The mission to acquire... Prime Minister Saxan had gone badly pretty early. It had been part of a five-part operation, with Jaina leading the capture of Saxan and Tahiri also on-planet leading the capture of Head of State Thrackan Sal-Solo. While Jaina had no idea how Tahiri's mission was going, hers was a disaster. There had been YVH war droids in the compartment Saxan should have been in, which meant they had walked into a trap. There had been CorSec interference. There had been speeder crashes. There had been injuries: Zekk had probably taken some bad burns just minutes earlier when a speeder had exploded next to him, and the Bothan Kolir, a brand new Jedi Knight, had been knocked unconscious for a while and was sporting an injury to her mouth that left her spitting blood and made talking difficult. Jaina was fine, but she had a missing team member to worry about, too.

It wasn't until she'd taken care of the YVHs that Jaina could even check to see where Zekk was. He was still unmoving on the street, with a passerby checking on him. She could sense that he was still alive, and the man checking on him had no ill intent, so she turned to Kolir to assess the situation. "What's your status?"

"My teef are looshe on the right shide," she said, and pointed with her lightsaber. "There'sh Thann."

Thann, the Falleen Jedi was indeed headed their way, bouncing from speeder to speeder in the oncoming traffic lane like a hyperkinetic insect. He had two YVHs following him, shooting the whole way, so Jaina did the same thing she had with the last droid she'd just faced: she reached out with the Force to grab a duracrete tanker that had been trying to flee the combat zone and diverted it from its intended flight path. It came down hard on top of the combat droid, grinding it to pieces as efficiently as it had the previous one.

Kolr picked up the large blaster rifle of one of the downed droids, firing to gets its attention so that Thann finally had a change to get at the thing with his lightsaber. And then to keep hacking away at it because it was damn hard to disable war droids, what with them being war droids.

When Thann had dispatched the thing and returned to Jaina and Kolir, the passerby who'd stopped to help Zekk saw three lightsabers and stood, his hands up in a placating gesture. "I didn't do anything."

"I know," Jaina assured him. "You'd better go."

After he'd gone, she knelt beside Zekk, finding an unburned part of his neck where she could check his pulse. He'd be fine, she decided, they just had to get him medical attention. "This operation's a bust," she told the others, "and from the looks of things, the guards down by the gates are massing for a run at us. Let's deprive them of the opportunity to get themselves killed. Thann, secure us some transportation."

"Done," he said, heading to stop a female pilot in a speeder. Falleens as a species were able to control pheromones, mostly of members of the opposite sex, so by combining that with Force persuasion and he could get someone to do anything he wanted, such as giving up their speeder and not telling anyone she saw them. It came in handy.

Jaina got herself and Zekk into the backseat, with his head resting in her lap, with Thann and Kolir up front. "Control acknowledged my transmission," Thann explained as he effortlessly pulled them into traffic like nothing had just happened. "But Team Tauntaun didn't. I suspect they ran into a trap."

"Right," Jaina sighed, cursing internally. That would be Tahiri, Doran Trainer, and Tiu Zax, who they now had no communication with and no idea what happened to them.

"You shouldn't do that, you know," Kolir said.

Thann spared her a glance. "Do what?"

"Use Jedi mind tricksh and pheromonesh at the shame time. Not fair."

He shrugged. "I should perhaps use the mind tricks alone and maybe fail?"

"Well, no."

Personally, Jaina didn't see the difference between using pheromones and using a mind trick, and neither did Thann. Instead of continuing the discussion, he asked, "How's Zekk?"

Zekk said, "Ow." His eyes opened.

"Better," Jaina said.

With a little bit of a break, Kolir was able to stuff a cloth along the inside of her mouth to try and stop the bleeding, Zekk went into a healing trance almost right away, since his injuries needed to be taken care of and he could at the very least dull some of the pain that way. So he got to miss a while later when space raid sirens began sounding.

Watching for the second Thann thumbed off his comlink, Jaina shouted up to him, "What's the situation?"

Thann pointed toward the distant gray antispacecraft clouds. "That? That's your uncle Luke and the Jedi coming to take us off-planet. But they've lost their shuttle and he doesn't think they're getting another one."

"Ah." Of course. The whole thing had gone belly-up, hadn't it? Had every bit of it gone wrong?

"Team Tauntaun was ambushed the way we were, except that they got inside Sal-Solo's mansion. They were attacked by troops and probots."

"Where are they now?"

"They're stealing a speeder and will rendezvous with us. They're thinking of stealing some payroll credit chips, or kidnapping a holodrama star so we won't come back empty-handed."

"Good of them. Anything else?"

"The fleet jumped in and was ambushed, too. Nothing much is going right," he said.

"We need a spaceport," Jaina decided. "We'll have to steal a shuttle." Their primary objective now was going to have to be getting offplanet. At least if they could acquire a ship they'd have something ready for when they found out what happened to Tahiri's team. All her people would have to do was get there.

"All nonmilitary air and space travel will be shut down until things are settled," Thann pointed out. "And the Coronet spaceport is going to be crawling with CorSec."

"There are smaller ports. Private spaceports, spaceports for outlying communities. And they'll have charter shuttle services," Jaina said.

"I'm on it," Kolir said immediately, getting her datapad out to check on where one might be.

"Find one with a female manager on duty." When he noticed Kolir's glare, he explained, "It'll speed things up."

"If I ever find out you do that to get datesh," she said, "I'm going to cut shomething off you."

"I am an ethical Jedi," Thann said. "I only twist people's minds in the line of duty."

The spaceport they managed to find outside of Coronet still wasn't ideal and it meant having to hide in plain sight, but it was what they could do right now. As the speeder came to a stop, Zekk opened his eyes, looking much better already. "Are we on Corellia yet?"

It was the same question he'd been asking since they'd gotten insystem, so it was met with Jaina's good-natured, "Quiet you," before she turned her attention to the others. "Thann, Kolir, how we doing?"

"Skywalker's squadron is making a run over the government center," Thann replied. "To disguise the real purpose of their arrival and to give us some time to get airborne. As soon as we are, he'll disengage and come over to escort us into space. Tahiri's speeder will be here in a couple of minutes. I think there's something she's not telling us."

She was already bracing herself for whatever that could be. "Like what?"

"I'm not sure. She wouldn't tell me."

Jaina scowled at him.

Tahiri's speeder showed up sooner than they thought. She was driving, with Doran Tainer in the passenger seat, and in the back... In the back was what looked like a woman covered in a cloak from head to almost toe. Given how badly everything else had gone, Jaina assumed the worst, sliding out from under Zekk to hop out of her speeder and run over to theirs.

"It's not what you think," Doran said quickly, but it wasn't quick enough to stop Jaina from pulling the cloak off to reveal a silver, switched-off protocol droid underneath it.

Um. "What's this?" Jaina asked, looking back at them. "Where's Tiu?"

"She's in Thrackan Sal-Solo's mansion," said Doran.

"Captured?"

"No," Tahiri said. "Hiding."

What. "Hiding?" Jaina repeated, arching an eyebrow.

"We ran into a trap," Doran explained. "It sounds like you did, too. Lots of guards. Several combat probots. A couple of YVH droids. Not a tenable situation. So we decided to run away."

By the look on her face, Tahiri was really not okay with the 'running away' description. "There was nothing we could accomplish there," she said, with a tone that said she thought her version was definitely the right one. "So I ordered a nice, clean withdrawal. Which would have been fine if Brilliant Notions here hadn't had his great idea."

Jaina fixed Doran with a hard stare. "Which was what?"

Doran shrugged. "We ran into this deactivated protocol droid in the room from which we decided to stage our retreat. And it occurred to me- I could dress it in my clothes, Tahiri and Tiu could carry it out, and it would look like they were taking the body of a fallen comrade to safety. They knew three of us had gone in, they'd watch three of us escape.. and I'd hide there, see what I could find out in the wake of this disaster."

"And a naked man the size of a dwarf Wookiee is going to stay hidden for how long?" Jaina demanded.

"That's what Tiu asked. In almost those exact words, as a matter of fact," Diran said with a wince. "So I said, 'Forget it.' And she said, 'No, it's a good plan, except for the fact that, as usual, you introduced a fatal flaw. We pull out the fatal flaw and it's viable again.'"

"And fixing the plan meant substituting a tiny Omwati woman for a big slab of hanging meat." She could see the logic, even though it made her mad. She didn't want to leave anyone behind, especially when things with Corellia were this tense and this mission was a little morally iffy to start with. Getting her back could be a problem later. But they couldn't go back for Tiu now, and having a resource in Thrackan's home might not be such a bad thing, and Tiu was suited for this sort of thing...

She covered the protocol droid's face and stood back from it, then pointed at Doran. "You. Get some bacta patches for Zekk's burns and whatever Kolir needs to deal with her mouth." Then her gaze fell on Thann. "You. Get us a vehicle." And hopefully she didn't have to hear one word from Kolir protesting that.

There were still questions to be answered, like who tipped the Corellian government off to the Jedi's plan, but that would have to wait till they got out of here. Besides, since it was Han doing what he thought was the right thing and thinking Luke wouldn't possibly use both Han's kids and Ben on a mission against Corellia, Jaina probably didn't want to know the answer anyway.

[NFB, NFI, OOC okay. Dialogue and a couple better lines taken from Betrayal by Aaron Allston. My god it feels early.]