Author's Note: I have unabashedly loved the Tales of the Jedi audio drama my entire life lmao, I've listened to it all the way through checking them out from the library so many times as a kid first on cassette tapes in the 90s and then CDs in the 2000s. And now I own them on Audible lmao. Felt good to use a 'first mission' to cut their teeth on before Sinsor escalates them to missions that may actually take them into conflict with Sidious's acolytes and non-Palpatine side minions.
Also the F1 explorer droid AKA F1D0 AKA Fido is a real ass droid from Legends.
Chapter 3: Time Flies, Leaving Shadows Behind
"Master…what in the Force's Will are you hoping to get out of tinkering on this Skipray all day?" My lanky Padawan inquired.
I popped my head out from underneath the wing that rotated to become ventral when in exospheric mode.
"I want to squeak out a bit more from the engines on speed and then I want to completely overhaul the navicomputer. The current one is just a patch job I put together to allow it to go up to six stored coordinates from the pathetic four the computer Sienar sells these things with!"
With that I ducked my head back under, examining whether the wing could take the sub-light speed increase I was planning.
"Master…don't you usually make me do the flying?"
"Of course I do!" I saw no correlation with the question, "You're good at it. I have trouble with exospheric piloting." The damned Z-axis got me every time. Too many summers in high school doing F-18 sims at the Air Force JROTC camps had ported over and old habits refused to get overridden by new ones even a lifetime and a half later.
Sure you used a bit of the Z-axis in atmospheric flight combat, but in a gravity well the G-forces were too insane to pull the kinds of stunts you could outside of a gravity well in space proper. Inertial dampeners did not work nearly as well in atmosphere.
Well the damned droids fighters could usually handle it, at least the ones with the built in as opposed to walk in pilots. But fuck those guys.
"Ruff?" Fido looked at me. I looked at him. I looked away. No way had he sensed my negative thoughts about other droids. He was a goddamn scaled up version of those little puppy robots that would do backflips in the 90s.
"It's okay boy, whatever he did I am sure he didn't mean it," My Padawan consoled the robodog, entirely not helping.
"Not only is that a droid, it's a droid of an animal. The indulgences you give it."
Ah yes, the adroit, confident, and condescending Taron Malicos. Freshly knighted, of the cadre of Initiates between my cohort and Kenobi's cohort. He was around thirty standard cycles of age, I couldn't be bothered with the exact number, and sported a much more well kept beard and head of hair than he would have after the Purge in his marooning on Dathomir. He did however maintain two lightsabers, a practitioner of Jar'kai even now. He was utilizing a Shoto as a second blade as opposed to a full second lightsaber.
But I wasn't recruiting him for his personality, I had no doubt he and I would clash until I proved my leadership was worth his very un-Jedi-like pride.
I planned to put that to bed on this first mission.
"Greetings to you too, Taron," As two of the relatively few Jar'kai masters around and being within a decade or so of age of each other, Knight Malicos and I had a somewhat rivalry going.
Well, he viewed me as a rival, and I viewed him as a potential future asset.
Present asset now, actually! It was so nice when a plan came together.
"Will that thing get us to where we are going?" He asked skeptically, also side-stepping pleasantries. Jerk.
"It will!" I promised, might not trust my piloting but we could damn well trust my handiwork. And especially my astrogation. I could get a hyperdrive computer to thread a Force-damned needle!
I just had to find where the needle was. Which was where my talented minion…Padawan came in.
Baylan had dug through what must have been high end hundreds of documents, astrogation charts, and astronomical holotelescope readings on gravity fluctuations to pinpoint the location of our destination.
The Sith tomb world of Nicht Ka. Shitty redheaded step brother of Korriban also known as Morabund.
Now what was important about this world? Practically nothing about the world itself. However, the system was likely the pivotal piece needed to break into the ancient and defunk Nache Bhelfia Hyperlane loop that connected all five of the Sacred Sith Worlds. Potentially allowing us to develop a backdoor to Ixigul also known as Exegol on the other side of Ziost, likely within the Stygian Caldera itself. Worst case scenario and some excavations of Ziost or Dromund Kaas should provide some kind of clue as to how to reach that ancient throneworld.
A backdoor into your enemy's greatest fallback point was certainly something you wanted in a war.
Though I hoped to never have to face Sidious on that throneworld, the goal was absolutely to trap him before he could ever get a clone program going.
"I simply need to finish upgrading the astronavigation computer. If I replace a few parts, thanks to some requisitioned funds, with higher end processing power I can get us there with only stopping for hyperfuel instead of recalculation of our route."
"I feel as if you meant for me to be more impressed, but I have yet to be enlightened about our destination, Sinsor."
I blinked, ah yes, I hadn't even given him a sector had I?
"We've got a lead on an ancient site in the Stygian Caldera that we recently recreated a hyper-route to. The old one closed a hundred years or so after the Reformation and had been a tight fit for even a single ship above a heavy freighter for centuries before that, too."
That was part of why the Army of Light had eventually beaten back the Brotherhood of Darkness, they had been caught unable to retreat back into the Sith Bastion systems of the Caldera after the Army of Light had taken Morabund as a chokepoint. They then, in typical Sith fashion, had decided to participate in the galactic equivalent of a "hold my beer" moment and rushed Ruusan and blown the whole place up with a Thought Bomb with them planetside as well.
Or something like that. I didn't have real time access to Wookiepedia from my last life. Only an encyclopedic obsession through my youth that ended with me having what one might describe "approximate knowledge of many things". Luckily I'd been able to fill in a lot of gaps upon my promotion to a Knight of the Explorer Corps and official Jedi Archaeologist. Maybe I could get a Jedi Corps intramural bolo-ball team going assuming we don't all die in the next twenty years.
"Khal, you are doing your space cadet thing again. And I know you do not get Force Visions, so no playing that card."
My droll rival oh so loved to criticize my…let's call it artistic attention span.
"Oh but Taron, my good friend! I could never play that card, as you know I am not even using a full deck to begin with!"
He visibly had to center himself in the Force to maintain a non-aggravated demeanor.
"Why did I accept the Council placing me on your kriffing team?" He apparently had not succeeded in releasing that frustration into the Force.
"Because you want the thrill and glory of hunting down rumors, echoes, and ghosts of the Sith?"
He shrugged, "Ah, there is that. But do not forget the challenge should we find any active remnants!"
Baylan watched the two of us, his head turning back and forth as if watching a tennis match.
"I…five years as your Padawan and I still cannot tell whether you two loathe each other or simply enjoy whatever this is."
As I was about to respond another voice echoed out, "They enjoy it, Padawan. They'll never admit it, but their rivalry is more reminiscent of siblings than anything else. They both came out of Boma Clan after all."
A human woman of average height with skin in the mid-range of the human spectrum and raven black hair, garbed in plain Jedi robes and decorative yet spartan piercings adorning her forehead and the bridge of her nose stepped forward from near the entrance of the hanger.
"Master Billaba," I crowed, bombastically opening my arms towards her in greeting, "How have you been, old friend? How long has it been? Five years? Ten? An eternity?"
Her responding facial expression was decidedly unamused.
"It's been two years since the Yinchorri Uprising, you are well aware," With this she turned towards Taron and Baylan, "Has he been like this all day?"
Taron nodded and Baylan actually had the audacity to groan and put his face in his hands, "All week even! Ever since the Council approved his latest passion projects."
E tu, Padawan?
"Baylan!" I put my left hand over my heart and took an affronted posture and expression, like some Southern dandy from Earth, "You betray your Master in his hour of greatest need? When your support could mean the difference between success and failure? Life and death? Ignorance and knowledge?"
"Now you're just paraphrasing the Jedi Code, badly might I add. Please stop, Sin." Depa was always playing the straight man to my…enthusiasm. A lesson I'd learned a few decades into my last life, and had taken and run with in this life, was that if you acted eccentric and strange in a consistent and predictable manner…you could get away with quite a lot.
It was a good thing eccentric had always been my initial impulse in both lives.
"Oh, I see. You're mad about your Life Day gift. I understand. But you must know, I can only get the knock off brands. Customs going into my home system is a nightmare! I have to buy from the Sullusts or the black market and I know you wouldn't want me to buy you illegal moisturizer."
"Khal…" Her tone was…rebuking I dare say, "I need you to be serious if I am to be joining you on this investigation. I recognize how important this is, but the entire Order needs Sinsor Khal the Knight and Archaeologist, not Sinsor Khal the Hapan fop he uses when he cannot seem to release all of his fear into the Force."
Shit, she got me. My face went neutral, my stance subtly shifted from the loose and relaxed one I had been in into something tighter. Agitated.
"I'll explain once we're in orbit. I need to install this navicomputer and do a final sweep for bugs."
Both she and Taron narrowed their eyes at me, before subtly glancing around the hangar bay and nodding back to me.
Five standard hours later we were up in orbit. The Skipray averaged a crew of four with no extra passenger room, but there were bunks and other amenities, which I had admittedly upgraded. The ship was eighty feet long after all. Though admittedly only about thirty-five of that was usable crew space between the cockpit, gunners seats, and the spinning dorsal wings of the craft.
It was a cozy but not entirely tight fit.
I leaned back in the co-pilot seat as Baylan ran us through our entrance into hyperspace.
"So, we're not only going to the Caldera, but Baylan believes, and I have checked his work and it is reasonable to assume he is correct, he has found a possible route to the Sith tomb world of Nicht Ka. If this is true we can possibly break into hyperlanes connecting to the rest of the Sith throneworlds and examine them for any recent inhabitation, disturbances, et cetera which might allude to a resurgence of the Sith. Should this not prove fruitful our next mission would be to investigate some mysterious Jedi deaths, both recent and past, as it is very unlikely that Qui-Gon Jinn was some Sith's first Jedi kill. He wasn't an aggressive man or a specialized warrior, but he was certainly no pushover."
Depa's hand went to her lightsaber, "Yes…I saw the ship recordings of the blitz attack on Tatooine and was there for young Kenobi's accounting of the combat. I would agree with that analysis. The Zabrak learned from somewhere, and a good place to start would be the ancient worlds. If you have found a way to break into the hyperlanes then that is…well perhaps the Force wills that we run down this lead."
"Hmm…" Malicos stroked his beard, deep in thought, "Yes, the Sith, even before their pathetic attempt at reforming that the Order crushed when Bane was hunted down often used mercenaries, cults, and minions who were not directly Sith themselves. We could very well be flying into a sector of planets festering with Dark Side cultists."
"Why Taron, you seem positively vibrating in your seat in the anticipation of having to enter such a conflict!" I chided him mildly.
He shrugged, "Code interpretation 23a, used most often with teaching younglings the underlying meaning of the Code: Jedi are the guardians of peace in the galaxy."
I raised an eyebrow, "I am fairly certain the next line of interpretation is 'Jedi use their powers to defend and protect, never to attack others.'."
He raised an eyebrow right back at me, the bastard, "Are you saying a hypothetical Sith cult would not attack us on sight?"
"Excuse me, Masters?" Baylan nervously cut in, "But we're entering hyperspace in ten…nine…"