Author: I'm aware that there are mistakes and typos in this version, and you'll just have to get over it. This site is a freaking pain in the backside when it comes to editing/fixing stories after uploading, and I've got better things to do than fuck around with website controls that are 25 years out of date. This story is also on AO3, so if you want a version with fewer mistakes, go there.

Wade Vox zoomed over a sun-baked desert plain, the many damage alarms of his modified X-34 landspeeder drowned out by its roaring turbine engines. A dusty blast arced over the duraplex windscreen, tossing his hair like crazy. Flashing laser blasts clipped his vehicle's hull or slammed into the ground to his left and right, kicking up bursts of sand.

A few dozen meters ahead, a towering Jawa sandcrawler was inching along. Suddenly another tall shape stepped from behind its bulk: it was Otto's AT-ST walker, moving to block his path! Wade seethed in fury as the renegade Imperial general's voice cawed over his comlink speaker: "This is the end of the line for you, scum! Mua ha ha ha haaa!"

Wade's targeting computer flashed red, indicating its sensors were damaged, but he didn't need it, angling his speeder even as Otto opened fire. Energy flashed and the windscreen shattered, blowing glass and sand past Wade's face, but the Force guided him. His forward blasters sent a pair of red bolts directly up the barrels of his enemy's twin cannons, exploding the chicken walker's cockpit from the inside.

There was no time to savor the victory, however. Wade tried to bank away from the remains of his foe, but his vehicle didn't respond fast enough. With a scream of metal, the right turbine was ripped clean off as it hit one of the walker's legs, throwing him out of control. What he hit next, he had no idea, but it was enough to toss him out of the speeder like a Jawa on a repulsor-springboard.

Bleeding and dazed, Wade staggered to his feed. The landspeeder had rolled over and was burning ten meters away. Meanwhile his jeering, whooping pursuers were rapidly catching up to him. He still heard engines rumbling; it was Big Bizz's gang of swoop bikers, infamous for terrorizing the Dune Sea. A half-dozen of them had already dismounted their swoops, including Spiker and Jix. The rest were farther off, but coming in at top speed.

"AYO, WADE-BOY! Whajoo doin' here?!" jeered Spiker, brandishing a vibro-machete and a blaster pistol.

Wade glanced to the left and right. In mere seconds he'd be surrounded. When he reached for his weapons, he found that his disruptor and blaster were both missing. The crash must have thrown them clear!

He was fragged. Weaponless, except...

I've got one weapon these space-creeps won't be expecting. Something they've never seen before.

It was also something he'd never used before because he'd never quite finished working on it...but he had the Force with him, and if it was ever gonna come through for him in a tight spot, now was the time.

With a sly smile, Wade opened the secret pocket in his longcoat, produced his lightsaber, and activated it. The blade of energy sprang forth, emitting a brilliant ruby glow and humming dangerously as he angled it before him.

Two seconds later it exploded. Blinded, seared, his hands gone, his chest full of shrapnel, Wade was flung across the pitiless desert ground like a discarded toy.

And he gasped, opening his eyes to find himself unhurt and intact, lying in bed in a dark, cramped cabin of a starship. When a few moments had passed, his heart stopped thumping like a dacho drum and his mind cleared. He was aboard the Bloodshark, which was racing through hyperspace toward Da Soocha V in the Cyax system. The trip wouldn't be a long one. In fact, they'd be arriving next day, which was...

Wade rubbed his eyes, then slapped at the chronometer on the bedside table to find it was 01:00. This, he decided, was ronto spit. After everything that had happened, most of all his close brush with death on Kessel, he'd been exhausted enough to sleep like a dead man. At the same time, he'd been so wired up and jittery that he wasn't sure he would sleep.

That was why Wade had taken three dozetabs even though the label said not to.

I've done it a hundred times before, he thought, sitting up in bed. They never made me wake up in the middle of the night. And they never gave me nightmares...

What's wrong with me?

Am I actually coming apart?

He'd asked himself that question many times in recent days, and there was good reason to. Zak Arranda had gotten captured on his watch. If Wade was going to be honest, that was when the sleep trouble really started, and Tash forgiving him didn't help (made it worse, if anything). After that, he'd been raw. Itching to prove himself, to bounce back, to take it out on some scum that deserved it...and look where that got him: falling into that crazy slide-chute trap on Kessel, being too stupid and distracted to watch out for it.

And I'd be a dead man right now, if not for Tash, Wade thought, shaking his head. Trioculus had me dead to rights. I thought I was hot stuff, but I needed a teenaged girl to slip my jiffies off the roaster.

Maybe the Force isn't with me after all.

Wade flopped back into bed, pulled his covers snug, and stared at the inside of his eyelids.

He shifted to lay on his side.

Stared.

Listened.

For whatever reason, Tash Arranda lingered in his thoughts. How she'd gone out of her way to talk to him more than once...and for what, to try to make him feel better? Restore his confidence? It didn't make much sense. In fact, their last conversation had been disarmingly mundane. They had just left Kessel and made the jump to hyperspace when the kid came up to Wade and started rambling to him about some planet he'd never heard of: Lorrd in the Kanz sector. Wade barely paid attention as she rattled off some history lesson about the planet. It had to do with a paper she'd written for school or something, but for her audience it went in through the plasma vent and out through the exhaust port; Wade was too busy ignoring the stranger in the corridor who wasn't there.

Anyway, at the end Tash had given him a rock she'd found somewhere, saying it was special. Wade was too frazzled to ask any questions.

He shifted to lay on his belly, then on his other side.

Stared into the dark.

Stared, seeing nothing.

Listened, hearing nothing.

Hoping he'd keep seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Because losing his edge was not the worst of Wade Vox's problems. At some point he'd started hallucinating. He would hear someone calling for him as from a great distance, but the voice always stopped when he tried to listen. Or a stranger would appear on the edge of his vision, only to not be there when he looked that way. It had even happened to him during the fighting on Kessel. Considering that he'd gotten through without emptying his DL-44 XT into a blank wall or a friendly, maybe the Force was watching out for him after all.

Since Alderaan's destruction, Wade Vox had been used to dealing with his own problems himself, but he wasn't a complete idiot. So he went to Ktrame Zaposug. It was the first time in Wade's adult life that he had gone to see a doctor for anything less urgently serious than a blaster wound.

"And what did he tell me?" Wade mumbled scornfully. "You just need some good sleep. Thanks a whole fraggin' lot, Dr. Z. Those medical degrees really pay for themselves..."

He sighed, and with that sigh the anxieties of his mind seemed to leak out of him, along with his alertness, and he drifted off to sleep again...

The next thing he knew, he was sitting at a desk in some kind of machine shop. He wore welding goggles, and dozens of tools and random odds and ends were scattered before him. Centered in the disorder was his lightsaber, which he had taken apart for some reason. With magnetic tongs, carbon chisels, arc wrenches, and other tools he adjusted various components of the weapon.

Wade knew he was dreaming, and his hazy thoughts were able to wander even as his hands continued to work. He thought back to Alderaan, to the mysterious man named Ferus whom the Imperials had taken away...and to the scraps of his journal that Wade had found hidden in his apartment. From these he had been able to devise a rough idea of the fabled Jedi Knights' signature weapon, the lightsaber—what the internal components were and how they were supposed to be arranged. In time Wade cobbled together an imitation, but his intuition always told him that it was incomplete, and his engineering knowledge told him that the consequences of activating it would be dire; he couldn't figure out how to project such a powerful beam of energy and keep it stable. The last time he tinkered with it had been at Searchlight, when Kyle walked in by mistake. Wade had not really been working on it then—only passing the time.

Yet here in the dream, he seemed to be working with purpose, knowing exactly what to do: calibrating the power cell here, rewiring the modulation circuits there. What stood out, though, was an all-new component. In addition to the authentic Jedi lightsaber gemstone sold to Wade by a junk dealer in Mos Espa, there was a second crystal—a rock, really—housed a few millimeters up the haft. Together they were given particularly minute adjustments before being secured into place. To Wade's own astonishment, he did not accomplish this with any of his tools; instead he simply spread his hands over the half-assembled weapon and concentrated, projecting his thoughts, and somehow causing the crystals to arrange themselves into the optimal position. This accomplished, he reassembled the lightsaber and stood up.

And was back in his demolition landspeeder, roaring across the dunes of Tatooine as Big Giz's swoop gang swarmed after him. With no sense of disorientation, Wade weaved back and forth as he sped along, taking blaster hits all the while, until General Otto's chicken walker stepped into his path from behind a meandering sandcrawler. Again Wade blew the walker's head to smithereens and disposed of the wayward Imperial. Again his speeder lost its turbine and spun out of control, throwing Wade clear.

He picked himself up, spitting out sand and slapping dust from his longcoat as the swoop jockeys leaped from their vehicles and confronted him anew: Spiker and Jix and Slobbatäppa and Bonko and all the rest, hefting vibromachetes and lightning rifles and old-fashioned blasters and Force-only-knew what else as they spread out to surround him.

Wade drew his lightsaber with a sly smile, knowing that this time it would be different. The appearance of the brilliant ruby blade made his assailants flinch, and Wade took the opportunity.

He had no training whatsoever. In fact, he knew nothing about how to properly swing a vibro-knife, let alone the ancient weapon of the legendary Jedi Knights. All he had to go on, in fact, was the theoretically knowledge that the blade itself, being made of pure energy, would have no natural weight or heft to it.

All he had was this foreknowledge and the guidance of the Force—however much it would give him.

He grasped the hilt in both hands, keeping it angled well away from his body, and swung it like a Cordibian war fan. The blue, fat-eared, snout-nosed Ortolan named Bonko was the first to fall—or rather his head was the first to fall, tumbling over the steaming desert sands like a squirming womp rat that had jumped through a landspeeder's tubine exhaust; Wade's lightsaber burned through his meaty, blubbery neck as easily as it would through a room-temperature block of Whorrwaarr Kashyyyk bantha butter.

Others stepped forward, swinging their weapons, while others fired, but Wade's mind was as clear as a bell of kaiburr crystal; leaving Bonko's headless body to collapse into the dust, he stepped forward into a thrust, spearing the multi-breasted Askajian Teräs Käsi artist, Slobbatäppa, through her elaborately ornamented head; then slashing through the bowcaster wielded by an unnamed Grave Tusken warrior, followed soon by his chest. In the same motion, Wade's energy blade smacked a snarling beam of electricity off-course, redirecting it into the Jix's bare chest and cooking the human alive like nerf steak. Spiker's lightning rifle was still recharging when Wade ran past him, chopping the Chiss in half.

More of them came, twirling or throwing or firing their exotic colllection of weaponry, and Wade met them in a beautiful dance of lethality, knowing not how or why the Force worked through him so powerfully—until his lightsaber gave a teeth-grinding whine and exploded again, throwing him to the ground, blinded and burned...

Again he jerked awake to find himself in his bed aboard the assault transport. After a moment Wade reached for the chronometer. When he saw that it read 01:29, he threw it against the wall.

"Hey, kid. Wake up," said someone.

Wade sat up, letting out a shriek that most would consider unbecoming of a seasoned spacer, gunslinger, and occasional Rebel agent. Funny thing, though, is that he didn't go for his blaster, because he knew, uncannily, that he was not in any danger. Not the normal sort of danger, at any rate.

And I've seen this guy before...haven't I?

The intruder was at once human and more than human. Considering that the cabin's glowlights were off, Wade shouldn't have seen anything more than a dark silhouette. In fact, though, the entire figure of the man emitted soft blue light. Wade placed him somewhere in the mid-to-late thirties. He wore a bulky jacket (probably armor-reinforced, like Kyle's), fingerless gloves, and spacer pants in a style Wade was not familiar with. His face was plain, his hair lazy, his entire posture arrogant.

And again, he had somehow gotten aboard this ship and into this room undetected in the middle of the night.

"What the—who the kriff are you!?" Wade gasped when he got his mouth working again. "How'd you get in here?!"

"Pipe down, would ya?" the stranger snapped. "There's other people sleeping next door, and you're the only one on my list. Let 'em get one last good night's sleep before you all go to your doom."

"Our doom?"

The man smacked himself in the forehead. "Forget I said that. Figure of speech. Or not. Point is, I don't know the future, so rest easy."

"What is going on?!"

"I said keep your voice down! Relax already! This is a Force thing. I'm here to help you. Just close your eyes and take a few deep breaths or something."

Closing his eyes while confronted with a glowing man who had come from nowhere in the middle of the night was a tall order. Again, though, Wade had a strong intuition that he was not in danger. In all likelihood, it was only another dream.

So he did as he was told. With his eyes shut and his nocturnal visitor not talking, it was easy to almost forget he was there...except that Wade felt something different, as if the temperature in his cabin had risen. Some kind of energy was radiating into him, connecting him to this mysterious presence.

Wade's breath caught as he realized that this was indeed no dream, and as he had just been told, this was a Force thing.

His eyes snapped open. "I've been seeing you. Hearing you. For days, but—"

"But you couldn't, not quite," said the glowing man, "because you've been too busy—either trying not to get shot, or sitting around feeling sorry for yourself." He grinned with half of his face. "Believe me, I've been there. Word of advice: stay away from the bottle if you can help it. And whatever you do, keep out of the Nar Shaddaa Red Sector. You wouldn't believe the kinds of diseases—"

"What's the Red Sector?" Wade blurted helplessly, and with some irritation. Whatever was going on, he wasn't very fond of this guy. He talked too fast—and reminded Wade too much of himself.

The stranger paused as if he didn't understand, then sighed. "Right, I forgot. It's been four thousand years. It's probably not there anymore."

Wade only stared, slack-jawed, not knowing what galaxy he had woken up in.

"Well, you seem to have settled down, so I'll clue you in," said the stranger, scratching the back of his neck. "The name's Atton. Atton Rand, and I'm a Jedi Master. Or I was one, about four thousand years ago. I've been knocking for a standard week or so, but like I said, you were too busy to answer the door until now. Word is, you and your buddies are in for a pretty serious fight tomorrow, so I'm here to give you a hint or two that'll help you out, if you want it."

"Y-y-you...you're the ghost of a...you expect me to believe you were a Jedi?" sputtered Wade. Sneering, he looked the apparition up and down. "A scruffy-lookin' nerf-herder like you was a Jedi Master? Give me a break."

Atton grimaced and spread his hands, like a scrapper in a rowdy tapcaf, inviting Wade to throw the first punch. "Okay, smart guy—you found me out. I wasn't a Jedi. I'm just some random barve who so happens to be able to appear out of thin air, radiating Force energy so powerful that even a laserbrain like you, who's never been trained, can sense it."

Wade opened his mouth, but couldn't voice a retort. Even then, in spite of all his skepticism, he could feel it—without even concentrating or trying to. Despite having believed for years that the Force was guiding him, Wade had never experienced it as strongly or continuously as he was now, in this strange and unprecedented episode. As before, however, it was something transcendent, something that went beyond his control.

Atton tossed his messy hair and put his hands in his pockets...and for the first time Wade noticed that the visitor was not only luminescent. He was also translucent, allowing Wade to vaguely see the door behind him. "Look, do you wanna go back forth like this all night, or are you gonna shut your exhaust port and listen?"

Wade's eyes tightened, but he figured he might as well play along. Who knew; maybe this was just a dream. "What do you need to tell me?"

"Meet me in the workshop. Bring your lightsaber." The next instant, Atton disappeared, faster than a hologram would.

"Son of a..." Wade left off, staring open-mouthed at spot where the stranger had been. The energy that he felt still seemed to be present, but it was weaker. More distant. A sound calling him from afar.

For a moment Wade didn't move. It occurred to him that he had the option of simply lying down again. Eventually he would sleep, and he knew—somehow, not knowing now he knew—that if he did that, Atton Rand would not bother him again.

Before he could think about it another moment, Wade scrambled out of bed and started throwing on his clothes.

The Bloodshark was quiet, no one moving in its halls except R2-Q8. Wade Vox shuffled through the corridors as fast as he dared yawning and rubbing his eyes.

Sure enough, the ghost was waiting in the workshop, with his ghostly hands in his ghostly pockets. "You bring it?"

Wade displayed the lightsaber.

Atton nodded and gestured to the nearest work desk, where Payvees's tools were strewn. "All right, good. Have a seat and take it apart."

"What for?" asked Wade.

"Remember your dream?"

Wade paused, and it all went through his mind in an instant: the sands of Tatooine, Jabba's sadistic demolition games, General Otto's chicken walker, Big Giz and his vicious swoop gang...and the lightsaber which exploded and killed him. "Uh... Yeah, how do you know about that?"

"Who do you think gave it to you, genius?"

"Wait a minute. You..." Wade paused, overpowered by a yawn. "You can give me dreams? How?"

Atton glowered impatiently. "Because the Force says so. Because there's a plan at work here."

Looking askance at him, Wade retorted, "What plan? What are you talking about? How...I mean, if you're really a Jedi Master, able to appear from beyond death, and you know who I am...why don't you tell me more about what's going to happen? What about the people I'm with—couldn't they use your guidance too, or whatever it is you're offering? Why are you only appearing to me now? I mean..." He cocked his head. "What about my friend Ferus, back on Alderaan? I think he was a Jedi. Maybe you could have helped him, so why didn't you?"

"Just because I'm one with the Force doesn't mean I understand how all this works, man," Atton snapped, throwing up his hands. "None of this was my idea. Believe it or not, I don't even know what you and your friends are up against. The only thing I do know is I'm supposed to help you fix up your lightsaber—sort of. Now, are we gonna do this or not?"

Wade glance down at the lightsaber still clutched in his hand—the weapon he had assembled with all of his skill, yet which he knew was still incomplete. The situation he now found himself in (again, assuming it wasn't just some dream) seemed to be in the territory of the miraculous. Once again he chose (not without difficulty) to suspend his misgivings.

"Sure," he said, "let's do it."

He sat down, put on a pair of welding goggles, and disassembled the lightsaber. Then, with Atton looking his shoulder, he made adjustments to several components, such as the power cell and the modulation circuits, according to the ghost's instructions.

After nearly a standard hour of work he thought they were done, but then Atton said, "All right, here's the important part. Get the secondary focusing crystal."

"The what?"

"The one the girl gave you."

Wade looked over his shoulder. "Wait, you know about Tash?"

"I know there's a girl who gave you a Lorrdian gemstone," Atton said with a tone one usually employed when addressing younglings. "Do you have it, or don't you?"

"Uh..." Wade fished through his pockets for half a standard minute before finding the gemstone. In his opinion, it barely qualified as a gem. He had fenced precious or semiprecious stones before, and in his opinion this was the sort of thing you'd have to beg someone to take off your hands.

"What's so special about this thing?" he asked.

Atton frowned. "What do you mean, what's so special about it? It's faintly imbued with the Force. It's an actual crystal of the kind Jedi use to build sabers with. That's one of the main things you're missing: a second crystal to help focus the beam."

"Wait, what else am I missing?"

"An actual primary crystal."

Wade looked at the ruddy multifaceted gem already embedded in the haft. "What's wrong with that one?"

"That one's crap. No Force attunement at all. It'll barely project a stable beam."

"Son of a..." Wade very nearly slammed a fist on the desk. He'd spent thousands of credits on that gem in Mos Espa! That ronto spit-gargling Toydarian had cheated him!

He wasn't looking at the ghost, but he could hear the grin in Atton's tone. "Y'know what they say, pal: let the buyer beware. Anyway, don't feel bad. Genuine lightsaber crystals are hard to come by. With this one from Lorrd, you'll just be able to squeak by—if you can do this right..."

Putting aside his frustration, Wade positioned the gemstone ahead of the other crystal. Then Atton had him close his eyes and visualize the two crystals in his mind. "They have to be perfectly positioned, perfectly aligned," he explained. "No ordinary person or droid could do it. You have to let go of all your regular senses, your conscious self, and let the Force do its thing. Just visualize the perfect orientation..." Atton's voice lowered until Wade almost couldn't hear it. "Remember how the lightsaber was in your dream, when you were fighting those swoop jockeys. Visualize the completed form of the weapon—the whole thing, and let it become the dream. You become the dream. Become the dream..."

When Wade opened his eyes, the crystals had moved into a new orientation. Following Atton's direction again, he locked them in place and spent another standard hour reassembling the weapon.

He stepped away from the desk and held the cylinder before him reverently, in a state of awe. Exteriorly it looked unchanged, but its true form and configuration was totally new. Wade's thumb brushed the activation stud over the rubber handgrip.

"Stop!"

He jumped and looked over his shoulder to find Atton glaring at him in disapproval. "What's the matter with you, nerf-herder? You want to get flash-fried or something?"

"What are you talking about?!" Wade demanded. "Isn't it going to work now? I thought that was why you showed up—to help me fix this thing!"

Atton laughed derisively. "Well, I'm sorry, but you thought wrong, pal. You can't build a real lightsaber with a primary crystal made of smoked gel-glass. Whoever sold that to you ought to go to prison."

"Wh—but—huh—what a was the point of this, then?!" Wade wanted to throw the lightsaber at Atton's head, but had a feeling that wasn't really accomplish anything.

"Cool your turbo-jets for a second, all right? Remember what I said: become the dream. Now, what happened in your dream?"

Wade wanted to continue arguing, but the durasteel-hard look on the ghost's face stopped him cold. He was still groggy, and it took him a minute to remember. "It was...I...the lightsaber didn't work. When I tried using it, the thing exploded."

"But that happened twice—the second time after you fixed it up the same way we just did. What was different the second time?"

It clicked. "Well, it took longer to explode."

"Yeah," said Atton, nodding. "After twenty or thirty standard seconds, give or take. So that's what you've got: an elegant weapon for a more civilized time, except also it's a bomb. As soon as you ignite it, you've lit the fuse."

Wade looked down at the weapon yet again. "Well, what good is this thing, then? I can't even turn it on to practice with."

"Get this into your ferrocrete skull, Wade: whatever's gonna happen tomorrow, whatever battle you're going into, it's bigger than you. You're just one more piece on the dejarik board. Same as me." Atton gestured at the saber. "That thing's as good as it's gonna get, but keep in mind, it'll still cut—for as long as it lasts. That's better than what you had before."

"I can't argue with that," Wade said reluctantly.

"It's all about timing. You'll pull it out when you need it, long as you're smart enough to know when that is. Become the dream. Become pure pazaak."

"Huh?"

"Pure pazaak," Atton repeated dully. Even as Wade stared at him, confused, the ghost's eyes drifted away to something only he could see. "Pure pazaak. Pure pazaak. Pure pazaak..."

And as Wade blinked, he found himself alone in the workshop in the middle of the night, trying to decide whether he was insane.

CHAPTER COMPLETE

PASSWORD: BAKURA