Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars. This story is purely a work of fan fiction, and I am not making any profit from it.

Author's note: A glottal stop (for which you can find the internationally recognized symbol by googling "IPA chart"), is - as Giles of BtVS fame once said, "a gulping noise." More precisely, "stops" in linguistics refer to consonants made by closing the airway completely, just for a second: for instance, the letters t, p, and k are all "stops." (They are also all voiceless, which means the vocal chords do not vibrate while stopping the airflow.) Moving backward through the articulatory space: A p is a bilabial stop. A t is a dental stop. A k, for most people, is a velar stop. A glottal stop is the sound made by closing the airway at the glottis, just behind where you would close it to make a 'k' sound.' Some dialects of English contain this sound in the ordinary way of speaking: a number of British accents, for instance, will substitute it for the 'tt' in "bottle." And most English speakers will make it if asked to put a quick pause between two vowels. In a number of other languages, it is a recognized consonant, on a par with 'g' or 'b' or whathaveyou. And this chapter is dedicated to Dr. Christy, who will certainly never see it, but in whose class I learned all the stuff I just explained to you, however ineptly.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Ryn hit the ground, dragging Anakin with her in case the shriek of incoming fighters wasn't enough of a warning for him. All around her, warriors were diving for cover, wrapping their arms around their heads as though that would protect them from a strafing run at this range. Sometimes training overrode common sense.

She couldn't hear anything over the roar of the fighters - probably wouldn't hear anything for an hour, if she lived that long - but Anakin caught her arm and turned her to face him, lips moving, and Ryn had a pretty fair idea of his question, because she was asking it herself: what the hell?

There was no point in yelling back at him - he wouldn't be able to hear any more than she did - so Ryn just shook her head in frustration and scanned the terrain for better cover.

The problem was, there wasn't any. They had reached the tundra now, the frozen arid wastes that extended for leagues around Khalî's ancient hiding grounds, where the only things that tread the bleak landscape were her creatures. The dry hills grew scrub, pitiful thorny bushes clinging to bare dirt, but not much else. Nothing that would hide them from the keen eyes and keener sensors of Chiss fighter pilots.

The fighters were coming around for another pass and Ryn was giving the order to spread out, waving frantically at the deafened warriors, when it turned out not to matter anyway. The fighters spun in the air and dropped, setting down on the tumbled hillside.

Ryn caught Makesh's eye and signaled, and he started wrangling their forces into a semblance of order while the Chiss took their time about settling into a landing formation that spread out across the slope. By the time the Chiss had powered down, the looked a little less like a flock of panicked kitchen fowl, though still nothing like the array of warriors that had met the Chiss at Feruil Shanhion.

The Chiss climbed out of their fighters, standing ready, and Ryn stepped forward, Anakin and Evinne flanking her without needing to be asked.

"Greetings," she said slowly, about the only word she could manage in Cheunh without sounding like an asthmatic cat.

The pained look on their commander's face told her it was still a long way from perfect pronunciation. "Greetings," he returned anyway. I am Commander -" He rattled off a typically unpronounceable series of clicks and glottals. Ryn couldn't have spelled it with a whole library full of dictionaries, but she saw the bars on his collar and caught the 'nuruodo at the end, and that told her what she mostly needed to know.

"Areth'ryn Orun," she identified herself. "Commander in the Lorethan Voluntary Militia." Voluntary, my ass, she thought, and barely restrained herself from wincing over the Adept she'd never earned. "Currently Warlord to to Jedi Padawan Anakin Skywalker." She indicated Anakin with a quick gesture to her right. "And this is Lieutenant-Adept Aesin-Evinne Ardel, newly chosen Prince of her clan." She cleared her throat. It was very bad manners, but ... "I'm guessing this is not a pleasure visit."

The Chis commander inclined his head and offered a string of syllables Ryn had no hope of following.

"Evinne?"

"Something about our High Command," Evinne answered unhappily. "That's all I got."

"Great," Ryn muttered. She met the commander's eyes and enunciated carefully: "Not in Cheunh, please."

The commander cycled through a couple more attempts in languages Ryn didn't recognize before Anakin suddenly jerked to alert beside her. "He's speaking Huttese."

"Thank all the gods," said Ryn, not in a mood to be picky. "Can you talk to him?"

Anakin gave her a dark look - he liked speaking Huttese about as much as most beings like having their teeth pulled - but he spouted a stream of choppy phonemes at the Chiss and listened to what he said back.

"He wants to know if you are aware that Loreth is being torn apart by some kind of erratic - chaotic, maybe that's a better word - energy beneath the surface. he says he has tried to talk to your, um, head of the family?"

"The high king," Ryn supplied. "Unless he means Kit, but probably not."

"And he won't bargain with them.

"Bargain?"

"The Hutts only have two words for talking: bargain and insult," Anakin said, with unusual asperity. "Probably because that's all they ever do."

Now wasn't the time to explore Anakin's childhood issues, linguistic or otherwise. And lexical vagaries aside, what it meant was that Commander Glottal Stop did not have sanction to be here. "Ask him what he thinks we can do about it."

Anakin spoke; Ryn ignored the urge to lean into his shoulder and focused on watching the Chiss commander instead, searching his reaction as he responded to Anakin's inquiry.

"He says that although the high king claimed to have no knowledge of the energy fluctuations, the presence of a Lorethan warband so near the source of the disturbance suggests some awareness of the problem."

"Tell him we have been out of contact," Ryn said. "And ask him how near?"

It wasn't hard to see what the Chiss thought of the relayed message. His glowing eyes swept over her, sharp and canny. "You don't know," he said in Cheunh, slowly enough that she could follow, and Ryn shook her head.

His next burst of speech made Anakin frown. "He says whatever we're going to do, we have to do it fast. The planet's crust will begin to shred itself in less than two rotations."

"Khalî," Evinne said grimly, and Ryn had to agree.

"We have to finish what we started," she answered, her own voice not much better. "Loreth can't be caught in this kind of tug of war forever. We have to free the underworld from Khalî's grip, once and for all."

"Just like that," Evinne muttered.

Ryn ignored her. "Ask him if they say any caves on their fly-by."

That took some time; evidently the word for cave required some negotiation. Finally Anakin said, "He says no, but I don't trust him. Ryn, what -"

"Ask him what his interest in our problems is." Beat. "Please."

Anakin gave her a dark look, but he did as she asked. "He would hate to see such a beautiful world and potential ally destroyed," he said. "He offers his help."

Ryn gave the Chiss a skeptical look. "And in return?"

"Better relation between our two peoples," Anakin translated. His voice turned grim. "Now he asks a question of his own. Do you know Kitraal Orun?"

"Brother," said Ryn in Cheunh, glancing back at the commander.

"He's asking if we know where he is," Anakin reported. "He wants to speak - I think this time he really does mean 'bargain,' or maybe 'negotiate' - with him."

Ryn met the Chiss's glowing eyes. "I was told your forces captured him weeks ago."

Anakin said, "He admits there was a bad deal - a skirmish, that's it. But he claims your brother was rescued by a ship of unfamiliar design."

Evinne's sharp intake of breath was loud in the stillness. "Omega," she said. "It has to be."

Ryn cast her a quick frown. "What would he be doing in the middle of a battle?"

"I don't know," said Evinne. "But it fits."

"Time will tell," Ryn said. Or not: all too often the fate of MIAs remained unknown for generations. But it was the kind of thing Sarta would have said, cryptically knowing in the face of his troops. "Right now, if he wants to 'bargain' with Clan Orun, he's got me."

Anakin relayed this information. "He says he would have asked your brother's permission to land and offer assistance, and now he asks you the same."

"Little late," Ryn muttered. But beggars could not be choosers. "Bid him welcome, and tell him he and his warriors can help us by finding a hole in the surface."

Evinne gripped her arm and hauled her closer to hiss in her ear. "You can't seriously be planning to negotiate with the Chiss!"

"I don't have much of a choice," Ryn muttered back. "If he's right, we don't have time to try and scout on our own."

"But -" Evinne cut herself off. "No, you're right. I don't have to like it, that's all."

"Yeah, same here." Ryn tugged her arm loose and faced the Chiss commander, so she could say, in Cheunh that she knew was horribly mangled, if sincere: "Thank you."