31 BBY
It had been almost a month since Dooku had defeated the Trade Federation in battle, firing the first salvo in the war between him and Sidious, but he had yet to receive any retaliation. He still held onto the Trade Federation's frigates, but only as a bargaining chip for the upcoming court battle, which a date still hadn't even been set for. He knew the Republic's Courts were hopelessly bogged down and convoluted, but even so this level of sluggishness surpassed Dooku's expectations. It seemed the same forces that paralyzed the response to the Trade Federation's aggression were equally deaf to its pleas.
It gave him little comfort. Dooku knew it was only a matter of time until the Trade Federation tried to make an example of him using extra legal means. As of right now he was far from being in a position to outlast them in a cold war, much less win a hot one.
Fueling his concerns, he hadn't heard from Jango in weeks. The man was the best bounty hunter money could buy, having defeated Dooku's fallen padawan Komari Vosa in personal combat. Yet despite the Mandalorian's skill and reputation Dooku was getting worried. If he didn't hear from him soon, Dooku would have to assume the swamps of Dathomir had claimed another.
At least with credits from Hego Damask, Serenno's future was really starting to take shape. Power plants were under construction, fueled by plasma imported from Naboo, and expert geologists and engineers had been brought in from Mandalore. Perhaps unsurprisingly with their fanatical obsession for beskar, the Mandalorians had a remarkable degree of expertise in extracting rare minerals, and they'd already begun planning Serenno's largest ever mine. Soon the sacanium ore would start to flow to sites where steelworks were being planned with expert help from Raxus Prime. In just a few short years, Serenno would be the Galaxy's largest supplier of sacanium durasteel.
Of course, that would only be the beginning. Too much of Serenno's industry was dependent on logging, an industry that had dominated this world for the last hundred years, the lasting legacy of his father, Count Gora, who had ended thousands of years of feudal agricultural tradition with armies of imported droids. Of course the goal wasn't to suddenly end the industry, but to diversify.
Dooku didn't have the deepest understanding of economics, but knew two basic facts: Starving people couldn't work, and neither could unpowered machines. His planet produced plenty of food, and soon it would have a great deal of energy. With those two things in place, everything would rapidly begin to improve as the population discovered new avenues for creating their own wealth.
A large middle class would be able to pay taxes, where villages full of starving wretches couldn't offer Dooku a damn thing.
Of course, the investments Hego had made into Serenno were dwarfed by those he made into Raxus. It would be great for Serenno to be able to make its own ships, but it simply didn't have the shipyards necessary, and to construct them would take decades. Raxus Prime already had those shipyards since ancient times, they'd just long been in disuse. With the help of Damask's generous loans, it would take a fraction of the time to get them cleaned out and updated with modern technology.
In just a few years, his Outer Rim Alliance would be constructing its own ships, and Dooku's empire building could at last begin in earnest.
Dooku's optimism vanished as the emergency com line rang. He had a feeling things had been going far too well for far too long. It couldn't be Jango calling, he would have used the holocom on Dooku's ship. This line was for official emergencies. Dooku reached across his desk and answered, facing the projection of a man that he didn't recognise at all.
"Your Majesty." The man bowed so low he almost looked like his nose might brush against his knees. He spoke with a local accent, so presumably he was a native Serennoan even if he looked quite educated and gentlemanly. "I'm sorry, but I got this number from the Advisory. I didn't know who else to call, but-"
"Is this an emergency?" Dooku asked him.
"Uh, yes Your Majesty, definitely."
"Explain it to me."
"Uh… yes, Your Majesty, right away." He replied, though he sounded less sure of himself, and Dooku's compad pinged with several incoming files. "I'm Sel Lur, and I'm supervising the Mandalorian survey team that's mapping out our sacanium veins. The trouble is they found something. While surveying. Uh, a facility Your Majesty, a secure one that stayed intact when it was buried. From the time of the New Sith occupation, I believe."
"Will it block our excavation?"
"I don't think so, Your Majesty, no. But we did send in a survey droid, and it confirmed that there was what seemed like a stasis chamber, sir. That's why I insisted you had to be called, being a Jedi as well as our Count."
Dooku ordered the man, and soon was watching the footage on his compad. "Is it dangerous?"
"Well, I don't know Your Majesty. This facility falls outside my area of expertise."
Dooku barely heard him, focusing on the footage. Through the grainy lens of the hovering droid's single eye, it floated through ancient dust filled corridors and halls, bent out of shape and with cracked walls and floors that bent and twisted to reveal earth and boulders outside. The droid paused, paying particular attention to a detached skeletal hand, clutching what looked like a crushed blaster, with the rest of the body nowhere in sight.
Finally the droid's video feed picked up something, at the far end of what was likely an elevator shaft that had fallen flat. Amidst broken vials and smashed desktops, was what looked like the remains of an ancient battle. A skeleton, trapped in the teeth of a massive beast's horned skull, even as the dead man clutched a lightsaber. There was what looked like plasma scoring on the creature's neck vertebrae where the dying warrior had plunged his weapon into the beast's throat even as it crushed him between its jaws.
Dooku recognised the beast as a Tirra'Taka. Likely a juvenile. The living one he had used to defeat his brother Ramil was much bigger than this one, but the shape of its head was much the same. The adult was able to create earthquakes and carve through the earth using a mixture of the force and its natural strength, so perhaps this juvenile had buried this facility. Dooku knew the Sith had used them as warbeasts in the past.
"That lightsaber is why I thought the facility might be Sith." Sel said in a pleading tone after a long silence. "If I was wrong though-"
Dooku held up a hand to silence him, and continued to watch the footage.
At the very end of the recording, the droid found a sealed room, the door coated in a glossy sheen of carbonite. There was a keypad right next to it, its interface dull, its buttons bearing old numbers in Outer Rim Standard.
"That's the stasis chamber. Much like in our time, carbonite was mainly used for long term storage. Uh, I didn't want to risk opening it. They might have kept prisoners inside. But, er, it also might just be long food storage."
Dooku considered, before putting the device down. "Send the coordinates."
He didn't know if this really was an emergency, but it was definitely an opportunity. A living Sith could be very useful in his coming war against Sidious, and if not, then nothing was really lost in being cautious. Whatever was being kept down there, the last thing Dooku wanted was for someone else to claim it.
Volume Four of a Complete History of the Galactic Republic was essentially complete. The first book Tan'ya had written in any of her lives was a completed file on her personal device, waiting to be published. All it would take for her to release it was to get in contact with Sifo's old publisher, and see if he was still interested in the latest work of Doctor Difo Syas.
Tan'ya still hadn't sent that email, though. And it wasn't because she was nervous about the quality of her writing. Obviously, she couldn't perfectly replicate her former teacher's style, but two lifetimes of report writing and the reassurance of Master Sturn had convinced her that it was an engaging read, one that concisely summarized the Great Hyperspace War. Or at least, it summarized what little could really be proven about the war.
So much of it just didn't seem to make sense to Tan'ya, to the point where she just wasn't sure if what was recorded really was true.
Why had the Sith Empire gone to war with the Republic? She didn't know if she really believed they thought they could conquer a state that was dozens of times larger than their own. The Sith Empire at that point had existed for at least two and a half thousand years in the -at the time- unexplored regions of the Outer Rim, and they seemed to have done a fairly good job governing. They lived in an extremely hostile region of space, beset by Mandalorians, Hutts, and countless other brutal cultures. Low level raiding and piracy just seemed to be a fact of life in that area.
In the face of such an existence, a warrior culture of local lords with their own personal armies developed. Each Sith Lord ruled over their own world or worlds as an absolute monarch, carrying the title Darth. The ruler of this fractious alliance of independent states was translated to Emperor in basic, but his official title was Sith'ari. The exact scope of this emperor's power wasn't clear, with lesser Darth's constantly betraying their ruler for their own benefit and feuding with each other over seemingly petty concerns.
Under such circumstances, was it really true that the Sith Empire had gone to war with the Republic? Was it even possible that such a fractured and feudal state could fight as a unified front?
It was a contradiction in the historical accounts that Tan'ya found herself increasingly irked by. She had no first hand Sith accounts of the war, and no way to prove they had really considered themselves to be in a state of total war. Even the Jedi accounts she had were fractured and incomplete, with many of the Temple's ancient records being destroyed during the Sacking of Coruscant three and a half millennia ago. The only full manuscript she had access to was the Qel Droma epic, which though the people of Empress Teta thought of it as pure history, to Tan'ya it seemed more like a work of historical fiction. Certainly, the Qel Droma Epic was inspired by true history, maybe even based on it, but Tan'ya was fairly certain it was written for entertainment, not education, hundreds of years after the fact.
Talking to Sifo Dyas's holocron had only gotten her access to one additional source, being Mandalorian battle poetry from the era. Rather than looking at the war as a whole, the Mandalorians focussed on the Sith in individual battles, their tactics and weapons, how to defeat them and what to be wary of. It seemed like it was written to educate future generations of Mandalorians on what to expect when they faced Sith in battle. Tan'ya now had a very complete perspective on the Siege of Ziost, who the leaders in the battle were and how the Sith were gradually defeated in a grinding attritional campaign that lasted years, but no good idea of what the events leading up to the battle were and what effect it had on the outcome of the war. All Tan'ya could really assume was that it came near the end of the war, and it was the same Siege of Ziost that the scholar Jedi Master Gnost-Dural briefly referenced.
It was frustrating. The Sith had clearly played a major role in much of Galactic history, shaping countless other cultures, but very little was said about them as a people on their own terms. There was a gaping hole in the Galaxy's history where it seemed like the Sith should be.
Of course, Tan'ya was reluctant to speak with any Jedi about this. The fear and hatred of the Sith ran deep within the Order, and any attempt from her to mention this would only upset them.
So Volume Four had languished on her hard drive. It had been weeks since she touched it, and it felt like a shame for so much work to go to waste, but she couldn't see any way to continue. In the meantime she continued collecting sources, creating notes and preparing to start work on Volume Five.
With that on the backburner for now, most of Tan'ya's time was currently being taken up by a mixture of administrative concerns and Jedi training. As the Advisor to the Defence, she had a direct role in Serenno's governance and policy for the Planetary Defence Force was set by her. For now, Serenno had its own officer school, and a million part time personnel, serving in a mix of administrative and combat roles. Most of her weekend warriors were young men recruited from the lumber yards, contributing their wages directly to their home villages. They'd work in the yards on weekdays, and learn soldiering on the weekends; how to shoot, march, navigate, follow orders and all the other business of men in uniform.
Some had been recruited as full time sailors, for her small but growing navy. A number of officers from the defunct Outer Rim Defence force were running the training programs for that, having proven their competence at the battle of Naboo serving under her father.
Finally, the House Guard was now ten thousand strong. Tan'ya was confident calling them a professional, elite fighting force that would be ready to go toe to toe with any other comparable army the Galaxy had to offer if they could just sort out the equipment issues. Soon the sacanium mines would be opened up, and each man could be issued a set of blaster resistant armor that would give them a major edge on the battlefield.
Tan'ya was proud to say that all of this was delivered under budget as well.
Once they had the rest of the Hammerheads available, Tan'ya was thinking it might be time for some Serennoan warriors to make for the stars as a private security firm. They could get some experience on the battlefields of the Galaxy, as well as make a lot of money.
Already the offices of the Advisory were receiving complaints from the Lumber Yards, about men who refused to do dangerous work anymore, unwilling to risk their weekend pay. Tan'ya sympathized with their struggles as businessmen, but ultimately the logging industry was something that she aimed to vastly reduce in the long run. It had been a stop gap measure, something the population had been forced to turn to after the droid based agricultural revolution forced them off their farms during Gora's reign. Now that Serenno was in good hands again, it was time for people to learn how to survive as mechanics, bricklayers, tilers, carpenters, technicians, pilots, weaponsmiths, media personalities, bankers, and all the other countless roles of a varied and vibrant economy.
Ah, glorious competition.
That was for the future, though. For now, it was almost a relief for Tan'ya to know that the future was looking bright. No one could solve all the problems of the Galaxy, but maybe she could set the people of her homeworld on the path to do it themselves.
She earnestly wished she could spend more time at the Advisory then she did, but she had Jedi lessons to focus on.
Her teacher was the Green Jedi, Master Sturn, and he was a decent and understanding man. He seemed a little softhearted to Tan'ya, but that same compassion and flexibility was probably why he was willing to teach her on Serenno, rather than demanding she attend her classes on Indinoor. Her father had wanted her to have a private tutor, but apparently Master Narec had insisted there just weren't enough Masters for that to be at all fair. As a result, the Palace now had one extra permanent guest in addition to her teacher, another supposed child prodigy named Vai.
There really wasn't much Tan'ya could say about Youngling Vai. The former child of the Mandalorians was smaller than her, despite being the same age. Pale from a lack of sunlight, with straight black hair down to her ears and emerald green eyes. She was quiet, and seemed to avoid conversation with Tan'ya, shying away and answering any question with just a single word and a bowed head, hands gripping her shirt uncomfortably. Tan'ya was much more powerful in the force, but Vai had an amazing level of control for someone her age.
Tan'ya's mother had encouraged her to try and make friends with the girl, but so far there had been no opportunity. After each lesson in the garden with Sturn, Vai would rush away to hide in her room. The only one she spoke to at all was Athemeene herself, who had made sure that the girl had a seat at the dinner table each night, though Vai only spoke when engaged in conversation. After each meal, Vai would thank Athemeene and run away to her room.
Perhaps the biggest change in the palace, was Tan'ya little sister becoming a toddler. Madale was a polite, well behaved child, who always said please and thank you, and followed Tan'ya around constantly. Some days Tan'ya would spend an hour tapping away at her computer only to look back and find Madale laying on her bed, watching her sister working. Sometimes while Sturn was meditating with his students in the garden, Madale would waddle over and sit down to start picking at the grass right next to them.
At first Tan'ya had thought she just wanted attention, but then Athemeene had explained, "She wants a girl closer to her own age to copy. She's trying to learn to be more like you."
Initially, Tan'ya thought nothing of it. Then after a little while she started to become worried. Tan'ya wasn't exactly a normal child, or even a good role model for girly conduct.
"Is there… someone else, Madalee could learn from?"
Athemeene smiled at her daughter gently. "Does she have any other older sisters?"
"...But I'm not…" Tan'ya trailed off, hesitating.
Athemeene crouched down to look Tan'ya in the eyes. "You're not what, sweet child?"
"I'm not someone she should copy." Tan'ya finally said, surprising herself at how bitter she sounded. "I'm not normal." And she wasn't. Tan'ya was a forty year old Japanese businessman, trapped in the body of a young girl. She was a war veteran. If Madale was to grow into a healthy young woman, she needed a role model who was a healthy young woman.
Athemeene pulled Tan'ya into a hug. "Who said that to you, Tan'ya? You are normal."
"No, I'm not." Tan'ya disagreed firmly, pulling away and looking into her mother's eyes. "We both know that I'm not someone Madalee can emulate."
Athemeene looked like she was ready to disagree, but something about the look in her daughter's eye froze the words in her throat. Eventually, she said softly, "...Every girl thinks they're different. Every girl just wants to be normal, and every girl wants to think they're not like the other girls."
"...Mother, please." Tan'ya stayed firm. "You've raised two other children. You know there's something wrong about me."
"It's not wrong!" Athemeene immediately defended. "You're not a problem, or anything like that at all, you're just-"
"But I am something different." Tan'ya insisted. "And we both know it."
After a long silence, Athemeene put her hands on Tan'ya's shoulders, rubbing them with her thumbs. "Not wrong, just different. The same in some ways, but yes, very different in others." She smiled, with only a hint of sadness. "Your brother never taught himself to read, and I don't think your sister will do that either."
Nodding, Tan'ya looked away. It was easy for a toddler to teach herself to read with two lifetimes to tell her how.
"Oh sweetie." Athemeene pulled her daughter in for another hug. "You don't need to worry about setting a bad example for your sister. I'm sure that one day you'll find that you two are more alike than you think."
After a moment, Athemeene shared one more sad smile with her daughter, then left.
When Tan'ya stepped out into the hallway she was surprised to realize there was a mind nearby in the Force, shielding itself. She turned the corner to find Vai's back retreating out to the main hall.
Tan'ya scowled as she watched the girl run away, shocked that she could be so rude as to spy on a private moment of her host. At that moment her holocom pinged, and she glanced down to see instruction from her father to meet him in his office. Glancing at where the other youngling had been, Tan'ya turned on her heel to climb the stairs to her father's office.
She found him seated behind his desk, waiting for her. "Come in, close the door."
After locking the door in case of any more prying ears, Tan'ya took a seat, feeling slightly nervous as she regarded her father. Part of her felt like she was about to receive a stern talking to, when he took out from under his desk a small red crystal.
Tan'ya immediately recognised it as a kyber crystal from the way it resonated in the force, though she had never personally held one before. Her training had taught her that each Jedi formed a special bond with their kyber crystals, which allowed them to commune with the force, aiding each other in battle. These crystals weren't just pretty gems, but a bizarre kind of organism capable of reproducing on a long enough time scale. Kyber mines allowed to rest would gradually repopulate over the course of centuries, and so the Jedi Temple on Coruscant was able to sustainably harvest crystals from the planet Ilum for millennia. Reading about them, Tan'ya couldn't help but wonder if it was possible to plant them somewhere else and in time reap the rewards.
The one in front of her was a bled kyber crystal. Rather than bonding with an individual and communing in the force, a dark sider could reportedly dominate the crystal forcefully, allowing them to use any crystal they liked, but turning any they touched red as though the stone itself was bleeding. Over time these red crystals and lightsabers came to be seen as a powerful symbol of the Sith, who had no regard for the feelings and thoughts of stones.
Regardless of Tan'ya's thoughts on the subject, the fact that her father was holding one was curious. She knew his to be blue, and could see his lightsaber still at his hip.
"Where did this come from, Father?" Tan'ya asked, curiously.
"The Mandalorian survey team uncovered a Sith fortress buried under the earth. Likely dragged below by the Tira'taka."
Tan'ya hesitated at hearing that. Of course she'd heard that her father had ridden the Tirra'taka into battle against Ramil, but it had sounded nearly mythological at the time. There were many witnesses to the event, so she'd supposed it to be true, but to hear her father speak of the dragon that in legend held the world together and punished evil with earthquakes left her feeling slightly cynical. Like they were discussing a fairytale as an ordinary part of history, when there was a much more plausible explanation available.
Hego had said that a sith assassin had killed Sifo Dyas, and here her father was with a red kyber crystal. The billionaire had claimed her father had nothing to do with Sifo's death, and Tan'ya wanted to believe him, but still wasn't quite willing to confront her father about what really happened.
"Something wrong?" Dooku asked, studying her face carefully.
"...The investigators report said that a Sith assassin was responsible for Sifo's death." Tan'ya said at last.
He paused, face frozen in a complex mixture of pain and concern, before he said. "Who shared that with you?"
"Asajj had a copy." Tan'ya lied, firmly keeping her mind closed, as she felt her father's force gently circling the edges of her control.
"I see." He said at last, frowning. "Yes, it's true. But this is not that kyber crystal. As I said, this comes from the lightsaber of a long dead sith." He turned on the holoprojector of his office holocom, and displayed footage of a droid probe exploring what appeared to be a buried facility. As he described, the probe eventually found a scene of ancient combat, with the bones of a man and an enormous beast large enough to carry someone in its jaws.
The skeleton was clearly an actual dragon, with wings and sharp spines growing down its back. "It's massive." Tan'ya murmured in disbelief, shocked at the scale of the creature. It was the size of a humpback whale!
"The one I called on was much larger." Her father said, matter of factly. "As big as Ramil's airship."
Tan'ya turned to him, eyebrows shooting up in surprise. "So it's true. You really rode the Tirra'taka into battle against your brother? As a liberator?"
"No, I didn't ride it. I merely… called on it." Dooku said. "But it had been corrupted by the Dark Side, a mad beast that threatened your Aunt. It had to be put down after the battle."
A miserable fate for the legendary Beast that Holds the World Together, or so Tan'ya thought. Looking at the bones of the dead creature, she could only remember the same feeling of being a child once and learning about dinosaurs for the first time.
Pushing down the sense of childish interest, Tan'ya looked back to her father. "Why show me this?"
"As a historian, and the Advisor to the Defence, this concerns you directly." Dooku replied, a smile tugging at the corners of his normally stern mouth. "This buried facility has a carbonite stasis chamber still sealed inside. I've been to the site personally and confirmed that it was safe."
It was a little bit too much to call Tan'ya a historian. She certainly didn't have any official qualifications, which made her feel a slight flicker of nervousness as she asked. "What was inside?"
"According to its logs, it stores a number of biological samples from Serenno, some plants and animals, but of particular note was a clutch of eggs, that are fertilized, still living, and force sensitive."
Force sensitive? Had the Sith captured some Rodians or Trandoshans to use as slaves? No, the facility was collecting native flora and fauna samples. Did that mean? "Tirra'taka?" Tan'ya asked, almost disbelieving. "They were collecting Tirra'taka?"
Dooku said, "The one I met was female, and had escaped captivity. Likely, this is the facility where it was raised and modified with sith alchemy. These eggs may be its offspring. The dead one may have been its mate, or an offspring that called its mother for help. When the voice of her child was silenced, the mother buried the whole facility in her wrath."
It sounded like a plausible theory to Tan'ya. It was said that when the Sith conquered this world more than a thousand years ago they had corrupted and rode its natural guardians into battle. Before then the original Tirra'taka had roamed all across the planet, ruling the peaks and plains as apex predators that even the humans feared and respected. For the primitive humans of Serenno, the Tirra'taka was a powerful symbol, and had only become even more so with the passage of time and the growing of myths.
Now the Tirra'taka wasn't just an ancient guardian beast, but the Beast that Holds the World Together.
"If they've been modified into beasts of war, they may be dangerous." Tan'ya cautioned. "But…"
Dooku watched her, raising an eyebrow as he waited for her to speak.
"But they're a very important symbol of our people." Tan'ya finally said. "It could only increase the prestige of our house to tame them."
"Then what is your advice?" Dooku asked, patiently.
"...We should try rearing one, and keep the rest in carbonite. As a juvenile, the risk would be minimal and the potential benefits not inconsiderable."
Dooku nodded, still gazing at his daughter. "And the rest of the facility? Such a dangerous and corrupting ruin would fall under the purview of the Jedi Temple."
"...Yes, and we are Jedi, as well as the rulers of Serenno. This facility represents an important part of Serenno's history. The kyber crystal and the lightsaber it came from, as well as any artifacts recovered, should be preserved and studied." Tan'ya said, speaking firmly.
Dooku nodded. "Then I trust that you will handle this? You will coordinate the archaeologists, the rearing of the beast, and make sure it's all handled in good order?"
"Yes, father."
Dooku smiled. "Then see to it."
On top of her other duties? Well, Tan'ya supposed that working on Volumes Four and Five could take a back seat for now. "I'll get started right away."
As she was leaving the office, Tan'ya had a sudden thought regarding her history book. Hadn't she just been concerned about a lack of available Sith Source Materials? If even a single datacron was recovered from this facility, then it could be invaluable as a historical text.
And if the Tirra'taka proved itself to be tameable, it might even make a great asset. With its help, could she one day fly again? Forcing down a flutter of excitement, Tan'ya reminded herself that safety was the highest priority. Flight may have been one of the few pure joys of her second life, but it was still a long way off in this life even if the creature wasn't a threat. Who knew what the Sith alchemists had done to the minds of Tirra'taka, let alone how long they would take to grow?
Still, despite herself, Tan'ya couldn't help but hope that maybe this would all go well, and she would get to experience the wind on her face once more as the horizon stretched out before her.