I cried into my palms while the navicomputer calculated the jump from Andara to... anywhere. Going home, seeing Pop's old place like that, the way Mum feared for his legacy, and the pain his faith conceived: What sort of scientist contends with this much soul searching? Was it like this for every research fellowship?
I needed to remove myself from it. I couldn't let my own feelings congeal into a bias, but how do I maintain impartial standards in something so personal? How could I follow my grandfather's steps and unlock the secrets he kept, without infecting the findings?
WEET BOOP WOOT-WOO
Artie rolled by and deactivated the hyperdrive. My hand had been hovering over the throttle for minutes, it would appear.
"I'm going to poison this research," I said as he turned to leave the cockpit. "My bias is going to bankrupt us."
"Your experience," he intoned carefully, "is the reason we now have holocrons. Don't be hard on yourself, I'm better at it anyway." He chortled as he turned and rolled back to the cargo hold.
Have I mentioned that Artie is over one hundred years old? He's had more refits and upgrades than I've had birthdays. In addition to the litany of service updates, he also developed quite a biting personality. But tell him a good story and he would consider it his duty to tell you three of his own. The droid's decades of experience processing and analyzing data made him the ideal partner for historical reference work. He was also the only being in the galaxy I could trust with my findings.
His judgment strengthened my resolve and I slipped out of the cockpit to try and reset my batteries. I changed my shirt, put on soft, lightweight pants and stockings, poured a hefty glass of Jadian Wine (thank you Mum!) and moseyed into the holding bay.
The black enameled paneling of the hold's walls and containers glistened a fiery red. I had to shield my eyes from the reflected glow.
"What's your plan for storing them, Artie?" I asked, as I knelt beside the droid. He ignored me as his two mechanical arms delicately shifted the trio of glowing stones into three separate lockers. "Durasteel is strong, but if those things stay that hot, they'll eat through eventually. Perhaps we can set up a coolant system for them?"
Artie merely chortled and finished boxing the second one. Then he picked up the third and rolled around to face me. He tossed it in my lap without warning. "Are your circuits fried?" I exclaimed and tried to jump back.
I halted when I realized that the holocron was not hot at all. It was actually a little cold if anything. The reddish glow turned black as coal and the radiating energy disappeared from the cargo hold. Artie laughed at me and retrieved it from my hands, as I took a big gulp of my sweet red wine.
"I don't get it? Those things were hot as comets when we found them."
Artie collected the boxes and stowed them in separate holds. He beeped about how the holocrons bore runes from a race on Dathomir, a nearly uninhabitable planet in the Outer Rim. And that they only glowed red hot when they were touching together. He would need some time to decipher them, and compare their structure to the cradle, but Artie felt confident that it could be done.
"What are we waiting for?" I couldn't believe how nonchalant he was being about all this. "If those are real, let's get them open!"
Artie laughed derisively and made an off-hand comment about the wine's effect on me. "R3, where are you going?"
"We have a datachip to slice," Artie scolded.
I rolled my eyes and he spun his dome back around to lead me out of the holding bay. I sat at my console and plugged Mum's necklace-datachip into the drive. Artie dialed into the ship's computer system through a multi-port opposite my station and together we set to work on the encryption.
The Zaetech was a preferred storage drive for the old explorers, spies and hyperspace smugglers due to its reliability. Cracking into the datalog was as simple as knowing a passkey, but without it you were doomed to endless lines of meaningless code and security redundancies. Artie relied on me to identify sequences that appeared authentic to my grandfather's style. I was relying on his ability to go through code as quickly as it cropped up.
The analysis was slow, arduous work that yielded little for some time. Rather than crack the passkey, we found we could track the encryption back to it's spawn point.
It was a set of planetary longitude and latitude, but did not bear any markings regarding which specific system. Like a needle in a haystack but on a galactic scale, right? Would you believe it didn't even take Artie three full hours to find?
He compiled a short-list of matches and together we came to the conclusion that our next stop would be a twin-sun system in the Outer Rim, known as Tatooine.
#
Findings Log — 11247
Tatooine
Dr Mary Au'Rona
"Records indicate that there is an island in the middle of the Dune Sea that was once home to a Jedi shrine," I said as the Converso dropped out of hyperspace. "It's the only locale that matches these coordinates and appears to have anything to do with the Church of the Force."
Artie beeped curtly about how inefficient biologicals are at slicing. Rather than argue, I made him take us into atmosphere on his own.
Tatooine orbits a pair of little yellow stars, is home to a couple tribes of thrifty scavengers and crafty hunters, lots and lots of sand, and that's about it. It is as if a deluge of sand was spilled in Space and it all congealed into a single mass. A swirling ball of yellow, brown, tan and every shade in between filled the viewport and made my neck start to sweat. The closer the Converso dipped into the atmosphere, the more barren the world appeared.
Artie angled toward the southern hemisphere of the system to track the coordinates.
I read through the meager dossier on our destination while Artie navigated the cloudless sky. Palazzo Dace was the only thing for fifty klicks in any direction and said to be abandoned centuries ago. It was named after a Jedi who once called this planet home, but there was little else to go on. One thing seemed certain, if we were going to unlock Pop's datachip, this was the place to find out how.
Palazzo Dace appeared as a red blister on the planet's tan skin. In the center of the island there was a diminutive pyramid covered by centuries of wind-blown sand, and a quartet of pylons at each corner of the structure. The Converso swooped in on the tiny mesa through the whipping sands and tumbling clouds.
"This place is making me thirsty already," I remarked as I zipped up a ventilation suit and covered my face with a scarf. "I don't know anyone that doesn't enjoy a good beach, but sand without surf is an abomination, if you ask me."
Artie turned to look at me, then turned back to his flying without saying anything. He might as well have grown a pair of eyes just to roll them at me. "I hate it when you do that, R3. I don't need you judging me, you over-programmed wastebasket. Bring us down, already."
Artie set us down on flat land and opened the gangplank.
A blast of super-hot air rushed in and gagged me. "Oh," I moaned, "I have got a bad feeling about this." Artie rolled to my side and squeaked out a few beeps of trepidation. "At least you don't have to worry about boob-sweat."
I trudged down the gangplank and Artie rolled down behind me. The pyramid was right before us, casting a shadow that I quickly ran under. The structure was about twenty feet tall and made of corroded blocks of pale sandstone. I took holo-images of everything and began biometric scanning while Artie took sample readings.
"I've got biologicals on my scanner," I told Artie through the comlink. "They're close too. Don't let me get ambushed, Artie."
I think he ignored me, but I was too distracted by what I found next. Implanted in the broad face of one of the pylons surrounding the pyramid, was a plaque dedicated:
Palazzo Dace
Koroght gaghgt Takt
"Would you look at that?" I said to myself, but Artie asked if he could see. I took an image and sent it to Artie. He whistled to say he would check it out when he finished his scans. "Fine, let me know what you find."
I turned around from the plaque in time to watch as a great geyser of sand and hot air erupted only meters away. It spewed from a gap in the ground beside the pyramid's foundation. Artie keyed the comlink with a warning that life forms were closing on me, but he was too late.
Out of the rush came half a dozen beings that stood about three feet high, dressed in hooded robes of brown and maroon. They surrounded me and looked up from behind their blacked-out cowls. I said hello and introduced myself as best I could in a generic version of the Jawa language. They said nothing, only continued to stare at me.
"Do you understand Basic?" I asked in as friendly a tone of voice as I could muster, and stepped toward them with my palms up. The group didn't cower, but they did seem to tense up a bit. Artie beeped a reminder that Jawas were merchants and traders and I thought quickly. "I am here to trade. I'm looking for information, and can pay for it."
The shortest of the six hooded beings tilted its head to the side, like a hound hearing an intriguing sound, and then the rest followed suit. "I want to know about the Jedi. Can you help me?"
"The Colonel," said the littlest one, and the rest echoed him. "Take you to the Colonel."
They all spoke perfect Basic and almost sounded like children. It was adorable, if I'm being honest, and in that moment I felt all my anxiety evaporate like any moisture on this godforsaken planet. They hurried back down through the gap in the ground that they came from and waved for me to follow.
We marched down a dark staircase and into an shadowy entrance chamber. Glow lamps slowly activated and spilled a hazy purple light down on us from overhead. The little beings formed a single-file line and removed their hoods.
"Wait," I said when I espied their bright, young, expressive faces in the dim lighting. "You're just children?"
"We never said we were Jawas," the littlest one, a blue-faced Chiss boy, said with a toothy grin.
"Then who is this Colonel?" I said, growing wary of a military figure who might fill his ranks with children.
"Follow us," a human girl said, and the line of children marched out of the chamber through a tight corridor. I followed them and marveled at the mining work that had gone into the creation of such a passageway. Could children really accomplish all this? I wondered, growing angrier the more it impressed me.
"What is that light?" I said after about a minute of steady, downward marching. There was an orange glow up ahead that illuminated the last hundred paces of the tunnel. None of the children responded to me, but kept up their uniformed pace to the end of the hall. I followed them through the threshold and into a massive underground lair.
It was an excavated chamber with a spiral ramp encircling it thirty or forty feet down to the bottom. There were more than a score tunnels branching off in every direction from the main chamber with dozens and dozens of the cloaked children, busily going about their tasks without speaking a single word.
It was unsettling to say the least; such busyness should be accompanied by some form of din. But their silence was only accentuated by the scurrying of sandy footsteps or the tumbling of loose stones. My mind raced down paths involving slavish-devotion, or ritualistic corporate punishment; I was starting to hate the Colonel before ever meeting him.
But the sights and sounds were not the only thing that set me off of my equilibrium. I checked my datapad for radiation readings, or extra-gravity, perhaps even a magnetic flux, but found nothing out of the ordinary to validate what I was perceiving. My instincts said otherwise, there was a feeling in my gut that I could neither place or ignore.
Orange lights illuminated the roundabout descent to the very bottom level of the circular chamber. About halfway down I realized that a train of children built up behind me, following to the landing. It was darker at the bottom and my night-vision took a little while to adjust. In that time, the children fanned out in a semi-circle behind me and faced the center of the dim chamber.
"Welcome—" a deep, throaty voice, boomed through a phonosystem. A loud thunk sounded and a flood of white-light knocked me to my knees. I held a hand up, blocking out the painful brightness to see that there was a being standing at the center of the chamber.
"Are you the Colonel I've been hearing so much about?" I said, returning to my feet.
"That's what they call me," the voice was mechanical, like it was being altered by the electronics. "You came here looking for Jedi?"
"I came here looking for information," I said. "But if you have one back there, I wouldn't say no to a cuppa with him."
My sight began to adjust and I realized there were a lot more children down here than I had thought. About a dozen teenagers sat at blacked-out computer terminals, ignoring everything but the work before their faces.
"We don't have tea here," the voice boomed.
"Okay, something stronger than," I quipped. "I've got some pretty exotic vintages back in my ship. You a drinker Colonel?"
"I like you," came a much quieter, unmodulated, female voice.
Suddenly, the flood lights dimmed, and I lowered my hands to take in the Colonel. She was an old human lady with light brown skin, dark brown dreadlocked hair, and a patchwork of tarnished grey stormtrooper armor covering her thick frame. Under her left arm she had an upturned RT-97C sniper rifle, retrofitted into a suitable crutch. The Colonel placed her microphone down on a table beside her, then hobbled toward me.
"We have no treasures, no technology," the Colonel said as she approached. "Nothing worth stealing. If you're running a con, you should head toward the Darklighter Farms."
"I promise," I held up my hands in surrender, "I just want some answers and then I'll leave."
"You're leaving Tatooine?"
"As long as my astromech hasn't taken my ship and abandoned me here, yes."
The Colonel smiled at me and straightened a bit. I would have considered her tall, were she not hobbled by age. "Then be welcome. This is Palazzo Dace, one of the last Force Rectories still in existence. I am a humble servant of the Force, and, of course, my orphans."
"These children," I said, as my eyes cast around the sea of silent observers. "They're all orphans?"
"Tatooine is hard and unforgiving." She stopped at arm's length from me and extended her hand. I shook it and she pulled me close to place her left arm over my shoulder. "The Force brings them to me. The wayward, the abandoned, the lost, and I do what I can."
"That's—" I paused to consider the complexities of such an undertaking, "heroic. You live out in the middle of nowhere to protect those with no hope?"
"It is my father's legacy," she said as two of her children brought over chairs for us. "I think I was ten when my father told me the story the first time. He was a member of the 501st—Vader's Fist—most decorated legion in the history of the Galactic Empire. My father came down to Tatooine with a detachment on a very secret mission.
"Vader sent troops to Mos Eisley and Anchorhead, and of course the old Lars Farm. Everyone's heard that story, by now. But Lord Vader, my father and a couple other troopers came out into the Dune Sea in search of a legend. Tatooine has long been connected with the old Jedi Order, and rumors about the ancient reliquary of the House of Diath survived even the Great Jedi Purge."
"The Darth Vader was looking for this place?" I said, and felt a queasy feeling in my stomach start to rise into my throat. "Why?"
"What he sought and what he found were two very different things," she said in a tone full of pride. Then she gathered herself and said sternly, "He sought a memory. An exposed kyber that locked up a terrible power."
"But he never found it?"
"No, my father did." She smiled at that. "Vader came through these halls and could have retrieved that which he came for. But my father managed to point Vader in the direction of a more tantalizing object: A holocron that belonged to the infamous Sith lord, Darth Bane. Some zealot or misguided apprentice had brought it here to achieve some nefarious end hundreds of years previous, but of course failed.
"Vader was blinded by his desire for the dark relic, and my father defected before the Empire left this planet behind for good. He dedicated the rest of his life to protecting this mesa and the crystal."
"That is incredible."
"He was incredible," the Colonel said with a smile that failed to hide the tears in her eyes. "He met my mother and they had me. Eventually he taught me all about this place and the Force. He said the treasure was the Palazzo, not what it held, and I took that to heart. When he and momma passed on, I sold off the family holdings and moved out here. I thought of it as an exile, but then the first orphan showed up outside my door within the first week."
"But there isn't a settlement for klicks around?" I said.
"The Force brings them to me, I do not understand how or why. But who are we to question the great mystery? I certainly do not consider myself that wise."
"Okay, so then that kyber is still here somewhere?" I said, trying to piece it all together. "Is that why I feel so…?"
"What?" she said, and cocked her head to the side involuntarily.
"I'm not sure," I said and looked down.
"Why do you seek the mysteries of the Force?" The Colonel was staring and it was unsettling. I leaned back in my seat as she leaned forward in hers.
"I want to know how the Jedi affected the Galaxy," I said, trying not to squirm.
"No, that's not it," she accused. "That is not the whole truth."
"No, I suppose not," I said and took a deep breath. "I don't know why I'm telling you this, I've never told anyone this: I am trying to find the impact the Jedi have had on me, and my family."
"I knew it," she said and turned around to signal someone in the back of the chamber. "What is your name, child?"
"You can call me Mary."
"Mary, it is a pleasure to meet you. My name is Moira." She turned about in her seat and retrieved a little white box from one of her silent orphans. "This is the kyber. It is no longer a weapon like the ones in a Jedi's sword, but it still has incredible power."
"Information is power," I said, eyes wide as she opened the case before me.
"It is a datacrystal, a technology lost along with the Jedi Order." She was almost whispering as she pulled out the tiny, cloudy, double pointed white stone, with an inconceivable amount of facets. "It's useless to me. Basically like a key without a door. But I've protected it, as my father did, for all my life."
My heart beat fast and I tried to contain myself. "Do you think it unlocks a datalog of some sort?"
"Probably," she said and closed her hand around the crystal. "Vader wanted it for some nefarious end, and would have sought to turn the kyber into a weapon, my father was sure of it. The actual datalog has been hidden for decades, I don't know where..."
"Because your father got it off the planet?" I asked, knowing the answer.
"Yes," Moira said, squinting to size me up suddenly. "A traveler and spiritual man took the log with him. He was supposed to hide it. My father said he was trustworthy and a hard man to find, by anyone's standards."
"He was indeed," I said, with a sad smile creeping across my face.
"Then how did you know that?"
"Lor San Tekka was a hard man to track, but not impossible. Even to a system as remote as Jakku. But the First Order managed just fine."
"Force save us," The Colonel covered her mouth. "What happened to him?"
"The First Order executed him for his faith," I said anticipating tears, but none came. "He died alone in the desert, for nothing. He was my grandfather, and the best man I've ever known."
"I am so, so sorry," the Colonel embraced me, then pulled back to face her children. One of the teenagers handed her the white box again, and she turned to hand it to me. "I offer you this as a trade, Mary. You take my eldest, the teenagers, in your ship to Anchorhead where they might start a new life. Do this for me and my children, and you may take the key."
The box touched my palms and it felt like a surge of electricity chased through my arms and tickled my core. "Moira, thank you. I know you are not doing this for the recognition, but, you've given Lor San Tekka's legacy new life."
I laughed a bit, and I noticed that the old Colonel was crying. She embraced each of the children that would be leaving her and then hugged me once more.
"You be good, Mary," she said before I climbed the passage to the surface. "To yourself and your grandfather's memory. It's all that we have of the ones we love. You know?"
I looked her in the eyes and said, "I do, Moira, and again, thank you."
"May the Force be with you," she said.
"Always," I bowed and turned to leave.
We left Palazzo Dace behind and I fulfilled my promise to Moira by bringing her kids to Anchorhead. I supplied them and made sure they had a good amount of credits to rent shelter and board. But my aching heart and Artie's clogged joints were anxious to get lots of space between us and the deserts of Tatooine.
I told Artie to set a course for Marleyvane and he whooped in celebration; and like a Snarlf returning to its master's call, the Converso leapt into hyperspace to take us home.
#