"The meeting took a couple days, but the second was kind of a wash. Part of it was because Anakin had already taken off, part of it was because Kyp- I know I've told you about Kyp- had said everything he wanted to say the first day and stomped off midway through when he'd done as much damage to Luke's argument as he'd wanted."

Yep, still bitter.

"I was supposed to find Kyp using a beacon placed on his ship, try to play peacemaker and see if I couldn't bring him back into the fold. Because after what happened at Yavin and Uncle Luke being forced to go underground, there wasn't really a choice but to try to bring the Jedi back together."

"Of course. He even managed to try and twist Uncle Luke's own history against him, things like the war against the Empire," she said with an eyeroll. "Kyp wants to take a more active, aggressive approach to the Vong, strike back when they strike at us. People are getting tired of sitting back and doing nothing, and so they like what Kyp has to say, and he says it well."

And there was a slight pause as Jaina admitted, "And I'm still not sure I entirely disagree with him."

Reluctantly- very reluctantly- Jaina nodded. "If we'd waited to do anything about Yavin like he'd suggested, we would have lost everyone at the academy. Three Masters wouldn't have been able to protect the trainees and themselves against a surprise invasion like that. They got out because Anakin acted on his own against orders. We went through proper channels and all we did was waste time. We can't just keep reacting all the time."

And while she still felt a little guilty about vocally disagreeing with Luke, the fact that Anakin could guess meant she could at least admit it.

"Well, Kyp's winning," she said flatly. "And it's not just Jedi he's winning over anymore."

That hadn't even occurred to her. "I don't know," she admitted. "I guess it all depends on how the pieces fall."

"He sounds convincing, all right," Jaina said, trying not to bite the words out. "Except what he's advertising is a path that don't make us any different than the Vong."

She took a breath and said, "When I got to Kyp, he agreed to the meeting with Uncle Luke, but he'd said he had been on his way to find me, because he wanted my help. He had a holo, showing a Vong superweapon with enough gravitic power to pull fire straight out of the sun. In use, a weapon like that would make what happened to Sernpidal look like nothing. I agreed to go to the military with it, and Gavin and I went to Wedge Antilles, who by the way put aside a lot of personal differences with Kyp in order to agree to this. Wedge tried to get us to wait, to be sure we actually knew what that thing did, but we carried on and got Admiral Kre'fey to agree to an off the record military action to take out the superweapon because we knew the New Republic would never back us up. Because they advertise nothing but patience with the enemy that's wiping out entire planets and enslaving the people."

Hm. Still a little conflicted there.

She didn't want to answer yes to that. "We destroyed it," she answered instead. "And found out afterwards that Kyp was fully aware that it was a half-finished worldship. Vong civilian transport."

Good, so she wasn't alone. "Not sure, I haven't gotten any numbers yet. He made a point to say that it was still under construction and wasn't completely filled, so the death count wasn't going to be as high as it could have been," she said, and now her words were getting more clipped. "And he turned it into an opportunity to make one of his big speeches and call everyone heroes and talk about how much good they did by killing innocent people and he got applause. The only ones that seemed to have a problem with it were those of us he duped."

"I don't know. I'd had to shut down my ship at that point. I have no idea who actually did it in," she admitted.

"I took quite a few hits," Jaina said, shaking her head. "Had to shut down or I'd have vaped myself again. First big combat. I was at Yavin and at the skirmish over Coruscant, but... yeah."

"I had a couple minor freakout moments. I got over it. I'm fine," she assured him, more than willing to leave it at that.