Chapter 2: A New Threat

Impossible! Only a few scant months before the culmination of his plans, Supreme Chancellor Palpatine of the soon to be reformed Galactic Republic finds himself contending with a severely destabilizing job.

Having received the information he required from the dispatched Republic Task Force. Palpatine's mind and concerns turn away from them, sending one last message to the doomed expedition before focusing elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Jedi Knight Renphi, the Task Force, and his young Padawan, ignorantly linger near the world of Pzob, nearly all unaware of the danger fast approaching.

Nearly all…

———

They had been stationed within System K749 for two weeks now. Two weeks of watching Dr Shina and her team pace, and argue, and tap on data pads. Two weeks of watching his master, Jedi Knight Renphi, do almost nothing but meditate. Two weeks of doing everything in his power to escape joining him in meditation. At first, Gaphin took shelter with the clones, but that proved only marginally less irritating than listening to his own breath, since all they did was drill and complain about drilling.

They didn't watch holo-vids or play pazaak, at least not most of them. Their hobbies, passions, and fun time distractions all had to do with fighting, or training to fight, or cleaning weapons, counting ammunition, or sometimes, comparing war stories. Gaphin's master had once mused to him that the Republic had never created anything as efficient and effective as the clone army.

"An entire army and armada of what amountssss to be tamed mandaloriansssss? The Republic will never losssse another conflict due to sssstrength of armsss, that isss cccertain."

Maybe that was true, and maybe it wasn't. Gaphin was no expert in mandalorians, though he figured his former acquaintance, Ahsoka Tano, would know a fair amount about them by now. He had known her as a learner, before she had been taken for training under a proper master, and he had heard of her exploits in regards to that nearly extinct warrior culture. Most recently, and troublingly, he had heard talk that she had chosen to leave the Jedi Order, though he knew only a few of those details.

He often found his mind wandering towards her, and the other learners he had been separated from, once their training had been completed. He had once thought to himself and the others, those chosen by jedi in order to learn more about the force, to be lucky, chosen even. Yet, each time he returned from duty, he heard only news of their own decline, as former friends and family within his order continued to fall or leave the Jedi, for one reason or another. Perhaps having been a farmer, aid worker, or explorer would not have been such a tragedy after all...

His pondering was interrupted as a group of clones entered the hallway beneath him, the squad clearly led by his own master. The padawan sucked in a breath and barely moved, tucking his feet closer to his chin as he watched on through the small grate above the clones and Jedi, and listened.

"We've checked the entire ship, General. I'm not sure that boy is still even present on the Honor Hound." Said Captain Kraken, the commanding clone of their forces, and a solid friend to Gaphin and his master whenever people started blasting.

Even as he spoke, the clones behind him were clearly looking for the padawan, peering into spaces where he might fit, and opening the maintenance access panels and storage compartments as they passed them. He almost laughed, they'd never find him like that, and they'd never even believe he could fit into the ventilation system, muchless check it.

"He issss here captain. He'ssss jusssst sssslacking off." Said Renphi, shaking his reptilian head in gentle bemusement.

"What are you going to do when you find him?" The captain asked.

The Jedi general shrugged, though the subtle wrinkling of the skin around his snout and eyes bespoke more surety than a shrug would suggest.

"I sssssupposssse I'll have to force him to make up for all the losssst time he wasssted. Three daysss of issssolative meditation will do usss both ssssome good."

Gaphin's blood ran cold in time with Captain Kraken's whistled response.

"Not pulling any punches this time, eh sir?" The clone captain said with a snicker.

"Well, if we disssscover that he wassss not sssslacking off. Perhapssss helping Dr. Shina, then maybe it would only be three hoursssss of meditation, insssstead of three daysss."

The clone tilted his head in confusion, but Renphi said nothing more. The statement clearly struck Captain Kraken as odd, and he remained in the room even as the Jedi moved on, looking around suspiciously. His eyes fell on the ventilation grates again and again, unable to shake an unease sway in his trained, albeit, mundane senses.

"Ah, blast it. Open up those vent covers. I know he probably can't fit in there, but that boy is damn flexible, all the jedi are." Kraken said at length.

The other clones moved to comply, but Gaphin had left even before the captain had issued his command, and the clones found nothing more substantial than the air of mischief the young jedi constantly exuded. The boy decided he'd be dyed red and black and grow horns before he willingly walked into a three day long meditation session! With that thought in mind, he made his way briskly through the shaft, towards where the science team had set up.

He inched his way along the tight confines of the vents, making himself weightless with the force while pushing and pulling himself with the tips of his fingers and toes. He was fourteen, soon to be fifteen, but he hadn't quite hit his growth spurt yet, and was making full use of his size before he lost it. Lots of other learners had expressed a desire to grow quickly, but master Yoda was smaller than all of them, and he was Grandmaster.

It wasn't long before he found himself edging along the ceiling of the impromptu science laboratory that the researchers had been using to do their work. He stopped when he was just above Dr Shina, a cerean scientist who worked for the high Chancellor as one of his staff. It was apparently rare for her to work outside of his gaze, and Gaphin knew why. Dr. Shina was jumpier than a loth cat in a spice rack.

She stood below him even now, thick black hair spilling over the white jumpsuit she and the other members of her team wore while at work. Just like any of her species, Shina had a towering, roughly ovoid skull, housing her large binary brains, both of which seemed to be working hard, as told by the many, rippling creases she maintained across the relatively vast expanse of her forehead.

Smirking, Gaphin stealthily undid the bolts holding the grate he was looking through, concentrating on each screw, one by one. Before long he was lifting the panel silently away and dropping down to land three feet in front of Dr. Shina, who had been looking down at her data pad when he landed. Almost walking directly into the padawan before pausing and snapping a scowling face up at him, she did not react well to his presence.

"Hey doc, how's it-" He had started to say.

She screamed, so loud and so suddenly that Gaphin almost didn't precognate fast enough to cover his ears. Everyone of the beings in the room dropped what they were doing to look over at the pair, a sudden still tenseness taking hold of nearly all present. Gaphin smiled sheepishly and was about to say something in an attempt to break that tension, when eight clones armored shoved into the room, rifles out and ready.

It took a couple of minutes for everything to recombobulate after that, but eventually all the scientists were back to work, the clones went back to guard duty, and Dr. Shina went back to referencing her data pad, only rarely interspersing a glare into the mix, for Gaphin's sake. The grinning padawan tried not to seem too pleased with the chaos he caused, and turned back to the Doctor for a further distraction.

"Why are you wound up so tight?" Gaphin asked.

For some reason, his words seemed to annoy her even more than his surprise had just done. She looked up, brown eyes wide with fury she had barely constrained during the recovery from his entrance.

"First of all, I'm always tense around Jedi. You are dangerous, illogical, and problems seem to go out of their way to find you. Even, or should I say, ESPECIALLY, the little ones like you!" She snapped.

"...More like we go out of our way to find them…" He muttered in response, crossing his arms and looking away.

"And secondly!" She continued.

"...and I'm not that little…" He added in.

"There are scarier things out there than Asajj Ventress and her Separatist friends! If your Jedi magic was half as impressive as your order says it is, then you should have seen THIS before we did!"

As if to prove her words, she walked closer to him and thrust her data pad into his hands. Gaphin took the tablet, his eyes scanning its contents for a few moments after. He 'hmm'd' and nodded as he looked down at the datapad, though he understood nothing from inspecting the odd data sequences and jargoned results written all over the digital file.

"Do you see?" she asked, both hopeful and hopelessly frustrated.

"I see a datapad I can't read." Gaphin answered blankly.

Dr. Shina huffed, snatching the pad out of his hands, and then showing it again from her hands.

"This part right here," she said, pointing at a box filled with text and a long sequence of numbers and letters written in Bothan.

"These are the results of a Hyperwave spectrogram analysis. Do you see this number here, after the dot?"

Gaphin nodded. He wasn't fluent in Bothan, but he had been taught enough to read numbers...or at least, he figured he had.

"Yeah, that's Bothan for...3.71...right?"

She rolled her eyes at his answer.

"That's close enough. The point is that there is NEVER supposed to be a number after that decimal! It makes no sense, it's too much!"

"T-Too much what? What do you mean?" Gaphin asked, a trickle of unease dripping its way between his thoughts.

Dr. Shina was always a raw bundle of nerves, but this was a bit much even for her. He could feel her panic, feel how much she was suppressing it. The doctor was genuinely terrified. Not scared. Terrified!

"You idiot, it's a hyperwave! Don't tell me you don't know about hyper waves!" She said, voice incredulous, as if it was entirely unreasonable for Gaphin to lack such rudimentary information.

"Um, can you...meditate on them? Because if not, I don't think master Renphi would really-" The chagrined padawan began to say, scratching the back of his head as he did.

"No no, it's got nothing to do with your dumb magic! Um, look, every time an object moves in or out of hyperspace, it leaves a gravitational wave, a hyperwave. It's like dropping stones in a pond, the bigger the stone, the bigger the wave."

"Uh, OK." Gaphin said.

"But don't we use radiation to track hyperspace travel?" He added.

Dr. Shina's pale face grew paler.

"Yes, because hyper waves are normally too faint to be used reliably. A single venator-class Star Destroyer has a Hyperwave reading of 0.00003, and that's not even detectable by a planet side scanner."

Gaphin felt like the floor was slowly dropping out from underneath him as understanding of the literal gravity of the situation began to sink in.

"But, then why can we even record this? Didn't lots of sensors get triggered?"

"Yes, hyper waves are harder to read, but they travel much farther and faster than Cronau radiation, which dissipates relatively quickly when compared to the rolling momentum of a hyperwave."

"But...but what does that mean? There aren't any confederate forces or Republic forces operating outside the Galaxy...isn't there a natural phenomenon that could explain this?" Gaphin asked.

Dr. Shina shook her head and slid her finger across the screen, swiping to a new page of the report.

"There are sometime special meteores with certain mineral elements which can react with tachyon fields to briefly enter hyperspace, but the largest one of those ever recorded had an estimated wave of .0000007, and it only traveled a quarter of a light minute before dropping out of hyperspace. It can't be that."

"W-Well what about Purrgil? Space whales are pretty large, and they can drag their wounded into hyperspace...so maybe...maybe it's just a bunch of extra galactic Purrgil, towing something?"

She looked at him flatly.

"Extra-galactic space whales? Towing something with a higher mass than the entire republic fleet? Do I actually have to tell you how stupid that sounds?"

"Well it's not some giant monster, or a swarm of hyperspace comets, so what are you even so scared of? The unknown?" Gaphin shot back.

The padawan regretted his hasty statement even as it spilled from his lips, watching the Doctor's already frenzied expression widen in response.

"No you discount parlor trick salesman's apprentice! Think! It's not natural, and it doesn't belong to us or the Separatists. Think!"

"That...it..." He stuttered, flustered and blushing, but drawing a blank.

"It's a fleet!" She almost shouted into his face.

"An extra-galactic fleet! A huge fleet! A veritable solar system just got thrown into close orbit of our Galaxy, and it is most likely stuff that BELONGS TO SOMEONE, understand?!"

Gaphin felt chills puncture into his spine, and race along his body like rogue jolts of energy.

"Well, wait." He said.

"How do we know they are dangerous?"

She looked up from the pad, showing him a huge red radius near the system. A line underneath it said "Projected movement potential".

"We don't. What we do know is that they have a larger fleet than us, than potentially any single military to date. And that is as good as knowing they are hostile!"

Gaphin said nothing after that, letting the information be absorbed into him.

"So what are you doing now?" He asked, almost numb.

"We are trying to figure out exactly where this fleet is supposed to be right now." She said, tapping away in a frenzy.

"Aren't you going to report this to Master Renphi?" The padawan asked, still retrieving his wit from the shock Shina had bestowed onto him.

"What for? I already sent a report to the supreme chancellor, and I told you, you can't do anything about this, you might as well not be here! We are too far from the fighting to get clone reinforcements all the way out here, not for a week at least." She snapped.

"Well, no, we can't do anything by ourselves." Gaphin admitted.

"But, we could... you know... negotiate for help from the nearby systems. Reinforcements maybe? They don't have to be clones." He ventured.

She put her datapad down with a clatter as she spun back towards him, and Gaphin was sure she was going to yell at him again, but when Dr. Shina finished turning to look at him, she wasn't glaring any longer. Well, she wasn't just glaring at him any longer. She was also blushing as the pretense of his suggestion settled in.

"Oh frag. Right, I guess we could do that."

———

It had been nearly a week since Orion and his allies had been stranded in deep space by the failing of the fleet's Navigators. Far too long by his estimation. The chapter master had watched as every single three eyed psycher across his broad fleet, and those of his allies, reported the same, horrid chime. The Emperor was dead, there could be no other truth, at least, this was what they howled as they were dragged from their viewing ports and sight stations. The practical problem behind this was two fold.

Firstly, word of the Emperor's evident demise was spreading panic and heresy through the fleets like a plague borne by words. Fed by the fear they faced in their becalmed state, it had been all Orion could do to instate order where he could, and flush chaos into space wherever he was unable to subdue it.

Secondly, whether the Emperor was dead or distant, the navigators were almost entirely useless, and that left them floating in the void with nothing faster than a beam of light to travel by. It would take them hundreds or thousands of years to reach the edge of the galaxy at materialistic speeds, and given the sheer size of the civilian fleet at his back, they wouldn't last a decade. Muchless, in fact. He needed warp travel back online, and he couldn't wait around for the navigators to get a hold of themselves to do it.

Already, fellow Chapter Master Davik Thune of the Crimson Razors had departed, taking his entire chapter fleet along with him, as well as nearly half of the Astra Militarum and a quarter of Battle Fleet Xeltek. Orion didn't know whether to call the man a fool for charging into the warp without navigators, or a visionary for doing what Orion was about to do now. Black Templars and their unofficial "successors" were not known for their tact, discipline, or patience, but Galaxy be damned if they weren't decisive.

A deep voice called him from his ponderingings, speaking a single word asked as a question.

"Sir?" Asked brother Torndenous.

The Space Marine stood behind the holo-lens operator, waiting to be signaled to begin. Orion felt his face tighten, but nodded in spite of whatever apprehension had managed to infect him, standing to address the glossy obsidian lense pointed towards him by the tech adept behind the camera. When the ancient Space Marine saw the blue light on the surface of the device flicker to life, he took in a deep breath through his nose, and began to speak.

"Brother's of the Sky Watch. Cousins of the Tempered Hands, allies of the Astra Militarum and Battlefleet Xektek, it is time for Elucidation. All of you have heard the damned portents cried out by our Navigators, and I have now gathered enough information to say with certainty that the truth of our situation is far stranger than we could have expected, yet less dreadful than we may have feared.

"Our astrogators have been manually observing and cataloging the constellations around us in an attempt to discern our precise location outside of the Galaxy. All of their findings return with one conclusion, the constellations are wrong. Either the universe itself has been impossibly rearranged, or we are not looking at our own Galaxy any longer. Our attempt to breach the Cicatrix Maledictum has somehow resulted in our forces being transported unthinkable distances away from our Emperor. He is not gone. We are."

He paused, letting his words sink in before continuing.

"Now that we know what situation we face, we have only one recourse. We must enter the nearby galaxy and take stock of our situation once within it. Perhaps we shall find a way to return among those strange stars...and if not, it may be that we were meant to arrive here first, and prepare the way for our Imperium to come.

"In either case, I call now upon your courage, your faith, and your strength, for we will need it in the time that is to come! There shall be no reinforcement, no resupply. The codex says nothing about this kind of extragalactic situation, nor does any other protocol. Our path is our own to carve, lest it carve itself into us instead.

"Fate has thrown us far from our undying Emperor, and expects us to wither under its burden. But fate is a fool, for fate does not yet understand that distance and time are mere petty obstacles when faced with the determined faith of The Imperium of Man!" His voice thundered, and in the aftermath of his exclamation, he took his seat, calm, composed once more and watching as the lense adjusted to track him.

"Steel yourselves. We go forth to find the unknown, and make it kneel to the will of Man. Faith is the duty of the righteous, and only in death does duty end. Go now and prepare to do yours."

He nodded again, and the light flicked off. Orion turned to look at the line of his assembled captains, standing near the back of the room. Each man was a handpicked member of his beloved chapter, each representing a strand or aspect that, together, embodied the Watch, and made them the great force they had become.

"Send out the orders to re-deploy the Navigators. Chain them to their stations if need be. All I need them to do is give us direction, and keep the ships near each other. If they won't or cannot, shoot them. Ensure their replacement is present."

"And if the replacements do not capitulate?" Asked Fifth Captain Annar Solstin.

The Chapter Master turned his bright, yellow eyes on the man, intense as twin rings of unblinking stars.

"We are departing via warp space at thirteen hundred hours, sharp. That will not change, whether we have navigators, or not."