Echoes

by inwardtransience

The Jedi thought that, by turning their greatest enemy into an unwitting assassin, they could grasp victory from the jaws of defeat, and safeguard the Republic, the democratic and egalitarian principles at its foundation, for future generations. Really, they should have just killed her.

20. The Descent — I

The twisting, chaotic maelstrom of hyperspace broke with streaks of blackness, stretched lines of starlight quickly resolving. Then the image out the viewport snapped into stillness, the stars a glittering, multicoloured array all around them, Tatooine some distance ahead, small enough Cina could easily cover it with her fist, the sun-side surface glowing brilliantly yellow and orange with reflected sunlight.

Kandosa flicked a switch over his head, bringing the sublight systems out of standby. There was a low thrum reverberating through the ship as the engines kicked in, building up to a full roar more quickly than normal due to the static built up in hyperspace. She felt Sasha, standing somewhere behind Cina's chair, plant a hand against a console to brace herself.

As uncomfortable as that first kick could be sometimes, it was by design — the static interfered with more sensitive electronics, flooding it into the engines was the safest way to clear sensors as quickly as possible. The screens in front of Cina quickly lit up, the ship's computer systems analysing and mapping their surroundings, identifying beacons and active com channels. "Looks good, we came out in the margin of error. Maybe twenty minutes to insertion."

Kandosa nodded. "What do we have for company?"

Scanning the transponder IDs accumulating in one window, Cina shook her head. "Not much. Few haulers and civilian frigates, couple private yachts, all clustered around Tatoo Station." The Tatoo system sat at an important confluence of trade routes, but the only habitable planet was considered by most sapient species to be unsuitable for settlement. Instead, a deep space station drifted far outsystem, tinkered with and expanded upon over millennia to an absolutely massive scale. It wasn't surprising the only activity she was picking up was around the Station. "Ah, picking up a single military vessel — Hutt tech, cruiser-class — out-system within missile range of the Station. Routine security, I'm sure, nothing to worry about."

"Anybody marking us?"

Querying their transponder in advance of hailing them, he meant. "Nope, doesn't look like it." Again, not surprising — the monitoring systems for the system were probably on the Station, and she doubted they gave a damn what people got up to around Tatooine. "It looks like there's a single active spaceport groundside. I'll route guidance to you as soon as the telemetry comes through." The beacon associated with the port was broadcasting geographical data, as was standard, but the planet surface was relatively featureless, the ship computer was having difficulty matching the map to the sensor profile.

Kandosa nodded. "All right, kebin'ika. What can you tell me about our approach?"

Sitting in the copilot seat to his right, Mission leaned forward — visually placing the planet and the suns, Cina would guess. She turned to the displays between them, poking at a primitive system map. "Ah, we came in behind the planet. Following it in its orbit, I mean. Is that why we went up through Rodia instead of Arkanis, to get a better angle?"

"Yes. Can you tell me why?"

Sitting behind her, Cina didn't have a direct view of Mission's face. But, against the black backdrop of empty space, she could see a faint, washed-out reflection of the girl frowning in concentration, biting at her lip.

During the extended journey from the core to Tatooine, Kandosa had pointed out that they really should have a secondary pilot. The question of what they would do should something happen to him aside, it would also drastically broaden the tactical options available to them — with a second pilot, Kandosa could participate in actions on the ground while still having the Hawk as support, or move to pick them up in an emergency. But their best pilot had been Asyr, and in her (and Onasi's) absence they didn't really have anyone suitable to fill the role.

Cina herself was a fair pilot — probably far better than she thought she was, actually, since most Revanchists had served as fighter pilots at some point in the war — but for any operation they'd want air cover for Cina would be needed on the ground. Similarly, Rhysam could fly, but it wasn't the best use of his skills, not by a long shot. (And nobody was certain how long he'd be sticking around, so depending on his presence long-term probably wasn't wise.) Bastila was somewhat less useful than Rhysam, but she was also a mediocre pilot — she'd gotten the same basic training all Jedi did, but had very little actual experience, and none at all in combat situations. Juhani had literally never flown a spacecraft once in her life, and had little interest in doing so (and would almost certainly follow Rhysam if and when he moved on). Sasha would probably be willing to learn, but she couldn't even reach the controls.

That left Mission and Zaalbar — Mission had some significant experience with airspeeders already, and Zaalbar was less than entirely comfortable with flight, so she'd volunteered. She'd spent most of her free time on the trip over reading training manuals pulled from the net and familiarising herself with the Hawk's controls. She was so excited over the whole thing she'd hardly seemed to sleep the last couple days, had been practically bouncing in her seat through the last leg in hyperspace. Because she was adorable like that sometime.

Tatooine gradually growing in the viewport ahead of them, Mission said, "Ah, relative velocity? You know, everything is orbiting the center of the galaxy, but they don't always orbit at the same direction at the same speed. So, if the system you left from and the system you're going to are moving toward each other, and you come out of hyperspace too close to the planet..."

Mission trailed off as Kandosa grunted, head nodding slightly. "That's exactly it. Nav data includes that sort of thing, where everything is and what direction it's all moving — if you plot a course coming in to a planet head-on, your navcomputer will probably flag it. You can override it if you really want to, but don't. The risk of a crash isn't very high, but it's a risk not worth taking. If you can, you want to come up from behind, like we just did. If you can't find a good angle, like our detour to Rodia, shoot to drop in further out and, maybe, fifty thousand clicks above or below the plane, just in case."

"Right," Mission said, with a determined (adorable) little nod.

There was a little bing at the navigation console, the computer finally having sorted the mapping out. With a couple keystrokes, Cina had the spaceport marked on the heads-up, a little red target projected over a spot on the planet through the viewport. Kandosa didn't change course at all, which was expected — they'd be making at least a full orbit around the planet before landing, there was nothing to do yet.

"Now, it may not look like it, but we're moving really damn fast right now. Everything in space is so big and so far apart, the speeds you have to go at to get anywhere in any kind of time are far too high to be going at in atmo."

"So we're gonna decelerate into orbit first? That's why we're coming in at an angle?"

"Yeah. Like this." Kandosa poked at the display between the two of them. She couldn't make it out from this angle, but he was presumably drawing a rough approximation of his planned descent, twisting in a spiral toward the surface. Assuming he was planning a Mandoade-style re-entry, anyway — many considered their particular form of trans-orbital insertion to be a bit mad, a long sequence of manual maneuvers without a moment for the pilot to even catch their breath in the whole process, but that was Mandoade for you. "We're gonna start a burn about here," tapping the display, "nose at the horizon behind us. That'll force us into a high orbit. With our thrusters against our direction of travel, and from the turn, we'll bleed speed quick, which will have us falling into the planet. We'll hit the upper atmosphere about here, air brake down to atmospheric flight around thirty kilometers up."

Mission looked slightly dubious. "Can't you just, like, crank up the shields to full and go straight down? You'd have to burn pretty hard to stop yourself from crashing right into the ground, but..."

"You gotta learn it the right way, first." Thrusters already put back on stand-by a couple minutes ago, Kandosa spun the ship around with a few easy twitches of a stick, glancing at monitors to orient himself. Cina couldn't see anything but stars out the front at the moment, but the planet would sweep past before too long. "Sure, this souped-up little monster has the power to brute force a straight landing like that, but most ships don't. And what are you gonna do if you need to make a landing, but the shields are out? Not to mention, pull that shit on an inhabited world, and they're not gonna be very happy with you."

"Why not?" The fiery yellow-orange of Tatooine was coming into view again, much larger now, peeking out from behind the top of the viewport and sweeping downward. Mission watched, eyes wide.

"Think about it, kebin'ika. What happens if a shield envelope punches into hard atmo at fifty klicks a second?"

"I mean, you'd have to push crazy power into the shields, but—" Mission broke off, cursing to herself in Huttese. "Right, forgot, energy scattering. That'd make one hell of an E.M. wake, wouldn't it?"

"That's one way to put it. Depending on how hard you're going in, you could knock out unshielded electronics for hundreds, even thousands of kilometers around. Civilian equipment, mostly. Planetary authorities tend to take a dim view on that kind of thing."

Cina couldn't see her face from here, but she didn't need to to feel Mission's reluctant amusement.

"We're coming in now, kebin'ika, keep an eye on the displays. You'll get a feel for how to do this sort of thing by hand eventually, but until then you'll want the computer to project your course, and watch for..."

While Kandosa talked through the insertion to Mission — the Hawk whipping around the planet in a long, drifting burn, rapidly dropping from interplanetary speeds in excess of three hundred kilometres a second to a comfortable ten kilometres a second, the effects of the intense deceleration entirely canceled by the ship's inertial compensation — Cina paged through the geographical data she'd pulled from the spaceport's beacon, and quickly hit a serious snag. Most systems with a formal spaceport had been fully surveyed, and while not all of that information was freely available, the geographical features of the planet tended to be broadcast in some detail. Just as a matter of routine, this was the standard pretty much everywhere throughout the galaxy.

The data broadcast by the Anchorhead beacon was very...lacking. A description of broad physical features only, sufficient to pinpoint the location of Anchorhead, and almost not even that — the dunes of the great Tatooinian deserts shifted over time, the visible texture of the planet from orbit slowly changing, it'd taken a long moment for the computer to put it together. Cina had expected deep scans of the planet to be available, revealing echoes of subterranean features, on which the remains of a Laqtaɦ settlement would hopefully be identifiable. Instead, nothing.

Cina frowned at the starburst-and-crescent logo stamped on all the documents she'd pulled — Czerka. She was familiar with Czerka Mining and Industrial, if only vaguely, as one of the various private concerns involved with Republic efforts to explore and develop the rim over the last millennium and a half or so. As far as such corporations went, they had a...relatively clean reputation — Czerka was mostly involved in surveying, mining, and electronics, which tended to involve labour specialised or automated, so were unlikely to involve the worst forms of exploitation or outright enslavement of local populations. That didn't mean abuses never happened, they were just less common, and less severe.

Like many of these rim corporations, the war with the Mandoade swiftly followed by the Sith invasion had seriously disrupted their operations. Czerka was one of those that had decided to remain neutral, openly operating in Republic and Sith space — as Republican corporations fled the Sith advance, these more mercenary conglomerates scrambled to gobble up the assets left behind, legally or otherwise. Czerka in particular had absorbed vehicle and civilian arms manufacturing concerns, broadening the markets they were involved in considerably.

Cina could only assume Lesami had intended to turn around and dismantle these opportunistic vultures as soon as the Republic was dealt with. As things stood, it looked like most of them would get away with their double-dealing and racketeering, which was a damn shame.

Czerka must have done extensive geological surveys of any planet they had a presence on — after all, "mining" was in the name. But they hadn't made even basic information available. They were legally obligated to do so, technically...if this were part of the Republic. Tatooine was on the outer reaches of Hutt space, and Czerka had severed their formal contracts with the Senate, so they had no obligation to conform to Republic law on the matter. Tatooine was, practically speaking, Czerka property, and they could do with it as they wished.

Cina attempted to query the beacon for more extensive survey data, but she was cut off as the Hawk slipped into the atmosphere, the heat and static buildup of their insertion overwhelming sensors and coms. She sat back in her seat, letting out a thin sigh. It didn't matter, she hadn't expected to actually succeed — private corporations tended to be quite proprietary about these things.

Which meant they would need to convince Czerka to hand it over to them somehow. Just perfect.

"That's just kinda freaky."

Cina looked up to see...well, not very much — they were in the middle of the harshest part of their descent, the viewport framed with superheated air, twisting flumes of plasma glowing like flickering yellow and orange flames. The Hawk was turned against its direction of travel, the nose pointed to the sky, but the fire of reentry stretched back and wrapped around them, blotting out the stars. Bright enough Mission's reflection was entirely washed out, Cina couldn't make out her face anymore, but she could feel she was somewhat unnerved, anxious. Intimidated by the idea of flying through this herself, presumably.

Personally, Cina had always thought this effect was quite pretty, but she realised she was sort of odd. She liked to look out into hyperspace, and some believed that could literally drive a person mad, so.

Amusement dripping from him, Kandosa's voice carried an audible smirk. "Kind of freaky, is it? You heard of bes'uliik, kebin'ika?"

"Ah, those basilisk droid things? I've seen a few smashed ones, shot down in, er, one of the battles over Taris, anyway, there were a few. Why?"

In Mandoa, he said, "So you've never seen a fire-drop, then?"

The half-familiar language had Mission hesitating, but only briefly. "Uh, no? What does that mean?"

"They rode bes'uliik down from orbit, Mission."

Mission jumped, twisted around to stare at Cina from around her seat, eyes wide and mind ringing with amazement. "What? How? Wouldn't they just burn up?"

"Beskar is very heat-resistant," Cina said, lifting a shoulder in a shrug. "Their armour is excellent against blasters and lightsabers, but no better than standard against physical trauma. In an unassisted free-fall, the beskargam itself will survive, but the warrior inside of it will be broiled alive." Well, it'd probably be deformed pretty badly slamming into the surface, but it wouldn't be incinerated, was the point. "Using the bulk of a bes'uliik as a shield, though, the friction heat is dispersed enough the cooling systems built in can keep up. In a planetary invasion, the bes'uliik are launched from orbit, and make a standard ballistic insertion down to the surface."

Her eyes still wide, face darkening somewhat with a hint of fear, Mission quietly cursed. In Nikto — Cina was convinced Mission only knew swear words in Nikto, she'd never said anything else.

Kandosa was chuckling, amused with Mission's reaction, but also with a faint shade of nostalgia. "It's a hell of a ride. An eighty-kilometer freefall, nothing between you and a fiery, painful death but the bes'uliik under your feet and fifteen centimetres of beskar. The whole time, surface-to-air batteries firing up at you and your comrades, dodging and weaving even as the fires of reentry start to burn, your hand in front of your face glowing from the heat, warriors falling from the sky like a hundred burning meteorites..."

"It is a rush, I'll give you that."

Now it was Kandosa who jerked in his seat, throwing her a look before snapping back to the controls. "You done a fire-drop before?"

"Well, it wasn't..." Cina frowned to herself, trying to make sense of the faded impressions dancing behind her eyes. "I think... I think I was in a fighter, strafing bes'uliik still in low orbit, when I was hit. I managed to punch out toward them and sort of...hitched a ride."

Kandosa let out a short, sharp huff of shocked laughter. "Yeah, I can see you pulling off something crazy like that." Cina was pretty sure he meant that as a compliment. "How did you survive the drop, though? Without beskargam..."

Cina shrugged. "Tutaminis, I assume. It's not impossible for a Jedi to absorb and disperse the heat from reentry, theoretically speaking — difficult, but not impossible. There are stories of Jedi surviving the breakup of vessels in orbit, and falling to step down onto the surface, completely uninjured. It's certainly not common, by any means — the strength in the Force needed to do something like that is somewhat rare — but it's known to happen."

And this wasn't something she was grasping at just on instinct — among treatises on Jedi philosophy and the mechanics of the use of the Force, Dorak had also included various stories and legends pulled from the long history of the Order. More than one featured an especially talented Jedi who managed to survive a free-fall from orbit. The theme recurred frequently enough, especially in their oldest stories, that the Order suspected it wasn't just the inherent impressiveness of the feat, but that there must be some underlying reason it had become so popular in the first place. The theory was that it'd had some religious association — the Jedi had originally been the priesthood of a theistic religion, a very long time ago, on the order of thirty millennia or so — or perhaps was a reference to a semi-legendary figure of myth, the particulars already lost to history by the time the Jedi were reorganised into their modern form, seven thousand years ago on Coruscant.

It did sound impressive, she had to admit. She almost wished she could remember it better.

Eventually, Kandosa's hard descent arse-first toward the surface, assisted with some goosing of the thrusters, had slowed them to a good four thousand metres a second or so. Whipping the ship back around to face their direction of travel, Kandosa switched to atmospheric controls. They glided high in the atmosphere for a while, the distance eaten away at hypersonic speeds. It was hard to tell looking out the viewport, but from the instruments Cina could see Kandosa was still bleeding speed, decelerating to a point maneuvering in atmosphere was in any way practical even as they crossed a third of the planet's circumference to reach the vicinity of Anchorhead.

By the time their speed had dropped well below a thousand metres a second, the Hawk dipping under what would be the cloud layer on a world any reasonable person would decide to live on, Kandosa flicked a couple switches, gave Mission a sideways nod. "How about you take over from here." It wasn't really a question.

Mission jumped, eyes jolting away from the yellow and red features of the planet flicking by beneath them to stare at Kandosa. "What? You realise I've never flown anything bigger than a four-person airspeeder, right?"

"You land on repulsors the same way. Just think of this as a big airspeeder."

"Most airspeeders don't go twice the speed of sound!"

Kandosa ignored her, keyed the intercom. "I'm handing the helm over to the kid. Might want to sit down, if you're not already." There was no response from the rest of the ship — Cina did pick up a flare of anxiety that might have been Bastila, but she didn't try to protest. Sasha sidled over to the seat across from Cina's, behind Kandosa. She didn't bother reaching for the restraints, but she was at least sitting down, which Cina decided to accept as good enough.

"I'm serious, old man, we should go up and do something nice and slow later, but I haven't even—"

"Oh shit, look at that," Kandosa said, leaning back in his seat, raising his empty hands, "my controls just went dead. How odd."

"What, you— Argh!" Mission jumped as the Hawk started slowly rolling to the right, the nose tilting downward. Huttese curses straining through grit teeth, her hands jolted to the copilot's controls, unlocked a moment ago by Kandosa's switch-flipping — coming against the stick hard enough she accidentally made the ship's tumble worse, the nose pitching far enough the viewport filled with brilliantly-glowing sand and stone, viewed at an odd sideways angle.

Groaning out a very graphic description of a sex act between Kandosa's mother and a mynock that was most definitely not biologically feasible — in Ryl, which was wise, Kandosa didn't speak Ryl — Mission wrenched the ship back around. Luckily, the inertial compensation was all the way up, because if it weren't that maneuver would have been very unpleasant. It took her a moment to get level again, glancing between the viewport and the instruments, practically vibrating with nerves, but at least they weren't diving straight into the ground anymore.

Once the ship was more or less level, Mission's panic mostly drained away, she shot Kandosa a glare, only for a second before turning back to her flying. He was still chuckling under his breath — not quite as obviously as he had been when Mission had been flailing a moment ago, but he didn't even seem to be trying to stop. "You're a fucking bastard, you know that."

Kandosa ignored the insult, as he usually did whenever Mission said anything of the like. (Besides, it wasn't really much of an insult to Mandoade, most clans tended not to care whether a child's parents had been married or not.) "Couldn't help myself. I did the same thing to my daughter, when I was teaching her to fly. She would have been a little bit younger than you, I think."

Cina would have to be completely blind to miss the sudden interest from both of the girls, Sasha blinking at the back of the pilot's seat, Mission risking another quick glance. Mission's head was frothing with curiosity, it was a clear strain on her to not ask about this daughter of his, why he'd never mentioned her before, where she was now. Instead she said, "You just like fucking with little kids, don't you."

"Excuse me, I thought you claimed not to be a little kid. Loudly and repeatedly, if I recall."

"Bite me, old man."

He chuckled again. "The sons and daughters of warrior clans are taken on their first flight when they leave childhood." So, somewhere between twelve and fifteen — it varied somewhat, place to place and person to person. "Your cursing was much more colourful than hers."

By the odd shifty sparks thrown from Mission, she wasn't certain whether she should be proud of that or not. "Do Mandos even do swearing? I thought you said Mandoa doesn't have swear words."

"They don't," Cina said, "but they tend to have very creative insults. It's not the particular words used that Mandoade might find offensive, but the content of what is said."

"Ah. So earlier, when I was talking about Kandosa's mom screwing a mynock, that would work just fine in Mandoa?"

"Sure. Cursing in Ryl and Mandoa is very similar, actually."

"Right, good to know."

Kandosa laughed.

While Kandosa talked Mission through a few very basic maneuvers — he even went to the effort of explaining the physics behind why banking turns were necessary in atmosphere, which Cina wouldn't have expected — Cina was distracted dealing with the spaceport on the coms. Control was rather more insistent asking after what exactly their business was than usual...but this was a company town they were flying into, they probably got very little in the way of traffic that hadn't been arranged with higher-ups in Czerka beforehand. She left Control with the impression that they were mercenaries looking for work, since apparently Czerka had had difficulties dealing with hostile native wildlife — she never actually explicitly said so, but she didn't see anything wrong with letting Czerka believe it long enough for them to land.

After all, Jedi poking around the peripheral properties of a major corporation, even just semi-officially, would probably be cause for suspicion. She didn't know what might happen if the local authorities kicked it up the chain, but it was worth avoiding if she could.

"Right, that's good. Let's dial down the compensation so you can get a feel for the ship."

"Okay." Mission was still a little tense, enough it was noticeable on her voice, but pulling off a few maneuvers without any real difficulties coming up had apparently eased her nerves somewhat.

Kandosa keyed on the intercom again. "We're about to try out some uncompensated maneuvers. You should probably strap in back there."

That flare of anxiety was definitely Bastila.

A flick of a safety switch, Kandosa fiddled with the setting for the ship's internal gravity field. Watching what he was doing on her own monitors, she saw him shut off simulated gravity entirely — since they were deep in a planet's gravity well now, that wasn't necessary anymore anyway — and dial down the inertial compensation to about sixty percent. So, they would be affected only be Tatooine's natural gravity, and would feel only forty percent of any acceleration affects. At the speeds they were going at right now, that was probably safe. Kandosa locked the safety back down, putting his new settings into affect.

Instantly, Cina felt a little heavier — the force of gravity on Tatooine was about about ten per cent heavier than on Corellia, the number most mass-produced antigravity systems intended for use by humans were calibrated to. (There was also a heavier Alsakani standard, which was in use in the immediate vicinity of Coruscant and the northern rim, a lighter Tionese standard, which was hardly ever used outside their own space, and a lighter Alderaanian standard, which almost nobody used at all anymore, but the Corellian standard was preferred by manufacturers throughout most of the Arrowhead and the Slice south of the Perlemian, a solid majority of the galaxy.) There was also a little bit of vibration, an effect generated by the normal operation of the thrusters that internal gravity usually zeroed out, and little intermittent jolts as the Hawk ploughed through some minor turbulence. Perfectly ordinary ship noise, felt like.

Not that Cina had realised she knew what ordinary ship noise felt like until just now. She couldn't recall ever flying uncompensated in her life — civilian transportation always zeroed outside acceleration entirely, especially in atmosphere. But she was used to that sort of thing happening by now.

Mission took a slow banking turn, moving somewhat more cautiously than she had before. Her hand was so light Cina didn't feel the roll at all — save for gravity drifting over to the side, anyway — the pressure of the turn pushing her back into her seat barely noticeable. After going back and forth a couple times, getting a feel for it, the nervousness in Mission's head was overwhelmed with a growing, giddy excitement. Apparently having realised she was slowly gaining altitude with her turns, Mission dipped the nose down going into the next one, moving more suddenly and harshly than she had the others. The jump up and foreward wasn't enough to take Cina out of her seat, but Sasha was lighter than her, she clutched at the armrests to stop herself from toppling over, shot Mission a glare.

Coming out of this turn, she went straight into the next one, ending her gradually upward climb even as she rolled to the left, going from the climb straight into a narrow dive. Going from being pressed into her seat to diving in such a short span of time actually had Cina weightless for a second until Mission started banking again, Sasha thrown from her seat with a little surprised yelp, but only for an instant, Cina caught her in a net of will, gently pushing her back down with telekinesis — so quick she'd hardly even thought about it, she was getting used to this Jedi magic shite — the force of the roll knocking Cina's elbow against the console while she was focusing on Sasha. Ow.

Cina kept holding her invisible netting over Sasha while she scrambled for her restraints, which was probably a good idea, because Mission made another rapid maneuver in the opposite direction, throwing Cina up and to the left this time. Instead of trying to keep herself in her seat, she moved with it, rising to stand in the middle of the cockpit. Sasha was belted in, so Cina let go of her, then started throwing a low, constant push in all directions — the ceiling, the viewport, the walls, picking spots toward the ground and above the consoles near the ceiling on both sides, the floor, the frame of the door behind her. That should keep her in place no matter what Mission did, she just had to be careful to not accidentally touch any of the controls.

She stook a step forward, leaned over to rest her arms on the backs of the pilot chairs. Kandosa glanced up at her, raising his claw-marked eyebrow in silent question — how are you doing that? Cina raised a sardonic eyebrow right back at him — Jedi things, obviously. But Mission didn't notice her at all, focused on her flying.

Practically vibrating with excitement, her eyes sparkling, her head almost glowing with glee, Mission was giggling. "This is so cool!"

"This is nothing, kebin'ika. You've barely started."

"Nothing? I'll show you nothing, old man, check this shit out." With a jerk of the stick, Mission kicked the Hawk into a roll, hard enough Sasha squeaked with surprise again, pulling into a banking turn...upside down.

They were pulling up (down) hard enough Cina felt she was still being pushed toward the floor, but it was still just unnerving, flying straight at the ground. Not that it really mattered, they were still — she glanced at the instruments — twenty kilometres from the surface, but such feelings often weren't rational. The distant surface rapidly scrolled by the viewport, before too long the blue of the sky peeking out from the bottom, cocked at an awkward angle. Once they were about even with the horizon, Mission spun the ship level again, then wiggled the wings a little apparently just for fun. Then she was pulling up again, then rolling, and they were upside-down—

Rolling her eyes, Cina pushed a little harder against the ceiling. She heard some clattering from somewhere far behind her, something in the kitchen area falling loose, followed by an annoyed bellow from Zaalbar, Bastila and Rhysam arguing about something.

—and then they were rolling again, coming out on the same... Was that a canopy roll just then? How did Mission even know how to do that? It was a basic maneuver used to reposition a fighter in atmosphere, though impossible in vacuum — that was presumably why Cina recognised it, even if she couldn't remember learning it — but it wasn't the sort of thing that was usually taught to civilian pilots, it wouldn't be in the manuals Mission had been reading. She could have just stumbled into it by accident, she guessed, but that didn't seem likely, Mission had performed it almost textbook. Too perfect to be coincidence. Mission had spent a lot of time playing around with swoop bikes, but unless she'd been paying enough attention to, like, action holos or something to actually pick it up, which was slightly absurd, there wasn't any way she could have...

Oh, no.

Mission pulled up, banking around, and suddenly they were in a barrel roll — but inverted, the canopy toward the inside of the axis of rotation, the primary vector of the acceleration pushing Cina's feet into the deck — she came out of it at the top, upside-down, twisting into an odd displacement roll that was half split-s and half she didn't know what, Mission clearly making it up as she went along, coming out level, roughly a hundred forty-five degrees against their previous heading. Kandosa was laughing along with her now, shaking his head with tolerant amusement.

She'd forgotten. Somehow, she'd forgotten one of Mission's hobbies. It wasn't so surprising she might have, it was something that had hardly come up, she'd seen Mission slice code and crack locks, but...

Mission pulled up, then looped over into what Cina instinctively identified as a textbook displacement roll, but she didn't pull up when she was supposed to, instead kept diving, the ground below them spinning dizzily as the ship rotated, a flicker of sky peeking out at the edge of the viewport now and again. Holding the spinning dive for a kilometre or two, Mission pulled "up", but upside-down, the ground tilting under them — Cina pushed harder against the ceiling, wincing at the clanging and hollering coming from behind her — until the sky was visible at the bottom of the viewport, spun back around to level out. Giggling like a small child on far too high a dose of stimulants for their age, Mission weaved back and forth, yawing against the bank of her turns, putting an odd little slipping and skipping motion into the maneuver, the Hawk jolting with each sudden reorientation, as though from an impact.

It felt exactly like skip turns on a speeder, but done with thrusters instead of repulsors.

Somehow, it hadn't occurred to Cina until just now that they'd picked as their future secondary pilot a teenager who followed swoop racing, and played around flying them herself for fun.

Son of a bitch, this was a terrible idea. Oh well, too late now...

Having had her fun, Mission finally set off for Anchorhead. Rhysam was just walking up toward the cockpit, his presence a tingle of warm awareness, when a collection of featureless tan buildings whipped by under them in a blink, the icon on the heads-up switching to a u-turn arrow. "Whoops!" Mission yawed the ship around in a one-eighty, lifting the right wing against the drift to the side — Rhysam stumbled into the side of the hall, his hand hitting metal with a high slap — a hard burn of the thrusters quickly bringing them to a near stop — Rhysam fell right on his arse, biting out a curse in Zeltrosi.

Cina coughed out a laugh. Apparently, Rhysam hadn't been holding a light push against his surroundings in case Mission pulled a surprise maneuver. Silly boy.

Mission jumped, jerked around to look up at her. "Cina! How long were— Shit, we're falling, hang on." They were falling, obviously, Mission had just stopped dead in mid-air. Instead of opening up the thrusters again, she reached for the repulsor controls, gradually increasing the power until their drop started to slow, then finally stop, the Hawk hanging at about eight hundred metres. "You about gave me a heart attack Cina, just floating over my shoulder like a creepy person."

"I've been standing here for a while, you know. Through your whole little stunt show."

Mission silently gaped at her for a second. "Oh shit, I'm sorry, I didn't notice. I, uh...didn't throw people around too much, did I?"

"Only a little bit." Rhysam leaned against the doorframe, shooting the back of Mission's head a smirk. "Having fun up here, cishansije?"

"Well, obviously, flying is awesome. What's that, er, cishansije?" Very close on the pronunciation, not bad.

"A silly little girl who's been watching too many action holos."

Mission's head sparked with annoyance — though less than Cina might have expected, Mission knew Rhysam was just joking around — so Cina got out in front of it. "A cishansi is a flying predator native to Zeltros. Sort of like a hawk-bat, but quicker and scarier."

"Oh, okay," Mission chirped, clearly deciding to take that as a compliment on her piloting skills...which it was, sort of. Cishansi tended to attack prey from above, coming out of steep dives with enough force their target was sometimes debilitated from the impact alone, claws driven deep into flesh before they could even think of resisting — Zeltrosi sometimes used the comparison to describe pilots who were talented, but also a little bit mad.

So, sort of a compliment, but the kind that only somebody it applied to would actually take as one. Like Kandosa saying Cina was probably crazy enough to pull off 'hitching a ride' on a bes'uliik. Same idea.

"Did you need something, Rhysam? We'll be down in a minute." Well, it'd be a few minutes, probably, but Mission shouldn't have any difficulty landing. She was crawling back toward Anchorhead at a much more reasonable speed as Cina spoke, with a confidence she hadn't had those first couple minutes on thrusters — all repulsorcraft maneuvered more or less the same, and she had experience with airspeeders, so.

"Oh, I was just wondering what our itinerary's looking like. How long do you expect we'll be groundside?"

Cina sighed. "Unfortunately, the beacon didn't have the geographical data we need to pick out any ruins that might still be around. I'll have to convince the local Czerka office to hand them over."

"So we're not just refueling and lifting off again."

"Doesn't look like it."

"So I'll have a day or two to show the kid around town."

"I'm sure there'll be plenty of time. We'll probably be here for a week at the least, and possibly more."

"Good, good," Rhysam said, nodding to himself with a smile. And then he was gone, sauntering back into the body of the ship with such cheerful ease Cina almost thought he should be whistling to himself.

Well, at least one of them was pleased.

In the end, the landing did go perfectly smoothly — Mission set down so softly that, due to the combination of repulsors and hydraulics, Cina hardly even felt it. Before Mission had even had the Hawk's flight systems cycled down, a wide door in front of them, cast in scorched and pitted heat-resistant metal, started sliding open, a trio of humans in green and gold uniforms stepping into the bay. Two were wearing armour, lugging a model of blaster rifle Cina didn't recognise off-hand, the other must be a port official of some kind, strapped around his arm what looked like a datapad complete with three different standards of card-reader attached.

"Mission? Did you remember to put together a registry card for this I.D. with my name on it?" When they'd stolen it, the Hawk had had waiting an impressive number of forged registries, matching the various false transponders the previous owner had set up. Mission had been going through them, switching in new owners as appropriate, some with their real names and some under false identities. It was one of several projects she'd been poking at in her spare time, Cina had no idea how far she'd gotten through the stack. A card identifying Cianen Hayal as the owner of a ship called the Ebon Hawk should have been at the top of the list, though.

"Oh! Yeah, er..." Twisting around in her seat, hesitating with a wince when one of her lekku got squeezed against her chair at an awkward angle, Mission reached around, tapped a key on the console. A narrow drawer slid out, she plucked out a datacard, confirmed it was the right one at a glance before holding it over her shoulder. "That should hold up to port authorities, but I wouldn't let them walk away with it."

Cina nearly asked whether Mission was certain this was it — there weren't any marks distinguishing this datacard from the others she could see. But then, there shouldn't be, a law-abiding citizen would have no reason to have multiple registry cards for the same ship, so putting a label on the thing would be inherently suspicious. Mission had done good work so far, as idiosyncratic as the style of self-taught slicers could be. She'd probably made up a code out of the serial number printed on the shell that only made sense to her or something.

Save for a lingering stare from Bastila, she made it back to her bunk unmolested, fished out her papers. (She'd had a new set printed at the Consulate, her old ones had been destroyed over Taris.) She debated for a second before, with a shrug, picking up her belt and cinching it over her hips — she'd rather change into trousers before actually going out, especially since she suspected this dress wouldn't work so well in the desert wind, but she shouldn't delay the waiting officer any longer than necessary. She could always come back and change after she was done with them.

The ramp was already down by the time she got to it, hot, dry, dusty wind barrelling up into the hall. A quick glance through the Force confirmed everybody was still on board, Kandosa must just have lowered it for her. Shrugging to herself, she padded down the ramp, turning in the direction of the uniformed men.

She winced — maybe she should have changed first, or at least gotten her boots on, the reinforced stone of their berth was hot from being under direct sunlight for hours, sand sharp and gritty under her feet. It wasn't a great effort to just bend the heat away, but it was an effort she wouldn't have had to take if she'd just put some bloody shoes on.

She winced again as she stepped out from under the shade of the ship, stepping into Tatooine sunlight for the first time. The heat fell on her like a suffocating blanket, like stepping too close to an open fire, her eyes watering. She bent the rest of the heat away, leaving her as comfortable as she'd been in the cool air of the ship, but it took an extra moment to deal with the brightness — light was a bit harder to manipulate than heat, took finer control. Before long, she had the sunlight tinted down to something she could actually see through, the white-yellow glow of the stone and the piercing glare off of bits of metal equipment here and there pitched down enough it wouldn't get her a headache, at least.

She could tell her improvised eyesight-saving trick was blurring some of the finer details a little, but that was fine — with her ridiculous magical sixth sense, it wasn't like she really needed to be able to see anyway.

The uniformed men perked up at her approach. The two with the guns twitched as though to bring them around to aim, seemingly on reflex, before catching themselves and relaxing again. The one with the datapad took a couple steps forward, meeting Cina with an officious little smile. "Czerka Corporation welcomes you to Anchorhead," he droned, the statement with the flat feel of something automatic, so expressionless it nearly washed out his Corellian drawl. "As your vessel is not among our scheduled arrivals for the day, I'm afraid there are some formalities we will need to address."

Cina handed over her papers and the registry card, answering the standard questions that came up during any kind of customs enforcement. The officer seemed somewhat doubtful of her claim that she was here to poke about the ruins dotted here and there across the planet, half-buried in the shifting sands, as part of her background research for a book on major pre-Republic civilisations she was planning, but he also didn't care enough to question it. He did question her claim that they weren't selling anything — she guessed it would be unusual to see someone coming in to Tatooine on a freighter like the Hawk who didn't intend to do any trading — and stuck on this point much longer, reluctantly surrendering when she promised that, should they do any trading, yes, she would remember to pay all the appropriate fees and taxes to Czerka.

Declaring the crew she had with her also went relatively simply, up to the moment she admitted she had three Jedi with her. Or, four Jedi, he insisted, once he'd confirmed the human woman she was talking about wasn't herself — he didn't quite seem to know what to do with her own insistence that she was a citizen of Alderaan, not a Jedi, just shrugged and moved on...to interrogating her about what exactly a group of Jedi were doing on Czerka's doorstep. It took longer than Cina thought was entirely reasonable to convince him they weren't here to interfere with Czerka's operations, they were on an archaeological mission, honestly, stop worrying.

She guessed it did make some sense for him to be concerned — as small and isolated as this settlement was, Cina didn't doubt that the four of them could easily dismantle the entire operation in the space of an hour or two. They simply had no intention of doing so.

And then they got into talk of fees and the like. This spaceport's fuel prices were actually rather low, but the holonet hookup fee was high. Which wasn't much of a surprise, when she thought about it — Tatooine sat at an important juncture in major trade routes, so they should have good access to fuel, but a relatively remote one, the upkeep of their local 'net infrastructure was probably very expensive, per capita. So, she didn't have any problem paying any of that. Mission probably could just slice their way into the 'net without any difficulty, but it wasn't that onerous of a cost, she was willing to contribute.

There was one particular point she got hung up on, though: the spaceport charged a docking fee of five thousand credits, plus an extra five hundred a day to hold the space. "You must be joking."

With an unamused raised eyebrow, the officer said, "I assure you, I am not."

"I just paid less than half that at Westport, in Galactic City." And the capital district had a higher standard of living than anywhere else in the galaxy, or at least close to it, all the credits a rim worlder could scrape together over the course a month could be spent in a day on Coruscant. Cina would have expected closer to a tenth of what the man was demanding, and she would have considered even that to be overcharging.

"Westport is a much larger installation, supported by taxation gathered across the galaxy. Czerka operates this spaceport privately, and we only have so many berths — we must recoup our loses somehow."

Was charging absurdly exorbitant docking fees really the way to do that? With these kinds of numbers, and the small size and isolation of the settlement, Cina doubted they got much in the way of traffic at all, the margins a third-party trader would have to exceed to be profitable... Of course, perhaps the intention of the fees was to discourage unaffiliated business — this was a company town, it wasn't unreasonable to assume that Czerka wanted to keep their monopoly over the commodities trade here intact.

And, actually, the claim that they needed to charge docking fees to recoup their losses was nonsense to begin with. Since this was a company town, they didn't have to worry about paying taxes to local authorities, or a lease on the land, or utilities, none of it. They had to cover maintenance costs, of course, but this spaceport appeared to be mostly stone and heat-treated metal, so the upkeep needed for the actual structure would be very low — they needed to maintain refueling and communications equipment, but that was an expense Czerka would need to undertake for their own purposes, lending them out to visitors didn't incur that much more in the way of costs. Besides, that's what the refueling and hookup fes were for.

Unless the officer was claiming they needed the credits to recoup their losses on the settlement in general, which Cina could believe — colonising undeveloped worlds was expensive, there were reasons the first couple waves of settlement were virtually always publicly-funded. But disincentivising travel only made it more expensive, they were kind of shooting themselves in the foot here.

"Look, I'm going to be here for a while, probably a week or two. How about we knock the fee down to one thousand, and I pay the five hundred a day."

The officer's face didn't shift, but Cina felt his smug amusement. "I'm afraid the fee is nonnegotiable."

"Nonnegotiable? Now, that's closed-minded. I'm not the sort of person who thinks in absolutes — the galaxy is full of possibilities. For example, I could get back in my ship, power up my turbolasers and pound your offices into dust from the sky. Then I wouldn't have to pay any fees at all. Or we could negotiate. See how that works?"

All three men tensed, Cina could practically see their minds turning, suddenly reevaluating her. She had the feeling they had been thinking of her as, oh, naïve core-world academic — that she'd stepped out of her ship barefoot in a sundress probably didn't help. Generally, that wasn't the kind of person one expected to calmly threaten to indiscriminately bombard office buildings from above. The armed men gripped their rifles, glancing at the officer between them, as though waiting for orders.

After a couple seconds, the officer said, "If you're going to make that kind of threat, why should Czerka deal with you at all?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, did you think that was a threat? No, I'm simply laying out possibilities. You know that's why spaceports tend to have defensive batteries, right, so people actually have to pay the fees?" She'd noticed coming in the town was completely defenseless against aerial assault, presumably they were depending on the Hutts out-system to repel pirates. "Czerka decided to leave simply killing you all as an option on the table. My pointing it out isn't making a threat, it's stating a fact."

The armed men were tensing further, so Cina picked one of them — the one who seemed closer to jumping to violence, anger more intense. She leaned a little toward him, not just physically but mentally, pushing a hint of fear into his mind, not enough to terrify him but enough to give him a vague sense of anxiety, to second-guess himself. Her voice smooth, cold, casual, she said, "If you point that gun at me, I will kill you before you can pull the trigger." She straightened, shooting the officer a cheerful smile. "That was a threat. See the difference?

"But, I can see you're a loyal company man. I'm sure you have strictures you need to follow, or else risk losing your job. Now, I wouldn't want to force you into such a situation, so, how about you just kick this one up to your boss and let them deal with it, hmm? I'll negotiate with them instead."

The officer, wisely, decided that sounded like an excellent idea.

---

Juhani sat listlessly on the sofa in the common area of the Ebon Hawk, unsure what she should be doing with herself.

The moments after they'd set down on the surface, the ship had become a hive of activity. Cina had already disappeared down the ramp outside, still in the flimsy dress she'd taken to wearing on the ship — she hadn't even bothered putting on shoes first. Zaalbar was scouring the kitchen area, righting what had been thrown askew by Mission's inelegant flying, mopping up a couple spills, when he was finished disappearing into the cargo holds. After a couple minutes, Mission and Canderous poured out of the cockpit, Canderous heading to the ramp, probably to supervise their refueling, Mission flopping across a chair to start poking at a datapad.

Not her own datapad, Juhani noticed at a glance, but the one she'd come away from their visit to the Alderaanian Consulate with. Most core worlds had childhood education requirements, which meant both Mission and Sasha were now expected to receive some sort of approved schooling — though it didn't have to be in person, there were long-distance programs available over the holonet for the children of Alderaanian spacers. Sasha hadn't even started yet, working on her Basic first — these programs were offered in a variety of languages, but apparently not Mandalorian — and Cina had suggested Mission could just get a programming certification if she wanted to skip the whole thing. Mission had said she would look over what the certification covered exactly, confirm she could actually do it, Juhani assumed that's what she was doing.

She could slip into Mission's head to check, but it was always very busy in there, it was difficult to pick out any one thing. Also, it would be very rude.

Shortly after Mission settled in, Bastila reappeared from one of the cargo holds, a few canvas packs floating along behind her. Setting them down near the holotable, she shuffled through them a bit, adding this or that bit of equipment, from the kitchen grabbing protein bars and filling water bottles. Preparing for their expedition into the Rakata ruins, Juhani knew — they didn't expect it to be easy to get to wherever they were, they might end up exploring caves and ruins for days.

Cina, Bastila, Rhysam, and Juhani herself would be on that trip, she'd been told. Exploring unknown and possibly unstable ground, their sensitivity to the Force would be a great benefit, the others could contribute little and might just get themselves hurt. From the sound of it, it had taken quite an argument to get Sasha to agree to stay behind. She assumed, anyway, the whole thing had been in Mandalorian, Juhani hadn't understood a word.

Half the conversation on this ship ended up being in Mandalorian, really. Juhani was considering trying to pick some up, just so she could understand Sasha, or what exactly Cina and Canderous were always muttering to each other about.

(She knew eavesdropping on them like that could hardly be considered Denying Curiosity, but she couldn't help wondering.)

Everyone had something they were doing, it seemed — except possibly Rhysam, she'd lost track of him somehow — but Juhani didn't, really. It had her feeling sort of...uncomfortably out of place. Like an interloper, someone who didn't truly belong here, and was only in the way.

Which wasn't an unfamiliar feeling, in the week and change since she'd left Dantooine. It was impossible for her to forget that most of the rest of the crew had been together for a couple months now, had lived and worked and fought together. From their original team, they'd lost two Republic pilots Juhani hadn't met — one of them had been Carth Onasi, apparently — but they had still been together long enough to form a cohesive unit of sorts. Each had their duties, each had their place, and they had been together long enough they knew each other, had grown accustomed to each other's personalities. With the exception of Bastila — she seemed to stick out nearly as much as Juhani, orbiting the rest of the group without truly joining them — they...

Even Rhysam, who'd joined some time after they'd arrived at Dantooine, he'd become part of their little group already, melding with them as smoothly as though he'd always been here. Drinking and joking with Canderous, whispering and giggling with Mission, poking at the Hawk's inner workings or cooking for the rest of them with Zaalbar, trading friendly insults with Bastila (which sometimes got a little bit too close to home, from both of them)...

...sleeping with Cina...

(Juhani still didn't know what to think about that.)

And it was all about Cina, when it came down to it. That might be part of why she felt so...unmoored, here. It had only taken Juhani a couple hours on the Hawk to put together that the focal point of all the relationships between the crew was Cina, she was what tied them all together. Sasha and Mission were her adopted children. Zaalbar had made some kind of oath to her, something to do with his people's culture, it hadn't been explicitly explained. Canderous was her employee, and also her friend — as gruff as he could be, it was obvious he enjoyed her company. Bastila and Cina had been together assigned a mission from the Council, so were partnered at least for the duration. (Whether they would be expected to work together after this depended on how well it went, Juhani guessed.) Rhysam was...not her romantic partner exactly, Juhani didn't really understand what they were, but he was certainly closer to her than he was any of the others.

Of the people on this ship, Juhani alone didn't have some tie to Cina that had brought her here. Their only previous interaction had been in the grove, where...

Well. After that day, Juhani hadn't known whether she would ever have much to do with Cina again, and she'd honestly been comfortable with that. Their only meeting hadn't exactly been pleasant, Juhani would rather just...not think about that...that, all of it.

Since leaving Dantooine, Juhani had been keeping her distance from Cina. In the literal sense, in that she kept some physical space between them — partially for her own peace of mind, but also out of respect for Cina's comfort (the idea that someone was literally allergic to her was just uncomfortable) — but also figuratively. She'd hardly spoken to Cina at all. And she hadn't really tried, or not tried, precisely, she just...had no idea what she would say. She would admit her conversational skills were rusty to begin with, but Cina in particular, she had no idea how to talk to her.

She didn't understand Cina, and she wasn't certain she wanted to.

Quite honestly, Cina frightened her, just a little bit.

And so she drifted. Not a part of the crew, part of their tightly woven relationships, just trailing after Rhysam and...watching. And she didn't know what to do with herself.

It was uncomfortable.

Juhani couldn't help a little startled hitch when Cina swept into the room, her presence in the Force enough the air around her almost seemed to crackle — so intense Juhani hadn't felt her coming, there was little practical difference between Cina standing across the room or out in the berth. (And that was just unnerving, Juhani really didn't know what to think of Cina.) Getting a sense of Cina's emotional state was always pretty much impossible, like reading white text on a white background, but she was obviously irritated, glaring at nothing and huffing to herself. Standing with a shoulder leaning against the bulkhead, she pulled on one of her boots, irritably yanking at the laces.

"You make trouble with the locals already?" Juhani again twitched with surprise, she hadn't realised Rhysam had reappeared, sauntering out of the hallway towards the men's (and Cina and Sasha's) bunks. It could be difficult to spot Rhysam through the Force too but, like Sasha, he was being sneaky on purpose — intimidating, yes, but not at all the same thing.

"Czerka's doing their level best to extort docking fees out of people. I might have threatened to slag their offices if they didn't bring the fee down to something halfway reasonable, so now I have to go negotiate with someone with the authority to do that."

Somehow, Juhani wasn't at all surprised that, upon meeting what passed for local government here for the first time, Cina had immediately jumped to threatening them. Rhysam didn't look surprised either — if anything, he seemed amused, lips quirked and one eyebrow ticked up. "You just make friends everywhere you go, don't you."

"Hey, I'm very friendly." Her boots laced, Cina smoothed her skirt out again, sighing. "And here I wanted to change before going out, but they'll probably get impatient if I take that long."

"Don't bother. Going out uncovered on a planet like this is an intimidation move all by itself."

"That thought did occur to me. I was just thinking about the wind, you know."

"Well, we wouldn't want to deprive the gentle people of Anchorhead a good show."

Cina smacked Rhysam's shoulder with the back of her hand. "Shut up, you. Anyway, I'm gone. Hopefully, I'll be back with the survey data so we can get started on tracking down our ruins. If I'm not back by evening, I'm sure you can figure out how to bust me out of Czerka's holding cells without me around to plan the whole thing for you."

Throwing a languid, sarcastic salute, Rhysam said, "Yes, sir, you can count on me, sir."

"In the absence of better options, I suppose I must." With a quick friendly nod at Juhani, Cina spun on her heel, and headed again toward the ramp to the surface.

"Right, kid, let's go for a walk."

Juhani glared at him for a second, but didn't say anything — kid was better than my adorable new apprentice. Pushing herself to her feet with a sigh, Juhani asked, "Where are we going?"

"We'll figure out when we get there."

"What?"

"You know, the Force will guide us where we're meant to be, and all that silly delusional nonsense." For a second there, Juhani had thought Rhysam almost sounded like a respectable Jedi, but of course he had to ruin it immediately. "You should hide your lightsaber."

Juhani frowned. "I was told to never conceal what I am."

"The Jedi who told you that are the sort who primarily move in official, polite circles — core worlds with a well-developed social infrastructure, Republic institutions with a rigid enforcement of the rule of law. We are not in one of those places. But even if we were..." Rhysam lifted one shoulder, fixing Juhani with an uncharacteristically soft smile. "Ordinary people are frightened of Jedi, Juhani. Some might treat you with suspicion, or even strike first, out of what they feel is self-defense. Others will simply be uncomfortable in your presence, a discomfort you can spare them of quite easily. I find, in most situations, letting people know what you are will only make things more complicated.

"So, hide your lightsaber."

While it did make her faintly uncomfortable to consider it, Juhani suspected Rhysam actually had a pretty decent point. Juhani didn't know how to go about concealing her lightsaber, it wasn't like it was something she'd ever attempted before, so Rhysam had to demonstrate how to cinch a belt high around her chest, hanging her lightsaber along her side under her arm. She had to undress for that but, miraculously, Rhysam wasn't an ass about it, she'd sort of expected he would be. The whole while, Juhani considered the implications of what he'd said a moment ago.

Juhani had never seen a Jedi in real life before the Revanchists had come to Taris.

She had hardly known a battle had been happening at all — Juhani had already been taken, as 'payment' against debts accumulated by her mother, and her father before her, she'd been being held with other newly-captured children deep below the surface until an auction could be arranged. The routine noises of the city around them, the chorus of muttering and crying, the occasional snap of a shock prod from one of their captors... She must have heard something of the battle, but it was too far away, she hadn't recognized it for what it was.

She hadn't known anything out of the ordinary had been happening until the door was forced open with much hissing of sparks and curling of smoke, windows high toward the ceiling smashed open to crash to the floor, and Republic soldiers — humans, mostly, but also Duros and Iridonians and Verpine — were everywhere, swarming all over the place, trading blasterfire with the guards, and then—

And then the Jedi had walked in.

Juhani had always been able to feel things, had always known things she had no way of knowing. She hadn't known why, her parents had had no knowledge of Jedi or the Force, but she'd known, the moment she'd seen them. They were... They were invigorating, just being in their presence, like a shot of a stimulant directly in her veins, an eager, bouncing energy she'd barely been able to contain. They'd practically glowed to her eyes, the power they carried seeping through their skin, making them somehow almost supernaturally charismatic, like gods walking among mortal beings.

(She'd learned to ignore that impression, accustomed to it from exposure, but it was still there if she cared to look, Force-blind people always seemed simple and dull by comparison.)

Shiny and compelling, yes, but also fearsome — she'd only been a few cages away when Nisotsa Thul had lost her temper with the foreman (who'd surrendered, like the coward he was), crushed the much larger man's throat in her bare hand with terrifying ease. But Juhani hadn't been discouraged, she'd still reached for them when she'd been freed, and she hadn't been the only one, dozens of children clinging and crying and begging...

(And later, when Juhani had snuck away from the apartment where the rescued children had been being cared for, found her way to the Jedi, it had been Nisotsa Thul again, and Juhani had been scared, yes, but she hadn't been discouraged, grasping the hem of Nisotsa's shirt, she'd begged them to take her with them, she didn't want to go back, she couldn't stay here, please—)

But that hadn't been an ordinary situation. Juhani's reaction to them couldn't be taken as indicative of anything, since she'd been seeing them through the Force as well as her eyes, but the other children, they'd been being rescued the same as her. They'd been miserable and desperate, and the Republic soldiers and the Jedi had come swooping in like heroes in a story, punishing the people who'd been hurting them and setting them free, as frighteningly alien and powerful as they'd been they'd been the good guys. There couldn't have been any doubt of that at the time, for any of them.

In any other situation, though...

And what Rhysam had implied, about the rule of law, and things being different out here... Well, people in the core, or even in places like Dantooine, the people there grew up with a certain expectation of safety, most of the time. An expectation of safety that had been entirely alien to Juhani at first — some of the other initiates, they'd been baffled by her unease at being alone in a room with the Masters or older Jedi, had teased her for always sitting so she could see the doors, or watching strangers whenever possible. She recalled, once, telling Belaya and Dak that she sometimes had trouble sleeping at night because there wasn't a lock on her door, their disbelief and pity.

To these people, it was simply incomprehensible that someone might abduct them from their bed while they slept, that a stronger adult might hurt them just because they could. These things were outside of their experience, they didn't occur to them.

But ordinary people on the rim, though, who might not have that expectation of safety — what did they think when they saw a Jedi?

Juhani could kill any one of them if she wanted to, whenever she wanted to. She could do anything to them, and there was nothing they could do to stop her. And they knew it. She wouldn't, even the thought of doing the sort of thing they would fear of her was abhorrent...but they didn't know that, did they?

She'd been told, by the Masters at Dantooine, that she should never conceal who she was. That it was a sort of dishonesty, and one that she should avoid whenever possible. Not only this, but Jedi were a sign of hope and safety to common people, that most would find their presence reassuring, and they might come to the Jedi with any problems they might have on their own accord — how could they well figure out what the locals might need assistance with if the locals wouldn't come to the Jedi with their concerns? how would they know to do so, if they couldn't tell at a glance what the Jedi was?

And they were wrong. It was almost painfully naïve, honestly, to think people on the fringes of society would always, or even generally, be at all comfortable in the presence of a Jedi. Being open with what they were would often only make people uncomfortable, and more reticent to approach them, and in extreme cases could cause a scene, break out into violence far too easily. They were wrong.

Juhani didn't know how to feel about that.

Her lightsaber repositioned and her vest pulled back over her head, Juhani was reaching for her tunic when Rhysam's hand came down on her wrist. "Hold up a sec. I haven't checked, how well does Cathar fur do in ultraviolet?"

Juhani blinked at him. "Ah, you mean, how reflective is it? I don't know, precisely, but I would guess it depends on the person's colouring. Why?"

"Have you ever gotten a sunburn before?"

"Thickly-furred beings cannot get sunburns."

A smile twitching at Rhysam's lips, he lifted a shoulder in a lazy shrug. "You'd be surprised. I know Bothans do — their star leans somewhat red, they're very susceptible to sunburns under suns with a greater output of ultraviolet light. Sometimes they don't even notice it happening, there are cases where they get such bad sun damage they end up with cutaneous infections. There are Bothans who have gone into sepsis and died from sunburns."

"Oh." Juhani hadn't even realised that was possible. "Um, I don't know, but I've simply never heard of a Cathar getting a sunburn."

"Right. Skip the layers, then." At her baffled look, Rhysam explained, "Furred species tend to have more difficulty regulating their body temperature, especially in hot environments. Tatooine is very arid, which should help somewhat, but stacking too many layers of cloth will just make it worse. Grab your cloak, though, to shield your eyes."

She gave him a last long, suspicious glare, but it was really just for the appearance of it. He did make a good point.

"And you'll go through water much more quickly than usual, just breathing out there, so we'll be carrying water bottles. If you start getting dizzy, tell me immediately — I suspect Cathar are likely to get overheated more quickly than dehydrated, and I'd rather my adorable little apprentice not get heat stroke."

Juhani huffed, but nodded. "Yes, Master."

A sort of wary, uncomfortable amusement flickered through her sense of Rhysam in the Force. It vanished as quickly as it'd come, and he shot her a bright smile before turning and starting off.

(It occurred to her, belatedly, that Rhysam wasn't technically a Master, that must be what that had been about.)

When she stepped down onto the surface, Juhani quickly realised Rhysam had not been over-estimating how bad the heat would be. A couple layers of protection in the form of her cloak and her fur insulated her from the sunlight somewhat — though they did absorb heat themselves, it wasn't long until they were warm to the touch, like light panels held millimeters from her skin — but she still had to deal with the air itself. She could feel it, a hot, dry channel carving all the way down into her chest, after only a few breaths her mouth was already uncomfortably dry, her throat itching with the pointless urge to cough.

They hadn't even been on Tatooine for an hour, and she already wanted to leave.

Rhysam hardly seemed affected by the heat, by what little of his figure she could make out through his cloak still sashaying across their berth with his normal casual grace. "You'll find settlements like this one all across the rim. When making your way through these sort of places, the most important thing to keep in mind is that this is a company town: Anchorhead is the property of Czerka Mining and Industrial, and is structured in a fashion so as to support their interests.

"It's been a while since I've looked into these things, I can't remember what the standard Jedi education covers. How much do you know about how corporations function?"

They were stepping out of the spaceport already — oddly, the Anchorhead spaceport didn't seem to have a terminal at all, or any of the periphery shops or offices, the various berths emptied directly out into the street. Well, she thought street, but it wasn't really. Anchorhead had been built directly onto a flat sheet of stone and left unpaved, thin streamers of sand whipped around by the wind skittering across the ground, Juhani had to squint against the grit. While the spaceport and a taller structure she suspected were the Czerka offices were darker, steel and stone in blacks and grays and browns, the other buildings huddled along the narrow alleys were made of the same native rock under her feet, a yellow-ish tan light enough it glowed almost painfully in the sunlight, streaked here and there with bands of orange and red.

Juhani opened her mouth to answer, choked on the hot air scratching at her throat. After throwing back a quick gulp of water, she said, "Not much. I know some of the major names and which markets they're involved with, but that's really it. Jedi are expected to not participate in such things." The Masters at Dantooine had obviously had some significant disdain for the major players, though they never really got into why, just said the internal operation of these institutions was not something Jedi need concern themselves with and moved on.

Rhysam scoffed. "That's disappointing, but not really surprising." Picking a direction seemingly at random, he sauntered down the street, lecturing on as he went. "The most important thing to keep in mind when dealing with anything associated with corporations like Czerka is that they are capitalist institutions — they exist to make a profit. Any goods they produce, any services they provide, they are not done for the sake of it, they don't do these things because society needs them. They do it to make money.

"And not just make money, but make ever more money." Passing by the Czerka offices — three stories high and slapped with little framed signs Juhani couldn't read from here (she couldn't see the roof either, it hurt to look up, the sky too bright) — Rhysam's hood turned in that direction, though she couldn't make out her face from this angle. (She couldn't see much at all, actually, her vision restricted by the shade of her hood, a circle of ground, the nearest walls.) "The board of directors of any corporation have contractual obligations to owners, to investors. These people expect not only a return on their investment, but ever greater returns — they want to make more money this year than they did last year, and more the next than they are now, and the next and the next. If the board is going to meet these expectations, every year they must increase revenue, cut expenses, or preferably both.

"Now, this is relatively easy to do for Czerka — the space between major trade routes is far less widely-explored than most people realise, and even worlds that have been settled for generations sometimes have resources not yet fully exploited, so there are always new projects to take on. Corporations like Czerka that are involved in surveying and mining are exceptionally stable, so far as these things go, because they reliably make returns on investments for this very reason. Corporations in other markets often have difficulty attracting investment because they have nowhere to expand and no more costs to cut — they tend to quickly stagnate, and collapse in the space of a century or two. Czerka, on the other hand, has been around since a couple centuries before the first war with the Sith, over a thousand years ago.

"Starting these mining settlements takes enormous start-up capital, but they expect the resources they extract will make them a tidy profit over the long-run, and it usually works out. But sometimes it doesn't." Rhysam gestured toward a nearby open space in the town, where surveying and excavating equipment — ground vehicles with long treads, heavy with industrial-scale sensors and big, blocky mining lasers — were sitting out in the open, pitted and scored here and there from long exposure to the sandy wind. She quickly looked down again, spots dancing across her vision from the glare of the suns off the metal, her eyes watering. By the shallow drifts accumulating against the vehicles, they hadn't been used in some time. "Mining operations on desert worlds like Tatooine can be very hit and miss — it's often difficult to tap profitable veins, and depending on the geological history of the world in question there might not be anything to find at all. The revenues they're making here are less than they expected, so they have to find other ways to make back their investment.

"Do some math for me, Juhani. The people running this settlement, how do you think they might try to keep it afloat?"

How the hell should she know? She knew virtually nothing about how business tended to operate, it wasn't like Jedi spent a lot of time with such things. But it was a relatively simple logic puzzle, when it came down to it, so she could at least attempt to do some educated guessing. Or, just apply the idea to what she'd already been told. "Is that why the docking fees Cina mentioned are so high?"

A slight tinge of annoyance flicked through Rhysam's mind — apparently she'd said something wrong, but she couldn't figure what. "Let's talk about spaceports. Generally, we could say there are four basic categories. There are public spaceports, owned and operated by the local government. These tend to have the lowest fees, operating at cost or even a loss, some have no berthing fees at all — Westport is a public spaceport, though the fees there are unusually high for such things, there are levies that bring in revenue for the local government. Then you have spaceports that are owned by the state, but managed by a private company; the fees at these are also generally low, the operation of the spaceport regulated and subsidized by the local government. And then you have privately-owned spaceports that exist within the jurisdiction of a planetary government, which vary too widely for me to make general statements about them. The empty field that passes for a spaceport on Dantooine is technically one of these, but is surprisingly fair in its pricing — it's a cooperative, owned and run by the people who live there. Cooperatives tend to be more reasonable than corporations, since they don't have the same drive to make a profit. You'll see a lot of cooperative spaceports in the less-populated rim planets, actually, they need a spaceport but they're not really profitable enough for most corporations to bother.

"But there is no law on Tatooine. The only government here is Czerka." They were looping around back past the spaceport already, the town really was very tiny. "Did you notice the lack of amenities or terminals, or service desks and the like?"

Juhani had to take another gulp of water before speaking — she had no idea how Rhysam was constantly talking like this, her voice would have long ago died. "I did, yes. I thought that was strange."

"It's perfectly rational, actually. Czerka does not require the functions the expected paraphernalia provide, so they didn't build them. You'll see a very similar setup in many company towns, especially when they're the only game around."

"But..." Juhani glanced through the entrance as they passed, the wide-shaded hallway curving away in the near distance, heavy doors here and there leading to individual berths, the space plain and drearily empty. "Surely they would need customs and security. I understand they don't have regular flights, so they wouldn't need to display arrivals and departures, but there should still be an exchange desk." Or, maybe it was in the Czerka offices, Dinar Enai had one in the town hall...

"Well, security they don't worry about — pirates aren't going to try anything, with the Hutts hovering out-system, and Czerka has armed guards to deal with any little things that come up. Customs, they have no laws to enforce where trade or private ownership are concerned, like an ordinary planetary government might, so it's not necessary. They do have fees and taxes that apply to third-party merchants, but we didn't declare any cargo coming in."

"But they did not confirm this with an inspection."

"Anchorhead is tiny, though. They'll definitely spot it if we start selling to the locals, you can bet someone will show up to shake us down for Czerka's cut before any credits even change hands. An exchange desk, well, I would agree such a service would be beneficial to the people living here, or who don't want to live here anymore, but it's not in Czerka's interest to operate one. I imagine they would rather control as much of the traffic coming in and out as they can, and that kind of operation in a settlement this small wouldn't get enough business for whatever fees Czerka would levy to make up the cost of building and maintaining it. I'm sure Czerka would be willing to arrange transportation or shipping for anyone who asks — for a fee."

Frowning to herself, Juhani glanced balefully back at the spaceport — they'd passed it by now, walking down another street, this one lined with dozens of tiny little domed buildings formed of the local stone (homes, she assumed). She couldn't help wishing they hadn't continued on, she was already getting uncomfortably warm. "Then why are the fees so high? They don't have the usual amenities or services, so have fewer expenses to cover. Shouldn't the fees be low, then?"

"If they were simply covering their costs, they would." Rhysam reached over, his hand settling on her shoulder. The Force surged from his direction, bubbling up toward her, coursing through her head to toe, twisted, and—

Juhani gasped (then coughed, the draw of dry air aggravating her throat) as the air around her abruptly cooled by what felt to be a good ten, fifteen degrees. Even after Rhysam's hand lifted away, the effect lingered, the Force contorted into a peculiar shape around her, doing something she couldn't quite figure out. Initially, she'd thought it was some healing thing, to help cool a feverish patient, but Rhysam would need to constantly maintain that — though, Juhani herself wasn't a healer, maybe it was possible to anchor such things. But, on closer examination, it didn't seem to be acting on her body directly. It was...sort of a loop, she thought (though the actual geometry of its operation was far more complicated than that, obviously), absorbing something from one direction, pulling it in and redirecting it to push it back out the same way, all around her in every direction all at once. She couldn't quite tell what this something was, the aperture was too fine for her to...

Except, she didn't need to feel what it was doing, it was easy enough to figure it out logically — Rhysam had taken an active alteration, presumably tutaminis-based energy redirection, and anchored it to Juhani like a control technique. She hadn't realized that fusing aspects like this was even possible. Well, no, that wasn't entirely true, healing techniques often had traits of multiple aspects, but other than that. It was very impressive, in any case, especially given how casually and effortlessly he'd done it — in the briefest pause between sentences, with only a quick touch of her shoulder.

As undignified and...flighty as he might seem, Juhani had known Rhysam must be a quite talented Jedi. She had heard from Belaya about his spars with Cina and other Jedi (mostly Cina), and he had the rigid-but-smooth control of his mind and his presence in the Force of a Master Shadow — somewhat like Vima Sunrider, the only Master Shadow Juhani had really met, though not quite the same. (Though, that could just be a difference in personality, Rhysam was a much more...exuberant sort of person than the Grandmaster's wayward daughter.) Rhysam just didn't act anything like the Jedi Masters she'd met before, it was very difficult to take him seriously sometimes. To remember that he had the power and skill of one, if not the temperament.

Leaving with him, Juhani had only intended to learn how to get by on her own, without the Order to support her. Now, she was wondering if she shouldn't ask for instruction in other fields as well.

"But Czerka here needs an operational spaceport," Rhysam continued, "it's not an additional expense but one that's baked in. In fact, I'll bet the majority of flights coming in and out don't pay any fees at all — they would mostly be Czerka ships, or contractors working with them. The spaceport is already paid for. They charge third-party flights so much because they're not wanted here. We don't work for Czerka, and we're not going to be doing business with them, so we're just going to be taking up space. The fees are to disincentivize us from coming back.

"Also, there's no way Anchorhead gets enough traffic for fees from the spaceport to bring in very much revenue at all. Try again."

Juhani sighed. "I don't know. They could cut expenses, I suppose."

"They could. How?"

"Go to different suppliers, for equipment and food."

"Czerka has contracts with Salliche and Seni for foodstuffs, and they manufacture most of their own equipment — the chances that they'll be able to get lower prices somewhere else are virtually zero." Rhysam turned into a side alley, then immediately turned right around, going back the way they'd come. Juhani lingered for a moment, giving the alley a long, confused look — it looked the same as any of the others, she couldn't see anything that might have put Rhysam off — before turning to follow him. "No, at this point in its development, the greatest expense Czerka has on Anchorhead is labor. And they have multiple ways of dealing with that.

"In company towns like this one, you'll find the thing the average person needs more than anything else is cash. Often, they'll spend significant portions of their free time trying to find ways to pick up a few credits here or there. Can you guess why?"

Well, Juhani knew what Quatra would say — that ordinary people, without the Force to guide them, were too often venal and shallow and greedy — but she assumed that wasn't the answer Rhysam was looking for. Besides, it was also the wrong answer — Juhani hadn't been with the Jedi so long that she'd forgotten what it was like to be poor. "I assume because they are having difficulty providing for themselves, but why should that happen? I would figure, in a settlement like this, the only people here are the people Czerka put here, so there should be work enough for all of them."

"Generally speaking, yes. But think about it, Juhani: who owns the housing here? who runs the shops? who sells the food, the clothes, everything?"

"Czerka, of course." Rhysam had said before that everything here was run by Czerka, and that they discouraged third-party merchants coming in — presumably, they simply wouldn't lease shop space to outsiders. Then, as she followed through the logic almost on auto-pilot, it clicked. "Oh. I understand."

"Czerka knows exactly how much their employees are making — the bottom-rung people, almost certainly the least they can get away with, since wages are one of those nasty expenses they want to cut — and they know what they'll need to buy. And their employees are almost literally a captive customer base, they have nowhere else to take their business. Czerka can charge whatever they want for rent, and anything else. In many isolated company towns, most of the employees' wages go right back into the local corporation — it's a relatively simple way for the company to recover the expense, with the benefit of not counting as slavery. I imagine the margin people here are living on is razor thin. Certainly not enough to arrange transportation off this rock."

Juhani took a second to process the implications of that. "And how does this not qualify as slavery?"

"I would argue it does. Republic law disagrees — Czerka's workers are technically being paid, so it's fine."

"That can't be right."

His hood turning toward her, she made out in its shadows a wry, unamused smile on Rhysam's face. "Why do you think labor disputes are so common on the rim?"

Well, she hadn't thought about it, honestly...

"Sorry, kid."

Juhani nearly asked what he was apologizing for, before putting it together herself — for marring the glittering image of the Republic in her idealistic young mind. He must be forgetting she'd grown up on Taris, back when it'd been a member of the Republic. Compared to the other apprentices on Dantooine, she'd always had a more ambivalent — realistic, she would say — opinion of the Republic. That Czerka was allowed to operate the way it was without intervention, even rewarded with lucrative public contracts, wasn't doing any particular damage to her ideals that hadn't already been done by her sixth birthday.

That the Masters would support an institution that allowed such obvious exploitation to continue, well, that was sort of different — as disillusioned as she'd always been about the Republic, that disillusionment hadn't applied to the Jedi. But there was a good reason for that. The Order had never claimed to believe that the Republic was perfect as it was, simply that it was the best vehicle currently in existence to guarantee peace and stability for the greatest number of people. And the Order had, at least once in their history, determined that this had no longer been the case and broken ties with the Republic (though that had been several millennia ago), which did suggest the Jedi were loyal to the principle and not the institution. The Masters on Dantooine could be remarkably frank about the Republic's flaws, if she caught them in an honest mood.

And, well, she had already come to accept that the Masters had their own interests and biases, and were not infallible. This conversation wasn't doing any more damage there than Rhysam hadn't already done a couple weeks ago.

"Anyway, what all this means is that the people in company towns tend to be more desperate than people you would find in many other situations. You'll find more people in places like Anchorhead who badly need help. But, it is more difficult for a person like us to slip in, do our good deed for the day, and slip out again — the corporation will have too tight a hold on transportation, and there are relatively few things you can do to actually solve people's problems. Except get them the fuck out of here, and that's usually dramatic enough the corporation is going to notice, and they'll blacklist you in response, which will make it more difficult to deal with that corporation in future. Which will mean leaving behind everyone you couldn't help the first time. Honestly, the only way to permanently help the people here is to dismantle Czerka's operation on Tatooine, and relocate them somewhere they can make a living with a functioning social system in place to keep an eye on their employer. But that's quite an undertaking for a lone Jedi, isn't it?"

A lone Jedi, sure, but they were four — she didn't doubt that they could overthrow a settlement this tiny by themselves if they decided they wanted to. But Juhani didn't think they should go around messing with local governments on a whim — at least not without a very good reason — and she didn't really think that was what Rhysam was suggesting. "So what are we doing out here, then?" When they could be back in the controlled environment on the Hawk...

"Your teachers showed you how to detect inflection points?"

"Yes."

"Go ahead. Point us in the direction of something interesting, and we'll see what we can make of it."

Juhani shot Rhysam a quick doubtful look. Not that it did any good, at an angle with his hood covering his face he wouldn't see her expression anyway. But she didn't actually think finding some point of tension in Anchorhead to resolve was a bad idea, she just really didn't want to be outside anymore, and her personal discomfort wasn't reason enough to shut herself up inside and not do anything for however long they were going to be here. Taking a thin, shallow breath, Juhani let her eyes drift closed, and reached out into the Force.

After having grown accustomed to the chaotic, vibrant tapestry of life on Dantooine, the feel of this place was... Well, it wasn't barren, exactly — there was a native biosphere, Juhani could tell just from a brief contact, however thin when compared against Dantooine's — just...harsh and sharp, unforgiving. And not just the background of the environment, no, Anchorhead and Dinar Enai had a drastically different character to them, something about the accumulated echoes of will and feeling here harder and colder and crueler.

It set Juhani's teeth on edge just touching it.

But she ignored the overall character of it, nor did she seek out any individual spark of consciousness, instead she set herself back to a more passive stance — like a net dropped into a stream, she let her surroundings flow over her, feeling out places where the gentle current snagged, where fates tangled together, independent wills set against each other in conflict.

Juhani would admit that, of the three primary aspects, she'd always had the greatest difficulty with sensing. Control abilities came to her naturally, telekinesis was easy, and while alteration wasn't quite as easy as control there wasn't anything she'd been shown yet that she hadn't been able to pick up with a little practice. But she simply wasn't quite so perceptive as many other Jedi she'd known. She wasn't certain why this was, it was the core of many of the frustrations that had come up with Quatra, in all her time on Dantooine she hadn't made that much progress.

But even she could feel out inflection points. She couldn't predict which way they were headed, she could hardly guess how to leverage them to come to a favorable result, but at the very least she did know they were there.

Though the process of placing them was interrupted somewhat when Cina's presence in the Force drifted too close — pausing to chat with Rhysam, she assumed — shining as brightly as the sky above, temporarily washing out Juhani's vision. But, since she was already searching for them, she noticed something about Cina she hadn't picked up before: twisted about her was an impossibly dense tangle in the threads of fate, inflection points one atop the other atop the next, reinforcing and straining against each other in a mess too chaotic for Juhani to even begin to make sense of. Just looking at it kind of made her head hurt, honestly.

Juhani wasn't sensitive enough to these things to glean any details at all. But she knew, just with this quick glance, that Cina was... Well, Juhani didn't know the word for it, exactly. That she was going to make a decision, perhaps multiple decisions, at some point in the near future that would have enormous consequences, trigger a chain reaction of cause and effect — not only for her, for her own life, but for millions of people.

With how deep the threads ran, how thickly they laid upon her, perhaps the whole galaxy.

Juhani had absolutely no idea what to think about that.

By the time Juhani had picked a direction to go — toward not just a single inflection point, but a collection of dozens all concentrated in a relatively small space (though nothing compared to the incomprehensible mess around Cina) — she and Rhysam were alone again, Cina having wandered off some minutes ago. "I have it." They weren't the only inflection points in Anchorhead, but there were enough gathered in one location they should be able to find something useful to do with themselves.

"Good," Rhysam chirped, still too easy and cheerful for how miserable it was out here. "Lead the way."

Juhani didn't bother looking up to get her bearings, she kept her eyes on the ground as she tracked the tangle of inflection points in the Force. Looking up would only give her a headache, after all, she probably didn't need to have her eyes open at all. And besides, by the feel of it they were probably indoors somewhere, and the sooner she could get out of this awful air the better.

She was less than ten meters away when she was stopped with a hand at her elbow. "Ah, yes," Rhysam said, "I thought we might come somewhere like this. You'll find, in company towns such as this one, the corporation will often stumble upon a secondary revenue stream, exploiting a resource on the planet they hadn't originally anticipated, opening it up to exploitation. Sometimes by a third-party contractor, or just individual people, it depends on what kind of thing we're looking at. A not uncommon feature of such worlds are permits for big-game hunters, or safaris or the like. The investment needed for that sort of thing on the part of the corporation is usually rather small, so, as small as the profits are likely to be, the margins are pretty good.

"Tatooine in particular has some interesting wildlife, and Czerka has taken to offering assistance to professional hunters in exchange for fees, plus a cut of whatever sales they might make. Especially krayt dragon pearls, collectors in Hutt space and the core have taken a particular liking to those, they can easily fetch millions of credits each with the right buyer."

Juhani tried not to gape at him. "Millions?"

A disdainful edge to his voice, Rhysam drawled, "Never underestimate the wasteful excesses of the idle rich — no price is too high to acquire a new curiosity they can show off to their friends. Anyway, you've led us to a lodge and cantina for the hunters Czerka has invited here. Let's check it out."

The instant Juhani stepped through the door, the weight of the sun beating down on her lifted away, she flipped her hood back and pushed her cloak off her shoulders. It was a little cooler in here, but it wasn't actually that much of a difference (though that might be because of Rhysam's cooling trick, which he cut off right away). Interestingly, the front door had led them into a tiny, square room, empty save for posters pinned to the walls — advertisements for weapons and equipment sold by Czerka, solo hunters seeking a partner to go out into the desert with, a few attempting to arrange transportation off the planet, that sort of thing — another thick, heavy door like the one they'd just passed through only a few meters away. Like an airlock, she realized, an extra layer of insulation between the controlled environment of the lodge and the harsh atmosphere of Tatooine.

This second door led into a broad but low-ceilinged room, a service kiosk on one end, complete with a little shop selling supplies and a surprisingly extensive drinks bar, little tables dotted here and there across the floor. The surfaces and furnishings mostly seemed to be plain stone and metal, accented here and there with only the most token attempts at decoration, the air thickened somewhat with inhalants of some kind, faintly glowing from the light cast by yellow-tinted glow-panels.

Juhani tried not to scowl at the smoke — it was fine, it would be a relatively simple effort to keep it out of her lungs. At least it was much cooler in here, the air humid enough to sooth her irritated throat. She let out a brief sigh of relief.

After a quick glance around the room, eyes flicking over the various rough-looking figures of various species seated at some of the tables, Rhysam started walking, making directly for the man behind the service desk. He must know what he was doing better than she did, she just followed. He gracefully weaved between the few tables along the way — most of them unoccupied, only an exhausted-looking human and a furred, long-faced being Juhani didn't recognize — a swagger to his walk he didn't usually have, loose and swaying. Probably getting into character, Rhysam had said before that while he was pretending to not be a Jedi he liked to play into stereotypes about—

Juhani jerked at a sudden touch high on her thigh, extending inward toward points, something about the feel of it revealing it was a clawed hand. The unknown being she'd just been passing was saying something, but she wasn't paying attention, she took a jerking step away, turned around to... Well, she didn't know, exactly. (This was hardly the first time she'd been grabbed at, and she never knew what to do.) Probably just glare at him(?) for a second before continuing after Rhysam.

But, somehow, Rhysam was already there, as quick as blinking.

Coming up behind him, before the being could react, Rhysam's hand came down hard on the back of his neck, slamming him face-first into the table. There was a high cracking noise — for a second, Juhani wondered if Rhysam hadn't broken his nose or something, but she remembered there'd been a large datapad on the table, that was probably it — a moment later a crash and skittering of glass, the being's drink thrown to the floor. The being growled out an incomprehensible protest, presumably in his native language, kicking in Rhysam's general direction, the chair sliding. Rhysam easily kicked the chair out of the way, then pressed his knee into the being's lower back, folding him awkwardly against the edge of the table — the being kept trying to kick at him, but the angle Rhysam was forcing his hips into made it impossible.

Shaking off her surprise at the sudden violence, Juhani glanced around the room, her hand kept far away from her lightsaber with conscious effort. She'd expected there to be some activity, people coming to intervene, but nobody had moved. They were being watched, dozens of eyes flicking their way, their attention sharp and curious on the Force, but it didn't look like anybody planned to do anything about it.

"Are we ready to be civilized, yet?" Juhani tried not to give Rhysam a double-take — he usually spoke with a Coruscanti accent, though with more of a lazy drawl to it than she was used to hearing from Jedi, but now he was using... Well, if she had to guess, she would say it was probably Zeltrosi, his Basic slightly strained in the manner of a non-native speaker, but Rhysam was literally the only Zeltron she'd ever spoken to, so she couldn't say for certain.

"Get your hands off me, you qrenshakse nammie!" The second to last word was obviously in a foreign language, but Juhani recognised the last as Corellian slang, adapted from an old Duros word for a prostitute. It was sometimes used as a general insult, but was most commonly a racial slur for certain non-human, non-Duros species, including Zeltrons. So, not at all a nice thing to call someone.

"I'll think about it, after you apologize for putting your hands on the girl."

"Rhysam—"

He shot her a look. "Ej nussa, nyśanje."

That was presumably Zeltrosi, which Juhani didn't speak a word of, but she got the message anyway — trust me, I know what I'm doing. Biting her tongue, Juhani went back to watching their audience.

"Look, man, I didn't mean anything for it, I wasn't trying to step into your—"

With a twitch of his shoulders, Rhysam pushed down harder, the being cutting off with a choking noise. Speaking louder than he really had to, enough the whole room could probably hear it, he said, "It's not my lover you was pawing at, that's my daughter. You got fire for little ones, yeah?"

Juhani, once again, forced herself to not react too suspiciously. They did need to have some explanation for why they were travelling together on hand. Given the age difference between them, and the fact that Rhysam was a Zeltron, that he had adopted her was really one of the better possibilities. Rhysam's backstory was probably going to be that he was a mercenary or something, that Juhani was a war orphan he'd picked up at some point fighting the Mandalorians.

That was fine, she guessed, but he could have at least warned her first.

"Hey, no, I didn't know she's a kid!"

"I don't care what you know or don't. You apologize."

The being's hands curled into fists, his voice harsh and snarling, he said, "All right, fine! I'm sorry, I didn't mean nothing by it."

Rhysam didn't let him go immediately so, trying not to look too uncomfortable, Juhani said, "It's fine."

"Good!" he chirped, bright and cheerful. "We are all friends, now." Rhysam straightened, releasing the unfamiliar being, than immediately turned to start for the desk again.

The being turned over, glaring at Rhysam's back. Just as Juhani started turning after him, the being reached a hand toward his waist, and Juhani reached out to—

But, again, Rhysam got there first. He whirled around, quick enough his cloak whipped around him, his fist coming up and crashing into the being's snout. Thrown back by the impact, he fell against the table, lay dazed on his back. Clumsily, one hand came up to his jaw, groaning.

Rhysam plucked his long, narrow blaster up from the table next to him. "Maasa, I don't think I can trust you with this. I will keep it. Or..." Without warning, Rhysam tossed the blaster at Juhani, she barely managed to catch it. "You keep it. Late birthday gift from our friend here."

...Well, okay. Juhani had hardly ever touched a blaster in her life, and didn't really need one, but she also didn't think it would be wise to give it back to a mercenary (or similar) Rhysam had just publicly humiliated. She confirmed it was switched off with a glance at the controls, then stuck the barrel under her belt, just let it hang there.

Once they were alone, sitting at one of the tables with drinks picked up at the desk, Juhani leaned in to whisper. "Was that really necessary?"

Rhysam gave her a brilliant, shameless grin. "I had to make a good first impression on our friends here."

"I see."

"Besides, he annoyed me."

Juhani huffed. She suspected Rhysam had come up with the former explanation to justify himself after the fact, that he'd really just done it because he wanted to, but it wasn't worth arguing about it.

"So." Rhysam took a sip of his drink, eyes bouncing over the two dozen or so people spread around the room. The two of them weren't still getting curious looks, their attention wavered as the excitement ended — unnervingly quickly, she thought, mild bursts of violence like that must be perfectly routine here. "Who are we here for?"

"I don't know." His eyes flicked over to her, she turned away to look sightlessly out into the room, trying not to look uncomfortable. "I've always had difficulty with sensing — I am sensitive enough to feel the inflection points in this room, but I can't tell what they are turning toward precisely, or which we should focus on."

Somewhat to her surprise, there wasn't any hint of disappointment or disapproval, just a slow, languid nod. "We'll have to use our eyes then, won't we?" Rhysam was silent a brief moment, sipping at his drink and surreptitiously gazing around the room. Juhani took a sip of her own drink and nearly choked, she hadn't realized it was carbonated. (Ugh, that was just unpleasant...) Finally, with an inherently suspicious casual air, he said, "You see that argument at khenth-mark-third?"

It took a moment for Juhani to realize he was orienting relative to her, not himself. She looked over her own shoulder, trying to make it look natural, and not like she was watching whoever it was Rhysam was talking about (and probably failing, she wasn't used to sneaking around). In one of the back corners of the room were a group of Gamorreans — enormous beings, each nearly two meters tall and probably two to there times as broad as Juhani or Rhysam, thick cords of muscle covered in layers of protective blubber. Each had stubby little horns on their heads, and all but one had tusks extending from their sharp-toothed jaws.

All of them were, of course, heavily armed — blasters and grenades, and in a couple cases large, wicked-looking axes. Not meant to be a primary weapon, she didn't think, each of them with axes also had blasters. They must be for close combat, or perhaps just cultural.

Standing in front of the group, across the table from one of the larger ones — and the most finely-dressed, their weaponry gleaming and expensive, presumably the leader — was a dark-haired human woman. They were talking, Juhani couldn't hear what from here, but the woman was clearly angry, her fists clenched and her shoulders hunched. The Gamorreans, just as clearly, weren't taking whatever it was at all seriously — Juhani suspected that huffing and grunting she heard was laughter, in fact. After a few minutes longer, the argument came to a sudden halt, and the woman walked away, stalking in the direction of the service desk.

She closed her eyes, and reached out through the Force. It took her a second to pinpoint the woman, but when she did she nearly cringed — grief and hatred and desperation, starting to color even as Juhani watched with creeping, stomach-churning despair.

She shook it off, nodded to Rhysam. "I don't know what, but there is something going on there." Her suspicion was that the woman held the Gamorreans responsible for the death of someone she cared about, but Juhani wasn't certain, and couldn't get any more specific than that.

"Right. Be back in a minute." Rhysam was up and sauntering off before Juhani could blink, meeting the woman at the desk. They talked for a little bit, the woman on edge and suspicious, Rhysam laughing it off. She guessed the woman had assumed Rhysam was trying to hit on her something, it took a couple moments before she finally relaxed.

He was a Zeltron, after all, they did have a reputation.

After buying her a drink — which made the woman tense up a little again, Rhysam had probably said something flirty without thinking about it — he led her back toward the table, plopping down next to Juhani. "This is em haselije, Juhani. Nyśanje, this is Sharina, maa, Fhissak?"

The woman, sitting directly across from Rhysam, shot him a slightly exasperated look. "Fizark. Sharina Fizark."

Rhysam muttered something incomprehensible, probably cursing in Zeltrosi. "I am sorry, these human names, they are so difficult." Basic did sound like it was difficult for him at the moment — by the way he was talking, Juhani would guess Zeltrosi had fewer vowels, and didn't like putting too many consonants together. It was making him a little difficult to understand, honestly.

By the brief pause before Fizark spoke, she probably felt the same. "Oh, that's alright. I can't pronounce your name either. Hello, Juhani," she said, with a somewhat reluctant smile.

It took a little bit of cajoling, but Fizark did eventually explain what her disagreement with the Gamorreans was. And by cajoling, Juhani didn't just mean the verbal kind. She was positive Rhysam was using his people's native telepathic abilities, tingling pulses of warmth and friendliness and safety washing over her — apparently, Rhysam couldn't aim this stuff very well, because he was hitting Juhani with it too. She tried to resist it, at first, before quickly giving up. She couldn't even feel however he was getting the foreign feelings to her at all — her control of herself was tight enough she could feel it acting on her, but she couldn't tell where it was coming from to stop it from touching her — and it wasn't like he was forcing anything particularly unpleasant on her. She could probably minimize the effects down to pretty much nothing if she really wanted to, but it wasn't really work the effort.

Anyway, Sharina Fizark had been one of the techs brought over by Czerka to maintain their surveying equipment. A significant portion of her pay had been on commission, but since the mining here had pretty much fallen through they hadn't done much in the way of surveying, meaning their equipment was getting less use, so they needed less maintenance — she was making much less than she had originally, just barely enough to cover housing and food. Her husband, who had been a freight driver before he'd essentially been laid off, had tried to make up some of the difference by joining one of the hunting parties going out into the desert. At the least, they'd hoped, they might be able to save up enough to get off Tatooine, coast by long enough to find work somewhere else.

A month ago now, he'd left Anchorhead with two other hunters.

They hadn't come back.

"And you're certain the Gamorreans are responsible?" Juhani asked. It was a fair question, she thought — Tatooine was hardly a safe place to go wandering around in, who knows what could have happened out there.

Fizark scowled over in their direction. "Oh, they are. Gurke and her men are thugs. They've been throwing their weight around since they got here, extorting people for credits, in a few cases even murdering miners and stealing their belongings over their corpses."

"And Czerka just lets them get away with killing their employees?"

Turning back toward them, Fizark gave Juhani a pitying look. "Anchorhead is dying, girl. The ore here, it can't be easily refined into something usable, there's no profit in it. As far as Czerka is concerned, they have too many workers here — what's it to them if Gurke kills a few now and again? Just means less paperwork for management."

Juhani hissed through clenched teeth — not necessarily at the content of what Fizark was saying, but the manner in which she was saying it, exhausted and run-down and hopeless. Fizark certainly believed what she was saying, that it was what it was and there was nothing to be done about it. And Juhani believed her. And it was just, just...

They'd only been here a couple hours, and she already hated this place. Not just the harsh environment of the planet itself, which was bad enough, but...

(Fury red and black filling her to bursting, her lightsaber cold and singing in her hand, and Quatra was cut down before she could hardly blink, and for a moment, a sickening, awful moment, Juhani was—)

A wave of cool, soothing calmness radiated out from Rhysam, washing away the hot anger bubbling up, the dark memories playing behind her eyes. Juhani shifted in her seat, nearly muttered an apology — Yes, Master, I know (there is no emotion; there is peace), I'll do better next time — but stopped herself before she could. Fizark would consider that a very peculiar thing for an orphan girl to say to her adoptive guardian, she should at least wait until they were alone. Besides, taking a moment to think about it, she had the feeling Rhysam wouldn't care about little slips like that one nearly as much as Quatra had.

Rhysam would say there were situations in which anger was perfectly justified. That anger was a natural thing to feel, sometimes, and it was not the emotion itself that was the problem. A person cannot control what they feel, and cannot be held responsible for it — it is what they do in reaction to what they feel that one can judge just or unjust. He'd said something similar once, when Juhani had asked after Cina adopting Sasha. That conversation had been about attachment, and how to organize one's obligations and priorities, but Juhani suspected the same principle would follow through to similar topics.

As...heretical as that kind of thinking had struck Juhani at first, with a bit of thinking she'd realized it didn't truly conflict with the principle of the Code at all. At its core, the point of the Code was that Jedi were supposed to detach themselves from their personal biases when making decisions for other beings, so their own feelings don't color their evaluation of what is in the best interests of people who might have very different priorities and preferences than the Jedi does. Theoretically, so long as the Jedi properly compartmentalizes their own feelings on the matter away from the decision-making process, the existence of those feelings was entirely irrelevant. With the power Jedi have at their fingertips, letting themselves get carried away would always be a potential danger, but expecting them to never have any feelings about anything important at all ever was just unrealistic.

Given what Quatra had been saying to her when it'd happened, it hadn't been realistic to expect Juhani to not become angry. She should have just walked away, and stayed away until she could think straight again — it would have been difficult, yes, but it was the only reasonable thing she could have done. She understood that now.

Rhysam must be using that Zeltron telepathy of his to pick up at least some of what was going on in her head, because the anger-smothering coolness was quickly followed up with a warm glow of satisfaction and approval, a faint smile pulling at his lips.

(Juhani tried not to react to that.)

After a few more questions, and assurances from Rhysam that they would look into it and get back to her, Fizark threw back the rest of her drink and left, heading toward the door leading outside. "Well," Rhysam sighed, slouching back in his chair, "this is an interesting dilemma you've found for us. How do you propose we go about solving it?"

Juhani scowled. "I don't suppose walking over there and confronting them would do any good."

"Mm, afraid not — Gamorreans aren't known for their openness to being reasoned with."

"I don't know, Rhysam. I would say we should talk to the local authorities, but there are no local authorities."

"That's where you're wrong, nyśanje." Leaning a little toward her, lips pulling into a crooked, silly smile, Rhysam muttered, "We're Jedi, Juhani. We are the authorities."

...She wasn't going to like this. No, she suspected she wasn't going to like this at all.

But, despite herself, she couldn't help smiling back at him, a little. She remembered, trapped in a cage with all the other children, she remembered watching the Republic burst in, she remembered the Jedi cutting down the slavers, she remembered Nisotsa Thul killing the leader, she remembered hinges and locks sliced apart in a swirl of tightly-controlled plasma, she remembered watching a recording of Revan, Malak, and Thul bursting into Parliament and demanding the planetary government submit themselves to their terms, she remembered the Jedi leaving, walking from the apartment tower they'd commandeered to the spaceport, the concourse packed with cheering crowds, confetti and flowers raining down from windows and airspeeders overhead, children — some of whom she'd recognized, other kids freed from the warehouse she'd been sharing living space with at the time — running up to hug them one last time, to thank them again, Republic soldiers carrying some of them on their shoulders, Malak had gotten mobbed, three or four kids climbing all over him, trying to look annoyed but he couldn't stop himself from laughing...

Despite what they'd become later down the line, when Juhani imagined what Jedi should be, what they should do, she still thought of the Revanchists on Taris. And she suspected it would always be so, no matter what happened in the years to come.

Which didn't mean they should do whatever they wanted to anyone they wanted, of course not. But the choice of what they would do with the power they had was in their hands. As it should be.

(She remembered Quatra, speaking of the hubris of heroism, but she didn't listen any more now than she had then.)

The aftermath of the Liberation of Taris dancing behind her eyes, Juhani nodded.

---

And that's a chapter. Woo. No idea how it got this long, but this is my life.

Personally, given her history, her age, and what we see of her behavior in the game, I like Juhani's biggest weakness being that she really, really wants to be a big damn hero, like the Revanchists before the whole Sith thing, despite years of the Masters on Dantooine trying to disabuse her of that notion. And of course Sesai is going to find those buttons quickly and play with them like a brilliant manipulative bastard, because this is Sesai.

[khenth-mark-third] — Rhysam is using a basic system of verbalising orientation here. Like the x-y-z coordinate system, they took what had been the last three letters of aurebesh at the time (ønith, khenth, ngeng) and applied them to the three axes of rotation available to most ships: ønith is vertical, khenth is horizontal, and ngeng is rolling. Mark-third means one third of a full rotation from the direction they're currently facing — "khenth-mark-third" is equivalent to saying "four o'clock".

Nerds might notice none of those names for aurebesh letters are standard. Yeah, so I have the very fundamentals of Basic phonology now, because that was a thing that needed to exist. We have nine plain vowels: /ɑ/ (arek), /ɛ/ (esk), /ɪ/ or /j/ (isk), /ʌ/ (osk), /u/ (usk), /y/ (ysk), /æ/ (ænth), /o/ (órenth), and /ø/ (ønith). There are a few diphthongs, two of which are phonologically monopthongs, esk-isk is /e/ and esk-ysk is /œ/ (though the latter is rare, and very dialectical). And then there are consonants: /b/ (besh), /c/ or /k/ (cresh), /d/ or /ð/ (dorn), /f/ (forn), /g/ or /ɟ/ (grek), /h/ (hef), /ʒ/ and /dʒ/ (jenth), /k/ (kril), /l/ (lenth), /m/ (mem), /n/ (nen), /p/ (penth), /q/ or /k/ (qek), /ɾ~ɹ~ʁ/ (resh), /s/ (senth), /t/ (tril), /v/ (vev), /w/ or /ʍ/ (wesk), /ks/ (xesh), /z/ or /ts/ or /ɕ/ (zerek), /tʃ/ (chek), /x/ (khenth), /ng/ (ngeng), /ʃ/ (shesh), and /θ/ (thesh).

These same nerds might notice I said ngeng used to be the last letter, meaning shesh and thesh were added later. But, wait, that would mean chek became a letter before shesh, despite chek being an affricate of tril and shesh. Well, see, chek actually came about from a lenition of cresh and xesh in certain environments, while shesh came from a lenition of senth and certain consonant clusters rather later on, after the alphabet was standardised. (In fact, some dialects don't even use shesh and thesh.) There's a similar process behind all these letters ending in -th, despite thesh being a later addition — /nti/ → /ntʲ/ → /nθ/.

Which, fun fact, means letter names are sometimes pronounced differently in different dialects. For example, if Cina is feeling particularly Lesami-ish, she might call khenth "khenta" — in Coruscanti/Corellian dialects, /θ/ is from a lenition of /t/ around front vowels, but in Alsakani it's instead a reduction of certain clusters (Cina mentioned /st/ specifically in a previous chapter). The influence of old Alskani on the now Basic-speaking population means they retained the historical /t/ in some environments, including in the alphabet itself.

And I've clearly thought about this way too hard...but, honestly, sound changes that came about late is a way better explanation for these letters being at the end of the sequence than the creators just putting English digraphs at the end because TOTALLY ALIENS YOU GUYS THEY USE ONE LETTER FOR TWO LETTERS!

Sometimes, I really wish people who don't know anything about linguistics would stop trying to be clever with this stuff. Just ask a language nerd to take care of it, come on...

Because my brain is terrible and I can't focus on things, I randomly remembered my HP/SW crossover exists. Ugh. Anyway, I'll be trying to update The Good War next, but depending on how the writer's block goes another chapter here might come first, we'll see.