I'm a guy, and Lucas or Disney ain't my last name.

As a lot of you know, last month for half of the month I had a poll up to decide which Star Wars Crossover I would post in January, since that month I was updating A Third Path. The winner of that poll was Horse for the Force.

Next month however, I am going to update Magic of the Force. I'm not putting it up for votes; I'm just going to do it. That will give me a chance to address the number of guests who are using the review section to discuss where they think I need to take the story and also write up a story I greatly enjoy and several scenes which I've already worked on.

By the way, just so there's no confusion - when talking about just one of them, the singular of lekku is lek. It's not a misspelling, though I had not actually known this until Michael my editor pointed this out. I would further like to thank Michael for his work on this chapter. He really is very good at spotting my DNS fueled mistakes when I cannot.

And, without further ado, here we go!


Horse of the Force 15: A Nemesis Appears!?

Ranma and Shaak Ti took their time returning to the Rwookrrorro the day after their love-making. This wasn't because Shaak Ti was slightly sore; while it would have appalled her teachers to use the technique in this manner, she had been able to use the Force to ease her sore muscles. Nor was their slowness because they were attacked on the way. Indeed, as the outskirts of the Wookie city came within sight, Shaak was rather surprised that she hadn't even seen any predators on their way.

Pausing as that thought occurred to her, she looked over at Ranma quizzically. "I just realized that we haven't seen a single predator or been attacked at all today. Could this be a start of a new trend?"

Ranma's blue eyes flashed with humor and other emotions as they locked with her black eyes, his lips twitching. The twitching of those lips which had brought her such pleasure made Shaak lick her lips even as she tried to concentrate on his response. "I doubt it. When you were, um…resting last night, but a few of the local animals tried to investigate the noise we were making. I sort of dealt with them the same way I dealt with that beastie on Mandalore."

"Hmm…" Shaak hummed, acknowledging the words but for a moment the two of them simply stared at one another before looking away with blushes on their faces. This is utterly ridiculous. We have been a couple for more than a year now, and we had tried everything but the final sexual act together before last night. Why is it that now that we have finally made love that we both find it impossible to look at one another without feeling shy, of all things? We are acting like love-struck teens in one of those horrible daytime television shows that are all the rage on Coruscant.

Ranma too was grappling with his thoughts. Every time Shaak moved, his eyes tracked her. Every time her lekku twitched, he wanted to kiss them. Every time her hips swayed, he had to fight to keep from either grabbing them or running away with a fiery blush. And when her eyes looked at him, Ranma felt almost frozen, feeling too many emotions to control.

The sheer silliness of the way they were acting brought suddenly Shaak up short, and she began to laugh, using the humor of the moment to help center herself in the Force. As Ranma looked back at her quizzically, Shaak was happy to realize that her self-control had returned enough for her to concentrate. "It just occurred to me we are acting like overly emotional teenagers from a…"

"A teen soap opera or something," Ranma finished, laughing with her now. The laughter trailed off, and Ranma held out a hand, which Shaak willingly took. There was still the tingle they both had been feeling after last night whenever they touched, but they were able to deal with it now. Black eyes met blue once more as Ranma gently kissed Shaak's hand. "I loved you before last night. All last night should change is that we have a new way of showing each other that."

"Technically it was yesterday and last night and half of this morning, but I do agree with the sentiment my love." Shaak said, starting out jokingly, but ending with her voice throbbing with more emotion than she had ever shown anyone else.

Ranma leaned in, and Shaak met him halfway. The two stayed there kissing for several minutes, neither trying to deepen it. Right now it wasn't about physical pleasure, as nice as that was. This kiss was about reaffirming their emotional connection.

Eventually they pulled back, and Ranma gently turned them back towards the city as his stomach began to grumble. Shaak laughed, poking him in the side as they started to move forward once more. "Hehe, worked up an appetite, did you?"

"And whose fault was that, hmmm?" Ranma asked, and for some reason Shaak found herself blushing again before laughing with him.

"It's not yet lunchtime, so if we are hungry we should either look for a restaurant in the city which would cater to offworlders, or head to the ship," Shaak said as they reached the edge of the city. "And I do think we need to talk about last night. Nothing bad, just a talk, to get us over the last bit of embarrassment I know we are both feeling."

Ranma opened his mouth to protest that, but Shaak gave him a level look and his words stumbled to a halt. "I'm projecting, aren't I?" Shaak nodded, and he scowled. "I knew there had to be a downside to loving a Jedi. All right, fine, but you get to go first."

Shaak balked slightly at that challenge, but rallied quickly. "Very well, so long as you do the cooking."

"Agreed," Ranma said, internally snapping his fingers as his attempt to get out of what was bound to be a very awkward discussion failed.

Moments later they entered the entrance to the semi-secret landing bay and from there the Wild Light. The entrance was carefully concealed, and Ranma almost missed it even though he knew where it was in a general way, but Shaak lead them unerringly to it, leaping across from one Wroshyr branch to the lip of the entrance. There she nodded to a few Wookies who were working on installing a doorway to further hide the entrance, heading deeper into the now hollow wroshyr branch which served the Jedi as their landing pad, with Ranma behind her.

While Ranma was preparing two steaks made from a local meat animal, Shaak took a quick shower and came back, wrapping her arms around him as he worked at the stove, pressing her body against his back. She laid a kiss on the side of his neck before joining him, cutting and chopping at the salad things he had brought out to go with the steak.

The greens in question were nothing like that which a Togrutan would have had on Shili. But in the months they had spent here on Kashyyyk she had gotten used to their looks, and they tasted good, having none of the intense heat that the local meats produced, whatever the animal they came from. Indeed, half of Ranma's work on the steak was intended to deaden some of the spiciness so that their merely human and Togrutan palates could handle them. Unlike my friend Aayla, who would be able to handle it as is, Shaak thought ruefully while putting the finishing touches on her salad. With the meal done, the two of them moved over to the table, for once not sitting next to one another while they ate.

The two of them remained silent at first while they ate, Shaak's own hunger, which she had kept in abeyance with Force exercises, being almost as acute as Ranma's. However, eventually their hunger was sated, and Shaak turned to the discussion she wanted the two of them to have.

"All right, so…" She hesitated, then pushed on quickly, thinking it best to get the embarrassment over with now. "Ahem, I enjoyed practically everything we did. I thought making love to your female form was just as amazing as your male body, though there are two things I didn't like. At the time I was too far gone with…positive emotions, shall we say," Shaak said almost primly, unable to find a word which really described the feelings of making love as they had. "But looking back on it I do not wish us to try them again."

Ranma nodded a blush evident on his face as he tried to avoid looking at her, unable to get over his own discomfiture even to tease her about trying to be prim and proper about such a topic. "Um, me too, er, but you're the one who wanted us to actually talk about this, so you first."

"Well for one thing, I think it was a mistake at the time, but I just want to make certain that you understand I am not only uninterested but disgusted by um…" Shaak's words faltered, her Jedi training failing as the trickle of mortification she was feeling became a flood. "R, rear, issues…" she finally squeaked.

"OH!" Ranma's blush now made his face resemble Shaak's normal skin tone, and her own had lightened her skin to a pinkish hue, the area around her eyes becoming even whiter than normal. "Erm, yeah, sorry, um, one of my fingers sort of slipped there; it was totally a mistake! I'm not interested in that area either." He laughed a little, trying to add humor to the moment to dilute the moment. "Um, your butt's cute, but that isn't really an interest I have."

"Good," Shaak said, breathing a sigh of relief. At the time she'd felt dread and something approaching horror for the brief moment Ranma's finger had touched that particular area, but the touch had been fleeting enough she had fallen back into the euphoria she had been feeling swiftly. Looking back on what they had done, it had stood out starkly, however.

The two of them fell silent, letting the discomfiture fade before Shaak went on, her voice much stronger this time. "The other issue was that a few times, you attempted to take full control of our lovemaking, Ranma." She paused, thinking how to say what she wanted to for a moment. "While that called out to my base Togrutan instincts, and I am more at home with said instincts than I was before I met you, that does not mean that I actually enjoyed that wholeheartedly. I would prefer to be an equal participant rather than a docile one."

"Huh, um, how does that dovetail with how you seem to, um…to try and dominate my female form?" Ranma asked quizzically, despite his blushing.

"It is a difference of degree, I think. When you are in your female body I know I have to take the lead and enjoy doing so. When you are in your male body I don't, but there is a difference between not being in the lead and being docilely controlled. I'm sorry I can't explain it better, but this is a first for me too, you know," Shaak said, shrugging and unable to come up with a better way of explaining her feelings than that.

"Understood, and I do know all of this is a first for both of us, Shaak," Ranma replied, his discomfiture receding at that admission as he reached across the table to take her hands. "As long as we make it up like this, by talking about it no matter how red that makes us, we're good, right?"

Shaak nodded, then fell silent, looking at Ranma expectantly.

The martial artist sighed, but nodded. "Um, besides sharing your aversion about um…rear entry stuff…there was only one thing I really did not like at all. I'm fine with how you like to take the lead when I'm in my female form; I even agree with your reasoning. Beyond hugs I'm just not comfortable enough in that body to take the lead. But I didn't like the feel of, of, um, your, your fingers in there," Ranma finished, just as uncomfortable. "It was just so weird, and wrong, that if not for how everything else had gone I might have stopped our lovemaking entirely."

"I will remember that, Ranma, and I can see that, certainly. After all, as you often say, your mind doesn't change, and there is no real male equivalent for that feeling. I think it's a pity, but understandable, and I won't press you," Shaak replied.

With the awkward discussion over now, the two of them turned their concentration to their food and other topics. Eventually they finished eating, and Shaak took a moment to change her underthings and her under-clothing before putting her Jedi cloak back on. She did not, however, remove the torque Ranma had given her from her back lek, instead covering it up with her Jedi robe. It was still there, obvious if you knew it, but not so obvious if you did not. In this manner Shaak continued her campaign of both embracing her relationship with Ranma and not shoving it into the Order's collective face.

While she was doing that, Ranma tossed the cloak he had given her into the wash before taking a short shower and changing as well. With that done the two met up on the landing ramp, exchanging one last kiss before heading up to the Jedi Temple.

There they noticed many of the Jedi they passed looking at them quizzically for some reason, or perhaps censoriously in many cases. Shaak, however, simply met such looks with her own serene gaze, and the other Jedi looked away. Other Jedi simply smiled at them, nodding to them as they passed or just smiling in general as they felt the emotions both lovers were broadcasting despite Shaak's self-control. The two of them were giving off this feeling of joy that those with any skill in reading emotions through the Force could feel. This broadcasting was aided by the amount of Living Force that Ranma, and to a lesser extent Shaak, contained within them. For those Jedi who felt that Jedi should abstain from all emotions, this was a sign of a lack of control, for those who felt otherwise, it was simply a very nice feeling.

The two of them did not stop as they walked through the temple, Ahsoka and the other younglings being in class and none of Shaak's acquaintances being present on Kashyyyk at this time. But Ranma shook his head as they ascended the stairs up to the fifth floor. When Shaak looked at him, Ranma laughed. "I just thought of another bonus of being in a relationship with a Jedi."

Watching Shaak raise an interrogative eyebrow, her white marking moving over one eye in a very telling fashion, he went on. "In a lot of stories I've read or seen on TV, the girl is almost always taken aside by her friends after her first night with a guy, and she tells them how it was and everything in enough detail to send the guy running. But Jedi don't gossip like that."

Shaak smiled lightly, the most she'd allow in public. "Indeed. The idea of discussing such an intimate thing would not occur to me at all. Though, I could see myself describing it in loose terms if Aayla or Luminara were here."

They soon ascended to the topmost floor were they met Yoda in his room. The diminutive Grand Master looked up from his meditations several moments before they opened the door, the feeling of love and joy they were putting out traveling before them to his senses.

It didn't quite serve to burn away the Veil of the Dark, which was always there, like oil on the top of the ocean, but it felt almost soothing to his mental senses, only subtly bringing attention to a bit of strain he had been feeling in keeping the Dark Side out before this. Push harder for more emotional instruction and control, I must, but carefully. Strain in the Order, appearing already it is. Light side emotions, a balm against the feel of the Dark Side they are. Lead to further complications, opening ourselves up to the Dark Side they might be, but a defense against the Dark Side they are as well.

Yet wonder do I, what caused this increased outflow of emotion. Master Ti, one to project like this she is not. He was still wondering later that day when the exercise ended having no wish to simply ask because he felt it rude and did not fit his position as Grand Master. His race was also against his understanding this topic, since he had only observed lovers occasionally outside the Order and none of those couples were Force sensitives.

This did not impact his ability to help Ranma with his Neko-Ken meditations. That day the martial artist was able to let one of the local feline-equivalents sit in his lap for twenty minutes, an impressive feat given that the day before they had only managed five.

As the two lovers were leaving Yoda however, he spoke up, arresting their movement. "Master Plo Koon, finishing on Mandalore he will be within a week. Coming to Kashyyyk he will be, before assigning his next mission we will. When he arrives, here will you be?"

"Uncertain at this time, old frog. I think it's time for us to move on. I even have the next few planets whose martial arts styles I want to explore lined up, but Shaak here wants to make certain her lessons with Ahsoka take before we leave, right?" Ranma said, first directing a teasing smile at Yoda than a far more tender smile towards Shaak, missing how Yoda seemed to be contemplating breaking in his new gimer stick on him for a second.

"Indeed. She has had two days now back with her clan, but I would like to observe Ahsoka's interaction with them and her solo meditation practices for a few more days," Shaak supplied. That this would allow the two of them a few more days mostly to themselves on Kashyyyk was also a bonus, which neither would voice to the Grand Master.

Shaak went on musingly as the three of them entered the corridor, making their way down to the commissary for the evening meal. "I also have to admit to some curiosity in talking to Master Koon about exactly how the changeover has gone. Bo wanted the power of Mandalore, but given her personality she might be regretting that now."

OOOOOOO

On Mandalore at around the same time as Ranma had finished up his meditation exercises Plo Koon had just begun his. Despite that and the fact that he was alone at present on the roof of the hotel he was staying in, the Kel Dor Jedi Master could have told Shaak the answer to her question: a resounding yes.

While the process was still ongoing on the lower levels, the younger Kryze sibling had taken control entirely of the government of Mandalore by this point. She had not acted as part of Plo had been worried she might, only putting her own people in power in certain places, not everywhere she could have. She left the New Mandalorians in charge of many of the municipalities and parts of the government even while changing the government's fundamental structure.

One example of these changes was that Bo ordered the online learning system the New Mandalorians had developed expanded. Eventually it would cover the entire planet, though what was taught through it had been changed to include what the Reborn wanted the young to learn. Plo had been called in to keep the peace in those discussions more often than any other, but in his opinion the new curriculum was a decent compromise between the two dichotomous social messages. With it the young would have enough knowledge of the two belief systems to make a truly informed decision on which to join.

Of course training centers had sprung up overnight practically everywhere on Mandalore. More and more younger people were joining up with the Reborn even from the cities which were nominally NM strongholds. The changed Resol'nare, however, seemed to call out to the adventurer in the young. It brought them in by droves to either join up or to start training as Mandalorians in the first place.

Bo Katan had even let the NM's retain control of most of the planet's industrial base, acknowledging that they had been the ones to rebuild it and the fact that it was centered in the cities they controlled. She had, however, begun to push hard for more orbital industry, devoting a huge amount of the government's budget to that, pulling that money from other areas. Bo Katan wanted to build more ships and expand their influence while also patrolling the space lanes between the planets which had already joined them. Even now the first few orbital shipyards were nearing completion.

But Bo Katan had also learned the first rule of ruling: that it often means you spend a lot of your time doing things you don't like with people you can't get along with. Her personal training time had swiftly taken over her evenings and served as a much needed break from her duties. Plo idly reflected that such personal training, beyond being necessary under the tenants of the Resol'nare, were possibly the only thing keeping Bo Katan both sane and on Mandalore instead of leading the small separate campaigns going on to wipe out various pirate bands that made their home in this sector.

Pushing such thoughts aside, Plo settled into his meditation, reaching out to the Force as he would normally. He had never been the strongest Jedi in terms of his ability to reach into the future, though this was offset by his ability to discern what he had to do in the now. And with the Veil of the Dark Side impacting his ability, Plo rarely received visions these days.

This was not the case today. Barely fifteen minutes after entering his meditation Plo had a vision. It was of his niece, Sha Koon, who also was a Jedi. She had just become a Knight the year before, and had since been going through the acclimatization process all Knights did in being on solo missions. He had no idea, of course, what mission she was on currently; their last discussion had been before he left Coruscant for Mandalore a little under a year ago. He knew she was well, and as a Consular she had been working with various security forces on nonviolent crimes, but that was all.

The vision was so clear, at first Plo thought that she had reached out to him through their telepathic connection, a means of communication Kel Dor Force users could use over vast distances. The two of them had used it to communicate with one another during the Stark Hyperspace War when Sha was a young padawan, which had served the Order and the Republic well. After a moment, however, he realized this was not the case: the image was too vague and had none of the flavor it would have had if that was the case.

The vision was of Sha Koon in danger, uncertain danger coming on her suddenly, from an unseen source. Then of her being trapped, snared in something or perhaps in an actual cage. The same danger seemed to hover over her image, slowly closing its grip, a grip, moreover, made of shadows.

Coming out of his meditation, Plo let loose a long breath behind his gas mask, centering himself in the Force after the impact of the unanticipated vision. Then he reached out in the Force to the telepathic connection he and his niece shared, only to find…nothing. It felt as if she was unconscious, due to wounds or something else, he could not tell. And with her unconscious, he could get no feel for her location either.

With no target to assault Plo Koon had no means to deal with this sudden vision on his own, so he immediately went to Mandalore's Hypercom system and contacted Master Windu and Master Yoda. The Master of the Order and the Grand Master listened without comment for a time as he explained. And, when they spoke, neither attacked the veracity of the vision or the familial connection that had no doubt spawned it, taking it at face value.

Instead Windu simply told the other two what he knew of Sha Koon's mission. "Sha Koon was selected to go on a mission to the Dorin system about a month and a half back. Several sector-wide corporations were being investigated for insider trading and misappropriation of public funds, hence why the Republic was involved in the investigation. It seemed a simple enough job, but as the evidence was pointing to the perpetrators operating on or over Dorin, we had to choose a Jedi to send that could breathe the environment there."

Dorin was a type three planet, which meant it had a helium based atmosphere rather than oxygen. This meant that very few races could breathe on it. The planet was also home to winds that even on the local equivalent of a normal day could tear the skin off of less hardy species. For example, humans could survive the atmosphere for a few moments without a rebreather, but not the actual environment. This had contributed to how few native animal species there were, as well as the development of the Kel Dor as a sentient race.

"Her last report was that she had exonerated one of the companies, but was closing in on a negative verdict against the other two, and that she might have found an issue on Dorin itself that she was going to look into. Given how few even among Jedi would be comfortable operating in Dorin, Master Gallia and I agreed that she could remain after completing her assigned mission," Windu finished, frowning thoughtfully.

"You made the right decision at the time," Plo Koon said promptly. Given the unique environment of their race's home planet, other races could not operate there nearly as well, and few, indeed, even tried. "And given the sometimes confusing social mores of Kel Dor, Sha or I would have been sent to deal with any such issue in the first place."

Left unsaid was that a portion of this was because the Kel Dor justice system was very different than the Republic's. And the Kel Dor firmly believed that their system took precedence on their planet. It was harsh but fair to all, more concerned about preserving the community than anything else.

For example, in terms of blue collar crimes, embezzlement would see someone fined heavily, sometimes up to twice the amount of money they had misused. If they could not pay, they would be forced to do service for the local community until the balance was paid.

Murderers or rapists, on the other hand, would be put to death immediately after their guilt was proven. The Kel Dor had no place for prisons in their system. To them if you were guilty of something which you shouldn't die for, it was best you were free to make penance to society under the watchful eye of your fellows. If you were guilty of such, you were put to death, simple as that.

"But that leaves what kind of trouble she could have run into. The vision I saw made it seem as if the danger came from a source she had not anticipated, so it is doubtful it came from her official mission going bad," Plo went on. "It also leaves us with a quandary, since the same issues which made Sha Koon the obvious one to be sent there make finding someone to go after her difficult.

"Certain are you, this danger a shadow its form took?" Yoda asked.

"Yes, Master Yoda. It was like a grasping shadow suddenly took her from behind, a spectre of death or violence of some kind, coming upon Sha unseen," Plo Koon replied.

Master Windu frowned at that, leaning back thoughtfully as he looked over to Yoda, who said nothing, but looked back at him silently. Both of them were wondering about the symbology of that, and wondering if perhaps, just perhaps, this was a break they had been looking for.

Nodding his head decisively, Yoda allowed a thin smile to come to his face. "Send Ranma and Master Ti we will. Martial arts, your planet has. Interest Ranma it will, and antsy he is becoming here on Kashyyyk. Further, Jedi here on Kashyyyk, becoming…curious, they are, of certain recent changes between them. Remove the two of them, best it would be."

"Will Ranma be able to handle wearing a gas mask all the time? He isn't a Jedi, so might have issues with the particular brand of claustrophobia that wearing such brings to the surface," Windu asked. "I agree with your reasoning, but I am just wondering if he will be able to handle it as Master Ti will via her Jedi training."

"Foresee a difficulty there, I do not. Come up with a solution Ranma will if faced with such a problem. Unique it will no doubt be," Yoda replied dryly.

While Windu nodded agreement, Plo Koon bowed deeply, the gesture visible in the pickup of the Mandalore Hypercom array. "Thank you, Master Yoda. I had not wanted to ask to allow to go myself; that smacks too much of putting a personal concern and connection over duty. But it is gratifying to see you are taking this seriously."

"It would have only been putting your personal connection over your duty if you had broken away from Mandalore as I know you wanted to," Windu replied, while Yoda fell silent, neither of them wishing to tell the other man over a communication like this why they were taking it so seriously. "And while I would not have thought of Ranma, he and Master Ti will certainly be able to deal with any physical danger they face. If Sha Koon is a prisoner somewhere, they will rescue her."

"Your replacement, arrive next week local time he will," Yoda said, looking at Plo Koon. "After that, free to join them on Dorin you will be. For now, tell the two of them of our request, I should."

OOOOOOO

Ending the communication, Yoda sent a message to the Wild Light. Shaak and Ranma had retreated to their ship for the night as they always did, and given the time he was unsurprised to get their astromech droid instead of either of them. "This is Tune. My master and mistress are asleep. May I take a message?"

Harrumphing, Yoda smacked his gimer stick against the communications device as if it was the droid in question. "Hrhrhrm, Master Yoda this is. Get them up, you will. Important issue, arisen one has."

Tune's childlike voice responded in a tone of finality. "I will take a message and tell them to call you back the instant they wake up."

"Hrhrhrm, asleep they are not. Get them on the line now you will," Yoda said gruffly, taking a brief second to reach out and feel for Shaak and Ranma's minds. He could feel something off about them, but they were certainly awake. He found it odd that Shaak hadn't felt his Force touch on her mind, but put it down to her concentrating on whatever it was they were doing, which strangely enough was heightening her emotions and her concentration on the physical world to an almost alarming degree. Part of what has changed between them, it could be. Know I do not what that could be, but unimportant it is.

"I will not!" The droid's reply was just as firm as before. "My master and mistress are busy currently, and I will not interrupt them. The last time HK did that he nearly got his ugly head kicked off, and he's a combat droid. I don't want to chance them trying the same kind of attack on me."

Yoda spent several moments smacking the side of the communication device, glowering angrily at it as if through it he could force the recalcitrant droid on the other end to follow his orders. To say Yoda had issues with droids was a distinct understatement. "Time, of the essence this is. Life of a Jedi, on the line could be. Wake them up now you will, or come down there myself I will."

For a moment Tune fell silent, then there was the squeal of an electronic sigh. "If either the master or mistress scrap me because of this I will find some way of getting back at you, Master Yoda."

"Hrhrhrm, take that chance, I will," Yoda replied dryly.

Thankfully for Tune's continued existence Shaak and Ranma had just finished up their lovemaking for the evening so all they did was growl at him before deciding to take the communication from where they were in the sitting room. Once they were brought onto the line and the problem had been explained, Ranma and Shaak took a brief moment to look at one another before replying affirmatively.

"Of course, Master Yoda. If you feel this could be a lead on the Sith we all believe is out there, then we'll be happy to take it," Shaak replied for them both. She had also made certain the transceiver was only picking up their heads.

"Yeah, and besides, Plo mentioned some of the Force techniques his people's home grown Force group had developed. They sounded interesting, so even if this is a wild goose chase we might pick up some new tricks," Ranma said, pulling his hand up from where it had been resting on Shaak's naked hip, tracing the white claw mark there, to give a thumb's up in the pickup.

"We will need to wear gas masks. I will come by within an hour to pick them up, while Ranma contacts Kashyyyk Space control to tell them we're leaving," Shaak said. "That will also allow me to speak to Ahsoka before we go. I do not want to simply disappear in the night like this after what occurred the last time."

Yoda smiled at their willingness to help, even though Ranma had no obligation to keep helping the Order like this. Then again, Yoda reflected, the Sith had taken shots at Ranma himself before this, so he might well consider this a way to find his own enemy rather than the enemy of the Order and the Republic. A second later the connection cut out, and Yoda leaned back on his cushion, closing his eyes as he meditated. As the Wild Light broke atmosphere Yoda had reached a conclusion, despite his visions of the future still being clouded to be utterly useless.

A sign of the Light breaking through this could be. Yet sense it is not, I do. Trap this could be. Still, trap to snare a Jedi, snare Ranma it will not. And if for Ranma designed this trap is, more attention on Ranma and Shaak Ti this will demand. Blind our enemy to more long term plans it will…

OOOOOOO

Sidious smiled in the darkness of his hidden throne room, ignoring the slight trickle of blood coming from his nose, a sign of the concentration and effort it had taken to influence a Jedi Master from so far away. He had to be very, very careful when using the Veil of the Dark Side to influence the Jedi. Like a thin layer of oil, the Veil was there whenever a Jedi reached out to touch the Force which in this analogy was the water under the oil. But if he wasn't careful the Jedi in question would feel the oil entering his system. And from this far away the difficulty was magnified, made all the worse by the ongoing effect of the Chaotic Locus.

Even so, I did it. A brief vision of his niece in trouble, and he will send it on to others. Yoda will then believe he sees an opportunity to ensnare me and will never realize that I am one step ahead of him.

With that in mind, Sidious opened up a connection to Set Harth electronically. Since Harth wasn't his apprentice, Sidious had not instilled a mental connection, though in terms of skill Harth was closer to becoming a Darth than Vosa. But Sidious wanted to be certain the man understood his place in the hierarchy, and talking to him via electronic communication rather than the Force was another way of making certain he did. And over the distance he had to reach, in this case, it was simply easier for the exhausted Sith Lord.

To keep Harth from sensing his exhaustion, Sidious kept the communication short: two simple sentences, in fact, loading them with as much menace and command that he could. "The trap has been baited; you will have them there soon. You had best be prepared."

OOOOOOO

Dorin was a planet located in the Expansion Region's Daedalus sector, and the system was further caught between the pull of two black holes. Given that Kashyyyk was in the Mytaranor sector of the Mid Rim, they couldn't even rely on the trade routes that served Kashyyyk, save for the Randon Run, to start them off. It would, by Tune's estimate, take them at least four days to make the trip and over twenty small jumps after leaving the Randon Run before hitting the Celanon Spur in Corsin and going the rest of the way in one.

This gave Shaak and Ranma some more time to themselves, almost the same time they would've had if they had followed their original plans to stay on Kashyyyk another week, something they were both pleased about, even though they were worried about Sha Koon. They didn't spent every moment making love, but they could've been accused of spending half of their time aboard the Wild Light naked, which invariably led to that, without much in the way of argument.

By the time they reached it, Corsin hadn't been the first inhabited system they had passed through on their way, of course. Indeed, most of the star systems they had to stop in to allow Tune to calculate their next jump since leaving Kashyyyk had been inhabited. But it was the first system where the ship's IFF code hadn't been enough to get them ignored by the locals.

The young lovers found this out when Tune called them up to the cockpit, his childlike voice sounding rather querulous. "Master, mistress, we are being hailed by someone calling themselves the system space control for the League of Free Humanity. Further, we are being ordered to lower our shields and wait to be brought into a freighter for a contraband search."

Shaak blinked, looking over at Ranma who looked back, one eyebrow rising in surprise. "Did you change the transponder at some point?" she asked.

"Shaak, I wouldn't even know how," Ranma replied.

"Then we should be registering as a ship on Jedi business to any friendly government. This is bizarre." Shaak frowned, reaching out with her Force powers for a moment. Given they had arrived in the outer system she couldn't reach to the planet very easily, but there were several small stations nearby and further out a series of living habitats on some asteroids. From these she could pull a sense of the gestalt emotions and even sometimes the thoughts of the inhabitants. "I sense…anger here, a lot of anger…and fear. Some kind of conflict is going on here, but it is not directed at us."

"I'll go power up HK, just in case. We've had him turned off for a while now, and if he misses the first chance at a real fight we've seen in months he'll be tetchy." Ranma said. "I'm assuming we're going to stick our noses in on this?" Ranma knew that Shaak, as a Jedi, would want to try and bring a halt to whatever conflict was going on, and he had to admit to wanting to see a bit of real violence himself.

"I'm afraid so, but I would prefer to use words rather than fists," Shaak said, frowning. "Let me see if I can talk to whoever is hailing us."

So saying, Shaak slid into her chair in the cockpit, centering herself in the Force and making certain she looked presentable as a Jedi, which over the past few days of travel had not been a consideration. Rather the reverse, actually, considering our activities, he thought ruefully.

A moment later she opened the communication system to reply to the hail, idly noticing that Tune had highlighted a large freighter that had broken orbit around the nearest habitat and was making its way over toward them. "This is Jedi Master Shaak Ti on the Jedi-aligned private ship the Wild Light. We are passing through your space on urgent Order business. Please identify yourselves and authenticate your last transmission."

"This is the Corsin Space Patrol. Apologies, Master Jedi we…" The voice trailed off as the communication's video system activated, and the human male on the other end first stared, then his tone and even the vague feel of him in the Force changed from surprise to contempt to match his words. "That's a very unlikely story. It's well known the Order only travels in its own starfighters or Senate registered diplomatic ships. Regardless, we demand you heave to and prepare for inspection."

"I'm sorry, but I cannot comply with that request. As I said, we are on Order business and wish to move on as quickly as possible," Shaak replied, calm in the face of the man's sneering contempt for her while internally wondering if this was some kind of anti-Jedi sentiment.

A moment later, however, she found that this was not the case at all, as the man sneered. "I heard you the first time, but my orders still stand, Togrutan," he said, spitting the name of her race. "All alien ships are to be searched for contraband, regardless of their registry. We of the League of Free Humanity will never allow the perversity and lawlessness of alien races to continue to contaminate our way of life!"

Shaak blinked in surprise, but before she could reply the man on the other side went on. "Prepare to be boarded, Jedi, if that's what you really are. Your secrets and lies will not avail you against humans freed of the blinders placed on them by aliens like you!"

With that he cut the connection leaving Shaak to gaze in consternation at the communication screen. She looked over to the entrance of the cockpit, however, sensing Ranma there before he could speak. "What do you think about that?"

"Well, I suppose they have a point about the perversity," Ranma teased.

"Who was it who corrupted whom here?" Shaak shot back. "Besides, I've never heard you complain before this."

"True," Ranma replied equably before turning back to the current issue. "So, how do you want to play this?"

Shaak sighed, but smiled at her man's (at the moment, anyway) willingness to follow her lead. "Given this seems to be one of the hate groups the Order had told me about which have sprung up across the Republic, I think you should be the one to answer the boarding party when that freighter pulls us into its hold. It will be a tight squeeze, I think, but doable."

Ranma nodded holding back an entirely inappropriate quip about tight spaces for a moment, despite what they had been doing before Tune's call interrupted them. "You still want to see if we can get out of this without violence?"

"I would prefer to hold off on violence until we know more. The transmission came in over the local space control's approved signal system, so this particular group of racists might have taken control of the government in some fashion, possibly even legally. If that is the case, solving that issue will take far longer than our current mission would allow for. I wish we were closer to the main planets so I could sense if that was the case, but we are not," Shaak replied with a self-deprecating shrug of her shoulders. "So we might wish to tread lightly here for the moment, if only so we can get on with our mission."

"Yeah… Tread lightly… hmm, might have to look that one up in a dictionary, Shaak," Ranma replied with a laugh, but Shaak shooed him out of the cockpit, moving to follow him a moment later.

A few moments later the larger freighter had opened its large main doors to swallow up the Wild Light. The ship then kept moving, according to Tune, who had linked himself into it via the communication system. At the same time a crowd of individuals made their way over to the ship from a nearby doorway leading deeper into the ship, where they had been hiding behind a blast barricade.

Looking them over from the security camera, Tune reported to his master and mistress. "Masters, the locals do seem to wear a uniform. It is green pants and shirt, a long sleeve shirt with tight shoulders but wide sleeves. There seems to be an arm patch they all wear, a raised black fist on a white background. However, looking closer, I see more facial hair than most militaries would allow, their weapons do not match, though are of uniformly decent quality, and their boots, though serviceable, do not match. If they are a police or military unit, they are not a regular one. Further, they are all human males."

"More evidence they might not be real officials, or perhaps have thrown out the old establishment," Shaak murmured, while Ranma moved to lower the ramp.

A second later Ranma was leading the officers into the main sitting room. HK was nowhere in sight for the moment, hidden in the kitchen, slightly out of sight. "As you can see, gentlemen, we don't even have anywhere we could hide contraband, let alone anything else. This ship's our home, not a business ship."

"I can see that," said the one in charge before he snapped his fingers. Half the men following him spread to surround Ranma while the other half moved toward Shaak who was standing in the short corridor which lead to their rooms and the cockpit, ignoring the sight of the lightsaber at her waist. The man himself sneered at Ranma contemptibly. "Fucking alien lover with your little love nest. Well, both you and this alien slut are going to learn what we do to deviants like you in Corsin."

Shaak closed her eyes briefly, the words rolling off her easily thanks to her Jedi training. It wouldn't even occur to her to become angry at them, even if they offended her as a woman and Jedi both. But Ranma had never learned to turn the other cheek to insults, especially to someone he cared about.

"Yeah, no," Ranma said, reaching forward and lifting the man into the air by two fingers to his nose of all things. As the man screamed the others raised their weapons and, without hesitating, opened fire on Ranma, their guns not set to stun.

Ranma, however, simply stood there, taking the bolts, the only damage being to his shirt. A second later he turned, hurling their officer by the nose hook Ranma had used to lift him off the ground.

The ones who had moved around Ranma towards Shaak had joined in at firing on Ranma, turning away from her. Now they found themselves suddenly picked up by an unseen force and hurled past him out the still open landing ramp. Fighting an urge to say something like, 'and stay out,' Shaak looked over to see that Ranma had finished the ones he had hurled their officer into, knocking them out with sharp blows to the head. They would have concussions and possibly lose some badly needed brain cells thanks to that, but they would be alive.

Growling angrily still at the insult paid to Shaak, Ranma turned to the doorway leading into the kitchen. "Hey, HK."

HK's looming bulk moved out of the kitchen, taking in the carnage Ranma had left. "Depressed plea: Master, if you activate me, the least you could do is let me have some of the fun. Calling me out only after the fact is just plain mean."

"Heh, nope. This was more of a prelude, HK. Shaak, why don't you see if you can get in touch with any of the locals who aren't connected to this bunch of racist pricks? HK and I can handle this."

As Shaak nodded at that idea, Ranma turned back to HK. "This isn't a battle to the death, HK. This is more along the lines of a spanking, though that doesn't mean we have to be overly nice about it. So I want two out of three alive, HK. And not crippled unless you can do it in a humorous and edifying manner. Perhaps taking their blasters and shoving them where the sun doesn't shine."

"Upbeat response: Now that is more like it, master. Affirmative. I'd prefer to slaughter all of the meatbags foolish enough to attack you like this; it would probably better the gene pool in the long run. But at least this will be both amusing and technically difficult."

HK went on as he led the way down the landing ramp. A series of stun bolts flashed from his weapon at the pile of groaning boarders who Shaak had hurled off the ship, knocking them out. "Bemused tone: But what part of the body is specifically called the place where the sun doesn't shine? There are, after all, many parts of a meatbag's body that are not designed to see the light of day."

Watching the avatar of chaos and his homicidal droid, Shaak shook her head sadly, almost feeling sorry for the racist idiots who had decided to try and get in their way. Then she turned back and began to sift through the local communications network, trying to figure out what was really going on in this system.

The resultant battle for the freighter was exceedingly anticlimactic, despite HK's best attempts to mentally scar the surviving racists through various means. "It was like they didn't even realize we had knocked out their boarding party! They never even had any internal security respond to our attacks, and they thought I was one of them for the first few clashes! I like a good fight, damn it, and this wasn't good or challenging or interesting at all!"

"Disdainful tone: Many of the foolish meatbags even attempted to give me orders, as if I was a mere servitor droid. Smug comment: not that I allowed that notion to remain in their heads for very long," HK commented via the communicator as the Wild Light exited the freighter's open hanger bay.

The instant they were out in space once more, the Wild Light turned its heading toward the system's sole real planet, an orange and dark brown planetoid around the size of Kashyyyk. Behind them HK piloted the freighter as best he could to follow them.

"That doesn't surprise me. I doubt very much that this group is being led by intellectual giants, and stupidity tends to have a trickle-down effect," Shaak replied dryly.

"What did you find out, anyway?" Ranma asked.

"The group is one of many racist groups which have sprung up, somewhat more organized than most, and heavily represented among the asteroid miners, hence why we are heading in-system. As for the League itself, their platform is that humanity has been halted from taking its 'rightful place' by the nonhuman races. Whatever that is seems to vary from one propaganda broadsheet to another. Never mind the fact that humanity is by the far the most numerous species in the Republic and in many ways the most powerful!" Shaak said with a sad shake of her head.

"As for their being a representative of the government here, not entirely, but they are unfortunately heavily represented among the government,. Stopping ships like they attempted with us is a relatively new thing for them, and I have no doubt the main 'League' will disavow such actions in a tongue in cheek manner once the events today become commonly known."

At Ranma's quizzical look she sighed, but then explained her meaning. "Their leaders will say something like, 'Of course violence is never the answer. We abhor their actions, despite it being certain that the aliens coming in from other systems are indeed part of the conspiracy trying to keep us down,' or 'the trouble plaguing us,' or whatever they try to feed the mindless drones that have bought into their drivel. It will do nothing to stop the violence, and may in fact cause more."

"So are we going to do anything about it?" Ranma asked.

"No. Solving this issue will take the Republic getting involved and sending a diplomatic team. We can hand over our prisoners, and I will talk to the police. From there I will request that Republic intervention. With my voice added to that of the planetary governor, the Senate will have to act. I can also bypass them slightly and contact the nearest Ord system to have them send a starfighter squadron to Corsin to keep the peace," Shaak shrugged. "Other than that, I don't think that we can spend any time here at all."

"Will you need me around for that?"

Shaak's eyes narrowed at what she was feeling from Ranma via the Force just now. He was not happy with the idea of doing nothing, but there was also a sense of duplicity interwoven with his irritation with the racists. "Why?"

"Oh, I just thought HK and I could take in the sights," Ranma replied in an overly innocent tone of voice, but he wouldn't meet her eyes.

Leaning back in her chair, Shaak was torn between reaching out to the Force for guidance and simply going with her gut feelings about this. After a second she did reach out, and got a feeling from the Force that for some reason reminded her of the feeling she felt whenever Ranma shifted forms, like the Force was having a joke at someone's expense. And this time it wasn't Ranma, rather it was coming from him. "Very well, I don't actually have to know what you want to do."

"Nope, you don't." Ranma nodded beatifically at that, and then laughed, leaning over to kiss her tenderly on the cheek right below where her white markings began around her eyes. "Don't worry, love. I'm not going to fly off the handle, not entirely, anyway."

Later, as Shaak was talking to the local authorities and contacting the Republic about the issues here in Corsin, Ranma and HK took the Wild Light back out into the outer system to the asteroid that had been the freighter's last port of call. There they locked the ship down and stepped out into the asteroid's hanger bay, smiling at the locals. Most of them were human men, and Ranma wondered idly if hate groups always had an easier time recruiting young male idiots than any other group for some reason.

Shaking off that thought, Ranma turned to HK. "No guns for this, HK, and no killing either. I sort of promised Shaak. We're here to humiliate, frustrate, and threaten, not pile up the bodies. That'll come if this group is still here and operating if we come back this way again."

"Resigned response: Understood, master. Irritated mumble: I never get to have any fun."

"I'll ignore that," Ranma replied with a chirp in her tone. Ranma had changed to his female form deliberately for this, figuring it would add another note to the symphony of humiliation she wanted to create here. The two of them moved towards the inner airlock which led deeper into the asteroid as Ranma contacted Tune, asking him to make certain this was the only real exit. When the droid answered in the affirmative, Ranma knew her impromptu plan was going to work.

The airlock opened up into a larger hollow area lined with shops, stalls, entrances to various homes, and other things. It was semi-crowded by miners, prospectors, and other such types, the noise a loud drone of hundreds of competing voices to Ranma's senses. A lot of them were armed, and the vast majority were wearing the same arm band the crew of the freighter had worn. Those that weren't were all older individuals who stepped around the ones wearing the arm band warily.

The moment the human girl and droid entered, they found themselves the center of attention. Every man there, even the older ones without the arm bands, eyed her up like a piece of meat.

Ranma shivered slightly at the looks she was getting, but since that was part of her plan, she didn't immediately do anything to the men who were quite obviously undressing her with their eyes. Instead she hopped over to the nearest armband wearing individual and asked, "Hi, I was wondering if I could talk to the leader of the Free Humanity League? I was thinking about joining up, but I don't really know enough about what you all stand for just yet. So I figured, why not learn about it from the ones leading the movement?"

With every word Ranma bounced lightly on her feet, the bounciness doing interesting things to her chest. The man in front of her lost any ability to question what Ranma was saying, how she had gotten here, or what the giant droid behind her was doing there. It was all he could do not to actually drool or just jump Ranma right then and there.

Instead he gulped, then put on what he probably thought was a saucy smile as he leaned down, putting an arm around Ranma's shoulders. "Damn, I could wish more women thought about joining up, but I suppose getting dirty like that isn't something that appeals ta most girls. But sorry to say, babe, no one sees the leaders until they join up and swear the oath. I could put in a good word for you, though…"

"Wrong answer." Ranma's voice had changed from a breathy sort of excited tone to a snarl with those two words, and her small, feminine fist shot down like a drop hammer, thumping into the man's balls with agonizing force. The blow lifted him off his feet and he fell, hands scrabbling at his very private agony.

As that man whimpered around his very private pain, Ranma turned to the next man. "You, where are the leaders of your band of merry morons?"

That man growled, reaching for her. "You little tart, I'm gonna teach YAGHGH!"

The second man's words ended in a screech of pain as HK reached out and grabbed his arm, hurling him away. "Eager announcement: my mastress is asking a simple question, meatbags. Failure to answer will result in pain and humiliation. Please do keep resisting. That will make this ever so much more fun."

Dozens of men rushed the two of them, and Ranma grinned in anticipation, cracking her knuckles and neck. "Now to find if you can cure stupid through violence and humiliation."

"Drawled interjection: master, if that was so, the galaxy's history would be vastly different," HK said before lashing out with his claw hand to one side, flinging several League members away while his other first punched out in a quick punch that rocked another man backward.

"Yeah, I know. Just remember to record everything, HK. We want this saved for posterity, after all," Ranma replied before charging forward.

The fight that followed was short, sharp, and very one sided. Even after the League members remembered they had blasters, Ranma and HK shrugged off their hand held weapons with ease. Ranma's shirt and pants suffered, which gave the last few men to fall to their assault a bit too much of a show for her liking, but Ranma used the Swift Change technique to change into a second pair of shirt and pants.

None of the group really owned up to being the leader at any point, but Ranma was fine with that. While HK began to move around, tearing armbands off people and destroying their weapons, Ranma started the humiliation part of his plan. Dozens of the League members found themselves trussed up by their boots to the habitat's ceiling. Others found themselves stripped to their boxers, with little slogans drawn on them with permanent marker. Some of these were simple, others elaborate, but all of them attacked either the idea of racism or the person in particular.

This took quite a while, given the number of people they were dealing with, indeed, quite a bit longer than the actual battle. But eventually it was finished, and Ranma moved over to one of the locals who several of the others had tried to protect during Ranma's rampage. He in turn had tried to get past Ranma and HK to the landing area, which Ranma figured was the way the leader of this group would act.

Ranma woke him from his unconsciousness with a slap to the face. The man snarled, then seemed to realize where he was and what had happened, quailing slightly as Ranma glared at him. "Okay, my man, here's what going to happen. I'm a human, and as a human I think you and your group are a bunch of fascist assholes. This ain't some kind of alien conspiracy; this ain't a Republic response to you. That would have given you legitimacy, and you don't have any. No, this is me, a concerned citizen, informing you that I don't like the way you've been acting."

The man made to speak, but Ranma slapped him once, not hard, just a light tap of the fingers, and he shut up as Ranma turned him around to look at the rest of the habitat to see what Ranma and HK had done to his followers. "Your League is going to shut down, you're going to no longer even think about attacking aliens or acting like pirates or rabble-rousers of any stripe. If you've got a problem with the way things are run, bitch and moan about it, but don't just attack all non-humans like they are the ones to blame for your own fuck ups or general lack of looks, skill, or intelligence. If you don't shut down your League BS, I'm going to sell the footage of this fight and make you lot the laughing stock of the Republic. Try to get yourselves taken seriously in your skivvies after being beaten by a single, very short, girl. I dare you."

The man remained silent after this small diatribe, staring at the wreckage of his Free Humanity League, which had really only just begun to flex their muscles. That kind of reversal to their public image would ruin them, and even might spread to the rest of the movement here in Corsin.

Ranma went on, smiling thinly. "I know your group ain't the only hate group out there, or even the only chapter, I suppose, of the League. So you just tell all the others you know about me. Tell 'em whatever you want; cover your ass however you can, so long as they realize that if they don't stop it with this fascist crap, I might be coming after them. Okay?"

With that Ranma dropped the man on a small pile of mostly naked men, patted him once on the head, and walked away. The man stared after the short, incredibly strong and scary girl before staring around once more at his followers as he wondered just what the hell had happened, and maybe if he tried hard enough he could wake up from this bizarre dream.

For their part, Ranma and HK took the Wild Light back in-system to pick up Shaak, who had done what she could. She took a brief moment on the landing ramp to look at Ranma before shaking her head. "I'm not going to ask. I refuse to even speculate about what you have done, Ranma."

"Well, I'm going to tell you anyway," Ranma retorted with a laugh.

Ranma did so as HK powered down once more, and the ship headed out-system, preparatory for a hyperspace jump. Listening, Shaak laughed several times during Ranma's tale, blanching at others when Ranma went into a little too much detail on some of the miner's bodies, which were not flattering at all. "That is one way of dealing with the racist idiots that would never occur to me, embarrassing them like that in public and amongst themselves," she confessed.

"Meh, that's what you've got me for," Ranma said with a grin, her head on Shaak's lap. She had yet to transform back to her male body for some reason.

Letting her eyes slowly trace down Ranma's body, Shaak smiled, one hand gently sliding under Ranma's shirt over her stomach. Once under the redhead's shirt, Shaak's hand began to move in slow circles, tracing her fingers around the flat, incredibly toned stomach.

"Yeah, heh, not at all surprising, is it, considering how good I look," Ranma bragged, then shrugged. "And the fact there were no girls among the asteroid miners, well, it had probably been a while since they saw a woman.

Shaak chuckled quietly, her hand moving around Ranma's stomach, rubbing slowly against the bottom of her breasts. "Hmm, that could have something to do with the boarders' antipathy towards me as well, I suppose."

Shivering, Ranma felt her body beginning to respond to Shaak's touch. But there was one more thing she wanted to know before leaving this subject. "Shaak, these hate groups, do you think they could have been started by this Sith that's out there?"

Shaak's hand stilled just as she began to move it up to trace around Ranma's breasts, and she sighed, pulling her hand out from under Ranma's shirt. "The Order has looked into that, but while the hate they feel and the conflicts they are starting feed the Dark Side, they do not do so in a controlled manner. So if this mysterious Sith started it, he couldn't possibly control it."

"Hmm… Then…smoke and mirrors, to throw us off the scent?" Ranma mused. God damn it, if only we had a real freaking target! I hope this mission of ours gives us that, because I am starting to get the impression I'm a freaking target for the opposition, and they know precisely where I am, when I know next to nothing about them.

"Indeed. That and don't forget that it ties up Jedi resources. Several Jedi have died thanks to these groups, but the tide seems to have begun turning against them. The Core Worlds have expunged most of the hate groups that popped up within their borders when we were on Mandalore, and the Chancellor's push for reform seems to have taken the—what is the term?—the wind out of many of the racist groups' sails. Their rhetoric doesn't make much sense, given that the Chancellor is human and works closely with several of the other races, and is pushing to do away with the corruption and 'perversion' the hate crimes rail against."

She frowned then, thinking as something about that sentence niggled at her senses. It wasn't a strong feeling, but it was there. The Force is telling me I am missing something there, but I can't detect what.

Before she could concentrate on it, Ranma leaned up, capturing Shaak's lips in a kiss as she pulled the taller girl's head down to her. "That's enough talking, I think. Now, let's do something to get our minds off the idiots…"

OOOOOOO

"Well on the whole, I have to say this trip has been one of the most peaceful we've had in a long while. Dare I hope that this becomes a new trend?" Shaak quipped as the Wild Light slid into orbit over Dorin.

Dorin was a planet only a few thousand kilometers bigger than Earth in diameter, with a dark orange and brown atmosphere with only a few clouds of white scattered here and there. The atmosphere was so thick you couldn't spot the lights of even ships entering or exiting the thermosphere, let alone anything below that, which you could on many planets.

There were several dozen medium sized space stations in orbit, and there looked to be a few large installations on the planet's single moon as well. The traffic here wasn't much and seemed to consist of a few scattered large freighters from out-system and dozens of smaller, local craft.

Shaak's hands paused on the controls as she noticed the look Ranma was giving her, then went over what she had just said and sighed. "If something happens after this, I will start believing in your idea that the Force looks unfavorably on such statements…"

"You mean when I said I was luck's bum bitch?" Ranma asked, mock-innocently, causing Shaak to smack him on the shoulder.

When she spoke next, however, her voice was serious. "I am going to meditate for a time before we head down to meet the government representative. I would like to know more about what might be going on down there."

"Right. Where's Sha Koon's ship? I'll go over and check it out, see if I can find any clues."

Now it was Shaak's turn to stare incredulously, and Ranma pouted. "Hey, it could happen!" Ignoring his lover's gurgling laughter at that, Ranma turned to HK. "HK, stay up here with Shaak just in case you're attacked while I'm away. And while we're flying down, I want you to reload with lethal weapons. There's a very good chance we're walking into a trap."

"Lofty response: But a trap for a Jedi will not be up to taking someone of my proven lethality. Begrudging addition: Or your own and that of your Togrutan."

Shaak ignored the dig sent her way like she did all insults, pulling her legs up under her as she began to reach out to the Force.

While Shaak was searching in her own way for some clues as to what had happened to Sha Koon, Ranma turned away and exited the cockpit. Their arrival had been noticed of course and a customs official was waiting for them, evidently not having gotten the memo.

As Ranma watched, the Kel Dor man stopped, however, looking down at his dataslate before looking back at the Wild Light. Then he moved toward Ranma once more, this time bowing deeply. "Master Jedi, I am Ono Door, a customs official on this space station. If you will follow me, I will take you to the ship the Jedi Knight Sha Koon had used upon her arrival. Although I doubt that you will find anything that will help you find her."

The Kel Dor's voice was low, a slight rumble in the air from behind his gas mask, and Ranma idly wondered why the Kel Dor hadn't decided to keep the atmosphere of their space station like that of their planet. He was also amused by the Kel Dor's first name matching Dr. Tofu's. "Why's that, Ono?"

"Upon her arrival in the system Sha Koon left her ship here after only a single night. We do not have a record of her ever returning." Ono replied.

Yeah, but that doesn't mean she didn't come back. Ranma shrugged, gesturing the man ahead of him. "Well, I'll still want to check it out, and I'm not a Jedi, darn it. I'm a Force user, but I don't have a lot of the powers they do. I'm a combat specialist."

Ono merely nodded at that, making no comment and leading the way. His thoughts, however, were his species' equivalent of, "if it swims like a fish and acts like a fish, then it's a fish." Whatever Ranma said, to many the phrase 'Force user' was synonymous with Jedi. Even here on a planet that had developed its own sect of Force users that was the case, the number of Baran Do followers having shrunk over the centuries since contact with the Republic and being reclusive in nature in any event. To most Kel Dor they weren't even a rumor, though several government officials knew they still existed and kept that secret.

The two men exchanged small talk for a time as Ono led the way to the Consular class ship Sha Koon had been assigned for this mission. Sha's records that Shaak had shared with Ranma said she was an okay starfighter pilot, but didn't have her uncle's flair for it and preferred to not use starfighters unless assigned to a mission where she would see space combat. Like him, she was a Consular, not a Guardian, though like Plo, Sha had become skilled with a lightsaber, unlike the majority of that sect.

The ship opened before them when Ono used an override system, a small circular object set on the loading ramp's control pad. When he made to move forward, however, Ranma held up a hand, staring into the darkened interior. "Hold on, shouldn't the lights have come on?"

Ono looked at him, then nodded, moving back quickly. Ranma smiled at that before kneeling down, looking for a tripwire. He found it quickly right by where the ramp ended. "Huh. Someone was here, that's for sure." He looked over at Ono, gesturing him further back. "Get on the horn with whoever you need to to get a recording from the video cameras here."

As Ono watched, Ranma leaped up and forward, resting a hand on the ceiling of the interior of the ship before somehow flipping up and clinging to the roof like a spider. He moved inside quickly from there out of sight, and Ono decided to simply shrug that off as a Jedi power and go to do what Ranma had asked him to.

Inside, Ranma dropped down onto the main holographic table, then looked around, pulling out a light from his ki space and flashing it about. It looked much like the Consular class vessels Ranma had been on numerous times before Dac, and there was little around the place to say it had been used at any point, even by a Jedi.

If, that is, you discounted the number of thermal detonators lodged here and there. One of which was tied to the trip wire Ranma had noticed. Others were scattered elsewhere, the entire ship rigged to be a death trap, not to explode, but to kill anyone inside who tried to investigate.

But beyond that, Ranma couldn't see any hints of where Sha Koon had gone. This…this wasn't an attempt to clean up after someone had come looking to get rid of evidence or anything. This ship is a trap, a trap for a Jedi…maybe even Plo Koon personally. How many Jedi have developed their Force senses to be able to sense traps like this? Damn few, I bet. I doubt even Plo would have if he wasn't tipped off by the lights not coming on.

With a sigh, Ranma moved through the ship via the ceiling, something no one could have known he could do. The door to the cockpit was closed and locked, and Ranma decided it probably wasn't worth the effort to get through a no doubt booby-trapped doorway.

Leaving the ship with a downward sort of leap from the ceiling of the ship, Ranma found two more Kel Dor had joined Ono out on the deck of the station. One was another man who looked older than Ono, his skin noticeably paler. The second was the first female Kel Dor Ranma had seen. Her face, what he could see around her mask, was slightly thinner than the men, and her body was distinctly feminine under her clothing, the same sort of utilitarian clothes all spacers wore.

The older man spoke up as Ranma landed. "Master Jedi, I have called for a bomb disposal team to be sent up to clear the ship. I am sorry to say, however, that our security cameras were…unhelpful in determining how this occurred."

"He means that they were cut out somehow, a computer program uploaded into the space station's systems blanked out the cameras in the area for in indeterminate amount of time," the woman cut in. "It was such a smooth job we don't even know how it happened or when the virus was uploaded into the system. We're doing a full purge now, but while that will make the systems secure, we can't help you find the perpetrator."

Setting aside the irritation of once more being called a Jedi, Ranma whistled, filing that information away. He also noted that computer attacks like that were another area that the Jedi could not combat very well. Yeah, this was a major trap. For Plo personally, or just any Jedi sent to help Sha Koon? Setting that unknown aside, Ranma told the locals what he had found, then left them to try and cautiously sweep the booby-trapped ship.

He was met at the Wild Light's ramp by HK and Shaak both. "You discovered something?" she asked, feeling the answer in the Force before she asked it.

"Sort of," Ranma said with a shrug, before gesturing the two to enter the ship, following them in. He explained what he had found to both of them, and then fell silent, looking at Shaak expectantly.

Sighing, Shaak shook her head. "I wasn't able to find anything conclusive, only the sense of danger, and that whatever we are searching for, it lies on Dorin's surface. Whatever is happening here, we will need to go down there to find out more. Once I am down there I will try again, though I don't think doing so will give me any more information. Not unless we have found a physical clue to help me guide my Force senses or something that can give me a feel for Sha Koon as an individual. Never having met her is hampering my Force abilities so much, I cannot push past the Veil even being as close as we are."

"Well, we knew that coming in, so let's get to it. Worrying over what we'll find serves no one," Ranma said, somewhat eagerly, somewhat philosophically.

Lips twitching, Shaak led the way to the cockpit. "You almost sounded like a Jedi there." She then squawked when Ranma spanked her lightly on the rear, passing her and sitting down in his chair in the cockpit before she could retaliate.

Glowering playfully at him, she sat down in the co-pilot's chair. "We will head down to the capital, Dor'shan. There we should find some of the locals ready to greet us and give us more information. And I will get you back for that, Ranma."

"Promises, promises," Ranma replied, already powering up the ships repulsors to carry them out of the hanger bay.

Flying through the atmosphere of Dorin was a disturbing experience for Ranma, given that they had to rely on their ship's sensors to a degree he hadn't experienced before, the gases quickly becoming too thick for them to see through. But following the locals' signal trail, the ship eventually came down to the Dor'shan's spaceport. Hovering over what looked like a domed pinnacle of rock, they were vaguely able to see its top opening slightly to allow the Wild Light to enter.

As the ship descended into this opening, the two of them were able to see more of the city around it. The city was built out of the side and top of several of those spires of rock, though Shaak was quick to tell Ranma that they were also built into the rock. They would find out more about that when they landed.

The Wild Light joined several other ships on the ferocrete of the small spaceport, all of them bearing the markings of the planetary government, a large stone crag with several local words written on a sign on the front. Once down, they could see several of the locals coming out to greet them, giving Ranma his first glimpse of Kel Dor without their masks.

Their noses were almost like a downturned beak, below which they had a gaping opening that descended to the mouth, which had drooping fleshy strands all around it. Framing their heads were some kind of sensory organs, which Ranma could now see terminated in small black tusks, usually hidden under their masks.

"Damn, they're ugly," Ranma said with a laugh, no censure or repugnance in his voice, rather, a bit of humor. "Then again, I doubt they find us any more handsome. It takes all kinds."

Shaak chuckled, then hopped to her feet, leading the way through the ship. She and Ranma donned gas masks, which covered their mouths and eyes, then exited the ship, HK moving to stand behind them. The wind was hot and pressing in on them the moment they exited, but it wasn't anything they couldn't deal with.

As they did so, Ranma chuckled, the sound ringing with a rueful note to Shaak's ears through his mask. Turning her head to look at him, Shaak saw him shrug. "Oh, I was just thinking that maybe we should have contacted the Nova Guard before coming here. Since they're always going around with those full body suits, they'd probably be right at home here."

"Hmm… Actually, that might not be a bad idea if we decide we need more firepower. We'll see. For now, official face on, my love," Shaak said. She shivered in pleasure as Ranma let his hand rest on her back for a brief moment before he stood beside her, the touch unseen by the locals as they moved forward to join them.

As the two moved forward, Shaak quickly took the lead, bowing formally to the locals. "Gentlemen, I am Jedi Master Ti. I thank you for your welcome, even if my reasons for being here are not pleasant." Calling herself a master still felt odd, even near to a year since the High Council had declared her one, but it was becoming easier to keep that from showing these days.

"Master Jedi, we have been expecting you. I am Tal Kine, administrator of off-world business. With me is chief inspector Las Buow, and Apprentice Min Zoon." The two worthies so named bowed, the apprentice meeting Shaak's serene gaze with her own as she did so.

"An apprentice. Then you are a member of the Baran Do?" Shaak asked, smiling slightly wider now. "Master Koon had told me of your sect several months back, and that he had studied many of your techniques. I will be very interested to speak with you later. My companion will also be intrigued. Unfortunately, we must take care of business before the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake."

"Indeed." The local Force user nodded her head, her dark black eyes, glancing over to the man standing beside the Togrutan Jedi. Off-world Kel Dor had to wear eye guards set into their eye sockets to go with their masks, another way of protecting themselves from oxygen-bearing environments.

While not very powerful in the Force, Apprentice Min still could sense things through the Force, and the power of the Living Force within Ranma was just below blinding to her Force Senses, as was the smaller pillar in the Jedi. Combined they even pushed back the encroaching Darkness that she always felt on the edge of her senses these days. The Dark Side seemed to build up once more right on the edge, beyond the pillar of Light, still blocking her vision both in the present and into the future, . Yet being close to it did make her feel better somehow, as if it was somehow cleansing her. It was a very odd feeling.

"But I must ask; your presence here is somewhat telling," Shaak went on, bringing Min's attention back to her.

"All Kel Dor Jedi know of the Baran Do, and when they return here, we put them up in one of our small monasteries. We might be a secret order, but it is more that we are simply not talked about than that we actively try to hide from our own people. From outsiders, however, we do tend to hide. However, the Ancient Sage has decided to open up our monasteries to you and your companion in hopes of aiding you in finding Knight Sha Koon," Kel said.

"There are only twenty people in the government who know of the Baran Do, but those that do keep the secret, since they are a major aid in local issues. Their ability to predict storms alone save thousands of lives a year." Tal Kine supplied. Wind storms on Dorin were a major hazard even with modern technology, able to appear within moments and batter down even modern shields given time.

"I see. A more honorable use of the Force I would be hard pressed to find," Shaak said. She smiled internally as Min's back straightened just slightly.

Indeed, all the locals seemed to relax as they detected no condescension or censure in Shaak's voice. Given the fact that many Jedi had given the impression to Ranma that they thought they had a monopoly on the Force, Ranma could see where their hesitation came from. But they were willing to show themselves to us in order to help us find Sha, remember that, Ranma.

"Would you like to be shown to the monastery first, Master Ti, or come with me to my office to go over what we know about Sha Koon's disappearance? Or do you already have a lead?" the police inspector asked. As the chief inspector, which meant something more like senior planetary investigator than what its label would suggest, he had worked extensively with Sha Koon, as well as any Jedi who had arrived on the planet as well as the Baran Do in the past, so was used to their odd powers.

"I think we will split up for now. I would like to talk to you first, but if you could show Ranma to your monastery, I will meet you there," Shaak said after a moment. "HK, if you could come with me, I might need your analytic skills."

"Prideful response: While I prefer to be known for my combat abilities, I suppose I can deign to aid you with my superior mental faculties. Just this once, mind you. Wouldn't want you to become too dependent on me to do your thinking for you," HK replied, to the concealed shock of the locals.

Shaak merely chuckled. "Indeed, if I ever want an aiming reticule to do my thinking for me, I know where to come, HK. Until then you can be put to other uses, if with difficulty."

"Rueful acknowledgment: Touché, mistress."

The police inspector looked closely at the visibly armed combat droid, but shook his head, visibly setting any questions about it to one side. He gestured for Shaak to follow him toward a waiting elevator which would take them down into the rock spire, where his office was located on a lower level. The spire which held the spaceport doubled as the city's administrative building, among other things. "Follow me, please." Both he and Tal led the way, with Shaak and HK following.

This left Ranma and Min alone for a moment, looking at one another. "Well then, Min, lead the way," Ranma said cheerfully. "Don't suppose we could go the scenic route, could we?"

"You might wish to take that back soon. Do not think that mask will always be enough to protect you from our planet's environment." With that Min led the way not to the elevator, but to the side of the spire, gesturing for Ranma to look over the side with her. Below them a hidden walkway was cut into the side of the rock. Beyond that, sticking out just slightly from underneath another series of clouds, was another rock spire, this one smaller and carved into looking like a building, but with several very odd crenellations here and there.

Smiling at the confusion on the human's face, Kel led the way down. As they went, the sound of the wind became audible now, away from the hustle and bustle of the port above them. There were other people using the walking path, and there were others Ranma could now see coming down from elsewhere around the side of the spire of rock.

As they went, Ranma paused from time to time, taking in the sights of the city as more and more of it became visible as they went. "While the industrial sectors are buried deep within the rock, we Kel Dor believe that we must face the harsh environment of our world. We cannot simply hunker down against the wind. Those settlements that try to stand like the rock against the Winds of the World find themselves battered down by them," Min said as Ranma once more stopped, staring at a fine, if high tech, bridge between one spire of rock and the next.

Ranma moved over to look down the side of the rock for a second, listening to the wind as it passed through a series of small holes dug into the rock well below where they were. There the walking path left the actual spire or rock, merging into a artificially made pathway of heavy ferocrete leading further down to where it merged with the rest of the city. "It's all about channeling, redirecting the power of the wind where you can, giving it an outlet where you can't. You don't just stand and take it; you have to move with it."

"Exactly. It is a method of thought that most offworlders can't seem to understand. That and the sound of the winds often drives them to distraction from what I understand. Since you and Master Ti are the first offworlders I have ever seen, I do not know the truth of… What are you doing?" Min asked, breaking off from what she had been saying.

The reason for this was that Ranma had actually hopped up onto the protective railing separating them from a very long drop. Ranma sent her a smirk, visible through the glass mask covering his lower face. "Just watch."

Min gasped as Ranma hopped off the railing, racing to the edge to stare at the young human man who had just decided to commit suicide while under her charge. But as she watched through wide eyes, Ranma spread his legs and arms, letting the wind carry him. Somehow he seemed to almost ride the wind like a hang glider, letting it blow him this way and that.

Falling, Ranma reached out a hand, pushing off against one of the homes sticking up at one of the highest points of the city, which was dominated by thin, narrowing houses of various sizes. They were distinctly alien in design and construction, with no colors and few affectations that didn't blend in with the idea of channeling the power of the wind. But they seemed to fit here, and the sound of the wind passing through them was almost soothing.

He let that wind blow him this way and that, laughing in delight as he continued to descend, before skidding his feet down the side of one building to come to a halt on a walking path between one large building and another. Behind him he heard a huffing and puffing sound and turned to find Min there, her hands on her knees as she gasped in air from running down after him.

"Oh, there ya are, Min. Took the long way, did ya?" Ranma asked, his eyes twinkling with remembered delight. "Y'know, if you want to wait here I won't mind. I want to go back up and try that again!"

It was only after releasing a long breath and centering herself with the Force that Min could stop herself from glaring. "Please do not! As you are under my charge at the moment, if anything were to happen to you it would reflect poorly on me. If you wish to further flirt with death, do it after I have delivered you to the Ancient Sage."

"Meh, I'd say it's more shaking hands with death; I reserve my flirting for Shaak," Ranma quipped, a statement that startled Min greatly. She hadn't picked up on Ranma and Shaak's connection through the Force, her limited senses almost drowned out by being around the font of the Living Force contained within Ranma.

She took a moment to center herself, but then realized that Ranma was off again. The call of the wind and of being in the air and floating like that was too powerful to ignore. Ranma also enjoyed tweaking people like Min greatly.

By the time Min had successfully led Ranma to the monastery, her monk-trained control was in stark abeyance and she was struggling with the urge to try and choke the infuriating offworlder. At the same time she was battling a growing admiration for him for his skill and ability to read the wind. Few Baran Do could have read the wind as well as Ranma had shown he could, and very few even of them would have trusted themselves to the wind like Ranma had.

Her distressed state was noticed by a Baran Do sitting on a rock outside the monastery. He was very much not a guard, but simply a watcher. There were no physical threats to the monastery here, but anyone interested in the out of the way mountain would be seen and either subtly redirected via a Force nudge, or be met and invited inside if he had business with the Baran Do. While they were not reclusive, the Baran Do were private and had no need or desire for visitors.

"Calm yourself, Min. Your mind is in disorder," the Baran Do said, standing up from the small rock he had been sitting on, his robe having blended into the rock. "Jedi, I am Brother Sal Noon. If you would please follow me, I will take you the rest of the way. Min, remain here and reflect on the Force until you have regained your center. Once that is done, please go about your duties."

Min flushed somewhat at the gentle rebuke in the older monk's voice, but nodded her head, grateful to be rid of the infuriating human. "Yes, brother. Thank you."

For his part Ranma was unrepentant, having had far too much fun. Instead he looked up at the monastery, which was situated high up and well away from the city. It had taken them at least an hour's worth of travel from the edge of the city to the monastery, which stood out from a single spire of rock in solitary majesty. Like the other Kel Dor buildings he had seen, this one fused living rock with portions of artificially made structures. There were various channels and holes here and there to redirect the wind, and lower down there looked to be runnels for rain or water, which was interesting since they were the first he had seen. Then again, I wasn't looking for them, now, was I?

Brother Sal led Ranma deeper into the monastery, but even here the noise of the wind was prevalent. "Would you like to meet with the Ancient Sage first or see the room we assigned to Sha Koon?"

"Actually, would you mind showing me your training center first? I'm not a Jedi myself, so I'm more interested in your techniques than trying to play detective. I've tried that once today, and it didn't really work out," Ranma replied drolly.

"Might this humble one ask what happened?" Sal asked, already turning away from the route he had been taking. "And if you are not a Jedi, why do you travel with one?"

"We travel together for our own reasons, and while I'm no Jedi, I've made a lot of friends within the Order over the past few years," Ranma said, having remembered that Shaak didn't want to make a point of rubbing their relationship into anyone's faces. It might be little late given my comment to Min about saving my flirting for Shaak, but better later than never.

Ranma was led into a larger cavern of some kind which stuck out of the side of the monastery. Two of its four walls were open to the elements, and there were six Kel Dor practicing there. Four of them were moving though a kata in their marital arts style, which seemed to Ranma's practiced eye something like Aikido mixed with a hard, slashing style of some kind, with no kicks mixed in.

The two who weren't working on their katas were practicing against one another, thrusting and slashing with unarmed hands. But from their waists and wrists the two of them had several long scarfs trailing behind them. Ranma instantly understood what they were for. The one at the waist is a target, the other two, weapons. The cloth technique: interesting though, if so. I wonder if they've added something to it?

At Brother Sal's shout the six of them halted their progress, moving over to stare at Ranma. Like Min, all of them could feel the power of the Living Force within Ranma, though they had been able to feel him within the city long before he had arrived at the temple. So the introduction was more formality than anything else. "Brothers, this young man is accompanying the Jedi sent to find Sha Koon. He also wishes to train with us. Would any one of you like to train with him in turn?"

"Fair weather, stranger. I think I would like to see what kind of hand to hand skills the Jedi have developed," one of the two that had been sparring said. He seemed a little eager, though for what, Ranma couldn't tell.

"Sal told you I was traveling with a Jedi, not that I was one. If you've made the assumption that I can't fight without a lightsaber, you'd best think again. The name's Ranma, yours?"

"I am Brother Zis, Ranma, and I stand corrected. Shall we see if you have the skill to back up your attitude?" Zis said ,his tone dry as he indicated the training area. Brother Sal left them there, while the others moved back to their own training.

Ranma nodded and followed the man, smirking slightly as he knew his normal attitude had already done its work to throw his opponent off balance. Standing across from the other man, he stood there lazily, his head cocked to one side.

Zis, in contrast, had crouched lightly, his hands out in a defensive stance, one hand lower than the other, the two ribbons on his wrists lined up with one another so they nearly seemed to merge from where Ranma was standing, moving in the wind. "Are you not going to take a stance?"

"Ehh, sure." Smiling slightly, Ranma decided to stop his normal method of making his opponent underestimate him or become angry, dropping into his own stance since it wasn't working. One hand formed a fist near his body while the other was thrust forward, palm open. "Let's go."

OOOOOOO

Setting down the local police report, Shaak opened her eyes, shaking her head. The mission Sha Koon had been sent on had been very low grade, a minor insider trading scheme, as she had been told by Master Yoda. It was so small that the Order wasn't certain it was even real or even being done on purpose. And it looked as if Sha Koon had cleaned her mission up in record time only to run into further trouble, trouble that took the form of an illegal drug operation. The police records were clear there, and indeed Sha Koon seemed to have hunted down several drug factories, but where Sha Koon herself had gone, Shaak couldn't say just yet.

But the dataslate recording of her findings have given me a sense of Sha Koon. With that I should be able to follow her trail in the Force once I find where she was seen last.

"Can you tell me what other cities Sha Koon could have visited?" Shaak asked, looking over at the chief inspector.

"Certainly, though I can tell you already she didn't visit many. Once she found clues of the drug operation, she started to search for their labs. After shutting down several, Knight Koon had determined she would not find the last of them within the cities, though what led her to that conclusion, I do not know."

"A starting point is all I need, inspector, never fear. Thank you for your aid on this." Shaak waited until the man had compiled a list of cities for her, and then walked out of the precinct, centering herself in the Force and sending out her senses to find the font of Living Force that was Ranma. She found him quickly and began to make her way in that direction, passing through the city and then out into the wilder lands beyond.

As she walked she thought about what had possibly happened here. Jedi often became involved or found other missions on planets they visited while on missions assigned to them by the Order or passed on by the Senate. Sha Koon's first mission on Dorin was a mission the Order had assigned to her having discovered the insider trading through their own sources. The second was one she had discovered on her own, and no report about it had gone back to the Order. This again wasn't unusual, and indeed happened all the time.

So we have a mystery here. A trap set for any follow on mission, none of which points to a Force user, but someone who wanted to kill Jedi. And no sign of any Dark Side user I can sense, despite what Yoda passed on about Plo's vision. But…but that really shouldn't matter much. If they could be sensed, the Sith would long since have been discovered. I will have to keep my guard up. And unfortunately, at least for now, Ranma's unique talents will be of no help. I will have to be the one to find us a trail.

She was greeted outside the monastery by Apprentice Min. Instantly the way the woman sat on the stone and the look in her face made Shaak chuckle. "Ah, and what has my… That is, what has Ranma done this time?"

Min looked up, shaking her head. "We just arrived about an hour ago, Master Ti, and yes, Ranma was…" The young Kel Dor woman tried to think up a way to describe what Ranma had been doing, then just told her.

Shaking her head, Shaak sighed theatrically. "Yes, Ranma seems to have a love of flight and high places, so that doesn't surprise me in the least. The next time he goes off like that and you have the misfortune of being assigned to guide him, please just leave him. as much as he acts like a child sometimes Ranma, is an adult and can be expected to look after himself."

That won Shaak a laugh from Min, who gestured into the monastery. "He is in the training area on the second floor, Master Ti. I will show you the way if you wish."

Moments later Shaak was watching with droll amusement as Ranma leaped around the training area with four of the local Baran Do around him trying to attack from every direction. The locals seemed to be doing relatively well keeping up with him, negating his aerial style with their own, or at least it seemed that way at first glance.

Their style is close to Ranma's, but their general level of skill and physical abilities are not. He is holding back tremendously, just as he was on Eshan. Thankfully, I won't have to deal with overly amorous locals chasing after him or myself this time. I wonder how long it will take Ranma to learn that particular trick.

That trick in this case was what Ranma had described to her once as the cloth technique. But here it wasn't just charging a piece of cloth with the Force to change it to a metal bar. No, the Kel Dor sect seemed to have taken that technique to a different level. Instead of imitating a solid object, the cloth shifted with their thoughts, and they had added something like small razors embedded into the cloth edges. So it was almost as if they had gained two extra hands holding weapons that could move somewhat independently of their arms. It was actually fascinating to watch.

The inclusion of actual razors means they were not able to discover a way to add an edge via the Force like Ranma says that Ryoga fellow was able to. Still, I have yet to learn how to shift the feel of the Force in an object to that level myself, so their style would be fascinating to learn. That being said, I feel a desire for some exercise of my own.

With a faint cough, Shaak stepped forward, allowing a smile to appear on her face as the Baran Do made way for her. Ranma in turn heard the sound and smiled widely, dodging a blow from one of the brothers and lashing out almost absentmindedly to grab the man's cloth whip, pulling him off balance and into the way of two of his fellows. A roundhouse kick to the fourth man who hadn't dodged backwards enough to get out of Ranma's range when his fellows went down, and the fight was over.

"Shaak!" Ranma moved quickly towards her, ignoring the groans and rueful chuckles from his former sparring partners as he did so, his eyes alight with a delight that Shaak knew was both from the spar he had just finished and from the sight of her. "Er, where's HK? I don't like the idea of him going around unsupervised."

That knowledge, that the look in Ranma's light blue eyes was for her alone, filled Shaak. Seeing the band of steel on his finger, her smile widened her own eyes lighting with love for him before she regained control of her expression. As far as she knew the Baran Do were celibate like the Order, though in the case of Kel Dor that wasn't as much of a hardship as it was for other races. But even so she had no wish to have their relationship become common knowledge. "I see you have found some playmates Ranma. As for HK, I sent him back with orders to remain there and kill no one unless they attacked the ship."

"Heh, yeah, but I think we can all learn something here," Ranma replied, smiling as he watched Shaak take off her Jedi robe, leaving her in a training outfit of leggings and a shirt. These were heavier than her normal style to help protect her body from the wind, though Ranma idly noted that Shaak probably didn't need that at this point.

"I have to agree with that," one of the men who had been sparring with Ranma said ruefully, his mouth mandibles quirking into a smile. "Ranma's style and strength are incredible, and his ability with Force Precognition is astonishing."

Shaak nodded, making no sign that she had seen Ranma rolling his eyes. It wasn't Force Precognition, after all, but pure speed and his ability to read his opponents' bodies. "I see. And your cloth technique was fascinating, though I have never seen Master Koon using a similar skill."

"It is rare for any Kel Dor Jedi to be able to use that technique away from Dorin, since it relies on manipulating the winds around us just as much as it involves imbuing the Force into the cloth. Reading the winds of other planets is made very difficult without feeling it with our eyes, faces, and fingers," an older brother who had been watching from the sidelines advised. "I remember Plo Koon, and he was able to use it, but preferred a harder style to the traditional methods of the Baran Do."

As the two aliens turned toward him, he bowed. "I am Brother Bar. The Ancient Sage wishes to speak with you, if you could follow me."

Snapping mental fingers at not being able to get some exercise of her own, she frowned as all the other Kel Dor followed them into the monastery, the doors to the semi-outside training area closing with a clang. At her look, Bar explained. "There is a storm coming. The winds will quickly rise to the level where they can tear anyone found outside into pieces."

"Damn. I wanted some more exercise," Ranma said, pouting so outrageously that Shaak nearly laughed aloud, before clamping down on it and giving him a withering glance. It failed to do anything beyond making him pout all the harder, and she resolutely turned away lest her self-control crack.

The two of them were led up to the topmost portion of the spire to a tiny room barely five by five meters, where they found the Ancient Sage sitting on a small thin cushion, surrounded by floor to ceiling windows all around, barring the four corners, and it was only a moment later that both offworlders realized that those were the first windows they had seen on Dorin. Looking closely, it was obvious they doubled as protectors against the wind and had been lowered into place.

The Ancient Sage was the oldest Kel Dor either of them had yet seen. His skin looked almost like rock, it was so craggy, and his eyes were rheumy and unseeing. He was also the first member of the Baran Do that Shaak could honestly say had enough power within him to become a Jedi. The others were not that strong in the Force, though their ability with their own Force powers was a perfect example that, despite there being a cutoff point to become a Jedi, power wasn't everything.

"We welcome you here, Master Jedi Shaak Ti and the Chaos Storm called Ranma," the Ancient Sage said, not looking at them. "I wish we could help you more on your search, but there is precious little we can tell you of Sha Koon that you have not discovered already." The Ancient Sage then waited as his two guests sat across from him on the stone floor of the room. "We can give you a list of the towns and villages Sha Koon visited. There is also a list of old mine sites she might have investigated. Beyond that, with the Force I can only tell you one thing."

With that the Ancient Sage turned to look at Shaak. "Before she disappeared, we felt a sense of shock through the Force, and sudden violence, but we could not localize it. Then we felt darkness, a feral Darkness reaching out for her, then nothing. We believe she surprised a Dark Side user of some kind and was taken. Dead or alive, we can no longer feel her or the Dark Side user. We have searched on our own in our own way, but found nothing. Still, if you need any help or a local guide, we will help as best we may."

"Thank you, Ancient Sage. For now, if you could show me her meditation cell and then let us stay here until the winds abate, that will be help enough for today," Shaak replied.

As they left, the two lovers exchanged a glance. Once more there was a hint that Sha Koon had run into something. The feral impression the Ancient Sage had mentioned was an odd addition, as was the fact they could no longer feel the Darkness which had sprung up to entrap Sha.

"So there was a Dark Side user here at one point, possibly long after whatever happened to Sha Koon, given what I found on her ship. He might have run off, but he wasn't running scared, and he set up traps that might well have worked against a lot of Jedi."

"I agree, but why do you refer to our opponent as a he?" Shaak asked.

"It isn't male machismo or anything, Shaak. I just think about that setup in the ship, and, I don't know, think it just feels that the mind behind it was a guy's," Ranma replied somewhat sheepishly as he pulled at his pigtail.

Unable to use the training area until the storm abated, the two stayed in the monastery for several hours while the winds outside wailed like a hurricane. Shaak spent her time meditating in the room Sha Koon had been given, further getting a feel for the Kel Dor Jedi Knight. Given time and a starting point, she could use that to retrace Sha Koon's steps and hopefully find her.

For his part Ranma talked with a few of the locals, trading some training ideas with them until they could leave, by which time night had fallen. The city was lit up now with lights, and the people had put out chimes, large and small, to celebrate the city's surviving another storm. The winds had died down to a faint rustle, and the chimes cascaded together like a choir.

The two of them smiled, listening to it, linking hands as they moved back to the Wild Light. "So, where do we go from here?"

"I will spend a day or so searching for where Sha Koon was last, then use the Force to pick up her trail. When I have done so, I will call you in, and we, and HK, I suppose, can follow it to discover what has happened," Shaak replied crisply. "We keep our eyes open and go forward as ready as we can for the unknown. That, unfortunately, is all we can do, and I refuse to make assumptions before the fact."

OOOOOOO

On the space station the Wild Light had stopped at, a thin, sallow faced man sat in a café that served offworlders, staring down at a datapad, fingers smacking into a tiny keyboard with an intensity that warned off anyone nearby. Set Harth could have used the Force to disappear from everyone's senses, but instead he had used Force Stealth to disappear in the Force, and a bit of playacting to blend in. It was subtle yet less draining in the Force than using both Cloak and Stealth would have been for any length of time.

Staring at the datapad, Set sneered slightly, shaking his head as he stared at his screen. It looked like any normal civilian style datapad, but if anyone had been able to look over his shoulder they would've realized that it wasn't, and that the keyboard was, in fact, not connected to it at all. It was instead controlling a very small, extremely high tech observation device that Set had left behind in Dor'shan to watch the comings and goings of his two targets. It was designed to look like the drones the Kel Dor used to both check the weather and to control traffic patterns, blending into the environment as Set was in the café currently.

Yet despite that I've had to redirect it twice today. The Jedi seems to be unaware of the drone, but the Chaotic Locus almost spotted my drone following them twice. Odd, but not impossible to overcome. Set had programmed the droid to investigate nearby traffic if it thought it had been spotted, and because of that the Locus seemed unaware of the drone's purpose. But this Jedi, she too looked almost as if she had felt my watching her when she left the main city. Damn. I would have liked to have had the drone follow her to wherever she is staying, but such is not to be. The wind had begun to pick up at that point, and the locals would have noticed a droid not acting as it should while the city was battening down for a storm. Still, I can assume that they will be staying with the weak band of Force users out there.

Closing the datapad, Set returned to his current domicile, a small, out-of-the-way apartment here on the space station, which was owned by a small time merchant who routinely came to Dor'shan on business or sent his proxies. Much like on Kashyyyk, outsiders stuck out like sore thumbs down on Dorin, so most of them preferred to do their business up here. That was one reason why there were so many space stations, each of them hovering over one of the larger cities of the planet. Set could have used the Force to blend in on Dorin easily, and had in order to set the first phase of his trap. But there was no point in putting himself in danger of being discovered at this point.

The Kel Dor having a homegrown sect of Force users was a surprise, Set admitted to himself as he sat down in the lotus position on his bed, pulling out his brand-new lightsaber and setting it on the bed in front of him as a target for his meditation. I had never known that the Kel Dor had developed such despite my being around since before the Reformation. Truly fascinating. None of them are powerful: indeed, I doubt more than two or three would be capable of even becoming a padawan, let alone complete Jedi training. Still, that doesn't mean they should be underestimated. They've been able to hide themselves from offworlders for centuries now, and they seem to be respected among the locals from what I could discern. Far more respect, actually, than Jedi would get on most planets of the Republic.

I wonder if my so-called master knew about them before he sent me here. It was certainly a shock to my system, and made creating my little trail of breadcrumbs all the harder. Still, I think they'll take it. I doubt they will become complacent, but they are still dancing to my tune even if they do not know it. They will come to me on my terms, and the two star-crossed lovers will die. Just like in so many of those idiotic tele-dramas, and I will win access to my collection back!

OOOOOOO

The next day, Ranma returned to the monastery while Shaak began her personal investigation. Now armed with a far greater sense of Knight Koon, Shaak was able to use the Force to find out which city the young Jedi had been seen in last. From there she was able to trail Sha Koon via the Force, following her trail out into the windswept hinterlands like a bloodhound on a scent. From there she called Ranma, and they used the Wild Light with Shaak meditating beside Ranma as he piloted them on a nape of the earth course under her directions.

Dorin was rocky in the extreme, with numerous heavy spires of even harder rock jutting out from the planet surface intermittently. The landscape almost reminded Ranma of Tatooine but instead of simple sand, here it was rocks. Regardless both were just as inhospitable.

Eventually, despite the fact that it'd been Shaak who had found the trail in the first place, Ranma was the first one to spot their destination. He pulled the ship to a stop, using its repulsors to keep it in the air for a moment as their main thrust fell to nothing.

Opening her eyes, Shaak looked over at it him quizzically. "What is it?"

"There was a glint of metal there for just a second. I'm putting us down."

Shaak quickly pulled up a telemetry reading of where they were in relation to the known settlements and shook her head. "There shouldn't be anything out here. There's a mine in this area, but it's about two kilometers to our south, nothing in this area. And even that mine is abandoned and has been for fifteen years according to this."

Even as she finished speaking, Shaak frowned in thought, going on slowly. "That would be a perfect place for drug dealers to use for their operation. But two kilometers distant?"

"Remember the virus program. Whoever was behind this could erase their presence in the space station, Shaak," Ranma said. "I bet they could misplace or relocate a mine site easily."

"Good point, but then does that mean the Dark Sider was working with the drug dealers?" Shaak mused. "Or something else?"

"Meh, we're not here to solve every little mystery, just the main one." Ranma looked at Shaak seriously. "How is your Force Stealth?"

Shaak winced. "I've been using my Force powers to try and find the trail, Ranma; I can't do that and hide my presence at the same time." Though could a Dark Side user, with the Veil helping them? That is an interesting point, and one I must remember to discuss with Master Yoda.

"Well, since we're here, I suggest you start doing it now," Ranma said. The words came out almost like an order, but it was a good one, and so Shaak decided not to pretend to take umbrage at it.

"I thought I was the one that was supposed to wear the pants in this relationship," she said instead, chuckling as Ranma stuck his tongue out at her.

However, even as she was doing that, Shaak had begun to bring in her Force powers, hiding her presence. When Shaak was done, she nodded. "Done. They won't be able to sense me through the Force any longer." Although, again, could the Veil interfere in such things in relation to a Dark Side user? I have to ask Aayla about that one, or perhaps Knight Vos at some point.

Putting on their gas masks, the two of them exited the ship with HK following them. "Where is this metal you spotted?" Shaak asked.

Ranma held up a hand, indicating quiet, then moved almost like a ghost over the rocky ground, so silently that even Shaak with her montrals couldn't make out the sound. He was back a moment later, holding out what looked like a mangled piece of some kind of blaster. "This was what I spotted. And I think that we now know where the drug dealers were and that Sha Koon was here too."

Taking the piece of metal from him, Shaak held it up to her eyes and nodded slowly as she saw where it had been chopped in two by a lightsaber. "Lead the way, please."

The three of them quickly moved across the open ground towards the small dip in a rocky cliff face where Ranma had spotted the glint of metal. It led into a mine, the entrance so cleverly hidden that no one flying over it could spot it, and it been only Ranma's keen sight and the glint of sun off the metal that had given it away.

Inside they found the bodies of ten or so people. While within the mine, they hadn't been nearly deep enough to get away from the wind, however, and a storm had come by at some point to tear the skin off their bones, desiccating the corpses so they could tell nothing about who they had been or how they died. There were still bits and pieces of blasters and other equipment around, however. And the mine continued underground, slopping down gently into the darkness.

Shaak and Ranma activated their lightsabers as HK activated a light set into his eyes, lighting the way as the trio made their way further into the abandoned mine warily, Ranma in the lead. Shaak was not happy about that, but even she couldn't detect more than a brief flicker of danger via the Force if the danger came from unmanned, unwatched traps. And Ranma's durability was well beyond her own. So she came second, moving even slower, most of her attention on her Force senses rather than her physical ones, trusting HK and Ranma to be on the lookout physically.

Because of that, Shaak felt the minds below them several moments before the mine began to descend along a gentle slope. "I feel something ahead of us." This close, whatever was interfering with her ability to feel the minds of others could no longer stop her from doing so, and she went on briskly. "I feel…a sense of wrongness, of…of taint, perhaps."

Shaak's eyes narrowed, and she looked at the other two sharply. "It feels like the beasts we ran into when we found the temple to Exar Kun."

Hissing from Ranma and the electronic equivalent told her that the others had heard and understood the implication. "Sha Koon?" Ranma asked.

"…No, I don't think so. I can feel her mind there, weak, but alive. It is almost as if she is caged somehow, or ah!" Shaak suddenly smiled. "Her master was a very good one! I think she is in a suspended animation. Jedi can slow our heart rate and breathing so we can survive on far less air or food for a time, so much so we might well appear dead. Bringing her out of it might be difficult, given the depth of Sha's meditation, but she is alive at least."

"Then let's make certain she stays that way," Ranma replied and, without another word, sped up.

They soon found more evidence of the fight that had occurred here: several more bodies, several Kel Dor and a few offworlders, representatives of species that Ranma had never seen before. Shaak identified one as a Verpine and another as a Gand. She had never run into Verpine before, the species being from somewhere out in the Outer Rim and rarely seen further inward, but she had heard of them being extremely good techs.

Moments later they met their first opposition in the form of several large beasts racing out of a nearby rent in the cavern wall, snarling hungrily. "The taint is within them," Shaak said, her lightsaber flashing into one of the beasts as Ranma's took another in the throat, his fist lashing out to smash another's skull in. "But there are more here than the ones currently attacking us."

"Exultant statement: Finally, some action! Not as satisfying as killing sentient meatbags, but it will do in a pinch," HK said, his blasters tracking multiple targets. A millisecond later he fired, and the horde of beasts died.

Ranma stepped over their rapidly cooling bodies to peer into the crack in the wall. "There's another tunnel here, leading down, a lot sharper than the mine shaft. You think Sha's down here?"

"From what I am sensing, yes, but wait here a moment," Shaak said, before retracing their steps. She examined the bodies of the dead quickly, then came back, her purple lips set in a grim line. The bodies had indeed been gnawed on, as she had feared. "I am beginning to paint a picture of what happened here. An accident of the Force that no one could foresee, Jedi or Sith."

Even while he moved into the crack and the tunnel beyond, Ranma asked her to explain what she meant. "I think that Sha chased these drug manufacturers here, following on their heels. Then the fight revealed they were not the first ones to use this particular hideaway."

"Our Sith friend?" Ranma asked.

"Indeed, though the how of it or why he was here in the first place I don't know," Shaak said.

With Ranma in the lead, the two of them entered the crevasse, heading deeper underground via a sharper incline than the mine shaft they had come from. They found two more bodies which had obviously been gnawed on before they found their passage blocked by an obvious cave-in. Ranma was about to start cutting through the rocks with his light pike, but Shaak's raised hand stopped that quickly. "Knight Koon is in there."

"Buried?"

"I can sense her there, yes."

The two looked at one another before Ranma powered down his light pike and ordered HK back. "Watch our back, HK. If Shaak could find Sha Koon, then the Sith we hope might be here should have been able to. That means they could have kept her alive as bait."

"Professional affront: Teach your meatbag grandmother to suck eggs!" HK said, moving back. He powered down his heavy shoulder mounted weapon, bringing up a series of other sensors, straining them to the utmost while Ranma and Shaak went to work.

With Shaak's Force powers guiding them as to which rocks to move without causing the cave-in to shift and possibly crush Sha Koon, Ranma and Shaak were able to eventually remove enough of the cave-in to spot the Jedi Knight. The Kel Dor Jedi was shorter than Shaak Ti, though taller than Ranma's female form, and looked extremely thin, almost waifish lying there on the floor of the tunnel. Her lower body was crushed under several rocks, but Shaak knew the Jedi Knight was still alive. "I can still sense her through the Force, but she is incredibly weak. We will have to be very, very careful to move her, and I think we need to have medical attention on hand."

Ranma looked at her questioningly, and Shaak shook her head. "I can heal myself, Ranma, but I can't heal other people nearly as well, certainly not to the level we'd need here."

"And I can't either. All right, I'll be right back." True to his word, Ranma had raced up and then came back after radioing their coordinates and a request for medical aid within just a few minutes. His phrase of, "Just keep going down the mine shaft; you'll find us just past the bodies," had been a shock to the locals, but they responded quickly.

Soon a medical flyer from the nearest city arrived, and four Kel Dor medics pushed into the crack in the wall where HK had been ordered to wait to show them in. From there they joined Shaak Ti and Ranma by Sha Koon's still comatose form.

Shaak had made the decision to leave Sha in her current meditation-induced comatose state, hoping to keep her from feeling the agony of her wounds. When they started to gently remove Sha, Shaak reached out, deadening Sha's body's pain receptors with the Force. Soon enough the Kel Dor Knight was on the gurney heading to the top.

Looking after the gurney, Shaak shook her head. "I think we might need to ask for a Jedi healer to come here after we are done investigating this place. After so many days buried, there is no way Sha Koon will ever walk without Force assisted healing. And even with that, after so long, it's doubtful."

"Then we need to make it worth it by finding out what she ran into here. We can ask Sha Koon about it later. For now, let's keep going and see where this leads."

After clearing the far end of the cave, they were almost immediately attacked again, this time by ravening slug-like figures that crawled towards them, maws agape. While dealing with the second such group, Shaak looked around wildly, her Force senses blaring a warning that had nothing to do with the threats right in front of her. Looking up she saw tiny explosives set in the ceiling and realized that their fight had triggered a second layer of defense.

Before she could gather her Force powers they exploded, sending the ceiling crashing down. "Look out!"

HK activated the repulsors set into his legs, rocketing back up the slope they had been descending. Ranma, however, was caught right below it, and while he dodged or sliced the first few dozen rocks, there were too many of them, and he couldn't get ahead of the cave in before he was buried. A muffled cry of pain and numerous curses followed, telling Shaak that he was still alive somewhere in there, but not at all happy.

"I think I need to up my own training, Ranma. I should have spotted that trap," Shaak apologized as she cut some of the rocks out of the way between her and her paramour. "My Force senses should be able to have spotted those bombs as things out of place." With that she began to levitate the pieces of stone out of the way, one by one.

"Don't apologize, Shaak. You at least spotted them before they went off. That was enough. My reaction should have been faster," Ranma said, having cleared an area around him at the last second by flashing his light-pike around at Amaguriken speeds, smashing enough of the rocks aside to give him some breathing space. It had battered his light-pike's ends somewhat, but the plasma blade had still activated, so he wasn't about to complain.

Shaak would have continued to try and apologize if not for a series of roars from behind her. She turned, staring at the animals still coming at her. This group was smaller and seemingly were the runts of the odd mutated slugs which they had been attacked by numerous times before. The taint radiating off the things made her shiver, the Dark Side in this place almost throbbing, hidden beneath layers of rock, but still almost a physical shadow. But it wasn't anything she hadn't seen before on Yavin 4.

Eyes narrowed, she reached out to the Force, grabbing the sliced rock segments she had pulled out of Ranma's path. Directing them with one hand, she hurled them at the creatures, smashing them flat.

An instant later Ranma joined her, and they both cut their way back to HK, who welcomed them in his own manner. "Sardonic welcome: Ah, so you survived too, master. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised."

"I really hope the Sith is here somewhere, or else I will become irritated," Ranma said angrily.

Several dozen clashes later and Shaak was almost inclined to agree with her beau. The number of animals that attacked them had slowly diminished, each one tainted, twisted by the Dark Side until they were almost unrecognizable. Both of them were covered with gore, the color of which ranged from a deep purple to dark green, the colors mixing on their clothes and skin in an awful riot of colors. It was slightly worse in Shaak's case, given her red skin, but neither were looking very happy, unlike HK, who had taken to whistling electronically until Ranma threatened him with dismemberment. During this escapade, Shaak had spotted and diffused several more explosive traps, and Ranma spotted a few physically before she could sense them through the Force, setting them off before they were near enough to be injured. But those too had tapered out, and now they stood at the bottom of the slope where it exited into a large cavern.

Inside the cavern was what looked like a series of medical instruments, a control panel of some kind, and seven large cells lining the walls on one side. All of those cells were open, their inhabitants gone, likely the same beasts they had been fighting. There was no one else here, and no sign of anyone having been there for several days at the least. There seemed to be a large hole up one wall larger than the one they had used to enter the cavern. "That looks like the main entrance. You think the druggies found the emergency bolt hole?"

I think so, yes," Shaak replied. "This whole thing has the feel of a surprise confrontation, not something the Sith who created those animals was planning for. Rather, it stinks of someone overreacting, then doing their best to cover their tracks."

"Hmm, I'll follow your lead on that, Shaak. Still, let's see what we can find."

"Doleful remark: Mastress, mistress, I am detecting no movement or energy signatures within the cavern. I am afraid that playtime is over for the day."

"Again with that nickname, darn it," Ranma muttered before leading the way into the cavern. Once they were certain the area was clear, Ranma leaped up to the shaft set high up the wall of the cavern, while HK looked around, making recordings, and Shaak moved toward the computers. While in no way a technician, Shaak could easily figure out that the system had been left in relatively one piece, with only a few of the memory cores removed along with the power source. We'll have to bring in a power source to see if the computers retain anything.

Ranma soon came back, leaping down easily and moving to Shaak. Ignoring their respective dirtiness Ranma put his arm around her waist as he looked at the computers. "The shaft leads out to the surface under an outcropping of rock. I'd bet whatever you want to name a ship blasted out of here at some point."

"Immediately before or after whoever it was stopped by to booby-trap Knight Koon's ship," Shaak murmured. "Do you think we could get the Wild Light down here?"

"Yeah. I'm willing to try, anyway."

"Please do so, Ranma. If we can find anything here, it will be on these computers."

"Or the animals," Ranma interjected, causing Shaak to look at him in surprise. "Well, they sure as hell ain't native, love!" Ranma said with a chuckle, squeezing Shaak lightly.

"True…" With that Shaak turned and pointed at HK. "HK, go back and get a recording of all of the animals we ran into. One of them might lead us to our Sith friend."

"Snarky response: Yes, mistress. At once, mistress. I will help you try to find this particular needle in the haystack, mistress."

"Enough of that, HK, or else I might think of leaving you behind the next time," Ranma quipped, already turning away to head back up to the surface the way they had come in.

HK quickly fell into step with him, heading up the way they had come. "Respectful reply: There's no need for cruelty, master. I will comply."

Once alone, Shaak looked around, trying to discern what her Force senses were telling her. The Dark Side was strong here, a small blot of Dark on the world, hidden deep, but she could feel it all too easily now. Yet there was something off about it. She could feel the fear and rage of the animals as they were experimented on, but even there something was niggling at her.

It wasn't a feeling from the Force—the Force here was filled with the feeling of the animals and the Dark Side, drowning everything else out—it was almost as if she should be feeling something more there, but what it was eluded her given the pressure of the Dark Side on her psyche. The anger and hate thundered at her, and she slowly pulled back her senses, shaking slightly.

Whoever was here is much more powerful than Exar Kun's Force Ghost was the first time I felt his presence, but not as strong as he was when he tried to assault my mind. I could wish that gave me comfort like the fact that whoever it was ran rather than stay and deal with any pursuers personally, but it does not.

It turned out that the computers had been utterly wiped out, save for a series of viruses which immediately tried to copy themselves into the Wild Light's system. Only Tune being ready for them stopped that from happening, and they returned to Dor'shan with only the pictures of the animals to show for their investigation. As HK and Tune played with them and ran them against pictures on the Hypernet, Ranma and Shaak retreated to the hospital where Sha Koon was being looked after.

Unknown to the hospital folk and even the doctor, two of the Baran Do Masters were watching the hospital. Shaak stepped in to talk to them, not that they thought the Sith was still around at this point, thanking them for their aid. Once Sha Koon's life was no longer in danger, they would remove her to the monastery to recover. "We have no healers like the Jedi do, but we can at least provide aid and peace. Will you call in a healer for our Jedi sister, Master Ti?" asked one of them.

Shaak paused, then shook her head once firmly, despite her lekku twitching in turmoil at what she was about to decide. "Not just yet. I would rather we wait until we are certain the individual who surprised her is no longer on the planet in a position to somehow intercept the message." What she didn't say was that the Order, or at least portions of the Order, had begun to be very leery about any message passed over the Hypercom. That paranoia had yet to spread, but Shaak knew the seriousness of their mission and didn't want to compromise it, not until every avenue of investigation had been considered.

Late that evening, Shaak Ti and Ranma returned to the hospital where Sha Koon had woken up to the shock of the locals. The Jedi Knight had the equivalent of several intravenous tubes connected to her arms, pain-relieving paste on her legs, along with numerous shots of medicine to deaden the feeling of her crushed, mangled legs, which were encased in the same kind of bacta-filled suit that Shaak had used when she had been wounded on Mandalore. There was little the bacta could do to wounds so old, but they could at least repair some of the damage.

For all of that, Sha Koon's eyes were clear as she looked at them, her silver irises gleaming in the dark of her eyes. "Master Ti, I have heard of you and your companion. I take it I have you to thank for my life? I wasn't even able to reach out to my uncle via our telepathic link before I had to turn my attention to entering suspended animation."

"Master Koon had a Force vision of the danger you ran into, and we set off here immediately. Given certain symbols he saw in the vision pointing to you having a run in with a Dark Side user, we felt it best to send combat specialists, and both Ranma and I have other skills the normal Jedi could not bring to bear."

"So I have heard. We Jedi are supposed to be above such petty things as gossip, but that only means we do not gossip about the things the normal populace would. I presume, however, that you would like my impression as to what happened?"

When Shaak nodded in the affirmative, Sha Koon went on. "I am afraid there I cannot help you very much. I never even caught a glimpse of the Dark Sider, not physically anyway. I had finished my nominal mission here, but had discovered via the police and the Force that there was a small but steadily growing illegal drug factory on the planet, shipping their goods off-world. I tracked them down, forcing them to retreat from several of their laboratories, capturing several. Then I tracked them down to their bolt hole, it wasn't even a lab, just a place to hide until the wind faded."

Sha sighed. "There it all went wrong. I called on them to surrender. They refused. I fought my way into the mine shaft and down it. Then, as I was about to corner them, two of them set off a small charge against the wall of the shaft, opening a fissure in the rock leading into what I thought was another mine shaft. As they ran into the entrance I felt it, the taint of those poor creatures and, beyond them, the Dark Side user. For a moment his Force Stealth faded, and I could feel the shock of the Dark Side user. I have no idea how long he had hidden there or what he was doing beyond twisting those animals, but whatever it was, we startled him."

"After feeling him there in the Force, I made the decision to let the drug dealers go, concentrating on him and forging ahead of most of them. But then he released his beasts. And then, while I was dealing with that, either I tripped or he activated the trap which caved in the ceiling on me, I know not which it was. After I was pinned I had no more attention to pay to him. I am sorry I could not be more help."

Shaak assured Sha Koon that she had done all she could have had, and that they would be sending for a Jedi Healer to help her recovery once they were certain the Dark Side user was gone, but that his apprehension was their primary goal. Sha Koon, however, simply stated she would get in touch with her uncle via telepathy, something no one could listen in on, and the conversation ended soon after.

Leaving the hospital they were quite disconsolate, knowing that, barring a miracle, the sudden largess of this discovery was going to end in nothing but a dead end. But when they arrived at the Wild Light they found HK waiting for them. "Anticipatory statement: Master, mistress, we have finished creating a list of the planets from which the animals we ran into came from. You will find it on your datapad within."

While Ranma created some dinner for the two of them, Shaak looked at the list and almost immediately went still. "Vjun," she whispered. "Of course, that would make perfect sense!"

"What was that?" Ranma asked, poking his head in from the kitchenette.

"I think I know where the Sith fell back to, for now, at least. The question is, should we chase after him now, or wait and lull him into thinking he got away clean?" Shaak said aloud, looking over to Ranma for his opinion.

"Chase after him. No way has someone like this guy remained active for so long without taking precautions. If he even thinks there's a way to track him down he'll keep moving," Ranma replied quickly.

Thinking about it, Shaak had to concede the point. With this kind of prey they couldn't get ahead of him and wait for the prey to come to them. No, they had to chase it down, which was a method of hunting she had done before, but didn't really enjoy as much as stalking.

Shaak reached out to the Force to see if it had any insight on this decision, only to sigh as, of course, it didn't. The Veil of the Dark Side was still there, blocking her ability to discern the future. "Then I suggest you get back to cooking, and I will head up to the cockpit. We might already be too late, but we need to try."

With that in mind, Shaak took over the navigation for this trip. Jedi could use the Force to navigate through hyperspace better than even the best astronavigational computer, like Ranma had during his assault on the Crimson Nova chapter. Tune looked a little nonplussed by this, but Shaak was adamant, and they were quickly on their way. The course to the planet would take two days, whereas Tune's best would have taken ten. The fact they would be almost traveling through several gravity wells was something Ranma decided not to dwell on, simply trusting Shaak to know her business.

While they were in hyperspace to Vjun, Shaak Ti filled Ranma in on what was known about the planet's history, which unfortunately was scant little. The accepted theory was that someone on the planet had been experimenting with biological warfare agents, and one had gotten loose. Vjun had been known for its medical sciences, so this was quite believable.

The outcome, however, was well known to the Order and to the Sector government. One day madness had begun to spread throughout the populace, a madness that drove them to attack everyone around them with murderous intent and berserk energy. Despite the best efforts of a few aid missions and the few Jedi who could get there quickly, the madness spread to the entire planet. Millions had died, torn asunder by their fellows, and thousands of aid workers had died before the Sector ordered them to pull back. The entire population had seemingly torn itself apart.

That had been about a year before Ranma arrived in this dimension, and Vjun had been quarantined since, though to the Jedi even the tragedy of what had happened wasn't the entire story. To their senses, Vjun was steeped in the Dark Side, a miasma of utter Dark like a black hole created by the hate, fear, and the overpowering rage of the infected. Because of this Shaak felt that it would be a perfect place for a Dark Side user to hide if they could be certain the plague or whatever it was had died out or wouldn't infect them.

The system quarantine was maintained by automated defense platforms. But such things could be bypassed or tricked, and so the two of them did now.

The moment they came out of hyperspace Shaak flinched, and even Ranma narrowed his eyes, the feel of the entire system just screaming danger and wrongness to his senses. It was like a dark malaise, a physical fog of corruption, reaching out towards him through the Force. To Shaak it was even worse: a drowning whirlpool of Dark Side energies trying to suck her in, to batter their way into her mind.

If she had come here before meeting Ranma and going on so many adventures with him, it might have forced Shaak to retreat. If she had not faced the taint of Exar Kun along with his ghost, it might have succeeded. But Shaak Ti was a Jedi Master for a reason, and she grimaced before throwing the touch off her mind, breathing in deeply as she did. "Well, that's unpleasant," she said mildly, though her face and eyes in no way reflected her tone.

"Yeah. Hell, even I can tell there's something wrong here. But now that we're here, how are we going to play this?"

Shaak frowned, thinking hard as she stared at the placid world ahead of them, its physical nature a shocking contrast to its impact on her Force senses. "If we can, I'd like to sneak in, but given the ability this Sith has with computers, he might have become aware of us the moment we came out of hyperspace, thanks to the buoys."

"Couldn't he then get them to fire on us despite your Order override code?" Ranma asked.

"No, that code is hardwired. It can be overwritten, but only if you physically connect to each platform, and you'd have to have the hardware to do it in the first place. That would take a lot of effort for little return."

"Makes sense," Ranma grunted. "Is there any way you can tell if they warned him we're here?"

"Well, there is no sign of a power source on the planet, certainly nothing that could power a space sensor platform. Give me a moment…" Shaak trailed off her fingers movied across the sensor controls before she finally nodded. "Yes. These platforms are cheap and therefore bare bones models; they don't even have the ability to send anything. Excellent. In that case we can sneak in and surprise the Sith, though we should be wary of sensors when we hit the outer atmosphere."

"Let's do that then," Ranma said, powering the ship forward. When they came within a few hundred kilometers of the planet, however, he slowed down, the engine cutting out. The ship kept on going via its momentum, entering the atmosphere slowly.

For a while it seemed to have worked, the two of them detecting no sign they had been spotted. Then from nowhere ion cannon bolts flashed up at the Wild Light.

"Evasive!" Shaak barked, since Ranma was the one at the controls at the moment.

"Where are they coming from?" Ranma replied, already juking the controls to port.

"I do not know," Shaak muttered, staring down at her controls and working closely with Tune to try and discover the source of the incoming fire. The ion blasts looked to be coming from the rubble of a city of some kind below them, but her readings couldn't find any power source.

Two more blows got in as Ranma juked around several more the ion cannon pulses eating into the ship's shielding further. The redundant nature of Mon Calamari shields meant that they were extremely difficult to take down even with an ion cannon.

Still the ion cannons firing on them were capital-class weapons. So those two bolts took the shielding down into the red, one of the shield blisters shorting out entirely, weakening them further.

"We have turbolaser fire incoming," Shaak said "It's coming in from all sides, but I can localize the targets now!"

"Light them up; we'll take them out with proton torpedoes!" Ranma replied.

Shaak's almost calm tone belied the amount of firepower coming at them. There was enough firepower down there to see off a flotilla, and all of them were planetary level turbolasers, capable of swatting capital ships out of the sky just like the ion cannons. It was only Ranma's reflexes and madcap flying style that kept them in one piece long enough for the targeting computers to do their work

Despite Ranma's best efforts, however, three shots connected. Two knocked down the Wild Light's shields and the third, an ion cannon round, did its insidious work, shorting the shields out entirely, as well as the quad lasers, which exploded as they shorted out. It was only the Mon Calamari design that kept the main generator and the engines from joining them, but Tune, connected to the ship's computers as he was, shorted out in a welter of sparks, the lights around his dome going out abruptly. And several of the panels in front of Shaak and Ranma also shorted out, sending sparks flying everywhere.

But because they weren't powered on at the time out and ready for battle, the proton torpedo launchers set into the snout of the Wild Light were still in working order when Shaak ordered the ship to pull the covers aside. Two proton torpedoes were sent out at every target in quick succession, exploding into the buildings that had housed the weapons.

But the damage was done. The shields of the Wild Light were down, and the turbolasers continued to fire. Ranma had to be lucky every time, the local defenses had to be lucky only once. Eventually Ranma's luck ran out, and two further bolts smashed into the Wild Light, sending it into a tailspin.

"We're going down!" Ranma reported. "I'll try to land us in one piece, but you take out more of those turbo lasers, as many as you can. HK! Are you good to go!?"

From the main room the droid replied. "Affirmative response: I am, master, and eager to crush meatbag heads."

"I think you're going to get your chance. Stand by on the gangway, we might have to let you out first before we crash." A second later HK was out, leaping away from the ship and trusting that the turbolasers wouldn't be able to range on such a small target.

Even as Shaak continued to destroy gun installations with their proton torpedoes, the brutal fire from the turbolasers continued to pepper them, and with the engines now barely responding Ranma's ability to dodge them was severely hampered. The ship lost several portions of its outer armor, but thanks to the Mon Calamari design it was still, generally speaking, in one piece when it crashed into the ground below. "Brace!"

The ship skidded into the ground, and then went end over end a few times before landing with a thump on its back. The two of them found themselves hanging from their seats from the deck that had suddenly become the ceiling. Tune fell out of his spot at the first roll, but Ranma reached out quickly, grabbing one of his legs and trying to hold him in midair during the twisting and turning of the crash. He could feel the little droid's leg buckling under his grip, but he hung on grimly until the ship stopped moving, allowing him to gently drop the droid to the floor below, wheels first.

As the droid clattered to the ground, Shaak and Ranma looked at one another. "If you say something about any crash we can walk away from is a good one, I am going to smack you," Shaak said simply.

Ranma laughed, but looking closer at Shaak he noticed a bruise forming on her forehead right below where her akul circlet hung. "Are you all right?"

Shaak simply nodded, disengaging the security harness around her and dropping lightly to the floor, flipping in midair to land feet-first. Ranma did the same, and the two of them moved through the ship towards the hatch, hoping that it could still be moved despite the hammering the ship had taken. It was, and with Ranma's strength they were able to push it open just enough to squeeze out through the crack, hopping out to land outside on the belly of the ship.

"Well, so much for taking whoever is here by surprise," Ranma said. As he spoke he pulled out his light pike, holding the staff over one shoulder as he stared around.

"Yes. It's evident that we walked into a trap here," Shaak said grimly, landing lightly behind him and activating her own lightsaber. "And it is doubtful that the anti-air defenses were the only portion of said trap."

"HK, can you read me?" Ranma asked into his intercom.

He was answered by a spurt of static, and he shrugged his shoulders, looking over at Shaak. "Not exactly surprised by that; still, an irritant."

Shaak shook her head and pointed to one side. Thanks to her montrals she was able to pick up the sounds of combat in that direction. "I believe we will find HK in that area." With that the two of them turned and raced on towards the sounds of combat.

They found HK making his own way towards them and being attacked by several of what looked almost like cannibal zombies of some kind. They weren't slow like zombies. No, they were incredibly fast, their movements feral; mostly men, but with some who looked like women. No children among them, thankfully, though when Ranma thought about why that would be, a sense of grim rage began to fill him.

The two lightsaber wielders cut their way through the small throng of beast-like cannibals, which retreated quickly, hiding here and there in the ruins starting up a manic scream of some kind. "What the hell?" Ranma asked, blinking at the noise.

HK shook his head. "Objective anecdote: It is a signal of some kind, master. After I beat off the first three meatbag vermin which attacked me, the survivor retreated and started that howl up before I could liquidate him. It is their way of calling more of its people to the attack."

From everywhere they came, hundreds of them, thousands, perhaps. They were almost human looking, their bodies anyway, but their fingers ended in claws, and their skin looked a little tougher than normal. Their clothing was shredded and dirty, their eyes wild and gleaming yellow and red, man and woman alike, their bodies pockmarked here and there by the acid storms that sometimes affected this planet. They moved unnaturally quickly, far quicker than a trained soldier, racing on all fours towards the two interlopers. As they came they howled, the same ululating, piercing howl, like that of a dog in distress crossed with a banshee.

To Shaak's senses they almost felt like very weak Force users, but not quite. Feeling that, though, Shaak wondered if perhaps the madness that had infected this world hadn't been a mistake at all? Perhaps the Sith isn't hiding here as much as returning to the scene of the crime. Yet one more thing he will have to answer for.

"HK, get high and give us some cover fire as we move! We can't get pinned down! Shaak, see if you can find the Sith user; I'll cover our back," Ranma ordered, already moving off as HK did the same.

"Gleeful announcement: Master, you bring me to the nicest places! Look at all the meatbag targets! A pity they don't seem sane enough to feel pain or acknowledge my martial prowess, but there is something to be said for the sheer quantity. Thoughtful statement: But I will have to use ammo conservation here, or I will run out of bolts before they run out of bodies."

Running along beside Ranma, Shaak sliced her lightsaber to the side, cutting down two of the locals. At one point they might have been human, but such was certainly not the case now, and she could not afford to show any mercy. "We need to break contact and start hiding instead of just running! As for searching out our quarry, this is not the time to go looking for more trouble."

"Yeah, but if we don't go looking, more trouble will find us. Still, breaking contact's a good idea," Ranma mused, using his light pike and fists to knock or slice several of the locals to pieces as he looked around. Spotting a large high-rise, he nodded, pointing to the road which ran alongside it. "Head that way!"

As they ran in that direction, Ranma switched out Shaak with HK, who had run out of concussion grenades already. Reaching the building's wall, he shouted, "Breaking point revised!" With that Ranma began to smash the building's walls all along its base, the breaking point shattering its ferocrete.

Circling the building, he ran into more cannibals, but Ranma handled them easily enough, continuing his grim work and now slicing into the girders the breaking point had revealed. At the same time HK and Shaak made a stand where he had left them, drawing in more of the locals.

"It's coming down! Get ready!" he shouted, finishing his work and racing back around the building, leaping into the air over the intervening horde.

With that cry, Shaak and HK responded in the affirmative, moving quickly towards the building and around it. Quickly after that the building came down, smashing a large portion of the horde and scaring off the rest for a moment, allowing them to race on, trying to get away from the point of contact.

"Oh, bravo," a voice shouted from nearby, and the three of them turned, staring. On top of a small house nearby stood a man. He was a middle-aged man, seemingly, with thin but muscled arms shown off by a jacket that had no sleeves. WHe had long, blue colored hair down to his shoulders, a sardonic, cruelly amused look on his face, and slightly pointed ears, which reminded Ranma of Master Fay, though not quite as pointed.

If Fay is a space-elf, this guy's a half-elf, Ranma thought, almost amused at that idea despite the situation they found themselves in. "I told you trouble would find us."

"Duly noted," Shaak murmured, taking in the most important factor about the newcomer's appearance: his eyes were glowing yellow with the Dark Side. That and, while he was surrounded by a massive pack of the locals, none of them were attacking him. Rather, they were sitting on their haunches all around him and on the ground nearby, staring at the interlopers, but not attacking, like a pack of hunting dogs waiting for the order to attack.

"Bravo," the man said again, chuckling and gesturing to the large building Ranma had brought down behind them. "Very well done. A Force technique I've not seen; something like a specialized form of the shatterpoint, is it? Very interesting indeed. Ah, but where are my manners?" The man bowed grandly, his sneer becoming even more prominent. "I am Set Harth, your executioner."

Shaak gasped at the name, but was still ready for the charging horde of locals, stepping back and gesturing with one hand, blasting the first few dozen that reached the duo into the air with a Force Push. Several of them were gunned down by HK quickly. Then Ranma was leaping through them, using each momentarily suspended creature as a springboard towards Set. "We'll see about that Elrond!"

"Elrond? Is that supposed to be a joke?" Set asked, his voice even, though he had to struggle for a moment to interpose his blade with Ranma's light pike. Then he flung himself backward, continuing to block Ranma's furious assault. As he had expected, there were brief flashes of various lightsaber styles there, but most of it was original based on Ranma's strength and speed.

Yet with his training under Sidious, Harth had enough speed to keep up when added to his Force Precognition. The two of them exchanged several blows, but Set quickly realized that concentrating on Ranma like he was being forced to would open him up to attacks from the Togrutan and combat droid once they finished with his small pack of locals. It also took too much of his Force powers to keep up with Ranma, forcing him to not use any of his other powers.

However this battle had already pinned down the trio of attackers long enough for more of the locals to arrive beyond the pack which had been with Harth. Ignoring him they piled in on the trio, allowing Harth to break away from Ranma.

Seeing an opening, HK twisted, bringing his blaster to bear and getting a shot off through the throng of rabid locals toward Harth, but Harth blocked it easily. A rock flung via a Force Push from Shaak at incredible speed, however, nearly caught him, and he hopped away awkwardly, almost falling off the roof where he had been standing when the battle was joined.

Ranma fell back to Shaak, and the two of them moved around HK, allowing him to once more concentrate on thinning the throng before they could reach them. Several times the trio were entirely surrounded, but Shaak and Ranma worked so well together that their plasma weapons created a web of light that none of the creatures the populace had become could get close to. And even as they did, Shaak began to concentrate on another Force technique entirely.

Standing on yet another rooftop, Set had followed the battle, watching as the three kept on trying to break out of the horde. But with him directing them, the cannibals were always ready for it, wherever they tried to go. And the few times they tried to enter the buildings they had to stop, thanks to traps the Sith-in-training had set up there.

One almost destroyed HK, the thermal detonators ripping into his side. But the droid's armor had stopped most of the destruction, though his normal looking hand was blown clear off him at the elbow, and the rest of that side of his had been badly scorched.

It took me months to get all this set up properly, but it seems to be working out, Set thought grimly as he watched the droid's injuries slowing the trio down. The Chaotic Locus immediately began to change his style, now leaping around over the horde in a way that Set had seen in his briefings on him. He idly wondered if the Togrutan Jedi would follow suit, abandoning the droid to its fate, then gasped, staring as she did something he had not anticipated.

Feeling the Force coursing through her, Shaak finally had gathered enough of her energy and concentration to activate Force Light. Thrusting out a palm, Shaak let her lightsaber fall to one side as light blazed from the palm. It was as if a pale, white sun had appeared in her hand, blasting away the Dark Side around them.

The effect of the Force Light on their attackers was profound, to say the least. The berserk cannibals screamed, the nearest simply screaming and falling over dead, thrashing in place. The rest took to their heels, their howls changing tone and becoming whimpers of fear and terror. That terror spread to the rest of the locals within hearing or seeing distance, and they all retreated quickly.

"What was that!?" Set bellowed, only to leap away as Ranma landed where he had just been standing, his fist shattering the roof he had been lying on. Kicking up and away from the rooftop, Set reached out with the Force, grabbing the rubble and hurling it at Ranma from several sides with all the power he could put behind it. Ranma grunted in pain, feeling the hits, but thanks to his toughness training none of them could stop him from charging in closer to Set.

Reaching for Ranma with the Force, Set gasped as Ranma flared his ki, breaking the lock and bringing around his light pike at the same time. Set battered that to the side and began to leap around Ranma while also clicking a button in his pocket, opening a set of doors nearby, getting in a lucky blow to Ranma's back from his lightsaber, though it didn't penetrate. The next moment, however, he couldn't even concentrate on that as Shaak Ti joined the fight.

For a few moments it was all Set could do to stay alive. Several blows got through, most of them from his attackers' lightsaber weapons, but one blow from Ranma nearly caved in his skull, and a kick from Shaak broke his ribs. And Shaak Ti's continued use of Force Light seemed to be draining Set of his strength.

But Set's ability to use Ataru canceled out Ranma's own aerial style, and his ability to use Force telekinesis while locked in battle with the two of them was able to offset a few of their tandem attacks. Despite that, Set knew he would die in short order, as none of his own attacks were getting through his attackers' defenses.

Then HK blared a warning, and the battle changed once more. "Warning: Master, I have readings on four incoming creatures of unknown type. They are not four of the berserkers; most of them are still running, and the four incoming lifeforms are larger than them as well.

There was a warbling war cry from the side of the battle, and then there were four monsters racing through the cityscape toward them. Three of them had taken to the rooftops, leaping with unusual agility from one rooftop to another. The last was racing towards them along the streets of the city suburb they were currently in.

The things looked like short Rancors, only about eight feet tall rather than two stories. Their skin was red, they each had three claws, and they had spikes coming from their shoulders and the back of their heads, and tusks protruding from either side of their mouths.

Shaak knew what they were the moment she spotted them. "Terentatek! Watch out, Ranma! They are Jedi hunters. My Force Light won't deter them; in fact, it might even attract them."

"Then we'll just have to see if we can change their minds. Or their faces, either works," Ranma quipped, despite the fact he was actually all business at the moment.

"I think you've forgotten about me, haven't you?" Set said, lashing out with Sith Lightning towards Ranma. Ranma blocked it with his light pike, but Shaak had turned her attention towards the Terentatek closing via the streets, because it was the closest. Thus she was unable to counter a Force Push that hurled her away.

Luckily, it wasn't in the direction of the Terentatek she had been looking at. Not so luckily, it brought her close to the three Terentatek that had been leaping toward them over the rooftops. And the shock of the impact of landing caused her to lose control of the Force Light technique, which abruptly disappeared. But Shaak had retained her grip on her lightsaber, and she pushed to her knees quickly, lashing out with it in a wide arc. The Terentatek leaped backwards, circling her, while the local cannibals swiftly overcame their fear of her Force Light and began to close quickly.

Now out of position to aid one another, Ranma and Shaak found themselves facing their foes alone. While Shaak quickly activated Force Light, warding off the local beasts from her, she was too far away for that to impact Ranma and the fight going on around him. And there was too much distance between them now, Set's Force Push having hurled Shaak several blocks away from Ranma. "Joy," Shaak said dryly, flashing her lightsaber in a figure of eight as the first Terentatek was joined by its two fellows, circling her.

HK twisted his wrecked body, his legs pumping as he moved to interpose himself between Ranma and the Terentatek moving to attack him. His shoulder mounted cannon fired several times, the heavy bolts hammering into the thing. Given the running battle they had been fighting since landing, he was unfortunately out of concussion grenades. But that and his own severe injuries weren't enough to force HK to be anything less than his normal aggressive and murderous self. "Angry challenge: Your fight is with me, beast!"

The Terentatek roared furiously, but took up the challenge, racing toward HK.

Yes! Finally seeing his plan of separating the trio working as it should, Set decided he couldn't afford to back away and let Ranma face the cannibals alone. None of them were intelligent enough to realize that they had to keep the trio away from one another, and Ranma was the most likely to be able to get through the cannibals towards the others. Not going to happen, he thought grimly, his lightsaber flashing forward.

What followed was a show of acrobatics and midair skill that might have had Genma and Yoda both nodding in approval. Ranma was trying to link up with Shaak, not really attacking Set anymore, but simply trying to get away from him while Set tried to keep the Chaotic Locus from doing so. Sith Lightning matched Moko Takabisha. Force Push was avoided or broken, Force Crush taken and returned with a hard enough hit that nearly did more damage to Set.

Both of them took hits, some debilitating, but none crippling. Ranma's healing was up to the task, and Set didn't take nearly as many hits as he was giving out, though he couldn't sustain that pace. However, Set only had to maintain this for a few moments, then the locals were attacking the Chaotic Locus as well.

Growling angrily, Ranma ducked and dodged, dancing around and moving this way and that, always keeping in the air, which seemed to flummox the locals' ability to work together, like the pack of beasts they so resembled. Set, however, was able to match him there, and Ranma started to take blows from the locals, and even once more from Set, when he pulled his disruptor from his waist. His durability turned the blows of the locals, but the disruptor beam left a large, mottled burn mark on Ranma's side, slowing him down enough for Set's lightsaber to catch him in the shoulder in the next instant. A few slashes from Set's lightsaber also got through, slicing his clothing and slightly burning the skin underneath.

In return Ranma kicked one of the cannibals up into Set's body, slicing through the cannibal, his lightsaber also catching Set. But Set's own durability was up to stopping the blade from penetrating. It left an angry burn, but even that wasn't enough to really hurt him.

Still, Ranma had anticipated that and turned with the blow, moving into one of his more destructive techniques as he cut down several cannibals, for once landing on the ground. Anger, check; hate, check; let's see if battle auras here create the same heating effect that they do at home. With that thought he slowly began to control his emotions, not entering the Soul of Ice, but keeping cool, cold and controlled while he began to move into a spiral.

It was tough with the sheer number of locals attacking him from every direction and Set pressing in hard. But Ranma was able to do it, and it was only his spiral pattern that mattered, not the heat front following the same pattern.

Set could feel something changing as his opponent began to concentrate more on dodging than striking back. His Force Precognition was trying to grasp at what was going on, what had changed, only to come up blank. So despite preparing for anything, he was not prepared for what actually happened.

"Hiryu Shoten Ha!" Ranma shouted, bringing up not his light pike, but his fist to crash into Set's down-swinging lightsaber. Even as the skin on his fist began to burn all around them a tornado appeared. The wind was so fast and powerful it picked up the cannibals surrounding the two combatants and Set Harth in turn, hurling them up and away. The tornado swiftly grew and grew and grew fed by the cannibals' feelings of mad rage and fury, fed by Set's hate and anger and then his own frightened fury and fear. It grew and tore into the surrounding buildings, tearing them asunder and sending the debris through the air to join Set and the cannibals.

"ARGGH!" Set howled, feeling his body tossed this way and that as debris and wind lashed him, but his durability was such that even that wasn't going to be enough to kill him. He lost his grip on his lightsaber, and the pain of the technique was such that he couldn't concentrate enough to try and get out of it, so he instead tried to curl up, with limited success, trying to concentrate just enough to ward off the debris that was caught in the tornado with him.

Then Ranma began to add something new to the equation. As the tornado ascended into the sky above the city, he pulled out his heavy blaster and his communicator. "HK, fire into the tornado!" Blasting away with the heavy blaster, Ranma also moved over to some of the nearby buildings the tornado had ripped apart. There he found pieces of metal or wood and began to fashion crude but sharp spears out of them, hurling them into the tornado, flinging each into the air as fast as he could.

For her part Shaak Ti had faced three Terentatek, legendary Jedi killers. Besides their visible weapons, the red-skinned beasts' hides were tough, and their claws and bones almost lightsaber proof, a sign of their ancient ancestors' manipulation via Sith alchemy. They were immune to mental Force powers and incredibly fast to go with their durability. They also had some immunity to other Force powers, though that, at least, could be overcome.

But Shaak Ti had her training with Ranma and her own skills. A Force Push scattered the trio before they could close in on her as one, and she charged in rather than retreat. Her lightsaber flashed forward, catching one Terentatek in the arm, slicing it off, and she ducked underneath its other clawed hand as it tried to cut her head off. Her free hand grabbed the outstretched arm right behind the wrist before it could regain its balance, and her lightsaber flashed back, cutting into its leg. As before, she used her hold on the monster's arm to flip herself up and away. This left the beast bleeding badly from the blows, but with both limbs still intact.

Shaak had to bring her lightsaber up to interpose it between a lunging Terentatek and her shoulder, grateful that the lightsaber couldn't convey nearly all of the impetus of that lunge. The Terentatek's teeth and tusks stopped her lightsaber, only a bit of the skin over its mouth sizzling under the heat of the plasma blade, but that was all. Yet the attack still pinned her there for a split second as its two fellows moved to attack her from behind.

Staring into the Terentatek's eyes, Shaak saw a vile, vaguely animal like intelligence, beyond that of a normal wild animal, but not enough to be sentient. But there was hate there, a burning hate for her and all Light Sider followers. So, they really were made to hunt Jedi. Shaak had known that, having read about beasts like this in the Order's histories, but to know it after staring into the beast's eyes was a different thing entirely.

Even so, she was prepared and turned, deactivating her lightsaber and letting the Terentatek she had been engaged with stumble past her. Lashing out, her fist slammed into its head with as much power as she could put behind the blow, snapping off one of its horns and caving in the side of its head. Even that didn't drop the beast, but it stumbled into the charge of one of its fellows, letting Shaak leap away.

A Quick Force grab pushed the last of the Terentatek into the other two and she used a variant of Ranma's aerial style to remain in the air, lashing down at them with her lightsaber. She wasn't going for any particular target now, only trying to injure them as much as possible.

The three Terentatek eventually got themselves sorted out, not attacking or injuring one another as many Rancor-like beasts would have if they had smashed together like that, showing once more their intelligence. And one of them swiftly surprised her. Instead of going for the chomp to her leg that her Force Precognition predicted, it raised a clawed hand, slashing toward her lightsaber hand.

Before she could pull her hand out of the way, the blow landed with numbing force. The monster's claws would have lacerated a normal Jedi's hand to bloody ruin, the impact enough to shatter bones. But to Shaak, thanks to her toughness training, it only broke the skin, giving her a nice gash and numbing her hand slightly, but not enough for her to drop her lightsaber or to break Shaak's concentration.

Flipping up and away via a kick to the forehead of another Terentatek, Shaak rested slightly on the side of a five story building, then thrust out a hand, throwing one of the Terentatek backwards into the side of the building behind them. The first Terentatek to reach her ate the tip of her lightsaber for its trouble, searing into the thing's eye.

Shaak was astonished that even so, the thing's skull protected its brain for a time under the heat of the plasma blade. But eventually the plasma blade did burst through into the thing's skull, making it the first Terentatek to fall.

Killing it, however, cost Shaak, because the last of the three closed in from the side, chomping down on her shoulder and raking its claws down her side. Her Jedi robe was shredded, her ribs creaking under the hit, but it was her shoulder which took the most damage. The thing's jaws punched through her skin, crunching down on her shoulder and digging in.

Gritting her teeth, Shaak deactivated her lightsaber and brought her other hand up to hammer into the thing's jaw, shattering its tusks with each blow, knowing that she had to get this beast off her arm before the Terentatek she had thrown across the street could join it.

When the thing's eyeball exploded under one of Shaak's blows, it finally released her, the pain of the blow overcoming its need to kill the prey it had been designed to kill. It opened its mouth, letting Shaak's ruined shoulder loose as it backed away, howling in agony, only to fall silent as Shaak lashed out with a quick punch from her unwounded arm, catching the thing in the throat and crushing it.

Rolling away and wincing in agony from her wounds, Shaak let the thing fall, pulling her lightsaber to her unwounded hand and activating it quickly, lashing out with her lightsaber to keep the beast back. It was the same one that she had attacked first, and it was already moving much more slowly thanks to the wounds it had taken to its arm and leg and it was unable to dodge her lightsaber's slash. It caught the Terentatek in its side, biting in until the plasma blade hit its ribs, stopping there.

In return it howled and tried to lash out at her with its remaining arm but Shaak leaped over the thing, her lightsaber flashing and slashing in a series of consecutive blows as she pushed her body to keep moving around the thing, using its hampered mobility to the best degree she could. Eventually the wounds piled up and the thing finally fell dead to the road of the blasted city.

Seeing several of the cannibal locals coming towards her, Shaak sighed, but began to concentrate on creating Force Light, only to watch in bemused shock as a tornado appeared inside the city, ripping away at adjacent buildings as it ascended into the sky. The locals also noticed this unnatural phenomenon and ran away, yipping and screaming, in almost as much haste as they had earlier from her Force Light technique.

Moving in the direction of the tornado with some difficulty, Shaak ignored her various wounds for now, concentrating on her surroundings just in case. The cannibals might have been afraid of the tornado, but if there were other Terentatek around, they might not be.

"Bemused inquiry: Togrutan, did the mastress ever inform you that he/she could impact the local weather in such a manner?" HK's voice sounded from Shaak's left.

Shaak turned in that direction, seeing that the droid had several dozen new dents on its body. One of the droid's claws on his claw hand was gone, the stub still sparking electricity, and its head looked as if something had tried to use it as a chew toy. Which, given the fact Shaak had noticed that HK had fought the last Terentatek, was probably what had actually happened. In HK's clawed hand he held a tusk from the beast he had been fighting as a trophy. "No, I can't say it ever came up in conversation. He mentioned one technique that created a tornado, but I actually thought it was an exaggeration."

"Sardonic amusement: Apparently not," HK drawled, before falling in beside Shaak as they made their way to the epicenter of the storm, having to stop a ways from it thanks to the speed of the wind. They saw Ranma starting to hurl spears up into the storm and joined in, with HK opening up with his shoulder mounted blaster as he heard Ranma's roared order through his communicator. Shaak, for her part, reached out with the Force, feeling both the way the wind was working and the fact that the Dark Side user was trapped within, before using her lightsaber to cut a series of spears like the ones Ranma was using.

In the tornado Set Harth knew he wasn't getting out of this alive. His lightsaber had been smashed, shattered by some of the debris the tornado had pulled up into itself, and his durability, the durability his training under Sidious had given him, had begun to falter. His mouth was a mangled mess, one of his ears was gone, and several of the spears had sliced him or even penetrated his body in several places. None of them went deep enough to kill him, but the wounds were piling up.

Desperate and now scared for his life Set reached out for the Force, beginning the process of Transfer Essence. He was still performing the technique when Shaak and HK joined in and was barely done before a spear hit the back of his neck, slicing into his spine.

Wearily, the trio of warriors watched as the tornado slowly began to dissipate, having slaughtered all of the cannibal berserkers it had caught within its radius which had been fueling it with their anger and fury. Their bodies were scattered across the city, and among them was the body of Set Harth. HK spotted his body falling to earth first, pointing him out to his master and mistress.

For a moment the three of them just stood around the Dark Jedi who had led them on such a not-at-all merry chase, before the renewed howls and hunting roars of the locals warned them that there was still danger around. Shaak quickly began to bring up her Force Light again, while at the same time Ranma knelt, checking for a pulse.

He had barely stood up when HK picked up the body and hurled it into the doorway of a nearby building. As the droid had anticipated, much like the majority of the other buildings in the city, this one too had been booby-trapped, and there was the 'crump' of an explosion, followed by the entire building crashing down. At his master's look, the droid shrugged, his servomotors noticeably whining as he did. "Jaundiced comment: Better safe than sorry, master."

"…Yeah, yeah. I can agree with that," Ranma replied, while Shaak simply chuckled wanly.

OOOOOOO

Set Harth's disembodied soul quickly found a home in one of his clones with the ease of long practice. Distance was nothing to someone who had mastered the Force technique of transplanting their souls. That did nothing for the feeling of disorientation, the rage building up inside him, or the fear which he could recall all too well from his latest brush with death. An instant longer, an instant longer and I wouldn't have been able to concentrate enough to send out my psyche! What, by the Dark Side, was that!?

The Sith-in-training looked up as he heard a clank and saw numerous guns pointed in his direction. He concentrated on his Force powers, but then pain lanced through his body, and he spasmed in the Spartii cloning cylinder. An instant later the pain ebbed, and he cursed volubly in his mind. Of course Sidious implanted those damn nanites in my clones as well.

"This was not an authorized transfer. State your reasons or be liquidated," a droid voice said over the intercom.

Set glared at the pickup, but he had been introduced to this one too. A droid after his own dark heart, but its loyalty to Sidious was hardwired, and he sat on the pain button, the button that would release a deadly plague into the room, and the button that would detonate the tiny thermonuclear device set into the floor. Sidious truly does believe in redundancy, doesn't he? The only thing he can't seem to plan for is the Chaotic Locus, and this time I'm the one who paid for it.

"Tell Lord Sidious that my plan to kill the Chaotic Locus failed, though I might have destroyed his ship and got close to killing both him and his Togrutan mate. It was only the fact that our information on their capabilities was incomplete which made my plan fail."

Harth hovered there for hours as he waited for that report to be relayed, and then Sidious was there, his face, or rather the dark hooded hole that was all he had ever shown to Harth, appearing there. For a moment he was silent, and when he spoke his voice was a whisper, but even so Harth could tell the man was holding on to his temper by a thread. Sidious was a planner, an organizer, the sort of Sith who wanted everything to be in its place, to follow his will. This probably was why he couldn't plan for the Chaotic Locus, whose presence was as the name implied.

"What do you mean, our information was faulty?" Sidious's cold sibilant hiss stated.

"I did not say that," Set said carefully, having no wish to attempt to transfer his essence again in so short a time. "I said it was incomplete. Everything we had information on, their speed, durability, and various esoteric Force tricks, was spot on. But both the Locus and the Togrutan had more abilities that we had no idea about."

Sidious waved the correction off, his eyes boring into Harth despite the fact that Harth couldn't see them. "Tell me."

"The Togrutan knows a technique I have never seen before, a pure Light Side technique that weakened all the Dark Side beasts and frightened the locals badly. It even weakened my connection to the Force. I have no idea what it could be."

Though Harth didn't know it, Force Light wasn't a new technique. But no Dark Side user had ever before survived a meeting with a Jedi who knew Force Light, and it was so esoteric a technique that few Jedi knew it existed in the first place or could even learn it if they did.

Sidious scowled, which was visible despite the hood he wore to hide the rest of his face. "I see. And the Chaotic Locus?"

Harth's lip's twitched, trying to smirk and grimace at the same time. This wasn't going to be good, but on the other hand, if Sidious's surprise was half what his own had been, this would be amusing at least. "The Chaotic Locus can create tornadoes. Giant tornadoes."

His lord and master's reaction of shock, shown by a jaw which dropped so hard it might have become unhinged, was almost amusing. Until the pain began; then it stopped being amusing at all.

OOOOOOO

With Shaak continually using Force Light, she couldn't concentrate on healing her wounds, but the three of them were able to get back to the Wild Light safely, if slowly. Once there, Ranma set to rebooting Tune from where he had shut down due to feedback from the ion cannons. "If we had more lift capacity I'd have liked us to salvage some of those guns, but we don't," Ranma mused, looking at the damage the Wild Light had taken on its outer hull before entering the still upturned ship.

"True, but best we concentrate on what we can do rather than what we might wish to do," Shaak replied, keeping up the Force Light in her hand while also using the Force to deaden the pain of her battered body. She could juggle those two things, but she couldn't also control her healing at the same time. And she had yet to train her internal Living Force to heal her wounds as Ranma could automatically. Even the horrible wounds she had taken would be healed quickly once she could concentrate on them, but not before.

Luckily for her, Ranma was able to figure out how to restart Tune quickly enough. The ion cannon had knocked the droid out, but his core programming had been protected by the android equivalent of an internal surge protector. His personality kernel had even survived, and the droid, finding itself on what should have been the ceiling of the ship's cockpit began to warble and groan, rocking on his wheels, his top spinning around several times before noticing the dents on his 'shoulder' where Ranma had been holding onto him. Tune then swiveled his eyes to glare at his master, who shrugged.

"Sorry about that, Tune, but there was no other way to keep you from hurting yourself or me and Shaak even more. We'll get that repaired when we get back to Dorin or somewhere else. Right now, though, I need to know what you can tell me about the ship. Can you power it up? Is it spaceworthy?"

Tune bleeped and warbled angrily for a second before directing its eye up to its tiny booth, which was, like the chairs and the controls of the cockpit, on the 'ceiling' at the moment.

"Ah, yeah, good point. Do you need to be feet down in that thing or not?" Ranma asked. When the droid answered in the negative, Ranma simply lifted Tune over his head until he was stuck into his little cubicle.

There the droid extended his connector arm into the socket. After a moment, however, it warbled a doleful sound, and Ranma let him down.

Ranma then remembered the vambrace with the communicator which could translate Tune's warbles into words, which he had neglected to put on thanks to the ambush they had run into here. Retrieving it from his room, Ranma came back and gestured for Tune to speak.

"The power generators are not responding, master. There is no power in the ship," Tune promptly reported. "I think it might be a problem with the energy runs rather than the generators themselves, but I cannot tell from here. It will take me several hours in the engine room to see." The engine room was a tiny compartment at the back of the ship, where Tune could access the various generators the Wild Light had within it, as well as the main engines, but it was so small that even in his female form Ranma would have trouble fitting in.

"Get to it then," Ranma ordered. "Any help you need, I'll give, but it'll just be you and I on the repairs, I'm afraid."

It turned out that thanks to the redundancy of the Mon Calamari's design, none of the generators had blown, though they had all shut down, one after another, under the ion cannons' pounding. Two of the shield blisters had been destroyed in the turbolaser fire after being shut down via the ion cannons, but they would be relatively easy to repair if they could return to Dac. One of the generators might well be slag too, but it was the outer hull that had taken the most pounding, along with the main engines.

Walking around the ship, Ranma and Tune could see that two of the engine thrusters were mangled beyond their ability to repair. Ranma could probably bend the metal back, but large portions of them were simply missing. Another issue was that several of the ship's compartments had been holed and were now open to space. Jeez, and this was with the limited amount of ki reinforcement I was able to do to the outer hull. On top of that, the quad lasers were gone, shot to pieces during the battle, and the proton torpedo launchers, along with the front of the ship to a large extent, had been mangled badly by the number of flips the ship had gone through during the crash.

However, a bare hour after they began, Tune was able to bring up one of the ship's shields. The Wild Light was still sitting on its back rather than its belly as it should be, but even so, the shield springing into place allowed Shaak to stop using Force Light. A second later she retreated inside. Moving to sit on the ceiling—now floor—in the main area, she quickly fell into a mediation trance as she began healing herself.

Looking at her, then up at the sofa and table which were embedded into the floor, Ranma shook his head with a laugh. "On the one hand, it's a good thing everything that can be nailed down is, but on the other, it makes this kind of irritating." Even the kitchen had been designed to take zero-G environments, so the plates and everything else were safe where they had been stored…which was now on the ceiling, and to use them someone would have to also be standing on the ceiling. Ranma could crawl across the ceiling, but stand in a single place and cook there, that was beyond him.

"Now, while she's doing that, HK you're on guard duty. Tune, see if you can pull some of the proton torpedoes out of their magazine and rig them as grenades for HK, just in case. At the same time, monitor the shields and inform HK and me the instant it fluctuates."

"Interrogative query: While I applaud the idea of making use of available resources to create more weapons, what exactly will you be doing while the tin can and I are busy?" HK asked. the assassin droid was outside still, standing below where the landing ramp was cracked open, facing directly up from the upside down ship.

Ranma leaped up out of the small entrance, landing beside the droid. His wounds had already mostly healed, though he was looking noticeably tired. "I'm going to go and see if I can find a large enough lever."

Closing his eyes, Ranma pulled the Umi-Sen-Ken around him, disappearing to all natural senses and even the Force, if you didn't know what to look for. A second later Tune let the shield fall to allow Ranma out, powering it back up the moment he was out.

"Jealous mutter: Showoff," HK huffed, before turning his attention to the cannibals slowly moving around their ship. They didn't seem to want to chance the shield, but there were certainly more of them out there than had been in sight before Shaak had canceled her Force Light technique.

Under the Umi-Sen-Ken, Ranma moved through the city, unseen by any of the locals. As he did, he thought about the fight they had just been through. We won by the skin of our fucking teeth and the fact that a lack of knowledge cuts both ways. Harth was ready for a lot of what Shaak and I could do, and it was only our tricks that kept us from losing this fight. Something to think about in the future, and it means I want to keep the Yama-Sen-Ken moves a secret for as long as possible. But that doesn't make me feel any better about being led right into a trap. This wasn't Harth trying to defend his secret base. No, this was an ambush from the get go. Something to think about in the future.

With thoughts of the fight still going through his head as he considered the problems they ran into and what he could do better, Ranma searched for a lever. The ship, after all, couldn't right itself, and they had to get it back on its belly in order to take off. Maybe if they had a runway or some large clear area in front of the ship they could have taken off just with the main engines. But they couldn't do that because they didn't have that much space before they would run into a series of apartment complexes, and not with two of the five thrusters mangled. They wouldn't be able to get up speed fast enough to lift into the air and miss them.

Eventually he found what he was looking for: a massive steel girder longer than the Wild Light was, sticking out of one of the local buildings. It looked as if there had been some kind of statue or other art on it at one point, but the design had long since fallen into disrepair.

Using his Bakusai Tenketsu, Ranma smashed the top of the building around the girder, catching it with an 'oof' of effort as it fell free. It was so heavy that Ranma had trouble dragging it back to the Wild Light, a task made worse by his Umi-Sen-Ken failing several times, causing Ranma to have to fight off a few of the locals, hide, and then wait for them to disperse before restarting his trip. But he was eventually able to do so just as local night began to fall.

With the shield up and HK on guard, Ranma kipped out on the floor next to Shaak, using her lap as a pillow, something that nearly knocked her out of her trance state before she realized who it was. The next day, with Shaak once more fully healed and wearing the cloak Ranma had given her instead of her Jedi robe, the two got to work repairing the ship as best they could.

Exiting the ship first thing that morning, Shaak paused, staring at the gigantic lever that Ranma had wedged under the ship. "You cannot be serious."

"Sure, it's a little low tech, but do you have a better idea?" Ranma retorted. He had wedged the steel girder underneath the forward jutting jaw of the ship, its other end sticking up into the air.

"And how are you going to use the lever? Your weight and mine would hardly be enough, and I will need to concentrate on Force Light to keep the locals away while you're doing this," Shaak said, shaking her head.

"I haven't quite gotten to that point yet. Maybe collapse a nearby building on it?" Ranma shrugged his shoulders. "I could bring down that tall one over there like I did the building yesterday."

Shaak wanted to rail at the very idea, knowing that such a move would damage the ship even more, but it might also flip the ship the right way up, which would solve the main problem facing their ability to take off. "That could work if you could aim its collapse… Yes, that could work, I suppose. Or we could look for Set Harth's ship."

"Cautionary interjection: Apologies, master and mistress, but there was an explosion late last night in the far northern quadrant of the city. I would estimate its location as being that of the planetary capital's building, which would be a likely place for our late opponent to have made his home."

Groaning, Ranma shook his head at HK's words, looking over at Shaak. She nodded, and he looked at the building once more. "I work on this, you go and see what you can find?"

"Indeed, but you can keep HK here. As injured as you are, HK, you would only slow me down." With that Shaak turned around, already concentrating on the Force Light technique as Tune brought down the shields once more.

"Injured tone: Hurtful, but accurate," HK muttered, watching Ranma enter the nearby building.

Shaak, unfortunately, found nothing but rubble and ashes. The whole palace which had served as the planetary governor's seat of authority was simply gone, the entire thing having been blown to pieces the night before. She reached out with the Force, trying to find any clues, anything out of place here, but found nothing. In the end they were still left in the dark about whether or not this Set Harth had been leading them on, was the Sith they were looking for, or was a random Dark Jedi who Sha Koon had just stumbled upon through the providence of the Force.

Walking back as she mused about the mysteries of this confrontation, Shaak paused halfway to the ship as she heard a loud booming explosion followed immediately by a crashing noise in the distance. Racing on, she found Ranma's plan had worked, and he was standing by both the now righted ship and the downed remains of the building he had used. "As one of my people once said millennia back, give me a big enough lever and I can move the world!"

Laughing, Shaak moved to join him, and the shield came down once more, letting Ranma and Tune work on the exterior of the ship, patching holes as best they could with bits of metal debris from the city around them. The ship would fly, but Tune would have to stay in the engine room to monitor the energy runs there, as there were fluctuations in the power grid which he couldn't run down just yet. And every compartment but the cockpit were still not reading as spaceworthy to Tune's sensors, despite them patching every hole they could find.

With the cockpit hatch closed behind them, Ranma sat down and began to power up the ship, wincing at the sheer number of red lights on his console. Tune's warning warble rang out through the ship, and he powered it down to half its full power, while the repulsors caught, activating and forcing the ship into the air. About half of them were not responding, but the remaining ones were enough to get them into the air, and from there the main engines powered them up and away from the blighted world.

Looking over at Shaak, Ranma waited until she had input their jump, which she had to calculate via her Force powers instead of using Tune, since the astromech was busy in the engine room. "So, I think we found more questions than answers on this trip, yeah?"

"Oh yes, lots of questions. Still, at least we know Set Harth is dead. Despite the number of questions his death leaves us with, that alone would have made this trip worthwhile," Shaak replied, finishing inputting the commands. About ten minutes later the ship exited the planet's gravity well and moved far enough away from the system's sun to go to hyperspace.

As the screens began to show the varicolored lights of hyperspace, Ranma glanced at Shaak out of the corner of his eyes. In as innocent a tone as he could manage he asked, "So, it'll take us, what, two days to get back to Dorin?"

"A little longer. I decided the ship couldn't handle skirting around the gravity wells between us and Dorin as we did coming out. So about four days," Shaak replied, then giggled as Ranma pulled her into his lap, smiling at her.

"Well then, whatever will we do with our time, stuck in the cockpit like this?" Ranma asked throatily, before he began to nibble at her neck and the sides of her lekku.

Shaak responded ardently to his touch, bringing his mouth up to meet hers. They were alive and returning to their friends, that was enough reason to celebrate in her book. The questions about what they had run into and what it meant in the long term could wait for now.

OOOOOOO

Cocking his head thoughtfully, Master Plo Koon watched as the boarding ramp of the Consular which had brought the first Sector Jedi to be assigned to the Mandalore sector ever slammed down onto the tarmac. Plo was certain about that; he had looked it up: no Jedi had ever been assigned to this sector, before or after the numerous wars with the Mandalorians. So this was a historical moment on two fronts: Plo Koon leaving Mandalore was a tacit sign that the Order (and the Republic, though the Senate wouldn't say so) and, for the first time, the Mandalorians and Jedi were, if not friendly, at least comfortable enough around one another for a permanent Sector Jedi to be assigned here.

And on top of that, the Jedi they have decided to assign is…telling. Though telling of what, I have yet to discern. Regardless, this frees me to travel to Dorin and be with my niece as she recovers.

As the human master walked down the ramp, Plo Koon and Bo Katan moved toward him. There was no one else here. Mandalorians did not go into fulsome public ceremonies, and the Jedi even less so.

Normally it would have been the Jedi who greeted his fellow first, but given the nature of the incoming Jedi's job, that was not the case here, and, after exchanging a nod with his fellow Jedi, Plo looked at Bo Katan who was smirking, though her words were derogatory. "Well, Je'dai, I'd say I could hope that you enjoy a peaceful stay here in our sector, but I'd be lying. So I'll just say welcome, and I hope you brought a boat load of Je'dai patience and your lightsaber. I have no doubt you're going to need both equally."

Jedi Master Dooku smiled widely. "I look forward to it."

End Chapter


I played somewhat with the timeline of Vjun, but felt it made sense to have its downfall occur before Sidious and Plagueis started the Sith End Game. I also played with the locals, making it as if a lot of them were still alive rather than having torn one another apart to the extent that they wiped the entire population out.

As you can see, I've set Set Harth up to be the entrapping, devious tactician sort of villain. This plus his clones will allow me to keep him around while also allowing me the pleasure of actually killing off a number of other villains as he uses them up. That's an issue that didn't show up in this chapter but which could be prevalent in the future.

However, I have also given several clues that Harth, and by extension Sidious, have overreached themselves in this latest attempt on Ranma's life. The long term consequences of that will become readily apparent in the next chapter. And maybe just maybe the Jedi will start to get out from behind the 8-ball when it comes to information security and espionage.

Anyway, hope you all enjoyed this, and the ever-evolving closeness of Shaak and Ranma's relationship.