Chapter 11

Cheat

The swoop was small, with an underpowered engine. On the open stretches of grass or road, Ahsoka pushed the engine up to a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour, but the engine didn't seem to want to go much faster than that. The wind whipped back the long nerf-hide coat that Ahsoka had put on to protect herself from wind, and to act as an extra layer of disguise. She wore a different set of goggles, one that was strongly tinted to hide her eyes. Cleaned of engine grease, now she looked less like a teenage mechanic, and more like a teenage swoop hooligan.

Or rather, with a swoop this underpowered, she looked more like a wannabe teenage swoop hooligan.

The first half of the trip was an exercise in beauty, crossing over broad plains of waving grasses. As much as Ahsoka tried to focus on the task at hand, she couldn't help but to be distracted, and calmed by the rolling landscape. Unfortunately, the landscape had a habit of occasionally tossing up bugs and bits of chaff up to Ahsoka's face level, so every now and then her moving meditation was interrupted rather unexpectedly.

The second half, once she got closer to the city, was on roads. Which meant that she actually had to slow down to the same speed as the other vehicles, which in this area were mostly grain delivery trucks.

Eventually she got to the outskirts of Sandrale city. There was no point in keeping an eye out for the Inquisitor's ship, it was so much faster than her swoop that it had probably arrived before she even finished fueling it up.

The city was the closest thing that this side of Dantooine had to a bustling spaceport. Which meant that by the standards Ahsoka was used to, it was tiny. Then again, after thirteen years spent on Coruscant, every city seemed tiny.

Now for the hard part. Ahsoka had to figure out what the Inquisitor's tip was, and how to beat him to it in spite of his head start. It was times like this that the Force came in really handy.


"Come on now, come on now, try your best. See if you can outsmart a ten year old boy. Are your eyes faster than my hands? Throw in a cred or two to find out," yelled Nat Tina. The din of the marketplace meant that he had to yell, otherwise no one could hear him from more than a few meters away. "You, sir, care to prove your mental might? Can you outwit a ten year old Twi'lek?"

The man, who had been walking through the marketplace with a pretty girl by his side, smiled and walked over to Nat. "Sure, I'll give it a try," he said as he flicked a two credit chit onto Nat's table, which was really more of a board sitting on top of a bucket than an actual table.

"Can you look faster than I can move? Let's see!" said Nat, in his most theatrical voice. He lifted up each of the three cups on his table, one by one, showing a warra nut underneath one of them. "Now, the object is simple. I flip, spin, move, switch these cups as fast as I can. It's up to you to keep track of which cup has the warra nut. Now, here we go... there's a spin, and a twist... and a twirl..."

Nat started off slow, moving and switching the cups again. He got faster, and faster, until eventually it got so fast that it was difficult to follow. Even he didn't bother keeping track of which cup the green nut was in. He came to a halt, and took his hands off the cups and said, "So... can you outsmart a ten year old? Which one is the warra nut in? Care to take a guess?"

The young man pointed to the cup on the right. Nat narrowed his eyes and focused in the Force. The young man was wrong... but he seemed like an honest guy. Nat knew he had to let people win now and then, otherwise he'd stop getting patrons. Using the Force, he lifted up the warra nuts in the left and center cups so that they hovered at the top of the cups. One by one, he lifted up the cups to show the only visible warra nut in the cup on the right. "Good call, you've beaten a ten year old!" Nat said, with a warm, but slightly sarcastic tone. He was nothing if not a showman. He tossed the young man's credit chit back to him, along with another two credit chit.

The young man laughed, and tossed one of the chits back to Nat. "Thanks for the show, kid. I wasn't sure I got it right."

Nat caught the chit out of midair, and winked at the girl next to the young man and said, "He's a keeper, don't let him stray too far!"

A week ago Nat Tina had been honored to be sent on his first mission as a Padawan to Jedi Master Tolan Reyes. Now he was a few dozen light years away, playing shell games to buy food.

And he was having trouble finding people he didn't feel guilty about taking money from. Most of the citizens here on Dantooine were friendly farmers, more than willing to toss a credit to a poor young boy in need. But Nat didn't want their money. He wanted money from the greedy, the churlish, and from those people who would toss money at him because they thought they could defeat and humiliate him in the middle of the market. Fortunately for this world, there weren't many people of that sort. Unfortunately for Nat's growling stomach, those people were, as far as he could tell, much too few and far between.

He looked up and scanned the crowd, with his eyes and with the Force. His senses drew his attention to a pretty Togruta girl in a long nerf-hide jacked. "What about you, care to try your luck, or if you're good enough, your skill?"

"You little turg," bellowed a slurred, drunken voice to Nat's right.

"Oh great," thought Nat, "there's one of those people now." He quickly started to gather up his cups and warra nuts. Those could very well end up being his dinner tonight.

"You cheated me! I want my karking money back!" The man stomped up to Nat and kicked Nat's short table. The bucket went spinning to the right, and the board went spinning to the left. The drunkard, a large man with bloodshot eyes and wearing stained coveralls, swiped one meaty hand at Nat's brain tails. Nat dodged, rolling to the left and grabbing his tabletop with both hands. He jumped to his feet and raised his board high, ready to swing it at the man's head. The man gave a grunt as he fell down to his knees, then made a choking sound.

Nat stared, confused. Then he noticed the thin orange arm that had snaked around the man's throat from behind. The teenage Togruta had one foot on the back of the drunkard's knees, and was gently, but firmly applying a sleeper hold to the man's cartoid artery.

"Sleep it off, buddy," she said, as the man went limp. She let go, and he fell to the ground. Nat stared, in shock and still ready to strike with his board. After dropping the drunk dead weight, she looked up at Nat and said, "I think we need to get you out of here. It's not safe."

Then Nat realized where he knew her from. The last time he'd seen that face, she'd been taking six other Younglings to Ilum to get their lightsaber crystals. "Padawan Tano?"

Suddenly his fledgling danger sense flared, and he turned and yelped, just in time to see former Padawan Ahsoka Tano sweep her hand in front of her, telekinetically knocking an electrified net to the side. A tall, red haired, well muscled Zygerrian stood ten meters away, with a small rifle of some kind pointed at them.