Chapter 54

Wayward

"I'm sorry, Nat," Ahsoka said. "But I think this mission will be dangerous. If something happens to me and Ylenic, you and Mirian will be safe with Jyssa and Arc."

"That's not fair. I'm almost as old as you were when you first went into battle. And the Masters thought I was old enough to become a full Padawan." He crossed his arms, and she saw one of his lekku twitch in annoyance.

"Yes, well I'm your Master for the time being. And my orders are to stay with Jyssa on the Drexl. Mirian needs somebody like you with her. Somebody who understands what it's like to be a Jedi, somebody who knows what it's like to feel the Force. Normally that would be Ylenic, but right now he and I need to go find out what is going on with an old Jedi Master on the run."

"I've got a bad feeling about this," Nat said as he stormed off.

Ahsoka yelled after him, "And no stowing away! That's a direct order!"

She turned to see Ylenic giving her an odd look. He asked, "What makes you think that he would stow away?"

"Because he's a lot like I was when I was that age."

"Ah," the older Jedi Master replied. "I understand."

"Only he doesn't have Master Plo Koon to use as an excuse." Ahsoka said, grinning. "Or access to carbon freezing equipment."

"I think," Ylenic said, "that this is a story you will have to tell me while we are in hyperspace."

"I think we'll have time."

This was the first time in weeks that she'd remembered her old friend and smiled. His death still hurt. A lot. But the good memories were there too. And they were starting to shine through the darkness.

They powered up the Whipclaw as quickly as possible, and the ship floated out of the docking bay, into space, and then leapt into hyperspace. The sun that illuminated the planet Wayland was a speck in the sky from the Rudrig. Thanks to the miracle of the hyperspace drive, it took about the same amount of time to fly from nearby Rudrig to the old asteroid mine that Ahsoka had made her home as it did to jump through hyperspace from the asteroid base to Wayland.


The stolen Imperial shuttle that Master Dyas was in was hurtling through hyperspace towards Wayland as well.

In the belly of that ship, Master Dyas looked down at his recently murdered foe. The well cushioned passenger seat had been in his way when he was trying to remember a complex Makashi form sequence of saber moves. But even the strongest durasteel chair swivel mechanism couldn't stand up to the newly constructed lightsaber in the Jedi's hand.

Using the Force, he lifted the chair off the ground and tossed it across the room. It clattered against other overstuffed passenger chairs.

Master Dyas paid it no mind. He had to train. He had to practice. It had been so long since he'd held a lightsaber, and he needed to be able to stand against a foe who was as powerful as he.

Even his visions of the future were becoming blurry. The galaxy had changed from what he remembered. The Republic was no more. The Jedi were no more. He hadn't expected to run into that Togruta girl, though, so clearly there were some things moving and changing that kept his visions from being clear. The Force was strong with her, and her lightsabers were the familiar blue and green colors of a Jedi.

There was one thing clear about his vision. The man who had murdered the keepers of the facility buried in Mount Tantiss did not have a typical Jedi lightsaber. There was a tinge of something dark about him. His lightsaber was not yellow, blue, or green. That much was clear in his visions.

He was also irreparably mad. That much was clear too. Although Master Dyas couldn't remember how he knew that. It wasn't part of his visions.

Come to think of it, he didn't know how he knew about Mount Tantiss, or why he knew the layout of the base built into the mountain.

But there was no time to meditate and try to recover lost memories. Right now he needed to recover lost combat skills. Only his amazing ability to use the Force to see the future had allowed him to win in the fight against the Togruta.

"Let's face it," he said to himself, "I'm rusty. Out of practice."

But now he had room to do his Makashi drill. And he had a few hours to try to regain his old combat reflexes.


"And then Master Skywalker dropped the grenade. Right down the pipe." Ahsoka laughed. "I couldn't believe it. We spent all that time trying to avoid setting any of the gas off, and he just... boom."

"I have no difficulty imagining that," Ylenic said. "Master Skywalker always had a certain... zest to him that many of the older Jedi lacked. Master Vos was the same way. Sometimes they would do something that would be so insane that it would make you question your own sanity rather than theirs."

Ahsoka shook her head. "We lost a lot of good men that day. Clones, officers, and Jedi. But we got out of there with the information and most of the prisoners."

"One of the many dichotomies of war. We remember our comrades, our missions, our time together fondly. But that time, those missions, those comrades, they are all marred by the losses."

"I remember them all," Ahsoka said. "Every clone in my command who lost their lives in the line of duty. They never asked for it. They never enlisted. They just did their duty. They sacrificed themselves so that the men and women of the Republic could be free."

Master It'kla tilted his head and asked, "Are you describing the clones, or the Jedi?"

"Maybe that's why we all got along so well. Worked together so well. We weren't too different. But the Jedi... we always had a choice. We could always walk away. We didn't, because we knew we were needed. But we could."

She left the next part unsaid. But they both knew that the end result of the Republic creating an army of men who had no real free will was what made it so easy to exterminate the Jedi.

The navicomp beeped, startling Ahsoka out of her reverie. "We're almost there. Reverting to realspace in thirty seconds."

The bluish purple vortex in the transparisteel cockpit was replaced with the long lines of stars, which shrunk down to individual points of light. Ahead of them was the planet Wayland.

It was a green planet, with a little more land than ocean.

"I can't see the satellites that Hondo mentioned from orbit here. We might want to do a full orbit to see if it's on the far side of the planet," Ahsoka said, looking at the sensors.


The Imperial shuttle came out of hyperspace on the far side of Wayland from Mount Tantiss. Dyas didn't want to be detected by any of the sensors in the mountain base itself, or in the satellites that were in geosynchronous orbit above it.

That was another bit of information that he knew, but couldn't remember how or why he knew it.

But his train of thought was derailed when he saw a blip on his scanners that shouldn't have been there. Hastily he focused passive sensors in the direction of the blip. Then, he laughed.

The ship was all too familiar. It was the ship that had docked with the fish-smelling freighter where he found his lightsaber crystal.

It was the ship that belonged to that Togruta Jedi.

Perhaps the Force was on his side after all.