A KNIGHTS TALE
by ardavenport
**** **** Part 3
The two Guardians climbed to their feet. "You will fight?" Malbus asked with hope.
"Looks like it." Zon shrugged his narrow shoulders. "I'm a Jedi in a workshop full of kyber crystals. When the Force is screaming at you this loud," he shrugged again, "it's time to listen." He held up his crystals, sizing them up. "Now, let's get you two suited up." He carefully lined them up before him, threw his head back and closed his eyes.
"Zon," Emoh demanded. " Aren't we supposed to be trying to get out of here?"
"Patience. I'm working on it." But he just sat there.
"We don't have time for more tricks."
"Hey, Emoh. We can have this fast. Or we can have it good." He used the exact same words that the captain got when she called down to the Engineer when she was impatient about when her ship would be on its way.
"I don't know what 'this' is."
"Just watch." He grinned up at the ceiling. "It's going to look good."
Imwe tapped his cane toward her. "Come." He felt for her hand and his partner guided them toward a bench at the end of a table and they sat together, facing Zon. She couldn't help thinking about how similar this was to when they first met them, except that now she sat between two black-robed Guardians of the Whills.
Nothing happened for a while and Zon remembered what Wabbi said about Zon sleeping sitting up. And she wondered what a 'Whill' was. Another name for kyber?
Something metal rattled. She and Malbus looked back toward a column of drawer inset in the wall. They all rattled again. Then something clinked and clicked on the other side of the room. Something metal glinted under the lights. Black and gray rings. Square and cylindrical components. Parts drifted up from all around them, spinning, drifting slowly toward Zon until he had a whole collection lazily drifting before him. The crystals, faintly glowing again, rose up and joined the crowd. The pieces milled about in no discernable pattern, but gradually they split into two elongated groups, some pieces splitting off and descending down to the table. The floating pieces assumed more organized orbits, circling two definite axes. Cylinders, black, gray and silver, lined up around components, the crystals in their midst. The collections became two long cylinders, the pieces clicking into place until they were two distinct devices, different in colors (one gray black and silver, the other silver with a few parts of faded brass), each with one open end.
Zon opened his eyes and plucked them out of the air. Grinning with his new toys, he jumped up to his feet on top of the table and shrugged the orange robe off his shoulders.
The cylinders got caught in the sleeves.
"Uh, I haven't worn a robe in a while," he guiltily admitted, while he struggled with the uncooperative sleeves.
Finally untangling his cylinders from the fabric, which he kicked aside onto the floor, he held up the cylinders again. Now, he just wore his gray ship coveralls with dark red accents at the cuffs of the arms and legs.
"It's showtime," he announced with a big grin.
Emoh jumped in her seat as two blazingly bright beams of light came out of the cylinders, one pale blue-white, the other, yellow-white. The hum from them was loud with ominous power, filling the whole room. If anyone knew only one thing about Jedi, it was always that they carried lightsabers. Now her annoyingly cheerful shipmate had two of them, casually spinning them around, one in each hand. He swooshed one then the other, their sounds rising and falling with the motion.
"Yah!"
He leaped from one table to the next and literally bounced off the wall and ceiling, his whole body flipping over twice before he hit the floor, still spinning and jumping.
He did not hit anything with the plasma beams of the lightsabers while he did it. Emoh had concluded that they must be more light than heat when Zon brought the blades down on the long narrow table on the other side of the room in one final big flourish.
The table crashed to the floor, cleaved into three large pieces.
Zon brought the two lightsabers around, blades up before clicking them off. He sighed loudly.
"That felt great." Then he shook himself off and came over to him. Both Guardians, even Malbus, stood and bowed deeply to him.
Zon waved off their deference. "We have not gotten out of this yet. I could feel that Darksider that I picked up on Coruscant. It's just a matter of time before he - - I'm pretty sure it's a he - - finds these passages and we don't want him to find us first.
"What shall we do?" Malbus asked, clearly ready to fight his way out. Emoh planned to be behind him and sneak away as soon as possible.
"First, we need something to use as binders, preferably with field binding, too."
No weapons? No comms? Emoh wondered.
The others looked at each other, confused by his request. "Come on. if I can build two lightsabers from the stuff lying around here, we must be able to come up with something." Zon's words spurred them to some action. Even Twos trundled over to a wall, extended its manipulators from their recesses and started opening drawers.
They finally came up with a pair of metal cuffs, fashioned from two spools and locked together. A bit of the cabling that came from one spool tightened them, and a miniature field generator (probably meant to contain a wayward crystal discharge) attached to them made a low-power, but passable blue shield around them when it was turned on.
Malbus looked doubtful of their creation. "Do you think these could really immobilize the Darksider?"
"The Darksider?" Zon looked confused for a moment. "Oh, these aren't for him. They're for me."
The others stared back. Zon pointed at Emoh.
"You are going to turn me to the Imperials for the bounty on a Jedi. And you two," he pointed at the Guardians, "are going to back her up."
Twos blatted and whistled.
"Yeah, you can back her up, too, Twos."
Malbus loudly broke the stunned silence. "What?! You bring us hope and now you take it away and trample on it!"
"Baze - - " His friend took his arm, but Malbus shook him off with a snarl. He stomped around in a couple of circles before advancing on Zon again.
"WHY should we do this?! If you want to die, go to the Imperials and turn yourself in and leave us be!" He angrily waved a big arm toward the door.
"I knew you wouldn't like this part of the plan," Zon muttered. "I was hoping - - - "
"WHAT plan!" Malbus shouted, now standing over the smaller man, who did not move from where he stood.
Fffff-zzzz-zzzzz-ttttt!
Malbus froze, the glowing blade of the blue-white lightsaber a finger-width from his face.
"I knew that would get your attention." Zon flicked off the lightsaber and the smile dropped from his face. He advanced and Malbus backed up.
"We are not going to be able to run. We are not going to be able to hide. Even if we got out of the city, the Imperials would murder everyone to get to me. And I - - " Zon slapped his chest, " - - will not let that happen. The only way we're going to get out of this is to go through them."
Malbus bumped into a table behind him.
"Through them?" Imwe asked, his blind eyes pointed toward the other two. "How? Your friend turns you in? Then what?"
"You," Zon shoved one of the lightsabers at Emoh. She did not want to touch it. "Take it."
She grasped the weapon with both hands as if it was an armed detonator, keeping her fingers away from the activation switch.
"You hand me over to an Imperial Officer and demand the reward. He's not going to believe I'm a Jedi unless you give him that, too, even with that holo of me they got on Coruscant. And you claim the reward." Zon's smile returned. "The bounty on a Jedi is pretty big. You'll be rich."
"I don't want to be rich." Emoh knew that was not true as she spoke the words, but . . . "Not . . . that way at least."
"Well, that's only if you have enough time to collect before we escape. Because I'm keeping this one." He held up the second lightsaber, bent down and tucked it into a short legging under the pant leg of his overalls. It was a little bulky, not hard to guess that something was there, but only if you looked down at his shins. "I use this to get away and do enough damage to slow them down before they re-group - - and before that darksider gets there - - we escape in the ship."
"Aaaaaah." Imwe nodded his approval, but his friend continued to scowl.
"Wait? We take the ship? We steal the ship? What about the Captain? It's her ship. And what about the rest of the crew?"
Zon gave her a big shrug. "We don't have time to find out where they're hiding, if they haven't been already caught. And we'll be doing Kajer and the others a big favor by not getting them involved. Losing a ship is a lot better than ending up in an Imperial prison, or worse."
Emoh glared back at him. "How are we supposed to steal the ship."
"You're the navigator. You can take us anywhere. We've got Twos, it can do the rest, fly the ship. The rest of it is automatic. Right?" said the man who spent most of his time breathing Wabbi's body odor in the engineering compartments while they were in hyperspace.
"It's not that simple."
"Really? It can't be that hard if Ceren can do it."
He had a point. They did not know why Captain Kajer put up with a first mate as lazy and self-congratulatory as Ceren, except that they were sure she wasn't family. Their ship's captain and first mate were not even close to being the same species.
"Well, we can't do much except go somewhere. Twos can pilot, nothing fancy, while I set a course. Maybe Closmat? Or Linget Nine?gf"
Both were unpleasant Outer Rim worlds where their crew had made some shady deliveries and pick-ups. But the Empire did not have a presence there and if they needed, they could sell or trade the ship for something else. Emoh's heart started beating faster, her mind suddenly running through what needed to happen for her to . . . survive. It was worse than when she left G'Shes. Then, she had saved and stolen funds, plotted her escape, for a whole season. This was completely improvised. That morning, she was just a navigator on a ship-for-hire with only vague plans for someday finding a planet that she could make her home.
"That sounds great," Zon agreed, "Let's go then."
"No."
The two shipmates and droid looked toward the Guardians.
"No," Imwe repeated. "We can help you. Lead you back to your ship. We are Guardians of the Whills. Keepers of the Kyber. But you must tell us, what you see in the Force, if we are to help."
Zon winced, but then took a step toward Imwe with a raised hand. "Now you don't have to go, you could just tell us - - -"
Imwe lunged, his staff whirling and smacking into Zon's hand. He pulled it back and shook it.
"Ow!"
"Do not use your power on us. We are Guardians and we can help. But you must tell us, what you see in the Force." Behind him, Malbus stood defiantly and silently backing up his friend's demand.
Rubbing his hand, Zon winced. "Yeah. Yeah, you're right. Just forget I tried that. But it's got to be quick."
"Tell us," Malbus demanded, standing by his friend.
"There's not much to tell. Darkness. I can't see what's going to happen at all. But I don't think it's going to be good for me . . .
" . . . and now . . . after all this time, it's clear." He looked back at them, eyes wide. Emoh could not read his expression. He was not happy, but not unhappy, maybe . . . satisfied? Relieved?
"That's what the Jedi Order saw. At the end. Darkness. They couldn't see what was coming, but they knew it was bad. And . . . I don't think the Council said anything about it. Kept it secret to themselves," he said softly, his words dredging up truths. "But any Jedi could see the darkness. No future. But they just kept going. What else could they do?"
"They fought the Dark Side," Malbus challenged. "When the war came."
"They shouldn't have fought that war!" Zon suddenly shouted and everyone backed up. "I figured that out years ago! The Chancellor, the Sith Lord we were looking for all along? Count Dooku fallen to the Dark Side, running the Separatists?
"The war was a trap, all along. Get us fighting droid armies. Who cares about using a lightsaber on droids while we're defending clones and Republic planets? But the problem wasn't who was fighting for what, it was the fighting itself.
"They should not have fought the Clone War," Zon muttered, his lips pressed together, breathing hard through his nose. "That's what the Force was telling me back on Geonosis.
f
"I sat it out. I could see the damage. Only a small fraction of the people who get ruined in a war are the ones who are fighting it. Whole populations bombed, blasted and displaced. Planets stripped their resources to build space fleets that blow each other up. But could the Jedi see that? No!" Zon threw his arms out, letting an old frustration out like a pent up explosion.
"The Jedi Order was tied to the Galactic Republic for a thousand years. The temple on Coruscant, outposts, recruiting; every child in the Republic was tested for their affinity with the Force, and brought to the temple for training. The Council probably never even thought about not fighting the Clone War. Because they would have LOST all that! Could you see the Jedi Order begging for alms to support their temple like you guys?" He waved at the Guardians and Malbus sneered back.
"But the Jedi Order had already LOST the Galactic Republic to the Sith years before the Clone Wars even STARTED! And they didn't even know it! They were WORKING for the Sith." Zon shouted at the ceiling, his arms raised. But no one answered. His rage spent, he let his arms drop. "That's what I had to go out and learn after I walked away from Geonosis.
"We were pledged to be peace-keepers, but we still have a whole history of getting into fights." He looked at the Guardians. "Do you get it now? That there are reasons not to fight? And the Jedi didn't see it, not when they needed to."
"Will you fight now?" Malbus demanded.
Zon held up the leg with the second lightsaber concealed under his pant leg; he effortlessly balanced on the other leg.
"I'm in. The one thing I know today is that I'm a Jedi, now. I have to be, to at least draw away the damage from this Jedi fight, keep the Empire from murdering their way through this whole city to find me. So, can we go with the plan now?"
The Guardians nodded. "Yes," Imwe's voice was soft, but determined.
**** **** End Part 3