Anabeth: New Beginnings

Chapter 8 - Aftermath

Ana stared after the speeder for a moment when her commlink eventually ripped her out of her trance.
"Ana, where exactly are you?" Bo's worried voice came through the other end.
"I was chasing our guy, but he escaped. Mind telling me why the room with all the old artefacts from the Mandalorian wars with the Jedi wasn't guarded?"

"It's usually locked. Are you okay? Did he take anything out of the room?" Bo asked.
"I've had worse," Ana replied. "But whether he took something or not is yet to be determined."
"And the Senators?" Bo added.

"Nothing more than a little scare," Ana confirmed.
"We can go off lockdown then. I already have people working on the power and I'll send the all clear out as soon as they have it fixed."
"And send a repair and cleanup team for the hallway in front of the conference room too. The guy was really out to get me there," Ana informed Bo of the damage done to that part of the building.

After she had promised to send someone, Ana ended the call and began her walk back towards the conference room. She jumped back through the window, briefly startling everyone inside a little as their heads turned towards her.

"Ana!" Satine was the first to hurry towards her, quickly followed by Padmè. "Are you alright? You surely don't look like it."
She had to admit, the woman wasn't wrong about that. Her hair was all over the place, her robes were torn or burnt at places and most notably, she was sporting multiple bloody cuts all over her hands and face from the debris, and a deep one on her lip from where the man had hit her in the face.

The blood from it was slowly running down her chin, a fact that she only seemed to notice now tat her adrenaline was wearing off.
"I'm fine though," Ana assured them, pressing the sleeve of her robes to the cut on her lip as she continued to walk towards Obi-Wan and he others.

Senator Vamma was quick to offer her a tissue to replace her sleeve with when she reached her. Ana took it with a gratitude as she sat down at the table to catch her breath.
"Everyone okay here?" she asked, still concerned about everyone else more then herself.

"No one was hurt," Obi-Wan assured her. Just then, the lights finally turned back on. Obi-Wan deactivated his lightsaber that had been their source of light until now.
"You're sure you're okay?" Ran Corren went to inquire again upon seeing the full extend of Ana's injuries in proper light.
"Nothing a shower and a change of clothes won't fix, really," Ana assured them again.

"Why don't we call it a day for now and head to bed. We'll pick up where we left off tomorrow," Satine suggested. As everyone was in agreement, the room slowly began clearing out until there was only Satine, Padmè, Obi-Wan and Ana left.

"No sense in just sitting around, we've got work to do," Ana announced as she got to her feet again.
"You sure?" Padmè asked as all three of Ana's friends stared at her skeptically.
"I'll take a shower and change my clothes first if it means this much to you," Ana offered.

"And I'm taking you to see a med droid before that," Obi-Wan insisted.
"Whatever helps you sleep at night," Ana sighed in defeat.
"I'll go ahead and check on Grace. Don't stay up too late," Satine told Obi-Wan.
"And I should go and call Anakin. He'll be fuming if he hears what happened from Windu and not me," Padmè decided.

The four of them headed out of the door. After a quick check with the med droid, it turned out a shower and a change of clothes was indeed all Ana needed. After she had done that, she headed down to the vault with the artifacts where Bo was already hard at work running inventory.

"I have a list of all items that should be in here listed by the crate they were in. I already finished those two," she told Ana, pointing towards two stacked crates. "Let's sort the remaining items into the right crates and see what turns out missing."

Ana quickly went to sit down on the floor next to Bo to help. After another half an hour, they were done and had identified the missing item.
"A sonic pulsor," Bo stated.
"Somehow that doesn't give me a very good feeling," Ana admitted. "We need to find out who this intruder was. And I need to inform Windu."

"We should go and call him then. Hang on, what's this?" Bo asked, holding up an item that wasn't part of her list.
"The flash grenade he threw at me. We should keep that for the investigation, perhaps we can find out where he got it from," Ana replied.

"Good call. I can take it to be analyzed while you call Windu," Bo suggested.
"Sounds good. Lets get going then."
The two of them parted ways at the door. Ana headed straight for her quarters where she used her holo transmitter to call her former Master.

"Ana, why are you calling at this hour? Did something happen?" Windu's hologramm appeared on the transmitter.
"We had an intruder," Ana informed him. "Strangely enough he wasn't after the delegations though. He stole a sonic pulsor from the vault."

"A sonic pulsor?" Windu double checked.
"Unfortunately. And unfortunately he also got away. But we found remains of a flash grenade that Bo is having analyzed, and he was working together with a hacker. I'll work on extracting the code he used and forward it to you. Maybe you could have Anakin take a look at it, it falls more in his field of expertise."

"Of course," Windu agreed. "Will you and Obi-Wan be alright on your own still?"
"You can count on us. Apart from the incident tonight it has been smooth sailing. I'm sure we'll just pick up right where we left off tomorrow and it will all be fine," Ana assured him.

"Very well. But don't hesitate to call if you need backup."
"Will do," Ana promised. "For now I'll have to look at that code though. I'll sent it over as soon as I can."
"Good luck then, may be force be with you."
"And with you," Ana replied before ending the call.

She quickly headed out of the door and back to the command center. She sat down at the desk from earlier again and began taking apart the code the hacker had used and compiling it in a separate document.

Bo stopped by at some point to inform her that her analysis of the grenade had only revealed it to be standard issue, holding no clues to its owner. After a brief chat with her, Ana continued to work on isolating the foreign code for another hour until she was finally done. She quickly sent the document off to Windu before calling it a day and collapsing into bed.