The Alderaanian Council
Title: The Alderaanian Council
Fandom: Star Wars
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Bail Organa, Ferus Olin, Garm Bel Iblis (mentioned), Jaden Korr, Kyle Katarn, Kyp Durron, Leia Skywalker, Mon Mothma, Padme Amidala,
Summary: The galaxy is reeling from the loss of Coruscant, of Contruum and Corellia and most of the Core Worlds. Alderaan is next in the invasion path, and Leia Skywalker is part of the war council.
Note: Set in the Destroyer of Worlds universe. Supporting cast includes Pellaeon, Piett, Ackbar, Raymus Antilles, Tycho Celchu, among others. A lot of politics. Little action.
-
It was a grim audience that gathered in the private meeting chambers of Alderaan’s royal palace. Most of the Core had fallen to the invaders which they knew nothing of, and most of the galaxy was reeling.
It had been brilliant, Leia acknowledged. The destruction of Coruscant had almost immediately removed any coherent leadership from the galaxy, in one fell stroke. In the same step, the invaders had disrupted communications. Most of the galaxy’s news, accessible on the HoloNet, had passed through Coruscant.
They knew nothing at all about any invasion paths, or if the enemy had even made any inroads into the Outer Rim territories. She’d caught Uncle Bail discussing the situation with Garm Bel Iblis, and the tough-as-nails Corellian Senator had thought it likely that the communications disruption meant that some Outer Rim worlds had fallen - and they knew nothing at all about it.
Nothing, Leia thought in frustration, clenching her fists. Nothing about the enemy they’d fought, and lost. Coruscant. Contruum. Corellia. There was something dark in Garm’s eyes now, and Uncle Bail had set Fors as the Senator’s bodyguard and unofficial watchman. They did not need fighting, not now, and there was something in Garm chafing at the leash, and sniffing and baying for blood.
She forced herself to relax when Uncle Bail sensed her distress and shot her a sharp look. People had thought Uncle Bail was soft, but he was showing his mettle now in the crisis, stepping between every time tempers flared and people were at each other’s throats. That happened a lot, these days. Bail Organa had a calming effect on people, almost quite like Luke, and Leia wished she could do something that would help.
“You’ve too much of your father’s temper,” Padme Amidala had said, ruefully. “And mine,” she’d added later. Leia had seen the holorecordings of the speeches her mother had made in the Senate before, and she was bound to agree.
The Senate. The apartment her mother lived in when she had been Senator of Naboo. The Jedi Temple. All of them must be dust by now, duracrete melted by unbearable solar temperatures.
You’re not a child, Leia, she reminded herself, but it was hard to think of all the destruction that the invaders had wrought and to not feel…afraid. Or saddened. Leia was a trained negotiator who had spent far more time in the Senate and watching diplomatic negotiations, rather than in the training rooms of the Jedi Temple. All she knew centred on the art of reading beings, of understanding their motives, of finding some sort of common ground. Compromise was at the heart of diplomacy and negotiating.
They knew nothing at all about the invaders, and even without her rudimentary Jedi abilities, Leia could all but sense the humming undercurrent of fear running throughout the war room.
She could read it, the way she was trained, in the harried lines on Uncle Bail’s face, the sharp thin edges of her mother’s features which suggested that her mother wasn’t getting enough rest again. She was probably skipping meals too, when she could. The faint blue hologram of Padme Amidala gave her daughter a tightly controlled nod before she returned her attention to the briefing taking place in the centre of the room.
Mother’s safe, Leia reminded herself, on top of the humming panic. Naboo’s in the Chommell sector, Mid Rim.
Alderaan is next in the invasion chain.
She looked up, and met Uncle Bail’s eyes. There were sharp creases around them, that spoke of his worry more than words could.
He has to know we’re next.
He gave a quick motion, more with his eyes, to the centre of the gathering of Senators and military personnel. Leia thought she recognised Jedi Master Kyle Katarn among them. Taking the centre of the briefing room, and thus the floor, was Kyp Durron.
Leia knew him. While he looked vaguely dashing with his dark hair tied loosely behind him, and his bright green eyes, most of Kyp Durron’s charm came, nevertheless, from the air of daring and boldness he’d managed to cultivate. From what Leia had heard, there were many in the Order who compared Kyp’s antics with that of a young Anakin Skywalker. Leia wasn’t certain how she felt about that. In any case, she’d never had a particularly close relationship to her father.
Father. Was he on Coruscant?
She took a deep breath. She wasn’t close to Anakin Skywalker, and yet he was her father. The idea that he had perished in Coruscant’s defense, like so many others had, opened up a wide gulf in her chest. She swallowed, and was glad she didn’t have to speak. Not now.
Almost imperceptibly, Kyp turned and gave her a small wink. His lips were pressed so tightly together that they were pale, and she thought she detected a tremor to his hands as he held a half-empty drinkbulb.
Every Force-sensitive in the galaxy could not have failed to sense the destruction of Coruscant, and then Contruum and Corellia. Leia had felt it in the Force, even as half-trained as she was, the screams of millions of lives at once winking out in a shuddering avalanche of death. The memory threatened to make her own hands shake; there were no words to describe how the death of an entire planet felt in the Force.
She hoped she wouldn’t ever sense it again.
But what Leia had sensed was an echo, resonating through the Force and picking up anyone caught in its wake. Kyp had lived through the battles.
Mon Mothma finally called the meeting to order, and Kyp began his debriefing. “The first sign were violet skies,” he said, in the deafening silence that followed. “I don’t think any of us detected anything wrong; it happened maybe one or two days before the invasion itself. It was the jurisdiction of the planetary authorities, and the change was gradual.”
“Tell us about the enemy forces,” the hologram of Admiral Ackbar said. The Admiral himself was likely stationed on some capital ship near Mon Calamari. They hadn’t had much time to mobilise, and Mon Calamari had not been able to scramble sufficient support for Contruum or Corellia - not in time to fend off the invaders’ swift offensive. “Their disposition, their firepower…”
Kyp nodded and stared down at the drinkbulb in his hand. “They had capital ships orbiting Coruscant,” he said, the clipped Coruscant accent he adopted under stress overlaying his Deyer accent. “At least twenty-five of them, huge ships of organic design. The same with the smaller ships - they looked like chunks of floating rock. I didn’t get a good idea of their numbers, but if they’d anything like our standard Venator-class Destroyers can mount, then that’s…”
“Stang,” Captain Raymus Antilles said. He coughed at the slip, but his eyebrows remained furrowed. “That’s nowhere near enough for an invasion fleet.”
“There’s more of them,” Ferus Olin remarked, quietly. Leia glanced over; she hadn’t expected the head of her uncle’s security to be in on this, although it made perfect sense. Ferus Olin had once trained as a Jedi, before he’d left the Order. He’d never looked back, ever since. “This was well-planned. Too well-planned an invasion to throw it away on just twenty-five capital ships.”
“Most planets don’t have that many,” said another captain. Piett, Leia thought.
“Depends on the planet,” Captain Gilad Pellaeon replied. “But Alderaan…”
“Alderaan’s never kept a large standing navy,” Tycho Celchu agreed with his colleague’s assessment. “But Olin’s right. There’s likely to be more of them.”
Kyle Katarn, Jedi Master and acting Grand Master of the Jedi Order nodded slowly. His Padawan, Jaden Korr, assumed a seat beside his Master. No, Leia realised, not Padawan. Not any longer. His braid had been newly severed, and Jedi Knight Jaden Korr felt the weight of her gaze and looked up, grey eyes meeting hers, giving her a nod of acknowledgement.
He’d Knighted his own Padawan on the field. For some reason, the knowledge that Jaden had never been taken to the Council chamber and Knighted struck her hard. The Jedi Order was fractured, mostly dead. Kyle had Knighted Jaden, not just because his Padawan was ready, but because they needed every Jedi Knight they could get operating in the field.
And he’d realised this even before their council had convened.
“Capabilities?” Kyle wanted to know, turning the discussion back to the invading fleet.
“They’re faster and more nimble,” Kyp said, turning the drinkbulb over in his hands, as if he needed the distraction. “Don’t know how whatever species in there sees, but they seem to have better visuals than our scanners - they react faster, anyway. Most of the ordinary pilots we eventually managed to scramble were shot down. They had some kind of shielding we couldn’t detect, took our lasers, proton torpedoes…just about anything, really, without much difficulty. I didn’t get to see if they could take a direct hit from a medium cruiser. Possibly. I took a few hits too - their weaponry didn’t seem like laser technology, more like some crude form of molten rock. Maybe plasma.” He took a long sip from the drinkbulb before he continued, “The larger ships weren’t firing on us. Ground control wasn’t able to get too many capital ships off the ground, and the few that did got shot down, or didn’t manage to make a difference in ship-to-ship combat.”
Ackbar blinked. The nictitating membranes flickered over his eyes as the Admiral sat back, seemingly in thought. Some of the scientists were muttering among themselves; Leia couldn’t quite catch what they were saying.
Alien ships, she thought. That a Jedi couldn’t identify them suggested a threat from the Outer Rim, or even the Unknown Regions. Maybe Wild Space. But how did a fleet make it from the Outer Rim or beyond to the Core without being detected along the hyperspace lanes?
Unless key planets along the hyperspace lanes have fallen. Or those ships don’t enter or use hyperspace in the way ours do. Ships of impossible organic design.
“The purple skies were some kind of chemical weapon,” Kyp continued. “Those who had to evac died. Whatever agent it was, an evac suit doesn’t keep it out. Flight suit scrubbers don’t seem to be able to detect them.”
Shamballa Dain leaned forward, interested. “Describe the symptoms,” one of Alderaan’s leading scientists said. Kyp’s eyes grew stormy; he took a deep breath, and the protocol droid must have sensed danger, because C3-PO was on him before a disaster could occur, offering him more refreshment. That delay meant everything to the anger and sadness darkening Kyp’s presence in the Force; something else overlaid it, a sense that Leia had come to recognise as a form of grim determination, with the faint tang of steel.
Kyp looked as if he wanted to reject the offer, but sighed and accepted another drinkbulb. He worked open the flimsiplast tab with his thumb absently, and then took another long sip from it.
“My Master was among the afflicted,” Kyp said, ice coating the sharp, distinct Coruscanti words. He sat up stiffly, as if giving a report to the Jedi Council, and Leia could sense the tightly-held back sense of distress leaking off his shields. “What I observed was some choking, a lot of coughing, along with blood. The eyes start streaming. The victim starts gasping for air. Perhaps at about ten standard minutes - maybe five, the victim starts to leak blood from every orifice and dies. He might or might not have been feverish. I don’t know. I didn’t check.”
“Could it have gotten through the cockpit seals?” Ei Chikwahoy of Neban blurted out, looking extremely horrified. “So this man could already be carrying the infection - “
“It doesn’t sound like a virus,” Tycho noted, “Unless any of the scientists have anything to say about it?” he was greeted by silence. “In any case, standard procedure requires a check of the cockpit vacuum seals before launch. Those cockpit canopies would have to be airtight, and we know that whatever it is, it’s airborne.”
Shamballa nodded. “It doesn’t sound like a chemical agent I can think of, not immediately,” she said aloud, in her clear voice. “We’d need to find samples, at the very least, and run some tests. Was this deployed on Corellia or Contruum?”
Garm Bel Iblis was already shaking his head.
“Are you sure?” Thees Ajid demanded. “You’d put all of us at risk with your guesses!” Mon Mothma shot him a coolly contemptuous look as the room dissolved into murmuring and the exchange of dark glances.
“Senators, please!” Padme’s voice cut through the babble of voices and the shouting that had enveloped the entire room. “If the chemical agent that Jedi Durron mentioned was so highly effective, I can scarcely believe he would be carrying it several days later and still be alive to tell us the tale!”
“Maybe he’s exaggerating,” Ajid growled, sullenly.
Kyle opened his mouth. Kyp stood up. But it was Leia who made the move, storming out of her seat and delivering an open-handed slap across the Senator’s face. “Enough!” she shouted, frustrated. Ajid staggered backwards, hand going to his cheek. He looked far more stunned than anything else; it wasn’t as if she had struck him hard.
Leia stared around the room, completely furious, and stared Ei Chikwahoy down until he glanced at his clasped hands and swallowed. “Senators, I am ashamed,” she said, more quietly now, modulating her voice as she’d been trained, forcing them to lean forward to listen to her. “I am ashamed because this mean - “ she stabbed her finger in Kyp’s direction, “- this brave man is a member of the Jedi Order in good standing. In any other system in the Republic, it would be enough for his word to be taken exactly as it is. It is not, enough, here. Then what is enough, Senators? Admirals?” she added, including the military personnel gathered in the room. “Doctors? Is it enough that he engaged the enemy above Coruscant’s skies? That he watched his Master die, one out of so many of the Jedi who have given their lives for the defense of the Galactic City? Can we say that all honour, all kindness, all reason died with the Senate on Coruscant?”
Ajid glared at her, but held his tongue.
“Senators, please,” she said again, “We are gathered here to stop the enemy that is inches away from our doorstep. We know they are coming. We know they can be stopped. They must be stopped. The silence of Coruscant, of Corellia, the graveyard of Contruum…they demand as much, gentlemen. The dead will not speak. The dead will not speak, except through men like Jedi Durron, who have survived where others fell. And if - “ she said forcefully, speaking over Ajid, who had opened his mouth again, “If we do not heed their warning, if we argue among ourselves and let fear and selfishness divide us, then we will last only until the enemy is on our doorstep. And they will come.”
She was breathing heavily when she sat back down. Kyp caught her eyes; his mouth quirked in a faint smile. She sensed approval from Kyle, and a strange sort of mingled pride and sadness from Uncle Bail.
“Well, Senators,” Padme Amidala said, “As my daughter has put forth so forcefully, we are at war with an enemy that will take advantage of our weaknesses…if we let them. And it is a war. The enemy has made no attempt to speak with Coruscant, or any of the worlds they have left in their wake. If we cannot set our minds to replacing what was lost on Coruscant, then we are lost.”
We are at war, Leia thought. As the dull rage faded away, in its place, there was fear. Trepidation. She’d been born as the Clone Wars ended. Her studies of history had said that the Republic had never seen a major war, not since the Ruusan Reformation.
And now, it looked as though one was right upon them.
-
Later, Leia found Kyp, sitting alone on one of the stone benches in the palace gardens. He said nothing, but she knew he’d sensed her coming. “Was it so bad?” Leia asked, softly, so as not to disturb anyone else who might be nearby. Kyp said nothing, just shifted a little on the stone bench to make room for her. There was something dark and haunted in his green eyes, something that shifted and hid as Leia tried to pin it down.
In the Force, he burned, his presence laced with a restlessness - no, a disquiet that Leia had never seen so clearly before. He was letting her see it, she realised, staring at the younger man.
“Had a good look?” Kyp asked wryly, and Leia recovered with the ease of a trained diplomat, slipping into the opening he’d left her.
“Yes,” she said, “But I’d like to hear it from you. What happened there, Kyp?” she asked gently. Kyp had been one of her friends during the brief time she’d spent at the Jedi Temple. The Jedi tended to ignore age-sets, once a student became a Padawan. While younglings mingled mostly among themselves, it wasn’t uncommon to find friendships among senior Padawans and younglings newly become Padawans.
Kyp had been something of a prodigy when it came to the Jedi arts, yet another thing that had gotten him comparisons with Anakin Skywalker. Kyp, Luke - even Galen - they’d all been friends of some sort. A mission to Kessel had somehow gotten sidetracked, leading Luke to Deyer, and there he’d picked Kyp up. Galen, they’d known if only because her father had taken him as his apprentice, and everyone thought the Anakin Skywalker was never going to train an apprentice.
Galen, Luke, Father - are they still alive?
Leia envied her mother, envied the way Padme Amidala could so easily set aside her concerns to deal with the host of issues they now faced. Some Senatorial aide that made her, Leia thought, thinking of her own inability to set aside her feelings and work.
“You were in the briefing,” Kyp said with a shrug. He tried one of his charming smiles on her, but Leia raised an eyebrow, unimpressed. He blinked, and with a chameleon-like change of mood, said, “It was bad. The briefing doesn’t begin to cover it, Leia.”
“Talk to me.”
He swung one of his legs over the edge of the bench, turning to face her. “Alright,” Kyp said. His eyes glittered fiercely. “This is the big one. The one you can’t talk about. Not even in the council.”
Leia frowned. “Alright. What?”
“We can’t sense them in the Force.”
“How is that possible?” Leia asked, puzzled. “The Force is supposed to be generated by and to connect all life.”
Kyp shrugged. “Blast if I know,” he said, almost cheerfully. Leia wondered how much of it was feigned. “Our transponder readers don’t pick up on them, our lasers can’t hit them, and they’re invisible in the Force. I’d get far better readings off a droid.”
And Kyp was right. Command - or whatever they had that passed for command needed to know. And yet if this got out, it would spark a panic. It would be an infestation in the wound of Coruscant. The Jedi were vulnerable. The Jedi were blind. “What about the Order now?”
Now, Kyp grinned. “Oh, you’re going to love this. Obi-Wan Kenobi is the Master of the Order, so presumably, if he survived, he would be next in line from Master Windu. But we have no idea if Kenobi survived Coruscant, so the only ranking Master that we know of who is in command is Master Katarn.”
“Have you told him?” Leia demanded.
Kyp’s smile faded. “Yes, of course,” he replied. “It’s Kyle’s problem, now.”
No, Leia thought, though she did not speak aloud. It wasn’t just Kyle’s problem. It was their problem: all of them, Force-sensitives and non-Force-sensitives both. Common sense and perhaps a spark of Jedi intuition told her exactly that.
If anything, Leia was a student of history. A politician’s training demanded as much, and Jedi history had been especially relevant to her family. More than one entry had been made by her father. The Jedi had often been critical to the war effort, spearheading decisive strikes, succeeding where non-Force-sensitives failed. But if these new invaders were dead to the Force…
Kyp shifted again. His hand brushed hers in a friendly gesture. “Hey,” he said, “Don’t think about it now.”
Leia blinked, and nodded. Focus, she told herself, drawing on lessons shared between the Jedi Temple and her diplomacy classes. Strange how politics and Jedi training overlapped at times, particularly when it came to control.
“What are you planning on doing?” she asked him, partly to make conversation, and partly because she knew that Kyp had been in on some war meetings that she’d missed. Leia didn’t find the specific briefings urgent: she was too busy handling the multiple diplomat-courier packages sent between planets and helping Uncle Bail deal with the public relations backlash from Coruscant.
Propaganda, history classes would name her efforts one day. Perhaps they were right.
Kyp looked away, down where his boots met the smooth pebbles of the paved path. He said, “I’ve signed up for a reconnaissance mission.”
A tight sense of guilt-determination-pain-guilt leaked through his shields. Kyp’s lips tightened, and so did his shields. The brief impression Leia had gotten through the Force disappeared abruptly.
She knew Kyp enough to know he’d deflect any probing questions with some wry observation, or humour. The hard truth was that one way or another, they had too few Jedi left. They were likely to need whatever information Kyp could give them - and he’d gone up against the invaders before. That kind of experience was always some sort of advantage. There was almost no one else who would have been as suitable for such a mission as Kyp.
As the other Jedi and military survivors of Coruscant - or even Contruum. Corellia.
Maybe doing something was what Kyp needed, too.
Leia itched to be far more useful. As it was, all she had was the nagging feeling that she wasn’t doing anything that Uncle Bail’s secretary couldn’t handle. That she wasn’t doing enough.
“What does that involve?” she asked, keeping her tone light.
Kyp grimaced as he sat properly on the bench now, swinging his leg back over the edge. “You remember Shamballa Dain, from the council meeting?”
Leia nodded. “She’s one of the best biochemists Alderaan has. Specialises in…” she frowned, and then snapped her fingers as the memory slipped into place. “Applied chemistry. Chemical warfare. Graduated from the university in Coruscant, and then came back to Alderaan to further her studies.”
Kyp made an open, loose gesture with his hands, suggesting she’d gotten the gist of it. “We need more information. You know that. What Shamballa’s proposing to do is to get small teams - one or two ships equipped with everything they need to get that data so our scientists can tell us exactly what we’re facing.”
There was something he wasn’t quite telling her; that dark look in his green eyes as if he was measuring her, considering whether to tell her or not to. Leia neatly solved the dilemma for him.
“Tell me,” she said - no, snapped - she must have been more frustrated than she’d thought, and it was all coming up now when she was speaking to Kyp.
Kyp started, and sighed as he saw the look in her eyes. “That’s Phase One,” he said slowly, scuffing at a loose pebble with his boot. “We go right into the dead zone, and see what we can find. It’s a high-priority mission. Jedi and ace pilots only.”
The dead zone. Leia almost forgot. That was what they were calling the region the invaders had struck. The dead zone. No signs of life left.
“We don’t think there are survivors, and any ships searching for survivors…will be put through full quarantine procedures,” Kyp’s eyes had grown hard, “At the urging of the Senator.”
They both knew which Senator. “And Phase Two?” Leia demanded.
Kyp took a deep breath. “Alderaan,” he said quietly. “We know they’re coming for the next of the Core Worlds. We evacuate Alderaan of all non-essential personnel. And hope to hell that in the fighting, we get something on the invaders we can use. If we can’t, we’re in for it.”
The most frightening thing was the empty look in his eyes when he said it.
Abandon Alderaan.
Abandon another world to the invaders.