"The Outer Rim's lawlessness and lack of central authority make it fertile ground for folklorists. In the Core children play at being T.I.E. aces, but at the distant edges of the known universe, where holoprojectors are rare and sanctioned galactic history is all but unknown, they still swing sticks like swords and proudly declare themselves heroes with no fear."
- Jon-Win Grale, Children's Tales in the Outer Rim, B'kath University Publishers, Ltd.

"Friendly reminder that this year's peer evaluations need to be filled out with constructive criticism (no swear words, please!) and submitted to your division's political officer by the end of the pay period."
- Century Shipyards Engineering Department, Internal HR Transmission 92-801-35

The Circle
Chapter 11

All things considered, it was a miracle that the crippled troop transport - leaking fuel and air and Force knew what else and far too fragile for any tractor beam to catch - didn't hit the Retaliator's hangar bay like a live bomb. In fact, all it did was skid across the deck and crash through a cluster of T.I.E.s no one had had time to move. The ensuing burst of heat and flames melted part of the comm relays and overloaded the fire suppression systems and was, generally speaking, a minor calamity in and of itself, but it was something that was well within the capacity of a disciplined Star Destroyer crew to handle.

And Rage's crew was nothing if not disciplined.

The two flight control towers were relatively undamaged. He had settled himself in one of them, flanked as always by Lieutenant Archimedes, and tried to remind himself that his crew was the best and most efficient at what they did and that he would do absolutely no good by barging into the hangar bay to rescue the soldiers and crew still trapped inside. When that didn't work, he folded his arms and peered through the clear plasticrete window at the haze of smoke that filled the hangar bay below, as if he could clear it with sheer willpower.

According to the rescue crews, the transport had come to rest upside-down at the far end of the hangar bay, where it had inconveniently entangled itself with a pair of T.I.E. bombers. Neither were armed, fortunately, but between the burning ship and the unstable fuel cells and poor internal shielding all T.I.E.s tended to have anyway, sending in medics without assessing the situation and fixing the fire suppression systems first was asking for disaster. One wrong move could blow a hole in the Retaliator.

Rage could sense the lives in the hangar bay, some of them flickering and faint. But there were very few of them - far fewer than the thousands that made up his whole crew. It wasn't a choice he wanted to make, but one he could make and had in fact made before. The survivors, however many there were, were just going to have to wait.

That didn't mean he was happy about it.

"How many people were on the transport?" he asked.

Lieutenant Archimedes looked up from her datapad. She seemed unconcerned about the fire, but then again, he hadn't seen her look truly worried about anything in almost twenty years. "Not counting the prisoner? The pilot and twenty-six stormtroopers."

"To escort one prisoner?"

"You did request that all precautions be taken, my lord. And this particular prisoner has a colorful history," she added as she held out the datapad.

Rage tore his gaze away from the hangar bay long enough to take it. He had far less interest in Han's gunner than he did in Han himself and in Corran Horn's son, but even a quick glance told him that said gunner - Melody, surname unknown, somewhere around eighteen standard years old, possibly but not definitely from Ord Mantell - had an impressive rap sheet: murder, kidnapping, arson, impersonation of Imperial personnel, gunrunning, armed robbery -

He looked up. "'Mynock smuggling'?"

"A very serious offensive on Nar Shaddaa, apparently."

"I don't see sabotage anywhere."

"With respect, my lord, we don't have confirmation that whatever happened to that transport wasn't mechanical failure - "

Rage used the datapad to point in the direction of the fiasco in the hangar bay.

" - but perhaps Captain Solo's gunner has expanded her horizons," Lieutenant Archimedes finished smoothly. "Or perhaps the astromech droid had something to do with it. One of those was apprehended as well."

"An R2 model?"

"A very old one, my lord. With dismantle-on-sight orders in half the Core."

Rage almost smiled at that. The whole galaxy and everything he thought he knew about it might have turned upside-down, but apparently Artoo was still Artoo. "Do we know what happened to the missing settler?" he asked as he skimmed through the rest of the datapad. Lieutenant Archimedes was obsessively thorough even when it he would have preferred her not to be, so he was forced to scroll through a comprehensive list of Melody the gunner's less notorious crimes, including "theft of sabacc table" and "assault with deadly weapon (pufferpig)".

"We're still attempting to ascertain whether or not he left Tatooine, my lord. In all likelihood he is in hiding on Ludlii somewhere. The squads still on the surface are currently searching for him."

"Make that your priority as soon as everyone is rescued." Rage stretched out with the Force, trying to get some sense of where the boy was. All he felt was the professionalism and determination of the repair and rescue teams working to get inside the hangar bay, and the anger and fear and confusion of the trapped stormtroopers and flight crews still inside.

And then, very suddenly, one of them flared up in a bright flash of puzzlement and surprise and recognition and pain - and was extinguished.

Rage handed the datapad back to Lieutenant Archimedes.

She gave him a look he had learned to recognize. "My lord," she said, following after him as he turned and quickly walked out of the tower. "Whatever you may feel you need to do, I'm sure the rescue teams are more than capable of - "

"Our prisoner is alive," he said. "And she has a weapon."

Lieutenant Archimedes didn't seem surprised or moved by this fact. "At least wait until we know the air is breathable," she said in a tone that perfectly straddled the line between detached professionalism and exasperation. "Think of the damage it would cause the Empire's reputation if you died of smoke inhalation."

Rage clenched his hands and resisted the urge to reach out and rip the protective seals off the hangar bay doors. "Of course. We can't have that."

If Lieutenant Archimedes noticed that he said this through gritted teeth, she chose not to comment.

For the third time in his life, Ben opened his eyes and found himself somewhere unfamiliar. In this case, it was flat on his back and looking up at a trio of stormtroopers.

He sat up very quickly and then immediately regretted it. Something inside his head felt like it had been shaken around, and between the suspicion that he had somehow bruised the inside of his skull, the distant klaxons, and the disconnect he got from looking through his helmet's viewports, he had to fight down a wave of dizziness and nausea.

"I think he's awake," someone - presumably one of the Imps - announced to the galaxy in general. His voice was hardly audible over the alarms.

A blaster rifle came into view, its barrel pointed right between Ben's eyes. The stormtrooper holding it looked battered, but otherwise appeared to be in the best shape of the three. Of the other two stormtroopers, one had an arm hanging at an awkward angle and the other was using some kind of support strut as a crutch.

"Where's everyone else?" Ben asked. His throat still hurt, but not as much as his head, so he supposed that was something.

"Dunno," the Imp with the crutch said. She sounded a little like one of the stormtroopers who had been trying to talk Melody into the transport's cockpit. "We were all by the aft exit when we crashed. Couldn't get to anyone else because of all the structural damage. We had to cut our way out with that toy of yours."

Belatedly, Ben realized that she was holding the lightsaber from Hermit's Hut in the hand that wasn't clutching her makeshift crutch. He also realized that they weren't on the transport, or even in a hangar bay for that matter. Instead of bulkheads, what was visible behind the Imps was something that looked like the sort of soft reflective tarp that came standard in survival kits. The Darklighter garage had always had extras and Aunt Olivea had spread them on the roof and used them to dry sunfruit rinds and h'kak beans. This one seemed to be something more like a prefab pop-up shelter and was presumably doing its job; whatever was causing the burning fuel smell that even the filters in Ben's helmet couldn't entirely keep out, the air was still mostly clear.

He swallowed back the question he wanted to ask next - but is everyone else going to be okay - because it was stupid and pointless. If the Imps had needed to cut themselves free of the transport, then of course everyone wasn't okay. Everyone else was probably dead, Melody included, and he was on his own.

"So what are you?" the Imp with the crutches was saying. "Donner here thinks you're an inquisitor, because of the lightsaber."

Ben shook his head and winced at the spike of pain. "Whatever that is, I'm not it."

"Uh huh." The Imp sounded unconvinced. "And Kell over there - the one with the broken arm - she thinks you're some kind of Rebel."

"I'm not," Ben protested, and tried not to think about the hidden datachip and the mysterious message that had started all of this.

The Imp shifted her weight back over to her crutch and rested the hand holding the lightsaber on her hip. "Me? I just want to know how you managed to bring down a whole transport from the damn bathroom."

He tried to ignore the sour churning guilt in his stomach. "Is anyone else still alive?"

"I just told you, kid," the Imp said with a sigh. "We couldn't get to anyone. I don't know."

She sounded more tired than intimidating, and maybe why that was why he answered more or less honestly. "I wasn't trying to damage the transport," he said. "Not like that. I just wanted the lights to switch off during the landing cycle."

"And you were doing that because…"

"Because I don't know what stormtroopers are supposed to do," Ben admitted, "and I wanted to get off the transport without getting shot."

The Imp pointing the blaster rifle at him made a disgusted noise. "Sounds like he's a Rebel to me, Cap."

"Then he's not a very good one," the Imp with the crutch - Cap - muttered under her breath, just loud enough for Ben to hear. Louder, she said, "So what were you doing on the transport and where did you come by the armor?"

Ben had no answer for that - at least not one that wouldn't get him and Sasha both in a lot of trouble - but he was saved from having to come up with a plausible lie when the soft plastic wall of the shelter suddenly crumpled inward. Waves of black smoke rolled in, accompanied by a fast-moving shape that slammed into the Imp holding the blaster rifle. By the time Ben managed to get to his feet, the Imp had dropped to the deck with a horrible gurgling noise.

There were the sounds of a struggle out in the swirling smoke. Ben froze, torn between ducking back down or running away, only to have the decision made for him when a heavy weight slammed into him and knocked him to one knee. There was a moment of slow creeping terror as he realized it was one of the Imps and that they weren't moving, something had killed them and it was a body weighing him down - and then he was frantically pushing the dead Imp away and scrambling back upright.

Only to find himself watching the indistinct shape of the mysterious attacker kick the last Imp's crutch out of her grasp and send her tumbling down.

Without even thinking about what he was doing - without thinking at all - Ben dove in front of her with his arms spread out like a shield. "Don't!"

The attacker checked their swing and let out a string of profanity that was becoming all too familiar.

It was Melody.

Up close, he could see that she was wearing the sort of clunky black emergency mask that came stashed under every cockpit seat in the galaxy and had a bandage slapped over her head. Instead of a blaster, she was holding a knife in one hand and what looked like a shard of cockpit viewport in the other. Both weapons had something dark on them that Ben decided didn't need to be examined too closely.

"Would you fragging move?" she snapped.

Ben, not quite sure what he was doing protecting a the injured stormtrooper or why he had decided this was a good idea in the first place, just shook his head.

"She's an Imp, you idiot!"

"I know she's an Imp!" he protested. "Just because people are Imps doesn't mean you have to go around sticking knives in them!"

Melody stared at him. "Are you kidding me?"

He shook his head again.

"What did you think we came here to do, have a nice picnic with them?" When Ben still didn't move, she tucked the knife into her belt and chucked the shard of viewport onto the deck. "Fine," she muttered. "You deal with her. See how long you last before you get shot. I'll be saving Hal if you need me."

Then she turned and stormed out, and Ben was left alone with the Imp.

He clenched his hands into fists to stop them from shaking. He couldn't do the same thing with his voice, though, and it came out far less steady than he would have liked. "Is she right? Are you going to shoot me?"

"Wasn't going to in the first place, kid." The Imp's voice was much steadier than his - much calmer and matter-of-fact than he would ever be able to manage if he had just seen people he knew die in front of him. "That's a fuel fire out there. A blaster bolt would set it all off and blow a hole in the ship."

And Melody probably knew that, he realized. That was why she had resorted to stabbing everyone in the first place.

"Can I have the lightsaber back?" he asked.

The Imp held it out.

He waited for a second, just in case it was a trick, and then quickly snatched it back before she could change her mind. It was a solid weight in his hand, the only proof he had of Tatooine until he got Sasha back.

"Kid," the Imp said suddenly, drawing his attention. She was holding a hand over her neck, right under her helmet, and the white armor of her glove had red smears on it. "Not that I don't appreciate it, but why'd you save me?"

Ben wished he had a good answer for that, but he didn't, so he settled for shrugging.

"I hope everyone else is okay," he said.

Before the Imp could ask what that had to do with anything - or remember that he was a stowaway with stolen stormtrooper armor and try to beat him to death with her crutch - he hurried after Melody.

In the hangar bay it was dark and warm, and but for the acrid smell of burning fuel, it was like walking into the heart of a sandstorm. Ben had the strange disorientating sensation that he hadn't left Tatooine at all - that there wasn't a Star Destroyer's deck under his booted feet, that he wasn't wearing a dead stormtrooper's secondhand armor and didn't have a lightsaber clipped to his belt, that he wasn't seeing everything through a helmet. What suddenly seemed far more real were the memories of all the times he had huddled in the safety of his home in Draco's Well and listened to the howling wind outside. Dune Sea sandstorms were like great living beasts, swift and impossibly powerful or broad and all-consuming, and it was only the very brave or very foolish who ventured out into them.

Ben was neither of those things and knew he never would be. As far as he was concerned, the only reason to go out into any kind of sandstorm, much less a Dune Sea monster, was to save lives.

Which was what he was trying to do, he thought as he spotted the shape of Melody in the smoke and stumbled after her. The nature of the storm and the danger it presented were just very different.

The air was starting to clear a little - perhaps because he was being led away from whatever was burning, perhaps because someone had repaired the fire suppression systems. He could see Melody more clearly now, a blurry outline holding her knife at ready and moving with the quiet deadly grace of a krayt dragon. There was no other sound but the fitful, staticky wail of klaxons coming through damaged speakers. It seemed to Ben that the smoke had swallowed up everything else in the universe.

"I caught an Imp wandering around while I was looking for you," Melody muttered under her breath as he caught up with her, and suddenly the spell was broken and Ben was keenly aware that he was in a hangar bay and that somewhere it was on fire. "Stashed his body and his blaster over by the storage lockers. He's pretty small, so the armor should fit me."

Ben forced himself to look ahead instead of staring at her. "Why are you so good at killing Imps?"

"Give it time and a couple more dead relatives. You'll get the hang of it."

She said this as if it were the most natural thing in the galaxy, and Ben was about to point out that Aunt Olivea would not have wanted him to start stabbing random stormtroopers with sharp objects when his breath began to freeze in his lungs. Without quite realizing what he was doing, he stopped dead and spun around, the air crystallizing him his lungs. Ice trickled down his spine and settled deep in his bones.

"There's someone here," he whispered.

He couldn't see Melody now, but he heard her move and then felt her back pressed against his. "Where?"

"I don't know." He peered through the smoke, but there was nothing - no movement, no sound but the klaxons, nothing at all. "It's cold," he said at last.

Rather than grumbling at him, Melody seemed to tense up even more. She was suddenly all business, as calm and professional as any soldier. "We need to move."

"But - " Ben began.

And then he saw it.

The smoke spun on its own, gentle ripples and eddies like sand kicked up by a breeze. There was a sound of scraping metal and something fiery-hot flared into existence somewhere in the darkness. It quickly solidified into the great hulking shape of a T.I.E. fighter burning like a torch. It moved slowly and serenely and without a sound as it passed not twenty paces from where he and Melody stood, a flame-wreathed apparition that didn't so much fly under its own power as glide in silence across the hangar bay.

Ben stared, transfixed by the sight of it, and might have remained that way forever if the smoke hadn't swirled in the T.I.E.'s wake for a split second. It wasn't long, but it was enough for him to see an assembled medical team with gas masks and first aid kits and folded stretchers. His attention caught on a man standing in the middle of them - someone who looked a little like a junior Imp officer in his plain black uniform. His eyes were closed and one hand was outstretched, and his head was bowed in concentration.

Rage, Ben thought as his heart stuttered against his ribs like a frightened animal battering the bars of its cage. He wasn't even sure how he knew.

"We need to go," Melody hissed. She grabbed him bodily and spun him around, so that he could see the way her eyes were wide frightened circles, utterly at odds with the fury in her voice. "We need to go now."

Ben had never been so quick to obey anyone in his life.

Like everything else, the Retaliator's medical bay was state of the art. It was also larger than Imperial regulations strictly required - which was just as well, since every one of its beds was occupied and its medics were running back and forth to treat burns, smoke inhalation, broken limbs, and all the other things that came with being in a horrific crash. One particular bed was reserved for the stormtrooper who had been rescued from an emergency shelter with a stab wound and a broken leg, and that was the particular patient Rage was making his way to.

"My lord," Lieutenant Archimedes was saying, "rescue teams and emergency equipment exist for a reason." Her voice was low and level and perfectly respectful, but the fact that she looked like a general about to throw her troops into the line of fire suggested how upset she actually was. "You know I have only the utmost admiration for your abilities, but surely you can see how moving a ship across a hangar bay might not be the wisest use of them."

Rage stepped aside to allow a pair of medics to hurry past. "Lieutenant," he said as a warning.

She ignored him. She always did when this sort of thing happened. "Perhaps my lord is unaware of the volatility of fighter fuel cells? Or what would become of this ship and its crew if you left it at the mercy of Core bureaucracy by accidentally dropped a T.I.E. fighter on yourself?"

"Lieutenant."

This time she subsided, after a fashion. He could still feel the indignation boiling off of her, all the things she wasn't saying - what about his special orders, what about the mission he had burdened her with all those years ago? Something about the set of her shoulders informed the galaxy in general that she was disappointed in him.

That was fine. He very much doubted it would be the last time.

The surviving stormtrooper had been tucked into a quieter corner of the medical bay, with dividers that offered some measure of privacy. Lieutenant Archimedes dutifully closed them as Rage examined the woman. She was human, perhaps forty years old, with black buzzcut hair and a tough, lined face - the sort of cut-from-a-mold career soldier one found in the rundown veterans' settlements the moffs like to establish in the least hospitable corners of the Outer Rim. When she saw Rage, she lifted her chin and squared her shoulders as if trying to stand at attention.

"At ease," Rage said, and she immediately collapsed back onto the bed. "What's your name?"

"TK-421."

"Your name."

"Trooper Varu Grath, sir."

It wasn't a name he recognized, but all that meant was that she hadn't required commendation or punishment significant enough to be brought to his attention. "You're the ranking survivor, Trooper Grath."

"I figured as much, sir. The landing was rough. I expect you'll be wanting a report on what happened."

"You can submit something official later. I just want to hear what you have to say."

She nodded once, just as crisp and curt as Lieutenant Archimedes at her most professional. "Right away, sir."

Rage listened as she recounted what had happened on the transport between Ludlii and the Retaliator. Like many older stormtroopers, she was good at giving a report without embellishments or speculation, and he didn't feel the need to interrupt her until she began to describe the mysterious intruder with the lightsaber.

He held up his hand to stop her. "Do you think he's a Jedi?" he asked, remembering the foreboding he had felt through the Force earlier - the surety that somehow, in some way, this all came back to Leia and everything she and the mythology built around her had come to represent.

Trooper Grath just shook her head. "No, sir. I'd bet money he wasn't. He didn't move like one."

"But he did have a lightsaber."

"Yes, sir." She shrugged a shoulder and then winced and seemed to wish she hadn't. "If I had to guess, I would say he's the missing fugitive from Tatooine. He's got the accent for it."

Rage glanced at Lieutenant Archimedes, who was already making a note on her datapad. "We'll need to debrief you as soon as possible. Did you see his face?"

"Couldn't take off his helmet, sir. Not with the air as bad as it was in the hangar bay. I figured you'd want him alive."

Her expression darkened at this, turning inward in some way Rage couldn't recognize. "You were right," he said.

That just made her mouth twist up in a grimace. "Permission to speak freely, sir?"

"I don't punish people for speaking their minds, Trooper."

It still took her a moment to continue. "I was with the 117th at Hardhall and Kapana Bay, back when we were trying to clear out Organa's Jedi. I know how they move, sir, and that kid's as much of a Jedi as I am. If he's had any kind of training, I don't think it stuck. He's no threat to anybody."

Rage watched the indecision flash across her face. "You're not telling me something."

"He saved my life. I don't know why and I'm not sure he does either, but he could have let me die and he didn't." She met his eyes. "And the truth is, sir, I'm starting to regret saving his."

Beside him, he felt more than saw Lieutenant Archimedes go very still. "Meaning?" he asked.

Trooper Grath pushed herself up on the bed, even though strain was making her arms shake. "When you catch that kid," she said, "just put him in front of a firing squad. It'll be kinder."

"Kinder than what?"

But he already knew. So did Lieutenant Archimedes, dutifully following the first order he had given her almost two decades ago.

And so, it seemed, did Trooper Grath, who still didn't look away from him.

"Then what happens to the ones who get taken alive, sir."

Wandering around a Star Destroyer unnoticed turned out to be easier than Ben had expected, even though he had no idea what he was doing. Melody seemed to acquire an air of authority the second she put on her stolen stormtrooper armor, and she marched through the corridors like she owned the whole ship, turning smartly at corners and standing at attention while she waited for the lifts. Ben did his best to copy her - and, more importantly, tried not to run into other stormtroopers, passing droids, or the occasional bulkhead.

"How do you know where we're going?" he grumbled under his breath when they briefly found themselves alone in a corridor. "I can't see a thing in this helmet."

Melody smacked him with the butt of her blaster rifle, hard. He decided to keep his thoughts to himself after that.

Or at least he did until he saw what their intended hiding place was. It was small and cramped, little more than a closet with a tiny bank of consoles, and apparently not important enough to bother about temperature regulation, given that it was very hot and the air was sticky and humid in a way that even Tatooine never quite managed. According to the sign on the door, it was Waste Disposal Station Six.

"Really?" he asked the second the door slid shut behind them.

In response, Melody ripped off her helmet and hit him with the butt of her rifle again, hard enough to send him crashing into a bulkhead.

"What the fragging hell were you thinking?" she snarled. "You weren't even supposed to be on that transport! You could've gotten us both killed!"

Ben pushed himself off the bulkhead and pulled off his own helmet, grateful to no longer have to deal with the stale smell and the limited field of vision. He took the opportunity to glare at Melody. "They wouldn't let me on the Icarus. What was I supposed to do?"

"Something besides sabotaging the fragging transport!"

"I wasn't trying to sabotage the transport!" he yelled back, and then immediately lowered his voice. The last thing he wanted to do was make it this far just to get discovered because he couldn't keep quiet. "I wasn't," he repeated. "I wanted the lights to switch off during the landing cycle so I could sneak out of the bathroom and get off the ship. I don't how to pretend to be an Imp, remember?"

"And how did you get from switching off the lights to blowing everything up?"

"I didn't. Whoever built that transport rigged everything back into the power conduits and set up some kind of feedback loop. The only reason we didn't explode is because I caught it in time."

Melody rolled her eyes at him. "So...what? The Imps sabotaged their own ship? Someone at the dockyards has a grudge?"

"I don't know." Ben remembered the darkness and the sound of bodies hitting the bulkheads as the transport tilted sideways and felt sick all over again. "I should have noticed something wasn't right, but I've never seen anything wired like that before."

Instead of the snappy and undoubtedly profane answer he was expecting, Melody gave him the same sort of considering look Uncle Gavin gave a new shipment of spare parts. "Think you can do something like that to this ship? Not enough to cripple anything," she added when Ben opened his mouth to object, "but enough to cause a distraction?"

He considered this. Whoever had built the troop transport - and then hopefully been banned from coming within a parsec of any shipyard ever again - hadn't made the sort of serious mistakes that would have been noticeable during routine maintenance. Although he felt uneasy thinking about it, the strange wiring had been so subtly and carefully wrong that in retrospect, it did almost seem deliberate.

And anything that someone else had done to a machine, Ben was almost certain he could replicate.

"Maybe," he said at last. "I know a little about how Imp stuff, but I don't know how a Star Destroyer's put together."

"And you know about Imp stuff how?"

"My family ran a garage. Imp speeder bikes get stolen, too."

"This is a little bigger than a speeder bike," she muttered. At Ben's exasperated look, she sighed and added, "Guess it wouldn't hurt to try. See if you can get in touch with Artoo."

He blinked at her. "Huh?"

"Artoo? Useless droid, about this big? He's got your other comlink. I gave it to him before we had to switch uniforms."

"Oh," he said, and quickly switched his on. "Artoo?"

After a minute of silence, he was rewarded with a stream of irritated beeping.

Melody snatched the comlink out of his hand. "Where are you, you overgrown pile of scrap? No, wait," she added hastily when a storm of whistles and beeps erupted from the comlink, "shut up, it's not like I can understand a word you're saying anyway. Can you get to a dataport?"

The beep was short and affirmative.

"We're in Waste Disposal Section Six. We need this ship's schematics. Think you can do that?"

This time the beeping was steady and constant and put Ben in mind of old Padreic muttering mild obscenities under his breath. Melody seemed reassured by this, though, and slouched against the bank of consoles as if she were waiting for something to happen. Soon enough, an extremely complex-looking schematic popped up on one of the screens.

Ben felt himself going cross-eyed just looking at it. He shook his head after a few seconds, giving up. "This isn't going to help me. I don't understand it."

"It's a schematic, fragface. I thought this is what you do for a living."

"I don't know where to begin with this."

Melody scrubbed her hands down her face and rolled her eyes up towards the ceiling as if begging some deity for patience. "I thought you were a kriffing mechanic."

"I am," Ben retorted more testily than he had meant to, "but there aren't any schools in Draco's Well, and even if there were, they wouldn't have...whatever this is." He waved his hand at the schematic, which continued to look as incomprehensible as ever. "I need to see the ship. I can't just do this from a picture."

Melody muttered something in Huttese. "It's some kind of stupid Force thing, isn't it." It wasn't even remotely a question.

Ben gave her the same look he gave Sasha every time she talked about running away and starting her own crime-fighting swoop gang. "Do you want me to do this or not?"

"Do I have a choice?"

"Do you have a better idea?" he grumbled back.

She stepped away from the consoles, leaving Ben room to rest his hands on them. He ran a palm across them the same way other people might soothe a pet bantha, then crouched down in front of it and pried the access panels off, leaving the wires and circuits and guts exposed.

This wasn't the same as the troop transport, he told himself. He could do this. He could.

At first it felt as though the Star Destroyer was laid out much as the transport had been - as every single piece of Imp technology he had ever come across had been, except a thousand times larger. It seemed normal enough on the surface, but when he peeled back those top layers and went deeper into the core of it, he could feel something strange and sickly running through it, like a disease. The sticky wrongness of it threaded its way through the power conduits and artillery batteries, twisted itself into an invisible chokehold around the command consoles, and then snaked its way into the bowels of the ship before reaching out somewhere far beyond it, deep into the vastness of space.

Ben followed it out of the ship and into the emptiness beyond.

It was like being caught in a web. The wrongness entangled with the Star Destroyer spoked off in all directions. There were dozens of strands - hundreds, thousands, far too many for him to count - and every single one of them emerged from a roiling core that tugged at him like a black hole.

Go back, boy.

Ben froze. There was something looming between him and the black core, a strange dark shape with a long cape and a blood-red blade.

Go back. Now.

It held out one hand and pushed.

Ben snapped his eyes open and frowned down at the tangles of wires, not sure why he felt as uneasy as he did. "This ship has the same problem as the transport," he said.

"So can you recreate your little stunt or not?" Melody asked.

He sat back on his heels, only listening to her with half an ear. His attention was still on the way the innards of the Star Destroyer looped back in on themselves in strange and complicated ways, a great coiled trap waiting to be sprung. "I don't think I need to. It's already there."

"What does that mean?" Melody squatted beside him, hands resting on her knees, and peered at the wires as if waiting for them to do something interesting.

"It means that if I wanted to," Ben said, and felt ice in his blood, "I could blow up the whole ship. So could anyone else who knew what to do."

She looked at him with her big serious eyes, and for some reason all Ben could imagine was her reaching out with her knife and slicing a hole in the Star Destroyer. The oily darkness coiling around her was stronger and more unsettling here than it had been on Ludlii or Tatooine; he wondered if she was considering their lives - his and hers, Captain Solo's, Hal's, even Sasha's - and weighing them against the prospect of cutting the belly of the ship open and watching air and men leak out.

"I can work around it," he said. "If you tell me where Sasha and the others are, I can set off the some of the emergency alarms. That would trick them into evacuating the whole area."

Melody flashed him a toothy grin. "That's a start. Glad to know you're not totally useless."

Ben made a face at her and focused on the wiring and the circuits, and as he did he tried to ignore the sudden crystal-clear feeling that Melody - not Rage, not stormtroopers, not this whole stupid catastrophe of a rescue mission - was going to be the death of him.

The chair was a sterile, metallic gray. It was the same color as the cuffs that had been fastened around Sasha's wrists, and it was exactly as uncomfortable as it looked. The small room that held it and the equally metallic desk had gray walls and a gray floor. The stormtrooper who had shoved Sasha into the chair and retreated to guard the door had clean white armor, not at all like the Imps she had seen on Tatooine.

In the holodramas it wasn't like this. None of the heros and heroines were ever left to sit quiet and alone, feeling like the only bit of color left in the universe.

When the door slid open a few minutes later, she almost jumped out of her skin. Instead she kept herself flat against the back of the chair and tried to push pictures of torture droids out of her mind. It was almost a relief when the person who came into view and sat across from her at the polished black table turned out to be alone and unarmed, no knives or needles in sight.

Then she realized who he was.

"We need to talk about you and your brother," Darth Rage said without preamble.

Sasha pushed her fingernails in her palms in an effort not to hyperventilate. She didn't try to correct him, though. "What about us?"

"Your names would be a good start."

She wondered if he already knew and was just asking her to test her. "I'm Sasha Darklighter," she said anyway, because she wasn't the important one and it didn't matter what the Empire found about her - because watching her parents get scammed into buying shoddy broken vaporator parts had taught her every good lie was mostly truth with a bit of falsehood sprinkled on top. "My brother's Dev Darklighter."

"Your parents?"

"Gavin Darklighter and Olivea Newsuns." Her voice hitched as she said her mother's name. She tried to hide it by glaring harder than before.

If Rage noticed, he didn't give any indication. "Anyone else?"

"We've got a great-aunt somewhere, but I hardly know her because she doesn't like Dad."

"Are any of you part of the Rebellion?"

"Cousin Biggs, maybe, but he died when my dad was still a kid. We're just settlers."

Rage expression suggested he didn't entirely believe her. "Why were you and your brother hiding from the stormtroopers?"

"We weren't," Sasha snapped before she could think better of it. "The stupid vaporator wasn't working and we can't pay back any of our loans without it. Dev can do anything with machines, so he thought maybe he could fix it. That's why we ran," she added, trying to get her voice back under control. "We thought you were slavers. Do you know what happens to people who borrow credits from the Hutts and can't pay them back?"

Rage said nothing. His face was blank.

"There's no comm or anything in the landspeeder, so we couldn't warn anybody. Dev made us hide at Hermit's Hut - Old Kenobi's place."

"I've heard of it," Rage said shortly.

"Everybody has. Nobody goes there, though - even the Jawas won't touch it - so we went there to hide. There was a lightsaber there," she babbled on, trying frantically to remember what the Empire already knew - what they might find out later and what she could do to alleviate the damage, "and it's stupid to leave something useful sitting around, so we kept it. After a while the odd-jobs-man found us and told us what happened to Mom, and he said it would be a good idea to get off of Tatooine so we didn't get shot. And we wound up here because Captain Solo did a blind jump to get us away from the tractor beams."

"And now your brother is somewhere on Ludlii."

Sasha bit her lip and cursed herself for telling as much as she had. "I don't know where he is."

"There's something you're not telling me about him."

"Dev?"

Rage nodded.

Unbidden, memories of Old Padreic's warnings came back to her, right on the heels of her own suspicions about Ben and his mysterious long-gone father. She could hear her heart pounding in her ears. "No, there isn't," she lied.

Rage looked at her in a way that - for one long horrible moment - reminded her of her cousin at his most irritated. "You're not too young to be sent to Kessel, you know."

Sasha wondered if her dad was still alive - and if he was, if he would ever find out what had become of her and Ben. Maybe they would become another Dune Sea mystery to be whispered over.

She tried to remember if thirteen was old enough to be shot for treason.

"There's nothing to tell you," she whispered.

She was saved from Rage's answer when a comm beeped. He sighed as he activated it. "I hope this is important."

"My lord," came a crisp and slightly nervous voice. "We have a massive power surge in Sector 6."

Rage's brow furrowed. He didn't take his eyes off Sasha. "Define 'massive'."

"It's centered around the detention blocks, my lord."

"I'm on my way," Rage said. He switched off the comm with the press of a button and folded his hands in front of him. The entire time, he kept looking at Sasha.

She dropped her gaze first.

"Your brother has something to do with this." The way Rage said it made it sound like a certainty.

Sasha didn't look up from her lap, in case Rage could read the emotions that were surely flitting across her face. Because there was no reason to think Ben was even on the Star Destroyer - there was no reason to think this wasn't some kind of glitch, or that Captain Solo wasn't doing what he did best in her dad's stories and staging another dramatic escape.

But she was certain in a way that went down to her bones. Ben didn't do flashy things like other Darklighters - he didn't run away and join rebellions and get himself shot down in the trenches of Death Stars, didn't die flying next to the man who would turn around and betray the Rebel Alliance just a few years later, and he certainly didn't knock another kid's teeth out for insulting his family - but he was patient and stubborn and did what he thought needed to be done, other people's opinions be damned.

Sometimes that meant dragging an angry, frightened cousin away from Draco's Well and hiding with her in an abandoned hut. Sometimes, apparently, it involved doing something really spectacularly heroically stupid.

Sasha lifted her head and looked Rage in the eyes. Despite the danger she was in, she grinned so hard her face hurt. My family's stronger than your whole Empire, she thought, and she felt prouder and braver than she ever had before.

"I told you he's good with machines," she said.