Prologue: The Bandit Queen
The Mandalorian host was a forest of banners and durasteel in the shadow of high cliffs. Repulsor engines idled in the chill desert morning. Dewbacks groaned under the unaccustomed weight of makeshift harnesses and armored riders as Tatoo I rose grey-white in the north. In the distance, the sound of shifting stone and crunching soil grew closer.
Stasia Kang sat a swoop at the raiding party's heart, her mother's helmet under her arm, her sunburnt scalp bare to the rising wind. She squinted into the sunrise, creasing the sunburst tattoos at the corners of her eyes. It was high summer, not that seasons meant much on Tatooine; the planet turned in an embrace of fire. She wiped sweat from her brow, listening.
"Three years ago you said this world would be the death of us." Her second, Ludo, rapped armored knuckles against his breastplate's painted veermok sigil. "Look at us now. Look at what you've built from a wreck at the ass end of the galaxy and a handful of washed-up mercs and bounty hunters."
"Happy to be caught out wrong," Stasia said, flashing the old campaigner a grin. "Now shut up. Here she comes."
"Sith spit," Ludo swore, shaking his head. "It's a hell of a thing."
The noise built to a rumbling crescendo as Crawler Town emerged from a rocky defile in the western cliff wall. Two hundred feet from end to end, its prow was the color of long-dried blood. Its treads churned the barren earth, leaving twin trails of broken ground behind it. A sandcrawler, one of the repurposed mining rigs the Jawas used for mobile caravanserai, but this one was different. Moisture 'vaporators rose from the great rig's back, snatching what moisture there was to be had from the bone-dry atmosphere. The topmost decks were reinforced, cisterns holding more clean water than could be found anywhere south of the governor's mansion in Bestine.
Stasia laughed, loud and raw, and the host roared with her. They revved swoop engines, fired blasters in the air, hauled on reins until their dewbacks set to bellowing, tossing their huge heads in irritation. The huddled hundreds of Crawler Town would see, but Stasia wanted them to see. She wanted them to know their days were numbered.
"Look at that, chief, will you?" Ludo shouted over the din of blaster fire and whooping voices. "You cannot keep the idealists down! Not even on Tatooine."
Beneath the cisterns the crawler's mammoth bulk flashed with sheets of plasteel, the panels of gigantic greenhouses. Crawler Town was farm and village, salvage yard and power plant, an oasis trundling across the plain. It was heading for the Dune Sea, for the open desert and the moisture-rich atmosphere of the Boonta Plains. One final run before it stopped for the autumn in Bestine to divest its surplus, take on fresh supplies, and get some local color. Or that was what the hulk had done before.
This year is different, Stasia thought, watching Crawler Town's greenhouse glass wink in the morning light, the thin silhouettes of trees and grow-frames swaying behind the pitted plasteel. This year it's all going to be different.
"They're ready to die," said Kana. The scout sat limp and motionless amid the tumult, a lazy smile curling her lips. "What's to stop us doing them right now, chief?"
"The kath hounds could use a little exercise," Ludo concurred.
Stasia ignored them both. She stood, planting one boot on her swoop's front cowl and the other on its rancor leather seat. With one foot she guided the swoop nimbly out of the press, banking in a wide curve as her exhaust fans kicked up a storm of dust. She thumbed the comlink in her gorget, feedback whining. Her voice boomed out over the furor.
"Bastards of Mandalore!" she thundered, her teeth aching at the volume of her amplified voice. "When's the best time for killing farmers?"
"After the harvest is in!" came the crashing reply from better than a hundred throats.
"Two months from now, that wreck's going to be carrying more water and fodder than half the Sith-spawned Outer Rim. How's that bloody sound?"
Blaster fire stitched the greying sky. Stasia's Mandalorians redoubled their clamor, Ludo joining in with a whoop and a blast of flame from his wrist-mounted 'thrower. One of the dewbacks spooked at the smell of burning fuel. The huge reptile took off at a clumsy run and Stasia, laughing, donned her helmet and dropped back into her seat to give chase. Scores of swoop engines screamed behind her as the host turned as one body, the other dewbacks surging into motion in an earth-shaking stampede.
Stasia flew across the dun-colored plain, dust flying up behind her like a standing wave. She looked to her right and saw the wing of her army spreading out upon her flank, a ragged sweep of black T-visors and glinting armor. The banners of a dozen mongrel clans flapped hard in the tearing, gritty wind.
They turned aside from Crawler Town like a scythe's blade missing wheat, leaving it to lurch in panicked torpor off into the Sea. Stasia felt the same pang of irritation and impatience she'd seen in her lieutenants, a prickling against the idea of turning aside from the thrill of the fight. She drew a flare gun from the holster just ahead of her right knee and fired it, banking, and a streamer of smoke unfurled itself across the sky to burst in reds and yellows off the starboard bow of Crawler Town three hundred feet above the sand.
Farmer-killing season would come soon enough. The swoops raced on into the waste.
"Mandalorians," said Chalk, lowering her binoculars. She hadn't seen helmets like those since the Crusade hit Onderon, but there wasn't a doubt in the old moisture farmer's mind. The wind ruffled her graying hair and pulled at the hem of her roughspun robe. Crawler Town's viewing platform lurched beneath them, stablizers groaning as the sandcrawler crested a dune. The four of them, three moisture farmers and a Jawa, stood watching trails of dust cut spirals through the sand.
"They should still be three hundred klicks away," said Taboruuk. The gaunt Wookiee engineer hugged himself, anxiously smoothing his patchy fur. "We changed our route from last year after they burned Mos Haba. How did this happen? How did they find us?"
"I heard no one even saw the raid." Bael Din, the mournful Kel Dor who'd built the hydroponics beds, leaned against the deck rail and stared out over the wasteland at the receding dust clouds of the Mandalorian swoops. "I heard when they couldn't get up enough tribute, the Mandalorians killed half of them and sold the rest to Trandoshan slavers."
Taboruuk moaned and covered his face with his hands.
"Fool," said Chalk, "if no one survived, and no one saw the raid, then how do you suppose you heard that story?"
"Ghosts tell stories, too," Dotan whispered. The Jawa's hands were clenched so tightly they they shook. "What are we going to do?"
"Pay." Taboruuk's voice shook. "Let them take the water, we'll survive another season-
"You heard that woman." Chalk joined Bael at the railing. "It's not credits they're after, or just water and crops. They're Mandalorians; there's going to be a fight."
Dotan sighed. "Even if it were just plunder, we already owe the governor taxes. We'd live today to starve tomorrow. I say we take this to Imalel."
Chalk didn't answer. The Jawas' answer to everything was to ask an elder; one of the prices of living in Crawler Town was deferring to the little sages in their smoky room down near the baths. She looked back at the 'vaporator towers clustered all along the sandcrawler's massive chassis top, at the promise of a Tatooine without thirst. She imagined the fires that would sweep through them, the trails of light the Mandalorians would ride, unleashing death.
"Alright," she said.
They went in, navigating the familiar maze of Crawler Town's heavily modified interior while Dotan gave reassurances to the frightened Jawas crowding close, asking questions in their high-pitched voices. Gloved hands snatched at the moisture farmers' robes and tunics. Bright yellow eyes shone under enveloping hoods. Chalk didn't speak much Jawaese, but she knew the words for "mercenaries" and "ruined."
"I don't know a damn thing," she told a pleading worker as the Jawa gabbled at her in broken Basic. "When I do, so will you. "
The pump station was a cavernous deck dominated by the great cylindrical pumps that kept Crawler Town's water pure and flowing. There were fifty pairs of hands on the floor at any given time, a corps of engineers and machinists working punishing shifts to keep the crawler's labyrinthine systems running. Chalk checked her chrono; her own shift wasn't for another three hours. It was a pity. She'd have liked to escape responsibility for a while, lose herself in the simple, constant needs of the machinery. A motley collection of sentients, everything from Neimoidians to disgraced Tuskens exiled from their bands, pushed toward Chalk and the others as they moved through the crowd.
"Later," Chalk shouted to one, a Tusken woman named Omi who carried her son, asleep despite the clamor of the pumps, in a sling on her back. "Tell them later, damn it!"
Omi signaled understanding and turned to herd the others back to their stations, shouting in an argot of Basic and rapid-fire Tusken with a dash of Rodian curses thrown in for good measure. The shift whistle blew as Dotan led Chalk and the others out of the crowds, his hands and voice raised in placatation until the moment the moisture-seal doors slid shut on angry faces, shaking fists. Silence echoed in the stairwell.
"Go calm them down, Bael," Chalk said. "We can't lose a day's work over this."
Bael sighed, then nodded. He palmed the door's pressure plate and stepped back through into the press. The noise reignited at once.
"Everyone, everyone please. I can answer your questions while Dotan talks to the elders, but I'm afraid there isn't much to say."
The doors slid shut again. Booming.
Dotan shook his head and started down the steps, built to human scale by the Czerka miners who'd brought the sandcrawler to Tatooine in another age and later refitted to accommodate short Jawa legs. It made for tricky footing, Chalk found. She lingered at the top of the stair, one hand on the rusted rail. Walking through the crowd had left her feeling sick and shaky. The pact that had founded Crawler Town, the agreement between the Nabi Jawa trading clan and the beleaguered moisture farmers of the Boonta Plains, had saved them all from ruin nineteen years ago. It had been naive to think that their safety, their prosperity, however hard-won, would last forever without calling violence down upon itself.
"Are you alright?" Taboruuk asked her. The Wookiee's eyes were watery, his posture hunched. Tabo, as the other engineers called him, had spent most of his youth in slavers' chains on one of Bespin's moons. Whatever had happened to him down in the quordium mines had left the Wookiee a few miles west of well at ease for as long as Chalk had known him.
"Fine," Chalk lied. "Just thinking." She pushed past Tabo and followed Bael and Dotan down into the dimness of Crawler Town's bowels. The corridors grew close. Pipes thunked and gurgled in the bulkhead walls, funneling recycled water into the sealed baths and then on to the refreshers and the manure processing plant built up near the vents in Crawler Town's aft octant. The air smelled of minerals and herb smoke.
The elders' grotto was low enough that Chalk and the other non-Jawas had to stoop. The
elders themselves sat on braided carpets in the gloom, their robes adorned with charms of womp rat bones and bright urusai-hide bands. A squat, round-bottomed hookah stood in the center of their half-circle and three of them smoked from its long-stemmed pipes. The smell was suffocating, dry and rich and earthy. The elders' eyes were bright in the ruddy dark.
Imalel was the oldest of the five. There was no light beneath her hood; her sight had gone dim long ago, before Chalk and the others had come aboard and Crawler Town had been rebuilt from the ashes of the Nabi clan's sandcrawler. Her dark, hairy hands were bare, their black nails sharp as knives. She used them to crack the shiny grey kreetles which she plucked from a bowl in her lap.
"There are bandits coming for the town," said Dotan once the proper length of time had passed. He knelt in the center of their little group of petitioners, his gloved hands clasped, his gaze respectfully downcast. "They've pledged to burn us to the ground, to take our water and our crops. Respectfully, elders, what can we do? I beg your guidance."
"They're Mandalorians." Chalk, crouched and sweating, pushed her way to Dotan's side. "More than a hundred of them. We don't have the blasters or the-"
Imalel held up a hand. The other elders muttered amongst themselves, but as usual they were content to let their leader speak for them.
"We can't fight them." Imalel shook her head slowly, then fell silent. She took another kreetle from her bowl, crushed its shell, and popped it into her mouth.
Chalk frowned. The Jawas liked to wait, to do their thinking in silence. It grated on her. "Even if they only take a tithe, we can't afford to bribe them and pay the governor."
Imalel spat shell fragments into her bowl. "Don't worry about your ears when you stand to lose your head, Emru."
Chalk purpled, but she held her tongue. However bad her life had been, the Jawas lived every day on the edge of oblivion. The desert made you dead, or it made you wise. "Forgive me," she said grudgingly. "I'm frightened, ma'am."
Imalel huffed a crackling breath. She was silent again for a time, and then she spoke. "I can see only one way. You must take what we have and go to the city."
"Leave Crawler Town?" Taboruuk, bent nearly double in the confines of the room, looked aghast. "Abandon everything we've worked for?"
"No," Imalel said. "Find Jedi."
"Jedi?" Dotan raised his empty palms, perplexed. "What could we offer them?"
Imalel shrugged. "We have water. Find thirsty Jedi."
The old Jawa gestured that the audience was at an end. She might call them back later in the day, or in the middle of the night, but in all likelihood she'd said her piece and that was that. Chalk turned for the door, ducking to keep from bumping her head on the lintel.
"With our luck," Taboruuk groaned as he shuffled out after her, "we'll go looking for Jedi and find nothing but the cursed Sith."
One alone of the departed host stayed on amid the lines of drifting dust. She watched the swoops run out like midges, watched with sunken orange eyes the great slow bulk of Crawler Town etch its strange words upon the broken hardpan. In one hand, tattooed in the stolen scrimshaw language of the Tusken shamans, she held a little folio of onionskin and flimsy prints. In the other, roiled with the waxy pink-red whorls of old burn scars, she held a pen, its ink-stained point poised just above an open page.
"The moment begs a poem," Subé Sarn said to herself. Her tattoo-banded lekku danced, anticipating. She sucked her teeth. Her speeder, a gift from the Mandalorian lady of war, idled near at hand. An interrupted circle hovering in a cloud of its own kicked-up grit.
Subé set the pen to paper. Ink bled from its point into the rough skin of the page as out upon the plain the crawler labored forward, dwindling. The pen's nib scratched.
Seven septal trinities
Dive swiftly, bear us aloft
Below, the desert dwindles
Around the Twi'Lek furrows carved themselves into the soil, stones fluttering aside like leaves, sand shivering into new formations. A pattern formed and propagated as she wrote until she stood at the center of a fractal lotus still unfolding from itself in nauseating splendor, every petal cut with stories and there reaching from the bud a fan of bony arms imploring some remembrance. There were blades among the intricate designs as well, a forest of them flaring hot against each other, and some movement slipped obscure as lines went quaking to collide and then explode and form new ways, new passages, new veins.
Subé paused. The Force paused with her. She thought of the lady of war, of how she'd want the omens read tonight when the raiders settled in to camp. And besides, the rest of the poem would not be finished with words. She blew on the page, drying the ink, and closed her book with a snap. Her boots scuffed the patterns the wind would take as she walked to her speeder and mounted it, feeling the jittery power of its engine running up her spine to the base of her skull. She draped one lekku like a scarf around her neck, the sensitive flesh thrilling to the touch, and watched the crawler for a moment more. Inspiration faded. All blooms died.
The swoops were dots on the watery horizon where a false sea shimmered from the bones of Tatooine. She set out after them, the backdraft of the speeder's engine scattering poem and dust alike into the wind.
Chapter 2: Chapter One: The Two-Liter Jedi
Chapter One: The Two-Liter Jedi
"Is a Jedi we can hire for water rations and a hard cot a Jedi worth having?" It wasn't the first time Dotan had voiced the question. The Jawa was not enjoying their journey west. Chalk, her neck sunburnt, her tailbone bruised by her eopie's uneven gait, didn't blame him. Jawas weren't made to ride. It didn't do anything to lessen her irritation at hearing the same damn question for the ninth damn time, though. "You got another idea?" she snapped, half-turning to look back along their little caravan at where Dotan's eopie straggled at the rear. The Jawa turned to look out at the open desert, ignoring her. The noonday suns beat down on them. Mirages shivered above the dunes and the eopies' tracks vanished within minutes in the dry, scouring wind. The four of them had left Crawler Town three days ago. Bael led the way, setting a hard pace, with Taboruuk behind them and then Chalk and the remounts they'd rented from the Sugi Jawa trading fort near Bando Canyon. Rumors about Mandalorian raids had flown thick in the air around the fort's evening cookfire. They were a thousand strong, they carried the bones of Mandalore the Destroyer into battle in a golden chest, they mated with Tuskens to produce half-human children; it was mostly drivel, to Chalk's ears. Too much of it, though, had the unpleasant ring of truth. The Mandalorians had been carving out a kingdom for themselves since one of their warships had crashed on the Boonta Plains three years ago. Mostly they'd been raiding in the west, strong-arming moisture farmers and Tusken tribes, picking up recruits from among Tatooine's generous population of hungry mercenaries. Their leader was the exiled daughter of some great Mandalorian clan, a woman by all accounts without a shred of mercy in her body. A spice trader from Mos Eisley had shown them grainy holos of the town after the Bastards of Mandalore had passed through, collecting tribute. Chalk had opted not to look, but Taboruuk's miserable expression and Dotan's stony silence had told her everything she'd needed to know. The desert stretched on endlessly ahead of their little column. Chalk tried not to think about how long she'd been riding, about how much water she'd lost to the sweat matting her hair and running down her back since they'd ridden out from Crawler Town with half the commune wishing them success and spitting for good fortune from the sandcrawler's portholes and balconies. She pressed a hand to the small of her back and closed her eyes, trying to find a moment of relief from the constant jarring of the journey. The beast's steps blurred together, becoming one long jolt that dulled, diffused, and slowly faded.
She must have drifted off, because when her mount jerked to a halt she snapped upright with a snort and found Tatoo I in the midst of a bloody sunset and Tatoo II nearing the horizon. Her back was stiff, her eyes gummy with sleep. The column stood strung out across the hardpan on the side of a broad, thinly-trafficked road, and at the road's end, built up in and around a tangle of cliffs and ravines, was the dun-colored sprawl of the city.
Bael looked back from the column's head and adjusted their hat, a flat straw dish like the ones herdsmen wore in the high cliffs to protect themselves from the sun. "Here we are."
Bestine, seat of planetary governor Cassus Pardon, was the largest and grandest city on Tatooine. Conquerors of every stripe, from the Sith to the Mandalorians to the Infinite Empire, had left their mark on its sandstone domes and permaform hab blocks, its forests of elaborate minarets, and the citadel of the governor's residence, all tile friezes and slate-roofed arcades. Freighters came and went from the city's clifftop landing pads, the blue glare of their ion engines lurid in the fading light. On the road, a group of Jawa merchants hailed them from the backs of towering, baggage-freighted rontos. The air smelled of spices, fuel, and dung.
"What a septic tank," Dotan said cheerfully.
Chalk straightened, her spine cracking, and urged her stubborn eopie forward with a judicious kick. They joined the flow of traffic heading for the city.
They paid for cots at a public house on the city's outskirts, following a tip from a hooded Kubaz chrono peddler who said Jedi sometimes roomed there. Privately, Chalk thought the Kubaz had been blowing smoke in hopes of squeezing a few credits out of them for one of her off-brand pieces, but it was all they had to go on.
The public house, a nameless pile of wind-smoothed permacrete run by an ancient, glowering Ithorian perpetually shrouded in noxious pipe smoke, looked about as likely to conceal a hidden wealth of Jedi as it did a thousand-gallon cistern of pure water. Its rooms were dark and stuffy, barely aerated by a wheezing coolant system, its crumbling ceilings held up by crude stanchions over communal tables while its sleeping alcoves, draped with dusty hangings, honeycombed the walls like the bores of some huge insect.
"What would a Jedi be doing in a dump like this?"
"You never know where they'll turn up," said Bael. "My grandmother's grandmother was
a Jedi, and she lived in a garbage midden on Ord Mantell for twenty years."
Dotan scoffed. "Bantha poodoo she did."
"Keep your voices down, damn peasants!"
The four of them paused in crossing the largest of the common rooms, a grimy space
where a pair of Rodians sat playing sabacc under flickering lights. The voice had come from one of the alcoves where a robed and armored arm clutching a jug of some dark, shimmering liquid hung out from between the drawn curtains. The arm withdrew, the jug bumping against the wall, and the pop of a cork forced from its nest followed. The alcove's occupant drank deeply, by the sound of it, then swept the curtain back and staggered out into the light.
It was a Twi'Lek, glowering and unshaven, dressed in a motley assortment of armor over a roughspun robe and ratty leggings. The chin strap of his helmet, modified to accommodate his lekku, dangled unfastened, and a pair of lightsaber hilts, one long and the other short, swung at his belt. He stretched, yawning hugely, and then thumped a fist against his dented breastplate. "If you wanted a glimpse at a Jedi, here it is! Drink it in."
The Rodians didn't look up from their game. Inwardly, Chalk cursed the Kubaz peddler. "Sorry to wake you," she said. "We'll be-"
At her side, Taboruuk dropped to his knees and pressed his brow to the common room's unpleasantly sticky floor. "Master Jedi, bandits have sworn to destroy our livelihoods and our home! We are only poor moisture farmers and can't offer you much, but we beg your aid and offer all that we can give!"
"Ha!" the Twi'Lek crowed. "You think I've fallen so far that I'd work for moisture farmers? I'm Amado Ban, a Jedi Knight, not some dew-grubbing peasant. You'd better learn to treat men of my station with some respect, or else I'll have to teach you a lesson."
"We beg your forgiveness, master Jedi," Taboruuk cringed. "Please don't kill us!"
"Don't you have any dignity?" Chalk growled, hauling on the Wookiee's shoulder. "This man isn't going to fight for us; that Kubaz on the street was jerking us around. Come on, let's find some supper and work on our plan."
"I'm so sorry, master Jedi!" Taboruuk said again, allowing Chalk to drag him to his feet but remaining stooped, eyes downcast, hands clasped. Dotan was already scurrying out of the room. Bael, expression inscrutable behind their antiox mask and goggles, shook their head and followed. Chalk, pulling Taboruuk toward their rooms, felt suddenly exhausted. Their journey had been long, but at least in the saddle there had been room to pretend that their task in Bestine was achievable. Now it was clear; they would squander their credits on food and lodging, then return empty-handed to Crawler Town to await the end.
"I despise farmers like you." Amado Ban blinked blearily and took another swallow from his jug of nameless spirits, then wiped his mouth clean on his sleeve. His mouth twitched, some spasm of feeling coloring his cheeks. "Don't insult me again."
Dinner was burnt flatbread, recycled water, and some rubbery sulfur-dwelling amphibian served on rice with sour Bantha-milk yogurt. The table in their cramped little corner of the public house only seated two, so Chalk and Dotan ate second while Bael and Taboruuk climbed into the alcoves to sleep. Soon Tabo's snoring drowned out the clamor of traffic outside the house and a worn-out peace descended on the room.
"What do we do next?" Dotan asked, shredding a hunk of flatbread with his short, thick fingers. "If that drunken joke in the other room is the best we can find, we're wasting our time."
"Two liters of water a day, a hard bed to sleep on, and the gratitude of farmers and merchants without two credits to rub together." Chalk pushed her plate away, her appetite gone, and stood from the table. "If that's all we can offer, what do we have to waste besides our time?"
"Where are you going?"
"For a walk. Make sure Taboruuk eats that; can't leave it to waste."
Dotan's shoulders sagged. "Just don't take too long. We should talk before tomorrow."
Chalk grunted acknowledgement. She hurried through the public house's rooms, parting mold-spotted moisture curtains and edging through crowds of boarders and transients coming in from the dark or else emerging from their alcoves to go out and vanish into it. The idea of remaining inside for another moment was intolerable, so Chalk joined the thread of groggy-looking tenants and went out past the Ithorian's desk and into the street. Bestine's slums weren't coming alive with nightfall so much as they were opening up like old wounds.
Lanterns strung above the narrow streets illuminated knots and strings of sentients in motion and in conversation. Across the street, a pazaak den's open door spilled dull red light and the pounding beat of a truly awful scrak band. Chalk grimaced, rubbing her hands together against the desert chill. The wonderful thing about Tatooine was that if the temperature bothered you, you only had to wait eight or nine hours for it to become a different flavor of unbearable.
She turned left at random, passing a closed and darkened corner market and several businesses whose sparse window displays and blast-shuttered doors suggested fronts for the Hutt crime syndicates. Her thoughts drifted as she left the crowds behind, turning to the desert and to the farm she'd left behind. She had come to Tatooine after the war, had worked herself half to death getting her aunt's moisture farm up and running after it had stood untended six years since the old woman's passing. She'd fought with Jawa salvagers over the price of every moisture condenser, every survey droid, every damn power converter until that farm had finally, blessedly, started turning some kind of profit.
Six years of Tusken raids had broken her fragile dream like kindling. Half the moisture farmers in the valley had gone bankrupt. Half those who didn't packed up and left, moving to the cities to tend bar or work rickshaw routes or else going off-planet to seek their fortunes out among the stars. Not Emru Chalk. She'd fought the governor's office, fought the Banking Clan, fought the water bureau and the land trusts until finally she and the others in her stubborn co-op had found their salvation. A sandcrawler, one of the Jawas' rolling fortress towns, left gutted and immobilized by a Tusken marauding party.
Alone, both of them were doomed. The desert would swallow the valley's moisture farmers just as certain as the water bureau would, sooner or later, snatch up their mortgaged machinery and sell it for scrap. The Jawas, left stranded in the bones of their home and livelihood both, would simply die. It had been hell at first, even after the initial agreements had been hammered out between the farmers and the trading clan. Getting the sandcrawler running, connecting its cisterns to the 'vaporators, fighting the Jawas on every modification made to their beloved crawler. When the great engines had started, when Crawler Town had sailed out into the boundless waste of the Dune Sea for the first time with a farm on her back and a few hundred souls in her belly, Chalk had hardly believed it. She still didn't, sometimes.
Now, finally, the war had found her again. All that work to get away and there were those damned helmets looming up out of the desert she'd come to love, the sun glinting off their visors and her blood running cold at the sight. She kept on for a while, hands tucked into her armpits to fend off the chill, until she found an open kiosk and bought a city map and a newscrip from the little stall's drowsy Bothan operator. She laid down a deca-cred along with the pittance for the map and the 'scrip.
"For anything you can tell me about Jedi in the city."
The Bothan, blinking to wakefulness at the sight of cash, fished a cheroot from a pocket of her threadbare coat and lit it. Smoke plumed from her nostrils and between her sharp yellow teeth. She put a claw on the cred chip. "I'll take your money, friend, but what do you want to know about the Jedi for?"
Chalk heard how weak it sounded as she said it. "My town's in trouble. Bandits, on top of everything else. I was...we were hoping they'd fight for us."
The Bothan made the money disappear. "All kinds of Jedi on Tatooine." She turned away to exhale smoke. "The governor's got her lapdogs, but you don't want to mess with fancy folk like them. The rest ain't much better. Dregs from the war, mostly. Go around like mad vrelts, fighting with each other, fighting anyone, looking for ways to die." She shrugged. "Tatooine ain't good for them."
"Thanks," Chalk said, dispirited. "If you hear anything, let me know."
The Bothan flicked her ears and smiled.
Chalk made her way back to the public house. She navigated the darkened rooms by the sound of Taboruuk's snores, one palm pressed to the rough, pebbled permacrete of the wall. Her alcove smelled of juma vapors and the unwashed bodies of a dozen species, but it was cool and dry. She pulled the curtains shut and lay there in the cold, staring up at nothing until finally sleep came.
The next morning Chalk woke before first light from dreams of burning fields and doors that wouldn't open. Taboruuk and Bael were playing sabacc at the table by the flickering light of the room's solar cells while Dotan snored in his alcove. Chalk sat up, bumping her head on her alcove ceiling, and dropped herself on the floor by the table where a bowl of cooling porridge waited for her.
"I'll call at the governor's residence today," she said, spooning up tasteless mush. "She has Jedi working for her; maybe one of them will feel like exercising their conscience and doing some good works for the lowly."
"The governor?" Taboruuk hunched his shoulders, eyes darting around the room as though Cassus Pardon and her cabinet might be hiding somewhere in it. "It sounds dangerous. We're only farmers; what if she gets angry with us for wasting her time? What if she calls in the town's taxes early?"
"Stop cowering." Chalk let her spoon clatter against the rim of her bowl. "We can't go ringing bells in the streets and shouting for Jedi to come out and fight for us."
Taboruuk laid his cards down on the table and covered his face with his hands. "I wish we were back in Crawler Town."
Bael sighed, folding as well. "We'll check the cantinas. Dotan sent a cable to the enclave; he'll see if the clans can help us."
"The clans," Chalk snorted. She set down her bowl, unable to continue eating. "If they give us a bent credit I'll eat my belt."
"You're going now?" Bael cocked their head to one side, inquisitive.
Chalk stood. "No point in waiting."
En route to the door, picking her way through the still-darkened rooms of the public house, she saw Amado Ban lying sprawled half out of his alcove with a jug of that dark liquor hugged against his chest and his mouth open in a constant, grinding snore. She looked down at the sleeping Twi'Lek, wondering if he really was a Jedi, if this was what the city had to offer.
And then she left.
The enclave of the Jawa trading clans sprawled in and around the wreck of the Corellian freighter Toorna's Profit. Permacrete domes and minarets grew from the rusted hulk like fungus. Droid soldiers cannibalized from a dozen makes and models watched the dusty streets from observation blisters and parapets or occupied tall crows'-nests built of driftwood and piping and strung together by lengths of rope. They cradled old blaster carbines, ion stunners, and slugthrowers in skeletal durasteel hands, their grimy optics gleaming in the early morning shade.
A Jawa clerk met Dotan in the shadow of the entryway, a remodeled airlock flanked by heavy stone slabs carved with the glyphs of the nine hundred clans. The clerk squinted at Dotan, one finger hovering over their dataslate. A pair of spindly security droids flanked them, blasters held at parade rest. Dotan cleared his throat. He hated the enclave, its crass displays of wealth, its boastful residents, its ceaseless, venal politics.
"Beba Dotan to see Extranji Futus."
The clerk typed something on their slate. "Clan head Futus is in the fungal gardens. It seems you're approved. Shall I fetch a guide?"
"I know the way," said Dotan.
The clerk shrugged. "Suit yourself, cousin."
The enclave was a warren, its true bulk concealed beneath Bestine's streets. Smoke-filled lounges, memorial walls, trophy rooms where old Jawa huntmasters nursed grudges, drank juma juice, and lingered with the tokens of their faded glories. Dotan loathed it, the divided space, the attempts to pretend Tatooine still belonged to the Jawas alone. He walked quickly and spoke only when spoken to. There were cheeks to kiss, hands to squeeze, a parade of cousins and second cousins and sundry diffusely related others.
The fungal gardens grew in a dank, dark ring of caverns far under the Toorna's Profit. Dotan stepped through the moisture seal with a heavy sigh, but the gardens lifted his spirit in spite of himself. Shelves of luminescent red fungus climbed the walls along with gentle lavender tendrils and porous caps which shed a soft, colorless radiance. Water dripped in the stillness. Extranji Futus squatted a short way off among a circle of spotted greencaps, the light from his eyes blending with the faint light of the fungus. He was tall for a Jawa. Even when they'd been children he'd always been the biggest, the strongest, the fastest. He'd used to strong-arm water from the other children in the clan and hide it in clay pots around his room.
"Cousin," Dotan said.
Futus straightened, his dewback-ivory necklace of office clinking. The doorkeeper must have called ahead, but Dotan's cousin still affected a look of surprise. "I didn't know Crawler Town had arrived. You should be months away, unless that monstrosity has finally gone bankrupt and you're here hawking it for scrap?"
Dotan fought down an angry retort. He needed his cousin's help, not the cheap satisfaction of sparring with him. "I'm here on my own. Crawler Town isn't bankrupt, but...but it is in trouble. The Bastards of Mandalore have sworn to take the crawler. Even if they let us live, Futus, we won't survive the season."
Futus sighed, his body language heavy with false regret. "I warned you time and time again, cousin. Crawler Town is a work of hubris. Now that you see I'm right you've come begging my aid, but how in good conscience can I embroil my own people in your failure?"
"We're sister-sons," Dotan said stiffly. "Without my mother's water loans where would the Extranji be? Broken down in the Dune Sea or scrubbing 'freshers for some Hutt gangster."
"Don't drag old business into this." Futus shook his head. "You're always trying to make a story about how the world's against you, Dotan. Those loans were repaid with interest. The Extranji trade like Jawas while the Beba consort with offworlders and pervert their sandcrawler with foreign technology."
"I'm asking for a loan," Dotan continued, trying to reclaim the conversation's thread. "We don't need charity, Futus, just a bridge to see us through the season."
"You want to buy off Mandalorians?" Futus shook his head. "No, Dotan. I won't pour money into your grave. Perhaps we could find room for some of you aboard our sandcrawler. Our kin, you understand." He shook a gloved finger at Dotan, an angry parent scolding a wayward child. "Your moisture farmers will have to fend for themselves."
"We're not going to bribe the Mandalorians." Dotan spoke through gritted teeth. "We're going to hire Jedi, to fight for us."
Futus's expression changed. His bluster, his gloating smirk both vanished. "You don't want Jedi in your home," he said. "They'll take your children, Dotan. They'll drag them away to their temple on Coruscant, raise them to forget you, to forget their clan. You don't want that grief, Dotan. Ebi and Chem don't want it."
"Leave them out of this." Dotan bridled, stepping closer to his cousin. "I'm asking for your help. I'll beg if you need to hear it."
"Come back to the fold, Dotan." Futus held out his hands, palms up. "We're kin. I carried water at your First Day. I've held your children in my arms. Don't throw those things away for a fool's dream."
Dotan swallowed past the lump in his throat. He imagined, for a moment, the sour-smelling cell that Futus would award his family. He imagined scrubbing out his cousin's quarters, laying out fresh sand each morning, the Beba transformed overnight into their cousins' handmaids. They would be alive, though, and perhaps Futus would make good marriages for Ebi and Chem. But the others… Chalk, Taboruuk, Omi, Bael. They would die or fade away into the cesspits of Mos Eisly or Mos Espa, their life's work up in smoke. Even Imalel and the elders would be guests in a stranger's home, forced to defer to the Extranji atriarchs.
"No," said Dotan. He cleared his throat. "No. I hear your generosity, cousin, and I will not forget it, but I must refuse."
Futus folded his arms. "Don't say that you weren't warned."
"I heard you, cousin." Dotan turned to leave. "Thank you."
Chalk followed the butler droid down the dark and echoing hall. The walls were glass, behind them seascapes where a multitude of strangements schooled and drifted. Glowing jellyfish propelled themselves through the gloom like living suns. A dwarf opee scrabbled over artificial reefs, some hapless prey fish wriggling in its jaws. Chalk hadn't seen so much water in one place outside a cistern in all her years on Tatooine. It made her nervous.
To her surprise, the droid had appeared to collect her at a comm office on Daru Street just minutes after she'd cabled Inolo Kadim, senior of the three Jedi in the governor's service. She'd chosen Kadim simply because the Kaminoan Jedi's comm line was the only one open to the public. There was little other information to be had about her. She and her fellow Jedi served the governor, it seemed, mostly by staying out of sight. No one Chalk had queried knew them, or at least no one had been willing to talk. The governor has her lapdogs, the Bothan shopkeep had told her. But you don't want to mess with fancy folk like them.
"The aquarium is supported by a private bequest from former governor Gerund Inch," the droid supplied in its tinned, oily voice. "Specimens from both Core worlds and the planets of the Outer Rim populate its many detailed environments. Visible here"—it paused to indicate a swampy terrarium on their left where some ridge-backed monstrosity coiled its scaly bulk through dirty brown water — "is a sixty-year-old dragonsnake of unknown provenance, a gift to governor Inch from senator Solo of Corellia."
Huge yellow fangs grinned through the swirling mud, then vanished. Chalk swallowed and kept walking. The droid prattled on about each new exhibit until at last they passed beneath a marble arch supported by two golden ronto statues and came into a yawning bath chamber. The floor was tiled green and blue, the walls decorated with towering friezes of Tusken raiders riding into battle, hunting krayt dragons, and raising their dead heroes to meet the rising suns. The droid halted, gesturing for Chalk to do the same, and cleared its vox circuits while adopting a formal pose with one arm behind its back and the other raised theatrically.
"Emru Chalk of Crawler Town to see the noble Jedi Inolo Kadim."
Kadim lay sprawled a short way off on a beautiful clawfoot fainting couch, her graceful eight-foot frame draped in a robe of black samite bound tight over her torso and falling loose around her waist and legs. The robe's heavy sleeves were patterned with intricate fractal designs and hung with little golden bells that chimed with the Kaminoan androgyne's infrequent movements. She had a flute of some golden liquor in one long, pale hand. The Jedi watched two others, Chalk guessed Acquisto and Peldarian, fencing by an open bath ninety paces long and a third as wide. The smell of chlorine tinged the air, an unimaginable waste. Left pure it might have hydrated a village for six months. The combatants' reflections advanced and retreated over the water's mirror-smooth surface. One was a sneering Gossam woman, the other a well-dressed Barabel with a stump for a tail. It seemed an even contest, green and violet blades scorching the air in dazzling patterns.
"Acquisto is the Barabel," Kadim said lazily, not turning. "Peldarian the Gossam. Whom do you favor for the match?"
Chalk scratched her chin. "I don't know much about fencing."
"This isn't fencing," said Kadim. She curled her legs and half-rose, bracing her willowy torso with one elbow as she turned. Her irises were like dust in the void, light diffuse around the white points of her pupils. "This is Makashi. The art of light."
Chalk struggled not to step back from the Kaminoan's disconcerting stare. "I don't know much about that either, I'm afraid."
Acquisto, laughing, drove Peldarian back a dozen hurried paces. Their footfalls echoed in the vastness of the baths.
"I don't know your name," said Kadim, returning her attention to the fight. "Your message said you sought the Order's counsel. So, the Order is listening." Her eyes were wet, their dark depths skinned in moisture like the gloom of the aquarium. "I get so few petitioners..."
"I'm a moisture farmer, ma'am." Chalk tried to keep her eyes off the lightsabers' burning blades. "Part of the Crawler Town collective. There's a bandit army, the Bastards of Mandalore; they've sworn to sack our 'crawler. I'm here to beg for the governor's protection. For your help, ma'am. We don't have anyone else to turn to."
"You have a soldier's look," the Kaminoan murmured. "Haven't you been to war, Emru Chalk? You hadn't thought to fight them yourself?"
The Kaminoan's attention felt like a vise squeezing Chalk's temples. "I stopped being that woman," she said, forcing herself not to grit her teeth. "Even if I went back to it, no one else in Crawler Town has training. We don't even have blasters."
"You don't need blasters to kill," said Kadim. The play of her fellow Jedis' sabers washed over her pallid skin in sinuous patterns. "It's the easiest thing in the world, killing."
"I thought you Jedi didn't kill." Chalk couldn't keep the anger from her voice. "You're keepers of the peace, right? Well why don't you negotiate for us? We're about as downtrodden as they come."
Kadim stood, bare feet a livid white against the dark slate floor. She towered over Chalk like a parent over a child, arms folded, attention straying from the fight across the pool to the dirty farmer at her side. Her lipless mouth twisted ever so slightly into a sneer. "How can I agree to your request when the entire Republic clamors for Jedi protection?"
"I thought you said you didn't get many petitioners."
"Just because I don't see them doesn't mean they don't exist." Kadim looked, for a moment, as though her drink had soured. "I can feel them crying out. Day and night from here to Coruscant they beg for our aid. How can I help you when so many are desperate for my blade's protection? I cannot forsake my duty to the Republic."
Chalk looked at the Kaminoan in disgust. Peldarian and Acquisto were locked together face to face, their weapons hissing and crackling. "Why'd you agree to see me, then, if you won't do a damn thing? "
Kadim gave an elegant shrug, her attention wandering from Chalk back to the duel. "It passes the time. Besides, sometimes people give me truly interesting offers."
"I guess we're all just womp rats to you, then," Chalk growled. "Who lives, who dies. It makes no difference to the Jedi."
Kadim said nothing. Across the chamber, Peldarian disarmed Acquisto with a flourish of her blade. The Barabel's violet weapon plunked into the pool, raising a plume of steam, and sank like a star submerged.
"How disappointing," sighed Kadim.