Phewm phewm. BOOM! The small ship shook with the force of the explosion.

"We lost the rear engine, General!"

Anakin clenched the navigation controls and gritted his teeth at his Captain's words. "Do we still have thrusters?" he shouted, twisting to the side to direct his words at Obi-wan.

"They're only at sixty percent power and dropping!" the Jedi Master called back.

"Ahsoka!" Anakin yelled louder. "I need the hyperdrive!"

Even above the roaring of the dying engines and the piercing sound of the blaster fire that lit up the surrounding space with red light, Anakin could hear his Padawan scoff. "What good is it going to do you at this point?" she shouted, her voice somewhat muted from below the deck. "It uses the rear engine – without that, it won't take us anywhere!"

"Then work on the rear engine!"

A short, slightly muffled explosion sounded from behind Anakin, and he heard Ahsoka coughing. He glanced back to see her rise up out of the square hole in the floor, where she'd been attempting to make repairs. A flood of black smoke smothered the air around her and she leaned out of the cloud, her face and shoulders coated with black ash. "Work on the engines," she choked out as she yanked the goggles off her face. The eye protectors left a ring of clean skin around her eyes. "What a great idea! Why didn't I think of that?"

A flash of light caught his eye and Anakin jerked the ship into a tight roll.

All of Anakin's passengers moaned simultaneously and something rammed into the back of Anakin's chair.

"Oof! A little warning would have been nice!" Ahsoka yelled

Anakin grinned, any concern he might've felt evaporating with her words. "Just trying to keep you on your toes, Snips!"

A sudden shift in the Force warned Anakin that enemy missiles were about to be hot on their tail. Ugh, he growled to himself. This is a mess!

What had started out as a simple conveyance mission had suddenly swerved into danger in a way that only Anakin ever seemed to experience. They'd been on their way to the Destreg system with Master Luminara when they received a call that a Jedi required pick up from a nearby planet. Upon hearing that the Jedi was his old Master – Obi-wan – Anakin opted to take a small shuttle to pick him up, and brought Rex and Ahsoka to accompany.

However, what the Jedi Council apparently didn't deem important enough to tell Anakin but Obi-wan later informed him after he and Commander Cody were on board was that Obi-wan had been following up on an informant's tip that had unintentionally led him to Dooku.

Apparently, both sides had been caught off guard by each other and, while Obi-wan had been checking out the tip, Dooku had attacked the Jedi's waiting ship. To bring a long story to conclusion, Obi-wan's cruiser took heavy damage and had been left with no other choice but to flee and pray that Obi-wan would not be found on the planet's surface. Their prayers did not go unanswered, and Obi-wan and Cody remained safely undiscovered.

However, when Anakin and Company arrived and were leaving with the pair, Dooku's ship very rudely announced that it hadn't pursued Obi-wan's ship and attacked their small shuttle.

And they were currently winning.

Another explosion shook their ship as one of the missiles managed to clip the side of the craft.

As yet another alarm started to blare – oh, how Anakin hated alarms – Ahsoka half-dove, half-fell against one of the computers and brought up the alarm's source.

"Master! There's a breach in the outer hull! We're losing air pressure!"

Cody leaped up from the co-pilot's seat and lunged out of Anakin's vision, headed somewhere unknown to Anakin. Ahsoka quickly took the Commander's place.

"We need to land right now," Anakin said, leaning forward.

Ahsoka searched through their computer's database for nearby planets. "There. Arbra," she said placing a finger on the screen in front of her.

Anakin yanked on the controls to avoid another missile that barreled down on them.

"What do we know about it?" Obi-wan asked as he came up behind them. He rested his hands on the backs of their chairs to brace himself against the jerking ship.

"Well, it's close and we're losing atmosphere while under attack," Ahsoka said wryly.

"Good enough for me," Anakin said. "Where is it?"

Ahsoka pointed out the front window at a dot of blue and green to their right.

"I don't particularly fancy the idea of landing on a planet we know nothing about," Obi-wan stated. "But it seems to be our only option."

"Yeah, something tells me you'd fancy dying at Dooku's hand even less," Anakin snorted. He drove the ship faster and the entire thing started shaking with the force of their speed, as if it was about to suddenly break apart.

Obi-wan clenched harder to the backs of the chairs. "Just don't let me die at yours, Anakin," he warned.

"According to this," Ahsoka piped in. "Arbra is uninhabited, so at least we don't have to worry about crashing on a Separatist planet."

"It could be Korriban, for all I care," Anakin said, referring to the home world of the Sith. "It's a planet and we're in trouble."

As the ship made its shaky but swift way towards Arbra, Ahsoka rushed to the back of the ship where, Anakin learned, Commander Cody was attempting to patch the ship's hull breach, or at least slow the air escape. They didn't seem to be making much progress, for the needle that monitored their air pressure continued to drop.

Anakin whipped the shuttle into another spin and realized right away that that was a mistake. One of the flaming side extensions of the ship broke off and sent them off balance. "Oh, poodoo."

They twisted out of control as one big blazing mess towards the planet.

Cody and Ahsoka came charging back onto the bridge.

"The Count's ship is pulling off his attack!" Ahsoka shouted as she dashed for her seat and immediately strapped in. Cody and Obi-wan rushed to follow suit.

Anakin scoffed. "Of course he is! I think it's safe to say it was effective!"

As soon as they hit the planet's atmosphere, any part of the ship that wasn't on fire a moment ago was now, and they barreled in all their flaming glory towards the surface.

Anakin realized too late that the mountains they were headed for were taller than they had first looked. He jerked on the controls, but there was no response in the ship's direction. The bottom of the shuttle rammed the peak.

The power of the blow knocked Anakin's body forward. His head slammed against the control panel with hard enough force that he never felt the pain of the ship's crash into the field on the other side of the mountains.

A pair of small figures watched from the shadows of the trees as, less than a klick away, the flaming craft plummeted from the sky and shook the ground with its impact. A ring of thick gray smoke that rose from the soil around the crash site obscured the ship from their view.

"There can't have been any survivors," one of them asked. However, she shifted her position on the limb in which she perched and threw back the hood of her dark cloak; a movement her companion recognized as uneasiness.

Said companion left her own hood up, and kept her eyes trained on the smoke. She squatted comfortably on the branch beside her friend, her balance perfect. "Even so, we'll wait for the dust to settle and the fire to cool, and then send an assemblage out before nightfall."

The other nodded. "It should be easy enough to frighten away a few injured travelers."

"True. Though, you'll do nothing without my consent, understood?" the hooded one said sharply.

She received a nod in response. "Of course."

"Good. Alert Gaylen of our findings. He will know what to do."

As the one figure drop from the tree, the hooded one moved her gaze back to the smoky field and sat still as a sculpture, watching the ship with probing eyes that searched for any signs of life.

Hello everyone! Been a while since I've posted and I'm glad to be back in the game! :-) Hope you enjoyed the first chapter! Love some feedback and thanks for reading!