Chapter Twenty-Three
CARTH
Carth woke up and for a moment didn't remember where he was. There was a smell of plant matter and wood smoke. Animals were shrieking everywhere, at varying distances. He was too warm, sweating, and grimy and gritty besides. Rough camp. Forest. Then it came back—Jolee's cabin in the Kashyyyk Shadowlands, looking for the Star Map and for the Wookiee that could help them rescue Zaalbar. One way or another.
Bastila was still asleep off to his left on the other side of Jolee's fire pit. Jolee was a lump in the corner atop the bed. He'd made them a pretty tasty dinner, but his hospitality had stopped there. He'd said if he was going adventuring again at his age, he was damn well going to spend his last night sleeping in his own bed, and they could have the floor. Their young bones would take it better. Just as if they'd asked him to join them instead of being extorted into taking him.
Aithne was up, though. Her back was to him. A dozen curls had escaped yesterday's braid, let out of its pins to lay like a frayed rope down her back. She also wasn't wearing pants. He caught an eyeful of an indecent amount of leg before jerking away in embarrassment. "Aithne! For crying out loud!" he yelped.
"Good, you're up," Aithne said, without turning around. She was rummaging in the packs—rummaging in his pack, he realized. "Where's my fiber armor?"
"Aithne, you didn't think you could wait to change clothes?"
"Don't be a prude. You're lifelong military. I don't imagine I have anything you haven't seen a thousand times, and a couple times on me on Taris. And I'm wearing underwear," Aithne said. She sounded frustrated. "Besides, you were all asleep. Now, the fiber armor. Where is it?"
Carth tried to get past her dismissal of the times he'd taken care of her in a coma on Taris. It wasn't an indignity he liked to think about or would have thought she could brush off so casually. He tried to remember the armor she might be talking about. "The set we picked up in the Vulkar base? You didn't sell it to the Outcasts, did you?"
"No, I wore it that day, to rescue Bastila, become dueling champion, and take the Sith headquarters. You didn't notice? You didn't pack it? You've got the armory pack and spare weapons; you always do."
Carth rolled off his bedroll and stood, pressing his back. Jolee might claim Carth's young bones could take sleeping on the floor better; his bones themselves were complaining they weren't as young as they used to be. He kept his back to Aithne. "Yeah, and I brought you and Bastila a Jedi robe each. But with a couple of vibroswords, two spare blasters, the shields, and my canteen, that was all I could do. I'm not a bantha. I can only carry so much."
He heard her still behind him. "Well, that's no good," she muttered finally. "I wore what I did yesterday specifically to avoid advertising I'm a Jedi to anyone I didn't end up killing. We've already got bounty hunters enough after us without them learning I've got some new tricks. Would've thought you'd think of that and pack better."
"Well, if I'd known about the bounty hunters before leaving the ship yesterday, I might have done," Carth retorted, "When I saw you'd left with your lightsaber yesterday—"
"Armband holsters. They were on the requisition list before we left Dantooine—"
"Which you sent with Mission and Bastila. You put me in charge of astrogation, food, and fuel supply."
Silence. Then a huff. "Stop being rational when I want to pick a fight."
Carth scoffed. "Pass me a canteen, would you? And a new shirt." He reached behind his back and took the items as she handed them over to him.
"Water barrel's in the corner if you want to wash," Jolee told them in a muffled voice, head still buried under his coverlet, though how he stood it in the warmth and humidity of Kashyyyk was beyond Carth. "You all smell riper than third-rate Gamorrean thugs on Nal Hutta."
"Don't suppose you'd lend me your razor, would you?" Carth asked him, rubbing his chin. "You keep your beard pretty neat for living out in the sticks like this."
"Use your own," Jolee said. "The lass is going to make you go back for her armor anyway."
Bastila let out a long, discontented groan. "What is all this talk about armor?" she yawned, sitting up, her own hair fallen somewhat out of its elaborate style during the night. Her cheeks were flushed, and she looked even younger than usual.
Aithne tossed her an energy bar. "I've got a feeling," she said. "There's fighting ahead, more than I want to take on in casuals. I want to take a leaf from Ordo's book. He's always saying it's no dishonor for a Jedi expecting a battle to wear some armor, so I want mine, but Carth forgot to pack it."
"Trust your feelings," Bastila told her. "I too sense that there may be strife ahead for us today."
"Beyond the usual kinrath and katarn," Aithne agreed. "We're going back. Now. I don't think we'll have a lot of time when we find the Wookiee and that Star Map."
"Expecting that much of a fight, are you?" Jolee growled, sitting up himself. He shot a look at Carth. "Told you, sonny," he said. Then he looked around the room. "You lot make more noise than a bunch of tachs in mating season. Huh. Nice legs," he said, apparently to Aithne, who still hadn't put on pants.
"Hey, keep it civil, old man!" Carth started, but Aithne cut over him.
"And you made more noise last night than a pack of charging katarn," she told Jolee. "Creeping around the hut with all of us trying to sleep. You think I didn't hear you?" There was a slithering sound, and then she said, "Onasi, the pants are on. It should be alright for your delicate sensibilities to turn around now. And while I appreciate the defense, if Jolee or anyone is uncivil, I'll tell them."
"Hah," Jolee said, and when Carth looked around, he saw the old man looking between him and Aithne with gleaming eyes. "I see." He turned to Aithne then. "If you want to make a trip back to the Czerka outpost and your ship, you might as well do it now. We've a rough road ahead of us, and I need to pack what possessions I intend to bring on this fool crusade anyway. The elevator is ten minutes to the front of my camp, marked with four torches that are always lit around it. Stray more than a single tree's width left or right, and you'll miss it. Will you need help finding it?"
Aithne shook her head. "We were there just yesterday. I'm not confident about my ability to find anything else down here, but I'd be a pretty poor scout if I couldn't remember a route I went as recently as all that. Expect Carth and me back around midmorning."
"Not me?" Bastila said, both surprised and hurt.
Aithne shook her head. "I want you to take command back on Ebon Hawk. Do the astrogation calculations for a return to Dantooine and resupply from the outpost. Get anything Juhani and Canderous say we need for Sasha that we haven't got already. And then, I want you to be prepared to mount a defense or get offworld if fighting breaks out like we suspect."
That made sense, and Bastila saw it. She got up and started to get ready.
They left Jolee and started back toward the spaceport. Carth spent most of the trip back to the Czerka outpost and the time they needed to get in better order for the day back on Ebon Hawk thinking about what he wanted to say to Aithne. They'd left things in a bad place. After he left the fresher, shaved, and redressed himself in some Republic-issue plate they'd found confiscated in the Sith base on Taris, he found her in the garage, cleaned up and standing over the workbench. Her eyes were closed, and several parts of a disassembled lightsaber were floating in front of her. He waited while they drifted into a mass and clicked together. She opened her eyes and looked at him.
"That the 'saber you took from that assassin yesterday?" he asked.
"Yep," she answered. "Jolee eventually stopped staring at me, wondering what I was, and went to bed. Purified the crystal then, but I wanted to rework the hilt before we headed out again." She activated the lightsaber, and the blade came out, blinding white now instead of Sith red. Aithne stared at it for a long time, then deactivated it and slid the hilt up her right sleeve. "Have to represent the Jedi Order properly to whatever we kill today. Let's go."
Carth fell into step with her and they headed together toward the airlock. "All this scrutiny's really getting to you, huh, beautiful?"
Aithne didn't look at him. "No. I've got dozens of Jedi looking at me like I'm the salvation or doom of the entire galazy and my fellow Padawan thinking she's the only one who can keep me from being the latter. Meanwhile, our senior knight's of the opinion I'm gonna keep her from falling to the Dark Side right after I started this Jedi gig. I'm letting down Zaalbar and Mission weeks after I promised to take care of them." Her voice was clipped and cool, but the anger underneath it boiled. "You and Canderous are both convinced I'm a deserter from one side or other of the Mandalorian Wars and lying about it, and I've got a princess-sized kill order on my head. Gotta say, after years of being on my own with nobody and nothing else to worry about it, I think I'm adjusting just fine."
"Well, when you put it that way . . ." Carth joked, but the joke petered out. He quickened his step to keep up with Aithne, who was striding fast enough she was halfway to a jog through the Czerka port. She kept her eyes on the pathway, ignoring the slaver gangs bundling strings of chained Wookiees onto transports, the green and gold uniforms all around, but every time they passed a slave or a member of the corporation, her jaw got tighter. "Jolee?" he asked in an undertone.
Aithne flashed their papers at the guard by the exit to the walkway. She walked a few more paces before she answered. "He's a nosy old busybody interested in what we plan to do with the Star Maps. He probably saw Revan a few years ago and got curious, though I doubt he knows what he saw. He's been out of action a while, but I know his type. He's not a threat; he might be a help; and what's more, I don't feel like he's afraid of me. Automatically makes him better than any Jedi or Sith I've met lately. Makes him better than a lot of people."
Carth wasn't sure what to say to that for a moment. When Aithne got angry—when she had a reason to be angry—she had a way of bludgeoning a person to death with a rant then running him up against the silence. He stared through the trees. "Why are they so afraid of you?" he said, more to himself than to her, really.
She responded instantly, her voice cracking like one of the slaver whips. "Why are you?"
Carth thought about it for a while. "I'm not sure I'd say I'm afraid of you—not the woman I know, anyway. There are things about you that don't add up for me. That's not the same thing as being afraid."
Aithne didn't seem too mollified. "You file a report with the Republic on that bounty chit yet?"
"I haven't exactly had the time and connectivity to file anything."
Aithne's eyes slid toward him and then away. "I wouldn't blame you if you had, or do in the future. I know it looks bad."
"It does," Carth conceded, "and it doesn't. But what do I have on you really? That the Sith think you aren't who the Republic records say you are. I still have no proof you're anything different and no idea who it is that they think you are. But . . . if that chit tells us anything, if all you've done so far tells us anything, it's that whoever you are, you're on our side for now. I guess I've decided to trust that—and that you're right: This working atmosphere we've had can't go on."
They walked a few more paces. Then Aithne spoke in a much softer voice. "Thank you."
"Did you talk to Mission?" Carth asked, changing the subject.
Aithne looked tired. "She handled us back without Big Z about as well as you might expect. I don't like that we left him there overnight, Carth."
"Not much we could've done, unless we did attack the village, and there are a lot of reasons that'd be a bad idea," Carth observed.
Beside him, Aithne stopped walking, and at first, Carth thought they were going to have another argument. Then he saw the way she was standing—the way her eyes had narrowed and were darting from left to right, the way her weight had shifted. His skin prickled, and even as she crossed her wrists in front of her to draw her lightsabers from her arm holsters, he went for his blasters.
The first viper kinrath put its first leg over the lip of the walkway ahead and to the right. Carth started firing. There were three of them. He and Aithne killed them in about forty-five seconds and started moving down the walkway toward the elevator like they'd never been interrupted.
After a moment, Carth gathered his courage. "About the way I've been acting—I want to apologize to you. You've been asking me to give you a chance to process things, and I just—I've been running right over that, over and over. I don't have the right to just expect you to talk to me, whether I like being left out of the loop or not. I haven't thought about what this all must be like for you, and it's made things for you harder than they need to be. So. I'm sorry. Will you accept my apology?"
"Even knowing you still think I'm not who I say I am?" Aithne challenged him, but not in a way that made him think she wanted a response. Carth didn't try one. There wasn't a point. They'd had the argument multiple times by now. She obviously wasn't who she said she was. He'd finally come around to the idea that that didn't make her an enemy. She would have to be satisfied with that. It was killing him not to know everything.
Aithne asked him another question then—a question he hadn't been expecting. "Remember back on Dantooine? Right after the ruin? I said I didn't want to talk with you because it'd be like an echo chamber." Carth remembered. He waited. "Ever since you told me the Jedi wanted me on Endar Spire, you've asked a lot of the same questions I have," she said.
She paused. "I can't explain the Sith bounty. I know it's suspicious, but I don't know who they think I am or why they think I'm valuable. I can't help that you and Canderous think that understanding Mando culture after a few gigs dealing with them and a knack for languages means I must've been involved in the war. It's exhausting and . . . unbelievably frustrating never to be taken at face value. But the rest of it? What the Council wants with me, why they're so damn scared, why I'm in charge of our mission? My bond with Bastila? My supposed destiny. The bounty. Revan." Her voice got quieter and quieter as she listed the questions he'd had about her and their mission. "I don't understand any of that either, and like you, I think there's more than they're telling us. It's got me more scared than the Council is, I think. So, yes: I've been struggling. You've made it worse. But not because you've been wrong. Because, for the most part, I think you're right."
"And they're using you," Carth said, slowing his pace. "Making you an asset without telling you the risks. And Bastila's what? Your handler?"
Aithne stopped to face him. She looked surprised he was following her, wary, but she gave a slight—very slight—little nod. Carth's stomach clenched. He'd noted Aithne's suitability for Republic spec ops back on Taris, and while he hadn't ever forced anyone into service himself or strong-armed them into a position they didn't volunteer for, he knew the war was getting desperate for the Republic. Aithne wasn't the only person the Republic had ever pressed into service. He knew men who'd wanted to retire who were still fighting against their will, and of special agents who would have preferred staying in the regs. He could imagine the Jedi Council might be in a similar position to the brass in the Republic fleet. They might have seen Aithne's talent in the Force and decided they needed her as soon as possible, whether or not they had the resources to train her well. They might be insecure about the ethics of using her, though. It could explain their nervousness about her falling to the Dark Side and wanting to keep one of their best Jedi on her.
"Juhani?" he asked.
This time, Aithne shook her head. "Juhani's auxiliary. As uninformed about whatever the Council wants with me as we are. The equivalent of a Jedi soldier, a decent warrior, but not Bas's special forces. I think they legitimately think she'll help us. There also might be a desire, on her part or theirs, to get her a certain distance away from the enclave and memories or influences there, to remind me how easy it can be to fall to the Dark Side, or to encourage me to stay Light-Sided by mentoring her. She was impressed by our talk in the grove."
Comparing Bastila to spec ops and Juhani to the regs made sense, Carth thought, and moved on. "What are you going to do? You don't really seem the type to sit back and let yourself be used. You planning to demand access?" He would.
Aithne shook her head again. "I've caught them lying to me enough times I wouldn't trust it. First and most obviously about enclave occupancy during our time on Dantooine—you saw that almost-empty academy. There was no real reason the Jedi needed to quarter Bas on Ebon Hawk except to keep an eye on me, and there've been other times. But I need to keep on good terms. I want Malak and the Sith defeated too, and dead if we can possibly manage it. I need Jedi support to provide for Mission and Zaalbar once we get him back. Still, it's got to the point where I don't want to ignore things anymore." She turned away then and started walking again, and Carth followed her.
"What stuck out to you yesterday?" she asked him then.
"Aside from the bounty?" Carth thought, then more on a hunch rooted in what he'd seen from Aithne herself than on anything he'd seen regarding their situation, he said, "Those last few moments of the fight with Calo Nord—was there something in the way Bastila took that knife for you?"
Aithne was satisfied. "Bingo." She explained what she had observed—the way Bastila's manner in the moment had indicated to her that the Padawan was conditioned by her superiors to prioritize Aithne's safety over her own, regardless of Bastila's Battle Meditation. "She's a Sentinel, not a Guardian. Battle support, not a front-line warrior. She knows precisely how important she is to the Republic war effort, and even though she likes me now more than she did, she's not actually the type to take a knife in the side just for the sake of friendship. You are. Mission is. She's the type to do it out of duty."
"So, what?" Carth asked. "You're more important to the war than Bastila?" It'd be consistent with the bounty rewards on the Sith chit. "Has the Council had a vision about you or something?" If they had, had someone on Dantooine leaked it to the Sith?
"If they have, they haven't told me," Aithne answered. She hesitated, glanced at him, and seemed to gather her own nerve for a moment. Then she told him her theory: that she was sharing the Star Map visions with Bastila over their Force bond, but that the visions themselves belonged to her. "I think I'm somehow resonating with the part of the Cosmic Force that used to be Darth Revan and channeling her memories."
Carth remembered she'd explained how her visions felt, the way she tapped into thoughts and emotions about the things she saw that didn't belong to her but made sense for Darth Revan. How Bastila, when they talked about their visions, only ever seemed to have gotten visuals and some audio, without everything attached. The way the visions Aithne was having didn't answer the description of any of the kinds of visions detailed in the Jedi records she'd read on Dantooine—glimpses of the future or some Force-sensitive location in the present, or symbols that could lead to enlightenment—but were much more consistent with memories of someone else's past.
He turned it all over in his head. "You aren't messing with me, right? You think you're actually seeing Revan's memories?"
"It's not like I'm in love with the idea, Carth," Aithne snapped. "It's just what makes the most sense. Like at crucial times—when I met Bastila, when we arrived on Dantooine, before we get to a Star Map—I'm remembering her memories." He noticed there were dark circles under her eyes, and when her mouth set, he saw lines beside it he hadn't noticed her having before. "The scary part is, I'm really starting to think that Bastila and the entire Jedi Council know that that's what's happening."
"You think that's why they're scared of you," Carth concluded. "That these memories—however they got there—are real somehow, and doing something to you. And the Council's what? Letting it happen because they need it?" All this was way above his paygrade, but he could follow, barely. If all this was true, Aithne would be more of a resource than an operative to the Jedi—something that made more sense than her being released from training after just six weeks. If she was accessing Revan's memories somehow, the Jedi might be trying to use her as a sort of walking conduit into Revan's information on the Star Forge, the intelligence they thought was the key to the Sith advance. And if the Sith knew the Jedi knew about whatever Aithne was doing, it also made sense they would be desperate to stop Aithne, whatever the cost.
"How is it happening, though? How do you think you're accessing Revan's memories?"
Aithne hesitated. "I want to research it when I get back to Dantooine and the Archives," she said, which meant she probably didn't know. "Force possession, maybe. Some form of necromancy or essence transfer."
"That doesn't sound like something the Jedi would normally approve of."
Aithne pursed her lips. "No—any of it would be decidedly Dark Side—but people will do a lot of things when their backs are up against the wall. But I'm also not sure it's the Jedi at all. That'd make the most sense. Otherwise, why did they want me, even before Taris? But it could be whatever's left of Darth Revan, reaching out somehow. There also might be a more natural way all this is happening I haven't read about or thought of yet. I don't know."
With everything laid out, Carth could understand how Aithne had been feeling overwhelmed. Even if she was wrong about her visions, just thinking she was experiencing the thought processes of one of most monstrous Sith in living memory had to be hell for her. And if the Jedi—or even worse, whatever was left of Revan—had been messing with her head? If there was some kind of uncertainty about what might happen because of it? He had to shudder.
"One thing your theory doesn't explain, though—" he said. "Where does Bastila come in? What's the deal with this bond the two of you have? You said you thought that was the most important thing before, right? That you dreamt of her before you two ever met and you think it might play into why you were recruited to Endar Spire."
"Right," Aithne confirmed. "There's going to end up being three questions here. One: How am I tapping into Revan's memories? Two: How do the Sith know about it? And three: Where does Bastila come in? The most important one to me personally is the first, because I think the answer will play into the level of danger I'm in for here, and I've decided I want to know. The second answer could be important to the Republic and the Jedi because there's been some kind of leak, and we need to find it. The third answer—I don't know. But it might tell me what the Jedi really want from the pair of us."
They were interrupted then by another group of wandering kinrath, but when the enormous tetrapods were steaming on their backs, Carth asked again, "What are you going to do?"
Aithne was quiet for a while. Then she said, "Take the visions as they come. Try to lead us to Malak's center of operations. Study up at the Archives and try to figure out how I'm getting the visions, ways to isolate that part of my consciousness from the rest. Ways to block Bastila out and create, manage, and break Force bonds. I need to know that anyway." She paused, opened her mouth, and for a moment, he thought she might tell him something else. Then she just shrugged and tried a smile. "Try not to turn into or become otherwise possessed by an evil Sith Lord, maybe?"
"Yeah, that'd put a damper on saving the galaxy." They walked on in silence for a while then, almost to the elevator. Carth worried about Aithne. He had a feeling that Bastila and the Jedi Council were starting to get to her, that they had her half convinced she actually was in danger of falling into the same kind of evil as Darth Revan. The nasty part was he couldn't come right out and deny it. A lot of Jedi had gone bad in and after the Mandalorian Wars. Revan and Malak had been heroes once, and there had been hundreds under them just as brave and well-intentioned, if they weren't as powerful or prominent. All but a handful who hadn't been killed had deserted the Republic and turned Sith. Something in the war or in the Dark Side of the Force had corrupted them. There was a real danger to Jedi that nobody who paid attention could ignore. He didn't want to think Aithne was capable of that kind of evil, but who was to say that if she'd been recruited earlier and gone to war like the others that she wouldn't have made the same choices they had?
Looking at her now, Carth decided he wasn't going to let it happen. Bastila—young, inexperienced, and sometimes a little too full of herself to know it—wasn't going to be the only person keeping Aithne in the Light. And if it wasn't Revan themself haunting Aithne somehow, if the Jedi had somehow drawn the Sith Lord into Aithne's head, he and Aithne would find out and hold them accountable. She didn't deserve to have that monster in her dreams. If Aithne could end Malak and the Sith, great, but the Republic didn't have to sacrifice her soul to do it. She had a family now. She had a life to live. He didn't want to see that wasted.
"Aithne," he started— "If I can help you in any way, just tell me, okay? I don't know what more I can do than I'm already doing—flying the ship, shooting some bad guys, helping to tutor Mission when you're busy—but I want to do whatever I can. I—I don't have access to any records that might help your research; if I did, I'd offer. But if you need the assistance of the Republic, later—"
"You'll do what you can for a damsel in distress?" Aithne suggested. She sighed again, and just when he was thinking he'd screwed up again and wondering exactly how many times a woman could reject a man when he hadn't ever really made a committed pass at her himself, Aithne reached out, looped her arm through his, and leaned her head against his shoulder. "You really can't help yourself, flyboy, can you? You know, I don't think I really want you to? You have a way of forcing a girl into the worst kinds of inconsistency."
Carth smiled. "I kind of like your kind of inconsistency," he admitted. Actions said more than words did, and despite everything Aithne said, her actions were almost always in his favor. "But as far as forcing you into anything—crap. You know, I'm actually starting to think that rumor you were press-ganged into service is just another front."
"I really should've turned pirate out of spite," Aithne mused, instead of answering the implicit question, but she squeezed his arm. Ahead, Carth saw the elevator through the gloom of Kashyyyk, and a figure that was Gorwooken, waiting for them. And eager as he was to finish the stuff they had to do in the Shadowlands, get Big Z back, and get offworld before more bounty hunters showed up, he was a little disappointed to see they'd got back to the elevator attendant so fast. "I didn't want an echo chamber, and now I do," Aithne said quietly, returning to the theme of inconsistency. "I want a wall to bounce all this off of. I want a friend." She hesitated again. "And I want a witness."
A chill went down his spine at the implication. While she was cooperating with the Jedi—to defeat Malak, to punish the Sith for Taris and make sure nothing like it ever happened again, and because it was the easiest way for a woman like her to take care of Mission and Zaalbar—Aithne was not okay with what was happening to her. And in asking him to be a witness, she was implying that someday when this was over with, she might want to go on record about it and expect his support in doing so. But even though he knew it could be an ugly fight, with huge ramifications for the Jedi and the Republic, something in Carth really liked the idea of going after them for this. The Jedi had made a bunch of mistakes, before the Mandalorian Wars and since. They were supposed to be the good guys here. If they hadn't been acting like it, they ought to be held responsible just like anyone in the Republic.
"Then you got it," he promised once he could speak. "And thank you, for letting me be there."
"As annoying as you are?" she answered lightly. "Couldn't be anyone else." She lifted her head up, looked him in the face for a moment, then let him go and stepped away.
Probably just as well, Carth thought. Aithne had talked about Jedi restraint and self-denial, and he hoped he could trust to that more than to her inconsistency. If he couldn't—well, his own reserves of restraint and self-denial were just about tapped out. He thought he had done the right thing, refusing her after Dantooine. But he wanted to be her friend too—without the distrust; without any arguments they didn't want to have, for fun; without restraint or misunderstandings. Sometimes they even managed it, but when they did, it was hard to tell just where the line was. Morgana had been gone for . . . for a long time.
So, in a way, Carth was grateful for the grumpy, human-hating Wookiee that met them with a glare by the elevator basket. In another way, he really just wished Gorwooken would disappear and leave them alone, suspended among the wroshyr trees, for a little while longer.
AITHNE
The ride down to the Shadowlands and the walk back to Jolee's was silent, but the quality of the silence had changed. Aithne was glad she had opened up to Carth. And while she wouldn't be willing to bet he'd never suspect her of anything stupid and unfounded again in the future, she thought he was probably more likely to focus his suspicions now on the things that actually were suspicious about what was going on. She felt like she had an ally. She felt like she wasn't alone. She'd been alone almost all her life, so it was a good feeling.
They found Jolee outside his hut, sitting on a rock. There was a worn leather pack beside him, with a fragment of the wrecked starship lashed to its back. A memento, perhaps. Jolee's eyes were closed, and he was humming a tuneless little song. When they drew near, his eyes opened. "'Bout time you two showed up. I was about to go save the galaxy myself. Make it back in time for tea, maybe."
Aithne grinned. She liked Jolee. She really did. "You gonna sit there and banter until Carth and I are as wrinkly as you are? Let's go!"
Jolee appraised her, and the corner of his mouth tipped up. He slid off his rock, slung his pack over his back, and took the lead. As Aithne followed after him, she was impressed. Bindo took them around kinrath nests and away from tach colonies, choosing the least disruptive path through the trees that offered an easy, more-or-less direct route, without making a lot of noise about what he was doing.
Carth was the one who broke the silence first. "So, Jolee, you've decided to leave your little hermitage in the forest and come help us stop the Sith. Thought this was worth coming out of retirement for?"
Jolee glanced back at Carth. "Yeah, that's right, sonny. The Sith are the greatest evil to hit the galaxy since well, the Mandalorians. And they're the worst thing since Exar Kun. Blah blah blah, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera."
Aithne stifled a laugh. She could see where Bindo was going with this. But Carth, for the moment, was just confused. "Okay, old man, you lost me there. Are you trying to make a point?"
Jolee sighed. "Look, everybody always figures the time they live in is the most epic, most important age to end all ages. But tyrants and heroes rise and fall, and historians sort out the pieces."
"Well, there's a way to make a gal feel better about saving the galaxy," Aithne remarked.
"I'm just trying to keep things in perspective," Jolee replied. "From what you've told me, Malak is a tyrant who should be stopped. If he conquers the galaxy, we're in for a couple of rough centuries. Eventually it'll come around again, but I'd rather not wait that long. So we do what we have to, and we try to stop the Sith." He paused and looked at Carth. "But don't start thinking that this war, your war, is more important than any other war just because you're in it."
Just like Aithne could have expected, Carth didn't like it. "That's an interesting theory, but I don't buy it. The Republic stands for something; it's stood for something for fifteen thousand years. And if it falls, everything will change forever."
Aithne decided to take up the argument. "For curiosity's sake, exactly what does the Republic stand for, Onasi? What are you fighting for?"
Carth's eyes flashed her way in the darkness, and his annoyance shifted over to her. "I'm fighting for freedom," he answered. "For justice and for equal representation."
"Honorable ideals," Aithne answered honestly. "And if the Republic actually stood for those things, I'd be behind you all the way."
"If?" Carth demanded, insulted.
Aithne waited a beat. "Yes, if. You can't tell me you don't see it, Carth. The Republic is bloated—trying to protect far too many citizens to ever guarantee the safety of all of them. It's sluggish. The Senate is overrun with petty politicians far more concerned with the welfare of their private business ventures than they are with the welfare of their respective peoples. Worse, corporations and special interest groups like Czerka and the banks have representatives, formalizing an already implicit tendency in the system to value greed over the interests of the everyday citizen. Freedom? There are slavers who sit in that senate hall on Coruscant. The Republic far too often cares more about maintaining the status quo than they do about justice, and people are only represented equally in proportion to the money and power they can put up to make their voices heard."
"That how you feel, is it?" Jolee asked, voice neutral.
Carth was incredulous. "Exactly whose side are you on, Aithne?"
Aithne raised her eyebrows at him and tilted her head. "Yours," she answered. "Personally. Mission Vao's. Zaalbar's. Teethree's and Canderous's and Juhani's. Bastila's. Sasha's, as long as she's with us. Now yours too, Jolee," she added to the listening old Jedi. She looked away from Carth and stared out into the dark. "You can't count on governments and politicians. Especially if you're little people from the Rim. The best I've ever been able to say is that the Republic's better than the alternative. So, I've stood for myself. For my own interests, and—when luxury allowed—for my ideals, not the ideals I wanted to believe any larger entity possessed. Friendship. Truth. Honor. And yes, justice, freedom, and equal representation. To be honest, these days I'm grateful when I can stand for those ideals embodied in my friends as well as myself."
"Huh," Jolee said. "Don't count on them always being embodied. They're luxury for everyone, not just you. You believe what you have to to get through whatever it falls to you to face. You ask me, we're just lucky all of us want to stop Malak. Anyway. We're here."
He gestured to a blue force field that had sprung up in the path. "There, you see? Beautifully subtle, isn't it? At least, compared to other Czerka equipment dumped down here. It's only been here a short while, or the Wookiees would have disabled it. They wouldn't have had an easy time of it, though."
Aithne looked around. "Cordoning off escape routes for the Wookiees? Sectioning off the forest for tach hunters and the like?" she guessed.
Jolee snorted. "Yes, there are others. Each blocking similar points on certain paths. It is all very calculated. Very precise. It would have been effective if it hadn't relied on the creatures to be walking. Climbers don't have much trouble getting around it."
"So no luck with the Wookiees, then," Aithne scoffed. "Alright. You going to let us through?"
Jolee fiddled with a keypad next to the force field. "I can manipulate it for a moment. Let me see: how did the Czerka engineers do it?" The force field dissipated. "There we go. Now keep moving," he instructed. "These are the most dangerous depths of Kashyyyk. A few surprises wait for us, I'll wager."
Aithne nodded for the old Jedi to proceed. He led her and Carth into an older section of the forest. Moss and kinrath webs hung off of the ancient wroshyr trunks. "Aside from the hordes of kinrath?" she murmured. But it was the Wookiee she heard first—a male by register, crying out in rage and anger.
Aithne ignited her sabers and broke into a run. The scene she darted into was dramatic. No less than three armored Mandalorians squared off against a single Wookiee. Two other Wookiees were already dead on the ground—exsanguinated, their blood soaking into the wroshyr roots. Aithne had less than a second to size up the situation. Knowing she might be wrong, misled purely by the numbers and the Mandalorians' possession of armor, she jumped in on the Wookiee's side.
She shouted as she attacked, drawing the Mandalorians' attention toward her, toward her lightsabers, toward the old enemy and a superior foe. It worked. All three of the men turned to face her, closing in. Aithne had a split second to panic before the forest ignited in a flash of blue-violet light. The smell of ozone, burnt metal, and cooking flesh filled the air. Aithne turned to see Bindo, hands extended. Lightning danced from his fingers, casting eerie, unnatural brightness back on his face, taut with concentration but otherwise expressionless. Aithne's hair stood on end. Force Lightning—a Dark Side power, purely offensive, and intended not only to kill but to kill painfully. Yet she sensed no hatred, no anger in the older man, and his face remained wrinkled only by age. He was channeling the power without draining his own connection to the Force, without corrupting himself. She'd never imagined anything like it.
The Mandalorians jerked and screamed, yet they were rallying, climbing back to their feet, blades raised. Aithne saw Bindo breathe in and flex his fingers, and she moved first, cutting down all three Mandalorians in what was now an act of mercy.
She opened her mouth to address Bindo, but the Wookiee they had saved intervened, staggering over to them. He bent to lean against a tree. He was bleeding heavily, badly wounded with a deep cut to the side.
/Great Bacca,/ he prayed, /let this outsider be different than the slavers.I beg you . . ./ he asked Aithne. /Can you heal my wounds? An attack . . . from nowhere. Please, I need to be healed. Can you?/
Aithne held out a hand, and Jolee placed a medpac into it. He'd had one ready already—and that as much as the Lightning interested Aithne. She shoved it aside for later. "What happened here?" she asked the Wookiee.
/Please . . . I need to be healed. I . . . am dying,/ the Wookiee told her.
Aithne stripped open the medpac and handed him the coagulant shot first. "This one first," she explained, "then stitches and a bandage. I'd do more," she added, gesturing with her hands to indicate the Force as he injected the shot, "but my understanding of Wookiee anatomy is chancy at best." Such an understanding was necessary to heal with the Force. She glanced at Jolee, eyebrow raised, but he shook his head, indicating he couldn't help with this either.
They watched as the Wookiee stitched himself up and bandaged his wound. Onasi gave him a drink of water. "Will you need help getting back above?" Carth asked, accompanying the question with its counterpart in spacer sign, just in case. It was a nice thought, Aithne mused, even if the Wookiee hadn't already demonstrated knowledge of Basic by following Aithne's directions and his knowledge of spacer sign was by no means certain.
The Wookiee shook his head, climbing to unsteady feet. /I will rest, build a hidden and fortified shelter to keep me until I may return,/ he answered. /I thank you. I would not have expected outsiders to aid me. Perhaps . . . you will help again?/ He gave Jolee and Aithne a strange look, and something about it made Aithne hesitate.
"If we can."
/My hunting party, all of them, killed without honor,/ the Wookiee explained. /I barely survived. I want the murderers to suffer the same./
Aithne heard Jolee translating in a low voice behind her for Onasi. It figured that after a couple decades on the planet, he'd understand Shyriiwook. "You want vengeance," Aithne summarized. She pressed her lips together. "Without committing one way or the other, tell me about the attackers."
/I've never seen their kind before, not even the Czerka,/ the Wookiee related. He sat down against a wroshyr trunk, leaning on his sword blade, but his voice seemed steadier. /You saw them, armored from head to toe, yet blending in with the forest. They followed us for a long while. We found bodies to the southwest, and then again further south after the west branch of the path. Their speed was amazing. They fought like outsiders, waiting until we were unarmed. They would not attack until we had put our weapons away! They strike like cowards!/
Aithne's jaw set. "Worse than the guys on Dantooine," she observed to Carth. "They were raiders, but it sounds like these guys decided to go big-game hunting sapients like the Trandoshans. Murdering just to murder. I know how Canderous would want us to handle them. If we do it, will you tell on me to Bas?"
Carth shrugged. "The way I see it, killing these Mandalorians doesn't have to be about vengeance. They're murdering cowards, killing people because they think it's fun. We stop them, we're protecting everyone they might hurt in the future. Don't the Jedi encourage the protection of others?"
"Not as much as they should," Aithne muttered.
"Ain't that the truth," Carth said.
"Well, if we're agreed," Aithne said to him. She turned back to the Wookiee and bowed.
The Wookiee bowed back. /I thank you. I will wait here. I am too weak to fight them again, but I refuse to leave the Shadowlands until vengeance is sated, whether that be your intent or not. If you kill them, I will reward you with whatever I can. They are not worthy of life. Look for them where the bodies of my fellows are. They will only attack you if you are unarmed. The cowards./
Aithne bowed again and started off into the forest again with the others. "Speaking of Jedi ideals and what is and isn't permitted to us," she said to Bindo, adopting a lightness she didn't feel.
"The Lightning?" Jolee grunted.
It had been a very deliberate display, Aithne thought. Jolee had definitely bailed her out of what could have been a very bad situation, if he hadn't outright saved her life, and he had done it in a way that underscored not merely the extreme usefulness he could have to their party but a defiance of Jedi teachings that crossed over into outright contempt. Without doing anything to disprove her and Bastila's belief that he was nevertheless unfallen. Sith didn't use Lightning the way Bindo just had—to defend the oppressed; punishing the wicked, but with conviction instead of malice; and drawing from the environment in a sympathetic way instead of exerting their own Force over the environment in a way that necessarily resulted in Dark Side corruption. Jolee had refused to tell her about himself with words, but he had just opened his heart to her through his actions. It felt calculated, and Aithne wasn't sure if that in itself made her like or distrust him more.
"It got the bad guys off you when you did your whole swooping-in defender-of-the-innocent bit, didn't it?" Jolee asked her. "Pretty stupid, rushing in like that. But what do I know?"
"I didn't think they'd all go for me," Aithne defended. "Reasonable tactics would dictate spreading out to cover you and Onasi too."
"You underestimate Mandalorian lust for glory, lass," Jolee noted.
Aithne sniffed. "Just be glad Bastila didn't see that back there," she said. "You'd never hear the end of it. Actually, can you do that for her sometime? Might get her to back off me a little."
"You hear a lot of 'Beware the Dark Side,' do you?"
Jolee sounded a bit too casual for her liking. He caught her eye and shrugged. "You're a bit obvious, asking the boy here not to tattle on you for killing cowards who deserve it."
Aithne pursed her lips and decided discretion was the better part of valor. She didn't know Bindo that well yet, and she wasn't exactly keen to share her issues with Bastila and the Council with him. "Let's clear the area before we start hunting for our hunters," she suggested instead. "I don't want to fight two different enemies at once."
"That could be a good idea," Jolee mused, "You never can tell how many beasts are lurking in the undergrowth, but—"
"—Let's at least let them know we're here and a lot deadlier than they are."
Time was funny in the Shadowlands. With everything the same gray-green, it was near impossible to tell where Kashyyyk's star was in the planet's sky. They could have spent less than an hour or nearly half a day clearing the area of nearly two dozen kinrath in order to secure their immediate surroundings to fight the Mandalorians and search for the Star Map and Chuundar's Wookiee. It was brutal, mindless exertion. The kinrath had no brains to speak of, but they were very strong, and Aithne noted that the variety in that area of Kashyyyk was particularly venomous. She lost count of the number of times she used a Force Push to hold a slavering beast at bay when its dripping fangs were inches away from someone's throat. But finally, the kinrath they saw began to scuttle away, and the forest floor was quieter, free of the sound of scuttling kinrath legs over the underbrush.
"See?" panted Aithne. "Nothing to it." That said, she slid down to sit on her butt against the trunk of a wroshyr.
"Uh-huh," said Carth, sitting beside her, but looking considerably less exhausted. He'd kept to range weapons and had not sapped nearly as much strength as the two Force-users. He rooted about in his pack and handed Aithne her canteen. She drank it down to the very dregs without a word. Jolee, too, took a water break.
"I wonder if we could eat something," Aithne said presently.
"Well, we have the ration bars," Carth began.
"No," Aithne interrupted before he could finish.
"Actually," said Jolee, eyeing a nearby kinrath corpse.
Aithne was struck by this. "Are they any good?" she asked.
"The vermin make pretty good eating," Jolee confirmed. "I could whip up some kinrath legs in ten, maybe twenty minutes if Carth started a fire."
Aithne considered. She pulled a ration bar out from her pack, looked at it in distaste, and flipped it back inside. "So forty-five minutes, with gathering the wood and getting the fire to start," she said. "Good enough."
They were in an old forest inhabited by dangerous animals with claws and horns, so it didn't take Aithne long to find some dead dry wood. While Jolee jointed and cracked open the legs of one of the kinrath corpses nearby, Carth cleared ground for a campfire and built one up, lighting it with materials Bindo also provided. The scent of the kinrath, once Bindo put them on the fire, wasn't quite what Aithne had hoped—despite coming from arboreal creatures, they smelled like oceanic crustaceans.
"Seafood on a landlocked forest world," she sighed. But when Bindo took the kinrath legs off the fire, her conclusion turned out to be misleading. The kinrath had the same consistency of some seafood but a gamier, woodier flavor, and in any event, the freshness of the meat was a blessing.
It was a messy meal, with more than one burnt finger in the eating, but when it was over and three full kinrath leg casings lay empty on the ground and they were all lying back around the fire staring at the treetops, seemingly an eternity away, they couldn't help sighing with satisfaction.
"Well, I understand why those Wookiees were down here hunting," Aithne remarked as she licked the last of the kinrath off her lips. "Wish we could take the time to smoke or dry some for Ebon Hawk."
"Wish we had the space to carry it," Carth agreed.
"I must admit, I'd like nothing better than to nap for a while, but my guess is if we do that, nasty scavengers we don't want to meet might come by?"
"It's the Shadowlands, lass," Jolee pointed out.
Aithne groaned and rolled to her feet. She kicked dirt and rocks over the fire until it was extinguished. "Unfortunately. Killing Mandalorians it is, then." She pulled her sabers out of her sleeves and stuffed them in the top of her pack, leaving it slightly open. When the Mandalorians attacked, she would use the Force to call them back to her. Jolee adopted the same measure. Carth, however, would have to rely on Aithne to arm him once the fighting began.
It didn't take long for them to find the first group of fallen Wookiees. And sure enough, as soon as they stepped among them, Aithne heard a faint hiss, and suddenly they were surrounded by three armed and armored Mandalorians. Shoving out with the Force, she thrust them all back several meters, knocking them off their feet. She reached back, flipped Carth's blasters out of her pack, and in the same movement, called her lightsabers to her palm. In the same moment, Carth flicked the safety off his guns, and Jolee ignited his own lightsaber.
The Mandalorians were taken aback by their preparedness. They had lain in wait for a hunt and had found an enemy prepared to kill. Two of them were dead in a split second—impaled by lightsabers from Jolee and Aithne. The third reacted quickly enough to survive a few moments longer. He ducked under Onasi's arm, swinging his weapon in a defensive blow aimed to incapacitate Onasi, to give him a chance to leave the circle and flee into the forest. But Onasi could dodge too. He leapt back toward Bindo, away from the blade, and brought up the barrels of both blasters and fired. His first shot went wide. The second went straight through the eye slit of the Mandalorian's helmet, and he fell to the ground like a sack of meal.
Aithne whistled. "Nice shot. One in about ten thousand."
Carth shrugged off the compliment. "Ah, sometimes you get lucky."
The second group of hunters, near another circle of their victims, proved about as easy to take down. Rummaging through their corpses, however, Aithne found something interesting. A datapad on one of the first group had revealed that the hunters were divided into three groups; a swoop bike signaling device on one of the others indicated how the groups were keeping in touch in the absence of radios. Aithne had spotted a deserted camp with the Mandalorians' powered-down swoop bikes in their sweep of the immediate area. She now led the others back to it, explaining, "The third group is senior. They're floating, not lying in wait for Wookiees to investigate the murders. I'd rather not take the time to find them in the forest, so I figure we call them back home."
"Calling the murderers to you for the showdown," Bindo mused.
"Never do more than you have to," Aithne answered.
"Yes, that is the rule we live by," Carth muttered under his breath.
Aithne shot him a look. "You're three times the do-gooder I am, Onasi, and you know it."
"You're only in it for the justifiable homicide."
"Glad you understand," Aithne retorted, ignoring his facetiousness. "But don't tell—"
"Don't tell Bastila. I got it."
Aithne walked into the camp. The Mandalorians had made an effort to camouflage their transportation. The supplies were caged and likewise hidden with leaves, moss, and tree bark. But she'd seen the clear ground right away, and from there, it hadn't been difficult to spot the remnants of a campfire that had been used for at least two days, and then to find the gear. Aithne swung the camo net off each of the swoop bikes. She considered for a moment, then activated her 'sabers and melted the steering on all three bikes, leaving them red and stinking like the forges they were made in. She then reattached the signaling device they had found to one of the bikes and activated it, sending out a signal that would be picked up—hopefully—on the third team's receiver, summoning them to return back to the camp for a find or an injury. Finally, she activated her energy shield and leaned up against one of the sabotaged bikes, a deactivated lightsaber in each hand, arms crossed.
"Dramatic much?" Carth commented.
Aithne shrugged. "You never get a second chance to make a first impression."
"Especially when you plan on killing the people in question," Jolee agreed.
They didn't have long to wait. Soon three Mandalorians appeared before them. These were bigger, and one wore blood-red armor. Aithne wondered what clan he had come from and whether it still acknowledged him. She examined her nails.
Red addressed her. "You have interrupted our hunt, interloper," he said.
"That was the general idea," Aithne agreed.
"The inhabitants of this world could do little against us, but you appear to be a threat," Red said.
"We don't like that, do we?" Aithne asked rhetorically. "No, we'd rather slaughter sapients completely unprepared for the challenge than engage in anything like a real battle again." She stood, taking up her stance, though she didn't activate her weapons again. She looked the Dar'manda up and down. /Lazy, cowardly scuts,/ she said then in their own language. /Your armor is a disgrace. You shame your clan and your ancestors. You call yourself men and warriors? Draw steel and fight, thou soulless. See if you can go to hell with some small shreds of your honor intact./
/You dare?!/ Red breathed.
Aithne activated her lightsabers and engaged without another word. To either side, she heard Bindo's lightsaber humming and Onasi's blasters singing and knew they were fighting too. She endeavored to maneuver the Mandalorians around so their backs were to Onasi and he would have clearer sight lines to fire. She didn't know how much good it would do; the painted beskar would deflect almost all blaster fire. It deflected lightsaber strokes, except at the joints. She, Carth, and Jolee were much more vulnerable by comparison. But she wanted to give Carth a chance to help, and in any event, she was wary of a certain desire she had to kill these Mandalorians, to kill them personally. Bastila, rubbing off on me? It was justifiable homicide, certainly, as Carth had joked, but there were ways and ways to approach those. Motivation was just as important as what a person did, whether that person happened to be a Force User or not. She felt she ought to share the kills on these monsters with the others, combat her urge to cut them down herself in a spirit of disgust and anger.
But like the first group by the Wookiee who had survived their attacks, these Mandalorians were fixated upon her. She'd delivered some of the worst insults she could think from their culture in their own language to begin the fight and now stood Jetii aruetii, both less than a person to a Mando and the most hated and desired foe, denouncing them as traitors, cowards, and unworthy of their armor, clan, and culture. Both intolerable affront and irresistible challenge.
And even though she knew she shouldn't, Aithne wanted it that way. She liked it that way. There was an electricity to the combat with three men in nigh-invulnerable armor coming at her, filled with hatred and desperate for the kill. There was something impossibly satisfying to her in knowing that cutting them down here and now, regardless of their defense and in defiance of all the odds, would be a righteous action, that no one would blame her for it. No one would miss these three. The galaxy would be better off. Wookiees and probably a host of other people would live because she'd repaid these murderers in kind.
She didn't fight fair. Mandalorians never did. Total war meant using every advantage at your disposal, and if none of them was enough, your enemy deserved to live. That was what the Mando'ade believed. So Aithne stretched her feelings out to the Force-rich fabric of the Kashyyyk Shadowlands and used it to push and to hold her enemy as required. She manipulated her environment, using the swoop bike at her back at one point, making use of blunt force trauma against her foes since weapons wouldn't penetrate their armor. And when Bindo made use of Force Lightning again, it occurred to her that there was one other use of the tactic that hadn't occurred to her earlier: that while lightsabers and blaster bolts had trouble getting through Mandalorian armor, the metal was plenty conductive.
She still got pinned for a moment once—this group was better than both the others and may have been expecting her. She was backed up against a tree root with a Mandalorian warrior bearing down on her with all his weight, holding off his cortosis-weave blade with both her lightsabers and hearing his breathing rattling inside his helm, edged with the excitement of his anger and bloodlust. She lifted her right foot and kicked his knee out from the inside. He fell with a cry, and she didn't hesitate to hit him when he was down with a direct thrust up under the helm.
She staggered a few steps, rolling her shoulders, and looked around at the scene. The immediate area was a disaster zone. It smelled of feces and ozone and burnt metal. One of the disabled swoop bikes was listing to the side. Another was crumpled, burning in the remains of the Mandalorian campfire atop the crushed and broken corpse of one of the enemy. The sounds of the forest nearby had completely died away, all the beasts having fled or gone into hiding. And Aithne could still taste the death and anger on the air.
She felt nothing herself—no sense of victory, no satisfaction. Now that the battle was over, she just felt tired. She swore once, viciously, under her breath instead of aloud. Then she knelt in the middle of the battlefield, closed her eyes, shoved her hair back from her face, and prayed—a Mando'a meditation for the dead, thinking not only of the dead murderers on the ground who should have been better but the Czerka patrol from the day before, of Bastila, and of all the fighting that likely lay ahead. She waited there for a long time, minutes, until the first tachs began to cry out again from the trees. Then she rose; took a drink from her canteen, which Jolee had helped her refill at a nearby spring since lunch; brushed the dirt from the knees of her fiber armor; and looked at the others.
Both of them were watching her with undisguised fascination. In Carth, it was mixed with both suspicion and empathy. In Jolee, with something like calculation.
"You alright there, lass?" Bindo asked.
"Think I've been down here too long," she answered. "Need to see the stars again. Not sure how you've done it all these years."
"Well, it wasn't like I had a whole lot of ethical options for getting off Kashyyyk," Jolee answered.
Aithne hesitated then, looking down at the body of the Mandalorian commander. It need not be the entire head, she decided. The Wookiee would prefer it, but just the helmet would be ample proof she'd completed his charge. These guys had been Mandalorians once. They wouldn't willingly part with any piece of their armor. Because they were deserters and cowards, and because she'd killed them, by the laws of their culture, technically all their armor was forfeit to her and her clan—or rather, her companions. But she couldn't carry all of it. As Carth had reminded her just this morning, he wasn't a bantha.
So, she bent and removed the helmet of the Mandalorian commander to show the Wookiee. The man beneath it had been young, she noted. Probably only in his early twenties when the Mandalorian Wars started, and probably less than thirty when he deserted. Handsome in a brutish kind of way. His blue eyes stared vacantly up at the canopy. She passed her hand over his lids to close them. There was no blood to clean off the helmet. He had died via lightsaber. She tossed it to Carth.
"For the Wookiee?" he guessed.
"Cleaner than the other way," Aithne answered. She stood again and looked at Bindo. "I don't want to look at another person for an hour at least, though. Where's the Star Map?"
Bindo thought for a moment. "You know, it isn't too far from here," he said. "This way."
It wasn't too far. Jolee had been leading them for less than five minutes before it came into view between a stand of four wroshyr trees. Just like the Map on Dantooine, a small, triangular pillar of the same strange black metal. Unlike it, wired up to a holointerface beside it that looked like it had been installed much more recently.
"Well, there it is," Jolee said. "Obstinate machine. I've no doubt it holds what you seek, but good luck getting it to respond!"
Aithne approached the holographic interface with mixed feelings of dread and resignation. She had wanted Bastila to take charge back at Ebon Hawk in the case of trouble with Czerka and the Wookiees if they defied Chuundar's orders in some way down here. But she'd also sent Bastila back because she had wanted Bastila away from here. In case she did end up killing for Chuundar, or rather, Zaalbar—and so she encountered whatever Revan's holointerface had to say independent of Bastila's input.
The image captured in the holointerface was that of an alien the likes of which Aithne had never seen before, though it spoke to the three of them in Basic. At first, it responded well to Aithne, like the droid in the ancient ruins on Dantooine. It even said it had brain patterns on file that indicated it should allow her to proceed. But as soon as Aithne asked her first question, it shut down. The computer became uncooperative and began withholding information. The conclusion was obvious: Aithne not only had a Force signature similar to Revan's, she thought like Revan, or her mind had been enough overshadowed by Revan's thinking patterns to be detectable by the computer's scans. But because she wasn't Revan, Revan's installation was programmed to deny her access to the Star Map.
The computer said that she could, however, undergo "behavioral reconfiguration" to match the pattern in memory. In other words, program her thoughts like a droid to resemble Revan's, or what she thought might be Revan's, in order to gain access to the Star Map. Aithne didn't like the idea, but they also didn't have the time for her to dismantle the holointerface and any preprogrammed defenses. There was also no way to tell if Revan might have programmed the interface to shred the Map and its contents if she tried that route. From what she remembered from her dreams and visions, it seemed like a precaution that Revan might take.
Aithne put off the computer's behavioral reconfiguration, asking as many questions as the computer would respond to before agreeing to undergo any further evaluation, but it was really just a stalling tactic. Among the things she uncovered was that the trees of Kashyyyk and the Wookiees themselves might have been bioengineered by the Builders thirty thousand years previously, and that Jolee had tried no fewer than 152 times to access the Star Map.
"One hundred and fifty-two," Aithne repeated. "Really?"
Jolee chuckled. "Call me stubborn, I guess. It's not like there was anything else to do around here."
The computer's log of the users that had failed to access the Star Map since its installation also included five attempts by a Wookiee named Freyyr. Aithne heard the name with satisfaction. She'd been right. The crazy rogue Chuundar had sent her to assassinate, the threat she had perceived to his rule now that she and Zaalbar were here, was indeed Chuundar and Zaalbar's father and the former chieftain. If he went back to the village now and supported Zaalbar instead of Chuundar, and the pair of them testified, they might be able to instigate an uprising. The plan that had only been a vague notion before solidified in her mind.
In the meantime, however, she needed the Star Map. Finally, Aithne gave up on putting off the inevitable and started talking about the computer's suggested behavioral reconfiguration. "How can I match the parameters in your memory when I don't know what they are?" she asked. She had some insight into Revan's thinking, she felt, but not nearly enough to say confidently that she could predict how the war hero turned Sith would have acted in every situation.
"There are measures available," the computer reassured her. "Personality profiling will verify the basic structure of your conscious mind. With that, I will determine whether you are ready to receive the Star Map or can be made ready."
Made ready . . . "What do you mean by that?" Aithne said, the hairs on the back of her neck rising as she contemplated further infiltration by whatever was left of Revan, not just in her dreams but in her day-to-day life.
"Information unavailable," the computer answered, as it had to at least nine of her questions thus far. Aithne wanted to scream. "If you have any further questions, ask them now. Access will be terminated upon success or failure of the examination."
"It's a really thorough installation and security system," Aithne muttered. "You have to give her that. Fine. Start your little 'evaluation.'"
"Evaluation commencing," the computer said. "Results will be compared against the pattern in memory. Just act like you should." Its tone became sharper, and it began. "You travel with a Wookiee and have encountered complications. Hypothetical: You and this Zaalbar are captured and separated. If you both remain silent, one year of prison for each of you. However, call Zaalbar a traitor, and he will serve five years, while you serve none. He is offered the same deal, but if you both accuse the other, you both serve two years. What do you do? What do you trust him to do?"
Aithne was disturbed. "How do you even know about Zaalbar?" she demanded. "He isn't here."
"I hear what happens on Kashyyyk, and a great deal beyond," replied the computer, which didn't help at all. "Answer the question I have posed."
"I should think inquisitiveness would match the pattern in your memory," Aithne muttered. Then she shook her head. She'd heard the hypothetical situation the computer was giving her now before. The prisoner's dilemma, it was called. She'd heard it discussed by some academics she'd worked for in the past. There were a couple of different strategies for it—the response of absolute dominance and supposedly perfect rationality, which dictated always betraying the other player regardless of their likely reaction, and the response which considered a reaction based upon the first player's knowledge of the other and the general public good. According to both recent history and the more intimate understanding she thought she had of Revan's mind, Revan might adopt either strategy in the hypothetical described, depending on Revan's fellow prisoner and the long-term goal. But given that Revan had been a Sith when she installed the holointerface, the top general of an army in a state of rebellion, and paranoid to boot, Aithne thought she knew the answer the computer wanted—the answer Revan would have wanted.
Abruptly, rashly, she decided she didn't care. She was not Darth Revan. She didn't want to be Darth Revan. She didn't want to become Darth Revan. Besides, Zaalbar had sworn her a life debt, and she'd made him a promise in turn, and the computer had made the hypothetical specific to him. "Zaalbar wouldn't turn me in," she said. "He'd consider it the height of dishonor, and assuming I do not have the ability to lie to our jailers and use my freedom to break him out too, he'd trust to my nobility and decision that we would wait out the year and go free together. So, that's what we'd do."
"Are you sure?" the computer asked. "If you turn, you risk two years or none at all. If you rely on loyalty, you risk one year. Or five. Your loyalty is dangerous. Your companion could take the opportunity to benefit by turning on you. Zaalbar's family is mired in treachery. What loyalty do they know? Your answer is incorrect."
"No. Zaalbar's tortured by his family's treachery and determined to act in a better way," Aithne answered. "I know my man, and that knowledge is far more valuable than indiscriminate paranoia likely to damage our working relationship and mutual goals in the future. My loyalty in reliance upon his enables us to continue on together. The hole in the hypothetical is the reliance upon our captors to abide by the terms of their deal and the rigidity of the problem's construction—there's always multiple options in a real-world situation, and honestly, the pattern in your memory would recognize that, though your programming might not."
"You're being difficult, lass," Jolee observed. "The thing can't help its programming. I assume you need the Star Map?" Aithne glared at him.
"Personality parameters must have limiting conditions," the computer said. "Evaluation must continue. You must match the pattern in memory. Your memory," it added meaningfully. Aithne tried to jump on that, but the computer was too quick for her. "I must demand honest acceptance of the proper behavior. That is a condition of my programming.
"The previous incorrect response will be discounted. Future incorrect responses will result in rejection," the computer told her. "Hypothetical: You are at war. Deciphering an intercepted code, you learn two things about your enemy. A single spot in their defense will be at its weakest in ten days, and they will attack one of your cities in five days. What do you do with this information? What is the most efficient course of action?"
Aithne sighed. She knew what Darth Revan would do in this hypothetical too. This time, it was the same thing Revan, leader of the Republic armies, would have done in the Mandalorian Wars before their fall to the Dark Side. And it was the same thing she would do. She hated that. She almost wanted to lie, but, as Jolee said, they needed the Star Map. So, she put on her best general cap and answered in a crisp, clipped, emotionless tone. "I prepare my forces to attack in ten days. I do nothing in the city."
The computer seemed pleased by this. "Very good. If you had moved to evacuate the city, you would have alerted the enemy to their lost codes."
Carth, who had been very quiet so far, was less than pleased. "You mean you'd just let all those people die?" he demanded. "That's monstrous!"
Aithne gave him a warning look, trying to hold the logic of her answer in her head for the scanning computer. But she answered, "A few thousand or a hundred million, Carth?"
"Ultimate victory required the deaths of the people in that city," intoned the computer. "You wisely ignored sentiment in your decision."
"It's the smart, logical thing to do," Aithne responded. "That doesn't mean Onasi's wrong. It is monstrous, even if you end up saving those hundred million others. That's why generals turn into monsters."
The computer was silent a moment. "Your response is correct," it said finally, "but your reasoning does not match the pattern in memory. I shall adjust my evaluation. Hypothetical: remove the ongoing war from the previous example. Consider enemy states to be weak and remote. With no external threat, your empire stagnates. Your people become complacent and begin to question you. Same scenario as before: you discover an impending attack, but also a weakness that will come after. How do you react?"
It wanted her to answer this one like a conqueror, like an emperor. Build solidarity within the state against a common foe by allowing an attack. Strengthen nationalistic sentiment with a tragedy and use the consequent outburst of energy and hatred against the enemy to fuel a territory expansion. She understood how it would work. She hated that she understood it. Suddenly, she hated herself, the computer, and the whole situation, and she didn't care anymore about those security measures she'd imagined Revan would have programmed in. She'd just have to be faster than any shred program Revan had designed.
"This is distasteful. I'll just take you apart to get the Star Map!" she spat, igniting her lightsabers.
"Implied threat matches pattern in memory," the computer answered, "but the subject has failed to demonstrate required recognition. Access denied. This system will purge the subject as false. Defense mode initiated!"
Abruptly, two fully functional, mean-looking droids strode into the clearing. "Oh, for crying out loud!" Carth shouted.
Aithne whirled and let loose a Force wave that set the droids to staggering on their spindly metal legs. Revan had been good with droids and computers. Fine. So was she. Good at building them, but also taking them apart. She didn't have to conform to Revan's stupid patterns. She was going to do this her way, and nothing anyone put in her way was going to stop her. She jointed the droids like forest kinrath and left them melted and twisted on the forest floor. Then she turned back to the computer, ready to attack.
But the holointerface looked as awkward, for an image of an alien physiology with which she was completely unfamiliar. It shifted on its virtual feet. "Neural scan complete. Analyzing . . . well. It would appear initial assumptions about you were incorrect," it said. "Secondary scans during battle have revealed much. Under duress, your emotions were easier to read. Programming now instructs that I give you what you seek."
Aithne felt Bindo's sharp look like a scalpel but kept her face turned away from him. "What exactly did the scan during battle reveal?" she asked instead.
"That information is unavailable," the Computer replied cheerfully. "Soon you will recognize the proper course to follow. The Star Map is yours. This unit has now completed its primary duty and has finished with the subject. Executing final action. Activation of the Star Map commencing."
Aithne fished the Star Map datapad out of her pack as the pillar began to open. She attached it to the Star Map and began to download the new coordinates it revealed. The computer kept talking. "Parameters reset. Stasis initiated. End communication."
The hologram disappeared, even as Aithne abruptly turned to demand details. She stared at the place where it had been, licked her lips, and swallowed. "Well," she said. "I think the next poor Jedi who comes looking for a Star Map will have to conform to my patterns."