CARTH

Carth groaned. Every part of him hurt. There was a pounding in his head and a wetness on his side hotter and stickier than sweat from the journey through atmo. He groped at it, assessing the damage. Laceration from the harness, he determined, sharp enough to break skin, even without tearing his jacket or shirt first. Minor injury and not even worth a medpac. But he'd have some bruises tomorrow.

He snapped off the harness and activated the flashlight attachment on his wrist comm, scanning the inside of the escape pod. The beam shone through rising concrete dust. The woman from Endar Spire had been on the side of the impact. There was a hull breach to her left, and metal had buckled inward. Not far, but far enough. He saw scattered debris from wherever they'd crashed littered over the woman's lap and chest, a rising purple knot on her left temple, and a long, deep, weeping gash on her arm. For a second, Carth thought she was dead, then he saw the rise and fall of her chest.

He forced himself into motion. Crashing escape pods drew a lot of notice. The Sith would be here before long, looking for Bastila. He unbuckled his fellow survivor, catching her up in one arm.

He looked around. Fortunately, the door to their escape pod had been on the airward side. He disengaged the airlock and shouldered open the door. It squealed in protest.

Grunting, with the unconscious woman over his shoulder in a half fireman's carry, Carth clambered free of the wreckage. She was heavy, and his shoulder strained to bear up under her dead weight. The woman was in good condition, with fine bones and a narrow waist, but she wasn't a whole lot shorter than he was: as tall as an average human man.

A few meters out from the pod, over the crater of broken concrete and oozing tar they'd left on impact, he could readjust her in his arms, slinging her right arm backward around his neck and gripping it with his right hand to leave his left arm free and his vision more or less unobscured. Smoke surrounded the pair of them. Carth looked up, and he could see their trail blazing across the night sky.

At least we landed on the night side of the planet, he thought. The horizon was jagged, a vista of climbing glass skyscrapers, neon, and chrome. A city. Good for breathable air and amenities; maybe not so good for avoiding detection. A pair of gleaming eyes shone at him out of the darkness, and Carth turned, hand on his hip and his left-hand blaster.

The watching Ithorian, the first of many onlookers who'd come to see the crash, held up his hands, backing away. Carth stared at him for a long moment, wondering if the alien would head straight for the Sith. They were murderous xenophobes, but they sometimes paid alien informants. Then he decided it didn't matter. He didn't understand the Ithorian language, and he couldn't murder someone on simple suspicion.

He grunted, adjusted the wounded woman in his arms, and staggered off in the opposite direction.

It took Carth ten minutes to find the right kind of low-rent, skeevy apartment complex to hide in. By that time, his arm and shoulder were screaming. The woman he'd been carrying still hadn't come to, and he was really starting to worry. Head injuries could be ugly.

She needed rest and treatment, and for that, he needed to find a good place to put her down. Luckily, they'd landed in what seemed to be a dodgy area of town. Not a lot of lighting. Mostly occupied by refugees and criminals hiding out. On a Sith-occupied planet, he and his friend from Endar Spire were both.

So, he'd looked for a place with signs out front promising furnished units, no ID check necessary, with a breaker box out back indicating utilities might be run for the building. Then he looked for a door that looked unloved. It took him another five minutes to find the right one. Rusty mailbox out front with a missing number on the address and dust in the join seam of the door. He used one of his last security spikes getting in.

The furniture was coated with dust just like the mailbox outside. Some of it had been overturned, like the last inmates of the apartment had left in a hurry. The single window and the glass door out to the tiny balcony were so coated with grime that no one could see in or out. Perfect. In the middle of the night, in a building like this, full of people who didn't want to be found almost as much as he didn't, no one was going to come looking for them here.

Carth carried the woman over to one of the couple of beds in the room. He dusted off the brown and yellow mattress with one hand the best he could and hoped the woman didn't have allergies. Then he set her down with a sigh of relief.

He walked over to the wall switch and hit it. He'd been right: utilities here were building-wide. The place would rent with a built-in utilities fee. The lights came on, and Carth returned to the bed and knelt to examine his friend from Endar Spire. She was covered in pavement and blood. Carth opened one of his few med kits and got out a moist, antiseptic towlette. He rubbed it across her face and hands, careful of the bump on her temple, about the size of the first two knuckles on a human hand.

Damn, he hoped there wasn't internal damage. He didn't have ID or credits for off-worlder medical treatment, especially if the Sith had any kind of major presence here, and he didn't like how pale the woman was looking behind that bruise.

She'd probably be pale anyway; she had several freckles ranging over a small, tilted nose and high cheekbones, but that just meant a knock on the head left her looking even worse. Her eyelashes fluttered a bit as he wiped her forehead. "Hey," he said, "you with me?"

But then she stilled. Some curls were stuck to her cheek, matted down with blood. Carth worked to wipe it away and was encouraged to realize it wasn't actually hers. She'd been carrying vibroblades aboard Endar Spire; it had to come from all the Sith she'd fought before she'd got to him.

All the blood and concrete dust, along with the poor apartment lighting, made it hard to tell what color the woman's hair actually was. He thought he remembered brown, or maybe red. Red would suit the freckles, anyway. But she'd been pretty, before the crash. He did remember that, if not the details of how she'd looked. Brave too, fighting her way through most of the ship with a rookie straight from the academy before she lost him just inside the airlock. She'd made a joke, as they'd hurtled down toward the planet, even though he could tell she was terrified.

She was still a lot prettier than he liked, for a woman who wasn't conscious to get medical treatment. She couldn't consent to letting him take a look at her, but injuries didn't care about modesty or privacy. That arm wound needed care, and there might be others. Carth grimaced, then went ahead, unzipped her vest, and worked her shirt off. He cleaned the gash on her arm, sealing it with butterfly bandages before wrapping it in gauze and injecting a kolto pack for good measure. Aside from the head injury, there weren't a lot of other easily treatable wounds on her. Some abrasions on her hands that he disinfected and treated with an antibacterial, and vicious bruising where she'd been caught by her escape pod harness. There might be some internal injuries there, he thought, and from a physical examination of her torso, she might have also cracked a rib, though none were broken clear through. The medpac injection would stimulate any fractures to knit together sooner if she lay flat.

He looked away then, hunting in her pack for a spare set of clothing, mostly to avoid looking at her, topless except for her underwear. With women as tall as this one was, you didn't often get curves to match the height, but she had them. She had curves like a cantina dancer. He brought out a crisp white shirt, unstained by blood or carbon scoring, and worked her limp arms through it, buttoning it over her chest until he felt comfortable again. She'd be happier if she woke up dressed.

Only then did Carth treat his own injuries. All in all, he was in better shape than the woman on the bed. And like she had, he'd managed to bring his pack with him. He washed up in the fresher, taking the time to clean it so that if he or his companion used it in the future, it would actually do some good. Then he dressed in his own spare clothes, leaving the ones he'd been wearing in the fresher to air out. Then he returned to the main room, dusted off the other bed a good deal better than he'd been able to dust the one his friend lay on while he carried her, and sat down.

Retrieving his datapad from his pack, he began searching through the service records of the crew of Endar Spire to find out who this woman was. He set the datapad to present the files to him in order of experience. It made sense that only one of Bastila's most experienced soldiers could have survived the ambush. But he didn't find the woman on the other bed among them. He didn't find her among the soldiers at all. Not until he had reached the advisory crew members did he find her, and he noted with considerable surprise that she was the very newest recruit.

Aithne Moran. He looked across. The grayscale picture in the file matched that of the woman on the bed. Twenty-eight. Apparently, she'd been a scout. Carth's eyebrows rose, though, when he saw the marksmanship and combat scores she'd been issued after training. The woman was a killing machine. She'd outscored 98 percent of Republic recruits in the galaxy in her handling of melee weapons, and 80 percent of them in marksmanship. Carth browsed in the psychological profile he'd had access to as a superior officer. She could've talked to that Ithorian, he saw. Hell, it looked like she could talk to almost any kind of alien they might run into here. Testing had revealed leadership ability, as well as a masterful grasp of tactics, but these skills had been lying mostly dormant, according to the profiler. That was fine, but what worried him was the line that said the woman hadn't actually been a willing recruit to the Republic Fleet. She was a conscript from one of the initiatives out in the Rim, taken on a visit to her homeworld because her ID said she had been a lot of places and in a lot of different situations. It was a policy Carth didn't appove of. Press-ganging soldiers into service didn't result in long-term loyalty or in particularly motivated troops. Numbers for desertion, and even betrayal, were significantly higher among servicemembers who came in like that.

Worse, Moran fit the profile. No living relatives, no friends to collect on Republic benefits. The Republic psychiatrist who had evaluated her had speculated she'd agreed to stay on mostly out of boredom. Her scores for intelligence, self-reliance, and creative problem-solving were incredibly high, but they were paired with incredibly low scores for respect for conformity, rank, authority, or tradition, as well as a slighter tendency toward impulsiveness. A borderline genius, but unreliable. Definitely a maverick.

But the Republic had thought she was worth it. Carth stared at the last, highlighted line in the file. The Jedi thought she was worth it. Apparently, Bastila had specifically requested this woman's transfer to Endar Spire. Five days before the attack.

Carth leaned over, bracing himself on his knees. Something stank here. No friends. No family. No reason, really, to fight for the Republic, and—if her file was accurate—both the capacity and psychological disposition not to, especially since they'd seized her assets and tried to force her. So, what was Aithne Moran doing here? And what did the Jedi want with her? There was only one conclusion: Aithne Moran was dangerous. He probably couldn't trust her. But he needed her help.

Well. At least he could solve some of the other unknowns before she came to, he thought. Silently, Carth slipped out of the apartment.

A few hours after dawn, Carth returned, exhausted. The Sith were already here in force. They'd quarantined the planet and were combing every level for Endar Spire survivors, Bastila among them. Carth had seen Bastila board the escape pod on Endar Spire, and already people were talking of a pod that had crashed in the Undercity of this planet.

Taris. Carth swore as he lay down. Taris, of all places! Carth knew that as soon as Aithne Moran awoke, they were in for a rough time.

Carth woke up the next evening, and immediately glanced over at Aithne Moran. Her cry had awoken him. Her arm flew up and over her face, her right leg kicked, but when he looked closer, he saw she was still asleep.

She pulled her legs to her chest, and he thought he heard her sob.

Carth turned over in the darkness, looking away from her. Every person who'd seen combat had nightmares. He wasn't sure he wanted to know what Aithne Moran's looked like. His own were bad enough. Carth closed his eyes, and he could feel the smoke clogging his nostrils, burning the back of his throat. He could hear the screams: civilians, running for cover, calling for their friends. Wives. Husbands. Parents. Children. He could feel . . .

Carth rolled over and climbed to his feet. There was no use dwelling on it. He crossed to the fresher, turned on the tap. Splashed some water in his face. Didn't do a lot to cleanse his conscience.

How the hell didn't I see it coming?

The hum of lightsabers, red and yellow. I looked over into a pair of narrowed blue eyes and tried to call on my aggression. Instead, I just felt ambivalent. Ambivalent and exhausted. I couldn't even muster up a spark of rage against the girl's naïve self-righteousness and determination.

It was all so idiotic and tedious. It was pointless for them all to stand against me, but they Just. Kept. Fighting.

I shrugged off my cloak, freeing my arms for one more battle, but then a tingle ran up my spine. A presentiment of danger—not from this Jedi child against me. Beyond. The ship's deck shook.

Then I did feel rage. And fear.

She woke up midmorning their second day on Taris. Carth jumped when Aithne Moran shot up like a rocket, hands poised to fight, eyes wild. Then she realized she wasn't under attack. She sat back, groaned, put a hand to her head, then stood. She ran her hands over her ribs, her arm, feeling the half-healed injuries, the edges of the bandage beneath her shirt. Then she looked over at him, questioning.

Open, her eyes were deep-set and large and a light golden brown. They cleared as she took him in.

"Good to see you up instead of thrashing around in your sleep," he told her. "You must have been having one hell of a nightmare. I was starting to wonder if you were ever going to wake up. I'm Carth, one of the soldiers from Endar Spire. I was with you on the escape pod. Do you remember?"

Aithne Moran had an interesting face awake, he thought. Expressive. He saw memory, grief, fear, and recognition all cross her face, each in an instant, and then she nodded. "Right. Major." Her voice came out hoarse. She frowned and cleared her throat. When she next spoke, the tone was low—melodic and a little bit wry, just like he remembered from Endar Spire. "I'm Aithne Moran, by the way. How did we get here?" She gestured at the grimy apartment surrounding them.

"Let's leave the titles on the wreck, Aithne," he told her. "This planet's under Sith occupation, and rank and protocol could get us killed. Judging by your file, you won't have a problem with that. Call me Carth." He explained how she'd been hurt in the pod crash and how he'd dragged her from the crash site to this abandoned apartment.

She seemed impressed when he had finished. "Som you just got up and went after a pod crash, dragging my dead weight along, and got out before anyone too bad caught us? Huh. Nothing to sneeze at, Maj—" she caught his look and caught herself in time, taking in a breath. "Carth," she reminded herself, nodding and meeting his eyes. "And more than most would've done. Or been able to do. Thank you."

She'd done that on Endar Spire too, Carth remembered. Thanked him for following protocol, like she expected him to leave her behind. He guessed she'd probably been on her own a while, and maybe out of the habit of relying on anyone else. Maybe she'd never even developed it. "You don't have to thank me. I've never abandoned anyone on a mission, and I'm not about to start now. Besides, I'm going to need your help. Taris is under Sith control. Their fleet is orbiting the planet. They've declared martial law, and they've imposed a planet-wide quarantine. But I've been in worse spots."

Aithne scoffed. "Like what?"

Carth smiled. "Maybe I'll tell you sometime. I saw on your service records that you understand a remarkable number of alien languages. That's pretty rare in a raw recruit, but it should come in handy while we're stranded on a foreign world. There's no way the Republic will be able to get anyone through the Sith blockade to help us. If we're going to find Bastila and get off this planet, we can't rely on anybody but ourselves."

Aithne sighed. "Better and better." She massaged her temples. "Bastila . . . Trask wanted to find her too."

Trask, Carth thought. The Alderaanian she'd fought through most of the cruiser with. Her bunkmate back on Endar Spire. He quickly explained why Bastila was the Sith's number-one target on the planet. "Bastila is the key to the whole Republic war effort. The Sith must have found out she was on Endar Spire and set an ambush for us in this system. I saw Bastila get on an escape pod. She must have crashed down here on Taris. For the sake of the Republic war effort, we have to find her."

"So this one Jedi is more crucial than any strategy or supplies?" Aithne asked.

Carth understood the sentiment. He had other things he'd rather be doing too. But he'd seen Bastila's battle meditation in action enough times to know how deadly it could be under the right circumstances. He explained to Aithne. "She can inspire her allies with confidence and make her enemies lose their will to fight. Often that's all it takes to tip the balance in a battle. Of course, there are limits to what she can do. From what I understand of her ability, it requires great concentration and focus to maintain her battle meditation. The attack on Endar Spire happened so fast she never had a chance to use it. Like us, she barely got out alive."

"And now, we've got two armies rushing to claim her," Aithne finished. "The Sith to bribe, recruit, or force her to their side—or take her out—and you Republics to make sure they can't. And, unfortunately, for now, I'm part of the 'you Republics.' Alright. Let's get the never-lose-a-battle good luck charm. How do you suggest we go about it?"

She sat back on her right leg, hands on hips, face frozen in a polite, go-to smile. It was a mask. She didn't think he had anything to contribute here. Carth took a breath, pushed down his temper, and shared some of the ideas he'd had. They had one advantage: the Sith weren't looking for them. No one would recognize Aithne Moran at all, and while a few Sith might know him by name or reputation, no one would be looking. Not with Bastila on the loose. He suggested they move without attracting notice. "If Bastila's going to escape Taris, she's going to need our help," he concluded, "and we'll probably need hers." Whether Aithne liked it or not, with the barricade in effect, the two of them alone probably wouldn't have the firepower to escape.

When he'd finished, Aithne's expression had changed. There was something like respect behind her eyes, and she nodded. "Any idea where we should start looking?" she asked.

"While you were out, I did some scouting around," Carth told her. "There are reports of a couple of escape pods crashing down into the Undercity. That's probably a good place to start, but the Undercity is a dangerous place. We don't want to go in there unprepared. It won't do Bastila any good if we go and get ourselves killed."

Aithne absorbed this. "So—scout out the upper levels and gather what information we can," she said. "We'll have to see if we can get some more credits and supplies too. I grabbed a few things off the bodies on Endar Spire, but the grand sum of my wealth is two extra vibroblades, a blaster, a couple of medpacs, and about seventy credits."

"You may want to check on those medpacs," Carth suggested.

Aithne grimaced, guessing he'd needed them to treat her while she'd been out. "Great. So. What do you know about Taris? I haven't ever been here for any extended period of time."

Carth gave her the rundown on the three levels of Taris and the classes that lived there. He'd been to Taris on assignment a few years back. It wasn't a fond memory. "I entered this info into your datapad journal," he said, when he'd finished, holding it out to her.

Aithne took the journal from him. "Thanks."

Carth nodded acknowledgment. "We can use this abandoned apartment as a base, and we can probably get some equipment and supplies here in the Upper City. Just remember to keep a low profile. I've heard some grim stories about the Sith interrogation techniques. They say the Force can do terrible things to a mind. It can wipe away your memories and destroy your very identity!"

Her face changed again at that, and he saw her shiver. Carth rushed to reassure her. "But I figure if we don't do anything stupid, we should be okay. I mean, after all, they're . . . they're looking for Bastila, not a couple of grunts like us."

"We'll take our advantages where we find them," Aithne agreed, and didn't say anything more about the Sith. "Give me a few minutes to clean up so I can look like I haven't just been in a pod crash and give us another advantage. Water in the fresher running?"

"Yeah, it's run through the building," Carth confirmed.

Aithne nodded again, turned on her heel, and scooped up the clean pants and vest he'd left on the foot of her bed. She emerged from the fresher twenty minutes later. Carth smiled, as if by reflex, when he saw her.

Yeah. She was pretty, all right. The bruise on her temple had faded from purple to blue-gray, and she'd hid most of it under a wave of washed-and-dried hair, which turned out to be brown like he'd thought, although with a lot of red and gold in it. Most of it was pinned and twisted up in a thick coil at the nape of her neck, but little curls were already escaping around her forehead and down behind her ears. She had some color in her cheeks, and wore her vest and trousers like a senator, though they looked years old, like something she might have picked up at a secondhand store or lived in for a while. He had to say, he liked the way her pants fit. She had legs that went on for days, but that tilt of her chin and that glint in her eye was even better. She looked like a woman who could kick just about anything that came at her in the teeth. Maverick or not, he needed some of that grit down here.

She raised an eyebrow at him and waved her hand in a What? gesture.

"You look better," he observed.

"Most people do when they're clean," she responded.

"You ready?"

She shook her head and strode across to the workbench on the back wall of the apartment. "Toss me my pack and a ration bar," she ordered.

Carth grabbed her pack from beside her bed and a ration bar from the meager supplies he had collected while scouting out Taris. Walking over, he handed them both to the woman at the workbench.

"Thanks," she said without looking at him. She was already opening up the casing of the hilt of one of her vibroblades, looking at the wiring inside. She fished out a part from an interior pocket of her pack and began tinkering. "Got this off a fallen Jedi on Endar Spire," she told him. "The blade's from the Sith captain of that squad that almost got you, before the others opened fire again. Together, they'll remind me what I'm doing."

She worked quickly and efficiently, and Carth saw she was an expert technician. That was something that could come in handy down here. She took a bite of ration bar every now and then, chewing without looking at or thinking about it. She crumpled the wrapper when she'd finished. "Disgusting," she remarked. "Somewhere in those supplies we're going to get, we have to get our hands on better food."

She shoved the wrapper in her pack for disposal later, and in a few more minutes, she was done upgrading her vibroblade. She sheathed it on her left hip and turned to him. "Ready," she said. Then, without waiting for him, she turned and led the way out of the apartment.

Well, Carth thought. He'd said she wouldn't have a problem forgetting rank and protocol.