Star Wars: Ahsoka

Neera sat down opposite Kaeden, across the crokin board, and began dividing the discs by color. She never asked if Kaeden wanted to play; she didn’t do much talking at all anymore, so this was how their games usually began. Kaeden was preparing to lose spectacularly again when Kolvin, who was on sentry duty, crawled out of the connecting tunnel, an alarmed expression on his face.

“There’s something coming,” he said.

“Stormtroopers?” Kaeden asked. “In the tanks?”

With the walkers out of commission, the tanks were the only ground transport option the Imperials had. They were slow and lumbering and didn’t do well in hills, but stormtroopers didn’t seem overly fond of walking.

“No,” Kolvin said. “Just one person. But moving really fast. They’ll be here soon.”

The main entrance was always locked. They’d spent time increasing the camouflage around the hidden entrances. It was one of the few activities they could manage safely without attracting attention. The weak point in their defense was the sentry door. They had to decide if they wanted to collapse it and lose their vantage point permanently or risk leaving it open. For Kaeden, it wasn’t a hard choice at all, but she wasn’t the one issuing orders.

Everyone looked at Miara. She wasn’t in command, either. No one really was, but the charges were her design. If they were going to be set off, she was the one to do it.

“It’ll take me a few moments to get everything ready,” Miara said. “Kolvin, do we have that kind of time?”

“We do if we go now,” he said. His wide black eyes gleamed, even in the dim of the cave.

“I’m coming with you,” Kaeden said.

Miara paused. “You can’t crawl yet,” she said. “And you can’t help with the charges.”

“I don’t want us to be separated,” Kaeden insisted.

“Then let me go so I can come back in a hurry,” Miara said.

“Your sister’s right,” Neera said. “They can kill one of you together as easily as they can apart. You might as well stay here and play crokin with me. It’s your turn anyway.”

Kaeden gaped at her, shocked that even in grief Neera could say something so awful. Miara took advantage of her sister’s distraction and dove into the tunnel with Kolvin on her heels. Time seemed to stretch out forever, but then the ground shook slightly, and Kaeden knew that the sentry point had been taken care of. She wished she’d gotten a look at the approaching figure. She didn’t like not knowing what was coming for them.

Neera tapped her on her injured shoulder, and she winced. The older girl gestured to the board.

“It’s your turn, Kaeden,” she said, as though they were sitting at Selda’s at the end of their shift.

Kaeden picked up a disc and debated her next shot.

* * *

Jenneth Pilar was packing. There was no rhyme or reason to the Empire once Force wielders got involved. Every one of his painstaking calculations was ignored and all his formulae were unbalanced by the very presence of such mythology, and he had no more patience for it. The one who called himself the Sixth Brother was back, and that meant that all Jenneth’s well-planned methodologies were about to be jettisoned in favor of some scheme involving a so-called Jedi.

Everyone knew the Jedi were dead. So far from the Core, there were few people who had any faith in the Jedi Order at all. Jenneth didn’t admire much about the Outer Rim, but he could respect that. The Force had no place in an ordered galaxy. It simply couldn’t be accounted for in the math.

He paused, looking around his quarters for anything he might have forgotten. His eyes fell on the datapad he’d used to calculate exactly how much of what the Empire needed could be extracted from the moon’s surface before destroying it for future generations. All that fuss for a plant. Just a simple plant that could be processed into a nutritional supplement that allowed people working in low gravity to process oxygen more efficiently. He couldn’t imagine it was worth the trouble the Empire had gone to in order to procure it.

He threw the datapad into his case and shut the latches. It was hardly his problem. He’d been paid, and he’d seen the job along as far as he could before it got out of his control. There was no reason for the Imperials to think he’d slighted them, and there was no reason for him to stay on the benighted moon a moment longer. He was going back to a planet with real trees, real food, a real bed, and no lingering smell of fertilizer.

In the fields, the farmers labored under duress and the little plants grew taller. A few more days and the harvest could begin.

Chapter 22