FIVE

Carth dug through the piles of hyperspace engine manifolds, looking for one he could fit into the Hawk's engine. It was a good-sized scrap yard, and well organized, but it didn't seem to have many Republic-compatible engine parts. They'd been out in the piles for two hours now, and Carth was beginning to think they might have to give up and buy something new.

Pellek was sitting on a pile of engine casings, looking bored and hot. She occasionally pushed her hair off her forehead and muttered something to the air next to her. Just when Carth was about to shut down the search, she pointed to the back of the pile and called, "Isn't that what you're looking for?"

Carth looked where she indicated and saw the manifold, like it had just been waiting for him to find it. He tugged it out of the stack and was rewarded by the hissing of a displaced rodent. Carth examined the manifold carefully and found it to be in relatively good shape. It would work. He put it in his pack and walked over to collect Pellek. "I thought you said you didn't know anything about engines."

She smiled like he'd said something funny. "I don't, believe me," she said enigmatically.

Carth clenched his jaw and slowly counted to ten. He'd had just about enough of vague Jedi glances, cryptic sayings, and knowing nods. He was too old for all of them to be treating him like a slightly dim child, someone to be protected from the frightening realities of the world. "Then tell me, Master Jedi," he said a tight voice, "how you knew that the Ebon Hawk required a Mark 1720 Titancore Hyperdrive Manifold." If she'd been digging around in his head, he wasn't sure he could be responsible for his actions.

She must have seen something in his expression, because she flushed. "You're right. I'll explain on the way back." They started back toward town. "You remember that I had a crew with me when we came back to Citadel Station? Well, some of them were Force Sensitive—actually, all of them were, except for Mandalore."

Carth smiled briefly at the thought of Canderous wielding anything as delicate as a lightsaber. "Three of your crew were lost on Malachor," he prompted.

She looked sharply at him. "Keeping track of me, Admiral?" She acknowledged his shrugged assent with a nod. "Of course you were. Yes, the three who followed me to the Core died. I couldn't save them." Her voice was stripped of emotion, a tone Carth knew well.

"Sometimes you can't," he said quietly.

They entered the center of town. Two and three story buildings lined the streets, shops and offices interspersed with homes and apartments. A mix of residents and off-worlders passed them without comment, though Carth still felt conspicuous as the only Humans. Pellek didn't seem to notice.

"I should have been able to save them," she continued. "But I had taught two of them—Atton Rand and Bao-Dur—to touch the Force. They appear to me sometimes as ghosts, Atton more than Bao-Dur." Pellek smiled thinly. "Sometimes they're even helpful."

Carth tried not to show his distaste. It figured that Jedi didn't even have the decency to die like normal sentients. "What about your third companion? The bounty hunter—is she a ghost, too?"

Pellek's jaw tightened. "Mira was Sensitive, probably more than Bao-Dur. But she wouldn't let me train her. She said it would unbalance our relationship for her to be my student. She said she would talk to Master Vrook about learning the Force after we finished our quest." Her voice dropped to barely a whisper. "She said she would stay on the ship."

Carth was a little surprised about the pairing. Mira had seemed almost a caricature of a bounty hunter's dream girl, with her revealing clothing and flirtatious manner. But he'd been wrong about women before, and the Exile was an attractive woman herself.

Pellek smiled at his expression. "Atton was terribly disappointed when she told him that she didn't like men." Her smile faded. "She died. Kreia killed her because she knew that I loved her. She killed them all. And because Mira wasn't trained as a Jedi, she'll never come back to me through the Force. She's just—gone."

Carth wanted to be angry with her. After all, regular sentients didn't get to see their loved ones again after they died, and there was a time he would have given anything—anything—to have that privilege. He couldn't quite muster sympathy for a Jedi having to muddle through life like the rest of the Galaxy. But then he looked at Pellek's expressionless face and understood why she'd spent the last year trolling the Rim for booze and warm beds. He recognized the hollowness in her eyes.

Carth squeezed her shoulder once. "I'm sorry."

She nodded, and they continued out of town.

Pellek was a little mortified that she'd opened up so completely to the Admiral. She certainly hadn't intended to spew out her sorrow like that, and for one terrible moment, she actually thought that she might cry. Fortunately, Carth hadn't offered any overt sympathy, just a quiet understanding. She didn't know much about him, but she knew he was from Telos. He understood loss.

They were approaching the end of the town's business district, and so far, no one had bothered them or even said hello. The aliens they passed looked at the ground when they walked by. Pellek wondered if it was just them, or if it was the local culture to avoid eye contact. To avoid appearing rude, she stopped watching the sentients and looked at the colorful posters on the sides of the buildings.

The posters looked like public warnings of some kind, like the sort she remembered from Corellia about not littering on the street or driving a speeder too slowly. She couldn't read the writing on the posters but they seemed to show aliens in different states of action. In one, a cloaked figure was pointing a stick at a group of other aliens with white fur. The next poster showed the same figure in a sitting position a few centimeters above the ground. Several round objects floated in the air around it. Pellek frowned at the last poster. It depicted the figure again, and for it looked for all the world like it was throwing Force Lightning at a group of blue furred aliens. She couldn't see the figure's face, but it was taller than the diminutive aliens and Human-shaped.

She glanced around her and this time noticed several aliens watching her examine the posters. She couldn't read their expressions, but she had to stop her hands from reaching for her saber hilt. Atton appeared at her elbow. "I don't like the way those look, Pel," he said in a low voice.

She glanced at him. He was still looking at the posters, his eyebrows furrowed. "You don't think those are Jedi, do you?" she asked. "They ought to be Sith—I mean, Force Lightning?"

He shrugged. "The Onasi kid throws Force Lightning, doesn't he?"

Pellek frowned. That didn't prove anything as far as she was concerned. She'd seen Dustil's yellow eyes and threatening blade. "Maybe you'd better get out of here. If any of these sents are Force Sensitive, they'll sniff you out in a second."

He nodded in agreement. "Be careful, babe. I can't get you out of jail anymore." He looked suddenly remorseful but blinked out before she could say anything.

Pellek quickened her pace to catch up to Carth, now half a block ahead.

"We need to get out of here quickly," she said in a low voice.

He looked sharply at her, hand on his blaster, then scanned the crowd. "What's going on?"

"I don't know," she replied, "but these sentients don't like Jedi." She pointed out the posters.

Carth nodded slowly. "I think you might be—"

A alarm, high-pitched and urgent, filled the streets. The aliens around them froze in place, staring upward at what looked like loudspeakers on the lightposts. A voice came from the loudspeakers, but it wasn't in Basic, and Pellek had no idea what it was saying. She could tell from the way the aliens' fur turned pale that something significant was being said. The aliens started to run into the buildings around them.

A alien stuck its head out of the building nearest them and waved them toward it urgently. It said something commanding. Carth had started to walk away when the alien said in broken Basic, "You. In. Bad out. Now."

Carth and Pellek looked at each other on the suddenly empty street. He glanced at the sky and shrugged. "It's not a tornado," he remarked, "but it could be almost anything else."

Pellek thought the short alien was going to have a fit. Its head fur was completely white, and its eyes bugged out of its head. It looked both ways, then ran out to them and grabbed Pellek's arm. "In, in, in," it said, then burst into unintelligible chatter. It tried to tug her toward the building.

Pellek glanced to Carth and nodded. Whatever was out here, it terrified the little alien, and she didn't sense any danger from him. She didn't much care to be standing out here during a freak radiation blast or something equally deadly. They followed him into the building.

Inside, the alien bolted the door securely and closed heavy shutters over the windows. It smiled at them. "Good," it said.

The room was small, like an office waiting area. There were several low benches, too close to the ground for Human comfort, and on them were seated four of the aliens, huddled together like refugees. Several stacks of datapads littered the low tables in the room, furthering the waiting-room feel. If it weren't for the palpable fear coming from all of these sentients, she would think she was waiting for a bureaucrat or the dentist.

The alien that had called them into the building disappeared into a back door and came out holding a basket of what appeared to be rolls. It held the basket out to her and Carth first, smiling. She and Carth each took one. Pellek took a bite and smiled approvingly at the alien. It was sweet and studded with some kind of chewy dried fruit. She was hungry, and it was good. "Thank you," she said. The alien nodded and served the others.

Carth was chewing on his roll absentmindedly and eyeing the barred and locked door. His hand kept dropping to his blaster and then pulling away. Pellek knew she didn't have Carth's military instincts, but she had plenty of merc ones, and she couldn't bring herself to be worried about these aliens. Their auras were soft and pale, like a child's plush toy. In contrast, Carth's aura was dark blue and jagged, like a mountain ridge. To her Force senses, he was vastly more dangerous than the sentients around them.

Pellek felt a soft touch to her arm. She looked to her left and saw an alien's wide eyes looking up at her. This one was smaller than the others, reaching barely to her elbow. "I'm Pellek," she said with a smile. "Can you tell me what's going on?"

The alien didn't smile back. It had a roll clutched tightly in its fist. "Are you a Force user, too?" it asked in surprisingly clear Basic.

Too? Pellek felt surreptitiously toward the small alien and saw the tiny spark of Sensitivity in it. Untrained, certainly, but there. It was young. She could feel the others' eyes on her and remembered the threatening posters. "Not me," she lied easily. "And not my friend, either. Why? What's wrong with the Force?"

One of the aliens let out a burst of reproachful chatter and the small alien ducked its head. "I'm Follani," it whispered, then ran back to the arms of the taller alien. Its mother, Pellek decided, seeing the alien's fierce, protective expression. It thought it had to protect its child from her.

Carth spoke up in a calm voice. "We're just a couple of travelers from the Republic down on our luck. We're not here to hurt anyone. Can anyone tell us what's happening outside?" The aliens looked at him blankly. He tried again, first in broken Huttese and then in even worse Mando'a. He looked at her and shrugged. "That's everything I know. If Case were here—" he broke off. "Do you know anything besides Basic?" he asked.

Before she could answer, Pellek felt a sudden burst of—power, was the only way to describe it. It was like a spotlight shining through the Force. She reached for it instinctively and recognized Dustil in the Force, as well as the familiar gray aura of—

"Revan," she breathed.

Carth looked at her sharply. "What did you say?" he demanded. His hand was back on his blaster.

She was spared a response by the alarms starting up again. The aliens burst into terrified chatter. The one who had let them in flipped down a computer panel and consulted a screen written in the same language as the posters outside. He announced something to the room and the chattering quieted.

Pellek felt a change in the room's atmosphere. The aliens were still afraid, but they were now—expectant, perhaps, like a collectively held breath. They were waiting for something to happen.

Follani was next to her again. "You're not as scary as they say," it whispered.

She looked at it, surprised. "As who--" she began.

The door to the room burst open and three aliens with blaster rifles charged in. Pellek called her saber to her hand without thinking and ignited it. The invading aliens' fur went pale and Pellek groaned. Stupid, stupid, stupid, she thought. She knew they were afraid of Jedi, and now here she was, the very picture of one.

Before she could extinguish her blade, though, it suddenly became heavy in her hands. The room spun nauseatingly and she found herself staring at an alien's boot, her head on the carpeted floor. She tried to raise herself up with her arms but found that she couldn't make them work. Across the room, she saw Carth drop to his knees and then to the ground, blaster falling uselessly from his hand. The rolls, she realized, feeling the now-obvious sedative pounding on her brain. This was what the aliens had been waiting for. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

The room went black.