Jayce had a lot of time to think about the encounter as he traveled across the hills. Letting him go had put the woman's family in danger, and not just from angry Separatists. What he was doing could well end with a Republic army overhead and fighting both in space and on the ground. Though Jayce had no doubt the people would be better off without the Separatists around, how many of them would end up as collateral damage?
He considered the ramifications of war as he journeyed east. Or at least what he thought was east, he stupidly hadn't thought to bring a portable nav computer. The stars were out, gleaming far brighter than on any world he could recall, but he didn't know the local constellations. So he picked a star that he was pretty sure was east, and headed in that direction.
After a while he had to concede he was lost. So he did what any Jedi would do. He sat down to meditate. He took slow, calming breaths, and opened his awareness to his surroundings. Instead of focusing on which way was east, he attempted to open himself up to the direction the Force wanted him to go. No direction was assumed, no goal focused on. Just a simple question of which direction to go.
Long minutes passed before he felt anything. It was just a tickle in the back of his mind, like a song whose tune he couldn't quite remember. But there was a direction. He slowly stood and started to follow. The nudge was taking him much farther to the right than he would have guessed. That was the point, he wasn't relying on his own guesses. He was trusting to the Force.
But the Force seemed to be playing a joke on him. After a long time walking over hills, avoiding herds of sleeping nerfs, and following the sensation guiding him on, he stopped. The call that had been straight as a laser bolt was now coming from behind him. He turned and walked back down the slope he had been climbing.
After a little ways, it happened again and he realized that he walking away from the impulse. So he turned around and started back up the hill. Then it was on his right. He turned and followed, only for it to be on his left. He was going in circles.
Then Jayce came upon a ravine so suddenly he was already halfway falling over the lip before he even realized it. He was just able to keep himself from tumbling end over end as he slid down.
He lay at the bottom, exhausted. This wasn't working. The moonless night made for impossible going. Jayce forced himself to his feet just long enough to do a quick once-over of the area, then found the softest part of the embankment and flopped back down. Whatever sensation he had been following, it could wait until morning.
That morning came much sooner than Jayce would have believed possible. It felt like he'd just shut his eyes when he sat bolt upright again in the gray light of dawn. The sound like thunder that had woken him still echoed across the hills. It came again, and Jayce recognized the sound of an explosion not very far away.
He picked himself up and dusted off what would dust off, then cautiously started in the direction of the sound. The ground sloped up away from him, the same slope he'd gone up and down several times during the night. He crouched down and crested the rise flat on his belly, next to a withered tree.
The slope was not another hill like he expected. Instead the far side dropped away several dozen meters in a sheer ridgeline. If he had walked over that during the night, he'd need a lot more than a new shirt.
The valley beyond, several hundred meters away, was quite a sight to behold. The area was swarming with droids moving about the edges of a massive excavation.
Jayce drew out his binocs and swept the hive of activity. The edges of the excavation were run through with spiderweb cracks and the ground seemed to have been broken into chunks. But he was more interested on the structure in the middle of the negative ant-hill. It had been partially excavated, enough to see the general shape of it. What he could see was roughly a hundred meters across and circular. A taller spire jutted out from one side. Part of the wall had fallen down and construction droids were removing bits of rubble.
The architecture was familiar, tiny by comparison but still reminiscent of the building in which Jayce had spent most of his life. This was jedi, an old enclave. The Separatists had found it and decided to excavate. Jayce had never heard of anything like that out here, but over the years there had been tons of outposts and temples and enclaves set up and abandoned all through the galaxy.
A vessel appeared over the hills coming towards them, a tall, brown, industrial thing with a hammerhead top. It dwarfed the rest of the excavation craft, like a boot coming to smash the anthill. The thing hovered over the excavation, then moved on past. It stopped roughly a hundred meters from Jayce's hiding spot on top of the ridge, so tall Jayce's neck ached looking up at it.
Claxons started up, a definite warning sign. Jayce slowly crawled back into cover. Below the alarms the humm of energy started to build, and build. This was a bad spot. Jayce started to back away faster. He got to a crouch and moved. Everything went silent. The claxons quit, the humm died away. Even Jayce's own heartbeats seemed to have been muted.
Then the blast came. So powerful it cracked the earth like an eggshell. Jayce was thrown off his feet by the quaking gound. A blast of air sent dust rocketing over the ridge. Bits of dirt blew past him, and he covered his head against the onslaught of pebbles. The ridge gave way. The tree where he had been sitting was swallowed by the heaving earth.
It went on and on, the wind, the shaking, the dust. Cracks continued to expand outwards, turning the fields into a web of cracks and chasms. Jayce tried to get away, but it was too late. The ground split beneath him, and he was falling, falling into blackness, swallowed by the hungry earth.
When everything stopped shaking, Jayce found, to his surprise, that he was still alive. Everything around him was pitch black. Rocks and debris had fallen all around him, but in a brilliant stroke of luck everything large had managed to miss him.
There is no such thing as luck, Master Mundi's voice played in his head. That always seemed one of the more ridiculous of the many jedi sayings. Of course there was such a thing as luck. The universe contained randomness, therefore the universe contained luck. This time, it seemed to have gone in his favor.
Jayce carefully got to his feet. By now there was no point in even attempting to dust himself off. His shirt was a tattered rag, his pants were ripped, he was bleeding from a dozen small cuts, and his pack had gone missing. The R-66 was still in its holster and seemed undamaged, so that was a positive.
News of the jedi enclave excavation was much bigger than grain harvests. He had to get back to send a message. The first question was of light. He missed his lightsaber. Apart from being a most elegant weapon, it made for a pretty good source of illumination.
Jayce reached for his belt. In another stroke of what Master Mundi would have insisted was not luck, his communicator had survived the fall. It wasn't getting a signal, but at least it had a light on it. Enough to let him examine his surroundings.
The first thing he saw was a leg, long, thin, and chitinous. He pulled back in surprise. Nothing moved. The leg's owner was buried under a pile of rocks. That made Jayce more than a little nervous. The creature in front of him was dead, but that didn't mean more weren't near at hand. And if they lived in darkness, they could probably navigate in darkness, too.
"Okay, cave," he said to himself. "If creatures can get in, then creatures can get out."
The path in front of him was clogged with debris. So he turned to face the only direction he could go and hoped that it was the correct path. The cave made for easy going at first. Eventually the gentle slope was interrupted by climbs and scrambles up and down, and squeezes through tight spots that had Jayce crawling along on his stomach.
After an hour of slow travel the air felt different, there was a hint of fresh earth that spurred Jayce onward. Soon he realized he could see farther than the weak beam on his comm should have allowed. He turned it off. Sure enough, there was light ahead. He was going to get out.
That's when he felt the itch again like a quiet beacon calling for him. But it wasn't coming from the tunnel with the light. It was coming from another passage, smaller, a bit of a squeeze, off to the right. And back into darkness.
Jayce hesitated. That sort of pull was strangely attractive. On the other hand, he had followed it all over the hills the night before, and it was always pointing a different way. But back to the first hand, he'd ended up right where he'd been trying to go. Wondering if he was following the Force, or just being an idiot, he squeezed along the narrower path. He could always come back if it proved pointless. Assuming he could find the way back.
The path widened up again after a short squeeze, then went steeply upwards. A soft sound echoed down the tunnel, a sort of skittering. Jayce froze. He listened. Nothing. Still, he drew the blaster and moved carefully forward.
More skittering. This was stupid. He should go back and follow the sensible path to fresh air and light. But that feeling was only growing stronger. The path joined a cavern large enough his light did not reach the far wall. The pull was impossible to ignore.
Then more legs appeared. With a horrid shriek the creature came at him. A stinger-like appendage shot out of the dark and knocked the light from Jayce's hand. It smashed against a rock and went out. He reflexively fired his blaster. The bolt of light was nearly blinding in the darkness, enough to see there were more than one of them. Pale, brown creatures standing over a meter tall, with long legs and wicked stingers on the front of their bodies.
They surged forward. Jayce backed away and fired again. One screamed and died. Then the nearest one pounced. The impact knocked Jayce to the ground, and its stinger jabbed forward, trying to find his flesh. Jayce pressed the blaster into the thing's carapace and fired, then fired again. Its legs twitched, and it died.
The others were slower to attack. Jayce used the moment of space to get to his feet. Another of the things came at him. Jayce could hear it scurrying forward. Then he felt a stab of pain as the whip-like front appendage caught him in the ribs. Jayce cried out, and fired. He shot the thing twice. It still moved, so he shot it again.
He kept shooting, using the brief flash of light to find the next target, not waiting for the things to attack. Blood seeped down his chest, but he stayed on his feet and pressed the attack. The creatures scattered, and Jayce was once more alone in the dark.
He groped around until found the communicator, but the light was busted. Coming this way had been stupid. He'd just been deceiving himself. Or perhaps the Force was just playing some cosmic joke on him. Promising that he'd be a jedi, only to let him down. Guiding him stumbling through the night, only to lead him nowhere. Luring him down a dark path, only to leave him bloodied in pitch black.
But it wasn't pitch black, not completely. A faint ghost-light shimmered from the far side of the cavern. Like a starving man towards food, Jayce stumbled towards the light. His feet crunched over small bones and cracked eggshells as he walked through the creatures' lair.
The path was a dead end. The faint glow came from a tiny crack in the back wall. His pulse quickened as he reached in. When his fingers found the source, Jayce forgot about the pain, the misery, the aches, the blood. He forgot about the night he'd spent being chased by bulls and wandering over hills. He even forgot about his task, and the Separatist excavation of the old Jedi enclave. None of it mattered.
Because in his hand, he held a kyber crystal.
