The Republic has fallen.
In the final days of the Clone Wars, Chancellor Palpatine died under mysterious circumstances. With the Senate struggling to retain a sense of unity, it was the perfect time for the Separatists to strike. And strike they did...
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"Hey, vod'ika – you still there, or did the transmission cut out again?"
Rex shook himself back to the present, but it took him a long moment to remember where he was, and what he was doing. Two or three days ago, depending on whether you used local time or Standard, they'd moved him to better quarters, and he was still adjusting to bunking away from his men. As for what he was doing...
"Sorry, Cody. Didn't get a ton of sleep last night."
"Too busy chatting with Commander Tano into the small hours of the morning, eh?" Marshal Commander Cody quipped, sympathetic but stern – his usual state of being. "You have be more careful about that. Our engineering does us clones a lot of good, but even we can't stay awake forever."
"Yeah, yeah. You can skip the lecture." As ever, Cody had insisted they restrict this transmission to audio only, but Rex found himself grinning anyway. "It just– all right, it might just be our programming messing with me, but everything – the lack of organization, the regime change, being the underdogs when we used to be kings of the hill – it feels so much better when I've got my Jedi only a call away."
" 'My'?" Cody's voice took on a teasing edge. "Sounds like you've got a crush."
"I do not! She's my vod'ika, same as I'm yours. You know as well as me how easy it is to get close to your commanding officers, 'specially when Jedi start honing their empathy the second they leave their growth tanks– uh, they're born."
"I mean, you're not even legal yet by Standard years, but with the accelerated growth I don't think Commander Tano would mind the age gap..."
"Keep playing like that, and I'll spend the precious few minutes we've got left on EF-4 before they cut me off recalling every time I've caught you mooning over General Kenobi," Rex threatened. "I've got seven just off the top of my head."
"That's different," Cody protested, his voice rising a fraction, which to Rex's trained ears was essentially a dead giveaway that his older brother was lying.
"Yeah, sure."
"Half the guys under the General's command were mooning over him by the end; all it took was saving their sheb once or sparing them a kind word when they were stuck in the medbay! None of 'em meant anything by it."
Rex smirked, feeling a little more awake, but his comm trilled the quick tune for a text-only message before he could needle Cody any further.
"What was that?" Cody asked, grateful for an excuse to change the subject.
Rex tapped the power button and cued up his inbox, scanning the two succinct lines in text to the new message with half an eye. "I'm needed in the briefing room in ten. New mission, apparently. Did you get all those documents I sent you?"
"Yup." There was the muffled ring of a hand tapping metal. "Artoo's got it covered, same as always. He's just decrypting the reports now."
"You still sure it's safe to use him as a go-between? It's definitely not regulation, and a few superior officers of mine'd take issue with sending our messages through an entity that could be sliced and used against us."
