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The worst thing about rebellions, thought Fox, was how messy they were. Asymmetric everything; command-and-control so often devolved until devoid of all meaning; rank reduced to nothing.
The second worst thing was that his wife wanted to start another one, and Fox felt powerless to stop it.
“Did anyone from the garrison see you?” he asked, breathless, releasing Riyo from a hug that was mostly a pat-down. She claimed she wasn’t injured, but she’d been less than truthful lately. It was only Fox’s old habit of monitoring emergency frequencies that had alerted him to the incident; he’d been halfway to the city in a borrowed speeder before she comm’d with the news that a meeting with a Separatist senator had gone sideways.
Riyo shook her head. “No. Nor did anyone else. And before you ask, Singh isn’t here. He’s in a safe location until Organa can arrange to extract him.”
Since the ordeal with Vader, Fox could no longer shout or even raise his voice. His throat remained thoroughly karked. But he had long since learned to mind the trigger press of his tongue, and Fox chose his next opening carefully. “Ignoring the fact that you lied to me and almost died, there is a real risk of muddying our objectives here.” Read: using Pantora to stage a clone exodus while also inviting fellow Imperial fugitives to tea was a fucking bad idea.
A consummate politician, Riyo tried to evade his meaning. “No one saw.”
“Riyo, there is a tea palace on fire and a platoon of engineers picking shrapnel out of the city’s main discharge channel.” Pantora was not a surveillance state like Coruscant, but that was hardly helpful here; the explosives residue could just as easily be pinned on imaginary rebels as Imperial hitmen. “Keep this up and the garrison is going to get popular.”
“I am aware.”
“And if Commander Squire smells Separatist spirit, his receptiveness to my personnel suggestions is going to shrivel up and die. I only just got green-badged onto base.” Squire himself had only just gotten over the shock of learning the Republic’s provost-marshal commander was still alive and, moreover, that he was now stumping hard for mass desertion.
“Few of us can move about as we’d like anymore. Captain Rex did the best he could.”
“Did he really?” Fox marvelled, sarcastic. He slumped onto the back of Riyo’s sofa, tired from the mere effort of standing and bitter about that, too. “I wonder I wasn’t informed, then.”
“You can ask him. He’s on the comm, waiting.”
Fox had been less than eager to thank Rex for saving Senator Chuchi the first time. His advance upon the commpad in the kitchen was practically prejudicial now.
When Rex finally deigned to step into the holo-field, he opened with a nonchalance that made Fox miss the RMCJ more than ever.
“It was another shadow—”
“I don’t care who he was,” Fox interrupted, cutting short his own thoughts of beasting that filthy poncho right off the captain’s back. “I want to know how he got within spitting distance of my wife.”
“It seems he had overrides for the city’s drainage tunnels and fire doors.”
“And you didn’t factor that into your threat assessment?” Fox had spent the whole war unlocking, hacking, or kicking his way through Coruscant’s infrastructure, never assuming for a moment that his enemy didn’t have the same capabilities.
“We had to balance resource with probability. I had four men,” said Rex.
“Then why didn’t you bring me into the op?”
Rex ignored the question. “How solid is that garrison of yours?”
“Don’t drag them into this,” said Fox, bristling at the implication. “You decided to bring him here.”
Rex shrugged. “It was Chuchi’s request. And it was Organa’s call.”
“And Plutonia was what, too uninhabited?”
“And you would have let her go off-world?”
That staggered Fox a little. Was that Rex’s assessment of their relationship, or Riyo’s? He couldn’t help looking over his shoulder to see if his wife had overheard. She had disappeared to bed.
By the time Fox knew what to say, he had to swallow the only retort he could honestly make.
I never would have known, because she never would have told me.
If the reconditioning had taken, if Thire hadn’t saved him from Palpatine’s medcenter, Fox might have been the assassin training a bead on Riyo’s skull. But that somehow scared him less than this new reality: she was hiding from him anyway.
“I’d get Squire to lobby for more sensitive pressure sensors in those drain water tunnels,” Rex said after a pause, an effort at neutrality steering his tone. “And for the city authority to improve its encryption.”
Fox nodded. He still couldn’t believe he was having this conversation, and that he had to be civil with a guy his wife trusted more than himself.
“I know you think I’m myopic,” Rex began suddenly. “That I get some thrill out of being an errand boy for insurrection. But I want this to stop. Really, I do. I’m sick of losing brothers and I’m tired of war.”
Fox raised a brow, unsure where this was going.
“I told her, when she first comm’d me about escorting Singh to Pantora. I told her what rebellions look like on the ground, when the shopfronts are shattered and tea is just dusty local water and you start flinching at the sight of every kid in case they grin and put their fingers in their ears.”
Fox’s experience with insurgency had been mostly theoretical. But he understood where Rex was coming from. Sometimes—not often, but sometimes—he was content with what the war had spared him.
Rebellions were ugly no matter what side you were on.
“Well, there was your mistake,” Fox finally huffed, uncomfortable, and unable to match Rex’s gravity. “She’s touchy on the subject of children. We’re still trying.”
Rex blinked. He reached for the transmission button. “Then I’ll leave you to it. I’m sorry this followed you home.”