Chapter Text
Satine Kryze was not what Commander Cody had expected.
The democratically elected leader of the United Mandalorian System stood with her back to him, turned pensively looking at the city sprawling before them. The view from the wide windows of her private office was astonishing. The city was covered every inch in green; a necessity on a planet where humans could only thrive under the protection of the large bio-domes that encompassed their settlements. Almost every inch of real estate that Cody could imagine was covered in vegetation; from the vines that trailed over the South facing sides of the buildings, the roofs covered in thick grasses and startlingly colourful wildflowers, to the mosses and hardy ferns that clung to the shaded North facing walls of the city's towers, everything was alive with a freshness the citizens of Coruscant could only dream of. The air smelled sweet. Air travel and industry was heavily regulated, relegated to the areas outside the domes in order to better safeguard the fragile air quality of the protected city.
The planet of Sundari had been bombarded in so many civil wars between warring Mandalorian planets in the past two hundred years that the beleaguered atmosphere had given up its last breath before the time Satine's grandparents had been born. Luckily, by then, the conditions on the planet had been harsh enough that most people had already been living under a self-contained atmosphere. But for those truly impoverished citizens who hadn't had access to such a resource, they had exhaled their last even as the planet did.
Earlier in the day, Cody had paused at his General's side to study the statues and read the plaques in the memorial gardens that commemorated the catastrophe. It had been a brief moment of respite before another lengthy round of negotiations for a ceasefire between the Republic that Cody represented and the Confederacy of Independent Systems that he had been at war with began again.
This was the second time in as many years that Mandalore had been the host and Satine one of the chief mediators at these ceasefire negotiations, and her incisive insight and natural charisma had made a deep impression on Cody. It was on her invitation that he stood with her now, in her office on the planet of Sundari and overlooking its capital city of the same name, plotting what amounted to treason.
“The Heads of House Chorn, Eldar and Vhett have all agreed to formally adopt your men into their ranks,” Satine reported, her fingers drumming into her arms where she held them clasped behind her back. The leader of Mandalore, who had made a name for herself completing her father’s lifelong efforts to unite the warring clans and drag them into demilitarizing their heavily armed society, had martial training; Cody could see it in everything from how she walked to the way she stood now, her core stacked straight through her chest and her shoulders back, but supple in a way that suggested she could respond immediately to a change in her surroundings.
Every time Cody talked to her, he was astounded again by the contradictions she embodied: trained in the traditional martial arts of her people and with a wicked mind for strategy; but a pacifist who had famously refused to wear armor when she had come to claim the capital city of Sundari back from the Death Watch's iron grip. And what's more: she had succeeded.
She might not wear armour, but her will, Cody thought, was made of the strongest beskar. She looked away from the cityscape to focus her gaze on Cody, her blue eyes piercing.
Of all the leaders of the neutral worlds, it was only Satine that Cody could possibly trust to the planning of a mass desertion from duty like this. It was unprecedented in the entire two thousand year history of the Republic; never before had an entire army, from the commanders to the lowest soldier, deserted en masse. It would be a mutiny unique in history, never even imagined; that rather than taking power, they sought only to lay down their weapons and seek political refuge in another system. But then, Cody reflected sardonically, never before had the Republic attempted to win a war with a slave army.
They were about to discover that loyalty could neither be bought nor enforced with the mere threat of violence, which all the clone soldiers lived under the reality of every day in any case.
No one could guess what was coming; Cody was sure of it. The idea of an entire army uprooting itself from a war they were winning and fleeing combat had been simply unimaginable, laughable even, to Cody when Satine had first archly suggested it to him two years ago. And now, here he stood, planning the details of such an attempt for freedom.
“The House system has been abolished as a method of martial and political organization, of course,” Satine explained, her tone as sharp as her gaze, “our people have embraced the freedom of democracy. No one wants to go back to the bad old days of rule by an iron fist. But one's clan still has cultural relevance to people,” she clarified, her eyes locking with Cody’s. She seemed to find the acknowledgement she had been looking for there, and she was able to turn her gaze back to the city they were both studying. “If the clone troopers are formally adopted into these Houses, representing different planets in the Mandalorian system and with markedly different political views, it will further assure the population that you mean to defect from the Republic. It will mean more to people than mere citizenship vows; though these too, will be legally necessary, of course.”
“We will embrace both, and with gratitude,” he reassured her, his voice firm.
She flicked her gaze at him once, and seemed to take in his resolution at a glance.
“And your men are quite united in this?” she asked him, her voice gentler now. Her eyes had been pulled back to the horizon; to beyond the edges of the city, where the planet had been poisoned to desert by the wars of her ancestors.
“As united as we can be,” he answered. He had been working with Slick, Rex, Wolfe, Fives, Tup and Gregor to reach out to as many of the clone commanders as they reasonably could manage while still protecting their information security. They all wanted to try and get a pulse on how the clone soldiers would react to a mass defection from the Republic before they took such a drastic measure. His general impression was that the brothers were beyond frustrated by the utter lack of movement in the Republic Senate to provide them with citizenship rights, and at this point in time, would be willing to live on a nigh unreachable planet in wild space if it meant their futures could be assured.
The end of the war was approaching. With the most crucial planets that supplied the alloys and critical component parts for droid and weapons manufacturing controlled by Republic forces, the major hyperlane corridors controlled by the Republic and most of the Sith either slain or fled other than Count Dooku, it was only a matter of time before the war would be officially over and the Republic would have to finally answer the question of what exactly they intended to do with the two million plus clone army they had lab grown, trained, and commissioned to war, all two million of them without citizenship rights or families or homes to return to.
Cody intended to have the question of what was coming next for his fellow soldiers answered for themselves before the Republic could twist its way out of enacting any basic protections for him and his kin.
“We can’t exactly run a poll on an issue like this,” he said drily to Satine, coming to stand next to her at the bay window overlooking the city. “But the Commanders, marshall commanders and most of the majors have all heard about the plan, and are agreed to it. Other than the Coruscant guard, who are impossible to extract, we are all prepared to order our men to Mandalore. The brothers have been trained since babyhood to follow the chain of the command. If we order them to disconnect from any of the communications systems that can put them in touch with the Jedi Temple or the Republic command structure, they will do it without questioning. At least then we can get them here safely. We can conduct a vote on our future once we have reached the planet.”
“And for those that dissent, what will you do?” Satine asked, raising an eyebrow and studying Cody with a skeptical expression.
“Put them on a droid transported troop transport carrier with just enough fuel to get them to one of the ice moons in the Stewjoni system and tell the Republic to pick them up from there,” Cody answered.
Satine frowned.
“President Nechtan won’t be happy with that,” she said.
“He won’t,” Cody admitted. The Stewjoni were one of the neutral allied systems, a far flung planet near the edge of wild space where the hyperlanes ended. The ice moons that surrounded a gas giant in his system had an oxygenated atmosphere, but no wildlife except that which could survive beneath two kilometers of sea ice that covered the thermal heated waters. In short, nothing lived long on the surface. But it was within the survivable range for humans, and provided the Republic loyal clones wore their armour at all times and stuck close to the ship, they could wait on the moons for pick up for weeks if need be. The frozen wastelands had been used several times before by the Republic for prisoner exchanges, and as much as the use of their world for such affairs made the Stewjoni leadership worried about being pulled into the conflict they wished to be no part of, they had no real way of enforcing their distaste of the situation without taking military action-- which was the last thing the small, resource scarce planet wanted. And so, President Nechtan would be informed of the plan, make a press release expressing his outrage at the situation and then watch nervously at what kind of spacecraft would approach his system, praying fervently the whole while, no doubt, that his planet would remain left well outside the galaxy-wide conflict.
“And you're certain about this plan?” Satine asked him, pressing him not because she doubted him, but because she needed to hear his commitment was firm for the risk she was taking in this endeavour.
“I am,” Cody vowed. The strength in his tone must have convinced her, because she only nodded once to hear it.
Cody's path to plotting treason had been sewn in a thousand tiny insults, the indignities small and large accumulating into a moral injury so vast that he could no longer consider the Republic a body worthy of fighting for.
Had it started two years ago on Coruscant, when Senator Amidala had first approached him about the clone citizenship bill, and Cody had become suddenly jarringly aware that none of his men had legal rights in the very Republic they fought to defend? No: at that time, though dim, the fire of rebellion had already burnt in his heart. Farther back, then: had it started in a star ship above that first bloody battle of Geonosis, desperately coordinating troop movements as he realized none of the Jedi who had bought the clones to work as their soldiers, who were supposed to be his superiors, had any tactical experience or any clue what they were doing? But this wasn’t quite right either. At that time, the realization of the Jedi's faults came more as a resigned weariness and not the shock perhaps it should have been. He already had very little in the way of expectations for those in charge of his wellbeing. So, then, the only place left to look for the first tendrils of rebellion were in the creche, listening to the Wookie nursemaids singing songs of their destroyed forest homes to help the identical toddlers to sleep at night. The mournful growls must have touched something fierce and defiant in Cody’s heart, even as far back as then.
Satine shifted, the first sign of discomfort she had shown.
“Does Obi Wan know of this plan?” she asked him. The question, then, was personal, rather than political; he had her support no matter the answer.
The lines of Cody's mouth hardened, his jaw clenched.
“He does not,” he answered stiffly.
A half sigh from Satine, the slightest crease in her brow.
“He trusts you,” Satine remarked: a flat statement of fact, with no inflection of either censure or approval.
A hand gripped around Cody’s heart. He had to swallow his anger before responding.
“As I trusted him, once, too,” he replied. “But he knows, as well as I do, that some things go beyond trust or distrust.”
Their eyes met, a wave of understanding passing between them.
“Very well,” Satine murmurred, and turned from the window to face him fully.
“We cannot exactly sign official documents to mark our agreement.”
Cody smiled faintly in acknowledgement.
“But I give you my word,” she said, and passed him an ancient, bulky signet ring, holding it before him in her two fingers so that he could look at the seal that adorned it; a Mandalorian lily. “And my sigil. The mere ownership of that ring is not enough to grant you passage on a Mandalorian ship, but it will give any citizen who recognizes it pause enough that you could negotiate further. And it isn't the mere ancient symbol that it seems,” She blew on the ring and then brought it to her forehead, and the sigil glowed with a subtle light for a moment. She flicked at the edge of the seal, and a tiny data stick slid out for him.
“Bring it to your forehead, and the bio lock will be set to you,” she instructed him, holding it to his mouth and watching as a tiny light on the stick switched colours from green to purple as he did so.
"But the other clones--" Cody objected.
"It syncs to your brain patterns," President Kryze assured him. "And those are unique to you."
She passed the tiny data stick to him-- it was no bigger than a grain of rice.
"The slide is a direct link to my personal comm,” she explained to him. “It can be inserted into any standard communicator and it will connect you to a heavily encrypted line. Use it only in the gravest of emergencies.”
Cody bowed to her then, something he had very few occasions to do in his life as a soldier; but something he had seen Obi Wan do many times in various political or social situations to those he respected, or those he did not respect but had to feign to.
“My lady,” he said to her, using formality to cover the sudden well of emotion this brought him; the symbol of his freedom, his brothers freedom, held in her hands.
Satine laughed then, a gentle sound, and bowed back with equal respect.
“Surely the plotting of treason brings us beyond formalities,” she teased him, and offered her hand to him. “Please call me Satine.”
He took it, and she enfolded his hand in hers, turned his hand palm up. She placed the ring into his hand with great care and then closed his fingers around it.
“The next time I see you, Cody, I hope I will be speaking to a citizen of Mandalore,” she said.
“As do I, Satine, as do I,” Cody replied softly, and he cradled the ring jealously next to his chest for just a moment, before he slipped it into the inner pocket of his dress uniform and followed her out the door of her office and back towards the halls of the Senate for more rounds of peace negotiations that Cody already knew would prove ultimately useless.