Star Wars: Ahsoka

“Can we blow things up yet?” he asked, at last.

“Did you have something particular in mind?” Ahsoka asked.

“Do you?” Hoban demanded.

Ahsoka sighed, and decided it was time to lay all her cards on the table. Or at least most of her cards. If she kept holding out, it was only a matter of time before Hoban did something stupid, and that might put Kaeden and Miara in harm’s way.

“There are caves out in the hills,” she said. She took a crokin disc off the top of the pile and flicked it toward the center of the board. It landed neatly behind one of the pegs, blocking it from an opponent’s shot.

“Everyone knows that,” Hoban said. “There are too many to map effectively, and nothing grows out there, so no one goes there.”

“I go there,” Ahsoka said. “And I take all kinds of interesting things with me.”

“You’ve been setting up camps?” Kaeden said. “Without telling anyone?”

“Selda knows,” Neera said. Ahsoka raised an eyebrow and Neera shrugged. “Selda knows everything, and he’s the one who’d be supplying your food, I imagine.”

“Yes,” Ahsoka said. “But it’s not just food. There are several water recyclers and whatever medical supplies I could scrounge. There’s also a lot of junked-up equipment. You know, sharp blades and circuits you have to be careful not to overload, because they might blow up on you.”

“But you still want us to wait,” Hoban said. “While our home dies underneath us.”

“I want you to think,” Ahsoka said.

“Lay off, Hoban. She’s right,” Neera said. She turned to the board and tried firing a crokin disc. It missed, bouncing off the peg that concealed Ahsoka’s piece.

“What do you want us to do?” Vartan asked. “We can’t slow down in the fields much more than we already are. The Imperials will notice and start withholding food again.”

“Can you spare Miara and Kaeden for a few days?” Ahsoka asked. “I’d like to take them with me. Miara can start building those bigger locks you talked about, and Kaeden and I can organize the rest of our potential gear. I can fix a machine well enough, but Kaeden’s more familiar with the local geography. She can help me decide where to put it.”

Vartan looked at the girls and nodded.

“We’ll tell the Imperials you’re sick, if they ask,” he said. “And we’ll mysteriously forget where you live so they can’t check on you themselves. It’s not much of a cover story, but it’s the best we can do.”

“It’ll be fine,” Ahsoka said. “We only need a few days to get organized, and then we’ll be able to check in with you again. In the meantime, keep your heads down. We’re all in enough danger as it is.”

Miara’s gaze turned to the spot on the floor where Tibbola had been gunned down, but Hoban only glared at Ahsoka. If he had any protests to make, he didn’t voice them. Instead, Selda arrived at the table with what passed for a hot dinner under the new Imperial restrictions, and soon everyone was too busy eating to talk.

* * *

Jenneth Pilar sat in his new temporary office and scrolled through the numbers. It was therapeutic, seeing his calculations add up the way he wanted them to, over and over and over again. He was encouraged by the scarcity of errors and the smallness of the margins. He had everything figured out perfectly. Here, in this bare little room on this soon-to-be-bare world, he had calculated life and death and gotten paid for it. Not bad work, all things considered, though the food was terrible.

Raada was a tedious little place, but it would serve its purpose. The Empire would get what it wanted and then be on its way. The farmers would have their freedom again, for all the good it would do them. They really should have thought of the risks before they became farmers. Jenneth turned a blind eye to his part in their incipient suffering, a privilege that came with never really having suffered.

He looked out the window at the ordered rows in the fields and then the grasslands beyond them, where nothing useful could grow. Beyond that were the low-lying hills that made up the rest of the moon’s surface—rocky, useless, and probably cold once the sun went down. But something about them niggled at Jenneth’s sense of order. He hadn’t included the hills in his calculations, because the planetary scans he’d studied had assured him they were barren. At the same time, their mere existence should merit their inclusion in his formula. He hated unbalanced equations.

In the morning he would commandeer a ship and take a closer look. He couldn’t go now, as much as he suddenly wished to, because it was too late in the day. It was nearly curfew, with the sun setting and the last poor ragged souls stumbling home after a hard day of near slavery in service of the Empire. If only they knew what awaited them.