The invites were tagged

Soon we'd have to report back to Padmé.

Where: Dee’ja Peak, Naboo.

Feeling: This journey’s almost over.

Listening to: Jardena.

Continued from here.

“Sure thing,” I said. I reached back, retrieved the surviving deck and got to work. The state of the data was poor, to put it mildly. We had audio, but little in the way of video. I worked through the mess, running filters to patch the corrupted data and fill in the gaps.

There was little of interest at first. Minutes and minutes of the happy couple talking about nothing. Then I started delving into the incoming transmissions for Bibble that Jardena’s gear had intercepted. A staffer at the Chancellor’s retreat had contacted Bibble and informed him that “the invitation in question had been collected and its embedded chip confirmed its identity.” We’d been marked.

I took my headset off. “Great news – the invites were tagged with a chip,” I said. “It never occurred to me that they were tracking the invites. That’s almost funny, considering I’ve been tracking Dormé through her use of marked credits. They might not know why we were at the party, or where we are now, but they know we’re around and that we were operating incognito.”

This will probably drive them underground, I thought. Or at the very least make them very circumspect.

“Hmm, not good, I’m surprised we both missed that. But would it be possible that he thinks that Padmé sneaked in and he didn’t notice her? And even if we’d known the chip was there, I doubt we could have removed it and still gotten in to the party. We should probably keep a very low profile when we go to pick up our stuff from there,” Jardena said.

“Good point,” I said. I turned my attention back to mining the audio. I played it out loud so that we’d both hear. Sure enough, Jardena was right about Bibble. Instead of assuming that the invites had been passed on or stolen, he was sure that Padmé had been at the masquerade party.

“I understand that it’s bad manners to record guests at events like this, but we should have, we should have made up some story about the need for security in times like these, it was the Chancellor’s house,” said Bibble. There was a gap in the recording, then he asked Dormé, “You were mingling, you were supposed to keep an eye out for her, didn’t you see her? Or at least whomever she came with? If she starts getting suspicious, we’ll be in grave danger.”

The conversation continued in the same vein, then there was some distortion and unidentifiable sounds. The last salvageable scrap of audio was Bibble saying, “Ah, my new friend is here.”

“If the ‘new friend’ is the Trandoshan bounty hunter, does that mean Bibble really does know about us,” I said. “Or could the Trandoshan have discovered us independently?”

“My guess?” she said. “The Trandoshan was probably hired to kill Padmé and he was the one who figured out we were here, he could have seen our speeder, or surveillance cameras, tracks, or even smelled us. But I don’t know if we were a side trip or he told Bibble. I don’t think Bibble knew about us, I think we would have caught some strange veiled terms and there would have been less talking if he’d known.”

She paused, then said, “I really hope he doesn’t know. If he did know that it was us specifically, there will most likely be repercussions, and probably fairly quickly. If he just knows that he was being watched, but not by who, then we should be ok. In fact, my alibi could be me working on my apartment to get it fixed and yours could be that you’ve been on Naboo, but resting and recovering from a knee injury you got during the blackout. I doubt your mom would blow your alibi,” she said, flashing a smile.

“No, but she’s going to point out that, should anyone else inquire, a blackout isn’t a very plausible explanation for how I got shot, had my ear drums ruptured AND blew out my knee,” I said, smiling in response. “Unless I live in a very rough neighborhood on Coruscant.”

“True,” she said with a shrug, “Wishful thinking.”

~~

It took several hours before we reached a small town where we could stretch our legs and refuel. When we got back in the speeder she mentioned that at our current pace we’d reach Dee’Ja peak at sundown.

“We could try to get a transport to Moenia tonight then go where we need to go early in the morning. Or we can stay the night here, then head to Moenia in the morning. Which would you prefer?” she said.

To be continued...

See Jardena’s blog for her point of view.

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