"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.

She might have preferred to stick to her battle reaction now. "Yeah, so Kyp was able to spin it to make everyone feel better about what we'd just done, and Wedge, Gavin and I were the only ones bothered by it. Every word out of his mouth is a half-truth at best," she said, and she was maybe still stinging from some of the things he'd said personally, "and he doesn't care how it actually affects anyone. If the Vong strike back, it could be the fault of the Jedi again. And they'd have reason to. It was an unprovoked attack on civilians. Sure the Vong have been hitting us unprovoked, but that does not mean we should be sinking to their level."

"He wants to strike back at them, let them know we're not going to sit back and take it. If they're going to attack our worlds, they need to see that their people are vulnerable to us, too," said Jaina. "I don't disagree with that, but this is not how you do that!"

"This is a guy who trained to be a Jedi for like a week before starting to train under a Sith spirit or something so he could blow up a planet. No, I don't think he learned," she said dryly.

"And you know, maybe the public will look upon this favorably. Maybe, for some strange reason, killing a bunch of innocents as long as it's the enemy makes the Jedi look good. And then you have the matter where those of us who helped him put our careers on the line for something we thought was the right thing to do. I'm just a lieutenant, it's easy to get rid of me. But Admiral Kre'fey, Wedge, Gavin, they're all high-ranking and necessary and we already saw what Fey'lya was willing to do to people like Luke and Mara for going against his way of operating when they didn't."

"That's the important stuff," Jaina said. Truth be told Kyp had given her a lot to think about, but that wasn't something she'd want to rant about like she had been.