Welcome to chapter 28! We'll spend the next few chapters getting up to speed on what's happening with Devin and Varda before returning to Ry's story.

Chapter 28: The View from Lothal

14 BBY 0 months 9 Days

Static.

Shie fiddled with the dial on the starship control panel, and a scratchy, nasal masculine voice came through: "Lothal perimeter security. State your purpose."

"I'm here for work."

Pause. Crackle. "I can't hear you."

Shie leaned into the mike and spoke slowly and clearly. "I'm here for work. I'm with Imperial AgSystems, mechanical services division."

"Employee ID number?"

"7378229194."

"You may proceed."

Shie closed the com channel and breathed a sigh of relief. After all the stress she'd had in the past week, getting through security smoothly was a welcome break, though she noted that the starship Eo had given them still needed work after sitting out in the damp forest of Hokto for what, seven years? Whatever it was, Shie noted that she'd need to work on the com reception-transmission system. She typed that into a to-do list on the ship's computer so that she wouldn't forget. There were enough other things on her mind without trying to keep another bit of information in her head.

Devin had come back from his trip to Iwaki not, as she had hoped, refreshed by a good visit with their old friend Ava Kirrin, but wrapped in a cloud of dark, unspeaking anger. She felt bad for feeling so relieved when the chance to pick up some work on Lothal gave her an excuse to escape. She didn't blame him for being angry about what had happened to Eo, but still, she had only stayed with them for a few days and yet he was taking it really hard. The worst part was that he'd barely even talk about it. How was she supposed to support him if he wouldn't talk? She had tried other ways of reaching out to him, but he just kept pushing her away.

The grey-brown disc of Lothal loomed large ahead. Shie punched in the coordinates that would allow her to land next to the Imperial AgSystems Mechanical Division building just outside Lothal's Capital City. She didn't love working for an Imperial crown corporation, but it paid well enough, and having the chance to get out of the house was nice. And down there on Lothal was her friend Stella, whom she hadn't seen in years, not since she and Devin disappeared to Nechako anyways. Work was just work. What Shie really looked forward to was a night out, to see an old friend and to get away from Nechako for awhile, and away from Devin.

Shie felt bad for feeling that way. It's not like she and Devin had such a bad relationship. They made love often enough. Maybe not the last week or so, but usually they did. And he was hardworking and reliable and he didn't run around with other women. They even talked sometimes about having a third child when Siri got a bit older.

But still. Even if there was no way she could ever get it back, Shie didn't want what Devin was now; she wanted what Devin used to be. She wanted the life they used to have back on Deema when Devin was still working with the Agri-Corps. Back then, he came home from work feeling good about doing something he believed in. Their door was always open for friends from the Agri-Corps or neighbouring farmers to just drop in and hang out together. Sometimes they'd even roast a pig out in front of the house and neighbours would come and bring their instruments and their voices to sing and play music together. Or sometimes Shie would drop by the Agri-Corps station to fix whatever needed fixing on their out-of-date equipment and end up staying to chat until way later than she had meant to stay. Back then it wasn't just her and Devin stuck by themselves like they were on Nechako. They had people around them, and with the Agri-Corps they were both doing work that felt like it mattered.

But the Jedi were gone and so the AgriCorps was gone and the friends who had known Devin as a Jedi were gone and there was no getting that back now, and so for Shie the next best thing to hope for was the rare chance to get away and have a night out after work with an old friend. A smooth ride through security and an uneventful day at work would just make it perfect.

The light on the com module flashed green and the system emitted a harsh beeeeeep. Shie punched the button to open the com channel again. More static. She fiddled with the dial.

"Ship registration number 34792, proceed to security bay 524." It was a different voice this time, female, clipped and commanding.

Shie scowled at the com panel. "Of course. Is there a problem?"

"Please obey all instructions. Proceed to security bay 524 immediately."

"Yes, right away."

She rolled her eyes. She'd heard that Lothal had a much more active Imperial presence than Nechako did, but really, did they have to make this kind of fuss? Then something niggled in her mind: why was she being pulled over? Possibilities raced through her mind: did her name trigger some match in some database about her husband having been a Jedi? No, she told herself, they'd changed their names, and her employee record with Imperial AgSystems held nothing worthy of being questioned.

Then the clouds opened in her mind and the blue sky of realization shone through: the ship. The ship had come with Eo, who got it from that Jedi Varda. This ship hadn't been out and about much since the Clone Wars. Was something about the ship's registration wrong? She hadn't done any interplanetary travel since the Empire got set up, so she hadn't thought to check.

Docking Bay 524 was aboard a sky-hangar in the upper part of Lothal's atmosphere. She landed in an empty booth, feeling at once awed and unnerved. The dizzyingly huge structure of the sky-hangar was filled with more starships, more equipment and more personnel than she'd seen in one place since she was in trade school. She got ready to disembark, planning to find some sort of reception desk, but when she opened the door a uniformed officer was standing there, a head taller than her and twice as wide.

"This is an inspection," he said, "I need to see the main computer." He raised a hand as if to push her back, and Shie instinctively stepped back from the door. He shoved his way in, all but herding her back into the cockpit. It felt wrong, him there in the small space, close enough to feel his unwelcome warmth.

"The ship's registration," he said, "we'll start with that."

Shie's hands moved quickly to pull up the document on the screen. She cringed when she saw it, wishing she had thought to check this earlier.

He leaned over to read the screen. Shie sidled to one side to avoid having to touch him.

"Can you tell me why this starship is registered to the Jedi Order?"

"I...I don't know, I got it used."

"From whom?"

"I didn't really know her. A woman, she didn't need it anymore."

"And where was this?"

Shie thought quickly. If she lied, she might not be able keep things straight, and some contradiction in her words could get her in trouble. And they already knew where she lived from her employee records. But if she told the truth...

"Where I live, on Nechako. I met her at the co-op." Shie felt stupid...the co-op was the centre of everything in their little community of Moosachu but this official from Lothal, "the Big Planet" as it was called on Nechako, wouldn't have any idea what she was talking about.

"And is she still there?"

"No, she went off with someone else."

"Can you tell me who?"

"No, I didn't know him," Shie said. That lie, she knew they couldn't follow up on.

The official grabbed Shie's arm and pulled her back in front of the computer. "I want the ship's log," he said. Shie tapped out the command sequence to pull it up, but her hands felt foreign to her, puppets of another will.

To Shie's relief, Eo had erased the ship's log when she arrived on Nechako, so there were only a few entries: the trip from Nechako to Iwaki and back in the week prior, and the present trip from Nechako to Lothal. She was glad now she hadn't lied and said she got the ship at the Wheel, even though it was in the neighbourhood; it spared her some further explaining now that the log was plain for this official to see.

The official said nothing, but copied the dates, times and coordinates of each trip into his data-pad, then flipped the cover on the data-pad shut with an air of finality.

"Your ship will be held for further inspection," he said and turned to go.

"But wait! How can I get to work?"

He looked back at her from the door of the starship. "That's hardly my problem. You should contact your employer."

"But please, I work for Imperial AgSystems, it's a government-run corporation..." Shie quickly pulled out her employee ID card before he could leave.

He sighed grudgingly and took the card, scanning it on a device that he unhooked from his belt. "Oh," he said almost apologetically when he saw her employee information. "In that case, the administration desk can call you a shuttle."

Shie wasn't sure she wanted to push her luck, but she did also need to get back home again before long. "When may I get the ship back?"

"In half a rotation," he said, "if you sign the declaration." And then he left her to deal with the rest herself.

The frustrations of the morning continued to grate on Shie as she went through the workday. At the Imperial AgSystems Mechanical Division facility just outside the capital, her supervisor did accept her explanation for why she was late, but many of the other workers there gave her the cold shoulder. For Shie, trying to figure out why didn't help much as she struggled to get through a day of fixing unfamiliar styles of harvesting and planting machinery with a new supervisor watching.

Shie was grateful when the day was over and her friend Stella came to pick her up. Stella, with her big eye makeup and long pink nails, wrapped Shie in a bear hug and then motioned her into a beat-up speeder that sat parked outside the building. As if they had some unspoken pact, they both waited until they were heading down the six-lane highway into the urban core of the capital before either of them said anything beyond Hi, how are you, so good see you.

"So they took your ship, huh?" Stella said as she merged into the fast lane.

Shie made a face. "Yeah," she said, "I get it back tonight but I have to sign a declaration. They searched my computer, everything in the log, where we live, where we've been. I'm just glad there wasn't much in there."

Stella swore under her breath. "Damn Imperials!" she said and spat out over the edge of the open-top speeder at a billboard showing three stormtroopers with blasters and the slogan Protecting Lothal, protecting you.

Shie took note. "But how are you doing? I haven't seen you since you moved here. How did it go with you and Jak?"

It was Stella's turn to make a face. "The guy was a dud but I decided to stick around Lothal anyways. I got friends here now. Actually, I was kinda thinking you might like to meet them. They'll be at the place I was thinking we could go tonight."

"Sure, that would be great," Shie said.

"But," Stella said, sounding worried and almost reluctant now, "what happened...what happened with Devin?"

"Oh," Shie said, at bit surprised, "we're still together." As good as it was to get a break from his mood, not being with Devin was unthinkable.

"No, I mean...when that thing happened with the Jedi...he didn't...?"

Shie almost laughed. She had gotten so used to pretending to everyone that her husband had never had anything to do with the Jedi that she had forgotten to quit pretending for Stella. "No, he's fine, he survived. We were on Nechako for his mom's funeral when we heard about it. So we had to take his dad's surname to register new ID cards there, but it's been OK."

Stella gave a sigh of relief. "That's good news!" she said, then more jovially, "You still playing that ukulele thing of yours?"

Shie laughed. "No, I got two kids now."

"You go, girl! Boys, girls, what?"

"A boy and a girl. I didn't know I was pregnant the last time I saw you."

"You guys must be great parents. What's Devin doing now?"

Shie winced. "Farming, or well, trying to. Things have been tough with the new rules. So we're kind of thinking he'll do the stay-home dad thing and I'll work a bit more."

"You coming to Lothal again?"

"Yeah, probably. They seem to need extra mechanics."

Stella scowled. "Before I forget, maybe don't talk about working for Imperial AgSystems while we're out tonight. A lot of people here aren't too thrilled the Imps are bringing in outside workers."

"Why? I thought they needed more people here," Shie asked, but a light went on. Maybe that was why she got the cold shoulder at work.

Stella shook her head. "It's complicated. I'll tell you more later. But do you think you could bring Devin with you next time you come?"

"Um, maybe...if we can..."

"I'll babysit the kids if you just bring them too. It would really help if you could get Devin over here."

"O...K...what did you have in mind?"

By now they were on the fringe of the city and were hitting some traffic. As they waited at a light, a bored-looking Imperial official on a speeder bike sat in the lane next to Stella's open-top speeder. Stella kept her tone carefully casual. "There was just a little something I wanted to ask him about," she said, and they were silent until the flow of traffic could obscure their words. "On the far side of town there's a refugee camp," Stella said at last. "People who got kicked out of their apartments when the Imps built the new factory district. My friends and I, the people you'll meet tonight, we've been trying to give them a hand. They want to make gardens and stuff but the soil is crap and everything they grow gets a lot of bugs on it. I just though Devin might be able to figure out something that we can't."

Shie's eyes lit up. "Wow, sure, I could ask him," she said. Maybe that was just what Devin needed, to get out himself and his bubble on Nechako and be more like who he was in the Agri-Corps again, even if it was just for one little project. "Who are your friends?" Shie asked.

"You'll see, you'll like them," Stella said.

Stella found a gap in traffic, changed lanes and slipped into a parking spot. "The place is across the street," she said, and the two got out.

Shie stepped out of the speeder and looked up at the tall apartment buildings and breathed deep. The place stank the way cities tend to stink: spent fuel, garbage and a touch of whatever people here were smoking. It was intoxicating. She hadn't been to a city for what? More than five years?

Shie trotted alongside Stella and soaked in the buzz of the people around her. This was what she missed living on Nechako: people. And not just humans and the odd Twilek. Here there were Rodians and Ugnaughts and Ithorians and even some species Shie didn't know by name. The street was lined with booths and stalls where people – farmers, she presumed – sold every kind of fruit and vegetable she could imagine and more. At one stall she stopped, mesmerized by the sweet and spicy scent of the green and purple fruit. She picked one up and smelled it.

"How much?" she asked the old Ithorian lady behind the booth.

"Three credits each."

"I'll take five," she said with a big smile. They never got things like that on Nechako, and Devin and the kids would enjoy a treat. She passed the woman a twenty credit chip. "Keep the change," she said. The Ithorian lady nodded and handed her the fruit in a bag. Shie nodded her thanks, then trotted after Stella, who was waiting a few metres away.

"Here's the place," Stella said and showed her towards the inviting dark of a cantina doorway. Capital City Burgers and Wraps read the sign above the door, and Shie smiled. Maybe today would be the day she'd been hoping for. A beer, and burger and a good chat with an old friend...just what she had been needing. The scent of the fruit wafting up from the bag she carried said a further yes to that promise.

Inside the dim womb of the cantina, a tired-looking Twilek lady with her head-tails tied back in a colourful scarf stood behind the bar.

"Hey, Moana!" Stella called.

The Twilek nodded to Stella but gave Shie a sharp look.

"It's OK, Moana, she's cool," Stella said, motioning with her head towards Shie.

The Twilek eyed Shie, then nodded again. "They're in the back room," she said.

"Moana lets us use her place, but she likes us to be careful," Stella whispered to Shie.

"Careful about what?" Shie whispered back, but Stella didn't answer.

They threaded their way between the round tables of the cantina and then went out the back door to a cramped yard where speeders in various states of disrepair were lined up along the wall of the next building. On the far side of the yard was a workshop. Stella opened the door like she knew the place and led Shie past a row of messy workbenches that smelled of machine oil and then up a narrow flight of stairs to an upper room where a few old fat couches sat on a dingy carpet. There was a dark-haired boy playing with toy starships in one corner, making the requisite sound effects as he made them crash into each other. A slender youngish woman with copper-toned skin and the same colour hair as the boy was setting up a holo-projector on the floor in front of the couches. She looked up when Shie and Stella entered.

"Hi Stella," she said, "Oh, and who's this you've got with you?" The woman had a smooth, even voice and a nice smile.

"This is the friend I was telling you about. Mira, meet my friend Shie. We go back to trade school days. Shie, this is my friend Mira, and her son Ezra."

Mira smiled and nodded but Ezra didn't look up from the explosion he was pretending to make of the toy starcraft.

"How old is your son?" Shie asked.

"Almost five. His birthday's in at the end of next week."

Shie smiled. "I have a son about his age too."

"Lovely!" Mira said. "Stella's told me a lot about you, but I didn't know you had kids." The way Miriam looked at her, Shie wondered if Stella had told her about Devin. She wasn't sure how she felt about that.

"It's a nice surprise to see you here early," Stella said. "You're usually..."

Mira waved a hand. "I helped Ephraim set up earlier and he'll take care of the rest by himself tonight. There were some things I wanted to talk to you and Tseebo about, and I figured it would be easy to just find you here." She knelt down and fiddled with the knob on the holoprojector again. A few grainy streaks appeared, and there was static.

"Where's everybody else?" Mira asked.

"I got a call from Melek," Stella said. "He had engine trouble and he's stuck out at Old Jho's, so he won't make it tonight. Maybe Tseebo's still at work. I thought he would be here already."

"Well, maybe we can get going and then eat after he gets here," Mira said.

"Take a seat if you like, it's about to start," Stella told Shie and motioned to one of the fat couches.

Shie sank down into the couch. "What's about to start?"

"The broadcast," Stella said, "you'll like this."

The holo-projector flickered to life in a burst of static and grainy streaks. Mira adjusted a knob and then sat down on the couch beside Stella.

We call on all people of conscience throughout the galaxy, a man's voice was saying. Together we must oppose the rule of the Galactic Empire.

Shie's eyes flew open. Rebels? Here on Lothal? It didn't make sense. Lothal was like Nechako, a resource planet that had welcomed the Empire as an antidote to its economic ills. Shie couldn't imagine her neighbours on Nechako so much as dreaming of rebellion.

We bring you the news the Empire doesn't want you to hear, the broadcaster's voice said, and then proceeded to relate a litany of local abuses: workers fired for refusing to work unpaid overtime at an Imperial munitions factory, farmers in remote rural areas who received no compensation when their land was seized for Imperial mining activities. Through all of this, the screen simply displayed a crest that Shie took to be the emblem of Lothal.

As the laundry list of abuses went on, Shie felt the novelty of rebellion give way, if not to cynicism, to realism: labour violations, seizure of private property...it was nothing that hadn't happened back on her homeworld of Deema.

Then the image changed. And now, we have an update from Dr. Trio Podleap, the broadcaster said, and the holo-screen produced the image of a Miralian man with a narrow face and a sharp pointy nose. His facial tattoos made it look like there were big dark tears falling down his cheeks, but his eyes, even on the grainy holo-screen, suggested grim determination rather than sorrow.

Are you angry yet? he said. You should be. The first voice in the broadcast had been commanding but reasonable. This Dr. Podleap had an aggressive edge to his voice. I'm here on Yemer, he went on, where the Empire has some explaining to do. Surviving locals report that four years ago, aircraft bearing Imperial insignia sprayed an unknown toxin over a local sacred site, which is now a dead zone spanning nearly ten thousand hectares. But that is not the only legacy of this attack. The toxin has built up in the bodies of Yemerian survivors and it is passed on to the young with every egg they lay. This toxin disrupts the development of the Yemerian fetus, and so thousands of children hatched with deformities in the wake of the attack will never live normal lives because of it.

As he spoke, the image changed again. The screen showed a lizard-like Yemerian child lying on its side in a hospital bed with tubes coming out of its nose. Its face was misshapen and its back bent at a sharp angle. Even its long lizard-tail was badly kinked, and the way its lungs heaved it seemed to have trouble breathing.

Shie looked away, feeling sick. Back when she was single, before she had kids, she could have just watched, but not now. She couldn't not think how much it would hurt to see Jonah or Siri like that.

This is what the Empire is doing, she heard Dr. Podleap's voice say, this is why I want YOU to get angry.

It was late at night by the time Shie left Lothal, and it was the wee hours of the morning by the time she crawled into bed back on Nechako. After the broadcast ended, Stella and Mira's friend Tseebo and later Mira's husband Ephraim came bringing food, and the five of them ate and talked until the last minute before Shie had to catch the shuttle to pick up her impounded starship. As much as Shie relished the chance for adult conversation, she didn't speak or eat much. The image of that Yemerian child haunted her.

Lying in bed at home, with the moonlight seeping through the edges of the blackout curtain, sleep didn't come. She listened to Devin breathing beside her and decided he probably wasn't actually asleep. She reached out and touched his back, warm beneath the covers.

"Devin?" she said softly.

The was a rumble of covers as Devin, startled, turned over. "What?"

Shie reached a hand out to his shoulder. "How would you feel about coming to Lothal with me next time I get work there?"

She could hear rather than see Devin shrug beneath the covers. "I guess. What about Jonah and Siri?"

"Stella said she could watch them."

"I guess. Why?"

Shie sighed, trying to decide where to begin. "There's something Stella wants your help with," she said. "Outside the capital there's a slum, a refugee camp, people who got kicked out of their apartments when big Imperial factories got put up. They're trying to grow stuff for food but they're having trouble. She was hoping you could take a look and see what could help...like back on Deema, with the Agri-Corps."

Devin practically snorted. "She has no idea what she's asking," he said. "There's no way in the galaxy I'm doing that."

"Devin, it's just one little..."

"No. It's OK for people like Stella who are single and don't have any responsibilities to try to do stuff like that. Not us."

Shie scowled into the dark. Stella might be all free and single, but the other people she'd met that night weren't. "There's a couple who does a secret broadcast..."

"Is it secret once they broadcast it?" Devin said sarcastically.

"Devin! That's not what I mean! I mean, there's people doing things to try to DO something about all of this, and those people, the people who do the broadcast, they have a kid! So..."

"Not my kid," Devin said grimly.

"I don't want to think like that," Shie said, her voice an angry whisper now, trying not to wake Siri in the next room but still forceful. "I never want to have to look my kids in the eye and tell them I sat back and did nothing."

"Shie, what in the stars is up with you?"

Shie made a face. Maybe telling him all about Stella's friends on Lothal wasn't such a hot idea, but there was something from that meeting with them that she just wasn't willing to let go of.

"I just think there's things we could do to make a difference that don't have to mean getting caught," she said with forced calm. "I think it would be better to do something than to do nothing."

"Like what?" It was a rebuttal, not a question.

"Devin! Don't be like that!"

"Shie..."

In the next room, the baby woke up screaming. Devin moved as if to get up.

"Never mind!" Shie hissed. "She wants me, not you!"

Shie stumbled out into the dark hallway and into the nursery in a storm of frustration. Without bothering to turn on the light, she opened her nightshirt, picked up her screaming daughter and lifted her to her breast. As Siri latched on and started to feed, Shie felt the tension of her argument with Devin melt out of her, but one thing remained: the image of Yemerian child with the bent back and the kinked tail. She held her healthy, straight-backed daughter close, tried to push the sick feeling of that image away, but the harder she pushed the more other feelings came to join it: the humiliating powerlessness she felt when her starship was impounded for the day. The ache she felt for the community that she and Devin lost when the Jedi AgriCorps was destroyed by the new Empire. The envy she felt for a woman like Mira Bridger who had a child and yet was doing something that made a difference for other people.

Shie shook her head hard and forced herself to think of something positive. What came to mind was the faces around the dinner table that night on Lothal. They were the kind of people she wanted around her, the kind of people she wanted to be. As she felt the weight of her daughter in her arms and watched the pale dawn dissolve the night, Shie made up her mind: no matter what Devin said, she was not going to just sit back and do nothing. What she would do, she didn't know yet, but whatever it was, it would be more than nothing.