Work Text
"I don't think--" Caar trails off, but the woman who shares his bed knows of what he is speaking. "It's not a good place to raise a child," he adds, as a sort of explanation for why he isn't interested in her getting pregnant. "And that architect you're always going on about..."Little daring to return to the Sith, the once acolyte goes into a faction monastery, takes on a new name.One fateful misstep destroys the future of the Sith; a sophorific miasma of heavier-than-air gas clings to the ground level of the swamp, and only certain footings are safe. The current singular Sith trips, falls, and in quick succession, passes out, drowns, and is absorbed into the murky depths.No one actually accuses Cosinga Palpatine of murder. They don't dare. Besides, common wisdom in this sector dictates that wives of powerful men who do not adhere to certain standards ...essentially forfeit their lives. No one cares to remember anything else about his wife. The day after she falls off the balcony and tumbles into the decorative goldfish pond, the cleaning droid finds a flimsi slip, which seems to have been carelessly discarded in Cosinga's private study, with fetal paternity test results (99.9% probability child of Cosinga Palpatine) on it. The cleaning droid is not programmed to speculate about the fact that a meddroid was called one week before the date of the postmark, because Lady Palpatine had suffered a miscarriage.No one witnessed how useless her vigorous protests were that night, that Cosinga threw her suddenly to the ground, and despite her desperate attempts at fighting, smashed her hand and killed the child he was (counter to the evidence he later received) certain was not his. Cosinga Palpatine is a jealous man.Yoda one day tells one Obi-Wan Kenobi, who is still a padawan, that the Sith no longer exist. He is correct.Unrest is brewing in every sector, every populated system. A new chancellor has been elected, but that doesn't help. The Senate hands more power to the Jedi every week, but there is no defined enemy to actually suppress. Efforts to test every child born in the galaxy are redoubled, and the Jedi seize some portion of the children who normally would not be eligible, on account of suspicion against the parents. These are sent to the Agri-Corps camps, to be raised by failed Jedi. The Agri-Corps is not a monastery and the children have no clear way of participating in the religious system they are taught.Slaves rebel on two planets, three, four. A Jedi peacekeeping force is sent to Tatooine. The Hutts fill their bags to bursting with non-republic credits, and the orchestrators are sent to nice clean prisons, colder, darker, and better supplied with food and water than Tatooine. There is a law on the books, as the old saying goes, against slavery. But keeping order and peace matters more than the law. As prisoners are processed, the system averages three executions a week. The second session includes a woman, not actually involved in the revolts, whose final words are "I am Shmi Skywalker."Factions in the Senate try to speak up and are forcibly escorted home, even placed under house arrest in hopes of breaking up "anti-Jedi" sentiment.The Mandalorians try to organize an "intervention". They model their strategy on peaceful Alderaan, which is too cowed by its unwilling transformation into a Agri-Corps outpost, in preparation for mass mobilization, to participate. Even so, Mandalore is strafed in response with poison gas grenades, and the survivors forcibly scattered among a hundred different planets.Terrorists pop up like dandelions after a spring rain, and even though nineteen attacks in twenty harm no one besides Jedi, and ten harm either absolutely no one but inanimate objects, or only inanimate objects and the attacker, travel bans are issued. Now only Jedi can legally get into space.Mon Calimar is nothing more than a shipyard, they say. A space-faring society has no call for sea ships, but the inexperienced and frankly callous administrator doesn't see a problem with using the watery planet for the builders' rubbish bin. Teratogens turn up in the water, the young and old are sick, and the medical facilities face heavy arrests and even riot weaponry when, faced with infants who lack any limbs, who cannot breathe unassisted, who have nervous system malformations, they fail to meet Jedi quotas. Corellia calls for even bigger guns, evidently. Historians whisper that there must be Sith involvement, because this much destruction has occurred previously only in response to Sith activity.Knight Dooku voices an objection one day in the council chambers, an elaborately built case on the datachip in his breast pocket. He is arrested after two sentences on charges of treachery and conspiring with Sith agents, and Yoda ineffectively crushes the datachip beneath his foot, even though this was his own Padawan. Qui-Gon Jinn commits semi-heroic suicide the next morning, taking a blaster shot to the heart in the lower levels of Coruscant, but preventing a mugging. Yoda crosses the dead man off the list of interrogators. What no one seems to comment on is that besides the Jedi themselves, the politicians who have been left to their own judgement have suppressed dissent in their own choice, violent ways. Eriadu builds a high powered attack satellite anyone would do well to fear. Elsewhere, bribery becomes rampant.It is into this mess that a first, unappointed envoy party from the Unknown Regions enters. They barely manage to skirt a Jedi patrol, but decide quickly there are no allies to be found here...