Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/5470769.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      F/M, F/F
  Fandom:
      Star_Wars:_The_Clone_Wars_(2008)_-_All_Media_Types
  Relationship:
      Padmé_Amidala/Anakin_Skywalker, Ahsoka_Tano/Original_Character(s)
  Character:
      Ahsoka_Tano, Original_Female_Character(s), Anakin_Skywalker, Padmé
      Amidala, Sheev_Palpatine_|_Darth_Sidious, Original_Sith_Character(s)
  Additional Tags:
      Alternate_Universe_-_Canon_Divergence
  Stats:
      Published: 2015-12-20 Updated: 2018-03-20 Chapters: 12/? Words: 32307
****** The Youxia Bond ******
by Narsil
Summary
     Having refused to rejoin the Jedi Order and seeking refuge in the
     backwaters of the Outer Rim from the bounty hunters on her trail,
     Ahsoka Tano encounters a Force-user with a very distant past and an
     equally uncertain future. At least that's something that the newcomer
     shares with the rest of the galaxy.
***** Endings and Beginnings *****
Chapter Notes
     In honor of a new Star Wars movie, my first Star Wars story. For
     those that follow my other stories, I know, I said I wasn't going to
     start any more stories until I finish off most of the ones I already
     have. In my defense, I've been inspired by some fine fanfic and the
     thought of the new movie (which I'll actually see in a few days). And
     also in my defense, except for today this chapter hasn't taken any of
     my usual writing time from my other stories, I've only worked on it
     after finishing my usual daily quota and if that quota wasn't met,
     then this story didn't get worked on at all — and that's how I plan
     to continue. Still, while I haven't read all that much Star Wars
     fanfic, I like to think that I've come up with a rather different way
     of handling the problem of Dark Side temptation, we'll have to see.
     Also, at the moment the rating is a warning of what's to come more
     than anything, and will probably go up along with additional archive
     warnings, fandoms, categories, relationships and characters as they
     become appropriate. But be warned that this story will eventually
     include F/F and possibly M/F/F. If that isn't your cup of tea, you'll
     want to avoid this.
     As a not-so-side note, while I've seen the prequel movies, the Clone
     Wars movie, and own and am watching the five seasons of the Clone
     Wars cartoon, I am fine from finished with that last. There's
     Wookieepedia, of course, but if anyone notes continuity/setting
     errors let me know and I'll do some more research and perhaps update
     the story.
See the end of the chapter for more notes
Jenni stepped through the permanently irised open door, shook the snow off her
sleeping bag-jacket, and brushed off her jeans, stamped the snow and mud off
her hiking boots, then started forward again, twisting her head to play the
beam from her flashlight-headband about what had been the foyer of the Youxia
central headquarters, nostalgia from her and the two women and two men
following her — the other four Dancers of her Bond — mixing until she couldn’t
tell where hers began and theirs ended. She was a little surprised — true,
there was dust everywhere, but she’d expected at least a few bodies. It may
have been over four years since the neutron bombs had wiped it clean of life
inside and out and ended a thousand years of peace at the same time, but there
should have been clothed skeletons at least. Maybe the Slaves didn’t want
decomposing corpses stinking up the place while they ransacked it.
A thousand years, while the League had ended the suffering of the poor if not
poverty itself, while mankind had terraformed Mars and then Venus, had even
reached out to the nearest stars with the newly-invented warp drive. All gone,
replaced by death, chaos and terror as the Void Slaves and their secretly armed
allies seized control of an Earth that had forgotten how to use the arms it
didn’t have.
At least the running will be over, if not the way we’d hoped, Jenni thought,
her nostalgia morphing into grief at the memory of the long months on the run
stretching into years as propaganda broadcasts had displayed the final battles
of bond after bond that hadn’t been gathered in the Mountain for the holiday
celebrating Ming Song’s discovery of the connection to the Tao, and how to both
directly guide and be guided by it. Those bonds that hadn’t become as skilled
as her own bond at muting their presence in the Tao before being caught and
turned into one more blow to the morale of a conquered Earth.
Feeling the concern coming from her bondmates, she shook off the grief.
Remember, whatever happens, The Party never ends. Taking a deep breath and
shifting her backpack to a (temporarily, after over a week of hiking) more
comfortable position, she sent, “Come on, people, no time for sightseeing. I
can’t imagine the Void Slaves don’t have Central under observation, so however
isolated the Mountain might be we’re on the clock. Let’s give them a proper
welcome.”
Grim amusement came back, and the five Dancers broke into a trot toward the
elevator banks; with no power the elevators wouldn’t run, of course, but it
would be faster to cut through the floors and make their own way down the
shafts. And they could leave a few surprises along the way.
                                      /\
The others were just laying down the last circles of crushed crystal-permeated
paint as Jenni sorted out crystals they’d gathered from the hidden storerooms
(and hadn’t they been relieved that the Void Slaves hadn’t found them) when a
soft alarm went off by their stacked backpacks — the first of their booby traps
had gone off. Everyone paused for a moment and looked up, then returned to
their tasks at perhaps a slightly faster pace than before, just shy of
hurrying.
A few minutes later Jason sent, “I’m done!” A chorus of agreement from the
other three followed.
Jenni leaned back on her heels. “Ithinkthe large crystals I have will do the
job. Everyone switch circles and double-check the work, and I’ll get them laid
out.” As the other four carefully double-checked their work she inserted a
large crystal in the depression at the center of each spiral and at the
cardinal points of the circle inlaid into the floor in the center of the room,
a huge crystal at the center, and then started double-checking her own circle
for any breaks from four years of neglect — nothing.
The room shook as the second booby-trap went off.
“Okay, we’re out of time. Drop what you’re doing and get into position.”
The four knelt at the open ends of the spirals they’d painted, and as Jenni sat
half-lotus style and swept her headband’s light around the room one last time
... but this time focused on the people she loved rather than the room itself:
tall, red-headed Henrik who’d been ‘gifted’ the nickname of ‘the Hammer’ by the
girls of the Bond, and not because of his blacksmithing hobby; bronze Kaulana,
he of the gentle hands and easy Island smile; almond-eyed Yua, the eager,
playful one, with a tendency to leave nip marks; and raven-haired Sacagawea,
who got as much pleasure from a night of cuddling as wild heights of passion.
Yes, their bond had had a good run — centuries long as Dancers had cycled
through, even if only Jenni and Henrik had been been members when the Void
Slaves struck, and Jenni only just barely — but it was over now. If David and
Usagi’s calculations were correct, in a few moments it would be over for every
Flame that burned bright in the current of the Tao. Well, except for those
Buddhists that moved to the Asteroid Belt so they could stare at their navels,
anyway. But hopefully with the Void Slaves gone the people of Earth will be
able to deal with their non-Awakened followers.
Breaking the silence for the first time, Jenni said, “See you on the other
side.” Then she took a deep breath, and stopped muting her presence in the Tao
as for the first time in four years she opened herself fully to the heartbeat
of the Universe. For a moment she feared being swept away by the sheer force of
the life the pattern of crushed crystal paint focused on her, but she had
always had an intuitive feel for the currents and now she rode them, gathered
them, poured them into the large crystal at her feet. It in turn accepted her
gift, amplified it, and divided it between the four cardinal point circles
around her. The others reeled under the onslaught but managed to rally and feed
the spirals. Those spirals amplified the power they received even more, and the
four floods hammered into the crystals at their heart and transformed into the
dark Yin of the Void before exploding outward.
To Jenni’s shock, the world went white instead of black.
                                     /oOo\
A hundred thousand years later, give or take a few centuries:
As the undulating, spinning, multi-white tunnel of hyperspace collapsed to
streaks of pure light then settled to a starscape, Ahsoka Tano breathed a sigh
of relief. Wherever she was, she’d made it! From the sounds the hyperdrive had
been making, she hadn’t been certain that would happen and hadn’t dared drop
out of hyperspace into the empty void between stars to make repairs the tramp
freighter might not have parts for, or the fuel to get her back into hyperspace
and to the nearest inhabited planet. She hadn’t exactly had the time to do a
survey of available resources before making her unannounced departure from
whatever mid-Rim world she’d stowed away to after the first bounty hunters
attacked her, and the fuel gauge was distressingly low. She didn’t think that
whatever was bedeviling the engines was the result of shoddy maintenance, not
from the neat, eat-off-the-floor clean state in which the freighter’s previous
owner had kept the cockpit and common room, but the open panels and hanging
wiring told the ship’s age and keeping it running properly had probably been a
near-full-time job for its captain.
Her mood darkened at the thought of that captain, the male human that had
stepped into her fight with the second band of bounty hunters to find her — the
ones that hadn’t underestimated her because she no longer had her lightsaber
thanks to her refusal to rejoin the Jedi Order, and were trying to kill her
rather than going for a capture. His interference had cost him his life even if
it saved hers, though he’d lived long enough to tell her which bay his ship
occupied and the access codes to give her access. She just wished she knew his
name, he hadn’t been carrying any identification. Maybe there’ll be something
identifying him in his room, I’ll have to check first thing once I land this
hunk of junk. What if he has a family? The young Togruta had seen deaths in the
two years she had been Skywalker’s padawan, Jedi and clone troopers she had
liked and respected among them, but the free trader had been one of the
civilians she was supposed to protect, not be protected by!
Shaking off the dark thoughts, she turned her attention to the planet she was
rapidly approaching, named Trey according to the nav-charts. It was the best
choice when she had compared the nav-charts she downloaded from Traffic Control
to those stored in the ship’s nav-comp, barely registering on the download
beyond a name and location on the official list but very well mapped on the
ship’s personal list — which meant she could arrive in less than a day, but
anyone making a straight jump on her trail might take a week or more. And why
would they? It was a barely settled Outer Rim backwater, one the dead free
trader had probably been able to make a living off of partly because his
detailed nav-charts significantly cut his travel time and so operating costs,
but mostly because no one else saw the point in challenging him for the market.
Hopefully, his desire to keep his monopoly extended to not letting anyone back
in civilization know where his goods were coming from.
Realizing that her thoughts had again drifted back into the same bleak rut they
had worn in the long hours she had occupied the pilot’s seat, she refocused out
the cockpit window to look over the planet growing ever larger: plenty of
clouds, a large majority of the surface covered by oceans; most of the land one
massive continent that mostly lay in the northern hemisphere, though it was
narrow in spots that would probably be underwater if the ice sheet that covered
much of the northern hemisphere wasn’t so extensive. From the green not a
desert world where it wasn’t ice, thankfully, that meant she’d have more time
to stay away from locals while she figured out what she was going to do next.
And speaking of locals, I’d better find out where they’re located so Ican stay
away from them. She brought up the ship’s database and was just beginning to
look for a map of the settlements when she paused. Something ... was different
... cleaner? Fresher? All her life, she had heard the Jedi Knights and Masters
that had trained her cohort speak of the ... the haze of the Dark Side that had
clouded the Force, that had them striking at shadows even before the Battle of
Geonosis and the beginning of the war. There had been times that she had
thought they were making excuses for their failures. No longer, as she swept
toward Trey and the clean, clear, beating heart of the Life of an entire planet
wrapped itself around her. Not even her visits to the Crystal Caves on Ilum had
felt like this. And look at those ice caps! And — she hastily glanced at the
scattered dots of small settlements on the database’s map — it’s practically
empty, what would a cleanCoruscantbe like!?
She shook off the thought, she’d have time to investigate once she was on the
ground. Let’s see, no hails from any kind of traffic control, no surprise
there, and ... no landing beacons. I guess they expect you to know where you’re
going. (That wasn’t really a surprise, either — a place this small and out of
the way in the Outer Rim would be vulnerable to pirate and slaver raids, and
the first place any raiders would land would be any settlement large enough to
need, and be able to afford, a landing beacon.) So, somewhere rugged enough
that there shouldn’t be anyone around, and close enough to a major settlement
that I can walk there in a few days if I have to. But hopefully there’ll be
some kind of speeder bike onboard.
She started looking over the various settlements, pulling up what data there
was on them in the computer (not much), but her eyes kept wandering back to a
spot inland on the northeastern part of the world continent. It was some of the
most rugged terrain on the planet, and high enough about sea level that its
center had acquired its own covering of ice separate from the northern and
southern ice packs. It was also very far from any settlements, there was no way
she was walking out of there. But while she hadn’t felt the Force pulling on
her like this very often she could recognize it for what it was — something
down there was important, to her if no one else.
With a sigh, she finally brought the freighter to a halt in relation to the
planet. She was going to have to investigate the ship’s hold, see if there was
a speeder bike, and enough power cells that she could get to what passed for
civilization if she couldn’t lift the ship once she landed.
                                      /\
The speeder bike slowly coasted to a halt, and Ahsoka simply sat on it as she
huddled in the blanket she’d pressed into service in lieu of a coat and stared
up at the mountain, her breath cloudy in the cold mid-day air. The mountain was
a steep, rugged, naked rocky spire, with glaciers on each flank like a scarf
draped over a pair of shoulders, apparently empty of life except for a few
flyers high in the sky. Whatever was pulling at her lay at the foot of the
left-hand glacier, and like the larger (relatively) flat spot where she had
left the freighter, this looked like the closest flat spot where she could park
the speeder bike. She had no idea what could be there, hidden in this most
desolate area of a backwater planet, but whatever was up there was still
calling to her. It reminded of some lines of a poem she’d read once, before the
war when she’d dreamed of exploring the Unknown Regions: ‘Something hidden. Go
and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges — Something lost behind the Ranges.
Lost and waiting for you. Go!’
“Well, I guess I’m walking from here.” Swinging a leg over the back of the
bike, she dropped to the ground and pulled off the blanket, then untied the
backpack of supplies she’d put together and slung it on her back before
rewrapping the blanket around her. She made sure the blanket didn’t cover the
blaster she’d found onboard and was now strapped to her hip, then she pressed
the off switch for the repulsorlift so the bike settled to the ground. Besides
not knowing how long she would be gone and so needing to conserve power, the
bike was like the freighter — lovingly maintained but way too old — and she
didn’t trust the repulsorlift to hold the bike’s position in any kind of wind.
As ready as she could be, she started up the mountain slope.
Hours later, a stunned Ahsoka turned off the hand light that she’d used to make
her way deep into the mountain. The crevasse she’d found at the base of the
glacier and the cracks in its wall had looked natural, but the room she’d found
deep in one of those cracks with one wall sheered away leaving it open to the
outside air, was clearly sentient-formed — a complex carved out of the heart of
the mountain. And from the dirty streaks of ice running down the polished stone
of the walls she’d passed as she carefully made her way deep into the mountain,
squirming around collapses and backtracking from the occasional crevasse, up
until recently the complex had probably been buried by the glacier.
And now she stood in an ice-free room buried deep in the heart of the mountain,
a room where her hand light was unnecessary ... because it was brightly lit by
a huge, slowly spinning oval mass of what she suspected was the Force so
concentrated that it was made visible, coruscating with every color imaginable,
reaching from floor to ceiling.
And even as that pure concentration of the Force overwhelmed her Force-sense,
leaving her limited to her physical senses, still she could feel the pull
toward it. She hesitated for long moments, before finally stepping forward and
slowly reaching out a hand upraised and flattened.
As she approached, the colors bleached away from a spot on the oval mass and a
face swam into view — a Human female face, young, bracketed by pure white hair
shot through with streaks of blue in a pattern eerily similar to Ahsoka’s
montrals and lekku waving about her head as if she was submerged in liquid.
Ahsoka hesitated again, her hand a few centimeters from the surface of the
coruscating pillar. Still feeling the pull — the need — she took a deep breath
and thrust her hand forward into the swirling mass.
For a split-second the entire pillar of energy flashed clear to reveal a slim
Human female slightly taller than Ahsoka dressed in a form-fitting shirt and
pants and an open heavy coat, and Ahsoka instinctively spread her arms to catch
the floating woman now falling forward just before the room plunged into
darkness and the woman’s weight slammed into her.
Chapter End Notes
     The bit of poetry Ahsoka remembers is from Rudyard Kipling's poem,
     "The Explorer."
***** Discoveries *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Palpatine finished rereading the news article from Milagro that had been
flagged by his news filter, then rose from his seat at the desk in his working
office and strode to the office’s clear wall to stare out from his point in the
highest tower on the planet at the scattered lights of a Coruscant night. The
capital city planet of a galaxy-spanning Republic never slept, of course, but,
biological imperatives being what they are, the tempo did slow down with the
fall of night. Not that he was really in the mood for ‘Coruscant stargazing’.
(The light pollution meant the sky never really got completely dark, just a
very deep blue, but there was still the artificial beauty of the semi-random
light show put on by those parts of the towers below him still occupied and
awake, and the multi-layered traffic lanes that passed between them.)
A world along the Corellian Run just shy of the Outer Rim border, there was
nothing particularly significant about Milagro — certainly nothing to draw the
attention of the Chancellor of the Republic. However, it was the world where
the mercenary gang hired by Darth Sidious to pursue a certain former Padawan
had met their deaths.
The second such band, actually, and what had been a simple case of cutting off
a loose end and perhaps furthering the estrangement between Anakin Skywalker
and the Jedi Council with news of his Padawan’s death was becoming more
serious. And Palpatine didn’t know why.
Everything seemed to be going well — Jedi after Jedi had fallen in the war; the
Jedi that survived were mostly scattered throughout the Republic fighting
alongside their future executioners; the military he would need to hold on to
power when he was declared Emperor was growing as the war continued, and the
news released to the Republic’s sheep subtly played up that military’s
accomplishments while undercutting the Jedi’s reputation; the Hunters that he
had tossed a few fragmentary Dark Side techniques moved about in the shadows
eliminating possible future threats as they gained the experience they would
need to form the core of his future Inquisitors; and the Jedi Council was
flailing about in the mists of the Dark Side that Darth Sidious had immersed
them in, trying to find the elusive Sith Master and unknowingly sowing the
seeds of their own destruction as their continuing alienation of Skywalker and
his ‘friendship’ with Palpatine allowed the Sith Master they couldn’t find to
further sink his hooks into his future apprentice. Yes, all was going as he had
foreseen.
But then the mercenary gang he’d tasked with capturing Ahsoka had failed, she’d
temporarily vanished, and Darth Sidious’s visions of the approaching glorious
future had become ... fuzzy — slightly indistinct, as glorious as ever but not
quite there. Then a short time ago those visions had cleared once again, but he
still felt as if something was off, somehow, a piece missing along with the
Padawan.
And now the news that his second attempt on Ahsoka had failed.
More mercenaries would both be pointless and risk exposure. I cannot order
Darth Tyranus to take up the hunt — his persona as ‘Count Dooku’ is too
important to my plan’s culmination, even if he were in position to quickly
resume the pursuit he would be missed. It will have to be one of my Hunters.
Decision made, Palpatine turned back to his desk to bring up his database, to
review his Hunters’ locations and missions and determine which was in position
and could be most easily spared.
                                     /oOo\
The trip back to the freighter was a nightmare. Ahsoka was actually both
skilled and powerful for her age, even as a newly-minted (if somewhat older)
padawan she had been able to reach out with the Force and pull down an entire
wall (with an empty window to supply a hole for Skywalker, and hadn’t that been
fun?). But the burst of effort that had required was a far cry from using the
Force to carry an unconscious body behind her as she made her way back to the
surface, for hours. Then there had been getting both of them on a speeder bike
she wasn’t certain could handle the weight, and the long cold trip down the
mountain. (The Human’s coat was thankfully much better protection than Ahsoka’s
blanket, she hadn’t had to worry about the patient the Force had led her to
dying of hypothermia without her realizing it — not that that didn’t stop her
from reaching out to sense the limp life tied to her back every few minutes.)
She was very happy when the freighter came into view.
She was also happy that her unnamed benefactor had taken especial care with
medical equipment and supplies — as lovingly maintained as the rest of the ship
and much newer. No bacta tank, of course, not even an emergency one, and when
she undressed her (frowning slightly at the primitive fastenings on the
clothes), her patient didn’t have any outward injuries needing bacta bandages.
Still, to be safe, as soon as she had the Human wrapped in a blanket and laid
out on the couch in the common room she gave her a bacta injection for any
internal injuries she might have.
Everything done that she could do for the moment, she sat at the game table and
laid her head down for a moment’s rest.
                                      /\
Jenni’s eyes snapped open, staring up at the metal-paneled wall that curved up
above her. It certainly wasn’t the Heaven she’d been expecting, or even any
heaven that she’d ever heard of. And if the Buddhists were right (or many of
the Buddhists, anyway) and those not reborn merged into Nirvana, she wouldn’t
be aware of anything, at all.
Instinctively, she reached out, sending, “Hey gang, what’s going on?”
Nothing. Not just no reply, the joy/grief/whimsy/determination/anger/love of
her Bond was gone, — she was alone in the Dark of her mind.
She bolted upright, looking around wildly only to find herself alone in a room
the like of which she’d never seen before: small, rounded corners, round
doorways in three walls, a built-in couch she had been lying on along the wall
without a doorway, a seat in the corner on the other side of the doorway at a
console with a dark screen and a scattering of lights above it, and in the
other corner across from another round doorway another table and several seats
— and one seat taken by a red-skinned girl, a white-and-blue headpiece on the
head she was lifting from the table. Jenni instinctively reached out, to get a
read of who she was dealing with, and froze in shock.
The girl she was sharing a room with wasn’t human.
Jenni scrambled backward along the couch toward the corner away from the alien.
“Who are you!? What are you!? Where am I!? What happened to my Bond!?”
But she knew what had happened to them: they were dead like she should be, and
as that reality crashed down on her she curled up against the corner on the
couch and began to cry.
                                      /\
Ahsoka stared at the crying Human female, trying to work through what had just
happened. There had been a wave of shock powerful enough to disturb her sleep
and she’d lifted her head to find her patient looking around wildly. That was
understandable, she’d never been on this freighter before, but why had she
panicked when she saw Ahsoka? It wasn’t like they’d ever met before. And what
language had she been speaking? She was a Human on a colony world, she should
be speaking Basic!
... just how longwasshe asleep in that Force vortex?
What do I do? She needs comforting, but if we don’t share a language ... Then
she remembered the head of a protocol droid she’d seen in a case of
miscellaneous spare parts she’d seen during her search of the ship. If she
could rig up a battery pack —
A few minutes and a quick search in the hold, and she’d found a battery pack
with a bit of a charge left. She thought she’d worked out which of the wires in
the droid’s neck stump she needed so attaching the pack’s lead should activate
it instead of frying every circuit it had left....
She carefully clipped the lead into place, pressed the ‘on’ button, and sighed
with relief when the head’s eyes lit up and it spoke with in a pleasant female
voice.
“Hello, I am D-FN8, sentient-cyborg relations. How may I ... Oh my, what
happened to my body!?”
                                      /\
Jenni jerked when a gentle hand gripped her shoulder, then lifted and shifted
her so she was half-on a lap — the alien’s, from the red skin tone she could
see through cracked eyelids. And another hand was gently stroking her hair as
the alien murmured something in (naturally) no language Jenni had ever heard
the like of. She focused on the alien, and gasped — she had rarely met a Dancer
whose Flame burned so brightly, more than enough that she could sense and
manipulate the currents of the Tao without the aid of living crystals. For a
moment fear flashed through her, but then she sensed the alien’s sympathy and
concern washing over her. She twisted to throw an arm around the waist by her
head and buried her face in a bare orange stomach, and sobbed.
She finally ran out of tears, and sat up to wipe at her cheeks. “Thanks, I
needed that. You don’t speak Anglic by any chance, do you?”
“Oh my, that is a fery obscoor language.” Jenni twisted in shock — there was
nothing living there! — then relaxed at the artificial head like a robot from a
scifi movie, sitting on top of a small black box on the table where the alien
had been sleeping. She hadn’t sensed anything because there was nothing living
to sense. The robot head continued, “Yam D-FN8, sentient-cyborg relations.
Mistress Ahsoka has tasked me to translate.”
“Uh ... hello ... Defenate.” She paused, surprised to hear Defenate speak in
another language using her voice. Oh, right, ‘translate’! It had been centuries
since the League had needed to use translators, Anglic had long since become
the unofficial common language of Earth’s people and its colonies, but she
remembered reading about their use by the United Nations that had preceded the
League. And they’d been people, of course, not robots.
Turning to face the alien sitting on the couch beside her, she repeated,
“Hello. My name is Jennifer Allston, but you can call me Jenni. Where am I?”
The alien replied, and Jenni did her best to pretend the robot speaking with
the same voice was actually the alien. “Hello, my name is Ahsoka Tano. Yoor on
... my freighter, but I found you inside the mount weer parked below.”
“Mount? Mountain? The Mountain! Maybe ... do you have a map?”
“Of course.” Ahsoka rose to walk over to the table where Defenate was placed.
Moving the robot head to another chair, she sat down and fiddle with controls
Jenni couldn’t see for a few minutes until a hologram of a planet sprang into
existence that instantly had Jenni’s complete attention.
“Weer here ...” Ahsoka was saying, but Jenni ignored the dot of light as she
rose to her feet and walked over. Her finger traced the white that covered the
top of the globe. “Is that all ice?”
“Yes, is an ice age. At least I think so.”
Jenni’s finger ran along the ice that had swept over the Bering Strait joining
Asia to North America, then circled the patch of ice that covered what had been
Tibet before resting on the dot of light on the easternmost edge. “Good thing
you found me when you did or the ice would have rolled over me, and who knows
how long it would have been before it retreated.”
Ahsoka stiffened, and Jenni turned to focus on the stunned silent alien staring
at her wide-eyed. “What is it?” Jenni asked, worry suddenly twisting her gut.
“Jenni ... the ice is retreating. You were covered.”
“It —” Jenni whirled back to the globe, staring at the vast expanse of white.
If that wasn’t the maximum advance ... She whispered, “How large is the
population?”
“I don’t know, I don’t think anyone does,” Ahsoka replied. She fiddled with the
table’s controls, and the globe began to turn as a thin scattering of lights
appeared across its surface, mostly along major rivers toward the equator.
“These are all the settlements in the database, maybe ... a few hundred
thousand settlers?”
A few hundred thousand!
Jenni toppled forward into the hologram, Ahsoka just fast enough to keep her
from cracking her chin on the far edge of the table.
Ahsoka stared down at the Human girl for a long moment before levitating her up
and back toward the couch. “Defenate, that language she was speaking, how old
is it?” she asked as she made Jenni as comfortable as she could.
“No one knows, mistress,” the robot head replied. “It is related to Anguc, an
ancestral Human language of several Core worlds that argue over which world
spoke it first. It is now spoken only by scholars that argue as much as the
worlds do.”
“ ‘Related’?”
“Yes, mistress. I was forced to ... approximate the translation of a number of
the words she used.”
“ ‘Approximate’ — does that mean ‘guess at’?”
“As you say, mistress.”
Ahsoka grinned for a moment at the protocol droid’s prissy, almost offended
tone, before sobering again as she refocused on Jenni. She speaks a dead
language. She was trapped in a Force vortex for so long that an ice age covered
up and then uncovered her location. She is so shocked by the number of
inhabitants that she faints. The picture that was being painted was bizarre, so
bizarre she could hardly believe it, but ...
She sat back down at the game table and started typing.
                                      /\
Jenni slowly came awake to find herself staring at the same metal-paneled wall
curving above her as before, and again instinctively reached out for her Bond
to find nothing but the Dark. She pressed her eyes closed to fight back the
tears, then sat up and wiped away the few that had escaped. Am I going to go
through thateverytime I wake up from now on?
She sat up and looked around for a distraction, and found the orange-skinned
alien — Ahsoka, her name is Ahsoka — sitting at the table with the rotating
hologram of Earth again, watching her. The young ... girl? Is shereallyfemale,
or is that just human preconceptions talking? Whichever, Jenni took comfort
from Ahsoka’s sympathy rippling through the Tao.
But however strong her sympathy, the question she asked through Defenate took
Jenni’s breath away for a second. “Jenni, when you were trapped in the Force
vortex, how many people lived on this planet?”
“Trapped in a what?” Jenni waved off the question. “Never mind, later. When I
should have died, there were as many souls as the planet could sustain,
approximately ten billion.”
“Ten billion ... yes, that’s ... a lot of people.” Ahsoka waved a hand through
the rotating hologram. “Yoor sure this is your home planet?”
Jenni pushed to her feet and walked over, and started poking at land masses.
“North America. South America. Africa. Eurasia. Australia. Yes, I’m sure.”
Ahsoka slumped back in her seat and stared at the globe, her sympathy washed
away by pure wonder. “Scholars back in the Core are going to go crazy when they
find out about this,” she muttered, then grinned up at Jenni. “This planet
rotates once in just over twenty-four hours. And it slowing slightly, thanks to
the moon — ‘suming the rate of slowing is constant, it would have been exactly
twenty-four hours around ninety thousand years ago. This might be the Human
homeworld!”
“Wait, you mean there are humans —” She waved at the ceiling. “— out there?”
“Oh, yeah, trillions of ‘em, planet after planet full. Can’t go anywhere
without running into ‘em. This planet is pretty far from the Core Worlds, it
was colonized — maybe recolonized? — just a few centuries ago, I think.”
Jenni collapsed into the other chair by the table to stare at the rotating
globe, so stunned she lost her focus on Ahsoka’s eddy in the Tao and was again
alone in her own head. “Wow.” Maybe ... maybe we weren’t such failures, after
all.
After awhile she shook herself free of her own wonderment at what she’d just
learned and looked over at Ahsoka. “So, now what?”
Chapter End Notes
     I came across ‘Coruscant stargazing’ in And None of It Seems to
     Matter, by Kablob.
     So, for levels of power when it comes to the Force. Whatever the RPGs
     might say, it’s clear from the movies that strength of connection to
     the Force and training in how to use it are two entirely separate
     things. However, while there is no way the Jedi Order finds all the
     strong force-sensitives in the Republic so there can be many more
     than seems to be the case on the surface, there aren’t so many that
     you can have enough in a single planetary population to populate a
     large Order (not unless that planet’s name is Coruscant, anyway).
     Hence the crystals Jenni is used to — among other things they amplify
     the Force, allowing someone that would otherwise be way too weak to
     perform at Jedi level. So Jenni thinks that Ahsoka, who I’m
     considering to be above average but not spectacularly so (and about
     Jenni’s level), to be incredibly powerful. What Jenni is going to
     think when she meets Anakin....
     I don't know when another chapter will be up, I basically spent a
     large chunk of the day working on this after finishing my weekend
     allotment of my primary stories and don't know when I'll be able to
     find the time again.
***** Beautiful Day *****
Chapter Notes
     I know, almost 2 1/2 months, I did say this one would be
     intermittent. But I've been good, focusing on my main stories all
     this time, and just couldn't resist this weekend. But fair warning,
     it'll probably be at least this long before I get back to it.
See the end of the chapter for more notes
Quill Bolera was bored, frustrated, and angry ... especially angry. He had been
stalking a senator that had become a minor thorn in his Master’s side and had
just been ready to strike, everything lined up to make it seem like a
Separatist terrorist cell — a perfect excuse for the local contingent of the
Grand Army of the Republic to impose more stringent controls. (And didn’t that
title make him want to snicker?) And then he’d gotten the order from his Master
— directly from his Master, not through the usual cut outs and blind drops — to
drop everything and search for a former Padawan that had run away from the Jedi
Order. However important the task had to be for the Sith Lord to risk
contacting him that way, he was feeling distinctly ill-used.
It hadn’t actually been all that hard to work out where she had run to once he
arrived at Milagro and sliced into the official records of the investigation,
what there were of them. (The police had assumed that the bounty hunters had
been after the free trader and bitten off more than they could chew ... but
only barely. That allowed the police to call it good and not take a closer look
— perhaps at his master’s ‘suggestion’.) The identity of the free trader whose
body had been found alongside those of the dead mercenaries had led him to the
bay he had been docked in — empty, but Bolera managed to find a witness that
had seen Tano enter the bay just before Fate’s Gift took off. Traffic control
hadn’t bothered to keep the record of the exact track of the freighter’s jump
into hyperspace, but Wynt Chinelo had been a regular at the port and the
traffic controllers had been able to tell Bolera the general vector. Between
that and the nature of the cargoes that Chinelo both sold and bought, Bolera
had known just which backwater Outer Rim world he’d been scratching out a
living off of.
Unfortunately traffic control hadn’t had anything like adequate nav-charts for
the hyperspace route to Trey and so Bolera had spent three weeks — three weeks
— prowling his ship’s limited living quarters bored out of his mind while he
was in hyperspace.
But his boredom was finally at an end as the swirling white of hyperspace
turned into streaks before collapsing into stars, and he found himself throwing
up his hands to block a light that was all in his mind, the concentrated power
of the light side of the Force washing over him — the whole planet was a
vergence! He almost pushed forward the levers that would throw his ship back
into hyperspace without bothering to compute a course, but with an act of will
that left him shaking managed to stop his hand halfway — and a good thing,
because he was flying directly toward Trey and doing that would have turned his
ship into a smoking crater and him with it.
Having gotten himself under control, he scanned for landing beacons, any form
of traffic control — nothing. He was able to locate the handful of settlements
on the map he’d downloaded back at Milagro, but it hadn’t been updated in a
century (in violation of the Republic’s requirement that an updated planetary
map and census be sent to Coruscant every twenty-five years, but throughout
most of the Outer Rim that the Republic actually claimed no one really cared)
and his scanners were picking up local com traffic for at least twice that
many. Population growth hadn’t been explosive, but it had been substantial. And
that meant he had more settlements to search through for the elusive Tano than
he’d hoped, if not as many as he’d feared.
For a moment he wished that he was more of a sensor, but he put the thought
aside as pointless — even if he was good enough to sense Tano from orbit, the
sheer power of the vergence would have undoubtedly washed out her presence.
He tried to send a report back to his Master, but as he’d feared it turned out
to be impossible: a hyperwave transceiver connected to the HoloNet was too
expensive for this backwater, and ... no, as was often the case in such systems
the local subspace transceiver was locked to outsiders — he could send the
message, but not without asking permission and leaving a record. For a brief
moment he considered turning right around and heading back to Milagro, but ...
three weeks. And once he’d made his report, his Master would undoubtedly order
him to turn around and return to hunt for Tano — another three weeks (minus the
maybe-a-day he would be able to shave off thanks to the data from his two trips
along the route). And then another three weeks returning after he’d completed
his mission. No, that was too long to keep his Master’s best Hunter cooling his
heels, and she’d probably be gone by the time he got back anyway. He would
simply have to find and kill the former Padawan and make his report when he
returned to civilization.
Decision made, he started by circling the planet, comparing settlement size on
the map with what he could glean from the com traffic — with no way to pick one
settlement over another, he would simply start with the largest and work his
way down. He grimaced at the thought. Yes, he knew the Sith were supposed to be
masters of their fate rather than slaves to the whim of a higher Power, but
sometimes he thought a little guidance outside of battle and Force visions of
possible futures would not be amiss — though since he was headed into a light
side vergence, it was possible that guidance would have been denied him,
anyway.
The comp pinged its success at locating the largest settlement, and he sighed
as he piloted a course toward it — unless he got lucky, this was going to be
almost as tedious as his weeks in hyperspace.
At least it’s not Coruscant.
                                     /oOo\
Ahsoka sat cross legged on the metal floor of Fate’s Gift’s hold, sighing as
she examined once again the parts spread out in front of her. Much to her
surprise, she almost had everything she needed to build a new lightsaber, three
of them even. They would be too large, clunky, and ugly, but they would work —
if she could find new kyber crystals to replace the ones in the lightsabers
she’d left behind when she walked out on the Order, which wasn’t likely. It
wasn’t like she could hop across to Ilum and seek out new ones, and there
weren’t a lot of loose ones kicking around the galaxy. She figured the chances
of finding a kyber crystal anywhere on Trey was about the same as the
temperature of deep space. Still, while she hadn’t actually expected to find
one on the ship, she had hoped —
She glanced up as she felt the now-familiar caress of Jenni’s Force-powered
attention. As expected, the human was standing in the hold’s inner doorway —
dressed in the same shirt and pants she’d been wearing under her coat when
Ahsoka first found her — but it felt early. Ahsoka focused through the Force on
her time sense for a moment, then frowned. It was early, normally Jenni would
still be in the common room practicing Galactic Standard with Defenate. Waving
Jenni over, Ahsoka asked, “Shouldn’t you still be translating?”
She did have to agree that the way Jenni and Defenate had overcome their lack
of training vids for Galactic Standard was unique. Jenni would recite something
she’d read with the Force enhancing her memory to get it word for word — in
Anglic, of course — then Defenate would translate it into Galactic and Jenni
would read it out loud with Defenate correcting her pronunciation and providing
the meaning (Jenni occasionally correcting the translation). It had certainly
worked, over the past several months Jenni’s Galactic, though still accented,
had become excellent if somewhat formal. But Ahsoka was getting a little
worried about Jenni’s growing obsession with regurgitating an endless stream of
history, philosophy, plays, novels —
“I thought I’d take a break, see what you were doing.” Jenni waved at the parts
scattered across the floor. “What’s all this?”
In spite of her apparent focus away from Ahsoka the caress of her awareness
never wavered, and the former Jedi fought to hide another growing ember of
concern at the desperation that underlay that awareness. Once Jenni had
explained the intimate nature of the Bonds, often physically but always
mentally, it hadn’t been hard to understand (if only dimly) why Jenni reached
out to Ahsoka through the Force whenever they shared a room — having one’s
constant emotional ... awareness? mindscape? ... reduced from five to one had
to be devastatingly lonely. But this was the first time Jenni had actually
sought her out for a ‘fix’, however limited Jenni’s perception of Ahsoka’s
presence in the Force must be compared to the shared emotional life of four
other people.
I wonder if she knows I know the first thing she does every morning is cry?
But nothing in Ahsoka’s sixteen years had prepared her for dealing with the
situation, so she set her growing fears aside once again. “I’m trying to build
a lightsaber.”
“A lightsaber?” Jenni’s eyes lit up at the word — much of what Ahsoka had told
her about the Jedi Order had her muttering about navel gazers, but she had been
impressed by the description of the Order’s signature weapon.
“Yeah, but I’m afraid I’m missing the kyber crystal, and it’s the most
important component.”
“Kyber crystal?” Jenni frowned thoughtfully. “What does it do?”
“It’s imbued with the Force, with it the lightsaber becomes a manifestation of
a Jedi’s — or a Force user’s, I guess, for me now at least — connection to the
Force.”
“ ‘Imbued with the Force’?” Jenni suddenly grinned. “Like a focus? I might have
an answer ...” Her voice trailed away as she suddenly looked sick. “Uh ... why
do you want a lightsaber?”
“Because we’re almost out of rations, maybe a week’s worth left. When we head
for what passes for civilization on this planet, I’d like to have at least one
weapon I’m practiced with.”
Jenni struggled with herself for a moment, then, reluctance clear in every
line, said, “I might have an alternative.”
                                      /\
Jenni stared into the room where Ahsoka had found her, eyes haunted.
The trip this time had been quicker than the first time Ahsoka had made it —
there were two of them, and Jenni had known the layout — but the Human had
become more withdrawn with every step until they’d reached the room. There
she’d simply stopped and stared as minute after minute ticked by.
Finally, Ahsoka stepped up behind Jenni and shifted a hand out from under the
blanket she was again using as a coat to place on the Human’s shoulder.
“Jenni?”
“It’s here they died, you know — all of them. Henrik, Kaulana, Yua, Sacagawea
... and every other Flame burning bright on the planet.”
“I know.”
Jenni turned to look Ahsoka in the eyes. “I should have died here — I wanted to
die here. I didn’t want to live past that day, not after what we did.”
Ahsoka desperately scrambled for words, blurted out, “Maybe the Force has a
purpose for you still?”
Jenni laughed, and Ahsoka felt her skin crawl at the bitter, hysterical edge to
the sound. “Ninety thousand years in stasis? More likely it just didn’t want to
throw away a useful tool.” She turned away and strode back up the corridor.
“Come on, what we need is this way.”
                                      /\
Ahsoka gaped, staring wide-eyed into the room whose secret entrance she and
Jenni had managed to blow open with her blaster.
Once again their hand lights weren’t necessary, because the entire room was lit
up by the boxes and boxes of softly glowing gems stashed in the shelves cut
into the rock. And not just glowing, Ahsoka felt like she was bathing in the
Force, sweeping over and around her through her covering blanket, washing away
her worries. Forcing her eyes away from the sight to her companion, she
whispered, “What are they?”
Jenni too could apparently feel their influence, as tension, so much a part of
the Human that Ahsoka hadn’t even realized it wasn’t a natural part of her,
seemed to just flow away. “We don’t ... didn’t have a distinguishing name for
them, we just called them crystals. Any Dancer would know what we were talking
about, and they were too ... private ... to speak of to anyone that wasn’t a
Dancer.”
“But what are they?”
“As best we could tell, they are ... not the Tao made manifest but in tune with
the Tao, so that we can focus on them, through them, to accomplish more than we
ever could alone. And just maybe, they are replacements for the ‘kyber
crystals’ you spoke of.”
“I think you may be right.” Ahsoka turned back to the room and opened herself
to the Force. It was hard not to allow it to ‘wash’ her away, to focus even as
she stayed relaxed and open to the Force all about her. And unlike her
pilgrimage to Ilum where she had spent long hours seeking out a single kyber
crystal calling to her, here all the crystals — thousands of them — called for
her attention. But amidst the ‘cacophony’ a single crystal ‘shone’ brighter
than the rest, and she confidently stepped forward to a single corroded box. It
came apart in her hands when she tried to pick it up off its shelf, glowing
crystals cascading down across the floor, but she stooped and scooped one
crystal out of the air, on the bounce. “This one.”
Now it was Jenni’s turn to stare wide-eyed, though at Ahsoka rather than the
room. “What did you just do?”
“I opened myself to the crystals, picked out the one that was most ... ‘in
tune’ with me. Didn’t your people do that?”
“No. we knew that individual crystals worked better for some Dancers than
others, but we found out which best suited us by trial and error. To pick out a
single one from all those? Still, you just did it....” Face firming in
determination, she turned back to the room, closed her eyes ... and staggered
back several steps. “Wow, that’s a rush.” She stepped forward again, closed her
eyes. Again, minute after minute ticked by as sweat beaded on her forehead.
Then she stretched out a hand and made her way into the room, eyes still
closed, sliding her feet on the floor to avoid slipping on the crystals
scattered there, until she touched another box. This time her touch alone was
enough for it to fall apart, and she snatched a handful of crystals out of
those streaming to the floor and picked one out before dropping the rest.
Then she bent over, hands on her knees as she gasped for breath. “That is
tough.” Finally straightening, she slid her way to the doorway then turned
around to stare back into the room. “I think we should leave the rest here.
This room is shielded, but to any whose flames burn bright any crystals we take
with us that aren’t not personally attuned will shine like spotlights, at least
any not kept in specially prepared containers that we don’t have. And we can
have only one crystal personally attuned to us at a time.”
Ahsoka grimaced. “That’s too bad, my usual fighting style uses two shota —
small lightsabers.” Shrugging, she added, “Perhaps it’s just as well, I was
probably too dependent on it. Let’s get back to the ship and find out if we
have any lightsabers at all.”
                                      /\
Ahsoka took a deep breath, squeezed the safety built into her new hopefully-a-
lightsaber’s hilt, pressed the ‘on’ button, and promptly dropped it as the hilt
heated up.
“Okay, that was more than just ‘not working’.” Jenni waited until the hilt
finished clattering cross the ship hold’s floor, then knelt and held her hand
an inch or so above it. “Hot. What happened?”
“I don’t know.” Ahsoka grabbed a pair of pliers and a screwdriver and set about
opening up the casing. In the end she had to pry it open, to find the
components inside fused into a solid mass. “Definitely more than ‘not
working’.”
Jenni peered over her shoulder, and Ahsoka suddenly realized that for once
Jenni wasn’t even partially focused on her through the Force as her curiosity
got the better of her. “Yeah, definitely more. What happened?”
“I don’t know, I just hope it didn’t damage the crystal.” Ahsoka started
chipping away at the fused components. The worry twisting at her gut was very
un-Jedi-like, but when Jenni had demonstrated how to attune herself with her
chosen crystal and then walked her through the process herself, the Togruta had
been stunned at the result. The kyber crystal she had been guided to on Ilum
had seemed to resonate with her when she reached out to it with the Force, but
her new crystal had seemed to merge with her. Even now as she struggled to free
it, she could sense it like a piece of herself buried in the melted metal and
rubber.
“Your crystal should be fine, they can be dipped in lava and be still cool when
they’re plucked out.” Jenni shifted around where she could watch Ahsoka work
the crystal free. “So how do lightsabers work?”
“Power from a power cell is focused through a series of lenses and energizers
that convert it to plasma. The plasma is projected through the krayt crystal to
give it the properties that allows the plasma to be held by the containment
field, then sent through another series of field energizers and modulation
circuitry to create the coherent beam of energy that forms the blade. The blade
is arced back to a negatively charged fissure ringing the emitter by the
containment field, which channels the power back to the power cell.”
The crystal finally popped out of its molten prison, and Ahsoka snatched it out
of the air then looked up and giggled at the confused look on Jenni’s face.
“Here, let me show you.” Reaching over to pull a box away from the wall, she
dumped out its contents and sorted out the various components for another
lightsaber, explaining each one’s purpose as she went.
When she finished, Jenni frowned thoughtfully. “I see why it didn’t work.
Thesecrystals can transform energy just fine, but the only source of power they
will accept flows from the Tao. Which means that when you flipped the ‘on’
switch the plasma hit your crystal and had nowhere to go.”
“So instant meltdown.”
“So instant meltdown.”
Ahsoka sighed in disappointment and started placing the components back in the
box. “Then I guess that’s that, we’ll just have to go with the blaster and hope
we don’t run into anything too dangerous.”
“Don’t give up yet.” Ahsoka’s head snapped up, and Jenni smiled at her renewed
hope. “Like I said, our crystals can transform the flow of the Tao into energy,
we just need to figure out the ... frequency? ... of the plasma we need and get
rid of the extraneous components, and try again.”
“But ... but how do we feed the Force through the crystal? Where does it come
from?”
“It comes from us.” Jenni fished her crystal out of her pocket and held it out
in the palm of her hand, and after a moment its faint glow began to brighten
until Ahsoka had to hold up her hand to shield her eyes. Jenni clenched her
hand into a fist, the light leaking through her fingers for an instant before
going out. “Ahsoka, so far as the Tao is concerned these crystals are a part of
us. As it flows through us it flows through them, and we can direct that flow
as the crystal transforms it at our direction.” With a grin, she added, “It’s
too bad we can only attune to a single crystal at a time, or we’d never need
batteries again!”
Ahsoka finished putting away the components and dug her own crystal out of her
pocket. “So how do we do this?”
Jenni’s grin broadened. “Practice.”
                                      /\
Ten days later:
Again crouched on the floor of the hold, Ahsoka finished assembling their
second attempt at a working lightsaber as unwanted tension again coiled in her
gut. It had taken them way too long to figure out exactly what ‘frequency’ they
needed for the crystals to produce plasma (not a bad descriptive Jenni had come
up with, Ahsoka thought, considering the process they’d gone through getting
the right output).
Then they’d had to work out what to do with the energy being fed back — they
couldn’t get rid of the fissure ringing the emitter, that feedback was needed
to maintain the blade’s stability, but they no longer had a battery powering
the blade for the fissure to feed that energy back into. They’d eventually
settled on a series of empty batteries for the power to feed into and a heat
vent and light if a fight went on too long, but it was a slapdash, temporary
fix at best.
Now if only that slapdash, temporary fix would work. It would have to, they had
enough rations left for one more meal.
“Ready?”
Ahsoka smiled at an equally tense Jenni and not even trying to hide it. (Though
one thing Ahsoka was pleased with was the way the last week’s effort had seemed
to ease that bitterness in the other woman.) “Ready!” She rose to her feet
walked out into the center of the hold. Holding the lightsaber out at arm’s
length, she clenched her hand to squeeze the safety, put her thumb over the
‘on’ button, focused on her crystal inside the hilt ... and froze as the Force
screamed at her of lethal danger.
“Ahsoka, what is wrong!?”
The Togruta carefully lowered the lightsaber and called back, “I don’t know,
but whatever it is, it’s really dangerous.”
After a moment’s quiet, Jenni called back, “Leave the lightsaber there, we’ll
activate it from a distance.”
“Good idea.” She carefully placed the lightsaber on the floor and walked back
toward Jenni. The Human was looking around, and Ahsoka felt her reach out
through the Force to pull several large crates over in front of them. “Another
good idea.”
Joining Jenni behind the crates, Ahsoka reached out through the Force and
lifted the lightsaber to shoulder height, squeezed the safety, focused on the
crystal, simultaneously fed the Force into the crystal and pressed the button —
and both she and Jenni ducked down as the lightsaber exploded, bits and pieces
pinging off the wall above their heads and the crates in front of them. They
both peeked over the top of the crates at the circular soot mark on the floor
with a softly glowing crystal bouncing to a stop in the middle.
“Did I mention that our crystals amplify the current of the Tao that we feed
into them?”
“No. No, you didn’t.”
                                      /\
Several hours later, Ahsoka finished assembling the last lightsaber they had
components for. She had spent those hours practicing moderating how much of the
Force she fed into her crystal, and figuring out just how much she needed for
the required output.
Now she again strode out into the middle of the hold, lifted the lightsaber out
to arm’s length at shoulder-height, clenched her hand to squeeze the safety,
put her thumb over the ‘on’ button, focused on her crystal inside the hilt ...
and when no warning came from the Force pressed the button while simultaneously
(and extremely cautiously) ‘pushed’ the Force into the crystal — and a pure
white blade spring from the hilt, humming.
“Yes, we did it!” At her shout her concentration on the crystal stuttered and
the blade vanished, but it didn’t matter — she had a working lightsaber, the
rest was just practice.
“Yes, we do.” Jenni walked out to join her, admiring the blade that Ahsoka had
once again activated. “That’s quite some weapon, too bad we don’t have the
components for another one.”
Relaxing her grip on the safety and dropping her focus on her crystal (did she
even need a safety, if the lightsaber could only activate if she focused on the
crystal?), Ahsoka shook her head. “No, it’s just as well. Lightsabers are
tricky to use, and incredibly dangerous to anyone that hasn’t practiced with
one. If we can get the components to control the intensity of the blade so we
could reduce it to practice saber-level then I could train you, but as it is
you’re better sticking to the blaster and leave the lightsaber to me.”
“That makes sense.” Jenni gazed longingly at the humming blade for another long
moment, then shrugged. “So, on to the nearest settlement to find out if we can
earn enough credits to refuel?”
“Maybe.” Deactivating the lightsaber, Ahsoka clipped it to her belt and strode
toward the hold’s doorway.
In the common room, Ahsoka brought up the world map dotted with the
settlements. Setting the map to slowly spin, she concentrated on the points of
light, opened herself to the Force ... she reached out to touch a light dot at
a junction of the two major rivers that Jenni had named ‘North America’. “That
one.”
She looked up to find Jenni staring at her in confusion. The Human asked, “Did
you just use the Tao to pick our destination?”
“Yes, I did. Do you mean your people didn’t?”
“No, we didn’t.” Jenni shifted her gaze back to the still-spinning map, eyes
alight with wonder.
“How about Force visions?”
“We’d get them in dreams occasionally, it’s not hard to tell them from ordinary
dreams or nightmares, but we don’t seek them out — just go with the flow of the
Tao. Do you seek them out?”
“Sometimes, but you can’t really depend on them — ‘Always is in motion is the
future’, as Master Yoda has said.”
“Coool.” Jenni gazed in wonder at the map for another long moment, then turned
to Ahsoka. “So let’s go and see what kind of future the Tao is sweeping us
toward.”
Chapter End Notes
     Yes, I know, mostly a process chapter this time. I wanted to get into
     some of the differences between the Jedi Order and the Youxia bonds.
     Sure, IMHO the bonds are superior to the Order, but not in everything
     — including the passivity they’ve picked up from the Taoism of their
     founder, insofar as looking to the future is concerned. It’s made
     them miss some possibilities, the same way that Order’s insistence on
     no emotion or connections has led it to miss some.
     I took Timothy Zahn’s idea of the cave on Dagobah being a vergence
     that hid Yoda from the Emperor and extended it to the entire planet,
     like Tython but not as dangerous to non-Force sensitives (nor lost in
     the Deep Core, just a backwater planet no one important has ever
     heard of).
     Note on time measurement: For this story I’m going with a Standard
     Year equaling 8766 hours (maybe make a Galactic Standard hour 3.6%
     shorter than ours for an even 9000?). But rather than the five days
     per standard week Wookieepedia gives I think ten days makes more
     sense: seven days for a usual work week and a three day weekend. Of
     course, non-Republic worlds will do whatever they please, and on the
     less “civilized” Republican worlds that seven-day work week is mostly
     a pipe dream.
     The chapter title comes from the song by U2 — it’s a Beautiful Day,
     but things don’t quite feel right....
***** Back to Sorta-Civilization *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Ghent Tardun sighed as he stepped out of his office/jail, rubbing his face.
At the sound Cal glanced up from where he was leaning his chair against the
wall. “That much fun, huh?”
“Yeah, Cort’s rants are getting longer. And even more obscene, if you can
believe it.”
“Can you blame him?”
Ghent sighed again as he dropped onto the chair next to his lifelong friend,
hand automatically checking to make sure the blaster on his hip was secure.
“No, I don’t — it’s been weeks since Riptide pinged him on arrival and promptly
disappeared, he’s getting scared ... more scared. But that doesn’t make it any
more fun being on the wrong side of the com while he vents. And then there’s
his demands that we drop everything and search the planet.”
“Yeah, like that’s gonna happen. Maybe we could manage to pull people away from
what little time they can get in on their digs if there was any real chance of
success, but it’s a big planet. If we had any ships we could scan for wreckage
from orbit, but ...” Cal shrugged.
“True.” Ghent tilted his chair back to lean against the jail’s wall and swept
his gaze along the synthecrete main street (only street, really, except for
some short dirt roads) to the single landing pad at the end. It wasn’t much,
but as the marshal of Newtown and the largely empty lands for hundreds of
kilometers in all directions and even more since his marriage, it was in some
sense his. “So, anything new from the dig at First Light? Or are they still
digging out all the frozen mud?”
“Still digging out the mud. They’re asking for more help from Alysha Ranch, but
they’re going to have to wait until after the roundup. However much everyone
would like to dive in, keeping us all fed comes first.”
Ghent chuckled. He knew a few that would starve before they’d walk away from a
dig, even if only temporarily, so it was a good thing cooler heads (or at least
less fanatical) were in charge. As fascinating as the possibilities the First
Light dig represented, he would miss the neo-nerf steaks next year if the
roundup was interrupted. The neo-nerfs only had two horns and their hides
lacked the nerf’s thick coat over their shoulders and heads, but their spit
wasn’t acidic, their stench wasn’t near as bad, the meat was just as delicious,
and the herds were finally getting large enough that it was dropping out of the
luxury item category. If it wasn’t for the Treyans’ consensus policy of staying
largely unnoticed until their digs had given up incontrovertible proof, that
meat would be a luxury item, Trey’s biggest export.
He frowned when his daydream of a thick, juicy, neo-nerf steak was interrupted
by the sight of a speeder bike coming out of one of those dirt roads. He didn’t
recognize either of the two girls, even if he did the species — a Togrutan
piloting and Human behind her. And he should recognize them, he knew everyone
around close enough to use a speeder bike to come to town. For that matter, he
knew everyone close enough to use a hopper to come to town — Newtown had only
been settled a couple generations, and with only a few unique finds so far
there hadn’t been a lot of immigration from the rest of the planet. And the
Togrutan especially, not many non-Humans had joined the wild bantha chase that
was Trey’s founding and fewer had migrated to Trey since. Though he’d never
seen anything like the Human’s white hair shot through with blue in imitation
of her Togrutan friend’s montrals and lekku, either
The speeder stopped in the middle of the street as the two women looked both
ways at the businesses that made up most of the buildings (on the first floors,
at least, with the owners living on the floors above them). Then the Togrutan
pointed at the general store before gunning the speeder bike into motion again.
The pair dismounted from the bike and walked inside.
Ghent, what’s wrong?”
“Strangers on a speeder bike.”
“So?”
“Where’d they come from, on a bike?”
Cal shrugged. “Maybe they’re staying on one of the farms, borrowed the bike.”
“But then I’d know the bike —” Ghent stiffened as he realized he did know the
bike, the dent and long scratch in the paint ... he could remember the time Ian
had tried to ride his bike up the side of a cliff-in-all-but-name on a drunken
dare and ended up leaving for his run to Milagro a few days late and smelling
thanks to his bacta bath. He glanced at the buildings around the store, on both
sides of the street, ran down his mental list of the people he knew were in
town. “Put out the call for a posse, a circle around Navin’s store.”
                                      /\
“— but there simply isn’t any work around here. The harvest is in so the farms
won’t have enough work for the hands they have until spring, and the bar has
enough maids. The digs are always happy for more hands, but I assume you’re
looking for more than room and board.”
“Yes, we are. But if that’s all we can get for a few months, then that’s all we
can get. Are there better prospects anywhere else?” Ahsoka kept half an eye on
the storekeeper as he frowned thoughtfully, and the rest of her attention on
Jenni as she wandered the store, examining its not-so-varied products. Ahsoka
wondered just how the store’s offerings looked to her time-lost friend — the
former Jedi figured that food packets probably looked the same after ninety
thousand years, and cooking aids would probably be a case of form following
function. But the power packs and engine parts, both mechanical and electronic
...
“Lorne, the Marshal’s on the com!”
The female voice came from a back room, and the storekeeper straightened and
turned away. “Excuse me for a moment.” He disappeared into the back room, and
Ahsoka focused all her attention on her friend with a smile.
The smile quickly faded, though, as a sense of unease grew ... a warning from
the Force. But it wasn’t as abrupt as the warnings she knew so well from when
she came under attack during the war, nor as intense as the constant “buzz” of
being in a hostile war zone.
And Jenni didn’t seem to sense anything at all.
Then Lorne came out of the back room. “My apologies for making you wait. I’m
afraid I can’t help you, any work at this season that actually pays would be
south of the equator but I don’t know what communities.”
Ahsoka forced a smile. “Thank you for your time. Can you give me the contact
info for the digs?”
“Certainly.” He quickly scribbled some numbers and letters on a small sheet of
paper. “Here’s the web address.”
“Thank you.” Ahsoka took the offered sheet. “Jenni, come on, we’re going!”
Jenni turned away from an assortment of battery packs and hurried over to
rejoin Ahoska. The two stepped through the doorway and walked toward the
speeder bike, Ahsoka’s tensing and looking around as the warning through the
Force grew stronger and stronger....
A heavy metal blast door slammed up across the door and windows behind them
with a massive clang that had Ahsoka jerking around, scrabbling at the clunky,
makeshift lightsaber at her belt as the whine of a blaster bolt sounded, a
ricochet —
She whipped back around, focusing on her crystal set inside her lightsaber’s
hilt as she squeezed the safety, its pure white blade sprang to life....
The speeder bike had lifted from hip-high to chest-high with a tendril of smoke
made of vaporized metal rising from it, hovering in front of Jenni’s widespread
hands as if they were plastered against an invisible window. And someone was
shouting.
“— nine rings take you, hold your fire! Someone take that damned idiot’s long-
gun away from him.”
A male Human, average height, dark hair balding, slightly overweight ... the
man that had been shouting, Ahsoka thought, stepped away from where he’d been
standing behind a building’s corner. He had a blaster in hand and a badge on
the chest of his vest — too far away to see the details, but she would have bet
the credits she didn’t have that it had the two back-to-back triangles that
were used to represent the law on many of the Outer Rim’s frontier planets. He
paused to stare at Ahsoka and Jenni for a moment, before sliding his blaster
back in its holster and walking toward them with his hands spread wide. A
younger Human male — maybe even a teenager — stepped out of the door of the
same building. (A building whose windows were also covered by metal shutters
with firing slits, Ahsoka noticed — along with most every other window and door
along the street.) He holstered his own blaster before joining the older man,
ignoring the irritated glance the marshal sent him.
Through the Force she could sense hostile attention, but the feeling of
imminent danger had faded. And none of the hostility was coming from the two
walking toward her and Jenni.
“Morning, I’m Ghent Tardun and this is my sometime deputy, Brodie Vandorack,”
the marshal said when the pair were close enough for normal conversation. “So,
what are two Jedi doing on Trey? And where’s Ian?”
For a brief moment Ahsoka was tempted, but ... “I’m afraid neither of us are
Jedi. Who is — ?”
“You’re Ahsoka Tano!”
Ahsoka froze for a moment at the deputy’s exclamation, but relaxed when no new
warning flared in the Force. “Yes, I am. How did you know?”
“We may be such a backwater we don’t have a hyperwave transceiver —” the
Marshal began.
“Yeah, how the Order treated you really suck!”
Ghent shot a repressive glance at his deputy. “— but we do get the news bursts
through the subspace transceiver — your trial got a lot of coverage, I don’t
know how I didn’t make the connection myself. And Ian Keel is the owner of the
speeder bike your ‘non-Jedi’ friend is using as a shield.”
“Oh, I never did learn his name.” Ahsoka hesitated, but didn’t know how to
sugarcoat it — with two years of war she’d had more than a few friends die, but
both as a Jedi and a commander of clone troopers she’d never had to write so
much as a condolence letter. “He died saving my life.”
Ghent sighed, suddenly looking older. “I was afraid of that. After Riptide
disappeared after pinging her arrival months ago and then you showing up on his
speeder ...” He lifted the comp on his wrist and pressed a button. “All clear,
everyone, thanks for coming out.” As people started rising on roofs and other
shuttered windows rose, he waved toward his office. “You want to join me? I got
someone that’s gonna need to know just how his friend died.”
                                      /\
“— and then Ian opened fire from behind his turned over table. He took down a
few of the bounty hunters, and half the rest turned their fire on him. He
probably thought the table would shield him, but didn’t take into account how
heavy some of the bounty hunters’ blasters were — they blew through the table
and took him down. But the distraction he provided gave me the chance to get
over the bar and charge the bounty hunters. I didn’t have my shotos, but I did
have a knife, and they weren’t wearing full body armor. Once I was in the
middle of them, they didn’t stand a chance. I killed a few, more died from
their own partners’ fire trying to shoot me and missing, and the survivors ran.
Ian was still alive when I got to him, but even if there’d been a bacta tank
right there I don’t think it would have helped. He was hurt too badly.” Ahsoka
paused for a moment, eyes haunted as she remembered others she’d known with
similar injuries, their hands in hers going limp as they died. Her voice gone
soft, she finished with, “He survived long enough to give me the access codes
to his ship and tell me where to find her. He never did tell me his name. I
wonder if he recognized me like Deputy Vandorack?”
“Probably,” the Human male whose head-and-chest holographic image floating over
the desk replied. (A rather handsome Human as they counted such things, as best
she could tell from the hologram, at least compared to Skyguy. At least he had
a full head of hair and no beard.) “He loved Riptide, he wouldn’t give it to
some random Togrutan that isn’t even fully grown yet, even if he was dying.”
“Riptide?”
“You would know it as Fate’s Gift, that’s what was on the paperwork he was
using.”
“So you believe her?”
Ahsoka and Jenni stiffened at Marshal Tardun’s question, but Cort nodded as he
surreptitiously wiped at wet cheeks. “Yes, now that Ahsoka’s given me the
details I’ve found the law enforcement records of his death in my downloads
from Milagro. What’s there checks out. Dumb bastard always did have a soft spot
for a pretty face. Once while we were on the run here —” He broke off, waving a
hand dismissively.
Ahsoka flinched, then stiffened for a moment when Jenni took one of her hands,
down toward their laps where neither man could see it. What do Ido? She
struggled with the thought for a moment, then settled for gently squeezing
Jenni’s hand before letting go.
“Besides,” Cort continued, “You’re being hunted. That adds some veracity to
your claim.”
Ghent straightened in his chair. “You really think so? Hold that thought.” He
lifted his wrist-comp to his mouth again. “Clear sailing, Cort’s given the
green light.” He lowered his hand as acknowledges sounded and grinned at the
two girls gaping at him. “You didn’t think we’d just take your word for who you
are? Well ... Tano, at least. I’m afraid the name ‘Jenni Allston’ doesn’t mean
anything to us.” Ahsoka froze, focused on Jenni, and relaxed when she sensed
her friend’s mental giggles through the Force ... and suddenly realized that
Jenni’s attention hadn’t been focused on her once since they’d hit town! At
least, not through the Force like on the ship. Maybe she’s getting better?
“— third town in a month. The story he’s used every time has him just arriving,
too. You’d think he didn’t think we’re talking to each other.”
Ahsoka refocused on the conversation in time to see a slight smirk cross the
face of Cort’s holographic image. “He doesn’t. The first thing he did once he
landed is slice the planetary network and go looking for the government
databases ... I think. If that’s what he was looking for, he didn’t go anywhere
near the trade databases. Guess he didn’t think that reports of what you found
in the digs matter.”
To the former Jedi he might as well have been speaking an alien language, but
Jenni was grinning. “Trade databases? Digs? You hid access to your government
databases in archaeologywebsites? That’s brilliant!”
“Ahhh ... well ...” Ghent mumbled.
Cort laughed, though it sounded slightly forced. “Their government databases
aren’t hidden in the archaeology websites, they are the archaeology websites.”
Now it was Jenni’s turn to stare at him as if he was speaking an alien language
(which for Jenni at least he was, now that Ahsoka thought about it). “What?”
“Well, yes ...” Ghent shrugged, embarrassed. “Trey was actually colonized by a
Core World archaeologist named Vinjera Kurn several centuries ago. Kurn found
some ancient records that said that Coruscant isn’t the Human homeworld, but as
far as the survivors of some great calamity got before their ships wore out.
The records didn’t say what the nature of the calamity was or how many refugees
landed on Coruscant, or even in what direction they had come, but it did
include a description of the star system. She spent decades searching every
star map she could find, and eventually found this world. All her fellow
scholars thought she was crazy to take those records so seriously, that it had
to be a hoax even if they couldn’t figure out how it was done, but she was a
true believer and so she and her followers — and their families — moved here
looking for proof, gave the planet the name in the records.” He shrugged again.
“They found evidence of an ancient civilization quickly enough, probably
humanoid and the right size from the layouts of the few below-ground
installations we’ve found, but no records or images have survived the
millennia. We’ll keep looking, though — it’s a big planet, the proof has to be
around here somewhere.”
Ahsoka stared at him for a long moment, then turned to meet Jenni’s eyes. She
hesitantly reached out to her Human friend through the Force, and gasped at the
wave of grief, exultation and loneliness that crashed over her.
But none of she was feeling showed when Jenni forced a smile. “Trey ... Terra.
I guess we have trade goods we can sell, after all.” Ahsoka thought of the
hours and hours of translated books stored away in Fate’s Gift’s data banks and
nodded. (Or was it Riptide’s? She’d have to decide which name she wanted to
keep for the ship she’d been given — the one that seemed so appropriate, or the
one given by the man that had loved it.)
As Ahsoka was momentarily lost in thought, Jenni asked, “Can you bring up a map
of the world?”
Ghent gazed at her curiously for a moment, then shrugged and typed some
instructions into the panel he’d used to bring up Cord’s hologram. That
hologram vanished, replaced by a rotating image of the globe.
Jenni rose and walked around by Ghent. She gazed at the globe for a moment,
then reached out and touched a spot on the southeast section of the same
continent as the town they were currently in. “Somewhere around here. It’ll
take some looking, but you should be able to find a huge carving into the side
of a mountain of three Human males on riding animals. The carving is under an
overhang and the rock is very hard, so it should still be there.”
Ghent stared at the spot on her finger rested on, then up at Jenni. “How do you
know? Is this some Jedi trick?”
“No.” Jenni shook her head, and shifted her hand to point at a spot on the
continent across the ocean to the east, on the west coast just below the
retreating ice. “Because I was born here when it was an island, ninety thousand
years ago.”
Chapter End Notes
     The carving actually exists — the Confederate Memorial Carving. This
     carving of President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and
     “Stonewall” Jackson is the largest high relief sculpture in the
     world, its top over 400 feet above the ground, measuring 90 feet by
     190 feet, and recessed 42 feet into the mountain. The rock is hard
     enough that if we all disappeared tomorrow, 100,000 years from now it
     might be the only evidence left that we were ever here. (I’m assuming
     that over the next thousand years leading to Jenni’s time, building
     materials are developed that are tough enough to survive ninety
     millennia if buried even if records and all other soft materials
     wouldn’t.)
     And yes, Jenni was born somewhere in the British Isles, though that
     would have only been of historical interest under a centuries-old
     world government.
***** Attachments *****
Chapter Notes
     Yes, I've need working on the latest chapter of Coming Home,
     hopefully the next chapter will be out by the end of the week. But
     I've been working on this one off and on when I'm mostly caught up on
     my writing for my current stories, so here it is.
     Also, fair warning: because of this chapter the rating has been
     bumped back up to E (I don't know who dropped it to M but I wish they
     hadn't).
Ahsoka slowly circled about Jenni, her lightsaber held high by one hand,
slanting diagonally down across her torso in the opening position of Soresu,
the blade humming at the low pitch that told anyone with any experience with
the weapons that it was set in training mode. Her new lightsaber. Her use of
Soresu — that most defensive of forms — was good practice even if she wasn’t as
skilled as she could be, but unnecessary ... Jenni never initiated an attack.
Instead she turned in place to keep facing Ahsoka, her new lightsaber in a two-
handed grip at waist level, blade slanting down and humming at the same low
pitch.
First the archaeologists had found the relief sculpture that Jenni had told
them of. Then they’d found more evidence of ancient occupation at site after
site that Jenni pointed out, some previously discovered, most not. Then they
found evidence of ancient terraforming of their next neighbor out from the sun,
the planet Jenni had said was named Mars — a place none of them had bothered to
visit, since even the most primitive hyperspace drive opened up local space
with its habitable planets to easy colonization ... the possibility that
humanity’s first form of space travel was something else much slower hadn’t
occurred to them. And with her credentials firmly established, Jenni had turned
over all her people’s literature she’d recited and translated over the past few
weeks.
Now the debate raging across the planet was when to release their findings to
the larger universe. (They’d avoided pirate raids by not having anything that
made the trip worth it, and with the war on ...) And Ahsoka and Jenni found
that what few credits they had were no good anywhere on the planet, whatever
they asked for — or even expressed an interest in — was theirs. They’d kept
their requests limited to an overhaul of Life’s Gift (the name for their ship
Ahsoka had eventually decided on in honor of the man that had saved her life at
the cost of his own), topping off the fuel tanks and restocking the ship’s
supplies, a few changes of clothing, a new body for Defenate ... and all the
necessary components for real lightsabers (with the addition of the crystals
they’d brought out from the Mountain). They had spent the week since then in
almost constant practice.
Ostensibly, it was to prepare Jenni for their confrontation with the stranger
still wandering from town to town searching for Ahsoka, in case he was another
Dark Side user. Certainly, Jenni had needed the training — she had some skill
with some sort of sword that helped with lightsabers, but even with Ahsoka
handicapped by her inability to use her favorite fighting style (Jar’Kai used
two swords, and there were no Kyber crystals on Trey for a third lightsaber)
Jenni had still been clumsy and easily handled by her trainer. At first. But
now ...
In an eye-blink Ahsoka shifted from Soresu to her next-favorite form — Ataru —
throwing herself up and forward, spinning and twisting head-over-heels over
Jenni, pure white blade slashing down toward the Human’s white, blue-striped
hair.
And just as Ahsoka had come to expect, Jenni’s equally pure white blade snapped
up to block the downward swing as she spun in place, blade sweeping across her
body to knock aside Ahsoka’s follow-up slash. Ahsoka stepped back, easily
parrying Jenni’s counter-thrust, and dropped to swing at her ankles, then when
Jenni hopped up over the attack shifted the path of the swing up between her
legs toward her crotch — only to blink when Jenni practically stood on her
head, one foot pointed at the ceiling, her blade easily knocking Ahsoka’s blade
away from her body through the space now empty.
At that Ahsoka leaped back and relaxed the flow of the Force through her into
her lightsaber. As her blade vanished she held up her hands to signal the end
of the bout. “Oh, come on! What was that? How do you do that?”
“Do what?” Jenni inquired as she shut down her own lightsaber.
“Always be somewhere else. I mean, I know Jedi Masters — which Force knows I’m
not — have levels of skill and emersion in the Force that make them untouchable
by anyone but another Master or overwhelming numbers. I’ve seen Master Yoda
bounce around a training room like a kiffa ball on enhancers. But you don’t
have that kind of skill, you can’t come close to touching me. So how can you
pull off stunts like that last one?”
“Ah, another difference. I should have realized when you told me of your six
Forms, we didn’t have anything them.” Jenni walked over and picked up a water
bottle by the wall, sucked down half of it, and dumped the rest over her head
before continuing.
“The Youxia didn’t go in for martial arts, not most of us. We didn’t have
lightsabers, or blasters, and did have a more peaceful union ... a utopia,
even, while it lasted.” She faltered for a moment, face going cold, and
Ahsoka’s heart clenched. She wished now she hadn’t asked, and was really happy
that for the moment her friend had dropped her usual near-constant focus on her
through the Force, it gave her the privacy to push down her growing fear of
Jenni’s mental state.
With clearly-forced cheer, Jenni continued, “Anyway, it’s another aspect of how
deeply I immerse myself in the currents of the Tao. Every act of aggression is
an act of self, an imposition of your own will to shift that current. And
because it is, there is a disturbance in that current that I sense before the
blow arrives. The only way to avoid that disturbance is to train that act of
aggression so strongly into mind and body that you act without thought.”
“Which I often don’t,” Ahsoka mused, realization dawning. “My preferred Form is
based around two shota, I almost never fall back on a single, longer-bladed
lightsaber. But why does that mean you have no Forms? There are any number of
Masters that can sense the ... ‘disturbance in the currents of the Tao’ as well
as you can.”
“But not many below their level, I think, your training must focus on other
aspects that never occurred to us. So you use the Forms to at least partially
make up for that lack. But it’s more than that. Yes, the only way to act
aggressively against a Youxia without forewarning or overwhelming numbers is
training, but that training is itself predictable if your opponent is trained
in the same Form. So the ‘Form’ of a Youxia that is swept into a warrior’s
destiny is both unique and constantly changing, so that when he faces another
Youxia warrior in a spar — or a slave of the Void in deadly combat — his Art is
not already known.”
“And we’ve been sparring for most of a week, you’ve been learning my moves,
even beyond your ‘immersion in the current of the Tao’. But I’d think that
would really slow down your training — beyond enough of the basics to avoid
killing yourself, every Youxia is self-taught.”
“Yes.”
The one word response was flat, cold, and through the Force Ahsoka sensed that
her friend was once again falling into that raging despair that she lived with
(or more like dwelt in) more and more with every passing day ... when she
wasn’t focused like a laser on Ahsoka during their sparring. And they couldn’t
spar all the time. So I’ll have to think of something else ... somehow. But for
now ...
Ahsoka raised her lightsaber, focused on her crystal with a part of her
attention as the rest centered itself on her friend, and her blade sprang to
life. “So I’ll have to get sneakier. Let’s see how I do.”
                                     /oOo\
When the alert from her secretary (and former handmaid and still her
bodyguard), softly chimed, Senator Padme Amidala of Naboo breathed a sigh of
relief and hastily pressed the acceptance key. “Yes, Aja?”
“Knight Skywalker is here, my lady, and wishes to know if you can tear yourself
away from your oh-so-important work.”
Padme grinned at the snark. Aja didn’t approve of her superior’s secret
intimacy with ‘the Hero with No Fear’, but nonetheless did her part to keep it
quiet. Her less than respectful announcement was her way of letting Padme know
that her husband had arrived alone.
She glanced around to make sure the office windows’ shutters were closed (as
they almost always were now, officially to make it harder for assassins but
really for these moments with her husband), then said, “Send him in. Then why
don’t you call it a day? Knight Skywalker and I may have a great deal to ...
discuss, and he can escort me home when we’re done.” Left unspoken, ‘the Hero
with No Fear’ would provide all the protection she needed.
“Of course, my lady.”
In the seconds before the door slid open, Padme blanked her screen of the
vitally important but mind-numbing trade agreement she’d been reading, pushed
the button that would withdraw the screen into her desk, and rose to her feet
as her husband strode into her office, dressed in the blue and brown battle
dress he preferred to the usual Jedi white. As soon as the door slid close
behind him, she was around her desk and in his arms. “Annie!”
His arms went around her without a word, without concern for how he crushed her
own gray and tan robes, her face pressed into the crook of his shoulder, his
face rubbing against her brunette braids. Under her hands, even through his
tunic his every muscle felt like it was poured steel. Sometimes she wished she
was Force-sensitive, to be able to read the moods of the man she’d chosen, but
at times like this there’d be no point.
She sighed into his neck. “No word, then.”
“No — no rumors in the under-levels, no hint that she caught a ship off
Coruscant ... it’s as if Ahsoka’s vanished like she never existed.” He released
her, pushed away and whirled around, fists by his side trembling. “And the
Council refuses to devote more resources searching for her, they say that since
she left the Order she’s no longer their concern. No longer their concern. As
if they were concerned about her before!”
Padme stepped over, laying a hand on his shoulder. “You care. You know Obi-Wan
cares. Yoda cares. And I care. And you at least know she’s still alive, right?
You said your master-padawan bond is still there.”
“Yes, I know she’s alive, but that’s all. And I can’t keep searching for her,
Obi-Wan and I have been assigned a new mission. Tomorrow I’ll be taking the
501st to Auwei, we won’t be back for a month at least. And without me and Obi-
Wan here to keeping searching ourselves —”
Padme broke their embrace to push back, hold Anakin at arm’s length so she
could look him in the eye. “That leaves me. I will not stop searching.”
Anakin gazed back at his wife for a long moment, then pulled her to him,
crushing his lips against hers hard enough to bruise.
Oh no, not again! Normally, Anakin was as loving and considerate a lover as a
woman could hope for. But lately ...
His hands were already busy at the fastenings for her robes. Those robes had
the appearance of the full, cumbersome robes that were the current popular
style for a human Senator to conduct official business. (She had considered
breaking with that style for something more comfortable, but as young and
powerless as she was she would have seemed only petulant rather than a trend-
setter.) But since their marriage over two years ago ... His seeking fingers
found the artfully hidden clasps and her robes fell open. He brushed them back
off her shoulders and she dropped her arms to her sides so the robes could
slide down her back to pool about her feet, leaving her standing in only her
white panties and low pink slipper-boots. One hand found an exposed breast as
the other pushed aside his own blue battle robes to scrabble at the fastening
of his tight, light brown pants.
Truthfully, in other circumstances she wouldn’t have minded his newfound
aggressiveness so much. If it wasn’t for her concern that it was driven by his
fears rather than because he had finally realized that normal people weren’t
more ... fragile ... than trained Jedi, she could enjoy a more dominant Anakin
— one that didn’t treat her like a precious, delicate flower that would crumble
at a careless touch. The problem was —
He spun her to face the front of her desk. One hand between her shoulder blades
pushed her down to lie across its top, her nipples tightening at the cool touch
of its surface, while his other hand pulled her panties to one side. A moment
later she could feel his engorged cock pushing past her nether lips to sink
into her sheath, and she wasn’t ready!
His hands gripped her hips as he hammered into her, and she gritted her teeth
as she endured the friction of his steel-hard cock against the stretched,
barely dampening walls of her sheath. The only good thing about this whole
botched up mess was that when her lover was like this he didn’t last long.
Indeed, she could already feel him swelling, the pain growing worse from the
imagined further stretching of her sheath’s walls, and then he exploded into
her as he always did on their first round whenever they could sneak in some
private time together.
His last few pumps were much less painful thanks to the lubrication of his seed
filling her, oozing out around his softening rod. Then he pulled out and
stumbled backward, falling onto the aluthiac-leather couch she had against one
wall, his pants fallen around his dark brown knee-high boots.
As he lay there gasping, she straightened and walked around to the back of her
desk, pressing a hidden stud for tissue. She ignored him as she silently wiped
her nether lips and inner thighs clean of the smeared white ooze. As she
dropped the soiled tissue into a special disposal box to vanish with a flash
into its constituent atoms, he finally spoke.
“I did it again. I’m sorry.”
Padme whirled and strode furiously toward him. “Yes, I’m sure you are! Like the
last time, and the time before that. ‘Sorry’ isn’t good enough, Annie, not
anymore!” She paused to stare down at him. Her resolve weakened for a moment at
the clear guilty regret on his face, but she steeled herself ... they could not
go on like this.
As she continued to stare down at him, a thought occurred to her. She smiled,
and Anakin paled. “What you need, love, is a lesson. You are going to lie there
and not move unless I tell you.”
He paled even more, swallowed, but nodded convulsively.
“Good.”
She began by kicking off her slipper-boots, then hooking a thumb under each
side of the waistband of her stained panties and slowly pulling them down along
her thighs until they came loose and slid down her legs to the floor. She
stepped out of them and kicked them to one side, then straightened and spread
her stance slightly, putting herself fully on display.
Eyes wide, Anakin swallowed ... though this time for a very different reason.
Good. Padme’s lips twitched at the sight ... but her lips weren’t what she
wanted twitching. She reached up one hand to pinch and twist a nipple before
kneading the breast it tipped, fingers of her other hand between her legs
rubbing along her cleft then slipping up into her sheath. She twisted those
rubbing fingers, seeking ... there! She moaned at the sensations rippling
through her from her hands and suppressed another smile as Anakin’s cock
twitched and swelled from her show, growing to attention thanks to her show.
Almost there, she thought, beginning to gasp slightly, her hips twitching....
Now!
She pulled her fingers clear of her cleft and lifted them up to suck and lick
them clean, her gaze fixed on her husbands’ still-wide eyes, then strode
forward and straddled his hips with her hands on his shoulders. Giving him what
she hoped was a sultry a smile (and hoping that his obvious lust had
overwhelmed whatever sense he might have been receiving through the Force of
her own state of mind), she undulated her hips, rubbing her nether lips along
his by now steel-hard rod and coating it with her juices. Satisfied, she
reached down to guide his cock to her sheath’s entrance and sank down with a
satisfied sigh. She held still as she adjusted again to that vein-laced rod,
more quickly this time thanks to her earlier reaming and fresh lubrication,
then finally began to slowly rise and fall.
By now her mind was fogging from the rising pleasure washing through her. He
pace began to pick up slightly, sucking in air as she struggled to hold on to
her purpose ... until Anakin’s own control finally slipped and he began to
frantically thrust up into her.
Instantly, she slammed down. “I said don’t move!”
He groaned with frustration but followed her order. She sat on his lap for a
long minute, let her breathing settle, waited until his hands resting on the
smooth aluthiac leather curled into fists before resuming her rise and fall.
This time she was better able to maintain control, her rhythm staying slow but
steady ... though her hands gripping Anakin’s shoulder were tightening,
fingernails digging into flesh.
Nor was she the only one maintaining control — when her husband wasn’t half-
insane from worry and frustration he really was a considerate lover, and had
quickly learned to somehow hold off his own release until she’d reached her own
peak. Though from his increasingly strangled groans she suspected she was
pushing his limits.
Finally, when she was beginning to tremble from the effort of maintaining her
even pace and his head was tilted back against the back of the couch, neck taut
and eyes screwed shut with his own fight to keep still, Padme decided she’d
tortured them both enough. “All right, you can move.”
Even before she finished her permission Anakin’s hands flew up from the couch
to pull her down against his chest even as he rolled them over, pinning her
down, the smooth leather cool against her sweat-slicked skin. Hands braced on
the back of the couch on each side of her head, he began the furiously pound
into her, bouncing her back against the couch with each thrust. But even now he
somehow managed to hold himself back until she felt her sheath clench tight
around his steel-hard cock and her shrill keen of release filled the office.
Within seconds Padme again felt the familiar swelling pulse and Anakin slammed
into her once more and froze, buried deep, as fresh seed gushed into her womb.
Finally, when the last pulse into her overflowing sheath was over and his cock
began to soften, he carefully rolled to the side and settled onto the couch
beside her. “Lesson learned,” he gasped out between gulps for air, “I won’t do
that again.”
Padme sighed as her own breathing slowed. “I hope not, I wouldn’t want to put
you through a repeat performance.” I think that was as hard on me as it was on
you, love.
When she decided she’d recovered enough, she pushed herself to her feet and
staggered toward her office ‘fresher. “Let’s finish this up in my suite,” she
called over her shoulder as the door disguised as just another wall panel slid
aside. She stepped in without waiting for a reply. Anakin knew the routine, and
by the time she’d finished wiping herself down and cleaned off with the sonic
shower she’d had installed after the first time her husband had surprised her
in her office he’d have hung up their clothes in the cleaning closet Aja had
helped her install (the cleaning closet wasn’t what she would call really
effective, but it was good enough to kill the smell and remove obvious stains)
and activated the cleaning droid he’d reprogrammed to forget dealing with the
messes left behind by their little interludes. By the time she was done he’d be
ready to take her place in the ‘fresher.
But this time she would be just a wee bit slower getting clean. As the door
slid closed behind her, she pushed a stud on the wall by the mirror and when a
small storage space’s cover slid aside removed the fluid collector that space
contained. The small device had been designed for collecting and preserving
forensic evidence at crime scenes, but she had another use in mind. Hastily
sitting on the toilet seat and spreading her legs, she inserted the probe up
into her sheath. She grimaced at the cold of the probe and the sensation of its
soft suction, but the clear crystaplast tube connecting the probe to the
reservoir quickly turned white before the light signaling that the reservoir
was full flashed. Sighing in relief, she removed the probe and returned the
collector to its storage space and again pushed the stud to hide it from sight.
The stud would only open to her fingerprint, the collected sample could wait to
be smuggled out another day.
I don’t care what those fools on the Jedi Council think, love, she thought
fondly as she again wiped her inner thighs clean of his smeared seed and her
own juices, youneedmore attachments. Ahsoka and Obi-Wan were actually making
things worse for her husband, not better — he needed another attachment that
wasn’t going to vanish or constantly be at risk on the battlefield, someone not
a part of the too-often horror of their current lives.And I’ll see to it you
have them. If tonight doesn’t do it, this sample will be a start.
***** Tearing Away the Curtain *****
Chapter Notes
     Yes, another chapter! Now that The Unexpected Hobbit and The Raven
     are done this is one of the stories I’ll be focused on (along with
     Ranma, the Naive Succubus, once I finish rereading what I’ve already
     written).
     And yes, this is a little short. For those that don’t read my other
     stories, I’ve decided to go with shorter chapters again, to try and
     motivate myself to write more. So far, it seems to be mostly working.
Jenni frowned as she stared at the large hologram in Navin-town’s small
library. Very small, only a hologram projector and keyboard in a room that
could be mistaken for a large closet if it wasn’t for the window, but she was a
little surprised to find a library at all — as connected through some form of
wireless as the current colonists of Earth-that-was were, everyone would have
their own tablet. But she supposed people would want a larger projector from
time to time, she’d been using the library screen for stellar maps.
It had been almost a day since she’d taken her fatigue-driven misstep during
her last spar with Ahsoka, and the town’s (village’s, really, ‘town’ was too
grandiose a label) single part-time medic had ordered her to take a two-day
break from all exercise to give her body a chance to recover from the strain of
the past week (ten days, she was still getting used to that) of near-constant
sparring. During that day she had felt the silence-fueled darkness of her mind
growing, filling in the corners, shadowing her every thought. Even the shining
flame of Ahsoka in the current of the Tao was helping less and less — as
comforting as the former padawan’s presence was, it was outside her, not
shining at the center of her being as her Bond had been. And now Ahsoka was
gone, answering a call from Marshal Tardun, and Jenni was desperate for any
distraction she could manage.
Finding a possible if permanent solution to her growing instability had been
quick, though it had revealed a very unpleasant side of galactic society — or
societies, better said. That done except for convincing Ahsoka to go along with
it (something that was not going to be easy), Jenni set that solution aside and
turned to a more general perusal of the library’s database. She had hoped that
satisfying her intellectual curiosity about recent history and current affairs
would provide a distraction. It was proving distracting, all right, but only
because now she was haunted by the overwhelming feeling that she was missing
something ... something important.
Whatever it was, it had to do with the beginning of the current war, whenever
she let the Tao’s currents sweep her attention where it would she kept coming
back to that opening battle, the First Battle of Geonosis. She reviewed the
historical record of the beginning of the war yet again, and yet again couldn’t
see anything significant — it seemed a straightforward battle: several Jedi
found out about the Separatists’ building military strength, the Separatists
tried to buy more time by killing the Jedi that found them (and Senator
Amidala, and how she ended up in that mess wasn’t clear), the Jedi swept in
with an army of their own, clones force-grown for war —
Her thoughts stumbled. From what Ahsoka had told her the Order was supposed to
be dedicated to peace — diplomats preferably, ‘one riot, one ranger’ (and maybe
a padawan) when diplomacy failed. What were the Jedi doing with an army of
their own!?
Some quick research had Jenni leaning back in her seat, more confused than
before. The thought of the Jedi Order making use of ultra-tech Mamelukes was
disturbing, but she could understand it ... there was a war on, they needed an
army, they had one handed to them, they made use of it. She couldn’t think but
that there had been at least some opposition to using what was essentially a
slave army, but the only alternative was a quick victory by the Separatists ...
and considering what the Trade Federation had done to Naboo a decade earlier,
that victory would have been catastrophic for hundreds if not thousands of
major worlds and uncountable minor ones. So yes, she could understand how the
pragmatists carried the day.
But where had that army come from? Or rather, following Kaulana’s advice when
investigating human behavior — whether crime or politics — to follow the money,
where had the funding for the army come from? (She fought to ignore the spurt
of grief at the thought of that gentle cynic’s missing mental
presence.) According to the public records, the creation of that army had been
commissioned by Jedi Master Sifo-Dyas without the knowledge of the rest of the
Order out of concern over the growing breakdown of public order, but surely a
lifelong member of the Order couldn’t have secretly accumulated enough private
wealth to fund the creation of an entire army! So who had backed him, and why
wasn’t that person or organization a matter of public record?
A little digging and it turned out his backer was a matter of public record,
just that the public record in question was buried deep in minor news articles:
Hego Damask of the Galactic Banking Clan. And that didn’t make sense, either —
Damask was wealthy but he wasn’t that wealthy, no individual was. Or rather he
hadn’t been that wealthy, seeing how he had died in his sleep at almost the
moment the war started. So if Damask hadn’t funded it out of his own wealth he
was either acting as a conduit for some shadowy conspiracy or he had convinced
the Banking Clan to pony up the funds itself. Of the two options, the former
seemed more likely than the latter — bankers weren’t big on unprofitable
ventures, and there was little less profitable than an army that wasn’t being
used for conquest; not much money to be had in building massive quantities of
expensive materiel, shipping it great distances, and blowing it up. In either
case any records wouldn’t be public, so following the money was a dead end.
But I’m on the right track, I think, the timing of Damask’s death isn’t
suspicious at all. So if I can’t follow the money, what about the power? Who
has gained the most power out of all this? It’s not the Trade Federation, the
last thing they wanted was a fair fight. But it could be someoneconnectedto the
Trade Federation, playing them off against the Republic.
So let’s google news articles for ‘increase political power war’ and see what
we get. (She fought to ignore the spurt of grief at that bit of nonsensical
slang for web searches that was now known by only a single living being.)
Unsurprisingly, the number of hits was in the thousands, and she sighed,
eliminated everything predating the Battle of Geonosis, sorted them from
earliest to latest, and dove in.
Several hours later she leaned back and rubbed tired eyes, almost shaking with
repressed anger — there had been many names that had come up in those articles,
but one that had surfaced over and over: Sheev Palpatine, former Senator of
Naboo and current Chancellor of the Republic. A Chancellor whose authority had
been steadily growing as the years of war passed. Don’t go off half-cocked, she
warned herself even as the need to obliterate something — anything — burned in
her veins. By all reports he’s done a lot of good with that power; he’s been a
decent war leader, and has had some real success reducing corruption. What if
it’s someone that intends to assassinate him and step into his shoes?
She sat and stared and the holo-projection for a time, now just waiting for
Ahsoka to return. The Togrutan was young, but still knew a hell of a lot more
about galactic politics than she did, perhaps she’d be able to see something
Jenni had missed. Though Jenni doubted a Padawan would be privy to the sort of
information that would answer her questions, that data would be deeply buried.
Wait, Ahsoka might not be privy to what I need, but Cort’s a hacker! (‘Slicer’,
by current Galactic slang.) I’ll bethecan find it for us!
It was a few moment’s work to bring up the library’s com app, and a few more
moments for a hologram of the upper half of a Cort rubbing at his eyes to
appear. He looked at her and grimaced. “Jenni, what was so important that you
called me in the middle of the night?”
Jenni’s eyes widened, and she glanced at the angle of the shadow cast by the
light from the window. “Ummm ... oops?”
Cort chuckled. “Forgot the time difference, did you? Well, I’m up now. What can
I do for you?”
A now blushing Jenni quickly explained what she’d learned and her concerns,
ending with, “I’ve taken it as far as I can, and I doubt Ahsoka can add
anything, but you’re a hacker ... uh, slicer. I know your connection here isn’t
the best but could you—”
She broke off at Cort’s raised hand. “And what will you do if you find out
who’s behind this?”
She shrugged, trying to keep the snarling fury she could feel slowly building
again off her face. “I don’t know, it’ll depend on who it is. Maybe nothing,
but it’s better to know who your enemies are.”
“Yeah, I thought so too, that’s why I’m here.” Jenni’s eyes widened again, but
this time he wasn’t laughing. “You’re not the first one to wonder about that,
you know, I did too. I’m sure we’re far from the only ones ... only unlike
those other ones, I was skilled enough to find out. But I wasn’t skilled enough
not to get caught.” He sighed and rubbed at his face. “The first assassin
missed us out of sheer dumb luck. Ian was paying attention after that and
caught the next one. After that ... I got the heads up of the massive bounty
posted with the Bounty Hunter’s Guild from someone that owed me a favor barely
early enough for us to run. I created new identities for us, but we didn’t have
anyone we trusted to give us new faces and not sell us out so we had to
disappear into the Outer Rim. And here we’ve been ever since, until Ian got
himself killed saving Ahsoka.”
Jenni was beginning to shake again. She whispered, “Who?”
“Are you sure you want to know? You won’t be able to un-know it after and I
doubt you can do anything about it.”
“Who?”
Cort hesitated, but finally shrugged. “The Chancellor.”
The building anger Jenni had been fighting for so long howled.
***** Breaking Point *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Ahsoka sighed as she walked alongside Marshal Tardun on their way back to the
Navin-town library. She knew Jenni needed her around to help keep her sane, but
she’d badly needed some alone time so the afternoon away from the time-lost
Human was something of a relief. Speaking of which ... “Thanks for letting my
borrow one of your blasters and your firing range.”
Ghent shrugged. “Whatever you want, you get. Within reason, anyway. Must say me
and the boys were a bit surprised by your request, though ... and how good you
were. Thought you Jedi stuck to your lightsabers.”
“We mostly do,” Ahsoka agreed, “but however ‘elegant’ a lightsaber might be
compared to a blaster, there are times you need the extra range. Especially
with the war. I imagine you didn’t find the rest surprising, though.”
“No, everyone knows about the Jedi ability to parry blaster bolts, and having
the boys take potshots at you while you bounced around like a kiffa ball made
for good practice for everyone. Good thing those blasters were set on stun,
though, we didn’t know you could reflect the bolts back at the shooters.”
“Not all Jedi can, mostly the more experienced ones that get sent out expecting
a fight. Which pretty much described my life since becoming a padawan, now that
I think about it.”
Ghent chuckled but didn’t respond, the two falling silent for half a block.
When they turned to corner onto the block with the city offices containing the
library cubicle, Ahsoka stopped. “So, Marshal, before we rejoin Jenni, what did
you want to talk to me about?”
Ghent sighed, shaking his head. “I suppose I should have expected a Jedi to
know.”
“Actually, it’s that you didn’t say anything before Jenni headed for the
library, and that your offices are on the other side of town.”
Ghent laughed. “How often are Jedi powers used to explain common sense?”
“More than you’d think, having a reputation for being all-knowing has two
edges,” Ahsoka replied with a grin. “Now talk!”
“Right.” Ghent hesitated for a moment, before shrugging. “Is something wrong
with Jenni?”
Ahsoka’s eyes widened, that had not been what she had been expecting. “Why do
you think something might be wrong with Jenni?”
“A few of my people whose instincts I trust tell me that they feel ... uneasy,
around Jenni. There’s nothing they can point to, but they feel like something’s
wrong.”
“Do they?” Ahsoka turned to lean against the wall of the store they were
standing next to, crossing her arms to seem as unthreatening as possible. “I
wonder if they’re Force-sensitive? That could explain it.”
“Force-sensitive?” Ghent repeated, eyebrows rising.
“Not everyone that can sense the Force is strong enough to become a Jedi. Most
aren’t, actually.” After a moment’s hesitation, Ahsoka sighed. “Yes, something
is wrong with Jenni. Remember, she may be a Force-user but she isn’t a Jedi,
her people did things differently. She joined her bond when she was sixteen,
and for the four years after before she ended up in stasis she lived with at
least two people in her head, usually four — those constant presences in the
Force, every emotion, able to communicate with them on the other side of the
planet as easily as if they were in the same room, her mind and memories an
open file, and the same for them. Now, her mind has gone silent and it’s
driving her insane. Maybe she’d be all right if she was back in her own time,
but …” She waved one arm, encompassing the town around them.
“But everything and everyone she knew and loved is ninety millennia gone,”
Ghent said for her. “And an insane Jedi — Force-user — is a dangerous one.”
Ahsoka reluctantly nodded. “It doesn’t happen often, but when it does the
results can be terrible. Falling to the Dark Side — ‘into the Void’, as Jenni
would put it — is inevitable.”
“If she might be so dangerous, why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because that would just make it worse. She’s empathic, in a way that Jedi
aren’t — we can sense emotions, but we usually need to focus on it. I think she
does it as automatically as breathing.”
“And sensing distrust in everyone around her would just push her over the edge
even faster.” Ahsoka nodded, and Ghent rubbed his forehead. “Force, what a
mess! Isn’t there anything you could have done to prepare us just in case?”
“I did.” At Ghent’s cocked eyebrow she forced a smile. “You didn’t notice that
today I trained you and your deputies in how to take down a single Jedi?”
His other eyebrow joined the first, then he suddenly looked thoughtful. “Pin
the Jedi in one place as best we can, with multiple blasters firing from
multiple directions. Explosive attacks from a distance would work, too.”
“Maybe. It would work better in a city than on a planet of small settlements,
but that’s the best way for non-Jedi to take down a Jedi short of orbital
bombardment.” Her gaze dropped, staring at the wind-blown pattern in the dust
covering the synthecrete at her feet. “It might be better for me for that
matter, with all the sparring we’ve been doing she’s learned a lot about my
fighting style and I’m lucky if I can get a touch on her at all. But I needed
something to take her mind off the silence, that we could do together so she
could sense me in the Force.” She looked up again, a single tear running down
her cheek. “Marshal, I don’t know what to do.”
And in an instant the young Togrutan changed from the admired Jedi Knight (even
if she insisted that she’d never been more than a Padawan) and hardened war
veteran to a child not much older than Ghent’s oldest boy, lost in a world she
didn’t fully understand. Ghent found himself fighting to resist the urge to hug
her and tell her that everything would be all right ... both because she might
take the embrace wrong, and because he didn’t like to make promises he wasn’t
sure he could keep. Instead, he cleared his throat as best he could of the
sudden lump and asked, “Have you talked to her about —”
Ahsoka gasped and whirled, lightsaber instinctively leaping into her hand, as
the oppressive sensation of the Dark Side of the Force washed over her. She
looked around frantically, senses reaching out, searching for the sudden danger
... and the glassteel window to the library cubicle exploded out of its frame
to hurtle across the street.
Even as she heard the high-pitched, enraged shriek coming from the now empty
window she was running forward, lightsaber angled to block anything coming out
of it, Marshal Tardun pounding along right behind her.
Then she slammed to a stop as the Force screamed a warning, just barely getting
her lightsaber up in time to block a crackling ribbon of lightning whipping
through the window. She held it, twisted to angle her lightsaber to catch a
second strand, glanced through the window and stiffened at the sight of Jenni
standing upright, legs and arms spread wide, blue-streaked white hair seeming
to coruscate around her thrown back head as writhing strands of lightning
radiated from her hands to score trails in the walls, hammer into the sparking
remnants of the library console, flash through the window and past her.
Then Jenni’s gaze dropped, and at the sight of her yellow-iris eyes Ahsoka
cried out ... and then screamed as the break in her concentration allowed the
force lightning she’d been blocking to hammer into her. She spasmed as every
nerve in her body seemed to light up, falling backward into the street.
“ ‘Soka!” The shout came at the same instant that the pain stopped, and a
moment later a gentle hand rolled her onto her back, the fingers of the other
hand pressing into one side of her neck. She forced open her eyelids to see
Jenni, a concerned expression on her face ... and not a hint of yellow in her
eyes.
“Jenni, raise your hands and back away slowly.”
Drawing on the Force to keep the pain from from driving her under as she so
badly wanted, Ahsoka twisted to see the Marshal standing several meters away,
blaster in a two-handed grip leveled at her friend. She managed to rasp out,
“Marshal, it’s all right. She didn’t intend to hit me ... she wasn’t aiming at
anything.”
Ghent hesitated, then lowered his blaster. “What happened?”
Jenni blushed. “I ... well ... I learned something and ... I lost it.” She rose
and stepped over to look through the window she’d just come out of, and
grimaced. “Someone needs to call Cort and tell him everything’s all right here,
I was talking to him and ... well, the library’s gone. Good thing Defenate is
overseeing the upgrade for Life’s Gift’s hold.”
Ahsoka ignored the burning pain that seemed to fill her from the soles of her
feet to the tiny montrals on top of her head and climbed to her feet, swaying
until Jenni caught her around her waist and pulled an arm around her friend’s
shoulders. The Togrutan rasped, “What did he tell you that upset you so badly?”
She felt Jenni’s shoulders stiffen under her arm, but she just said, “Let’s get
you to the medtech first, I’ll tell you after.”
                                      /\
Half an hour later Ahsoka sighed in relief as the pain-deadening effect of the
multiple bacta injections kicked in, though she suspected the anesthetic effect
wouldn’t last long enough. Thel Serat was surprised she’d been able to walk to
his office even with help, and from the way she’d felt like a badly seared
piece of meat she believed him.
Now she sat on a stool, Jenni standing behind her holding up her shaking arms,
her hanging lekku still twitching spasmodically against upper breasts and neck,
as Thel finished wrapping bacta bandages around her bare chest to cover the
large weeping, almost skinless patch right below her breasts where the Force
lightning had hit her. He’d wanted to stick her in a bacta tank, but she’d
refused ... maybe later (probably later, she didn’t think she’d ever been more
grateful for that ancient universal healant), but she had things to do first.
Wrapping done, Jenni lowered Ahsoka’s arms and the Togrutan spun on the stool
to look up at her friend. She reached out to the Human’s presence in the Force,
both make herself more open to Jenni and to heighten her awareness of Jenni’s
emotional state. “So Jenni, what did you learn from Cort that was so
upsetting?”
She felt Jenni’s anger explode, and Jenni reached back through the Force to
Ahsoka as she fought back against the conflagration. But this time there wasn’t
a hint of her inner turmoil on her face, no hint of yellow in her eyes. Then
the moment was past, and Jenni was shaking her head as she turned and sat on
the office’s bed facing Ahsoka. “Later, when Cort is back in the loop. There’s
something more important. Serat, can I borrow your tablet?”
“Sure.” The medtech scooped his tablet off the nearby counter and handed it
over. Jenni typed on the screen for a few moments, then handed it to Ahsoka.
“How hard do you think it would be for someone here to make one of these?”
Ahsoka glanced down at the tablet at the picture of a slave collar, the type
used by bounty hunters and slavers before they chipped their acquisitions. Her
shock brightened the blue stripes against the white of her lekku. “No, we are
not blowing your head off!”
Jenni sighed, shoulders slumping. She rubbed at her face as the office door
slid open, the Marshal stepping through with his blaster gripped in one hand
hanging at his side, ignoring the sight of Ahsoka's bare breasts to focus on
Jenni. “What’s the shouting?”
Ahsoka handed him the tablet. “She wants us to put one of these ... these
monstrosities on her!”
Ghent accepted the tablet with his free hand while holstering his blaster, his
eyebrows rising at the picture on the display. He looked up at Jenni. “Really?”
Jenni nodded. “Yes.” Looking over at Ahsoka, she continued, “I don’t know how
much experience you’ve had with Void Slaves, but we found that even those that
voluntarily dive in inevitably become sociopaths. For those that are pulled
under by the undertow, well ...” She shrugged. “Our technical term is ... was
—” She grimaced as Ahsoka felt her pain and anger surge for a moment. “— ‘bug-
nuts crazy’. And I’m being pulled under. Waking up in the Now, I could probably
survive if I wasn’t a Dancer. But I am a Dancer, the last survivor of the
Dahlia Bond — of all the Youxia Bonds — and the Silence ...”
She shrugged again, but her gaze stayed fixed on Ahsoka and the former Padawan
could feel her grim determination. “From what Serat” — She nodded at the
medtech — “said about your recovery time in the bacta tank I think I can hold
it together long enough, and we can take on your Hunter together. I don’t
expect to hold it together through that, but at least I can go down fighting.
If I don’t kill him myself I’m sure I can at least distract him enough to give
you the opening you need. After that ... talk to Cort about what he told me,
you’ll need to decide for yourself what to do about it. You’d know better than
me, anyway.”
Ghent had lifted his gaze from the tablet to stare at Jenni. “Are you sure
about this?” When Jenni nodded he sighed regretfully. “Yeah, we can make one of
these easy enough. But what’s to stop you from just making it pop off? You are
a Jedi ... or whatever ... after all.”
Jenni grinned, and to Ahsoka’s surprise it was actually genuine. “We ...
‘Force-users’ —” She glanced at Ahsoka, her grin turning sly. What a prosaic
term for those like us, you people have no poetry in your souls.” She looked
back at the Marshal as he chuckled. “Anyway, we Force-users aren’t gods. I have
no idea how the lock works, so ...” She shrugged yet again. “My sense of the
current of the Tao would warn me when I’m about to set it off, but is unlikely
to do more to guide me. I doubt the universe wants to inflict a dangerous
lunatic on you.”
“All right, I’ll —”
“NO.”
Everyone in the room turned to look at Ahsoka. Jenni slid off the bed to lay a
hand on her friend’s shoulder. “ ‘Soka —”
“NO!” She knocked Jenni’s hand away. “I said we are not blowing your head off!
There has to be another —”
She froze at a sudden thought that in retrospect was blindingly obvious, and
Jenni blanched at the abrupt wave of fear. “Ahsoka? What’s wrong?”
Ahsoka took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and released her fear into the
Force as she’d been trained. She’d never been the best student of that
foundational technique of the Jedi Order (not helped by the fact that her
Master wasn't much better), but this time it helped ... mostly, at least.
Opening her eyes, she forced a smile for her friend. “What if you’re not alone
in your head?”
Chapter End Notes
     Another chapter up, and only slightly delayed due to Christmas
     preparations! The next chapter is likely to be delayed rather more
     due the actual holiday, though....
***** Everything Comes With a Cost *****
Chapter Notes
     Yes, one more chapter before Christmas! And the last chapter of the
     year, so to all my readers celebrating Christmas and New Year's, a
     joyful and safe holiday to you.
See the end of the chapter for more notes
What if you’re not alone in your head?
The words seemed to hang in the air, and Ahsoka gasped as all sense of Jenni
through the Force vanished. Her friend was still there, to sight ... and sound,
when she turned to the Marshal and medtech. “Could me and Ahsoka have some
privacy, please?” But when the two men nodded and left the room, and the door
whooshed shut, so far as Ahsoka could sense through the Force she was alone.
Jenni had watched the men leave, and now she turned to hop back up onto the bed
and looked at Ahsoka, her expression calm. “When you made that suggestion, you
were afraid. Why?”
“I ... well ...” She was sure the blue stripes of her lekku were brightening
again with her embarrassment. “I got the impression that everyone in your Bond
were ... intimate. You did say it was common for Bonds even if you didn't say
it was for your Bond.”
Jenni nodded. “You're right, we were. At least, us girls were with the guys and
each other. Henrik — one of the guys — would have been bisexual but Kaulana —
the other guy — wasn’t so Henrik was heterosexual instead. So is it the actual
sex that scares you, or are you worried about how your friends would take it
when they learned you’re in an intimate relationship?”
“The sex, really. Since I walked out on the Order, my yearmates, what few
acquaintances in the Order I’ve made during the war will probably think I’m
capable of anything. Jedi who choose to leave aren’t well thought of.” She
giggled suddenly, and if Jenni heard the nervous edge to her humor the Human
ignored it. “They probably think I’ve been in bed with a different man every
night, you wouldn’t believe the rumors that you hear in the crèche! When
actually ...” She shrugged. “I think it was the sex that kept me from thinking
of this until a few minutes ago. It’s an obvious solution, after all.”
“Yes, it is,” Jenni agreed, “but even though I told you already, you don’t
really understand. Yes, sex can be intimate whether you’re getting hammered
into the mattress or in a long, slow cuddle, and joining a Bond generally means
sleeping with whoever in the Bond shares your preferences. But the truth is
that the mental intimacy is what many Dancers couldn’t risk — or adjust to
sometimes, there were Dancers that would break their ties. When the bond is
formed, both individuals see everything about each other ... every hidden fear,
desire, regret, all of it, along with those memories they cling to the hardest.
For that one moment they see each other as God must see us. It won’t happen
again, not for that pair, but they won’t forget it, either. And then after,
always knowing what each other is feeling, always having your mind and memories
open to your Bonded — even able to share each other’s physical senses,
sometimes without meaning to.” She giggled, though to Ahsoka she still remained
an empty hole in the Force. “Half the reason orgies are common within Bonds is
because having all the emotions and sensations of someone else’s sex in your
head while you’re trying to negotiate, study, spar, sleep, whatever, is so
distracting! So if it’s going to happen, why not have it all happen at the same
time?”
Ahsoka surprised herself by laughing, though she was sure the blues of her
lekku must be positively glowing by now from what she was certain had to be an
almost death-dealing level of embarrassment, Jenni joining her. As their mirth
settled, Jenni said, “I know this is practically the opposite of the lack of
attachments — the celibacy — the Order demands, what you were raised to. Do you
really think you can handle it? If it turns out you can’t, not only will I be
pulled under by the undertow into the Void, you’ll probably be pulled in with
me.”
The last of Ahsoka’s humor fled, and she straightened on her stool and took a
deep breath. “Yes, I can do this.” A moment later, Jenni was off the bed,
kneeling in front of her with her arms around her waist and sobbing into her
stomach, her presence filled with relief and gratitude flooding back into the
Force. After a frozen moment, Ahsoka hesitantly wrapped her arms around Jenni’s
shoulders.
                                      /\
Now dressed in a loose tunic that hung to her midsection along with her
panties, just as she was about to be lowered into the bacta tank, Ahsoka
finally thought to ask. “Jenni, while we were talking, I couldn’t sense you
through the Force at all. How did you do that?”
“Oh, that.” Jenni grinned up at her from where she was leaning against the wall
... she hadn’t stopped smiling since she’d calmed down; Ahsoka had already
quietly told the Marshal that Jenni would have no trouble staying rational
until Ahsoka was out of the bath, not with hope to give her strength. But Jenni
was still speaking: “Advanced technique, where you literally become one with
the current of the Tao. On the plus side, since you are such an integral part
of the current there’s no separate entity to sense. The downside, though, is
that you become an automaton, an observer as your body speaks and acts on its
own.”
“A ‘downside’?” Ahsoka repeated. “But isn’t that the goal ... to be guided by
the Force? That sounds like what the Order strives for, and even more for your
... ‘go with the flow’.”
“When you’re like that the Tao isn’t guiding, it’s driving,” Jenni rebutted.
“What the Tao wants to do isn’t necessarily what you want to do — and yes, your
own wishes are important. If our own desires don’t matter, why did sentience
evolve in the first place?”
“I’ll have to think about that.” Ahsoka frowned thoughtfully for a moment, then
grinned … grinned wider when Jenni stiffened, undoubtedly picking up the
feeling inspired by her sudden impish thought. “Oh, and intimacy isn’t totally
unknown to Jedi. When I get out, remind me to tell you about the Altisian
Jedi.” With that, she signaled Thel to lower her into the tank.
The last sight through the clear tube of the bacta tank a giggling Ahsoka took
with her as she sank into the lassitude that came with being immersed in the
healing fluid around her was the sharp look Ghent was sending her friend and
future lover.
                                     /oOo\
Quill Bolera didn’t even bother to curse his lack of training as a sensor as he
fell out of his meditative state — the weeks he’d spent searching one scattered
settlement after another of this misbegotten hole of a planet for an errant
Padawan had taken him past boredom and frustration deep into the simmering
anger that was the closest any Dark Sider came to calm. That faux-calm had been
necessary to interact with the inhabitants of this self-important backwater,
and had helped him resist the urge to grab one of the women and play — the
population was simply too small for that, the woman would have been missed and
suspicion naturally focused on him. Before he had sensed something through the
Force he had been considering giving up on the hunt and leaving a virus in the
local subspace transceiver to send an alert if it detected Riptide leaving the
planet ... and taking a few women with him, for entertainment on the three-week
journey back to civilization. And he’d have left some presents for the biggest
settlements behind, launched from orbit.
But he had sensed something through the Force, and unfortunately, as useful as
his ‘calm’ had been for his attempt at meditation, that attempt had failed to
shed any more light on that hint. The hint had only lasted a few seconds, maybe
as much as half a minute, before it vanished and all he had was a direction.
And that was all his attempt at meditation had given him, though he supposed
the verification was useful.
But itisa direction, and that’s more than I had before. Rising to his feet, he
grabbed his tablet to pull up a hologram of the settlements around him. He
would have to turn at ... not quite a right angle to the search pattern he’d
been following, but close. And there were at least half-a-dozen settlements
along the direction he’d be taking now, next to one of this continent’s major
rivers, and a few more before hitting an ancient mountain range close to the
east coast.
It was going to take time, but at least now he had a goal.
                                     /oOo\
Chancellor Palpatine — or rather Darth Sidious in his guise of Chancellor
Palpatine — was standing at his office window looking down on his kingdom,
Coruscant stargazing. Things were still going well — the near-disaster of the
discovery of the chips in the clone troopers prevented; the Outer Rim sieges
beginning, spreading out and isolating the Jedi even more, making them easy
prey when the time came to sweep them from the board; Anakin growing
estrangement from his former master thanks to Obi-Wan’s siding with the Jedi
Council during Ahsoka’s expulsion and trial (if only in his heart), and his
trust in the Chancellor he fondly believed to be the few true friends he had
left absolute — yes, victory was so close the Sith Master could taste it ...
and it was sweet.
The only flaw in his enjoyment was that the Hunter he’d sent after Ahsoka
hadn’t reported back! His last report had contained his findings on Milagro
before his departure for Trey, and even with the combined estimated travel time
to and from that backwater ... Quill Bolera, was it? yes ... Quill must have
been on Trey for weeks now. And Darth Sidious could not escape the feeling that
there was an Ahsoka-shaped piece missing from the picture of his gathering
victory, even if that picture was clear and becoming clearer.
Let’s see if that loose end is still on Trey. If she isn’t, I can start the
manhunt again in the systems around Trey until my tool finally reports back. If
she escaped before he could arrive, they’ll pick up her trail that much faster.
And if it turns out he’s already disposed of her and is on his way back ... He
shrugged. That was how insurance worked, resources expended that you hoped were
wasted.
Decision made, he turned from the window and strode over to his desk. Bringing
up the control panel in his desk, he verified that the doors to his office were
locked, closed the paneling over his office windows, and brought up the
hologram of the galactic territory the Veil covered. The same miasma that
blinded the Sight of the Jed, allowed him to mentally reach out to anywhere
within his realm, but the number of inhabited systems within that vast
territory was literally incalculable. Once Ahsoka had escaped off Coruscant he
hadn’t considered trying to track her down himself for even a moment, but now
with a likely system ...
Locating the Milagro system along the Corellian Run and then Trey off to one
side in the Outer Rim, he reached out through the Veil for the familiar feel of
the young Padawan he’d met with her master on multiple occasions ... nothing.
Sighing in disappointment, he shut down the map and was just closing the panel
in his desk when he suddenly realized that he hadn’t sensed his Hunter, either.
In fact, he hadn’t sensed anything ... and as lightly inhabited as Trey was he
should still have sensed something. Even a planet inhabited by nothing but
lower lifeforms should have been detectable!
He quickly reopened the panel and brought up the map. Locating Trey, he again
reached ... and found nothing. Either a pirate fleet had decided to not only
raid that poverty-stricken backwater but expend the firepower necessary to wipe
it clean of life (extremely unlikely), or some unknown factor was blocking the
reach of his senses into that part of the Outer Rim.
Some quick checking of the systems around Trey (such as they were) revealed
that whatever it was, was apparently restricted to the Trey system alone, and
the secret Emperor (as he considered himself already) leaned back and stared
thoughtfully at the galactic map. He had no other Hunters free to investigate,
and with a Hunter perhaps already on Trey there was no point in sending
mercenaries. But ...
A vicious grin spread across his face and he opened the panel for his com. A
few moments later the familiar voice of Naboo’s Senator responded, with no
hologram as he'd expected at this hour. “Chancellor, what’s happened?”
“There’s no emergency, my dear. My apologies for calling so late, but I thought
you would wish to know immediately. I believe I may have stumbled across the
location of our wandering Padawan.”
A few minutes of conversation later and he leaned back with a self-satisfied
smirk. Yes, this would do nicely. His warning of the bounty hunters pursuing
Ahsoka and reassurances that with the Republic on the offensive in the Outer
Rim she would not be missed in the Senate would send Amidala scurrying to find
her friend and offer the protection of her diplomatic status. At worst she
would return with better navigation data of the route to Trey and some word of
Ahsoka’s intentions, at best with Ahsoka herself ... and once back on Coruscant
he could consider how best to use them to further isolate Anakin.
And while Amidala was on her mission of mercy, his lackeys could use her
absence to undermine her influence by portraying her as an impulsive,
headstrong girl perhaps too young for the responsibilities of her position. The
more intelligent Senators would never buy it, of course, but that august body
was full of fools and his bought-and-paid-for lackeys (often the same people).
Yes, all was once again going as he had foreseen it.
Chapter End Notes
     I doubt the Empire-spanning reach of the Emperor is official canon,
     but it is at least hinted at in what Wookiepedia calls Legends — when
     Mara Jade was an Emperor's Hand she was able to hear his voice
     wherever she was, and who knows how far away she was when the Emperor
     stuck his Last Command in her head just before he died on the Death
     Star? But there will still be limitations, and here's mine: even with
     his ability to 'observe' any planet in his future Empire there are a
     lot of planets, and so one can hide by simply not being anywhere he
     would look (Obi-Wan hiding on Tatooine) or even next to a Vergence of
     the Force that would hide your presence in the Force (Yoda on
     Dagobah, with the added benefit of it being a Dark Side Vergence and
     so an even more unlikely place to hide).
     The line “ ... was heterosexual instead” is a variation of a line
     from Lois McMaster Bujold’s Barrayar. When the villain of the story
     tried to blow up the heroine’s marriage by telling her that her new
     husband was bisexual, her response was “He was bisexual, now he’s
     monogamous.” The poor man didn’t quite know how to handle that....
***** On the Edge *****
At the sound of the door chime Jenni looked up from her tablet, surprised. She
had been grateful for Ahsoka’s trust and support, but had been less confident
herself of her ability to maintain control. So after the young Togrutan had
been placed in the bacta tank, she had asked Marshal Tardun for his advice on
the most innocent feel-good fluff-piece of entertainment he knew of, completely
devoid of a hint of politics. Ghent had come through, suggesting Dew on the
Sands, a vid-series about a Core World socialite whose bad investments cost her
everything except for a single Outer Rim moisture farm, and her adventures
learning how to make that farm work ... with the help of a very handsome
unmarried (and often exasperated) neighbor. With that show and enough food to
last until Ahsoka was healed, Jenni had settled down in her room to enjoy a
story she could understand in its broad outlines while pausing it occasionally
to jot down yet another addition to an ever-growing list of cultural references
Ahsoka could explain once she was healed. Jenni suspected that the Marshal had
realized that she had essentially put herself under house arrest, because she
hadn’t been disturbed since. Until now.
Pausing the latest episode just as Mott and Llyl were frantically working to
repair a vaporator damaged by a sandstorm (and she guessed were going to end up
in the same bed when they were done, but too exhausted to do anything about
it), she called out, “Come in!”
The door slid aside to reveal the Marshal. “Jenni, we have a problem.”
                                     /oOo\
Ahsoka blinked as the world slowly came into focus, her bacta tank-imposed
lassitude fading away. From the height of the ceiling and the padded but
extremely firm surface beneath her, she was lying on a mat on the infirmary
floor. She could feel the expected weakness from the drugs mixed with the
bacta, as if the world was sitting on her chest, and ... at the sensation of
cloth on her stomach, she struggled up to brace herself on her elbows to find
Jenni using a towel to wipe away the bacta residue coating her. At her movement
Jenni looked up and smiled at her, but that smile was tight, the Human’s eyes
worried.
Raising herself up had awakened a deep ache, and Ahsoka carefully lay back down
and closed her eyes to turn her Force sense inward ... as she suspected, she’d
been taken out of the bacta tank too early; she wasn’t in any danger, or even
really disadvantaged, but she wasn’t going to be enjoying life for awhile.
Without opening her eyes, she said, “I’m out of the tank early. Something’s
wrong.”
“We’ll talk about it as soon as you’re clean and Serat has checked you over.”
“I don’t need to be checked, I just did. I’m fine, nothing a healing trance
won’t fix.”
“A healing trance? Jedi can heal themselves?”
“Of course we can ... you can’t?”
Jenni shook her head. “Get your shirt off, I have a change of clothing that
covers more and isn’t bacta-saturated, and you’ll want as much of this muck off
as possible before you hop in the shower. No, we don’t heal ourselves, though
we do heal faster, don’t get sick, live longer, whatever is required for where
the Tao’s currents sweep us.”
Ahsoka sat up and stared at her friend for a long moment. “ ... don’t get sick.
Live longer.” After a moment she shrugged, then tucked her lekku inside her
shirt’s neckline, grabbed the lower hem of her shirt just below her breasts.
She hesitated for a moment, then groaned at the effort it took to pull it over
her head. It wasn’t like Jenni wasn’t going to get thoroughly acquainted with
her breasts — along with the rest of her body — once they bonded. “Jedi heal at
the same rate as everyone else, but can go into a trance that speeds it up.
Same thing for disease. And we ... they ... those that don’t die violently ...
don’t live any longer than anyone else.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised, it sounds like the Jedi can mostly do what the
Youxia can, maybe better, but only if you force the issue.” Jenni toweled off
the bacta fluids coating Ahsoka’s breasts, her manner as impersonal as any
medtech (something for which Ahsoka was grateful, and more than a little
ashamed at the depth of her gratitude), then shifted around to her back as she
slumped forward. “Let’s get you in the shower and then that change of clothes.
By then the drugs should have worn off, and the good Marshal is waiting.”
“All right.” Ahsoka waited as Jenni finished wiping her back, arms, head and
lekku then helped her to her feet. She braced herself on the bed as Jenni
pulled down her panties so she could step out of them, then with one arm around
Jenni’s shoulder and Jenni’s arm around her waist staggered toward the shower.
As Jenni started the water and set the temperature, Ahsoka asked, “Jenni,
what’s wrong? Why the rush?”
Jenni hesitated, then shrugged as she helped Ahsoka into the shower stall and
grabbed the soap and washcloth. “Your hunter must have sensed my tantrum, he’s
headed this way. You had as much time in the tank as you did because he’s still
stopping at each settlement between us and him, but he’ll be here in a few
days.”
                                      /\
Ahsoka carefully eased herself into her chair by the desk in the Marshal’s
office, Jenni taking the chair beside her. By the time her shower was over
she’d been steady enough to towel dry and dress herself, but she wasn’t quite
ready to go leaping into combat yet.
Ghent had already asked how she was feeling (and Ahsoka had had no choice but
to answer truthfully, thanks to the imminent combat), so now he waited until
the pair were settled before getting down to business. “Jenni told you?” Ahsoka
nodded, and he leaned back in his chair and continued, “I like to think I’m a
good marshal, but even with the training you’ve given my men a Dark Sider with
a lightsaber is above my level. So how do we handle this?”
“You’ve confirmed he has a lightsaber?”
Ghent nodded. “He’s not exactly flaunting it, but a waitress at one of the
diners he’s eaten at saw it on his belt. She didn’t recognize it for what it
is, but remembered it because she didn’t recognize it and was wondering what
kind of tool it might be.”
Ahsoka frowned thoughtfully. “Okay — first thing, make sure that when he gets
here you and your men are nowhere close to him ... out of town with
landspeeders so you can get back in a hurry. Anything else, and he’ll pick up
your hostile intent, go on alert.”
“That means we can’t tell anyone else.”
“That’s right. Jenni or I can trigger the alert to get everyone off the street
when we confront him, that can be your signal to get back into town. When you
arrive ...” Ahsoka paused as she considered what she remembered of the town’s
layout. “ ... the same thing you did when you braced me and Jenni, only get
everyone up on the roofs. There you can take shots at him when you can — I
don’t expect you to hit him, but it’ll be one more distraction. Just remember
that he can reflect your shots back at you, so duck after each shot.”
“Makes sense.” Ghent straightened and touched a stud on his desk. A holograph
of the town sprang up, and as he worked the controls a scattering of points of
light appeared on rooftops along the main street. “We can use the pirate raid
warning to get everyone off the streets and out of your way ... you’ll need to
set it off at the same time you alert me when you’re ready to spring the trap.
I’ll have my people stash blaster rifles here at the spots I’ve highlighted
ahead of time so anyone can play, not just my deputies, and personal messages
ready to send to the ones I think are up to this....”
                                      /\
Ahsoka could feel herself tensing more and more as she followed Jenni toward
the tiny house they’d been staying at, like a spring coiled too tight. Bonding
was her idea and a price she was willing to pay to keep Jenni alive and sane,
but now that they finally doing it she found she was edging beyond nervous into
terrified, and mortified that Jenni’s own constant empathic sense meant there
was no hiding it.
Then they were in their tiny shared main room, the front door hissed shut, and
Jenni turned around to face her. “No sex.”
Ahsoka’s jaw dropped. “What?”
“No sex.” Jenni giggled, apparently amused at the total confusion Ahsoka was
sure she was picking up. The Youxia stepped back to lean against the counter
for food preparation and crossed her arms. “Ahsoka, I’m afraid I’ve
accidentally misled you. Yes, adding a new Dancer to a Bond is usually followed
by an orgy ... at least in my bond ... but it doesn’t have to be. There’ll only
be the two of us, so sex until you’re ready. It is the sex that has you tighter
than a drum, right? Not the bonding itself?”
“I ... well, yes ... but you ... needs?” Ahsoka sputtered out.
Now Jenni’s giggles turned into laughter as Ahsoka felt the blue stripes on her
lekku brighten with embarrassment. When Jenni got herself under control,
leaving only a broad grin, she said, “Sure, I wouldn’t mind having some fun in
bed, you’re cute as a button and I’m wondering how much of my research is
accurate — yes, I did some checking on erotic differences between Humans and
Togrutans and I want to hear what you sound like.” (By now, Ahsoka was once
again wondering if it was possible to die from embarrassment.) “But you’re
supposed to enjoy it as much as I do, and even if you weren’t still sore from
my tantrum you’d be too tense to enjoy it. I’m no longer a randy teenager, if
only by a few years, I can wait.”
“I ...” Ahsoka’s tongue stumbled to a halt, the relief and gratitude filling
her mixed with shame (and perhaps just a dash of disappointment, something she
was going to studiously ignore until later).
Jenni’s grin softened into a gentle smile, and she straightened up. “But we
still need to to form our Bond, and don’t think putting off the sex means you
get to dress up ... ‘skyclad’, the Western Wiccans called it, even if we’re
doing this indoors instead of the sun in the middle of open wilderness — as
open to each other physically as we will be mentally. So come on.” She walked
toward the room they’d been using for sparring, shedding her clothing as she
went.
***** Rising to Battle *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Quill Bolera grinned, his excitement stirring as he piloted his ship down
towards the latest settlement along the line toward whatever he’d sensed almost
a week earlier after dumping the supplies he’d purchased at the last settlement
in orbit. (He had to have some reason for visiting each town, after all, and he
could pile up only so much in his hold.) He might not have had the sensor
training that this kind of mission called for, but for the first time since his
arrival on this Light-infest rock the Force was warning him that something in
the rapidly approaching buildings was dangerous — and to him personally, not
just something that was a danger to the common herd but that any half-trained
Sith (and Jedi, he would admit to himself if no one else) could handle. And he
could only think of one thing ... or rather one person ... on this backwater
hole that could be that threat. Finally!
Then the ship was settled on a flat piece of ground on the settlement’s
outskirts. It only took a few moments to shut down the engines, get his speeder
bike out of the hold, and head into town. Really, the town was so small going
on foot would have made more sense, if his exit might not need to be ...
expedited.
As he rode along the main street his grin returned. The power of the Light Side
that seemed to permeate the planet might be swamping his senses, but the Force
user he could sense in a nearby eatery was practically glowing with joy-
permeated power of the Force. Whatever Ahsoka had found here, it had made her a
very happy Togrutan indeed.
Quill smirked as he parked the speeder bike in front of the eatery. It was such
a shame that he’d have to spoil everything for her....
                                      /\
Ahsoka was not in proper form for combat. She knew her pursuer was coming, that
in minutes she would be in yet another life or death struggle with innocent
lives on the line (she had no illusions how her pursuer would act once he was
revealed for what he was, she had seen too many examples of the ruin those that
fell to the Dark Side — slaves of the Void, to use Jenni's poetic turn of
phrase — left in their wake); she should have been preparing herself mentally,
focusing on the battle to come, releasing her fears and worries into the Force
so she could enter combat calm and in control ... she’d never been particularly
good at it, any more than her master, but she should at least try.
Instead, in spite of the fact that it had been a day since their bonding, that
she still ached to her core from Jenni’s Force lightning she’d gotten in the
way of, that she was about to fight for her life and the lives of others ... in
spite of all of that, she could not keep the joy bubbling up from her heart and
spreading a broad smile across her face. And it wasn’t just because of Jenni’s
welcoming joy still blazing in her heart.
She had recognized how lonely ... how incomplete ... Jenni had been thanks to
the loss of her Bond — in the life Ahsoka had seen when they bonded, family and
close friends had been a constant and even when the Void Slaves’ coup had
driven the survivors of Jenni’s new Bond (all two of them) underground shortly
after her sixteenth birthday she had still had that Bond. But Ahsoka hadn’t
recognized how lonely she herself had been. She may not have been bonded mind-
to-mind with anyone but Anakin — and that Padawan-Master bond like a candle to
the noonday sun compared to this one — but she had still been a Jedi ... one
among a united whole, with drive and purpose. She had lost all that when she
had walked away from the Order, alone in a cold and hostile galaxy, more cold
and hostile than she’d imagined. Now ...
Now I’ll never be alone again, she thought as she once again focused for a
moment on Jenni’s presence in the back of her mind.
That presence ‘laughed’ back at her. “Time to pay attention to the real world,
‘Snips’, our target just landed,” Jenni’s mental presence announced.
“Like you’re one to talk!” And it was true, Ahsoka’s own joy was dim in
comparison to Jenni’s blazing happiness and gratitude.
“Maybe, but I have abitmore experience. When this is over, we’ll need to talk
about Barriss Offee.”
The statement came like cold water to the face, Ahsoka’s joy guttering from the
shock of that statement, and the wave of bitter anger she still felt whenever
she thought of how her former friend betrayed her swept through her yet again.
She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and released that anger into the Force
... and much of the joy that had been making her giddy.
“Better. And just in time, he’s here. Showtime. Remember the plan, we need to
make thisfastbefore he has time to involve innocents in spite of the
evacuation.”
“Right.” Ahsoka took another deep breath, and stepped out of the eatery to face
her hunter with Jenni right behind her.
                                      /\
Quill was surprised when two women stepped out of the eatery to meet him: his
target, dressed in her usual skimpy, tight battle dress; and a Human dressed in
a skirt with a loose top draped over her torso. The human’s hair was dyed white
and blue in a pattern that reversed the colors of Ahsoka’s lekku and montrals.
He was even more surprised when an ear-splitting siren went off for several
seconds, and blast shutters slammed down over doors and windows all along the
street.
“That was a warning siren, to alert everyone that they need to evacuate the
town,” the unknown woman said. “Congratulations, you’re considered as dangerous
as a pirate raid.”
Quill focused on her — he already had the measure of the former Padawan — and
frowned. She was confident, supremely so, but she was weak. He could barely
detect her presence in the Force at all. Certainly she was too weak to be a
Jedi, even if the metal tube in her hand was a lightsaber. (Lightsabers weren’t
exactly standardized, one could never be sure until they were used.) He
smirked, this was going to be fun. Ignoring the fact that they’d obviously
known he was coming, and the way the Togrutan that was the only one that was
remotely a threat was shifting to one side, he asked, “And you think you’re up
to dealing with a threat as dangerous as a pirate raid?”
“We shall see, won’t we? I’m Jenni, by the way.” The Human hefted the metal
tube in her hand, and a bright white blade sprang humming from its end. As
Ahsoka copied her — her blade also a pure white, unlike the shorter green
blades of the pair she had typically wielded before — Jenni chanted,
For ten years I have been polishing this sword;
Its frosty edge has never been put to the test.
Now I am holding it and showing it to you, sir:
Is there anyone suffering from injustice?
A complete lunatic. Where did the runt find her, and why is one of the oh-so-
noble Jedi letting her die pointlessly? Are they lovers? She wouldn’t be the
first Jedi that ran wild after leaving the Order. Not that it mattered — the
additional Human meant he was facing two instead of the one he’d been
expecting, but he’d long since learned that if you knew what you were doing,
multiple opponents that weren’t trained to work together made it easier, not
harder. Two Jedi working together could be dangerous, the Force helped them
coordinate, but Jenni was hardly a Jedi. Still, he supposed she could possibly
be a distraction, best not to take unnecessary chances.
Without a hint of warning he sprang toward her, his own lightsaber leaping into
his hand and its fiery red blade springing to life as it swung straight for
Jenni’s torso — and she took a step back as she parried his actual strike for
her neck instead of the feint ... and the follow-up strike that would have
taken off an arm, and the strike that would have sliced her in half at the
waist, and the one that would have done the same from neck to groin ... and at
the Force’s warning he whirled and stepped to one side as he parried Ahsoka’s
attempt to drive her blade through his back, so that the combatants formed
three points of a triangle. This might be harder than I thought.
Quill knew other Hunters liked to taunt their prey as they brought them down,
but he considered it rather pointless to waste the effort on the dead. So
without a word he stepped toward his target, red humming blade shrieking as it
impacted the Padawan’s glowing white blade again and again, before spinning
away to block Jenni’s attacks as she came to her friend’s defense ... to easily
block Jenni’s attacks, and he frowned.
He wasn’t surprised that the Human’s skill with a lightsaber wasn’t up to a
Jedi Knight’s level, or even a Padawan’s — a new Padawan’s. What he did find
surprising was she didn’t even rise to the level of her defense against his
first assault. But why? Who was stupid enough to focus purely on defense? It
had to be some kind of trap, but he couldn’t see how.
It doesn’t matter what kind of trap it is if they don’t get a chance to —
He leaped back away from Jenni as suddenly blaster bolts started to rain down
from the roofs of the buildings around them. Most of them slammed down into the
synthecrete street around the pair, but both he and Jenni whirled their
lightsabers above their heads to deflect multiple bolts ... and several
hammered into his speeder bike, dropping the sparking, smoking ruin to the
roadway as flames began leaping from its engine. Bastards! He had liked that
bike....
Even as he cursed his ambushers he saw his opportunity, shifted position to
place his back to a wall and Jenni between him and Ahsoka running toward them
through the hail of blaster fire (knocking aside a few bolts of her own as she
came), and used the Force to activate the wrist shield he’d taken off a
Mandalorian he’d killed as he used his lightsaber to deflect bolts toward Jenni
at point-blank range.
She whirled to face him and deflected the bolts, several back at him, and he
used the wrist shield to reflect them straight back. They hammered into her
chest even as another shot from a roof hammered into her back, and the Human
dropped limply to the road as her presence in the Force vanished like a
snuffed-out candle.
“Jenni!” his target screamed as she leaped over the corpse and slashed blindly
at Quill. He grinned as he parried her strikes — apparently they had been
lovers, and nothing made a target as furious ... and as vulnerable ... as the
death of a loved one. And someone on a rooftop was shouting for them to cease
fire. Once Ahsoka was dead he could take to the rooftops to make his way back
to his ship, and kill a few of his ambushers on the way.
He’d won. His only regret was that he wouldn’t be able to grab some women to
take with him, and since they’d apparently been tracking him since his arrival
he couldn’t drop in on another settlement instead to pick some up there. But
he’d definitely be giving this settlement a gift from orbit before he left.
Time to end this. He parried Ahsoka’s last wild slash and riposted, fast enough
that the Padawan was only barely able to parry it ... and his next strike, and
the next, and the next. She backed up, trying to break contact, but he pressed
her. She stepped back again and her heel caught on her lover’s corpse, tumbling
her backwards onto the synthecrete of the road. Quill stepped over the corpse,
batting away a few blaster bolts as some of the men on the roofs opened fire
again — and staggered as the worst pain he’d ever felt in his life pierced
through him, up through his torso and into his chest. He looked down, gaping at
the sight of the corpse he was straddling glaring up at him, leaning up on one
elbow. Her other hand held her lightsaber, its blade stabbing up through his
groin. She yanked sideways, the lightsaber’s blade burning through heart, lung,
and rib cage as it ripped out of his torso, and as the world went dark his last
emotion was stunned amazement that according to the Force the Human that had
killed him didn’t exist.
                                      /\
Ahsoka was gasping as she rolled to her feet. She’d been right on both counts —
the damage she had suffered from Jenni’s Force lightning that the bacta tank
hadn’t had the time to heal hadn’t hindered her at all, but that didn’t mean it
hadn’t hurt. But the flash of pain she had felt from Jenni just before her
bondmate had vanished from her Force sense had given the former Padawan a nasty
shock — it had felt just like all too many clone troopers that had died around
her during her two years at war, and only the fact she could still sense
Jenni’s presence in her mind had kept her from panicking. Though that presence
had had an odd feel to it, even after the less than a day since their bonding
... muted, distant somehow. It must have been the effect of Jenni fully
‘immersing herself in the current of the Tao’, as she would put it.
But that muting effect was gone now and Jenni’s pain was back, burning across
back and chest. But Jenni didn’t seem to notice it — she simply stood over the
man that she’d killed, staring down at his corpse with the oddest mix of
emotions ... a sort of singing emptiness mixed with worry. She looked up as
Ahsoka approached and silently asked, “Shouldn’t I feel something?”
“Feel something? Oh!” Ahsoka remembered the piece of poetry Jenni had recited
just before the fight started, and realized that not once throughout her vision
of Jenni’s life — not a single time — had she seen any combat. This was Jenni’s
first kill. Or at least the first face-to-face, she thought as she remembered
the ritual that had ended with Jenni trapped in a Force vortex of some sort,
and with the deaths of every single person on Trey with a significant
connection to the Force. (Terra, the colonists were debating changing the
planet’s name to the original, and the yeas were winning.)
Ahsoka laid a hand on Jenni’s shoulder. “You will. You’ll have nights you spend
in meditation because you can’t face your dreams. Believe it. I'll be there
with you.”
Jenni nodded, but flinched at the new weight on her shoulder as her burning
pain jumped. Ahsoka’s eyes narrowed and she hastily tore open Jenni’s charred
top, checking the improvised armor she’d worn underneath it. “What’s wrong?
Didn’t the armor hold? Weren’t the blasters set to half strength? Thel, Ghent,
get over here, Jenni’s hurt!”
By now the blast shields over windows and doors had risen, and as Thel and
Ghent ran over Ahsoka scrabbled at the armor’s clasps. The armor fell away, and
the medtech hissed. “Crap, we forgot about the heat transfer! You’re going into
the bacta tank right now.” He shouted for the bystanders gathering around to
fetch a stretcher.
“Yeah,” Ghent agreed, staring at the strips of skin that had pealed away with
the armor. “Jenni, why aren’t you screaming?”
“I definitely know the pain is there,” Jenni said, “but we Dancers can immerse
ourselves in the Tao’s currents enough that the pain doesn’t interfere with
whatever needs doing. Ahsoka?”
Ahsoka nodded. “Jedi can as well, through a kind of walking meditation. It does
require us to split our attention, though.” She looked over as one of the
deputies she’d met the day she'd gone into the bacta tank herself hurried up,
pushing a stretcher hovering on its own repulsor ahead of him. “Let’s get you
in the tank before your Tao decides you feeling your pain won’t get in the way
of anything.”
A Jenni beginning to tremble from shock nodded. “You’re beginning to figure out
how it works for the Dancers. Yes, let's.” She lay down on the stretcher, and
the clean pad Thel had yanked from the foot of the stretcher to its head, and
Thel and the deputy guided it toward Thel’s office.
Ahsoka and Ghent began to follow, when another deputy ran up to them. “Marshal,
Cort’s on the com, he says another ship is coming into orbit!”
Chapter End Notes
     The poetry is a translation of "The Swordsman" by Jia Dao, a poet
     from the Tang dynasty (roughly the early 7th century A.D. to the
     early 10th), and nicely sums up the Youxia spirit of knight errantry.
***** Best Friends Forever *****
Padme rushed into the infirmary, and sagged with relief at the sight of Ahsoka
standing by the bacta tank, one hand on its clear surface as she turned her
gaze from the young Human woman in the tank to the newcomer.
A puffing Marshal entered behind her. “You didn’t ... let me finish,” he gasped
out. “Jenni’s the injured one ... not Ahsoka.”
Ahsoka stepped away from the tank. “Yeah, I’m fine, and Jenni will be.”
“Ahsoka ...” Padme hesitated, knowing Jedi’s dislike of personal shows of
affection, then threw aside restraint and stepped forward to throw her arms
around her young friend. “I’m so happy you’re all right, we were worried about
you.”
Ahsoka hesitantly returned the embrace for a moment before gently pushing Padme
away. “ ‘We’?”
“Yes, Obi-Wan is worried about you and Anakin is desperate, he’ll be so happy
to hear you’re all right. Even the Chancellor has been searching for you, he’s
the one who warned me of the bounty hunters after you and where I could find
you.” Padme hesitated at the odd expression that crossed Ahsoka’s face. “You
... did know about the bounty hunters?”
Ahsoka opened her mouth, paused, then glanced at the bacta tank before turning
her attention back to Padme, her expression hard. “Yes, I knew about them. A
gang of bounty hunters jumped me on Coruscant, again on Milagro. And I’m sure
when you landed you noticed the ship parked on the outskirts of town? That
belonged to a hunter we took down just before you arrived.” She glanced at the
tank again, her face softening. “Once Jenni gets out of the tank we’ll have to
see about breaking into it, I’m sure it’s booby-trapped.”
Padme’s eyes widened in surprised speculation. During one of Annie’s rants
after his Padawan’s departure he’d mentioned the bizarre rumors circulating in
the Temple about what Ahsoka was getting up to now that she’d left the Order,
and Padme had been as outraged as he was — just because Ahsoka hadn’t been able
to trust the Order after the way it had treated her didn’t mean she’d turn into
a slut! But maybe there’s a kernel of truth, after all — romance at least, not
the promiscuity. She hoped so, her Togrutan friend deserved to be happy as much
as Annie. And at least she won’t have to hide it.
Padme fought to keep the momentary bitterness that stabbed through her off her
face, but she must have let something slip because Ahsoka’s gaze sharpened. For
a moment Padme thought she was going to ask about whatever she’d seen, but
instead she grinned. “And when did you intend to tell me that you’re pregnant?”
Padme felt the world go hazy, lightheaded from the shock. “I’m pregnant?”
Ahsoka’s face went blank. “You didn’t know?”
“No. I hoped but ...” Then it finally sank in, and Padme reached out to embrace
her friend and spun them around, laughing joyfully. “I’m pregnant!”
“Let me go!” Though it was hard to take Ahsoka’s protest seriously, the way she
was laughing ... laughter with a definite edge of pain to it.
Padme hastily let her back down. “I thought you said you were fine!”
“I am, just the remnants of a nasty shock I took just before the hunter
arrived, I haven’t had time for a healing trance yet to clear up the last of
the damage. So obviously that was good news, who’s the father? I must have met
him at some point, considering me and Sky Guy seemed to spend as much time with
you as we did in the Temple.”
Again Padme fought to keep her expression clear, and again she must have failed
— Ahsoka froze, her eyes going wide. “Anakin? It’s Anakin? When did that
happen?!”
Padme frantically looked around. Then sighed with relief. The Marshal had
discreetly let himself out once it was obvious she and Ahsoka were friends, and
the Human woman — Jenni’, had Ahsoka said? — was asleep, thanks to the drugs
mixed with the tank’s bacta to keep patients from dying of boredom. “Shhhhh!
Not so loud! No one can know.”
“ ... oops?” The blue stripes across Ahsoka’s lekku brightened with
embarrassment. “I get it, I won’t tell anyone. But you sure moved fast after I
left, was I in the way or something?”
“It was before you were assigned to Anakin. We were secretly married just after
the war started.”
“Married even? Wow! But if I missed that I’ll bet Obi-Wan doesn’t know, either,
does he? Are you going to tell him once it becomes obvious you slipped up and
got pregnant?”
Padme frowned repressively at her grinning friend. “I didn’t ‘slip up’, I got
pregnant deliberately — after you left I thought Anakin needs more
‘attachments’, whatever the Jedi Code might say. And no, Obi-Wan doesn’t know.
Do you think I should tell him?”
Ahsoka’s grin softened into a gentle smile, her gaze flicking over yet again to
the bacta tank for a moment. “ ‘Attachments’. Yeah, I’ve pretty much decided
that part of the Code is nonsense, so good for you. Obi-Wan?” She frowned
thoughtfully for a moment. “I ... can’t really say. He’s formed his own
attachment to Anakin, but he’s also rather ... inflexible, I guess ... about
the Order’s rules. But you can’t hide it forever — unless you don’t intend to
let the children know who their father is? No, that won’t work, either. Whether
Anakin’s known as their father or a really close friend of the family, the
Council will still consider it too strong an attachment.” She shrugged. “I
guess it’s just a matter of timing, whether you want the big reveal to be
during or after the war.”
Padme considered Ahsoka’s advice and thought her friend was probably right, she
and Annie were going to have to talk it over the next time their schedules
overlapped. She had no idea how he was going to take it, though, in spite of
his issues with the Order’s restrictions he was still devoted to it.
But that was an issue for another day, and she focused on Ahsoka’s ... friend
... floating in the bacta tank. The Human was beautiful, and older than Ahsoka,
and the coloration of the waves of hair floating about her head ... “So how
long have you and ... Jenni, was it? ... Jenni been an item yourselves? That
must have been the whirlwind romance you thought I and Annie had, you haven’t
been on Trey all that many weeks.”
The blush on Ahsoka’s lekku was back, and she stammered an attempted denial for
a moment before giving up with a sigh. “How did you know?”
Padme giggled. “The way you can’t keep your eyes off the bacta tank is a big
hint, but really, her hair style matching you lekku’s pattern?”
“Oh.” It was Ahsoka’s turn to giggle. “Actually, that’s a coincidence, that was
her style when I met her.”
“It was?” Padme’s giggles turned into laughter. “In that case, she might want
to change that if you intend to hide your relationship.” Then as Ahsoka shook
her head ruefully, Padme sobered. “You won’t be coming back with me, will you?”
“No. No, we won’t. We can’t stay here, but Coruscant ... unless I rejoin the
Order I can’t think of a more dangerous place for me in the entire Republic,
too many bounty hunters. And now I can’t rejoin the Order, not ever again.”
Padme sighed, but nodded. “I thought as much. Annie will be disappointed, but
he’ll understand.” Now it was her turn to glance toward the bacta tank. “How
long until she comes out?”
“Days, maybe even a week. She lost a lot of skin, and her internal organs were
almost cooked.”
Padme’s eyes widened. “That bad? I’m surprised she’s alive. But I’m afraid that
means I won’t be able to wait to meet her when she gets out. Just the trip out
and back is really more time away from Coruscant than I should be taking, even
with the new advances in the war. By the way, you do have an up-to-date nav-
chart for the run back to Milagro? It would be nice to shave a week off the
return trip.”
“Yes, we do. Defenate’s on board our ship, I’ll have her send it to you.” But
her eyes tracked back toward the bacta tank, and Padme took her by the arm and
gently pulled her toward the door.
“Come on. I know you’re worried about her, however pointless it might be —
she’s in a bacta tank and it isn’t a disease, if she hasn’t died yet she isn’t
going to — I’m the same way with Anakin. But you can’t just sit around waiting,
so why don’t you come back to my skiff? I can give you a meal like you haven’t
had since the last time we ate together, and we can catch up.
                                      /\
Ahsoka protested, but let herself be pulled toward the door. “Jenni, are you
sure?”
“Yes, I’ll be fine. I think ...” Jenni broke off for a wave of exhaustion, that
Ahsoka guessed signaled a yawn. “... I think the current is sweeping me toward
sleep anyway, the drugs must finally be taking effect. The Tao must have
decided I’ve been awake long enough. So catch up with your friend, then go into
your own healing trance. Just don’t forget that anything you tell her the
Chancellor is likely to hear as well.”
“All right, I will.” Ahsoka wasn’t surprised to find Aja, Padme’s secretary/
bodyguard, waiting outside the infirmary with the Marshal, and after Ahsoka let
Ghent know that everything was all right the three started walking back in
companionable silence toward the edge of town where Padme’s skiff was parked.
Then Ahsoka twitched as Jenni spoke up again. “Ahsoka, you need to have Padme
take a message with her, for Barriss Offee.”
“And why would I want to send that murderous traitor a message?”
Jenni paused while Ahsoka fought to again release into the Force the rage that
thoughts of the Mirialan woman that had framed her for murder could still fan
to life many weeks later. When Ahsoka’s inner turmoil eased, she continued:
“‘Soka, would you say Barriss was your friend?”
“Yes.”
“A good friend?”
“ ... yes.”
“A loyal and valiant Jedi?”
“You saw my life when we bonded, yes!”
“You know I didn’t reallyseeyour whole life, just the highlightsyouconsider
important. But yes, I’m asking questions that I already know the answers to,
she’s important enough to you that she featured prominently in what I saw.”
“Then you saw what she did to us! To me!”
“Yes. But Ahsoka, just what kind of pressure must she have been under for the
loyal and valiant Jedi you knew to be twisted into ... that? And no one saw the
warning signs that must have been there — not the masters, not the Jedi and
troopers she fought alongside ... not the friends that knew her best. Not you.
“Think about it.”
Ahsoka barely noticed as her bondmate finally let herself slip into slumber, so
stunned was she by Jenni’s last statement. She only came to herself when a
concerned Padme gently shook her shoulder, to find she’d come to a stop in the
middle of the street. She quickly excused her sudden inattention to a passing
thought, and they resumed their walk to the ship.
But she did think about it, as she called up Defenate onboard Life’s Gift for
the nav-chart for the jump to Milagro. She thought about it during the meal
Padme and Aja prepared from the luxurious stores with which a grateful Queen
Apailana had stocked the skiff. Her mind kept cycling back to it as she and
Padma told the stories of their lives since they’d last seen each other. While
she recorded a message for her former master.
And in the end, after she'd reluctantly said goodbye and was walking down the
ship’s ramp to return to the infirmary and her own healing trance to get rid of
the last of the bone-deep ache from Jenni’s accidental assault, she turned back
to face her friend. “Padme, could you take another message back for me? For
Barriss Offee? I’d like you to deliver it to her personally.”
***** On the Road Again *****
Jenni walked into the infirmary, toweling her still damp hair after her shower
to clean away the bacta residue. (Ahsoka had insisted on wiping off most of the
excess first, just as Jenni had done for her, and if her touch hadn’t been as
... experienced ... as Jenni’s it had still had her purring as she got in the
shower.)
Ghent straightened from where he’d been leaning against the wall. Jenni’s eye
widened when Cort stood up from the medtech’s normal seat, but before she had
the chance to say anything Ahsoka spoke up from where she sat on the patient’s
bed.
“What took so long?”
Jenni grimaced. “You would not believe how many times I had to wash my hair to
get the bacta-stink out of it.”
Ahsoka laughed, one hand rising to stroke a short, white, blue-striped lek
lying across her shoulder and down along her chest. “Another reason to be happy
to be a member of a species that doesn’t have hair.”
“Oh, it has its uses. It makes a nice handhold during sex.” Jenni flashed
Ahsoka a memory of Henrik’s head pinned between her thighs with her hands
buried in his fiery locks, holding his mouth against her burning cleft as her
hips bucked, and laughed when the blue of Ahsoka’s lekku brightened at her
unspoken response. Taking mercy on her Bonded, she turned to the slicer to find
him watching the exchange with one eyebrow cocked. “Cort, I have to say I’m
surprised to find you here. Didn’t Ahsoka get in touch to get the details about
what you told me while I was in the bacta tank?”
“Yes, she did. But while I don’t think there’s any danger of another one of the
... Sith Lord’s minions showing up any time soon, I want to go with you when
you leave. Oh, and don’t worry about anyone showing up too quickly. Even if the
Senator hands over the nav-data at Milagro like she’s supposed to I have a worm
in their systems that’ll wipe the data, it’ll be as if it was never there.”
It was all Jenni could do to keep her own eyebrows from rising. Sith Lord?
Ahsokahasbeen talking with him. And from the Marshal’s start of surprise, she
hadn’t told him. She gave him what she hoped was a reassuring smile, and
refocused on Cort. “He won’t need to send any minions, once he finds out what
happened to the one he sent all he’ll need to do is let the Bounty Hunter’s
Guild know where Ahsoka is and they’ll come swarming in.”
Having managed to fight down her blush as the discussion turned serious, Ahsoka
spoke up. “If he learns that much, he’ll also learn that I told Padme that we
wouldn’t be staying.”
“Nice phrasing, not letting Ghent know how certain it is our Sith Lord will
learn everything Padme knows.”
“It’s as you told me when you kept me from telling Padme about the Chancellor,
if he can’t do anything about it all telling him will do is paint an even
bigger target on our backs if he’s forced to give up what he knows.” Ahsoka was
not happy about that, and Jenni knew why — if any other Void Slaves showed up,
Ghent’s questioning would be extremely painful and almost certainly lethal. And
they couldn’t stay to protect him, along with the rest of Trey’s inhabitants.
But Cort was shaking his head. “It doesn’t matter if I’m still safe, I’ve been
hiding here long enough. With Ian dead, it’s time to move on.”
But not necessarily with us. Though now that Jenni thought about it, who else
did he have to go with? It wasn’t like there was an abundance to free traders
dropping by — in fact, with Ian dead there wasn’t likely to be any. We’re going
to have to go through Milagro, have Cort shut down his worm, and pass on
thegoodcharts along with word that Trey’s market is open. If we don’t, who
knows when the next free trader will show up. Unless — “Ahsoka, have you gotten
onto the Hunter’s ship?”
Ahsoka shook her head. “I tried, but the Force warned me off and I don’t know
enough to even recognize the traps, much less disarm them. We’re going to have
to blow up the ship in place before we leave.”
“So much for that idea.” Jenni sighed, realized she’d been standing in place
since noticing Cort’s presence, and stepped over to sit down beside Ahsoka,
Cort sitting down as well and Ghent leaning back against the wall. “All right,
Cort, we can at least get you off the planet. But after that you’re safer
making your own way, with all the bounty hunters we’re too much of a target.”
                                      /\
In the end, Ahsoka and Jenni placed the mining charges all over the Hunter’s
ship, while sharpshooters with blaster rifles around the ship kept a watch for
the automated anti-personnel blasters common to smugglers and bounty hunters’
ships. Nothing popped up (or down, as the case may be), though the Force warned
Ahsoka off from several places that she suspected were hidden access ports.
(When it occurred to Ahsoka to ask, Jenni explained that she wasn’t so much
warned off as guided by the feel of the currents of the Tao.)
Once Ahsoka and Jenni were safely away and the mining charges set off, the
resulting explosion collapsed a few of the closest houses and left a good-sized
crater. Some form of self-destruct mechanism must have been triggered, because
the miners that had brought the explosives swore they hadn’t brought enough for
that.
But it was done, and as Ahsoka watched the lights of the starscape stretch into
lines and vanish into the roiling gray of hyperspace she felt an eagerness that
she had been missing since she’d walked away from the Order. As horrible as the
war had often been, her actions in defense of the Republic has mattered. The
fight for survival since had not been enough to lift what she now recognized as
a deep depression ... if anything, that lonely struggle had strengthened it.
Only first her concern for Jenni and then their glorious Bonding had relieved
it, she felt the last vestiges of that depression fade away as she once again
set off on a mission in the Republic’s defense. Even the way the Force had
returned to the murky mistiness that she’d known all her life as soon as they’d
left Trey-space (or rather, Terra-space, since Ghent told them just before they
left that an overwhelming majority of its inhabitants had voted to adopt the
original name) couldn’t dampen her spirits.
The shock she’d felt from Jenni, though ...
She set the alarm and was unbuckling the seat belts she had automatically
latched even though there was zero chance of combat, when she heard Jenni say,
“So, Cort, you aren’t going to want to be dropped off, are you?” Turning her
seat, she found that as she had been lifting off and setting course for Milagro
the slicer had entered Life’s Gift’s cockpit and was seated behind her. And she
hadn’t noticed. I’m going to have to ask Jenni to teach me her constant
awareness of everyone’s emotions around her. Battlefield awareness and the
Force’s warnings of danger are fine, but I’ll take the problems she says she
has with large crowds over being caught unaware when I’mnotin danger — not all
dangers are immediate.
Ahsoka ignored Cort’s reply to focus on her Bonded, the white around Jenni’s
lips and eyes matching the shakiness Ahsoka was picking up through their bond.
She was just about to ‘say’ something through their link, when —
“— the Chancellor, aren’t you?”
She instantly switched her attention back to Cort, focusing on him through the
Force. Jenni wasn’t in any immediate danger, and this ... “Cort, are you
certain Chancellor Palpatine is the hidden Sith Lord the Order has been worried
about since finding Anakin ... Skywalker? I mean, he’s been so friendly,
supportive. He’s practically Anakin’s patron, has been since Anakin joined the
Order.”
Cort shrugged. “I don’t know anything about a Sith Lord, I thought they were
centuries extinct. But yes, it’s the Chancellor that’s behind the war ... both
sides of the war. And you are going after him, aren’t you?”
There was a predatory hunger behind his quiet question, and Ahsoka silently
asked, “What do we tell him? Youaresensing what I am, right?”
Rather than answer her Bonded, Jenni asked, “And why do you care? With Ahsoka
being hunted, I’d think you’d want to stay as far away from us ... and him ...
as possible.”
Cort’s lips tightened, his hunger turning angry. “Because he owes me — for a
year on the run, years hiding on that backwater hole —” For a moment his hunger
turned into amusement, his lips quirking. “— however historically significant
that backwater has turned out to be.” The moment of levity was fleeting,
however. “He owes me for the loss of all the savings me and Ian had managed to
accumulate, for Ian’s death. No offence, but if we hadn’t been hunted he
wouldn’t have been killed in that bar.”
There wasn’t any way to respond to the implicit statement that Cort would
rather Ahsoka had died than his friend that wouldn’t sound selfish, so Ahsoka
just glanced over at Jenni.
Jenni gazed back for a moment, then looked back at Cort. “And how can you help
us deal with him?”
“When I sliced the Chancellor’s files, the first thing I did, before I was
discovered, was create a back door. I never bothered to go back in, with the
signal lag over galactic distances ...” He shrugged. “But if I’m actually on
Coruscant the lack of lag time should allow me to seize control of the files,
at least long enough to copy everything. I won’t be able to do that without
setting off all kinds of alarms, through, so after that we could take refuge in
the Jedi Temple. We give everything to them, and let them deal with him.”
“Hmmm.” Jenni glanced over at her Bonded. “‘Soka?”
Ahsoka felt a warmth blossom in her heart at what was apparently becoming her
nickname — unlike her former master’s ‘Snips’ there was no gentle mockery
involved — but forced herself to focus. Though she’d had Life’s Gift’s quarters
altered so she and Jenni could share a room ... and a bed ... Focus! She ‘sent’
back, “That’s better than what I could come up with. All I had was to go to the
Order with what we’d learned, and hope even without proof they’d take us
seriously enough to investigate themselves — theydoowe me, after all, and some
of them might even recognize that. The only alternative I could see was to
attack him, force him to defend himself with the Force, as a Sith Lord he would
be tainted by his connection to the Void and easily detectible from the Temple.
But ...”
“But that could go wrong any number of ways.” Jenni sighed and leaned back in
her seat. “All right, Cort, you’re in, with one change — instead of taking what
you get to the Order, you dump it straight into the hyperwave. You can do that,
right?” At a stunned Cort’s jerky nod, she continued, “Good, after the way the
Jedi Council treated Ahsoka I don’t trust them, so we take the decision out of
their hands. Then we go to the Order, after that we’ll probably need their
protection — Palpatine will have more important things to worry about than us,
but Void Slaves are vindictive bastards.
“But you’re going to be with us for awhile, because we’re going to have to
wait.” At the other two’s questioning looks, she shrugged. “From the news, it
looks like the Republic’s on its way to winning. If we go in right now,
destabilize the Republic’s leadership, who knows how long we’ll be extending
the killing? Besides, we’ll need to figure out some way to get onto Coruscant
without being detected. There is some way to track individual ships?”
Ahsoka and Cort both nodded. “Yes, by the emissions of the sublight drives,”
Ahsoka said. “But I can take care of that once we leave Milagro, alter the
drive’s performance enough to register as a different ship.”
“And I have a false ship’s ID,” Cort added. “Get me within range of a hyperwave
transceiver, and Republican port authorities will even recognize us by the
false ID. Still, once we get that all set up, are you sure you want to wait? If
Palpatine’s started his end game, he must have some plan already in place for
taking down the Order once the Republic has won. Striking after victory is
certain but before he makes his move ... that’ll be a tricky piece of timing.”
Suddenly, in spite of everything — her months on the run and near death;
Jenni’s near death; the years of pain and suffering that had preceded that, all
of them dancing to a Sith Lord’s tune; the feel of the shroud of the Dark Side
that was twisting her gut and still had Jenni white — Ahsoka found herself
laughing a wave of optimism swept over her. “We’re the Youxia Bond. If there’s
anything we excel at, it’s timing!”
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