Seven Minutes in Hell

[Solaris]

"Dze Jedee were soundly trounced at Boonta," Katarina Forge said to the small group of Imperial Knights. "Dzey suffered manee casualties, but dze Seez took preesoners. We weell take dzem back." She smiled tightly. This was going to be the most daring operation the Knights had conducted since they lost Seoul - and one desperately necessary. "I do not dzeenk we can recover dzem before dze Seez can eenterrogate dzem . . . but we can as dzey are transferreeng dzem to what dze Seez dzeenk are more permanent accommodateeons."

Unbeknownst to the Knights, it was going to go even better than they thought - the Dark Lord of the Sith was away from his ship and his Empire, gallivanting off to Tatooine and Hoth.

---

The shuttle carrying the Jedi prisoners was the weakest link of the Imperial chain of custody. Specifically, the personnel manning the shuttle. That was where the Initiative operatives came in. While not entirely outside the expertise of the Imperial Knights, the Initiative excelled at secrecy and covert operations. The Initiative operatives, after infiltrating the Imperial Navy before spending a week covertly observing the shuttle's operations and the personnel aboard, struck a few minutes before the shuttle launched to go collect the Jedi prisoners. Present among them was a pair of Imperial Knights, both hidden in the Force not to the point of invisibility, but their presences simply dampened down to the Force auras of ordinary people. The entire team wore Imperial uniforms, though many of the enforcers and Knights were dressed up in stormtrooper armor to conceal their faces. They sliced the local security, ensuring it displayed a carefully-constructed forgery of all being quiet and routine. The operatives stormed the shuttle quickly and quietly, forcing the crew aboard and stunning them with contact stunners.

All except the pilot, that is. Through spectacularly passable forged documents and expertly untraceable slicing, the Initiative inserted their own pilot into the shuttle's flight rotation and thus knew exactly when to strike in order to pull off this rescue mission.

 

[Padmé]

Something could be said of synergy in unity. The sheer power of collective individuals/groups working together to accomplish one objective. It was for this reason The Initiative’s Faith Kyyysha was present. The mission was fairly simply- rescue.

Adorned in her Operative mission attire, with hidden weapons, Faith Kyyysha, patiently waited in the pilot’s seat. Her work droid, next to her, checking the target and surroundings for a final run down. Tensions were high, but she relied on her Jedi background to clam her emotions. “At least that time was wasted,” she thought to herself moments late. When the signal finally came through, via her data pad, The Initiative’s, Operative piloted the ship to dock with the prison barge.

 

[Fyston]

He awoke with a start, glancing around at his surroundings in hopes that they weren't the same blank walls reflecting the same blank light down upon the same blank floors. He didn't mind the monotony so much, at least not anymore. He'd gotten used to it, and had come to like the blank room when they were hauling him back from the torture chambers.

It wasn't the same room, of course, as they decided to move him away from the front. It was the beginning of the end, at least for him. He knew the Sith showed no mercy, and he wasn't going to let them break him. He'd already decided on his final actions, the ones that would prevent them from learning what he had stored inside his mind. Using the Force, he would force his brain to hemorrhage. He would feel the pain for the slightest second, yet there was nothing either side could do once he had started. They would be able to recover nothing and he would be dead. Lose-lose for all, but he wasn't about to let the Sith win.

He was brought back to his room by the dull, throbbing pain emanating from his leg. The Sith had done nothing to help, but most of the time Fyston had been able to control his pain. It was impossible to do so while being tortured, though he was able to prevent spikes in pain, spikes that would leave him unconscious. That was why they were moving him. His leg only throbbed like that, however, when something wasn't quite right. His senses had been dulled, but his leg seemed to know. It knew if they were coming to torture him. It knew if one of the other prisoners had been killed. It knew.

With a groan, he sat up and put a hand on the wall as he made to stand, putting his weight entirely on his healthy leg to avoid aggravating his injured one. "It's going to be a long day," he said grimly. It didn't seem right, though. Something seemed off, as if today were wrong in some sense. He focused, overcoming the dulling effects of the Sith medicine with relative ease. After all, he was a doctor and a healer and it wasn't hard to disarm something that you knew how to arm.

When the door opened, the armed guards stepped into the room and motioned, still thinking he was under the influence of the Sith drugs. He stumbled forward and, resigned to his fate, turned his back and allowed them to slip the stun cuffs on his wrists and ankles. He'd had his affairs sorted and they wouldn't be getting anything from him. If he could not live, they would not use him for their benefit, and that was fine with him. He noticed the other prisoners and wasn't surprised at the state of them. Each of them had been through hell and back and he, as their commander, was responsible for it. He wished he could take them home to their families, but he could not. He nodded to them and looked sympathetically upon them. This was his mistake and they were paying for it, and that saddened him.

The transfer went smoothly, the pilots and their effects handed over to the stormtroopers from the other ship. The ragged group was half-pushed through the docking tube and into the hold of the other ship, where they sat together in the back. Fyston pushed calming waves of Force energy upon them, hoping to make their transition to whatever came just a little bit easier.

 

[Solaris]

Katarina, clad in the armor of an Imperial Stormtrooper, sauntered into the shuttle's prison hold with the stolen blaster rifle slung on her shoulder. She looked them over, her body language speaking of her utter disdain and loathing for them.

"Jedi scum," Kat sneered in an Imperial accent, her voice sexless and harsh through the helmet's voice filter, before she yanked the helmet off her head and shook out her collar-length hair. She couldn't restrain her elated grin; she felt good, better than she had in a long, long time. This was the sort of thing the Imperial Knights should be doing. "'We're en route to dze 'Apes Consorteeum, and my pilot tells me dzat all sensors, trackers, beacons, and dze like 'ave been swept cleanly from dze shuttle and your persons. You're free."

 

[Padmé]

Her ship now ready to undock, The Initiative Operative, Faith, quickly maneuvered the ship out. Meanwhile her droid scanned the area, surveilling for any unplanned out of the ordinary circumstances that may arise. Her coordinates preloaded and recalculated, the ex Jedi Knight’s ship could be seen heading into in hyperspace. Her final destination being....

...Hapes Consortium.

 

[Fyston]

He was used to being called scum and being looked down upon. If you spend long enough in the care of the Sith, you get used to it. So he didn't see it coming when one stormtrooper pulled off her helmet and smiled as she announced that they were free. He had many questions, but they could wait. With more strength than he had mustered in quite some time, he stood. His steps did not falter, nor did his face waver from the blank expression he had held during the transfer.

When he had gotten close to Katerina, he simply hugged her, pulling back long before it could be considered anything but a sign of gratefulness. "Thank you," he said simply. "From us all." Between his arduous imprisonment and the rescue, he had reached a sudden level of clarity that he'd lacked in quite some time. They'd been through quite a lot, but the initial shock of the rescue was over and everyone in the hold had transitioned to a state of excited relief. "I hope you don't mind if we raid your food stores, they haven't fed us much," Fyston said with a pained yet relieved smile. As soon as he finished talking, the Knight bowed and motioned to the rest of the pilots. With anticipatory grins on their faces, they stood, using each other for balance as their malnourished frames stood. They were halfway between an army of skeletons and an army of the living, their eyes taut and sunken into their skulls. It was with great anticipation that the few hundred prisoners began moving, as one, to the food stores. Fyston knew he'd have to watch them and ensure they did not eat too much, but he was confident they knew how to avoid refeeding syndrome.

When they reached their destination, which Fyston learned to be the Hapes Consortium, the group seemed to disband with impressive speed, falling into the shadows as if they had never been there. They knew how thankful the group of prisoners were, but their jobs were done. It wasn't much trouble for Fyston to get to a travel company and charter transport for the few hundred prisoners. He gave them the option of returning to their homeworlds but, excepting a few, all decided to return to Tython with their commander, glad that they had escaped the hellhole that was Sith custody.

 

[Solaris]

The shuttle made it to the Hapes Consortium without incident, where Katarina and her small group of Imperial Knights simply vanished without so much as a word of farewell. The Initiative operatives, having not only cleaned out the Imperial bugs but also replaced the shuttle's transponder codes, were able to make a clean escape with the stolen materiel.

~=El Fin=~​