Previously on Star Wars: Exile's Journey

After leaving the Jedi Order, ex Jedi Ahsoka Tano joined the crew of a freighter, the Red Drexl. After a year of working as a mechanic and copilot, suddenly the Republic fell and the Empire rose in its place, and she found herself fighting and defeating a bounty hunter named Koros L'Larr and taking his ship for her own. Now Ahsoka has taken on the persona of Riella Masso, bounty hunter, as a way of keeping tabs on the current hunt for Jedi on the run

Ahsoka and Jedi Master Ylenic It'kla tracked a rogue Jedi to a planet named Wayland, where they discovered a secret cloning facility. At the facility, a clone had been made of Jedi Master Mace Windu. The clonemasters had attempted to brainwash the clone into acting as a guardian of the facility, but the clone had gone insane and had grown three other Windu clones in secret. The clones attempted to finish the last mission that had been in their copied memories from the original Windu, and had gone to the Jedi Temple on the planet Bpfassh.

Ahsoka, Master It'kla, and an angry teenager named Boba Fett tracked them down. When the dust settled, only the first clone was still standing...

Chapter 61

Shii-Cho

Through the macrobinoculars, Jorj Car'das could see steam hissing from the side of the hovertruck. The Jedi was gone, seemingly vaporized by the blast. He wasn't sure what had happened to the bounty hunter, so he scanned the footage back a few seconds.

It looked like she had jumped clear of the blast zone right before the turbolaser had hit. Car'das scanned forward in time until macrobinoculars showed what was happening in real time.

The heat from the blasts had evaporated some of the sugary drinks in the truck, and several cases worth of bottles had spilled out on the road. The steam was fading, and the edges of the turbolaser holes had gone from a dull red to black.

Then the macrobinoculars were torn away from his eyes.

"Hey!" he shouted, as they were dashed against the ground. Shattered lenses and electronics spilled out of the plasteel casing. Then a strong grip wrapped around his throat, and he couldn't speak.

A pale-faced Bpfasshi man appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. His hand was held out seemingly in a match to the grip that he could feel against his throat, and Car'das knew that he was one of the Jedi.

"Take me to your ship," the man said. His voice sounded calm, but his eyes betrayed a simmering anger. The brown irises were ringed with red and yellow, and Jorj didn't need to use the ability to read people's faces that he'd honed through years of smuggling, negotiating, spying, and when he had a free night, playing sabacc. The anger around them was clear as day.

"Wh..." Car'das tried to reply, but the grip on his neck was too tight. The Jedi relaxed his grip, and Jorj gasped for air. "Where do you want to go?"

The Jedi closed his eyes. Car'das thought about trying to go for his hidden blaster, but this was a Jedi in front of him. One who had a lightsaber in one hand, and another on his belt.

It just wasn't worth the risk.

Ahsoka couldn't see. Covering most of her visor was a brownish splatter of something, either heat-distilled blood from the clone that had been destroyed in front of her, or the remains of a sticky sweet beverage that now spilled out of the hovertruck they'd been fighting on top of and all over the street. She also had a little trouble breathing. Her Jedi reflexes had given her warning, and she'd jumped back out of the way. The clone was so angry, so focused on her that he didn't seem to notice or care about the danger.

A blue line of static swiped across her visor, either cleaning it off or just compensating for the color shift that the stain caused, and her vision returned to normal. In front of her was a yellow Bpfasshi sky, and a building with a chunk missing from the side.

She didn't even remember landing on the ground, but apparently she was on her back and looking up.

A pale-skinned man in a local military uniform came into her line of sight, holding out a hand. His lips were moving, but Ahsoka's montrals were tingling from the blast and she couldn't hear him very well.

She took his hand and he pulled her up. Faintly, over the sound of her montrals ringing, she heard him say, "That was amazing! Are you okay?"

"Yeah," she replied, "I'm... grife. Where's my sword? That thing's valuable."

Another soldier ran up to her and held it out, hilt first. She took it and put it in its sheath. The pins and needles feeling in her montrals was slowly subsiding. If she hadn't been wearing her armored mask, that blast could have caused permanent hearing damage. She made a mental note to thank Xho for his work on it the next time she saw him.

"There were three cl... uh... Jedi," she said. "What happened to the other two?"

"One of them went down in the fight," the first soldier said, pointing a little bit farther down the road. "I'm not sure about the last one."

Ahsoka jogged that way, trying to ignore the various bumps and bruises that were trying to tell her that moving fast right now was a bad idea. Behind the broken remains of a police cruiser, she saw the clone.

A gaping blaster wound was in the middle of his chest, and even though the clone looked to be a teenager, and he was wearing white body paint to appear more like a Bpfasshi, she still recognized the features of Mace Windu.

She searched the rubble nearby, but there was no sign of his lightsaber.

The numbness in her montrals was almost gone, and she heard footsteps behind her. One of the soldiers came around the fallen police cruiser. "Is it over?" he asked.

"No," she said, "There were three. We've only accounted for two of them."

Over the soldier's com unit, she heard a burst of static, then a call of "Code red, code red. There's a Jedi at the spaceport!"

Ahsoka opened up her own com channel, "Ylenic, one of them is at the spaceport. We need to get there as soon as possible."

The Whipclaw came back into sight, and Ylenic's voice responded on the com, "That was quick. I hadn't found a good place to land yet."

The soldier gaped at the heavily armed ship that was settling down on a clear spot on the road. "Is that your ship?"

"Yes," Ahsoka said, as she walked towards it.

"Wait!" the soldier shouted after her, "Who are you?"

"Riella Masso," she replied over her shoulder, "bounty hunter."

In the cockpit of the Slave I, Boba Fett heard the com on the military channel. "No!" he yelled, "I know I hit him!"

He boosted the throttle to full, and the Firespray's engines glowed brightly as they propelled the ship over the city and towards the spaceport.

The First held the puny human in a Force grip, marching him towards his ship. All who stood in their way were cut down, either with the Force, or with his lightsaber.

The clone's mind was splintered. He knew who he was. He was a clone of Mace Windu, one of the most powerful members of the Jedi council. He was on a mission to Bpfassh to cleanse the Jedi temple of any Jedi who had fallen to the dark side of the Force. Master Yoda was missing, his original was missing. He was forced to clone himself in order to have the manpower to finish this mission. But it had failed. His clones, his brothers, his children, were all dead. Because Mace Windu and Yoda were missing.

It was all their fault.

But every time he looked at his reflection, he saw a dark Jedi. Everyone attacked him, treated him like a dark Jedi. He had lashed out, killed, destroyed. Out of anger, fear, and hate.

He remembered his history. There had been dark Jedi on Bpfassh before. Only one had survived and left the planet, and he fled to a nearby uninhabited world. A world where he had faced down a diminutive Jedi and battled with him.

A Jedi who looked astonishingly like Master Yoda.

The clone's lip curled in anger. Yoda. It all came back to Yoda. His brothers had died because Yoda wasn't there. He had acted in anger, in the dark side of the Force. Because Yoda had failed him.

Either he was a dark Jedi, and he would face Minch in final battle. Or he was a clone of Mace Windu, and he would kill Yoda for his betrayal. The stinking swamps would be someone's grave.

"Dagobah," he finally said to the Human. "We will take your ship to Dagobah."

"I don't even know where that is," the Human said. "Is that a planet or a city?"

"It is our destiny," he replied.

Author's note: For all the attention I try to put into detail in my stories... thanks to one of my readers, I found a glaring mistake in this chapter after it was posted. One that I repeated four or five times. So... yeah. Togruta have montrals. I kept saying 'her ears were ringing' which is a little difficult for a race that doesn't have ears.

... d'oh.