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“Nope,” said Depa Billaba, yanking Obi-Wan out of the starcraft by the nape of his neck.
“I- you- what?” Obi-Wan choked.
“Nope! No, nope, definitely not, no. You are not going to Kamino.”
“But I have been charged to investigate-”
“You are going to take over bodyguarding Padme Amidala, and Padawan Skywalker is going to Kamino,” Depa said, planting both feet and crossing her arms in a stance clearly copied from Master Mace Windu.
The stubbornness, however, was not Mace Windu. That was all Depa.
It occurred to Obi-Wan, rubbing absently at his neck, that he’d never actually seen Depa looking stubborn before.
Depa caught him eyeing the distance from her to the starcraft, and scowled.
“Obi-Wan. The Force has spoken.” The way she said it made it sound like she was the force that was speaking.
Depa had never had a reputation for Force visions or premonitions. As far as Obi-Wan knew, she’d never had a Force vision.
…Had she?
“Skywalker will go to Kamino. You will go guard Amidala.”
A chill ran down Obi-Wan’s back. Slowly, he nodded.
“Very well, Councilor. I will go guard Amidala.”
Depa nodded back, with the self-satisfied air of someone whose personal universe has been put right once more, finally unfolded her arms, and walked off. Obi-Wan, already dreading the whining, pulled out his comm to call Anakin and inform him of the change in plans.
Naboo was beautiful. The estate was beautiful, and the food was beautiful, and Senator Amidala was beautiful, and Obi-Wan Kenobi was bored out of his skull.
He should never have complained about having to search through all those planetary records to find Kamino. He should never have complained about that month Qui-Gon had him folding laundry as an exercise in patience. He should definitely not have complained all those times he’d been…inconveniently detained in various prisons.
Obi-Wan had never been so bored in his entire life.
He was so bored he was talking about politics. Voluntarily.
Senator Amidala smiled winsomely, and made several excellent if slightly naïve arguments in favor of democracy, and fluttered her eyelashes.
A butterfly wafted gently by.
Obi-Wan contemplated sticking his head in the sparkling nearby lake.
“So,” Senator Amidala asked, eyes sparkling with nearly as much brilliance as the lake waters. “Since the assassins obviously aren’t here yet, do you want to come back to the palace and help me dig through several thousand gigabytes of Republic Tax Records to find out why they were hired?”
“Oh Force yes.”
“This palace has almost no security,” explained Senator Amidala-no-please-call-me-Padme, now dressed in much more practical and comfortable clothes, as she laid the tax records out across the ludicrously picturesque candlelit dining room. “If these mysterious enemies actually wanted me dead, they’d have tried something during the last three days of me making a target of myself in this horribly low-security family palace. Therefore, I have to assume they wanted to force me away from Coruscant for some reason. I'm a very new Senator, and the only thing I’ve done since taking office that’s at all impressive is join the Interplanetary Trade Taxation Audit Committee, so…”
“So you made illegal backup copies of all your auditing budget sheets and dragged them with you to what you told us would be a safer and more secure location?”
Call-me-Padme lifted an eyebrow.
“Yes, all right, we were using you as bait to draw them out,” Obi-Wan admitted sheepishly. “This palace really does have no security whatsoever. I am still quite impressed by the…er…volume of tax documents you managed to smuggle.”
“These assassins are forcing me to take a vacation,” fumed call-me-Padme. “If I can’t spend it having a fling with a handsome Jedi, I’m at least not going to give them the satisfaction of stopping my work.”
Obi-Wan went bright red.
Driven by the twin desires to avoid both boredom and excruciating social awkwardness, he buried his nose in a tabulated summary of the last decade’s metal-trading, and pulled desperately for the Force to calm him.
The Force drew his eyes immediately to a line item on the fourteenth page.
“…Why the kriff has the Trade Federation been buying so much iron ore?”
The Trade Federation had apparently been buying impossibly large volumes of quite a few different metals, without any associated outgoing sales. More curiously, the money used to pay for this seemed to have been laundered through multiple planetary governmental accounts, including Serenno’s, and ultimately originated from the funds set aside for the reelection of Chancellor Sheev Palpatine.
“Why would Chancellor Palpatine be using his election campaign money to illegally hoard metal for the Trade Federation?” Obi-Wan wondered aloud, staring down at the spreadsheets. “Much less this much metal? This is enough to build a small moon!”
“We could ask his employees,” call-me-Padm- Senator Amidala suggested. “His political staff mostly work out of Coruscant, but his family estate is right here on Naboo, only a few klicks away.”
Obi-Wan staggered out into the sunlight and vomited.
The sun was not quite as warm, out here on the outskirts of the Palpatine estate. The brightness was somehow more sinister, and threw darker shadows. Or maybe that was just the knowledge of what he’d seen inside, tainting his perception, chilling him to the bone.
After what he’d seen inside, Obi-Wan rather thought he might never feel warm again.
No. No, it wasn’t just perception, was it.
There was no sign from the outside, but once you walked across the boundary, Palpatine’s whole estate – possibly the whole surrounding countryside – was stained and rotting with the Dark Side of the Force.
“Oh Mercy,” Padme gasped, one hand on the wall to hold herself upright and the other clutched to her mouth. “Oh Force. Those- those poor things-”
The Chancellor had not just been misusing government funds to stockpile several planets’ worth of raw ores and metals. He’d also been performing obviously unsanctioned cloning. And…experiments.
Horrible experiments. Sith experiments.
“They’re still alive,” Obi-Wan managed once he had his shields back more-or-less in place against the Darkness and was able to stand upright. “Padme, some of those poor clones are still alive in there. We have to get them out.”
They had a screaming argument about what to do with the facilities, after. Obi-Wan and the Sheev-clone that had been used as a kind of living battery thought it should all be kept intact to study the Sith artifacts and as evidence for the Chancellor’s future prosecution; Padme, the Sheev-clone covered in tumors, the six child Sheev-clones, and the Sheev-clone that had been mostly flayed all wanted to burn the place to the ground and then salt the ashes. Obi-Wan eventually called a halt to the argument when he felt himself getting furious enough to lean on the Force to intimidate, and demanded they all evacuate away from the Darkness immediately.
Once everyone was back on the Naberrie estate, safely ensconced by beautiful sunlight and butterflies and flowers that Obi-Wan solemnly promised to never ever take for granted again, everyone collectively changed their minds.
Obviously, the only right thing to do with the palace was bomb it from orbit.
“Don’t wanna go back,” explained toddler-Sheev-clone number 3, clutching an incubator that contained…something. Possibly a fetus? Obi-Wan had taken it along mostly because it felt sentient and, like everything else in that horrible hidden basement, in pain. “Siblings is dead already anyway.”
Everyone present looked down, in a moment of somber shared silence.
Some of the…experiments…hadn’t survived being freed from their chambers. Some had obviously known they weren’t going to survive, but smashed off the restraints and crawled out anyway, and Obi-Wan hadn’t been able to bring himself to stop them. Neither had Padme.
Three of the surviving Sheev-clones still had screws and spikes and electric wires embedded in their flesh.
“Well,” Obi-Wan said, shakily. “I suppose it isn’t that important to study those Sith artifacts, as long as we make sure nobody can use them again.”
“We can use C3P0’s recordings for the trial,” Padme agreed.
After medical care was arranged for everyone, and the concepts of food and names and personal bodily autonomy were introduced to the Sheev-clones and discussed at length, and the first of what would be many horrible reports were sent back to Coruscant about their findings, Padme called up Boss Nass and asked for a couple thousand boombas, and they bombed the palace to slag.
By the time all the Sheev-clones were more-or-less medically stabilized and had chosen names for themselves (and one had declared her intention for a gender change), a reply message finally filtered back from Coruscant.
Apparently, when Mace Windu, Yoda, and Adi Gallia went to arrest Chancellor Palpatine on charges of illegal experimentation and gross misuse of Republic funds, they had discovered that:
- the Chancellor was definitely a Sith Lord
- he apparently exploded when he died, and
- according to his not-Sith-but-definitely-evil Trade Federation allies and several incriminating documents found in his offices, those planets’ worth of illegally-purchased metal ores had in fact been used to construct a massive droid army, which the Trade Federation was planning to use to secede from the Republic.
Fortunately for everyone, Chancellor definitely-a-Sith Palpatine’s very explosive death had not destroyed the droid army’s controller codes, which he’d kept in a secret Force-shielded compartment of his desk alongside his Sith holocrons, his lightsaber, his late Master’s diary of horrifying medical experiments, and several extremely disturbing holos of Anakin as a child.
Oh, and Obi-Wan and Padme and all their collected evidence were needed back on Coruscant immediately, because the Trade Federation was suing the Jedi Order for stealing “their” droids.
“There is no possible way your week has been stranger than mine,” said Obi-Wan some days later, staggering down the hallway to collapse in a chair next to Anakin.
“The Kaminoans were cloning billions of slaves to make a massive army with control chips in their brains, so I lost my temper, slaughtered every slaver in the whole facility, and was eventually knocked unconscious and then adopted by the incognito King of Mandalore and his toddler clone,” said Anakin.
“…Um.”
“We’re ready to hear your reports now,” said Depa Billaba, smiling serenely at both of them as she opened the door to the Council Chambers.