Welcome to Chapter 29! Many thanks to fanfiction author Sensey for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

Chapter 29: Devin's Fight

14 BBY 0 months 8 - 7 Days

Devin woke to the same fantasy that was running through his head when he fell asleep: he was back on Iwaki by the creekside, and Ry Kyver sat there, yellow-eyed and clad in black. He could feel the weight of his blaster in his hand, feel its smooth handle against his palm, feel the tension against his finger as he pulled the trigger, but this time Ava Kirrin didn't stop him. He couldn't. Devin fired that blaster into Ry Kyver again and again until the air reeked of singed flesh and her blood was burned black against the rocks and her bones were shattered fragments scattered on the stony creekside and then and only then did he holster his blaster, feeling very, very good about what he had just done.

When this was done, his mind looped back to the beginning, standing there by the creekside, again and again until...

Enh! Enh! Enh! All of Devin's muscles jerked as the alarm went off. Why wasn't Shie turning it off?

Devin rolled over and found the space beside him on the bed empty. Shie was already up and gone for the day. But then why was the house quiet? Weren't the kids awake yet? He had some vague memory of waking up earlier, Siri screaming, Shie getting up to feed her. Was Siri still asleep then? What about Jonah?

There was a patter of feet outside the door and the sound of a chair being dragged across the floor. Devin groaned, slapped the alarm button off, and sat on the side of the bed holding his head in his hands. If he could only get through this day and go back to bed again, he would be a happy man.

But in the meantime, things outside his door were far too quiet. He pulled on a shirt and a pair of pants and went out into the hallway, where he could hear little munching noises coming from the kitchen.

When Devin reached the kitchen doorway, Jonah looked up in horror. He was standing on the counter, eating crackers out of a white-and-yellow box. The way he looked at his dad, Devin knew that Jonah knew that he shouldn't be doing that.

"Jonah, get down from there now," Devin said and took a step towards him.

Jonah scrambled to get down, climbing backwards down onto the chair he'd used to get up, but his foot missed and he fell with a dull crack as his head hit the floor. His face crumpled into a red, teary mess as he started wailing. In the next room, Siri woke up and started wailing too.

"Now look what you've done!" Devin snapped and pulled Jonah to his feet. "Let me look at that!" he said, and tried to examine the bump on Jonah's head but his son pulled away and ran into his bedroom. "Jonah, come back here!" Devin said sharply and was about to go after him when the doorbell rang.

Cursing under his breath, Devin slid the door open.

There on the doorstep stood Garth, no longer wearing that bandana but still sporting an ugly welt across one side of his forehead.

"I thought you were in Bulkley," Devin said. He didn't want Garth to have the chance to ask about what had happened with the trip to Iwaki.

"I was," Garth said, "but I got to ask a favour of you. Can I borrow that laser auger you've got in the barn?"

"What for?" Devin asked, and stepped outside, oblivious to the cold spring air, sliding the door shut behind him to keep the warmth in the house.

"It works better if we bore holes to plant the charges. Damn thing we were using broke on us."

Devin scowled and folded his arms across his chest. He didn't want his tools being used to blow up a government project, whether he agreed with the dam being built on Nechako's biggest river or not. "No," he said.

"C'mon, I really need it. I'll have it back to you by the end of the week."

"No," Devin said, more forcefully this time, "I'm not helping you commit terrorism."

"The dam's an Imperial project. They're the terrorists here." Garth's voice came out rough and low.

"That's not my problem."

"Damn well it is!"

"No, it's not."

"It damn well is your fricking problem!" Garth shot back. "You're a fricking Jedi!" His fist caught Devin square in the jaw.

Devin stumbled back against the door. Catching himself, he narrowed his eyes at Garth, who stood there glaring, fists balled up at his sides. He brought the cuff of his blue plaid sleeve up to the trickle at the corner of his lip and brought it away with a big splotch of red.

Under normal circumstances, Devin would have kept his cool. Under normal circumstances, he would have talked his way out of this and left Garth to cool down on his own. But having the miracle of a Jedi survivor show up on his doorstep only to find her dead in the forest days later while Ava Kirrin let her killer go free was not normal circumstances.

Devin lunged at Garth, dodging a second punch, and knocked his friend to the ground, going down with him. The two grappled on the wet spring grass, wrestling, gripping, punching.

Garth was no stranger to a bar-room brawl, but Devin had no less than twenty years of Jedi training behind him. He found himself panting, pinning Garth to the ground with his knees and elbow, one hand at his friend's throat.

"I win," he said grimly.

Garth groaned. "Sure, you win," he said and got up stiffly when Devin released him. He walked backwards a few paces, enough to be out of range of Devin's fists. "You win," he said again and wiped his bloody nose on his sleeve. "You're the biggest damned loser I ever met."

Garth turned and walked quickly, if awkwardly, favouring one leg, back to his starship. Devin watched him go, dimly aware that in the house, Siri was still wailing. He turned to go back inside.

There at the window was Jonah, nose pressed to his bedroom window, watching wide-eyed. He had seen everything. When he caught his dad looking at him, he disappeared, leaving the curtain swinging behind him.

That little brat! I'll bash his...the violence of what flashed through Devin's mind hit him harder than the whoosh of pressure from Garth's starship as it took off. He gulped a breath of the cool spring air and sat down on the cold doorstep and buried his face in his hands, asking himself how in all the galaxy he got like this.

In the picture of himself that he carried around in his head, Devin was a good guy. He might not be a Jedi knight with a shining light-sabre, but he had the Force and knew how to use it and when he did, sick animals got better and farmers got to watch their hard work pay off after all. He was no Yoda, but the Devin in Devin's mind was pretty grounded. He meditated and read the Jedi texts, or at least he used to. He was a good guy, friendly, helpful, considerate. That's what he had thought anyways, not some jerk who smashed his friend's nose in and yelled as his kid. So what happened?

The pale spring sunlight didn't exactly warm Devin but when he looked up, it did help clear his head. He realized now that he couldn't actually remember the last time he'd done anything for anyone outside the bubble of his own little family. Taking Eo to Iwaki had seemed like a nice thing to do at the time, but he didn't want to think about that now. And as for meditation, between being busy and that slow simmering anger at everything that had gone wrong since that day he heard what happened to the Jedi, he began to think it might well be a solid four years since he'd so much as sat for five minutes with any intention of centring himself.

The wind whistled softly in Devin's ears and brushed across his face. Inside the house was quiet. Perhaps Siri had cried herself to sleep, but her diaper probably needed changing and who knew what Jonah was up to. Breakfast needed making and there were chores to deal with in the barn and...

Devin took a deep breath and stood up. He couldn't exactly go around using his old Agri-Corps skills to help his neighbours, but meditation, that was something he could quietly start doing again, somehow.

Back in the house, Devin started a pot of porridge on the stove and rolled up his sleeves to tackle last night's dishes, then had an idea. He took out some inu meat to defrost for dinner, not the soup bones and such that his family usually ate, but one of the cuts he usually reserved for selling.

By the time Shie came home that night, the floor was clean and the table was set and Jonah was quietly playing in the living room. The air in the house was filled with the aroma of the roast he pulled from the oven. He greeted his wife at the door with a kiss.

"I'm sorry about last night," he said.

Shie looked a bit surprised. "Oh, thanks," she said, and Devin realized it was going to take a while to fix what he needed to fix with her as well as with Jonah, but he took it in stride. After the kids were in bed, he suggested that they read to each other. They used to do that, and he was glad when she seemed happy. But he didn't suggest they make love that night and was glad when she said made no move in that direction either. He needed his mind to be clear for what he had planned for later.

After Shie was in bed and the house was quiet, Devin padded softly into the living room, barefoot. The house was dark now, but two of Nechako's three moons shone through the skylight, casting separate but overlapping patches of light on the floor, one yellow-white, the other pale blue.

Devin went and sat down cross-legged where the two patches met. He began first just to breathe, to feel the feel of his body: his bum pressed against the floor, his forearms resting on his knees, his breath rising and falling in his chest. One thing stood between him and his meditation, though: Ry Kyver. The hate he felt for her was just. She didn't deserve for him to let it go.

But alongside that hate, Devin now felt a sense of urgency. If he didn't seize this moment now, now while he had the will to do so, he might never come back to himself. He might always just be that guy who flew off the handle and yelled at his kids and bit by bit pushed his wife away from him. And not only that, something he couldn't name seemed to press him, warning him not to miss what the chance he had now.

Devin sighed. Ry Kyver didn't deserve to be let go. But hate too was an attachment, coming back to himself meant coming back, as much as he could, to the way of the Jedi: to dispassion, to detachment, if not detachment from his family, detachment to all the other unnecessary attachments to things and feelings that were always grabbing at him. He knew all too well that this wouldn't be a one-and-done kind of choice, but he also knew that the first round of letting go had to start somewhere, and somewhere might as well be now.

And so, Devin let go. He closed his eyes to the moonlit couch and the toys on the floor and let his breath alone mark the time. Without seeing, he found one of Jonah's building blocks lying around and brought it to float before him, a few centimetres off the floor. It was not so much that he wanted to practice levitation in itself, but rather it was an act of focus, the discipline of being aware only of that one block hanging the space of that one moment until he felt the edges of his being soften and the boundaries of self and non-self dissolve away.

With the borders of skin and walls gone, Devin could feel the inu out in the field, backs hunched against the wind, never sleeping, always grazing the new growth of grass that pushed up through the dry thatch of the former year. He could feel, no he was those grasses, their resolute patience, their determination, the hardening of their collective will: however much they were eaten down, they would rise yet again. He was one with the land, with night-owl that glided along the wind, and yes, with Shie and Jonah and Siri all sleeping quietly. He sensed all the epic struggle of life around him accepted it as it was, grounded within himself.

When Devin opened his eyes and once again felt the weight of his body against the floor and saw the chronometer glowing with big red digits above the couch, only half an hour had passed, but Devin felt completely different. It was as if something had clicked into place and aligned, as if muddled water had become clear and still. He breathed one last deep breath and then got up.

His bare feet padded along the old carpet as he walked out of the living room. He was a few steps from the hall when he first felt it: it felt the way the barn cats looked when they arched their backs and all their hair stood on end. It was cold panic rising in his neck, fear that threatened to sweep him away in its flood. He glanced behind him and could have sworn that one of the moon-patched darkened for a moment, too big and too swift to have been a passing night-owl. He walked quickly and quietly back to the living room window and lifted a slat of the dusty blinds with one finger, but outside he saw only empty prairie, black and silver in the moonlight.

But seeing nothing didn't mean nothing was there. The Sith ruled the galaxy now. That much he knew. Was this the presence of a Sith lord that he felt? Devin swallowed. Back in the bedroom, Master Lu's old light-sabre was in the bottom drawer of his dresser, carefully wrapped in a blue bandana. But even at the height of his skill, he wouldn't have known how to wield it. Even at his best, whatever dark power was out there would find no threat in his strength.

Devin forced himself to breathe, breathe, breathe his way beyond the fear. He needed power beyond his own. With his hands and with his mind, he reached out around him to find it.

No two Jedi experience the Force exactly the same way. Yoda might have found in the Force around him a sense of transcendent calm, the clarity in which to see the one small thing that would tip that balance of that moment. Others might have found the mind of their unseen foe and quietly turned it away from them. But as Devin reached out, the power that met him was in no way separable from the land itself. The power he sensed as he reached out was the power of the prairie, a nation of grass millions upon millions strong, exulting in their strength as they thrust green spears up into the night and reached white roots down into the crust of the planet below them, standing unshakable, bent at times but never broken.

To that power, Devin reached out and drew it around him, around him and his family.

Outside, maybe three hundred metres from the house, the wind whipped a woman's long dark hair out behind her. She wore dark grey armour bearing a white crest of six gear-teeth. She looked human, perhaps, or Mirialian maybe, or Pantoran. The eyes that blinked in the stinging wind were too yellow now to mark what colour they may once have been, and her skin, though it prickled in the cold, was too grey now to ever again tell what colour it had been when she was born.

If you asked her name, she would only say: I am the Third Sister. The name she had, the life she had, before the Sith Lord took her and re-made her, those were lost to her now, and she knew only I am the Third Sister. The third of how many under Lord Vader's command, even she did not know.

She came to Nechako with a knowing beyond knowing that she would find one of those she sought there. That was the only life she knew now: to seek and destroy what remained of the Jedi, to take captive the young and adept who might be bent to her master's will.

She was not often wrong, and this time, she was so sure that she had seen it from the air: the little domed house on the prairie, gleaming in the light of the planet's three moons. Yet when she landed her starcraft, there was nothing. Only grass rippling in the wind, silvered by the moonlight, on and on endlessly to the horizon. The wind tore at her hair and hissed in her ears, mocking her: whatever she thought she had seen, whatever she thought she had sensed, she was completely wrong. The only sign of civilized life was one red light high in the air on the horizon, blinking like an accusing eye, and that she knew was the beacon on the regional communications tower.

Another rustling in the grass, not of the wind, caught her ears, and with it she heard the grinding of flat teeth and the soft lowing of some beast of cattle-kind grazing there. Thirty metres or so away, one of the herd lifted its shaggy head, big dark eyes shining in the moonlight.

She reached behind her back and drew out the circular hilt of her light-sabre. The sound of the double-blade igniting tore the air, and the cattle moved uneasily. Lifting the glowing red blade high above her, she set it to spin and then let it fly like the wings of a helicopter. Something would die tonight, if not a Jedi.

The blade flew through the air like a boomerang. The cattle fled together when the first beast to fall cried out in pain, but the blade was too swift for them. Another one, three, six of them fell, bellowing in pain, except for those whose heads and lungs were severed.

The Inquisitor reached out her hand, and the blade came flying back to her. She re-sheathed it and glared out across the prairie. The wind howled angrily at her but it could do her no harm. She turned to go. A little unit like a tiny helicopter flew past her. Her light-sabre flashed again, and the field monitor drone disintegrated in a thousand sparks.

Her work was not done. She would be back.

Early the next morning, Devin stood shivering in the lush spring grass, too plain scared to feel angry.

It would have been fascinating if it wasn't so macabre, like something out of a demented biology textbook: one inu with her unborn fetus in near-perfect cross-section, another cloven through the head as if to illustrate the lobed structure of the inu brain. Yet another, still alive, moaned and rolled her distended eyes as she flailed stumps of legs that had literally been cut out from under her.

When Devin finally managed to unfreeze himself, he drew his blaster and ended her misery with one clean shot between the eyes. Putting down livestock he couldn't heal was just part of his job, one last kindness to offer an animal, but all the same, as Devin aimed and fired the gun his hands felt foreign to him, like droid hands controlled by a pre-programmed mind.

He put the blaster back in its holster and ran a hand through his hair. Only one weapon could cut that clean and leave wounds that didn't bleed. Only one sort of wielder would wield that weapon so as to do this.

"These are light-sabre cuts," Aggie said, sounding scared. Devin had almost forgotten that she was standing there beside him.

"Yes," Devin said. That was all he could say.

Aggie flagged down a field monitor drone. The little helicopter-like automaton came to her hand like a bird, and she reached into a compartment in her belly to attach a data-transfer cord to the unit.

"A starship landed here last night," Aggie said as she disconnected the cord and let the drone fly away. "Over there," she pointed towards the rising sun, but there was only the same grass as everywhere else.

"Did the drones pick up anything else?"

"Not this one, but Unit 4 is missing. That might be it there," Aggie said and pointed to the scattered mechanical bits lying on the ground a few meters away. In the midst of the other carnage, Devin hadn't noticed it at first.

Aggie walked over and examined the remains of the drone. "The memory card is shattered," she said, "but it's possible some information might have been transferred to the main computer beforehand."

Devin looked around at the dead inu and sighed. "Well, let's go then," he said. As they turned and walked back towards the barn, broad dark wings passed low over Devin's head. He looked up and then back over his shoulder to see a huge vulture, black with a red head, land on one of the carcasses. He wasn't squeamish about that sort of thing, but this time he turned away and kept walking quickly. Somehow, he didn't have the stomach to watch carrion fowl gorge themselves on this one.

In the barn, Aggie went to the bulky main computer and pulled up information sent from drone Unit 4. In the grainy holo-vid, with images of infra-red and visual-spectrum data overlaid, Devin watched a slender humanoid figure draw a red light-sabre, not the single blade to which he was accustomed, but a double-blade. He felt his stomach in his throat as the little figure made the blade fly through the air like a helicopter, striking down inu as it flew.

When the video ended with the light-sabre raised to strike the viewer, Devin almost raised his arm to ward off the blow, but then he replayed the final seconds of the recording to study the assailant's face. It looked like a human, a woman as far as he could tell, but pale-eyed in a way that made him think of Ry Kyver sitting there by the creekside on Iwaki. The shape of the face in the video, however, revealed a very different person, one he didn't recognize.

Standing there in the barn with the familiar smells of hay and manure around him, normal felt surreal now. Nechako had always seemed so plain and boring and more or less safe. Now Sith had walked here. What was it like to face a Sith? Devin felt sick and shaky just thinking about it. He'd never had to do anything like that. As a member of the Agri-Corps, it wasn't even part of his training. That was the realm of Jedi Knights, and they were all gone now.

Eo, he realized now, had faced a Sith, or an underling of theirs at least, in the form of Ry Kyver. If only Eo had stayed on Hokto, he thought, she would have been safe there. He envied her for all those blissful years on Hokto, not knowing what had happened to the galaxy around her.

Hokto. An idea flashed into Devin's mind, as sudden and spectacular as a bolt of lightning: he was not alone in all the galaxy. There was at least one Jedi Knight left alive. She would know what to do with this menace. Her name was Varda Wahi.

Devin opened his mouth to say something to Aggie, then shut it again fast. There was one big problem: he didn't know where Varda was. In the Hokto system, yes, but there were at least a dozen habitable planetoids in the mess of the debris field there. The exact coordinates of the exact planet would have been in the ship's log, but Eo had erased that when she arrived on Nechako as per Varda's request. Devin knew. When Eo wasn't looking he had checked the ship's computer, even the discarded files directory.

And with that thought, Devin realized there was one thing he could still try. "Aggie, do you know any way to recover deleted files from a computer?"

Aggie tilted her expressionless mechanical face to one side, considering. "Data recovery is not my primary function, but I might be of some assistance. Are files missing from the computer?"

Devin looked at the big bulky computer unit that housed the farm's information systems. "No," he said, "I was thinking about the computer onboard the starship that Eo gave us."

"Oh that," Aggie said, sounding relieved. "You don't need to worry about data loss from that computer."

"Why not?"

"The nav-droid backs everything up periodically."

"The nav-droid? You mean CX24?" Devin looked behind him at the pile of garbage awaiting disposal in the corner of the barn. Shie refused to use a nav-droid that had crash-landed a ship more than once and Devin had deposited the droid there in the garbage pile, after a rather frustrating attempt to coax any other use out of it.

"Yes," Aggie said, with pride and reproach both evident in her voice. "You shouldn't throw that droid out. She was made by my maker, Astvan Virk. He was a genius."

Devin winced. For him, the name Astvan Virk was synonymous with scandal. Astvan and Devin had been clan-mates back in the Jedi Temple, and while Devin had been assigned to the Agri-Corps for lack of knightly skill, Astvan was relegated to the Jedi Order's agricultural ranks for having a rebellious streak ten kilometres wide. And so in their teenage years, while Devin applied himself to learning animal science and Force-assisted veterinary technique, Astvan used his Force skills to win at the local gambling parlors and played with inventing new kinds of droids. When Astvan was finally kicked out of the Order, purportedly for taking funds from an Agri-Corps account to set up his new droid venture after he was barred from the gambling establishments, Devin was dimly aware that this was only an excuse for some deeper thing that the Jedi Council wasn't happy with.

"I'm not sure Virk..." Devin trailed off. Telling a droid that her maker wasn't all he'd taught her to think he was didn't seem like an argument he needed to get into right now. "Are you sure that droid had the starship's computer backed up? Could you pull up the ship's log for me?"

Aggie nodded and walked over to the scrap heap. She gently, almost reverently, uncovered the boxy little nav-droid and pressed the button on top of its head to wake it up. She took the data-transfer cord out of her belly again and connected to the little droid, then led it over to Devin. She sighed and shook her head.

"CX24 didn't want to leave Hokto, but she says they forced her to come here."

Devin raised an eyebrow. Droid's weren't supposed to want things that badly. "But does she have the ship's log?"

"Yes," Aggie said, a bit defensively. "But she's very scared, so it will take a minute."

Devin watched Aggie commune silently with the little nav-droid, reaching down a mechanical hand to stroke the round top of CX24's head.

"She says she'll only tell you the coordinates if you promise not to throw her out and not to sell her either."

Devin scowled. He didn't really want a nav-droid that couldn't navigate messing around on his farm. "Until I know the coordinates, I don't even know if we can get through the debris field or not," he said.

"She says there is still a small gap, enough for a very good pilot to get through. She has maps of the debris field inside her."

"OK, OK, I promise!" Devin said. Anything to get on with this and get the Jedi help he needed.

The round, domed head atop CX24's boxy body lit up and began to spin. For a minute Devin just stood there, half mesmerized and half incredulous at this whirring little monstrosity.

"Here it is now," Aggie said at last, and CX24 projected a holo-image of the Hokto system, highlighting one tiny planetoid among the many asteroids and planetoids circling the system's bright white star. In a tight little string of tiny Basic characters, a set of co-ordinates indicated the position from which the ship had taken off. Devin quickly copied them into the farm computer, just in case.

"Thank you, Aggie, and thank you, CX24," he said and gave the two droids a slight bow.

Devin's hands moved quickly to the comm system beside the computer. There was only one pilot he knew who could fly well enough to get him through the tight maze of interplanetary debris that blocked a direct approach to the planet where Eo had stayed. He entered the digits for the contact code quickly, before he could change his mind. He took a deep breath and forced himself not to tense up as a gruff voice answered: "What do you want?"

"Garth, I just wanted to say I'm really sorry about yesterday," Devin said. He really tried to sound confident as well as humble and conciliatory, but it all came out in a big rush.

"Either you want something from me or you're the biggest damned flake I ever met." Garth's voice had a gruff edge to it, even more than what Devin had noticed when he came by the day before.

Devin sighed and tried to master himself. "I need your help," he said. "You know how Eo said there was an older lady who took care of her when she was in the Hokto system? I need you to help me fly in there and get her out."

"What, the kid wants to see her mama again?"

"No, Eo is dead," Devin said grimly. Something in Garth's tone of voice made him mad enough to forget to not say this.

"What?!"

"Let's just say we ran into you know who."

"Oh," Garth said quietly, and there was a silence.

Devin decided to press his advantage. "I need to get the old lady out while there's still an opening in the debris field. She's the only..." Devin trailed off, wondering how to say "Jedi" without saying "Jedi" over an unencrypted connection. "She's the only person who can help me with a certain...special situation that's come up."

On the other end of the line, Garth remained silent. Devin knew that Garth knew enough to put two and two together from what he was saying. He knew Garth knew that Varda was a Jedi. Devin silently willed him not only to understand, but to cooperate.

"I'll tell you what," Garth said at last. "We'll make a deal. You bring me that laser auger. I'll help you get the old lady."

It was Devin's turn to be quiet.

"Well, you want to get her, or don't you?"

Devin looked at the laser auger leaning against the wall of the barn. He looked out the dusty barn window at the slowly swirling cloud of dark specks that he knew were carrion birds flocking to the carcasses out in the field.

"I'll be there by tonight," he said.

Devin lay belly-down on top of the dam, muscles wire-tight, watching the lighted barracks on the far side of the canyon like a hawk. He would have been cold, lying there in the dark on the permaplast of the two-hundred-metre high dam, if not for the fleece-lined leather jacket he'd borrowed from one of the guys in Garth's gang. It smelled of another man's sweat, but at least it was warm.

Before him lay the whole hundred kilometres of the upper Bulkley Valley, hidden from him now in the night, but a few homes that hadn't been evacuated yet still had lights on. And the barracks where the construction workers for the dam and a few Imperial patrol troops were stationed was lit, but quiet. In another month, when the weather warmed up enough to melt the ice and snow on the mountains that blocked out the stars at the far end of the valley, the river would swell to ten times its present gentle flow, the sluice gate would be closed and the whole valley would fill with water. Then the hydro-electric turbines behind Devin, at the bottom of the dam, would grind into action, and hundreds of kilometres of electrical cable would carry the power back up into the mountains to charge up the equipment that would grind up all of Nechako Ridge for the aluminum ore long hidden there.

At least, that was the plan of the people in the barracks, which Devin was keeping an eye on. The whole reason Devin watched there in the dark was that behind him, at the bottom of the dam, Garth and ten other guys were planting charges to blow the dam up tonight.

It wasn't supposed to have been like this. He only agreed to bring the laser-auger they were using to get the charges deeper in the permaplast structure, where they could do more serious damage. But when Devin saw how close the dam was to the barracks and realized that an Imperial patrol was stationed there, he agreed to help by standing watch. After all, if Garth got himself killed or caught, there was no way Garth could help Devin get Varda, and if he didn't get Varda...

Devin had showed Shie the recording of the Sith-ling slaying the inu, and showed her the carcasses out in the field. When she saw those, she was quiet for a long time, and finally then said it was OK if he and Garth went to get Varda from Hokto. Before he showed her the evidence of the Sith visit, she was irate that he even suggested such a dangerous trip. "You could get yourself killed!" she kept telling him. But seeing the reality of that darksider proved more frightening to her than the treachery of the Hokto system debris field, and so she conceded. Devin didn't tell her, though, that he was lending Garth the laser-auger, much less why Garth wanted it. He only told her that he would meet Garth down in Bulkley, then head to Hokto and come back, if at all possible, with Varda.

Devin held onto that thought, that he would bring Varda back with him, as he listened to the heavy rush of water passing through the open portal in the dam, and watched, and waited. It was a few hours before midnight now, with a few stars showing in a mostly cloudy sky, with a slight breeze bringing the cold of the mountains down the valley. The barracks was quiet, no one moving, but something didn't feel quite right to Devin. It was that feeling, deeper even than a gut feeling, that twenty-plus years of Jedi training had honed in him, and this time, that feeling told him to be uneasy at best.

No one could see him there on top of the dam in the dark, much less hear him over the rush of the water, but Devin was still careful to keep his movements small and quiet as he answered the beep of his comm.

"How we doing there?" Garth asked, much friendlier now that Devin was cooperating.

"The barracks is quiet, but I've got a bad feeling about this. You guys might want to be ready to pull out."

"Hang one sec," Garth said, and Devin could hear Garth's muffled voice say something to someone else nearby.

"Pull out? What do you mean, pull out? We're almost done?" the other man's voice was muffled by its distance from Garth's comm, but it spoke loudly enough for Devin to hear the words and know this to be the voice of Saw Gerrera, the leader of the gang, whom he'd met earlier that evening.

"I hear you," Garth said, back at the comm, his voice sounding clear now. "But the boss wants us to push forward, so keep me posted, K?"

"Right," Devin said, a bit sarcastic, and closed the connection. Why post a watchman if you aren't going to listen to him?

Devin ran his fingers along the rough permaplast in front of him and waited. Through the Force he was dimly aware of the movements of the guys behind and below him at the base of the dam. There were about ten guys all working away down there, making their way across the kilometres-long breadth of the dam. He knew none of them except Garth, but from the way they talked, about half seemed to be ranchers, angry that the flooding of the valley would push them out of their homes. The other half seemed, like Saw, to be one-time soldiers, now turned roving thugs and rebels.

Over at the barracks on the far side of the canyon, light spilled out as a door opened and Devin saw one, two, three, four little figures exit. The door closed then, and Devin saw nothing until the headlights on a speeder lit up and started moving towards the dam. Devin clicked his comm back on.

"You got a patrol car heading your way. Now's a good time to lay low for a while."

"Roger that. Saw says we're almost done."

Devin watched as the lights of the speeder coursed through the darkness. "They'll be on you in a couple minutes. I'll head back to the ship and be ready to pick you guys up."

Devin didn't wait for an answer before he flicked his comm off. He wasn't about to wait for Saw to give the OK, not if waiting meant getting caught and leaving Shie and Jonah and Siri to face that darksider on their own, not if waiting meant Garth might be out of the picture within three hundred seconds or so.

That thought made every second precious. Devin was no Jedi knight, but with the Force he could run just a little faster and jump just a little farther than a normal guy could, and he sprinted with lightning speed up along the top of the dam and up the embankment beside it, then dove through the open door of the starship.

He somersaulted to break the impact and came up just behind the cockpit. That's when the stench hit him like a week's worth of dirty socks.

"Hey, what are you doing here?" a deep and scratchy voice demanded of him.

He turned to see the hulk of a two-metre tall Lasat with bulging yellow-green eyes and a 75 cm long turbo-blaster.

"We've got a patrol car coming from the barracks. It's time to pull out of here," Devin said, trying to catch his breath.

"Saw didn't say nothing about it." The Lasat blocked Devin's path to the cockpit.

"Saw's busy setting the last of the charges," Devin said. "We have to move."

At that moment, the Lasat's comm beeped. He answered. The voice was Saw.

"Baz, fire up the ship and get us out of here pronto!" There was the sound of blaster fire in the background and over the comm, Saw swore.

"Right, boss," the Lasat said and motioned with his thumb to the cockpit. "You get the helm, I'll get the guns," he told Devin.

Devin wasted no time powering up the engine and swinging the starship around and down to the base of the dam. Blaster-fire flashing back and forth told him there was no need now for secrecy. He got the blast shield up then turned on the floodlights so he could see the guys he was supposed to be picking up. He watched one of them fall and hoped it wasn't Garth.

With the blast shield around him rippling with each impact of enemy fire, Devin brought the ship to rest briefly at the base of the dam and opened the portal. Booted feet pounded up the gangway and soon the ship was filled with the sound and smell of seven or eight sweating, panting men.

"Good job," a voice said beside Devin. It was Garth.

"Buddy, am I ever glad to see you!" Devin said, and traded places with him for the pilot's seat. The shield quivered and gave way for a moment. In that gap blaster fire from the Imperials rocked the ship, but Garth had them up and away quickly.

"Hey Baz, drop the payload!" Devin heard Saw yell.

As they sped up and over the dam, a series of explosions shattered the air and the men in the ship cheered. Devin, still with Garth in the cockpit, pulled up the rear view on the computer console. The dam collapsed in a roar, with a cloud of dust and fire red against the night, as bombs from above and charges from beneath went off simultaneously. He had to admit, watching the dam explode did feel pretty good. The lights from the barracks were in front of them, then beneath them. Another explosion went off.

"What?" Devin said, and peered into the computer screen again. It was hard to make out in the dark, but what he saw looked like the barracks being blasted to pieces. He knew families in Moosachu whose twenty-year-old sons and daughters worked out of that barracks and sent money home every month.

Devin turned to Garth. "I thought you said no civilian casualties," Devin said to Garth.

"That's what I thought too," Garth said quietly.

Devin looked ahead. In the dark, the lights of the next work camp came into view. "How'd you feel about disabling the munitions drop?" he said to Garth.

Garth neither nodded nor answered, but flicked a series of switches on the dashboard just before they flew over the second work camp.

"Karavast!" Devin heard the Lasat yell. "Turn the ship around, the bomb drop ain't working. We still gotta blast that damn work camp!"

Garth did not turn the ship around.

"You heard him!" Saw yelled, coming up behind the cockpit, "Turn the ship around!"

"I thought you said no civilian casualties," Devin said quietly.

"There are no civilians!" Saw shot back. "You work for the Empire, you're not a civilian! Now turn the ship around!"

"I don't think that's a good idea," Devin said.

If Jedi training had taught Devin anything, this was it: he dodged Saw's first punch and flowed with the second, landing against the wall of the cockpit with only a trickle of blood on his lip. Saw stood there, blue eyes glaring, looking like he was ready to break some bones. It would have felt so good to hit a guy like Saw back, but Devin put his hands up. "Look Saw, you're right. The Empire's evil. There's no middle ground. You're either for it or you're against it."

"You better remember that!" Saw spat. "Now turn the ship around!"

"Um, boss, we've got incoming." Garth pointed ahead of him. Three TIE fighters, likely from the Imperial air base down in the city, Devin thought, were angling towards them and firing. Saw swore a blue streak, and Garth did the one thing that he could do: he made a leap to hyperspace.

Devin kept a dour face. There was no point getting Saw's back up again. But inside, Devin was cheering. Thanks to those TIE fighters, Saw didn't have his way after all. The people in that second work camp were safe. Then all at once Devin felt sick: the TIE fighters he'd been cheering for, they were the Empire.

Garth dropped Saw and the rest of the guys off at a massive space-station known as the Wheel, where Saw had plans to meet up with some other contacts for his next strike. It was only an hour or so away, but the whole trip there was tense and neither Garth nor Devin said much.

When the other guys were gone, Garth turned to Devin, who was sitting beside him in the cockpit.

"You OK?" he asked.

Devin touched his swollen lip. The bleeding had stopped. "I'll live. Nothing that hasn't happened before," he said with a smile, and then winked.

Garth laughed. "Right! So, let's go get that old lady!" he said, and the two set off to find Varda.