The Pulse of the Republic

"Ugh Politics"

Quinn watched in apprehension as a small army of scanners, lasers, EMP's, and technical droids converged on the table where the Tracker was resting. They went to work, never actually touching the device, but she knew that by the end of this session, they would be able to tell if it was for real. If they thought that that the Tracker was a fake, Quinn knew that the chances of her team making it out alive would be slim. That's why these tests had to go perfectly. "Come on Bard, my old friend. Don't let your tech fail me now." She crossed her arms over chest to hide her nerves and observed the Separatists out of the corner of her eye. She knew that the majority of them had no idea what they were watching as the testing progressed. These lifeforms were politicians, senators, and businessmen. They wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a device that could track lightsaber emission, and a 217 engine. That didn't stop them from attempting to carry on a conversation among themselves, each trying to use more technical vocabulary than the last.

"Miss Quinn," said Nute, and she turned and smiled politely, signalling that he had her attention. "I see that the Tracker is quite a small device. That's excellent. Just excellent. But would we be able to make more of them? Or is it...a unique type of technology?"

"Though the technology used to make the Tracker is rare, it would be possible to eventually mass produce my product. At this point, it's one of a kind. But if we're given the right price, there is no reason why you wouldn't have our full cooperation. You could be in pre-production the very next day." Quinn was doing her job flawlessly; giving them as little information as possible, but selling the product with every word. "Imagine that...a Tracker for every general in your army. No more large scale battles with Jedi that are nearly impossible to control."

Nute's blinked, his eye lids sliding back and forth with an audible snick. "Indeed. We should have become allies long ago. If we had, this war might have been done long ago."

Quinn cringed internally at the word 'allies', but nodded, and gestured to the Tracker, which had come alive as they ran a system check. "It will soon be over my friend." Quinn clasped her left hand over her right wrist and slid her thumb inside her sleeve, tapping out the activation for the dummy code that she had instructed Bard to build into the Tracker. Dummy code is programmer's slang for an additional technical circuit board that is layered on top of the original design. The dummy code was Quinn's own personal fail safe, just in case the tests activated the actual coding of the Tracker and started exposing Jedi in the surrounding systems. Her eyes were fixed on the small black box as the tests read and re-read the data provided by the dummy code, and transmitted it onto the screen in front of Nute. 

His bulbus orange eyes slid over the data, widening at the sheer volume of information that the Tracker was providing. There was a 3D graphic map of the nearby systems that highlighted specific areas of lightsaber discharge, charts showing how recent the discharge was, and pages and pages of text that analyzed what type of lightsaber. "Amazing. So amazing." Nute breathed, scrolling through the data. 

Quinn smiled and set a hand on his shoulder. "Welcome to your future Nute. One that will soon be Jedi free."

Little did he know that the tracking data that he was reading wasn't actually leading him lightsaber discharge, but to some of the best Jumba juice bars in the galaxy. When Bard has been writing the dummy code to protect that Tracker from the tests, he had asked Quinn what data she wanted on the code, and she had given him a list of some of her favorite juice bars. "If it's going to be fake data, I might as well be able to use it for something once this mission is over."

***

The first transmissions of intell had started arriving a few hours before, and ever since, the clones and Obi-Wan had formed a circle around the blue monitor that cast ghostly shadows across one of the larger cave holes that they had all wedged themselves into. Tabitha, Ammada, and Gill had spent the last couple of hours taking tours of the entire facility, including a brief look at the factories. And the entire time, they had been transmitting all of the data that they observed, and all of the audio that the droid was telling them, up into space for Ahsoka to dissect. From there, she took all of the raw data and sent it back down to the clones and Obi-Wan in the form of half completed maps and layouts. It was shoddy system, but it was amazing the sheer amount of information about the base that they were able to gather.