Star Wars: Revival/ Chapter 3: Judge, Jury, Executioner

Chapter Three: Judge, Jury, Executioner

The items clanged to the floor, like so much overturned silverware, their echos bouncing off the sparse, metallic ceiling. Ponds was pleased with himself, despite the unpleasant nature of his new line of work. He took a moment to examine his bounty, though his celebration was cut short by the hiss of the door behind him and the shrill admonishment of Aurra Sing.

"Careful!" she shrieked, pushing past him as though he were nothing and dropping to her knees to root through the hodgepodge of crates.

"Master Windu. You promised," Ponds reiterated as he stared down at the erupting tuft of orange hair cascading from the top of her largely bald head. He hadn't decided yet if she was attractive, and as he noted the way the few lights in the cargo hold shone off her blue skin, he realized that he hadn't even considered her until this very moment.

"Yes. About that." She moved her hands quickly, turning crates and boxes over in her hands, flipping them open and examining them before moving them off to the sides in efficiently neat stacks. Her long pause irritated Ponds.

"Yes. About that?" She continued her search, murmuring quietly to herself, and as the moment stretched, Ponds recognized quite acutely that he was staring at the butt of her gun, slung inside the holster on her hip. The button on the clasp was undone, no doubt to expedite her quick draw. "What about that?"

"Ah, I've found it!" she exclaimed, and rose quickly, a metal orb in her clutched right hand. She spun to face Ponds, their noses a breath apart. He looked into her cold blue eyes: ''No, definitely not attractive. Too angular. And evil.''

"Master Windu. Now."

"Now? Giving orders, are you?"

Ponds's shoulder sank, his bravado leaving his chest as she stared him down. "Please."

She brought her left hand to his face and caressed its side with her impossibly long fingers. "You poor soul. Here, have a seat." She gestured to one of the stacks of crates she'd just made. Ponds new whatever was coming wasn't going to be pleasant, and so he sat, dazed, preparing for the worst.

She sighed, casually tossed the orb in the air and caught it, then sat herself at another stack near him.

"Master Mace Windu is dead."

"Impossible," Ponds spat, instinctively. Immediately he noted that he couldn't conceive of such a truth, when the gravity of all that he'd seen thus far demanded he do so.

"It's a shame. He was a good man. Alas, many of the Jedi have fallen since you've been asleep."

"Since you put me in Cryo-Stasis!"

"Do you want to argue or do you want to know the truth?" Ponds stared hard at Aurra, a raging fist shaking in his mind, but his incredulity gave way to curiosity, and he gestured for her to elaborate as he let out a defeated sigh.

"I'm going to say something and you want you to tell me what your immediate impulse is. Deal?"

"What?"

"Just... let's see." Ponds waved dismissively and nodded. Aurra centered her eyes on his says and said, slowly, "CT-411, Execute Order 66."

The two sat in silence as the vastness of space whispered at the walls around them.

"Anything?" she asked.

"No. Nothing. Why?"

"Thank goodness. The same cloaking that's keeping me off Republic radar, or Imperial, I should say, is keeping your conditioning signal dampened, as well."

"My inhibitor chip has been removed."

"Inhibitions gone? Great. But you've still got conditioning, training and directives encoded into your DNA from inception that can be activated with a phrase so long as this cranium..." She poked his head aggressively. "...is near an Imperial Flagship."

"Why do you keep saying 'Imperial'. I'm a Clone Trooper for the Army of the Republic."

"You're a killing machine at the command of a Sith Lord. And Order 66 is the execution phrase to make you kill every Jedi you see."

"You lie. All you ever do is lie."

"On the contrary, I believe in a truth you have yet to learn." She tossed the orb in the air and caught it again. "You know what this is, don't you, soldier?"

"A thermo detonator. That's what you wanted to me to steal?"

"Liberate, to be precise. And it's not just a thermo detonator, 411. It's a hyper thermo detonator. Much more destructive, and exactly what we need."

"What you need. For what?"

She looked at him coolly, a smile breaking over her angular, evil face.

"We're going to blow up the Rebellion."