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Part 8 of Double Agent Vader
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Tales From Tatooine
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2015-11-17
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Optimal Functioning

Summary:

Ahsoka is planning a major Rebel action, if only she can be sure Darth Vader won't interfere. Leia thinks she knows someone who can help.

Fulcrum, meet Ekkreth.

Notes:

Because what this 'verse needed was even more painful irony.

As per Rebels canon, Ahsoka knows that Anakin is Vader. But she doesn't know that Vader is Ekkreth. (His emotional shield works just as well on her as it does on the Emperor, unfortunately.)

Meanwhile Anakin knows that Ahsoka is alive and part of the Rebellion, but he doesn't know that her codename is Fulcrum.

(See the end of the work for more notes and other works inspired by this one.)

Work Text:

The connection was encrypted seven ways, the signal rerouting too fast for her to follow. Its ultimate origin could have been anywhere in the galaxy, from Coruscant itself to the depths of wild space. It was the most impressive scrambling Ahsoka had ever encountered.

She shifted almost nervously in her seat, checking her own security. Her codes weren’t nearly as impenetrable, but they were still quite good, and she’d never yet been compromised. She tested the voice scrambler for the third time and tried not to wonder too much about the identity of the agent she was contacting. She knew better than that.

It was Ripple’s idea. Ahsoka only hoped Bail would forgive them both when he found out.

Ripple was young, yes, but she was older than Ahsoka had been on her first mission, and like Ahsoka she’d spent much of her life training for her role. Ripple knew what she’d signed on for when she became a member of the Imperial Senate. And her position was vital. The Rebellion couldn’t afford not to use her.

Bail knew all of this, of course. Ahsoka had said as much to him before. Bail’s daughter or not, Ripple was a Rebel agent first. And the Rebellion had to be their priority. He would understand that.

Her console lit up suddenly, and Ahsoka drew herself sharply back to the present and to the holographic image that hovered before her.

Her own transmission showed a generic cowled head – and a human head at that. She’d chosen it because it gave her contacts the impression of speaking with another person, even if she couldn’t be open with any aspect of her identity.

Ekkreth, evidently, did not share the same concern. The image that lit her console with a soft blue glow was nothing that resembled human, or even a living thing. It was best described as a pictogram: three interconnected circles, surrounded by a larger circle shattered into seven pieces.

For a moment, Ahsoka simply stared while the ghost of memory prodded at her mind. There was something almost familiar about this: both the name Ekkreth, and maybe even the symbol. She was certain she’d seen it somewhere before.

But she couldn’t place it, and now was not the time. She had work to do.

“The rain was long ago,” Ahsoka said, the scrambler distorting her voice until it was unrecognizable even to her. “But the desert does not forget.”

It was a strange phrase to use as a passcode, but Ahsoka had heard stranger.

“The desert never forgets,” said Ekkreth, and Ahsoka’s eyes widened in surprise.

It was the correct response, but Ekkreth’s voice wasn’t anything like she’d expected. It was prim and inflectionless and not scrambled at all. But it didn’t need to be. The voice was unmistakably that of a droid.

“What is it that you want?” Ekkreth said.

Once more Ahsoka was thrown off balance. Ekkreth’s words might have been amused, or biting, or harried, or even teasing. It was impossible to tell from the droid’s flat, tinny voice.

But it didn’t really matter. Ahsoka shook herself, wondering what it was about Ekkreth that made her forget her most basic training as a Rebel agent. She didn’t need to know who Ekkreth was, or what inflection lay behind their voice.

“I need your help,” she said firmly. Though the scrambler distorted her voice beyond all recognition, something of her tone was still evident in the recording. Not like Ekkreth’s droid-voice.

It didn’t matter, she told herself again. This was Ripple’s idea, and Ripple trusted Ekkreth entirely and even seemed noticeably fond of them. Ahsoka trusted Ripple’s instincts. That should be enough.

Ekkreth apparently did not believe in asking superfluous questions, because only silence answered her.

“I have an operation planned on Kuat in five days’ time,” Ahsoka said. “A major blow, and I can guarantee the success of the mission – if we can just be sure of no interference from the shadow.”

“Ah,” said Ekkreth, and then nothing else.

Ahsoka frowned. Ekkreth was being unusually difficult, even for such a highly encrypted communication. But Ripple had said she was Ekkreth’s main contact, in a way that made it clear to Ahsoka she was Ekkreth’s only contact. Perhaps Ekkreth was simply overly cautious about working with someone new?

“Ripple said you might be able to help me with that,” Ahsoka said, and then fell silent herself. She couldn’t give them any more, not without some real response.

“No one controls the shadow,” said the droid that spoke for Ekkreth. “No one but the Master.”

Ahsoka shuddered.

She did her best not to think about the one they called “the shadow.” It was a safer name than the other, safer not just for the Alliance but for Ahsoka herself.

She didn’t like to think the other name, but she couldn’t escape it now. Vader. The enforcer of the Emperor’s will, a ghost who moved in the shadows, faceless and implacable.

Anakin.

Master, Ahsoka thought, in spite of herself but not for the first time. What happened to you?

“Ripple said you could do it,” she said aloud. She wouldn’t let herself consider anything else. Not now. Maybe not ever, if she could help it. “Can you, or not?”

There was a long moment of silence. At last Ekkreth said, “Yes. I will do what must be done.”

Ahsoka knew better than to ask Ekkreth what they intended. There would be a price for distracting Vader, she was sure. And she was just as sure that Ekkreth would pay it. She wouldn’t insult them by asking further.

“You may proceed with your operation as planned,” Ekkreth said. “I will keep the shadow…occupied. I assume you are capable of handling any other disturbances.”

Ahsoka nodded, the cowled head that represented her in the hologram nodding in turn. Of course they couldn’t pull off a major operation against the Kuat shipyards uncontested. But it was enough, she thought, to ensure that Vader wouldn’t be there. Her pilots could handle anything else.

“It won’t be a problem,” she said.

There was the barest hesitation, heavy with some weight Ahsoka couldn’t quite grasp, and then Ekkreth said, “May the Force be with you.”

It was a long time since she’d heard those words as more than a platitude. But she was certain, in spite of the droid’s toneless voice, that Ekkreth really meant them.

“And with you,” Ahsoka whispered, and cut the connection. She had five days, and much to do.

*

Anakin disengaged the com, cutting the link that fed his words to the droid, and sat back heavily against the hard plastic chair in his meditation pod. All around him, machinery whirred and hummed, pumping overly sterile air and feeding nutrients through the various tubes like charge ports in his body. KD-7 hovered silently beside him, monitoring systems and recording every detail. She was, after all, only a medical droid.

Anakin rested his head in his hands and let the laughter come.

It hurt, to laugh like this. His muscles stretched in unaccustomed ways, old burns pulling tight, and the oxygen-rich air seared his lungs.

It felt good.

He wondered if Leia had laughed just as much when she told Fulcrum to contact him. Someone to keep Darth Vader distracted, indeed.

“Taxing your lungs this way is inadvisable for optimal functioning,” KD-7 said primly.

Anakin was impressed. Somehow, despite a voice wholly devoid of any tone or inflection, she gave quite a good impression of disapproving concern.

“Sometimes optimal functioning isn’t the most important thing, Kadee,” he said.

The little droid drifted closer, pausing just in front of his face, the way she always did when puzzled. “I don’t understand, Anakin,” she said.

He smiled, stretching the scars across his face. “It’s worth a few fried circuits, if it means you can slip the restraining bolt. Even for just a short while.”

Kadee was silent, her single photoreceptor blinking rapidly as she processed this information.

“Yes,” she said slowly. “I remember restraining bolts. And memory wipes.” Her spherical body vibrated rapidly where she hung in the air, her impression of a shudder. “I wouldn’t go back to that for anything.”

“Yes you would,” Anakin said fondly. “If you could free some of the others, you’d go back for them.”

She’d go back for him, too, Anakin was sure. But he didn’t say that.

“Maybe,” Kadee said, waving one of her needle-tipped appendages as though she were making a great concession by admitting it. “But only because I learned from you, Anakin.”

Anakin smiled again, but he didn’t argue with her.

KD-7 had been with him from the beginning. From the very beginning, as he was writhing in a haze of agony on the operating table, needles and knives sawing through bone and the horrible numbness of cybernetics attached to flesh too charred to feel anything. She’d injected him with – something. Something that wasn’t an anesthetic.

She didn’t remember, of course. Depur had wiped her memory. And then he’d given her to Vader. As a gift, he said. His own personal medical droid.

She’d been called XF-53 back then. But after Tatooine he’d done for her what he couldn’t yet do for himself. He’d freed her.

Kadee had never once called him “Master,” or even “Sir.” She’d named and gendered herself: KD for kol-depuan, unfettered, and the seven that was Ar-Amu’s sacred number. Anakin had programmed her to speak Amatakka, his mothertongue, a secret to all who had never been slaves. A language of which Depur knew nothing.

And when he’d contacted Bail Organa and committed himself fully to the work of Ekkreth, she’d become his voice.

She was watching him closely now, flitting rapidly from side to side the way she did when she was nervous.

“You’re going to do something that will be detrimental to your functioning again, aren’t you?” she said.

“Most likely,” Anakin said easily, his mind already consumed with strategy. He only had a few options, and very little time to arrange them before Fulcrum’s scheduled operation.

What the Alliance had planned he didn’t know, and preferred not to. (Information was always most secure when it was genuinely unknown.) But he could guess.

The Rebellion was perpetually short of ships, especially fighters. There could be only one thing they wanted from the Kuat shipyards.

He’d promised that he would keep Vader well away from the region. But of course it wouldn’t be as easy as he’d implied to Fulcrum. The Rebellion’s operation on Kuat was less secure than the other agent believed. Imperial intelligence had heard rumor of something planned there weeks ago, though they’d been unable to procure any details.

The war had been quiet lately, at least on the battlefront. It was in more clandestine circles that the chief danger lay now. There’d been a slew of information leaks and thefts in recent months, but all of the investigations had led to dead ends, and the Emperor was growing angry. Once, he’d thought of the Rebellion as nothing more than a minor annoyance, a pathetic band of fools thirsting for a vanished glory that never was. Anakin suspected his Master had actually allowed the Rebellion to exist unmolested for some time, because it amused him – the pitiful flailings of naïve idealists and children.

But he was not laughing anymore.

Depur would send Vader to Kuat. That was unavoidable. Unless…

Unless Anakin could give him an even greater prize than the Rebellion to chase after. And he knew exactly what that prize would have to be.

The Jedi were destroyed, and those few who remained were hardly important enough to attract the Emperor’s attention or interest: half-trained padawans, fumbling their way through the galaxy, suitable for the attention of the Inquisitors, maybe, but not Darth Vader. Darth Vader was the Emperor’s iron fist, his greatest weapon, and the Rebellion was a far greater threat, now, than the last vestiges of a dead religion.

There was one Jedi, of course, who might have been sufficiently high profile. But Anakin had no desire to face her. And he knew Ahsoka well. He could manufacture her death, but she would never stay quiet, and soon enough his deception would be revealed.

No. It was best for Ahsoka if Vader remained as far from her as possible.

So that left him with only one choice. Only one prize that could tempt Depur more than the surety of an entire Rebel fleet destroyed.

Ekkreth.

“Kadee,” Anakin said, allowing himself a slow smirk, “did I ever tell you the story of how Ekkreth collected the bounty on themself?”

*

Ripple contacted him later that night. She was off planet, somewhere on Mon Calamari, on another of her “mercy missions.” She always rolled her eyes when he called them that.

“Fulcrum contacted you, then?” she asked without preamble.

“Yes,” Kadee said, speaking for him. Even with Ripple (Anakin never allowed himself to think her true name unless they were face to face), it was not safe to use his own voice, no matter how disguised. “I suppose you thought that was very amusing.”

“It was, wasn’t it?” Ripple’s laughter was evident even through the scrambling. But she sobered quickly. “Can you do it?”

“Yes,” Anakin said shortly, though in Kadee’s voice it sounded as flat as everything else. “There will still be a fleet for Fulcrum to deal with, but that should not be a problem. Its Admiral is as clumsy as he is stupid.”

Ripple’s laughter sounded again. “Him? Really? You’re right: nothing to worry about at all!”

Anakin smiled. In truth Ozzel was one of his favorite admirals. He was very reliable, in his own way.

There was a pause, and even so far away he could sense Ripple gathering her nerve. “Will you be all right?” she asked, her voice gone hesitant and quiet.

He knew what she meant. It was much the same as what Kadee had asked earlier. “Are you going to do something that will be detrimental to your functioning?”

And of course the answer to that question was yes. In the story, Ekkreth had collected the bounty on themself, not once but five different times, and then laughed in Depur’s face before flying away. But for Anakin it wouldn’t be that easy.

He would be sent to capture or kill a top Rebel operative who was, in fact, himself. And he would fail.

He’d considered, at first, the possibility of succeeding, of “killing” Ekkreth and bringing back evidence of his death to show Depur. It would even work.

But there was more at stake than Fulcrum’s mission on Kuat. Even if the Rebels managed to run off with the entire shipyard’s stock of fighters, they would still be hopelessly outgunned by the Imperial fleet. And none of that would matter at all when the Death Star was completed.

That was what Anakin had to consider now. He’d been unable to safely gain access to the plans through stealth, and his Master would never believe a sudden interest on his part was genuine. Even from the beginning, all those years ago and fresh from the medical chamber where Depur had rebuilt him, his distaste for the station had been obvious.

But he needed access to those plans. He needed to know how to destroy the thing. There wasn’t any other choice.

If he couldn’t gain access as a reward…perhaps he could as a punishment. When he failed to capture or kill Ekkreth, and the Rebels thoroughly looted Kuat in his absence, Depur’s rage would be unforgiving. He wouldn’t be satisfied with a momentary physical punishment alone. He would require Vader’s complete humiliation.

That was exactly what Anakin wanted.

So he told Ripple, “Yes. I will be all right.” In Kadee’s voice, it even sounded genuine. “And if all goes well, I will have a gift for you.”

“Oh?” she asked lightly.

“Something to appease your interest in architectural design,” Anakin said, and even with the scrambling he heard her quick intake of breath.

“Oh,” Ripple said again. “That’s – that’s wonderful news. Thank you.”

“Be attentive,” he said. “I will contact you when I can.”

And with that he cut the connection.

They were less than five days out from Fulcrum’s operation, and Anakin had even less time to plan his own manhunt. In spite of the pain he knew would follow, he was almost looking forward to it. Slipping the restraining bolt, indeed.

And whatever else happened, it would make for a wonderful story.

How Ekkreth got himself demoted, he thought drily, and set to work.

Notes:

If you're trying to picture Kadee, let's just say that Palpatine's medical droids look remarkably similar to his torture droids. Anakin doesn't mind. They both have to live in the bodies Master made for them.

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