Make No Assumptions- Escaping

If Margoli'd had human-style eyebrows, they would have arched high on her sloping forehead when Malak came up out of the tent. "So which are you?" she asked, with a complete and total lack of tact that I was becoming accustomed to. It seemed to be her signature, although I had, at least, managed to get her to lower her voice. "A plucked Wookiee or a Zeltron with serious pituitary problems?" I noticed that even as she said this, she seemed... almost twitchily alert, turning her head and swiveling her big, tufted ears in response to every rustle or snore. Probably a good tactic in enemy territory... still, it has to be hell on the nerves.

I cut in before my friend could decide whether to be offended or amused. "Neither. He's a sunburned near-human, I am either full-human or near but with an odd taste in prosthetics, and you are a Bothan. Margoli, meet Malak. 'Lak, meet Margoli Fi'lyae. Yes, she does have an actual, inherited last name, and no, she isn't related to that di'kutla Senator." Get back on topic... "That, and the fact that we really should focus on escaping this place, is all I know. Perhaps she can tell us more?" Gahhh... that was subtle. I guess she's rubbing off on me.

Margoli's bright eyes narrowed, and the fur on her face and head rippled. "You're full Knights, aren't you? Both of you? But here you are, both of you, in functional physical condition, resting on your hairless laurels in the middle of a Mandalorian encampment as if you're paid to be here. Meanwhile, the rest of the galaxy, the Republic at least, is doing... what? Looking at all the missing patrols and outposts and the like, looking at the slowly-encroaching Mandalorian menace, then putting two and two together by themselves? No. Of course not. They're puttering along as usual, and responding to an unspecified distress call made by a small cruiser whose crew includes not one but two promising Knights, and responding by requesting that each and every Republic military unit within an increasing number of parsecs pops in on an individual basis to take a look." Her voice, which started sweetly reasonable, ended in a sarcastic, teeth-bared snarl.

It took a second for me to see what she meant. "We're the bait for a trap. At the moment, it's not catching much. But eventually..."

"Bang," the Bothan drawled. "Congradulations! Give the woman her cigarra, she's won the prize!"

"Oh. That's why we're here," Malak spoke up, evidently surprised. "Damn. Why didn't I think of that? Six months under those Tenth Company professional saboteurs, and I can't spot a simple funnel-ambush..." I sensed him shaking his head in disgust before looking at Margoli. "So just what are you, Margoli, that you saw this?"

His voice had been mild, but Margoli reacted as if he had accused her of being a traitor. She flinched and glared up at him, fur rippling and waving and flattening as if it had been caught in a hurricane. Malak just looked back, unreadable. I extended my senses towards the Bothan. Her reaction had been rather suspicious... but what I sensed wasn't the guilt and anger of someone who had been caught out. Guilt and anger were there, but they didn't have the 'flavor' I associated with a double-crosser.

"All right," she said at last. "I'm a Sensitive with the Jedi Service Corps. Exploratory division, scouting hyperspace routes and the like. My team just happened to be in the area when we got the distress signal. You people have such brilliant deductive skills, don't you?" That last sentence was in a low enough voice that I couldn't be certain if we'd been meant to hear it. I decided to ignore it anyway.

"What would have landed you there? The Service Corps is part volunteers, part Temple washouts," I stated. "Exploratory is two steps up from the Agricultural corps, but since you've had the benefit of at least some training, you have to have failed somehow. Are you a burnout, or your talents failed to develop? Did you perform some crime?" A few of my close friends, and several of my less-than-close friends were in the Service Corps - but Margoli was a sharp contrast to Laury and the others.

"Hey, take it easy, Revan," Malak told me. He was playing "sympathetic questioner" to my "antagonistic interrogator". Silently I willed him not to overdo it. "There are plenty of other reasons to be in the Service Corps."

"I really don't think it's personal preference this time, though. It-"

Margoli followed this exchange impatiently before interrupting. "You don't have to play good guy / bad guy. I'll tell you, all right?" It was that obvious? Damn. "I just happened to come of age right after a really big group. I had no claims. There were more prospective Padawans than eligible Knights or Masters. I didn't draw enough attention, and after a couple of years my grace period expired." 'Eligible' meant a Jedi who had attained Knighthood at least five years ago and hadn't had a Padawan for at least two. There were exceptions, but those were very rare indeed. It wouldn't be long before Malak and I became 'eligible' too, although the Council might decide that we weren't ready for students yet.

"So why didn't you go to another Temple?" I asked. "It's kind of hard to manage, but there is a program in place." Some eligible Jedi didn't like to visit certain Temples to pick over Padawans. It was one of those odd, fussy traits that a lot of them, particularly the older and more reclusive ones, had. And because reclusive or elderly Jedi are often marked with high power or status, the Order accommodates them. As Kae had told me, old Jedi are rare, and those with Great Ability tend to either die off or become recluses. Many who had participated in Exar Kun's war just couldn't bear to be anywhere near the Core any more, but quite a few of them still wanted to pass on their knowledge.

Margoli's fur rippled, then stilled. I tried to gauge her age - it's hard to tell with Bothans, but she did seem a bit older than I had first thought. "I trained on Corusucant," she said flatly. I winced in sympathy and sudden understanding. The new Temple on Corusucant was notorious for being very harsh on prospective Padawans. "None of the eligible Knights or Masters off-world who'd been recorded as looking for a Padawan had a psych profile that matched mine. So I was told, anyway. Couple days later, one became eligible, but by then the paperwork'd been signed and a shuttle was commissioned to take me to Base Five."

"Oh," I said, at a bit of a loss for words. Shunted into the Service Corps for something as stupid as that... that could have been me, if Kreia hadn't shown up when she did. True, my first teacher had put a claim on me when I was still a Youngling, and all of my prospective Masters had known not to show any interest, but I hadn't known that at the time. "I'm... sorry about that."

Margoli twitched dismissively, her fur flickering. "Eh. It happened a long time ago. You couldn't have known." Before an awkward silence could develop, she looked us over impatiently again. "So? Resources?"

I looked up and to the side at Malak, who glanced down at me, then shrugged.

The Bothan made a sound that was something like a snort, something like a choked-off cry of despair. "What did your Masters teach you, anyway? Don't answer that; it was a rhetorical question. Look. Resources. What do we have, among the three of us, that we can use to get out of here and back to the Republic?"

"Don't you mean four?" Turning slowly, I saw Tanaab in the tent's entryway, rubbing his face with one hand.

"Weren't you sleeping?" I asked, surprised. He yawned, stretching, and rubbed at his eyes.

"Five, at least." Someone I didn't know crawled out of a nearby tent. I realized that instead of snoring, I heard a great deal of rustling and yawning from every side. Malak sighed.

"Looks like more than five, then. Next time, if you only want to let two people in on something, keep your voice down."

"Hmph." Margoli shrugged. "More people, more heads. You don't seem to have any bright ideas, and it'll be a while before I get any, so we might as well see if these layabouts can contribute. Can't you, I don't know, call a meeting?"

We called a meeting. What else could we do? A quarter of the stockade had already roused, quite willing to make plans now that the idea was fixed in its collective head, and the rest was sure to follow.

As it turned out, though, "more heads" was not necessarily a good thing. The various captives were bleary and apparently had very little to say, most of it revolving around the fact that others had tried to escape in the past and had failed miserably. The problem was that despite having so little to say, they were insistent on saying it loudly, repeatedly, and in great, unnecessary detail.

Margoli put up with this for longer than I would have believed before picking out "useful people" to help with the plan, telling all the others that if they didn't go back to their tents right now, the Mandalorians would suspect something. To my faint surprise, the "useless blithering idiots", as she called them under her breath, actually obeyed, leaving a much smaller group that included me, Malak, Tralus, and, for some reason, Tanaab.

We'd all been searched, of course. Margoli had been allowed to keep her soft, thin-soled scouting boots, but because the rest of us had all had sturdier footwear that could possibly have concealed surprises, it had been confiscated, along with packs, kit, armor, and all real weapons. The Mandalorians had allowed us to keep credits, jewelry, trinkets, and such minor weapons as my claws and vibroblades about as long as my finger. We'd kept containers of water, although their contents had all been poured out. The pockets on clothing had been searched and torn in some cases, the contents either left or removed. It seemed that there was a bit of inconsistency among the searchers - heavier rope had always been taken, but light, strong cord had sometimes been confiscated, sometimes cut into pieces but left in the pocket, and sometimes left intact.

"There's also some stuff in my arm," I said reluctantly at that point, flexing the clawed Barabel fingers. About a handspan from my left shoulder, beneath where the pebbled black scales began, there was a sort of ring. Four pressure-points set in it - I had to requisition Malak's help to get them all - made the entire arm disengage and "lose its grip" and fall away, leaving a stump with a metallic "cap" perforated by tiny extensions and holes. The process felt uncanny - numbing, and an odd lightness. Yet I could still feel an arm, a hand, fingers - it was the phantom limb thing again.

I toyed with the phantom hand, waving it about and poking its fingers into my right hand, not paying too much attention to Malak, who was busy with making the Barabel arm open up and stripping it of the various things he'd added- the wire, the tiny wire-cutter, the probes, the potentially-explosive energy cells - and explaining exactly what they were meant to do.

I jerked alert again, of course, when the arm made an alarming whirr-splutter. Apparently it had been overstressed and the entire thing went through a catastrophic failure; the circuits built into the joints fried, the muscle and tendon fibers locked rigidly, and each and every place where "bone" met "bone" had become scratched due to a lack of lubricating oils. Short of a good stint in a repair shop, it wasn't going to be at all functional.

That decided it; we were going to try and get out today.

I blinked rapidly to keep the rain out of my eyes as the last member of the team finally became untangled from the rope and touched down on the other side of the stockade. Back inside, Tralus hurled his end of the braided, knotted cord over; Margoli caught it soundlessly with the Force and coiled it up. Tralus, who wasn't a pilot and had stiffened joints to boot, pressed his face to a gap in the logs and wished us well in a hoarse whisper.

"You'll need the Force to be with you, too. You can deny knowing anything, but someone will suspect," I reminded him softly. The idea that had been forming itself in the back of my mind finally coalesced. "Go. Find something to do; an alibi. Several people who will swear that you were with them the whole time." My conscience and the vague feeling that Something Bad was about to happen settled as the man's eyes widened; he nodded and immediately vanished from the gap.

"If we're done now? Just because this section of fence isn't patrolled right now doesn't mean it won't be." Margoli's voice was tense and acidic. She was even jumpier now than she'd been inside, covering every possible direction with rapid flicks of her eyes and ears, practically hopping from one foot to the other with impatience. Or it could just have been that the rain made her flinchy, I suppose.

I raised an eyebrow at her. "We're going, we're going. Calm down. You'll know if someone gets close."

When she didn't acknowledge me, I frowned. "Won't you?"

"I never covered that, that low-level monitoring technique," she admitted, clearly irritated. "Mystical stuff isn't my specialty, allright? I'm just getting a bad feeling about lingering here."

"Ah," I allowed. She may not be a Jedi, but her intuition still has a fair amount of value. I'm not getting anything, but if we stay here - oh, that's a strong one. Yep. That would be bad. On the heels of that thought I came over to where Malak, the first one to go over the wall, stood, knees locked, eyes closed in a light trance. Out of the three of us, he was by far the best at opening up and figuring out not only where people were, but how far away they were relative to each other and to us.

"Hey," I said quietly, wanting him out of the trance but assuredly not wanting to startle him out. You never know just what will happen if a trance is broken abruptly, after all. The Force was with us this time, though, because Malak blinked unglazed eyes open without further prompting. "We should get going, 'Lak. Can't stay here."

My friend shook his head - not in disagreement, but to clear it of any lingering fog, frowning in an effort to keep track of both his physical surroundings and the positions of the Mandalorians. Water beaded on him and trickled down his forehead like thin tentacles; he brushed it off irritably. "All right. I was just about done anyway; there's a 'clear' path to the G-wings that avoids all of them, and I think it's wide and stable enough. We should move quickly, though, before it twists any more."

He, and all the others, just waited for several long seconds before I realized what they wanted to me do. "Let's go."

How, exactly, did I become leader? I wondered wryly as we moved purposefully out into the dark, away from the flickering stockade lamps. Yes, I had the idea about using the snubfighter-style G-wings instead of more guarded shuttles, and I did map out the area and the snubfighter's cockpit. And I did shoot down a couple of the less practical ideas. It couldn't have been Tralus; we knew from the start that we couldn't take him. Still... why not Margoli? Or one of those pilots?I dismissed the thought; for now it would only be a distraction, and I didn't need one. The chances were harsh enough as it was.

We had prearranged things so that Margoli, whose nightsight was at least as good as mine, had the unenviable task of nerfherding our rabble of nervous pilots, keeping the ones farthest from Malak and I tromping in the right directions instead of blundering out of the "clear path". I could hear her sharply admonishing whispers marking her exact location, but decided against going out and scolding her for them, as it would only make things more confusing for the pilots, who clearly heard and saw almost nothing. We didn't have much farther to go, anyway.

Quite abruptly Malak froze, one foot in the air, and raised his hand. I did the same - well, I stopped moving and raised my hand, anyway - and sent Margoli a furious thought; she might not have been able to decipher it into words, but she could feel it, and this was the signal for her to raise her hand; between the three of us, hopefully each pilot would see someone's raised palm in the darkness. That particular hand-signal, in this case, meant "Hold very still and make no sound". The pilots knew that, of course, but whether all of them would see and remember that was a question I didn't like answering.

Apparently they did, because the sounds of heavy breathing, footsteps, and occasional choked curses as bare feet found sharp objects cut off. If not for the fact that I could see them, dimly, eyes and mouths gaping wide and the rain spattering off their bodies, I might have thought that the entire group had quietly dropped into some giant hole.

Without the clumsy nightblind pilots masking everything, I could hear again. Rain, of course. The usual sounds of distant nightbirds and insects, the thin and far-off strains of a terribly nasal snore that had to be impossibly loud to anyone close to its maker, several shrill voices rising in complaint as a different voice, pitched reassuringly low, wove in among them. I suspected that the shrill voices were slaves; I couldn't see why Mandalorians wouldn't use a private com channel for something like that, and I rather doubted that any of the Republic captives would use quite that tone of good-natured petulance.

Keeping still and listening in the dark like this woke an odd feeling in my body; almost a tingle, an enhancement of all my senses as if I had stepped into a trance and boosted them on purpose. As if my skin could see, as if it was covered in feathery tendrils that showed me what was moving and what was not, and where. The night was filled with faint warm and cool pressures that trembled and stilled.

My upraised right arm started to ache; without thinking I moved my left arm to support it, remembering that I didn't have a left arm only as I felt the oddly cool, light pressure of the hand-that-wasn't-there on my right forearm. I blinked and looked at the phantom limb, or, rather, the point in space where the limb would have been. Nothing, of course. Raindrops fell straight through it, until I became conscious of them doing so, at which point they began to splash and roll off of something invisible. Well. Now there's a puzzle. I'm sure Master Riii would be able to explain it... Think about that later, though. Not now.

I felt him, a pressure in my mind, a tingling on my skin, before I heard him; heavy, confident footsteps squelching in an undignified fashion on the thoroughly soaked mat of grasses. It was loud enough that our pilots could pick it up; one or two of the younger ones swiveled to gape in his direction. He was a Mandalorian, of course. No others would be walking so loudly and confidently here, in rain like this. What was more, he was bored and wandering off to talk to a friend, not on sentry duty.

Yet, unfortunately, we were between him and where he was going. He seemed to be heading towards us like a needle to a magnet. I exhaled slowly, considering options. Trying to sneak away wasn't going to work. The rabble of pilots were not working as a team and had already proved themselves to be less than quiet; sentry or not, the Mandalorian would hear them and raise the alarm. Even if we did escape notice, it would take precious time to regather the scattered rabble, and I didn't know how much time we had.

So, what does that leave? Distraction? No, too risky; it would probably just make him suspicious. I don't know anything about this person except that he's male, a Mandalorian, and going to visit a friend. That's not enough to go on, I can't manipulate his mind.

There might be other options, but, conveniently enough, I can't think of any. So. Assault. Well, Malak knows Quatra's trick for knocking human-types unconscious, but he has to be close to do it, and I don't know if it works through armor. Hmm. What if...

Taking my phantom hand off of my raised "real" one, I reached out towards the approaching Mandalorian. Faster than I would have believed, and despite the fact that several meters of space still separated us, the fingers-that-were-not-there encountered a breastplate, underarmor, skin, muscle, bone, and passed through each of them. I stopped at the point where the hot pulse, magnificently powerful and strong, was strongest, feeling the peculiarly pulsating hard/soft branching structures that were surely veins. It would be all too easy to rake my fingers across... or simply squeeze.

But I really, really don't want to do that. I moved the phantom hand deeper and upwards, finding a thin, finely muscled tube. The tube's interior was wet and slimy; I felt the tube constricting as a glob of frothy liquid worked its way down. After a momentary blankness, I realized that this must be the esophagus.

Interesting. Absolutely disgusting, but... interesting. Something changed subtly in the "feel" of it; as I tried to figure out what I idly stroked the phantom fingers upwards. The Mandalorian's esophagus quivered; he stopped moving forwards and swallowed again, harder. The glob of saliva caught against the phantom fingers.

In a sudden flash of inspiration, I worked the phantom fingers and their load of spit upwards. The smooth esophageal muscles fought me, of course, stronger and harder as I moved higher, but I made pretty good progress, coming all the way to the top of the throat. The Mandalorian was definitely quivering. I withdrew back to myself as saliva flooded his mouth and he began to retch.

The pouring rain did little to mask the sound of the Mandalorian stumbling off instinctively. I swallowed a bit of sympathetic bile and privately hoped that he would manage to get his helmet off. Vomiting in an enclosed helmet can't be pleasant. But if he chokes to death on it - well, that's a terrible way to die. Completely devoid of honor, dignity, and bragging rights in whatever afterlife Mandalorians believe in.

I lowered my arm, Malak lowered his, and presumably out there somewhere Margoli lowered hers and started nerfherding again, because we resumed forwards motion, walking just a little bit more slowly, a slight hint more quietly.

We were interrupted like that a few more times; by a sentry returning to his post, by a slave on some kind of a fetching errand, by a much younger Mandalorian who was all-too-clearly "playing hero" with a large stick as some kind of combination of sword and blaster. The sentry and the slave didn't get close enough to hold things up for long, and Margoli distracted the child by making a small "plop" sound off in the distance; he or she wasn't on sentry duty and so trotted off to investigate.

I thought things were going swimmingly until Malak froze (again), signaled us to stop and come together, and muttered something incomprehensible under his breath. "Bastasi!" he swore in a somewhat louder voice. "Two of them got ahead of us. I knew this was too easy."

"Ahh, carbon flush," growled one of the nearby pilots. "Just chase 'em off with another distraction. We have to go; I'll miss my sister's wedding." A spate of muffled laughter made its way around the rabble; the joke evidently made sense to these pilots. I exchanged a bewildered shrug with Malak before stretching out with my senses for a quick look.

Just as quickly, I withdrew, blinking. "Stang it, Ve'vuut's one of them. And that child of hers is the other."

My report was greeted with silence for several seconds, until Malak sighed explosively. "The Clan Leader. It figures. We're in deep mopak now, aren't we?"

"Well?" Margoli demanded, eeling past the clustered pilots to stand before me. "So their leader's there. How exactly are you prevented from doing that throat-touch thing eariler?" She 'saw' that? Huh. Must be more perceptive than I'd thought.

I twitched my chin in the general direction of the tarpaulin-swathed G-wings, which bulked as larger shadows in the rain. "Ve'vuut is there, but so is another Mandalorian. Most people don't just keel over sick without a reason. If I touch one, the other will call out a replacement, and might suspect that someone's out here. I don't think I can take care of both at the same time." Precog, naturally, told me nothing this time.

Margoli's bright eyes flashed. "So? Touch one, we all come out and swarm the other. Simple plans always work best. What's the big deal? Are you cowards or something?" she added, fur rippling in disbelief, when the pilots stared at her and began to mutter amongst themselves, giving her their versions of the Look. "You weren't expecting this to be easy, were you?" She turned, glaring back at them, her voice rising with indignation. "Come now. You're Republic pilots! Are you telling me that you can't even-"

Moving almost without my own volition, my arm came up on the other side of her head, whipping over and clamping around her long Bothan muzzle, then jerking it and her head down the handful of centimeters needed for me to look her straight in the eye. Which I did.

"Pilots, Margol-ika," I said quietly, keeping my customary mild tone of voice and using the affectionate Mandalorian suffix for "child". I'd heard Ve'vuut use it, once, when she thought that I was being particularly naive. "Republic pilots. Not skirmishers. Not Mandalorian pilots. Not Jedi aces either. Pilots are usually the smaller guys, at a disadvantage when it comes to melee. In physical combat, a Republic pilot is expected to be able to fight, but with ranged weapons. Not hand-to-hand. Not with a little dagger. Not against a very, very well-trained Mandalorian who is armed. They're good, but we shouldn't ask them to do what they can't. Not if we have any other choice. And keep your voice down; they will hear us and all debate will be moot."

I released her, noticing only after the fact that I had used my phantom left hand instead of my right. Margoli nodded submissively and stepped unsteadily away, rubbing her muzzle, the fur on her head flattened except for a single stiff ridge that had raised like a crest.

The pilots stared at me as if I'd grown horns. I let my mouth quirk over to one side, inwardly bemused. What was that about? I dressed Margoli down, sure, but I also grabbed at her face before I did so. I don't do that to sentients, ever. Of course, each and ever one of these pilots was probably wishing that he or she could do the same, but... are they affecting me somehow? Riii did tell me about how my talents influenced me on a subconscious level. Wish I'd paid more attention.

"It's a good thing you're on our side," Malak told me wryly. "It's also good to know that you have a real temper, one that can actually be lost. I'd wondered." He did have a point - the number of times that I had displayed rather than dissipated real anger, as opposed to aggression or similar impulses, could be counted on the fingers of one hand. That single tantrum about toys when I was little, Kreia comparing my laugh to a Sand People bray, that incident with Bolook and the dinko, and, lately, the Council's refusal to take my concerns seriously. Might be one or two other cases, but I think that's it. I'm not called "mellow" and "a planner" for nothing, after all.

Even so. "I don't know what you're talking about," I informed him, voice infused with perfect calm. "That wasn't temper. Margoli is young, and under a lot of stress. She might have done something unwise." It was true, I realized. I hadn't been angry.

"If you say so. All right, since a frontal assault is out of the question and I certainly can't do whatever you did before, I assume that you have a plan?"

"As a matter of fact," I allowed slowly as things fell into place, "I think I do."