Jedi Fugitive (The Bad Batch)

14

Astera:

Our escape from the Empire on Bracca had been short lived. It felt like only minutes before a shuttle had taken off after us, firing like their lives depended on it. Tech threw the steering controls to the side, forcing the ship into a spin to avoid the cannon's lasers. The pounding heartbeat and heavy breathing had eased as soon as we'd taken off, but with Crosshair determined to shoot us down and Omega gone, capture was the least of my worries right now.

"Any sign of that bounty hunter?" Hunter demanded, grimacing as the effort to speak pulled at the wound in his chest. Echo and I had had to pull off his armour to bandage him properly, and he still insisted on sitting in the cockpit with the rest of us, determined to find the bounty hunter with Omega. I sat on the opposite side of him, searching through the Imperial database for any files with Cad Bane's name on it. Which was annoyingly more difficult than it had to be.

"The only ship on our scanners is Crosshair's," Tech responded distractedly, focusing on flying the ship, "and he is right on top of us."

"It's getting hot back here!" Wrecker yelled to us from the gunner's room as the ship took another shot to the engines.

"Prepping to jump," Tech answered promptly, starting to calibrate the hyperdrive.

"Not without Omega!" Hunter objected, spinning his chair in indignation as he registered the words.

"The bounty hunter who took Omega is long gone," Echo countered forcibly. "We'll have no chance of finding them if Crosshair shoots us down!"

"Rear deflector shields are failing!" Tech reported urgently from the pilot's seat, supporting Echo's words. The indecision on Hunter's face was clear; torn between holding out for Omega, in case she was here, and leaving Bracca to find her another time.

"If we don't jump now, we're not gonna survive long enough to find her," I warned him, the ship jolting forward as another bolt hit us from behind. Hunter's shoulders slumped down subtly, and he sighed.

"Make the jump," he said reluctantly. Tech nodded sharply in affirmation, throwing the hyperdrive's lever forward and blasting us into hyperspace.

Cad Bane's name finally flashed across the screen; I opened up his files without a second's hesitation. "Found him."

The clones clustered around me, staring at the mugshots of Cad Bane on the screen. The files were old, from the Republic database, but it had all the information we needed. "The bounty hunter we're looking for is Cad Bane."

"That's him," Hunter affirmed from right behind me.

"He had multiple run-ins with the Jedi and was responsible for attempting to abduct Chancellor Palpatine." I couldn't help a hard edge creeping into my voice. Several of those "run-ins" had ended up involving Obi-Wan and Anakin, Ahsoka and I along with them. Bane had almost killed Ahsoka by ejecting her out an airlock in the early days of our apprenticeship, kidnapping Force-sensitive children after stealing a holocron straight from the Temple, and even holding me hostage at one point. It had become a somewhat personal vendetta against him for the four of us, the ease of which he'd managed to evade us. No one else had managed to do it like he had.

"First the bounty hunter on Pantora, and now this guy?" Wrecker exclaimed, oblivious to the angry set to my words. "Why are they after the kid?"

My eyebrows furrowed. So they'd had run-ins with bounty hunters before, on other planets. And Omega was the reason why. I didn't know much about her, or her history, just that she was a clone, probably the only female one to exist, and the Batch had picked her up off Kamino before they'd defected and run away. But clearly, she was of more interest to the Kaminoans than they'd thought.