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The older man was staring at the galactic map so hard that Lily had the rather whimsical thought that he might be trying to burn it away with his mind. Of course, as a Jedi, he might be able to do that with training. "Agreed, if you act against any one part of this scheme, the mind guiding it will get away. We need some way to trace this back to the main base or whatever it is, staging ground, maybe?" Lily said aloud, her voice unheard by all but the Force sensitives.
Harry looked up at her, then pulled out a datapad, typing out a quick message. "Could we use a Point Me technique?" That Force technique allowed you to find things by pointing you in the direction it lay, like a compass. "If we used triangulation…"
"Harry, you know that technique only works on items that are on the same planet you are." It might actually have been more directly distance related than that, but the few times they had tested it in space it hadn't worked. "Besides, we don't know enough about whoever is behind this to really form the spell."
"We could use the parts they stole, right? Use the manifest to find the exact serial number. And I still say it's a power requirement, not an inherent limitation," Harry returned, typing quickly as he tried to keep a pout off his face.
Having listened to this, Fay smiled, leaning in and whispering in Harry's ear, causing him to flush and duck away slightly as Aayla giggled under her breath on his other side. "Forgive me, Harry, but I much prefer you awake and conscious rather than unconscious and Force exhausted. I tried that technique once, remember, and if I cannot form the technique through the background of the rest of the Force, you would have scant luck trying to brute force it through."
Watching his mother's ghost nod firmly and feeling Aayla's agreement, Harry dropped the subject. A second later he turned to Aayla as he felt a sudden spike of concentration through their link. "What is it?"
Aayla shook her head. "Just a second Harry… I think…"
The two padawans tuned back to the main conversation as most of the counts were nodding at something one of the starfighter commanders had said. "Now that's a not bad idea," said one of the other counts. "It will certainly cut down on the time necessary to arm our new starfighter corps. And if we send our pilots to Kuat where they can take personal charge of those Delta 6s and CloakShapes we purchased it gives us a force already moving and out of sight of whatever spies they might have here. But that still doesn't answer the main problem of where to point them," he continued, scowling. "We keep coming back to the point of not knowing where they are based."
"I think I might have an idea…" Aayla said aloud, and all eyes turned to the young Rutian Twi'lek. Any other young woman might have felt self-conscious at that, but Aayla was a Jedi padawan and wouldn't have even understood why she should.
Aayla had been looking at the list of things this pirate group had stolen and noticed something missing that, given the rest of what they had stolen, made little sense. "There is one important item that's missing here: food. I understand that that's not a big deal, but surely if this group was getting food from an agrarian planet we would have heard rumors or seen evidence about it by now. And that third list points to them working from a hostile environment, so it's really doubtful they could be growing their own."
"True, the prefabs and other things of that nature, and the air filters in particular, point to the base being on a gas planet or a moon with no atmosphere," Quinlan said with a nod of approval at his padawan.
"There was actually a report I read today from Nez Peron about several Nabooan transports showing up on the open market. Given the events on Naboo that grabbed my contact's attention," he went on thoughtfully, his eyes lighting up suddenly with eagerness. "And Naboo is known as a major exporter of foodstuffs. But if they're already selling the ships, those ships might have transported directly from the planet to the target we're seeking..."
Harry exchanged a glance with Aayla, then looked towards Master Dooku and the other Jedi. "Well, we do know someone we can get in touch with on that planet…"
OOOOOOO
While she could handle the general day to day duties of her position and even the added workload of leading her planet in recovering from its recent occupation, Padme was slowly becoming unraveled due to lack of sleep and guilt: guilt caused by knowing that her people had been taken into slavery while she had run away. Every time she tried to close her eyes for the brief spats of sleep her workload allowed, the guilt would come back to haunt her, making her dreams things of horror.
Padme had hoped against hope that her citizens had simply been stored elsewhere in the system, in the few large asteroid mining complexes, until one of the Lucrehulks could be freed to take them away en masse. This had proven a false hope. Not only had they not been stored there, but the small flotillas had been recorded by the Lucrehulks in orbit as jumping out into hyperspace well within their sensor range.
Before leaving for Coruscant, Master Piell had a little more luck than Obi-Wan had in his search for the slaves in his own interrogation of the prisoners. In fact the Lannik had trouble stopping the deluge of information once the Neimoidian prisoners were told why he was after it. It turned out that Captain-owner Seve Crass, which was the individual's name, was not very well thought of by the other Neimoidians. It was known that he was a xenophobe of the first order, arrogant even by their people's standards, and also prone to dirty deals.
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