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.
After a prolonged battle, all but one clone was killed. The last clone kidnapped smuggler Jorj Car'das, destroyed his crew, and crashed his ship, the Talus Twin, onto the surface of the swamp planet Dagobah...
Chapter 65
Dagobah
"I'm picking up an ion trail heading towards the planet," Ahsoka said. "The atmosphere is blocking sensor readings, though. We'll have to just try to follow the heading as best we can."
"Can you tell if it's from the freighter we were following?" Master It'kla asked from the copilot's seat.
"No way to tell." Ahsoka shrugged. She was glad to be rid of the durasteel mask that she had been using to hide her identity. Xho had done a good job of making it as comfortable as possible, but she still wasn't entirely used to it. "The weird part is... this ship is way faster in hyperspace than any freighter should be. We should have beaten them here if that's where they were going."
"Still, I feel we must investigate. I sense... something here." Master It'kla closed his eyes. "Something dark."
"I feel it too. Heading into the atmosphere."
The Whipclaw followed the ion trail down into Dagobah's cloudy stratosphere.
Car'das crawled away, whimpering in pain every time he put pressure on his shoulder or his ribs. The small green alien just stood there, leaning on a walking stick.
A shout from far away could be heard. "Minch! Yoda! I know you're here!"
Just as Jorj Car'das thought he was about to collapse, the small green alien waved a hand, and the human found himself floating over a bush, and gently deposited on the other side. He lay on the damp ground, taking shallow breaths because his injured ribs wouldn't allow anything more.
"Waiting for your arrival, I have been," the alien said. His voice echoed around their swampy surroundings. "Forseen this collision, I have."
"Your tricks won't hide you, Jedi." The voice in the distance was strong. The manic anger had faded until a cold presence in the Force. Car'das had seen this shift a few times in the journey so far. The dark Jedi was clearly mentally unstable.
"Out in the open I stand. Find me, if you dare."
A flock of screeching birdlike creatures erupted in the distance, flying up into the fog. A lightsaber hummed in the distance, and Car'das heard a loud screech from some unfortunate creature that had gotten in the dark Jedi's way.
The tiny alien Jedi a few meters away from Car'das closed his eyes and shook his head sadly. "A wise Jedi Master, Windu was. Now, a twisted husk. A stain in the Force you are."
The lightsaber hummed loudly, changing pitch as it sliced through something solid. It was much closer now. The sound of a tree falling over, half crashing into the earth, half squelching in the mud could be heard over the sound of the saber.
The lightsaber rose in pitch again, and dark Jedi's voice could be heard through the brush. "A stain on the ground you will be, Jedi."
In the blink of an eye, the tiny green Jedi launched upwards into the sky. A massive segment of a tree trunk, nearly a meter thick and at least five meters long, flew through the air at high velocity. It passed through where the tiny Jedi had been and deflected off of a boulder behind Car'das. A shower of wet dirt and bark and dry splinters peppered him, and he tried not to shout in pain when a particularly large piece of wood hit his injured ribs.
"A master of the shatterpoint, the real Windu was. A pale imitation you are," the small Jedi said.
"Yoda. It is you. Why were you not at Bpfassh? You abandoned us!" The dark Jedi screamed loudly, his mood rapidly shifting back from cold anger to blind rage.
"From the cloning process, shattered your mind is," replied Yoda.
The dark Jedi screamed incoherently, and all around, rocks and branches floated up off the ground. "They all died because you weren't there to help! You left us to die!"
As one, every piece of rock and debris shot towards Yoda, accelerating to high speed in an instant. Moving with surprising agility for a wizened alien leaning on a cane, Yoda jumped again, spinning to the side. The first few pieces of stone flew by harmlessly. But through the underbrush, Car'das saw the dark Jedi's hands twitch, and the remaining projectiles curved through the air towards Yoda.
The tiny Jedi stood his ground. The knobby walking stick dropped from his hands, and he held out both of his three fingered hands, splayed wide. His eyes half closed in concentration, and the projectiles slowed to a stop.
The swamp was almost silent for a moment. The nearby animal life had mostly been frightened away by the furor of Force powered battle. In the distance, the life in the swamp continued to hum and drip and squawk. But here and now, there was silence as the two Jedi strained against each other through the Force.
The large boulder behind Yoda, the same one that the tree trunk had splintered against, began to shake. The muddy ground that held it in place shuddered as it pulled free, making a wet, almost organic sucking sound as it separated from the ground.
Car'das didn't know which one of them was controlling it, but either way, he tried to continue slowly crawling away from the battle as best he could. This was not a safe place to be.
"My instruments aren't showing a whole lot. Just a lot of water, a lot of life, and a lot of fog." Ahsoka guided the Whipclaw through the clouds. "I can feel something in the Force... something powerful. I don't know why I couldn't feel it from farther away."
Ylenic nodded and said, "The dark side of the Force clouds all. Now that we are closer, I can sense both the light and the dark. But from a distance..."
"You're telling me that they just blend together?"
"That is correct. I suspect that some place on this planet is tainted by the dark side of the Force. Perhaps a Jedi hid here in the hopes of going unnoticed by the Sith."
"Well, I guess I'll head that way," Ahsoka said. "You'd think somebody would have mentioned that at the temple."
"We Masters weren't entirely sure about it, until the last few years when the dark side of the Force clouded our own vision. Now we know why. The Sith were right there in the center of things on Coruscant."
Ahsoka changed the angle of her descent to head towards where she sensed the Force presence. The Whipclaw broke through the last of the thick layers of clouds, only to find nothing but muddy brown and fog below.
"Not much here to look at," she said. "Wait! There! Do you see that?"
"I believe I do," Ylenic replied.
A faint purple glow could be seen in the foliage about a kilometer away.
"What are the odds that somebody else on this mud hole has a purple lightsaber?" she asked Ylenic.
"Considering that the planet is purportedly uninhabited... slim to none."
"It looks like there's a flat spot near there that I can... oh. Look at that." She pointed out the windscreen at a long gouge in the dirt and mud that hadn't been visible from their previous angle of descent. At the end of the trail was the somewhat crumpled remains of a Barloz-class Corellian freighter.
"It isn't sinking into the mud," Ylenic said. "That may be a stable place to set down."
"Right. Going in." Ahsoka goosed the throttle and pointed the nose down towards the fallen freighter.
Then her danger sense flared in the Force, and she jerked the yoke to the side. A boulder smashed through the branches of a tree, shattering them. The boulder flew upwards towards the Whipclaw. But the Whipclaw was maneuverable, and Ahsoka was an accomplished pilot with Jedi reflexes. The giant boulder scraped against the ship's shields, depleting them by nearly half with the impact, but it didn't touch the Whipclaw's hull.
Following the larger boulder was a horde of smaller rocks and branches. She weaved the Whipclaw around as best she could, trusting the Force to guide her hands on the yoke.
Then, amidst the clatter of debris hitting the shield, Ahsoka heard the sound of hullmetal being struck hard. On her control panel, the portside engine indicators all turned bright red.
"Hold on to something," she yelled over the impacts. "We might not be landing quite where we want to!"
Ahsoka feathered the remaining engine and tried to hard-start the repulsors so that she Whipclaw wouldn't be sent spinning by the off-center force of one working engine. But something shorted out, and only the emergency repulsors came online.
"This isn't going to be my best landing," she said.
Author's note: Since I'm doing my best to keep both book, movie, game, and TV canon as much together as possible, I decided to stick with Timothy Zahn's writing where when Luke goes back to Dagobah a few years after Yoda's passing, his instruments work fine, leading him to believe that Yoda somehow made them stop working properly and helped to guide the craft down to the one spot on the planet where Luke needed to be. However, since the planet is uninhabited by intelligent life and overgrown with swamp life, there still isn't much for the sensors to pick up. :)