Chapter 28: Resident Jedi
It wasn't as if she couldn't see him, but Kit Fisto delighted in the fact that the Force-user around the white corner would wait for him to show himself.
When the wait reached the right moment of tension he stepped out empty-handed.
She was human, tall and slender, pushing red hair around the curve of her shoulder to get it out of her face, using her left hand as her right loosely held a lit, red lightsaber, her tiny mammalian eyes gleaming fierce and green and with the sour burn of the dark side. He had seen it so many times before.
"So this is the resident Jedi." She said softly, with great anticipation. The lightsaber came up into a vertical guard line six.
Kit shrugged the brown cloak from his arms and pulled it over his left shoulder with his right hand, and let the fabric drop. He pulled his lightsaber from its holster with the Force, ducked and rolled to the woman's left. He brought the lightsaber up, thrumming, at the completion of the roll, grinned at the sound and the smell of anticipation.
The initial stuttering contact stemmed directly from that movement, that emotion. Red and green fields contracted and fought, and their fight-blank faces were outlined in neon.
Horn felt ensconced in the walker head, away from the cold of space and away from Darth Vader and his unsettling prisoner, his son.
The change came suddenly, so suddenly that his hands just had time to clench the joysticks, ridges digging red into his palms.
Corran Horn, Jedi Knight just removed from Maw Installation, woke into a new world angling for a Star Destroyer.
"Woah,"
"Come in, GK One, Commander Horn?" The voice was Imperial-filtered and issued from the open comm. Corran pushed one of the pod-style joysticks to bank port and avoid the Destroyer, but the response time was quick, the dynamics too different from those of an X-Wing. The starboard wing swept port and overhead across the view of the Destroyer, and something metal creaked. Corran killed relative motion by yanking the sticks back to neutral and the gara-katte floated, parallel to the Destroyer and silent.
Corran stabbed the comm with a finger before another staticky voice issued from the black metal.
"Ah,I'm having technical difficulties, control." He felt himself slip partly back into the persona of the Imperial commander, but now it was an act, a tool, one of many assigned identities.
"Alright, we'll bring you in with a tractor beam." The voice crisply replied.
Corran sighed and settled back in the alien-leather chair supposed to be the pilot's seat of a starfighter. The Star Destroyer grew closer, smooth silver turning to gun turrets and rivets and blue-swathed docking bays. In the Force, tension grew on opposite sides of a war not yet begun.