Chapter 13

Hours earlier, Captain Jocque had returned to Okuvad's quarters, following Rayjer in. The captain helped the clone back onto his bunk then informed Okuvad his confinement to quarters was rescinded. Something had changed, though exactly what Okuvad did not know. Fear radiated from the captain. Fear and confusion. Either Captain Jocque had learned something or he and the crew had come to some conclusion they neither liked nor understood. However, Okuvad could feel the captain no longer considered him a threat to the crew, and Okuvad took that as a small victory. Although Captain Jocque had again given him permission to move about the ship, Okuvad had no particular reason to do so. He attempted to meditate at first, hoping the Force would grant him some answers to the questions that circled his mind, but no matter his focus visions eluded him.

Hours later, Rayjer still slept deeply on his charging station. None of the crew seemed interested in visiting, and Okuvad risked removing the treasure from his pocket. Weeks ago he had felt it's call, a whisper in the dark beckoning him across the galaxy. Lai Stree called it a fool's errand, but Okuvad set a course for Utapau anyway. He followed the call across the wind-scarred surface of the planet to a narrow cave opening. The Force tempted him deeper and deeper into the cavern. He felt as though he'd lost all choice in the matter, the Force dragging him into the dark against his will. In that impossibly black underground of Utapau he found a single shining point of light, an ethereal voice singing in the dark. His hand closed around the kyber crystal and suddenly he was complete, like discovering a piece of himself he never knew was missing. He was riding dreams of a lightsaber when the barrage of turbolaser fire destroyed their yacht and his escape from the Jedi began.

Now he meditated with the crystal suspended before him. He could feel the Force within it. To anyone else the crystal would appear slightly dull and clear like silicon-dioxide. To Okuvad, the crystal glowed with faint inner light, a brilliant white haloed in a radiant array of colors. He wouldn't know the color of his blade until he constructed a proper lightsaber, but all his tools and parts were destroyed with the shuttle. For now he would keep his crystal safe until his opportunity to become complete. Isolated from the Jedi Order with his few supplies destroyed, Okuvad was unsure if such a time would ever come. He must trust the Force.

Time slipped away as he stared into the crystal. His own thoughts drifted with the currents of the Force and for a sliver of eternity he knew only the warmth of the crystal's glow. Some irritance scratched the edge of his consciousness. Okuvad was young, a decade of training from obtaining the rank of Jedi Knight when he left in exile. Still, he trained at the Jedi Temple as far back as he could remember. Meditation was a foundation of the Jedi's training, and Okuvad developed the skill to push stray thoughts aside before he was even 10 years old. Now though, the distraction persisted and grew until forcing him from his meditation, his crystal dropping into his hand. His senses focused on the chamber around him. Okuvad realized the distraction had not come from his mind but from the clone sleeping across from him: Rayjer. When sleeping, the clone's cybernetics went into a standby state and didn't move, but his upper torso and head now shook and glistened with sweat. From time to time the clone would mumble or groan in his sleep; a nightmare.

"Good. Good! Good soldiers… good soldiers..." The clone repeated the phrase over and over again, his voice sometimes crescendoing to a near yell but mostly a muted and barely intelligible mumble. Okuvad thought the clone should be thrashing in his sleep but his deactivated cybernetics kept him relatively still. Okuvad's first instinct was to wake the clone, but another thought came to mind. Cool, grey fingers delicately embraced the clone's head. Closing his eyes, Okuvad extended his will into the clone's mind bracing himself for the biting chill of the clone's emotionless state. He found something else. Fear, anger, and pain radiated from the clone threatening to overwhelm Okuvad. He pushed through the emotions trying to find a trace of the clone's dream but the turbulent emotions fought Okuvad's probe, like trying to swim against a current. Okuvad pushed the emotions aside gently as he knew how, slipping closer and closer to the memories and dreams spawning them. Flickering images began to appear to Okuvad. Soon the images coalesced into scenes, and the scenes came together until the dream enveloped Okuvad.

He felt the oppressive humidity of Felucia suffocating him. A thick jungle of massive fungi rose from the ground like a living cage. The jungle a violent explosion of life: dense leaves, caps, and stalks twitching and swaying as though driven by some terrible will. The muted blues and flaring oranges of fungus mixed with toxic greens, reds, and the burnt brown of the soil. The array of colors disorienting Okuvad until he realized he saw the colors from a human's perspective.

Okuvad pushed a closer to Rayjer's mind and immediately the sounds of battle engulfed him. Blaster fire, explosions, and screaming. Ghostly figures of clones coalescing from the shadows, the distinctive white plastoid-alloy armor of the clone army a sharp contrast to the vivid jungle. Perhaps half a dozen of the troops wore specialized armor decorated orange and carried packs bulging with tools. Okuvad himself had little experience with the clone army, but his connection with Rayjer afforded him a little information about what they watched. The orange-armored clones were an ordnance disposal unit, Rayjer's squad.

Okuvad had heard tales of this battle. Rayjer dreamed of the First Battle of Felucia. The thought nearly pulled Okuvad back into the chaos of it all, and he desperately braced himself against the torrent trying to maintain his presence near enough to Rayjer's mind to observe but separate enough to remain free of the emotions. The droid army emerged from the jungle approaching relentlessly in lockstep, hundreds of droids for every dozen clones. A solid wall of alloy spewed plasma bolts that burned away the jungle to send flames towering into the sky. The Jedi are failing them. We are dying. My brothers are dying! Okuvad realized the thought was Rayjer's, and his awareness of it drew his attention to the other side of the battlefield. Faceless beings in flowing robes wielded blades of fire. The droids' attention and fire power seemed split between the tight knot of clones and the Jedi beyond. The Jedi's blades were a blur of light blocking every bolt fired at them. Not just blocking. At first, the Jedi redirected the plasma back into the ranks of droids or sent a blast sailing into the jungle. Then slowly the shots blocked by the Jedi began to fall closer and closer to the clones. Then shots flew haphazardly into the ranks of clones. To Okuvad's horror he watched as clone after clone fell, caught between the horde of droids and Jedi.

Hate and fear consumed Okuvad; Rayjer's hate and fear. Not for the battle but for the Jedi. He blamed the Jedi for the losses of Felucia, and those emotions turned the dream against Rayjer. The Jedi were no longer failing to protect the clones but intentionally harming them. Okuvad watched as clones died all around him and he was powerless to save them. The survivors tried to drag the wounded to cover but explosions rocked the battlefield. His eyes were drawn to the bodies strewn around him, mines and explosives rigged to the fallen clones. A clone sergeant pointed to Rayjer and yelled, "Follow orders!"

He paws at his pack struggling to find tools to disarm the devices, but his hands shake and his fingers stiffen. He clips a wire on the device and in an instant of terror realizes his mistake, white light and heat bathing him in unimaginable pain. Rayjer lies on his back looking through the burning foliage at the dark Felucian night, dying. A croaking laughter fills his ears, a cackle terrible for the absolute mirth it takes in the suffering of war. As his vision fades, the embodiment of his death fills the sky: a hooded figure all of black, hands outstretched with delicate threads connecting fingertips to battlefield. Jedi, clones, and droids alike dance to Death's will and delight.

Then the dream and battle began again, a cycle of death relived again and again. Okuvad pulled away from the clone's mind in a wave of nausea and despair. He crossed his arms over his belly and doubled over as the compartment spun around him. Okuvad concentrated on breathing techniques to center himself and separate his own emotions from those of Rayjer. Okuvad slowly freed himself of Rayjer's hate and fear and settled into his own comfortable feeling of serenity. He felt pity for Rayjer, and a twinge of guilt. No one should live with the terrible memories that haunted the clone, and he knew his presence only exacerbated the problem. No matter how long Okuvad's exile from the Order, Rayjer saw him as a Jedi and a constant reminder of the battle.

Okuvad could not watch Rayjer suffer. Though he wished to never experience the horror of that nightmare again, he made himself touch Rayjer's mind again. This time, Okuvad maintained his focus and held himself separate from the dream. He fought the pull that had sucked him into the events before. From his place just outside of the dream he focused his will to gently shape the events in Rayjer's memory. He wasn't strong enough to erase the memory, but that wasn't his goal. He didn't want Rayjer aware of any manipulation. Okuvad couldn't stop the other clones from dying, but he hid their presence from Rayjer. He focused Rayjer's awareness and concern for his task and dimmed the clone's perception of the others. Soon Rayjer stood alone between the army of droids and the Jedi.

Now, Okuvad extended his will to the droids to focus their fire solely on the Jedi. The bolts redirected by the Jedi no longer threatened Rayjer and instead returned precisely into those that fired them. Rayjer's place on the battlefield became an island of safety in the sea of chaos and destruction. A nudge from Okuvad sent Rayjer walking from the battlefield into the natural beauty of Felucia-now a scene untouched by the destruction of war, a sliver of memory from before the fighting. He looked to the sky and instead of the hooded death figure Rayjer saw the millions of his brothers who yet lived, serving proudly across the expanse of the galaxy. No longer did the dream end with him burning and in pieces. Rayjer realized his body was strong, stronger than ever before. The nightmare didn't end with an agonizing fade to black but with an uplifting sensation of bliss bathed in the warm light of a rising Felucian sun.

Okuvad opened his eyes and stepped away from Rayjer's charging station. No more did the clone groan and grumble. His face stilled and voice quieted, the compartment silent but for the gentle whistle of the clone's oxygen scrubbers. Soft steps took Okuvad away from the clone to the compartment's hatch, which zipped open with a gentle swish. Walking into the corridor he found the ship bathed in a gentle glow of red light just at the edge of his perception, indicating the ship's period of simulated night cycle. Captain Jocque had lifted Okuvad's restriction to quarters and given him leave to move about the ship, but he wasn't sure if the captain considered that common spaces only or the more delicate areas of ship's operation as well. Okuvad thought he might take a chance and turned to the cockpit. As far as he could tell the ship's droid pilot remained a permanent fixture at the pilot's station, and he had been allowed in the cockpit once before. After the experience witnessing the clone's nightmare and the strain of manipulating his thoughts, Okuvad thought a few minutes staring into the glow of hyperspace might do him some good.

The cockpit hatch opened to reveal the copilot's chair already occupied, surprising Okuvad. Captain Jocque's thin frame and dark blue skin silhouetted against the electric blue glow passing through the ship's viewports. The captain didn't bother looking over his shoulder to identify his visitor. "Trouble sleeping, young Jedi?"

"How did you know it was me?"

The captain reached out and tapped one of the screens on the copilot's console with a slender finger. "Security monitoring. The ship logs the use of every hatch on the ship. I saw the hatch to your quarters open. Rayjer's sleep cycles are artificially regulated, so…" He let the sentence trail off, the logic not requiring further explanation.

"And you? Trouble sleeping also?" Okuvad inquired.

"Always." The captain looked over his shoulder and held Okuvad with a steady gaze for a moment. "Mind if I ask you something?" Jocque asked.

Okuvad shook his head. "No. I owe you answers for not shooting me out an airlock."

Captain Jocque spun the copilot's chair around so he could face Okuvad directly. He saw the captain still had his holsters and pistols on. Red eyes stared at Okuvad over steepled fingers. "Tell me about your master and your exile. I don't care about what you were doing, but I can't stop myself from wondering the why of it. Why leave the Jedi Order but continue studying the Force? Can you tell me the whys? Was your master running from something or searching for something? The holes in my understanding haunt me."

Okuvad leaned against a bulkhead support and crossed his arms. "That's a lot of information."

Captain Jocque shrugged in reply. "Doesn't look like either of us has much else to do."

"Where do I start?"

"Start with how you became apprentice to your master then why you both left the Jedi."

Okuvad wasn't sure how detailed the captain wanted his story, but he had the impression he shouldn't omit a thing. Captain Jocque would know. "The beginning then." Okuvad took a deep breath to prepare himself. "I met Lai Stree when I was a youngling-that's the first phase of Jedi training," he clarified. "Just before the onset of the Clone Wars I was preparing for the Gathering, a kind of initiation rite. At the end of the Gathering younglings acquire a lightsaber crystal and become padawans: an apprentice to a Jedi Master or Knight. Those in search of a padawan often make contact with the younglings before the Gathering, assessing individual talents and skills and predetermining the apprenticeships. Lai Stree was a Jedi Knight without a padawan, and I was a good match for her.

"Before the time of my Gathering, the Clone Wars began. Suddenly the Jedi were propelled from negotiators, scholars, and peacekeepers into the role of battlefield commanders and generals. Lai Stree foresaw the role as the death knell of the Jedi Order. The battlefield would inevitably cause the Jedi to embrace the Dark Side of the Force."

Captain Jocque held up one hand, stopping Okuvad. "I know nothing of the Force, what it is or how it works. Explain to me, as simply as possible, what is the Force and the Dark Side?"

Okuvad ran his hand across his short hair. "Imagine the Force as an energy field encompassing and permeating every part of the Galaxy, influencing and influenced by all living things. The Jedi describe the Force based on several aspects: the Living Force generated by living beings, an ever present field of energy called the Cosmic Force, the Light side of the Force representing peace and serenity, and the Dark side of the Force representing aggression and passion." Okuvad stepped forward, his voice becoming higher and faster with excitement. Nothing brought him more joy than learning and teaching.

"Lai Stree taught that the dichotomy of the Light and Dark was an artificial construct of the Jedi, not an innate reality of the Force. The Jedi taught that we must always resist giving in to their emotions. By remaining calm and rational the Jedi maintain their commitment to the Light side and resist the seductive power of the Dark. Lai Stree doesn't believe this. The Force has no inherent good or evil aspects. The Light and Dark exist only in the minds of the Jedi. No one can experience battle without experiencing the feelings the Jedi associate with the Dark side: anger, fear, hate," he said, emphasizing each emotion by dramatically slapping the back of one hand into the palm of the other. "My master predicted the Jedi would fall to the Dark side not because it truly exists but because they believe it does, embracing the violence and wickedness for no better reason than because their philosophy dictates the experience of those emotions must make them evil."

"A self-fulfilling prophecy," Jocque interjected.

"Yes," agreed Okuvad, smiling at the captain's understanding. "My master chose to distance herself from the self-imposed corruption of the Jedi Order, exploring the essence of the Force without Jedi dogma corrupting her perception. She took me as her apprentice-in-exile. She was already set to be my master and I trusted her judgement."

Captain Jocque shook his head, still seemingly confused. "So, you've been studying other understandings of the Force? Why?"

"My master rejected the false concept of Force users perpetually trapped by creeds requiring either complete devotion to emotionless logic or absolute submission to one's emotions. Studying the lesser known traditions gave us a broader perspective of the Force and greater understanding." Okuvad searched Captain Jocque's face looking for some sign of his thoughts. All he found was concern. "What is it?"

Captain Jocque sighed and ran one hand down his face, exasperated. "I can't comment on the nature of the Force. That is way, way beyond my understanding." The captain shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Okuvad could see pain and hesitation written all over his face, giving the impression he wanted to say something but also didn't like the idea of talking about it. Okuvad reached for the captain's mind with the Force-calling to him, enticing him, drawing the information from him. Okuvad's presence in the captain's mind was a gentle, seductive siren song whispering to the captain that it was safe to talk here.

The captain continued, "When we first met you looked so confused and asked me what I was. I've experienced that my whole life." Again the captain adjusted his position in his seat, now leaning forward to place his elbows on his knees. "You have to know where I come from to understand the point I'm getting to. I was born on Corellia. My father"-the captain stressing the word to indicate he thought of the man as anything but-"was a Corellian diplomat. Human. My mother was the daughter of an envoy from Duros. Her father and mine arranged the marriage like some sort of primitive tribal gesture of alliance, making a connection between them to increase their diplomatic importance to their associated governments." The captain swallowed and scratched an imaginary itch on his head. Okuvad was surprised to see the normally fierce and decisive captain suddenly looking quite vulnerable and embarrassed.

"Humans and Duros can't mate, but my father was adamant the relationship produce offspring. He hired the best geneticists to give him a son, using modified DNA from my maternal grandfather to create me. I'm basically my grandfather's clone, but they modified my DNA to encourage the development of features to make me appear more human, creating the illusion that I am my father's son. As I grew, my appearance was further modified by cosmetic surgery just to please my father. I was raised as a human, but to the Corellians I was alien. Other Duros see me as deformed, a freak. I fit in nowhere and with no one."

The captain tapped one finger on the cockpit's console. "This ship-any ship really-was my chance to escape it all. I started my career as a starship engineer with the Corellian Engineering Corporation. I could work all day and fantasize about stealing one of the ship's and fleeing my life. Then Hadron came along," the captain leaned back in his chair and his eyes swept across the ship, seemingly looking through the bulkheads to view the ship in its entirety. "CEC wanted to scrap her but she's unique, like me. If I was ever going to steal a ship to escape my father, Hadron was the one. We were meant to be together."

Captain Jocque paused for a long moment, lost in thought and memories. "And, now my point. I know what it is to walk that middle ground, to see what life is like to either side yet included in neither. It sucks void. I'd have given anything to fit in. I don't know if your master's beliefs have any merit; the Force is a mystery to me. I do know the legends though. The Jedi Order has existed for thousands of years. Tens of thousands of Jedi have served the Order, and I know of none who have fallen to this Dark Side you speak of. Except one," he said with a raised finger. "Count Dooku. The one Jedi Master known throughout the galaxy for leaving the Jedi Order. He turned his back on the Jedi and embraced his own beliefs. What did he do next? He started a war that has left a how many dead? Billions? Doesn't that tell you something?"

Jocque watched the young Jedi rush from the cockpit without saying a word, the hatch opening at a wave of his hand. He knew he'd struck a nerve. The kid must have doubts, buried somewhere deep in his subconscious. He feared making assumptions about this Lai Stree's motivations, but the way Okuvad described their relationship-Jocque shook his head. Maybe this mysterious master of Okuvad's sincerely wanted to find a better path, a less violent path. But, that didn't sit right with Jocque. The way Okuvad described their relationship: the casual contact at a young age, instilling a perception of failure in Okuvad's guardians, alienating him from the Jedi. While smuggling for the Hutts Jocque had seen that same formula put to work by the worst scum in the galaxy. Most gangs in the Outer Rim used the same technique, enticing youth into the dark underworld with sweet lies. The young Jedi's story left Jocque with a knot in his belly.