Hello there! Well, it's been a long time, but I finally got part 3 of my ongoing series finished, and ready to post! As usual, the story is complete, and I'll be posting a chapter every week or so, so no worries on whether it'll be finished or not. Personally, I can't stand getting into a story, and then it never gets updated! :( This story is a starting point for where the series will be headed, and all due to a silly youtube video that gave me the idea. For anyone that's interested out of some sort of morbid curiosity, you can find it by doing a search for Star Wars A-Team. Anyway, enough mindless blather and onto the story!
Chapter 1 Duty Bound
Ascension Station, Dienzo System, Outskirts of Mid Rim
All in all, Rika Tymor thought to herself, it had been a pretty eventful week. The fugitive Jedi Padawan and her business partner Randal Sarn had gone through a lot in the two years since Order 66 ended her way of life and made her a fugitive on the run, but the last week was nothing compared to the rest.
It had begun with an unsavory contact who claimed that he had information on the location of some fugitive Jedi survivors who wanted to have a meeting on the unspectacular mining world of Dienzo III, a useless rock on the outskirts of the Mid Rim. Randal had refused to go that far into Imperial territory, but Rika had insisted and he conceded, but griped about it the entire time. Their contact never showed, but the Force works in mysterious ways. While on Dienzo III, they met a miner who was in need of someone who could teach his people to defend themselves from a larger corporate mogul who had a gang of thugs working for him and wanted their land. They helped them, though Randal griped about this as well until he learned that the thugs were led by a particular nasty and cruel Mandalorian named Kaul.
Together, Randal and Rika fought alongside the villagers and drove the thugs away, however, in the fight, Rika had to use her lightsaber; and even though the Jedi were all but extinct for two years now, everyone realized what she was... even Kual. Rika blamed herself for what happened next, after all, Randal continuously told her not to carry the weapon anymore, even to the point of annoyance. During the night of the attack, once everyone felt that the thugs wouldn't come back and the worst was behind them, Kaul returned. But this time, instead of attacking the village, he was there only for her; or at least the million credit bounty that the Empire had posted for fugitive Jedi.
She was caught by surprise, drugged, and kidnapped. What happened after that, she wasn't clear on. All she remembered after that was waking up here on Ascension Station, a refueling and transfer station on the edge of the system. Randal had said that Kaul and his thugs wouldn't be a problem anymore, but he failed to elaborate any further.
Once the medical droid said she was okay to leave, Randal insisted on having a drink, so they went to a cantina where she was given a napkin that held the best hope for her Jedi searching quest yet. It was a hand drawn picture of a suubatar and a docking bay number. Randal had no idea what it meant, but of course the animal wasn't relevant to him. But to Rika, it meant the world. When she was a youngling, she was in the suubatar clan, so obviously a fellow clan's member was here on the station.
Now, as Rika and Randal headed to the indicated docking bay, she couldn't help but feel a mix of different emotions coursing through her, making her stomach turn violently. Randal caught her by the arm and for the twentieth time made her slow down. She was so excited to finally see another Jedi that she was nearly running to the docking bay.
She paused at the docking bay door and took in a deep breath. It had been nearly two years since the last time she was in the presence of another Jedi, and nearly forgot what it was like to be touched through the Force by another Force user. It was something that she used to find normal and mundane, but after such a long time without it, she craved for the sensation like a bird longing to soar through the air but was stuck inside a cage.
She readied herself, and then stepped through the doors. Briefly, she scanned the area, noting the massive Charger C70 that was being loaded with cargo containers. For a split second, she thought it was odd to see one of these so long after the war, but her thoughts fell onto a figure standing with their back to her, wearing a green hooded cloak with the cloak covering their head. Somewhere behind her, she heard Randal say something.
"Wow, a Charger C70. You don't see those too often in civvie hands."
As they continued to walk into the docking bay, Rika tried to see if she could remember this person by their signature in the Force. Rika stretched out with her feelings and got a sense of everything in the docking bay, except for the hooded figure. She was taken aback by this; everything gave off some sort of resonance in the Force, even droids if one were to concentrate hard enough. But whoever this was, they weren't emitting even a flicker, as if they were a black spot in the Force. Rika had no idea what was being done here and felt both confused and cautious at the same time.
The mysterious stranger must have been able to sense her confusion, because they turned around from the droid that they were talking to and began to approach the duo. A pair of slender hands reached up and lowered the cloak, revealing a human female with a head of long blonde hair, gray eyes, and an old smile that Rika hadn't seen in years. The blonde ran to Rika, grabbed her arms in an embrace and shook her excitedly.
"Rika! I thought that was you in the cantina! You don't know how happy I am to see that you've survived! How did you do it? So many others didn't make it," she said solemnly with a slight frown at remembering that so many of their comrades were no longer on the living side of the Force. Rika recognized her of course. This was Orena Melar, the star pupil of the suubatar clan; always the first one with any answer, the highest scorer on any test, the first of the clan to be chosen as a Padawan, and the first Padawan to be granted the full rank of Jedi Knight. Rika didn't know why, but though most of the butterflies in her stomach had disappeared, she still seemed to feel something else that she couldn't understand, or didn't want to admit. She pushed these thoughts away and smiled back.
"I was lucky, I guess," was the best that she could come up with. "I've been searching for other Jedi ever since that day, and I was almost about to give up hope. I'm so relieved to find you alive and well, Orena." The two shared a smile, but doubt seemed to be creeping into the back of Rika's mind. Why did it feel forced? She was glad that she had found another Jedi after all this time, and Orena was the brightest student the Masters had seen for many years, or so they used to say all the time, so naturally she would have found a way to survive Order 66. So what else could it be?
Rika felt a sense of uneasiness coming from Randal. They had been working together in his transporting/smuggling business ever since the end of the Clone Wars, so she was pretty attuned to his shifts in moods and feelings. She turned to the dark haired spacer and smiled at him to ease his discomfort.
"Orena, I'd like you to meet Randal Sarn. If it wasn't for him, I'd likely be dead or captured by the Empire by now." Rika said it light heartedly, but she meant every word of it. He had saved her several times now from a certain end at the hands of the Empire, but she had saved his backside just as many times as well.
"It's Captain Randal Sarn. I keep having to remind her of that," Randal said as he offered his hand to Orena. She took it and shook back firmly.
"Well, Captain Randal Sarn, I'm Orena Melar, Jedi Knight of the former Republic." Orena's introduction caught Rika off guard. For the past two years, Rika hadn't mentioned that she was a Jedi to anyone, and had kept her lightsaber in her cabin aboard the Destrier, Randal's YT-2400 freighter. It was in that moment that she realized that Orena looked odd not wearing the old Jedi robes that she had always seen her in. Instead of those, she now wore a pale green shirt with a conforming black vest over it. Draped around her shoulders, and clasped around her neck was the dark green hooded cloak. She was also wearing a pair of dark blue pants with black boots, and a matching gun belt with a blaster situated on her left in a cross-draw rig. As Rika looked her over, her eyes stuck on the lightsaber that Orena wore out in plain sight on her right leg. She wore it openly, knowing full well that the weapon pegged her as a fugitive?
"So the two of you know each other then, right?" Randal asked, drawing Rika out of her thoughts and bringing her back into the moment.
"Yes, we were in the same youngling clan as children," Orena said before she turned back to Rika and smiled. "I still can't believe that we ran into each other like this." Rika smiled and lightly shook her head.
"Nothing happens by accident, or at least that was what the master always told us." Orena smiled and laughed at their inside joke, and Rika joined in, finding the common ground that she had so longingly missed comforting. From behind Orena, the protocol droid that she was speaking to earlier walked up and interrupted their reunion.
"Sir! Tower control says that the Imperial cruiser is leaving orbit of Dienzo III and is heading to this station," the droid said in a stiff military sounding voice. The cruiser! Rika had forgotten all about it. Earlier when they were in the cantina, the waitress had said that everyone seemed on edge because an Imperial cruiser was in the system, but was headed towards Dienzo III and not the station. But now that it was headed here, that changed everything.
"I'd like to be able to catch up and see what you're up to, but I make it a habit of not sticking around when Imperials show up," Orena said with a regretful expression on her face. "If you'd like, we can set a rendezvous point up and meet there. Then we can talk more leisurely," Orena suggested with a smile that showed her enthusiasm. Rika nodded agreement, and Orena took out a notepad and pulled out a sheet of flimsi, quickly wrote down a set of coordinates and handed them to Rika. Rika looked over them quickly, and then looked back up at Orena and nodded.
"We'll meet you there." They both didn't say a farewell, but instead nodded and turned away from each other. As Orena headed back towards her ship, Rika started towards the exit.
Randal caught up with her and leaned over her shoulder to take a look at the flimsi. "I guess we're headed there, then?" She rolled her eyes and then looked up and over at Randal and smiled.
"Yes, if you don't mind." Randal shrugged nonchalantly and put his hands in his pants pockets.
"No, I don't mind. Haven't got anything else to do." Rika shook her head as she laughed to herself at her partner's casual nature. He knew full well that this was what she had been searching for for the past two years. But instead of treating it like a momentous occasion, he acted like it was something as casual as any other day in the week. On one hand, she found this behavior to be annoying and sometimes frustrating, but on the other, she enjoyed his idiosyncrasies compared to the stoic nature she had always seemed to encounter in other Jedi.
They continued to make their way back towards the docking bay where the Destrier was docked, and while Rika was continuing to look at the flimsi that Orena had given her and not pay attention to what was going on around her, she caught the slight level of confusion and uneasiness in Randal. She looked up from the flimsi and noticed that everyone seemed to be moving more quickly than normal, as if they had somewhere else to be. Naturally, with an Imperial cruiser headed this way, it made perfect sense.
As they passed the cantina, they saw the Bothan bartender sliding the security grating down and locking it in place.
"You don't think the Imps are going to want a drink?" Randal said jokingly. The Bothan turned around quickly and gave Randal a stern look.
"Those bastards can go burn in the core after what they just did." Rika saw Randal's usual smirk disappear and his shoulders tensed up. She too felt the hairs on the back of her neck standing up in alertness.
"What do you mean?" Randal asked seriously.
"You haven't heard?" the Bothan said, his fury at the Imperials only rising further as he continued. "Those stormtroopers went down to some small mining village, demanding that they give up a fugitive or something. When they refused, they opened fire. Killed every last one of them. Women and children, from what the report said." Rika opened her eyes wide as the breath was knocked out of her lungs. No, it simply couldn't be the same one, could it?
"What was the name of the village?" Rika found herself asking.
"Oh, it had some funny name. New Beginning, or something like that. Poor bastards, I guess it wasn't after all." Randal seemed to drift away and the bartender turned and left. Rika had to blink a few times and shook her head as the enormity of what had happened sunk in. She was numb to the Force, but she didn't need it to sense Randal's crumbling self control. Rika reached out and touched his arm, and suddenly got a rush of guilt and pain coming from him through the Force.
"I can't believe it," he said softly, barely even audible as he seemed to slump over. "They killed everyone there because of us; because of what we did. Giles, Otzz, even Cal and Kayla." Rika shook her head to get herself back in the moment and took Randal by the arm fully.
"Come on, we've got to get off of this station before they get here. Don't blame yourself. We didn't kill them, the Empire did." She hoped that Randal was convinced of what she said, because she didn't fully believe it herself.
Randal lightly nodded, as if he still wasn't fully there, and started to walk again. Rika kept close to him, willing him to continue on, and hoping that he was doing the same for her. The further they went, the more determined his steps became, until he was nearly marching with grave determination. Rika tried to focus on him through the Force, but her concentration was fractured by her own emotional distress. She would have to calm herself and meditate to re-center herself, but that would have to happen later.
As they entered the docking bay that housed the Destrier, R3-G5 or Geefive as they called him, Randal and Rika's third partner in their business, rolled up and started whistling and beeping at an alarming speed. Randal could fully understand the droid, but Rika could only catch every other word. Right now, he was blaring the alarm about the incoming Imperial cruiser, and what it had done while at Dienzo III. Randal merely nodded, and continued into the ship. Geefive twittered a slightly offensive remark to Randal's briskness, but Rika patted him on his durasteel R2 series dome and walked besides the droid back into the Destrier.
"Don't mind him, Geefive. We both still can't really believe that it's happened." Geefive drew out a long somber tone as he rolled up the loading ramp. Rika closed the ramp once she was in and went to the cockpit, where Randal was silently going over the take-off procedures. She sat in her usual spot, the copilot's seat, and didn't say anything while he continued to go over the checks in silence.
Without saying a word, he ignited the engines and engaged the repulsorlifts. The Destrier lifted off, and with a quick blast, raced out of the magnetic field and headed out into deep space. Randal looked over at Rika and held his hand out for the flimsi. Rika silently handed it to him, and after he put the coordinates into the navicomputer, he gave it back. Once the light turned green, he pulled the lever back, and the Destrier entered hyperspace.
Randal sat in the pilot's chair for a few more minutes, making sure everything was running properly and that they were on course, then got up from his chair and exited the cockpit. Rika opened her mouth to say something, but couldn't find the words to express her thoughts. Instead, she leaned over to see the navicomputer. It said that they had an hour before they reached the rendezvous point, so she sighed and stood from her chair and exited the cockpit. She knew that she had to say something to Randal, not only to comfort him, but to also reassure herself that it wasn't her fault either. She first checked the main cabin, but he wasn't there. The door to his private cabin was open, but he wasn't in there either. She doubted that he would be in her cabin, so that only left the refresher, the engine room, or one of the cargo cabins.
The ship was circular, like all ships in the YT series, so she started walking around. First, she entered the starboard cargo bay, but it was empty. The engine room was next, but save from the constant thrumming of the hyperdrive, it was vacant. The smaller of the two cargo bays was next, in the aft port side. It too was empty. Rika was now back in the main cabin next to the entry ramp, and was completely confused as to where he could have gone. The 'fresher door was open and the light was off, so he wasn't in there either. She was about to go back to the cockpit to see if he had doubled back somehow, but she heard a creaking sound coming from the dorsal turret gun well.
She leaned into the ladder access tunnel and looked up. Sitting in the turret chair in the small pocket of gravity that always gave her vertigo as she passed through the field was Randal. He looked back at her for a moment, and then turned back to the rapidly passing crystalline tunnel of hyperspace and leaned his head back against the headrest. She was about to speak, but Randal broke the silence before she could.
"We should have been there. We could have saved them, turned ourselves in or something." Rika sighed as she shook her head and leaned against the bulkhead.
"That wouldn't have done any good. You've heard the same stories as I have about the Empire's tactics. After we would have surrendered, they would still have killed them all just for harboring us."
"Well then we shouldn't have even gotten involved in the first place!" Randal yelled as he threw his hands into the air. Rika lightly shook her head and continued to talk calmly.
"Then Dalledo would have sent Kual in with his thugs and they would have been tortured to death." She could hear Randal sighing angrily, though through the Force she could tell that he was also helplessly frustrated. He didn't know whether to blame himself or the Empire.
"Randal, don't keep dwelling on "what ifs". They'll only drive you crazy in the long run. Instead of blaming yourself, remember them as they were in life and continue to live your own as they would have wanted you to."
"Yeah. That's easy for you Jedi to say." Rika felt hurt by what he said, but knew that he didn't really mean it. Distressed emotional states and random outbursts were the type of thing that the masters used to always say happened to individuals, especially during the Clone Wars when death was so frequently around them. She was told that so many times, that she believed it was true. But honestly, she wasn't sure about that anymore. She pushed away from the bulkhead and went to her cabin, where she sat on her bed and held her lightsaber in her hands. It was this single thing, this weapon of a now extinct order, that had sealed the fate of everyone in that village. How could a simple thing like this bring such heavy consequences to those around it?
Randal regretted saying it the moment it left his mouth. It was a hurtful thing to say, and he really didn't mean it, nor was he sure why he even did. But he did, and the damage was done. He let out a long sigh through his nose as he looked out at the rapidly passing blue swirls. He used to do this sort of thing years ago, when he was in the Judicial Starfighter Corps when he needed a moment to escape from everything. How long had it been? Seven years? Eight? It seemed like a lifetime ago.
He broke himself away from his drifting reverie and cursed himself under his breath before he started to climb out of the turret chair. Rika was right; neither one of them was to blame for any of this. The only one who was solely responsible was the Empire.
Randal climbed off of the ladder and looked around the main cabin, but knew that Rika would be in her cabin. He lightly knocked on the door before he stuck his head inside. She was sitting cross-legged on her bunk, with her lightsaber in her lap as she meditated. She opened her eyes and looked at him with a slight smile.
"Rika, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. I didn't mean it, really." Rika watched Randal for a moment and then closed her eyes again.
"It's okay; I know you didn't mean anything by it." Randal nodded his head and looked around her cabin for a moment. She could tell that he was still there, so she opened her eyes and looked at him again. Randal could only look her back in her eyes for a moment before he had to look away. Whether it was out of embarrassment or something else, he didn't know.
"So tell me about Orena. How well do you know her?" Rika shrugged her shoulders and took her legs off of her bunk and sat normally.
"We were in the same clan for nearly ten years. Everyone was close, but outside of the classes I didn't spend much time with her. She was always spending her time in the archives, reading anything and everything that she could get her hands on. She has an eidetic memory; able to recall anything she's ever seen or heard in her entire life."
"So the two of you weren't that close then?" Rika shrugged and leaned back on her bunk.
"It's not that we weren't close, or even that good of friends; everyone in a clan knows each other and calls each other friends. She was the star pupil of the clan. Always having every answer and able to perform any task on her first try. Me, well, it always took me a few tries. She was the first of the clan chosen by a Master to be their Padawan. I was one of the last. We really didn't hang out much because, well, I guess I felt that I would only slow her down." Randal nodded and crossed his arms as he leaned on the doorway.
"Sounds like me and my older brother. He was the perfect son, and everything I did paled in comparison. I guess that's why I'm the rogue that I am; the complete opposite of him. It's funny how things turn out like that sometimes." Rika nodded and looked down at the deck. Had she always been jealous of Orena? She never thought she had been, but looking back on it, she couldn't see how she didn't see it before. It was a very un-Jedi like thing to experience, but it was still basic nature to have those feelings. If her Master were still alive, he would tell her to calm herself and let the Force flow through her. But he was long gone now, and she had to make it in this galaxy on her own now.
Randal heard Geefive whistle from the cockpit, and he pushed himself off of the bulkhead and motioned for Rika to follow him.
"Come on, we're about to reach the rendezvous point."