We don't have that kind of time…
Carth absent-mindedly rubbed his knee, now sure to have a bruise from where it had banged against the metal bulkhead for at least the sixth time. For some reason his legs kept stretching themselves out under the small navigational workstation in the cockpit, despite the fact that there was no additional room beyond a couple of centimeters.
Because you're used to finding more than metal bulkheads at your feet when you're working.
What he was used to finding, what his wayward feet kept searching for, was back near the Core worlds, far away on Coruscant.
"It'll be all right, Jawa. Everyone here's a Jedi, just like Mommy and Dustil."
Who are you reassuring, Onasi? Her or you?
Celyn had stood behind him, peering out with a wary look on her face.
He didn't blame her. The sun was barely up, casting contorted shadows of the dozen or so children in the room across the pale geometric patterns in the floor. It was deathly quiet; a couple of the older ones were absorbed in datapads, but most of them sat with their legs folded and their hands resting on their knees in meditation.
No, they weren't sitting. They were floating. And either they didn't notice him standing in the doorway in his old orange flight jacket with a little girl hiding behind him, or they didn't think it was anything out of the ordinary.
Nope. He didn't blame Celyn in the slightest. It looked like the beginnings of a kid-sized cult.
"Now Celyn-"
He had turned and half-knelt to say a final goodbye to her, but his daughter just squeezed his hand, lifted her chin and walked right past him.
Well. That's rich, he thought, rolling his eyes and watching her for a second or so as she walked down the few steps into the room.
The child Jedi apprentices might not have noticed him, but they did notice Celyn. A few opened their eyes or glanced up at her as she passed them.
You're just like your mother, Jawa-
One of the meditating children had dropped one of the objects they had been levitating. He watched Celyn pause and retrieve it from the floor, inspecting it before holding it towards the apprentice and saying something. The Jedi kid floated back to the floor clumsily, glancing up at Celyn and finally answering.
Except for that, he had thought with a smile, turning around and finally leaving, leaving her for good. Because Katrina would have tried to make the thing turn cartwheels in the air before giving it back to the kid.
Carth leaned back in his chair, rubbing his neck and staring vaguely at the star maps in front of him. Thinking about her for too long always ended in something bad. Either he got angry that she had left in the first place, or he got worried that something had happened to her. Or, he began to miss her enough that he started imagining she was here, standing over his shoulder or curled up in the co-pilot's seat. He sighed.
Where are you, gorgeous?
Katrina Onasi, whom he hadn't seen in nearly a year and one month. Revan, whom he hadn't heard from in almost seven months. He already worried that every passing day was just bringing him closer to his now-recurring nightmare:
"Father?"
Carth glanced up at Dustil's hand, heavy on his shoulder. He followed it up to Dustil's face, which looked unusually guilty.
"What's wrong?"
Dustil sat down in the co-pilot's chair, clasping his hands together and leaning forward to rest his arms on his knees.
His Force-sensitive son, able to sense what was going to happen, able to know the fate of those he was connected with, including his former master, sighed once.
"We can go home, Father. Revan's dead."
Carth turned his attention back to the star maps and the navigational array lying out in front of him. Going sublight they were a month behind the Ebon Hawk's position at the first real planet past the boundaries of the Outer Rim. He checked his calculations once more. They looked right. They matched up with the Hawk's last position. Open space, nothing to impede a ship dropping out of hyperspace.
Never make a hyperspace jump into uncharted territory.
That wasn't something you were taught in the Fleet; that was something every idiot who could pilot a freighter knew.
But this is someplace she might have stopped; someplace she might have been…
A lot of things could happen in a month. And they didn't have that kind of time to waste.
He pushed himself up from the navigational workstation and stretched. Dustil entered the cramped cockpit, batting one of his flexing elbows out of his way.
"Hey, what do you know- more stars," he said, rolling his eyes and dropping into the pilot's chair.
Carth sometimes wondered how the hell Dustil could be a Jedi Knight, founder of a future Jedi Academy, engaged to be married, and still manage to slouch and look as utterly bored as he did right now.
"Cheer up. We're going to catch up to the Hawk and that planet soon."
"With the state that thing is in, it'll probably slow down enough to catch up to us," his son muttered.
"What's with everybody knocking the Hawk lately? Sure, it's a little beat up, but hell, it saved the galaxy in its day."
Dustil gave him a wicked smile. "They'll be saying that about you in a couple years."
Carth slapped him on the shoulder with the datapad and dropped it into his lap. His son only laughed. Dustil turned the datapad right side up and glanced over it.
"We're making a hyperspace jump?"
Carth reached up and hit a couple switches, making the adjustments necessary to send the Chaser into hyperspace. He nodded to Dustil. His son leaned forward and punched in the coordinates.
The Chaser's engines gave a slow crescendo up to a high pitch, and the stars turned into long blue and white lines around them.
The slight heaviness of hyperspace travel pressed Carth back into his chair. The rhythm of a hyperspace jump was comforting. Members of the Fleet learned it was the best place to be; no one could attack you in the midst of a hyperspace jump.
He was so relaxed and confident that it came as a complete shock when Dustil reached for the controls to pull them out of the jump and a huge wall of brown rock appeared, just centimeters from the windows of the cockpit.
The Chaser made a sharp nose dive, only to meet another brown rock, punctured with dozens of holes that ranged from tiny dots to larger burrows.
"Frack, frack, frack-"
Dustil's entire body shifted as he worked the controls, punctuating each successfully cleared rock with a 'frack'.
Carth blinked a few times to make sure that the field of innumerable asteroids in front of his eyes wasn't his imagination. The Chaser swung wildly to the left in an effort to avoid another one, only to practically bounce into a smaller asteroid. The shield alarms began ringing loudly.
Nope. Definitely not his imagination.
"What the hell did you do?" Carth shouted.
"It wasn't me! It was you and your stupid coordinates!" Dustil protested. The Chaser rocked violently as their hull barely scraped another asteroid.
Need to get in the pilot's chair, need to be the one flying us out of this mess-
"Give me the controls-"
"No, I can do it-"
"Give me the damn controls, Dustil!"
His son quickly slid out of the pilot's chair. Carth barely had time to maneuver the ship between two asteroids heading straight for either side.
The field seemed like it would never end. The asteroids hurtling towards him were gigantic and brown and full of holes that, from far away, looked like they could swallow the Jedi Chaser whole.
Carth couldn't avoid side-swiping an angular rock to starboard. The ship began to shimmy violently.
Must have calculated wrong, or gotten the wrong coordinates, something must have gone wrong-
"Father, aren't you supposed be some kind of famous pilot? Can you try not to hit every single hunk of space debris you see?" Dustil snapped, his hands clenched tightly around the edges of his seat.
"You're not too old to be grounded, you know," Carth shot back, feeling the sweat starting to run down his brow.
Dustil snorted. "From what, my wedding?"
Concentrate, concentrate, pay attention, do not start wondering if you're going to live to see your son's wedding, do not start hating yourself for putting him in danger-
The Chaser's stabilizers finally kicked in and the ship righted itself. Carth began to weave between the asteroids, looking desperately for the end of the field. Another scraped loudly against the top of the cockpit and he involuntarily cringed, waiting for it to come crashing through the roof.
And then, as abruptly as they had entered the field, they were out of it. In front of them was a field of white stars and black space. The planet loomed off to the right, a burnt orange mass that looked slightly misshapen because of its craters.
Carth slumped backwards in the chair, reaching to unbutton his jacket. His vision was impaired by several sweaty strands of his own hair.
"You all right, Dustil?"
His son nodded, standing up and cautiously looking around; like the asteroids had developed sentient thought and were forming ranks, ready to strike again.
"If I ever complain about being bored again, hit me."
Carth sighed, putting his hands on his knees and pushing himself up from the chair, heading back towards the Chaser's engine room.
Once he saw it, he didn't like the looks of the hyperdrive. For one, the readings were completely off the charts. The thing should have been doing triple-lightspeed from the numbers he saw on the wall console. For another, the edges of the access panel were singed. Trickles of smoke and electrical sparks licked out from its corners. He reached for the panel door and hissed loudly, holding his slightly burned fingers up to his lips.
Dustil stood in the doorway, scratching his head.
"So what now, Admiral?"
A month on a ship alone with his twenty-something son's smart-aleck behavior made Carth remind himself that glaring at Dustil wasn't going to solve anything. He managed to soften it to a stern parental gaze.
Why don't you blow up the whole ship, Onasi? Save yourself some time-
"Look, Father, it'll be all right-"
"Hey, you're the kid here, not the parent. You don't have to reassure me-"
"Well I wouldn't if you weren't broadcasting general panic wide enough for any Force sensitive in the area to pick up-"
"Oh for crying out…you see, this is why I can't stand Jedi," Carth snapped, whirling on Dustil, pointing an accusatory finger in his face. "There's always some greater, mystical plan to everything, some bigger threat that the rest of us can't possibly understand because we can't feel it. You know, the galaxy's going to blow up by the time you people figure it out!"
Carth became aware of his half open jacket, his hair plastered to his sweaty brow, but most of all Dustil's critically raised eyebrow.
Good job, Onasi, break the ship, tell your son his occupation is for losers-
"Sorry, Dustil," he finally said. "I'm just…you…you shouldn't be out here. I shouldn't have left your sister. And we're both here because of Katrina's stupid idea that she has to fight these Sith she feels, even though there's no proof-"
"Revan's right about this one," Dustil replied flatly. "They exist, and they could crush the Order if they wanted to."
"How? Are there a lot of them? Do they have resources, manpower, what? What exactly happened out there while you two were in hiding?"
Because he didn't have a very clear idea. Hell, he'd been so glad to see them both, floored by the knowledge of pregnant Revan and smitten Dustil that the actual mechanics of her mysterious "I have to leave" speech and Dustil's supposed first-hand knowledge of these ancient Sith methods of conversion hadn't crossed his mind until Revan had already decided what she was going to tell him and what she was going to omit.
His son began to fidget, leaning forward to repeat Carth's earlier attempted inspection of the hyperdrive panel; biting his lip and shaking his burnt fingers.
"It's only going to upset you-"
"You want to know what I'm tired of, Dustil?" Carth began with a frown, watching Dustil pace around the small engine room nursing his hand.
"I'm tired of everyone treating me like I'm not a middle-aged Admiral in the Republic Fleet, like I haven't been through two wars already. I've seen and done a lot of things in my life, and I'm not going to crumble or die of despair if someone tells me something I don't particularly want to hear."
"Well good, we're agreed," Dustil continued weakly, turning towards the cockpit and walking to the doorway. "You don't want to hear about it, and I don't want to talk about it-"
"You don't have to protect me, son," Carth forced out slowly, though it was still direct enough to make Dustil glance over his shoulder.
The Jedi Chaser was a lot smaller than the Ebon Hawk; cockpit, engine room, cargo hold, captain's quarters and crew quarters made up its sleek design. But whoever had constructed it had made the most of its space. There were hundreds of various nooks for everyday activities, such as the low shelf in the engine room that acted like a bench. Carth seated himself on it, gesturing towards Dustil to join him.
His son watched him cautiously like it was some kind of trap.
"You won't understand, Father," he finally said, joining Carth on the bench. "It's beyond ships and firepower-"
"Let me worry about understanding, all right? Just tell me. Tell me what's so different, what's so horrible about these true or ancient Sith."
He didn't like the look on Dustil's face, and more so didn't like the fact that it was his questioning that was bringing it on.
"These Sith…they're really old Sith. They're either direct descendents of or the last survivors of the ancient Sith race, the beings that first learned to use the Force from dark Jedi who left the Order."
Carth struggled not to fall behind under terms like 'ancient Sith race' and 'dark Jedi who left the Order', parts of a history he and most of the galaxy had never been taught.
"And they're nothing like the Sith you've been fighting, they've got nothing to do with the Republic, not like the ones that blew up Telos or Admiral Karath or any of that. Not even like on Korriban or like Malak and-"
His son trailed off, avoiding his gaze.
"They're not out to kill us. They're not out to exterminate the Jedi-"
"Then what do they want?" Carth pressed.
"Us. Jedi. Modern Sith. All Force sensitives. They want us."
Dustil sighed heavily.
"Just the thought of conversion is frightening enough to the right people."
My son is one of those right people. My son was a Sith.
"The fear and the anticipation are almost enough to make a Force user turn without their help." Dustil shifted uncomfortably next to him, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped in front of him, staring blankly across the room.
"They start with the usual torture- physical stuff like lightning. It burns. It burns cold though, not hot like you'd think it would. Your skin itches so much you feel like you want to rip it all off."
He'd never been hit with Force lightning. He'd watched Bastila, Juhani, Katrina and Jolee all grit their teeth and continue through it like it was just hail.
He wondered how many times Dustil had been jolted breathless by it, how many times his son had writhed on the ground in pain like Carth remembered watching Katrina and one of the kids from the Academy- Melek? Mekel?- do on Korriban.
The thought that it had even been once made his fists clench together.
"But that's nothing, Father. You've…you've been tortured before, you know-"
"I know." Carth said sharply.
The Leviathan. Felt like I was being cut with eight-thousand vibroblades and then dipped in salt water.
Wanted it to stop, wanted to tell them all about the Jedi and the Star Forge and Morgana and Dustil and anything else they wanted to know-
"That stuff's not enough to make a good Jedi turn. Pain can be worked through, pain you can meditate past, wounds you can heal. It's how they hurt people that aren't even there that ends up converting you."
"That doesn't make any sense, Dustil-"
"They take your memories and twist them. They show you variations on your past decisions or someone else's, or they show you what might have happened if you had made different choices."
He watched Dustil's clasped hands tremble slightly.
"And you try to remember what really happened before they messed with your memory of something, but all you can see is their version. And then you start to wonder if their version is actually how it happened."
He had been barely asleep, so it wasn't a surprise that even her small jolt, sigh, and resettling into the pillow had disturbed him.
Carth rolled over.
"Revan?" Her eyes opened obediently.
"You all right?" She nodded even though the stiffness in her body was visibly painful. Carth grasped her hand.
"Just another memory," Katrina whispered.
"I'm sorry, gorgeous. If I could make them stop, I would-"
"I don't want them to stop," she interrupted softly, closing her eyes. "I want them back. I want to stop wondering if I've done something before, only I just don't remember."
They say the Force can do terrible things to a mind. It can wipe away your memories and destroy your very identity.
I can't believe I said that to her…before we even knew-
He became aware of Dustil inching away from him, ready to bolt for the cockpit.
"Hey, Dustil…" Carth tried to grasp his shoulder comfortingly, keep him from retreating, but his son's Jedi reflexes had him on his feet and a couple centimeters away from Carth before his hand could even touch him.
"If they…if we ever find them, Father," Dustil began, his tone stern like the Jedi Masters Carth never envisioned his son emulating. "If we're ever up against them in a fight…don't think about anything you care about. Don't think about me, don't think about Revan, don't think about Celyn…"
His son paused in the doorway, his back to Carth, whatever emotions creeping into his face hidden from Carth's view.
"And especially Mom," Dustil finished hoarsely. "Do not think about Mom."
He considered chasing after him, although Dustil admittedly couldn't get much farther than the cockpit, and Carth could even see him slump down into the co-pilot's chair if he leaned over and peered down the corridor.
Carth clasped his hands together, waiting out the obligatory ten minutes to give Dustil time for contemplation, or meditation, or…whatever Jedi in a bad mood did.
"Unidentified ship, export or import?"
The ten minutes were up, and the gruff voice that asked Carth the question as he sat back down in the pilot's chair was not recognizably alien or Sith or anything else other than male and slightly bored. Dustil turned to look at him, raising an eyebrow expectantly.
"We've sustained heavy damage, unidentified port," Carth replied smoothly. "We're drifting towards you and request permission to land and make repairs."
His voice was smooth but the feeling in his stomach was anything but. He had absolutely no idea what to expect or how to prepare for it. Katrina's coordinates told him nothing but what direction to go.
And her messages weren't a big help either. He knew: he'd dissected every single one.
She had kept them on a strict timeline- two transmissions every month like clockwork. And then suddenly, inexplicably, they had stopped. There had been no slow down, no visible proof in what she wrote to him that anything had changed.
Carth frowned. It wasn't as if she had ever sent him anything useful anyways. She never said a word about where she was or what she was doing; only generic letters about how she missed him and Celyn, questions about Dustil, or, rarest of all, how she was feeling.
Nothing helpful like, say, planet names and affiliations and what the hell 'export or import' might mean…
"Temporary docking granted in distribution port six."
Carth shook his head, sitting up over the console and moving the Chaser towards the planet's atmosphere.
I don't see any Sith yet, beautiful. You still haven't convinced me. He glanced over at Dustil, who had come pretty close.
It infuriated him that there were things in the galaxy he would never even have a chance to protect them from. It infuriated him more that there was a whole dimension to Dustil and Katrina and even Celyn's lives that he could never grasp because he wasn't Force-sensitive.
But that wasn't about to make him stop trying.
