Despite not currently being aboard the Raventalon, PY-HD's monitoring protocols were still in effect while stationed at the hideout on Orto Plutonia: Every twenty standard minutes, stop and monitor the scanner for ten minutes. For three months the blue-and-pink astromech had been following that routine around the clock.

And it was so bored.

Plugged into the console on the observation deck of the former military installation, the droid sat diligently monitoring the scanner. It was like being stranded on Moraband all over again. A planet almost completely devoid of life, and there was no way anyone could possibly know they were there. It was a complete waste of time to constantly monitor the scanners.

Right up until something pinged on the radar.

No, that couldn't be. It wasn't possible. PY-HD double and triple checked the signal.

It was possible.

Marco was hoping he'd find Star alone, and he did. She was in the barracks, laying in the bunk that the two of them shared. Stretched out flat on her back, her fingers laced behind her head, staring up at the ceiling, unmoving.

Marco swallowed nervously. He'd been meaning to bring this point up for quite some time, but every time he tried, Tom or Janna would walk in and interrupt, or he'd simply find himself tongue tied and unable to coax the words from his vocal chords. Slowly approaching the bunk, he watched as Star's vibrant blue irises flickered to meet his.

"Um...h-hey, Star."

"Hey, Marco."

He shuffled his boot back and forth across the bare floor. "So...um...how is you? I mean, uh, how is you...are doing?"

"You're never gonna learn how to make small talk, are you?" Star deadpanned.

The boy's cheeks flushed pink. "Um...I uh...I just wanted to make sure you're okay. You haven't really talked much about...you know...what happened on Mewni, and-"

"I'm fine, Marco." Despite cutting her best friend off mid-thought, there was no animosity in her voice.

"Are...are you sure? I mean...you lost your-"

"Marco." She rose to a sitting position, her lips curled into a reassuring smile, and rested her hand on his. "I'm fine. Really."

"...Really?"

"Yeah. We're Jedi. I just did what we were always taught. I mourned, and then I let go."

Marco blinked at her a few times. "...But you hate doing stuff the Jedi taught us."

"Well, in this case, it actually helped. It's okay, Marco, really. I'm fine." And to punctuate the declaration, she leaned forward and planted a kiss on his lips.

Marco wasn't entirely convinced. Star had been distant and downtrodden for awhile after the gang had arrived on Orto Plutonia, but she had abruptly gone right back to being her usual cheerful self. Marco wasn't sure that was very healthy. Or truthful.

"Well...if you say so...then I guess-"

A loud click echoed through the barracks as the PA system powered up. It was followed by a frantic series of the beeps and bloops that made up Astromech binary. Marco still had no idea what it meant, but he saw Star's eyes widen in surprise.

"Was that Pony Head?" Marco asked.

"Yup," Star replied as she launched over Marco out of the bed. Landing in front of him, she grabbed his arm and hauled him out of the room, heading toward the lift. "Observation deck, now!"

"What's going on?" Marco yelped as he tripped over his own feet trying to keep up with Star.

"Pony picked up an incoming ship on the scanner."

That was all it took for Marco's blood to turn to ice.

Tom and Janna were already on the command deck with PY-HD when their Jedi companions came spilling haphazardly out of the lift. Star and Marco joined them at the main computer terminal in examining the unidentified spacecraft being tracked on a large monitor.

"Is it the Empire?" Marco asked. "Did they find us?"

"Don't know yet, but I'd put money on it," Janna replied. "There's never traffic of any kind on Orto Plutonia. Everything in the system is to and from the moon of Pantora. If someone is coming here, then they're most likely looking for us."

PY-HD twittered something from the console. As usual, Marco asked for a translation.

"Pony says that based on that ship's movements, it looks like it's running a search grid," Janna translated. "Which means it's only a matter of time before they find us. We should get out of here before they do."

The blip on the radar abruptly changed directions, its trajectory turning directly toward the base in the middle, and its speed increasing.

Tom grimaced. "I think it might be too late for that."

"Oh, it's definitely too late." Star rounded the computer console and jumped down the short stairs to the observation windows that took up most of the exterior wall. The others followed. There, far in the distance but rapidly approaching, was the outline of a Pelta-class frigate.

The inquisitor stood behind the stormtrooper pilots seated at the controls, watching as the object on the scanner readout came into range of sight out the view screen. Despite the passage of several standard months since it had seen the ship last, the shape of the YV-560 had been burned into the inquisitor's memory and it recognized it immediately, even from a still considerable distance.

"That's it," it said. "That's their ship." Then, without so much as a moment's hesitation, "Blow it up."

Rosado was surprised the inquisitor did not want to defeat the Padawans face-to-face. At least then the poor younglings might have at least some semblance of a chance at escaping. "What if they aren't on board?" he asked.

"I don't care if they are or not. I want the ship destroyed so that there is no chance of them escaping again. Now blow it up."

"Yes, Inquisitor," replied one of the pilots as he flicked a switch on the control panel. "Arming missiles."

PY-HD let out a terrified electronic squeal, followed by a series of panicked bleeps spaced so close together that Star couldn't translate it. Janna could. "Pony says they're arming missiles!"

"We gotta get out of here!" Tom cried, but the astromech wasn't finished.

"They aren't targeting us!" Janna translated. "They're targeting the Raventalon!"

No sooner did Star turn back to the window, a pair of explosive projectiles fired off from the incoming ship, trailing white smoke. Without a moment to spare, she grabbed Marco's hand. "Marco! Force-shield! Force-shield!"

"Huh? Oh, right!"

They outstretched their free hands toward the Raventalon on the ground below, their cheek marks glowing as they Force-cleaved. A second later, the missiles exploded as they reached their target. The shockwave from the explosion shattered the transparisteel windows and sent all four teenagers flying backwards into the control console in the center of the room.

As the cloud of smoke and fire dissipated, the outline of a still fully intact YV-560 freighter came into view.

"How did you idiots miss?!" yelled the inquisitor. "How?!"

"We didn't miss, sir. We were dead on target," replied one of the stormtrooper pilots. "They must have it ray shielded."

The inquisitor fell silent, watching as they passed over where the freighter was parked, nestled in beside a towering column of rock. "Circle back around and set down next to it."

"Yes, sir!"

Tom groaned as he picked himself up off the floor, brushing shards of transparisteel from his jacket. He could see Star and Marco, both sprawled out unconscious on the floor. He did not, however, see his partner. "Janna?" he called.

"Right here," she replied from somewhere behind him.

He turned toward the voice and saw the girl pulling herself to her feet, having flown over top of the control console and landed somewhere near the lift door. PY-HD rolled up beside her as she made her way back over to Tom.

"You okay, Lucy?"

"I don't think anything is broken," he said loudly. "But my ears are ringing a little."

"Yeah, mine too." She pointed to their unconscious friends. "Are they okay?"

"I don't know..."

They quickly knelt down on the floor and checked to make sure Star and Marco were still breathing and were relieved to find that they were. Star had a nasty cut on the left side of her forehead where a piece of the shattered window had sliced across her skin, but the pair appeared otherwise uninjured.

Having determined that her friends were not dead, Janna stood and hurried to the shattered window, ignoring the sting of the icy wind as she watched the Imperial frigate make a slow, wide turn through the air. "We need to leave. Now."

Tom pointed to the unconscious Padawans still lying motionless on the floor. PY-HD was applying a bandage to the cut on Star's forehead. "We aren't gonna make it very far if we have to carry them. Besides, the converters need time to warm up before we can take off, they're probably about frozen solid."

"Good point." Janna thought hard. This would not be easy. What they really needed was for someone to prep the Raventalon for takeoff while they were transporting Star and Marco downstairs. "Pony Head, you gotta jump out the window."

The droid jolted in surprise, bleeping a shocked response followed by an indignant protest.

"C'mon, Pony," Janna pleaded. "You gotta get down there and get the ship ready to go so we can get off this frozen rock as soon as we get on board. Please?"

The droid hesitantly rolled to the edge of the window, looking down to the snow-covered ground several stories below. It protested in binary once again.

"Well, I tried asking nicely," Janna shrugged. She darted forward, dropped to her knees behind the droid, placed her hands below the droid's body, lifted the droid up and over the control panel below the window, and flipped it through one of the shattered panes, sending the astromech plummeting to the ground. PY-HD landed in a snow drift, the soft impact keeping the droid from sustaining damage. It quickly wrenched itself free of the snow, looking up at the window and twittering angrily.

"Great job, Pony!" Janna yelled. "You're our hero!"

Still bleeping to itself with annoyance, PY-HD hurried to the Raventalon, remotely lowered the ramp and boarded, retracting the ramp again behind it just as the Imperial frigate retuned, slowing to a hover overhead before gently descending toward the ground.

Still standing on the bridge as the ground rose up to meet the Mentis Mal, the inquisitor scrutinized the YV-560 freighter parked fifty meters away. It appeared to be locked up tight. Not surprising if the owner wanted to keep out the ice and snow.

They're close now, I can feel them...

...and yet...I still can't quite tell exactly where they are...

"Pilot, does this bucket have a lifeform scanner?"

"Yes, inquisitor."

"Scan that freighter for lifeforms."

"Yes, sir. Right away." The trooper flicked a switch on the control panel. "Initiating lifeform scan."

A silhouette of the YV-560 appeared on the copilot's console screen. A vertical blue line moved slowly from left to right across the outline of the ship, indicating how far the sensors had progressed. When it reached the end, no targets had appeared.

"No lifeforms aboard, sir."

The inquisitor frowned beneath its helmet as the landing gear touched down softly on the frozen ground." So the fugitives aren't on the ship. But they are nearby, I can sense them." It turned and stalked from the cockpit. "Let's go pay a visit to a pair of Padawans."

Tom gave a labored grunt as he finally managed to haul Marco's unconscious body into the lift. Janna and Star were already inside.

"Okay," he panted. "Let's go."

Janna pressed the button for the ground floor hanger and the lift doors slid quietly shut. They descended at a pace that felt so slow they might as well have been riding atop a giant snail.

The inquisitor halted at the end of the Mentis Mal's boarding ramp. There was a set of large sliding doors set into the rock face just behind where the YV-560 had been parked. "What the heck is this place?"

The sound of footsteps alerted the inquisitor to the arrival of another being, but it didn't bother looking at him. "Oh, hey, I know where we are," Security Officer Rosado said. "This is where the Republic built that outpost during the Clone War. I remember when I had to coordinate supply shipments to built this thing."

That's where they are. They're inside. It whirled around and began barking orders at the stormtroopers descending the ramp. "You four! Go over there and guard that ship!" it yelled, pointing to the YV-560. "Make sure they can't skirt around us and get onboard to escape."

"Yes, sir!"

"The rest of you, with me!"

Rosado began to follow after the inquisitor, but suddenly found a leather-gloved hand roughly shoving him backwards.

"Except you, Rosado. You wait on the ship. I won't have to preventing me from doing my job this time."

Rosado was shocked. Did the inquisitor really think he would try to prevent it from killing those kids?

Well, he supposed he couldn't blame it for thinking so. He didn't really want to see them dead. But he also wasn't stupid. He'd prevented the deaths of a few innocent bystanders and gotten away with it. But if he tried to save the Padawans, that would be considered treason, and he fully expected the inquisitor would immediately execute him with a lightsaber through the chest if he did so.

"Yes, Inquisitor," he said obediently. And he quietly strolled back up the boarding ramp.

As the four appointed stormtroopers took up sentry positions near the YV-560, the inquisitor led the remaining twelve to the large double-sliding hanger doors of the abandoned outpost.

"Get these doors open! Now!"

"I'm on it, sir!" replied a stormtrooper carrying a slicer. "I'll have it open in a moment."

The doors to the lift slid open with a soft whoosh and Janna took a cautious step out into the open. The bright military lighting clearly showed that the large hanger was void of life, empty aside from the jump speeder from the Raventalon.

"Coast is clear," she said to Tom, returning to the lift and hoisting up Star under the arms. "They must not have landed yet. Let's just get out of here and-"

She stopped mid-thought as the hanger doors suddenly slid open. A blast of cold air surged through the open space, and when Janna turned she found herself staring into the lifeless helmets of a dozen stormtroopers and one very perturbed inquisitor.

"Coast is not clear anymore."

The Jedi hunter angrily jabbed a finger into the air. "Open fire!"

Janna let Star drop unceremoniously to the floor and slammed the lift control button for the basement as the first barrage of lasers tore across the hanger toward them. The doors slid closed and Janna could hear the shots pinging off the other side before the lift started down.

"Now what do we do?" Tom asked frantically.

"When I figure that out, I'll let you know."

The stormtroopers ceased fire as the inquisitor barked out another order. "Cut off the power to the entire facility. We'll trap them in the lift."

"On it, sir!"

The overhead light blinked out as the lift suddenly jolted to an abrupt halt.

"What happened?!" Tom cried in panic.

"They must have cut the power. They're trying to trap us," Janna said angrily. "We gotta get down to the basement before they throw a thermal detonator down the shaft or something."

"How are we gonna do that?"

Janna bent down and blindly groped around until she found Star's bag, retrieving the lightsaber from within. "I have an idea." The emerald blade ignited at Janna's command and she held the lightsaber vertically, cutting out a hole in the roof of the lift car large enough to fit through.

"Uh, Janna? Don't we want to go down, not up?"

"We can't jump down from here, we'd break our legs at the bottom of the shaft." She carefully stood to the side as she finished the cutout, the section of the roof dropping down to the floor with a loud clang. "But if I can release us from the drive mechanism, the lift car has emergency mechanical brakes that will slow us down before we hit the bottom." She extinguished the lightsaber. "Give me a boost, Lucy."

Tom cupped his hands and Janna stepped into his palms with her left foot, pushing off the front with her right. She rose through the hole in the roof, careful not to touch the still-molten edges where the lightsaber blade had cut through. She pushed herself up through the hole and reignited Star's lightsaber. The green glow from the blade showed her the rail upon which the lift car traveled up and down the shaft.

"Okay, I just gotta detach the drive mechanism so the car free rides on the rail."

The drive mechanism was bolted to the roof of the lift car and connected to the rail by way of a contact armature that both drove the car up and down and also picked up power from the electrified rail by way of sliding contacts. The drive mechanism also acted as the brake to slow the car and the holding device to keep the car from plummeting when stationary.

"If I cut through this arm, we should essentially free fall to the bottom," Janna called down to Tom. "Hang on!"

"To what?"

Janna swung the lightsaber as if she were wielding an ax instead of a sword, severing the armature in one motion. Her stomach instantly flew up into her chest as the car dropped out from beneath her. Thankfully, while far too long to jump, at their great rate of falling velocity, the trip to the basement was very short. The emergency mechanical dampers kicked in when the car reached a speed deemed by the designers to be too high and dragged against the rail, slowing the car down until it roughly collided with the bottom of the shaft.

Janna's legs buckled beneath her as the car abruptly halted and she fell to her knees, catching herself with her palms and accidentally slicing a hole into the lift car's roof with the still-ignited lightsaber.

"Janna?" Tom called up to her as he picked himself up, holding his head where he'd smacked it against the wall. "You okay up there?"

"Yeah, I'm good." She hopped back down through the hole into the interior of the lift car. She glanced at Star and Marco, still unconscious. "Bet they'll be glad they were out cold for that."

Without power to open the lift door, Janna plunged Star's lightsaber into the spot where they sealed in the middle, breaking the connection and allowing the doors to be pushed apart. While the power had been cut off, the basement's red-tinted emergency lighting was still functional, revealing the large power generators and some storage, but not much else. Janna clipped Star's lightsaber to her own belt, thinking. How do we get out of here...? Her eyes landed on something on the far side of the room, something she had completely forgotten existed in the hideout. Bingo. "C'mon, Lucy, let's go."

"Where exactly are we going?" Tom asked, peering out into the dim basement. "Is there even another way out of here?"

"As a matter of fact, there is." Janna picked up Star under the unconscious girl's arms and began walking backwards, dragging her across the duracrete floor. Skeptical but trusting his partner, Tom hoisted up Marco in much the same way and followed.

They made their way past the power generators and abandoned equipment to the far forward edge of the basement. There, an alcove in the wall stretched about five meters across and equally as deep.

Tom was surprised. "Is that-?"

"A freight elevator, yup."

"I didn't even know this was down here."

"And I forgot all about it."

Tom looked up at the blank ceiling above their heads. "Where's this thing let out? Aren't we out past the hanger?"

"Yup. I'm actually not even sure where it goes. The middle of the ice field, I guess."

They dragged their limp friends onto the large platform that inhabited the bottom of the square shaft and laid them gently down. Realizing that there was a major flaw in the plan, Tom pointed it out. "Um, except the power's still off."

"Yeah, but we're in the room where the power generators are."

"Oh, right."

Janna quickly hurried over to the nearest generator's control panel. The panel contained not only the controls for the generators, but also power routing for the entire facility. Janna brought one generator back online and sent electrical power to the freight elevator, but kept the power off for all other circuits. If they were going to be in the dark, their attackers might as well be, too.

Satisfied, Janna hurried back toward the elevator. "Okay, Lucy, let's-"

And that's when the first blaster bolt singed the side of Janna's hat, just barely grazing the wool. The stormtroopers had made their way down the lift shaft and were firing at them from all the way across the room. In a split second, Tom and Janna had both drawn their blasters and were returning fire, the latter walking backwards toward the freight elevator. Neither side had very much luck. The stormtroopers ducked and juked between the power generators as they fired, making them into very difficult targets, but also making it quite hard for them to take aim themselves.

"Come on, Janna! Let's go!"

The instant Janna's boots touched the platform, Tom slammed his fist into the freight elevator's control button. A loud buzzer sounded, and a moment later the platform slowly began to rise. Within a few seconds they had disappeared up beyond the top of the alcove opening into the elevator shaft. Tom and Janna sighed in relief and rode the rest of the way up in silence.

"Sir! They made it into the freight elevator on the south side of the basement! They're heading back up!"

The inquisitor wanted to be furious with the stormtroopers down below, but didn't have the time to spare. It stalked quickly out of the hanger, the remaining six troopers in tow. "Find the hatch where that elevator lets out! It's buried beneath the snow!"

"Yes, sir!"

The top of the shaft was blocked off by a bisected sliding hatch which would be triggered to open by a sensor that would be tripped by whatever cargo was atop the freight elevator.

With seconds to spare before the sensor tripped, Janna quickly hit the emergency stop button. Another buzzer accompanied the abrupt halting of the lift just about two meters below the top.

"What did you do that for?!" Tom yelped in surprise.

"Because there's probably more of them waiting for us up there and I'm not one hundred percent sure where this elevator opens up. Besides, when you hit the emergency stop, it trips the breaker and cuts the power, so they can't call the elevator back down. Well, I mean...until they cycle the generator, anyway."

"...Oh."

"The point is, we need a plan."

Tom leaned back against the shaft wall. "Did you...have something in mind?"

Janna sighed and leaned beside her partner. She looked to the pair of Jedi Padawans, slumped over on top of each other. "...I was kinda hoping Star and Marco would wake up and think of something."

For a moment, the pair said nothing. The freight elevator shaft drew eerily silent. Somewhere down below, the stormtroopers were likely scrambling back up to the surface to cut them off. Janna almost regretted her decision to stop the lift. If the Imperials didn't already know where the freight elevator opened up to, they sure were giving them plenty of time to find it. They'd almost certainly be walking into an ambush now.

"What we need..." Janna began slowly, "is a distraction up on the surface."

"Yeah, that'd be great!" Tom said sarcastically. "Except there's no one here but us! How are we gonna create a distraction?"

"Pony Head is up there."

"Oh, yeah, I'm sure one astromech droid is very distracting," Tom said with a three-pupiled eye roll. "Pony might be able to hold their attention for almost two whole seconds before they blow her to smithereens!"

"Oh, hush." Janna retrieved her commlink from her jacket pocket. "Pony, come in."

A series of annoyed bleeps returned.

"Pony, we need your help. We're trapped in the freight elevator and we need you to do something to distract those stormtroopers."

More annoyed beeps.

"I don't know! You're a smart droid, think of something!"

PY-HD was quite perturbed. First being thrown out of a window and now being asked to distract a squadron of stormtroopers? This was just too much.

It checked the readouts on the Raventalon's computer again. The converters had about thawed and the ship was nearly nearly to fly. Shaking its horned dome in disgust, the astromech formulated a plan. It may have been annoyed, but the four organics were still its friends and it couldn't stand idly by while they needed help.

In the rear of the ship was a tiny vacuum lift just the size for a standard-sized astromech droid. It rolled inside and launched to the top, ending on the topside of the hull. Wishing it were a model equipped with hover jets, PY-HD rolled off the side of the ship and landed in a snow drift for the second time in less than twenty minutes. The snow completely obscured the droid from sight, because the four stormtroopers guarding the Raventalon were only a dozen meters away.

"Did you hear that?"

"Hear what?"

"I don't know, I thought I heard something. The snow muffles everything and makes it hard to hear."

The troopers turned around and searched the landscape, bending down to look beneath the ship and out toward the misty horizon.

"I don't see anything."

"Yeah, neither do I."

"Probably just something over there." The stormtrooper pointed to where their compatriots, including the inquisitor, were searching the hard-packed snow for the hatch that covered the top of the freight elevator shaft.

"Yeah...probably."

When it was certain the troopers had lost interest, PY-HD extricated itself from the snow. Its sensors didn't work very well in the cold, but it had a pretty good idea which way it should be heading. It set off across the fields of ice and snow, toward the ice ridge.