'm sure you cannot listen to the Supreme Chancellor's personal communications without leaving a footprint."
Shina smirked and nodded. "Well, I wouldn't phrase it quite like that, but yes. Which is why I'm not trying to listen to anything," she said.
"Then what are you even looking for?" he asked.
"Simple," she said. "A timestamp."
"What?" he asked.
She breathed heavily and prepared herself for another explanation. "If I can see if a message was sent, and get a timestamp, then I can see if it was sent just before the ramming happened. It won't prove anything, not by itself, but—"
"But it will be way too convenient to be coincidence," he finished for her.
She nodded.
"But if you do find out, and the message was sent... then what next? Who do we tell about something like this? The Jedi?" Bucket asked.
Shina almost laughed again. "The Jedi? No, they are either in on it themselves at some level, or, if they are not, they are bound to do something ridiculous. Can you imagine if the Jedi tried to arrest the Chancellor over this? If he really did orchestrate these events, then there is no telling what else he is capable of. He could tear the Republic apart, and it would be as easy as issuing Order 66 just before his arrest," she said.
"Order 66?" asked Bucket.
The doctor nodded her head as she continued her work. "It's one of the one hundred and fifty Contingency Orders that were drafted at the onset of the Clone Wars. They are supposed to be just for show, but who knows what would happen if he actually issued them," she said.
"So who do we tell, if not the Jedi? The Senate?" Bucket asked.
"Almost," she said, before one of her screens turned blue, and then all of them followed suit.
Dr. Shina pulled her hands away from the keys abruptly as a new data stream began to fill her view, and she blinked her bloodshot eyes for the first time in too long, wanting to be sure she was reading this correctly, wanting to avoid an error at all costs.
"Whoa, what was that?" Bucket asked, leaning in towards the alcove.
"I'm in..." Shina whispered, eyes scanning frantically.
"...and?" Bucket asked, voice tight as he came to watch over her shoulder.
Her hand snapped out, tapping a key, and the data stream froze. She lifted her finger to one line, tracing under the holographic script, and feeling her heart beat harder and harder as she read it again and again.
"There it is," she said at last. "A private transmission sent from the office of the Chancellor... to an unmarked Venator... Unmarked, but, within the war theater we were operating within. The message was sent only a few minutes before the ram… Frag, only seconds before Kraken broke formation... it's all right there," the doctor breathed.
"Oh skrogging skrog," Bucket moaned. "So what now?" he asked.
The words seemed to snap Dr. Shina back to reality, and she reached for the keys again, starting the process of covering her tracks, minuscule though they were.
"We need to get in contact with the leader of the Loyalist Committee," she said.
"Who? Bail Organa? Why him?" the clone asked.
"No," said the Cerean doctor. "The real leader of the Loyalists. We need to speak with the only person in the Senate with the backing and backbone to even think about doing anything about this," she said.
Bucket shrugged his shoulders. "And who's that?" he asked.
"Senator Padmé Amidala," said Shina. "And we need to speak with her before she leaves for Axum!"