JEDI
by ardavenport
Monoko Tyri strolled out into the immense hangar for a break. He had spent the morning cooped up with a room full of cranky binary lifters and a bin of improvised replacement parts. At the moment, the echoing gray expanse of the hangar and the smell of space fighter fuel counted as a breath of fresh air to the old Rebel tech.
A whitish-blue flash caught his eye.
He wandered over toward it.
By his small, battered space freighter, the privateer captain, Han Solo sat back in a rickety chair, his feet up on a crate, his blaster out, aimed and firing.
At Luke Skywalker.
The young pilot deflected every shot with his lightsaber.
Tyri watched. In the past, the young hero's practice had drawn a crowd, but the novelty had worn out. Most people didn't pay any attention to it now.
The blaster fired with a softer, higher sound than usual. They were only low power shots. Even if one of them hit Skywalker (and none of them did though Solo was clearly aiming for him) they would only sting. They wouldn't even leave a mark.
Looking at the young farm boy from Tatooine, Tyri had to remind himself that the pilots were not getting younger. He was just getting older. Old enough to remember what a real Jedi fought like.
Tyri un-holstered his sidearm, unclicked the safety, aimed just to Skywalker's left and fired.
The blue lightsaber blade caught the live shot with a snap and flash. It ricocheted, leaving a black scorch mark on the duracrete in front of Tyri. Not too close, but he started anyway.
"Hey!" Skywalker called out, shutting off the saber and coming toward him. Solo had gotten up and walked with the younger man and Tyri saw him clicking up the setting on his blaster.
"What was that for?" Skywalker demanded.
"Yeah, this isn't an open target practice, . . . ." Solo scowled.
"Senior Tech Tyri," he answered, scowling back. "And Jedi in the Old Republic didn't have to 'practice' with light shots. They used the real thing."
"Yeah, well, then you can talk to Crew Chief Cabat about the ricochets," Skywalker said, waving at the scorch mark.
Tyri blew air out and nodded. Cabat was not a man to cross, especially in his own hangar.
"You got a problem here? Tyri?" Solo challenged, conspicuously resting his hand on is own blaster. Tyri just as conspicuously and carefully re-engaged the safety and re-holstered his own blaster.
"Got no problem with you, Solo," he said. "But. . . . " Tyri sighed. He had started something. So now he had to finish it.
"I always hated Jedi," he finally admitted. Then he smirked at the surprised look on Skywalker's face. "And a real Jedi never would have bothered to take that shot. I was firing to your left. And I probably would have been dead from the rebound. It was always a bad idea to shoot at a Jedi. You could never be sure what would come back at you."
"And what do you know about it?" Solo asked, warily curious, taking his hand away from his own blaster.
"I fought on the Separatist side during the Clone Wars."
"Really?" Solo asked. "You must have been pretty high up then. The Separatist only fought with droids." Skywalker looked back and forth between Tyri and his friend.
"I was a tech for one of the generals. They didn't always trust their machines. Most of them always had a sentient tech around who knew how to fix things."
"So, what do you know about Jedi?" Skywalker asked, blue eyes wide under his dark blond bangs.
"I know you didn't want to get into a fight with one." Tyri sighed with the memories of a lost war. "We could have clone troops out-numbered ten-to-one, but if they had one Jedi with them, we'd still lose. To take out a Jedi, you had to have at least a hundred-to-one, but they would probably still get away.
"The clones had them out-numbered thousands-to-one when they turned on the Jedi at the end of the war," Tyri finished.
"Did you see it happen?" Skywalker asked.
Tyri refocused on the young pilot. The would-be Jedi.
"Yeah. I was there.
"You ever see what happens when the stormtroopers have orders to eliminate someone? Not just kill them. They get in a circle and fire until the body combusts so there's nothing left but bone and ash.
Skywalker's expression hardened.
"Yeah, I have," he said with a vehemence that got Tyri's attention. Someone Skywalker knew had been eliminated by the Imperials, someone he cared about. A lot of people in the Rebel Alliance answered the same way to that question.
"Well, that's what happened to that Jedi," the old tech went on. "One minute, he was in front, cutting down our lines. The next, the clones all stopped and pointed their guns at him. There was maybe a second, when you could see he knew what was coming. He tried to deflect the shots, but there were just too many. They cut him in half. And then they formed their circle and just kept firing."
Tyri shrugged. "Then we killed the clones. Without the Jedi, we beat them; we won the battle. But we knew it didn't matter because the Separatists were losing badly. It still gave us cover to get away out of Republic territory. Empire territory by then. General Zeddos cut loose all the droids and we went our separate ways." Tyri smirked a the pun; he'd used it before.
Skywalker lowered his eyes for a moment. In respect, Tyri supposed.
"Did you ever fight General Kenobi?" Skywalker asked, his blue eyes again looking up to the old tech.
"No," Tyri said, shaking his head. "But I heard he was tough. And smart. Plenty of Separatist commanders didn't survive going up against him," he finished without saying what he was really thinking.
'But I once ended up on the wrong side of a fight with General Skywalker. And General Zekkos lost half his command over that. Almost his life.'
Tyri said none of that.
He supposed that he might be getting soft, that he couldn't bear to tell this earnest kid how good General Skywalker had been. And how pretentious and pathetic his story of being a Jedi really was.
Hadn't any of the higher-ups told him what real Jedi were like? The ones who had really met Jedi in the Old Republic. That the Jedi trained to be fighters since they were small younglings. That a full Jedi Master had unnatural senses and could decimate an army of battle droids without breaking a sweat. But even the Togruta teenager who served as General Skywalker's second could have cut this young rebel down in three short breaths.
Who did this farm kid from Tatooine with an old lightsaber and the name of 'Skywalker' think he was?
But, Tyri reflected, this Skywalker still had to be a good pilot. . . . .
. . . . .No. A great pilot. To walk away from the [i]Death Star[/i] alive, and be the one who fired the impossible shot that destroyed it. That was actually the kind of thing. . . . .
. . . . that a Jedi could do.
Some people said that it had been a lucky shot. Others said that nobody in the galaxy could be that lucky. Tyri was not sure which side of the argument he leaned toward.
"Aye!"
Everyone's head turned to see a broad-shouldered Zabrak in gray coveralls coming their way. Crew Chief Cabat.
"What's this?" the surly chief snarled at the scorch mark on the floor.
"That's mine," Tyri spoke up first, deflecting Cabat's ire toward himself, since he was the real culprit. "I didn't have the right setting on this thing," he explained, patting his holster.
Cabat grimaced at him.
"Then I guess you can get some of those droids of yours to clean this up."
"Of course."
Cabot sneered.
"Now."
Cabat was not a person to cross.
"I'll get them right now," Tyri nodded and turned to leave.
"I'll come with you," Skywalker announced and then a second later the pilot was quick walking next to him.
"It was my lightsaber," he shrugged. Tyri silently accepted. They went to the droid bay together and herded a couple of X-Z4's away from their recharge sockets and headed back to the hangar. Skywalker knew his way around droids, unexpected for a space jockey. Tyri grunted his approval.
Captain Solo had gone on to his own business when the got back to set the droids to work, shaving down the scorch mark and patching the duracrete.
"I know you don't take it seriously," Skywalker said after they stepped back from the work. Tyri looked at him curiously. The young man touched the lightsaber hanging from his belt.
"That I couldn't be a Jedi," he went on, "just because I got a lightsaber and one lesson from Ben Kenobi."
"I doubt anyone would say that," Tyri told him, "not after you took out the [i]Death Star[/i]."
"Yeah, well they don't say it. But they're thinking it."
Tyri knew that the 'they' he was talking about meant 'you'. For the first time, he wondered if this kid could really be a Jedi? But Tyri knew he wasn't a hard person to read; you didn't need Jedi mind powers to tell what he was thinking.
"Do you know how many years a Jedi would train? The things they could do with their lightsabers?"
"Yeah, people have told me. But what else am I going to do? Ben Kenobi didn't make it out of the [i]Death Star[/i], but he meant to train me. And. . . ." He stopped, apparently rethinking something he was about to say. "I'm just going to do the best I can. With what I've got. But it doesn't make it any easier if people don't tell me what they know about the Jedi because they think that this is just a joke."
Tyri looked at those earnest blue eyes. Skywalker had stated things about as plainly as anyone could. And there wasn't anything pretentious or pathetic about someone who might be short on background or resources but still wanted to try. Especially in the Rebel Alliance. That was practically their motto.
"Well," Tyri began, "I can tell you something about this one Jedi General that we tangled with, that you might be interested in . . . ."
= = = END = = =
This story first posted on tf.n: 30-Mar-2009
Disclaimer: All characters and situations belong to George and Lucasfilm; I'm just playing in their sandbox.