The Mandalorian Wars

by DeralianShadow

3976 years before the Battle Of Yavin, the Mandalorians have begun their incursions of non Republic worlds the on the Outer Rim. The planet of the Deralia being among the first to fall to the Mandalorian onslaught.

7. Chapter 7: Introductions

"All things truly wicked start from innocence," Ernest Hemingway.

When the Halls of Knowledge on Ossus were evacuated after Aleema of Krath used ancient Sith magic to trigger a cataclysmic explosion that consumed the Cron Cluster, the Jedi had only a few hours to pack twenty-thousand years of history. With no time to scour the city-sized collection of books, scrolls and artifacts, they simply grabbed whatever they could carry and fled the stellar holocaust that scorched the surface of their peaceful world.

There was little wonder why, even twenty years later, Jedi scholars on Exis Station were still busy sorting, sifting and cataloging mountains upon mountains of Jedi teachings. And even when the Jedi Temple was razed to the ground, almost four thousand years later, Exis Station would still contain many forgotten ancient Jedi artifacts.

Fully engulfed in their work, few Jedi scholars had time to look down and spot one they thought to be a very young Padawan as she quietly walked by.

And standing at well under a meter tall, Revan was easily overlooked. Yet what the little toddler lacked in size she more than made up for in curiosity. For a half-hour she aimlessly wandered the repository, counting doors. She gazed in wonder at the colorful transparansteel-paneled dome of the cathedral-like auditorium where the Jedi had met years earlier. And she meandered in and out of the room's alcoves lined with etched crystalline plaques that detailed the events leading up to and after the destruction of Ossus. Being unable to read, her young mind could only scratch the surface of their content, gathering that they were not intended to simply look pretty and that the people who had made them thought them to be very important. She paused only when realizing the main corridor went around in a circle. Then, overwhelmed by the childhood impulse to see what was on the other side, she started checking doors.

Aware that the little signs next to the doors probably meant something, the child concluded that the odd scribbles, "PULL," indicated places where she was not allowed to enter; while other odd scribbles, "PUSH," indicated places where she could enter. And that was what she did: she opened the very first door with the symbols "PUSH" next to it, blissfully unaware of the sign that said "UNSORTED STORAGE AREA: REPOSITORY STAFF ONLY."

Revan found herself in a large dark room with shelves that rose almost up to the ceiling, each haphazardly piled with all manner of books, scrolls and miscellaneous artifacts. The Jedi had not allowed cleaning droids to service their unsorted holdings for fear of damaging the priceless treasures that were still waiting to be found; this resulted in thick layer of fine dust that covered everything in the room. This same dust disagreed with the young explorer's nose causing her little eyes to water and triggering an uncontrollable paroxysm of sneezes that kicked up a thick mist of even more dust, which in turn, led to even more sneezing.

Recovering from her eighth consecutive sneeze and finding that she had nothing to wipe her runny sniffly nose, besides her jumpsuit sleeve, Revan quickly started looking for a suitable replacement. But as she wandered the aisles of five-meter high shelves, something else drew her attention.

It was very faint at first, nearly unnoticeable and easily dismissed by older incurious eyes, but the closer she came to it the brighter the pale light, on top of one of the shelves, became. By the time the child reached the shelf from where it originated, the entire aisle was lit by eerie blade-like rays of green-white light. As if hypnotized, the youngster's wariness faded, and she cast off all caution as her tiny fingers grabbed a hold of the shelf-railing and began to climb, compelled both by wonder and the warmth of the light that grew as she drew nearer.

Up and up she climbed, heedless of any danger and ignoring the intermittent creaking of the shelf made under her shifting weight, steadily reaching a height over five times her own. And there, on the very top shelf, she saw it: a cube of blinding green-white light, just a finger-length out of reach.

Pushing off the edge of the shelf below her with her left foot, using the very tips of her toes, the youngster finally closed the distance between herself and the odd glowing object. In spite the heat it gave off, she found it to be surprisingly cool to the touch as she awkwardly grasped it, barely managing a steady grip on the cube before her shoe slipped and she began to slide. Like a squirrel frantically struggling to recover its faltered footing, Revan scrambled with her remaining freehand finding a steady wooden knob only to discover that it was just the end of a dusty scroll that slid with her as she fell.

She hit the floor with a thump muffled by the thudder of several books that had joined her pilgrimage to the bottom of the aisle, coming to rest on her rear end and bringing up a big mushroom cloud of dust. Although thankfully uninjured, despite a sore bottom and a wounded pride, she rose to her feet and, for a moment, just stood there, as if stunned, deliberating whether or not to burst into to tears.

But before she could decide, the cube she held tightly in her right hand vibrated, and the image of a furry, long-snouted alien studied her intently. "Greetings, young Padawan," a male Caamasi said warmly. "I believe this module's internal chronometer is malfunctioning: it says that it has been about seven-thousand three-hundred and ninety-nine days, sixteen hours, thirty-eight minutes and twenty-seven seconds since prior activation. But it will readjust itself if you will please state the current date and time."

Taken aback, Revan quelled her fear by remembering that the alien resembled one of the statues she had seen near the repository's entrance. "Um, I don't know today's date is," she spoke softly. "What calendar are you using?"

"The Standard Republic Calendar," the image replied, "that every Republic world uses."

"Hmm," the toddler frowned contemplatively, "I think my Mama said something about a year in Republic Time being only long as half a monsoon season, but I'm not sure."

The image studied the surroundings. "Well, then perhaps another student in this wing would be happy to—" the alien's voice trailed off a bit as if coming to a surprising realization— "this is not the Antiquities Wing of the Halls of Knowledge!" he exclaimed. "Where on Ossus are we?"

"We're not on Ossus," the child declared. "Jolee said it was"—she paused, searching for the proper word— "evacuated?" she looked up quizzically at the image, not quite sure if she pronounced it properly.

"Evacuated?" asked the perplexed alien. "But why?"

"Jolee said the stars in the Cron Cluster exploded," Revan spoke as if reciting a story. "And that the Jedi had to leave there. And that's why they came here."

"Exploded!" the Caamasi hologram repeated shockingly. "How could ten middle-aged stars explode just like that?"

"I don't know," the youngster shrugged. "That's what I was told."

"And this place," the hologram continued, "what is it?"

The child looked around her and then back at the hologram. "A repository," she answered. "Did I say that right?"

"Yes, you did," said the hologram. "Then the Order survived, thank the Force."

"The Force?" she asked curiously.

With that, the hologram's pupils widened in surprise. "Have you not been instructed on the nature of the living Force?"

Revan shook her head.

"How could that be if you are a student?"

"I was told I'm going to live with the Jedi," the child replied. "Does that make me one?"

"Yes," the image responded, "it does. You must be strong in the Force; otherwise you would have been unable to access this holocron."

Revan's eyes narrowed suspiciously as she studied the figure before her, "If you're a hologram, how come you act like a real live person?"

"Because, at one time, I was a real person," the image answered. "In some ways, I still am. My name is Baledor Halakwi, Jedi Master, and gatekeeper of this holocron."

"How did you get small enough to fit in there?" the child asked moving the holocron trying to look for an opening underneath, slightly disturbing the image in the process.

"Oh!" the gatekeeper exclaimed in surprise as his image scrambled. "Please do not do that; it disrupts the holo-emitters."

"Oops!" Revan quickly turned the holocron back to its original position. "Sorry! Is that better?"

"Yes," the gatekeeper replied. "I am not the real Baledor Halakwi; he became one with the Force in the year eight-thousand four-hundred, whereas I am a fully interactive instructional program designed to help and teach Jedi initiates of all levels. Yet, I have subroutines that mimic Master Baledor's personality."

"Wow," the child commented as she poked her index finger though the hologram. "So you're a fully sentient artificial life-form."

"Um, no, I am not sentient," the gatekeeper said.

"But you have emotions," she countered. "And you can think."

"I have a subset of preprogrammed behavioral nuances that many associate with certain emotions, but these nuances are activated by a Force-sensitive sentient. I can display only a limited set of behavioral responses. I am incapable of showing any negative or aggressive mannerisms attributed to anger, fear or impatience. In fact, I am programmed to be patient and I can answer almost any question about the Living Force as long has it relates to any content I have stored in my database."

"Almost any question?"

"Well, yes, I am also programmed to gauge a student's level of proficiency and, thus, will only reveal age and level-appropriate material. Besides, the body of knowledge pertaining to the Force is simply too large to be contained in a single holocron, and, as vast and as varied as the Jedi teachings are, we may never have full knowledge of the Force."

"Why not?"

"Because the Force is so infinite one could study it for a thousand lifetimes and still fail to fully understand it, nor should one believe that they can. The belief that one has fully comprehended that nature of the Force has been an unfortunate combination of folly, hubris and madness on the part of many Jedi over the millennia which has had many regrettable results for the Jedi Order, the Republic and the galaxy as a whole.

"Then why study it at all, if you can't understand it?" the child asked perceptively.

"Because, little one, the Force is in everything and in everyone; the Force is everything and everything is the Force. And if you cross an unfamiliar river without first discerning its depths and shallows and you will fail without reaching your goal."

Revan pursed her lips together trying to take in the gatekeepers bewildering words, but she was still unsatisfied with his response. "But don't all rivers go into a sea or ocean or larger body of water anyway? They go to the same place, so they all have the same goal. What difference does it make?"

The hologram paused a moment, studying the child's response. Every single Jedi apprentice for the past twenty-thousand years had heard that same utterance before their very first lesson, and, as each student was unique, so each responded to it differently. Among the more common responses recorded in the holocron's records was the interpretation that the statement was a warning to heed the lessons of one's master without question. But Revan's reaction was more novel, betraying a clear affinity for independent thought that could not be laid to rest with a simple formulaic answer. A living Master would have probably taken the child's answer to be disrespectful and down right impudent. Yet as the delicate controls inside the crystal structure analyzed and reanalyzed her words, they could pick up no trace of vehemence, and if there was any, it was well below the detection levels of the holocron's behavior analysis protocols. "That may be true," the gatekeeper said slowly as if the interactive sequencing that generated his image was being pushed to its very limits, "for, indeed, as all things are part of the Force so all things rejoin into the Force. But how one reaches the goal, the choices one makes, and the journey as a whole is even more important."

"But why if all things are in the Force, why take the journey at all?"

"A good question," Master Baledor mused, "but a question only you can answer. For each Jedi the journey is different."

"Why?"

"Because the Force is infinite and manifests itself an uncountable number of ways."

"Why?"

"There are many legends that try to answer your question, but I can only give you one," the gatekeeper said. "It is the legend often told to young apprentices, like yourself, at the start of their training. . . "

Still a sore from her fall, Revan seated herself down, placing the holocron on the floor in front of her.

The gatekeeper continued: ". . . before there was a beginning or an end, there was the Force, and the Force was all, as the Force is all"—with that the child's eyebrows met together in an obvious frown that stopped hologram mid-sentence. "What is the matter?" the Master Baledor asked.

"Oh, nothing," she grimaced impatiently. "I think I've heard this story before, or something a lot like it."

"It is possible," the gatekeeper admitted. "Almost every known culture as something similar, but perhaps you should listen before judging it."

"Okay," she sighed a little reluctantly. It sounded like something she had heard the Sooth Singers from her village recite.

"And the Force itself is and was pure limitless energy. And like all conscious living things it sought to know itself and define itself through its limits only to find that the more it knew, the more there was to learn. The more it learned, the more in changed, and the more it changed the more it learned. And through this endless change, reality, as we understand it, came into being and is in a process of constant becoming. Everything partakes in this cycle of change, for all change is a beginning and an ending and a new beginning again. And that is the way of all things."

"Everything?" the child asked. "Including planets and stars and people?"

"Everything," Master Baledor replied definitively, "especially people."

"How do you know all this?"

"At the very dawn of the Republic, on the planet Typhon, a group of scholars and mystics came together to study a positive energy known as the Ashla which they later deemed to be the light side of the Force. Some of them were able to feel the Force, as they could sense the thoughts and intentions of others as well as the stirrings of their surroundings."

"Like I can," Revan responded. "Sometimes I know when things will happen, but I didn't know why."

"Yes," Master Baledor observed. "Many who are Force-sensitive are born with the ability to feel it. Later on, they found that it was possible to alter their environment by channeling it."

"Like getting doors to open by just thinking about them opening?" the child asked, wondering if that was how she had made that big mess in the kitchen of the Station's medical facility.

"That is one of a number of ways that one can manipulate their surroundings through Force," the gatekeeper answered. "In time, you will learn to control it."

"But how? How can you control everything?"

"What do you think, little one, can a single being control and master that which encompasses the entire universe?"

Revan thought for a moment back to how in one week she had learned how vast the universe was compared to herself. "No," she said quietly. "They can't."

"That is correct. Every being is part of a greater whole. That is why the early Jedi Masters quickly learned at all Force-mastery is self-mastery: to have power over oneself, rather than power over others. It is the ability to live in harmony with the rest of the universe and to attune yourself to the Will of the Force."

"How can you do that?"

"By letting go of your own personal valuations and opening yourself up to it," the gatekeeper answered as he carefully observed her. "Close your eyes and reach out; let your awareness drift way from your worries."

Revan did as she was told, closing her eyes and trying to cast out the burning images that had been imprinted in her mind over the past few weeks, but this time found herself unable to let go. The more she opened herself up, the more random images came rushing in. She saw the ruined buildings of her village and the black smoke rising from the pile of bodies in the center square. There were thousands of rampaging, faceless Mandalorians encircling a small rag-tag group of villagers. There were bodies of children scattered on the ground; some wore expressionless faces and others had the undeniable stare of pure frozen horror, that heart-wrenching look that children often have when seeing something so terrible they cannot even describe it. The stifled spark of remaining life in their eyes was just a reflection of the orange flames that poured off the massive engines of the basilisk droids whirling overhead. And behind them, a funnel of black smoke turned into the open night sky. Except the stars themselves were at war with one another as small insect-like projections of light swarmed wildly against the pitch-black curtain of space.

"Concentrate," a voice said.

As she focused in further on the sparks of light she saw they were Republic craft engaged with Mandalorian warships, and she knew she was seeing a space-battle. But she could not tell whether it was the one that had already happened or one that was yet to come. Sometimes, in Revan's visions, the future, past and present seemed to bleed together in one dizzying patchwork of sight and sound. And then, right when she could not bear to see any more, the vision shifted and the black of space took the form of shadowy garments that flowed off several phantasms as dark as the abysmal waters of the Deralian monsoon tide at their peak. Her breath staggered like she had been swept away by a wave of ice-cold water that froze and burned at the same time.

She was blinded by a bright red light as she heard the rumbling of black surf crashing against the razor sharp rocks where her mother had leaped to her death.

"Revan," she heard a familiar voice calling her and she looked down to see the image of her own mother reaching out to her from the beneath the cloudy water. Revan's mother wore the same ashen mien as she had at the moment when the Mandalorian monster had torn her child away from her cold dead grasp.

Revan wanted to scream in terror, but her throat was stuck. She wanted to run, but she remained frozen in place.

"You must control your fear!" the voice said again, loud enough to pierce the vision.

Revan flinched as she found herself alone in the repository storeroom where she had been before, realizing that the voice in her vision was none other than the gatekeeper trying to snap her out of her trance, but the rumbling noise was still there.

"Control yourself!" Master Baledor's hologram exclaimed repeatedly as the room shook from wall to wall.

Books fell from their places. Dust rose in columns like white smoke. That was when Revan realized she was the source of the disturbance, and with that realization the rumbling was silenced and the shaking stopped. She shuddered. What had happened? What had she done?

The child was right about to sigh with relief when all of sudden she heard her mother's voice loud enough to make her jump.

"Revan!" the hollow haunting echo pleaded.

Revan turned in the direction of the sound only to see the same blinding red light she had seen in her vision. And it was coming from a small glowing pyramid up high on another shelf a few meters away.

---

Led down one of the halls that branched out from the repository's antechamber, Jolee felt his neck tense as he followed the Mon Calamari Jedi Scholar to the Lore Master's receiving room. It had been twenty years since he had last been amongst other Jedi. Even as he paced down the hall and passed a series of open doorways leading to chambers where dozens of scholars were busily working away, the painful memories of his youth came creeping back to him like a hot knife cutting the sutures of a festering wound.

His Force-heightened senses could feel many eyes shift and lock on him, and that old feeling of belonging to the Jedi Order came back, reminding him of why he had left in the first place.

No sooner had his foot stepped through the entrance to the Lore Master's chambers when her voice split the silence like a smoothly sharpened spear.

"So," Master Kreia observed with a tone that sounded more like gloat than an observation. "You have returned." Her black eyes purposefully probed his stern gaze for a moment and then withdrew like two winged predators that had found whatever they were looking for.

The faint smile that touched her thin, half-withered lips almost made Jolee cringe; although the past two decades had not been kind to him, as the surviving hairs on the back of the aging Jedi's head could testify, it was as if time itself had taken a lightsaber to the Lore Master's face. "Master Kreia," Jolee stiffened from his ceremonious bow, a gesture of respect from a Knight to a Master; his brown eyes remained steady as he mirrored her scrutinizing stare like the serene surface of a meditation pool. "I see the years haven't darkened your cheery disposition."

"Nor have they improved yours," the older woman shot back. "I trust this time you will be staying?"

The Jedi Knight's thicker lower-lip curled. "Maybe," he said evenly. "Maybe not."

"Then your solitary sojourn through the backwater of space has served only to indulge your self-pity," the Jedi Master declared, "as I warned you it would. Yet the fact that you are here means that you have learned something."

"It means nothing," the Jedi snapped.

"Then why have you returned, if you have not stopped living in the past?"

"I'm not here for myself, Kreia," Jolee's expression darkened. "Even if I was, this is the last place I'd ever want to be." He uncoiled the roll of wax-pencil drawings he held under his arm. "I'm here because past problems have a strange way of showing up in the present," he said holding out the sheet of flimsiplast with Revan's rendition of the space-battle. "This was done a few hours ago; right before there was any word on the Mandalorians attacking that fleet."

"Mandalorians?" Kreia scoffed. "They were defeated—Their leader was destroyed on the moon of Dxun and they were scattered all across the Outer Rim. They couldn't have been responsible for that attack on the Republic fleet earlier today."

"I have proof," the dark-skinned Jedi said emphatically as he handed her the drawing and unrolled more of them. He pulled out the drawing with the attack on the Deralian village. "The invaders on both of these drawings match."

The older woman stared at the two drawings skeptically. "And what precisely are these scribblings supposed to prove?" she asked. "They're just drawings that appear to have been done by a child with a very fertile imagination."

"That's because they were drawn by a child," Jolee declared grimly as Kreia looked down and studied the drawing she held in her hand, "a survivor of a previous raid, who can confirm that the armored invaders who attacked her village were the very same ones who attacked the Republic Fleet earlier today."

"Impossible," Kreia pronounced flatly. "If this drawing depicts the battle as it was, how could she have known unless she had been there? It's far more likely the child heard of the attack over a holocast and then drew whatever her impressionable young mind could conjure."

"All things are possible through the Force," the Jedi Knight said stubbornly. "You known that better than anyone seeing you are on the High Council and a historian."

The Jedi Master's eyebrows rose slightly, "The child is Force-sensitive?"

"Obviously," Jolee half-retorted gesturing to the drawing Kreia was holding.

Master Kreia considered this a moment. "Who are her parents?"

"She's an orphan," the Jedi said quietly.

"I see," the Jedi Master twisted her lip slightly, knowing exactly what would follow next: Jolee would insist that the child be taken on as a student, a simplistic solution harkening to the belief that the Jedi where supposed to solve everyone's problems. Kreia believed that the Jedi Order's critical failing was that it already took on too many other peoples' responsibilities while failing to address its own. While the Jedi lived to be in the service of life; learning was part of life. And how could anyone learn anything if the Jedi always interfered by saving people from the consequences of their own actions? Or by saving them from their own misfortune? Surely if anything ever happened it was always through the will of the Force, and life defined itself in the face of adversity and challenge. So many Jedi failed to realize this to own detriment. "So you think that the Order is obligated to interfere?"

"I think we're obligated to help," the other said, "yes, if you want to call that interfering."

"And since when do you speak for the Order on who is and is not worthy of training?" Kreia probed, fully aware of significance of her question.

The Jolee's eyebrows dropped to the point where his eyes were barely visible. Kreia's callous reminder of his decision to train his ill-fated wife and pupil against the Council's wishes was like a kick to the stomach, but he quickly hid his indignation knowing that any emotional response to her question would only earn a quick reprimand that he should control his emotions. And he had dealt enough Jedi Masters over the years to know when one wore her arrogance on her sleeve. "I'm not speaking for the Council," he said monotonously. "I am making a suggestion."

"Yes," the Jedi Master observed acidly. "A suggestion that the Order is the solution to every ill-favored result from every unfortunate copulation."

Jolee snorted impatiently; the conversation seemed to be going nowhere. "I said nothing of the kind," he snapped. "Given the child has demonstrated a clear ability to see into the future, beyond what anyone on the Council has accomplished in the last two decades, I would think that warrants some consideration." Kreia had to have known what Jolee was referring to. It had begun quietly, like a veiled whisper: the influence of the dark side of the Force slowly began to wax over the centuries as the Sith War had drawn near, but even as the war came and went, its tide had not ebbed. Some said remnants of the Ancient Sith Empire were still lurking in the far unexplored regions of space, while there were whispers that the Sith War had tainted the Jedi and that the source of the darkness was within the Order itself. What was clear was that, in the years following the Sith War, dark side monsters, known as Tarentatek, had turned up even in the most remote corners of the galaxy. Three years following the war, the Jedi Order dispatched three knights, Guun Han Saresh, Shaela Nuri and Duron Qel-Droma, to hunt down these abominations in a mission called "the Great Hunt." But this mission ended in tragedy: shortly after arriving on the ancient Sith burial world of Korriban the team disappeared and none of them were heard from again. After the loss of these Jedi, the Order decided against sending any more Knights out to any world seen as a bastion of dark side energy. Although many dark side creatures were slain both during and after the war, the influence of the dark side continued to grow, muddying the flow of the Force to the point that even the most powerful masters in the Order could not pierce the murk that clouded their vision. The Jedi had all but lost the ability to see into the future and Revan's prediction of the space-battle in the Vergasso Asteroids suggested an uncanny aptitude for farseeing that could not be ignored. "You know what I'm referring to," he eyed her.

A nervous grimace pierced the calm of the Jedi Masters demeanor. "Yes," she said finally. "I have felt it, just as the rest of the Council has. The shadow of the dark side is growing, and as its power increases, our ability to see through the Force steadily diminishes." But then her gaze again became hard, "but you cannot honestly believe that this foundling of yours is a solution to the problem. Things are in motion th—" a loud rumbling stopped her mid-sentence. Her eyes widened as the columns supporting the vaulted archway shook like tree branches in the wind.

The concerned murmur of voices coming from the Jedi scholars who were shaken from their work was overpowered by a low reverberation that was not unlike the sound of distant thunder.

The Mon Calamari scholar that Jolee had seen earlier now poked his head into the receiving room's doorway. "Is everyone alright?" the scholar asked as the sound faded.

"What was that?" Jolee asked, casting a circumspect scowl at the teetering light fixture directly above him.

"It must have been a fluctuation in the Station's artificial gravity," the Jedi scholar suggested with self-assured conclusive tone.

"Fluctuation indeed—" Kreia's eyes narrowed in annoyance at the scholar's presumption. Jedi scholars were often students who had shown less promise in their ability to sense the Force, but had demonstrated great academic mastery of Order's history and teachings, "—in judgment. That was no gravitational anomaly. That was a disturbance in the Force."

"A disturbance?" Jolee questioned; it had struck him more like an explosion.

"Yes," the Jedi Master replied, turning to walk out of her receiving chambers. "And it came from the storage area!" she exclaimed quickening her pace just slightly.

Jolee followed her to the point where they both arrived at the Repository's main antechamber, but Revan was nowhere to be found. "She was right here," he said in response to the Kreia's questioning look. "I told her to stay right here."

Kreia let out a long exasperated sigh as she sorted through the choice words she had for the negligent knight. "You mean to tell me that you left an incredibly powerful Force-wielding child, who has no clue as to what she is capable of nor any concept of control, alone without any supervision whatsoever??" the pitch of her voice grew higher and louder with each word. "Where was your brain!"

The last question seemed to echo off the archways and come back to the Jedi like a repeated demand for an answer. "I didn't think—" but before he could finish his reply he was tersely cut off.

"—that is correct," the older woman snapped. "You didn't think," she concluded, turning to walk in the direction of the main corridor.

---

After lying empty for almost twenty years what had once been the Ascendant's infirmary, when it had been a Republic ship, was finally being used for its intended purpose. Back on board his vessel, the Ordonian chieftain, in an unusual display of strength for his advanced years, carried his unconscious son to the all but forgotten section of the Dreadnaught and, not too gently, laid him down on one of the empty surgical tables.

As a rule, the Mandalorians did not practice medicine nor did they commonly care for their sick or injured. Although many of them still possessed rudimentary first aid skills, which proved useful on the battlefield where unattended minor wounds could seriously hinder fighting ability, and they were not above using performance enhancing stimulants either. The Mandalorian code of honor had very strict criteria for such things, and aid to a fellow Mandalorian was rendered on the condition that he would not be a hindrance. But there were still some clan leaders, like Caldar, who preferred to liberally interpret their traditions on a case by case basis. And this case was clearly an exception.

"Get him out of that armor!" he barked to the clansmen that had followed him in, as he removed his own helmet. By human standards, Caldar was considered handsome even with the long scar that cut across his left cheek from the corner of his eye down to his jaw, but his people had long abandoned complacent notions of superficial beauty. He was of slighter build than his son; otherwise, the family resemblance obvious as both father and son had the same dark hair and the same fierce greyish-blue eyes.

With Canderous' helmet off, his father quickly set about to jumpstarting the younger Mandalorian's vitals by injecting several stim packs directly into his neck as the other clansmen worked furiously at cutting their injured comrade out of his armor. The unhealthy pallor of the unconscious Mandalorian's normally tan skin against brownish-black hair clearly marked his most recent brush with death.

A few hours later, a faint light that steadily glowed brighter pierced through the fog of Canderous' unconsciousness. Although his vision was blurred, the Mandalorian warrior quickly became aware that he was lying somewhere on a table or a bed. His skin tingled with the chill of a slight draft, and he realized that he was only wearing his undergarment. Someone had removed his armor and clothes for whatever reason, but a sharp pain on the right side of his neck, that shot up his head and down his arm, interrupted his train of thought. He instinctively reached over to see what it was, when a strong arm quickly restrained him from moving.

"Don't move," his father said gruffly, trying to mask the apparent relief in his voice.

The incapacitated warrior breathed in suddenly as another sharp pain shot down his spine. "What's going on?" he demanded. "Where am I?"

"You were injured," Caldar replied. "You are back on board the Ascendant."

"How long have I been out?"

"Four hours."

"Four hours!" the younger Mandalorian exclaimed trying to get up, but again he winced as the same pain plagued him once more.

"Try not to move," the voice of another Mandalorian from Clan Ordo said. "The implant needs time to take to your body properly."

"Implant!" Canderous questioned incredulously as he tried to reach over with his right arm to push whoever had spoken, but even as he did this, he was overcome by another pain that cut into his large hand like a hot dagger. "What the hell for!" He tried to sit up but failed.

"Udesii," Caldar said, trying to calm his son down so he did not injure himself any further. "It's just a regenerative implant we put in to help you heal faster."

"B-but the traditions?" his son objected.

"Not your problem," came a stern reply. "When you're in charge of the Clan you'll do things your way. Until then, you worry about getting better and I'll worry about the rules." The older Mandalorian managed a thin but wily smile, "Besides, the point of the code is to make us stronger. And that's all I've done. Once that implant is fully incorporated into your system, you will be."

Turning his head slightly, Canderous eyed the three centimeter metallic square with a blinking green light that was now lodged at the base of his neck near his right clavicle. "You should have just let me die. That would have been the honorable thing to have done."

"Honorable?" the other muttered disdainfully. "Not everything the code says is always honorable. Some of it is quite stupid."

"How can you say that?" the younger Mandalorian demanded. "You accepted the Canons of Honor when our people swore fealty to Mandalore. How could you go back on your word?"

"I swore to defend the Mandalore's goals. I swore to aid him in this quest against the Republic; I didn't swear to watch my people or my son die needlessly on of account badly interpreted superstition. The honorable warrior does what is necessary according to the situation; he does not adhere blindly to ritual or to any code of laws to his own detriment. What point is there in leaving the injured to perish when, once healed, they can fight again?"

"In battle it is the weak who perish," the injured warrior said repeating the words he had so often been told. "The strong linger and flourish."

"You're just spouting that off like gibberish," his father retorted. Was his son that dense? "Every warrior that falls in battle must be replaced by a new recruit that takes years to train. Whereas giving an injured warrior a chance to recover takes months, weeks, and, in your case, days. That means our practice of leaving our wounded behind is wasteful and stupid, regardless of what the Canons say."

"You're getting soft, old man!" Canderous exclaimed ruefully.

"Yeah, and you're still young and hard-headed. Someday, when you are older, you'll understand," Caldar observed warily. "The time may come when we will do battle and need every single brother we left for dead on the battlefield."

"That will never happen!" his son replied. "Now you're rambling."

"I hope you're right," the other mused with measure of doubt in his voice.

Shrugging off his father's words, Canderous was eager to change the subject. "How's Claws? Did he sustain much damage? When will he be repaired?"

Caldar frowned; ever since Canderous' early teenage years, his bond with his basilisk droid seemed to be a little too strong. He even went as far as naming it and referring to it as a "he." Although, every Mandalorian rider developed a unique relationship with his warmount, in the end, it was still a machine. He had to break the news eventually, and it was better his son learned the news sooner than later. "The droid was damaged beyond repair," he said uncomfortably. "I'll see that you get a new one as soon as you are well enough to ride again."

"What!" the big brawny warrior exclaimed like a child who just learned his favorite pet had died. "How?" he asked.

"There was some rubble floating about not too far from where I found you," Caldar admitted uncomfortably. The Ordonian chieftain's view was that the sooner Canderous accepted his droid was gone, the sooner he could move on. "I think I saw some pieces of it there."

Canderous sighed remembering the events that led up to him floating in space right before he went unconscious. There had been that crazed female pilot that shot him . . . and then there was him, that Republic pilot that somehow managed to throw a thermal detonator right in the path of his warmount. Te hut'uun! The vein on the side of his forehead bulged as the anger bubbled up inside him. "Arrgh that pilot! It's all his fault!"

"You mean the one that blew up the Apocalypse's interdictor?" the other asked; after all, there had only been two Republic starfighters that had made it through the asteroid field.

"He did!" this only served to further enrage the younger warrior.

"Yes, that's why we weren't able to capture that Dreadnaught."

Canderous clenched his jaw, and swore under his breath. "If that di'kut ever crosses my path again, he'll look fondly on his worst nightmare!"

---

Meanwhile, on the Vanguard, Carth Onasi had trouble closing his eyes, let alone dreaming up his worst nightmare. The young cadet, having survived his first battle, was in an emotional conundrum. Every time he tried to sleep he was overcome by the grizzly memories of the ship's medical bay where he saw so many soldiers various in stages of dying: some with plasma burns so severe it was hard make out their species, others who were bleeding so profusely they lay in puddles of their own blood, and still more with missing limbs and exposed innards. It reminded him of the day his own father died, but, if that was not enough, seeing the doctors and medics make split-second decisions on who was and who was not beyond help shook the boy to his core. In contrast to the scuffle and shuffle of the medics and their screaming patients, the soldier's barracks were uncomfortably quiet.

Like a tomb, he thought. When he had first arrived at the Academy on Carida, six months earlier, he had trouble sleeping because with constant murmur of his other barrack mates: some would play pazzak, others would be talking and some would be reading their letters from home. Now, the sinister silence of the empty chamber served only to intensify his mixed feelings of dread and guilt. The very bunk he lay in belonged to someone else. Had he made it? Was the pilot in whose bed he was now trying to sleep in having the same thoughts somewhere on board the Resilient, possibly lying beneath the blankets of Carth's bunk? And what about the pilot whose pillow the cadet had barrowed, who had slept in the next bunk over not twelve hours ago? Where was he? Was he dead or alive? And where were the rest of the soldiers whose beds lay empty? As his mind raced over the dismal implications of the battle, the door annunciator triggered signaling that someone was at the door.

At first he was grateful for a break in his morbid thoughts, but as he walked over to see who it was, fear came back into his mind. Was it a personnel officer coming to investigate why he had disobeyed orders or some other harbinger of doom? No, it can't be. The debriefing was postponed for eight-hundred hours tomorrow," he thought trying to reassure himself as he pressed the door release button. Apparently, the admiral and the remaining ship captains were still busy trying make sense of what had gone wrong.

The doors slid open to reveal a young woman in her mid twenties with short golden-blonde hair, leaning in the side of the door jamb with her face looking down at the deck. She looked smaller without her flightsuit and helmet on, but her stubborn glare in her green eyes all but confirmed that she was the same die-hard, iron-willed pilot that had saved his life.

"Meg!" the young cadet exclaimed. "What are you doing here?" he asked apprehensively. "And for Forcesake put some clothes on!" he hissed almost pulling her through the door so one would see.

"Hey!" the Megan snorted turning towards her squadron mate. "This is standard issue military gear," she gestured to her dark grey sweatpants and almost skin-tight white T-shirt that had the emblem of the Republic Military and the words "PROPERTY OF THE REPUBLIC SPACE CORPS" written beneath it, stretching squarely right over her ample bust line.

"For what?" Carth asked as he made sure the door slid shut, "Interrogation?"

"It's exercise gear, dummy. It's the only thing logistics had in my size," she said. "You may be lucky, but you're not that lucky." She took a seat on the edge of the nearest bunk. "We need to talk," she declared procuring a small datapad from her pocket. "I have a report to file in about an hour, and I'm running out of ideas on how to explain how your sudden flash of intuition overrode an order from our CO." Even if he is a snake.

The boy sighed uncomfortably; he knew it was going to come up eventually. "Okay, well technically I'm not really military personnel yet which means if you say I came up with it, then I would be to blame. They're not going to come down too hard on me because I'm still a student."

"Um, sure," the young woman observed sarcastically. "And I who, for all intensive purposes, was your commanding officer at the time you had this epiphany, just let you run amok? I'm sure Karath and Halan would be very understanding." She shook her head. "It doesn't work that way, Carth. Since I'm above you, I'm responsible for everything you do. What's worse, is that I defied Karath's orders to stay on board the Resilient to cover your tail while you were out there alone, and I even threatened one of the hangar crewmen to do it."

"You did what you thought was the right thing."

"I know that!" Megan snapped. "It's just those hairless monkey-lizards on the bridge, who wear the shiny buttons on their uniforms, don't care. And trying to get them to understand is going to be like trying to reason with a two year-old."

"Isn't it one of the first principles of starfighter-piloting that you don't let anyone fly without a wingmate?"

"Yes, it's as old as the Republic itself, but so is obeying the orders of a superior officer."

"Okay, so just say that given your assessment of the situation, and from what seemed to make sense strategically you thought it unlikely that the Mandies would expose their interdictor to an attack."

"That it was a feint?"

"Yeah," the boy replied. "And that's what it was."

"Yeah," the young woman added, "but, at the time, that was a guess."

"And Karath's call wasn't?" Carth objected.

"Yes, but there's just one problem with that: he's a line captain, with decades of experience, I'm a low-ranking flight lieutenant and you're not even a commissioned officer," Megan sighed. "Carth, no matter how I well explain our actions in this report—even if now, in hindsight, I know for certain we did the right thing—we still disrespected rank. You could get expelled, and I could get reprimanded." Or worse, she thought wretchedly.

"Then why did you follow me?" the youth asked.

"Because," she said frowning, "I thought we were all going to die anyway, and if I'm gonna die, then—damn it—I'm going to explore every chance for the fleet's survival. Do you actually think I believed I would live through that?"

Carth was lost for words. "No," he answered. "I was more worried about what would have happened if that interdiction field had stayed up."

"We would have all died," Megan grumbled. "That's what would have happened, and as it stands, the tally of casualties is at nearly twenty-thousand."

The boy's brown eyes bulged in disbelief. "Wait!" he exclaimed wondering if he had heard it right. "HOW many did you say!"

The young lieutenant breathed heavily, "Out of a fleet crewed by fifty-three thousand and thirty-five soldiers, we have lost eighteen-thousand four-hundred and fifty-six of them." She turned her head and surveyed the chamber. "Didn't you find it a little spooky that you're in here by yourself?"

"Yeah," the other admitted uneasily.

"Well, good, 'cause they're all dead!"

Carth felt his stomach turn. "How do you know this? Where did you get information?"

Megan's frown momentarily twisted into a wry half-smile, "I got it by flirting with the Comm officer who finished his shift about an hour ago. You'd be surprised what a guy will do for a little female attention after a close brush will death."

"You did what!" the boy asked indignantly.

"Calm down, Junior," she assured him. "He just wanted to someone to talk to; you think we're the only ones who had it hard? If someone needs to talk, I'll be there. I was there for you, when you needed me." She paused briefly trying to let her words sink in. "I hope you realize that you never heard anything about the casualty count from me or anyone else, for that matter."

"I didn't know we had that many casualties. . . " his voice trailed off as his mind tried to comprehend the full extent of what had happened that day. "You can't put that in your report, though."

Megan shook her head despondently as she started working on her data pad. "I don't know how we're getting out of this. It all depends on how they interpret this report. You could get off easy, since you weren't supposed to be here in the first place. I, on the other hand, am as good as dead. Karath's had it in for me since—"she hesitated— "forever."

Carth eyebrows lowered a bit. Why was she being so cryptic? "What is it between you and Karath? I mean all he did was make a bad call and that could have happened to anyone."

"Sure," the young woman said dismissively, not looking up from her datapad. "I'm not referring to that. And quite honestly, it's better that you don't know, since you're new to this and all."

"Um, perhaps you should just tell me and get it over with," he insisted.

"Well perhaps it's not really any of your business," she replied angrily as she finished typing the last few sentences onto her datapad and looked up at him with an exasperated frown. "Here, you better get yourself acquainted with the content of this report, in case they decide to separate us and see if our stories match up," she all but shoved the device in his face, glad with changing the subject.

"Am I going to get an answer, Meg?" Carth said as he took the datapad.

"Perhaps," she replied, "if and when I feel like it."

"Oh come on," the young cadet insisted.

"Um no, it doesn't really concern you, Carth. And besides, you need to worry more about our debriefing than about Saul Karath and his sexist command style."

"What!" the boy looked up from the datapad. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"I'm not going to get into this with you," Megan replied, grabbing the device out of her wingmate's hands and heading towards the door.

"Hey, wait!" Carth exclaimed, following her. "I'm not done with that!"

"You can read it on the way to the personnel office," she added.

"I can't go like this!" the boy said gesturing to the shorts and tank top he was wearing. All his clothes, besides his flightsuit which was being cleaned for his debriefing in the morning, were still aboard the Resilient.

"You think I look any better?" the young woman questioned. "Come on, let's go!"

Two pilots left the barracks, making their way towards the turbolift where they endured a series of grueling stares from various miscellaneous personnel they encountered on the way up the command deck.

Thoroughly engrossed in reading his fellow crewmate's report, Carth had little time to notice how Megan confronted most of the raised eyebrows she saw with a few dirty looks of her own, along with an occasional "What are you looking at?" and "What? Haven't you seen humans wearing rec gear before?"

Of course, after a few minutes of waiting for his crewmate to finish turning in her report, he could not help feeling that he was being watched. And in fact he was: every uniformed sentient that passed him going through the corridor either widened their eyes and raised their eyebrows or took a second look. Great, Carth sighed knowing he was the only person on the command deck showing any leg. He started wondering whether following Megan in would have been less uncomfortable than standing outside the door looking like a misplaced idiot.

Thankfully, a few minutes later the office doors slid open and she walked out. Carth noticed that despite her straight posture, the young lieutenant was obviously dejected as her worries had been somehow confirmed. "Well?" he asked meeting her green eyes in a fixed gaze. "Anything?"

"Nothing," Megan said uneasily. "No one said anything. I just uploaded it into the ship's personnel files, and that was it. Looks like we'll find out tomorrow in exactly how much deep flarg we're in." She started walking in the opposite direction down the corridor. "Are you coming?"

"Where are you going?" the boy asked.

The young lieutenant sighed trying to relax her shoulders. "To the chow hall; I need to eat something—" she declared anxiously— "preferably sweet and very fattening. Yah hungry?"

"Um, no," Carth turned pale. After what he had seen in the medical bay, the very thought of food made him queasy. "I don't think could eat right now, even if I wanted to."

The young woman threw her wingmate a curious look and then realized what was bothering him. "Oh yeah, right," she said with perfect understanding. "Heh," she gave him a friendly pat on the back. "You've just learned the first thing not to do right after you've been in combat: visit the infirmary."

"Nice of you to tell me now," he responded sardonically.

"You see it's just one of things you don't want to do unless you're being brought in, your entrails are dragging on the floor and you're absolutely going to die without medical attention."

"Thanks."

"Hey, it's not something I could have predicted," she interjected. "And besides," a mischievous grin shone on her face. "We can't all be clairvoyant."

"Right," the other said not seeing any humor in her words.

Megan slowed her pace and eyed him intently; the smile on her face vanished and she became serious once more. "I'm sorry, Carth."

They continued walking down the corridor for a few minutes when she broke the uneasy silence. "The truth is, besides the routine check-ups, few of us pilots ever get to see the inside of a ship's medical bay. Usually you either make it through in one piece or you don't at all. The nice thing about it is that, for us, death is pretty quick, but it's hell for family members who can't even get the closure of burying you. All they get is a flowery letter and your id bracelet, if the recovery crew finds it—" but he stopped her before she could finish.

"—Meg!" the boy exclaimed with frustration. "You're really not helping."

Megan stopped and observed the younger pilot very closely. He was actually handling the situation rather well; she had seen many pilots collapse under a lot less pressure. "Okay, Carth," she spoke softly. "Sometimes I don't know when to quit. I'll stop now."

Carth sighed with relief, "thank you."

"I'll tell you what," she tried cheering him up, "let's skip the chow hall and check the rec room out instead. I hear these big Dreadnaughts all come with a fully-operational gym."

"Why do you want to go there?"

"Because, like you, I'm not going to be able to sleep until tomorrow when I finally hear whether I'm going to be discharged or not," she answered as she kept walking. "I've given eight years to the Republic Navy, Carth. All that time I've never once had the perks of being on a bigger ship, nor the free time to enjoy it. If I'm going to face the possibility of loosing my career, then I want to at least know I've done everything."

"Okay," the boy said. "But I was told not to do anything strenuous for a week."

"Fine," Megan replied shrugging him off in annoyance. "You can hold on to my towel and water bottle and let me know if someone ogles me."

---

Guilt and frustration weighed heavily on Jolee's shoulders as he trailed Master Kreia through the main corridor.

The Jedi Master reached out with the Force and then quickened her pace, disturbed by what she was feeling. Like many of the masters in the Order, Kreia had the post-cognitive ability to sense traces of a person's whereabouts in the Force. It was almost like following a set of invisible footprints. While it was common for most Force-Sensitive individuals to leave traces of their presence, the child Jolee had found seemed to have an unusual resonance in the Force. Strange, the older woman thought as continued walking, becoming increasingly agitated. It's almost as if . . . but it couldn't be . . . "She went into the storage room."

The Jedi Knight was now genuinely worried, "That's where the disturbance came from!"

"Yes," Kreia said quietly. "That's were everything that has not been cataloged is held. There could be Sith artifacts in there."

"What?" Jolee was now beside himself. The Halls of Knowledge also housed a collection of Sith paraphernalia seized after the Great Hyperspace War, which very likely had been mixed with other things that were taken during the evacuation. "I thought by you would have accounted for all of them by now! You know what could happen if one of those blasted contraptions fell into the wrong hands!"

The Jedi Master's eyes narrowed. You incomparable fool. "Don't lecture me on the nature of my duties. There are rules in place here, and beyond those lie the vulgar dictates of common sense which say you do not leave a young child unsupervised. You knew the nature of this facility before you brought her here, which means you had to be aware of the dangers of leaving her alone." She sighed with exasperation. "Tell me? How many more lives do you plan to ruin before you learn the meaning of responsibility?"

With that Jolee's shoulders slumped back and he sighed and his older companion pushed the door open. Perhaps Kreia was right; perhaps things would be better all around if his actions only affected him.

---

Deep inside the maze of dusty bookshelves, Revan eyed the glowing red pyramid in half-frenzied fascination as she stood up to get a closer look. It was definitely a pyramid, roughly the size of both her hands put together with dark runes or hieroglyphs all over it. And as she drew closer, it seemed to almost call to her.

"Revan," a lisping voice that resembled her mother's said.

The child jumped and then glanced over to Master Baledor's image which was still floating above the holocron. "What's that?" she asked ambivalently gesturing to the glowing pyramid at the top of the bookshelf.

The gatekeeper seemed to stare upwards as the holocron's internal sensors did a spectral analysis. "It appears to be another holocron of some kind, but one I have never seen before." And having lived almost a three-thousand years prior to the Great Hyperspace War, when the Jedi first discovered a Sith holocron, he could not give her any information beyond what his own holocron contained.

So Revan approached the red holocron; unaware what she was seeing a Sith creation; not knowing that unlike their Jedi counterparts these insipid relics worked quite differently, powered not through any kind of circuitry but by the life-force of the dark side spirits that dwelt within the crystal, who wanted nothing more than to warp an impressionable young mind to their diabolical purpose, and whose lure was difficult even for fully-trained Jedi to resist. That was why she could not take her eyes off it, and why it began to float towards her when she barely outstretched her fingers in its direction.

The Sith Holocron flickered growing dark and lighting up again as it rose off the shelf were it lay and lowered itself down to the child's height as it crossed the aisle. It was no more than half a meter away from Revan's grasp when she heard a stern command.

"Revan!—" A second was all it took to break the child's concentration as she turned to see Jolee's half-angered, half-worried face as he approached— "Don't touch that!" he yelled urgently as he ran towards her.

And in that same second the ominous glowing pyramid stopped mid-air and plummeted in a free-fall towards the floor.

"No!" Jolee panicked. He dived right into the path of the falling Sith artifact, catching it right before it would have hit the floor and shattered into thousand pieces.

Landing in Jolee's large smooth palms it burned right through his energy-absorption field he had called up through the Force and came to a crackling sizzle upon direct contact with his skin. The Jedi let out a painful cry as he let the smoldering holocron slip from his grasp, letting it drop a few centimeters to the floor where it bounced and came to stop in its side with a clunk right at the Lore Master's feet before it went completely dark.

Master Kreia bent over, picked it up and silently slipped it into her robe pocket.

"Didn't I tell you to remain where you were?" the Jedi demanded glaring angrily at Revan. "How did you get in here? What were you doing fooling around with that!"

Revan's shoulders shrugged together uncomfortably, half-scared and half-ashamed.

"That's not a toy!" He fumed. "Do you have any idea what would have happened if it had shattered?"

"How could she?" Kreia interrupted as she found the other square holocron and held it in her hand. She quickly took a look at Jolee and then at the little toddler right next to him. "She's a child. She couldn't tell one holocron from the other." The old woman eyed the little girl with disappointment. Given the complexity of the child's drawings, Kreia had been expecting at least an eight or a nine year-old. Yet she could not help but notice something very bizarre: the air around her almost hummed with power.

With that Jolee let out long sigh as he rose to his feet. Turning to the child, "Revan," and then to Kreia gesturing, "this is Master Kreia; Master Kreia," he turned back "this is Revan."

The two sets of eyes studied each other; obsidian-black against ice-cold blue. And for a moment, Kreia's eyebrows raised very high in surprise and narrowed in doubt studying the diminutive little figure in front of her. The dark-haired toddler was small, seemed sturdy on her feet and had an spark of intelligence in her eyes rather unusual for her age. But how old was she? Two or three, at the most—possibly younger. She was far too young. It can't be . . . but it seems to be. Yet . . . she frowned reluctantly dismissing the thought. No it isn't . . . impossible.

For a moment Revan fidgeted against the Jedi Master's long probing gaze. But Kreia shifted her attention to Jolee. "So this is the child who can see the future? Who predicted an attack on the Republic fleet? Who you think should be trained in the ways of the Force?" she asked skeptically.

"Yes," Jolee said.

"You can't be serious!" the Jedi Master exclaimed. "She's too . . . too . . ." what was the word she was looking for? " . . . young."

To that Jolee countered, insisting on what the child had already done.

Meanwhile Revan stood there, looking rather bewildered, gazing back and forth and Jolee and at the older Jedi Master.

"Do you honestly think this child possibly comprehend such grave implications?" Kreia demanded emphatically. "Just look at her—"

Of the corner of his eye, Jolee saw Revan cock her left eyebrow over her right and studied the two adults before her in amazement.

There they were, two mature big people, pointlessly and hopelessly arguing about her. And neither of them really new her, so what in the universe made them think they had anything to argue over? It just looked so . . . stupid. For a moment the child thought back, trying to remember if her own parents ever acted this strangely, but if they had, then they never had done so in front of her. As remote as their system seemed to be, Deralian adults had more sense than to be stupid in front of their own children. But then as she studied the dynamics of the conversation, she quickly realized there was more going on. The fact that the older Jedi was talking down to Jolee clearly meant she had to be in a position of authority, but, in Revan's eyes, this made the Lore Master appear far worse than stupid; she was mean. Why was she mean? Because her authority obligated to know better.

Master Kreia continued, not noticing that the child had crossed her little arms over her chest and eyed her with a look of disdain she could have only learned in the last thirty seconds "—she's hardly coherent. Is she even toilet-trained?" she asked. The last thing a Jedi Master needed was an apprentice who could not keep clean.

"Yes!" an emphatic interruption broke the argument, and the two Jedi stopped and looked at Revan in surprise.

"And I can even flush the 'fresher without falling in," Revan said triumphantly glancing at the Lore Master in defiance.

The Lore Master was caught off guard for a moment; it was not every day one got sarcasm from a two year-old. She returned the child's stern gaze, "So it seems, you are gifted indeed." She returned the scowl evenly and realized her doubts had been misplaced. So, legend is true after all.

---

"Four consecutive blows win the round," Megan heard the tall Echani say to his companion as she and Carth came through the sliding doors of the Vanguard's recreation area. "We'll go for twelve rounds."

"No contact outside the agreed-upon attack areas," his dark-haired partner replied as the two young soldiers walked in quietly.

"And no cheating either," the other said.

The two exchanged a series of punches and kicks on the mat in the far corner of the chamber.

The young cadet gave the two men a wide berth, not wanting to interrupt them, but Megan eyed them with great interest.

"You see that guy with the white hair right there?" she whispered. "He's an Echani, their system focuses on expression and communication through individual hand-to-hand combat."

Carth rolled his eyes "Uh huh, sure," he said suspecting that Megan's reasons for watching had more to do with the Echani's fighter's broad shoulders, athletic physique and the glistening little beads of sweat that poured down his rippling muscles as he countered his partner's blows. "What about the other guy?" he asked, causally pretending to care.

"Hmmm," the young woman studied the Echani fighter's companion as the two went for another round of blows and parries. "I'm not sure, exactly." The other sparer's movements slightly different. His stance was lower, and he moved faster. "He's using a technique I've never seen before, probably Teräs Käsi or something else, but he's really good: he hasn't even broken a sweat—"

Carth grimaced as he eyed the Echani's sparring partner. The only thing he had noticed was an intricate tattoo that covered the man's entire back: two vicious looking dragons, one dark and one light, were intertwined in a struggle for domination. But as the youth studied the design more carefully he found it was actually two different heads on the same body and neither one had the advantage. He had never seen anything like it.

"—then again they only touch sparring," the female pilot continued. "It's not like they're really going at it." She was not expecting the Echani to be listening.

"You know," he said dropping out of his forward fighting stance and looking the tattooed man, "she's right. Point contact is good for practice, but if you're going to get anything constructive out of it, you'll need to put some emotion in your fighting."

"That would be cheating," the other cocked an eyebrow.

"I didn't think Echani practitioners used touch-point sparring," Megan observed joining the conversation.

The Echani regarded her for a moment. "Normally we don't, but it depends on the sparring partner," he said eyeing the tattooed man. "After all, how do you know your limits if you don't put them to a hard test every once in awhile?"

To that his partner replied: "It's far more difficult to use restraint than to go after opponent with every gram of strength available, but I'm sure this young pilot here, would agree with you." He gazed back in Megan's direction and smiled.

At first, Megan felt her cheeks flush self-consciously. Although both men were attractive by her standards, she could have almost sworn she had seen the tattooed man's eyes somewhere before. But her thought vanished in suspicion. "How do you know I'm a pilot?"

"Your uniform," he replied.

To that Carth let out a nervous snicker.

"Oh, right," the young woman said throwing an obstinate look in Carth's direction.

"And besides," the tattooed man continued. "I think you two are the only starpilots left on this vessel."

"Um, you know about us?" Carth asked.

"Yes, the whole ship has been talking about you two," the other said.

"Nice," the cadet said glaring at Megan. No wonder he had gotten funny looks on the command deck.

"Are they saying good or bad things?" the female pilot asked.

"Well you haven't been debriefed yet, so I imagine you're not at liberty to discuss it," the tattooed man replied.

"Yeah," Carth noted warily. "Why spoil the surprise?"

The awkward silence was broken by the Echani who eyed Megan closely. "You have also trained in the Echani arts," he said. "Can tell by your movements—how many years have you studied?"

"Oh," she said. "That was awhile back; way back when I was in secondary school and my dad made me take study the Echani styles. He figured no daughter of his was going to grow up without being able to handle herself along with any man that tried to handle her."

"I'm curious of how effective the styles are in military combat," the other responded.

"I don't do too much hand-to-hand fighting," the young woman admitted. "But there was one time at the academy where they came in useful."

"Really?" the Echani raised his brows. "Could you describe the incident?"

"Um, well," Megan shrugged in embarrassment, "not much to describe, actually. One of my smarter classmates decided it was a good idea to snap my bra right before inspection and well . . ."

"Uh oh," Carth muttered.

"What did you do?"

The young lieutenant blushed, ". . . I—um, sorta broke his legs . . ."

The cadet looked at his wingmate uneasily. Her story reminded him of the fight he had gotten into over half a day ago.

" . . . but, of course no one gave any me grief about it," she added, "probably because the guy had it coming. And no one pulled anything on me the rest of the time I was there. So, overall, I'd say knowing the Echani styles was a good thing."

"Well," the Echani's sparring partner observed. "Since you're both trained in the Echani fighting arts, why don't you two go at it for while I take a breather."

"You're not going to continue?" Megan asked him.

"No," the man said. "I think I've had enough action for one day."

The young pilot found his response a little puzzling but shrugged it off as she looked back at the Echani fighter. "Point-contact or full-contact?"

"How far along did you get in your training?" he asked.

"I completed the Second Tier," the lieutenant replied as she removed her shoes before stepping onto the mat. "I don't mind going full contact if you don't."

"Very well," the other said. "Classic rules of engagement then; we spar until either you or I hit the mat."

"Understood," she nodded. "Whichever comes first."

At first, Carth thought for certain that given Megan was going to get the wind knocked out of her given the size of her taller opponent, but she quickly proved him wrong. In spite of being a full head shorter than the Echani she was gracefully able to block and redirect several of his volleys, which were intermixed with punches and short jabbing kicks, and to counter with a couple of blows of her own.

Ten minutes into the match, the young flight lieutenant realized that she had underestimated her opponent on the basis of his previous sparring with the tattooed man. The sweat on the Echani's was not on account of his lack of stamina, but that his earlier opponent had to have been stronger than he was. Yet, Megan found it hard to believe; she had sparred with men on many occasions but none had exhibited her current opponent's level of skill or matched his strength. She had to change tactics after the first couple of minutes and use circular movements to deflect the force of his blows.

After forty minutes of watching, Carth rolled his eyes and took a seat on one of the benches, leaning with his back against the wall and yawned.

The tattooed man joined him. "I'm curious," he regarded the young cadet. "What are the two of you doing up at this hour after an ordeal like that?"

"Couldn't sleep," the boy said watching Megan and the Echani continue to spar. "Couldn't stop thinking about what's happened, and we're not quite sure what's going to happen to us after our briefing tomorrow."

The other looked down at his time piece. "You mean this morning," he said pointing to his wrist-watch, "it's already five-hundred hours."

"O-five hundred hours!" Megan turned her head in the direction of the conversation. "Already?"

Of course the Echani took full advantage of her momentary distraction and managed to grab a hold of her arm, pulling it behind her into a tight lock.

As the young woman struggled to maintain her footing against while the Echani pulled on her arm even further, and a sudden crunching noise interrupted their foray.

"Oh!" Echani exclaimed in surprise has he immediately let go of the young pilot. "I'm terribly sorry! Are you alright?"

Carth gazed in disbelief as Megan winced. She looked down at her left arm that hung at her side. "Lovely," she said shaking her head at her dislocated shoulder.

"I didn't pull hard," the Echani insisted apologetically at his companion who immediately rose to his feet to check on the young woman.

"It's okay," she assured them. "That's happened before." And then she looked at Carth who was starting to turn green, "well, looks like you're not the only pilot making a trip to the medical bay."

Of course the young cadet was unsure what to say; between his vivid memories of the previous day, the trip to the ship's infirmary and now seeing his wingmate's arm hanging out of its socket, he head was starting to spin. "Oh—" he said feeling dizzy bracing himself against the wall only to find himself being steadied down on the bench by the tattooed man who stood over him.

"Carth?" Megan said looking at him with concern. "Not you too!"

"Try to slow your breathing," the tattooed man eyed Carth with concern. "Otherwise, you'll hyperventilate."

The boy nodded as he tried slowing his breaths. "I'm okay," he said finally.

"Well, so much for the briefing," the flight-lieutenant said.

"Perhaps not," the tattooed man said turning his attention away from the cadet and walking up beside her. "Let's see if we can pop that shoulder back in. May I?"

Megan smiled ironically as he lightly pressed his right over her shoulder blade, "So one of you is a medic and the other is a warrior?"

"It's always nice if you can do a little of both," he said grabbing the lower portion of her upper arm. "This may hurt a bit," he cautioned.

"Like it doesn't hurt now?" the young woman asked him.

"Good point," the other added as he snapped her shoulder back into place with another resounding pop that made the other pilot cringe.

"Hmph," she said slowly starting to swing her arm a bit, finding it a little odd that she felt no pain. "Thanks."

"You may want to go to the infirmary later on, after they've stopped doing triage," the dark-haired man said. "so they could give you something for the inflammation."

"Yeah, but we're not going anywhere until we get our clothes and report to the personnel office first," Carth interjected. "And we have to get going soon."

"As do we," the Echani said looking intently at his companion.

"Oh, right," the other said picking up his towel and looking at his watch. "I apologize, for the terse farewell. Good luck to both of you." He concluded heading for the door.

The Echani was right above to leave when he turned around. "One more thing," he said to Megan. "You said that you completed the Second Tier, but given your skill you really should be on the Fourth Tier. If and when you see your instructor again, tell them your ranking should reflect this."

Megan grinned. "That's rich. And what do I say after he keels over in hysterical laughter?"

"You tell him Yusanis of Echani told you to say it, and then he will have a good reason to keel over," the Echani said as he stepped through the door.

The young woman remained speechless as Carth handed her back her towel and water bottle.

"Um, we have to start getting ready for the debriefing, and we both know it's not going to be pretty," the boy said walking towards the door. But after a couple of steps he realized Megan remained standing in place. "Are you okay?"

"That was Yusanis of Echani," she echoed quietly. "I can't believe I didn't recognize him."

"Yeah, so?"

"What do you mean, 'yeah so'?" the young lieutenant retorted. "You don't even know who he is?"

"Should I?"

Megan snorted as they both walked out of the chamber. "He's only the highest-ranking Echani Grandmaster ever!"

"Um, I'm not familiar with that kind of thing," the boy shrugged. "Is that supposed to be a big deal?"

"Of course it is!" the young woman said. "What asteroid in the middle of freaking nowhere did you hatch on that you don't know something like that?"

"Sorry," the other said finally. "I just didn't know. But if that was him, who was the other guy?"

"Hmm," she shrugged. "Beats me."

---

As the evening hours on Exis Station drew to a close, the Jedi courier ship Star Darter was being primed for take-off. The itinerary was routine, as the vessel's crew had gotten used to ferrying the constant stream of Jedi back and forth from the temple on Coruscant to the repository. But this voyage would be slightly different; while the crew, by now, had grown very familiar with Master Kreia this time she had very young travel-partner. This accounted for the fifteen minute delay in the ship's normally impeccable record of regularly-scheduled take-offs.

Waiting on the ship's passenger-loading ramp, Kreia watched the child silently. Shortly after the evening meal, where she and Jolee had both witnessed a blue stream of milk fly back into its cup after Revan had accidentally tipped it over, it was decided that the child would accompany her to Coruscant. The Council would definitely be interested in how one so young could see through the Force. But Kreia also knew that she would be regarded with suspicion for the child, as Jolee had said, was alarmingly powerful. How one so young could have such an intuitive grasp on the Living Force simply defied conventional logic, although the Lore Master already had a theory of her own and an ancient prophesy to back it up. Of course, the Jedi texts were littered with dozens of prophesies: some were about the Jedi Order, some were about people, and others simply made no sense at all. Either way, Force prodigy or object of prophesy, Revan was hardly what Kreia had in mind when she had originally uncovered the text.

The fact that she had been witnessed the Mandalorian invasion of her world was unfortunate. That the child had possibly overheard future battle plans, was a huge headache, and still more incalculable was that she could clearly and accurately predict the future. And of course, for Kreia, there was only one way to handle the situation: the child would have to become her Padawan. Even as she watched the child say her final fare-well to Jolee, Kreia knew she had her work cut out for her.

"Well," Jolee said as he crouched down on his knees, getting to eye-level with the little toddler. "I guess this is it. Good-bye, Revan. May the Force be with you."

"You're not coming?" the child asked with a frown.

"No," Jolee replied. "I cannot."

"Can't or won't?"

"A little of both, actually," he replied with resignation; he had given up trying to avoid answering her questions because he knew it would simply lead to more questions.

"Why?"

"It's complicated," the middle-aged Jedi replied. "But I'm going away too."

"But why can't I go with you?" Revan insisted. "I don't want to go with her." She gestured towards the Jedi Master who stood watching in the distance.

"Revan," Jolee said sternly. "Now, that's not a very nice thing to say about Master Kreia."

The child shrugged. "She's not that nice to begin with."

"What makes you say that?"

The little girl's eyes checked her surroundings to make sure no one was watching her mouth the words. Then she drew in close and whispered. "You see all those lines on her face?"

"Yes," Jolee said looking back at Kreia with the corner of his eye, whose piercing stare made caught him so off guard that for a slight second he felt guilty. He was only trying to quell the child's fears and doubts by listening to her, yet he could not help the nagging thought in the back of his mind that he, at some point, had the same suspicion.

"Those are all frown lines," Revan indicated.

"So?" the Jedi asked. "Old people frown from time to time."

"I know," the child added, "you do it a lot."

Jolee made a face. Cute. "Okay, but what does that have to do with Master Kreia?"

"To look like that she has to frown all the time," the little girl gestured back at Kreia who just happened to be wearing a particularly acrid expression on her face. "You see what I mean?"

"Uh huh," the Jedi said showing that he was expecting a clarification. "And?"

"Do you think that anyone who frowns that much and can be nice?"

"Stranger things have happened," Jolee countered.

"That's not funny," the child said.

"Well, look who's frowning now."

"I'm not being cute," Revan said finally. "I'm being serious."

"I think you're jumping to conclusions," the other said. "You can't tell how nice someone is just by looking at them."

"It's not just that," the girl insisted. "She smells kinda funny too."

Jolee's eyes narrowed in slight annoyance. "Look, I'm going somewhere where I can take a little girl with me. And you need to be around children your own age, that's why you're going to Coruscant. It's for your own good. Master Kreia may not seem all that nice to you, but she does care about you." He said as he patted her on the shoulder. "Now, be a good girl and don't keep her waiting."

The child sighed as if she was expecting to hear that answer. It was just like big people to think that only their worries were real. "Will I see you again?"

"Maybe someday," Jolee regarded her for a moment. Of course that's if you can figure out where I'm going. He sighed. "Fare-well, little one. Listen to what the masters have to say, mind your lessons and never ever doubt that the Force is with you." He originally had reached out to shake her little hand, but was surprised with hug instead. His hardened expression softened in the face of her childish sincerity. And with that they parted, each going their separate ways.

"So, you think I'm not nice?" Master Kreia inquired.

The question almost made Revan jump as she scampered up the boarding ramp which lifted and closed behind her. Although startled by the Kreia's uncanny perception, her wits quickly recovered. "Well, you don't say such nice things," she said boldly. "You said I wasn't co-co—"

"—coherent?"

"Yes," the child's expression darkened in frustration, she had not asked to have her sentences completed for her, "coherent," she said carefully. "And you didn't mean it in a good way."

"Oh," the Jedi Master's expression eased and even managed a thin smile. "Let us be frank with one another: most children at your age can hardly utter an intelligible phrase and sadly, the condition hardly improves with age for many adults are no better. So, it should please you to learn you are not in their company."

The child was still frowning skeptically, feeling anything but pleased as the ship lifted off and finding the Jedi Master's consolation neither convincing nor especially nice.

---

Admiral Halan had almost spilled his cup of caffa on himself reaching over to turn down the volume on the holocom as the Line Captain continued with the same tirade that seemed to have gone on for much of the morning.

"—I cannot believe that on top of the not taking any disciplinary action you're actually thinking of commending those two. Even if they did manage to destroy that interdictor, they did so by disregarding a direct order . . ."

Halan sighed and made sure he was out of the path of the holocam when he looked at his watch. It was seven-hundred hours and forty-nine minutes. Saul Karath, had been speaking for about five minutes, but it felt like he had been droning on for at least five hours.

"Is that all you have to say, Saul? Or do I have to clear my schedule for the rest of the year?" Halan asked dryly. Karath was more of a friend to him that a subordinate but behind closed doors the two were on a first-name basis.

"Mon, you know what I'm talking about," Captain Karath said finally in frustration. "It's about discipline."

"Yes," Halan answered. "I know, and I've already explained to you it's not that simple. The boy's choice was made upon the basis of intelligence you couldn't have had at that moment. And Lieutenant Nayland's courage to back him up may have very well saved us all—"

"Yes but"—"I'm not finished," the Admiral quickly cut off the Captain's attempted interjection. "The best military commanders make their calls by looking at the intel and reaching a conclusion on induction, and that is precisely what you did. But Cadet Onasi's decision, as Lieutenant Nayland's report says and both Jedi Masters explained, was reached through deduction. Which would you prefer if your arse was on the line?"

Karath sighed. "All our arses were on the line."

"Precisely," Halan replied, "which is why I don't even understand why you are upset, unless, of course, it has something to do with you being a Line Captain and being second-guessed by a first-year cadet. Am I getting warm?"

The Line Captain stiffened considerably. "Um no, of course not."

"Hmm of course not," Halan said dismissively. "We both learned yesterday that there are far worse things than a bruised ego. You should be thankful for what that boy did, and if I were you I would be very interested in keeping him around. You may find that your own career might benefit from mentoring someone with raw talent like that."

"What do you mean?"

"The vice-chancellor wants to meet him."

"He does?" the Karath's eyes bulged. "Whatever for?"

"For whatever reason most politicians like to meet with the person who saved their lives," Halan replied. As he said this the door indicator sensor to his office chimed. "Come in," he said pressing the comm button on his desk.

The doors Halan's readiroom slid open, and Commander Varrs, the Executive Officer, walked in. "Sir, Lieutenant Nayland and Cadet Onasi are in the personnel office."

"Very good," the Admiral said. "Have the Lieutenant escorted here and Cadet Onasi to the briefing room."

"Yes Sir."

---

Standing quietly in the Vanguard's personnel office, Megan nervously made eye contact with her uptight-looking companion. "Well," she swallowed hard, trying to shake the terrible sense of dread that gripped her, "this is it."

"You think they'll be lenient?" Carth fidgeted, finding his flightsuit to be unusually uncomfortable today, but knowing it had more to do him being in an uncomfortable situation.

"On you, maybe," the young lieutenant said.

As she said this, the Personnel Officer entered the room with his eyes fixed sharply on the two young pilots, who both stiffened to attention and a quick salute.

"Second Lieutenant Megan Nayland?" he questioned.

"That's me, Sir," came a prompt reply.

"Follow me," the Personnel Officer said as he walked towards the doors leading to the main corridor on the command deck.

"Yes, Sir," the young woman said, she quickly flashed Carth an "I-told-you-so" look regarding them each being debriefed separately.

The young cadet said nothing he saw both of them turn to leave, but then at the last possible moment he spoke: "Um, what about me, Sir?"

The other man turned and glared at him. "Don't worry, you'll get yours soon enough."

"Um, yes, Sir," the boy replied. "Sorry, Sir." But as soon as the officer left the room, he sighed with embarrassment. Wow, I bet.

Meanwhile, Megan said nothing as she followed the Personnel Officer down the corridor towards what looked to be the bridge of the ship. Passing through the sliding doors that marked the bridge's entrance, she walked a series of naval officers working at their control panels. Occasionally one or two of them would look up at her, which only reinforced her impending sense of doom. I must have really fracked up royally this time.

As soon as the readiroom's doors slid open, the young flight lieutenant thought she was going to be sick. She could almost feel the heat of her military career going down in flames. Her green eyes turned and saw and aging grey-haired man wearing a perfect bright red uniform, the tell-tale sign of a fleet admiral; the same one she had mouthed-off to earlier. "Admiral Halan," she said clicking her heels together straitening her back and saluting so quickly that she nearly poked herself in the eye, "Sir."

"At ease Lieutenant," the Halan told her as he eyed her from head to toe. "And take a seat. You look like you're about to have a heart-attack."

---

Carth followed the Personnel Officer through the Vanguard's command deck, down a side corridor. "Um, excuse me, Sir, but where are we going?" He had distinctly remembered that his wingmate had taken the opposite direction.

The officer turned and scowled. "You're scheduled for debriefing right?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Well, that's where you're going to the briefing room; isn't it obvious?"

"Sorry, Sir." And then Carth saw something he had only briefly seen in his textbook and HoloNet newscasts: two tall men wearing dark blue armor, covered with thick cloaks of rich royal blue velvet. Each wore a matching helmet with a small protruding crest topped with long strands of black synth-hair draping over. Each had a force-pike in one hand and the stock of a very large blaster carbine protruded out from behind the opposite shoulder. These were Senatorial Guards, which meant the only reason they were standing outside the corridor was that they were guarding a Senate official who had to be inside the room. And to Carth's knowledge, the only Senate official aboard the Vanguard was the vice-chancellor.

No sooner had he seen this when another guard came through the doors. "Cadet Onasi?" the guard asked.

"Um, yes Sir?"

"You are not carrying any weapons, blasters, knives, explosives or any other object that could be used or construed as a weapon, are you?"

"No, Sir."

But even as they boy said this, the guard pulled out a scanner and swept it over the boy's flightsuit. About a minute later, the guard looked up again and said. "Okay, you are clear. You may enter."

Taking a deep breath as if he was about to plunge into a tub of ice-water, the boy stepped into the briefing room. It was much darker than the corridor; the large viewport on the opposite wall painted everything in the bluish light of hyperspace. The cadet heard the humming of hydraulic gears and a familiar-sounding sputter of whistles.

"Teethree?" Carth said seeing the little lights on the droid's paneling flickering in the darkness as it rolled up and greeted him.

"You're okay! I didn't think you made it through the explosion."

The T-3's outer casing was still a little singed in places, although it looked like someone tried to clean it up. The droid let out two staccato sets of affirmative beeps, indicating he was grateful for the concern.

"He almost didn't," an extremely familiar voice with the properly inflected Deep Core accent came from the shadows. It grew louder as the person who spoke was getting closer and then a tall black-haired man stepped into the light. His features were strong with a distinctly long nose, arched dark eyebrows, and a well-defined jaw line. He wore a suit with a long blue-grey waistcoat contrasting only with the crisp white tunic collar that protruded from underneath. "But, you and Lieutenant Nayland barely made it through yourselves," Vice-Chancellor Antares spoke; the look on his face was unmistakable.

Carth was thunderstruck. What the—! It was the tattooed man that he had met just a few hours earlier in the rec room.

Antares smiled thinly, noting look of shock on the cadet's face. "Are you alright?" he inquired as he raised an eyebrow.

"Um, no," the boy said bewildered. "Um, I mean yes."

"Would you mind terribly if I dropped the accent?" Antares asked switching into the more casually inflected basic of the Colonies and the rim ward territories. "In the Core, most beings speak Basic with received pronunciation, but I prefer to switch to my native Basic whenever I meet someone from the Rim."

"Sure, go ahead."

The vice-chancellor regarded Carth directly gesturing for him to have a seat at the long conference table where one of guards immediately pulled out a chair. The young cadet paused for a moment as he recognized the Echani fighter from the night before.

"Not quite what you expected, am I?" Antares observed, as he reached over to a heavy crystal decanter and poured some amber-colored liquid into a conspicuously unpretentious flimsiplast cup.

"No, Sir," Carth replied. "I thought you were going to be older."

With that Antares smiled in full earnest. "I could say the same thing for you. Don't watch much holovision, do you?"

"Um, can't say I have, lately, Sir."

"Good. That stuff rots your brain anyway," he said as he took a seat at the table across from where Carth was sitting. "Most people, when they think of my title, imagine someone who has had too many diplomatic dinners, and far too few push-ups. It's unfortunate condition that plagues most of my distinguished peers resulting a in common stereotype that I don't mind breaking." He handed the boy a flimsiplast cup of amber liquid. "I know you've been having trouble sleeping. This will help. Just don't drink it all at once or it will go straight to your head, especially on an empty stomach."

Carth sniffed the cup curiously and immediately knew it was a strong liquor of some kind. "Um, I can't. I'm under the legal drinking age."

"You're also under legal piloting age, but that didn't stop Fleet Command from putting you in this predicament, did it? Nor did it stop you from acting?" the other asked. "You see really knowing the rules entails knowing when and why they can be broken."

The boy sighed uncomfortably knowing precisely where the conversation was headed, suddenly the drink in front of him did not look that bad after all.

"In light of what you did, I decided to have a look through your file," Antares said keying up a datapad that lay on the table.

"My file, Sir?"

"Yes, the military keeps a file on everyone who has served and their family members," the other said glancing over at the datapad. "Look's like both your parents fought in the Sith War, not a bad thing although the war itself was a bad thing for the Republic. I'm terribly sorry to hear about your father, by the way. It's quite tragic."

"Um thanks," the cadet said quietly, but then he thought about it a moment. "Wait! That can't be right; as far as I was told only my father served."

"Yes, he was a pilot as well. However, your mother was also involved, but I'm not surprised that you don't know."

The boy eyed Antares very carefully. "Am I in trouble, because I defied Captain Karath's orders, Sir?"

"Quite the opposite. Had it not been for your's and Lieutenant Nayland's actions, we would have all been permanantly one with the Force. You can read the Admiral Halan's notes on it if you like, here." He called up a different file on the datapad and slid the device across the table to his young companion.

"But I could have been wrong. In many ways, it was a stupid risk," Carth objected.

"The risk was only there because so many pilots were not provided with the proper equipment due to the budget cuts the Senate enacted after the war. Had you all had upgraded astromech droids, like Teethree over there," he gestured towards the little astromech droid that stood in the corner of the room, "I'm certain that battle would have gone very differently. I apologize for any part I may have played that terrible debacle. And I promise, that once we reach Republic space, that I will do everything in my power to ensure that what happened yesterday will never happen again, even if the Finance Committee has to redirect emergency funding to it."

Carth sighed, "What's the likelihood of that happening?"

"It's not going to be easy. To make up for the shortfall the Senate will have to either increase taxes or slash the budgeting from other areas. I know that's not going to make me very popular, but my staff and I are already in working on getting a draft of the preliminary proposal to be submitted as soon as we arrive on Corellia. So at this point, nothing short of assassination is going to stop me from going forward with it."

"Still," Carth said. "I didn't know that Dreadnaught was there. It was a guess."

"No," the vice-chancellor said with emphatic assurance. "No, it wasn't. You made an intuitive leap of faith and you landed on solid ground."

"A leap of faith?"

"Yes, it doesn't happen often, but it does occur with some beings," Antares continued. "You are what when I was your age back in the day that gigantic space grazers roamed the galaxy, was called 'favored by the Force,' known more commonly today as being Force-sensitive."

"You mean I could be a Jedi?" the thought struck the boy as very odd.

"Well, not really. You're a little old for that now. All Jedi are Force-sensitive, but not all Force-sensitives are Jedi. There are some that follow more mundane career paths: some go into medicine; others who go into law-enforcement; a few go into the military, like yourself; and some even go into politics," he hesitated a bit on his last phrase and then continued: " Which brings me to back to reason I requested to meet you. I'm recommending you for an immediate transfer into the OTP."

"The Officer's Training Program?" the Carth was not quite sure he had heard correctly. "That's not possible I've got to return to the Academy in three weeks to start the new semester."

"I know, that's why I've spoken with the administrator there and we're in the process of arranging things. You're not going back to the Academy next semester. You're going to attend the Aerial Combat and Command School on Corellia instead."

"B—but what about the entrance exams?"

"Waved in light of what you pulled off yesterday. I seriously doubt any obstacle could compare to what you've already surmounted."

"And I haven't even graduated," the boy continued.

Antares reached over into his coat pocket, pulled out a small black cloth-covered box and placed it on the table.

The young cadet picked it up and eyed it carefully.

"As we are speaking, Admiral Halan is promoting Second Lieutenant Nayland to lieutenant flight commander. At first we weren't sure what exactly to do with you, since your are still a cadet. The rank of first lieutenant was proposed, but since you haven't finished your training we decided it was unfair to the other officers. Go ahead and open it."

Flipping the little box open, Carth saw a small insignia with two red wings hanging together. "The Crimson Wings?" the boy questioned in disbelief so taken aback he rose from his chair— "B-but that means that I've just-just—"

The boy was still trying to get his mind around the idea when Antares reached out and shook his hand.

"You've just graduated. Congratulations Ensign Onasi."

---

With the unexpected loss of one of Mandalorian Dungeon Ships, Mandalore had called for seven more Dreadnaughts to provide fire-cover in case another Republic cruiser went up in flames and to transport the rest of the Republic captives. He stood on the bridge of the Apocalypse waiting for the capture operation to finish, when all of a sudden the Mandalorian warrior managing the communications frequency saw an incoming hyperwave signal on a priority channel.

"Mando'," she said. "There is an incoming hyperwave transmission. It's encrypted."

The armored Mandalorian Commander took a long look at the console. "I recognize the frequency," he said finally. "Transfer it to my chambers immediately."

The Mandalorian female looked up partially wondering why he seemed agitated, but she followed his orders.

He then turned and briskly made his way off the bridge, his long red cape flared in the air as he quickened his pace.

Stepping through the threshold of his private chambers, Mandalore reached for the comm console on his desk and activated the holocomm.

The transceiver flickered on, displaying the image of a dark clocked figure. A partially covered human face indicated the person who was speaking as female, but he already knew this much since he had dealt with her before.

"You have been careless in your dealings, Mandalore," an older woman's voice declared with an icy disproving tone. "Why are you not honoring terms of our arrangement?"

"I have, Lord Traya," the Mandalorian Commander insisted, pausing a moment when he realized he had addressed the Sith Lord, or Lady in this instance, incorrectly according to proper Basic. And, yet, he also knew that in many cultures that spoke the language, females and males were not regarded as equals as many thought that feminine title did not possess the legitimate authority of masculine one. Of course, Mando'a was not a gendered language and the Mandalorians did not make such trivial distinctions, and he saw no need to stoop to that level. In his mind, a Sith Lord was a Sith Lord whether male or female, just as a Mandalorian warrior was a Mandalorian warrior, regardless of gender. And anyone who idled their time away conceiving or entertaining to such frivolous notions deserved to be conquered. "I am adhering to the agreement I made with you and the others."

"But not to the timetable," the Sith declared, "as demonstrated through your brush with Admiral Halan's Fleet in the Bajic Sector this morning."

"Attacking during the Republic Tournament will accelerate what you said would be the Republic's inevitable involvement in this war. And it provided an excellent opportunity to test ourselves against the battle against the enemy."

"Drawing their attention, alerting them to the threat, and thus making them stronger."

"Doubtful, at best," Mandalore observed. "The Deralians took a standard month to subdue, while a fleet took five hours."

"Yes, I know all about the Deralian incident," the Traya noted. "And warn you to be cautious where and when you choose to conquer, lest you transplant the seed of your own demise and water it with blood."

"Cautious? If I knew a Republic Fleet would have folded so quickly, I would have started the raids sooner. You said the Republic Navy would be a worthy adversary; that this war would immortalize the memory of the Mando'ade for all time. There's no honor in facing an inept and inferior opponent on the battlefield."

"And as a warrior you already know that few stray shots fired blindly in the night is not a battle, just as a battle is not to be confused with war."

"So when will this war take place?"

"When you have enough warriors, ships, and resources to face that adversary, acquired by adhering to the original timetable."

"But means at least another decade."

"Patience, Mandalore, for it takes a great deal of time and prodding to rouse a sleeping giant," with that the transmission ended, and he was left to ponder the implications of the Sith Lord's warning.

---

Somewhere on a ship traveling at the speed of light in the whirling blue tunnel of hyperspace, a hand reached over and shut off the holocomm. This shrouded main hold of the Jedi courier vessel in almost complete darkness. Kreia turned and eyed the small lump that lay motionless on one of the passenger couches, covered over with two blankets. "Especially when she hasn't grown up yet," the Sith Lord, in the most unlikely of guises, mused as she quietly walked out of the room.

But no sooner had the older woman left the room when two eyes opened. Wide awake and fully aware, Revan remained motionless on the passenger couch until finally she found the courage to wrap her arms around the cushion she had been using as a pillow. Once again, she was alone against big, scary and hostile universe, as she would be in almost all the defining moments of her life. No amount of tears could change this.

The child drew the pillow close to her breast and she curled herself around it, trying to draw whatever comfort could be had from it, yet she could find none. There was no one who could save her or come to her rescue, or even so much as utter a single phrase of encouragement. Revan shivered in darkness, feeling lost, helpless and, above all, powerless for she had heard everything.