The ship hums. Outside, stars pass us by in haste. Space gives way, sliding on around us. Lifeless, inanimate objects given qualities more lifelike than some people I've known. The stars twinkling off the viewport seem so far and yet so close in comparison to those on this tiny ship. Space gives way in absence of companionship. Stars pass by instead of laughter. The ship hums in lieu of the gentle breath of sleep.

We've grown so far apart these last few months. They're with me now, begrudgingly, as I go to face a danger even they cannot ignore and take back the only thing I was ever able to call my own.

Even if they would listen, I couldn't even begin to thank them - the men and women that have come with me all this way, even after they saw what they did. Even after they learned the truth.

Whether we live or die these next few weeks I know the galaxy will move on as it always has, unaware that once the fate of the galaxy balanced like a thin knife over a fine thread. I could explain why the fear and worry that grips my friends holds me tightly in its sway now too, but I always hated stories that told you what happened in the end and expected you to read on after. Besides, what better way to tell the story than from the beginning?


I think my quest began on a similar sleepless night, tossing and turning as I tried to force my eyes to close and sleep to come. The ship lurched unannounced, sending me rolling off the cot and onto the hard floor. Within seconds, alarms started blaring and voices called out the warning level over the comm system, switching between nine different languages. They all said the same thing: The ship is breached. Evacuate immediately.

Untangling myself from the blanket and standing up on shaky feet, I tilted my comlog to my face and called up the current ship schematics, bringing up a real-time holo of the ship we were on.

The Endar Spire was a hammerhead-class cruiser with a wide command post at one end and a tapered point at the other. From the real-time data pouring in I could see a large breach in the middle of the ship outlined in flashing red and a concerning number of growing red dots flashing on all sides.

Our ship was classified as a civilian ship even though every last one of the crew members were trained in combat. It seemed someone had leaked important information about the who we had on board.

Still, the hammerhead-class cruiser may have been listed as a civilian ship but it had shields that no low-end military cruiser could possibly take down. The red data showing a growing breach and a series of red dots gaining numbers by the second showed that the largest breach had been made in first contact.

We were not dealing with a low-end military vessel.

My heart began to pound as I pushed the data to the only screen in the tiny room, rushing to a corner where my locker was and yanking the comp-repair jumpsuit I wore as a uniform on.

I had debated slicing into the real-time tracking systems the Endar Spire used in case something like this were to happen but I'd decided against tapping into that data in case I was caught. The more channels I opened on my end the higher chance someone would notice the number of listening ports was not what it should be. A faint voice read aloud tactical data as I struggled to get my arm through a sleeve; it was not looking good for the Endar Spire.

Just as my head poked through the jumpsuit the security door hissed open, barely giving me enough time to call the comlog display off. I stood looking guilty as a man in orange-and-black engineering slacks burst into the room, but he didn't even glance at the screen above my head.

"Good, you're up! We need to leave now, most of the crew are already heading toward the escape pods. Come on!"

He could tell from my face that there was no recognition because he gestured wildly to himself with one hand, steadying what I now noticed as a blaster at the door with his other hand.

"My name is Trask Ulgo. You probably don't recognize me because we work opposite shifts. I'm your roommate."

He was right that I wouldn't recognize him. We shared the same room on off hours and I'd done my best to stay away from the room well before he'd arrive and well after he'd leave to avoid meeting him. All I'd really known about my roommate was a plaque below a plaque of my own name that read T. Ulgo and a plastic sheet carefully folded below the bed that I assumed he placed over the bed when he slept on it every shift. His presence was also in the fact that whenever I'd come into the room everything would be arranged just so — things I'd placed one way would always be changed, always facing the same direction. Precise to a degree. I'd started keeping things where I found them after that first week of noticing the interesting trend. I'd assumed T. Ulgo would have appreciated it at the very least.

Now he stood before me, having come back to save me for some reason before leaving a dying ship. I figured he'd needed something from the room to explain why he'd come all the way back here — engineering shift locations varied but they were mostly all well away from the rooming section we were in.

"Yevana Mar." He nodded impatiently and gestured for me to move quickly. I turned to stuff what little belongings I had in various pockets. "Thanks for coming back to get me," I threw over my shoulder, slipping a small short knife just long enough for a shady vendor to have called it a sword and priced it similarly into the belt hook on my jumpsuit.

He didn't grab anything as I stepped out into the hallway, following me with his gun trained on the door at the end as if he expected soldiers to burst through at any moment. They probably would, I realised.

"No need to mention it. It's what soldiers do. You probably didn't get much of that from your past."

I straightened and turned to look him in the eye. My new friend continued on, "What with being a smuggler and all, I'm honestly surprised you didn't run for it the first chance you got. Still, they saw something in you or they wouldn't have brought you in along with Bastila."

The name rang a bell. Bastila. Jedi. The only important passenger on our ship. Or so the Jedi said. "Where's she?" I asked, plowing past his blatant ignorance.

"With luck on an escape pod. If not, we have to find her." I didn't bother to hide the disapproval I felt and he frowned at me, "We — all of us — swore an oath to protect Bastila with our lives. That's you included. If she doesn't get out, neither do we."

I wanted to challenge this insane notion — sure I signed some contract to get out of going to prison but that didn't mean my life was now forfeit for some Jedi. A holo shimmered on the console beside us in the hallway into the pale blue face of a man warning the crew to head for the escape pods before I could say anything.

"Carth Onasi," my companion said needlessly, "If he says things are bad that means they're bad. Come, we should move out." He turned on his heel and headed to the security door at the far end of the hallway, and I took a deep breath to calm myself before following suit.

We followed the map downloaded to our comlogs and headed toward the escape pods. Our journey was largely quiet apart from the constant faint huff of breath as Trask and I jogged through empty corridors, stopping to check the pulse of fallen soldiers and see if any electrocuted droids could be repaired. We were stopped once or twice by fighters armoured in shiny chrome-coloured bodysuits with flexible black padding around their joints. They seemed to eat Trask's bullets without issue, but my knife had no trouble slicing through the black cloth when I was able to get close enough. Trask and I didn't need to know much to realise we were fighting trained warriors. They fought with an efficiency I'd never seen outside of an army, and moved together almost as a single unit.

It was down one of these corridors I met my first Sith — or so I thought at the time.

It is difficult to explain the fear one feels on first seeing something straight out of a children's ahorror book. Now, having faced so many Jedi — dark and light alike — it seems laughable that I once stood at the edge of a door, shaking in my boots as a man dressed in black and casually holding a glowing red blade approached me, ready to drop the knife and run at a moment's notice and leave my companion behind to an awful fate.

A woman bolted in from the right, and we saw a flash of green before they both turned into a blur of green and red. I could barely keep up with their movement unless I focused hard enough. I caught a glimpse of them in action. A green arc of a thrust to one side here, a red flash of a parry there.

At the last second I was able to see a glimpse of the man's face, teeth bared. He turned for a split second and stared at me, his eyes boring into me, narrowing in some sort of understanding, before the Jedi ran him through.

I know now why he looked at me that way, why his gaze set my skin crawling and my heart slowed, stuttering as though I'd been passed through a cryotank. I wonder often if he hadn't died — if he had come to me, awakened something within me at that point — would the memories have come back? Would knowing what — who — I was have changed this story forever? Would it have detailed the end of that poor engineer and the death of that brave pilot and headstrong Jedi passenger? Would entire planets have been razed, citizens forced under the power of whatever would have been awakened?

At the time I thought I was simply unlucky. That he'd caught wind of me even when I was trying to hide. Later I'd think he sensed what I could not — the Force, coursing through me like the blood in my veins. Now I wonder if he'd known something else. I wonder if he'd known the truth.

At that moment all I thought was how lucky we were that he was dead and we weren't. Trask and I sighed aloud in relief and started to move toward the Jedi. We were steps away when an explosion rocked the ship to the side. The movement sent us careening to the other side of the wall, bits of our clothing on fire. The Light Jedi didn't stand a chance. All we heard of her was a scream and a sickening thud.

The ship managed to use thrusters to almost properly right itself. We rolled back to the center. So did she. Or what was left of her.

A sob threatened to escape me but I settled for retching unceremoniously in the corner, dry heaving when that was done. Trask leaned over, steadying a hand on my shoulder.

"We all knew the risks," he started, gesturing back to the body, "Come, we should go."

I stood, gripping the wall tightly. The ship was just barely askew enough that we ended up walking down a slant to the door on the far end, reaching out to grab the wall to keep our balance.

I triggered the security override and the door acquiesced. We were in the command center, and several of those armoured bastards had their guns trained on us even as the door slid open. Trask and I rolled to opposite sides of the door. I slipped my hand into my makeshift bag as I did so, palming a frag grenade and flicking the detonate primer with my thumb. I raised my arm and tossed the grenade in an arc to the far end of the room. It would definitely fry the consoles but I didn't think we were going anywhere with this ship after all this.

The soldiers there fell unanimously. Trask shot a few rounds in front of him at the soldiers closest to us and tossed a grenade of his own at them. We peeked in and waited a few moments to make sure they were all gone.

After quickly rummaging through the bodies under Trask's distrustful eye, I picked up a few security spikes and one decent blast rifle I held out to Trask, who jerked his head to the side and made a disgusted noise. I shrugged and tucked the rifle near my knife after confirming the lock was on. No sense in dying for the sake of propriety.

Trask gave me a wide berth, eyeing me as we made our way through the ship, silent except for the alarms blaring intermittently. We finally came up to the corridor that led to the turbolifts and my heart felt like it would beat out of my chest with anxiety. "Almost there," Trask said grudgingly, as if even talking to me would acknowledge the fact that he was associating with a criminal. His voice was raw, as raw as my throat felt at that moment. We were both so close to the end and yet we knew that something terrible was waiting to happen to us on the other side of the turbolift-access door. At least, I did. We stood before the door for a moment before nodding at each other. I slammed my hand down on the controls several times until the door finally opened. Trask and I stumbled in, resting against a wall and trying to regain our breath.

The way was miraculously clear. I could feel my heart pounding but I sighed aloud in relief, making my way over to one of the access ports.

I felt something seconds before I heard the terrible hair-raising hum. The room went deathly cold and it seemed as though all the light around us had lost its saturation. I was already turning, ducking and dragging Trask down to the ground with me. Red flashed above us, at shoulder level.

Trask stared at me with open eyes and then pushed me. At first I thought he was pushing me away, off of him, but I realised he was aiming for a turbolift just to the left of us. It wouldn't take us directly to the access port but we'd be close enough that we could sprint down a few corridors and make it out. I started crawling for the exit.

Trask's weight shifted and suddenly he was yanked back. I slid forward on the smooth floor, my knees slamming uncomfortably on the ground while my fingers scrabbled for purchase as I tried to crawl across to the turbolift.

I entered and looked back, heaving as I tried to catch my breath. Trask was in the Dark Jedi's grip, but his gun was pointed at the man's face.

"Go!" He screamed, "I'll buy you some time."

I didn't hear him finish the sentence. I had keyed the lift to leave at his first insistence and I was rising when I heard the blade hum underneath the squeal of the turbolift doors closing and a scream under the rush of air as I was carried to one side of the ship.

My heart was beating wildly now. I could hear the lightsaber's hum near the turbolift, buzzing as if it was cutting into the access doors below me. I held tightly to the wall of the lift behind me, if only to keep myself from collapsing to the ground.

I couldn't think about Trask, and how I'd left him there. The turbolift slowed to a stop, but it jerked to one side slightly. Almost instantly I heard the hum of a lightsaber and a red light pierced through the bottom of the lift. I pawed at the controls and resorted to peeling the doors back with my own hands when it opened up onto the floor too slowly, too in-shock to even make a noise.

The floor disappeared underneath me just as I stepped out and a brilliant flash of red lit the lift. I scrambled for the other side, already out of breath and hearing the man's footsteps draw nearer. My foot caught on a crack in the floor and I almost tumbled down but I somehow managed to stay on my feet, racing past to the door in front of me. The blade hummed past me just as I ducked into the corridor and whizzed past again, returning to its master. He chuckled aloud in delight while I stayed there, shivering.

The corridor was darkly lit, illuminated mostly by the emergency generator lights that had switched on when the main power generator had been shot. At the end of the tunnel, two red lights blinked and rotated, sending a constant red beam sweeping across the floor in front of me. I could hear the man's breath, slow and meditative near the entrance to the tunnel. My hand, perched firmly against the wall in front of the tiny cubbyhole I'd hid in was shaking so badly I worried it would start tapping against the wall.

"If you come out now I'll make your death swift. You might not even feel pain, like your unfortunate friend."

My heart pounded in my chest and I curled the fingers of my outstretched hand into a fist.

"Come, now, I haven't got all-"

The dark-Jedi stepped back, stunned into silence. From my vantage point his jaw was slowly working as if he was gingerly testing to see that it wasn't broken from the punch I'd rounded the corner and given him, surprising even myself. His gaze narrowed and I felt terror closing around my throat, giving a physical substance to the pain and cruelty I felt leach from him. My throat was constricting but my feet still worked, I found out. Something seemed to curl around me, like a cold fog solidifying, and tried to lift me in the air.

I started to run, for a second it felt like I was caught motionless in air as the fog crowded my body and curled against my skin, stuffing my nose and throat with an almost unbearable chill. I took it for my own fear, shaking off the effect with great effort, like a bantha removing a fly with one great jerk of its head, until I felt my feet touch something solid. It felt like I was running in water but the second my first foot touched the ground nothing mattered anymore. I propelled myself forward every inch by straining with each step I made.

The corridor door was only two steps in front of me and then I was slamming into it, knocking on the panel to open the door as quickly as I could. It hissed open and I stumbled inside, finally screaming as I felt cold fingers grasp my elbow. I struck out hard, slamming my elbow back several times until I felt flesh give way and was able to pull away.

The hum of a lightsaber blade drew so close I was sure it had burned some of the hairs on my shin. I yelped and staggered toward the other side of the dark room, pushing myself up using the single long table as a handhold to keep myself from falling down.

"Go through the door in front of you and stay well away from the console, I can buy you enough time to get in here."

Whether or not I have ever had what one could call a 'conventional conscience', I knew for sure that this voice, male and with the authority of a military commander, was not something I made up on my own head.

My comlog buzzed again as he repeated his message and I felt one last burst of energy hit me as I raced past the table to the last door, wheezing out loud.

Something grabbed my hair that must have come undone during my flight, but I had just gotten through the doors and shot the panel, overloading the circuits and forcing it to close almost instantly.

There was a buzz of electricity from the first room and I felt a rush of heat, the hair on my skin crackling as I was blasted to the other end of the second room just as the door snapped shut.

I blinked from my position on the floor, trying to muster up the will to lift my head. A familiar voice was swearing from the other side of the door. I lifted my wrist — it took all of my energy to even do that — and realised that my comlog had been fried and was now just displaying a blank screen before my arm fell to the ground with a thud.

The cursing stopped and I heard a knocking from the other side of the door. "Are you still there? Can you hear me? Answer me, damnit!" The last sentence was punctuated with a thud, rather like a fist hitting a door.

I opened my mouth to speak but nothing came out, I groaned instead, wheezing as my lungs slowly released what little air I had left. My fingers twitched and I found myself rolled over on my side, coughing loudly all of a sudden, the burst turning quickly into more gasps for air as I started to hyperventilate.

There was a thudding sound on the other side of the door that seemed to shake the floor beneath me. The coughing worsened as I expected my worst fear to happen. I was almost ready to find myself at the point-end of a lightsaber soon enough.

Instead the door on the other side of the room squealed open, a cool feminine voice coming to life across the comm system to state that emergency protocols had been breached in several alien languages as well as Basic. A man wedged himself between the two doors and leaned across to one side, shooting open one of the door panels and reaching in to yank out an assortment of wires, teeth grit from the strain of holding the door open. The panel system made a loud high pitched hum and the doors immediately snapped open, sending the man tumbling to the ground near me.

My coughing had stilled while I watched him enter, I slowly rolled to my right and onto my hands, trying to find some leverage to sit up. He was there beside me, arm around my shoulder, pulling me carefully into a sitting position.

"Thank the stars you're alright," he whispered, relieved, "I overloaded the console in the room behind you and fried that Dark Jedi to a crisp but then your comsignal went off and I was worried I'd killed you too."

He wrapped his hand around my wrist and turned it toward him, "Looks like it's fried is all. That can be fixed when we're off this ship. Can you walk, soldier?"

I finally spoke. Or, well, tried to. All I could manage was a groan. He shifted so that he was in my field of vision. I'd never met the man before but I knew his face — what little I could see of it, in the dim light — I was with Carth Onasi, the pilot that had spoken to us earlier.

"Come on, it's only a few steps away." He stood, pulling me up with him. I felt like I had enough strength to support myself but I clutched tightly to his shoulder as we made the first few tentative steps.

We made it to the threshold of the door and Carth touched the panel on the side, cursing aloud when nothing happened. I looked at him curiously and he gestured to the door, concern etched into the small lines on his face. "Door's jammed. I had to disable the controls on the other side to open it but I don't think we have time to rewire that whole thing."

I shifted slowly to face the panel on the escape pod side of the door, Carth twisting around to accommodate me. I let go of his shoulder and braced myself against the wall, one hand up to steady myself while the other one tapped a few codes into the panel. I was able to get the panel open while alarms blared around us and the comm system warned that life support would be shutting down in a few minutes. I hadn't even realised I'd let go of the wall to rewire the panel but by the time the panel dinged and I'd entered the security code it wanted, I'd almost forgotten my weariness.

The door squeaked shut and I turned to look at Carth staring at me in admiration. "Guess they knew what they were doing when they hired a smuggler on board," he said with an easy grin. I had opened my mouth to reply but stopped myself, noticing the difference in his stature with my roommate Trask. Carth was being appreciative.

I grinned back at him and finally spoke, my voice raw and barely able to hold above a whisper, "Let's get outta here."


I don't quite remember what happened on our trip down to Taris, the planet closest to our now scuttled ship. Taris was under Imperial blockade, but a planet is large and an escape pod quite small. We had a good chance of breaking atmosphere so long as we weren't targeted on our way out of the ship.

Carth and I settled into the pod, Carth keying in his code while jokingly admitting he wanted to know where I had gotten the security access codes to the Endar Spire. The air in the escape pod was fresh and cold, with an almost burnt quality as oxygen was pumped in through the life support.

We set off, and the view on the transparent end of our pod grew bright once the shadow of our dead ship had passed and the outline of Taris' hemisphere swirled into view.

We were midway when the shuttle jerked to the side and alarms began pinging.

There was no hole in the shuttle and the life support systems were on still, though I felt myself rise slowly as the small gravity generator hummed it's last before dying out on us. "It was a stray shot." I told Carth, steadying my hand on his shoulder as he turned to key in an evasive pattern. "An escape pod is an easy target for small fighters and we don't have any shields. If it was intentional we'd be dead." We were both rising to the ceiling. I'd stretched my body out so that I was resting afloat and Carth pulled away from the panel while he did the same.

"Makes sense," he muttered, pulling back the sleeve of his jacket and checking his comlog. "We've got 15 standard minutes until we land."

It may have been the hysteria and my brush with certain death earlier finally getting to me, or the almost pure oxygen targeted for humans being pumped in through the system, but I realised that with the emergency lights on in the ship the rest of the corridors had only been faintly illuminated. I'd seen Carth, memorised his face and the tiny stray piece of hair that had escaped the rest of his crew styled cut and dangled over his brow. But I hadn't noticed the brilliant orange jacket he'd been wearing until the light Taris reflected from its sun shone brilliantly into our escape pod.

It really was one of the most hideous things I'd ever seen. I began to chuckle and then when I couldn't stop, Carth's confused expression made me burst out in laughter.

He smiled wryly at some point, reaching out to steady me as the barely sentient navigation systems detected a piece of debris in front and shifted quickly to avoid it, sending us both careening against the pod ceiling. I could feel my tears well up around my eyes but with no gravity to pull it away it looked like I was seeing underwater.

I continued laughing until the escape pod jerked away again and Carth and I slammed into the ceiling once more, and then his confused look faded to concern as the light began to slip off of his face and my world plunged into darkness.